by Nik Cohn
No trace of such revels now remained. What had survived were the commercial buildings raised after the Civil War, and many among them were beauties. Prefabricated cast iron, they’d been designed purely as workplaces, as factories and showrooms, department stores, and so were lumbered with none of the false pomps of Lower Broadway. Their architects had kept function first, ornament for lagniappe. So the Haughwout, the Little Singer, and others were perfect in proportion, glorious in detail, but their grace was carried without fuss, no straining for effect.
The Haughwout’s fate was typical. Built in 1857, it had been among the most fashionable of carriage-trade emporia, its design modeled after Sansovino’s Library in St Mark’s, Venice, with a chocolate-columned façade, a fine clock, and the first Otis elevator in New York. Now it manufactured bras and wholesale knickers, and the clock had a vacant face, no hands.
Splash began at Spring.
It had come oozing up out of SoHo, which lay simmering to the west, so glutted with galleries that it couldn’t contain them all. Earlier the overspill had seeped south into TriBeCa, east to Alphabet City. Now Broadway caught the lees.
SoHo itself was Boomtown, rabid with gold-rush fever. Twenty-five years back, only trucks had lived here. Its narrow black canyons, gaunt with warehouses, were full of welding shops. Then the first few artists had snuck down from Greenwich Village, lured by the emptiness and the unobstructed light, by floor-through lofts at $10,000.
It was the moment of the minimalists. Their raw materials – steel plates and blocks of Styrofoam, industrial felt, daubed bundles of rags – lay ready to hand in these streets, tumbling out of every basement and manhole cover. So a cabal formed. Paula Cooper opened one gallery, Max Hutchinson another. Then came the critics.
Among the first was Robert Hughes.
A long-haired and black-leathered Australian, newly imported from London by Time, he was a young man with a motorbike and fitted right in. Above the SoHo Heat-Treating & Pacivating Company, he found a floor-through loft of his own. Already the price had upped to $25,000. He bought it anyway.
His neighborhood, solidly Italian, was as minimalist as its art. Apart from a single Puerto Rican bodega, the only shops were two pork butchers, a greengrocer, a trattoria, and one lone bar, Fanelli’s, in which the art colony huddled, molelike, most earnestly disputing. On wintry nights, Hughes could step out through the snow for an evening’s revelry and find his footprints untouched on returning.
Money was no issue. In that age, painters were not moguls. Wealth was reserved for museum artists, the Jasper Johns and the Willem de Koonings. In SoHo, success was paying your rent.
All of this changed in a hurry. A rash of articles began to appear in the Style sections of the glossy magazines. Leo Castelli and Andre Emmerich, uptown dealers, opened downtown branches. Soon West Broadway was lined solid with bistros and chic saloons, art-supply stores, gourmet food-fares: ‘Came the dawn,’ said Hughes, ‘came the boutique.’
Overnight, it seemed, SoHo was crammed, not only with painters and sculptors, but potters, art historians, framers and canvas-stretchers, professional girlfriends, professional boyfriends and, above all, assistants, a locust-plague of assistants. On one West Broadway wall, a lone graffito, crying in the wilderness, wailed SOHO SUCKS, BRING BACK THE TRUCKS. Double-quick, it was painted over, replaced by a daubed proclamation from Rene, a Labial Formalist, announcing I AM THE BEST ARTIST.
From a neighborhood, SoHo was transformed into a theme park. ‘ArtWorld,’ Robert Hughes called it.
And now the show had opened on Broadway.
In the manufacturies, whole floors had been annexed. Above and below, regiments of Hispanic women still churned out bikinis, pantyhose, garter belts. But sandwiched in between, like miniature shopping malls, sat clusters of bright white galleries, each peddling a different brand name: Neo-Geo or Retro-Abstractionism, Hyper-Realism, Postmodern Recidivism, Conceptual Art and/or Anti-Art.
The Broadway Restaurant was not impressed. A dim and cavernous bunker, heavy on the Lysol, it was not impressed by much. Deep in its recesses, men played cards and sipped sticky drinks, disputed the Racing Form. When strangers approached, the players froze, stiff as cardboard cutouts. ‘Art? Don’t tip worth shit,’ said a man in a porkpie hat. Fluttering his hand in shadow play, he made silhouettes on the wall, a squawking bird, a flapping of black wings. ‘Cheap, cheap,’ he said.
