When you the Martin Creed retrospective “Feelings” at Bard’s Center for Curatorial Studies, it is through a room full of blue balloons.  “Half the Air in the Room” is exactly that, and for something as simple and ubiquitous as air, it manages to set in motion a rather vivid string of associations:  Those ball pits that haven’t been sufficiently deep since I was three — what happened to that girl who had those birthday parties? We had the same shoes — I never really liked Care Bears — my mother hated that place — an inland lake — slimy on the bottom — I tuck my legs and curl my toes — slime turns to plants — fish — snapping turtles — puking drunk off a dock — house boats — suburban parking lots ….

I go swimming along in a state of giggle-inducing disorientation until I finally find the entrance to the next gallery, where I immediately notice a loud banging noise coming from somewhere and then notice all of the other people noticing the banging noise.  It is a supremely unfamiliar way of entering the white box.   Unlike the anxious, if momentary, confusion one might normally experience at the threshold of such a formal space — containing as it does such revered and mystified objects — it is not generated by a distant parental warning not to break anything or a fear of speaking too loudly. Nor does it produce the more carefully disguised anxiety about your adequacy as interpreter.  No, this disorientation is pleasant, that banging makes me curious, those words on the wall make me want to get a dictionary, that person is wondering about the noise as well but we can’t yet tell where it is coming from, so it will have to wait.    My hair has become a science experiment; I want to go back to the static squeaking of taut rubber but I need to know what is making that noise ….

Martin Creed’s artwork, says the New York Times, “veers between shock therapy and something quite a bit more tender” It is also “like swimming with dolphins” apparently — an experience that I don’t share with the times reviewer and therefore can’t evaluate.  In fact most of what seems to be written about Creed’s work bears a trace of the desperate confusion revealed by statements similar to these.  Somewhere between shock therapy and anything save for unanaesthasized electrocution?  Well, yes, it is like something I suppose, but dolphins?

The alternative to this hyperbole is comparison, but in the case of Creed even statements of influence or attempts to place him within a movement have a tendency to expand and extend into the realm of exaggeration.  In a single paragraph, the New York Times declares that Martin Creed is “minimalist,” “conceptualist” and has the “rarefied art in the street tendency of situationism.”  He is also an artist in the tradition of “Dada” with “formalist savvy.”  Martin Creed, in short, is everything and anything that might have happened during the 20th century.

But then I can’t blame them much, because I find myself at a similar loss for words and lacking an arsenal of contemporary art historical jargon, I am unable to avoid one rather unsophisticated conclusion.  Martin Creed’s work is funny. This is, anyway, the quality that I value most. Not, as might think, because it is entertaining but for a sense of intimacy and secrecy produced by the coded exchange.  I don’t find myself laughing so much as smirking — allowing knowing half smiles to escape when no one else is looking.  I have this deep conviction that I appreciate these objects in the same way that I appreciate the minute particular gesture of a close friend; that I have gotten the joke; that there is a mutual understanding conveyed by a lot of winking and head nodding.

But this really makes very little sense, for as absurd as the New York Times’ placement somewhere between ECT and anything else happens to be on the level of description, it is in some ways an accurate evaluation of Creed’s oeuvre and sounds rather similar to the statement “somewhere between a wadded up ball of paper, a neon sign and a pneumatic piano.”   So then how do we understand these objects if our language is so incapable of placing them into rational, understandable relationships?

I suppose the answer is contained in the question, we understand them as objects with little or no affect on anything outside of our relationship to them, and individual experience can only hope to be approximated in universally apprehended terms.  Be it sensual, auditory or visual the objects meaning is dependent on your position vis a vis it.  And here, in the expression of a singular relationship between object and subject, art historical discourse fails miserably.  But in its complete failure it has made room for something else. It has necessitated by its utter impotence a different form of language, one that tends towards the literary, the poetic, the personal narrative … (Everything!)

Jack Tilton Gallery is located in a beautiful townhouse on E. 74th St.. Somewhere between the subway and the gallery is a nursery school so luxuriantly lacking in handprints, messes and improvised playthings that the crowd of children out front seems almost inappropriate.   When I arrived at the gallery door on the tree-lined street, I rang a bell and was buzzed in.

The first floor gallery is large and white, the ceilings high and the staircase prominent and slightly curved.   I reserve a guilty love of austere gallery spaces.   The white box is conceptually problematic for me but certain art is done a service by these walls whose sole purpose is the display of a series of objects.   I can think of nothing more conducive to the images complete domination of your gaze.   This is also I suppose, a way of saying that art I like and want to look at without distraction for long periods of time, should be hung on white walls and I liked David Hammons’ body prints.

I am stopped in the hallway before the main gallery by “The Wine Leading the Wine,” two figures in profile facing left.  What I automatically assume is a man (because of the artist’s name? because of the figure’s hat? his posture? I honestly don’t know) has his head tilted and a bottle of wine (because of the title) to his lips.  He is slouching forward and leaning back simultaneously — pelvis slightly protruding along with the soft curve of his belly.  A hand curls over the top of his shoulder, a series of marks stark in color and sensual in contour cupping the light space of a sleeveless white shirt — a bit dirty I think.  Drunks spill things.  The hand narrows to an unnaturally thin wrist and the knuckles meet the chin (bearded perhaps) of the figure being led.  This second character fades towards the edge of the print, disappearing into the subtly variegated monochrome background for there is no third figure to frame his body as he has framed the other.
\image(place=”right” src=”HammonsInstallation3_e.jpg”)

As I stood about six feet away from another piece called “Close Your Eyes and See Black” (1969), admiring the amount of activity in this deceptively simple shape, I was shaken from my reverie by the voice of a gallery assistant helping a French couple shop for art.   Yes, it was very easy to appreciate the prints and other objects so neatly framed by a lack of color, but as I listened to the prices roll off of her well bread tongue I had to reconsider whether I could actually stand for these white walls.  While an innocuous background aesthetically speaking, it is not so innocent politically.   As we step outside to admire the beautiful stonework and realize that we will never be able to afford to live here it becomes difficult to claim that aesthetics are asocial.  And it is even harder to argue that the art on display is anything but political — if not in content then in origin.

The second floor held a collection of works, mainly sculpture, produced from the early 60s to now, collectively titled L.A. Object.   L.A. was not the friendliest of places to be if you were an artist or not white or both in the early sixties and these sculptures and prints are products of a highly politicized environment as much as, if not more so, than any aesthetic credo.   It is distinctly difficult to find a common visual thread in   L.A. Object.  There are the pin-headed sculptures of John Outerbridge, their plump bodies lounging on white cubes, small abstract sculptures of bamboo and other materials by Alonzo Davis on the walls, a framed wasps nest with a suggestive slit down the middle entitled “The Source” by Kenzi Shiokaba, Betye Saar’s collage on wood-panel re-interpretation of phrenology.  There are, however certain intersections; many of them are made from found objects, marginalized items but couldn’t this have as much to do with economics as anything else?  A number of them are figural, but since when has the human body been above politics?  What they do have in common is a location in space and time to a place and a moment marked by a country recovering from H.U.A.C. and the Watts riots as well as the vital artistic communities that emerged from the literal and ideological rubble.

In 1911 the city of Los Angeles established the Municipal Art Commission who claimed authority over “public building, bridge, approach, fence retaining wall lamp post or other similar structure proposed to be erected by or under the authority of the city….all paintings murals decorations, inscriptions, stained glass, statues, bas reliefs and other sculptures, monuments, fountains, arches, gates and other structures of a permanent character.”    L.A.’s relationship to art was not the de facto aesthetic fascism that we associate with commercial galleries but a carefully articulated assertion of authority on the part of the state.

Over forty years later Wallace Berman (who has several pieces in LA Object) added significantly to the notoriety of the Ferus gallery when he was arrested for the content of a piece in his show.   And it is from this history of antagonism on the part of the state and protest on the part of the artist from which all of these artworks issue, if their creators were not directly involved in the conflict.

In bringing them together Jack Tilton has offered the public a chance to think of these works in terms of their social and specifically geographic origin and in so doing suggests a dimension of social history that is popularly ignored, namely the generative aspect of marginalization and conflict, but it remains to be determined whether these objects can legitimately claim meaning in an environment that aspires to the vacuum behind price — tags far larger than the incomes of artists economically obliged to create sculptures from trash that will never be found on East 76th St. New York, NY.
—

* The Art of the City: Modernism, Censorship, and the Emergence of the Los Angeles’s Postwar Art Scene.  Sarah Schrank. American Quarterly. 665.

If one is to see the world in a grain  of sand, one must first see the sand…and understand how patinas are variously made, by additions sometimes, or by subtractions, while being similarly shaped.

–William H. Gass

The works of Marilyn Minter, on display from November 12th to December 20th at Salon 94, force the spectator to adopt two distinct poses.   Their size, combined with the extremely large scale of the subject, necessitates a movement away from the image.  The photo-realistic style of the enamel images invites you closer.  You are compelled to perform a myopic examination of each piece in order to determine whether it is photograph or painting.  Yet you remain haunted by the propriety of the first stance despite the analytical necessity of the second; they are meant to be seen from a distance; these are billboards before they are paintings.  It is only from a distance that you can tell what is being represented.

But of course they are paintings before they are billboards and it is only by getting your face as close to the glass as the gallery assistant will allow, that you can tell \italic{by what means} the subject is represented.

While the subjects themselves are straight off the runway (high heeled shoes, well manicured feet, theatrically make-uped eye)  and the palette indistinguishable from most ads in Vogue (saturated colors and glossy finishes exacerbated by particular and dramatic lighting),  Minter’s large scale images of high-heeled feet and sparkle caked eyelashes mimic and even surpass the fetishism inherent in our popular vision of bodies- and in all their brightly lit glamour, indicate a set of relationships between object and spectator that are essential to a critique of both fashion and art (or perhaps a deflation of their conflation).  In this movement towards and away, of attraction and repulsion we are able to glimpse the complexities of our relationship with images in general and fashion iconography in particular.

That IS Kate Moss’s body.  That photograph is airbrushed.  She’s too skinny.  I am going on a diet.

This is the stated purpose of Minter’s work.  “I’m not making a critique.  It’s more about our love hate relationship to this ideal, and how the pleasure we feel as a viewer is ultimately about constant failure.”   If not offering a criticism of her own she is providing the tools to begin one and a point of departure.   Minter states that her art is “in the moment when everything goes wrong… It’s when the model sweats.  There’s lipstick on the teeth and the makeup’s running.”

Just as skipping records recall to our conscious minds the apparatus by which music is produced, Minter’s work underscores the construction of the illusion by emphasizing its flaws and weak points.  By drawing attention to the moments during which the illusion both disappears and makes itself overly apparent, she may not be offering any sort of positive critique but she is identifying a point at which it could feasibly begin by exposing the phantasmagoria of fashion and fetish as anything but seamless.  We can call it an appearing act.

