July 13 to September 30, 2018
99 Gansevoort Street, between 10th Avenue and Washington Street
New York City, whitney.org

In a counter-intuitive approach, the exhibition “David Wojnarorwicz: History Keeps Me Up at Night” opens with the photographic series, “Arthur Rimbaud in New York,” (1979) a group of black and white photographs. Wojnarowicz disguises himself as the poet Arthur Rimbaud with a mask of his own creation and takes it on a journey through New York City. “I fashioned a mask of Rimbaud and brought him on a narrative trail – the places I haunted when living on the streets as a teen as well as the industrial sites that were like technological meadows where I could place New York City at my back,” he wrote.

These various locations that have drastically transformed over the past twenty-five years. Ironically, Rimbaud/ Wojnarowicz finds himself at several sites near to the current Whitney Museum, an area that was formerly operational in its now quaint name, the Meatpacking District, as well as a pick up zone for transvestite prostitution. The nearby piers were once a gay male sex destination. Other rapidly disappearing haunts, such a Greek coffee shop, graffitied interiors of subway cars, and an extremely seedy Times Square, are remnants of a lost cityscape. One notable image has him by a warehouse wall graffitied with the phrase “The Silence of Marcel Duchamp is Overrated.” Central to the installation of the series is the actual Rimbaud mask, encased in glass on a vertical axis, mounted on a pedestal. The mask, to some extent like the series itself, begs the question: artwork or archival object?

In the same gallery there are images that include other iconic gay literary figures, William S. Burroughs and Jean Genet amongst them, in works such as the photographic collage Untitled (Genet After Brassaï) (1979). The opening exhibition wall text is juxtaposed with a large-scale self-portrait of the artist that combines photography, painting and collage. The self-portrait contains leitmotifs such as maps, flames, globes, clocks and a fleeing man engulfed in flames that appear in numerous artworks throughout the exhibition.

Wojnarowicz’s oeuvre encompasses multiple media and genres: painting, sculpture, drawings, photography, installation and performance, as well as film, music, and literature. The stunning Gallery 7 contains the four remarkable paintings from his series on the four elements first exhibited at Gracie Mansion Gallery in the East Village in 1987. The layered imagery is powerfully compelling, bringing the viewer into multiple visual and symbolic readings of earth, air, water and fire.

Wojnarowicz’s prolific output is well organized by the curators in bringing together disparate works from his curtailed career (he died in 1992, aged 37). The later flower series (1990) includes the mixed media painting History Keeps Me Up at Night, revealing another innovation of the artist in terms of layering techniques. The series consists of painted (phallic) flowers with square cutouts and red yarn sutured in small black and white photographs. The floral images are overlaid with text blocks of the artist’s memoirist writings silk-screened onto the picture plane, the texts often referencing the AIDS crisis, his own activism, and personal, everyday experience. Sculptures of reconfigured globes are exhibited in the same gallery linking personal reflection to a geo-political context. Notable is Wojnarowicz’ use of black and white photography in multiple images that are individually framed within a single composition such as Spirituality (For Paul Thek) (1988-89).

Another gallery is filled with truncated bust-like sculptures both painted and/or covered with various materials such as maps, masks, collage, and paper currency. Despite working in the heyday of post-modern appropriation, Wojnarowicz consistently avoided seductively slick advertising materials, preferring, for example, to utilize cheap silk-screen posters that advertise food sale specials in grocery stores windows. These crude, ephemeral advertising posters serve as canvases on which the artist paints graphic stenciled images.

