Fantabulosity Über Alles, Notes on Andrew Cornell Robinson
“Beauty is not a luxury; rather it is a way of creating possibility in the space of enclosure, a radical art of subsistence, an embrace of our terribleness, a transfiguration of the given. It is a will to adorn, a proclivity for the baroque, and the love of too much.”[1]
– Sadiya Hartman
“Art is a way to survive, not a way to live.”
– Andrew Cornell Robinson
It all begins with clay and a troubled little gay boy. With the unspoiled innocence of a five-year-old, Robinson described his desire for a hot nursery school teacher and his love of naked men. The reaction of the others in the car, especially his father’s eyes in the rearview mirror, tells him he isn’t safe. The transformation begins. He knows he’s gay, and it’s not cool. Like every other precocious gay boy, he begins concealing, going within and underground. He is now a chrysalis—or better still, a lump of uncentered, un-molded clay. There is at least some refuge. His mother is a painter. The house is filled with art, books and music. He loves church and sings in the choir. The musical notes are legible, unlike the letters that dance and drip across the page, the way he will one day drizzle colored glazes on the pots he learns to center. He nearly drops out of school. Then he wanders into a ceramics studio. An older potter comes to the rescue and takes him on as an apprentice. He has found his future in clay.
I know his struggle and that of millions of other little gay boys negotiating a hostile environment. The miracle is how many of us survive, and how often art comes to the rescue. Art becomes a path to a larger world and ways of understanding not immediately available. And with the many cultural sanctioned nudes and figure studies, it can even provide a form of soft porn that can be looked at safely.
Like Robinson, by the time I was five I knew I was gay. One of the earliest erotic dreams I had was of half-naked, muscular Simon of Sirene, who helped Jesus carry his cross, embracing me. (And it made me wonder just why the painter chose to depict Simon’s chest so enticingly.) In the eighth grade, I learned the word homosexual. A clandestine library search led to Yukio Mishima’s autobiographical novel Confessions of a Mask. Mishima’s stand in, Kochan, translates his desires into heterosexual terms in order to hide from his classmates. Words are perfect for his project. What words were for Mishima, clay was for Robinson. Clay. The human clay. Dust to dust. From out of the earth.
* * *
Over the course of an eight-year apprenticeship at an Anglo-Japanese pottery he learns to work the clay, to knead it until it’s ready to throw or mold or roll. He masters various techniques, developing expertise in Raku kiln building, glaze chemistry, and production methods. He reclaims and renews himself, over and over, in the resistance of the materials, the discipline of the wheel, object by object, drawing after drawing, creating an identity able to withstand the destructive force of the conversion therapy to which he was subjected, the cultural erasure of LGBTQ+ lives which he will incorporate into his work. At the beginning of his life as an artist, he commits to a daily drawing practice, at least one drawing per day. The drawings anchor his work in the actual conditions of his life and provide thousands of images for use in silk screens, transfers, all the various ways he uses portraiture. He spends, as he writes of another ceramicist whose work he admires, “years inside the material—chemistry, heat, failure, and adjustment.[2]” As he talks to and learns from others artists he realizes “if you’re doing it honestly, it will cost you comfort—but save you from something worse.”[3] A lesson learned in a conversation with Leon Golub and Nancy Spero about what to aim for in one’s work: Not ambition. Not success. Survival. Witness. Defiance.
* * *
“I love the dark hours of my being, for they deepen my senses.”
– Rainer Maria Rilke
He has been exploring various possibilities for decades, in project after project. In Robinson’s hands the possibilities are endless. Forms are suggestions and the suggestions are followed. There is playfulness and visual wit, e.g. in My Cup Runneth Over 419 (Good Friday), 2025, his overcrowded cup “runneth over” with among other things, a ham and little blue duck sitting happily on a banana. The ham is a a frequent image in his work, but there is a subtext. Ham was served in Christian Spain to ferret out Jews. But religious symbolism aside, think about why a gay man would place a banana next to a ham. And is that the Blue Duck of Happiness? And notice how a banana reappears in Fantabulosas 7 March 2026. In Strangers and Neighbors faces appear in ghostly sketches, then are draped with a cartoon ghost hanging from the frame, or they stare back as you wonder about the pink protrusions affixed above the perplexed black haired woman. The vast catalog of prints, text pieces, and layered signs and aphorisms in The Congregation of Wits are by turns witty (“I’m a Groucho Marxist”), intimate (“Big fat ugly thighs, filled with childhood resentments”), and tender “I like my eggs and bacon served by someone I love”). The title alone of Bicameral obfuscations is playfully perplexing. Can my left brain play with your right hand? Pentimento: bowls on boxes. Beautiful bowls on plain plywood. Iridescence and gold sit above the most basic materials for coffins. Or a box is painted heartsblood red and a tower of cones partially obscures a beautiful young boy. One of the beehive shaped grottoes in Rebellious Heart houses the Sacré-Coeur de Jean-Paul Marat. What else would or should we expect from an Accidental Revolutionary. And typical of his associative wit, for the Socrates Park installation of ‘Bellwether’ (inspired by Pete Seeger) featuring dozens of maiolica glazed bells, one of the bells is decorated with erotic drawings calling to mind some of the discussions in The Symposium. There is an intellectual undergrowth in all his work, rich and unruly, extending from the scholarly to the quotidian. Myth, politics, sexuality, art history, popular culture, personal memory, coexist without the need to reconcile contradictions or provide or even suggest anything like an interpretation. “Against interpretation”—the wisdom Paul Thek conferred on Susan Sontag. To understand is to stop seeing. Once you’ve “understood” a work you are now merely looking, not seeing. “Pain produces logic, which is very bad for you.” Frank O’Hara
