Jean-Michel and the Times Square Show in Heerlen

This post records my visit to an exhibition in Holland which contained a key part of my past, the Times Square Show. That experience I relected on in my memoir "Art Worker", which was built in part on these Art Gangs blog posts.

PIC: Jean-Michel Basquiat’s cover for “Rammellzee vs. K Rob” single, called the most valuable hip-hop record collectible; Red Bull did a retrospective of Rammellzee’s work in 2018, and produced an amazing 9-minute video for it

We recently trekked to Heerlen, a Dutch town not far from the touristic old city of Maastricht, to see "Basquiat: The Artist and His New York Scene." The curators chose to recollect the Times Square Show of 1980, Jean-Michel’s first public art exhibition, so like several other Colab artists, I had a piece in the exhibition. It’s a collaboration with Jean-Michel, actually, albeit somewhat inadvertent.
Why was the show in Heerlen? It was not clear. The city isn’t so exciting. It’s basically a busted mining town whose leaders have made a long series of bad urban decisions.
It has a deep history. The Romans built a camp there called Coriovallum in order to control a road junction, and the town was an agrarian center for centuries, bouncing often into the hands of various rulers. A coal mining boom at the turn of the last century brought climate-killing prosperity to the town, and they decided to raze their historic center. That is why tourists go to Maastricht. When coal got cheaper elsewhere starting in '65 (hooray global capitalism!), Heerlen lost 60,000 jobs.
As it seems was their habit, the city then demolished its major industrial landmarks, the tallest mine chimneys in Europe, called -- "Lange Lies" (tall Liz), and "Lange Jan" (tall John). They have a 12th century church and defensive tower (a combination you see also in Maastricht), but it was weirdly renovated inside into a blank nothing in the 1950s. A garden dwarf-style pilgrim statue smirks from a niche over the entrance.

Heerlen's Glaspalast. (Photo by Dirk van der Made)

I don't mean at all to laugh at Heerlen... but the author Thomas Bernhard (1931–1989) was born there, which tells you a lot. I love his writing, but it is seriously crazy and bleak.
They do have one jewel. The museum is housed inside an old department store, the Modehuis Schunck. It's now called the Glass Palace, built by Frits Peutz, and it is a startling building for 1935.
The restaurant on top of it is Michelin rated, and served me a “speciaal Basquiat-bier”, an IPA, which was, like the Glaspalast, startlingly good.

