On the second day of the symposium I actually made it on time for the breakfast rolls.
Natalie Phillips (Ball State U) rolled out an iconographic analysis on the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat, something rather obvious which I’ve never seen performed. He was a kind of transcriber – every one of his images comes from another source, so Phillips hunted for his sources. Her book will have three chapters, one on catalogues, indices, etc., another on graffiti, and the third on the body.
Basquiat questions the biases of catalogues. This got a little obscure, but Phillips tracks the repetitive series of numbers on some works to music catalogues of different jazz artists, both white and black. As I understood it, Basquiat was evidencing the industrial racism of the music business in the form of their own codes.
Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop
“I argue he never gave up graffiti,” she said. (Basquiat’s relationships with graffiti artists was explored in a recent show at MFA in Boston [link below]. It has been averred that J-MB couldn’t acknowledge his friendships and connections with graf artists at the time without imperiling his delicate position as an accepted high artist.)
Phillips reads the painting Victor 25448 as a reflection on the death of Michael Stewart. (The well-known work made on Keith Haring’s wall and shown recently at the Guggenheim NYC was a reaction to the killing.) Stewart was rousted by police for writing in the subway late at night, hogtied and suffocated. He was not a graffiti artist, but, Phillips contends, a ‘toy’, or wannabe novice writer. Ergo, the broken brown body in the painting is labelled as a toy: “Ideal”.
In the Warhol-Basquiat-Clemente collaborations there is one in which Basquiat paints over Clemente entirely. This Phillips says, signifies dominance of the “king” over another writer.
The New Excluded
Curiously, the mention of Clemente was the only time the name of a neoexpressionist painter, one among the market leaders of the 1980s artworld, came up during this symposium. I thought that curious for a gathering of art historians, although the cultural studies-ish focus of these days’ talks was fine by me. But it means things have changed. In my time, professors explained to me that the principal sponsor of this symposium, the Terra Foundation, was “object oriented”, so I could forget about applying to them for support.
Perhaps in the wholesale return to figuration, artists of those days unwittingly reduced themselves to illustrators of the texts of a different kind of discourse. (What? Please explain; no you explain.) Or perhaps the next turn in scholarly fashion simply hasn’t creaked into motion. I do recall someone told me she wants to work on Richard Hambleton.
Return to the Text
Andrew Strombeck (Wright State U), author of DIY on the Lower East Side: Books, Buildings, and Art after the 1975 Fiscal Crisis (2020), Skyped in to maintain that David Wojnarowicz’s writing was already about nostalgia – for the 1970s. He wrote about precarious people, Strombeck said, who “would make it onto the page only marginally”.
I instantly thought of the key work in the video program I put together for the Wojnarowicz show in Madrid in ‘19, the video document of a performance of his “Sounds in the Distance” text which took place in Bill Rice’s backyard. Woj did his time on the road, like many of his generation, and unlike most also plunged into the life of the street. The lumpen precarious included his younger self. The book “Sounds” is a record of some of his meetings.
As I understood Strombeck, downtown writing more broadly is “concerned with how to manage these people”. Again, as in the earlier discussion on ‘ventriloquism’ [in post #3 on the London conference], are these the people who don’t, won’t, can’t speak for themselves?, or simply aren’t heard?
On the Road and in the Commune
I think North Americans hang on to a nomadism, what used to be called a ‘pioneer spirit’ – a dissatisfaction with the familiar, a chance of adventure, of betterment, or simple curiosity. All of this drives people to the road. And even, finally, to chance the Big Apple.
A sense of responsibility for others sharing one’s life space reflects the collective nature of most of the significant downtown creative projects, the “safety in numbers”, “we’re in it together” spirit of the epoch. As well as DIY, it was and still is, and maybe even more now, DIT – do-it-together.
I’ll leave aside Strombeck’s theoretical rabbit-hole, the notion of “interpretive delirium”, as per Michel de Certeau’s discussion of the moment in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) when he discovers the footprint on the beach. Academics love these asides.
"It's Your Fault"
I was struck by his provocation that, “By depicting the Lower East Side as a decadent landscape you [meaning LES wrtiers] reinforce the city commissioner’s view of it as a dead zone needing erasing.”
In these terms Strombeck discussed Catherine Texier’s Love Me Tender (1987), a novel about a young dancer working in a strip joint and her several lovers. Texier apparently writes that the cities are full of useless zombies, just like the elites said. (Maybe why Penguin published that emigre French romantic author?) Less convincingly, Strombeck indicts the indie magazine Redtape’s “Cracked Mirror” issue, with its multiple contributors in the same brief.