A prescient figure in his use of photography and innovative painting techniques, Wojnarowicz is all the more remarkable for harnessing this creativity to the pressing issue of the AIDS crisis, addressing the horrors of living with the disease and demanding political action. In an elaborate installation, The Lazaretto (1990), a collaboration with artist Paul Marcus AIDS organizations were invited to distribute informational materials in the gallery alongside the sculptural tableaux. This installation, however, and the activism it incorporated, isn’t reconstructed for the Whitney show. Similarly absent is Wojnarowicz’s literary contribution: a vitrine or reading area could have represented such works as “Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration,” “Memories that Smell Like Gasoline” and “7 Miles a Second,” a prescient graphic novel created in collaboration with James Romberger & Marguerite Van Cook

This exhibition demonstrates the extreme depth and breadth of this artist’s work while concurrently leaving the viewer with the sense of profound loss. It is a loss of an extremely talented young artist and the work that he may have produced; as well as the magnitude of lost lives in the wake of the AIDS crisis. Wojnarowicz wrote of the Rimbaud Series, “I didn’t see myself as Rimbaud but rather used him as a device to confront my own desires, experiences, biography and to try to touch on those elusive ‘sites of attraction’; those places that suddenly and unexpectedly revive the smell and traces of former states of body and mind long left behind…” As a whole the exhibition is an elegy to a generation that lived and endured through the perils of the AIDS crisis. It stands both as a memorial to the era and as a testament to progress won, in part, through the efforts of activists like Wojnarowicz. In the landmark case, Wojnarowicz vs. American Family Organization and Donald Wildmon (1990) the artist defeated the misuse of his artwork in political propaganda leaflets that discredit the National Endowment for the Arts

An artist as complex, prolific and engaged as David Wojnarowicz rarely appears at so appropriate a moment within the arc of art history, as this exhibition hauntingly reveals.

The post Sites of Attraction: David Wojnarowicz at the Whitney appeared first on artcritical.

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.

The post The Past is a Foreign Country: On Photos by Peter Hujar and Chris Killip appeared first on artcritical.

In 1973, Candy Darling invited the photographer Peter Hujar to her hospital room at Columbia University Medical Center. She was dying, and she wanted him to take her picture. The resulting photograph, the last taken before her death, appears very still. The velvety blacks and satin whites of the gelatin silver print render a glamorous woman lying in a hospital bed, surrounded by flowers. It is, in a word, beautiful. After the initial captivation of Darling’s gaze and the sensory pleasure of the photograph loosens its grip, this aesthetic quality, however pure, quickly begins disintegrating into an image saturated with contradictions.

Born in 1944 as James Slattery, her youth was filled with the banal tyranny of the suburbs in Long Island, followed by several experiments with different transsexual identities in New York City, Candy Darling entered the world in the early 1960s. The duality of Darling’s identity gave her no shortage of discrimination and misunderstanding, yet there are countless stories of people overcoming their close-mindedness because of her undeniable beauty and femininity. When Darling’s mother, Theresa, first confronted James about the rumors she heard of him cross-dressing, he left the room and returned fully transformed into Candy Darling. Theresa later recalled, “I knew then… that I couldn’t stop Jimmy. Candy was just too beautiful and talented.”

Through Darling’s early realization that she was destined for something more important and more fantastic than the paths of her bucolic peers, she idolized classical Hollywood starlets. She was fascinated by Kim Novak and her piercing presence; in a home video of Darling reciting Novak’s lines from a scene in the 1955 film Picnic, Darling morphs into the character with total commitment, then says to the others in the room, “She was so strong, that’s what I liked about her. Something stable and so strong… but Kim was also vulnerable.” The combination of strength and vulnerability defined Darling throughout her short life. She filled pages of her diary with manifestos of tenacity: “I will not cease to be myself for foolish people. For foolish people make harsh judgments on me. You must always be yourself, no matter what the price. It is the highest form of morality.” As well as descriptions of her despondence and hardship: “I feel like I’m living in a prison. There are so many things I may not experience. I cannot go swimming. Can’t visit relatives. Can’t get a job. Can’t have a boyfriend. I see so much of life I cannot have. I am living in a veritable prison.”

Despite consistent poverty and frequent homelessness, Darling’s determination carried her to the stardom she so desperately desired, albeit briefly. In the five years during which she starred in several of Andy Warhol’s films, and in Tennessee Williams’ play, Small Craft Warnings (1970), Darling got a taste of the life she always wanted. But it all fell apart when Andy Warhol lost interest in her, claiming he did not want to use “chicks with dicks,” instead, he wanted to use “real women.” When Warhol made his film Heat in 1972, he did not invite Darling to play any roll, which left her devastated. Two years later, Darling was diagnosed with lymphoma. Those close to her suspect it was caused by the hormones she took to grow breasts — at Warhol’s suggestion. In the ultimate tragedy, it may have been her effort to transform into what she believed was her true self that killed her.

