June 2023
Dear readers,
I was recently chatting with a friend about a series of events – evening ‘takeovers’ – they used to put on in different arts organisations. They would invite a number of peers to present their work: either ‘finished’ stuff (e.g. prints, sculptures, videos, performances) or practices which the audiences could participate in (e.g. printing, embroidering, conversation, bodywork, etc.) Rather than presenting all this through traditional exhibition/museum display, the space would be more informally set up, to emphasise sociality and relaxation: low-lighting, lots of cushions, armchairs, yoga mats, mass-produced decorations (fairy lights, shiny plastic hangings), etc.
These events were marketed as ‘house parties’. My friend said something interesting about their motivation: “I wanted to figure out a way that these big institutions could be more comfortable for an audience; and I thought, what’s more comfortable than home?”
What a claim! It brings up so many questions of this PhD project. What does it mean to regard – or use – an art space as one’s home? Are homes particularly comfortable places to be? And why might be we interested in being comfortable?
I wanted to use this anecdote to tease out some of my thinking about this – about home, and our feelings of belonging – and draw links between a number of texts that have shaped my thinking. It’s ended up being a longer piece of writing than I had expected. I’ve interspersed it with images from Ghosting, a project I did with Rohanne Udall in 2019, in which we supported a group of art workers to dress up as ghosts and haunt Toynbee Studios in London for two days.1 I’ve recently realised how significantly this project precipitated this PhD as a whole, and I’m keen to fold that work back in among other work I’ve undertaken within the period of funded research. They’re also just lush images; it’s nice to have an excuse to air them.
There are a number of ways that arts spaces can become regarded as ‘home’. Most literally, this might be when people are actually living there, temporarily or for the long-term. Some theatres, galleries and studios have spaces for ‘resident’ artists to reside while they work there: Battersea Arts Centre in London made a big deal of commissioning artists to design the bedrooms in the building2, whereas the rooms in Mousonturm in Frankfurt have a much simpler, cleaner and more institutional feel (which I much prefer – more on this later). Rather than simply accommodating people while they work, the primary mission of many places (like Delfina Art Foundation) is to invite artists to undertake short or long-term ‘residencies’ through which they can visit a particular region and make contact with fellow artists, curators, etc. And then there are places like Performing Arts Forum in France, or Massia in Estonia, into which (alongside the more temporary guests) some people have moved and lived for years, perhaps permanently.
These are all organisations which have assigned dedicated living quarters within the wider building. There are other situations, in which parts of the building that are not normally living spaces become used as such. The two performers in Zecora Ura’s Don't Feed the Lions3 confined themselves within the Oval House stage for the entire week of the show. There are also projects in which audiences themselves are invited to live in the space. At B-Visible – a “72-hour queer laboratory” at Vooruit Arts Centre in Belgium in 20024 – the main stage was converted to a sleeping space for overnight attendees. My friend’s ‘house parties’ could be understood as doing something similar. Even if they only last for an evening, and not that many domestic activities actually take place, one could argue that there is some kind of domestic layering and transformation of the space for (or through) the form of the ‘house party’.
All of these latter propositions are short-term projects which repurpose areas of the building as living space. Despite their reconfiguring of the space, they are all framed as artistic gestures, and broadly serve the mission of the organisation (i.e. to develop or present artistic practice). There are also other kinds of situations – during extreme conflict, or natural disaster, or political crisis – in which arts spaces might be repurposed and transformed into temporary or ongoing shelters. (e.g. the Les Kurbas Theatre in Lviv in Ukraine5; or the Diyarkbakir art gallery in Turkey in 20146).
Alongside these more literal and practical situations, arts spaces can also be regarded as homes in a more metaphorical sense. My friend, at the start of this text, wanted to think of arts organisations as ‘home’, not to actually move in there, but to render them as places of greater comfort, welcome and belonging.
My PhD project uses ‘hosting’ to think about various kinds of asymmetrical relations – the choreographer and dancer, the salaried programmer and freelance artist – and to understand our sense of participation and belonging in institutions. And although ‘hosting’ takes place in many different contexts, I think it’s most often associated with domestic hosting. And so if we are to think about an artistic or curatorial practices of ‘hosting’ in, for example, a museum, we might end up thinking metaphorically about that space as being a ‘home’.
For example: in a talk organised by National Dance Network in 20217, which invited various arts professionals to reflect on the needs of freelance artists, Lucie Mirkova (the former director of DanceXchange in Birmingham) suggested that it was up to artists to take the initiative in how they participate and move through institutional buildings. The artist Dan Daw responded by saying that it’s not as simple as that, and that there needs to be invitation: “I wouldn’t just come into your home, open the fridge, and start eating what I found there.” Dan was drawing on the concept of host and guest to make sense of the relation to salaried staff and freelance workers – and metaphorically situated this encounter in domestic space, as the primary context in which we understand how these relations play out.
And so, even if this PhD is not actually dealing with projects that involve artists literally living and sleeping in arts spaces, ‘hosting’ seems to drag along with it the notion of ‘home’. But it’s hard to talk about ‘home’. It is so fundamental to how keep ourselves alive, and how we make sense of our lives, that it is overwhelmed with symbolism, metaphor, and cliché.
The concept of ‘home’ is complex and potent. Any discussion of the home ‘in general’ will inevitably fail to account for this or that home in particular – and these particularities are of great importance to the people have lived in those homes. Homes matter, a lot. Anything I can write will risk misunderstanding and exclusion, and no doubt expose many of my blindspots.
While home is saturated in symbolism and metaphor, it is also very material and concrete; losing sight of that disrespects many people who face profound precarities and violences of home and homelessness. I’m thinking of an interview with Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, in which the two thinkers were challenged about their philosophy of ‘giving up your home’.8 The interviewer often work in prisons with incarcerated people. He asked how they can justify their philosophy to these people who have been deprived of their home, and whose release from prison (and, once out, their ability to stay out for the long-term) will depend on their having ‘a home’.