At the counter stood a young Englishman, cash in hand. He glanced left, then right, then shrugged, then twitched. Then he ducked his head, he opened his mouth half an inch. ‘Pack Winstons,’ he hissed.
‘And what else?’ the cashier asked.
‘Depends,’ said the Englishman.
A slightly built youth, curly-haired in a feather-tweed jacket, he had the face of a very old child. Pocketing the Winstons, he edged away from the counter, glanced left again, glanced right again. ‘All depends,’ he said, and made good his escape.
His name was Paul Kasmin; he ran a gallery upstairs. At this moment, it was a small empty box at the end of a blank corridor, containing nothing but a few kissee beads from Mozambique, short black banderillas like barbed-wire kebabs. But more was expected. If present plans worked out, there would soon be drawings, photographs, even paintings. ‘Art,’ said Paul. ‘And then.’ He wiggled his eyebrows, wrinkled his nose. ‘Or maybe not,’ he said.
Hidden behind a white partition, a girl scribbled notes, answered phones. ‘Are you in?’ she asked.
‘Up to a point,’ said Paul.
His father dealt art in England, had done so for three decades. In the sixties, he had helped package the generation of young and disparate English painters – David Hockney, Patrick Proctor, R. B. Kitaj, Allen Jones – that journalists lumped together as Pop, job-lot stars of Swinging London.
Paul himself, aged six, had had his portrait drawn by Hockney; had grown up immersed in Splash of all persuasions. In his twenties, he had studied art history at the Courtauld Institute, hustled prints in the Kensington Market, collected Brancusi photographs and, when England burned out, made his way to New York. He had drunk a bit and traveled a lot; he had met many people with money. Now he was turned thirty, and it was time to get serious.
To that end, he had rented this white space. With assistant, secretary, three-hour lunches at Da Silvano, and flights back and forth to art fairs around the globe, it cost him some $18,000 monthly, and he really must think how to fill it. He had drawers full of fine photographs, he had contacts and connections, his name was Kasmin, and he wished devoutly to be rich. Was that enough? ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘and no.’
Everything was fine in theory; but in practice, he had a sharp and urgent problem. This same evening he was due to try selling a Donald Baechler oil to a young French couple. Laurent and Gaby Pelletier, their names were, and they made a perfect team. ‘He is a man with lots of money, she is a woman with lots of legs,’ Paul explained. But selling was not his strong point. ‘I know art. Or I think I do,’ he said. He made a small choking sound. ‘But my song and dance, it’s not. I mean it isn’t.’ He gulped. ‘It never has been.’
Normally, he left the merchandising to his assistant, Marina, a dark girl with bottomless black eyes. Buyers needed to be nuzzled, led sweetly by the hand, and Marina could have sold life insurance on the Titanic. But she was out with the flu. That left everything up to Paul, and his gift of gab.
It was an all-important role. In recent years, a new breed of collectors had sprung up. They were primarily investors, not art lovers, and they paid in brand-new money. They’d made a killing in Hollywood or real estate, videos, computers, junk bonds and, as professional salesmen, they expected good sell in return. Just hand them a painting, however splendid, and they felt cheated: ‘Premature ejaculation. Coitus interruptus,’ said Paul. ‘One of those, anyway.’ His eyes flickered over the blank white walls of the gallery, the blank brick walls outside his window. ‘For every painting, there’s a—. You just have to find the—.’ Rumpling his alread
y rumpled hair, he dragged at an unlit Winston. ‘The key,’ he said. ‘The magic words.’
Glumly, he thumbed through past catalogs of Donald Baechler’s work. Baechler was very much a coming young artist, still in his early thirties, and Paul believed in him strongly. But words? ‘Oh, crumbs,’ he said.
In Baechler’s paintings, deliberately naif, there were figures of fat naked mothers and dinosaurs and little girls, the backs of heads, black-haired or bald, and faces howling and jeering, weeping, praying, just staring. Set against them, gaudy as picturebook cutouts, were soccer balls and Christmas trees, onions, okras, potatoes. ‘Great stuff,’ said Paul.
‘Why don’t you just say that?’ I asked.
‘Single syllables,’ he said. ‘Are you mad?’
His face was never still. He had pinkish eyes, small pink ears, a small tight mouth and, at every question, the little eyes would go darting every which way, desperate for boltholes. So he looked like a rabbit at bay, but a streetwise rabbit, an Artful Dodger indeed.
