When John S. Boskovich returned to the apartment he shared with his partner, Stephen Earabino, shortly after Earabino’s death from AIDS-related complications in 1995, he found it completely empty. Earabino’s family had cleared all his possessions, as well as most of Boskovich’s. The only remaining item was an electric box fan. Boskovich encased the fan in Plexiglass, with a vinyl etching reading “Only unclaimed item from the Stephen Earabino estate". Holes in the Plexiglass allow air from the fan to escape, exhaling over the viewer. The work is entitled Electric Fan (Feel It Motherfuckers).
Unable to view this piece in a gallery, I sit in a dark room and let the humming of fan blades lull me into meditation. It is a warm, mid-April evening, announced by cicadas chirping in the dying light. The air feels rhythmic. I try to harmonise with the drone, but I cannot catch the note—it feels ragged, constantly shifting in place, heavy with everlasting breath and cold touch and the weight of a body beside me. I don’t know if I will ever comprehend the scale of Boskovich’s loss, the erasure of an entire person from existence, grief echoing concentrically outwards, like a ripple or an aftershock throughout the rest of the country. Endowed with this awareness, the texture of the sound grows harsher, like a cry; the wind feels icy against my face. What I can do, however, is sit by the fan and remember.
My mother grew up on the outskirts of San Francisco during the height of the AIDS crisis; she was 13 years old when the Reagan administration first addressed AIDS (with laughter) and 18 when the then-president gave his first speech on the subject. In the temporal gap of her teenage years, over 16,000 Americans were killed by a disease born from extreme political negligence. The persistence of her growth in a time of great undoing—undoing that surrounded her, stifling acquaintances and loved ones and old high-school peers—feels surreal. When a person dies, the world carries on. When a community is slowly eradicated, when famous Hollywood stars are outed by their own illnesses, when queer identity is infused with its own death sentence; like a thousand stones dropped into a pond, time freezes in ripples that meet and transform and surround, yet the Earth keeps turning. There is no harsher reckoning than the march of time through unspeakable devastation.
So begs the question: how do you scale this tragedy into something knowable? Artistic attempts to conceive slip quickly back into inconceivable. The AIDS memorial quilt covers the entire White House lawn. The white-clad surviving members of the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus disappear into a sea of black body-doubles. Faced with limitless obliteration, the bounds of logic and rationality begin to waver. This is how it is: if the world were rational, then a fan would be a fan, and a quilt would be a quilt, and the words “gay plague” would never have been uttered in White House press correspondence. The world, however, tends more towards entropy, and unrealised chaos. Dada, in etymology: the hobby horse, the nurse, the father, yesyes, means nothing at all. Born from mass disillusionment following the great loss of World War I, Dadaism becomes an outlet through which the tragic absurdity of one’s circumstance is reckoned through artistic meaninglessness.
Dadaism, more than an art movement or a political surrender, is an assault against capitalism, the bourgeois, rational thought, and logic. Notably, its ‘anti-art’ rhetoric is a reaction to what poet Tristan Tzara, author of Dada Manifesto 1918, penned as “Dadaist Disgust”. He writes that Dada is the “abolition of logic, which is the dance of those impotent to create: Dada; of every social hierarchy and equation set up for the sake of values by our valets”. Dadaism is inseparable from politics of gender and sexuality: founded in a Zurich cabaret, the movement built itself from a legacy of transgressiveness, biting social satire, risqué sexuality and underground political movements.
Furthermore, artists used Dadaism as a lens to explore gender expression; Duchamp employed a female pseudonym named Rose Sélavy to explore sexual gratification, agency and identity within his art. In the deconstruction of established order, one can speculate upon the absurdity of homophobia, transphobia and the vilification of mutual union—distinct from comedy, Dadaism’s absurdity is irrational cruelty, a pit in the stomach instead of an uncomfortable laugh.
Duchamp was the first to coin the ‘readymade’, referring to works of art made from manufactured objects removed from their context and delivered to new meaning. Electric Fan (Feel It Motherfuckers) is an example of such artistic process, though emboldened with a greater tragedy. While, traditionally, it is the artist’s decision to revoke the object’s usefulness and provide it with ‘a new thought’, Earabino’s family instilled its value when they eradicated all physical memory of Boskovich’s partner by clearing his apartment. Revoking Boskovich’s consent from the transformational aspect of the readymade is just one example of the lack of autonomy queer communities experienced when mourning their dead, with families refusing to acknowledge queerness, homophobia in the law, and the dissemination of community due to continued death. Electric Fan is not a readymade ‘choice’ but a reclamation, and Boskovich’s repurposing of an object with such grief into a symbol of Earabino’s eternal life is both radical and exceptionally brave.
In the mechanical, Earabino lives on. The Plexiglass is a preservation instead of a cage, while its holes suggest a place for his breath to escape, washing over the viewer. The spirit of Earabino hums, sings, touches the observer with a chill, cools the skin, and, most importantly, breathes without a heartbeat. Amongst the stillness of a gallery, the drone is meditative. Against the absurdity of the readymade, there masks a cruelty. A viewer may ask, devoid of context,“why a fan?” The answer is, of course, because there was nothing else. The enduring power of grief and love together infuses the most menial of objects with intense connotation. Were it to be a pen, or an extension cable, or a stainless steel pan, it would become Earabino’s eternal life. Because Stephen Earabino never dies, so long as his breath remains.
In memory of Stephen Earabino, Rock Hudson, Robert Mapplethorpe, Keith Haring, Freddy Mercury, Anthony Perkins, Sylvester, Elizabeth and Ariel Glaser, Peter Hujar, Haoui Montaug, David Wojnarowicz, Félix González-Torres and Ross Laycock, Amanda Blake, and all other artists, activists and cultural figures whose revolutionary visions were cut short by AIDS-related complications. And, to my parents’ old neighbours in Atlanta, who were wonderful cooks and excellent people—to the one that was lost, and the one that carries it with them. May memory become power and power become rage and rage bring about the promise of change.
-