”Same Old Beer” by Brouwerij De Fontein at Brasserie Mijn Streek, Heerlen

I’ll have to read the catalogue to discover the special relevance Jean-Michel Basquiat’s story had for Heerlen, but it was clearly a big deal there. The museum did many special events and education projects around the show during its run. Banners were hung everywhere along the shopping street, and during our time in the museum troops of schoolchildren came through.
As an art tourist parachuting in from a global city, my main interest was in how the show dealt with “my” history. But still I wonder: Why Basquiat here?
Most of the art in the Times Square Show of 1980 dealt directly with urban themes. What did Heerlen get from this? Just a flash in the national pan? (The Queen visited.) Or some important cultural stimulus? A short plug for the catalogue says the NYC of the ‘70s and ‘80s “mirrors the post-industrial character of the city of Heerlen, the vacancies and drug problems that followed the region’s economic downturn” in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Hmmm...
Marc Miller was hired as a consultant for the show, and he promoted the extensive inclusion of work by Colab artists from the Times Square Show. Marc told me the curators had intended to include Dutch artists influenced by Basquiat and the graffiti movement. They didn’t. Maybe, fearing for their walls, the powers that be put the ‘ixnay’ on that part of the show. (I’ve seen that happen before.) Or they ran out of room.
There’s a monitor playing Manfred Kirchheimer’s 1981 documentary film Stations of the Elevated, the first to document the graffiti movement in New York City. Jean-Michel’s relations with graffiti artists like Rammellzee, the Iconoclastic Panzerist prophet of Afro-Futurism (1960?-2010), who dressed like a Japanese transformer and had his major art career in Europe are not explored. Al Diaz’s role in SAMO©, Basquiat’s first art project, is not mentioned. Diaz has recently revved up his art career after a strong showing in the Howl! Happening exhibition last year “Zeitgeist: The Art Scene of Teenage Basquiat.” That show coincided with the release of Sara Driver’s film Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of J-MB which was playing in the gallery. The film makes the case for the show, as various NYC people speak of the artist, like Lee Quiñones, who says, “He knew he only had a short time.” Diaz said the same.
It was fascinating to see the documents of the apartment J-MB shared with Alexis Adler in her photos of Jean-Michel and his objects, plus some drawings and texts he left her during the years. Not long after, he was hanging with other graffiti artists at Art-Rite editor Edit DeAk’s loft apartment in Soho, as a tagged-up wall excavated some years ago proved.
With his neo-expressionist cryptograms of American mestizo identity, Basquiat marked a major changing of the guard in “American art.” I was dismissive when Stefan Eins called Colab an art movement. Fashion/Moda (Fashion 时装 Moda МОДА), Eins’ project in the South Bronx, was a crucial pivot point during the late ‘70s-early ‘80s. But I get it now. “Colab” is not just the historic organization with the generic name (in full, Collaborative Projects, Inc.). It is a description of what was going on then, and in a way generally in post-modern art – multimedia experimentation with social relevance, and artists working together fluidly between projects, i.e., artists like musicians like filmmakers. All of this was wrapped up in NYC in the '60s – I am boiling it together with Fluxus, an important radical precursor movement with which Eins himself was involved -- '70s, and '80s, a multi-cultural anti-academic bohemia. So art historians in the future can talk about "colab" with the now-canonical Jean-Michel and David Wojnarowicz, both of whom did all of that.
(I’ve been blogging about Wojo’s work in anticipation of the big show coming to Reina Sofia museum in Madrid this May ‘19. One of the posts includes a consideration of the Times Square Show in relation to him.)
More specifically about the show, one thing I think they missed is Basquiat’s clear and close involvement with fashion, and the experimental radical clothing designers and marketing of the day. He was making t-shirts in Alexis Adler’s apartment. At the Times Square Show, after he left me in the lobby to deal with the imbroglio over the sign, he went directly upstairs to see the girls in the Fashion Lounge. He sprayed at least one mural on the wall there, and maybe he helped Mary Lemley and the others paint up some of the 500-pound bale of clothing that comprised the principal part of that installation. Sophie Vieille, a participant in that installation, tells the story on the website of the Hunter College exhibition, “Times Square Show Revisited” (2012).

Photo of 'rediscovered' wall painting made by graffiti artists visiting the late Edit DeAk's loft on Wooster Street during the late '70s, early '80s.

Jean-Michel’s work can be seen briefly in Andrea Callard’s slide show record of the TSS, which was clicking away in the gallery. It seems rather indifferent.
The perspicacious art critic Anthony Haden-Guest wrote of this fashion connection in an article for Vanity Fair not long after Jean-Michel's death, a pre-digital text now online. Haden-Guest tracks Jean-Michel into the lair of Andy. the premier "sellout" artist he most admired who was running a magazine dedicated to fashion and media celebrities, Interview.
"Visiting the actual Factory, he sold Warhol a few more Xeroxes for a dollar. Warhol gave him four or five cans of expensive Liquitex paint, which he slathered on more clothing and sold at Patricia Field’s shop on Eighth Street.
"Basquiat was by then a natural choice to star in a movie about downtown called The New York Beat. It featured Debbie Harry, was financed by Rizzoli, directed by the photographer Edo (later questioned in the [Andrew] Crispo [murder] case), written by Glenn O’Brien, and based loosely on Basquiat’s own life. ‘It never came out,’ O’Brien says, ‘because a couple of the Rizzolis went to the slammer.’"
The rest of the article is a harrowing read. I can’t go on with it. Basically, Jean-Michel was sucked up into the tornado of international jet set new wave art culture business. And, like his jazz heroes, he drugged himself up to get through it all. Which finally killed him.
I read Phoebe Hoban's Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art (2004), which was dark enough. Haven’t yet tackled Jennifer Clement’s Widow Basquiat (2014) about his relationship with Suzanne Malouk. It’ll just put new perspective on my last sight of him, in an elevator in the Cable Building, riding up to work on his last NYC show. He was puffed up, looking woebegone and dazed. We didn’t say anything to each other.
Every step of his whirlwind trip to fame and death reveals some important aspect of the superheated moment when the art market went global.
Like David Wojnarowicz, Jean-Michel Basquiat is a kind of prism of his moment. And, like Wojo, Basquiat as a cultural figure represents the forceful emergence of a previously minoritarian position in American-Western art. Both were in their way history painters, the highest genre in the classic hierarchy of kinds of painting. I’m talking deep art history, what – climate apocalypse aside – can remain of these artists in 100 years. Basquiat was more. He was the Jackie Robinson of the western art market, the post-colonial ice breaker for waves of artists of African heritage who had previously been frozen out of the mainstream. Today his work commands some of the highest auction prices, long eclipsing stars like Jasper Johns.
As a prism of his times, Basquiat’s work and importance remains available for what we all, like School of Paris around Picasso, can get out of him, reflections of the intense interest in his work and story. It’s great for Colab, and for the artists of the Times Square Show, who can hitch a ride on the back of the great black whale.

