Gregg Bordowitz—AIDS activist, teacher, author, and artist—departs from his more recent work with his debut exhibition in a commercial gallery. Best known for his videos, performances, and writing, Bordowitz returns to creating 2-D visual media. Tetragrammaton, an unutterable Hebrew word for God, features monotypes based on abstractions of the four letters from the tetragrammaton: yodh, he, vav, and he.

Gregg Bordowitz, Tetragrammaton (Non-Binary Ten Sefirot), 2021, monotype, 30 x 22 inches, unique. Courtesy of the artist and Corbett vs. Dempsey.

Usually, the meditation of the tetragrammaton is a practice wherein the letters of the tetragrammaton are rearranged in the mind. However, Bordowitz boldly pictorializes the centuries-old Jewish meditation practice. He turns what had been purely private and internal into what is now public and external. Thus as Bordowitz’s prints of the tetragrammaton letters splash and scrawl across the wall in black, purple, and yellow printed-ink, he foregrounds a tension between the internal sphere and the external world.

Bordowitz mobilizes his printed renderings of mental meditations as a commentary on illness. While pristine organization at first appears to govern the exhibition, the individual prints actually showcase upheaval. Ink smudges uncontrollably; white space contends with color; and markings shower. Chaos across the pages upends pristine organization in display.

The print Tzitzit (Some Say Violet), for example, contrasts the print Tetragrammaton (Non-Binary Ten Sefirot). Though boasting order in how they are arranged in the gallery, they depict starkly different moments of disarray. Tzitzit (Some Say Violet) features an interplay between purple ink and the white of the page. The application of the color flashes in and out of the white space in splotches, lines, and layers. The ink rarely meets the full edges of the print. And the edges themselves of the page are roughly hewn. Contrastingly, the print Tetragrammaton (Non-Binary Ten Sefirot), features a gradient of yellow, purple, and black ink. Color dominates the white space, its application reminiscent of watercolor. The ink of Tetragrammaton (Non-Binary Ten Sefirot) seeps to the clean-cut edges of this print. Thus, perfect arrangement confronts messy reality. Bordowitz, in putting the tetragrammaton into prints, pictorializes a meditation practice that reflects his own reality of living with AIDS: the external picture might evidence calm and composure, but the x-ray glimpse reveals chaos unleashed.

Across the fourteen prints on view, order and upheaval clash as a thought-provoking commentary on illness. What at first appears to be a stark departure from his earlier work, Tetragrammaton, actually stands as a continuation of his earlier projects. Tetragrammaton represents a new mode of tackling the same issue he has confronted before: dealing with the theme of performative okay-ness in relation to an AIDS diagnosis. Like Bordowitz’s earlier activist work, the exhibition confronts perception and reality. In presenting an exhibition focused on meditation, the overall first impression of the show is one of calm, collected, put-together-ness. But the reality of the prints screams wild disorder. Appearances up-ended, flash-judgments shattered. Bordowitz’s prints stand as a challenge. Where might we be choosing to see only order where we might actually need to take a step closer to confront disorder?

Théodora Dillman