Ira Sachs and Morgan Bassichis on reenacting artists lost to AIDS

Impersonating the dead can be risky work. This year, Ira Sachs' Peter Hujar's Day and Morgan Bassichis' Can I Be Frank? each used reenactment to animate artists lost to AIDS. Below, Sachs and Bassichis join Kyle Croft, Executive Director at Visual AIDS, for a conversation about the stakes and motivations behind their work. 

Kyle Croft: To get started, could each of you share how you came to the artists your works center on, Frank Maya and Peter Hujar?

Morgan Bassichis: I tell the story of how I encountered Frank Maya as part of the show. I was at a residency in Sag Harbor, Long Island, and I had a chance meeting with Frank’s brother, who says, “Oh, my brother was a performance artist, comedian, and musician,” and I have a joke in the show saying, “My first thought, I don't know why, was… I'm going to win a Tony Award.” I think right there, it begins to index the complex economy of the “queer ancestor.” There's some capital involved! The show is trying to play with the dynamic of both reverence and exploitation, and honoring and commodification.

That is not new to my project or any of these projects. In fact, Frank Maya’s ex Neil Greenberg—and many other exes and friends and family—jokingly called his memorial a “canonization ceremony”. So they were already joking and parodying the ways in which artists who died of AIDS were immediately turned to these saint figures. At that memorial, at the Kitchen in 1995 (Neil was the dance curator at the Kitchen at that time), they reperformed monologues and songs of Frank's. That was Neil, but also Steve Buscemi and John Cameron Mitchell and other people who were dear. 

This tradition of the reperformance, the tribute—and the ego at play there, like, ‘did I do it better than you?’—this is already in the mix. Then I spent basically a year and a half studying Frank’s work and interviewing his people and honed in on a performance that he did at La Mama in 1987.

Ira Sachs: I remember that Cynthia Carr published an article about David Wojnarowicz in the Village Voice in 1990. I think that was when I first read about Peter. He was just like a shadow of David's, I think, for a little bit, and he was dead by then. Then Matthew Marks Gallery had a show, a couple of shows, of Hujar's work in the early 1990s. Opposite to you, Morgan, I didn't see any capital for me. I just saw a window into a certain visual and aesthetic rigor, and beauty. He was connecting me to a whole culture that I wanted, a culture of the people he was photographing and making beautiful. I felt like even knowing his work made me a little beautiful somehow. I was part of something, in the familiarity of that. 

Recently, when I finished the film, Gary Schneider, who was Hujar’s printer and who was a subject of a lot of Hujar photographs, said, ‘Oh, now you're part of the Hujar family.’ I said, ‘I'm definitely not.’ I didn't know Peter. There is just this huge chasm between me actually being intimate with him. I'm intimate with this very particular text that he and Linda Rosenkrantz created in December of 1974. I know that text as well as anyone. I made a movie of that text. But it was really the whole of that text that was compelling to me. Certainly because of its relationship to Peter, it was more interesting to me. But there's also a lack of intimacy I have with him—that actually feels more present for me. I have an intimacy with Ben Whishaw playing Peter Hujar. Ben and I have a love for Peter Hujar that we share, but it seems very contemporary, present tense. It's anti-historical, almost.

Ira: For some reason I thought about, ‘Me think she doth protest too much.’ To say, ‘I didn't know Peter, I wasn't intimate with Peter,’ is a way to create a defense against anyone who might see that before I do. There is this fear of being called a grave robber. I want to be clear. Because ultimately, Morgan, it seemed to me that you were embodying Frank Maya. As an audience member, I understand that, and also the layers of that were present in a beautiful way. I loved your show. It was so meaningful to me. But ultimately, we're talking from a crouched position of trying to be connected to these artists, but also not to exploit them. It's a little bit dodgy, I would say. 

I did a very cursory, but deep enough, it seems, dive into all the names that were described in the 55 pages of text by Peter and Linda. I did a glossary, and I did the research of that glossary at about a Wikipedia level. Not deeper, certainly. I shared that with Ben Whishaw, who somehow took this slightly shallow explanation of a whole universe and managed through performance to actually create that universe. That's what seems somewhat extraordinary about what he does in the film, is that you believe that there is a whole universe that this person shares with you – as if you've known him your whole life, because you know all those people, because he knows all those people. It's like a Shakespearean magic of what people can somehow create with language and talent. That was visible to me when we started shooting. I was like, ‘Wow, he's really making every word matter.’ He's done that primarily on his own. 

Morgan: Your film was such a beautiful visualization of the witness. Peter's this witness, and then Linda's this witness, and then you're this witness. It's revealing the labor, the role of the witness. You're not hiding it, which to me was just really magical to watch. 

I love that you said 'She doth protest too much' because there is a power dynamic when anyone's dead and someone is alive. Do you know what I mean? There's no use in pretending that's not there. In fact, I think so much of the generativity comes from acknowledging that there's tons of power dynamics at play. If there's something I'm allergic to, it's the profession of good motives. That's what scares me, actually, amongst activists, amongst art historians, amongst politicians, is people not owning their own humanity. How many curators have you met where you're like, ‘Oh, you need me to know that you own this artist. You need me to know that this is your artist.’ Without claiming the power dynamics or erotics in there. 

