John Boskovich
Rude Awakening Series: Gardner Gilles as Psychedelic Surfer Jesus, “The only one who helped me move out of 514 S. Barrington”
1997
Framed Polaroid photograph with silkscreen text
10.25 x 9.75 in (26.03 x 24.77 cm)
John Boskovich (b. 1956-d. 2006, Los Angeles) received both undergraduate and graduate degrees in art from the California Institute of Arts. His work spanned photography, installation, and film, and this work is from a celebrated early series of photographic works called Rude Awakening based on photographs Boskovich took in and around his home in 1997 paired with lines from Joyce Strum’s 1987 self-help book Love Lines: Affirmations for Mind, Body, Spirit.
Affirmations such as Strum’s promise improvements as well—self-improvements— though if there is spirituality in these neoliberal mantras, it’s of the “new spirit of capitalism” variety. The kind of brutal honesty one might expect from artists documenting their bohemian lifestyles here runs up against the condition of life as an immense accumulation of spectacles. “Rude Awakening” seems to exist at the narrow junction of a Venn diagram between Louise Lawler and Nan Goldin, combining, against all odds, the former’s deconstruction of the culture industry with the latter’s documentation of the alternative scene. The irony is all the more pronounced once one learns that Boskovich came across Strum’s book when it was gifted to a friend who was on his deathbed due to AIDS….
One Polaroid, titled Gardner Gilles as Psychedelic Surfer Jesus, ‘The only one who helped me move out of 514 S. Barrington’ (1997), depicts the titular figure in triplicate (photographed through a prism, presumably), and captioned “I surround myself with people who care about me.” The image talks back to the caption: perhaps no one cares about you but yourself, caught in a narcissistic echo chamber. And the work’s title reveals how few people cared enough to lend the artist a hand when he was in need. Just as the unnatural green tint and multiplied likeness of Gardner Gilles undercuts the presumption of photographic truth, the series as a whole thwarts the viewer’s desire for unfiltered access to Boskovich’s life.
– Thomas Love, “John Boskovich: Rude Awakening,” Portable Gray, Vol. 7, No. 2, Fall 2024
“I chose Polaroids because that format is almost intrinsically a non-artist mode and I was drawn to its spontaneity,” the artist remarked. The images have a given quality, like the residue of unmediated lived experience. The arty fooling around in them is of the nature of a party trick. Fractured faces, lurid colors, sexual shenanigans. The Polaroids adhere to the anti- or anaesthetic character of much Conceptual art photography, yet in crucial moments gesture outside of and beyond it, e.g., in the theatrical, showbiz chiaroscuro of certain “boudoir pictures.” “From a psychological perspective, I was trying to be very immediate and real,” Boskovich relates elsewhere.
The subjects are mostly persons: Gardner Gillies in triplicate, a friend of the artist. I remember his very blond hair — though his hair looks blue-black in the Polaroid that looks as if soaked in crème de menthe — arranged in plaits, or pigtails, and that one afternoon he was around when John made psilocybin-laced hot toddies to a recipe of Martha Stewart.
Boskovich exhibited actively as an artist for about 10 years before withdrawing following the death of his lover due to AIDS-related illness in 1995. Boskovich turned inward and devoted the last decade of his life to transforming his home into an elaborate gesamtkunstwerk dubbed the “Boskostudio,” partially reconstructed in two exhibitions in 2019 and 2020, which both included works from the Rude Awakening series. This work thus forms a meta-connection to the home and later Boskostudio as a mythical and real site of creation. Boskovich died at age 49 of undisclosed causes.
Provenance
Horror Vacui, New York
Exhibitions
Horror Vacui, “John Boskovich” New York, December 2024 – January 2025
Bodenrader, “Rude Awakening,” Chicago, March 30 – May 11, 2024
David Lewis, “John Boskovich” New York, March 6, 2020 – April 19, 2020
O Town House, “Psycho Salon” Los Angeles, September 27th, 2019 – January 4, 2020
“Boskostudio” aka “Alligator Farm” Los Angeles, 1997-2006
See also
“John Boskovich: Rude Awakening,” Bodenrader, Chicago, March 30 – May 11, 2024