You Killed Me First
the ninth circle
Walking around the Lower East Side one cold day, I stopped in front of a telephone pole with dozens of notices and thousands of old staples because I had spotted a Xeroxed poster that let me know my college pal Richard, who took the photos of Forty Boxes in the rock quarry, was now making films and living in New York. He had become part of the crowd of underground transgressive filmmakers with his low-budget slasher-type films he screened in East Village venues; films with titles that both flaunted and mocked themselves: You Killed Me First, or Manhattan Love Suicides. He had gotten some attention by pushing boundaries and casting notorious performers like David Wojnarowicz, Lydia Lunch or Leg Lung as stars of his 8mm films.
One day I called him up and let him know I was living in New York, too, and arranged to visit him in his apartment deep in Alphabet City. He was living in a fourth-floor walkup tenement with four or five big dead-bolt locks on the door. After I knocked, I had to stand listening to them click and clunk as he released them to let me in. He even had one of those Police locks with a steel pole running from floor to door so someone couldn’t get in with a battering ram. The long hair I remembered from college was gone, but the lanky frame was still intact. He was dressed in typical East Village attire - all black. Was there a cast iron clawfoot tub in the middle of the apartment or was that someone else’s tenement? I’m not sure, but on Avenue D, it scans. We took up right where we had left off as college pals, with only the briefest exchanges of pleasantries.
“What’s with all the locks Richard?”
“Ah, I sell some drugs sometimes and need to protect myself. It’s not the best neighborhood you know.”
“What the hell are you doing selling drugs, man? What kind of drugs are you selling?”
“I’m trying to pay the rent and keep making work.”
“Yeah, and get yourself bumped off in the process.”
Richard had an easy laugh, so he let loose one of those, but turned to the table in his living room and picked up a pistol and brandished it back and forth like No one’s gonna fuck with me.
“Yeah, that’s brilliant,” I said. “That is the one way to insure you get your ass shot, just carry around a gun you don’t know how to use.”
“I can use it,” he said and pointed it at my face.
With one swift move I swiped my hand across, grabbed the gun out of his hand and turned it on him. “Bam, motherfucker. You’re dead.”
This got an even bigger laugh, but also a very sheepish look.
“Is this thing loaded?”
“Yeah.”
“Jesus Christ!” I carefully placed it back on the table.
Richard and I were close friends and allies almost from the moment we met at UNC, both interested in challenging ideas and ways of working, both tending toward conceptualism. He pitched in on some of my projects, documenting the Forty Boxes piece, helping me hang four hundred yards of pink tricot fabric from the college flagpole and across the campus, and I assisted him with some of his conceptual work; padlocking him into a plywood box he’d built on the UNC quad where he stayed for an entire day, silent, except for the moments when he couldn’t abide the impoliteness of not answering the obvious question, to which he’d respond, sotto voce, “I’m not allowed to talk.” Shortly after we graduated, I mounted a big show of his work at The Upstairs.
Not long after that Richard moved to Philadelphia. We stayed in touch and he occasionally sent me postcards signed “stay in tough” or copies of his xeroxed ‘zine, The Valium Addict. A couple of years later the name of the ‘zine changed to The Heroin Addict. At the time I thought these titles were ironic and sardonic attention grabbers.
“So, what are you working on these days,” I said. “Still making films?”
“Nah, I’m mostly working on still photography. Films don’t sell.”
“Who says photographs sell?”
“I’m trying to do the same thing with photos I was trying to do with films – just give people what they want.” I couldn’t tell if this was a for-real cynical attitude or just a defense mechanism that allowed him to pretend he didn’t really take it seriously as art. It didn’t occur to me at the time it could be a long-game strategy. There were some vague mentions of young women models or transgressive photo shoots, but I didn’t fully pursue it and he didn’t offer to show me any images. I knew he was friendly with David Wojnarowicz and that he had taken a transgressive attitude with his films, too, so I could fill in the picture.
“I get it.” I could well understand the desire to force the break needed to allow him to live the life of art supported by sales. “I’m still chained to the man. I wish I could find a part-time job that pays, but if I want a studio and an apartment, I need more money.”
“Yeah, who doesn’t?”
“I call it the New York Physics Problem.”
“Physics?”
“You can have time or space, but not both.”
“Yep. You got that right. Didn’t you get a show at White Columns?”
“Yeah. Sold two pieces. Made five hundred bucks. One month’s rent. I also somehow got picked for the Selections from the Artists File show at Artists’ Space.”
“Artists’ Space and White Columns? You’re golden, man.”
“Yeah, at Artists’ Space nothing sold. I need to go out and hustle some critics and galleries and get them to look at my work, but I hate that shit.”
“So does everybody else. You gotta do it.”
The running joke was that when bankers and real estate agents got together, they talked about art. When artists got together, they talked about money and real estate.
After a while I said, “So, let’s go get a drink or go gallery hopping or something.”
“Nah, I pretty much don’t do anything these days that doesn’t involve either intense pleasure or making money.”
I descended the stairwell to echoes of clacking locks and wandered north, futile scenarios playing out in my head. Might the tension between mockery and homage attract some critical attention.? Yes, that and young, naked, female bodies. Richard had told me he had a ready stream of wannabe young models willing to pose for very little money. Plenty of other artists over the centuries had made money with blue drawings made for discreet art collectors. But is it a legitimate strategy to make things whose sole purpose is to grab attention? If you analyze the meaning of this gambit, if you drill down on the meaning of the work, what do you get?
