Beat The Heat

Specific exhibitions almost always determine my museum-going, but the prospect of air-conditioned sightseeing with friends from Colorado lured me to MoMA during an unusually sweltering heatwave.

I'm not a big fan of abstract art, but "Jack Whitten: The Messenger" made a huge impression, and not just because of the enormous scale of much of his work. The 78-year-old mixed media artist, whose studio had been located in Lower Manhattan since 1962, saw the Twin Towers go up and up . . . and then come crashing down.

Self-Portrait (1979)

After the 2001 terrorist attacks, he spent the next five years creating this mostly acrylic painting which incorporates blood, hair, ash and dust. It actually made me shudder.

"9.11.01" (2006)

With the exception of Whitten's ghostly self-portrait and this tribute to Jean Michel Basquiat, the only indications of his African-American ethnicity are found in his titles.

"For J.M.B" (1988)

"Memory Container" (partial, 1972)

"Golden Spaces" (partial, 1971)

"Four Wheel Drive" (1970)

The intricacy of his mosaic work astonishes.

"Black Monolith Il (Homage To Ralph Ellison The Invisible" (1994)

"Flying High For Betty Carter" (1998)

"Data II" (1991)

"Blue Chips: A Dedication To Jackson Pollock" (2006-07)

"Quantum Wall, VIII (For Arshile Gorky, My First Love In Painting)" (2017)

You really can't go wrong with MoMA's permanent collection although my youngest companion spent more time looking at her phone than the art that that attracts visitors from all over the world.  New millennium kids!

"Still Life with Three Puppies" by Paul Gauguin (1888)

Has an anarchist ever been depicted with so much flair?

"Opus 217. Against the Enamel of a Background Rhythmic with Beats and Angles, Tones, and Tints, Portrait of M. Félix Fénéon in 1890" by Paul Signac (1890)

Self-Portrait by Oskar Kokoschka (1913)

Several works reminded me yet again how much our south-of-the-border neighbor has contributed to 20th century art.  I really would like to return to Mexico City.  Five days wasn't nearly enough.

"My Grandparents, My Parents, and |" by Frida Kahlo (1936)

"Cubist Landscape" by Diego Rivera (1912)

"Echo of a Scream" by David Alfaro Siqueiros (1937)

"Head of the Montserrat, II" by Julio González (1942)

Will anyone ever paint a Tesla supercharging station so evocatively?

"Gas" by Edward Hopper (1940)

I was surprised to see a kitty in "Eat," Andy Warhol's 1964 collaboration with Robert Indiana. Twenty seconds of the 45-minute "underground film" was plenty.

"Portrait of My Mother" by Florine Stettheimer (1925)

I never would have guessed who painted this Depression-era poet.  His left-wing politics likely influenced the artist, triggering an FBI investigation during the early 1950s.  By that time her style had evolved considerably.

Kenneth Fearing by Alice Neel (1935)

"Dancer in the Mirror" by Max Pechstein (1923)

The Documentation Center in Nuremberg cites this artist's work as a prime example of what the Nazi's called "degenerate" art. 

 

"Leonie" by Otto Dix (partial, 1923)

"Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites" by Mike Kelley (1987) occupies an entire gallery. He sewed the stuffed animals face-in to dampen the cute factor!

Hyundai partners with MoMA to showcase the work of emerging artists and to promote the car company's credit card.  This is America, after all.

Thanks for the Memories

You get to be a gay man of a certain age in the city that never sleeps, and sometimes you can find a personal connection to museum exhibits as I discovered at the New York Historical Society where work by Village Voice photographer Fred W. McDarrah was on display.  Anyone who's ever read this blog knows that Andy Warhol and the scene at the Factory drew me here more than anything else.  Here, McDarrah has photographed Cecil Beaton taking his picture with the Johnson twins. Jed (closest to Andy) was his caretaker after Valerie Solanas nearly killed him, and eventual lover.  Andy looks almost pretty, as if he put make-up on for the shoot.

