The Autotheorizing Sinthomosexual: Transitional Subjectivity within Geoffrey Hendricks’s Ring Piece and the Conditions of 1960s Intermedia Practice

Abstract

In 1971, at the Armory Show in New York City, Fluxus artist Geoffrey Hendricks sat on a mound of dirt, writing in his diary over the course of twelve hours. Titled Ring Piece, Hendricks wrote about his experience coming out as a queer man follow-ing his divorce, which, too, was a performance. In the 1960s-1970s, there was a pro-lific emergence of site-specific artworks, or installations whose meaning was contin-gent on its location. When applied to autotheoreticalFluxus practices, site-specificity was reflected through the presence of one’s body and objects laden with meaning. For Hendricks and Ring Piece, his decision to bury a box with material remnants of his marriage –including his wedding ring–into the mound he sat upon illustrates the archeological nature of writing and one relationship to queerness requires a strong and intimate connection to a site and the objects which inhabit it. This paper examines how Hendricks utilizes his artistic practice as an autotheoretical method to explore his shifting role into coming out as a homosexual publicly while not dis-closing it to anyone except his diary. Through a close reading of Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive’s theorization of the sinthomosexual, or the embracement of one’s solitude. Through this notion of the sinthomosexual ap-plied in Fluxus performance art, it becomes autotheoreticalinsofar as it expands our art historical understanding of how site-specific art can be as simple as a mound of dirt, or an “Island”, as Hendrick described it.