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If You Should Fall

The queer art of salvage Icarian XI, Leg Extension(1993), Daniel Goldstein. | Courtesy the artist’s estate.

In the early 1990s, the artist Daniel Goldstein became transfixed by the leather that coated the workout equipment at the Muscle System, the gay gym he went to in the Castro. “The leather was absorbing the sweat, and it was being abraded by the bodies,” he told me in 2023. “And I just kept thinking, ‘God, these pieces of leather are so fascinating, so beautiful—the patinas on them!’” Because vinyl upholstery was both cheaper and easier to clean, gyms that had real leather were something of a rarity. Aware that the coverings needed to be replaced regularly, Goldstein bribed the manager with an artwork to put the old ones aside for him. He lacked a vision for what he would do with these “skins,” as he called them, until there was a pile on his studio floor several months later. He decided to nail one up on the wall. “It literally blew me across the room,” he recalled. Displayed vertically, the leather, worn out from years of repetitive exercise, revealed a breathtaking figure, a collective death mask made from the sweat of bodies at their limits.

It had been a decade since the AIDS pandemic reared its ugly head, and that period before the mid-nineties advent of life-saving protease inhibitors was spectacularly brutal in San Francisco. In 1984, Goldstein and his partner of several years, AIDS immunology researcher Steve Richards, were among the earliest to receive a diagnosis of what would eventually be called HIV. Richards died two years later; scores of their friends followed. A successful printmaker who had a 1983 solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in his early thirties, Goldstein—who died in January at the age of seventy-four—found himself reevaluating his priorities as an artist, letting go his studio’s five-person staff to focus more on his favorite medium of sculpture, which is how he came to collect the skins.  

The Muscle System was where many HIV-positive men like Goldstein, losing weight and muscle mass, were trying to keep their bodies strong. As author Bill Hayes, who also had a membership there, recalls in his book Sweat: A History of Exercise:

Directly or indirectly, every gay man was in some stage of the disease—infection, illness, survival, caregiving, denial, or mourning. Indeed, the degree to which AIDS was central to our lives may have been best expressed atthe gym, where night after night the rotating members of the club came together: healthy, fresh-faced arrivals to the city constantly replacing those who’d left it.

According to Bill Heter, a manager and instructor at the Muscle System, the pandemic transformed the gym from an arena of serious fitness into more of a social space—and not just in the way of cruising (though it had always hummed with hookup prospects, particularly around the hot tub and sauna). As Heter observed in 2017, “People were afraid to go to the bars and began meeting at the gym,” which was less associated with disease. Goldstein similarly characterized the gym as “the village green . . . Who was sick? Was there a funeral coming up this week? It was a nexus for the community.”

He regarded the skins—first exhibited at Foster Goldstrom Gallery in New York City in 1993—as contemporary relics on par with Veronica’s Veil, a garment used by Saint Veronica to wipe the blood and sweat off Jesus’s face on the Via Dolorosa, and the Shroud of Turin, the linen that many think Jesus was buried in and which shows the indistinct image of a crucified man. The leather hides—cracked, stained, scarred, scratched, perforated—manifest inverse angels. To encounter one in person is to bear witness to oily residues of queer ritual. “Instead of being just from one saint, or one person, or one place, it was an Everyman,” Goldstein told me. “It was all these men who were striving to keep their bodies alive.” Goldstein, overly familiar with death by the early 1990s, was also one of those men from the Muscle System who contributed to the patina. Like a medieval artisan, he housed the unaltered relics in minimalist reliquaries, mounting them on black felt and framing them in copper-lined wooden crates under plexiglass. In this presentation, they evoked coffins.

Just as the individual titles of the twenty or so works referenced the workout apparatus (e.g. Incline, Decline, Twist, Leg Extension, and so forth), the series name, Icarian, was a nod to the equipment brand, itself, of course, pointing to the Greek mythological figure who flew too close to the sun. For a generation of gay men who had experienced the seventies’ bacchanalian bliss, this fable had overdetermined meaning, calling to mind the crushing chorus from “Don’t Cry Out Loud,” a 1976 song, written by Carole Bayer Sager and Peter Allen, the latter of whom would die of AIDS-related complications in 1992: “Fly high and proud/ and if you should fall/ remember you almost had it all.”