What is a home? Home is tied to the self. Home is where we belong. Home is our own space, where we hold onto the keys, where we retreat to and take refuge from the world. Home is our registered address, at which we can be found. Home is where we cook, we eat, we store our food, we store our belongings; where we take our clothes off, clean ourselves, put them back on again and prepare ourselves for the outside world. Home is where we make ourselves vulnerable. Home is where we lie down to sleep.
Obviously, all these things are highly culturally dependent. Many of these activities – eating, washing – can take place outside of the home (baths, kitchens, community gardens). The Covid-19 pandemic gave rise to massive shifts in cultures of working-from-home, in which many of us had to reconfigure and rethink our homes. I’m fascinated by the blur effect I see many people use when making video calls for work from their home. Their image they share is of their face, torso, and clothing, but any details of their home in the background are obscured; (re)asserting a boundary about which aspects of their lives are made available to their colleagues for scrutiny.9
‘Home’ is a personal and private space, which is not to say it is not social. Home is a place we share with others: co-habitants or guests. One of the novels of French writer Guillaume Dustan is centered on the author’s bedroom; Thomas Clerc describes this as an “this intimate space, that of sex […] a social space, but it is first a personal space […] that is both private and public.”10 One way of distinguishing home from not-home could be to say leaving home and entering ‘public space’ makes us available to many kinds of encounters, whether or not we chose to have them (My favourite definition of ‘public art’ is art which viewers have not chosen to see11). In contrast, home is a place where we can control what kinds of encounters we have; where we can close the door on the world, and refuse others entry.
In her poem ‘Lecture on the History of the House’, Claire Schwartz takes this act of boundary-setting as a definition of the home:
The house scripts its defense.
(The House writes the fence.)
[…] Which came first, the fence or the yard?12
And in the same interview I cited earlier, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney say this reflects the general understanding of home in North America:
home is a castle, it’s your sovereign space. You put a fence around it, and barbed wire if you can get some. And some god-damn surveillance equipment and gods. To make sure that no one comes up in your home.13
This act of boundary-setting gives rise to an ethic of hospitality, for both Schwartz, and Moten and Harney. This is how the latter reply to the interview’s challenge over what they mean by ‘giving away your home’:
if we want to maintain some kind of commitment to ‘home’, we do so by way of this constant questioning, in violation of the rigidity of the boundaries that it is supposed to represent. That’s what it means to be homeless. Homelessness is not the condition by which you don’t got a place to stay. Homelessness is not the condition by which you don’t got a house. Homelessness is a condition in which you share the house; in which you give the house away, constantly, as a practice of hospitality. So the homelessness that we’re trying to talk about, is precisely this practice of hospitality. Home is where you give home away.14
As such, whenever we are developing (or inheriting or taking responsibility for) some form of home – i.e. some borders in the world – we have a responsibility to continually test and challenge those boundaries. Every time we find ourselves in the position of a gatekeeper, our challenge is to see how many people (and what kinds of people) we can smuggle inside.
And while this can take place in very literal situations of home, and other kinds of spaces (like arts organisations) with very literal walls, doors and keys – it goes beyond that. When the Buddhist writer Pema Chödrön talks about an ethical maxim of hospitality, she is referring to the more psychic and emotional dimension of how we open ourselves to others in all kinds of social encounter:
The commitment to take care of one another is often described as a vow to invite all sentient beings to be our guest. […] It means opening our door to everyone, not just to the people we like or the ones who smell good or the ones we consider “proper” but also to the violent ones and the confused ones.15
Something I find interesting in this quote is how emphasis on ‘guests’ who might exceed or fall short of the host’s interests. It is not simply a case of offering an invitation when and how it might suit us, and to who; but it’s also about receiving those who arrive, of their own volition. This is made more explicit in Harney and Moten formulation, in which they insist on the welcome to such ‘transgressive’ entries:
My experience of home, growing up, constant violation of the so-called boundaries of home. […] The greatest feeling in the world was to see Mike walking through the door, without knocking. […] that loving, transgressive violation of the boundary.16
There are other formulations of ‘home’ that are not underpinned by such logics of property, possession and sovereignty. Many people have and continue to developed alternative forms of living that practice different philosophies of land, inhabitation, collectivity, bordering, etc.
For example, I visited Massia in Estonia in 2021. And in trying to write about the complex co-habiting agreements there, I ended up describing it as a place where everyone is “simultaneously guests and hosts”.17 I’m also curious about David Mancuso, the legendary New York DJ who threw weekly parties in his home for hundreds of people for decades. In a talk I attended a few months ago18, Tim Lawrence was keen to stress that Mancuso’s Loft was never formalised as a club (in contrast to other comparable ventures in the ‘70s like the Paradise Garage or the Gallery). But while this was a private residence, it was part of the New York counterculture that radically opposed mid-century American suburban domesticity. These New York lofts were former industrial spaces, that were not licensed for residential living. There were no subdivisions between bedrooms, kitchens and living rooms; they were a literal and symbolic rethinking of the borders between work and leisure. Additionally, people like Mancuso – who were using these homes for cultural events, and regularly inviting huge groups of people in – were radically challenging the traditional bordering of the home.
However, it’s not easy or even possible possible to disentangle oneself from principles of property and possession. As I noted earlier – home is our registered address, home is where we can be found. Home has a function in the the UK legal system, and is partly how our rights and protections as citizens.19 In the same poem as earlier, Schwartz writes that:
You own to prove you cannot be owned.
In owning, you sign a contract of possession.
