Fire in the Belly

by Cynthia Carr

  Rice’s backyard was mostly broken asphalt sheltered by a few ailanthus trees, and accessible through his apartment. Frame and Bates experimented with the staging. One performer delivered a monologue from a fire escape. Their cast included Nan Goldin, her then-boyfriend Brian Burchill, and Rice himself. They lit the small space using extension cords strung over backyards from the La Mama theater on Fourth Street. The garden had room for about fifteen lawn chairs, folding chairs, and broken-down seating scrounged from the street.

  Inside his emptying building, Rice had commandeered one of the vacant apartments to use as an exhibition space. It was more salon than gallery, since it wasn’t open to the public. David became one of many artists who showed work at those soirées.

  Carlo McCormick met David at the Pyramid Club, during Pet Night. David had entered a cock-a-bunny in the contest for the most horrible pet. Carlo recalled someone else entering a ferret. And maybe someone had a rat. Any dog in the contest would have been ugly, or, as Carlo put it, “a breed associated with bottom-feeders.” He remembered Pet Night as an event the Pyramid sponsored “to celebrate the squalor and poverty of our lives.” Carlo had seen the “Hit and Run” show at Civilian with David, Savard, and Bronson Eden. And he’d attended the opening of “The Beast Show,” where he’d seen guards chasing cock-a-bunnies. (He was sure David had brought in hundreds.) So he approached him at the Pyramid. “I was like, ‘My god, you’re David,’ but David didn’t like people doing that to him. He jumped out of his skin.”

  Carlo—who quickly became a major critic, curator, and promoter of the East Village scene—wrote his first piece for the East Village Eye on the closing of the Ward Line pier, and one of his first reviews on David’s show at Civilian (“homoerotic and dramatic urban and military images done with skill and energy”). The Eye had not reviewed neighborhood galleries before this.

  Midway through ’83, however, the scene had begun to solidify and would not be ignored again, with the Eye functioning as house organ. When Club 57 closed that spring, the performance scene also moved into a new phase, as 57’s trash-and-vaudeville ambience spread to other venues. Its stars had no trouble finding gigs elsewhere, but in the East Village they tended to play at the Pyramid Club. In July, for example, the Eye reported on John Sex singing “Only the Lonely” there with his pet boa constrictor Delilah draped around his torso. Ann Magnuson could pack the place practically on word of mouth alone.

  That same month, Carlo curated an event for Limbo Lounge, a tiny club on the north side of Tompkins Square Park: fourteen consecutive one-night, one-person shows. David was one of the artists (as were Mike Bidlo, Keiko Bonk, and Rhonda Zwillinger, for example), and here one could definitely smoke (or drink or vomit) in front of a painting.

  The East Village was the art world’s surly teenager, ready to tromp all over the unspoken etiquette established in “grown-up” galleries. No one would walk into Leo Castelli’s space and ask, “How much is that Rauschenberg?” It wasn’t done. Money and status were the elephants in such rooms where top dealers sold top artists to top collectors. In the East Village, prices were discussed right up front. Often you could get something for fifty or a hundred dollars. A completely sold-out Rodney Alan Greenblat show at Gracie Mansion had work starting at five dollars. I once saw a dealer get work out of some dinky back room, spread it over the floor, and ask, “Is this the right size? Want something in blue?” Then, the East Village galleries were not just open on Sunday—but that was their big day. At openings, most of the artgoers were actually out in the street, since so few could fit inside. And at Civilian, Savard always served vodka, never white wine. What was not yet called “branding” revolved around such superficialities. At the same time, the whole East Village setup was a critique of elitism. When I wrote, in 1984, about what was happening in my neighborhood, I declared that new ideas were being explored here about what a collector, a dealer, an artist, and a gallery could be. Looking at it after more than twenty-five years, I’m not sure anything really changed. The art world has a magical ability to absorb every critique, and make money on it.

