The transdisciplinary documentary practice of Angelo Madsen Minax is characterized by a desire to discover ever more expressive and personalized methods of narrating desire in all its forms. Dense in both existential inquiry and emotional intensity, Minax’s films function as conversations between different facets of his own person: kaleidoscopic portraits of the artist as chronicler, storyteller, lover, brother, erotic subject, object erotic, artist again. In “A Crisis of Human Contact”, his first institutional solo exhibition, he guides visitors through his practice with Rehearsals towards an erotic approach, 2022, a brief and oddly moving single-screen study of a perverse education workshop at the Cléo Dubois Academy of SM Arts in San Francisco. Fixing moments of close contact between an intergenerational gathering of aspiring and veteran pro-dominants, the film suggests pathways for yearning for liberating forms of tenderness, and something like faith in the kindness of strangers. The loose, intelligent ease of his portrayal is a fitting introduction to Minax’s cinema of proximities – what Jill H. Casid’s superb text for the show describes as a “kinema”, or “alter-cinema of kink, kin, and kind”.
Minax thematizes the cruise, the structural logic of its cinema in The source is a hole2017, and Bigger inside, 2022, essay films that weave together layers of digression around deeply personal narratives of transgender grief and longing. Exhibited suggestively almost (but not exactly) face to face across the expanse of the main gallery of the De La Warr Pavilion, the two films oscillate between theory and first-person autofiction, semi-ironic philosophical tangents and moments of self – raw revelation. Fisting is a recurring theme, as are stargazing and dying. The wall text discloses that The source is a hole has been reissued for this exhibition to comply with UK state legislation against the ‘possession of extreme pornographic imagery’, designed to prevent material considered ‘grossly offensive, disgusting or obscene in character’ from meeting an audience . While we don’t know the exact details of these changes, the disclaimer is not without a certain amount of humor given the gleefully unapologetic nature of what’s left. Bigger inside contains a sequence in which increasingly arousal-laden messages about a hookup app, worthy of Dennis Cooper (“I just want your eyelids to crave my pores in such a way that you go insane, mad, bigoted”), are hypnotically opposed to found- images of images of a black hole. Such frenetic juxtapositions make Minax’s shrewd fusion of cosmic-scale sincerity and modest propositionality – not to mention the often laugh-out-loud drollery – palpable.
Among the archives extracted from Minax’s itinerant, research-driven work are the artist’s own complicated family history; those who saw North by current, 2021, his feature film foray into a more conventional narrative documentary mode, will find its echoes in several works collected here. The artist further enriches his exploration of the unknowable nature of intimacy and embodiment with the poetry, sculpture and photographic assemblages that punctuate the exhibition’s four moving image anchors. I spent so much time with To squeeze And Do not tighten, both from 2022 – poems displayed on two framed pages – as I did with some of the videos. The poems share with the videos a collage structure and a tone of dissociative fragility: “You ask what to do. / I don’t know. / I don’t know.”
It’s hard not to register “A Crisis of Human Contact” as an institution’s bold show of faith in trans-affirmative and sex-positive practices, and its refusal to condescend to the censored restrictions of the moment. Outside the walls of the exhibition, a highly mobilized, sexually conservative and transphobic moral panic has become one of the UK’s last export industries, giving the artist’s work an undeniable extra layer of urgency and lady. Here in the world of Minax, we always simultaneously look inward and outward, toward mysterious and unnameable forces beyond the reach of even our most adventurous imagination. This elsewhere is also here, where artistic transgression, pleasure and experimentation are all necessary strategies to negotiate our environment of perpetual crisis.
