TERENCE DEAREST
by AA Bronson

(from the upcoming catalogue, GONE, YET STILL)

I want to write about Terence in a moment—that is my desire: to have the words spring fully formed from my fingers, at my laptop here in the skies, traveling from Vienna to Frankfurt and then back to New York City.

I have been mostly at the Vienna Secession in the last several days. I was invited for Vienna Art Week, and accepted, and came: because I love Vienna, but more, because the Secession is my favorite institution in the world (in some ways it has overtaken even my own baby, Art Metropole, and my current refuge, Printed Matter), because we are planning a little exhibition of General Idea editions for the fall, and because Terence has described to me his project for the Secession’s Graphisches Kabinett, and I know I must see it again in order to write this piece for his catalogue.

Terence does nothing halfway. Given the smallest gallery space, and the opportunity for a modest exhibition, he has turned it into an opus, a life work, in fact quite literally a sort of Gesamtkunstwerk. This little space, perched above the gallery shop and overlooking the lobby, reached by its narrow staircase with its Deco vitrine, like a lookout punctuated by a broad window; and then, further, through another door and up a few steps, a balcony, under the high ceiling of the entrance hall, looking down on the crowds of Japanese tourists, and Americans, and Germans, come to see the murals of Klimt, which lie in the deep vaults of the lower cellar.

In this high small room, one feels complete. As Terence told me, one could live there, and I believe he will. It has its own bathroom, but, more than that, a sense of isolation from the rest of the building. It is an encapsulated space, protected from the rest of the institution by the twin buffers of the switchback staircase and the balcony: from here one has an overview, both of the street and neighboring market, and of the institution itself. One can traverse the little balcony and enter the region above the main gallery; from here the gridded glass ceiling with its automated carriages for cleaning are another kind of separation, and connection. One is in the heavens of the Secession. There is a sense of clarity, of purity, of power.

For Terence, making art is a matter of life—and of death. For this exhibition, in a space 7 meters square, he will fill the space with vitrines, small vitrines, that become a kind of cataloguing, a way of being deliberate in a casual world. They constitute a kind of mortuary, or an archive—for all archives are implicitly mortuaries. Here is his description:

“…an idea for two forces: the complete act of creativity and the complete act of non-creativity with a string of death linking it.”

Terence is like a seismograph. He is small and precious, quite literally. He is a jewel. He is a kind of crystal, quartz perhaps, with the palest hint of pink, or of lavender. He is not quite yet a diamond, but he is giving it his best shot.

I photographed Terence and his partner Garrick in their new apartment on the Lower East Side of New York City. Although small, the apartment boasts three bedrooms, and all of the diminutive spaces have been painted the same bright flat white. Most of the objects in the apartment are also white, or painted white. Their cat, Gilbert (“his Highness”), is white and fluffy and forgiving: he agrees to be tormented, because he recognizes in the torment a surfeit of love. (Terence could never be deliberately cruel. He can barely eat an egg, seeing in it the stirrings of life).

When I arrived to take their portrait, one Saturday morning, with Mark, my spouse, in tow, I discovered them still in bed, rather groggy, but welcoming. As Garrick pulled himself torturously out of sleep, Terence began to fly around the apartment, gathering stuffed rabbits, Christmas lights, and anything else that might decorate the bed for our incipient photo. These he arranged into a sort of nest, and they settled back into sleepy repose for the lens of my camera.

I first ‘met’ Terence at a time when he and Garrick were living in Vancouver. Terence was constructing his infamous life-size mirrored coffin—Untitled (My Coffin)—and was requesting objects to encapsulate in the 73 white plexi boxes that pack it. I sent him the remains of a fluffy stuffed toy bone, eviscerated by my dog, Jenny. The next time I saw the bone was in the library of Phil Aarons, the current keeper of the coffin: opening box after box to show me the contents, he came across the remnants of the bone, painted flat white, and now quite unrecognizable. “That’s Jenny’s bone!” I cried, in a triumphant moment of recognition.

Sixteen days have passed since I began writing this text. Tomorrow I return to JFK, and take to the skies again, this time to Los Angeles, where I will give a lecture on General Idea. The hotel I will stay in is not far from the gallery where Terence’s most ambitious projects have taken place: Peres Projects, in Chinatown. I will visit the gallery like visiting a sacred site: this is the space that Terence filled with talcum powder; where his white budgies flew freely, where his Chinese opera was enacted. It seems all too appropriate to begin this text in Vienna, with a walk through the space that Terence has yet to inhabit, and end with a walk through Peres Project, where the ghosts of Terence’s inhabitation still exist. A thin white cord of ectoplasm joins the two: what has been, what will become, Terence’s “string of death”.