Of course trans people were well-represented at the Factory and in the movies Andy made with Paul Morrissey.  Women In Revolt was my bewildering first exposure to the genre.  It featured three trans women whose freaky personae made me deeply uneasy.  McDarrah took this photo of Jackie Curtis at a party celebrating the publication of Rock Dreams by Guy Peellaert and Nik Cohn, one of my earliest pop culture purchases.

At the time, including David Bowie in the rock star pantheon gathered at this diner (where's Paul?) was a bold, unprecedented move, one of the reasons I sprung $8 from my very tight budget for the book. 

Lou Reed immortalized Candy Darling in "Walk on the Wild Side" around the same time, when I was a freshman at Columbia.

I stayed in New York the summer after my sophomore year.  Tom and I ventured to the 82 Club with Niko, a hip Argentinian fencing friend of his who plowed through my unread copy of Gravity's Rainbow while wearing not much more than a black thong and clogs on the South Lawn, where pro-Palestinian demonstrators camped more than half a century later. It's quite possible that this same contingent of "female impersonators" from the club, who marched in the 4th annual Gay Liberation Day parade--the forerunner of Pride--had teased us about our age and sexual orientation a few weeks earlier.  We definitely were a hit.

David and I went to see Charles Ludlam and his Ridiculous Theater Company perform in The Ventriloquist's Wife. The campy humor went way over our mostly untutored heads.  Less than a decade later, Ludlam, just 44, was gone. His obituary appeared on the front page of the New York Times, the first time the Old Gray Lady listed AIDS as a specific cause of death.

Arthur Bell wrote a column for the Village Voice which allowed me to follow New York's gay scene vicariously.  David and I somehow got invited to a party at his Upper West Side apartment.  It was as crowded as a gay bar which may explain (but does not excuse) why I steadied myself with a foot on one of his walls.  Bell, an activist as well as a journalist, organized protests against the movie Cruising.  I was doing exactly that when I stumbled upon the location shoot in the Ramble.  McDarrah caught Bell marching with Jill Johnston, his colleague at the Voice and author of Lesbian Nation, in the 2nd annual Gay Liberation Day parade, the first one I would have been able to attend, if so inclined.  It took six years for that happen, and then only as an observer.

Would you believe it took even longer for me to work up the courage to enter the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop in the West Village, despite the definitive reassurances of proprietor Craig Rodwell?

Pride & Protest: Photographs by Fred W. McDarrah also includes two gay pioneers whose influence on my "lifestyle" was incalculable, in retrospect.

Marsha P. Johnson, Fourth Christopher Street Liberation Day March (1973)

Larry Kramer (1990)

Oddly, it was an exhibit of photographs by Arlene Gottfried that drew me to the Historical Society, my first cultural outing since returning from Florida, mostly because of this wonderful shot which appeared in a New York Times review.  A curator described her work as Diane Arbus without the snark.

"Lloyd Steir and Dogs at the Big Apple Circus" (1976)

Turns out, Gottfried, sister of comic Gilbert, was beginning her career around the time I graduated from college.  Both exhibits left me a little rueful about the professional road not taken, although the New York Daily News did once publish one of my ASPCA photos of a sea turtle rescue.

"Three Men With Afros" (1979)

"Ocean Beach Gay Couple" (1977)

"Marsha P. Johnson and Young Boy with Roses"  (1980)

Plenty of work hanging in other galleries also reminded me how creatively my adopted home of 50 years has been depicted in art.

"Liberty and Justice for All" by Peter Max (2001)

"927 5th Avenue" by Michiyo Fukushima (2010)

"Municipal Building" by Ben Shahn (1930s)

"Ernestine & Three Friends" by John Ahearn & Rigoberto Torres (1992)

"Canal Street" by Martin Wong (1992)

"Contact 2,021" by Courtney M. Leonard (Shinnecock) (2021)

"Far Eastsiders, aka: Cowgirl Mama A.B & Son Wukong" by Oscar Yi Hou (2021)

"Nurse Tracey" by Tim Okamura (2021)

But as much as I love New York, I've really begun to wonder if it's worth the hassle, expense, noise and occasional incivility that my much easier snowbird life at the Folly throws into high relief in the days immediately following my return.   

