Interview with Gregg Bordowitz

Image courtesy of the artist. Photo: Justin Bettman.

In Exodus 3:14, G-d reveals his personal name to Moses, a name typically translated as “I will be what I will be” or “I am what I am.”¹ In Hebrew, the name is composed of the four letters yod, he, vav, and he, spelling a word observant Jews consider too sacred to pronounce aloud and therefore simply refer to as the “Tetragrammaton.”

The letters of the Tetragrammaton appeared over and over in Gregg Bordowitz’s recent exhibition This is Not a Love Song, in calligraphic scrawls captured in a series of monotypes that encircled The Brick’s main gallery. The prints were shown alongside (and in some cases physically on top of) an epic associative poem in a funerary typeface; wooden structures that recalled tree protectors on the sidewalks of New York; a video of Bordowitz reading a poem by the light of a headlamp; and cartoonish plaster sculptures of clouds drawn from a Baroque monument to the plague. In an adjacent space played a feature-length video compilation of the artist’s deadpan stand-up routines, poetry readings, and a Yom Kippur sermon, interspersed with jarring cell phone footage of a man on his deathbed.

Altogether, the many individual components of the exhibition set a tone that alternated between holy and playful, heavy and buoyant—descriptors that could easily apply to Bordowitz’s relationship to Jewishness, a facet of his identity that has been an explicit part of his work from the beginning. His breakthrough video Fast Trip, Long Drop (1993), for example, is an autobiographical documentary in which he contends with the complexities of living with HIV, with straight-to-camera narration and found footage set rather pointedly to stirring music by The Klezmatics. The video, much like This is Not a Love Song, transforms contradiction into life-affirming duality, centering identity in order to destabilize the self.

Over three hours of conversation at a café in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, Bordowitz graciously answered my questions, often with a dizzying array of references to pop culture and erudite Jewish scholarship, much of which did not make it into this condensed transcript. More importantly, he shared how experiences marked by pain, loss, joy, and hope have informed his evolving artistic practice, which continues to reach for the universal—and the political—through the personal.

Andrea Gyorody: I felt like the crux of your exhibition at The Brick was articulated in the compilation video, where you say that Jewishness is the key to understanding all the other identities that make up who you are. What is the Venn diagram for you between Jewishness and queerness, and how has that changed over time?

Gregg Bordowitz: The names and categories that we use to identify ourselves are impoverished in relationship to the lived complexity of our lives. I came up at a formative moment as an artist, as a young person within the framework of identity politics, and identity politics came to mean various things. For me it meant allowing identities and names and labels to attach to me and to embrace them in their contradictions and complexity so that the combined weight of all of the identities would actually lead to the collapse of the self. So ultimately, my definition of identity politics is about defeating identity structures.

At the same time—and I don’t think it’s a contradiction, it’s a conundrum that we live—identity politics or identitarian claims are extremely important politically. In my experience, they can mean survival. It’s the way we form communities. It’s also the way we open ourselves up to the world.

AG: Was that the Jewish community for you, as a kid growing up in Queens?

GB: My family had a very complicated relationship to Jewish life. My parents were Jewish hippies. My grandfather was Orthodox. In my family it was all very culturally Jewish. And the older people, by that I mean my grandparents and their generation, my aunts, my uncles, they were all Yiddish speaking, they were all either from Europe or were the firstborn children to European immigrants. My family was huge when I was a child, and every Sunday we got together, at least 20 people at my Aunt Gertie’s house in Long Island. It’s Yiddish, Jewish food, but a varying level of commitment [to observance] based on various trajectories of complexity, of lived lives. […]

I went to heder [Hebrew school] as a young child. I was often used in the classroom as an example of the assimilated Jew, because I had really long hair, and it was clear that I wasn’t observant, or as observant as many of my fellow students. But I was well embraced and smart and had an amazing attachment to some of my teachers there. I fell in love with Jewish study, with Torah study, Talmud, and it shaped my intellectual aspirations.

AG: A lot of kids are repelled by Hebrew school, but it seems like you were drawn deeply to Torah study.

GB: In some ways it’s like any object attraction. It comes unbidden. My mom taught me how to read before I got into school. […] My mom was a reader. She loved reading. My grandfather was a reader. My grandfather was studious. These are not college-educated people, but they are really super smart. And yeah, I just fell for it. I kind of went queer for it in a certain way. […] There was something that I couldn’t articulate when I was young, but I went to a gender-separated educational environment. […] I was invited to sit in with the older teenagers and men studying. There was something really hot about the smell of male BO and books, and the books had beard hairs in them. It’s very homosocial.

The thing that [is] abiding, now that I have words for [it], is that the Torah has relevance to every generation… Not only the interpretation, but interpretation within and among a group. I have a chavruta, a study partner who I love, who’s 80 years old, and we meet every Friday morning to talk about the Torah portion before Torah study, which we attend at the same congregation, [Kolot Chayeinu].

AG: It’s remarkable to me that you’ve remained part of organized religion given the ostracization you must have experienced during the AIDS crisis.

GB: I became very alienated from orthodoxy as a teenager because of queerness, because of politics. I was deeply hurt in the ’80s when I started doing AIDS activism, having realized that I was probably—eventually finding out that I was—infected with HIV. The homophobia I encountered as an activist in the organized Jewish world and all [its] denominations was horrifying to me, very deeply alienating and hurtful… I had some very bad experiences, so I was really hurt, but I never gave up studying.

