Peter Hujar: Lost Downtown at Paul Kasmin
January 28 to February 27, 2016
297 10th Avenue (at 27th Street)
New York, 212 563 4474

“One is not only a little individual, living a little individual life. One is in oneself the whole of mankind, and one’s fate is the fate of the whole of mankind.”
-D.H. Lawrence

Chris Killip and Peter Hujar — in 1976, an ocean apart — photographed a boy and a man, respectively, wearing combat boots. In both photographs, the combat boots are broken in. Leather is scuffed at the toes and sides. Around the ankles, the boots have wrinkled where the laces have been pulled tight, time and again. The rigid soles have softened and worn along the gait. Imprints and residues, scratches and bashes: marks that are on the boundary between body and life.

The geographical separation of these two photographs in 1976 has now, 40 years later, been reduced to a few New York City blocks. It is very easy to be comfortable, insular, and at home in Hujar’s “Lost Downtown” at Paul Kasmin Gallery. Vince Aletti, a critic at the Village Voice, a close friend and subject of Hujar’s, wrote that Hujar “defined Downtown.” Viewing Hujar’s photographs of the intellectual and creative elite, at a time when New York City was at a cultural zenith, could be limited to nostalgia and regret of what New York was and what we have lost. But, in relationship to Killip’s series “In Flagrante Two” at Yossi Milo, both series of photographs metamorphose into universals.

There are other resonances between Killip’s Youth on a Wall, Jarrow, Tyneside and Hujar’s Christopher Street Pier #2 (Crossed Legs). The boots on Killip’s youth seem too large for him. He sits in the crick of a brick wall with his knees drawn to his chest. His face is turned down: his chin tucked and his eyes closed tight like a fist. He pushes his forehead into his hands — hands that are in turn gripped by his knees. His suit jacket with mismatched pants is rumpled and stained. These also seem too big — both in the grown up style and size. Though he fights the collapse, he is being crumpled into a ball. Hujar’s “crossed legs” are laid long: one leg pulled up, the other across his knee, while the torso recedes, back flat. The legs’ length is accentuated by dense, delicate hair bookended by combat boots and denim cutoffs. Two elbows poke from the sides like fins seeming to place his hands behind his head. In Hujar’s photograph, the man balances precariously, on a wooden beam high over the Hudson River. There is little fear, though, in his languid sunbathing. Overwhelmed in clothes and imploding posture, it is Killip’s youth who is more vulnerable.

The solitary figures play with ambivalence. The pose of Killip’s youth is uncertain: what has happened to him? Is he hurt or is he in trouble? The repetitive monotony of the brick wall provides little clue — the photograph feels imprisoning and claustrophobic. For Killip, there is uncertainty in the relationship between the youth and his surroundings; the unknown people and places that define his life. Hujar’s man is confidently at leisure. His surroundings are glimpsed in another seated figure, a large boat, and buildings across the river. Rather, the indecision is contemplation: daydreaming and open to possibility. Ambiguity exists not because of the unknown, but all possibilities are present and imaginable.

Killip’s In Flagrante Two series is being exhibited for the first time in its entirety in America. The series was photographed in the Northeast of England from 1973 to 1985. It features photographs of the largely working class community as it was reacting to the economic turmoil of inflation, recession, challenges to the unions and widespread strikes. Social rebellion, particularly punk rock, rejected the mainstream — punk expressed freedom. In flagrante has a multi-faceted meaning. The term is more typically used in exposing a crime. Here, Killip’s camera is catching people in the act. The photograph becomes a document not of a crime, but of a way of life under threat. Bever’s First Day Out, Skinningrove, North Yorkshire (1982) depicts one man sitting in the driver’s seat of a small car leaning out of the window. Another man throws his body against the car as if to put his arm around the man inside it, instead leaning on the roof. The expression of the standing man’s face is difficult to read. An illegible tattoo slits his throat. His fingernails are short and dirty. Both men look to the left towards a small wedge of ocean. That this is Bever’s first day out is seen in his sallow skin, the squint of his eyes unused to sun, the pucker of his lips in an unfamiliar sigh, and the awkward way he leans against the car. (Though perhaps, Bever is the man in the car, who has yet to get out.) Bever’s pose is of one unfamiliar with a day out, he is attempting the comfort in Hujar’s “crossed legs,” but his body does not quite lay that way.

Hujar’s portraits adjoin death. Not long after these were taken, the AIDS epidemic (and subsequent Culture Wars) killed a generation of artists, including Hujar. In “Lost Downtown,” it is the people that are gone. Death is unambiguously referenced in Hujar’s seminal Candy Darling on her Deathbed (1973) and Sydney Faulkner, Hospital (II), from 1981. Hujar explicitly linked life and death in the only book he published in his lifetime, Portraits of Life and Death (1976). The similarities between the reclining postures of many of Hujar’s portraits with Faulkner show the easy mutability between life and death. Faulkner’s eyelids droop. He looks, perhaps, towards Hujar, but the gaze is unfixed. Fine white hairs at his temple and just under his nose, a hard place to shave, are indescribably poignant. Death is ever-present while the body still finds small ways to grow. The contradiction in life and death is of little relevance as the bond of love is constant. Hujar’s death and those in many of the photographs on display could be a memorial of sorts. Downtown maybe lost but the vivid presence of this community, its creative force and impact on American culture, is potent.

