This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s

note: photographs by Peter Hujar (1934 - 1987)

In February 1981 I moved to New York City from the metropolitan Detroit area. I was 21 years old. Also, I did not drive.

Years after the fact when I consider what might have been if I had stayed in Detroit I assume it would have been the same boredom I now recollect dimly, the same lack of stimulation - no art, no books, no film. Of course there was some, but on a limited scale & for one with no automobility, it could be inaccessible. & considering all the "dumb jobs" one could get in NYC, there was no comparable economy in the shrinking Midwest. I worked at one point at a used bookstore in Royal Oak on Woodward Ave near 13 1/2 Mile - the shop manager at one point told me (this may have been when she laid me off), "Go to New York - there's nothing here for you - you don't belong here." New York was considered highly dangerous for the most part, but open in ways that one wouldn't find in the duller & homogenous Midwest.

"Not belonging here" was also partial code for being gay - something I would understand with more depth, later. While there are environments much worse than Detroit for being gay, my own yearnings informed a sense that it could be better, somewhere else probably, probably meaning NYC. & it retrospect, it was.

By the time I arrived in NYC there was already a sense that whatever it was had ended already. The tawdry excesses of the 1970s were on the wane. For those who follow real estate in NYC, one of the curious unintentional documents of the 1970s is in the movie Saturday Night Fever, in particular the character Stephanie Mangano who becomes John Travolta's dance partner - she breaks out of the stasis of their Staten Island neighborhood to make a psychic leap to a grim studio apartment in the Upper West Side. Years afterwards when I hear people complain about "the people who've occupied rent controlled apartments FOREVER" as if this is the cause for the absurd rents in NYC, her unhappy, restless, alienated character comes to mind.

Although it was only a few years later when I got to NYC, such mobility was on the wane, although as was said to me by the Michiganders I knew who preceded me to NYC at Columbia, Barnard & NYU, "you can still find someplace."

The liberatory chaos of Delirious New York manifested itself in many ways. By 1982 I lived in a shared apt on Stanton Street off of Essex, paying $200/month, & I worked part-time (which could often be overtime - it varied) at the Bleecker St Cinema. There was still a sense of NYC in general as dangerous, & within that a sense of "downtown" - of those who live either entirely below 14th St, or entirely above it. These boundaries now seem absurd - the 10013 zip code in Tribeca is now wealthier than 10021 (the former BUtterfield 8). But my youthful blitheness factored in, let's say downtown was still poorer, economically mixed, & bohemian.

By the time I began living and working downtown there had been sea-changes in the real estate potentials of SoHo, which had become a prosperous & centralized gallery district for contemporary art. Whether working at the Bleecker, which was 1 block north of Houston, or later, beginning in 1984, when I began to work at Film Forum, at that point on Watts St at the entrance to the Holland Tunnel, on the southwestern edge of SoHo, I spent the shank of my youth in the area, & its expanding galleries of the globalizing Art World. With its "success" the galleries moved elsewhere, replaced by high end boutiques, but that came later. In the 1980s there was still a texture of differences in the area. The cafeteria Food was still open (although now when I see the Gordon Matta-Clark film of it, I realize I was never there in that earlier incarnation), there were still some small storefront businesses, and the old Italian neighborhood on Sullivan & Thompson Streets, with the local tavern Milady's. Unlike Midtown or the Financial District (which had NO residents at the time - quite a place to bicycle in the dead of night), the buildings were not too high & there was more sunlight. There were streets of heavy traffic as well as smaller residential blocks. West Broadway had already transformed significantly from what is seen in the introductory NYC scenes of the film The American Friend, which came out in 1977.

One of my memories, which seems more like fiction or fantasy, occurred in my first week in NYC, when one of my Ann Arbor friends, D, took me to a SoHo loft where we had coffee with Hannah Wilke, who I did not know of at all until several years ago - all I recall is her chewing gum art. How goofy, but one of the charms of being young & witless in such a setting is that such things can occur randomly.

Another more professional encounter was at the Bleecker St Cinema, where among other tasks, I did 16mm projection (non-union) in a small space there called the James Agee Room. One afternoon it was leased out to Louise Lawler, who did a NYC version of "A Movie Will Be Shown Without the Picture" - I projected (without the picture) the Paul Newman movie The Hustler, which is 134 minutes - something a projectionist would notice first & foremost. Again - I barely knew this from nothing.