LINKS

"Basquiat: The Artist and His New York Scene", Schunck, Heerlen, NL. Feb-June, 2019 https://basquiat.schunck.nl/

Heerlen – “It has a deep history”
I took all that from “Heerlen,” Wikipedia in English

Ashleigh Kane, “The story of SAMO©, Basquiat’s first art project”, Dazed Digital, September 2017
http://www.dazeddigital.com/art-photography/article/37058/1/al-diaz-on-samo-and-basquiat

"Zeitgeist: The Art Scene of Teenage Basquiat" at Howl! Happening Gallery, 2018
https://www.howlarts.org/event/zeitgeist-the-art-scene-of-teenage-basquiat-2/

Boom For Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat - Trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUsy5RObL2U
the writer of this blog flashes by in this trailer with a building shape on his head

Stream Sara Driver’s film here
https://www.boomforrealfilm.com/

"recently excavated tagged-up wall"
“151 Wooster: Where The Basquiat At?”, by Sheila, Gawker, December 2007
https://gawker.com/334080%2F151-wooster-where-the-basquiat-at
Historic graffiti mural discovered in Manhattan building, December 2007
http://grafarc.org/news/2007/12/historic-graffiti-mural-discovered-in-manhattan-building/

Stefan Eins
on Wikipedia
artist’s website – http://www.oneunoeins.com/

Fashion 时装 Moda МОДА
is on Wikipedia

the “imbroglio over the sign”
The story of the collaborative sign board I made with Basquiat is briefly told in the Schunck exhibition catalogue. It’ll be more fully described in my next book – Some Title TK from Some Publisher.

“Times Square Show Revisited” - Sophie Vieille interview; Hunter College CUNY art gallery, 2012
www.timessquareshowrevisited.com/accounts/sophie-vieille.html

Anthony Haden-Guest, “Burning Out,” Vanity Fair November 1988
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/1988/11/jean-michel-basquiat

classic hierarchy of kinds of painting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchy_of_genres

The blogger standing next to his signboard in Heerlen. And yes, indeed I did.