Seeking inspiration, he read out of the catalog of Baechler’s last exhibit. ‘His recent drawings provide the viewer with an experience of simultaneous attraction and vexation. Subtly attenuated surfaces layered by an indispensable fluctuation of line on the one hand, and the disorienting, claustrophobic image of a plenum; a sea of faces internally constrained and yet held from expanse by the paper’s edge on the other, is reflective of this concomitance. What is offered by the density of these images is both the allure of commiseration and the negation of a subjective gaze (in an impedance of communicative intention), through the specific placement of profiles at once bearing a plethora of expressions and rarely addressing the viewer directly.’
There was an extended silence.
In this white space, the phone failed to ring, the blank walls outstared the starer. ‘Oh, crumbs,’ said Paul again, and he plunged out into SoHo, went searching for magic words.
Inside Fanelli’s, there were boxing pictures on the wall, a bar scarred deep by expressionists. But Mike Fanelli himself was long gone. He had always been a ghostly presence, his figure so cadaverous and flesh so parchment-thin that he’d looked like one of those dried Japanese blowfish with a guttering candle inside. On frozen nights, when the pipes failed, an ancient Coleman stove would be hauled out. Its flames, refracted, shadow danced on ceiling and walls. Then the long bar seemed a cavern, a Hogarthian thieves’ kitchen. In the men’s room, above the marbled Edwardian urinals, some unknown hand had scrawled ARTIST OUTLAWS ALTOGETHER. Until the drink wore off, it had almost seemed true.
Now credit cards were accepted, and the salads were dressed with Balsamic vinegar. Wedged tight against the bar, hemmed in by day-trippers, two German dealers stood drinking Harvey Wallbangers, poring over their art-map. They’d just flown in from Stuttgart; they were here for forty-eight hours. Middle-aged STABs, they had covered six shows this morning, were expected at eight more this afternoon. But that was not enough: ‘We must see faster,’ said Dealer A.
‘One more beer, we go,’ said Dealer B.
‘No more beer, we go now,’ rapped Dealer A. ‘After Twombly, then we drink. After Twombly, mein Gott, we drink till the crows come home.’
Snatching the space they vacated, we called for ardent spirits. We were surrounded by the images of Mickey Walker and Young Griffo, Packey McFarland and Paul Berlenbach, the Astoria assassin; but no painters. ‘The thing about art. It is or it isn’t,’ said Paul. His hands described a pair of plump and bulging half-moons, reminiscent of Edam cheeses or Jayne Mansfield’s breasts. ‘But ArtSpeak?’ he said. The moons crumpled, dissolved. ‘Who knows?’
Tony Shafrazi knew.
He was the acknowledged SoHo rap-master, an emblematic figure whose rise had paralleled Art World’s own and whose fall, if it came, would prove its darkest fears.
Iranian, born of Armenian parents, Shafrazi had grown up in England. Coming to New York in 1965, he tried to be an artist himself, without success. ‘I was strapped in a waiting position, isolated, in a Kafkaesque state,’ he said later. And so, in 1974, when Picasso’s Guernica was on view at the Museum of Modern Art, he’d smuggled in a can of red paint and defaced it with the sprayed slogan Kill Lies All.
In its moment, it seemed a promising debut. Conservatives raged, blackballed him for life, but that was because they failed to understand. ‘I did it,’ Shafrazi said, ‘because I wanted to take on a greater responsibility.’
Wrist-slapped for a misdemeanor, he published a book of photographs and notations, started buying American art for the Teheran Museum. By the early eighties, East Village artists such as Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf had started making Graffiti Art, and Shafrazi brought them to SoHo. Their opening on Mercer Street was riotous with noisemakers and balloons, a hundred squealing male models.
Since then, Shafrazi had been unstoppable. Andy Warhol had showed with him, Charles Saatchi sold through him. Now of an age he declined to divulge, he had recently leased a new gallery on Prince, the size of a small museum, which was said to cost him $40,000 a month. But this new palazzo was not open yet. For the moment, Shafrazi still worked out of Mercer, in a clean, well-lighted airplane hangar.
Seated plump behind his office desk like a bank manager, he proved a fashion plate. Forget mad bombers, red paint-cans in hand – late-model Shafrazis came with distinguished gray hair and year-round tan, an Italian suit, a custom-made striped shirt. ‘I don’t use the word dealer. I am a gallerist,’ he said, looking everywhere but at us. ‘It involves more creative involvement and depth of responsibility.’
