Projects
This page documents projects generated around the story of William Deveaux Wilson. I am particularly interested in tracking how Wilson and myself shift around as the objects and subjects of the research depending on the work accomplished by the various forms of these projects.
Multimedia work and collaborations are ongoing.
Idiolect is a sound piece 3 minutes and 42 seconds in duration. When I began this work, my first projects were creative attempts to establish some form of proximity with my subject. Since Bill and Jack met in Atlanta, I went about trying to recreate my own southern dialect as a way of resonating my body in similar ways as my subjects. In the summer of 2007, the Visual and Critical Studies program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago supported my work with a voice coach and speech pathologist to return my dialect to a place it might have been if it had not been trained out of me through education and other cultural norms. (An impossible task, of course.)
Saturday, January 1, 1955
Written by William Deveaux Wilson to Jack Strouss from the Beverly Hills Warner Bros. Theatre
excerpt: “Sometimes when I’m up in the balcony, watching the theatre operate, there in the dark, while the drama and sadness of ‘Country Girl’ spreads across the theatre, I wander to thoughts of you, and before long I am crying again.”
Based on the trailer for Country Girl (Grace Kelly, Bing Crosby and William Holden), this clip brings the affair between two men in the 1950s into a fictional realm in which the unpublished novel, September Venus, has achieved the status its author sought. It also acknowledges a creative and fictionalized relationship between researcher and historical subjects, while playing with the idea of melodrama as a historical trope.
This presentation, Research and Desire, is a gesture toward my own limitations and biases as a researcher. While desire is operative in different ways for all researchers, the fact remains that the subjects of my inquiry serve my desires–desires to understand time, history, space and queerness. They do not have agency in terms of what evidence of their lives is rescued nor to what ends it is framed.
As a way of acknowledging the limited agency of my subjects, I have tried to similarly locate myself for this presentation. Since Bill and Jack met cruising, I went to Boystown in Chicago cruising once a week. When I found someone with whom there was mutual attraction, I asked if this person would be willing to present my work at the Alogon Gallery exhibition, Discipline Problems, curated by Joseph Grigely.
Presenting my work is someone with whom I am connected through a culture of desire. He knew very little about me other than a brief overview of my research project and whatever information he personally requested. The information was presented in my own absence, and the manner in which my project was framed and presented was completely out of my control.
Memory Flash (supported by Flux Projects, Emory Center for Creativity and Art, LUBO Fund and the Lloyd E. Russell Foundation) was a collaborative project presented by my collective John Q. While this work does not directly address the affair between Jack and Bill, it does take up micro-histories from the same era and in some of the same neighborhoods. This collaboration took me from a very intimate exchange of ideas with one other person to working with larger publics who were also encouraged to take part in the memorial process. More in depth discussion of Memory Flash can be found in Emory University’s online journal, Southern Spaces. The catalogue for this public art work, Discursive Documents, took the form of installations and public programming in the project space of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Atlanta. The printed matter was an edition of The JOSH curated by John Q (January 2011), soon available at the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Midnight Bill (2011) is a four-part radio art work that takes various moments from Jack Strouss’s oral history and juxtaposes them with Bill’s love letters, radio segments, music, archival materials and my own narrative. Each segment is between 14 and 15 minutes.
…more to come…
