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 Boskovich losing his partner along with a number of friends over the 90’s 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 there is only one image of Boskovich in the entire exhibition, keeping viewers at arms 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. Turning his back on the more noble, politicized expressions of loss from the era Boskovich looks into the festering exit wound loss inflicts. Love is a politics for two, and 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, culminating 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 makes the case for a kind of meagerness that only the depths of grief seem to impel. 

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 the 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 thumb tacked onto 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 all the affirmations are consciously injected with varying degrees of insincerity, none of them feel quite so caustic. 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 bitter 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, is a deep chemical green portrait of a young man with gentle eyes in wonked-out triplicate. The sitter is accompanied by the affirmation that “I surround myself with people who care about me.” With a few extra seconds of thought, the optimism is easily deflated. 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 the amount of friends presently absent.

Likewise, the entire enterprise is almost called into question with the final work on the checklist, Rude Awakening Series: For Larry Johnson: Another Original Idea, Another Risky Persona, a photograph of a blue sky and clouds that Boskovich has directly printed with the text, “I am totally honest with myself and others”. Where most images on view feel like wry jokes, this 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 intimate photos, but instead, the mind-numbingly universal applicability of self-help language transfigures the polaroids to a kind of stock image no matter how mordant the combination of text.

With this strategy in mind, Boskovich can simultaneously air his anger publicly, but also keep his audiences from feeling empathetically. 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 root action in.

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 this part of his education failed to impart on 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 and manageable. 

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. In 2024, grifters, gurus, and good vibes peddlers have only multiplied, proliferating on screens and airwaves. Time is supposed to heal all wounds, but in Boskovich’s case the causes of injury have only festered. The dead are still dead, the marginal 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 festered into the palliative society of today. The whole operation 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.