The Pleasure and Terror of Domestic Comfort
My home both soothes and scares me.
When I was twenty, I went to see a photography show at the Museum of Modern Art called The Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort, curated by Peter Galassi. (So yes, I stole his line). The photos have haunted me ever since, which was clearly Galassi’s goal. (If you want to see what I mean, you can find some images here, here, and here and here).
It was a weird time. George Bush the elder was President, about a year away from losing the election to Bill Clinton. At my (very) politically liberal, liberal arts college we pushed back against what Bush represented to us: income inequality, the Gordon Gekko ethos of “greed is good,” racism woven into the war on drugs. (After all, due south of the museum on Wall Street, traders were doing blow off of naked models covered in sushi, while Black people were going to jail for crack).
We were energized by protesting apartheid in South Africa. Act Up was staging “die-ins” to get the medical community to finally take AIDs seriously. But for all that energy, there was a strange feeling of stagnation. Bret Easton Ellis had given us Less Than Zero, capturing an emptiness we all seemed to share, although we couldn’t quite figure out why.
