Nelson Henricks - Prix Robert-Forget 2024

Contrary to its common usage now, “queer” originally signified a refusal of fixed identity, seeking instead to name that which exceeded or evaded binary understandings of gender or sexual orientation. At its most generative, queer also had—and has—the capacity to disorder firm distinctions between living and dead, form and content, authenticity and artifice, mind and gut, and more. A nascent conceptualization of “queer” arguably also created the possibility for Henricks to create two exquisite video works in the mid-to-late 1990s: Shimmer (1995) and Crush (1997). Here “queer” helps bring into focus the intertwined affective relation-ships between past and present, between self and other, and between body and voice.

First, however, there was Henricks’s 1992 tape Conspiracy of Lies. In it, Henricks narrates, “I found some papers in a shoebox when I was walking to work today. The box was beside a garbage bin outside of an apartment building. The contents are as follows: four lists, three and a half pages from a diary, two budgets, a telephone number written on the flap of a cigarette package, and a fragment of a photo which seems to depict two people in a restaurant kitchen.” The artist’s official synopsis explains: “When I found the texts, I assumed the author to be a white, gay man like myself. Through the use of twelve narrators of different race, gender, religion and sexual orientation, I attempted to destabilize my own subjectivity and challenge my pre-existing assumptions regarding difference [as well as] to render the boundary between myself and the anonymous author more fluid, thereby questioning the ‘authority’ of authorship.” Here, Henricks confronts the other through fragmentary and ephemeral detritus, which inevitably invites desirous projection that makes the other more legible and similar to oneself. He wanted to find himself reflected in the scraps, and the tape represents his efforts to resist that impulse by creating a conceptual framework to test other possible realities for the anonymous person who left this scrawled evidence behind, unaware that it would be analyzed. This tape also opens up his practice to those of his friends and collaborators, which, in this essay, include Nik Forrest, Monique Moumblow, Steve Reinke, and Yudi Sewraj. They assisted on each other’s tapes and joined in a larger conversation.

The voice emerged as a central concern in Henricks’s oeuvre. In contemporary discourse, we want people to “feel heard,” to listen to the “marginalized voices” that have long been “voiceless.” The voice is an authoritative marker of identity but also hard to pin down. Henricks’s voice is a queer voice and it is as much an expression of artifice as of authenticity. Irony is the ability to hold two different meanings in play at once, which is why it is an antiquated expressive form in our current moment of literality and didacticism. The queer voice is not born but made, drawing on a cultural lineage that has been shaped by hiding, passing, subterfuge, performance, and split identifications. The voice is powerful: in Henricks’s short collaboration with Forrest, My Heart the Devil (2002), it delivers an incantation (“pretty virgins yes”) that, played backward, unleashes demonic possibilities (“satan is your video”). The voice is certainly not to be taken lightly.

In 2010, Ingrid Schaffner curated the show Queer Voice at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. For the catalogue, she invited a number of people to offer responses to the prompt: “Describe the queer voice.” Here is art historian Kenneth E. Silver’s:

I’ve always been troubled that the voice in my head—the pleasant voice I hear myself using—bears little relationship to the voice I hear when I listen to recordings of my voice, one I don’t like at all. It occurred to me from a pretty early age that it was my queer voice I didn’t like, and that I couldn’t do much about it. I was stuck with two voices, one I lived with comfortably, and one I projected (that I preferred not to hear). After a while, being able to tolerate this discrepancy between how I imagined myself, and how I sounded or “appeared” to others, started to look to me like an important talent, a form of power, an essential kind of self-knowledge, and a key to happiness. It’s also funny and reassuring: instead of just plain old boring me there are two of me, and we’re great friends!²

Dedicated “for Mom and Dad,” Henricks’s Shimmer looks back as a means of looking forward, grappling with the meaning of “home” to a queer person who left their place of origin. (Henricks recalls the work as the first time he “felt in control of the medium.”) A shimmer is an effect of the light created from looking at something from a specific point of view; it is not an essence but the effect of a particular orientation.³ The images in the video are fleeting; rather it is the voice that we hold onto. The voice is the thread and the foundation: images come and go, but the voice endures. The voice comes from a body but it can be separated, lifted from it as in a voiceover. Henricks tells us a story while reflexively considering the meaning and power of the speaking voice.