Without any specific personal agency, the galleries were part of my everyday, which now seems incredible. Working at the Bleecker & then Film Forum & the short-lived VanDam (run by a short-lived distribution company which I suspect was a money laundering outfit) & Anthology Film Archives, when it reopened on 2nd Avenue in 1988, I took it for granted, & it was the only time in my working life when lunchtime was genuinely interesting.

In the past 2 years, working with undergrads I've found the students are more informed with our hyper media saturated environment than us oldsters - or they think they are informed, & they think that it is theirs somehow. From my middle-aged perspective it seems entirely false & misleading, but I realize that I need to go against the same youthful impulses in myself, now a fading memory, in order to contend with the ideas brought up in the exhibit This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s, curated by Helen Molesworth, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

The catalog for the exhibit documents cultural upheavals in the US (primarily), using a time frame of 1979- 1992, and as conceptual markers, the impact of feminism in art practices followed by the impact of AIDS. The essays by the curator Helen Molesworth and Frazer Ward, Kobena Mercer, Johanna Burton, Elisabeth Lebovici, Bill Horrigan, and Sarah Schulman present multiple perspectives of the time, in themes titled The End is Near, Democracy, Gender Trouble, Desire & Longing. This is an extremely rich book about art & the time.

As much as coming from the misery of Detroit to the horny energy of NYC was a boon, the 1980s was a remarkably alienating time in terms of culture. I was in Ann Arbor when Ronald Reagan was elected: the University of Michigan radio station played Leslie Gore's It's My Party on a loop for 24 hours. That is, it wasn't a party to be happy about any more.

Kobena Mercer writes:

The idea of a public space that is independent of commercial interests and separate from the state is one of the elementary building blocks of modernity. It is a concept that helped overthrow the absolutist monarchies of seventeenth-century Europe, and it was a precondition of the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century. To say that the critical art of the 1980s lays bare the restructuring of public and private boundaries that took place in late-twentieth-century life is to suggest that it is only now, with some thirty years' distance, that some of the era's aesthetic tendencies begin to reveal their far-reaching political significance.
. . . In the late 1970s conservative forces took command of "the new" by winning popular consent for their vision of a future that would consign the welfare state to history. Back when the New Right really was new it took a leading or hegemonic role in the imaginative drive to push back the frontiers of perception by positioning itself as the agent of modernization capable of redressing the ongoing crises of industrial capitalism. Neoconservativism thus heralded a future based on consumerism, new technologies, finance capital, and a service economy - all of which were to be delivered by the privatization of almost everything, from housing to education to health, that defined "the public good" under the terms of the post 1945 consensus . . .it was precisely the generative agency of the intersecting forces clustered around the shifting borders of public and private life that gave rise to multiple lines of dissensus in 1980s art. . . 1980s art reveals the catalyzing antagonisms put into by by an emergent conception of multiple publics . . . (p. 135)

Mass media, as a condition of daily life, informs the art in question, which is seen as a break with an earlier heroic High Modernism which exempted itself from politics, whether it be the perceived in activism or in daily life. Helen Molesworth posits that this was the first generation of artists to grow up with television - itself highly mutable & expansive from the 1950s through the 1980s. The deregulation & privatization of Cable TV is brought up, & there is particularly ripe mention by Dara Birnbaum, quoting Manfredo Tafuri that "television was the real architecture of the time." (p. 156).

This Will Have Been reinvests the art from the period outside its mercantile potential (or mercantile splendor - this is not a "best of" sort of collection) with an agency that addresses the Reaganite/Thatcherite retro-spasms of change that occurred in this period.

The last 2 essays, by Bill Horrigan (A Backward Glance: Video in the 1980s), & Sarah Schulman (Making Love Making Art: Living and Dying Performance in the 1980s), touch on that of which I know next to nothing - that is, the history of video; & one that which touches on something that I experienced as well - the highly mutable performance scene in the East Village, once upon a time. After reading the catalog I read Sarah Schulman's book The Gentrification of the Mind - in it she makes a comment that doing "performance" for a young artist is now synonymous with "private income" - whereas the performance she relates in the MCA catalog predates such a denotation. It's a lost world of "Whispers" on Sunday evenings at the Pyramid Club, or Jennifer Miller the Bearded Lady, all highly extraordinary & accessible in an everyday world.

