A House in the Tropics

Eliminate conceptual, accentuate the physical, (don't mess with mister in-between)

A House in the Tropics, linoleum, broomsticks, chair, at Artists’ Space, NYC

As I spent more time with people who had no place to call home, who literally lived on the street, both the concept and the bodily reality of home and the absence of home began to show up in subtle ways in my artwork. The materials I chose offered a ready and resonant way to accomplish this. Just as I had walked un-seeing past homeless people, I had also been blind to a transformation going on around me. Despite the grit and trash and danger of the Lower East Side, it also had the feel of a cloistered neighborhood where the denizens were part of our tribe: artists, musicians, actors, and other outcasts from conventional society. On a regular day you’d see a hundred leather jackets and dozens of spiked hair-dos and body piercings, and no one wearing a suit.

But unintentionally, artists like me were contributing to the demise of that down-market bohemian appeal. Always quick to seize on opportunity, they (we) recognized the neighborhood as affordable and proximate to their desires, so they (we) snapped up apartments and storefronts as the older Ukrainian and Hispanic population died off. Our own apartment, a storefront on East Ninth, was larger, better placed, and less expensive than the SRO we left behind on Twenty-third Street beside the Chelsea Hotel. Because our apartment on East Ninth was commercial and not rent-controlled, we paid literally ten times what our upstairs neighbor paid, (us $450, Mrs. Smith, $47) but in Chelsea we were paying over six hundred. Before becoming an apartment, we were told, our storefront had been a laundry and then a motorcycle repair shop. Now the motorcycles were being repaired just west in a psychedelic-painted storefront neighbors referred to as “the motorheads.” Once a week a hose trailing smoking liquid would snake from their door and into the gutter. They told us they used psychedelics as their eucharist. One day we passed them in a heated conversation with a pair of Mormon missionaries.

All over the East Village, hundreds of apartments were being renovated, or “gentrified,” as the housing advocates called it. Never mind that the artists moving in and being labeled as gentry barely had two nickels to rub together, nor did the artists who were renting storefronts and labeling them art galleries. No matter. Their presence attracted bars and cafes which inexorably drew the boutiques and with them the actual gentry. Jump forward thirty years and I will escort you to the boutique vintage clothing store run by two young sisters in our old apartment at 337 East Ninth. In 2017, their rent exceeded six thousand a month. When I visited the block in 2022 and found the storefront empty, Billy, the guy who ran the Indian clothing store, told me the sisters had been forced out by another big rent increase.

But in 1986, walking the streets of the East Village, I had begun to notice the scraps and pieces of “linoleum rugs” being torn from the floors of poverty-level apartments. The new tenants recognized them as the inexpensive flooring of choice from a previous century pathetically attempting to call to mind the Persian rugs that, in an upper East Side apartment, denoted wealth. The new arrivals in the neighborhood saw them as a marker of low class and discarded them by the dozens. To me they spoke of far more. Often printed in strikingly sophisticated designs with remarkable color relationships, I claimed them as found abstract paintings. Even those less successful as paintings had a deep resonance, inscribed with the graffiti-like scratches and gouges of the working-class lives lived on top of them for a generation or more. And then to make the objects even more resonant, some new working stiff had ripped them from the floor in random ways that offered me evocative sculptural shapes operating in the same way a Rorschach splotch might. I presented all of these found scraps unaltered, simply giving back the resonance in the random torn shapes and the deep patina of use. And it was all given to me. All I needed to do was acknowledge it, trace the shape onto a piece of plywood or MDF, cut it out with a bandsaw and hang it on the gallery wall. Something that looked like a painting but wasn’t one, that flew in the face of painting, that challenged its primacy.

This questioning of painting, arising in the early seventies, had its origin in the work of Marcel Duchamp, who had been brought back into the conversation a few years earlier by Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. The cerebral work and thinking of Duchamp had also figured prominently in my own transformation and in the development of conceptual work in general, but I had begun to feel it had reached an impasse.

Me/Not Me, linoleum and carpet on canvas with broomsticks, at White Columns

One of the beautiful things about New York is that nobody has storage space, so everything goes onto the street, more often than not to be picked up and re-used or re-purposed by the next person down the scale of affluence. All our furniture save our futon came from the street. In the same way I was seeing scraps of linoleum, I began to notice the brooms and mops left behind in these apartments also discarded on the street. Once I started paying attention, I realized they were everywhere and I started collecting the abundant wooden handles. Sometimes they came already broken, or I would detach them from their business end with a swift down-thrust on the edge of a steel mesh trash can.

These objects spoke of the labor of the same hard-working, often newly naturalized people, showed the markings of use in similar ways as the linoleum, offering up the extraordinary variations of color derived from inexpensive production. I could echo similar colors found in the linoleum or I could group slight color variations together to manifest the close harmonies of slightly different hues of yellow, say, or blue and then literally ground the painting by placing the sticks on the floor and leaning them into the linoleum, magically transforming the piece from a painting into an object, a sculpture. Sweeping is one of the beautiful metaphors of the Zen tradition, and I often began my own studio sessions in just this way, mesmerizing myself, concentrating only on the act, but more than anything at the time, I chose these rod-like objects as the yang to the yin of the floral linoleum rugs.