[…] Ownership is a chronic condition.20
One of the only ways to protect oneself from possession is to enter into possession. One of the only ways to avoid the rental market is to become a home-owner; to protect oneself from state violence one must become a citizen; to protect one’s contributions as an artist one must declare oneself an author.
I’m going to put aside any further discussion of ‘property’ for another text. I want to focus here on home and our sense of identity and belonging.
The ‘failure’ of the home that I’ve discussed so far – its borders and exclusions, and the ethics of hospitality that these demand – continues to presume that home is a desirable place to be. Home is understood a site of refuge, security and belonging. As my friend put it: where’s more comfortable than home?
And as much as this might correspond with one cliché, “home is where the heart is”, it could be balanced by another, “home is where the harm is’. The concept of ‘home’ is significantly bound up with the heterosexual and patriarchal family unit, which – as many feminists and queers have noted – makes it a privileged site of violence and exploitation.21 The ‘home’ is not merely an incidental site of harms that might take place elsewhere. Its distance from the public sphere – the reason why it is considered as a ‘refuge' or 'escape' – is precisely how and why its particular violences arise.
In the B-Festival sleepover event I cited earlier, Claude Wampler presented Strategies for Stagefright: in which the artist presented film footage showing both real and fictionalised transgressions enacted upon the audience while they had been sleeping the night before (e.g. recording and touching sleeping bodies, leaving notes and marks on them, changing their clothes, etc.).22 Home is where we lay our heads down to rest; and Wampler suggests that these domestic activities are both confined to the home – and are constitutive of the home – because of how they leave us vulnerable to harm.
We separate ourselves in order to manage these vulnerabilities. But at home, these harms can persist without witness. In 1961, the urban anthropologist Jane Jacobs wrote in favour of public space and strangers – who are usually understood as representing threat – to suggest that they actually mitigate the greater risks posed by isolation (domestic or otherwise):
Strangers become an enormous asset on the street on which I live, and the spurs off it, particularly at night when safety assets are most needed. […] The comings and goings from this bar do much to keep our street reasonably populated until three in the morning, and it is a street always safe to come home to.23
As the artist Jon Chandler succinctly puts it: “At home, no-one can hear you scream.”24
Home is an ideal of refuge and security, that is often failed. This separation between ‘ideal’ and ‘actual’ home can be particularly overt within diasporic experience. One grows up in a home that is not-home. ‘Home’ is always an elsewhere, that might never be reached, or might have never even existed. As Audre Lorde describes in her autobiography Zami: A New Spelling of my Name:
home was a far way off, a place I had never been to but knew well out of my mother’s mouth. [….] This now, here, was a space, some temporary abode, never to be considered forever nor totally binding nor defining, no matter how much it commanded in energy and attention.25
This idealised ‘home’ remains an elusive myth, that cruelly inures her to the failures of her ongoing situation. Lorde writes the unspoken rules of her childhood: “if we lived correctly and with frugality, looked both ways before crossing the street, then someday we would arrive back in the sweet place, back home.”26
Rather than being a site of identity or belonging, home for many is that which needs to be escaped before life can take place. William E. Jones’ memoir begins by stating “My birthplace was not a place at all, but a void I was afraid would envelop me in nothingness if I didn’t devise a plan to escape it.”27 Of course, this is not such a radical claim in itself: one could reduce much of the Western literary canon to stories about leaving home. But the meaning of Odysseus’ departure is grounded in his inevitable return. What does it mean to leave home, and stay gone?
Home is not simply an environment in which a pre-developed individual does not ‘fit in’. Derek McCormack writes that: “If our house was haunted, it was haunted by me.”28 By identifying with the ghost, McCormack understands himself as an entity which cannot be directly seen or addressed within this environment. His presence within the home will always be characterised as absence. He follows: “I think a lot of gay guys develop ideas […] as boys, that they’re invisible or monstrous or evil In some way.”29 People might define their lives through such an inversion of the values that constitute or represent the home. I’m thinking of Kenneth Anger, who died recently, with a tattoo of ‘LUCIFER’ emblazoned on his chest.
In the face of these failures of home, one could argue that there is an urgency and value in queer and diasporic practitioners – and any for whom a meaningful ‘home’ has been elusive or denied – to develop forms of domesticity that can offer security, dignity and pleasure. This strategy would ultimately expand and reinforce the concept of ‘the home’. It would suggest that each of these instances of home were not really home; that home as a more perfect site of belonging is still possible, and at which we are yet to arrive.
And I think we can compare this strategy with queer conceptions of the family that seek to expand our understanding of what a family can be (through same-sex marriage, queer parents being able to adopt, children being raised with permission for fluid gender expressions, etc.). But others have asked: how necessary is to keep family central as a concept? To salvage and reinvent it? Are there other ways we can understand and value our lives and our relations? As John Giorno puts it, “Just say no to family values, we don’t have to say no to family values, cause we never think about them”30.
I was recently reading The Undertaking by the poet Thomas Lynch, in which he reflects on Western cultures of death and burial through his experiences of working as an undertaker and funeral director. In one chapter of the book, he writes about a bridge in his town falling into disrepair, such that the funeral processions can no longer take their usual route to the cemetery through the residential part of town.
The procession must now pass through a more commercial and industrial landscape. Lynch characterises this shift as the difference between moving past “the backyards bordered with perennials and the factory yard surrounded by chain-link and barbed wire.”31 With clear concern, he goes on to ask what it means to subject the deceased to “storefronts” in which “shoppers gawked or merchants carried on irreverently”32, rather than taking “our dead by tidy homes / with fresh bedlinens hung in the backyards / and lanky boys in driveways shooting hoops / and gardens to turn and lawns for mowing / and young girls sunning in their bright new bodies”.