On top of its allusions to Christianity, the Icarian series prompts a revisitation of some of the most iconic episodes of twentieth-century art history. The over-ambitious art historian in me is tempted to situate the project in a frenetic genealogy of embodied practices: Susan Weil and Robert Rauschenberg’s blueprints (1949–51), Yves Klein’s Anthropométriesseries (1960), Jasper Johns’ Study for Skindrawings (1962), Bruce Conner’s angels photograms (1973–75), Andy Warhol’s Oxidation paintings (1978). To discuss artists’ radical use of bodily matter in the age of AIDS, from Ron Athey’s bloody performances to Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s little-known scattering of his partner Ross Laycock’s ashes across his sculptural installations. To maybe even gesture at Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus (1920), made famous in Walter Benjamin’s essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History.”

Yet my interest in Goldstein’s project, at least in this essay, lies in its queer elaboration on something else: the readymade. In 1917, Marcel Duchamp purchased a mass-produced porcelain urinal from a plumbing supply company, rotated it ninety degrees from the normal orientation, positioned it on its back, and signed it “R. Mutt.” He titled his creation Fountain. It was, he said, a readymade, un objet trouvé, a formerly functional thing that, transported to the realm of art, was now entirely useless. If, as art historian Paul B. Franklin convincingly demonstrates, Duchamp’s provocative authorial act arose from modern gay public sexual cultures of watersports and pissoirs, it is hardly surprising that Goldstein and other artists in his footsteps have expanded the readymade’s conceptual terrain to honor and advance more complex understandings of queer history.

But rather than buying pristine commodities à la Duchamp, they have salvaged weathered materials from bathhouses, bars, and cruising grounds, sometimes saving them from the dumpster. “I have never felt so much like the artist but rather as the custodian of these pieces of leather,” Goldstein told me in an email. “They came into my possession, and I felt from the beginning that it was my task to protect them and allow them to be seen.” Repurposing the skins as artworks was an act of stewardship, a form of historical preservation.

This strategy in queer contemporary art differs, for example, from Sadie Barnette’s installation The New Eagle Creek Saloon, a glittery reimagination of her father’s gay bar of the same name—the first black-owned one in San Francisco. Commissioned by and first presented at The Lab in San Francisco in 2019, this artwork is a fanciful yet functional recreation of its bar, which becomes a makeshift venue for performance, revelry, and community-building as it travels from museum to museum. And while this reconstruction of the original joint, which closed in 1993 after a three-year run, contains some archival photographs displayed on shelves and embedded in the countertop, the materials themselves are largely brand new. The queer readymade, by contrast, foregrounds site-specific vestiges of use and togetherness, exposing the depths of absence held by these lieux de mémoire. It is more about the haunting than the haunt.

Goldstein’s skins have ripples of affinity with recent artworks that retrieve used materials of queer import from oblivion. In 2017, for instance, Carlos Reyes started telephoning gay bathhouses across the country to inquire about their saunas. If there were ever plans to replace the cedar planks, he told the businesses, he would be more than happy to collect them. Reyes, a queer artist who was then forty and living in New York City, had developed an interest in the material properties of cedar as well as its role as a backdrop for bodily encounters. “I wanted wood that had been sweated on . . . manipulated by temperature, air, breathing,” Reyes, who now splits his time between New York and Puerto Rico, told me in 2023. Finally, an employee at Chelsea’s West Side Club, a notorious cruising ground, had good news: their sauna was going to be renovated, so he was welcome to pick up the vertical planks lining its walls.

For several weeks, Reyes donned a mask and gloves and delicately scraped off layers upon layers of black gunk. What he discovered under the mold and mildew was “scratchitti,” laboriously made by keys: a rough medley of initials, first names, and even a heart that enclosed “D+G,” like high school sweethearts proclaiming their love on a tree trunk. His initial interest in the wood extended to the men who had made these incisions. “There’s a tenderness there, and it started to become almost confessional to me,” Reyes said, describing his Pompeian process of uncovering and pondering the marks, reminiscent of the graffiti in Parisian pissoirs studied by lawyer and sexologist Eugène Wilhelm a century earlier. “It was a little bit archaeological, a little bit nostalgic, even though I hadn’t been there.” Many people carved the names of countries, presumably where they were from—Colombia, Trinidad, Nigeria—leaving a trace of themselves in the big, often hostile city, where some might not have been able to be open about their sexualities in the outside world. “You start feeling the sadness,” he remembered, picturing a man at work on the cedar. “Somebody was really lonely or excited or high on drugs.”