Just clip one tiny thread and ….

At the same time that these images are documents of momentary unraveling, they are also images of intersection and accumulation; accumulation of enamel on metal, photography on painting, painting on photography, photography on culture, culture on painting on photography on meaning on bodies on canvas on culture….ad infinitum.

This is also an accumulation of anxiety and ambivalence; the lubricious surface of the enamel is really no less bright and oily than the prints and the jewel covered heels in mud speak to a number of fetishes that create a simultaneous sense of revulsion and desire and so we move towards the large images of glitter caked eyeballs and potentially broken ankles and then away again- disturbed by an uneasy proximity and our inability to make sense of the image at such close quarters.

Andy Warhol prophesized that eventually all malls will be museums and all museums great shopping malls.  Minter suggests that this prediction has been realized and invites us to think about exactly what such a reversal means.

“Passing/Posing: Kehinde Wileys Painting”

At the Brooklyn Museum

      “Go,” 2003

      Oil on canvas mounted on five panels.

      Brooklyn Museum, Mary Smith Dorward Fund

The Trash Collector

by Nicholas Powers

We are a thrown away people. Stolen centuries ago by the West, our ancestors built nation after nation, until they were no longer needed and thrown away. They wondered through the world they created finding no home. They picked up left over meat and made it a meal. They picked out barren lands and made communities. They picked up horns and drums from dead Civil War soldiers and made Jazz.

Black artists have inherited this legacy of recycling. We can see it continued in the work of Kehinde Wiley, a 27 year old painter, born and raised in South Central L.A. and whose work has received acclaim as a fusion of Hip-Hop and Classical European art. In a B.E.T interview Wiley said, “I remember being appalled that we had to go through the garbage of wealthy neighbors to pick out a shirt.” Years later, he would again find what he needed in the trash. While walking in Harlem he saw a mug shot on the street. He picked it up and months later painted the man’s image into a Renaissance background. It became the first portrait in his now famous series. It was also, in a sense, a continuation of pulling out a shirt from the garbage of his wealthy neighbors. Wiley found, out of the many Black lives thrown away by American white supremacy a single face and saved it.

Wiley is a new force in the art world. The 27 year-old Yale Graduate earned attention for his recent Passing/Posing series at the Brooklyn Museum and in May he will be part of a group exhibit titled Maximum Flavor at the Atlantic College of Art. Yet even if he is a new force in the art world the ideological needs of his audiences are old.

Wiley frames young Black men within a European tradition of Renaissance portraiture. The pleasure of his work is the pleasure of the slave narrative. It offers the viewer a spectacle of redemption, of embracing Black men who have been sanitized by saintliness. It is art that shares with the slave narrative the lack of risk for the reader or viewer because the moral ambiguity of the Black protagonist has been cleansed. Wiley said his art school professors expected him to make the great Negro statement. Even now, his closet is filled with paintings of ironic watermelons in the style of Magritte and de Chirico; it is his personal gallery of shame, of cliché’s he once felt compelled to paint. In a NY Times Magazine interview he said, “They remind me of a point in my life that I felt absolutely desperate and lost and powerless. I don’t want to romanticize that too much, but it’s interesting to look at.”

Yet the direction he has chosen still moves along the axis of race, except now ironic images of watermelons are replaced by iconic images of Black men floating in a White gaze. The Passing/Posing} series intends to ask the viewer why they are troubled by Black men being framed by European aesthetics, the tension being the same that elevated the Civil Rights Movement into the great moral event in our nation’s history. Why do we feel awkward at seeing Black bodies integrating White space? Except here that space is not diners or water-fountains or bathrooms but the history of European art.  

Even though Wiley says he refused to make the great Negro Statement, his fame and fortune rides on the art world’s need for one. The art world reflects the dreams and fears of liberal society in the United States, a sector whose ideology is integration but whose practice is political paternalism and economic gentrification. Wiley’s art satisfies them because it excites guilt and relieves it in one viewing.

Black men are made safe with beauty. Although Wiley says he intends the female names and flowery patterns to critique the code of masculinity, he doesn’t show how or why that code became necessary. We have art whose narrative tension is based on the fusion of high and low, yet the men are strangely unscarred, as if the evidence of oppression must be erased, which is part of the process of integration. In that, integration does not destroy power it seeks to join it. Which is why Wiley’s art touches a nerve, he completes the mission of the Civil Rights Movement by not just merging with power in the present but by reaching back and becoming part of its past.

When Denzel Washington and Russell Simons buy his paintings, they are buying images of inheritance. The Talented Tenth is lining up to buy his portraits because Wiley offers them a dream of total integration, of the ghetto youth they once were or feel alienated from or responsible for now stand haloed by European aesthetics of power.

The anonymity of the Black men allows for projection. It helps the Black art collector to see the stereo-types they are trapped in as symbols of divinity and freedom and innocence. It allows the White art collector to purchase a new token of their liberalism. Such anonymity allows the figures to stand in for Wiley, for his ambition to pose in the same halls of power as the masters he criticizes. What troubles me, is not that Black men are seen in classical European frames but that the frames themselves are not challenged. The man alone, floating in the sky, untouched by age or doubt, untouched by the laws of nature or society is a replica of class hierarchy itself, of the one elevated above the many. The grandiose gestures, limbs positioned like antennae to receive divine signals, which means the human world is mute and silenced.

Wiley transforms thugs into saints but it does not achieve his goal of troubling the art world audience. In fact in he comforts them because whether Black men are seen in mug shots or Renaissance frames, whether they are the dark embodiment of sin or the sacred victims of a racist society, they are in either case, still not human. The tragedy of racism is the same as the tragedy of religion in that both allow their audiences to objectify the other.

In these paintings, Black men are missing the one thing that could free us from our need to redeem them. They are missing their humanity. If they had it, we could see it and ask how we can free ourselves from our store-bought self worth, how we can let go of our fear and loathing of them and instead, redeem ourselves. In Wiley’s work brothers are transferred from one prism to another and in the end from one prison to another. Some see in his work an edgy fusion of high and low. I see Black men jailed in the sky, floating among gold sperm, Rococo design and religious patterns. They float out of reach of those of us who live with them on earth, those of us who love them not as thugs or saints but as men who mirror us because their confusion and fear and joy reminds us of our own.

The Radiant Death

by Nicholas Powers

“Basquiat”

At the Brooklyn Museum

Through June 5

Basquiat thrashed inside his paintings as if he lived in a prison cell filling up with boiling colors. He struck at the walls of paper. He cooled the vivid emotions by spreading them into shapes but he could not stop the rising tide. It poured out of his mind and eventually it drowned him. The cell collapsed and the walls floated away into the hands of art collectors who display them in the Brooklyn Museum’s latest exhibit Basquiat. The show which lasts until June 5th has gotten good reviews. A rare buzz can be felt around the museum’s 200 Eastern Parkway address.

It is a buzz that for most visitors will become a surge of sentimentality over his death, or confusion as to what his work says. It may be impossible to fully recognize Basquiat’s art and remain sane because his art was his continual struggle for sanity. Each painting is a window through which we see the encroaching chaos that defeated his busy hands. 

His rise in the art world has no arc, no descent because he did not live long enough to bore us. He died young and he died hard, frozen in the blue bliss of heroin. He is locked inside it still, sealed from view by a maze of curator introductions, articles and reviews. Each new exhibition guides the visitor around his absence because if we went there, if we entered the chaos he disappeared into we might not simply look at his art but dare our selves to become it.

He hasn’t had such a grand viewing since the 1992 Whitney Museum exhibit, which for some art critics was not a show but a belated funeral. Its emphasis on his early death was read as a liberal lament for a noble street savage captured and sacrificed to the art world’s hunger for authenticity. Robert Hughes in his Time Magazine article \work{The Purple Haze of Hype} called it an exercise in “heroic victimology” that raised an unrealized talent to the status of a saint. He dismissed Basquiat’s sympathizers who said the forces of history collided inside the painter and threw his exploded psyche on the canvas. No he insists, “The plain truth — that Basquiat killed Basquiat — that nobody but he was sticking needles into his arm — is not going to get an airing.”

In response the four curators, Marc Mayer, Kellie Jones, Fred Hoffman and Franklin Sirmans, keep a cool distance from tragic interpretation. Instead of explaining his death they explain his art. Carefully chronological, they begin as most do, with his graffiti and end as most do, with the heroin binge that killed him. In between they give the visitor new guidelines. Yes Basquiat closed the circle of European appropriation of African forms that began with Pablo Picasso and Henry Matisse. Yes he used Cubist collage, reaching into the trash everyday life for material to transform such as news papers, anatomy lists, the names of empires and cartoon figures. Yes he was angry and Black and male, an art world rapper, sampling the rage and senselessness of the era and fusing it into violent compositions. Yes he used the authority of his own talent to create himself, because nowadays we affirm Black agency, even if Basquiat failed to achieve it. Yes, he was the griot of a destroyed generation, who painted its un-witnessed violence in loud shrieks of color. We can see this in his painting Obnoxious Liberals 1982, where a Black man, whose spine is an exposed jagged line, plays the role of Samson by pushing cartoon pillars apart as a top hat liberal Lincoln caricature stares out of burn scarred eyes. It is an image of a man eager to die with the knowledge that he is killing his enemies in the same imminent collapse.

What cannot be said is that the booming art market of the 1980s was riding the giant waves of capital swelling out from Wall Street as investors sent manufacturing jobs to “developing nations”. It was Good Morning in America. Reagan was in charge. White men felt good again. What cannot be said was that this Right Wing era resembled the origins of Expressionism itself. In post World War 1 Germany the militarized aristocratic elite demanded art that glorified national heroes, in essence they wanted propaganda. Artists revolted. Instead of painting halos on mass murderers they delved inside themselves to search for the cause of war. They found it to be that distance that exists in each of us between what we can feel and what can be said. They found it in the life-long ache of exile from one’s emotions as we make our selves out of signs we did not shape but simply inherited.  Expressionism is not just a style of art it is the place of speaking. It begins in a place before words, where a blind hunger begs to heard but cannot find the signs to satisfy it.

The Neo-Expressionism of the 1980s was an attempt to stand still on the sleek surface of irony that was Pop-Art. It was a way to connect art to necessity and Basquiat had needs, desperate needs. It is why his life and death is so much part of his art’s value. His art and its aesthetic tradition were not based on technical skill but terrifying sincerity. In the end it is an aesthetic which demands a constant sacrifice of raw emotion, the more raw and pure the better yet no one warned him that the passage of such primal energy through the mind will inevitably destroy it.