The Schulman essay is up front about varying incomes, capricious real estate, & porous emotional and sexual liaisons: She also suggests some of the joy of being young & relatively carefree, in a partially collapsed city. As an addendum, I would also recommend another project Sarah & Jim Hubbard put together, the ACT UP Oral History Project.

I found the 1980s to be an intensely alienating time. Competitive class differences became marks of distinction, from the top down. Any wayward bohemian dalliance with art was superseded by a hierarchy of professionalized practitioners. With the spread of HIV and AIDS a Foucauldian paranoia of a harsh indifferent Administration (that is, multiple administrations of power) became very real and did its best to remain immovable except under the duress of insistent, dedicated activists. In terms of real estate speculation, the city became a violent machine of gentrification which has driven so many out with a hostile economic logic, for greener but not necessarily better pastures. In the abstract I tend to think of it as a kind of Hell - there is a recoupment in all these sources which gives me a plateau to think otherwise.

Sigmar Polke, 1941-2010

Michelangelo Pistoletto - No To The Increase of the Tram Fare, 1965

Michelangelo Pistoletto's mirror paintings, while not photography per se, engage the viewer with, for want of better terms, the conditions of photography. I find them meditative in regards to the act of looking in a technological, inexpressive manner, akin to either the snapshot or a news photo. They address the anonymity of photographic images, as a kind of mute recording, and the residue of looking at a photograph, unmoored as it is from its initial exposure, as a kind of after-taste. The mirror-polished steel of the surface, on which drawings from photographs are glued could be conceived as an echo of the daguerreotype, with its brilliant mirrored surface. However that seems much too historicist a reading: Instead what seems germane is the tension between a photograph as an art of both space & time, in which the recording of time is rendered as a 2-dimensional image, and the act of looking at a photograph, which is always a looking at whatever "time" is recorded as that time in the past tense, contrasted with the phenomenon of looking at that time in the here & now. The viewer is necessary to see the image & is complicit in its structure.

On a recent trip to the Detroit Institute of Arts I found a Pistoletto mirror-painting in the permanent collection of which I have no memory. The DIA is a museum I knew well in high school & college, but which I saw little of except in the past few years. The museum was renovated & expanded, re-opening in 2007 & I am just now seeing my way around its changes.

I found the Pistoletto very moving. I realize that Pistoletto's work isn't really suitable for an "emotional" reading per se. While like other examples of Arte Povera it involves a very direct experience in the here & now, it is also suffused w/ enough irony & distance to become a kind of alienated experience, it amplifies the lackings it invokes. Most often in the Pistoletto mirror-paintings it is images of others, but others barely seen, figures turning away, social scenes of no fixity, which put the viewer reflected in the scene into an oblique relation to the scene, never involved enough, not really there, but there. In this oeuvre of anonymity there are also several scenes of political activism, such as the scene in No To The Increase of the Tram Fare. The ambiguity of the relation to a political event, which can evoke both sympathy & distance, seems the ultimate subject. Other examples that come to mind are the woven global maps of Alghieri e Boetti in which the needlepoint contours of countries are filled w/ variations of their flags, or numerous paintings of Gerhard Richter, such as his portraits of leaders, or the suite of paintings of the Red Army Faction taken from news photographs - also w/ Richter, history is as common as the utter banality of the everyday, it is not "different" from more anonymous scenes. It's a kind of queasy relation to history, to politics, existing outside the boundaries of the frame of whatever - photo, weaving, painting.