Wojnarowicz in Madrid #3: Notions of the Collaborative

The members of 3 Teens Kill 4 circa 1982

This research began with the intention to produce a screening event of some of the video and film collaborations of David Wojnarowicz, moving image “products” which MWF Video Club, Colab’s distribution project represented until 2002. I also thought it odd that a show of Wojnarowicz’s work was coming to Madrid, and none of his writing had been translated into Spanish.
As an early member of Colab, a founder of ABC No Rio, and later an art historian who wrote an MA on Dada and dissertated on NYC artists’ groups (as a book, Art Gangs, the title of this blog), I thought I knew a lot about collaboration. I do, and in my bones. But what scholars think and express in their specialized languages matters too, probably more.
A paper by Fiona Anderson, “Notions of the Collaborative in the Work of David Wojnarowicz” (Papers of Surrealism, No. 8, Spring 2010) lays out a series of ideas about his work with others which I find original and striking. Much of my experience and understandings, indeed even my fears and regrets – coincide with her observations. I will precis and comment upon her text in this blog post.
Just as Wojnarowicz began his art career as a writer, Anderson starts her scholarly consideration by turning to literary history – Robert Siegle’s Suburban Ambush (1989; now on my reading list), and his thesis that the downtown NYC writing of this period constitutes a “fiction of insurgency.” (Weirdly, in my outing as a video artist, the “war movie” I was working on when I met Wojnarowicz was precisely that.) She posits an ambivalence of alienation and belonging in artists’ positions within community, warning against its romanticization.
This is clear in Wojnarowicz’s writings, his deep commitment to a historical bohemian tradition of criminals and sexual outlaws. They’re very entertaining, occasionally profound; we love ‘em, but we all already know what rascals they can be. But when the broader creative community is sore oppressed, we need warriors; they are not often nice people.

“Historical Incoherence”

Anderson considers the writings of Pamela Lee on Gordon Matta-Clark, another great NYC artist who died young. Gordon – (I met him briefly also, as he yelled to me over a pile of marijuana he was bagging his opinion of a review of his work I had written) – was an incessant collaborator and inspiration to some Colab artists who worked with him. (Coleen Fitzgibbon, Peter Fend and Gerry Hovagimyan all assisted Matta-Clark.)
In my book Art Gangs I included collective formations around the Soho alternative spaces of the 1970s in my lineal account of artists’ groups in NYC. So I too was fascinated by the continuous communalizing turn in Matta-Clark’s work at 112 Greene Street – although to what degree these alternative spaces were collective formations is arguable. (Richard Kostelanetz’s episodic and personal book Soho: The Rise and Fall of an Artists' Colony, 2003, makes good sense of this.)
For Lee the “testimonials” of those who knew the artist produce “historiographic incoherence” in the work of history. Anderson however sees the mix of nostalgia and sadness in these accounts as productive, and as the product of the artist’s collaborations.

”Fiction of Insurgency”

The “fiction of insurgency” is part of the public relations for any new art wave or movement modernist times. The East Village artists, and especially their promoters, were very conscious of their posturing; Liza Kirwin describes the period as an art gallery movement. Anderson discusses gentrification, the fly in the ointment of this cultural moment, through Rosalyn Deutsche and Cara Gendel Ryan’s 1984 article. We may add Craig Owens’ riposte to Walter Robinson and Carlo McCormick’s major article on the scene in Art in America. Coming along fast behind them was the work of the late radical geographer Neil Smith with his gentrification index formula, and sociologist Christopher Mele’s book Selling of the Lower East Side which squarely blames artists for greasing the revaluation of the longtime slum district which priced out so many of its longtime residents.
That’s been my beat for decades, ever since our Real Estate Show in 1980. But we must reckon with the fact that most of the artists who took these political questions seriously then have been neglected by collectors and forgotten by institutions.
Writers like Carlo McCormick, Nicolas Moufarrege (whose text Anderson critique), and Walter Robinson, were publicists first. Their objective was to build the scene. They ignored the processes playing out before their eyes, leaving the political business of urban affairs – Anderson’s “critical engagement with the work and its environment” – to others, principally Lucy Lippard.

Punk to the Bone

I read Wojnarowicz’s position in this long-simmering artworld feud – (it’s about collaboration with capital, innit?) – as pure punk, or beat-punk. He adhered to bohemian tradition, by hating his success and the collectors who enabled it.
Wojnarowicz straddled the dialectic – “political” versus the “hedonistic” – through his participation in punk culture, i.e. the universal odium of young creative people throughout the USA for the revanchist turn of the Reagan 1980s. That’s clear from the names of punk bands – Born Against; Reagan Youth; Black Flag; Minor Threat; The Clash, and the band Wojnarowicz himself was in, 3 Teens Kill 4 No Motive.
Wojnarowicz’s work today is understood as political, and not only for gay rights and PWAs. Much of his mature imagery is specifically about the ruin and wreckage he senses in U.S. culture. Rather than join the local struggle on specific issues of displacement and racial oppression he beat around the bush of the universal, the natural cosmos and the march of gringo history.
The East Village – formerly known as the Lower East Side, or Loisaida, a name which residents today cling to – marks the lurid sunset of perhaps the last real U.S. bohemia, in the classic sense of poor artists living in a working class district. It was like that all over the USA, and now in most other world cities.

