Just Like Honey
John Boskovich, "Rude Awakening" at Bodenrader
Rude Awakening, an exhibition of eleven Polaroid-and-text pieces by John Boskovich (1956 - 2006), now up at Bodenrader, will leave its audience with a bitter taste where they’d expect something sweet. Finished in 1997, the Rude Awakening Series (1993 - 1997) was made in the before, during, and aftermath of Boskovich losing his partner along with numerous friends to AIDS-related illness, in addition to leaving the apartment he occupied for many years. As an artist often associated with self-portraiture, audiences may be surprised to see only one image of Boskovich in the entire exhibition, keeping viewers at arm's length of the images, much as he does himself.
Rude Awakening imparts the kind of ugly truth its title suggests: just because the personal happens to be political doesn’t make it any less personal. In turning his back on the more noble or politicized expressions of loss from the era, Boskovich looks into the festering exit wound loss inflicts. Love can be a politics for two, but it’s not particularly easy to have a politics for the many when the only other citizen of your secret republic wastes away before your eyes. Rude Awakening sees Boskovich rejecting art as a vehicle for moral or political appeal, which culminated in his near total abandonment of exhibiting work in 1999. Sardonically coupling photographs from his personal life with selected aphorisms from Joyce Strum’s 1987 self-help tome, Love Lines: Affirmations for Mind, Body and Spirit, Boskovich justifies a kind of meagerness that only the depths of grief seem to impel.
The Rude Awakening Series: ‘Oración de la Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe,’ Another Angle of Stephen’s Day of the Dead Altar, November 1995, features an ofrenda dedicated to Stephen Earabino, Boskovich’s partner who died a month prior to the photo being taken. Arranged impromptu on an apartment stovetop, a t-shirt bearing the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe is thumbtacked to the lip of a counter, where a cane—illness’s hallmark—rests its russet handle. Atop the range, two honey bear bottles—a tragicomical motif across Boskovich’s oeuvre—find themselves in the company of holy figures beside the Blessed Virgin; a statuette of Shiva the Destroyer can be seen cropped at the waist and is flanked by two small Buddhas to its left and right. Proximity to the divine doesn’t seem to guarantee salvation. One of the bears is chained by a rosary to one of the stove’s burners, which remains for now, mercifully, shut off; while the other is placed on the opposite burner, similarly supine, but unbound and protected from potential ignition by a tray below it. The accompanying mantra reads, “I acknowledge my personal power.”
While every affirmation is consciously injected with varying degrees of insincerity, none feel quite so caustic as this. The honey bears’ blank, consumer-friendly expressions make them ideal proxies for subjects of a hyper-financialized society, helpless to do much other than watch as life exacts its targeted indifference onto anyone and everyone. T-shirts with Virgin Mothers and jolly Buddhas are baubles, mass-produced for cheap reassurance as much as the mottos Boskovich castigates in each frame. Rather than an affirmation, Boskovich presents a negation, where acknowledging one’s personal power would require acknowledgement of what feels like its total evacuation.
As much as the show traffics in sardonic intertextual games between image, mantra, and title, not all of them seem quite as cutting. Rude Awakening Series: Gardner Gilles as Psychedelic Surfer Jesus, ‘The only one who helped me move out of 514 S. Barrington, 1997, yields a deep chemical green portrait of a young man with gentle eyes in wonked-out triplicate. The subject of this image is accompanied by the affirmation that “I surround myself with people who care about me.” Given a few extra seconds of thought, the artist easily deflates any hint of optimism that may have gotten our hopes up. Boskovich’s admittance that the gardener was the only one who helped him move speaks not only to the neighborly disposition of the depicted horticulturist but also to the amount of friends presently absent.
Similarly, the entire enterprise is almost called into question by the final work on the checklist, Rude Awakening Series: For Larry Johnson: Another Original Idea, Another Risky Persona, a polaroid of a blue sky and clouds that are directly printed on with the text, “I am totally honest with myself and others.” Where most images on view feel like wry jokes, this admission has the air of a provocation, or even—tenuously—an aspiration, but only almost.
Rude Awakenings is not just a series of one-way antagonisms directed by Boskovich against Joyce’s platitudes; the language harangues the photographs as well. Each affirmation has a way of anesthetizing what would otherwise be something intimate. Instead, the mind-numbingly universal applicability of self-help language transfigures the polaroids into a kind of stock image no matter how mordant the combination of text. Maybe, secretly, Boskovitch found some therapeutic value in the words he castigated, their numbing power muting images that would otherwise be far too painful on their own.
With this strategy in mind, Boskovich can simultaneously air his anger publicly but also keep his audiences from feeling empathetic. Were one to try and locate any explicitly political content in Boskovich’s Rude Awakening Series, it would be the assertion that feeling bad for someone is an awfully patronizing ground to base any action on.
If there is an overlooked detail about Boskovich worthy of mention, it’s that he simultaneously achieved a law degree while pursuing his MFA at CalArts. Though he never practiced professionally, it is doubtful that his legal education failed to impart to him the difference between what a speech act claims to do and what it actually achieves in effect. Above all, the law might be the best indicator of the verbal contortionism people will suffer through to feel like life is coherent.
The hope that using the right words will affect some kind of immediate self-optimization hasn’t changed much since 1987, when Love Lines first saw print. It's 2024, and the grifters, gurus, and good vibes peddlers have only multiplied, proliferating on screens as well as airwaves. Time is supposed to heal all wounds, but in Boskovich’s case the causes of injury have only deteriorated. The dead are still dead, the marginalized are even more marginalized, and no amount of manifestation or daily mantra will fix this. The anti-society of “individual men and individual women” from the closing decades of the 20th century has suppurated into the palliative society of today. The schtick is just as solipsistic but even less interested in leaving us alone with the ugly thoughts and feelings whose power Boskovich makes his best case for.
John Boskovich: Rude Awakening is on view until May 11.
