"Until something better comes along": William Cullum and Art After Incarceration

William Trlak reflects on the life and work of William Cullum (1958–2020), an artist who was among the first ten to join the Visual AIDS Archive. Considering Cullum's artwork alongside his 2013 blog documenting his search for stable housing following his release from federal prison, Trlak traces how questions of space, confinement, and survival shaped the artist's practice.

Bill Cullum was born in 1958 in Virginia to a middle-class family, where he was originally trained as a classical pianist.² He arrived in New York in 1978 to study painting at the School for Visual Arts, though he dropped out soon thereafter. An article by Tim Gay for amNewYork suggests that Bill held multiple jobs in the city through the 90s: staff photographer for the gay newspaper and magazine the New York Native and Christopher Street, assistant to early HIV/AIDS researcher and creator of the non-profit AIDS Community Research Initiative of America, Dr. Joseph Sonnabend.³ Ultimately, however, it was sex work that offered Bill the most freedom to continue his artistic practice.⁴

Bill’s artistic works were well received in New York art scene and exhibited at galleries like Debs & Co.—founded by former Visual AIDS executive director Nick Debs—in 1997. His early works lean heavily on the principles of collage. His artistic motif relies on the fixing of printed photographs on surfaces that he painted with designs, drawings, and spectres of the associations he finds between the picture and life. One such work, Study (Urn) (1994), exemplifies this practice (see fig. 1). The piece shows a print of an urn fixed on a piece of wood and painted with encaustic, a material made by suspending pigment in heated wax that is then applied to the surface. Blurred, nearly smeared figures of gold skulls surround the print. Their presence and means through which they are physically preserved admits the spectre of death and mortality that permeates Bill’s artistic and personal work.

Study (Urn) was featured in Visual AIDS’ 1995 exhibition at PS 122 Gallery The First 10, showcasing the first ten HIV-positive artists archived in Visual AIDS’ Archive Project. The show’s program hones in on Bill’s use of the grid across his oeuvre as a unit of artistic production and ideation.

• "Grids are essential to Cullum’s work, often dividing an image into smaller parts. The grids refer to the way a computer presents visual information as small squares. In his selection and placement of images and designs from other sources mixed with his own original photographs, Cullum implies a conversation between the two."⁵

Grids, to Bill, divide space, putting each piece of an artistic work in a dialectical relationship with that which lies next to, across from, and near it.⁶ The grid occupies a simultaneously partitioned and coterminous space with the whole of each piece, blurring the lines between what constitutes difference within a seemingly discrete plane. In other words, the grid asks its viewer to reimagine the physical and metaphysical limits of the artistic in dialogue within and beyond the canvas, the emblem of art’s supposed limitation.

Grids, like SRO units in a HASA housing building or cells in a prison, make space more manageable for those who administer it, be it the artist, the blogger, the case worker, or the warden. Grids make space understandable as a discretely defined and socially accessible unit of analysis, while simultaneously and self-reflexively reiterating the structures of power that allow it to come into being. It is apparent, looking across the near forty years of his life that his archive offers brief glimpses into, that Bill is intently aware of the contradictions and collusions between the structures that thrust him into uncertainty: HIV, the New York City queer art scene, mental illness, incarceration, insecure public housing, among others.

A reading of Bill Cullum’s blog as an extension of his artistic practice that attends to the spatial shows a sustained critique of the simultaneous burden and possibilities that space presents for the queer, the seropositive, the incarcerated, or the homeless. Beyond this, it asks a question: how can Bill’s archive, both personal on his blog and institutionalized in the memory of Visual AIDS, act as its own mode of artistic production? Andrew Cole might term this practice of seeing space as “synchronic,” that is, “to see two things at once, in the same space—the thing as individuated but whole unto itself, and the thing as an assembly of parts, produced this way rather than that; likewise, it is to behold the thing as a part in a whole, and the whole as a construction or composition of parts."⁷ Bill brings his history to bear on the rhetorical, artistic, and digital spaces he constructs and engages, taking their individual interjections seriously as a political interdiction.

On February 2, 2013, two years after his release from prison, Bill shared a photo of his Single Room Occupancy (SRO) in New York City’s HIV/AIDS Services Administration (HASA) building in Chelsea under the title “The new digs.” The slightly blurry photo shows a small white room, with a single bed. Behind the bed, in the corner of the room, a plastic lawn chair faces inward towards the small wooden dresser and white minifridge placed on the room’s opposite wall. On the hind wall a window is mostly covered by a white blind, cockeyed at the top, the open door at the far right of the photo gives the sense of standing in the room’s entryway, marking the short distance between its entry and its furthest expanse, giving the otherwise flat photo depth. No personal effects can be seen in the photo, only what appears to be a single wrapped roll of toilet paper placed centrally atop the dresser.