AG: More recently you’ve been drawing the Tetragrammaton, a much more mystical Jewish practice than textual study. How did that come about?

GB: [The art historian] Douglas [Crimp] got very sick with myeloma, a blood-borne cancer that disintegrates your bones. And Douglas and I were very close and best friends, and he was 20 years my senior. But we had a very deep relationship, and as fellow travelers, we’ve fought out loud together. We both started doing AIDS activism at the same time. In many ways, Douglas was a mentor in the queer world for me. He was not religious, but he knew I was, or am. […]

And Douglas, like a lot of people I know who are facing terminal illness and mortality, got curious about spirituality. And that’s a long story, but the salient feature of that is I was talking to Douglas and he asked me to talk about it. He said, “How do you believe in G-d? I love you. You don’t really talk about this side, but I know you believe in G-d, and you’re brilliant, and I love you. And I never understood how that’s the case.” And so, well, I talked to him about negative theology, and G-d is what you can’t define.

AG: So his curiosity reignited your own practice.

GB: Douglas and I were having these conversations… and I thought, “I need something. I don’t even know what day it is.” And then I said, “It’s… Shabbos. I know. I know what Shabbos is.” So I just started going back [to synagogue] then [and] in 2018 started going regularly and joined this Torah study group. It got me through the pandemic and the lockdown. I’m still very involved. And that’s what I tell people that say, “How can you be part of a congregation?” There’s no ACT UP [AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power] in my life anymore.²I went to ACT UP meetings every night for seven years of my life. There’s a committee in my congregation for acts of love and kindness… So this thing is about Jewish study, but there’s also just congregational life. I’ve always been making congregations.

AG: How did that lead you to the Tetragrammaton?

GB: [Douglas] asks me finally in our deep friendship to open up about this aspect of my life, which I was sharing with other people. So he’s reading the Bible, we’re talking about G-d. I talk to him about G-d, faith, all of these things. I find my way back to observance, weekly observance, and become deeply involved with Kolot again… It becomes part of the poetry I write. I write daily… I didn’t get that discipline until my 40s. And now, I just wake up into writing. I fill books. It’s not precious. […]

I start[ed] making drawings daily, based on a meditational practice that I have used that I get from [Rabbi] Aryeh Kaplan and others— [Rabbi] Zalman Schachter-Shalomi is an important figure.³ The way you imagine the Tetragrammaton in your head, and you move the letters in and out, and combine them. You take the four letters of the Tetragrammaton, imagine them as the Hebrew letters, and that is a meditational practice. […]

[I thought,] what if I do this on paper? And then I had to figure out [how], because actually I’m one of those people who puts a dash between G and D… How do you do these drawings and make them kosher? They’re based on this exercise, but actually I purposely don’t complete them.

AG: What do the drawings accomplish for you that exceeds what’s possible through the meditational practice?

GB: What I’m interested in doing is defeating the distinctions between writing and drawing. I was retroactively thinking, “Oh, okay. So I’ve chosen a calligraphic practice that gets me back to a drawing practice, which is interesting.” I’m writing as drawing. Drawing as writing.

AG: How did the drawings then morph into the prints we saw in This Is Not a Love Song?

GB: I didn’t feel confident in picking up the paintbrush right away, but I was looking for a kind of wet ink-driven, paint-driven practice. […] I got a commission from [curator Liz Park at] the University at Buffalo Gallery, which I [produced with printmaker] Marina [Ancona] for two weeks [at 10 Grand Press]. And I loved it. I just loved it. […]

Every print we were making, we couldn’t predict what the press was going to do. Especially because we were working with ghost prints and all these techniques. So that I loved too. I like giving myself over to that.

AG: The prints were of course just one part of the exhibition, which was wide-ranging in medium and tone. How would you describe your overall ambition?

GB: I’m trying to create a holding environment or a place of first permission, to emphasize the grounds upon which credibility is staged and at the same time, produce a central engagement with ideas… There’s no such thing as a pure idea, which is why I kind of abandoned conceptualism. I don’t ideate and execute. I find these things through making, and what is an idea? It’s blood sugar and hormones and electrochemical reactions. That’s also the substance of an idea and so I’d be really interested in defeating distinctions, the distinction between the idea and beauty, the distinction between thought and feeling, this distinction between writing and drawing… There’s no contradiction between the various aspects of my life. I live between Jewish experience and secular life.

Gregg Bordowitz, This is Not a Love Song (installation view) (2025). Image courtesy of the artist and The Brick. Photo: Ruben Diaz.

Gregg Bordowitz, There: a Feeling (installation view) (2025). Image courtesy of the artist and Camden Art Centre. Photo: Luke Walker.

Gregg Bordowitz, This is Not a Love Song (installation view) (2025). Image courtesy of the artist and The Brick. Photo: Ruben Diaz.

Gregg Bordowitz, There: a Feeling (installation view) (2025). Image courtesy of the artist and Camden Art Centre. Photo: Luke Walker.

Gregg Bordowitz, Tetragrammaton (2021) (installation view). Image courtesy of the artist and Bonner Kunstverein. Photo: Mareike Tocha.

Andrea Gyorody is director of the Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art at Pepperdine University. She has co-organized major exhibitions on Joseph Beuys, Eva Hesse, and the legacies of the Black Atlantic, in addition to curating solo projects by Jeni Spota C., Cameron Harvey, Hildur Ásgeirsdóttir Jónsson, and Isabel Yellin. Her writing appears regularly in Artforum.

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