We see it in Basquiat. The world is locked in a child’s state of exposure, the force of color is his translation of the madness of his mother and the rage of his father, the crude drawings, the crayon faces emaciated of detail. It was not the world he saw with his eyes that he painted but the world he could live in; jagged and simple, held together by gusts of color that blew like radiation through the bodies of his figures. He once said in an interview about his peers work, “I’ll take a little kid’s work over any of that any day.” What they could have said about him was that he did take a little kid’s work because he took his own art from the child he never stopped being.

Basquiat needed fame. He didn’t need money or power but fame. The spotlight saved him from disappearing into the chaos rising in him. It gave him an image of himself he could exist within, a manufactured self to show the world and also hide behind. He of course was the audience member who didn’t believe it. Again and again he fought his way out until nothing was left but a man who died in his dreams. Yes Basquiat did kill himself and we paid to see it.

“Spanish Painting From El Greco to Picasso: Time, Truth, and History”

At the Guggenheim Museum

Through March 28

La Visión de San Juan

El Greco

Tiempo, Verdad e Historia en los últimos cinco siglos del Arte Español 

Bajo el título El Greco to Picasso. Time, Truth and History (Del Greco a Picasso. Tiempo, Verdad e Historia), se presenta en el Museo Guggenheim de Nueva York, la primera revisión histórica del arte español en Estados Unidos. Cerca de ciento cuarenta pinturas de artistas desde Velázquez, El Greco, Murillo, Zurbarán, Goya, Mirò, Juan Gris a Dalí y Picasso, por citar algunos nombres, todos de primer orden, distribuidas tan magistralmente, a pesar de la dificultad de la disposición de la rotonda ideada por Frank Lloyd Wright, que parece que siempre estuvieron allí, y en las salas adyacentes. 

La elocuencia de la elección de las obras dispuestas con un criterio temático acorde a la historia del arte español, es la gran apuesta de los comisarios de la muestra: Francisco Calvo Serraller y Carmen Giménez, prestigiosos y ampliamente reconocidos expertos, consigue hacer vibrar la historia del arte, y a nuestro juicio salvarla de algunos prejuicios antiguos, presentando al arte español en toda su historia y verdad. Frente al arte clásico, atemporal, el arte español se revela esencialmente anticlásico y por tanto consustancialmente temporal. La verdad que se desvela a través de esta muestra, lo hace al hilo de la historia, al hilo de los hechos que se convierten en obras de arte, ya nunca más lejanos del arte contemporáneo europeo, ni a gran parte de los movimientos vanguardistas a los que inspiran. Ni lejanos tampoco de los grandes artistas españoles del siglo XX, Picasso, Mirò o Dalí, recuperados para siempre para el arte español sin el que su pintura no puede entenderse.  

Los temas que vertebran la exposición son híbridos de géneros pictóricos. En primer lugar el de los Bodegones españoles, las pinturas de frutas y hortalizas, de naturalezas muertas, que tienen para la pintura española una connotación distinta al resto de la pintura europea, fruto de las ideas de la Contrarreforma religiosa, pues también en las cosas sencillas se manifiesta lo sagrado. La imagen ya sin la connotación religiosa va a ser retomada por los pintores contemporáneos como un diálogo eterno con los grandes maestros, así las naturalezas muertas de Picasso o de Juan Gris, inventan el Cubismo, y se entienden ahora en toda su perspectiva cercanas a las hortalizas de Sánchez Cotan, a los cacharros de Zurbarán o Van der Hammen o a las naturalezas muertas con animales de Goya. 

El paisaje por sí solo, entendido como el reflejo de la Arcadia pagana fue escasamente practicado como tal por los artistas españoles del Siglo de Oro. Sin embargo, los hermosos paisajes que ambientan las escenas de El Greco, en obras tan significativas como La adoración del nombre de Jesús, realizada alrededor de 1577, del Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial en Madrid, o los que preconizan claramente el Surrealismo como la Visión de San Juan, hacia 1608, del Metropolitan de Nueva York, están en todo su esplendor. El paisaje como tal fue apenas también escasamente tratado por Picasso sin embargo, el caso de su lóbrego Paisaje de invierno, Vallauris en diciembre de 1950, al que Picasso consideró esencial para el desarrollo posterior de su obra, y quizá por eso mismo o por el afecto que tenía a esta obra, aunque por un tiempo consintió en prestársela a Matisse para que la tuviera en su casa de Cimiez, al cabo de unos meses y y a pesar del interés de este último por quedarse con la pintura Picasso no accedió a los deseos de su amigo. Una variante del paisaje que sí alcanza personalidad por sí sola es la de la corrida de toros, el  paisaje como Arena y Sangre, que encuentra su imagen en la obra de Goya, Pasó con una capa, de 1793, que se encuentra en una coleccion particular, junto a Paisaje de Joan Mirò, pintado en el otoño de 1927, y que pertenece a la colección Salomon R. Guggenheim Museum de Nueva York. También la gran cantidad de obras de Picasso entorno a esta tema como se ve aquí entre otras Corrida, muerte del torero, Boisgeloup, fechada el 19 de septiembre de 1933. 

El tema de la mujer, al que Francisco Calvo Serraller ha dedicado especial atención, está ampliamente tratado en la exposición, y realzado en todas sus posibles vertientes desde la dama noble, hasta la prostituta. La noble dama, es para la cultura española “una joven bella y silenciosa” y así lo define incluso el diccionario de Covarrubias, la Ana de Austria, de hacia 1570 de Alonso Sánchez Coello, en el Museo Lázaro Galdiano de Madrid, la Santa Isabel de Portugal, 1640 de Zurbaran, en el Museo Nacional del Prado, así lo ponen de manifiesto, ante todo el silencio y la belleza de su porte. Incluso la Duquesa de Alba, 1797, guapa y callada, señala con su dedo índice hacia la inscripción en tierra “sólo Goya”, es esta obra testimonio explícito de la relación entre la duquesa y el pintor y obra estrella de la Hispanic Society. Picasso también pinta mujeres silenciosas, sea la Mujer de Azul , 1901 del Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, o su bella esposa Olga en el sofá, pintada en Mountrouge en el otoño de 1917 y que hoy se encuentra en el Musée Picasso de París. 

Como contrapunto el tema del silencioso recato se presenta la mujer en público, un juego de palabras que hace referencia a la mujer pública, y que permite alzar la vista hacia otra faceta femenina tan antigua como la historia. Se muestran nuevamente obras de primera categoría como la de  Las jóvenes mujeres (la Carta, pintada por Goya hacia 1812 es una de las obras mas importantes del Museo de Lille, en ella la mujer atractiva y coqueta, que recuerda en su porte zalamero y en su parasol a la conocida pintura del quitasol de los cartones para tapices de su primera época, representa quizás la última compañera de Goya, Leocadia Weiss, envuelta por todo un velo de misterio, pues nada se sabe con certeza acerca de ella. La dureza de la mujer de la calle le pone imagen José Gutiérrez Solana, las Busconas pintura realizada hacia 1915, y hoy en el Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao. 

Otros de los temas femeninos, es el mundo doméstico, que cuenta con cuadros tan excepcionales tanto por su factura como por la originalidad de su tema, como es la pintura de Zurbarán,  La casa de Nazareth, 1644, en la colección Colomer y La costurera, pintada alrededor del año 1640 por Velázquez y hoy en la National Gallery de Washington; por otro lado y en un mismo punto de sobriedad compositiva aunque cargada además de una atmosfera fuertemente melancólica es La Planchadora, 1904 de Picasso, que pertenece a la colección Salomon R. Guggenheim Museum, y que fue también expuesta en el Museo del Prado en la muestra de Picasso y el Arte Español hace unos escasos meses y realizada por estos mismos comisarios. 

Una imagen que se ve siempre cercana a lo femenino, es la imagen de la mujer llorando que tiene además un gran eco en la pintura española. La mujer que sufre, no necesita contenerse y llora, las Dolorosas, como la de Murillo del Museo de Bellas Artes de Sevilla, o las mujeres penitentes, como la  Santa María Egipcíaca de José de Ribera, del Museo Civico de Nápoles, son grandes heroínas; tanto como la heroína moderna pintada por Picasso en su Mujer llorando y que representa a su mujer Dora Maar. Estos estudios serán utilizados para la realización de El Guernica, máximo punto trágico, en el caso del llanto, no calma el dolor sino que lo sublima. 

Siguen desfilando por la exposición, mujeres Vírgenes o madres, pintadas tanto por Dalí o Picasso como por Zurbarán o Murillo. Niños, desnudos, caballeros y fantasmas, monjes, bufones de la corte, crucificados, caídos y voladores, ya sean ángeles o saltimbanquis zarandeados por mujeres: como uno de los estudios para El Saltimbanqui, 1791 de Goya del Hammer Museum. Todos ellos aportan a través de esta imagen temática y diacrítica que conforma la exposición y su magnífico catálogo, una revisión de la pintura española, una revisión que se presenta como verdad, pues es ratificada por la historia que son los propios hechos materializados en las pinturas, y es a su vez temporal, pues el arte español es definitivamente anticlásico. 

Mar Sánchez-Ramón

Ph D. Art History

Profesor de Historia del Arte de la Universidad Rey Juan Carlos

Frank Gonzales of “Manito”

A Star is Born in A Brilliant and Gritty Film

…Infinite Loop

Review and Interview by Melanie Maria Goodreaux

Frank Gonzales, otherwise known as”Frankie G.,” heats up a seat at the House of Tribes Theatre, a small black box on the Lower East Side of New York City. With a quiet confidence and intense gaze that could melt Alaska, he sits inside the red theatre seat in a black jumpsuit and sneakers, donning a chiseled jaw, gracious humility, and the smoldering eyes of a rising star. He looks like”Junior,” his touching role as the foxy and dutiful big brother in Eric Eason’s Manito, but assures me that he’s not.”I never experienced Junior’s story, but I had a friend that did, and I drew from that,” says Gonzales, his voice thickened with a Brooklyn accent.”Acting is going into someone else’s mind- jumping into their spirit, their body,” says Frankie G., who recalls drawing upon his grandmother’s death to fuel his performance as Junior in Manito.”I couldn’t stop crying,” says a remembering Gonzales,”I felt Junior.”

Junior, the character posed as Eason’s”big brother” in Manito,(which means”little brother” in Latin slang), is a hard working, married man, who did a prison sentence because of his involvement with his father’s drug ring. He served as the spy for the cops on the corner in front of the bodega where his father sold sandwiches, candy, beer and drugs to pull off living in the Washington Heights area of Manhattan. Junior took the rap, did the time, and never sold out his father. Once out of prison, Junior works hard as a contractor, who hustles gigs without a license to make ends meet and to throw a big high school graduation party for his”manito,” the scrawny and yet brainy brother of promise who has plans to go to college. A frighteningly believable twist of fate happens on the subway as Junior’s little brother Manny is traveling home from the party with his girlfriend and a wad of cash that the community has given him to send him successfully into the future to fulfill his dreams and theirs. Then the plot twists and the subway turns—two men harass the couple, they flee, his girlfriend gives him a gun, and then our”manito of promise” ends up killing the gangsters and having to do time. His future is now dimmed by this twist, all the hard work and hopes of the family are slammed into yet another jail cell-and Junior can’t do anything to raise the money to get his little brother out of prison besides asking his father.

