Andrew Suggs is a curator, writer, and artist from Appalachian Tennessee who lives in New York. Andrew’s work and research focuses on art and AIDS, queer art and artists, and performance.
Full CV
Andrew Suggs is a curator, writer, and artist from Appalachian Tennessee who lives in New York. Andrew’s work and research focuses on art and AIDS, queer art and artists, and performance.
Full CV
Each Man Kills the Thing He Loves
Curator
April 5 – May 25, 2025
Hessel Museum, Bard College
Each Man Kills the Thing He Loves makes use of the archive to center process and performance, engaging questions around how traces of both performance practices and HIV/AIDS are inherited. John Lovett and Alessandro Codagnone made genre-spanning work as Lovett/Codagnone starting in 1995 and until Codagnone’s death in 2019. Their collaborative practice calls forth histories of subversive sexuality, ranging from the aesthetics of gay leather and S&M culture to important queer cultural works. Lovett/Codagnone’s highly citational practice investigates power structures—intimate and interpersonal struggles as well as issues of citizenship and state control—as a way to chronicle subcultures and work against their erasure and commodification.
Two studio walls from Lovett/Codagnone’s residence in New York City—one maintained by each of the duo—are meticulously re-created. The walls display hundreds of pieces of ephemera that speak to key themes in their practice. They also chronicle a key period in HIV/AIDS history that writers Theodore (ted) Kerr and Alexandra Juhasz call the “Second Silence”—a period of cultural avoidance of HIV/AIDS from around 1996, when life-saving antiretroviral treatment was first prescribed in the United States, until around 2012, when culture began to revisit the early years of the pandemic.
During the three-hour opening, Closer (1998), a key performance work by artist team Lovett/Codagnone will be archived and given new form by longtime collaborator Julie Tolentino.
In the original performance, Alessandro Codagnone (wearing a plastic mask, leather shorts, and black high heels) blindfolds and ties Lovett’s hands behind his back, then seductively dances circles around him, against the sonic backdrop of “Moments in Love” by Art of Noise (1984). Tolentino’s durational and solo performance archive of Closer alternates between the two roles, as she swaps costumes and mimics the action of one partner, then the other. This work centers the beauty and problems of archival performance presentation, engaging questions of how gender is translated through different bodies over time and how traces of performance practices are inherited.
Julie Tolentino’s innovative performance-based work includes The Sky Remains the Same, a series in which Tolentino invites collaborators to select work from their own performance history to archive onto or through her body.
Generous support for the exhibition was provided by the Second Ward Foundation.
>> There Is No Revolution Without Libidinal Investment: Emi Fontana, Andrew Suggs, and Julie Tolentino in conversation, Mousse
>> Fifteen Shows in One at Bard’s Center for Curatorial Studies, Taliesin Thomas for Hyperallergic
Lovett/Codagnone (header image): The Walk, 1996. C-print, 30 x 30 inches. Installation views from Lovett/Codagnone: Each Man Kills the Thing He Loves, Hessel Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, April 5 – May 25, 2025. Photos: Olympia Shannon. Performance documentation of Julie Tolentino, The Sky Remains the Same: Lovett/Codagnone’s Closer (1998/2005), 2025. Photos: Ohan Breiding.