RE:CIRCULATION 006 — The Video Artists of Abject Art

Whitney Museum of American Art, 1993

Three weeks after it opened, Abject Art already read as history. Reviewing it for the New York Times in 1993, Holland Cotter called the show, alongside the Whitney's concurrent The Subject of Rape, “juiceless, frozen, inorganic” — already an artifact, in his account, of a decade that hadn’t finished happening yet.

Thirty-three years later, something stranger has happened. Part of the exhibition has become history. Another part has nearly disappeared from its own.

Ask anyone who knows Abject Art by reputation rather than by the catalogue itself, and the same handful of images comes back: Robert Gober’s severed leg, Serrano, Mapplethorpe, Cindy Sherman, Kusama set against Oldenburg, Mike Kelley, Kiki Smith. That’s not a random sample of what the show contained. It’s the residue of what the show contained. A Dutch museum’s own library holds a copy of this exact catalogue, and its indexed record of named artists reads, in full: Lynda Benglis, Mapplethorpe, Serrano, Sherman, Smith. Five names. Sculpture and photography, every one.

Seven other names are in the same book and absent from that index entirely: Maria Beatty, Sadie Benning, Gregg Bordowitz, Sammy Cucher, Isaac Julien, Jennifer Montgomery, Suzie Silver.

They weren’t a side programme. Craig Houser’s catalogue essay, “I, Abject,” was built specifically around their work, asking what happens when people already treated as socially improper — queer, HIV-positive, gender-nonconforming — represent themselves rather than waiting to be represented by someone else. Sadie Benning recorded her own adolescence on a Fisher-Price PXL2000, a toy camera. Isaac Julien made an eight-minute film about an older Black museum attendant’s fantasies toward a young white visitor. Suzie Silver restaged Jesus as an unmistakably queer figure. None of it needed a gallery-ready object to make its case.

It would be tidy to say the sculptures survived because they were worth more money. That isn’t quite provable, and it probably isn’t the actual mechanism. What travels well is whatever converts cleanly into one reproducible image — a leg on a cover, a toilet on a plinth, a photograph that is already, itself, the artwork. A fifty-four-minute video needs equipment, a screening, someone’s patience. It resists being flattened into the single picture a later writer reaches for. When an exhibition gets compressed, three decades on, into five images for a paragraph, video starts at a disadvantage that has nothing to do with the quality of the work.

Gregg Bordowitz made his contribution, Fast Trip, Long Drop, that same year, seriously ill and uncertain he’d survive the decade, with friends already dying around him. The film turns away from the era’s required optimism toward exhaustion, doubt, and the plain fact of mortality. It wasn’t lost. MoMA bought it, and still holds it. But look at where MoMA files it: under AIDS activism. Not alongside Gober. Not alongside Sherman. The work survived completely. Its place inside this particular argument didn’t.

In 2020, a scholar named Renée Inaía Steffen went looking specifically for this half of the show and wrote the piece that had to exist for it to be found again: “Queer Video in Abject Art.” Twenty-seven years after the exhibition closed, someone had to go back and recover a part of it the shorthand version had already let go of.

Abject Art’s whole premise was that a society defines itself by what it decides to push outside its own boundaries. Thirty-three years on, the history of the exhibition appears to have done exactly that to part of itself — sorted, without anyone deciding to, along the same line between what holds an image and what doesn’t.

A catalogue is not a neutral container. It’s the one form that still holds what a later shorthand chooses to drop — captions, credits, an essay written specifically to make the case for seven names that didn’t survive the retelling.

The book didn’t forget anything. Everyone who talked about it afterward did.

The catalogue remembered what the exhibition’s history forgot. Thirty-three years later, we’re opening it again.