The Gathering — Anthony Cudahy

The Gathering, The Java Project, Brooklyn, NY

January 20 - February 20, 2018

ESSAY BY Marcelo Gabriel Yáñez

On a phone call with Pat Rocco on December 2nd, I was told that the photograph above should be captioned as such: Gays NA Mt. Baldy Retreat. 1973. Rocco did not say much about the retreat nor its subjects ‘NA’ when asked. The phone call left me with little information. Rocco seemed to have pushed the image to exist within a decontextualized state where the figures remained anonymous, and so did the legacy of the gathering. In the photograph, a group of over twenty is captured in various simultaneous states of interaction, engagement, and movement -- the group is temporal and oscillating, friendships are frequently lost and gained, groups change and reshape themselves. The flash renders a haunting to the space and a flatness to the earth the figures inhabit, blowing out details of body, clothing, and gender
as figures sit and stand. In the huddled group in the bottom right, bodies glow spectral -- everyone has long hair. It is truly difficult, for a majority of the figures, to decipher facial features, gender, space, and depth, even if you blow the image up. In the imprecision of the photograph, these figures seem to exist in a no-place or a type of celestial earth.

Anthony Cudahy found Rocco’s image through the online One Archives at the University of Southern California. In appropriating the image, he splits the majority of the photograph across two large 70x96” canvases, and renders select faces and figures on smaller canvases and paper. The paintings, collectively titled The Gathering, work within the limits of Rocco’s photograph to be completely understood, and within those breaks of knowability, instilling them with a personal desire for what this gathering could have been. In repeatedly painting figures and their gestures, there is an attempt to recuperate and connect with the ephemeral remains of the photograph -- to break into the gathering itself: “Ephemera includes traces of lived experiences and performances of lived experience, maintaining experiential politics and urgencies long after these structures of feeling have been lived.”

Through the repeated paintings, the gathering crosses time -- the figures are not dead, but constantly being reiterated, reshaped, embodying new states by proxy of Cudahy’s imagining and reimagining of them. There is a break with past events as fixed, and he looks at the archival as a site of imagining and potentiality. When Cudahy and I spoke of the work, the conversation surrounded itself around the idea that this gathering could be shifted -- beyond what it might have in fact been -- towards an anti-identitarian and inherently queer utopia.

Within the two large paintings that ground the exhibit, Cudahy focuses on the gestures of relation and interaction among the group. He closely crops the source photograph to reduce its negative space, and renders the glow of the flash by offsetting bright yellows, reds, and
greens -- in between with hot pink and turquoise tones. The colors radiate outward as light, and in this treatment Cudahy takes inspiration from Goya’s Witches Sabbath: the effect is best seen in the first of the large canvases with the luminescent green figure on the far left. The bright colors stand in contrast to a darker background of subdued green, indigo, and violet, where certain figures sink and recede. The shadows and background encompass spirit, nature, and serenity -- the color palate functioning symbolically in accordance with the assigned meanings of the original pride flag. In the huddled group on the bottom right of Rocco’s photograph, their bodies dissolve under the contrast of the flash; in the painting, they shape and morph with each other under the auspices of sex, healing, and nature. A singular figure with their back towards the viewer has a body charged with green and yellow -- nature and sunlight. The mystery of Rocco’s photograph remains, but where as the photograph maintains a neutrality, the paintings work with a utopian language through their coloration.

The smaller paintings that stand alongside the two large ones show a greater shaping and shifting of the photograph towards Cudahy’s own vision of the gathering. Collecting profiles, gestures, and faces, Cudahy takes figures from their original arrangement and places them elsewhere -- gazing at someone new, looking down, surrounded by flowers, engaging in a kiss. Like in the case of the kiss, actions are
manipulated within the moments that the black and white photograph is illegible -- are the two figures in the bottom right of the photograph actually kissing? On the far left of Rocco’s group, a figure stands in profile holding something in their hand which cannot entirely be made out. His hand remains empty in Cudahy’s large canvas, yet within the smaller reiterations, the figure becomes the ‘flower-collector.’

The act of collecting, placing, and holding flowers becomes a consistent motif, and in the bright turquoise Ruysch’s Chain the action is given a funerary significance -- the profile from the huddled group is disembodied and surrounded by a wreath appropriated from a vanitas still-life by Dutch painter Rachel Ruysch. The single figure who stares at the camera is painted and re-painted Christ-like, mysterious, looking directly at us, dissolving and reforming under blue, black, and yellow iterations. Throughout all the works which encompass The Gathering, there is a lingering sense of tribute and communication with the dead, the possibilities of the life they had led, and their presence among each other.
As each person is repeatedly painted, it is as if the event is manifesting in new places -- celestial, post-mortem earths where once again these people have come together to speak.

Photography: The Java Project

the gathering 1, 2017
Oil on canvas
70 x 96 inches

the gathering 2, 2017
Oil on canvas
96 x 70 inches

flower collector, 2017
Oil on canvas
24 x 18 inches

ruysch’s chain, 2017
Oil on canvas
30 x 30 inches

A.G., 2017
Oil on linen
12 x 6 inches

Blue A.G., 2017
Oil on linen
12 x 9 inches

center, 2017
Oil on canvas
24 x 24 inches

L, 2017
Gouache on linen
10 x 8 inches

pink stare, 2017
Oil on canvas
16 x 12 inches

R, 2017
Gouache on linen
10 x 8 inches

2017
Gouache on paper
11 x 8.5 inches