“John Boskovich: I Appreciate My Uniqueness,” Scherben, Berlin, 2024

“I Appreciate My Uniqueness” is the first European retrospective of the late LA-based artist John Boskovich (1956–2006). But more than just a survey of Boskovich’s career, the exhibition seems like a survey of 20th-century artistic strategies. Across just eight artworks, one can discern Surrealist collage, found objects, détourned mass media, Pop symbolism, snapshot photography, conceptual image-text combinations, Koonsian vitrines, video works, and wearable art, as well as photo documentation of Boskovich’s apartment: a phantasmagoric installation dubbed the Boskostudio, which the artist described as “something like a John Cage or a Fluxus performance” and “a Fassbinder set where no movie ever occurred.” [1] But despite its impressive variety, Boskovich’s work has a surprising consistency because of the way it centers on the artist himself. He called many of his pieces self-portraits, and while only a few include his own image, signifiers of the self recur throughout: his phone number and social security number, his anti-anxiety and anti-depressant medications, his lover’s profile minted as a coin, a print edition from his teacher John Baldessari. This may be a good reason to call Boskovich a post-conceptualist, as if conceptualism’s reflexive turn toward institutional context, political subtext, and, well, everything-as-text, has returned to the author in the end.

The recent resurgence of interest in Boskovich’s work – due especially to two exhibitions restaging the Boskostudio in 2020 – has frequently given in to a temptation to mythologize this prodigal author figure. [2] (I criticized this phenomenon in another review of Boskovich’s work by drawing on Roland Barthes’s notion of the biographeme. [3]) The exhibition at Scherben takes a different approach. With its efforts at museum-lite comprehensiveness and a parallel exhibition displaying artists of a younger generation who are ostensibly building on Boskovich’s legacy, “I Appreciate My Uniqueness” is more concerned with historiography than hagiography. But these two approaches are not mutually exclusive. While I agree with the press release’s claim that Boskovich’s work is “deeply integrated with the artist’s life,” what kind of a life is lived in an apartment that looks like a museum, replete with quotations on the walls from literary modernists such as T. S. Eliot, Arthur Rimbaud, Jean Genet, and Sylvia Plath? Certainly, Boskovich wants to show off his erudition. This is, after all, someone who studied philosophy at USC, literature at Cambridge, and art history at the Prado, received a BFA and MFA from CalArts, and a law degree from Loyola. But on a deeper level, Boskovich’s references convey a distinctly modernist anxiety around the status of the self, which we risk losing sight of when we collapse the self with either the life or the art.

Here’s the textbook version (complete with old-fashioned patriarchal Eurocentrism). First, Immanuel Kant’s Copernican revolution made Man the center of the universe. Then, the unholy trinity of Nietzsche-Marx-Freud showed that Man is not the master of his own house: he is controlled by morals, exploited by the ruling class, and compelled by unconscious drives. Modernism in art expressed this state of affairs by emphasizing both subjectivity and alienation. However, this modernist concern with “the self” suffered its first blows with the gnomic superficiality of Pop art, followed by the uncanny inorganic presence of Minimalism. Conceptual art was the nail in the coffin. How did “the self” fare in the context of postmodernism? The calculated ambiguity of the word, which suggests both the end of modernism and its infinite extension, aptly addresses a split in the fate of the self. On the one hand, it seemed finally to have dissolved into pure simulation, while on the other hand making a triumphant return in the context of identity politics and a new rhetoric of authenticity. It is this split that Boskovich’s work so eloquently rehearses.

John Boskovich, “Self Portrait,” 1989

Perhaps no object better conveys this than Signifiers for Being Smart #1: Disco October (1999) (unfortunately not on view at Scherben). It is an oil-on-mahogany painting that reproduces the cover of the landmark Winter 1987 issue of the journal October, edited by Douglas Crimp and titled “AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism.” [4] This piece is a consummate example of conceptual painting, replacing tired ideas of individual expression with a sociological-semiotic critique of art-world discourse. But it is also a poignantly personal memorial to the gay culture worker. Amid the homophobic moral panic surrounding the AIDS crisis, one would have hoped that a queer art historian could find sanctuary among the Marxian cultural theorists of October, but Crimp was ousted from the editorial board because his issue of the journal was deemed political in all the wrong ways. [5] And so Disco October captures the double bind of being a queer intellectual, rejected from the halls of high culture no matter how zealous one’s devotions. The “self” is present here not only as a performance (of smartness), but also as an experience (of vulnerability and minoritization) – that is, both a floating signifier and an identity. Indeed, Boskovich’s great achievement is showing that these two selves are self-same.

This sensibility undergirds the work in the exhibition as well, if in a more oblique way. Take Self-Portrait (1989), for example. As with many of Boskovich’s works, it contains diverse text and image elements unified by a simple, solid matte and frame. The centerpiece is a found hand-colored engraving of four species of whale, over which the artist has silkscreened his phone number. This image is flanked on the left by a custom-made coin featuring the profile portrait of his lover, Stephen Earabino, engraved with the artist’s social security number. On the right, there is a biblical quotation from the Book of Jonah describing futile efforts to row against the storm. The piece seems to express a desire for connection, whether to a particular or a potential lover who might read one’s phone number in a personal ad (another Boskovich theme). But it also laments the impediments to connection: money, religion, bureaucracy, technology ... even weather. The bible verse suggests the threat of being swallowed whole, whether by a consuming passion or something more sinister. For a work of conceptual art, it is unusually self-obsessed, while as a self-portrait, it doesn’t really cohere, and that is what makes it strong.