Even though the lanky boys and young girls in Lynch’s description seem even more indifferent to the funeral procession than the shoppers and merchants, it’s clear which part of the city he considers more appropriate and meaningful. Whatever purpose these industrial and commercial parts of the city might serve, they are ultimately dismissed as being more trivial and base in contrast to the residential.
I can find it quite seductive to imagine this as representative of quite a mainstream sensibility – or at least, something common to the white suburban middle class, from which Lynch is writing. I had introduced this idea of decentering the ‘home’ by comparing it to other traditions of radical queer politic. But I actually think many mainstream examples can easily be found that contradict Lynch’s perspective.
To keep within the realm of death and memorials, I see examples all across Nottingham. When I walk along the river Trent, I pass the football pitch for Nottingham Forest Football Club. The front wall is completely covered in plaques bearing the names of deceased fans. This very mainstream space has been deemed an appropriate place to mark these people’s lives; a place that they themselves, or their loved ones, have decided is a significant site of their lives’ meaning, devotion, and belonging.
It might not be easy or even possible to entirely disentangle ourselves from ‘home’. Home – like families – might hang around in the background. But we don’t need to entirely eradicate them to decenter them from being the fundamental core of self and life. Many other places in our lives can take up this role. Of course, the trick would be to acknowledge these other sites as being of profound importance to us, without then metaphorising them as a ‘home’; without needing to make recourse to ‘home’ as a concept to value or honour them.
So. We can find many places meaningful within our lives, without understanding them through the logic of ‘home’. We do not need to think of arts organisations as ‘home’ in order to care about and feel a sense of belonging within them. But I want to question something else in my friend’s thinking. Why might we want to deepen our sense of investment or comfort in these art institutions at all? Are there any pleasures and possibilities to be found in not belonging?
I’m struck by this passage from Audre Lorde in The Cancer Journals, in which she contemplates returning home after her prolonged stay and treatment in the hospital:
I was anxious to go home. But I found also, and couldn’t admit at the time, that the very bland whiteness of the hospital which I railed against and hated so, was also a kind of protection, a welcome institution within which I could continue to non-feel. It was an erotically blank environment within whose undifferentiated and undemanding and infantilising walls I could continue to be emotionally vacant – psychic mulch – without being required by myself or anyone to be anything else. Going home to the very people and places that I loved most, at the same time as it was welcome and so desirable, also felt intolerable, like there was an unbearable demand about to be made upon me that I would have to meet.33
Lorde describes this environment as “bland”, “erotically blank”, “undemanding”; a space of lacking feeling, sociality and warmth. I think this is what most people mean when they describe somewhere as being ‘institutional’. It is impersonal and bureaucratic. Rather than interacting directly with ‘people’, we feel as if we are all operating with a system which positions us in roles that pre-determined the nature of our exchange. Even if there are gestures of care and hospitality – nursing, catering, conversation, protection, whatever – we understand that these are enactments of contracted services, rather than any ‘real’ expression of attention, feeling, or care. I’m struck by María Lugonez definition of ‘intimacy’ not as being “exclusively or mainly about sexual relations” but instead “the interwoven social life among people who are not acting as representatives or officials.”34
And while this notion of ‘institutionality’ is often disparaged (we complain of being given an ‘institutional response’, or decry a space or event as ‘feeling institutional’), Lorde makes a strong case for why this lack of intimacy can be desirable. The anonymity and emotional vacancy of hospital offered her space to bear the intense instability that her treatment has given rise to within herself and her body, without demanding she navigate that in the company and gaze of loved ones, and all the expectations, demands and vulnerabilities that they might bring. This institutional environment was a space in which no meaningful or lasting social bonds were formed; in which the social demands between herself and the other people there can remain ‘civil’ and ‘professional’; in which she doesn’t have to worry about how she was seen or thought of, and in which she didn’t have to care particularly for these other people, either.
So I want to say to my friend: yeah, sure, I like being in my home. And I like having friends and lovers around. I also like it when they leave. And I like it when I leave, and hang out in spaces in which I feel comfortable; and those in which I feel uncomfortable, too. I enjoy hanging out in many kinds of places, home and not-home, and some of time I enjoy those spaces precisely because they’re not my home, and what that makes possible.
It can nice to be just smoothly processed through a system, and not really have to think or care. To clock in and out of work, without the demand to fully invest both heart and soul. There is much to be said for emotional and psychic divestment, and refusing to make places our home – particularly in the arts. This field both encourages and is driven by a deep sense of vocation: of self-expression, invention, of a personal commitment that exceeds the traditional (spatial, temporal, social) boundaries of work. It is also a significantly underfunded industry, that uses this significant personal investment to sustain itself, despite hostile working conditions and low pay.35 And of course, this goes beyond the peculiar ecosystem of the arts; Sarah Jaffe’s recent book Work won’t love you back advocates for an emotional divestment from workplaces across teaching, nursing, charity sector, athletics and more.36
In Arundhati Roy’s novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, the military general Musa advises his friend that, “enemies can’t break your spirit, only friends can.”37 This is not an argument against friends altogether. Nor is Lorde’s description of the hospital a generalised disavowal of forming home or developing relationships with friends and lovers. Nor are Claude Wampler’s nighttime transgressions an argument against sleeping. All of these things are ways to think about what it means to make psychic and social investments in the world (and other kinds of investments too), and how they make render us vulnerable.
I’m interested in these more ambivalent understandings of belonging. Belonging isn’t always necessary or desirable. I wonder: is belonging inevitable? Will there always be some kind of psychic center, whether or not that is understood as a ‘home’? Could one dispense with belonging altogether?