In my view, the abandoned styles of living in a busted-up proletarian multi-ethnic neighborhood licensed bad behaviors by artists from middle class backgrounds. What have artists to do with the heavenly motions of big capital which presage an impending doom of their bohemian utopia? Drunkenness can lead to double consciousness as easily as double vision. NYCers, I think, have always been fatalistic about the big monkies who swing in the realms high above them. At least they don’t mis-identify the piss that rains down below as rain.
Who’s to Blame for Negative Urban Outcomes?
Strombeck also cited the late critic Craig Owens, that the “art galleries capitalize on ideas of risk and danger”. Literary artists, he seemed to argue, were as much compradors in gentrification as the artists whose gallery infrastructure enabled by landlords actually effected it.
This is an old canard, which enraged critics Walter Robinson and Carlo McCormick at the time. The article by Craig Owens which Strombeck cites follows directly that pair’s huge takeout on the East Village art scene in Art in America, in essence arguing that the artists were all guilty. Gregory Sholette fretted that all the political artwork in the Owens piece was uncredited.
For me, the come-to-Grundrisse Marxists of the haute theorie crowd mostly ignored the vigorous activism that was contesting the bleak situations they so glumly described. Both on home ground, and near abroad, they could have pitched in on organizing a good deal more. Even then, had everyone put their queer shoulders to the wheel, it’s hard to imagine the heavenly motions could have been much slowed. (By “motions” I allude not to old Yahweh, but rather to the gods of Greek colonists and mercenaries.)
Finally, this is a book I have to read. In the pre-text Strombeck writes that NYC’s 1975 fiscal crisis [is] now recognized as a template for the austerity politics of the past four decades, and he “directly considers the era’s aesthetic production in terms of the crisis”. It sounds like a synthetic doxa for left cultural studies of the period.
“Hard Line Brainstorm”
Felix Vogel (U of Kassel) spoke on the Art & Language group in the mid-’70s. He moved off a text by Corrine Robbins in a 1976 issue of the Soho Weekly News, “Go Marxist or Move to Texas” (odd, A&L historian Michael Corris eventually did – although he certainly remained Marxist!).
Vogel read Mel Ramsden’s unpublished text “Hard Line Brainstorm” (1975, unpublished; estate of Sarah Charlesworth) where Ramsden writes, “the means of authority ‘stand above’ [artistic] production”, leading artists to a “passive vulnerability” to manipulation.
Mel Ramsden was probably the sharpest analyst in that crowd. I recall Anna Chave opening our eyes to the not-so-quiet political subtexts in Minimal art through a Ramsden text in The Fox.
Vogel reported Zoran Popovic’s 1976 A&L-based film Struggle in New York for its critique of the newly launched art center P.S. 1 – “if P.S. 1 is an alternative, why does it pose no threat to the ruling class?” It is simply “hiding the real working class community and replacing it with artists”. (The film’s script was published in 2020.)
I think that’s a little hard on Alanna Heiss. It was precisely her ‘in’ with the elites on her board (like Brendan Gill) that enabled her to colonize so much vacant property with adventurous artists. The initial residency program put scores of international artists into studios there, seeding a new “loose collection of international vagabonds”, as Vogel described Soho. Unlike Charlotte Moorman’s, Heiss’s was an authoritarian project, but she was at least a philosopher queen.
Finally, Vogel believes his research into the A&L-to-AMCC continuum of the mid-1970s, the period of the deflation of the anti-Vietnam war movement, can help define the “locally specific relationship between art and politics” of this time. That could be helpful.
I’d like to see the era of Pattern & Decoration painting in NYC look like something besides expatriate commie tourists kicking cans around the basement of the Empire.
Whispers about Vietnam
Catherine Quan Damman (NYU) spoke about the overlooked work of Anthony Ramos, “About Media” (1977). Ramos was a student of Allan Kaprow at Cal Arts who did time in prison as a conscientious objector (CO) during the Vietnam War. His work concerned President Jimmy Carter’s post-war pardon of Vietnam War draft resisters.
Damman spoke about the black artist’s reputation for honesty and authenticity, and the “labor of authorial construction”. Unfortunately, the room was stifling, the fans were whirring, and despite our pleas the speaker could scarcely be heard.