About Confabulations and Fantabulosas: A Queer Archive, Robinson declares: “I’ve been used to working through erasure and abstraction. That was about protection and survival.” Years “inside the material” coincided with years of struggle to heal, acknowledge, own, and accept life as a gay man in a culture determined to deny, erase, and condemn. “Now I want to work in presence—pleasure, visibility, being seen without apology. I’m making something every day to stay close to queer joy, male bodies, male gazes, gay males, intimacy, humor, excess. I begin with freedom and desire, and see what is possible.” The erased. And the erasers. The desires condemned as a child but fulfilled as an adult. The past that returns decades later in a primal scream: “They ruined my childhood,” becomes the impetus for a “series of sculptural portraits that explore the interplay between identity, memory, and erasure. . . . “
The archive of altars and images “confabulate”[4] the lives and histories of many queer bodies and places and celebrate their Fantabulosity. A word about altars: all children make them, spontaneously setting up a site of devotion to their personal loves and desires. Teenage walls covered with the pop stars of the moment, or if you were like me, the famous Avedon portrait of Allen Ginsberg and Peter Olorvsky naked in each other’s arms, paired with the poster for the original production of Peter Brooks Marat Sade featuring one of the deranged inmates of the Asylum of Charenton staring into the camera. Both pictures freaked out my parents, which of course they were designed to do, but they were also meant to remind me of things that I treasure—queer intimacy and a willingness to face any difficulty even to the point of madness. An altar’s presence in an art gallery reminds us that “The word culture comes from cultus, worship. What a culture adores tells us what it believes.”[5] The things we leave out when we’re children can put put back when we’re adults.
Although never schematic or tied to any literal interpretation, the the tripartite structure of hinged reliquaries can subliminally suggest other trinities: body, soul, spirit; past, present, future; id ego, superego. The altars in Confabulations make a home for the homeless, the rejected and abused, and the humiliated. In Anthony de Arroz Con Pollo, peeking out from beneath acrylic overlay and ceramic assemblage, the image of a gay ten year old boy is paired with an image of the raw rice he was forced to sleep on. Beaten by his mother and her boyfriend, he eventually committed suicide. The series of Fantabulosas posted almost daily since January 2026 augment the altars, Fantabulosas 28 January 2026 depicts dual images of a young and post internment Pierre Seel, a French gay concentration camp survivor. Beneath the ghostly second image is his camp identification number: 7038495.
Confabulations and Fabulosas is confounding to the uninitiated not used to such playful, shame-banishing work. It honors the dishonored, resurrects a past through what Saidiya Hartman terms “critical fabulation”[6]—an adjunct to Robinson’s confabulations—and creates a sacred space which reclaims the dignity denied the historically erased. But clay and clay differs in dignity, Whose dust is both alike.[7] Some worship is ratified by the larger culture; some is condemned. They want to deny our holiness; we cannot let them. They want to forbid our joy. Robinson’s project is inspiring, aesthetically as well as spiritually. It has prompted me to remember my own saints, and add them to his in a roll call of fabulosity to which everyone can contribute.
Litany of the Fabulous
Charlotte Corday, who pierced the Sacred Heart of Marat
Pray for us.
Pierre Seel, witness to our shame, who could no longer speak of his time in the camps, who did not speak for forty years, whose ass still bled decades later, who saw his friend eaten by dogs.
Pray for us.
John Brown, Saint and Martyr, whose death was an explosion still felt today
Pray for us.
Renee Nicole Good, martyred by fascists,
Pray for us.
Marsha most generous, who danced to Bad Girls on Weehawken Street—
Pray for us.
Sylvia most loyal, who braved the taunts of middle-class gay white boys—
Pray for us.
Agosto most humble, who enshrined his holy ones—
Pray for us.
Anthony de Arroz Con Pollo, who slept on raw rice for the sins of his mother
Pray for us
[1] Hartman, Saidiya. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals.
[2] https://artspiel.org/elisa-darrigo-slouching-sculpture-forward-at-george-adams/
[3] https://www.andrewcornellrobinson.com/projects/media/fantabulosas-24-january-2026-mercenary-painting/ recounting a conversation with Leon Golum and Nancy Spero
[4] Confabulation—a creative reimagining of historical gaps and erasures.
[5] “Appletopia: Media Technology and the Religious Imagination (2013), written by media scholar” Brett T. Robinson
[6] In Hartman’s words, “impossible writing that attempts to say that which resists being said” due to gaps and erasures in archival history.
[7] Shakespeare – Cymbeline Act 4 Scene 2