It Was Gonna to Be Like Paris

In this, and many other respects, the LES/EV of the 1980s compares directly with Montmartre of Paris a century before, as a recent exhibition in Madrid, “Toulouse-Lautrec y el espíritu de Montmartre” reminded me. Those artists too developed a festive culture as an economic platform for their work across media. In Paris it was cafe-concerts, shadow theater, humor magazines and an exploding art market for lithographs, then a recent process. In NYC it was nightclubs, a vibrant government-funded alternative sector, and mushrooming art galleries, many of them run by artists. In a further doubling, the East Village repeated in many aspects the West Village of the years before the Great War. The artists of Greenwich Village directly followed the lead of the Montmartrians, and in the ‘20s were themselves displaced by what sociologist Caroline Ware called “inmigration.” Ergo, to refute Deutsche and Ryan 30 years on, the disdain of East Village “romanticism” evident in their and other texts of the period ignores entirely the economic bases these affective positions made possible.
As Anderson points out, Wojnarowicz was deeply interested in Paris. He lived and loved there for a time and conceived the Rimbaud project. In this he coincided with a strong current of beat and punk historical identification, e.g., Patti Smith, Tom Verlaine.
A further parallelism with Montmartre is much darker – the epidemic of syphilis which claimed so many lives, among them Baudelaire, Goncourt, Maupassant, Seurat, Toulouse-Lautrec and Gauguin.
Just as the syphilis epidemic brought a new awareness and attention to the position of women in French society, so AIDS brought attention to gay life. While the triumph of the feminist movement in suffrage is well recalled, less remembered (although still deeply engrained) is the toxicity of the reaction. As the 20th century began, women endured a return of the antonymic stereotype of the virgin and the whore – la femme honnête et l'autre – reaching a lethal apogee in the proto-fascism of the Freikorps, described by Klaus Theweleit in his Male Fantasies.

Next: Crime, Drugs and Collaboration

LINKS and NOTES

MWF Video Club, NYC 1986-2002
http://www.brickhaus.com/amoore/

Fiona Anderson, “Notions of the collaborative in the work of David Wojnarowicz”, 2010
https://www.academia.edu/466039/Notions_of_the_collaborative_in_the_work_of_David_Wojnarowicz
I linked out of the David Wojnarowicz Knowledge Base - NYU Computer Science
https://cs.nyu.edu/.../the-david-wojnarowicz-knowledge-base/
Fiona Anderson expands on this work in her Cruising the Dead River: David Wojnarowicz and New York’s Ruined Waterfront (University of Chicago, forthcoming).

The Real Estate Show (1980)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Real_Estate_Show

title of Emily Listfield’s novel of the East Village, It Was Gonna Be Like Paris (1988)

"Toulouse-Lautrec y el espíritu de Montmartre", Caixa Forum, Madrid (closed)
https://caixaforum.es/barcelona/fichaexposicion?entryId=544677

Wojnarowicz in Madrid #2: Old Times Square

Nan Goldin, photo of Kiki Smith, Christof Kohlhöfer, and David Wojnarowicz in the Tin Pan Alley bar

I was struck by a photo in a book I’ve had for years, the Lotringer interview anthology DW: A Definitive History of Six years on the Lower East Side (MIT/Semiotext(e), 2006). I hadn’t read it. Books, like art, can lie in wait for us.
The photo, by Nan Goldin, is of Wojnarowicz with Kiki Smith and Christof Kohlhöfer in the Tin Pan Alley bar near Times Square 42nd Street. Kiki, now famous, was a cook there, Nan a bardtender. Christof was art director for the East Village Eye monthly.
Times Square, where Wojnarowicz as a boy hustled older men (called “chicken hawks”), was the site in 1980 of an art show, produced by the Colab group, which was understood as epochal – the Times Square Show. That happened in June. Artists’ engagement in that NYC crossroads of crime and sex work continued at the Tin Pan Alley bar.
Sex workers, double feature movies, cheap fried food, open all night – Times Square was the hard cement playground of the lumpen. And a nighttime work site. In a 2015 interview, Nan Goldin herself recalled her work as a bartender:

