As she wrote in Don Quixote: “Even freaks need homes, countries, language, communication. The only characteristic freaks share is our knowledge that we don't fit in. Anywhere. It is for you, freaks my loves, I am writing and it is about you. Since humans enjoy moralizing, over and over again they attack us. Language presupposes community. Therefore without you, nothing I say has any meaning.”
PART II
The Consequences of Loss
As crimes pile up, they become invisible.
Bertolt Brecht
CHAPTER FOUR
The Gentrification of Creation
Why do artists move to cities? Because they want to be part of the creation of new ways of thinking. One of the reasons I have always loved being an artist in New York City is that we get to hear some kinds of ideas before they are widely available. We get to invent and hear new approaches as they are rawly, freshly born. And then we get to be part of the development of those ideas through conversations in living rooms, on subways, in the audiences of live presentations, in artists' studios, looking at works in progress, watching rough cuts of films, hearing workshops of plays, and over dinner. By the time the book is written, able to find a publisher, actually printed, possibly distributed, and finally available at the mall, about two to six years have passed. By the time those books are purchased and finally read, two generations of subsequent, newer discoveries have already taken place. But in order for us to gather together for this purpose certain preconditions are required: (1) affordable places for unrecognized practitioners to live, have work space, and find time to make their work; (2) diversity of thought and experience that produces a dynamic mutual exposure to varied points of view; (3) stimulation, unlimited raw material; (4) some kind of pleasure in difference; (5) regular, direct access to great artists and their work.
Under gentrification, what is possible for young artists, hence how they see themselves, is dramatically different. They cannot afford to live or work. They are faced with conformity of aesthetics and values in their neighborhoods. Conventional bourgeois behavior becomes a requirement for surviving socially, developing professionally, and earning a living. By necessity, their goals are altered. Reimagining the world becomes far more difficult, and reflecting back what power brokers and institutional administrators think about themselves feels essential to survival. This is a much more difficult environment in which to imagine one's self as an artist, negotiate the expense of art-making, and—most challenging of all—to be allowed, by the tight fist of the prevailing institutions, to emerge without losing one's soul. There seems to be no other game in town. Right now. I believe, of course, that this can, will, and must change. But that would only be possible with consciousness. And so I want to talk about how gentrification and AIDS have created the loss and replacement of the community-based artist—who responds to people and their aesthetic complexities, instead of to power institutions.
People also move to cities to invent new political movements. Gay liberation, like all explosive visions that transform the world of possibility, required urbanity. It was not born in Scarsdale, Levittown, Syosset, or Great Neck. It required freedom, oppositionality, imagination, rebellion, and interaction with difference. In order for radical queer culture to thrive, there must be diverse, dynamic cities in which we can hide/flaunt/learn/ influence—in which there is room for variation and discovery. If people who are not wealthy are going to become artists and revolutionaries, they need affordable rents and workspaces, ways to learn their craft without paying tuitions, and a process of development that is not systematized. They need ways of being seen and helped by those in power behind the scenes, without having to be professionalized facsimiles to get help. Most importantly, real artists—people who invent instead of replicate— need counterculture as a playing field.
Most plays that get produced these days are kind of like live-TV. If they involve complex social dynamics, they usually argue, in the end, that people are resilient and good prevails after all. But most often, rewarded plays involve the small concerns of recognizable bourgeois types, and may have some formal innovation for their own sake. I've experienced two talented theater directors telling me explicitly that they don't care about what a play is saying or what happens in a play, they are only interested in how it says it. But formal invention is not inherently progressive, as we have learned from video clips, computer graphics, and sampling. Formal invention has a radical purpose when used to convey unconventional points of view, that is to say when it is used to expand what is conveyed about human experience. Even though many heterosexuals avoid the fate/destiny of romance/marriage/parenthood, it is a well worn and instantly recognizable structure upon which most mainstream representations are based. In other words, most bourgeois straight people already know the storyline their lives are supposed to follow before their lives are even begun. For preassimilation queers, this was not the case. Our lives were strangely structured singular works without predetermination, unknown stories that had never before been heard. The dominant culture told us we were outcasts and alone and then did everything they could to make that come true. Out of the conflict between our determination to truly exist fully as ourselves, and our clash with highly propagandized false stories and even more powerful silences, came queer culture, the marvel that produced many of the great art ideas of the twentieth century.
The artful AIDS dead, of course, included some very successful and high-earning celebrity artists like Keith Haring and Robert Mapplethorpe. But the vast majority were rank-and-file artists who didn't live long enough to become known, or to quit, or to become teachers or heads of institutions. They didn't live long enough to influence. I could list names like Gordon Kurti, Brian Taylor, John Sex, Huck Snyder, Paul Walker, Paul Walker (there were two of them), Harry Whitaker Shepard, and on and on forever. But what would be the point? Since many of them worked before video was a regular part of life, there is little documentation of what they did. In a sense they only live on in the memories of the living. Penny Arcade's brilliant play Invitation to the End of the World featured a heartbreaking scene in which Penny imagines the mother of Rita Redd, a drag artist who died of AIDS, standing on a street corner in the East Village stopping passersby and asking if they'd ever heard of her son.
