RAW THROUGH A STRAW Opening Reception

Hawkins HQ is pleased to announce Raw Through A Straw, an exhibition of new work by Jackson Markovic; this is his second exhibition in the gallery. 

During Art Basel Switzerland in Summer 2025, Hauser and Wirth presented Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ 1991 work “Untitled (Go-go Dancing Platform)” in the special projects section of the fair alongside a robust press run. The work is frequently described for its joy and sexiness, qualities given an extra emphasis as the work was produced shortly after the passing of Gonzalez-Torres’ partner, Ross, from AIDs the same year. The work consists of a powder blue stage lined with frosted light bulbs and instructions requiring a male dancer perform on the stage in silver briefs once a day for approximately five minutes, the exact time determined at the dancer’s discretion; the other 23 hours and 55 minutes the stage is empty. Most documentation of the work features a dancer on stage, stretching the five minute gesture into an indefinite and iconic performance. The work’s sadness, the empty platform for which it is named, becomes obsolete in the repeated context of global art fairs and slick documentation.

The dancer in Hauser and Wirth’s presentation wears white crew socks with thick black stripes, an innocuous yet tacky detail. Socks which mimic styles of athletic gear from the 1970’s and 80’s worn in a piece made in 1991 and performed in 2025. This confluence of decades has guided recent work, with a specific interest in how Queer artists who launched careers in the late 80’s and early 90’s are applied to our current decade (think also of Wolfgang Tillmans’ foray into graphics against Brexit, or Nan Goldin’s campaign against the Sackler family). The reprinting of images of those lost to AIDs has become its own practice of abstraction. This abstraction is increasingly familiar in the unstable decade of Covid, M-Pox, diminished HIV funding, etcetera: the feeling of precarity in one’s body while its likeness exists indefinitely in images and surveillance documents. A likeness that can be stretched indefinitely or reduced to a series of data points. 

Raw Through a Straw is a phrase immortalized by musician Terre Thaemlitz on a track of the same name released in 1993. She describes the song as an “audio blow-job,” which in ‘93 represented a false safety as a young queer person during the North American AIDS crisis, oral sex a relatively risk free act among a generation dying young. I like that the track in its quiet tonality never discloses who is giving or receiving head; it does not deny a power dynamic but instead lets it be amorphous and pleasurable. Though Thaemlitz would later note that the track’s optimism was naive, I still find great meaning in its warmth and insistence on feeling, its invitation to get on your knees a more moving call to action than the past 30 years of mainstream “Queer discourse.”