Tom Burr | Green Bomber Jacket (2019)

Tom Burr | Green Bomber Jacket (2019)[[specs start]] Green Bomber Jacket (Amarillo) Green Bomber Jacket (Atlanta) Green Bomber Jacket (Blackgang, Isle of Wight) Green Bomber Jacket (Boston) SOLD OUT Green Bomber Jacket (Brighton) SOLD OUT Green Bomber Jacket (Bristol) Green Bomber Jacket (Chicago) SOLD OUT Green Bomber Jacket (Edinburgh) Green Bomber Jacket (El Paso) Green Bomber Jacket (Fire Island) SOLD OUT Green Bomber Jacket (Liverpool) SOLD OUT Green Bomber Jacket (London) SOLD OUT

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Silkscreen onto Bomber Jacket
Approximate dimensions: 72 x 120 cm (Men's Medium)
Series of 20, accompanied by signed certificate.

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About the work

Tom Burr’s edition for the Whitechapel Gallery is a series of 20 green bomber jackets each with a different inscription printed in silver ink on the reverse. These short texts are listings from an issue of Spartacus International Gay Guide from the 1990’s, and describe cruising areas from cites and towns across the UK and USA. Burr first deployed listings of US cruising sites in a series of sculptures in 1989/90, printed onto free standing 4’ x 4’ sections of sheet rock wall. Never exhibited outside of the artist’s studio, the work  is now being reprised for a forthcoming exhibition.

Individually each text describes specific landmarks, instructions, and at times warnings for unmapped locations.  The passages in the series form a highly codified language, as well as collectively creating a sort of poetic discourse that links places, subjectivities, and conditions ( of secrecy, danger, illegality, pleasure, visibility, and invisibility).

In these works Burr wanted to evoke the invisible and precarious status of queer (specifically gay male) geographic meeting points, as camouflaged within the larger normative landscape. Displayed in a gallery, they are also intended to rupture the alleged neutrality of an exhibition space, and the corresponding alleged neutrality of its viewing public. Worn, on a jacket, the meaning shifts, the passages hint at hidden modes of survival. The bodies which are referred to indirectly through the texts become complicit.

This particular era of ‘Spartacus,’ the 1980’s and 90’s, is significant for Burr, as signalling a new gay male tourist class, one that had the financial means to travel frequently. However due to shifting urban forces, with gentrification and privatisation no longer allowing for unspeculated space, many of these spaces no longer exist. In this sense, ‘Spartacus’ guide was a map for survival, a sort of playbook for pleasure and queer communal connection, while it was also born in the same moment of neo liberal global economies that would ultimately, along with the internet, pronounce its obsolescence. If spaces produce subjects, what subjectivities will emerge from the new spaces of control and constraint? Green Bomber Jacket is both a memorial to the just recent past, and an attempt at reclaiming some of queer culture’s historical strategies from the grip of capital, as memory to be reconstituted in the present. 

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About the artist

New York based artist Tom Burr’s (b.1963) practice explores the intersection of sexual identity with public and private sites. His stripped-down sculptural assemblages, which invoke a polished neutrality associated with minimalism - combine site-specific materials, such as hardware and display-furniture, with printed ephemera, items of clothing and references to cultural figures. Burr’s site-specific constructions are imbued with personal narrative and memory, serving to redress and disrupt official histories.

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Selected Exhibitions

Queer Spaces: London, 1980s – Today, Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK, 2019; MATRIX 182, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut, USA, 2019: Hélio-Centricities, auroras, São Paulo, Brazil, 2019; Sedimental, SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia, USA, 2018; Abridged, Galerie Neu, Berlin, Germany, 2018; New York, USA; Cruising Pavillion, Spazio Punch, 16th Venice Architecture Biennale, Venice, Italy, 2018; Stages, Maureen Paley, London, UK, 2018; Grips, Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, Israel , 2016; Circa, Bortolami Gallery, New York, NY, USA, 2015; Notes on Camp, curated by Vienna: The Century Bed, Vienna, Austria , 2014; Drunk Emily, Galleria Franco Noero, Torino, Italy, 2014; Dressage, Parcours, Art Basel, Basel, Switzerland, 2013; Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London, UK, 2013; Promiscuous Pleats, Galleria Franco Noero, Torino, Italy, 2012; Gravity Moves Me, FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims, France, 2011; Addict – Love, Sculpture Center, New York, NY, USA, 2008; Swiss Institute with Walter Pfeiffer, New York, NY, USA, 2007; Moods, Secession, Vienna, Austria 2007; Deep Purple, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, USA, 2002.

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Whitechapel Gallery editions are generously donated by the artists. All proceeds from the sale of these works directly support our exhibition and education programmes. As is traditional in editions publishing, prices will rise as an edition starts to sell out. 

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