I just feel like we can get liberated if we tell the truth about all the other stuff at play that doesn't undermine the work. It doesn't mean, ‘Oh, I'm too impure to do this project,’ but it does mean, ‘Oh, all that other stuff is here, just like in any other family dynamic.’ We say ‘queer ancestor’—I wish we would stop. We think that that doesn't mean ‘I also hate that person and envy that person.’ It's the same with anyone's father.

Ira: Yes, there are monsters. For me, there’s this filmmaker, Maurice Piaulat, who I can't stop thinking about for 25 years, and looking at and admiring. I feel like greatness is a monster in a room when you're trying to create. Harold Bloom called it the anxiety of influence. It's a huge anxiety. I'm turning 60 this year, so I'm curious if you can get over that anxiety. When watching Peter Hujar's Day now, what I get from it is an artist transmitting and sharing the anxiety of making work. That's really what the film is about. It's about the anxiety of making a good photograph of Allen Ginsberg. And not often do we see our greats, our monsters, show their vulnerability on that level. It isn't visible to us in the finished product.

Morgan: I love in your film how the narrative continues in the interview, and they keep moving between spaces, and the time of day keeps changing. There's the impossibility of capturing one day. There's Linda's impossible task, Can you say one day? No, the answer is no, I can't. I can't fully. Then, can you capture one interview? I just love how you stretch it out, and we show the impossibility of really ever capturing a one person's life, or one person's day, or even one person's conversation. One of the things I love so much in the film was not knowing some of those names and thinking, everybody has their own social world that's so apparent to them and then it just vanishes at the end of their day, and at the end of their life.

Kyle: There is always a surplus. I felt that the power of the emotional crescendo at the end of Can I Be Frank? was its disorganization, the refusal to tell the audience how to feel. It made me laugh and cry and hope and mourn and think, and in toggling between all of these affective registers I felt released from a need to make sense. 

In the context of the AIDS crisis, there are certain orthodoxies of how legacies are packaged and the kinds of emotional responses that are supposed to go with that. I’m interested in both of your works because I think they’re able to deal with these histories and acknowledge the surplus, what can’t be kept or brought back, and you are able to deliver something that is moving and cathartic in some way without overdetermining these legacies into the cliches of tragedy or something like that.

Ira: I have to say that without being just a mutually flattering society here, what you describe seems to me the strength of Visual AIDS as an organization. The name Visual AIDS is simple enough that it doesn't demand a particular response and the image of Visual AIDS is also very open. It's not sappy. I think maybe that's what we're all trying to resist—the sappiness that, by the way, Frank Maya and Peter Hujar would not have enjoyed. 

Kyle: Thank you, Ira. Both of you have been involved in conversations around HIV and AIDS for quite a while. Over the last decade or so we have seen a growing cultural interest in AIDS histories, and I wonder if that has created room to engage these legacies with more creative license.

Ira: I think you’re asking a question that posits that things move in a direction of better. I don’t totally identify with that. I don’t think Morgan and I represent a movement, sadly. I think we are actually outliers in terms of the cultural production. I think that there's a greater concern around complete forgetfulness, which I would actually say is what Peter Hujar's Day is about. We forget everything. It's not a malicious forgetfulness. We just forget everything. Everything's gone. We might be forgetting AIDS, and we're also forgetting the Second World War, and we're forgetting typhus. A lot of terrible things happen. I think for me, what I would want for myself out of thinking about the world that Peter describes in the text of Peter Hujar’s Day, and the world that he and Linda replicate in the film is a world of intimacy and conversation and sustained interaction with others of similar interest, which for me means other queer artists. Without being nostalgic, I'm not feeling that that's my future. What frightens me is a lack of gathering. And without being sentimental, that's too bad.

Morgan: One of the things that happened over the course of making Can I Be Frank? was Israel's genocide in Gaza. As organizers, we were trying to figure out how to assert a Jewish refusal to comply with the narrative that Israel has anything to do with Jewish safety, we revisited all these ACT UP actions. Particularly the Day of Desperation on January 23, 1991, at Grand Central Station during the Gulf War, when they said, ‘Fight AIDS, not Arabs,’ and ‘Fund healthcare, not warfare.’ These targets, these affects, are not new—they are intertwined with our past. The rage at the US government for sanctioning the mass murder of people with AIDS and the mass murder of Palestinians is connected. 

I think if people are turning towards artworks that people who died of AIDS made, it is that maybe we are remembering that we have a lot to plug into and that we're not the first. And that when we plug into not forgetting, we have a lot more power and a lot more courage and a lot more hope and possibility. 

A big point of reference for me in this show was Ron Vawter doing Jack Smith and Roy Cohn. He did Jack Smith. He re-performed Jack Smith three years after Jack Smith died, 1992. Jack Smith died in 1989. So this is our heritage, if we have a heritage, which is remixing and revisiting those who came before us—in a way that is not morally pure or one-to-one. This is where we come from.