Responsibility was his magic word. His overheads and commitments, and the many personality wars in which he was embroiled, might have daunted a less unselfish man. But Shafrazi did not flinch. ‘It is always the task of those with vision and integrity to forge ahead,’ he said. ‘Art is my religion. With such a passion, it is my duty to address it at every level, the financial as well as the poetic and creative. That is my cross to bear, you might say.’
‘To make money, you mean?’
‘If necessary,’ said Shafrazi, ‘even that.’
Black Monday’s shadow lay heavy overall. What if a major depression were brewing? It was a horrid thought. All those forty-thousand-dollar rentals and hundred-thousand-dollar pricetags up in smoke. And the miniskirted assistants with them, the power lunches at Da Silvano, the weekend raids on Paris, Barcelona, Los Angeles. Yet Shafrazi betrayed no dismay. ‘I take the positive view. Pioneers always do,’ he said. ‘With integrity, a proper sense of responsibility, even periods of upheaval may result in contextual reinforcement.’
‘Meaning profit?’
‘I call it creative enhancement.’
In the gallery outside hung a Donald Baechler, a large oil and acrylic featuring a black-coated man with a black stove-pipe hat and a brightly colored beachball. It made me think of clockwork toys and decals, Indian pickle cans, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. But this was not my call. ‘What do you see?’ Shafrazi demanded.
‘No, please,’ said Paul cannily. ‘What do you see?’
‘The first caveman making the first mark, saying “I am Man, I exist, This is my testament.”’
Around the block, inside a converted diner called Jerry’s, Sasha Zim sat drinking iced milk with Alexei Alexandrovich and drawing a scarlet beard on a New York Post picture of Madonna. ‘Is my testament,’ Sasha said. But his public was not impressed. ‘Art is dead,’ said Alexei.
He was a bird man; some species of crested grebe. Twin white tufts and a silver plume flared from his bald pate, and his face was split by a purpled blue beak. ‘Dead. Kaput. Bought the farm,’ he said. His right arm, polio-crippled, hugged his chest like a broken wing. ‘Come speed the friendly bullet,’ he said.
He wasn’t from here. His home was in the Lower East Side, in a basement studio underneath Ludlow Street, and he only ventured out in need: ‘When my gut feeling is my gut needs filling,’ he said. In those hard times, he’d peddle his canvases on the side
walks of Cooper Square, along with stacks of used paperbacks and National Geographics. If that failed, he played the balalaika and sang Russian songs in the subway.
It was singing that I’d first met him. That was three years ago, long before I’d begun to Broadway. Alexei was midway through Moscow Nights, serenading the A train at Thirty-fourth Street. His high-pitched voice beat helplessly against the din. I gave him a dollar and requested Stenka Razin. ‘It’s not enough,’ he said.
‘It’s what I have,’ I replied.
‘Then here. Take this,’ said Alexei. And, reaching inside the beer mug that served as his tin cup, he handed me a crisp new five.
Afterwards, in the basement at Ludlow Street, we got drunk on buttermilk laced with potato vodka. There was no glass in the windows, only blankets. Inside, there was a German shepherd called Leon, and the walls were lined three-deep with paintings, unframed expressionist oils.
There were only two subjects: still lifes and crucifixions. ‘I try other stuff sometimes. Nudes, landscapes, what you like,’ said Alexei. But the nudes always ended up eating raw produce; every landscape sprouted a cross. ‘Aubergines, zucchini, nails,’ he said. ‘It’s what I see. Only I can paint what I see.’ And what he saw was ruin. The moment his brush approached it, all matter took sick. Fruit rotted, meat turned green; the savior’s flesh turned to ooze. ‘Putrefaction,’ said Alexei. The thought seemed to give him a backhanded pleasure. ‘The Abattoir School,’ he said.
As we drank, sundry Russians had wandered in, ambled out. They acted as if they lived here, but Alexei said they were just resting. One, a Mongoloid, started riffling through the paintings. When he came to a study of Christ’s martyred feet, he burst out laughing. Somebody cursed him, and the Mongol flushed crimson, ran away. But Alexei himself took no offense. On the contrary, he seemed reassured. ‘You can’t fool the jester,’ he’d said.
This basement doubled as a safehouse; a home for Soverican waifs. Alexei Alexandrovich had been living there for thirty-two years. In that span, he claimed, he had also sold thirty-two paintings. Meantime, he had sheltered a thousand dispossessed: ‘The army of the lost,’ he said now, sipping his iced milk in SoHo. ‘And their drums.’