“...at Tin Pan Alley, this tough bar on Times Square – back when it was Times Square, not Disney World – [I worked] for this amazing woman who politicized me. This was Maggie Smith. I worked at the bar first, and then Kiki Smith worked there, and Ulli Rimkus, who later opened Max Fish, and Cara Perlman and other female artists. There were a lot of street people, a lot of prostitutes and pimps and gang kids. Some of them really didn’t like what happened to the bar. It was a neighborhood bar. Maggie cooked. It was on 49th Street and there was nowhere to eat. So people from CBS Records and all these places started coming because it was the only place with good food. And it was in this Japanese tourist guide, so suddenly a lot of Japanese tourists would come in, and the Clash would come in, and the bar changed and the regulars didn’t really like it, having all these arty women working there.”

Goldin alludes to Disney World, which is the 42nd Street Times Square of today, with its manic visual overload of animated signage and wandering herds of family tourists. All that it was before the redevelopment is gone, just as the piers Wojnarowicz and so many other gay men cruised are gone, replaced by the Chelsea art gallery district, a luxurious park called the High Line, and, finally, the Whitney Museum of American Art, from whence comes the Madrid retrospective.
Once a scene is dead, the culture industry can make something of it. Maggie’s Tin Pan Alley tavern has become fodder for Hollywood. Stories of this tavern form the basis of an HBO TV series, “The Deuce” (slang name for old 42nd Street), which focusses of course on crime and sex work.

Painting by Jane Dickson

Spectacolor and Wild Style

Jane Dickson, a painter and Colab artist lived there during those years. She came to the area as a worker on the animated Spectacolor board – “a cool job in a crazy place”. She and her husband Charlie Ahearn took a loft on 43rd Street. Tin Pan Alley was her neighborhood bar. In a recent interview for her new book, Jane recalled:

“Maggie ran Tin Pan as a conscious social experiment in dialogue between extremely diverse and usually very separate groups; the strippers, the trannies, as they were called then [transvestites], who’d bring in clothes they’d ‘boosted’ from Macys to sell, the animators union, which met there weekly, downtown artists, Euro punks, like the Clash, Australian political activists, and performers like Sweet Honey and the Rock and many others. It was electric. Nan Goldin was bartender, and did early slide shows there, Kiki Smith was the chef and sold hand printed scarves and tee shirts there. Everyone mingled and sparked projects together.”

Jane produced and Charlie directed the epochal hip hop movie Wild Style (1983), which brought the volatile cultural movement of the South Bronx to first a national, then a global audience. They were both friends of David Wojnarowicz.
Jane's background was more typical of our group, even for a time of Wojnarowicz himself. “I grew up in the suburbs, which always felt like a false front, while the dense urban darkness I was supposedly being protected from felt real and necessary to understand. I’ve been exploring corners of American darkness ever since.”
As for the darkness Times Square was most famous for, she said: “As poor young artists some of my friends worked for a time as strippers or doing phone sex etc. until they found less draining gigs. Actual prostitution and drugs totally consumed those who got into it and except for David Wojnarowicz and Kathy Acker, no one I knew managed to survive those experiences, and make work about it.”

Not My Scene

I knew Tin Pan – (named for the early 20th century songwriters’ district of midtown… like “Frankie and Johnny”…) – but not well. From time to time I dropped in, usually for the holiday dinners Maggie would throw for those who didn’t or couldn’t go back home for those occasions. It was a kind of haven, with the rough part at the front, at the bar, the people of those streets. And deeper into the place people talking and eating at tables. I remember visiting Kiki as she cooked, amidst the intense crazy chaos of a dinner rush.