After a few months of mulling over ideas, Reyes used the newly immaculate planks to assemble four rectilinear columns, which he then suspended from the ceiling so that they hovered a few inches above the floor. First exhibited at the New York City gallery Derosia in 2018, West Side Clubcombines the Duchampian gesture with the poetic minimalism of John McCracken’s austere monoliths, bringing feral desire to a sterile white-cube environment. While the anonymous individuals who produced the scratchitti might be lost to history, and the sauna would permanently shut its doors in 2021, Reyes’s work gives monumental power to these elusive stories, turning the bathhouse remnants into twenty-first-century stelae of lust, desperation, and communion.

As a university student in the late 2000s, after a night of clubbing, Prem Sahib sometimes preferred to go to Chariots Shoreditch, a twenty-four-hour gay sauna in East London, rather than attempt to catch the night bus back home to the suburbs. The bathhouse, abuzz with people having sex to the blare of disco and pop, attracted a more intergenerational and racially diverse crowd than many of the nearby bars. “When I was younger, it felt like somewhere where there might be this promise of finding myself,” they told me in 2023. But after seeing that bathhouses could also reinforce dominant structures of white, cisgender men’s sexuality, Sahib, who is a non-binary person of color, “recognized that they aren’t always safe spaces for everyone.”

When Chariots Shoreditch closed in 2016, its building to be razed for a luxury hotel, Sahib, who had, in fact, already been making art related to the sauna, noticed the familiar lockers from the changing room in the parking lot, along with a “Please Help Yourself” sign. “So I quite literally did,” Sahib said. They spent eight months studying the lockers, taking note of every scratch, dent, sticker, and abandoned package of lube, as they contemplated how to proceed. Ultimately, the artist placed the lockers on low-lying plinths and otherwise left them just as they found them, the doors open to expose cigarette lighters, coins, and towels.

This work, Do you care? We do (2017), is now in the collection of the Tate—a far cry from a sleazy sauna. Its title was inspired by the slogan on one sticker from a 1990s condom campaign that appeared on multiple lockers. Born out of an urgency to save elements of Chariots for posterity, the project moreover insists on the bathhouse’s historical role as a resource for safer sex and argues for its potential as a space of not only radical sexuality, but also communal care—even if this has not always been the case. But the condom campaign’s catchphrase was also particularly resonant to Sahib because it “has to do with care, and my literal caring of these objects,” they said, “the archival labor of trying to preserve something.” Like the readymades by Goldstein and Reyes, Sahib’s installation conjures gay ghosts who pose that exact same question: Do you care? Do you care that we were here?

We Were Here is, in fact, the name of David Weissman’s 2011 documentary about the early years of the AIDS pandemic in San Francisco. In it, Goldstein—one of the five subjects whose stories are given pride of place—details how the thrust of his work shifted from art to activism and mutual aid in the mid-1980s. In between bouts of sickness, he cofounded Visual Aid, a fundraising and grantmaking organization that supported local artists living with HIV/AIDS and cancer, in 1989. “I was seeing artist friends who were having to make the choice between medical care and art supplies,” he recounts. But, he maintains, “Art was also therapy; it would keep you going.” Two years later, he established Under One Roof, a volunteer-run gift store that resold wholesale merchandise as well as donations from retailors and vendors. Initially located at the site of Harvey Milk’s first camera store on Market Street, the nonprofit would raise more than $4 million for local HIV/AIDS charities before its closure around 2014. According to Goldstein, such efforts reflected the rise of mutual aid in the queer community: “Gay people were never seen as caregivers. They were seen as good-time people, having fun, being wild. And all of a sudden, we were the ultimate caregivers.”

It isn’t a coincidence that an artist so involved in mutual aid projects would concurrently create the Icarian series; his experiences of caregiving and caretaking in the world informed and paralleled his preservation of the skins. Because cultural institutions and other repositories, even those focused on queer history, do not typically collect, steward, and conserve banal materials like sweat-stained leather, discarded planks, and shabby lockers, these readymades are more than artworks; they function as archives and monuments, entrancing viewers with these visceral scraps of history. Unlike that dandy Duchamp, Goldstein, Reyes, and Sahib are activating the readymade as a strategy of care, making used-up objects useful again.