Andrea Geyer
from a series entitled "Out of Sorts" (2008)
9 banners for public display

The Aesthetics and Politics of Intimacy

Contributors: Claire Barliant, Svetlana Boym, Rene Gabri, Andrea Geyer, Joseph Grima, Ed Halter, Jill Magid, Dave Rankin & Marisa Jahn, and Mary Anne Staniszewski. Edited by Marisa Jahn and Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy.

Intimacy is often thought of in terms of a feeling of rawness, confluence, and proximity. The space of intimacy often feels atemporal, privileging the safety of disclosure and heightened physiological, sexual, or affective response. But how does a geopolitical and micropolitical understanding of the conditions that frame intimacy questions notion of the body and self? The contributors to Issue #1 examine these questions from the perspectives of art, architecture, film, and law.

In her essay entitled “Intimacy, Barbarism, and Delusion,” Mary Anne Staniszewski draws parallels between the New MoMA’s depoliticized museological practices and what she refers to as acts of barbarism in culture at large—Obama’s refusal to make public images of torture, continued inhumane conditions for incarcerated mentally ill, the criminalization of “Dilation and Extraction” abortion procedures, etc. Through this comparison, Staniszewski concludes that by willfully ignoring the incursion of such political regress on the body politic, the generalized public maintains delusions about a putative liberal democracy.

Echoing Staniszewski’s concern about contextual erasure, Joseph Grima’s ‘Foreclosure Tourism’ is a videographic essay documenting a realtor’s tour of foreclosed homes in Queens. The conspicuous absence of the lives of previous inhabitants is ruptured through the occasional remains—an overlooked children’s sticker left on the bedroom ceiling, holes punched through walls, etc. Svetlana Boym complicates the association of intimacy with inhabitation with her notion of a “diasporic intimacy” — an intimacy based on emigrants’ shared experience of placial transposition and dislocation. She writes, “In contrast to the utopian images of intimacy as transparency, authenticity, and ultimate belonging, diasporic intimacy is distopic by definition; it is rooted in the suspicion of a single home, in shared longing without belonging.” Claire Barliant’s vignette about the streets and transit stops of New York remind us of the peripatetic nature of memory: “Memories are our geographical markers, linking one block to another more concretely than signposts and sidewalks.”

Several contributions to the issue foreground the inadequacy of language to describe quotidian thought and emotion. Suturing fragments that approximate aphorisms, Rene Gabri’s quasi-poem, quasi-list reads, “11e. The time of a want is a time of searching for the right word, the right touch, for the right light, the right taste, the right warmth… 13a. Ten is the kind of round number that events of the utmost intimacy can be marked. Usually, there is a song sung, but on some occasions, the loneliest loneliness is called upon (and of which, we should not be afraid).” Andrea Geyer’s artwork seen on the cover of the magazine depicts two men in embrace. Superimposed over the image, fragments of text such as the phrase “discriminated by syntactical laws” suggest the violence and absurdity of laws that proscribe certain forms of sexual intimacy and bodily union.

Other texts included in this issue also examine the body—its safety, maintenance, and violation—as a site where politics are inscribed or played out. “I want you to search me,” Jill Magid requests of the MTA transit worker whom she later accompanies on his subterranean rounds beneath the city. Despite the increased security after 9/11, excerpts from Magid’s “Lincoln Ocean Victor Eddy” describe sexually-charged and strangely intimate encounters that breech normative government protocol and humanize the institutional face of authority. While Magid’s solicitation transforms bodily violation into invitation, civil rights lawyer Dave Rankin and Marisa Jahn point towards a recent New York State Supreme Court ruling (The People v. Azim Hall) about strip searches to question the juridical normalization of bodily intrusion. Awkward and poetic, the case raises larger questions about the epistemological division of sight and touch and the contingent thresholds of privacy.

Through their exploration of the contingency of history and on the one hand and an authentic experience of intimacy on the other, the contributions to Issue #1 locate a sense of political and aesthetic agency.