Aporias
I also have few notes for Jeannine Tang’s (New School) talk on Julie Tolentino, lesbian cult performer and principal motivator of a venue called the Clit Club. I confess that, though I love the name, I never went; nor might I have been allowed in if I had. WOW (Women’s One World) cafe and Dixon Place were as far as I went, and mostly to see Diane Torr.
I noted the cool-looking figural calendar, and the curious affective questionnaire sent to people involved with the Clit Club – how did it smell? What did you wear? Issues Tang was concerned with included performance art in a context of mutual disaffection, and how art history recognizes friendship.
Tellus: The Cassette Magazine
Joseph Nechvatal, my old comrade from Colab days, did an hour-long “listening session” drawn from the archive of the Tellus audio magazine project. Nechvatal DJ’d from his laptop; the entire run of the cassette journal are online at Ubuweb.net.
He told how he got into this. “The [Sony] Walkman really did it for me. You could have your own private soundtrack of the city.” Cassette tape was already part of the mail art scene, being sent around.
As he played the selections, Nechvatal made wry comments on the sound art and music scene of the day. He played an early Lamonte Young piece, the Dia Foundation-supported musician for whom he worked for a time. Of the No Wave selections he said, “if you knew how to play an instrument it was held against you”. He played “noise scapes”, and a work by Julius Eastman who “slows it to a heroin pace”.
The later issues of Tellus threw a wider net. “We got bored with downtown, so we went international…. New York is a port, a place of fluidity…. It’s a mental space of networks.”
New York, Our Time
Having missed the first screening, I caught the second by Vivienne Dick, of her 2020 film New York, Our Time. For this project she hunted up old friends from her days in the city in the late ‘70s. They spoke with her in relaxed conversation about their lives then and now – “like a sandwich of time”. Lydia Lunch did a kind of performative set piece: “This is to the ghosts.”
She also talked to some of her friend’s children: “You can’t live alone” in NYC today, said one, because of the expense of rent. “Neoliberal New York is unbearable.”
The film had a very relaxed femisocial feeling, like kitchen table conversation. It was anti-documentary; despite that some of her conversants are known figures, they aren’t identified. They were all friends, not this one and that one. Vivienne has a great still listening style. Her friend Andrew, who I met in Madrid later, said that was due to “spiritual training”.
I dug seeing Dick’s short takes of the period, dressing up to go out nightclubbing. Of her film, she said, “It’s kind of ethnographic, except I’m in it.”
Somehow it’s hard to grasp New York, Our Time. The film is so quiet, ruminative, and largely undeclarative about things one somehow wants to shout about. In a way, the informality of it defeats opinion.
“I like to get that kind of feel to the film, that it is just messing around,” Dick said. “Years ago, in New York when I saw quite a lot of American independent film, I was very impressed with some of the work I saw that was just like that. People playing around with the camera, making like films in their kitchen. That really grabbed me.” (Dick to McCann, 2022)
NEXT: Tish & Snooky's hair dye empire, queer counter-publics and homonormativity, roll call of black dancers, and a chicken wearing trousers.
REFERENCES
Boston MFA show, "Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation" October 18, 2020–July 25, 2021
https://www.mfa.org/exhibition/writing-the-future
On the lesser known of Basquiat’s celebrity collaborations, one might look up – Susanne Kleine, Ménage à trois: Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente (2012); preface by Robert Fleck and interviews by Dieter Buchhart with Bruno Bishofberger, Tony Shafrazi and Francesco Clemente. In which the living get the last word.
Allen Frame, Kirsten Bates, et al., “Sounds in the Distance”; performance document based on David Wojnarowicz’ text
1984 | 00:38:00 | United States | English | Color | Stereo | 4:3 | 3/4" U-matic
https://vdb.org/titles/turmoil-garden
Marc H. Miller, “Redtape Magazine, 1982-1992”, Dec 6, 2017
https://gallery.98bowery.com/news/redtape-magazine-1982-1992/
Nina Kennedy, “Remembrances of the Clit Club”, April 10, 2021
http://fem-entertainmentnews.infemnity.com/2021/04/remembrances-of-clit-club.html
Julie Tolentino Wins 2020 Queer|Art|Prize for Sustained Achievement
https://www.artforum.com/news/julie-tolentino-wins-2020-queer-art-prize-for-sustained-achievement-84210
Ruairí McCann, “New York Our Time—An Interview with Vivienne Dick”, February 2022
https://ultradogme.com/2022/02/22/vivienne-dick/
Still from Vivienne Dick's New York Our Time
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