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.

Francis Bacon/John Deakin

The most profound moment I have had viewing Francis Bacon was not seeing any painting itself, but a brief scene in the Pier Paolo Pasolini film Teorema.

The plot of Teorema is simple: an unnamed visitor (Terence Stamp) comes to the house of of Milanese industrialist for an extended visit. The mysterious stranger sleeps with each member of the household: father, mother, sister, son, maid. This encounter has a profound effect on each, altered by an instance of unconditional love, & each begins to act in a way, for want of better term, less puppet-like than in their previous existences, they become "more themselves" to use pop terminology. The teenage son, formerly undistinguished & "one of the boys" becomes an artist. The boy becomes aware of his singularity, that his emotions & sexuality place him outside polite society, & that the transcendence of his alienation is in his creativity. There is a brief scene in which Terence Stamp sits with the boy & they look at a book of paintings by Francis Bacon, at which point, as the pages turn, there is a brief pause over a painting I know from the Detroit Institute of Arts, Study for a Crouching Nude, from 1952, which is now currently on view in the Bacon centenary exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum.

I should also point out that as sweetly tender as the scene between Terence Stamp & Andres Jose Cruz Soublette is, it is equivocal as well. The "theorem" of the title is stated at the onset of the film: that no matter what, the bourgeoisie is always wrong. The boy's subsequent exploration of his self-expression has a parodic trajectory, wherein the boy uses paint gesturally & finally his own bodily fluids, semen & piss, as his medium. One has to laugh.

With some skepticism regarding "self-expression" through my cinematic dalliance with Pasolini & Bacon in the back of my mind, such self-expression is a bit jarring in its prevalence as a curatorial strategy in the current show at the Met, in the heavily attended guided tours of the paintings, which discuss Bacon's "lifestyle" as part of the aesthetic which shapes the work.

I have been to the show twice now & in each instance I heard the Detroit painting discussed by a guide with a thick notebook, giving, laudably, a very thorough discussion of the painting: citing its visual quotes from Michelangelo, the Eisenstein film Battleship Potemkin (The Ultimate Edition) (2pc) (Full B&W), & the Nazi Nuremberg rallies - an image ostensibly of a classic subject of western painting, the nude, it becomes overshadowed by the physical claustrophobia which such visual references render as a kind of disastrous fate. Also I heard that Bacon drank excessively, had sexual trysts with anonymous sailors & businessmen, that he was a sexual masochist who liked to be whipped, that he treated those near him poorly, especially his lover George Dyer, who committed suicide, etc. These are all biographical details which can be found in the literature about Bacon. Hearing them discussed along w/ formal discussions of paintings, to guided tours of mostly older people (trying to imagine my grandmother hearing this) adds a burlesque element to otherwise somewhat dry material. While there are numerous discussions of Pablo Picasso's mistresses, for example, mostly in terms of identification of the models in the paintings, none have the gravity ascribed to Bacon's vices as a kind of direct channel to the work at hand, & how it is there for us to look at and understand.

I find this curiously offensive. I can't help but think that Bacon's homosexuality & his openness about S/M sex, both socially marginalized aspects to his personality, are assumed to be the direct causes of the rather miserable emotional tenor of the work, as opposed to, say, the physical conditions of Europe after World War II, or the unredeemable atheism of the paintings (from a Catholic country no less - there's an entire gallery of screaming toothsome Popes in the exhibit). This is a conflation of art history, pop psychology & tabloid journalism presented as biographic narrative, explaining the grand masterpiece(s). Why something is what it is, like that.

There is a certain hilarity in guided tours being led on a tour of the wild side along w/ cultural information, but it does make me question double-standards in our society, in this supposed example of "frankness."

There have been intimations of deviant sexual practices of Picasso, also Man Ray (Black Dahlia Avenger: The True Storyby Steve Hodel includes accounts of an S/M "ring," possibly imagined, which included Man Ray & the director John Huston, with private parties in a "hidden" room inside Lloyd Wright's Sowden House on Franklin Ave.in Los Angeles in the 1940s) - Man Ray catalogs include images of hooded & chained women, without any charges of perversity accompanying the images, or any morbid kinkiness used to "explain" his practices. Picasso's erotic etchings detail male domination of the female, all of it "classical" enough to weave into the dry continuum of art history.

It's not my intention to detail perversities lurking in standard art histories, but I find the candor used to discuss Bacon in effect further marginalizes him as a kinky drunken fag, regardless if he was one or not, by making him further strange & different.

