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Discursive Documents: Performing the Catalogue
10am - 5pm
This project was a catalogue. In 2010, John Q proposed that memorials could be public happenings. Presented on April 3, 2010, Memory Flash consisted of four installations in different public spaces, each addressing a specific event in Atlanta queer history in the space where it originally happened. The events were drawn from oral histories, news stories, and other archival sources. As memorials, the only public upkeep was in the remembering or the forgetting. Similarly, the catalogue for this work exists in a place and for a time.
Discursive Documents included artifacts and sound recordings from Memory Flash, as well as works and ephemera produced by others in response: murals, photographs, documentations, course syllabi, and other texts. A resource table included these items as well as references and books used during research. After expanding the archives into the public space for Memory Flash, MOCA GA expanded the catalogue for the event into the space of the museum (and specifically into this museum’s dedicated archival/research space – so, in a sense, Memory Flash returns to the archives).
This catalogue process still had written components. Discursive Memorials: Queer Histories in Atlanta’s Public Spaces was published by Emory’s online journal, Southern Spaces. As for printed matter, John Q guest curated a special issue of the JOSH (the Journal of Sexual Homos) published by Arts and Sciences PROJECTS, NY. This issue includes images from the four movements of Memory Flash along with works by other artists from the U.S., Mexico, and England concerned with queer memory and place.
John Q was an artist collective whose name references “John Q. Public.” The “public” is left understood, though the work is considered a kind of public scholarship, and the “Q” is left hanging to reference the group’s interest in queer history and politics.
The collective consisted of Wesley Chenault, Andy Ditzler and Joey Orr.