I would likely have succumbed to the AIDS epidemic if I’d been around in the 1980s. Had I been lucky enough to dodge the virus as a promiscuous gay guy living in a big city, I’d still have had to bear witness to the inevitable deaths of lovers, friends, colleagues, and rivals. I can never truly comprehend the suffering and grief experienced by an older generation, but I think about it, most recently during my visit to Jim Hodges’s exhibition “It only takes a minute.” The imposing sculpture Craig’s closet, 2024, resembles a flat-pack wardrobe, except its sidewalls and doors are missing, as if perfectly sliced off to reveal the contents. Everything has been rendered in marble and bronze, all in angelic white: a hanging rail of T-shirts and hoodies, boxes piled high, a set of deely bobbers—plus a walking stick propped against the side. An earlier version of the piece (that one in pure somber black) was commissioned for the New York City AIDS Memorial Park, where it was displayed from 2023 to 2024. In The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination (2012), a short but impactful memoir of the AIDS crisis, Sarah Schulman recalls, “It was normal to hear that someone we knew had died and that their belongings were thrown out on the street.” I couldn’t help but see Hodges’s artwork as a correcting of that heartless wrong. Even its positioning in the space here in London, with its back to the large window, felt like a rebuke to the sidewalk outside.
Having said that, I’m not sure that, beyond the memorial context, Craig’s closet is still solely an AIDS-related artwork. It has wider connotations about remembrance and mourning beyond the artist’s autobiography. Although a portrait of a specific person, Craig’s closet still looks pretty universal. The contents of millions of wardrobes would probably look similar, especially when everything has been cast in a unifying white. Swap out the walking stick and deely bobbers for a cheap casino-style visor (a relic from a bachelorette party I attended years ago) and this could have been my own.
The show featured other, smaller pieces such as awaiting, (a study of time), 2025, a stack of plastic bins filled with sweets, such as marshmallows and glow-in-the-dark cotton candy, in a vitrine. The sculpture seems colder, more deadpan than the intricate, vibrant works, often executed in mirrored glass or fabric, for which Hodges is best known. The trademark sweetness was still there (literally, with sachets of individual sweetener included in the boxes) but now barricaded away from us under several layers of plastic packaging and impenetrable containers. Thankfully, there were no barriers holding us back from the exhibition’s second major work, an installation called double portrait: father and son, 2025: a huge, dimly lit shed, made of wood and corrugated iron, which had been salvaged from the Louisiana bayou and placed in a darkened room. Visitors had to work their way around the structure before finding and stepping through its doorway, all while a man singing gently could be heard—this was the audio installation Angel Angel, 2025, a collaboration with Carlos Marques da Cruz. Inside, the only hint of color in this rusty environment was an old purple biscuit tin. A boy’s bike was parked against the wall—it looked fit for the scrap heap; long gone were the days when this kid’s father might have given him a cycling lesson. Nor had the corroded tools hanging from the walls been used in many years. This could easily have served as a set for The Walking Dead or some other postapocalyptic TV franchise. But I fought the urge to read a sinister meaning into the work, instead deciding that this place embodied happy memories, albeit ones that had long been neglected and forgotten. For a few minutes I was left alone and undisturbed, allowing myself to be completely immersed in Hodges’s world-building. The intrusion of some other visitors eventually broke that spell, but as I stepped out of the shed, I made a mental note to give my own dad a call. It’s been a while.