The DIA has a remarkable mural sequence by Diego Rivera in the center of its original structure, made in 1933 of industry in Detroit which was paid for by Edsel Ford. The subject is primarily the manufacture of automobiles, but it also includes the pharmaceutical industry, shipping, aviation, agriculture. There was controversy about the murals in terms of Rivera being a sworn communist (although kicked out of the CP for his interactions w/ Leon Trotsky), also a communist being paid by an uber-capitalist such as Ford - I think also there was difficulty with the subject matter being a bit too close to home. The automotive money which built the DIA had fairly conservative tastes which was a happy occasion for the museum being able to acquire great Italian, Dutch & Flemish paintings, but not necessarily navigate the sedition of modern art. The Rivera murals are not biased with a specific political viewpoint, except out of sympathy with workers & the conditions of working & work as a fact of daily life. There is a cartoon-like parody of the bourgeoisie in the portrayal of factory visitors to the Rouge Plant, seen on a platform overlooking the assembly line (& looking almost like something from the Fleischer Studios) - then, as now, a feature of Ford. But otherwise any insidious propaganda is lacking, from what I can discern.

The direct engagement between Rivera & the factory is not there in the Pistoletto & his strikers, but I think the sympathy is still at least somewhat extant. But it has become a mediation of a mediation, hanging there mysteriously.

Joachim Schmid, Other People's Photographs

Photography as a medium of originality can be explored in museum collections, from the rough-hewn negatives & positives of the calotype, to the MFA mandated images of today. If one were to consider photography not just as another medium, but as a social phenomenon, its ubiquity as well as its banality must be taken into account. From the introduction of the Kodak camera (& image) in 1888, which created a global amateur market, photography has had a role beyond its aesthetics, in the everyday.

The industrialization of imagery, its crazy ubiquity, as well as its acceptance, indicates a faith which may extend beyond the average. The lowest common denominator may be recognition, if nothing else. A tacit faith in doing something, with a machine, which in its objectivity, denotes a moment, its reality.

I first noticed the books of Joachim Schmid on the shelves at Printed Matter. There is a great deal of humor in Schmid's self-published books, such as Phantome, in which a sort of game is involved, matching up media images of criminals with their crimes. Schmid addresses the absolute & unconscious aspect of photography, the fact that it is accepted without a question, as well as its role in daily life, whether or not that is actually clear. It is simply there.

The books,"Other People's Pictures" are a series of POD books available from Blurb. Culled from flickr, Schmid has created his own taxonomies using appropriate key words, & utilizing the daily excess of on line postings. "Other people's pictures" indicates a willingness to share & to be like others as much as it will show a sense of standing alone. Photography is a lonely but ubiquitous enterprise. I is like others.

Schmid's books interject in a daily electronic culture, a vast every-expanding archive of virtual collections.

The apparent clarity of selected keywords ("Mickey" or "Digits" for example) become strange & exotic. Ostensibly each book ordered from Schmid is itself unique in its selection & editing. No two are exactly alike, yet all are so familiar.

Photography in Schmid's book becomes a shared technology rather than a singular expressive medium. Our fantasies are also someone else's & we can see so, easily. On sites such as flickr this may be the salient detail/ which prompts not only an excess of compiling images, but of circulating them in an efficient & globally open manner.

Peter Hujar - Photographs 1956-1958

The current show of Peter Hujar's early photographs, dated 1956-1958, at Matthew Marks Gallery, convinces me (not that I really needed to be convinced) that Peter Hujar is one of truly great photographers of our time. "Our time" may be a bit porous - these images are now over 50 years old, & Hujar died in 1987, but perhaps his "time" is now & in the future. My suspicion is that there is much work that has never been seen, like the images in the show, which I do not think have had much circulation.

The photographs are of what are now referred to as "developmentally challenged" children. One of my students, who accompanied me to the show, asked, "Are these special needs students?" These terms are bureaucratic & with all good intentions, more inhuman than any pejorative term in their sentimental but airtight classification. It's language which acts as a placebo for the speaker, absolving the speaker of having to say much else. The Hujar images predate a very well-known body of work by Diane Arbus of the same subject, by about 10 years & have some structural similarities (square format, black-&-white). The Arbus images are rightly famous for their moodiness, their sense of isolation & incarceration. Peter Hujar's images have a very different emotional tenor in what could be seen as ebullience, anarchy & a very deep sweetness. Both bodies of work were done in institutions - institutions for those who would be classified (using the volume titles employed by August Sander for his planned books of portraits) as among "The Last People." Such institutions also function as as a kind of container for society, hiding away its defective members. The intrusion of a photographer in such a setting has many possibilities, such as a journalistic narrative of whatever stripe. What distinguishes both the Arbus & Hujar portfolios is their media-uselessness. Why? What for? The photographer in her/his naked voyeurism shows a curiosity & suspension of judgment which allows for multiple readings of the subjects & their images. We can't look at the photos & know automatically what to think.

