A Personal Ride in an Art-World Hearse
by Jeff Weinstein
MARCH 25, 2010 TAGS:
“Do you remember all your hundreds and hundreds of shoots?” I ask Robin as we walk into the gallery.
She doesn’t answer because she strides ahead to study the photos taken by, or of, David Wojnarowicz, a “downtown” artist who died oh so young at 37, in 1992. I catch up, and we stop at pose after pose of a skinny young man in seedy alleys and against smudged loft walls, wearing a photo-mask of the hero of so many outsiders: Arthur Rimbaud. Those black-and-whites, first published in the Soho Weekly News, a New York arts newspaper where I once worked, launched Wojnarowicz’s career.
The series changes abruptly to three of David’s stark, almost unimaginable photographs of his sick lover, photographer Peter Hujar, on a hospital deathbed.
Robin Holland no doubt photographed David because she worked at the Soho News and shot almost all the visual arts coverage at the Village Voice in the 1980s and ‘90s, when I edited the section. Robin has a gift of making art on the wall or sculpture on the floor look alive, but “alive” isn’t what we’re thinking about as we begin our circuit.
“Downtown Pix: Mining the Fales Archives,1961-1991" at New York University’s Grey Gallery is the magnet that drew us in. This show was our world: Some of Robin’s pictures from those audacious library files are on the walls, and so are many of my memories. The exhibition is up until April 3, and any reader who can should see it, but that’s not the reason I am writing.
Art has been credited with many benefits: the power to create wonder, to agitate and activate, to “define” a sense of better humanity. Yet this show does something different. It is an obituary, a surprisingly somber – though potent – appreciation of art and artists past. The Grey Gallery should be draped in art-world black.
Please don’t misunderstand: Not all the artists pictured or credited in “Downtown Pix” are dead. Dancer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer – here she is, in the ‘60s -- is still making strong, reflective work. How little that impassive face and straightforward body have changed! Her photographer Robert Alexander, however, whose lens captured so many of that decade’s pioneering dances, died in 1989.
A buffet of not-quite-candid Richard Hell photos fills the next wall. He’s still alive, as Richard Meyers, and a writer. No later photos of him are up, of course, because his punk personhood doesn’t stretch into the present. Robin and I look at Hell, and at each other. Yes, old friends see themselves through a scrim of how we were during our first, electric moments. We can never fully age.
Next comes a suite of fetish photos by Jimmy De Sana (1950-90), with men trussed on cars and wire hangers in the wrong places. I met Jimmy once. Some of these gutsy pictures from that long-ago yesterday make us laugh now.
And here are Robin’s studies of Art on the Beach, a seminal public-art project that threw visual artists, musicians, performers, and architects onto a landfill off the Hudson that resulted from building … the World Trade Center. Oh, that one next to hers was taken by Sarah Longacre, another Soho News colleague and gentle friend.
Then Robin tells me, to my surprise, that Sarah has died.
Readers, I understand that most, if not all, of these names may be unfamiliar, and I realize too that I am visiting an Our Town cemetery that’s probably not yours. But new art almost everywhere acknowledges these now-quiet creators, once fountains of insouciance. They swept out derelict East Village storefronts and taped up their just-made work, took over club stages to mount gender-bending performances, postered and graffitied downtown streets with calls to action that were also advertisements for themselves. Much of the incisive fashion, music, photography and art of the 21st century owes its edge and bravery to these denizens of downtown. I remind myself of their importance as I continue through the show -- increasingly apprehensive.
Next comes the 1989 poster by AIDS activist-group Gran Fury, a seminal photo of three cute couples of assorted genders and races locking lips. The caption? “Kissing Doesn’t Kill: Greed and Indifference Do.” So many dead from that decade and after, I think. Air is pulled from my lungs in grief. But fewer are dead because of such activism.
The vaunted Robert Mapplethorpe must be around the corner, and here he is, in the form of a black man’s glossy back and buttocks. Is that voluptuous model dead too?
I am searching for relief, and finally, here’s Ira, Ira Silverberg, the savvy and handsome – he’s been called the Jewish Richard Gere, though Gere was born Jewish – boy publisher of avant-garde writers. Happily, Ira is very much around, a new neighbor even, recently married and thriving. But he published Kathy, and my heart sinks, because I know what’s coming.