Eason creates a thick distance and tension between Junior and his estranged father. In the early moments of the film we see papi preparing a huge hoagie big enough to feed the entire guest list at his youngest son’s graduation party. He prepares the sandwich graciously enough to feed a king- but once Junior sees the huge hoagie at the dance hall before the party starts, he grabs it, throws it in a van and speeds through Washington Heights only to throw the sandwich out the window. It lands as a demolished heap of bread, meat, lettuce and tomatoes in front of his father’s bodega. Later, while giving a tearful toast to his younger brother at the party, he eyes his father at the door and rushes through the crowd to beat him down and send him on his way. Obviously dad’s affection and attention comes uninvited and a little too late for a Junior that is bitter and angry about doing time for a man that has no genuine love for his family, a man that never visited Junior in prison. When Junior is forced to go to his father to ask for the cash to bail out his little brother, cash that Junior’s pride kept him from asking for in the first place, cash that Junior is well aware that his father has–his father still refuses. The impassioned Junior, hurt by hopelessness and his father’s cold display of heartlessness ends up strangling him to death after he is beaten with a bat. We catch each blow of the bat, we hear every desperate suck for life as he is strangled beneath a hand held camera that makes the viewer feel like it has just caught a domestic violence episode ending in death on a home video. The film ends with a repetitive shot of Junior running frantically from the scene of the crime. All hope is snatched away and there is no one to blame but the rugged, ragged, random monster of chance. This is what closes in on these characters, this is what makes Junior run. Manito’s characters are twisted into a fate of recycled hopelessness and trouble.”A lot was going on in Junior’s head,” says Frankie G. of his character,” he was running away from everything, running away from his problems-he didn’t want to go back to prison.”

Even though Frankie G. was just doing his job as an actor by”jumping into the spirit” of Junior in Manito, doesn’t mean that he and Junior haven’t faced some similar salt. He says that playing Junior made him think of his own family’s struggle as working class folks from Brooklyn.”I thought of my family and their suffering, what they went through. My father worked hard so that we could move out of the troubles of the time.

When I told Frankie G. that some of the Latinos at the Julio Burgos Center in East Harlem argued that the film played up negative stereotypes of his people, he strongly shrugged it off saying,”This film was not just for Hispanics and Blacks. They’re upset cause they feel the realness of it. It was a reality check. It’s just a story, but it felt real– like a documentary. These people were trying to make a life for themselves, that’s life, period. How can someone think the film was just about drug deals?” Who am I to play the devil’s advocate with Frankie G.? He’s an actor who is sitting in obvious support of fellow Puerto Rican director Lou Torres, who also served as actor and producer of Manito. The two are part of the theater happenings at the House of Tribes this weekend. Torres is directing one of Juan Shamsul Alam’s plays and Frankie G. is coming to hear the work and watch the spirits do their jumping.

Gonzales’ magical delving into his character, the brilliance of Eason’s strong and gritty script, and its true to the times camera work, make Manito a classical addition to film history. Eason brought Washington Heights to film, and Washington Heights Manito style is as gritty as the city itself. Manito’s hand held camera shots make it come across as a documentary while actually delivering a great story built thick with suspense, a story that Frankie G. calls”soo good.” Rugged, raw, and real, Manito makes you feel a moment away from ordering yucca at the Cuchifrito, and a spot away from the little things in life blowing up into big drama. It documents what is both charming and mundane about neighborhood living in New York City. This juxtaposition is exactly where the style of filming matches the story. Manito masks its edgy story within a”reality television” style. Eason brings brilliance to a style that received lots of attention years ago with the disappointing Blair Witch Project. The audience witnesses intimate and unseen moments of”real life” in Washington Heights. The impromptu conversations of neighborhood Latino teenagers rapping about the comings and goings of their high school scene, being taken inside of a Washington Heights apartment with sexy prostitutes adorned with hot tops and big tits, skirts with slits, pale blue eye shadow and lip gloss, and the toasts of all the folks at the graduation party who feel like family, dancing and swaying, wishing Manny well through champagne, tears, and sweet Spanish Music in the background are just a few examples of scenes that are cut to look uncut. The viewer is in awe of the familiar, without being suspect of Eason’s brilliant storytelling. As a society, we have become numb to taking a movie camera into the privacy of our lives. We look in on first dates, on high priced dare devil reality game shows, and are dazed by watching hours of shows like”The Real World.” What may make audiences feel uncomfortable about Manito’s drama is that it could easily be anyone’s drama.

Gonzales’ humble brilliance as an actor matches the edgy, raw, rugged, and realistic vision of Eason’s masterpiece, a masterpiece that has already won awards at Sundance, Urbanworld, Gotham, and the Miami Film Festival, just to name a few. Yes, Frankie is all that and a bag of chips, as they say. He’s got the edge, he’s got the bomb of a first big gig, he’s coming with talent and good looks, AND he’s just finished working with Dustin Hoffman in Confidence? The intimate space of the House of Tribes Theater sets the stage for a moment that starts to get even smaller- I realize that Frankie G., the handsome and humble talent sitting across from me- is about to”blow up” or already has. And although our new star might not have ever faced the same hopeless brick wall as Junior, he certainly has had people around him trying to bring him down and keep him down.”When I first started acting, I didn’t tell anyone. At one time I was going to give up because of all the negative feedback. I had a lot of my own people telling me that I couldn’t do it, telling me that they knew that I wasn’t going to make it. They had such negative vibes. I had to prove myself. I had to believe in myself. Now I can tell them,’I told YOU so.’”

Frankie finishes up our talk by assuring me his visits to Hollywood are just that– he plans on staying in New York He offers a bit of hope to any young talent that may come behind him,”Believe in yourself. Don’t listen to people with negative vibes. The ones with positive vibes will lead you to your path.” It’s time for the play at the House of Tribes Theater to begin. The lights go down on Frankie G. and our conversation. The actors jump into the spirits of Juan Shamsul Alam’s characters on stage. This time, Frank Gonzales, a new star with new hope, will just sit back and watch.

Kader Attia

As far as I have seen it, New Yorkers have several hobbies, like european art, that you can actually see at the ICP or in the NYC library, make fun of French society and of course speaking about psychoanalysis (their own analysis preferably). For this reason, Kader Attia, a young french artist should please the New Yorkers.

Kader Attia is a native of Algeria and has grown up in the sad parisian suburbs. Here, he had discovered the questioning raised by multiculturality, and the big gap separating occidental and oriental cultures. He is particularly endeavour to show the difficulties raised by the link he had, as a lot of emigrates to make between a traditionnal culture and the attraction of a consumering society, linked to an idea of  abundance.

As an example, one of his most important work on this  theme is “The Runway”, made between 1997 and 2000. This is a slide show about the life of transsexual Algerians exiled in Paris.

An other work questioning and denouncing the bearing between occidentals and the rest of the world had been shown in Miami’s Art Basel in 2004: Attia had recreate a clandestine workshop in a caravan which was in the exhibiton place. This had create a huge debate and a wonderful feeling of revolt among all the visitors dressed with made-in-china-fashionable clothes. This help us to put into question our own ambiguities: are we ready to admit that we should abandon things that we considered such as privileges in order to create a more equal world? it seems that the answer is: not yet. We are just ready to be revolted when seeing the life conditions of the poor workers and maybe some of us considered that it is still a great pace in the story of humanity …

The clothes created during this show participe of a  wider proposal: he had created a deposit mark called  “hallal” in reference to the muslim food, once again in order to question the link between his own identity and the consumerist attraction.

In the same vein, he creates a vending machine (usually containing candies and sodas), and put in it some false products as  “hallal ham” Those works functioned immediatly because they are made with very usual things. We are so accustomed to see streetwear clothes and vending machines that it products a striking effect to find that in exhibitions, usually filled with aesthetic works, which bring us far from our daily life. Attia doesn’t want to entertain us, he wants to put into question our codes and values, to confrontate us to our paradoxical behaviour, to our fears: he forces us to confront ourselves to everything we do not want to admit.

A more recent work “The Loop,” illustrates this confrontation too, and illustrates the strikening effect of Attia’s works. This work gathered a hanged on  DJ, two break dancers, a turner dervish and some music in a circus. At first sight, it is hypnotizing because of the movement of the break dancers and of the derviche, and in the mean time disturbing because of the hanged Dj, and a constantly repeated  “god” in the musical theme which creates an uncanny atmosphere and a certain malaise. Kader Attia, about this work speaks about a confrontation of “the ecstatic vision of trance, the circular movement which is in the mean time the movement of the Dj and of the spiritual world”. the gathering of those different themes which are part of his identity (the religion and the suburbs culture) in a universe of desperation is both a sign of his own history and a provocation toward the spectator. His art make sense always as questioning of our behaviours and his personal story.

Kader Attia, when exploring his unconscious explores in the mean time ours. In recreating some gigantic spiders, using simply umbrella metallic structures, he asks our phobia and play on the double sens it has for him: indeed, spiders are synonymous with hapiness in oriental culture, and are one of our worst nightmare in occidental countries. Kader Attia is always playing to a disturbing game in

His universe is often creates thanks to very simple things such as the umbrellas. In another work he recreates thanks to policemen coshes (a few of them had been collected after the november riots in France) a souvik calligraphy talking about peace…

Our collective imaginary is constantly questioned by Kader Attia. In using 152 old frigdes, he recreates a city in wich the spectator walk, constantly wodering if he walks betwenn fidges or between buildings. This indetermination leads us to be completely lost. This is one of the strenght of Attia’s work: emotions come immediatly and are always followed by a deep (and necessary) reflexion.

Kader Attia always demonstrates the importance that the arts should have in a society. They are mediums which convey both a testimony and a questioning of a society, the individuals it is composed of, and both its history and its future.

So in matter of art as in football, France should take a look to its diversity.

In Sync With The Future Mary S. Chen, 3/29/00

In this high-tech age, it is no surprise that art has taken on a technological twist.

Nam June Paik, a Korean-born artist now based in New York, is one of the first to introduce multi-media into the vocabulary of art-making. His large-scaled video and laser art presently transform the stark rotunda and ramps of the Guggenheim Museum into a futuristic spectacle. The Worlds of Nam June Paik presents a dynamic vision encapsulated in an array of works that span the artist’s three decade-long career.

