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
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