The touches between Killip and Hujar are in the individuals they photographed: combat boots, days off, life and death. The specter in their future is for us to define them as lost. This explanation is too trite, and provides us a nice, comfortable distance from which to mourn. It is a stance that does a disservice to Killip, Hujar and those they have portrayed. Their fate is ours.

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Ching Ho Cheng: The Five Elements at Shepherd Gallery
April 7th through May 9th, 2015
58 East 79th Street (between Madison and Park avenues)
New York, 212 861 4050

Likely the first American artist to prominently feature the selfie, Tseng Kwong Chi has already become an important figure in the history of contemporary American photography and performance history, even though he died of AIDS in 1990. His work is on view at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery. And Ching Ho Cheng, not quite as well known in New York art circles, deserves equal status and recognition for his remarkable psychedelic paintings and torn-paper collages, which maintain a startling contemporaneity — this despite the fact that Cheng, too, died during the AIDS crisis in 1989. His work is currently being shown at Shepherd Gallery, on the Upper East Side.

The two shows demonstrate the fact that, early on, the art of Chinese expatriates in New York was not fully recognized, but this failure was not because of a lack of accomplishment. Indeed, Tseng and Cheng formed a nucleus of a small, but remarkable group of Chinese artists working here during the 1980s, including sculptor Ming Fay and multimedia artist and author Mary Ting. Their activities, begun well before the mania for Chinese art arrived, reflected the budding realities of being an Asian artist in the city’s varied cultural context.

Of the two, Tseng has received the most publicity as an originating participant among the Asian-American avant-garde. He also successfully connected with the downtown scene in the 1980s, becoming a close friend of graffiti artist Keith Haring. His black-and-white photographic art, in which he poses in a Mao suit alongside bohemian comrades or the world’s wonders, is a much a performance event as it is a documentary record.

In New York, New York (Brooklyn Bridge) (1979), Tseng offers a startlingly forceful image: he is seen jumping straight up into the air, towering over the graceful if slightly worn lines of the Brooklyn Bridge, one of the great icons of New York City. As usual, Tseng wears his Mao jacket and dark sunglasses, His left hand, clenched into a fist, is raised high above the bridge — or so it seems, given the low perspective he uses in shooting the photograph. At the same time, he holds in his right hand the shutter-release cable that enables him to photograph himself.

As a picture, New York, New York (Brooklyn Bridge) is a visionary romance invoking the city and bridge, but it also announces the extent of Tseng’s ambition. It is clear here, and in Hollywood Hills, California (1979), in which the artist assumes a smart pose, looking upward on the left and wearing reflective sunglasses, with the famous Hollywood Sign in the background at right. Not only was Tseng posing as a prophetic tourist, he also was asserting the right of a Chinese immigrant to participate in the exclusive, fully American rite of passage through the appropriation of historical icons.

The situation for Cheng is comparable, but also different. In the late 1960s, he made psychedelic paintings: highly detailed and patterned works that feel like suspended music, more or less inspired by the great rock melodies, and the great guitar solos, of the period. One work in gouache and ink on rag board, Queenie Study (1968), feels like a spiral slowing moving downward, away from the viewer. The descent is accomplished through circles of red and black bands — dotted with myriad spermatozoa — which ring more and more tightly as the imagery moves toward the center of the composition.

One untitled work from 1987 consists of torn rag paper colored with iron oxide. A leaf-like piece of torn paper, coppery and regularly dotted with depressions that resemble craters, is placed upon another copper-colored sheet whose angle of placement can only be seen at the bottom of the composition. Cheng commits himself to imagery of more or less uncontestable beauty.

Cheng’s determination to create something memorable, even something exquisite, resonates in profound ways. An untitled canvas from 1988, created with iron and copper oxide, as well as acrylic paint, is stunning in its range of colors from gray to black to a fiery copper hue. On the upper left is a black egg-shape, done with acrylic; it balances the differing background colors, which are not directly legible as imagery.

A much earlier work, from 1979, is a very subtle study of a window’s shadow on the wall. Painted with gouache, it marvelously suggests impermanence. The windowpanes are rendered as being on an angle, with a single band or bar separating the two sheets of glass. The band and background are painted a gray-blue, and as a study, the painting is wonderfully satisfying, a kind of image we often see and remark upon, but never capture because of the mercurial nature of daylight shadows.