One night on the way to the dance club The Tunnel with Sheila, Pinkney, and Janice, deep in the Chelsea of prostitutes and meat-packers, (no pun––it was the meatpacking district) I came upon a scrap of flooring too unwieldy to carry around. Not far away I found cast-off steel pipes and florescent tubes and remarkably, a loading dock that presented itself like a proscenium stage. I assembled the piece on the loading dock––a solo show in a hip, out-of-the-way exhibition space––and we all kept on walking. A few days later I went back with a car, found it was still on exhibit, and collected it.

The Tunnel

I embraced these works as a continuation of the metaphor of the dowsing rod––the combination of male and female, delta becoming rod, the magical juxtaposition and conjunction of opposites. My dependence on this ancient insight into the universe may have been simply a way of chipping a foothold on the sheer rock face of the enigma of visual art. Like the art critics I had scoffed, I became guilty of the same thing: needing an intellectual handhold on a thing beyond the intellect. Whatever success these sculptures enjoyed, it definitively was not explained by male-female opposition, nor by male-female conjunction. Something else was going on here, something beyond the cerebral, something visual, that is to say, something unspeakable, or rather beyond the capacity of words, catalyzed by the color combinations or the rhythm of the repetitions of the vertical sticks or the real-life accumulation of some mysterious human residue clinging to the linoleum or the sticks.

Three decades later I still have scraps of linoleum and dozens of these colored sticks and I still have push-pinned to the wall of my studio like the talisman it is, ball-point ink faded to near-illegibility on French tablet-sized graph-paper: There is no denying, at any rate, that among the elements of the elegancies in which we take such delight, is a measure of the unclean, the unsanitary … for better or for worse, we [Orientals] {sic} do love things that bear the marks of grime, soot, and weather and we love the colors and sheen that call to mind the past that made them.” ––Junchiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows.

It was this body of work that had captured the imagination of the independent curator Bob Nickas. One day Bob and I, having never met, happened to be in a gallery in the East Village at the same; a tiny space with unswept floors squeezed into what had been originally built as tenement storefront. We stood at a tall desk that separated the front door from the art-viewing space and served as a place for information, press-releases, promo. On the cover of an Artforum sitting there was an image of one of the photos of Hiroshi Sugimoto - an empty movie screen filled with light. Bob was puzzling over it and I took one look, intuited its method, and said, “It’s a time-lapse image of an entire film.” He was so startled by this insight that he had asked to come to my studio and then had invited me to be part of an exhibition he was curating at Bess Cutler Gallery with Alfredo Jaar, David Diao, and others far better known than I was. It was to be called Mind/Matter. Bob was attracted by the degree to which I was NOT manipulating the things I found on the street. He had begun to make a career of curating interesting exhibitions in galleries owned by other people. He and I hit it off and soon discovered we shared a birthday. We would walk around together from time to time while I listened to him talk about ideas he had for shows. At first, he was doing exhibitions either co-opting or building upon earlier iconic exhibitions. Standing at the corner of St. Marks and Bowery in front of Cooper Union, alongside guys with stolen watches and pocketbooks lined up for sale on filthy blankets, Bob rattled on about a show he was conceptualizing he wanted to name When Attitude becomes Form after the famed exhibition When Attitudes Become Form by Harald Szeemann. Szeemann was perhaps the pioneer of the idea of curator as artist and Bob was formulating the branding of himself as a conceptual artist as much as a curator. His material was the artwork of other artists.

Just as the art world of New York was embracing conceptualism anew, I began to move beyond the conceptual to embrace the mystery and profundity of the physical world. The Neo-Expressionist paintings that had arisen in response to the provocations of the seventies and had taken the art-market by storm, were themselves now being challenged by another shiny new thing for collectors to speculate on. Now, the attention of the young critics and curators had shifted, led by two East Village galleries: Nature Morte and International With Monument. Haim Steinbeck, Jeff Koons, Ashley Bickerton, and others were forging a path that appropriated images from advertising or used slick consumer goods, claiming to critique the rampant materialism of the moment. Perhaps their intent was good, maybe they hated consumerism as much as I did, but they offered work that, like Neo-Expressionism, mitigated against the subversions of art’s dematerialization––environmental work, first-gen conceptualism, performance art––and embraced the commercialism of the market. These neo-conceptualists were accompanied by tracts quoting French philosophers that were meant to offer intellectual underpinnings for the work, never mind that the philosophers were poorly translated and often mis-read thanks to prose that was often intentionally incomprehensible.

My view of this work was that, like Warhol before them, the real message of their artwork, the message everyone but the critics and a few cognoscenti took away, was that these bright shiny things should be celebrated. In fact, assuming that an artist speaks to the culture at large rather than a hermetic group of insiders, their works actually elevated these consumer goods to the level of sacred relic, that, like those of yore, were for sale to those with the means. One artist said to me there was no need to make art, he could simply go to a store and “choose” his art off the shelf. I saw this as warmed-over and misguided Duchamp. Duchamp had, himself, written nearly these very words seventy years earlier. In 1916 it was radical and subversive because the things were chosen for their ubiquity and availability. In 1916, it was a critique of the market. In 1986, written about breathlessly in Artforum, for sale in the galleries at high prices, it was more like a gleeful embrace of the culture of consumerism and materialism as brought to you by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. I detested it.

I was out of step.