The French writer Guillaume Dustan’s first novel In My Room centers his home (in particular, his bedroom) whereas his next novel, I’m Going Out Tonight, focusses on the nightclub. He writes about the feeling of security there:
I look around telling myself that it’s cool to be here again, amongst my brothers from the neighbourhood. Only fags. Only guys I can look at without any risk of getting the shit beaten out of me. Even if it’s just in their eyes. Only guys who would theoretically want for me to want them. A place where I don’t feel I must have my guard up the whole time. A place where I’m no longer an animal waiting to be attacked. Paradise.38
We would take this as a neat example of Dustan – or the narrator – valorising the club as a site of refuge, without needing to frame it as a ’home’.
But what I find most interesting about this passage is the final one-word sentence, “paradise”, which might be in reference to this rare feeling of safety, or his description of the space itself, or both. As I was rereading this passage, I thought of another reference to ‘paradise’, in the poem ‘Ode to the Beloved Hips’ by the Native American (Mojave) writer Nathalie Diaz. The poem is a lengthy celebration of her lover’s hips, which she refers to as “Muzem Cab’s hidden Temple of Tulum”, “this wild hive”, “the enormous orchard of Alcinous”.39 Overwhelmed in the splendour of this body, and her own desire, she ends up exclaiming (demanding?) “Imparadise me”.
For Dustan, the site of queer desire is paradise, but for Diaz it brings her to be ejected from it. Sexual desire, or at least queer desire, is being discussed through the Christian story of Adam and Eve being expelled from The Garden of Eden. And I what I find interesting about this is how it can suggest a sense of queer life not belonging within ‘the home’, or in spaces that are ‘not home’ (e.g. the club, the football ground, wherever), but in an ‘outside’: in a state of ejection, wandering, non-belonging, in-between.
Of course, this reading is contradicted by Diaz in another poem from the same collection, in which she finds resolution to her loneliness and desire through the fantasy of arriving at the house of her lover.40 But I am interested in this idea of non belonging, and I think it can be pursued across a number of poems written by gay men about landscapes of cruising.
Wilfred Owen describes himself as a ghost in ‘Shadwell Stair’, as he moves along the cruise-y banks of the Thames at night. He is a ghost with “flesh both firm and cool” that by end of the poem, “with another ghost am lain.”41 As with McCormack earlier, I read the figure of the ghost as having a sustained by limited position within the environment they haunt: they are an absence that is present, or a presence that is absent.
Rather than focussing on the encounter, Richard Scott’s poem ‘heath’ more directly addresses this uncertain presence of the individual within such a landscape:
the moon bleeds
light onto the black ash
every branch
in this dismal canopy
rasps indifference
like an ex-boyfriend
the salt march
is full of drowned things
the walnut trees
beckon like trade
the dark moves
no you are not dreaming
this desperate place
this scrub
cold
as dead starlight
violet
is your home now42
This place might be ‘the home’ of this figure, but only at a great remove from its conventional meanings. This is a place of “indifference”, “darkness”, and “drowned” things. It is a cold and uncomfortable place to lie down. It lacks borders: there are no walls, no privacy, no shelter; no protection from the sky, or anyone else who might wander along.
While it’s less evidently a cruising site, Thom Gunn describes a similar sense of finding refuge in a hostile landscape in his ‘A Sketch of the Great Dejection’:
a place of poverty,
of inner and outer famine,
where all movement had stopped
[…] The wind was like a punishment to the face and hands.
These were marshes of privation:
[…] I remained alert, confused and uncomforted.
I fared on and, though the landscape did not change,
it came to seem after a while like a place of recuperation.43
One way to read these three poems would be as evidence of the human capacity to adapt to and develop a sense of self within any set of circumstances, despite how marginal or undesirable or worthless they might appear to others.44 ‘Belonging’ becomes an inevitable and inescapable process; wherever we end up, we make our homes.
But another reading is possible, which suggests a more uncertain relationship to ‘belonging’ altogether. These poets are describing these sites as ‘home’ or ‘places of recuperation’. But they are not elevating them for the reader. These places do not become more habitable, beautiful, accommodating, loving: “the landscape did not change” and Gunn remains “uncomforted”. However, something does change in these poems. And rather than identifying this shift within the spaces themselves, I would locate it in the speaker of each poems capacity and need for ‘belonging’ itself.
Neither Scott nor Gunn’s poems identify any particular comforts in these sites; nor are they suggesting their curious sense of belonging comes from the encounters they might have had with other people cruising there. I think that them calling these sites ‘home’ or ‘places of recuperation’ reveals something about the capacity of the speakers to sustain themselves not only these landscapes, but many other kinds of inhospitable landscapes. They are reconciling themselves to their dwelling in these spaces – and I understand this to reflect a generalised attitude they can then hold to many kinds of spaces, that they might inhabit and move through. Rather than a particular sense of ‘belonging’, or a frustrated sense of ‘not belonging’, I think these poems suggest the viability of a life in a sustained position that is more indifferent; which I will call ‘un/belonging’.
I’m reading these poems as being by gay men and about cruising sites, but arguing that this sense of ‘un/belonging’ can come from and bear on other kinds of sites too. I’m following Tim Dean here – who theorises cruising “less as a localised gay male practice than as an ethical philosophy of living that is available to anyone, irrespective of gender or sexuality.”45 I think ‘un/belonging’ can also be felt (or practiced?) by people of many different genders and sexualities.
And I’m curious about how it might help make sense of some interesting instances of hosting. For example, I’m interested in how the fictional host Anjum in Arundhati Roy’s novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, who describes the cemetery in which she lives with others:
This place where we live, where we have made our home, is the place of falling people. Here there is no haqueeqat. Arre, even we aren’t real. We don’t really exist.46
But I have a couple of hesitations.47
Firstly, I’m trying to read something in these poems about of forms of living that trouble conventions of home, identity and belonging. Not simply that our homes might not neatly correspond to the classic hetero models, but that we might not form a sense of ‘home’ altogether. And I think a risk in this is how it might reproduce narratives that characterise queer life as miserable or tragic.