As she faced the last days of her life, she received one final, perfect tribute in the photograph, Candy Darling On Her Deathbed (1973) by her friend Peter Hujar. Fran Lebowitz — a friend of both Darling and Hujar — recalled the day they visited Darling in the hospital, and that she was too scared to see her friend so close to death, let alone photograph her. But Hujar was uniquely suited for the act because he had an innate understanding and appreciation for subjects in liminal states of contradiction. Lebowitz said: “No one else could have taken that photograph. Peter never thought of Candy as a freak… I think that’s why Candy responded to Peter. He thought of her in the way that my mother thinks of her best friend or anyone she would meet, the most usual kind of person. Candy loved that.” That was typical of Hujar in both his life and his artistic practice; subjects that existed outside the norms of orthodox culture fascinated him, but they were not abnormal to him. They were mysteries he wanted understand, and knew that the camera could help him reveal their enigmatic secrets. In both his portraits of humans and animals, Hujar captured an unconcerned openness and intimacy; there is an understanding and collaboration between the photographer and his subjects. Candy Darling On Her Deathbed, considered by many to be the apotheosis of Hujar’s career, contains everything that made Darling’s personality and Hujar’s photographs so alluring.

Technically, the photograph is masterful. Hujar expertly rendered the high contrast between the darkened room, Darling’s alabaster skin, her dark shirt, the white hospital bed sheets, and the fluffy white chrysanthemums floating on a darkened back wall, recalling the classic Hollywood glamour she loved so dearly. If the photograph were in color, the sconce above her would cast the room in a sickly florescent light, but in black and white it glows softly. The title of the photograph, despite being purely descriptive, carries a lyrical quality when spoken aloud; it is almost impossible not to sing it. Mirroring the content of the image, the sweetness of the title’s cadence and of Darling’s name fractures with the inclusion of her dying state. In her reclined pose, common to Hujar portraits, Darling looks as though she could be relaxing in her own bed if it were not for the strange sterility of the hospital room décor. With her perfectly applied make up and famously blond hair, Darling looks ready to go to a party, but upon remembering her illness, her dark eye make up and angular physiognomy turn her face into a skull, prophesying her impending death. The image complicates its viewing — continually shifting between seducing with its beauty and repelling with its morbidity. Darling lived and died in that space; when John Waters compared Darling to other transsexuals at the time he said: “The others were freakish and she was beautiful in a way that really put people off and drew them to her because she confused them.”

Hujar captured this confusion of expectation, reality, and fantasy that permeated Darling’s entire life with an eloquence that no one else could have matched. The combination of Hujar’s open-minded inquisitiveness with Darling’s undeniable magnetism infuses the image with a charisma worthy of them both. There is something magical that happens when a photographer and his or her subject share a generosity and willingness to be honest; it’s something ineffable that can only be felt, like the haunting sense of déjà-vu.

The post Candy Says: Remembering Two Artists and One Image appeared first on artcritical.

April 4 to July 7, 2012
26 Wooster Street, between Grand and Canal streets
New York City, 212-431-2609

This fascinating, intelligently-conceived, at once astute  and celebratory exhibition, organized by Jonathan Weinberg and artist Darren Jones, documents, mostly through photographs, a moment of unique intersection between several histories: gay, art, industrial and New York. From 1971 to 1983 – post-Stonewall and pre-AIDS, and at a time of social liberation and economic distress – the rapidly decaying wharfs and docks on the West Side below 14th Street were the site of unprecedented sexual and artistic experimentation.  As commercial shipping moved to Jersey and Brooklyn and a bankrupt city could not afford to police its abandoned industrial stock along the waterfront, artists and gays, for varying reasons, seized the day (and night).