In a chapter coauthored with anthropologist Andrew Irving for The Routledge International Handbook for Existential Science (2023), Bill writes autoethnographically on the vexing effect incarceration had on his relationship with movement:

They organized my capacity for bodily movement to such an extent that it soon became my life. By which I mean, although I could remember a life before prison where time, space and the body were under the control of my own will, I could no longer conceive of it in any practical or grounded way. Paradoxically, it was sometimes quite comforting to be subject to the ritual and institutional organisation of time and space. To live, move and be moved according to a kind of certainty and surety in which there is no decision to be made. It was as it was.”⁸

Bill’s written and artistic practice embody what Nicole Fleetwood terms a “carceral aesthetics,” the “production of art under conditions of unfreedom” that “involves rendering ‘one’s self out of sight... or being forcibly rendered out of sight, to imagine and then clandestinely construct other worlds, ones that speak to and through captivity."⁹ I might name the contemporary conditions that render confinement foundational on spatial, economic, epidemiological, and aesthetic registers as carceral modernity. Bill makes clear that the bureaucratic and carceral conditions of housing within the system of HIV/AIDS public services reiterate the burden of housing as falling on the homeless in a way that demands their participation in these structures of impossibility. Understanding the prison and SRO together is itself an exercise in detaching spaces from architectural fixity and reading them instead through their functions, both physical and otherwise, as structures that attempt to cultivate isolation.

In presenting the vexed and complicated network of agencies, people, and places through which they must pass in maintaining and securing housing, Bill and his contemporaries gesture towards what Gill et al. call “carceral circuitry,” or the “routes, courses and pathways that constitute carceral space."¹⁰ In thinking of the carceral as composed of a network of circuits, the limitation of seeing confinement as simply spatial is substituted by something more malleable and responsive to its ever evolving and subversive identity. As the authors note, conceiving the carceral as a matter of circuitry emphasizes its “continuity across institutional and urban settings."¹¹ Bill identifies the relationship he sees between his incarceration and his experience contending with the city’s public housing system as one that emerges not only spatially, but in the processes and people through which he must interface in finding housing.

Though Bill neither clarifies nor justifies his artistic impulse in creating Requiem for Lin Jun, the formal and metaphorical principles of the piece continue to make sense of the questions of death, violence, and place that imbue his artistic and written work prior. In the painting, the forcible unseeing of the self that Fleetwood brings happens doubly. On one side, the unseeing of the body of Lin Jun is done through murderous violence, the cutting of his limbs rendering his body an anonymized amalgam of itself that appears to the viewer as the remnants of the moment of attack. On the other the perspective of the painting enjoys another, seemingly less violent, anonymization of its subject. The crossed feet are the only trace of the body on the right, whose cutting is done by the boundary of the painting. The relationship between the two bodies is left completely unstated, the viewer left to imagine how they are related, or if perhaps their only relationship is in the frame of the painting. Bill posts the final iteration of the painting on June 3rd in a blog post titled “So near yet so far”. From its first appearance on the blog, the painting has undergone a transformation. On the right of the painting are the feet from the reference photo, now painted in front of a window looking out upon foamy sea waves. To the left of the window a purple flower hangs above the painting of a body, its legs and arms severed, lying in a pool of blood. A white panel of Chinese characters stands in front of the body: “This Requiem is for Lin Jun.” In the background of the photo, circling the canvas, we see a glimpse into the space in which Bill paints, a low bookshelf and a short table barely visible behind the painting.

From the creation, to the presentation, to the content of Requiem of Lin Jun, Bill continues his fashioning of an artistic ethic that derives from the dialectical relationship between parts in the construction of a meaningful whole. Looking at the finished painting, one can’t help but imagine how each side would continue, how the bodies of the painting would end, or how far the body of water continues. Seeing the painting for the first time I was struck by its reflection on death, life, and space, how the three are in disorienting conversation. The feet on the right, representing the assumed comfort and security of the home, are disrupted by the dismembered body and its artistic actualization of the violence and death that haunt the domestic. If the teleological logic of the process of housing stability seeks to propose a condition of possibility at its end, Bill seems to interject with a disruption, an arresting visual reminder of the violence with which the process and its goals are imbued.

Ultimately, the painting seems to represent a disillusionment Bill holds towards the process of becoming homed and the contradictions staged between his experience of and the structural barriers in finding a home. Every iteration of the piece is separated by posts where Bill speaks of his troubles and woes in the process of securing stable housing. To see Requiem for Lin Jun in its fragmented state is to be unable to see the final product as anything but a distillation of the intersecting creative and bureaucratic processes Bill undertook in the near year his blog spanned. Just as housing is a process, so too is art, incapable from being divorced or read outside of the social and political sphere through which the artwork came into being, its entirety a material manifestation of the task of its self-reflexive creation.

On August 7th, Bill updated his blog with the news of his new apartment in Brownsville, a neighborhood in east Brooklyn. He gives his address, 505 Rockaway Parkway, and his initial assessment of the neighborhood: “The neighbors are all Jamaican, the prices in the grocery are half what they are in Chelsea, and there are lots of Caribbean treats that I’m looking forward to trying.” Notable is Bill’s attention to his feeling as an outsider, how even though the system found him stable housing, his process of integrating himself into the community still demands much of him. He notes that his probation officer has already come to complete a home visit in his new apartment, reminding the reader that though his task of finding housing may have come to a close, the burden of his incarceration continues all the same.

Bill continued as an active member of the Visual AIDS community until his death in 2020, last working on a monograph of Hugh Steers published in 2015. He last posted Until something better comes along… on October 21st, 2013. In it he speaks of his attempts to receive food stamps, and ends by sharing an update on his current art project: “I’ve abandoned the gouache I was working on as it wasn’t coming together at all and am at work on a large painting that will almost certainly take a month to finish. Maybe longer. I’ll keep you posted.”

William Trlak is a writer and researcher based in South Philadelphia. He is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at Princeton University, where he studies literature, art and carcerality in the Americas since the mid-twentieth century. He holds an AB in Comparative Literature from the University of Chicago.