“He did shows!” she insists. “He put on lots of shows.”
She can't understand why none of the recent yuppie arrivals know who he was. She doesn't realize that his audience has also died.
These dead and their friends pioneered new art ideas including performance, installation, the intersection of new technologies and live performance, improvisational new music and improvisational dance, drag, expansions of materials and techniques. They came to New York or grew up in New York and lived in low-income areas, hustled legally and illegally for a living, made art for low-income audiences, and had an interactive relationship with urban life. They did not live long enough to be able to object to the professionalization of the arts, which might not have been so thorough had they lived. They did not mature. When they died, their practice of creating new paradigms outside of institutional structures was removed from sight.
A recent issue of the New Yorker included a short profile of John Kelly, one of the survivors of the lost generation of radical gay male artists. The author was talking to him about his many years of performing the works of Joni Mitchell, and at one point she asked John why he “did not want” to be part of a recent Joni Mitchell tribute album. “I wasn't invited,” John replied. It was such an amazing moment. The New Yorker reporter, who by definition has power and access, projected that this important senior artist would have the same. She assumed that he had “made it.” And that the only reason he was not being included would be because of his own refusal. She projected power onto this gay experimental artist that he cannot possibly have because of his cultural position. I would have understood from the first Second that of course he was excluded, that inclusion in the Joni Mitchell tribute album was not based on talent,
understanding, merit, or having something to say. But this reporter, believing that things are different than they actually are, believed that he was now normal.
About a week later I had a Facebook conversation with a reporter from New York Magazine. She said she had “read somewhere” that I argued that gay people should have nothing to do with their homophobic families. I informed her that my belief was, in fact, the opposite of that. I told her that my book on familial homophobia argued that third parties should intervene and create consequences for homophobic families so that they could not get away with marginalizing and shunning their gay family members. Again, she skewed reality to create a false but comfortable illusion in which it is the gay person who has the power and who refuses to participate, when the truth is that we are the ones who are excluded.
In light of this contemporary redrawing of reality, I want to try to show what it is like to be a queer artist of the disappeared generation, what kinds of emblematic experiences are at play, and how our values have been formed. So, let me try to piece together that process by looking at some of my favorite survivors. First I want to introduce you to Jack and Peter. And then let you in on a bit of my conversation with Jim.
Jack Waters and Peter Cramer met on stage in the 1970s and have shared the spotlight ever since. The history of their love and work crosses paths with the most marginal and occasionally the mainstream. They move in and out. It's a history of cheekiness, haphazard decision making, and incredible risk-taking. Long-term AIDS survivors, they live in a squat on the Lower Eastside that they have shared for decades with Kembra Phfaler (of the cult band The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black) and filmmaker Carl George, plus a never-ending assortment of homeless and/or wandering gay kids needing a place to be an artist for a little while.
Peter was a straight white ballerina, performing in Giselle and The Nutcracker. Jack was a gay Black modern dancer in the tradition of Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey. They met while performing in a middlebrow dance company for Wall Street white-collar workers needing entertainment on their lunch hour. A friend begged them to never do bland work like that again, and so, newly in love, they fled the mainstream dance world forever.
Peter had been a club kid in the seventies, working at the No Name Club (run by Eric Goode and Sean Houseman), a renegade place, constantly shifting its location. He also worked at the A Salon with Charlotte Moorman (an iconic sixties pioneer of the Fluxus movement, collaborator of Nam June Paik, and notoriously arrested on a decency charge for playing the cello without concealing her breasts) and Michael Keane, part of a group called Des Refusees. They worked in an interdisciplinary voice crossing between visual art, ballet, butoh, and performance in nightspots where “club” and “art” were synonymous.
“Neither of us had ever been very interested in the authoritarian way of art-making,” Jack said. “We're very social.” And so were the times.
Both men were heavily influenced by the historic Times Square Show in 1980, put on by Co-Lab (Collaborative Projects), a nonprofit collective of artists including Kiki Smith, her late sister Bebe (who died of AIDS), and David Hammonds, producing work in divergent places in response to the dead world of blue-chip art galleries, still selling pop art and abstract expressionists. This pioneering show, which is widely seen as emblematic of the new era, was set in abandoned buildings in a Midtown Manhattan that was full of abandoned buildings, as New York City had almost defaulted into bankruptcy. Real estate then was undesirable, so artists had shells of buildings in the Times Square area in which to do their work. Co-Lab was not looking at their art as product but rather for social impact. There were no labels or tags, no commercial intent. In many ways this show was a model for Peter and Jack's sense of what an artistic community could be and do.
With the late Brian Taylor, who died of AIDS, they established a collective called Pool that became the resident company of the Pyramid Club, a drag/performance club on Avenue A where I had my first play, at 2 a.m. in 1979.