In a heady fusion of hedonism and politics, the Stonewall riots of 1969 empowered new levels of public affection.  Docks and sailors held historic associations of gay adventure anyway, but the virtual police no-go piers proved an enticing playground for those who liked it rough. “Why do gays love ruins?” asks a character in Andrew Holleran’s novel, Nostalgia for the Mud, quoted by Weinberg as the epigraph to his accompanying essay.  “The Lower West Side, the docks.  Why do we love slums so much?”  “One can hardly suck cock on Madison Avenue, darling” comes the reply.  With the ocean liners gone, cruising began in earnest.

But the piers were also compelling for artists, regardless of their orientation.  The abandoned real estate proved a perfect canvas for Gordon Matta-Clark’s literally breakthrough environmental interventions, his “building cuts.”  The show is rich in photographs of Day’s End (Pier 52), his iconic cutout at the river’s end, steel wall of a mammoth shed, an Ellsworth Kelly-like sail-shaped puncture opening the dark interior to daylight.  Beside Matta-Clark’s own photographic diptych of his work there are images by urban photographers who documented the Piers scene such as Harry Shunk, Leonard Fink, Frank Hallam and Shelley Seccombe, who captures guys sunbathing along a jetty oblivious of the cut formed behind them in the name of art.  In contrast to literally and sexually cold nocturnal activities, the piers became a great place for mass gay sunbathing, and were soon dubbed “Manhattan Beach.”

For Vito Acconci, the dark, sinister, edgy quality of the wharfs made a suitable locus for Untitled Project for Pier 17 (1971). As announced in a printed statement posted at the John Gibson Gallery, the artist waited at a designated hour at the end of the pier and to anyone who came to see him there he would reveal “something that has not been exposed before and that would be disturbing for me to make public.”  Matta-Clark and Acconci were both made aware of the piers by ground-breaking curator Willoughby Sharp who anticipated the post-studio potential of the waterfront.

Artists and queers are by no means mutually exclusive groups, of course, but as cohabiters of the abandoned piers they were an odd couple.  Could this come down to the fact that for gays, whether there to cruise or sunbathe, the piers were perfect just as they were, a place in which life could improve, while for the artists, the piers were mere raw material, awaiting their magic touch?  The relations were active and passive: for gays, the piers were transformative whereas for artists the piers awaited transformation. Matta-Clark, as if anticipating a charge of vandalism of city property, defended himself in a rather prissy manifesto of 1975 in which he lamented the way the properties had been taken over by “a recently popularized sado-masochistic fringe,” arguing that his interventions would “transform the structure in the midst of its ugly criminal state into a place of interest, fascination and value.”  The city would ultimately do its own improvements, leveling the piers to create the running and cycling trails we have today.

Of course, both Matta-Clark’s macho hole busting and Acconci’s whispered secrets can be read as playing, with innuendo, upon the gayness of what was going on around them, a collision of sub and high culture.  But art in the piers was not all about cold cuts and furtive revelations: there was “gay abandon” aplenty.  At the end of the period covered by this show, in 1983, Mike Bidlo and David Wojnarowicz took over the Ward Line Pier which they made an extension of the then burgeoning East Village scene.  For artists they attracted like Luis Frangella and Judy Glantzman, the vacant industrial spaces were Sistine chapels awaiting their mural painting exuberance.  The Austrian street artist Tava (Gustav von Will) was already decorating the piers with stories high gay graphics of great skill and verve.

Sometimes, business and pleasure could be combined.  Colleagues Stanley Stellar and Peter Hujar ran into one another during a photo shoot at Pier 46 in 1981, as Weinberg recounts.  The photographers shot pictures of one another on Stellar’s camera.  And Hujar posed, getting a blow job, in the background of Stellar’s portrait of J.D. Slater as the celebrated porn-star leaned half-naked against a door jam with Keith Haring graffiti behind him, “a startling juxtaposition between an act of fellatio, a beautiful male body, and a signature Haring,” as Weinberg writes. This sumptuous photograph seems to be saying, in paraphrase of a chant made popular at the time: It’s a pier, we’re all here, get used to it.