Peter Hujar's photographs resonate with me so strongly. Everyone I know thinks he's great, so I feel a bit presumptuous saying this, but he appears neglected in histories & anthologies. His photographs of animals are as strong as his portraits. His photographs of nighttime streets are as erotic as his nudes. Hujar's work is permeated with mortality: I hesitate to describe his work as morbid, despite the many photographs of dead animals, or the photographs of the catacombs in Palermo, or a portfolio I saw once of the tableaux of the long-gone Wax Musee at Coney Island, which was primarily of serial killers in action (I remember Richard Speck strangling a nurse, in particular). Or the portrait of Candy Darling in her hospital bed. Or the portrait of Edwin Denby just before Denby died. Nevertheless in such finely wrought forms I think there's a strong sense of corporeality: Flesh has its own life, whether it is a waddling duck or the enormous cock of a nude boy.

Estimations of mortality are written out of a lot of current photographic discourse. The photographic is understood more in semiotic terms, or as a cultural product. Hujar's photographs are more like a 17th century memento mori image: a Dutch bouquet in which in such splendid beauty there is the beetle & the worm, slightly hidden, the slight but advancing wilt, with their intimations of passing.

I try to discern: what are my favorite Hujar images? The list just extends - it is a useless prospect. I hesitate to use the word "classic photography" to describe his work, which evokes more formal black-&-white images of western landscapes or abstractions of natural forms done with The Zone System, yet Hujar is part of such a former photographic world. Hujar's work can be classified in very traditional terms: portraits, nudes, cityviews & landscapes. But the work is intense & immediate which undermines its great formality. Hujar's work is imbued with a remarkable moral sense: the same level of carefulness goes towards both a woman passed out in his stairwell on 2nd Ave, or a portrait of Miss Peggy Lee. I am also reminded of this in his portraits of the elderly Edwin Denby or Lotte Eisner. I have little reference to Hujar's psychology, except in the work, which is perhaps a more ideal way to contemplate anyone's creative endeavors. One hopes that at some point there is a truly great book of this work, in all its scope.

souvenirs of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts

*****

Oliver Herring, Nathan; 50,000 Beds

Last Sunday I attended the opening at the Aldrich Museum in Ridgefield, CT, of "50,000 Beds" a project by Chris Doyle, of videos produced in hotel rooms in Connecticut, with exhibition venues at the Aldrich, Artspace in New Haven, and Real Art Ways in Hartford. The shows are comprised of videos made specifically for the project, all of which involve use of a hotel room somewhere in Connecticut. Curiously, the catalogue for the show includes a listing of participating hotels with contact information, which indicates a kind of touristic agenda, although the videos could hardly be seen as infomercials for scenic CT. Or one could consider them the kinds of infomercials one could at least hope for.

Oliver Herring's video "Nathan" is of "Nathan" dancing in a strenuous balletic manner in a tiny crowded & otherwise undistinguished hotel room. Nathan is tall & in a suit. The suit has an artificial aspect: it does not seem to fit the boy. Or it does not fit his movements which are extremely athletic & both graceful & rough. Tumbles accompany leaps & pirouettes. Stretches collide with the furniture. & one can hear huffing, puffing & the thuds of Nathan's body hitting walls & floor. As I understand it, the video was done with a certain amount of spontaneity, without a defined choreography, the exertions of the eponymous Nathan and chance forming the perimeters of the medium. Oliver Herring's camera work is hand-held & as improvised as the movements of the boy Nathan. The video reminded me of silent film comedy & also the "New American Cinema" of downtown NYC in the 1960s. Quizzed about his working methods, the filmmaker Ron Rice once answered, "Turn the camera on." Oliver Herring's video reminds me of the intense beauty that can be found in everyday delirium - incantatory, full of longing, parodic, witty. It is just fun to watch. What is truly distinctive about the work is an exultation of energy, which I would attribute to both the hard-working model & the very alert videographer.