His narrator begins: “Where do these voices come from? Where do they go? All I know is this: I have to tell you something. And you have to listen. You listen and I don’t know why. But I want to tell you, and you want to listen.” The narrator—Henricks but also not-Henricks—is testing us as viewers, or rather listeners. He tells us, “In a dream, I saw this” and we want to believe him despite no evidence of his reliability. (Surely the artist has the right to speak in a voice that is not their own?) The images flash by: a lit match, a sparkler, a penumbra but also Henricks himself, spectral. Show and tell, images of attempted communication: a glass being held up to eavesdrop through a wall, a distorted video signal. The voice is a shimmering thread that connects you to me, lips to ears. Voices and vision lose blur: “Where do these visions come from? Where do they go? Voices from behind the walls. Visions from inside my bones. I don’t know why.”

The narrator speaks of family, specifically a beloved grandmother; her quilt takes on the monumental scale of a landscape through the camera lens. He says “you” but means “I”: “And you feel like a hypocrite: missing a place you know you hate. You hate it more than any other place in the world. You’re just in love with the idea of missing it. You never want to go back home.” Henricks’s use of video enables the “I” to become “you.

The voice begins to speak in “flashes,” fragments, taking on a pulsing rhythm as if seeking to channel the dead: “A thousand years pass through my face in a flash. I am the end of the line. Viruses and atom bombs. Violence on a molecular level. Throw the photos on the fire. The body turns inside out.” The end of the line signifies the end of a Henricks lineage—this queer artist will not have children, will not do his part to pass on the family name—and also the end of a line of his monologue: he is his voice, his lines.

It ends, “Where did I come from? Where am I going? Are you listening? What more can be said? What more than, I’ll be home soon. I’ve got to go. I’m afraid. Hold me. What holds me to you is tangible. Almost real. It comes and goes. It is strong but fragile, weak. Unbearable. I try. I can’t. I’m not allowed. What connects me to you is dimming, slipping, disappearing, fading. It’s done.” Where is home? In video—freed of indexical responsibility, now free-floating—which he treats as voice: Henricks’s incorporation of both recorded and found footage frames all through a first-person lens, external and internal commingling. Video bracingly connects us to the world; it is porous and open to penetration by outside forces. The self is a collage drawn from what we see and hear.

Steve Reinke’s landmark work The Hundred Videos (1989–96) mastered the ironic relationship between word and image in video, and Henricks closely watched the tapes as they progressed, curating them in Montreal and engaging in dialogue with Reinke as they proliferated. Although he narrates many of his tapes—with his voice forging new ways of looking at found images—in his one collaboration with Henricks, no. 69 in the series, Harvey K (1995), there is no narration and no language. We see actor Harvey Keitel in brief clips from his performances: he vocalizes grunts, groans, whines, screams, huffs, hacks—all manner of raw noises—but he does not form any words. He is inchoate, creaturely, his words escape him, leaving an intense animal magnetism in his wake.

In Forrest’s Static from the same year (1995), the voices belong to men on talk radio or TV extolling the dangers of gays and lesbians as a “deviant fringe group” set apart from the rest of society. While the voices frame them as an object of concern—a social problem—the bodies we see in slow motion here stand firm. The hateful words—which aurally layer, accumulating into a senseless cacophony—flow through them, becoming mere static: one body moves gracefully through water, another buttons their shirt; two share a bed, a multitude is on the march. Another voice calmly arises from the din: “To prevent yourself from disappearing, you make these gestures. In the process of disintegrating and reconfiguring, edges become permeable.” In Static, water becomes a medium for tuning out the homophobic “white noise,” for seeking solace in the self and trusting one’s desires in the face of the widespread demonization of sexual minorities.

