Pre-Digital Moments in (My) Time

What would Alvin Baltrop, who died penniless in 2004 with barely any recognition, have to say about the exhibition of his photos at the Bronx Museum of Art?  It's very simply hung which seems fitting given the modesty and poor printed quality of the work.

Mostly black and white, the well-composed photos document his tour in the Navy as well as his fascination with the decaying piers on the west side of Manhattan in the 70s, shortly after a Daily News headline screamed FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD.  It can't have been easy for a queer black man to capture the homoerotic vibe of life at sea, no matter how discreet he may have been.

The piers didn't require discretion although it's doubtful that the gay men who used them for cruising and sex welcomed Baltrop.  If his photographic ID, also on display, is any indication he didn't measure up to clone standards of beauty.  

I visited the area on my bike shortly before graduation from college.  The World Trade Center loomed to the south, the only downtown symbol of modernity. Anyone cool sneered at the domineering twin phalluses.  The carless, elevated highway eventually went the way of the piers.

Rollerblades hadn't been invented and Baltrop, like everybody else, worshipped beer swilling, macho men.

The gallery next door documents a different scene and culture just ten miles north of Manhattan but a world away.  Going from the Baltrop exhibit, which showcases the work of a native son of the Bronx, to one that documents the birth of graffiti in the same borough, is like moving from a hushed tomb (or maybe a back room?) to a theme park.  As much as I enjoyed both, they made me wonder what the Baltrop exhibit might have looked like if he had had the resources of Henry Chalfant who clearly had a hand in mounting his.  Whether intentionally or not, the Bronx Museum illustrates the impact of white privilege on an artist's work, past and present.

The Chalfant exhibit recreates a subway yard in the south Bronx.

Graffiti images shot by Chalfant, whose wife Kathleen is a well-regarded actress, appear on sheets of cloth as long as actual subway cars.

Chalfant's original photos, beautifully framed and mounted, hang in a nearby room.  He shot five images of a single, stopped car from a bridge with the sun behind him and later spliced them together in his studio.  No "panorama" mode on cameras, then!  He had to work fast because the MTA washed off the graffiti as quickly as it could.

Some taggers, as graffiti artists were known, spoofed pop art while others created their own signatures, literally and figuratively.

The Bronx museum also provides a facsimile of the Soho studio where Chalfant printed and assembled his work.  His "open-door" policy for taggers helped "some weird white guy" gain their trust.  Altrop, by contrast, had only a couple of cameras and needed food stamps to survive, even with veteran benefits.

Chalfant, not quite a decade older than Altrop, partied with the taggers, too.  Here, Madonna gets down with Crazy Legs at Danceteria.  Those were the days!

When Chalfant froze this group of taggers in time (including Crazy Legs, 2nd from the left), I wasn't much older than they were.  

Chalfant also caught the movement of graffiti from the subway to the streets.

Look no further than the Grand Concourse, just outside, to find some today.

Time erases street art, too, but digital photography makes it a lot easier to preserve.

Martin Wong

Seventeen years ago, AIDS killed Martin Wong, an artist I'd never heard until a New York Times critic raved about a retrospective of his work at the Bronx Museum of Arts.

Here's what he looked like before he joined the Cockettes and left San Francisco:

Wong fancied himself as a rodeo cowboy after moving to New York.  Note the weird little demons that float around him. He was HIV positive by the time of this self portrait.

Divine may have influenced Wong to move East.  Wong was a member of the Cockettes when Divine visited San Francisco in 1970.

Wong called himself the "Human Instamatic." He painted in Loisaida, a mostly Puerto Rican neighborhood and hung out with taggers, or graffiti artists.

Wong shifted his focus to Chinatown once the gentrification of the Lower East Side began.

There aren't many women in the show.

He obviously preferred painting men, including Bruce Lee.

Wong celebrated multiculturalism decades before it became politically correct.

It isn't difficult to interpret his shout-out to the Statue of Liberty.

Wong painted bricks, an unlikely subject, painstakingly well.

Like sign language, tabloid humor, books, eight balls and constellations, they're a common motif in his work.

Firefighters and prisons were among Wong's obsessions.

He and and Miguel Pinero, who wrote the prison drama Short Eyes based on his own incarceration experience, were boyfriends.

This penis hangs in a separate gallery.  More bricks!

Wong's biggest work hangs in the museum lobby.  It reminds me of Lolita.

When Wong got sick, he moved back to San Francisco so his parents could take care of him. His last works are utterly bereft of color.

Wong would have been 70 in July.