If Tseng and Cheng were merely pioneers as Chinese artists during a time of remarkable cultural change, their work would be less valuable even as it documented, both abstractly and figuratively, the spirit of that time. But these artists are highly intelligent; moreover, they are technically accomplished in their chosen mediums. Tseng’s photos are memorable in formal terms, just as Cheng’s paintings and torn-paper collages remain in the thoughts of his viewers at least partially for their excellent execution. One hopes that the lives of these two men will remain secondary in interest when the actual works are looked at and read for what they are: sophisticated artworks that hold the viewer’s attention.

In fact, Muna Tseng, sister of the artist, has remarked that writers may focus “too much” on her brother’s death; the same might be true of Cheng as well. This makes sense, as death played no role in her brother’s art, or in Cheng’s. Both men celebrated life. Tragically, both men were stricken young. That doesn’t mean, however, that their work is immature, or that they produced only small bodies of work. Now, Tseng and Cheng are carefully presented to the public by their sisters (Muna and Sybao Cheng-Wilson), who do their best to increase awareness of each artist’s achievements. Time will determine whether the work will be considered major; it is this writer’s belief that Tseng and Cheng will be included among the very best artists of their time.

The post Visionaries and Visions: Retrospectives of Tseng Kwong Chi and Ching Ho Cheng appeared first on artcritical.

English-born artist Rupert Goldsworthy has followed an eclectic path over the past two decades. Living mostly in Berlin or — as at present — New York, he’s spread his energies across writing, researching and curating, as well as his own art, and has run project spaces in both cities. There are clear continuities across all those activities, though: the history of political activism and AIDS; an interest in how different communities interrelate; and an ongoing investigation into how images are reused and what they stand for. His book, CONSUMING//TERROR: Images of the Baader-Meinhof (2010), for example, traces the visual history of the Red Army Faction (the West German terror group) and their logo. His last exhibition at Ritter/Zamet, in 2012, used image sources as diverse as medicine packaging, stickers from street art, and his own photographs of signs and monuments to juxtapose the old and new communities in the Neukölln area of Berlin.

Everything in Goldsworthy’s current show was made onsite during a month’s residency at the gallery. The floor dominates: it was undisguisedly hand-painted with typically North African tile-like patterns. Combined with the natural light filtering through the small gallery’s roof, Mosque Floor generates the atmosphere of a courtyard and makes for an environment that — true to his interdisciplinary form — provides the platform for events with guest artists, musicians and writers.

The images around the courtyard are predictably varied. The most striking and conventionally painted is Clone Moustache, a looming close-up of part of a face with bushy hair completely covering the mouth. That suggests secrecy or a failure of communication, as well as membership of the 1970’s Castro-clone scene, a culture driven by extreme promiscuity. Both aspects fit the text paintings Mineshaft Dress Code and The Coleherne, which adopt a painterly photographic halftone dot format, similar to Sigmar Polke’s, to depict a crowd outside a notorious 1970s London leather club. The text is a word-for-word enamel reproduction of the club’s amateurishly hand-written dress code notice, which Goldsworthy has blown up to the scale of a man’s body. New York’s Mineshaft was among the first sex clubs to be closed by the city during the AIDS crisis, and according to Goldsworthy, its dress rules were well known in gay lore. The list is fascinating, featuring as it does both what can be worn (biker leathers, western gear, uniforms) and what can’t (suits, rugby shirts, disco drag and, surprisingly, cologne or perfume).

If those three paintings suggest nostalgia for the pre-AIDS freedoms of the ‘70s, albeit tinged by what came later, then Anita and Brian takes us back a little further: in a red and black graphic style that imitates a printing process, we see Anita Pallenberg and Brian Jones in Nazi uniforms. That puts us in 1969, just before Jones was found dead in

his swimming pool. Finally, Bull appropriates an early 20th century cartoon about the plight of Armenians, then adds a painterly splatter of bloody color. Several copiously moustached men strive to push a bull off a cliff: impending disaster is now visibly present.

The overall effect is more allusive than systematic, but we might think not just about AIDS, but more generally about how one culture imitates or opposes another, or how visual representations help form cultural identities, or whether the various patterns of collapse referenced — not just the end of the pre-AIDS sex scenes, but the dissolution of Ottoman Turkey, the fall of the Third Reich, and the endpoint of Western colonialism suggested by the floor’s expansion of Islamic influence — have any commonalities.

All that makes for a fascinating and emotional installation. London is very different now, and as an ex-pat visiting his hometown this year after three decades abroad, Goldsworthy talks of finding a sad irony in the double erasure of its recent history: first the decimation of his generation by AIDS, and then gentrification. You do, though, need the background provided by Goldsworthy to pick that up, else all you get is disparate work with an aura of potential linkage. Other artists — de Chirico and Rauch, for example — make a virtue of frustrating our desire to make logical connections, but integrate their choices in a distinctive painterly language. Goldsworthy is a chameleon painter, choosing styles to match his sources. That may be thematically appropriate, but it does sacrifice that sense of the artist’s own visually coded world, which makes for more immediate appreciation.

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