Two things stick out for me about Nayland Blake’s work. The first is that while there’s a kind of cerebral, conceptual dimension to it, there’s still something emotional, sexual or visceral going on. The other thing is that there’s usually a kind of queerness in play, but it doesn’t have much to do with “representation.” These two qualities feed on—and get off on—each other. Conceptual, but also horny; horny, but for abstract pleasures. You can see for yourself in their huge show at Mathew Marks Gallery in New York through October 2025, or read about it in their own words in My Studio is a Dungeon is the Studio: Writings and Interviews 1983–2024, out next month.
Blake is my age. We both came of age at the start of the ’80s. It’s thrilling to see the artist negotiate their way through the artistic and intellectual tendencies of the last forty years, and to do it so well. They always seem to ride the edge between the inside and outside of any given cultural or aesthetic moment. Never quite seduced by the new thing, but not claiming the purity of innocence of the outsider. It’s the collage method applied to history itself.
They’re always looking for the diagonal move, a way to mess with the habits of thought of a moment. Take, for example, the grand and now enduring obsession that is psychoanalysis, and its idée fixe of “sexuation.” In a 1989 essay reproduced in My Studio is a Dungeon is the Studio and in their installation The Schreber Suite, Blake follows Freud and Lacan by taking up the case of Judge Daniel Paul Schreber, via Schreber’s Memoir of My Mental Illness (1903).
Blake: “Schreber is compelled not only to become female but to become a woman engaged in the sexual act with herself, to provide God with the spectacle of a doubled femaleness. Duchamp’s women exist without orifices, and their virginity exists as an ironic critique of the phallus. In both senses, these are models of a woman who does not lack. They are not castrated males but truly other. I would like, at this point, to suggest a line of inquiry about homosexuality and meaning. I see in the homosexual, as well, certain aspects of a refusal of the phallus, and I wonder if this refusal can be the genesis for a different type of meaning—one that is aleatory, connective, and diffuse, rather than centralized. It may well be that when conclusion is denied, the way is opened for horizontal reading.” For Blake, “these structures are not equivalent but are rather variants of the same myth, a myth of potential redemption denied. I have attempted to construct yet another variant of this myth in my work… .”
I like this. The suggestion of another way to read Schreber, a connection to weird Duchampian femininity, and on to a hint of what the actually queer wing of queer culture could become. I learn a lot from how Blake looks at other artists and writers. The way they inhabit the subject sympathetically and yet draw back. Blake sees Jack Smith, for instance, as more of a religious than artistic outsider, always siding with decay against form, against the encrusting power of culture industries.
Blake: “[Smith’s] work rests on two aesthetic assertions: first, that art is being made around us all the time—every time we arrange something— and that everyone is acting all the time; and, second, that the organizations supposedly dedicated to presenting, preserving, and fostering art are actually engaged in endless attempts to stamp it out and bury it beneath layers of plaster and crust.”
Blake has to think and feel their way out of some of the enduring tropes of gay culture to arrive somewhere else. A queer aesthetic that, for example, isn’t defined by (or entirely defined against) camp, of which Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963) is probably the apotheosis.
Blake: “Camp is a thorny subject, a cultural gesture that both subverts and reinforces convention, but one thing is true: Camp has become an impossibility today. Camp, as Jack Smith practiced it, is an attitude of profound seriousness and connoisseurship directed at an inappropriate subject.”
There are no longer any inappropriate subjects. The forensic practices of fine art, rendering everything into its material, combined with the internet’s incessant harvesting of every last morsel of culture, leaves nothing outside its economies. Even camp itself becomes internal to both the high and low culture machines.
As for drag, that draws Blake’s most cancelable take: “Much of the performing tradition of today’s drag is derived from vaudeville and, ultimately, from minstrelsy: working-class forms of gender and racial anxiety. In the same way that donning blackface allowed whites to illustrate both their desire for and difference from Black bodies and Black cultural expression, most drag allows men the luxury of playing at female identification without losing phallic power.”
Finding ways to sidestep phallic power is a through-line in Blake. Finding that potential as something always on the margins, neither in nor out, of gay cultures (plural). Neither gay homosexuality, nor trans femininity. Somewhere off the grid of sex and its representation altogether.
“What does liberation look like?” This crucial question comes up in the latter part of the book, and it turns out it’s been running through the whole inquiry. One dimension of it is the question of what a specifically queer liberation looks like. Blake: “We may define ourselves by our struggles, but it is in the compilation of our joys that we fly free.”
Blake: “The civil rights model and representational politics in this country lead us to ask the following questions: Where’s my slice of the status quo? Is it the same size as my neighbor’s? Is it predicated on an assumption that I am supposed to be both myself and the representation of a social group, an abstraction?”
Blake at their most programmatic doubles down on this: “Fuck the status quo. I don’t want my fair share of ignorance, jingoism, and billionaire worship. I’m not waiting outside the chapel to get my love validated. I got into the cocksucking racket because I thought I wouldn’t have to worry about any of that crap.”
Much of the energy of Blake’s writing, like their art, comes from kink and furry communities. The dungeon meets the studio. Blake: “Let’s talk about the spaces where meaning can happen, the spaces that inform my making: One is empty, white, brimming with illumination and possibility at the top of five extra tall stories of stairs. A studio. The other is dim, cluttered with tools and toys, filled with sound, but set up so that sound cannot escape. A dungeon. I need both because very different things happen in each, and one without the other leaves me arid and incomplete.”
There’s refreshing ways here of playing along the borders between art, politics and queer sexual life. I learned a lot from Blake that I find I can apply to the frictions I find between writing, rave culture and transsexuality. I put an enthusiastic “hell yes” in the margin next to this: “The tools developed by kinky people would be helpful in an art world that professes an interest in social movements and interactions but remains quite naive about how to cultivate trust and safety.”
If you’re involved in any kind of queer demimonde, there’s a constant demand to account for what this contributes to “real” politics. As if what we’d created there through the difficult art of both expressing and meshing desires wasn’t already a laboratory of another space for another life. An aesthetic of how life can be expressed, not represented.
To talk of “representation” and “identity” is to be stuck in an old timey realist aesthetics before its even a politics. One not without its uses, but limiting for an artist, and probably limited as a politics as well. It’s an artist’s job (or a writer’s job) to propose other kinds of possible connection between the aesthetic and the political, not to merely decorate the latter with the former in the style to which it is long accustomed.
There is, however, a pedagogic dimension to Blake. Teaching in a classroom or a dungeon are different practices, but trust and safety feature in both in specific ways. It’s delightful to see how these kinds of teaching inform each other, particularly in scripts Blake wrote for their performances. Editor Jarrett Ernest has mixed in interviews and brief comments from Blake that help set the scene for the more performative pieces.
Blake: “From very early on, I have had the vision of a utopic space: a living space where art could be created, where it could be displayed, and where it could generate more art. An environment that grew and changed through the actions of its occupants. I’ve spent a lot of time daydreaming about that space, and over the years I have had the chance to try to concretize various versions of those dreams. I’d say that all my work is an attempt to call that utopia into being.”
This book is itself such a utopia.