  Sur Rodney Sur and Gracie Mansion outside the gallery on East Tenth Street. She is wearing the evening gown to which Mike Bildo added Jackson Pollock drips. (Photograph © Andreas Sterzing)

  Ultimately 176 galleries would open in the neighborhood (not all at once, obviously). Landlords were eagerly endorsing this unlikely trend by offering former bodegas and social clubs—and sometimes apartments for the dealers—at remarkably low rents. I’ll never forget the young dealer who took me to her filthy, unheated apartment a few doors away from her gallery, served me instant Bustelo in a dirty cup, and then announced, “This is how we live on the Lower East Side.” She’d lived there for six months, after growing up on the Upper East Side. Poverty was apparently a cool new lifestyle, but it wouldn’t be for long. As this dealer proudly declared, “We’re raising the property values.”

  Gracie Mansion had started her career as a dealer by looking at the mechanisms involved in presenting and selling art, and she set up another sly commentary in September ’83 with her “Sofa/Painting” show. Because when you’re not elitist, you end up dealing with art buyers at the other end of the spectrum, those who say, “I need something that looks good over the sofa.”

  David was one of the six artists she invited to create both a sofa and a painting to hang above it. She gave each artist twenty-five or fifty dollars to help in the purchase of a couch. David found one on the street—a legless banquette that might have come from a diner. He set it on two milk cartons. On the seat he placed a piece of Plexiglas, covered on one side with his complaint about the art world. Yes, he already had one: Too many people wanted to show him. Or, were “trying to seduce him,” as Gracie put it. That meant Civilian and Gracie and Hal Bromm. On the other side of the Plexiglas he obscured those words by painting red, green, and white branchlike forms along with a screaming head and a small image of his own head. On the back of the sofa, he painted a cityscape in black and yellow, with a globe in the sky. The painting on the wall above the sofa showed a figure climbing a tree with one stump of a branch. “It’s him, trying to get away from all of us,” Gracie explained.

  David sold work in 1983 through all three of the galleries named and blamed above, earning a total of almost seventeen thousand dollars. He had a gross income of about twenty-six thousand dollars in ’84, but he was never rich. As usual, he embodied contradiction: he was irritated by the art world; he was also relieved that he finally had a way to make a living and worried that the whole thing could evaporate at any moment.

  David’s strange relationship with money began to manifest as soon as he made some. He would give it away without a second thought to a needy friend. Then sometimes, he’d be nearly broke again. He had no concept of financial planning. He never had a savings account. He never had an IRA. He did not have a credit card until almost 1990. Near the end of his life, he confessed to a friend that he had never known how to balance a checkbook. If possible, he would have avoided using money altogether. He preferred trading. He certainly would not consider making art just for money. But then, he wanted the purity of that intention to be matched by a purity of acquisition in collectors. They should care what the work meant! It made him angry, even disgusted, that people would buy work as an investment once it was validated by certain critics. Though he was never remotely as bad as Hujar on this score, his attitude led him into a certain amount of self-sabotage.

  He could not walk easily into his success. He had begun to get very prickly.

  In autumn 1983, a second wave of galleries opened, including P.P.O.W and Pat Hearn. The scene wasn’t percolating up from the streets anymore. The new galleries were run by people who’d always wanted to be dealers, and many came armed with backers or business plans. Hearn even remodeled her space. I remember passing it one midnight with friends right before it opened and stopping, astonished at the gleaming new facade that looked so out of place on Avenue B.

>   Halloween saw the opening of 8BC, soon to be a centerpiece of the East Village club scene, but then just an unheated basement space in a hundred-year-old Loisaidan farmhouse. The owners had removed most of the first floor, leaving the back end of it to serve as a stage. Spectators stood in the basement, heads craned back for a view, taking care to avoid the trickle of an ancient creek bisecting the dirt floor. Named for its location on Eighth Street between Avenues B and C, the club was in one of the few occupied buildings on the block.

  In October the East Village Eye did a cover story on the nascent scene, featuring twenty short pieces on artists who were now “hot commodities.” One was David. Writer Sylvia Falcon mentioned both Sounds in the Distance and an art “attuned to the bitter details of life.” She’d first encountered his work in the SoHo News—that centerfold “in which he compared himself to Arthur Rimbaud.” Now he was embarrassed by that claim, he told Falcon. “He does not share Rimbaud’s boyish enthusiasm for evil.”