The show starts off with a bang before you even reach the ticket booth. Green laser beams zigzag through a seven-story high waterfall that drizzles down to the rotunda, where 100 upturned television sets flash disjointed images and blare fragmented music. Opposite to the semi-circular arrangement of TV sets are colorful geometric shapes drawn in laser and projected onto a white screen suspended from the skylight. The large video screens hanging between the ramps and across the laser waterfall frame the television sets on the ground and complete the four-way installation. Featured in video are cultural performances from Rio to Seoul to Jerusalem, some of which appear on the TV screens below. The composition is clearly custom-designed to fit the architecture of the Guggenheim. Created in 2000, Jacob’s Ladder, Modulation in Sync, and Sweet and Sublime juxtapose the artist’s earlier mediums - video and music - with his latest - laser. The minimalism of the laser contrasts with the flashiness of the video. Dramatic and impressionistic, these installations involve the viewer in a sensory experience that is not easily comprehensible, but leaves a memorable impact.

As the exhibition continues up the ramps, it gradually moves backwards in time. Tucked away in a back room on the first ramp are other works of laser art created between 1997 and 2000, entitled Three Elements. Projected through spinning prisms in large mirror-backed geometric structures, the lasers ricochet off the side panels. The darkness of the room accentuates the concentrated color in the beams.

Earlier notable works mix real life with life portrayed through video. Video Fish from 1975 contains aquariums filled with live fish placed in front of a row of TVs showing various video clips. In TV Garden, television monitors of various sizes are”planted” at different angles in a lush garden of greens, alluding to the compatibility between the real and the artificial, nature and technology.

Video as sculpture was an idea Paik toyed with in the 1980s. In 1986, he constructed an electronic Family of Robot, complete with Grandmother, Grandfather, and Hi-tech Baby. Television monitors and old-fashioned radio casings were used to construct heads, arms, and legs. Two years later in 1988, he created his own version of a Swiss Clock, complete with three monitors and a video camera.

Only a few pieces in the exhibition point to Paik’s Asian ancestry, as his thirst for exploration and the avant-garde led him to study modern Western music and move to the West, first to Germany, and then to New York. However, he does seem to pay a certain tribute to the Buddha, a religious figure worshiped particularly in the East. Video Buddha, made between 1976 and 1978, displays a roughly sculpted bronze Buddha looking down at a live black and white video image of himself encased in a pile of dirt. Whether the artist is aiming to put down the Buddha as”dirty” or revere him as”earthy” is unclear. At the top of the ramp is a felt and wood Mongolian Tent inhabited by not just one, but several Ugly Buddhas carved out of bronze. They sit cross-legged on sand, with one watching an Ugly TV, while a Western singer’s performance is projected inside the tent.

In the final area at the top of the ramp is a room devoted to Paik’s early works, which include photographs of his audio works and performances of pieces composed during the radical Fluxus movement in the 1960s. Interesting to watch on video is the collaboration between Paik and Charlotte Moorman, a classically trained cellist who performed the avant-garde pieces Paik composed for her on a TV Cello wearing a TV Bra and TV Glasses. The interactive pieces where visitors can create screechy sounds on strips of audiotape stuck on the wall or manipulate the shape of a loop on a TV screen by talking or singing into a microphone attached to the monitor are fun.

Overall, the Nam June Paik retrospective at the Guggenheim is a delight to the senses. Paik has truly explored the possibilities of media as a creative and interactive medium. Compared to the video art of today, Paik’s work emphasizes cultural commentary more than personal expression. But, beware - the exhibit is huge, so it would be a good idea to pace yourself, so you don’t run the risk of being overwhelmed. While you may not walk out of the exhibit fully grasping the artist’s intent, you will certainly appreciate the effect of his work and his desire for innovation.

Alice Zinnes “Tunnel of Hell” oil on canvas, 36 x 40 inches

 
      Alice Zinnes: Orpheus Rising

      Tribes Gallery

      East Village, New York

The Exhilaration of the Dark

The Poetic Descent of Alice Zinnes

in that instant she was whisked away,

clawing at the shawls that hid her from the world

to show him the ravaged face of all farewells

and the blank pennies of her defeated eyes.

– Stanley Kunitz, “In The Dark House”

“Tunnel of Hell”

      oil on canvas

      36 x 40 inches

The dramas of our inner worlds spill to an essential descent. There is an arc to the movement of imaginative life, a curving crescendo and a dive, a plunging to the fiery insights of the self-interrogating, probing soul, and then a return - a gesture of the dreaming dance that drops past the easy optimisms of the surface life. The soul that seeks to know itself must step down to its death, and then arise. There is a tragedy in the hard realizations of the inward existence, and it is written in our myths.

It has been the devotion of myth to remind us of the dramas in our inner world, and in the arts, it has been the devotion of poetry to remind us of the myths. But not of poetry alone. Through the ages, painting and sculpture have repeatedly revealed their undying ties to the poetic dedication, returning to the depths of myths and the penetration downward that poetry protects and renews - to the turbulent drive to the mangling center, the place that destroys that it may re-create.

Narrative paintings have often illustrated the myths directly, but it would seem the terrible transformation of insight is natural to abstraction, to the mode of painting that unmakes everything. And so, clearly, it seems to Alice Zinnes.

Zinnes has frequently taken poetry as the inspiration for her work. She has done so again in her exhibition at Tribes Gallery, a riveting display of 15 oil paintings and charcoal sketches, many of which are based on poems that Zinnes has set in a book in the gallery’s main room.

There is a difference this time, and it is the theme: the myth of Orpheus. In Greek mythology, Orpheus was the first human poet. He fell in love with Eurydice and, when she suddenly died, descended to the underworld to retrieve her. He sang of his love so sweetly to Hades that he won her back, on condition that, as he led her up to the surface, he not turn round to look upon her. Yet, his impatience and doubt were so great that he did look back, only to see Eurydice falling back to Hell.

It is the story of the descent to the harrowing depths, of seeking the center of the heart in the center of death, and it is the heart of this exhibition. Clearly, Zinnes understands the tragic, creative fall into darkness. Every work enacts the chaos of the soul, the eternal battle of darkness with light that is the source of creativity - the source of life itself. On each canvas, atmospheres of seething hues infiltrate each other, as if suffusing intuitions of things enlightening and deadly were grappling, battling for possession of the spirit. And in Tunnel of Hell, which is matched to a poem by Stanley Kunitz, we witness the sight of the crucible, the touchstone of the vision. It is a spectacular work, as exhilarating as it is threatening - like inspiration, and life, itself.

Downtown: Legend, Myth and Institutionalized Caprice

Downtown: The New York Art Scene 1974 - 1984

The Grey Art Gallery and The Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University

curated by Carlo McCormick

through April 1, 2006

Carolee Schneemann

Up To and Including Her Limits, 1976

Film transferred to DVD

29 minutes, color, sound

Courtesy the artist and Electronic Arts Intermix

The Downtown Collection, an amalgam of archives in NYU’s Fales Library provided the initial impetus for The Downtown Show, curated by Carlo McCormick, currently on view at both the Fales and NYU’s Grey Art Gallery, and its companion publication, “The Downtown Book”. Less an art show in the traditional sense than a barrage of ephemera, periodicals, manuscripts and artifacts, richly supplemented — for the most part — by exemplary paintings and sculptural objects, and rarely seen early works by well-known artists and writers, as well as a glut of musical and performance/video documentation. The Downtown Show should be applauded for attempting to situate creative activity from 1974-1984 in an interdisciplinary framework, where developments in diverse media had profound impacts upon one another, and were often the product of the same artists. New York punk rock, especially, is shown as both a product of, and a galvanizing force for, this vibrant and important period of cultural ferment. Though the NYU shows both trace a wider trajectory and includes a spate of figures excluded from last years’ New Museum “East Village USA“, its conflation of the downtown avant garde generally with artists whose concerns were more peculiar to the East Village and/or Lower East Side is confusing and sometimes troubling. What’s missing is a sociopolitical context for understanding the shift of creative energy that culminated in the East Village Art scene and its scruffier cousins in the Lower East Side, as well as some of the key individuals, spaces and periodicals that kept the creative stew boiling. (Ironically, a somewhat misguidedly-titled satellite show, “From Anarchy to Affluence” at Parsons, includes some key items NYU’s extravaganza leaves out.)

The exhibition is broken into multiple parts in the two spaces. The works at The Grey attempt to elide strict chronology, focusing on themes or motifs which the curators believe united various “downtown” artists, a strategy which sometimes yields new insights and novel associations, yet in the end obfuscates and distorts the historical record, and minimizes any claim for social and political cohesion on the part of various artist’s groups (the chief exception perhaps being Colab). A few of these categories, retain a certain coherency concept-wise: “Broken Stories” (mostly when it focuses on the literary). “The Mock Shop” (especially as a synechdoche of Colab artists and practices), “Body Politics”" (focusing on gender/transgressive imaging of the body in performance and photography.) Others feel more dubious: “Sublime Time” (artists for whom temporality was a major issue in their work); “Salon de Refuse” (the appropriation of trash and other lowly materials); “De-Signs” (artists appropriating the written and visual language of the media for their own needs) and the “Portrait Gallery”, works by mostly celebrated photographers capturing the personalities who created the “downtown scene”.

Flyer for Richard Hell and the Voidoids,

Photocopy

(A true rogues’ gallery including likenesses of Philip Glass by Chuck Close; Robin Winters by John Ahearn; Wojnarowicz and Candy darling on her deathbed by Peter Hujar, Cookie Mueller by Nan Goldin; Richard Hell, Legs McNeil and Andy Warhol, by Roberta Bailey; Holly Solomon and Patti Smith by Robert Mapplethorpe, etc… the famous and the fabulous; the quick and the dead, and a few slowpokes.) Again, what’s spurious here are not so much the categories themselves, as some of the choices and associations made –  and unmade.

As gleaned from works strewn amidst these segments, the story of “Downtown” begins with often visionary pioneers, mainly in SoHo, circa 1974-75, and includes such -key artworld figures as Vito Acconci, Jonathan Borofsky, Gordon Matta-Clark, Ray Johnson, Joan Jonas, Sol Lewitt, Charlemagne Palestine, Carolee Schneeman, Robert Smithson, William Wegman, and Robert Wilson, as well as painters like and Ida Applebroog, , Chuck Close, Jack Goldstein, Leon Golub, Ron Gorchov, Duncan Hannah, Lucio Pozzi, Nancy Spero and John Torreano (though not Elizabeth Murray, then concurrently uber-exposed at MOMA); and sculptors such as Lynda Benglis, Scott Burton and Robert Gober. These artists mainly came from a conceptualist, political or performative bias, reacting to the predominant minimalism of the early 70’s. Featured in one of the gallery’s vitrines, Avalanche Magazine, edited by Liza Bear and Willoughby Sharp, documented and celebrated these artists, as well as early East Village iconoclasts like Jack Smith. Many were also responsible for what the curator calls “Interventions’, or the mapping of an art/conceptual context onto the raw matter of the city, then internationally distinguished for its blight and neglect. The NYU show does a fine job of documenting these events and strategies underlying them, which culminated in 1980’s Times Square Show, the fateful Real Estate Show, and “Illegal America” at Franklin Furnace. It also includes as “Interventions”: Adam Purple’s circular garden on Forsyth Street, Justen Ladda’s “Book Burnings,” site-specific signage by John Fekner and Don Leight, a crowbar by Stefan Eins, postcards by Adrian Piper, and many stills from David Wojnarowicz’s early (1979) self-documenting performance, “Rimbaud in New York.”