At least for an afternoon, the Historical Society seemed to be saying "Hell, yes!"  

Nothing Special

 

Enigmatic isn't a quality I usually find appealing in fiction, but Nicole Flattery has wrapped it in a mesmerizing package:  the story of a young woman assigned to transcribe the speed-fueled raps of Factory denizens that Andy Warhol eventually released, reputedly unedited, as a, A Novel in 1968.

Nothing Special also happens to be one of the few books I've ever read which passes the Bechdel test with flying colors:  it knowingly examines the complexities of female friendship and chronicles the evolution of a fraught mother/daughter relationship over time.  Of course a man is at the center of the story but Warhol's exclusive focus on creation and indifference to individual suffering makes him seem more god-like than male.  Whether the author finds him repulsive or admirable remains open to interpretation.

Born two years after Warhol's death in 1987, Flattery convincingly re-creates the early days of the Factory, before it became a revolving door for mundane celebrities rather than Superstars.  Although Mae, a native New Yorker, and Shelley, a faux runaway from California,  are the "nothing special" teenage girls of the title, their typing skills provide a passport to the new, exciting world of the 60s, when America was finally letting loose.  

What brought you here?’ [Mae] asked.

‘I couldn’t use my abilities where I’m from.’

‘Typing?’

[Shelley] smiled. ‘And listening. There’s not a single thing to listen to where I grew up. The life I would have had if I stayed there, it really filled me with terror. It made me feel like a freak. That’s the only way I can put it. So here seemed like a good idea. Everyone is on my level here.’ 

It turns out not quite.  The glow of being at the very center of things diminishes the longer they stick around and the closer they get to the end of their assignment.  Mae and Shelley, who both aspire to be Edie Sedgwick on some level, lose their innocence, if not their front-row seats shortly before Valerie Solanas shoots Warhol in the abdomen, killing the Factory's openness vibe forever.

On the couch, there would still be one or two people left over from the night before, looking like they had been spat out of a giant mouth.

The times change, along with the young women, and forecast the kind of posing that Warhol recognized would become a fundamental characteristic of human nature in a media-saturated world.

It was in these boys’ looks and lifestyles that I really saw the effect of their influence on the city – the leather, the smirks, the quiet aggression, the amused and cynical attitudes. All of it was second-hand. It was a way of being Ondine without being Ondine. You didn’t have to actually be a maniac, you could just wear the clothes.

As someone who routinely fantasized during adolescence about becoming a Factory flunkey, I got a truly vicarious thrill from reading Flattery's meditation on femininity and fame but put the novel down with a queasy feeling.  Be careful what you wish for, even in retrospect. Being nothing special ain't such a bad thing.

Basquiat x Warhol

It's no secret that I worship Andy Warhol, with plenty of blog posts and a pilgrimage to Pittsburgh to prove it.  

But I'll admit that even a drug-addled Jean-Michel Basquiat was the stronger artist during their collaborative period, miserably imagined on Broadway in 2022.

Although I do love Andy's portrait generous portrait of the younger artist even if it does fetishize the younger man.

Andy's contribution is more apparent in some works than others.

Logos are an easy tell.  Jon Gould, Andy's boyfriend, worked as a marketing executive for Paramount.  I once met him in Central Park, swinging around a lamp pole while listening to the as-yet-as-unreleased Flashdance soundtrack.  The encounter conferred two-degrees-of-separation status from my idol.  That doesn't make me like the painting any more.

At the time of their collaboration, Andy's rep had been in the toilet for years, primarily due to overexposure.  All those nights of celebrity-hobnobbing at Studio.  Private commissions to support his penny-pinching yet expensive lifestyle. Starstruck cable television programming then seen as dreck instead of the bellwether it proved to be. People sneered that Andy was desperately trying to stay relevant by working with younger artists like Basquiat and Keith Haring who were as hot as he had been twenty years earlier.  But IMHO, Andy had earned the right to coast with the extraordinarily talented kids who couldn't have been happier hanging out with the most influential philosopher/artist of the 20th century.

Who's sneering now?