Kathy Acker, novelist and performer, razor-edge fashion avatar, exemplar of hypersexual postmodernism, was my longtime friend. When we went to school together, she told me I would never be a “real writer,” just a critic. She lived around the corner, I made her mint tea when she was sad, and in 1997 she died in Mexico of breast cancer. Near Ira are two fine photos of Kathy, one by Mapplethorpe with her face covered, the other an even better image by Kate Simon of the pouting, shaved artiste sitting atop a chair.
Mint tea and tattoos. Cookies and a shaved head.
XXX
A white-haired survivor strolls among deceased and talented friends. Was the art world better, more vigorous and vital, a few decades ago?
Many believe so, because unlike now, its precious pedestaled objects were joyfully derided, its Madison Avenue boundaries energetically erased. Although parents soon sent their children to art school, much as they might to medical school, to guarantee a big-bucks career, the worth of art in those downtown days was not determined solely by an auction gavel. A brave few still held wealth to be the enemy of creativity.
Yet I must have laminated my youthful heat and optimism onto the thrilling exhibitions, performances, and readings I attended. Does that mean I carry loss and sorrow, my sagging, grownup mortality, to the work I see today?
If I’m lucky, the art itself will save me from that fate.
“Let’s go to lunch,” Robin says. “We have people to talk about.”
Jeff Weinstein, deputy director of the University of Southern California-Annenberg Getty Arts Journalism Program, writes about culture and gay issues for artsjournal.com/outthere.
Photo Credits:
1. David Wojnarowicz, Untitled, from the series Rimbaud in New York, 1977–79 Gelatin silver print, 8 x 10 in. David Wojnarowicz Papers, Fales Library, NYU
2. Photographer unknown, Documentation of installation by Dennis Adams and Nicholas Goldsmith with Ann Magnuson, A Podium for Dissent, for Art on the Beach 7, organized by Creative Time, 1985 Gelatin silver print, 8 x 10 in. Creative Time Archive, Fales Library, NYU
3. Kate Simon, Kathy Acker, 1987 Gelatin silver print, 10 x 8 in. Ira Silverberg Papers, Fales Library, NYU
She doesn’t answer because she strides ahead to study the photos taken by, or of, David Wojnarowicz, a “downtown” artist who died oh so young at 37, in 1992. I catch up, and we stop at pose after pose of a skinny young man in seedy alleys and against smudged loft walls, wearing a photo-mask of the hero of so many outsiders: Arthur Rimbaud. Those black-and-whites, first published in the Soho Weekly News, a New York arts newspaper where I once worked, launched Wojnarowicz’s career.
The series changes abruptly to three of David’s stark, almost unimaginable photographs of his sick lover, photographer Peter Hujar, on a hospital deathbed. Robin Holland no doubt photographed David because she worked at the Soho News and shot almost all the visual arts coverage at the Village Voice in the 1980s and ‘90s, when I edited the section. Robin has a gift of making art on the wall or sculpture on the floor look alive, but “alive” isn’t what we’re thinking about as we begin our circuit.
“Downtown Pix: Mining the Fales Archives,1961-1991" at New York University’s Grey Gallery is the magnet that drew us in. This show was our world: Some of Robin’s pictures from those audacious library files are on the walls, and so are many of my memories. The exhibition is up until April 3, and any reader who can should see it, but that’s not the reason I am writing.
Art has been credited with many benefits: the power to create wonder, to agitate and activate, to “define” a sense of better humanity. Yet this show does something different. It is an obituary, a surprisingly somber – though potent – appreciation of art and artists past. The Grey Gallery should be draped in art-world black.
Please don’t misunderstand: Not all the artists pictured or credited in “Downtown Pix” are dead. Dancer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer – here she is, in the ‘60s -- is still making strong, reflective work. How little that impassive face and straightforward body have changed! Her photographer Robert Alexander, however, whose lens captured so many of that decade’s pioneering dances, died in 1989.
A buffet of not-quite-candid Richard Hell photos fills the next wall. He’s still alive, as Richard Meyers, and a writer. No later photos of him are up, of course, because his punk personhood doesn’t stretch into the present. Robin and I look at Hell, and at each other. Yes, old friends see themselves through a scrim of how we were during our first, electric moments. We can never fully age.
Next comes a suite of fetish photos by Jimmy De Sana (1950-90), with men trussed on cars and wire hangers in the wrong places. I met Jimmy once. Some of these gutsy pictures from that long-ago yesterday make us laugh now.