Julian Schnabel  

Draw-A-Family, 1974

Rhoplex on canvas

#96 x 72 in.

Courtesy the artist

Around this time also began the rumblings of what would become the Neo-expressionist juggernaut of the ’80s, with painters like Julian Schnabel, (though Schnabel’s painting in the show dates from 1974), Basquiat, David Salle, Susan Rothenberg, et al. coming onto the downtown scene, later joined by the SUNY Buffalo/Metro Pictures brigade of Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, Robert Longo and composer Glenn Branca. This last crew is generously represented here, especially by Longo’s huge drawing of a contorted male figure from the Men In the Cities series, which holds up amazingly well. These artists, along with writers like Walter Abish, Kathy Acker, Constance de Jong, Gary Indiana, Richard Kostelanetz, multimedia/performance artists like Laurie Anderson, Eric Bogosian, Spalding Gray, and dramatists such as Richard Foreman, the Ohio Theatre, Squat Theatre and Liz LeCompte’s Wooster Group, formed the core of what would become the new Downtown (mainly SoHo) avant garde. The focus was expanding by exploding the narrative, whether the media was paint, sculpture, theatre or sound. Many of these works are in the “Broken Stories” section, which also features several artists whose work involved a recontextualization of highly politically charged issues, as seen in Tim Rollins and the Kids of the South Bronx (”Absalom, Absalom”), Sherrie Levine’s appropriations of Egon Schiele, Sue Coe’s “Reagan Speaks for Himself”, Golub’s “Henry Kissinger” and Martha Rosler’s Bowery video project.

In the mid to late ’70s, though, it still made sense to speak of a “downtown scene”; the artists were spread out far and wide below 14th Street. (Some in fact geographically above, yet nonetheless bespoke “the downtown vibe”. Semiotexte  – especially the Schizoculture” issue –  though published, at Columbia University, was a case in point.) More ethnically diverse (predominantly Latino), the areas east and to the north of SoHo, had their own traditions of multicultural Bohemianism, via the Beats, Black Arts Movement and what would become the Nuyorican poetry movement. And while these movements (as later did graffiti) would greatly impact the SoHo scene, their particular resonances were mostly strongly felt in the vast No Man’s Land known as the Lower East Side. (The Grey Art Show does feature a couple of manuscripts by the Nuyorican’s most famous voice, Miguel Pinero, but nothing from Miguel Algarin, Jessica Hagedorn, Bimbo Rivas, Pedro Pietri, Sandra Maria Esteves, Victor Hernandez Cruz, et al; nor does it document the legacy of the “Umbra” Magazine writers and artists, who continued through the ’70s to refract Afro-American aesthetic sensibility on the Lower East; Steve Cannon and David Henderson among them. To its credit, “Downtown” does include an early work by David Hammons, “Elephant Dung Sculpture” (which predated Chris Ofili’s Guiliani-censored use of the same material by more than 20 years). Yet it also largely fails to document contributions by poets associated with the Poetry Project like Bernadette Mayer, Eileen Myles, Bob Holman and Tom Savage, and E.vil mavericks like poet Ted Berrigan and writer/artist Yuri Kapralov, whose “Once There Was A Village” is still the best record of the neighborhood during its most neglected and harrowing era. Neither is there any acknowledgement of the Life Café-Neither/Nor art/music/poetry scene which flourished in the early ’80s.)

Yo Women! Wanted, 1982

Flyer for a women’s dance party at Club 57, Photocopy

#11 x 8 ½ in. (27.9 x 21.6 cm)

April Palmieri Papers, Fales Library, New York University

The mid-Seventies, however, also gave rise to another “downtown” movement, with roots in the SoHo avant-garde and the druggy yet poetical squalor of the Lower East Side, whose impact would be felt not just in downtown or in New York but worldwide: Punk Rock. On the Bowery corridor that ran between Soho and the East Village, CBGB’s became the major downtown locus for artistic energies (writing, visual arts, filmmaking) of all kind, and the one thing that the Downtown Show gets very right is to showcase the enormous impact the early CB’s scene (as well as the No Wave Scene which followed) had on downtown aesthetics in the late ’70s and early ’80s. The Grey Art exhibition gives us a veritable glut of artworks and artifacts by the scene’s leading avatars: Patti Smith, Richard Hell, Ramones, Alan Vega, Tom Verlaine, Talking Heads, Blondie and the Heartbreakers, and others (most captured in their prime in Amos Poe’s and Ivan Kral’s epochal film “Blank Generation”), as well as influential forbears such as The New York Dolls.

Like swinging London in the ’60s (with a spikier haircut), New York Punk Rock was a distortion-pedal-damaged call to disaffected but artistically ambitious youth around the world, and led to an influx of creative (and destructive) energies in and around the area, culminating in the East Village art scene of the early to mid ’80s. Along the way, an area with its own proud Bohemian tradition from the ’30s through ’70s, saw a punk- influenced aesthetic emerge, not just in music but in film (the New Cinema) and performance/art (Mudd Club, Club 57, et al.) and of course fashion. The Downtown Show references this confluence of fashion, music and art, by including Patti Astor’s graff-damaged togs (tagged by Basquiat, Dondi, Fab Five Freddy, Futura 2000, Kiely Jenkins, and Kenny Scharf) as well as Haring’s designs for Vivienne Westwood, early works by Betsey Johnson, Stephen Sprouse and Andre Walker. (The show at Parsons show also does a fine job charting punk’s influence on design, couture and print media, including Joey Ramone’s T- Shirt, issues of John Holmstrom’s and Legs McNeil’s “Punk” magazine, a poster by Pat Howe from Redtape Magazine (”The D-Squad”), and togs by Stephen Sprouse, Vivienne Westwood, etc..)

Strewn amidst its categories, The Downtown Show mostly pays respectful homage to this (d)evolution, focusing on the creative cauldron that was Club 57, and its leading lights are well-represented: Keith Haring, Ann Magnuson, Kenny Scharf, Klaus Nomi, et al., as well as painters like James Nares and David McDermott, and musicians such as John Lurie and Rhys Chataham, This core of the new Downtown cool also made frequent appearances at the Mudd Club (where Haring curated a key show in 1981(?), featuring Jean Michel Basquiat, Scharf and other grafitti inspired painters), and on Glenn O’Brien’s early cable variety show, TV Party. The Club 57 kids were the true children of Warhol, who saw America (and especially America as media simulacrum) through a whimsical and satirical, though coolly detached lens. And, well before Prince, knew how to party like it was 1999 (er, 1979). The films of the New Cinema, also known as Punk Cinema, and later No-Wave Cinema, are represented by Eric Mitchell, Amos Poe, Beth and Scott B, Sarah Driver, Charlie Ahearn, and stills from Jim Jarmusch’s 1979 feature “Permanent Vacation and his later 1984 breakout, “Stranger Than Paradise”. However, Nick Zedd’s “They Eat Scum”, perhaps stylistically the punkest of punk films (lauded by John Waters) is not referenced here, nor is the work of filmmaker/animator M. Henry Jones, who worked with Club 57 faves, the Fleshtones.)

Further down in the Lower East Side, the artists collective that would become known as Collaborative Projects (or Colab) was forming in 1979, whose first major action was the Real Estate Show in a squatted space on Delancey Street. (Although a photo from the opening of the Real Estate Show, featuring Joseph Beuys and an uncredited Alan Moore is included in “The Downtown Book”, the subsequent events at the ABC No Rio space, granted Colab by the City following their eviction from the Delancey Street space, are given short shrift in the Downtown Show.) The mission of Colab was to free artists from the traditional galleries and spaces by acting collectively, and their artworks focused attention on an array of social ills, and sometimes offered whimsical solutions toward solving them. Many artists associated with Colab are featured in the Downtown Show (especially in the “Mock Shop” or artists’ multiples section), including John Ahearn, Jane Dickson, Tom Otterness, Kiki Smith, Jenny Holzer, Christy Rupp, Christof  Kohlhofer, Walter Robinson, Justen Ladda, Joseph Nechvatal, Bobby G. Becky Howland, and the “A. More Store” (founded by Alan Moore), which offered many of their wares. But Colab’s most celebrated achievement was not strictly a “downtown event”; in 1980, gathering energies, from not just the Colab artists, but street artists associated with Club 57 like Basquiat and Haring, and graffiti artists from Fashion Moda uptown, coalesced to produce the Time Square Show, now considered a watershed event of the “downtown” art scene. Curiously, though, the biggest art event of 1983 (which also occurred outside “downtown”), “The Terminal Show” in the vast abandoned Brooklyn Army Terminal, which featured a cross-section of artists and performers in “Downtown” along with hundreds of others, receives no mention at all.

David Hammons

Elephant Dung Sculpture, 1978

Elephant dung, paint, and gold leaf

#5 ¼ x 6 x 5 ¼ in. (13.3 x 15.2 x 13.3 cm)

Private collection, New York

By 1981-82, graffiti and street art had burst upon the downtown gallery scene in a major way, both in the East Village/Lower east Side and in Soho. 51X gallery, next to Club 57, became the first EV gallery to cater to graffiti-inflected art, then the original FUN gallery on 11th Street. These galleries mainly catered to graffiti and street artists, but also included sculptors such as the late Kiely Jenkins. Soon, Nature Morte, Gracie Mansion, and Civilian Warfare opened small storefronts, and the main wave of the East Village art boom was well underway. Around this time many of the artists associated with this wave, including Luis Frangella, Steven Lack and David Wojnarowicz created mural-like paintings in an abandoned pier on the West Village, a place mainly used for illicit sex. The Downtown Show presents photo documentation of this event, along with other paintings and artifacts of the early EV art scene, including a paint-smeared suit belonging to Basquiat and a crib bombed with graffiti by Haring and LA2, most of this street-inflected work finding its way into the “Salon de Refuse” section. Other artists ssociated with the early EV art scene such as Mike Bidlo, Arch Connelly, Rhonda Zwillinger, Rodney Greenblat, Nicholas Mouffarege and Martin Wong are bunched into this section, along with earlier “downtown” creations by Colette, Schnabel and Hammons. (But why isn’t David Finn, an East Village sculptor who created stunning tableau from garbage bags, included in the “refuse salon”?)