  For his November show at Hal Bromm—a Tribeca space that would soon open an East Village branch—David made more totems and hauled a pile of sand into the gallery so he could place the things on a facsimile of a beach. Among his new paintings was Smuggler, a sailor painted over a photo of a riverboat. This was the image chosen for the poster, and there David added a block of text. He had abandoned his writing at this point, but I recognize some of the lines from his journals. The images don’t exactly cohere, but they’re vivid, like “the drag queen in the dive waterfront coffee shop turning towards a stranger and giving a coy seductive smile which reveals a mouth of rotted teeth.”

  When Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in Buffalo invited Gary Indiana to introduce two new writers in its reading series, he selected David and Joe Vojtko. At the beginning of November, the three of them flew to Buffalo. In an article commemorating his friendship with David, Vojtko recalled that the three of them met at the Kiev for breakfast before heading to the airport and there they began discussing “the purple death, the plague,” the disease they still knew so little about. David informed them that the first sign of AIDS was “white stuff on your tongue.”

  The three got to know each other that weekend in Buffalo. Vojtko wrote, “David and Gary were exchanging ideas and biographical information a mile a moment. I knew Gary well enough to know Gary was totally smitten.” It would get complicated later, but back in New York, David and Gary remained the closest of friends, in Vojtko’s estimation, for “many weeks, if not months.”

  Chuck Nanney had known both David and Keith Haring since the three of them were busboys together at Danceteria. Nanney recalled that David loved Haring’s subway drawings—to the point of obsession. But Haring had brushed aside any overtures of friendship from David. “In fact,” Nanney said, “I think he was kind of rude, because at some point David became really angry about Keith Haring.”

  During the interview taped by Keith Davis, David complained that Haring had “stolen” his image of a naked man with a dog’s head. It was in the piece David contributed to “The Erotic Show” at Club 57 in 1981 which Haring curated. “I didn’t feel comfortable using the man-with-dog’s-head image anymore after his became well known,” David said.

  But as Nanney explained it, David’s antagonism had nothing to do with art. “I think David wanted a kind of acceptance from Keith that he never got, and that turned into bitterness.” Feeling excluded could make David apoplectic. Nanney recalled a day that he’d gone out to look for old comic books with French artist Hervé Di Rosa—a straight guy both he and David had a crush on. When Nanney showed David the comics he’d found, David went off on a tirade: How could Nanney not invite him? How could he show him this stuff after excluding him? When Nanney tried to tell him that the jaunt had been spontaneous, not intended to exclude anyone, David went on ranting: “This happens to me all the time!”

  “I think it was part of his frustration, his wanting to feel connected to the scene that was still evolving around Keith Haring and feeling ostracized and not welcomed into that,” Nanney said. “It was kind of around that time that he became really anti-Keith and started going around town drawing radiant babies.” That was Haring’s trademark image.

  Nanney, who worked at the Mudd Club with Haring after the Danceteria bust, said Haring was angry when someone else began drawing the babies. “Everybody was talking about it, and Keith was like, ‘I didn’t tag here—who’s doing this?’ “

  David thought that was hilarious. “He had a strong mischievous side that sometimes was impish and delightful,” said Nanney, “and sometimes just—inexplicable.”

  Nanney and his boyfriend, Nicolas Moufarrege, spent time hanging out with David and Hujar—at the Bar or going for walks in the neighborhood. “David had this favorite game he always wanted to play, because he always knew Peter’s result,” Nanney said. He would ask, If you could have one piece of art from any artist from any time, what would it be? Nanney and Moufarrege would choose something different every time. But Hujar always said the same thing: either one of Keith Haring’s subway drawings or an Andy Warhol film, preferably Chelsea Girls.

  “David would always wait for Peter’s answer, and he’d be like, ‘Can you believe that?’ He’d go into this whole routine: ‘He doesn’t even want a piece of mine. He wants a Keith Haring drawing.’ He would do this every time so he could go into this mini-rant.”

  Hujar would just laugh.