John Boskovich, “Rude Awakening Series: If It Works Don't Fix It (TV Shots),” 1993

“I Appreciate My Uniqueness” also counteracts the lionization of Boskovich by emphasizing his collaborations. The exhibition includes a rosary necklace of anti-depressant pills cast in silver that was manufactured by the designer and writer Tere Tereba, who also appears in the show in a Polaroid photograph from the series Rude Awakening. Boskovich’s video North (2001) features the recently deceased writer Gary Indiana reading from Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s 1960 memoir of the same name, interspersed with footage from Jean-Luc Godard’s 1965 film Pierrot le Fou. The gallery also organized a screening at Babylon Berlin of Boskovich’s 1990 feature film, Without You I’m Nothing, a vehicle for the acidic comedian Sandra Bernhard. While Bernhard’s efforts at transgression have not aged as well, North holds up. The camera follows a circular track around Indiana in an uncomfortable close-up, surveying his acne scars and ear hairs, as he reads Céline’s description of decadent meals in the luxurious Hotel Simplon in Baden-Baden (now Brenners Hotel and Spa) in the final years of the Third Reich. Highlighting the bizarre parallel reality of the rich and powerful in times of crisis is as relevant today as it was in 2001 or the 1960s, as is noting how art and literature are complicit in underwriting that reality. As a mouthpiece for the artist, Indiana channels an arch, queer sensibility resolved to its own inefficacy. “The defeated are always scum,” he reads. “I know it; I know it well.”

Boskovich’s concern with the self is not entirely solipsistic, as demonstrated by his sculpture I Have a Dream (1993). It consists of three bongs shaped like peace symbols: a black one, a white one, and, between them, one with zebra stripes. They’re housed in a Plexiglas vitrine engraved with Rodney King’s famous quotation “Can’t we all just get along?” Between Martin Luther King Jr., whose 1963 speech lends the work its title, and Rodney King, whose brutal beating by the LAPD in 1991 set off a week of riots, the sculpture tells a story of intractable racism and failed desegregation. In this context, the bongs suggest a counterculture that has succeeded only in dropping out, not in turning on or tuning in. Boskovich takes aim here at the neoliberal conception of selfhood that poses all politics as personal responsibility, such that anti-racism is nothing but self-betterment.

John Boskovich, “I Have a Dream,” 1993

Of course, this neoliberal ideology is still strong today. Scherben has tried to make this point by installing a parallel exhibition of younger artists in a back room. Titled “Millennial Hallway” after a room in the Boskostudio, this show turned Boskovich’s apocalyptic Millenarianism into a simple narrative of generational turnover. While there were several strong works in the show, I felt it lacked cohesion, and the connection to the main exhibition was tenuous. Above all, the sense that the combined exhibitions were making a claim for Boskovich’s legacy felt overly aggrandizing for an artist who was consistently self-conscious. “I Appreciate My Uniqueness” is, after all, a phrase loaded with cynicism and rage for Boskovich, not self-promotion. It comes from a book of daily affirmations that was given to a friend who was on his deathbed due to AIDS-related illness. Disturbed by the gift’s message of docile acceptance in the face of government neglect and widespread homophobia, Boskovich used phrases from the book to caption a series of Polaroid photographs titled Rude Awakening, two of which have been included at Scherben. With this knowledge in mind, the title of the exhibition becomes much more nuanced, capturing the paradox of a uniqueness that can only appear in familiar formats, taxonomies, and clichés. Furthermore, Boskovich used this particular phrase to caption a photograph of a plastic bear-shaped honey pot, a commodity that appears throughout the artist’s oeuvre as a stand-in for himself.

Boskovich criticized conceptual art for being elitist, boring, and prudish. But he also appreciated it as a “brilliant fuckover on pretentious collectors.” [6] While it’s clear that he reintroduced sex and emotion into Conceptualism, he maintained this quality of it being a brilliant fuckover. Except the fuckover was no longer directed at collectors; instead, the self becomes the fuckover, precisely because it gets fucked over. And over.

“John Boskovich: I Appreciate My Uniqueness,” Scherben, Berlin, September 11–November 2, 2024.

Thomas Love received their PhD in art history from Northwestern University and is now a Preparing Future Faculty for Inclusive Excellence (PFFIE) postdoctoral fellow at the University of Missouri. Love’s current book project, titled Queer Exoticism: Strategies of Self-Othering in West Germany, analyzes queer art in post-’60s West Germany to show how representations of racial and ethnic difference became essential to the formation of contemporary queer identity. Their writing has been published in Angela McRobbie (ed.), Ulrike Ottinger: Film, Art and the Ethnographic Imagination (Intellect, 2024), as well as in The Germanic Review, Art in America, Portable Gray, and the Art Institute of Chicago’s Perspectives series.

Image credit: Courtesy of the Estate of John S. Boskovich, © Max Eulitz / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2024