The post Beyond the Studio & Out of the Closet: Art and Sex on the Waterfront, 1971-83 appeared first on artcritical.

June 10 – September 2, 2010
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid

New York City endured a near-death experience during the 1960s, and the steep decline of lower Manhattan precipitated the rise of a vibrant underground culture. The City began to acknowledge the pioneering efforts of artists to create live-work spaces or lofts within this wasteland of residential and commercial buildings in the 1970s by rezoning them as “mixed use”, albeit in piecemeal fashion and with much rancor. Within a decade, the empty lots and ruined real estate property that had incubated a wealth of sinewy conceptual art were transmuted into Soho gold.

If “mixed use” as a real estate term inspires this show’s outward theme, it implicitly applies to “artistic practices and strategies” in transition over a four decade period, as well. Curators Lynne Cooke and Douglas Crimp present a considerable array of films, photographs, texts, and sound installations by 40 artists spanning several generations. The city as performance space or experiential sphere of creativity becomes the unifying frame around projects of wildly differing intention, and the show often suggests links between specific works by artists who might otherwise appear to have little in common.

For example, several of Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills from 1978 (#25, #60, #83, #63), hang near Barbara Probst’s Exposure #9, New York City, Grand Central Station, 12.18.01, 1:21 pm from 2001. Probst’s six-part work features a female model, photographed simultaneously from six distinct points of view. Clearly, Sherman’s and Probst’s concerns, conveyed through distinct conceptual and technical approaches to picture-taking and picture-making, are strikingly different and decades apart. Yet the juxtaposition of these selected works highlights a common interest in the instability of photographic verity, set right in the midst of some of New York’s most familiar public spaces.

By contrast, photography as a straightforward accomplice to performance pertains in Babette Mangolte’s Woman Walking Down a Ladder from 1973. The ladder in question is that of a rooftop water tower. Contact sheets reveal a figure descending perpendicular to the ladder with no visible sign of a harness or guide wire. At close range, we see that she wears a nondescript blouse and skirt, while her face is obscured by her hair. At medium distance in profile, her descent appears even more precarious against the void of sky; and she is a mere speck when the photographer pulls back to reveal the full height and might of the building on which the water tower is delicately perched.

New York City’s rooftop water towers are also featured in Bernd and Hilla Becher’s 15-part array of fine black and white photographs from 1988. Echoing a 19th century trend to assemble photographic archives of like things for civic records, the Bechers adopted a similar methodology in the 1960s to make comparative studies of decaying industrial architecture in Europe and the US. Their systematic approach dovetailed with strategies of conceptual art being forged in that era, and the Bechers’ typological studies of water towers, gas tanks, blast furnaces, and other industrial relics have been highly influential.

Typologies abound in Mixed Use, Manhattan. From John Miller’s enigmantic series Clubs for America (1993) to Moyra Davey’s Newstands (1994), the streets of New York are teeming with similar things made unique by happenstance and style as much as wear and tear. The windows of urban buildings are the common denominator for Jennifer Bolande’s Globe series, which features blue metallic orbs with maps that are forever out of date. In a different key, Gordon Matta-Clark’s deadpan, black and white Window Blow-Out from 1973 depicts an abandoned building whose grid of broken windows is animated by a lone dog’s vigil.

The line between typology and series is porous. They synchronize neatly in William Gedney’s 1960s views from his apartment window. Entertaining a play between the static camera and everyday movement in the world beyond, his window is the theme for a set of variations. James Welling employs much the same strategy in Eastern Window #1-24 (1997-2000) except #8, 11, 12, 23. A chair on the neighboring rooftop changes position; light alters the buildings’ forms; the moon changes phase and disappears. Welling’s introduction of occasional color in this black and white world of ideas is mildly startling.

If still photography lends itself easily to urban typologies, photography on the move offers other possibilities. Sound and physical movement predominate in David Hammons’s video Phat Free (1995), in which a hand-held camera follows a performer kicking a can down the street. In David Wojnarowicz’s well-known series, Arthur Rimbaud in New York (1978-1979), a figure wearing a crude paper mask of the poet’s face traverses Coney Island, Chinatown, and the deserted streets of the West Side, enacting the artist’s taste for romantic irony and despair. With less drama, the painter Christopher Wool would photograph streets at night while walking home from his studio, studying incidental marks.