What interested me most in the exhibit was the use of photographs by John Deakin, as well as other images taken from Bacon's studio, which were all used for paintings (images by Eadweard Muybridge, stills from the Battleship Potemkin, newspaper photos). In the biographic accounts of Bacon, John Deakin (1912-1972) is an irascible figure, perhaps more gin-soaked than Bacon, basically always nearby on a barstool, a perfect sidekick, w/ a drunk's nastiness, & what seems little emotional connection to others. Deakin worked for Vogue, as well as making portraits for Bacon on commission for eventual paintings. Deakin's portraits lack glamor, they do not compliment, yet they have an amazing presence & in their high-contrast black-&-white extremes seem prescient of later photographic work such as William Klein's images of New York, or the portraits of Richard Avedon - all of which have some morbidity to them. The camera image works as a mechanical memento mori - ripeness & rot.

The retrieval of Deakin's prints, from filthy floors & garbage cans, speaks as well of Deakin's apparent apathy to his extraordinary work. His visibility now exists from the scavenging efforts of gallerists & the pungent memories of those who knew him. For me, looking at photos of George Dyer, Muriel Belcher, the Bernard brothers, Isabel Rawsthorne, Henrietta Moraes, Lucian Freud, etc. has more to say about lives in London in the early 1950s, those who didn't believe in much & found each other in various bars, including the Colony Club, run by Muriel Belcher. Photos, memoirs, movies speak more to me than the great paintings themselves.

There are 2 books of photos: John Deakin: Photographs and A Maverick Eye: The Street Photography of John Deakin. Both have an archaeological appeal as no systematic archives were kept & many of the prints are damaged. I doubt Deakin will ever emerge in any histories of photography: he is not stunningly innovative or original, but for the company he kept, but I can't help but think of how profound I find these little bits of a lost world, as despairing or destructive as it might have been, & how pitiful or pathetic it may have been perceived. This is where I would locate any weltschmerz, rather than in any grand artistic gesture.

from the NY Times, last week:

Den Mother to the Louche and Famous

By GEOFFREY WHEATCROFT

LONDON

A VISITOR to the magnificent Francis Bacon exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art might easily pass by an alcove filled with photographs of Bacon’s friends. Among them is a tiny, yellowing snapshot of a striking woman gazing at the camera, taken around 1965. But then few Americans would even recognize the name of Muriel Belcher, or know about the part she played in Bacon’s life, as his den mother of sorts, and about the club she ran as his refuge.

She was the greatest of Soho hostesses, from 1948, when she opened the Colony Room Club on Dean Street here, until her death in 1979. The place we all called Muriel’s was a drinking club, a salon, a little community of its own (and one about which this reporter is regrettably well qualified to write, having spent too much of his early life there). What makes the story more poignant today is that not only have most of the players departed, but also the stage itself is dark. Muriel and Francis are no more, and neither is the Colony.

So we’re left with memories, of the kind novelists convey better: “It is an old timetable now, disintegrating at its folds, and headed ‘This schedule in effect July 5, 1922.’ But I can still read the gray names, and they will give you a better impression than my generalities of those who accepted Gatsby’s hospitality.” On another old timetable I can still read the names of those who drank at Muriel’s in July 1972.

Among them were writers, hustlers, shady politicians, decayed aristocrats and petty criminals, maybe more Anthony Powell than F. Scott Fitzgerald. But you could also find some of the most famous painters of the age, and Muriel’s deserves at least a small footnote in the history of art.

In those days Soho was full of clubs, though very different from the haughty gentlemen’s establishments of St. James’s Street and Pall Mall. They existed partly to refresh thirsty “afternoon men” at a time when the pubs were obliged to shut from 3 to 5:30 p.m., but each had its own character. Gerry’s on Shaftesbury Avenue was for actors (more likely “resting” than working). The Kismet, a k a the Iron Lung, on Cranbourn Street, also in a basement, had two bars for two clienteles. Back in the ’60s, in the more bohemian bar on the left, I briefly met “the Roberts,” the inseparable painters Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde, while in the other bar somber men in raincoats and hats stood drinking and talking quietly: this was the London underworld and the plainclothes police meeting on equal terms.

But Muriel’s was sui generis. You passed through a door beside an Italian restaurant, climbed stairs smelling of damp or worse, and entered a dark green room with a bar to the left. The walls were covered with pictures, from a cartoon of Muriel by the jazz musician Wally Fawkes (a k a Trog) to a conversation piece set in the Colony by the painter Michael Andrews.

Nothing was more striking than the hostess herself, perched birdlike on her stool, drink in one hand and cigarette in the other, with one eye on the door to block unwelcome visitors and the other on customers to make sure they were spending enough. And all the while she kept up her machine-gun chatter: sarcastic, witty, scabrously obscene.

Her family was Birmingham Jewish, or so I believe. She had made her way to London and the demimonde, and during the war opened her first club, the Music Box, whose core membership seems to have been the better sort of homosexual officer in the Brigade of Guards (not as small a constituency as you might think).

