Jonathan Berger, An Introduction to Nameless Love

Narrator: Jonathan Berger was inspired to make Introduction to Nameless Love by his friendship with the artist Ellen Cantor. They became close friends in 2008, and she passed away in 2013. Reflecting on their relationship, he came to be very compelled by his feeling that it had had the depth and intensity of true love, which is typically reserved for romantic relationships.

Jonathan Berger: I got interested in making a show that really sort of tried to crack that open in some way, and make a platform for relationships that are remarkable in some way, but also that really validate people, like viewers, and allow people to sort of celebrate the relationships in their own lives that are profound, and life changing, and transformative, but that don’t fit into like a sort of conventionally romantic, societally hierarchical thing.

Plenty of people are like, “I love my dog more than I’ll ever love my husband.” People get that. People have that phenomena or that transformative, ecstatic, depth thing, with relationships that aren’t romantic all the time.

Narrator: Over the course of six years, Berger had ongoing dialogues with those engaged in six different profound non-romantic relationships, and distilled the transcripts into short form narrative, each of which takes the final form of a text-based sculpture. The three sections of the larger project on view here center the photographer Margaret Morton and Maria A. Prado, former resident of the New York City underground houseless community known as The Tunnel; turtle conservationist Richard Ogust; and Autistic writer/philosopher Mark Utter with his communication supporter and collaborator Emily Anderson.