Anton Stuebner — Early Fits & Repeated Starts
When I think about how to describe my writing practice, I imagine it as a series of fits and starts. Every essay or review begins as an attempt to figure out why an object, image or sensation grabs hold of me — and why, after repeated encounters, it still won’t let go. The most significant works don’t reveal themselves immediately: instead, they burrow themselves, lay dormant until some kind of aperture emerges — a turn of phrase, or a shimmer on a sequined dress, or a guitar trill
Early fits: when I was ten, I saw Neil Jordan’s thriller The Crying Game (1992). I still don’t know why I was drawn to the cover. It could have been the stark black and white text, or the arresting sight of Miranda Richardson’s red fingernail cradling the trigger of a gun. The plot confused me, a story of double crosses and mistaken alliances set against an Anglo-Irish conflict that I knew nothing about.
I was about to give up until, suddenly, the setting switched from a bunker hideout in Ireland to a gay club in London. As Fergus (Stephen Rea) sits at the bar, distractedly fiddling with an cocktail umbrella in his drink, the lights dim and a guitar begins to trill against a staccato drumbeat. The camera cuts to a folding screen on a stage. A manicured hand twirls from behind, red lacquered nails glistening in the spotlight. Dil (Jaye Davidson) steps out, sheathed in a tight gold sequined dress covered with fuchsia and mint green swirls while lip-synching to the opening bars of karaoke cover of Dave Berry’s 1964 song, “The Crying Game.” I paused the film, transfixed. I quickly hit rewind, replaying the scene: Fergus’ cocktail umbrella, dimmed lights, Dil’s twirling hand.
Repeated starts: I watch The Crying Game at least once a year. Each time, I try to figure out why it had such an impact on me when I first saw it. Perhaps I recognized its overt “queerness,” saw those sequins on Dil’s dress and knew that they — and their display of glamour and camp — were somehow meant for me. I might have even recognized it as an important “cultural text”: years later, in graduate school, I wrote my thesis on British artist Derek Jarman, whose films were part of what critic B. Ruby Rich coined as the “New Queer Cinema,” a movement of queer-themed independent cinema in the early 1990s that included The Crying Game.
But whom the hell am I kidding? There’s no way that I was that precocious.
To this day, I don’t watch The Crying Game for its historical significance or cultural importance (although both, arguably, are notable). I watch it for that surge of physical sensation — anticipatory jolt of giddiness? — I feel when the lights dim and Dil’s sequined sleeve shimmers from behind that screen.
When I was offered the Writing Residency at Minnesota Street Project, I immediately wanted to use this opportunity to expand my graduate research — to spend time ruminating on, say, Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ “candy spills” and their historical importance in signaling a shift towards a kind of “queer abstraction” that resisted visual cultures around queer bodies that circulated in mainstream media during the HIV/AIDS crisis.
It certainly seemed like the right kind of project.
Every time that I began writing preliminary notes on Gonzalez-Torres’ “candy spills,” however, I’d feel stymied by the work’s importance; by the reams of critical discourse on Gonzalez-Torres; and — not insignificantly — by the e-mail from the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation, still sitting in my inbox, which contained an impressively thorough (and terrifyingly exact) compendium of “recognized” bibliographic materials on the artist’s best known work, “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) (1991).
I needed another way to connect to the work. I didn’t want to look at Gonzalez-Torres’ work and see it as a piece about HIV/AIDS. I wanted to feel that excitement of encountering a strangeness in its materials — thousands of cellophane wrapped candies — that was so curious and difficult to place that I couldn’t help but draw closer.
I wanted the work to take hold of me and not let go.
During my Writing Residency at Minnesota Street Project, I want to eschew the personal context of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ candy spills — at least initially — and focus on their materiality: the sheen of the cellophane wrappers, the smell of the candies, the tactile experience of shaping and digging through a mound of plastic and cellophane and hardened sugars. I want to think about how cultural associations with “candy” — as well as films and songs that reference candy — affect how we encounter Gonzalez-Torres’ candy spills. I want to consider these works expansively, inviting other artists to offer their own interpretations/responses/riffs/rebuttals to Gonzalez-Torres.
Above all, I want the work to become unfamiliar to me. I want to approach it in fits and starts, to try and fail to understand it repeatedly until it reveals itself.
Anton Stuebner is San Francisco-based arts writer whose areas of focus include queer representation, critical race, and visual cultures around bodies. He is a Contributing Writer to Art Practical and has filed additional reviews and essays with Metalsmith and California College of the Art’s graduate journal, Sightlines. He has presented research through Queer Conversation on Culture and the Arts (QCCA), the Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference at the University of Wisconsin — Milwaukee, and the Visual and Critical Studies Graduate Symposium at California College of the Arts.
In 2016, Stuebner was selected for the Emerging Scholars Program through QCCA, an ongoing collaboration between the Queer Cultural Center, California College of the Arts, and the University of California, Berkeley’s College of Environment Design. He was also awarded a 2015–2016 Project Index Fellowship through the Kadist Art Foundation. Stuebner was also a 2016 Finalist and Alternate for an Arts Professional Residency at Headlands Center for the Arts. In 2017, he joined the Board of Directors of the San Francisco Arts Education Project (SFArtsEd), a non-profit founded by artist and educator Ruth Asawa that provides access to arts education in over twenty elementary and middle schools in the San Francisco Unified School District.
In addition to his writing practice, Stuebner is the Associate Director at Catharine Clark Gallery. He holds a Master of Arts in Visual and Critical Studies from California College of the Arts and a Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of California, Berkeley
