Program
Artists
One works
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Kévin Blinderman
Promise I’ll Be Kind
15.02.2025 – 29.03.2025
In a photograph dated June 28, 1960, a seventy-year-old Jean Cocteau is poised to break a bottle of champagne over a bowling ball bookended by two bowling pins as men in suits crowd around him. What cultural conditions made it make sense that summer for this elder gay poet to inaugurate a bowling alley? Does this document reveal anything about the artist, or about France at that moment, or is it just a red herring, an archival oddity?
This assumes, however, that historical archives possess a logic or an order that a singular item can deviate from. We search them for figures who fulfill our present-day needs, for heroes who will save us or for models of transgression to inspire our own disobedience. Every archival venture is as much about our own desires and projections as it is about the actual historical individuals and communities whose traces can be found in there.
Paris-based artist Kévin Blinderman’s work is affected by this “queer desire for history” as scholar Carolyn Dinshaw called it. Promise I’ll Be Kind is a constellation of documents gathered together for us to divine what meanings and resonances they might hold. Where past exhibitions by Blinderman acted as conceptual portraits of specific people such as sexologist Magnus Hirschfield or actress Zoë Lund, Promise I’ll Be Kind is more like the first act in an ongoing play that will continue evolving as it unfolds into the future. Protagonists like Cocteau – as well as American gay playwright Tony Kushner– will reappear as the project’s themes grow and deepen over time.
The artist is present in his sense of affiliation or of being emotionally drawn to these specific images and artifacts, marked by Blinderman’s growing up in 2000s France amid an American popular culture that was increasingly trafficking in queer whispers as it was exported around the globe. Aptly, the terrain covered by the memorabilia that he collects here is as much the pre-Internet archive of homophobia as the archive of homosexuality because these are forces that mutually shape one another. On display are “poor” media: press photos, Le Crapouillot and 5 sur 5 magazines, Broadway playbills, autographs. While Blinderman’s presentation of these documents lends them an auratic quality, their true value lies more in how they develop meaning in their reception and circulation, in frottage with other images, texts and figures. At the same time, here he traps the documents inside frames, a gesture that keeps us at arm’s length: presenting their “rectos” while hiding their “versos” (and their insides) acts as a catalyst for fantasy. The artist notes that such materials act to construct a personal quest, functioning not only as an imagined past for himself – “where I can be from” – but also an imagined future: “where I want to go.”
What emerges is a nuanced meditation on the variety of styles of masculinity offered by 20th-century homophilia, a spectrum that includes more ironic, playful or liberatory possibilities for masculinity, which many have forgotten about. Lost gender styles, lost cultural practices, lost forms of intimacy – a cosmology, if you will, and the first volley in what will accumulate into a baroque profusion that strikes off in multiple directions.
– Jon Davies
Crapouillot, ‘Les Homosexuels’, artist’s frame.
40.5 x 43 cm
Crapouillot, ‘Les Pédérastes’, artist’s frame.
40.5 x 43 cm
Crapouillot, ‘Les Homos’, artist’s frame.
40.5 x 43 cm
Press photo, ‘Jean Cocteau’, artist’s frame.
34 x 26 cm
Playbill, ‘Angels in America’, artist’s frame.
40 x 33.5 cm
5 Sur 5, ‘Zaza a New York,’ artist’s frame.
40 x 33.5 cm
Autographed photo, ‘Tony Kushner’, artist’s frame.
41.5 x 36 cm