It’s not that I feel the need to adhere to a strict party line of optimism (“It gets better”, etc.), but these narratives are deep-seated and can be weaponised at both interpersonal and societal levels. In The Promise of Happiness, Sara Ahmed considers heterosexual parents who use this received understanding of queer unhappiness to police their children (e.g., the classic line: “I just want you to be happy, dear, and it’s such an unhappy life.”)48 I was recently reminded of Lord Arran’s speech within parliament, following the passing of the Sexual Offences Act in 1967, in which he insisted that “Homosexuals must continue to remember that while there may be nothing bad in being a homosexual, there is certainly nothing good.”49
One response to these narratives is to rush to insist on stories of queer happiness and belonging: either by mapping queer lives onto existing structures understood to mark success and happiness (long-term monogamous partners, children or child-substitutes, etc.), or to highlight a sense of ‘finding oneself’ through other forms (a welcoming community, a ‘chosen family’, the club which is ‘paradise’). And I wonder how to tread this line; how not to anxiously reproduce these neat narratives queer belonging, and instead dwell with un/belonging: not as a tragic state of loss, but a generative and potentially pleasurable disposition of living.
My second hesitation comes from the risk of conflating different meanings of home and belonging. I am talking about some kind of persisting psychic or cultural state of comfortably not feeling ‘at home’. As with Moten and Harney earlier, it’s worth asking what kinds of social, civic or material securities might underlie and enable such un/belonging.
A quick search online tells me that – like me – Thom Gunn, Richard Scott and Tim Dean are all white cis men, who have found work in universities alongside or as part of their writing practices. I don’t have the biographical detail or desire to make further claims about their lives.
Within my own situation, I can note that one of the most significant things that has taken place over the course of this PhD has been a substantial shift in my sense of investment in arts organisations. A few years ago, I craved the legitimacy and approval of arts organisations – both particular places, and I think the field more broadly. They mattered to me. My sense of ambition and future were shaped around them. I don’t think I would of thought of these spaces as ‘home’ – nor how much I might have neat sense of ‘belonging’ in many of them – but they were significant parts of my identity.50
In 2019, my collaborator Rohanne Udall and I led a two-day event in which a number of arts workers – artists, producers, writers, administrators, critics – dressed up as ghosts and ‘haunted’ Artsadmin, a major arts organisation.51 This activity was fuelled by our and the participants sense of alienation; we were upset about feeling excluded within these kinds of spaces. It required our sense of belonging – even if it was fustrated. It wouldn’t have worked if we simply didn’t care about these spaces.
These days, I still participate in various organisations, but I don’t think I have such a psychic reliance on them. I understand my artistic practice to be first and foremost something for my friends. Some of the work ends up entering into and circulating within institutional platforms and markets, but that is always a secondary concern.
But while this shift could be seen as a self-empowered recalibration of who I am, and what I care about, it has to be recognized that it coincides with me having more financial security than ever before in my life. The PhD stipend – four years of guaranteed income – means I can literally afford to not care about these places. I am in a rare and temporary relieve from the ongoing hustle of neoliberalism, in which a ’job-for-life’ is scarce. As such, I have been able to stop and step back, and hang out in places other than these organisations that so dominated my desires.
However, we’re talking about feeling, about which it is impossible to determine or verify any clear causal reasoning. There are so many other factors at play; I’d be hesitant to make any firm claims about my own feeling, let alone someone else’s sense of belonging, particularly when expressed through the literary form of a poem.
I think one of the ways these two hesitations can be addressed is through reformulating this notion of un/belonging. Rather than the more radical insistence of the capacity to live (and thrive!) without a sense of belonging altogether, it could instead be understood as having a partial sense of belonging in many places; an in/coherent self that locates itself across and in between.
This partial belonging dispenses with the idealised notion that a place can offer any ‘pure’ or ‘successful’ or ‘true’ belonging. I think this is very directly expressed in this passage by Lorde, as she reflects on living in New York in the ‘50s:
The important message seemed to be that you had to have a place. Whether or not it did justice to whatever you felt you were about, there had to be some place to refuel and check your flaps. […] For some of us there was no one particular place, and we grabbed whatever we could from wherever we found space, comfort, quiet, a smile, non-judgement. […] Each of us had our own needs and pursuits, and many different alliances. Self-preservation warned some of us that we could not afford to settle for one easy definition, one narrow individuation of self. At the Bag, at Hunter College, uptown in Harlem, at the library, there was a piece of the real me bound up in each place, and growing.52
Lorde found and moved between each of these different places – the white-dominated lesbian bar, the class-ridden academic environment, the black neighborhood, her literary workplace. This movement was through necessity. As a working-class black queer poet, there was no particular place that was designed with her in mind; that could welcome or accommodate all these aspects of herself. But I read her as suggesting that even if there were to be such a space, it would not wholly satisfy her sense of desire and belonging:
It was a while before we came to realize that our place was the very house of difference rather the security of any one particular difference. (And often, we were cowards in our learning.)53
Each place does different things for different groups of people. These groups are full of differences, no matter how micro; and each individual is full of contradiction and difference. No one space can cater to everyone, because no one space can cater to anyone. There will always be parts of ourselves that are restless and desire otherwise. And as such, rather than seeking any site of ‘total’ belonging, all we can hope for is that this or space might offer some parts of ourselves refuge and pleasure; and hope that there are other spaces that can invite and cater to some of our other qualities.
