The Brooklyn Rail

Since the 1980s, the artist Nayland Blake has cultivated a practice that transcends boundaries. Moving fluidly across image and object making, performance, writing, teaching, and curating, Blake’s art is aptly described by curator Jamillah James as one of play, in each sense of the word, i.e., to perform, act, pretend, maneuver within the parameters of a game, or simply enjoy. “Play awakens us to the possibilities in ourselves and in others that fear hides from us,” Blake explains. Their participation in various kink subcultures provides a framework for understanding the exploratory and relational nature of their art, which has examined racial identity, queer history and aesthetics, and the evolution of their personal identity. A descendent of Jack Smith in their refusal to distinguish between their art and a life lived in the underground milieus that have inspired and supported their practice, Blake’s work is an ongoing act of self-discovery that lays bare the tragedies and contradictions of American life while inviting us to take pleasure in the social connections that define our place within it.

No Wrong Holes: Thirty Years of Nayland Blake provides an in-depth account of Blake’s creative evolution. Published last year in commemoration of Blake’s career retrospective organized by the ICA Los Angeles, which opened in 2019 and later traveled to MIT’s List Visual Arts Center, the catalogue’s meticulous design and detailed history of Blake’s multifaceted practice render it well worth the wait. The material variety of the design smartly complements the multifaceted nature of Blake’s art, comprising glossy color plates, matte pages with half-tone reproductions presenting essays, a playlist of albums from their vinyl record collection, a reader, and an exhibition chronology. The opening pages feature several full-page reproductions of Blake’s drawings of rabbits, monsters, and various cartoon scenarios. A tied up, pantsless gnome labeled as “A Guy I Would Fuck” sits a few pages before an anthropomorphic tree who looks up in despair at a noose hanging from its branches, providing a succinct formal and thematic outline of the artist’s visual vocabulary. These materials are bound in the softcover book with a thick but flexible textured binding reminiscent of the leather objects reproduced therein. With contributions by James, David Evans Frantz, and Maggie Nelson, No Wrong Holes provides a range of historical, conceptual, and emotional entry points for engaging with Blake’s art.

Frantz’s essay chronicles Blake’s development as a young artist in the Bay Area’s queer art scenes of the 1980s, when they established their early performance practice and became involved in several of the city’s alternative art spaces. Costumes, puppets, toys, and masks—that is, tools of surrogacy and transformation—have always been prevalent in Blake’s performative and sculptural language. An important early example of this is Blake’s box assemblage Magic (1990–91), featured in detail in the plates, which is dedicated to the comedian Wayland Flowers, who died from AIDS-related complications in 1988. In this elegy to a queer elder, silk flowers are placed at the feet of Flowers’s puppet, “Madame”, a sassy proxy for the comic himself who starred alongside him in the syndicated sitcom Madame’s Place.

Many of the leitmotifs of Blake’s oeuvre originated in the years of the AIDS crisis, including their identification with bunnies. Birthday Present (1993), a sculpture composed of two copulating plush Bugs Bunny toys, is reproduced in both the plates and essay section. Using performance scholar José Esteban Muñoz’s concept of “disidentification,” James illuminates Blake’s work as one that reconfigures cultural ideas in a way that draws attention to the harm they cause and demonstrates the empowering potential of such acts. Blake was born in New York to a Black father and a white mother in 1960 and has described their ability to “pass” as analogous to their play with the bunny rabbit. Bugs, a gray (read: black and white) crossdressing rabbit who sings minstrel songs, is thus understandably resonant with the artist, symbolizing ambiguity and fluidity along racial and gendered lines. There are also, of course, rabbits engaged in kink, another major through-line of Blake’s work.

Many of the larger-scale objects reproduced in the plates dating to the late 1980s and ’90s reference an absent body using the instruments of kink, such as the “Work Station” assemblages, which present a variety of objects—meat cleavers, chains, buckets of tar, water bottles—on carts one might find in a dungeon or clinician’s office. While these works impart a clear sense of danger, those familiar with kink scenes understand that communication, care, and consent are as central to BDSM as any of the physical aspects of the practice. Nelson’s essay examining the nature of shame in Blake’s practice references Blake’s assertion that “introspection is necessary to benefit from kink”; exploring all possible versions of oneself through this kind of play requires honesty about one’s shame and desires as they manifest within the power dynamics of a given scenario.

In the “Reader” section of the catalogue, a selection of publications Blake has self-published or collaborated on offer an introduction to their career-long engagement with text, both found and composed. They have often invited writers they admire to respond to their work, including Kathy Acker, whose collage technique and explicit exploration of her sexuality Blake has cited as formative to their early artistic development. Her 1990 essay on the artist is reproduced alongside previously published texts by Blake, D-L Alvarez, Richard Hawkins, Carla Harryman, Maurice Berger, and an inset facsimile of one of Blake’s Bunny Butt zines.

Blake’s thirty-year teaching career, which has taken place at “colleges, residencies, and sex parties,” as they explain, is represented by their “100 Assignments Towards a Curriculum,” reprinted in the catalogue’s final section. Like all good teachers, Blake seeks to bring out the individual qualities of their students while providing a framework for their art to develop, rather than simply imparting a set of skills. The prompts range from relatively practical—“Find a painting made before 1600: Recreate one object depicted in it in three dimensions”—to deeply intimate: “Make a piece that lies to you about your heritage,” and “Sculpt a self-portrait where every part of your body that you feel is vulnerable is rendered at twice its normal size.”

Earnest consideration of Blake’s lessons may lead us to a deeper understanding of our own shame and desires, both collective and personal. Arising from social mores and intrinsic impulse, the nature of such feelings is beyond our control, but what we do with them is ours for the making. Pursuing what we need and want from the world may require acts of transgression, transformation, or collaboration, and though these acts can be playful, they’re never frivolous. There are, after all, no wrong holes.