HAZEL FRIEDMAN previews Johnny Golightly’s latest collection called Love: A Retrospective
WHAT do you do when the romance goes out of your relationship? “You put on your clothes and go home.” Those words are familiar to all of us who’ve gone looking for love in all the wrong beds. But to artist John Anthony Boerma, aka Johnny Golightly, the quest for transient, glamorous, trashy love was the perfect way to slip through life without ever really touching sides: travelling light, with only a hangover and the occasional bruise as baggage. Laying now and paying later. Much much later.
That was Johnny Golightly 18 months ago. He had a predilection for painting celebrity portraits (remember his 1995 Portrait Collection) and two fried eggs as his artistic signature (a reference to Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Holly Golightly, the ephemeral character in the book and the source of the Golightly namesake).
He also had a tendency to transform the most private of thoughts into whimsical aphorisms (and vice versa), penned on to paper fragments from the Golightly travel guide. He had a penchant for hiphopping between the hotspots of the world – from the bowels of New York to his boma in Nelspruit. Life was fabulous, glamorous, gorgeous, gay, gay, gay. And there was always Prozac to paralyse fear, suspending thoughts of past and future, and turning life into a time- capsule of painless, passionless pleasure.
Then Golightly landed. Heavily. Almost a year ago he was attacked in his hotel room in Volksrust where he was giving a series of environmental workshops. In order to escape his attackers he jumped from his window and broke his ankles. And it was during “this time of crisis, when being gay meant having the saddest experience around … when one’s clunking Doc Martens are made of lead”… that Golightly got truly intimate with pain. And love. As he recalls in achingly beautiful prose: “I searched for love in so many beds. I found it in crisp white sheets in a hospital where I couldn’t even find the courage to masturbate.”
The crumpled, empty bed – a throwback to his hustling days – hospital drips filled with red fur attached to 13 high tech, Gothic chairs (a reference to Christ’s Last Supper), constitute the thematic fulcrums on which Love: A Retrospective revolves. And the1 000 little love aphorisms – careless one-liners moaned momentarily between the sheets, in bars or bathrooms and immortalised on paper scraps; lyrics from mushy love songs like Barbara Streisand’s Evergreen; Yours Forever; Love You Stax; Love Hurts. There is a dart for every heart.
Yet there is nothing overtly maudlin about Love: A Retrospective. With the gallery garishly decked out in fluffy feathers and pussy-pink paint, it is unashamedly, crudely cheerful. A brothel and trashy boutique in one, it sells mementoes of the moment – guns, postcards, condoms, cigarettes – packaged, significantly, in rows of thirteen.
This is the residue of the morning after the night before. Simultaneously the objects suggest an attempt to seal, pocket and preserve love’s ephemerae. But most of all they confirm that even life’s lightest travellers carry some load. Love: A Retrospective will open at Gallery The Space in Sandton, Johannesburg on November 16