Images of the bygone West Side Piers stir piquant nostalgia for many New Yorkers of a certain age. In all their decrepit glory, the Piers were a magnet for aesthetic prowess as well as sexual trysts. From 1975-1986, Alvin Baltrop photographed their interiors and exteriors, observing cruisers, lovers, and yawning empty space in exquisite detail. When Gordon Matta-Clark cut an enormous, half-moon aperture at the far end of one pier, Baltrop noted its impact on the huge space as sublime cathedral or camera obscura. Peter Hujar’s haunting nocturnes of the Canal St. Piers, from 1983, submerge their secrets in velvet hues of photographic black. What’s left of them in 2010 amounts to jagged rows of decaying piles, as shown in Emily Roysdon’s gray-hued photographs, The Piers, Untitled (#2-5).

In 1971, the Piers were the site of an ambitious series of conceptual art pieces by 27 artists (all male, as it happened). Curated by Willoughby Sharp, photographed by Harry Shrunk and Janos Kender, the consistent format and high quality of the small, gelatin silver photographs establishes a collaborative framework within which each artist had his own word-and-image solo. Because the works were installed in a long corridor of the museum, viewers walking past the sequential imagery might experience it like stills from short silent movies. Vito Acconci, for example, spars with a reputed stranger who threatens to push him off the pier. Besides Acconci, the list of illustrious participants included John Baldessari, Keith Sonnier, Michael Snow, Daniel Buren, George Trakas, and others.

In quite another register, Charles Simonds, Gabriel Orozco, and Bernard Guillot found in the city places for reverie and magical thinking. Simonds, a sculptor, made a 16mm film called Dwellings in 1972. With children as his witnesses in blighted neighborhoods on the Lower East Side, Simonds uses tweezers to move tiny clay bricks into wall crevices. He explains that he’s creating miniature cities for “Little People” who will be moving in soon. (Simonds’s ephemeral archaeology eventually found its way into permanent niches, such as the stairwell of the Whitney Museum). Orozco’s color photograph, Isla en la isla (1993), also plays with changes in the cityscape’s scale. Wooden planks and other debris lean against a traffic barrier in a parking lot beside the Hudson River, mimicking the World Trade Center buildings and piers along the skyline due south. Guillot, in a series of photographs titled Orpheus and Eurydice from 1977, reinvents a mythic tale of tragic love, death, and descent into the underworld as photographic views of forlorn territory on the West Side.

The richness and variety of these projects is daunting. They attest to the elasticity of photographic and cinematic media as co-conspirator to artistic vision, be it performance, conceptual art, architectural intervention, socio-aesthetic political commentary, memento mori, extreme ballet, found object, available view, topographic documentation, lyrical serial existentialist anarchy, rough play. Cumulatively, the show exudes an inviting sense of spontaneity and hard-won freedom. I was particularly moved by Glenn Ligon’s harrowing, 20 wall-panel narrative of his residences, from his youth in the Bronx through a series of legal and illegal sublets early in his career, to, more recently, a stable situation in a condominium. Ligon’s true story is a bracing reminder of the anarchic forces of city real estate and the crucial, double role of the home-studio environment in an artist’s life.

It should be remembered that many of the works in Mixed Use, Manhattan were not seen publicly at the time of their creation. Some of the work on view came to light only through the efforts of dedicated curators and/or the survivors of loved ones. With equanimity and to fascinating effect, the curators have conjoined informal, private, and underknown works with widely known icons. Despite the real estate theme, as I see it this exhibition primarily draws inspiration from artists of the 1960s and 1970s who intentionally kept their work out of mainstream systems, creating alternative avenues for reception and distribution. A long perspective on the sensibility they set in motion can be found here, in disparate works that embrace plurality and resist categorization, revealing quixotic and tantalizing whispers of desire.

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