  In December 1983, Kiki Smith had her first show, in the exhibition space at the Kitchen, an arts organization known for supporting experimental work in many disciplines. She had decided on a multimedia installation about domestic violence, “Life Wants to Live.” David helped. “We got pig’s blood from the butcher on Seventh Street and covered ourselves with blood and then we made prints of our bodies,” she said. While covered with blood, they passed a camera back and forth, taking close-ups of their bodies, then did the same with a Super 8 camera. Kiki also wanted to do CAT scans of their bodies, but when they went to a man with medical-imaging equipment, he said, why don’t you do X-rays? So they did X-rays of themselves pretending to beat each other up. She added a stethoscopic recording of a heartbeat.

  The X-ray technician didn’t have them wear lead shields at any point, then said something about how they should have covered their genitals “if you’re reproducing.” Kiki told him they weren’t reproducing. “I remember David was very angry at me for a very long time,” she said. When they discussed it later, he said something like, how come you don’t want to have children with me? This had nothing to do with sex; they weren’t lovers. This had nothing to do with children; he didn’t want children (though he said that if he did, he’d want to have them with Kiki). This had everything to do with his readiness to feel dismissed and rejected.

  The Europeans weren’t afraid, Alan Barrows remembered. They’d walk into the neighborhood, while the New York collectors kept their limos parked right outside the galleries. Europeans were among the first buyers at places like Civilian, scooping up work before the art establishment even took the scene seriously. German television had already sent a camera crew in 1983.

  Near the end of that year, David left for Europe with Dean Savard and Alan Barrows. A dealer in Amsterdam wanted to meet with them. Then they took the train to Cologne, where the Anna Friebe Gallery was putting together a February ’84 group show of East Village artists. Friebe’s son drove them to Bonn, where they’d been invited to meet with a curator at the Rheinisches Landesmuseum. David and Barrows went on to Berlin for New Year’s. Savard, smitten with Friebe’s son, returned with him to Cologne.

  A German journalist had given David a phone number for filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim in Berlin. Barrows had never heard of him, while David still had enough of a crush on Rosa to feel tongue-tied. (During their chance encounter at the GAA firehouse in 1972, they had not spoken.) Rosa didn’t know who they were but helped them anyway. He arranged for a friend to give them her apartment while she moved in with Rosa for two weeks. Year
s later, Barrows recalled it as a wonderful trip. “David had to go everywhere,” Barrows said. “In Amsterdam he took me to a male brothel. For rent boys. He wanted to see what it was like. He wanted to see the kids that were there.” They didn’t hire any of them. David just wanted to see it. Then, in Berlin, David wanted to see a female brothel. “That was creepy,” said Barrows. “It was in a bad area, and these women were just ugly. But he wanted to see it.” They went to the parts of East Berlin that were still bombed-out. They walked around both Amsterdam and Berlin looking at graffiti. David photographed everywhere they went—the landscape but also Barrows. He painted on Barrows’s shirt, painted on Barrows’s sneakers. He painted on the souvenir maps.

  One day in an Amsterdam bar, David sat doodling on cocktail napkins with a Magic Marker as he griped to Barrows on a familiar topic: all the attention that Keith Haring was getting. And his stuff was so easy! To demonstrate, David drew the radiant baby on one of the cocktail napkins. Apparently he did a convincing job. The bartender looked over and gasped, “It’s you!” He began running over with free drinks for David and Barrows. Then he took the cocktail napkin and put it up behind the bar. David didn’t say anything.

  David arrived in Paris on January 9, 1984. He stayed with Jean Pierre till February 22, but JP was at work during the day. And David didn’t know where his remarried sister was till she wrote in March to give him her new address and last name.

  Then Gary Indiana showed up. He told David he’d written an article he didn’t even want to write just to get money to come see him. “It wasn’t true,” Gary said later. “I just told him that. I had a big crush on him, and I thought, ‘Oh, we’ll have an affair in Paris.’ But then the very first day, he made it clear that that wasn’t what he was interested in. I didn’t want to spend all my time with him because I still had this crush, but he wanted to spend all his time with me because he didn’t know anybody else. It was really stupid.”