Kiki Smith, Untitled (Severed Finger), 1980. Collection Jeffrey Deitch.
What must that have been for Wojnarowicz? He had many relations with artists there, and was on the cusp of a serious career. He must have felt a sense of double comfort, with the old street life he’d known as a child flowing in like a tidal wash, and his more recently discovered art world also around him.
From his cruising diaries, early in 1980:

“There’s a discreet pleasure I have in the walking of familiar streets, streets familiar more because of the faraway past than for the recent past, streets that I walked down odd times while living amongst them, seen through the same eyes but each time the eyes belonging to an older boy, spaced by summers and winters and geographical locations. Each time different because of the companions I had previously while walking those streets. I can barely remember or recall the senses I had had when viewing the streets years arelier, my whole change in psyche, I mean. Yet there’s still a slight trace of what I felt left, a trace filled with the unconcerned dreams and tragedies and longings that make up thoughts before the seriousness of age sets in.”
– In the Shadow of the American Dream, p. 145.

Wojnarowicz was a man of the streets and roads. I think of Holger Cahill, a modernist figure, writer, critic and curator, who also “tramped” the country as a youth and did not pursue formal education. He was later director of the Museum of Modern Art and ran the Federal Arts Project. The time when that kind of rise in the artworld is possible, even admirable, seems to have passed.

Ulli Rimkus, finger-paint portraits Tin Pan Alley, by Cara Perlman, 1981-82

The Traces Scatter Out...

The nexus of art and crime lived at Tin Pan Alley passionately, ambisexually. That nexus Penny Arcade insists is vital for art. A longtime theater artist, Penny (Susana Ventura) is an eloquent voice who decries what has been lost. Inarguably the general lot of western man (and woman) has been improved by the normalization of homosexuality. But what has vanished is exactly that edge of danger, of life more vividly lived, which Wojnarowicz explored so fervently.
I remember a panel discussion where Samuel Delaney, who wrote Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999) recalled the paradise/inferno of gay sex that marked his youth. Delaney lamented the passing of this zone of proletarian amuseument. The architect Robert Stern, whose books chronicle the redevelopment, laughed out loud. A terrible sound, the very boorish bray of Trumpian New York.
Do I and others long for a return to a time of criminalized homosexuality, a terrifying epidemic disease, violent street crime, ruinous drug addiction, and blind eyes turned to domestic violence and hate crimes? Of course not. But the bathwater of those babies that were thrown out was vital to the life of culture in New York City.

Postscript: There's no mention of the Times Square Show of Colab in Wojnarowicz's published diaries of that period. (There's 1000s of pages in the Fales Library of course; only some were published.) But it's hard to imagine he was unaware of it. It was big news in the downtown artworld, and it made careers. Among those was Jean-Michel Basquiat, who first showed there publicly at age 20. That part of his brief life is profiled in a show now in Heerlen, a Dutch city not far from Maastricht. That show, at the Schunck Kunsthalle, is closing soon.

Next: MWF Video Club Tries to Make Business

LINKS:

Nearly all the issues of the East Village Eye (including the one with Wojnarowicz’s text) are digitized online at editor Leonard Abrams' website
https://www.east-village-eye.com/issues-year.html

“The Times Square Show Revisited,” exhibition at Hunter College art gallery, 2012
www.timessquareshowrevisited.com/

A Conversation With Nan Goldin on the 30th Anniversary of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency photographic series, by Rebecca Bengal, October 2015
https://www.vogue.com/article/nan-goldin-interview-ballad-of-sexual-dependency-30th-anniversary

TV series on HBO "The Deuce"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Deuce_(TV_series)

Jane talks about her book Jane Dickson in Times Square (Anthology Editions, NY, 2018) with Fused · On November 12, 2018
https://www.fusedmagazine.co.uk/jane-dickson-in-times-square/

Wild Style - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Style

Holger Cahill
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holger_Cahill

Penny Arcade on the Professionalization of Performance Art, with Geraldine Visco,December 31, 2014
https://hyperallergic.com/172190/penny-arcade-on-the-professionalization-of-performance-art/

Cara Perlman: Finger-Paint Portraits, Tin Pan Alley, 1981-82
http://gallery.98bowery.com/exhibition/cara-perlman-finger-paint-portraits-tin-pan-alley-1981-83/

"Basquiat: The Artist and His New York Scene" at Schunck, Heerlen, NL 2 Feb-2 June 2019
https://basquiat.schunck.nl/exhibition/?lang=en