Though most of the principals are acknowledged, The Downtown Show’s coverage of the EV art scene in ‘83 and ‘84 proceeds in fits and starts, understandably omitting a number of important artists from that time on account of the sheer glut of talent (and otherwise) that began to pour into the East Village. Amidst its categories, the Grey Gallery references neo-conceptualist (or “Neo-Geo”) artists like Peter Halley (an early ‘prison conduit’ (1981) is included in the “Sublime Time” section) and Jeff Koons (because his work is supposedly consumer society-critical, included in “the Mock Shop”) and other artists associated with International with Monument gallery on 7th Street, which would supplant “street art” as the dominant art-world-sanctioned aesthetic. Perhaps not so ironically, many of the grittier EV artists curator Carlo McCormick enthusiastically championed during these years — and who would impact the East Village scene for years to come, are not included: Keiko Bonk, Ken Hiratsuka, Julius Klein, Mark Kostabi, Rick Prol, Philip Pocock, James Romberger, Marguerite Van Cook, and others, along with up-from-nothing East Village magazines like “Avenue A”, ‘World War 3 Illustrated”, “Between C& D” (on the late side, in ‘84) and “Redtape”, which had published 4 of its 7 issues before 1985. (The complete archive of which is in the Fales library, right under the procurator’s thumbing nose.)

Regarding the portion of The Downtown Show in the Fales itself, “Body Politics” is devoted to artists, mainly photographers and performers who pushed (or altogether discarded) the envelope concerning social/sexual taboos. Here we find photographers like Jimmy DeSana, Nan Goldin, Robert Mapplethorpe , David Wojnarowicz , Richard Kern, Charles Gatewood and artifacts by artists/performers Ana Mendieta, Hannah Wilke, Annie Sprinkle, Carolee Schneeman, Greer Lankton, Jane Dickson and Tim Miller. Its nice to see an early still from a Kembra Pfahler film included in this section, along with photos from a Karen Finley performance, but why not also Bradley Eros’ and Aline Mare’s “Erotic Psyche” multimedia performances? (And where is Andres Serrano, who was exhibiting his disturbing photos at A & P gallery in 1984?) Also on view here is a small photo documenting one of Richard Hambleton’s “Shadow” figures. A street artist whose scope and notoriety once rivaled Basquiat and Haring, Hambleton’s paintings were conspicuously absent on opening night from the Grey Gallery (nor was it listed in the checklist). Yet upon returning a few days later, one of his signature figures (its stature shrunken like the artist’s own) appeared slumped against a corner of the “Salon de Refuse”, with what could only be a middle finger raised in shadowy derision. Another part of the Library is decorated with artefacts mainly from Colab and especially from the Times Square Show. This is part of the “De-Signs” sector, which also features word and image works which used the urban context to recontextualize their messages (artists as diverse as Jenny Holzer, Ilona Granet, Les Levine, Anton Van Dalen, Matt Mullican, Lawrence Weiner and Fekner, as well as artists more associated with graffiti like Basquiat, Hambleton and Lee Quinones.) The remainder of the walls and vitrines in the Fales are taken up by various poster and flyers, mainly for rock bands (some famous, some more famous downtown (especially DNA), some otherwise forgotten) and club performances, and scattered throughout Downtown are artist’s and writers books and fascinatingly obscure manuscripts, such as Richard Hell’s “Journal from Patti 1974-1979″, Kathy Acker’s 1973 ms. “Rip Off Red: Girl Detective”, Lynn Tillman’s” Madame Realism”(with illos. By Kiki Smith), RAW magazine (along with Gary Panter’s early “Okupant X”), and other DIY periodicals such as Public Illuminations, Barabara Ess’s Just Another Asshole, and TV magazine}, along with spreads from the East Village Eye, New York Rocker, Punk, and Arturo Vega’s trademark designs for the Ramones.

Colab’s A More Store, December 1981

#Photodocumentation of

Installation at White Columns, New York

#(two gelatin silver prints)

Photographs by Lisa Kahane

#Sheets: 11 x 14 in. each

#Frames: 13 x 16 in. each

Courtesy the photographer

Another glaring omission in what is called the Downtown Show is any acknowledgment of the burgeoning performance art scene on Rivington Street, whose bellwether was the “99 Nites of Performance” at No Se No Social Club in 1983. Building on energies generated from the Storefront for Art and Architecture’s performance A-Z (another notable omission), Club Armageddon in the West Village, and Arleen Schloss’ A’s space on Broome Street (acknowledged in the Downtown Book, though neither Schloss nor A’s elicit a scrap in the “Show”.) Presided by Ray Kelly and R.L. Seltman, for a new generation of performers, the No Se No club bore a similar role to that of CBGB’s for musicians in the mid 70’s, and was a late nexus between the quickly diverging Soho and Lower East Side scenes. Over the course of 99 consecutive nights at least one performance took place on the tiny bar in the smoky illegal social club, as seasoned performers mixed with rank amateurs (sometimes literally) cutting their teeth, and such personalities as Taylor Mead, Jackie Curtis, Ray Johnson, Tehching Hsieh and Linda Montano (tied together during their one year performance at the time), mixed with performers like Dragan Ilic, Phoebe Legere, KWOK, Penelope Wehrli, Howie Solo, Jack Waters and Peter Cramer, Christa Gamper, Julius Klein, Bradley Eros and Aline Mare, Schloss,  Pfahler , and assorted poets, along with neophytes such as Vindaloo, Peggy Cyphers, David White and others. (McCormick was there himself for many of these “Nites” and tended bar at No Se from time to time.) Most of the “Nites” are vibrantly captured in numerous b/w photos by Toyo Tsuchiya, and would have been nice to see some acknowledgment of that scene, that in 1984 also spawned Casa Nada and the Rivington gallery scene, the street artists of the Rivington School and Sculpture Garden.

Ditto ABC no Rio. Though lip service is paid this small bastion of artistic freedom on the Lower East Side, “Downtown” basically regards events there as an afterthought to the Times Square Show and the founding Colab artists who showed there early on. No acknowledgement is made of the fact that many early shows focused on issues especially germane to the area, and from the beginning part of No Rio’s mission was to interact positively with the surrounding resident culture. The encroachment of gentrification, police brutality, and the ravages of drugs were always major issues. No Rio’s early years from 1980-84 are well-documented in video, and in Alan Moore and Marc Miller’s “ABC No Rio Dinero” which the “Downtown Show” did not even think worthy of sequestering in a vitrine. And while Madonna is inarguably the most famous media personality the East Village produced during that time, is it necessary to waste a whole display on her plastic baubles designed by Maripol?

These cavils aside, the Downtown Show is a sprawling and ambitious, star-strewn adventure through the not so (for me, anyway) distant past. It hits a lot of the right marks, especially in the earlier years it covers, makes some surprising connections, and should be lauded for uncovering multiple levels of interaction between various creative media and personalities that produced successive scenes in (or of) the geographical area known as “downtown” New York City during the period 1974-1984. It also acknowledges the contributions of a great many artists hitherto under-appreciated, and redresses some of the lacunae of recent offerings like “East Village USA“. (Supposedly a sequel to the Downtown Show, (1984-94?) is already in the offing; hypocrite lecteur: bate thy breath or bite thy tongue?) Yet, cram-packed, illuminating and entertaining though the exhibition may be (some of it even brings back the fun, and the madness), it remains a survey, and thereby necessarily incomplete. Moreover, its conflation of SoHo, Lower East Side, TriBeCa, East and West Village, all under the rubric “Downtown” (what about Wall Street?) — especially after 1980, is a serious conceptual flaw that fails to sufficiently acknowledge the economic and cultural forces which were even then at work dividing up this turf, separating the Cool from the cooler.

Perhaps it should not be surprising that such a show at NYU gives short shrift to artists who fought the gentrification of its very neighborhood, as the University has become a major developer there and is at least indirectly responsible for skyrocketing rents and property values, which have driven all but the wealthiest or luckiest artists out, including some artists in the Downtown Show (those who neither had the good taste to die of AIDS or other socially-sanctioned ailments, nor win lotto…). With the Downtown Collection, NYU has indeed amassed a vast and impressive archive of visual, literary, media-based and culturally-significant works and artifacts, and personally, I’m very happy to have had my little magazine included there. But the very image of NYU gobbling up scraps of an artistic milieu whose raison d’etre was anti-institutional at its core and mostly resistant to corporate capitalism more than a little resembles those 19th century robber barons who founded great museums to assuage their complicity. Also, while institutions like NYU obviously enrich the literary, artistic and filmic culture of New York by continuing to nurture individual talents, these same also tend to produce and encourage a culture of specialization that would be anathema to the multi-faceted “renaissance” artists of “Downtown.” The contemporary field of the visual arts, say, with its thousands of artists graduated each year and thousands of galleries, has grown to resemble a strangely-mutated corporate form, whose highly-trained and specialized candidates are groomed, evaluated and promoted, competing for rewards of celebrity and wealth, the social impact of their practice a secondary afterthought. “Downtown” on the other hand, attempts to reconstruct an era when creative individuality was contagious, and the virus it spread, though dangerous and even deadly to some, could also be liberating and vital, certainly inspiring; often transcendent. Yet as exhausting as the exhibit can be, it is far from exhaustive, and has perhaps thrown a net so wide a good many (anti)social butterflies (and nasty moths, waterbugs, blackflies, etc.) have been missed; the “Downtown Show” (supplemented by the “Book”) documents the trail left by over two hundred artists — but the story of that “downtown” (or again, so many several stories) is incomplete without the efforts of several hundred others. “Downtown” hits most of the high water marks, already part of lore and legend, and adds a splash of new recognitions to the pool, but like a good snotnosed punk rocker, pisses on diamonds in its own backyard.

Peter Hujar

Candy Darling on her Deathbed, 1974

Vintage gelatin silver print

15 7/8 x 19 7/8 in. (40.3 x 50.5 cm)

Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York

Basquiat at the Brooklyn Museum

Reviewed by Michael Carter

“If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.”

–Charlie Parker

Because society is less concerned with understanding the meaning of artistic production than with promoting and profiting from name brand artists’ commodities, it creates personal mythologies which insure the chosen’s entry to the pantheon, all the more compelling if the artist has the good taste to die young. Keats, Kahlo, Pollock, Parker, Plath, Hendrix, Cobain, and thousands of other less recognizable names; usually some form of self-destruction is involved. (”Die young, and stay pretty”, sang Blondie’s Debbie Harry, who managed to avoid that fate.) In the 80s art world, the two meteors were Jean Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. Hagiography blinds hindsight, and the meaning and method of the work of both these artists are ripe for re-investigation. Though both were associated early on with the East Village, both saw the world (and the streets) as a greater canvas, to be re-coded and interpreted through a personal yet largely accessible visual hermeneutics. Haring devised a hieroglyphic language in which images supplanted words. Basquiat saw words as images with loaded and multivalent meanings, and images and visual style as a language of their own, all sparking off one another via puns and association, comic and lyric and haunting. The current show at the Brooklyn Museum not only displays the range and genesis of Basquiat’s multiple talents, but goes far towards explicating his major strategies and recurrent themes, providing a broader cultural and aesthetic context for disentangling the artist’s undeniable accomplishment from the hype, arguing for its significance today and for the future.