Then she moved to that upstairs room on Dean Street. Although Bacon was already making his name, he needed pocket money, and Muriel paid him to bring in rich patrons. If the word isn’t too far-fetched, she became his muse, while he became one of Muriel’s “daughters.” Most men were “she” to Muriel; it could be disconcerting when some elderly major was introduced with the words, “She was a very gallant little lady on the Somme.”

Before long most of what would later be known as the School of London congregated there, including Frank Auerbach and Lucian Freud as well as Bacon and Andrews. That painting by Andrews showed the names on the schedule in effect in the mid-1960s. Clustered around Muriel are her companion Carmel; Jeffrey Bernard (dropout, boozer, wit and later Spectator columnist); Henrietta Moraes (also much painted by Bacon); Lady Rose McClaren (the déclassé sister of the Marquess of Anglesey); and John Deakin, who took the photograph of Muriel, as well as several others in the Bacon exhibition at the Met.

Also Bacon and Mr. Freud, whose friendship had been commemorated years before in another painting, Mr. Freud’s haunting small portrait of Bacon. They could often be seen talking together in the corner, a study in contrasts: Mr. Freud reserved, ironic, abstemious (and conspicuously heterosexual — Muriel’s was very camp, not to say lewd, but far from merely what was then called a “queer club”); Bacon more expansive, especially while the drink flowed.

As it did when he was around. “Champagne for your real friends and real pain for your sham friends” was his favorite Irish toast, and he meant it, both ways. He said superfluously that Muriel’s was “a place where we came to dissolve our inhibitions,” and his were very solvent.

Even after a long drinking session Bacon might still be genial. Though he did once tear open my shirt front, that wasn’t anger, or lust, but simply because he couldn’t quite stand upright and was trying to break his fall.

But obstreperous on occasion veered toward obnoxious. Late one evening he was so truculent that Ian Board, Muriel’s barman asked me to get him out of the Colony, which I did by taking him down the road to a casino where, since he could scarcely tell rouge from noir by then, he lost an enormous sum.

If Bacon was by turns affable and abusive, Muriel herself was “a benevolent witch,” in the words of the writer and musician George Melly. Her humor was certainly distinctive. A friend once surprised us all by getting married and begetting a son. We lunched to celebrate, before climbing the stairs for a postprandial drink and to tell Muriel about this happy event. Her own slightly deflating mode of congratulation was to say, “It’s amazing what a poof can do when she tries.”

Writers and moviemakers as well as painters have portrayed Muriel. Rodney Ackland’s play “The Pink Room” opened in London in 1952, but not for long, since critics were shocked by the frank picture of inebriation and sexual variety in a club very much like the Colony. But the play was revived and televised many years later as “Absolute Hell,” with Judi Dench as the formidable hostess, and very good she was, if too ladylike for Muriel.

In the 1998 biopic “Love Is the Devil,” Bacon is played by Derek Jacobi, his companion George Dyer by Daniel Craig (whose fans can see more of him anatomically here than in his later James Bond films), and our hostess by Tilda Swinton. Although she doesn’t sound anything like Muriel, she looks curiously like her, and the tricksy-arty cinematography through a fisheye lens captures the atmosphere of the Colony rather well.

Not everyone loved Muriel and her club. I once took my friend Shiva Naipaul — younger brother of V. S. Naipaul and a brilliant writer himself, who died suddenly in 1985 at 40 — up to the Colony for a digestif. After a few minutes he said: “Can we please leave? I find this place infinitely depressing.”

But many others were captivated by that room, and not just the people you might expect. The Labor member of Parliament Tom Driberg might be found talking to one of the journalists who liked to look in at Muriel’s, like Peter Jenkins, the liberal columnist, and, more surprisingly, the radical turned conservative Paul Johnson.

Now we can look in no more. Muriel died barely into her 70s, and by the time Bacon died in 1992 he and Mr. Freud had fallen out, quite why I never knew. To make it sadder, that beautiful portrait by Mr. Freud was stolen from an exhibition in Berlin and has never been seen since.

After Muriel died, the Colony was kept going by Mr. Board, and after his death in 1994 by Michael Wojas. But he closed the club some months ago, and sold the contents. Great efforts were made to save the Colony, which had acquired a newer membership, some of them well-known younger artists, and a fund-raiser was held before Christmas, but to no avail. This is not the place to describe the acrimonious and litigious upshot, and although there are some plans to reopen the Colony, almost certainly in some other location, it will not be the same.

Many years ago Jenkins gestured round him, and said fervently he hoped places like this would never vanish. But Muriel’s has, and for some of us Soho today is a place of ghosts, gray names from a green room.