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.
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.
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
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