A stone’s throw from the artist’s birthplace in Park Slope, the exhibition dutifully traces the evolution of Basquiat’s early drawing and painting style from childlike scrawls of milk trucks and airplanes and graffiti, to the creation of his alter ego SAMO (i.e., the SAME Old shit, whose street poetry started off as wry observation and quickly, intensely grew lyrical (”Whole livery line bow like this with big money all crushed into these feet/plush safe… he think”). Images only occasionally accompanied  SAMO’s musings, but signature elements begin to emerge: the jagged three-toothed crown, the repetition of TAR, CARBON, and the Copyright © and Notary symbols. In the late 70s, graffiti enjoyed an underground appreciation, and the Crown was a common motif, which SAMO appropriated and altered, simultaneously for its street cred and to distinguish himself from it. The copyright and notary signs, along with “SAMO” became his street tag (though he originally shared it with then friend Al Diaz). Combining these symbols, along with street imagery sifted through his mixed Hispanic/Haitian heritage (”Arroz con Pollo”, “Peso Neto”), and the repetition of various phrases, with deliberately “primitivist” imagery derived from African prehistoric stone paintings as well as expressionistic self-portraiture and anatomical drawing texts, along with harsh, angular lines reminiscent of late Picasso and wild graffiti-like acrylic colors and sometimes spray paint, Basquiat caught the eyes and imagination of art world insiders. As friend to Haring and Kenny Scharf, Basquiat met the downtown art/music/drug elite in his late teens, hanging and contributing to exhibits at performance bars like the Mudd Club and Club 57 and fashion hangs like Fiorucci and Pat Field’s, culminating with his inclusion first in the watershed Times Square show and then in the New Wave/New York show at PS 1, curated by Diego Cortez, who had encouraged him early on.

In a few short years, fueled by wide acclaim and a galloping pharmacopia, Basquiat was already showing in major Soho galleries (as well as bringing it all back home to the EV’s FUN Gallery in ‘82), a wunderkind of expressionistic energy and cryptic phaseology, which he would hone and augment, experimenting with a wide range of surface materials, collage techniques, and image layering, beginning with Xerox appliqués (which he used to appropriate the look of a well-detourned urban wall) and later silkscreen for compositional and repetitive effect. Unlike the chronological colorsplash of the 1992 Whitney Museum show (which, of course, included many of the same works), the Brooklyn show is intent on examining the phases and techniques of Basquiat’s artistic practice. Spread over two large floors, separate areas are devoted to  JMB’s various aesthetic and thematic concerns. The former manifests in the oilstick drawings of the Daros Suite (which chart his mind interacting with art/world history), a room devoted to seriography, maps or charts of wordplay; primary themes illustrated include the Griot series of ‘84-’85, homage to black heroes of music (especially Charlie Parker) and sport (as well as undersung African/American history generally; “The Origin of Cotton”, “Jim Crow”) and a preoccupation with images and words copied from Gray’s Anatomy. But Basquiat himself, perhaps no more than he could fully control the torrent of words, images, and color in his paintings, didn’t usually compartmentalize these concerns. In fact his oeuvre is distingushed by a sometimes messy cross-mapping of otherwise incongruous themes, styles, symbols, and imagery into a visually stunning, rich codex of personal, historical, and aesthetic information. A case point is Grillo, a large Griot-like image which is also an homage to the artist’s friend Steven Grillo, with Basquiat playfully punning on the name — a homophone in Spanish.

Stylistically, Basquiat emerges as the great synthesizer of 20th-century aesthetic strategy and technique. In this respect, he is something like the last modernist. Again, the primitivist drawing strokes align him with Picasso and Dubuffet; the wild color derives from the Fauves and the Cobra artists, as well as New York graffitists of the late ’70s; his thick “paint-outs” are more reminiscent of De Kooning’s bravura brushstrokes; his word-play again deriving from graffiti-writers, but also from Cy Twombly (whom he deeply admired), who integrated (especially poetic) language as a visual element in scratchy compositions; his use of silkscreen and multiple collage derived from Pop artists like Rauschenberg and Warhol (with whom he famously collaborated); his obsession with cryptic punning and personal alchemy echoes Duchamp. (Like Duchamp with his ready-made or Picasso with his instant sketch, he knew the artist could pull off the ultimate alchemic feat in capitalist society; i.e., transmute trash to cash.) His work also melded well with the Neo-expressionist zeitgeist of the time, then the trendiest (and most lucrative) art style glutting Europe and Soho.

Music, especially jazz with its improvisational structure and repetitive riffs, was important to Basquiat’s technique as well as to his themes. Many of the paintings can be seen as compositional scores, where image, word, and color emerge, submerge and are transformed. The repeated, often monotone “riffs”, with his brash “noisy” style, also recalls the loud, minimalist noise bands of the time, like Glenn Branca, the No-Wave bands documented in the film  Downtown ‘81 (starring Basquiat), or his own brief foray in the band Gray. The Brooklyn show also emphasizes the fallout of early hip-hop on his method, particularly the improvised scratching of DJs (”graffito” meaning scratch in Italian), as well as the technique of sampling, and colorful slang grammar. His approach is also diaristic, a visual record of all he saw read, heard, thought, ingested. This he shares with writers like Kerouac, another quick-mind engaged in improvisational inquiry and superfueled by substances, also tragic. (A famous picture of Basquiat shows him holding The Subterraneans, a favorite and influential text.) As with AbEx painters like Pollock and the African Griot he emulated, Basquiat possessed a shamanic power to open the collective unconscious, as well as his own. He also had a need to expose the rifts in the foundations of both.

His canvases themselves often bespeak, conjure, reveal the tension of time, the ephemeral nature of existence, of imagery, even of utterance. Not only was world/art/personal history his primary subject matter, Basquiat underscored this tension in the techniques of “the cross-out” and “the paint-out”, where the certainty of meaning (of word, of image) is put into question, and both that which is elided and its ghost image/phrase are retained. To mean and not mean. To destroy, yet reference the destroyed (and the act of destroying/creating), in one or several fell swoops. Common in graffiti over-writing, this effect is also similar to Derrida’s notion of the suture, a mark whereby erasure is indicated, as well as that which is erased. In Basquiat’s case (see Untitled, 1981}, we’re talkin’ Frankenstein stitches. And as an African-American who identified with the street, Basquiat was keen to the cultural resonance of erasure. Even in early works like Untitled 1982 (Quality), the “cross-out” is in effect; while, in paintings like Three Quarters of Olympia Minus the Servant, thick swaths of paint blot out much of the image underneath — a strategy which enabled Basquiat to exult with painterly flourish at the expense of (or complementary to) the imagery or words occluded. (Though in the case of Olympia, this ploy has clear social overtones; he dedicated another canvas solely to the maid.) This allows Basquiat to destroy his cake and eat it too, which is something like how he must have felt about his position in the art world in general.) His collaborations with Warhol, critically maligned at the time, were large-scale painterly jousts where each artist sought to cross-out, “improve,” or transform the imagery of the other, with often unexpected and comic results.

If Basquiat identified with the grinning black, lozenge-eyed “Griot” figure (such as the one on the famous New York Times cover, which doubled as promo for this exhibit) at the giddy peak of his career, his darker, final years reference the African trickster god, Exu. The final painting in the Brooklyn show, Exu offers a central figure of fiery power beset by a multiplicity of floating eyes, an image expressing paranoia as well as defiance, and perhaps the ravages of celebrity. Like Warhol, Basquiat understood that his celebrity vastly increased the degree of his artistic/shamanic power, and like Warhol, that very celebrity and its trappings often became subject matter. In Basquiat’s case, however he was compelled to examine that celebrity’s incongruities, the extent to which he was using and being used by It; and he was keen to the paradoxes here entailed by his racial background. (A painting like Notary (1983), and the famous Marc Miller interview lifted by Julian Schnabel’s fawning biopic, evinces Basquiat’s evident disdain and evasiveness towards those who would try to pin simplistic interpretations on his imagery, as well as towards the artworld “fleas” and “leeches” that so eagerly attached themselves to him. Doubtless he would disavow anything in this exegesis as well; I once asked him to tag my jacket– he just kind of grinned, “you fool”…) The later paintings of 1986, ‘87, and ‘88, are either relatively spare blottings of color brimming with mordant irony, such as The Dingoes that Park Their Brains With Their Gum} and Riddle Me This Batman}; large, sparse constructions like To Repel Ghosts and Gravestone (clearly intimations of - as well as desperate roadblocks to — a deeply-sensed impending mortality); or the densely repetitive, mostly verbal meditations such as Pegasus, that evidence a late 20th-century alchemist on the edge, desperate to combine and record all he sees, hears, ingests, dizzying in their lyric jumps and scale, equally maddening. Evoking Beethoven, the Eroica} paintings of ‘87 and ‘88 once more attest to his musical ambition and range, though all the while looking toward the end, with their coda and symbol, “Man dies.” In fact, the final Eroica, with its circled lists of Basquiat’s basic needs and preoccupations, “balls, banks, white women, injections,” and the like, culminates in a powerfully self-exploding Beethovian crescendo, the chemical formula for  TNT.

Exhaustive as the Brooklyn exhibit may seem, it is nonetheless an edited picture, which does aid in interpreting Basquiat’s major subjects and stylistic flourishes. Yet certain works, like the large paintings known as the Blue Ribbon series, which showcase the heights of Basquiat’s ability to integrate his intuitive flair for color with the verbal - the “paint-out” with the “cross-out” — are notably absent. So is the grim, elegaic Riding with Death, which referenced a da Vinci drawing of a spectral horse and (one-eyed) rider, and punctuated the ‘92 Whitney show. Ever larger shows will be in the offing. That Basquiat could create so many signature works with such thematic and technical range in less than ten years testifies to a mind and talent in hyperdrive; for and against hype. Especially in the paintings of ‘83 through ‘85, Basquiat sometimes fell into formulaic repetition, pushed by demand of often greedy collectors and dealers. But while not every blessed fragment evidences genius, the aggregate effect of a retro survey like the one in Brooklyn is dazzling, making us re-ask questions we thought we already knew the answer to - the question of genius included. Now that much of the hype has finally been buried, along with Basquiat’s bones in Brooklyn’s nearby Greenwood cemetery, what we see is a very special artist: part poet, part shaman, part seer, and part uncontrollable ego (all full-force at once), whose accomplishment stands as rebuke to the art world’s self-serving insular smugness and society’s current technology-coddled complacency.

“Build a Fort. Light That on Fire”

–SAMO