I walked west on Seventh Street, past Taylor’s Graffiti mission storefront. Seventh emptied me into the southeast corner of Tompkins Square Park. A cold breeze. Remnants of snow. I turned in and started diagonally across the park, winding through the make-shift shelters of the growing tent city: blue tarps, cardboard boxes, plastic-wrapped sleeping bags; the avant-garde of a new Manhattan settlement.
Women in the art world had used their own naked bodies for years, in photographs, in videos, in performance art, asserting their own empowerment or a critique of the male gaze but also cashing in on the fact that human nakedness ––or female nakedness––unfailingly rivets rapt attention; Robert Mapplethorpe demonstrated that the same approach with men’s bodies would scandalize polite society. What does this strategy do for my own daughter in her crib on Ninth Street? Does it make her empowerment more likely or does it simply cement her future exploitation- guarantee that young women will be objectified. Here’s the answer: What would the response be if the art were exactly the same except the naked bodies offered up for view were old men?
In the moment, it was so difficult to extricate myself from the desperation, the lack of money, the exquisite indifference of the art world. How to slap them in the face – how to arrest their eyeballs – how to reach down and grab them by the balls? In the middle of the park, dozens of people had set up tents, having gathered over many months. A homeless man I had seen before sat on a piece of cardboard surrounded by three black and tan Rottweilers tethered to him with ropes. Needles and crack vials littered the ground. Scraps of paper blew in whirls. My own desperation, the bourgeois desperation of someone with the luxury to think about art, seemed ridiculous in the face of this. These were people without a home, without access to basic amenities, often depending on handouts or begging in order to eat. Soon a brutal riot will explode right here that will rival and echo the transformational one in this park a hundred years earlier. This time, as before, class warfare will be the rallying cry. Taylor, refusing to leave, acting as an advocate for the denizens of the park, many of whom were his parishioners, will be hauled off to jail along with several others.
Did I recognize at the time that artists were the foot soldiers of the other side - the exploiters, the gentrifiers that brought it all to pass? I did, at least, ask myself what I could possibly do to ameliorate it. The answer I gave seemed rational, as most rationalizations do. It was so easy to justify taking one step off the righteous path if that step might offer the ability to reach the goal of effecting some change. All it will take, I told myself, filled with hubris, naively confident that powerful, resonant art could change peoples’ attitude, is the freedom to concentrate on making art. All it will take to do that is to sell enough art to support myself. All it will take to do that is to get a gallery to represent my work. All it will take to do that is a brief journey to the underworld.
Without explicitly recognizing it as such, my goal had shifted from making powerful art or making art that could catalyze change, to securing gallery representation. A false god, yes, but at the time, I simply recognized that I was at the epicenter of that possibility––the East Village; dozens of new art galleries springing up within a few blocks of where I stood, many run by artists with the same desire as myself––access to the art market. They swirled around me; Alphabet City to the east, Tenth Street to the north, St. Mark’s Place to the west, Tompkins Square Park the empty center of that world––the ninth circle. I stood near the center of that center, my feet in thin-soled, jangling motorcycle boots, frozen to the ground. Beside me, at Ninth Street, a stone fountain – four Doric columns supporting a stone canopy, one word carved along each entablature: FAITH. HOPE. CHARITY. I walked around to the far side and looked up. TEMPERANCE. Given to the city by a wealthy dentist in 1880, six years after the first riot. Yes, motherfucker, all it takes to remove LOVE is a little bit of money.
I didn’t see Richard again for several years. By then he had published several books of photos and was showing his work at Feature Gallery, run by an eccentric visionary guy called Hudson, who’d cut his teeth in the artists’ spaces movement in Chicago.
I was in the East Village, in a tenement building on 13th Street, in the early 80s, my jr. undergrad year at NYU. So, a later era. Not a full-fledged grownup and not in the art scene. And not as far east. But our block (I lived with 2 other female acting students who were in my class at Circle in the Square Studio) was a bit sketchy (on our move-in day, a very old, very short, very gleeful in a nasty way guy exposed himself to the 3 of us as we were walking across the block in opposite directions -- we had to laugh at this simultaneously depressing and hilarious welcome to the neighborhood). Yes, to multiple, heavy-duty locks; yes to the steel pole that ran from the door to its little steel plate in the floor. And to never entering our kitchen at night, in the dark, without stomping our feet before turning on the light, so we might hear, but not have to watch, the massed ranks of roaches scatter back into the baseboards and god knows where else they came from. Also men playing dominoes at a rickety card table on the sidewalk, with salsa music tearing raggedly through partially blown speakers in the doorway of the bodega, lots of Spanish flying through the air day & night. And the evening we witnessed a stabbing on 2nd Ave when we were walking over to St Marks to see a theater piece. Spent hours at the precinct after the show, in a brown, grubby, open plan "office" of plainclothes policemen. Was there when the phone call came in from the hospital that the victim had died, and the charge was solemnly elevated to murder. (They'd caught the perpetrator moments after he'd stabbed the man with scissors.) Got to listen to the in-no-way accidental monologue/lecture from a middle-aged cop about how dangerous and wrong it was to have women on the police force, where, apparently, some poor Good Cop was sure as anything going to eventually get killed because his Lady Cop Partner wouldn't have his back/be up to the job. Barney Miller, it wasn't. Not even Kojak. Summer was fistfight weather, when people without ac spent most of their time on stoops and a lot of drinking went on. Fall was enough to make you believe you might actually find your way into a life in the theater someday, enough to make the City feel more like Woody Allen's Manhattan than Scorcese's Taxi Driver. We were so young, and so wrong, and so right to be both.
All this to say -- you really brought it all back to me with this marvelous piece.
I love reading about these early middle years on your art journey in the belly of the Art World Beast. Amazing cast of characters, including our 1975 roadie Taylor Field who gets mentioned.