I’m not particularly well read on ‘polyamory’ lingo, but I think this might resonate with some of its central tenants: that it’s unreasonable to expect that any one relation might fulfil all our expectation and needs. Instead, we seek and can find different kinds of pleasure, nourishment and connection in many different people. As the narrator of Nate Lippens’ novel My Dead Book puts it, when thinking about one of his friends:
I’ve wanted Rudy to understand me. He’s the closest I’ve had to someone who does. But when I consider the reverse—am I that person to him? Does he want to be understood?—I see how stupid the wish is. That’s what is wrong: It’s a wish. […] Yearning for Rudy to see the cause, the explanation for my life. It’s cruel to want someone to see everything about you because you can’t imagine yourself as real.54
And it seems to me that this can hold as true for places, as it does for individuals. After all, it seems a bit unfair of Guillaume Dustan to call his club ‘paradise’. How many places could continue to meet that expectation?
I do think this shift from ‘un/belonging’ to ‘partial belonging’ more accurately describes most people’s sense of belonging within the world. And I think it is useful in evading some of the angsty tenor of the poems by Scott and Gunn that I had cited. Lorde comes across as enjoying life a bit more than these melodramatic gays. But I do wonder if some ‘un/belonging’ has some radical potential that is worth holding onto. I need to think about it more, but I’m curious about it might compare to the Buddhist principle of ‘non-attachment’, in which we form relations with other people without imposing demands on them. Rather than holding ourselves apart from others, this is a way to better apprehend and respond to them, without our baggage (needs, dependencies, projections, ghosts, chips on our shoulders, …) getting in the way.
I’m not totally sure how Buddhists actually understand the process of non-attachment: whether it is through a sense of being tethered in many different relations (à la Lorde), or a more fundamental detachment altogether. I find it striking that Lorde’s suggests that individual make these idealisations on places when then they are at moments of greatest need: “In times of need and great instability, the place sometimes became more a definition than the substance of why you needed it to begin with.”55 I’m curious about how Buddhists go about trying to mitigate that desire, without satisfying that need.
I’m not trying to make a particular argument here. I’m trying to tease out some of my latent thinking about ‘home’ and ‘belonging’, as part of ongoing thinking in doing this PhD project.
However, I have ended up coming to some kind of conclusion: that we form a sense of ourselves across lots of different spaces. And while this feels pretty unambitious and noncontroversial, I do suspect it might contradict some of the unspoken assumptions at play in conversations taking place in recent years across the publicly-funded arts in the UK. These (formal and informal) discussions are about access and welcome, often with explicitly addressing historic exclusions based on disability, race, class and queerness. And while I agree with and support this move to address these historic and ongoing exclusions, I suspect that sometimes people can lose sight of the unsatisfiability of belonging. No space can or should satisfy everyone. Not every space is trying to cultivate a sense of belonging. And no space can offer an individual a total sense of belonging. Our vigilance toward systemic exclusions should not lead us to a position where we anxiously interpret any report of people feeling a sense of out-of-place-ness, awkwardness or discomfort as necessarily being a sign of failure.
I’ll leave it there.
Sending my best from my studio in my home in Nottingham, full of music, flowers and sunshine,
Paul
You can find more information on the project on our website here: https://currentname.info/ghosting/. We talk about Ghosting as part of a talk we did recently called Uninvited Guests: https://currentname.info/uninvited-guests/
As described in Hito Steyerl (2019) Duty Free Art. London: Verso, p.77.
National Dance Network (2021) What do artists need?. Online. February. A recording was hosted on Youtube at this link, but it has since been taken down.
Beyond my notes, I can find no record that this talk actually happening. I am paraphrasing Mirkova and Daw’s words from memory. It’s not a one-off situation. I find I am attending many talks and events in which the ethics and practices of the field of UK professional dance are being worked out – and then they disappear without any trace.
I’m so curious about what it means that such significant discourses of this PhD project are not available to be quoted or scrutinised. And alongside whatever objections might be made on the grounds of transparency and access, I am shocked by the financial waste. There were at least four or five freelancers speaking at the event, who would have all been payed a fee. How can such an investment be allowed to just disappear?
Millenials are Killing Capitalism (2020) "Give Your House Away, Constantly" - Fred Moten and Stefano Harney Revisit The Undercommons In A Time of Pandemic And Rebellion (part 2) [Podcast]. Available at: https://millennialsarekillingcapitalism.libsyn.com/give-away-your-home-constantly-fred-moten-and-stefano-harney
In 2000, Jacques Derrida was already addressing the huge ramifications that email software has on the division between public and private space. See: Derrida, J. (2000) Of hospitality / Anne Dufourmantelle invites Jacques Derrida to respond (Trans. Bowlby, R.) Stanford University Press: California.
Thomas Clerc, ‘Introduction to In My Room’, in Dustin, Guillaume (2021) The Works of Guillaume Dustan. Edited by Clerc, T. Translated by Maroun, D. South Pasadena: semiotext(e), p.37-8.
Lovell, Vivien, ‘Issues of Patronage in Public Art’, in de Ville, N. and Foster, S. (eds.) (1993) Space Invaders: Issues of Presentation, Context and Meaning in Contemporary Art. Southhampton: John Hansard Gallery, pp.29-31.
Schwartz, Claire (2022) Civil Service. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, p.40.
Millenials are Killing Capitalism (2020) "Give Your House Away, Constantly”. At around 8:30.
Ibid. At around 13:00.
Chödrön, Pema (2012) Living Beautifully: with Uncertainty and Change. Colorado: Shambala Publications, p.63.
