The Magician and His Wardrobe: Luis Carle’s Queer Translocal Photography
Fig. 1. Black Party, 1998. B & W Silver Gelatin Print, 16 x 20. Image courtesy of the artist.
Disco sounds and laughter enlivened the opening reception of The Magic of Everyday Life: Luis Carle’s Queer Translocal Photography on March 3, 2022 at Paul Robeson Gallery on the Rutgers University, Newark campus. Highlighting camera-generated artworks from the photographer’s thirty-year career, the show was expertly organized by Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé and featured displays orchestrated by Gregory de Silva. Together, they amassed a narrow yet rich appraisal of Carle’s oeuvre with a set of questions about the translocal, queer, and quotidian happenings in the work. As José Vidal once said about the artist, “Something will capture Luis’s eye on the street and, inevitably; he must make a comment, though not always in words.”¹ More than the aesthetics of the mundane, Carle’s exhibition is also a story about the repurposes of photographic chains of signification for speculative potentialities, or what the curators deem, “magic.” Speculation serves the curatorial framing of the exhibition well, as a manifold crossroads of science fiction, fantasy, horror, the paranormal, and weird tales.
For instance, a pictorial overture from Carle’s documentation of the black party in New York opens the show. Considered the longest running circuit party in the country, this celebration of fetish and bondage is generously regarded in an image of moshing shirtless men whipped up in a leather clad frenzy (see fig. 1). Carle hints at desirous performances of cruising and male anonymity, an homage to a pre-COVID bygone era. As Joshua Chambers-Letson recalls, “The party, as refuge, is a place to catch one’s breath when you can’t breathe. It is a way of staying alive and of keeping each other alive.”² Carle’s high-angled camera lens surveys a crowd in mass, unlike his more well-known candid snapshots which iconized trans and gender non-binary performers like Joey Arias, Kevin Aviance, Amanda Lepore, and Sylvia Rivera (also found in the show). Negotiating scale and space, this image is no ordinary depiction of nightlife photography. Silkscreened onto unstretched fabric and velvet panels which dot the gallery’s entryway, viewers are invited to contemplate the delicacy of Carle’s photographs, the intimacy of the subject, and the possible afterlives for a photographic language that refuses to be hermeneutically sealed and archivally arrested (see fig. 2). The image circulates in a visual ecosystem of happenings and hauntings bearing witness to a queer collectivity that never fully disappears from Carle’s oeuvre or the exhibition. Because if we, the audience, are supposed to reencounter the party then we are also extending Carle’s capacity to support life among the scores of gyrating gay men lingering in the gallery space. Evidence of them is found even in the clothing that the artist wears (see fig. 3); a togetherness staged in the radical conjurations of photography, fabric, and disco light.
Fig. 2. Black Party Banner, 1998. Two Piece B & W Banner Printed from Negatives on Velvet and Silk, 40 x 50. Image courtesy of the artist.
Fig. 3. Artist Luis Carle wears a “Black Party” hoodie at the Paul Robeson Gallery, Rutgers University, 2022. Image courtesy of the artist.
The phantasmic power of Carle’s nightlife photos lightens up in the otherworldly “Puerto Ricans on the Moon” series. Partaking in a Latinx vocabulary of camera-generated conceptual imagery with a compatriot artist like the late ADÁL is worthy of consideration here. Carle unseals his black-and-white tourist snapshots of New Zealand’s volcanoes and superimposes candid photographs of Puerto Rican and New York locals engaged in mundane activities. We are invited to contemplate the speculative possibilities of Puerto Rican life on the moon. Despite the visual inaccuracy of the astronomic context as human space missions determined that the lunar surface was quite flat and smooth, the resulting tenor of this series is quite humorous. In one scene, scholar Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes’s drag alter ego Lola von Miramar camps it up, consistent with the way in which some currents of Latinx futurism laugh and critique simultaneously (see fig. 4). Similarly, Carle seems to ask: Will Puerto Ricans on the moon continue to experience the same exploitative conditions that exist for workers on the island? Or will they recreate society having survived the climate disaster that presumably submerged the Caribbean under melted ice caps? With the reworking of past imagery for future reconsideration, the speculative aesthetic in his oeuvre is socially intervening.
Fig. 4. Puerto Ricans on the Moon, 2015. Digital Print, 16 x 20. Image courtesy of the artist.
Such political mobilizations are more poignantly rendered in his small-scale installation, Blood Cells (1995/2021). Borrowing from a portrait of the artist screenprinted onto pillowy orbs, these handcrafted soft sculptures are a self-indexical project and are reminiscent of the doll heads and busts of artist Elia Alba (see fig. 5). Much like the fabric panels of the black party, the hard edge of queer cis-gender masculinity is softened. Strung together in cascades of gravity-defying spheres, this mobile demands another kind of relationship to the personal. Shifting from the macroscopic lens of men in mass, Carle points to the microscopic cellular structures of disease and infection. Sharing an AIDS visual vocabulary also enunciated in works by Carlos Alfonzo, Félix González-Torres, and David Wojnarowicz from the 1990s, Carle reimagines the cell motif for another plague, COVID-19. Through viral replication, this reencounter with a self-portrait that once represented his own HIV diagnosis with uncertainty now braves another public health crisis. The virus continues to mutate and threaten a way of life as AIDS once did (and continues to do). Carle’s installation haunts us, bringing the painful reminders of irrational AIDS-phobia into tension with the airborne menace of COVID-19. We are asked to question the mortal fear over contagion, illness, and transformation at a cellular level like the plot of a scary movie. Together, we walk the gallery in masks and assess the risks of trying to breathe in a time and place “when you can’t breathe,” finding each other in new yet familiar territory.³ In this way, Carle asks his audience to recover that resilient spirit, that energetic drive for an impossible future like the one channeled at a black party decades ago.
Fig. 5. Blood Cells, 1992/2021. Soft Sculpture Mobile Installation with Silkscreen Self-Portraits on Fabric, 8 x 4 (each piece). Image courtesy of the artist.
Overall, Cruz-Malavé and de Silva offer the gallery-goer a curatorial rumination of a corpus enunciated in the tense of multiples, duplications, reproductions, and revisitations. Five themes organize the exhibition: nightlife, portraiture, futurism, avian metaphor, and infection. With the tactical use of parlor stacks, micro installations, mobiles, and the occasional disco ball, viewers navigate image clusters that parlay alternative visions of the everyday. Whether pictured in the flamboyant luminosity of street performers festooned in glittering garments, or the prophetic omen of storm clouds warning of impending disaster, Carle finds the extraordinary in the ordinary and magic where others see none.
“The Magic of Everyday Life: Luis Carle’s Queer Translocal Photography” appears at the Paul Robeson Campus Center Gallery at Rutgers University-Newark, October 7, 2021-April 7, 2022. It is free and open to the public.
Footnotes
¹ José Vidal, “Luis Carle.” CENTRO Journal 19, no. 1 (2007): 361.
² Joshua Chambers-Letson, After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life (New York: NYU Press, 2018), xi.
³ Ibid.
Robb Hernández is an Associate Professor of English at Fordham University. He is the Senior Fellow in Latinx Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and author of Archiving an Epidemic: Art, AIDS, and the Queer Chicanx Avant-Garde (NYU Press, 2019).