Photo of Leonard recently, by Angie Sloan
Last night was un poco loco, sitting in a hotel in a beach town in Catalunya in the middle of the night, watching the live stream of the memorial for Leonard Abrams in faraway NYC. Despite the many absences of friends and influenced (those whom Leonard enabled), the event at the Bowery Poetry Club succeeded in evoking the spirit of our dear departed friend. I am sure a few cocktails helped those present. I wrote a text for the memorial, which I’ll shape up later, but for now I’m posting a text by Leonard himself.
In 2022, Howl gallery hosted a panel discussion for my book Art Worker, and Leonard spoke then. I found the text he read odd, but he rolled around to explain it at the end. His sudden death a year later was a shock to the Lower East Side creative community. He was a key figure, a linchpin there, a person who never ceased to engage with the recollections and continuations of that golden period in American art and culture which the the magazine he ran chronicled. Leonard’s passing in the spring of 2023 marked the unraveling of the first-hand knowledge of our bohemia.
“I still can’t believe he’s not here with us. It’s like a bird swooped down and carried him off.” – Bonny Finberg
The Broken-Open People
by Leonard Abrams
What I wanted to talk about today was the importance of breaking things open. One of the reasons there was so much creative activity going on in downtown New York in the 1970s and ‘80s is that there was a convergence of people that had been broken open in some way. And this allowed a lot of stuff to dribble out. It was the kind of thing we all find so interesting because the typical state of people and other living things is to cover up your brokenness so as to present an unblemished, impermeable exterior to the outside world so that the outside world would be less prone to destroying it. And we love looking at broken people because it saves us the hassle of being broken open ourselves at any given moment.
I’m not suggesting that these broken people were just dying to turn up in New York and show everyone their wounds. Perhaps it’s more likely that they thought they were doing a pretty good job of covering them up, but maybe their wounds were easier to see than before. So I’m saying that New York became a magnet for broken open people. Why? Well maybe it was because New York had gotten such a bad reputation that the broken people thought: Well, hey, I can’t make it any worse. Or maybe their brokenness caused them to look for a place in which it was easier to survive because so many people didn’t want to live there. Or maybe their brokenness caused them to see it as some kind of paradise instead of the godawful wreck that John Q. Public thought it was.
In any case, all these cracked, bleeding [inaudible] people came here to play out their lives in relative peace and anonymity. Or to make a project out of their brokenness, to use it as a starting point for some kind of narrative about the condition of all of us. Of course every good artist’s drive depends upon the kinds of wounds that tear the facade away from themselves and those around them.
Now this is not to imply that everybody making some kind of art in the inner city neighborhoods of New York came here with that purpose in mind. Some had nowhere else to go, and some were just born here. But ask yourself, what would make you climb over a barbed wire fence and risk electrocution and getting crushed to death just to write your name on a train? Or pull apart a 100 amp streetlight to power a block party sound system? Now if you calculate that the risk of not painting a train or throwing a party was worse than getting killed, you take it. That’s just common sense. Of course this works better with teenagers.
Pretty soon comes the unbroken people, or rather the ones who have hidden their cracks and breaks better, and have no interest in showing them to anyone else, but prefer building up layers of armor to displaying their soft spots. And these folks do a pretty good job of displacing the other ones. And this is when the party starts to end. By “party” I mean a real explosion of creativity and more than a little bit of bacchanalia, and chances are we won’t see anything like it for a while. Unless of course things fall apart again. I wouldn’t mind seeing that happen, but not everyone is with me on that one.
– recorded at Howl Happening Gallery, May 2022 by Stephen Zacks
LINKS
EV Grieve, April 4, 2023
RIP Leonard Abrams
https://evgrieve.com/2023/04/rip-leonard-abrams.html
Marc H. Miller, “Leonard Abrams (1954 – 2023): Remembering the Publisher of the East Village Eye”, April 6, 2023
https://gallery.98bowery.com/news/leonard-abrams-1954-2023-remembering-the-publisher-of-the-east-village-eye/
East Village Eye, 1979-1987 - Gallery 98
https://gallery.98bowery.com/exhibition/east-village-eye/
Leonard's East Village Eye website news section chronicles his continuous festive organizing around the community his magazine brought together
https://www.east-village-eye.com/news.html
Leonard's film "Quilombo Country" website
https://www.quilombofilm.com/
"We can't leave, because if we leave we could lose our land. So we have to stay in our place. If we leave to work, we lose the land. Because farmers from outside will come in and take the land." Sounds like NYC.
Via expatriate ex-Eye comrade Tony Heiberg -- "Here’s my tribute to my dear friend Leonard Abrams that will be shown tonight - along with many other testimonials - at his memorial in New York at the Bowery Poetry Club. I hadn’t intended to post this here but technical requirements meant it was necessary before I could send it on to Leonard’s sister, Bethany Haye". Tony's tribute did not play in NYC, but you can see it here --
Chris "Daze" Ellis, Club Amazon, MCNY, Martin Wong collection
No comments:
Post a Comment