Note: This project was designed for the printed journal, our website is limited in presentation. A pair of card inserts were placed in the middle of the project for the reader to tear out. For the best experience of the project, order a copy here.
Holy Holes
In 1978, Harvey Milk was assassinated, at the age of forty-eight. He was the first openly gay elected official in California, a member of the Board of Supervisors of San Francisco. Among the possessions he left behind was a large cactus plant. This plant is still alive, now, forty years later, and the artist Julie Tolentino was given a cutting from it by a friend who is an archivist at the UCLA Special Collections. In 2019, Julie Tolentino exhibited the small cactus, called Harvey, in a show, Altered After, which also included work by Kang Seung Lee. Julie Tolentino’s piece is titled Archive in Dirt and Kang made a drawing of it, showing the living plant in its pot.
Derek Jarman was informed he was HIV positive on December 22, 1986. He told the visibly distressed doctor, “not to worry, I never liked Christmas.” Some months later, he went for a walk on the beach at Dungeness in Kent, with his partners-in-art-and-life, Keith Collins and Tilda Swinton. It’s a bleak landscape: an endless expanse of pebbles and worn stones, with the cold, slow waves of the English Channel rising and crashing onto the shingle, rolling the pebbles back and forth in a perpetual dull roar. Walking along the strand, past the small fisherman’s cottages, they came upon a For Sale sign, and as Jarman’s father had recently died—he was a military man, a kleptomaniac, and a hoarder, who stashed money and other valuables around his house before he died—Jarman was unexpectedly flush, and he could come up with £30,000 for the wooden cottage, and an additional £700 for a stretch of shingle that would eventually become the garden.
Prospect Cottage is small, with an exterior weatherproofed with black tar, and bright yellow painted doors. Inside the walls are made of wood panels, tongue and groove, with watery glass in the drafty windows, the wind and waves making an unbroken soundtrack. Outside, the wind is so strong, conversation is sometimes impossible: voices are blown away, streaking over the waves.
In the distance, the nuclear power station looms. Dungeness B makes use of the limitless supply of cold salt water to cool its radioactive materials—like Fukushima in Japan, like SONGS, the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, on the beach south of Los Angeles. These are both closed now, since the tsunami at Fukushima, but Dungeness B goes on. The building is massive, a distortion of scale and perspective. At night, the nuclear power plant is illuminated, and the vast building glows, Jarman wrote, like the Emerald City, so near, so far.
Derek Jarman and Keith Collins lived at Prospect Cottage for the rest of Derek’s life, going back and forth between Dungeness and Derek’s Soho flat, in a Victorian block called Phoenix House, overlooking the bright taxis and buses rumbling down Charing Cross Road.
In 1994, when Derek Jarman died of AIDS-related complications, at the age of fifty-two, Keith Collins inherited Prospect Cottage and the garden they had made together. Derek said he didn’t want it to become an artwork; he wanted his beloved Keith to have it, and enjoy it, and he told Keith that when the time came, he should leave it to his boyfriend, and so on, projecting a lineage of queer relations, a chosen family tree, unfolding in time.
In August 2018, Keith Collins died, at the age of fifty-four, soon after being diagnosed with a brain tumor. His husband, Garry Clayton, owns Prospect Cottage now. It was Garry Clayton who sent Kang Seung Lee a California poppy pod from the garden at Prospect Cottage, and Kang made a drawing of it.
These two drawings are printed here with perforated edges, so that you can tear them out of the journal if you wish.
More intertwined histories and images: lavender seeds going back to the 1980s, collected from the garden at Prospect Cottage and kept in a large bowl. Embroidered on the thin white curtain in the cottage window, a single simple outline of a plant with a heart for its flower. A lump of sea glass from the beach, with the word Life etched in Derek Jarman’s handwriting. The absence of Korean writer and activist Oh Joon-soo, who died in 1998 of AIDS-related complications, at the age of thirty-four, drawn in graphite. A pebble from Dungeness placed in a living, split tree in Tapgol Park, the traditional place for cruising in Seoul; a stone from Tapgol Park lost among an infinite number in the garden at Prospect Cottage.
On the beach at Dungeness, to find a pebble with a hole right through is rare; it is regarded as a small treasure. Such a stone is called a holy hole. Derek Jarman collected them, stringing them together on rope to make heavy necklaces, to hang on the door or the wall. A singular holy hole was given to Kang Seung Lee by Derek’s assistant, Karl, taken from a bowl in a shared house in Dungeness, and Kang suspended it alone, tied with antique gold thread from Kyoto.
–Leslie Dick
Kang Seung Lee is a multidisciplinary artist who was born in South Korea and now lives and works in Los Angeles. Recent projects include exhibitions at Participant Inc., New York (2019); Palm Springs Art Museum (2019); One and J. Gallery, Seoul (2018); Artpace San Antonio (2017); Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles (2017). Lee is the recipient of the CCF Fellowship for Visual Artists (2019), Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant (2018), and Artpace San Antonio International Artist-In-Residence (2017). He received an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts).
Leslie Dick is a writer who lives in Los Angeles. She teaches in the Art Program at CalArts.