John Lovett (b. 1962) and Alessandro Codagnone (1967–2019) made genre-spanning work as Lovett/Codagnone starting in 1995 and until Codagnone’s death. Their collaborative practice calls forth histories of subversive sexuality, ranging from the aesthetics of gay leather and S&M culture to important queer cultural works like Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975). Lovett/Codagnone trace queer and radical political dissent, citing Memoirs of an Italian Terrorist (2003) by Giorgio, reading lines from a radio play by Antonin Artaud through a bullhorn, and referencing anarchist punk music. Their practice investigates power structures—intimate and interpersonal struggles as well as issues of citizenship and state control—as a way to chronicle subcultures and work against their erasure and commodification. This exhibition uses the archive to center process and performance, engaging questions around how traces of both performance practices and HIV/AIDS are inherited.
Two studio walls from Lovett/Codagnone’s residence in New York City—one maintained by each of the duo—are meticulously re-created. The walls display hundreds of pieces of ephemera that speak to key themes in their practice. They also chronicle a key period in HIV/AIDS history that writers Theodore (ted) Kerr and Alexandra Juhasz call the “Second Silence”—a period of cultural avoidance of HIV/AIDS from around 1996, when life-saving antiretroviral treatment was first prescribed in the United States, until around 2012, when culture began to revisit the early years of the pandemic. Lovett/Codagnone’s practice interrogates queer voice as related to this silence—its limitations and potential to upset linear understandings of time through its erotic citational practices. With effective treatment, AIDS became a more private matter and collective activism waned, but Lovett/Codagnone pushed against the normalization of dissident sexuality this represented, creating a body of work focused on issues of collective identity, queer genealogies, and the preservation of subcultures.
Support for the exhibition is provided by the Second Ward Foundation.