And here are Robin’s studies of Art on the Beach, a seminal public-art project that threw visual artists, musicians, performers, and architects onto a landfill off the Hudson that resulted from building … the World Trade Center. Oh, that one next to hers was taken by Sarah Longacre, another Soho News colleague and gentle friend.Then Robin tells me, to my surprise, that Sarah has died.
Readers, I understand that most, if not all, of these names may be unfamiliar, and I realize too that I am visiting an Our Town cemetery that’s probably not yours. But new art almost everywhere acknowledges these now-quiet creators, once fountains of insouciance. They swept out derelict East Village storefronts and taped up their just-made work, took over club stages to mount gender-bending performances, postered and graffitied downtown streets with calls to action that were also advertisements for themselves. Much of the incisive fashion, music, photography and art of the 21st century owes its edge and bravery to these denizens of downtown. I remind myself of their importance as I continue through the show -- increasingly apprehensive.
Next comes the 1989 poster by AIDS activist-group Gran Fury, a seminal photo of three cute couples of assorted genders and races locking lips. The caption? “Kissing Doesn’t Kill: Greed and Indifference Do.” So many dead from that decade and after, I think. Air is pulled from my lungs in grief. But fewer are dead because of such activism.
The vaunted Robert Mapplethorpe must be around the corner, and here he is, in the form of a black man’s glossy back and buttocks. Is that voluptuous model dead too?
I am searching for relief, and finally, here’s Ira, Ira Silverberg, the savvy and handsome – he’s been called the Jewish Richard Gere, though Gere was born Jewish – boy publisher of avant-garde writers. Happily, Ira is very much around, a new neighbor even, recently married and thriving. But he published Kathy, and my heart sinks, because I know what’s coming.
Kathy Acker, novelist and performer, razor-edge fashion avatar, exemplar of hypersexual postmodernism, was my longtime friend. When we went to school together, she told me I would never be a “real writer,” just a critic. She lived around the corner, I made her mint tea when she was sad, and in 1997 she died in Mexico of breast cancer. Near Ira are two fine photos of Kathy, one by Mapplethorpe with her face covered, the other an even better image by Kate Simon of the pouting, shaved artiste sitting atop a chair. Mint tea and tattoos. Cookies and a shaved head.
XXX
A white-haired survivor strolls among deceased and talented friends. Was the art world better, more vigorous and vital, a few decades ago?
Many believe so, because unlike now, its precious pedestaled objects were joyfully derided, its Madison Avenue boundaries energetically erased. Although parents soon sent their children to art school, much as they might to medical school, to guarantee a big-bucks career, the worth of art in those downtown days was not determined solely by an auction gavel. A brave few still held wealth to be the enemy of creativity.
Yet I must have laminated my youthful heat and optimism onto the thrilling exhibitions, performances, and readings I attended. Does that mean I carry loss and sorrow, my sagging, grownup mortality, to the work I see today?
If I’m lucky, the art itself will save me from that fate.
“Let’s go to lunch,” Robin says. “We have people to talk about.”
Jeff Weinstein, deputy director of the University of Southern California-Annenberg Getty Arts Journalism Program, writes about culture and gay issues for artsjournal.com/outthere.
Photo Credits:
1. David Wojnarowicz, Untitled, from the series Rimbaud in New York, 1977–79 Gelatin silver print, 8 x 10 in. David Wojnarowicz Papers, Fales Library, NYU
2. Photographer unknown, Documentation of installation by Dennis Adams and Nicholas Goldsmith with Ann Magnuson, A Podium for Dissent, for Art on the Beach 7, organized by Creative Time, 1985 Gelatin silver print, 8 x 10 in. Creative Time Archive, Fales Library, NYU
3. Kate Simon, Kathy Acker, 1987 Gelatin silver print, 10 x 8 in. Ira Silverberg Papers, Fales Library, NYU
RELATED CONTENT
COMMENTS (1)
Latest News Delivered to Your Inbox - Sign up with our site and you will get the latest news about people and subjects that interest you.
Bennet Harvey wrote on March 25, 2010 8:49am
Wikepedia gives Richard Gere a Wasp Mayflower ancestry but you can have him if you want. I'll take Cary Grant in exchange. [Report Comment]
