I awoke later than usual this morning, to daylight and the sound of birds at 6:00 am. I am unclear how to write about these five very different artists or even about AA Bronson's School for Young Shamans. What is this school? The title of an exhibition? It began as an idea for a summer workshop, a school not so much in Shamanism as in healing, which is perhaps the same thing. It transformed into my solo exhibition at John Connelly Presents, in New York City, in which I incorporated the work of ten younger artists into a larger installation of my own, together with five kilos of blessed white sage, collaborations with Terence Koh and Scott Treleaven, a sound track by Andrew Zealley, and a photograph each by Bruce LaBruce and Scott Hug. My own alter ego, J. X. Williams, provided shamanic tools made of brooms, a sledgehammer, and other household implements, and Desi Santiago completed the exhibition with an enormous neon inverted pentagram.

I first came across Christophe Chemin on MySpace, when he asked to become my friend. He is a sexy lad with a kind of magnetic almost mystical force, which hit me from the far side of the Atlantic. His video The Gold Room is imbued with shamanic energy, fringed with the erotic. He was an easy choice for my project. Christophe, as it turns out, was performing for my pal Bruce LaBruce in his film and theatre work in Berlin, but his own performative and video work should not be missed. *1977 in Bordeaux. Lives in Berlin. 

Item Idem is designer, stylist and artist all in one. His black and gold shaman’s coat of plastic Vuitton garment bags was decorated with metallic brick-a-brack from Mexico’s Day of the Dead, together with a very liberal application of black tar. This coat-of-not-so-many-colors had a performative aspect too: Duval carried the coat into the Brazilian desert, conceiving and creating a fashion shoot after which it took an entire eight hours to remove the tar from his body. A bottle of Comme des Garcons Tar perfume added to the chaotic effect in the exhibition: the mix of white sage, black tar, and an expensive high fashion scent was intoxicating indeed. *1970 in Woodstock / NY. Lives in Tokyo.

I met Michael Dudeck at a conference in Winnipeg, Canada, titled Art Tomorrow. We talked briefly, and later I found that I could remember his hands in perfect detail, but nothing else – which is why I invited him to be in this exhibition. Naked, with an enormous dead fish, big black boots, and a Cleopatra wig, he fixed his gaze on each visitor in turn, inviting a kind of duel of the senses. A series of refined manadala-like drawings in black and pink – which he told me were asshole drawings – completed the picture. *1969 in Winnipeg. Lives in Winnipeg. 

A friend who knows these things said: »Oh, when I walked into that back space, I could feel it, someone had been at work there«. Naufus’ sculptural intervention into the collective environment took the form of a ring of tree branches on the floor, encircling the room, each covered in brightly colored gum balls. On the wall: a video, Masturbating in the Fatherland, in which the artist’s father, iconically Guatemalan, plays guitar and sings a love song, interspersed with scenes of Naufus fondling carrots, and inserting them into his rectum. Performance Art, of a sort, in two modalities: the relic, and the documentation. *1978 in Guatemala City. Lives in Guatemala City.

Sands is a feminist. His work and his life are inseparable to the most fantastical degree. I don’t remember how we first met, but he and his husband Robin were one of the first gay male couples that I photographed in their bed for my photographic series NEST. His utter refusal to separate the private and the public are displayed in the works he chose for my project: a 3 hour video that documents Sands in bed sick, and monologuing nonstop to the camera, a modest artists’ statement photocopied on a piece of notepaper that anyone could take with them (a kind of poor man’s version of Felix Gonzales Torres’ more heroic and vertical paper stacks), and a length of wallpaper reproducing Sands’ self-portraits of his youth, when he wanted to be a porn star. In typical Sands style, he also included a photographic self-portrait by Danish artist Peter Brandt, another male feminist who deserves our attention. *1974 in Topeka / USA. Lives in Amsterdam.


AA BRONSON was born in 1946 in Vancouver. He is an artist and healer. He was one of the three artists of General Idea (1969- 1994). Shows and solo shows include Sex + Death, Galerie Frederic Giroux, Paris (2007), Six Feet Under, Kunstmuseum Bern (2006), AA Bronson Healer, Vera List Center for Art & Politics, New York and others (2005), Whitney Biennial, New York (2002). He lives and works in New York City with his spouse, the architect Mark Jan Krayenhoff van de Leur.