To be clear, Chödrön is articulating this practice as an ideal and gradual process: “We can invite everybody and open the door to them all, but open the door only briefly at first. We open it only for as long as we’re currently able to and give ourselves permission to close it when we become too uncomfortable. However, our aspiration is always to open the door again and to keep it open for a few seconds longer than the time before. […] In opening the door gradually, not trying to throw it open all at once, we get used to the shaky feeling we experience when people we can’t quite handle start coming to the part. […] Opening the door reflects our intention to remove our armour, to take off our mask, to face our fears. It is only to the degree that we become willing to face out own feelings that we can really help others.”
Millennials are Killing Capitalism (2020) "Give Your House Away, Constantly”. At around 9:10.
Tim Lawrence (2022) Love Saves the Day. Presented at: Nottingham Contemporary. 22 November. https://www.nottinghamcontemporary.org/whats-on/seeing-through-flames-love-saves-the-day-by-tim-lawrence/
At some point I will actually read some John Locke, as part of this PhD, but… not yet.
Lecture on the History of the House, Civil Service, p.42.
“They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work.” Federici, Silvia (1975) Wages for Housework. Bristol: Falling Wall Press. Available at: https://caringlabor.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/federici-wages-against-housework.pdf
Wampler, Claude (2002) Strategies for Stagefright. B-Festival, Vooriut Art Center, Gent, Belgium. Available at: https://www.claudewampler.org/archive/STRATEGIES_FOR_STAGEFRIGHT.html
Jacobs, Jane (1961) The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House, p.41.
Lorde, Audre (2018 [1982]) Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. London: Penguin Books, p.11.
[^zami2]: Ibid.
Jones, William, E. (2019) I’m Open to Anything. Los Angeles: We Heard You Like Books, p.1.
McCormack, Derek (2021). Judy Blame's Obituary: Writings on Fashion and Death. London: Pilot Press, p.225,
Ibid, p.63.
Giorno, John (2008) Subduing Demons in America: Selected poems 1962-2007. Edited by Boon, M. New York: Soft Skull Press, p.350-1. Quote taken from ‘Just Say No to Family Values’, Originally published in Everyone Gets Lighter in 2007.
Lynch, Thomas (1998) The Undertaking: Reflections on the Dismal Trade. London: Vintage, p.125.
Ibid, p.136. Excerpt from his poem ‘At the Opening of Oak Grove Cemertery Bridge’.
Lorde, Audre (2020 [1980]) The Cancer Diaries. Penguin Random House: London, p.38-9.
Lugones, María (2010) Toward a Decolonial Feminism, Hypatia, 25(4), pp. 742-759
See: Industria (2023) Structurally Fucked. England: a-n The Artists Information Company. Available at https://www.we-industria.org/_files/ugd/2d0dc3_a590eee01e234c7aa8ddd4ae832b2639.pdf.
Jaffe, Sarah (2021) Work won’t love you back. New York: Bold Type Books.
Roy, Arundhati (2018) The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. London: Penguin Books, p.269
Dustin, Guillaume (2021) The Works of Guillaume Dustan. Edited by Clerc, T. Translated by Maroun, D. South Pasadena: semiotext(e), p.168-9.
Diaz, Nathalie. (2020) Postcolonial Love Poem. London: Faber. From Ode to te Beloved’s Hips, p.40-41.
Ibid. From ‘If I Should Come Upon Your House Lonely in the West Texas Desert.’, p.86-7: “I am riding the night / on a full tank of gas and my headlights / are reaching out for something.”, “If you say to me, This is not your new house but I am your new home, I will enter the door of your throat”.
Owens’ poem is can be read here. This cruise-y reading of the poem comes from Jeremy Atherton Lin in his (2021) Gay Bar. London: Granta Books, p.6.
Scott, Richard (2018) Soho. London: Faber & Faber, p.42.
Gunn, Thomas (1992) The Man with Night Sweats. London: Faber, p.19-20.
I am thinking Box Hill, the novel by Adam Mars-Jones, which follows an intense and life-defining sado-maschostic sexual and domestic relationship, which has no legibility within the wider culture of 70s English suburbia, and ends without any materials traces or acknowledgements by any of the narrators friends or family. In the final line, the narrator states that “people can care about anything”. Mars-Jones, Adam (2020) Box Hill. London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, p.120
Dean, Tim. (2009) Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, p.5
Roy, Arundhati (2018) The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. London: Penguin Books, p.84. A bit of Googling tells me that ‘haqueeqat’ means essence, quality; the underlying truth of someone’s nature, etc.
Actually, three hesitations. I worry that all of my discussion feels so… earnest? Dry? I’m trying to tease out some of these ideas. I think the reach for clarity is challenging, and useful. I also anticipate that some of this writing might end up being folded into an academic thesis. But I wonder how this approach ends up misrepresenting and misunderstanding some of the dispositions I’m trying to describe, given the layers of irony, camp, poetics, inversion and ambivalence that are at play in many of the writings and practices I’m thinking about. I’m conscious of something one of my supervisors noted recently about some of my writing – when do the demands for academic writing end up compromising the poetry?
Ahmed, Sara (2010) The Promise of Happiness. Durham and London: Duke University Press, p.93.
In 2021, I co-wrote an essay with Simon Ellis called ‘Dancing Their Unahppy Freedoms’, that tried to articulate this sense of frustrated dependancy and belonging of dance artists in publicly funded institutions. In one section, it tries to follow how an individual’s sense of belonging can shift over time, as they recalibrate their ambitions to the meet their growing disillusionment. You can read the text here: https://currentnameinfo.files.wordpress.com/2023/06/dancing-their-unhappy-freedoms.pdf
The images interspersing this text are from Ghosting. You can find more information here: https://currentname.info/ghosting/
Lorde, Audre (2018 [1982]) Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. United Kingdom: Penguin Books, p.267-8.
Ibid.
Lippens, Nate (2021) My Dead Book. Troy: Publication Studio, p.61.
Lorde, Zami. p.267.