Henricks’s dazzling Crush, released two years later, presents the narrator’s vision of a body striving for complete transformation, even obliteration.⁴ Water again acts as a medium, but for corporeal mutation rather than steadfastness.⁵ Not coincidentally, Crush was made soon after the peak in AIDS deaths mid-decade, and around the time that more effective drug treatment “cocktails” were becoming available in Canada. Bodily disintegration was not a metaphor, but rather the condition of life for Henricks’s friends and community in the 1980s and ’90s. Becoming-animal⁶ offers a potential escape. Here the voice is extended and abbreviated, it changes gender—the voice does not let you forget that it is also a body; it is manipulated, pushed, pulled, something muscular. The narrator’s “goal” is: “To become larger or smaller, to twist, to bend, to stretch, to break, to change one’s shape. But what way is best?” The body consciousness that afflicts gay men is exaggerated: rather than simply losing weight, the narrator imagines cutting off his fingers: “This vision of the reconstruction is not interested in aesthetics, just in hurrying evolution along a little. Where art and psychoanalysis lack the capacity to create true transformation, science is capable of miracles.” The fantasy of a dramatically changed body is not just described but enacted through the editing: Henricks’s eye is intercut with that of a horse; shots of knives being sharpened, ready for carving, are intercut with a string instrument whose striking notes are audible on the soundtrack. These hands harm and heal, create and destroy. The narrator’s core self is carried more by the hand than the voice, but the self is as fleeting as a fistful of glitter: “When I become an animal, I will dissolve, become anonymous and interchangeable with any other member of my species. Myself I want to disappear, I want the ‘I’ to disappear, I want the ‘me’ to disappear. Nothing left but the shell of my body, housing a blank identity, free.”

Yudi Sewraj’s and Monique Moumblow’s works from the same period imagine similar extreme transformations and schisms of selfhood: In Sewraj’s Rut (1998), we see a bear attempting to shave the fur from its torso, perhaps an attempt at joining humanity. Texts read, “I see myself as a bear” and then, “Everyone else sees me as a man in a bear suit.” In his earlier Hybrid Creatures (1993), we meet a variety of postmodern, post-human, and postcolonial subjects including “Jinhan the Recycler,” who imagines a “completely closed system” where “the organisms are joined at the original openings, mouth and anus, forming a completely self-sustaining circle. Food is ingested at one end, digested, excreted, and then fully recycled and returned to begin the process once again.” In her unsettling Joan and Stephen (1996), meanwhile, Moumblow speaks in intimate close-up directly into the camera lens: “Hi Stephen, it’s me Monique. You know, if I had been a boy, my parents would have named me Stephen. I can’t really picture being male so I decided to invent you. Actually, I’m not really sure who you are. At first, I used to call you my imaginary boyfriend, but then that sounded kind of stupid, so I think that it would probably be better if I called you a lover.”

If Shimmer was about the past, Crush is about the future, but they unfold against the radical destruction of linear temporality that AIDS enacted—one where young, healthy men were rapidly enfeebled, where a generation was close to wiped out. Those who were lost endure through their art but also through our fantasies of them, what we want them to be. Crush ultimately retreats from the future and turns backward—while the bodily transformations it imagines are miracles of engineering, they are about devolving, not having to confront the crushing weight of human problems. About undoing, unmaking, unaliving—to use a term currently fashionable to evade social media censors—the self. The body is put under the microscope and it is found wanting; the hope that becoming-animal offers is seductive yet false. It is best to just bellow into the void like Harvey K.

I will end with the poetry that ends Crush, as the narrator is exhaustedly winding down: “No, I am not remembering, I am forgetting. There are no meanings left to make, no space left in my head, no point in learning, no point in starting over. Nowhere to build once I have torn myself down. No one to talk to once I have rebuilt myself from nothing. I am forgetting. All that which cripples me, I am erasing. Day by day, I am letting go of history. When I’m free of the past, I will be free of my duty to the future. There is almost nothing left. Just one last thing: my words. I will shed them like a second skin. No more. At last, silence. [Breathing.] The edges of the body dissolve, become permeable. You are spreading. You are moving out. This feeling will never leave you. And if what?”