“There was a lot happening at the same time,” Jack says. “And that was our steady paying gig. Forty dollars a night and drinks to your heart's content.”
Fellow Pyramid performers, many of whom died of AIDS, included the late John Sex, the late Ethyl Eichelberger, John Jeshrun (with his legendary Chang In A Void Moon—a performance serial), John Kelly, the late Frank Maya, the late John Bernd, the late Huck Snyder, and of course drag queens galore like Tanya Ransom, the late Rita Redd, and the late Bobby Bradley, “this really cute pervert Mormon.” The late Anne Craig was the emcee. In the early eighties the Pyramid was a few blocks down from Ela Troyano and Uzi Parnes's illegal Chandelier Club, where the windows were blacked out to keep the fire department from noticing, Dennis and Cornelius's 8BC Club, and Club 57, where Anne Magnuson performed. But the gentrifiers were coming.
“As the Pyramid became more successful, the bridge and tunnel crowd started showing up,” Jack says. “So, then we got our own place.”
“Bridge and tunnel” was New York–speak for tourists from New Jersey and the suburbs. Later, when rich Europeans started flocking to the East Village and were quickly followed by a bevy of four-dollar cappuccino places, it got amended to “B&T&A” (“bridge and tunnel and airplane”).
Some Co-Lab artists like Bobby Gee, Alan More, and Rebecca Howland had established a gallery space in an abandoned building on Rivington Street called ABC No Rio (derived from the half effaced sign of the previous tenant, a Spanish-speaking Notorio) and were looking for new directors to take on operating responsibilities. By this time the boys had hooked up with their collaborators: Carl George, the late Gordon Kurti, Brad Taylor and his brother the late Brian Taylor, Edgar Oliver, and Erotic Psyche (Aline Mare and Bradley Eros), so they had an extended community of artists to work with. Jack and Peter moved into the basement at No Rio and a new art energy was born.
For the next four years they ran ABC No Rio with a dizzying revolving door of visual arts, music, and performance. Literally thousands of artists moved through. Then Mathew Courtney started the influential open mike at No Rio, the precursor to the spoken word / slam scene later to come to fruition at the Nuyorican Poets Café. They also housed Amica Bunker, a seminal music series founded in 1984 by Chris Cochrane and Cinny Cole, with pioneer artists like John Zorn, Zeena Parkins, Shelley Hirsch, and Christian Marclay.
“It wasn't a space, it was a place,” Jack says. “Everyone from Michelle Shocked to Keith Haring to Nick Zedd and Lydia Lunch. It wasn't curated. People could just come and draw if they wanted to. It was available. It was there.”
One of the aesthetic shifts Jack noticed that came with gentrification was the sudden popularity of solo performance, a kind of alternative stand-up. “To us,” he said, “that was too normal.” The elaborate epic ritual pieces that Ping Chong or Meredith Monk or Erotic Psyche would do were replaced by a single person standing in front of a mike. This was, of course, the influence of television—instead of inventing forms from outside of corporate culture, the newly arriving crew of professionalized artists were using forms from The Tonight Show. Stand-up and solo were a much more commodifiable form to work in. Later, solo performance became the curateable, acceptable expression for minority voices in mainstream theaters, as multicharacter plays with gravitas, or elaborate works with large casts, remained the arena of the white male. Lesbians, Latinos, and Experimentalists were marginalized into the vaudeville solo niche.
Another sign of gentrification was the opening of what was called “performance clubs” like Area in 1985.
“We thought it's a new club, we're all going to get work there,” Jack remembers. “But when Area opened it was about display. It was heralded as a performance club, but they put artists into display cases to be looked at as background, not to be heard.”
Thinking about this insight, I can see that this was the shift from a neighborhood focused on artistic production into a destination neighborhood for tourists who wished to drink and socialize surrounded by artists as the backg
round scenery. Their primary task was the reproduction of status through sexual, social, and business networking. The class interest came first, and art was its Muzak.
“Looking back,” Jack says, “at Area there was less and less interruption of the beat. The beat couldn't stop for performance because the beat was hypnotic and the beat makes you drink and the beat makes you want to stay. If you did a performance that people didn't like and they would boo or walk out, they didn't drink. When the emphasis is on the bottom line, you don't want anyone to walk out.”
Here we see a really pivotal moment of change, when art must become something that does not make people uncomfortable, so that they will spend money. The kind of person who is expected to consume art is transformed in the mind of the producer. The people who might very possibly love being expanded by what they see are never given the chance. They're trained to be narcissistic and unimaginative, even if they could be productive creative thinkers. Drawing a connection between the art they see and the world in which they live becomes less available. The long-term effect of such a condition is that gatekeepers (producers/agents/publishers/editors/programmers/critics, etc.) become narrower and narrower in terms of what they are willing to present, living in a state of projected fear of ever presenting anything that could make someone uncomfortable. There is a dialogic relationship with the culture—when consumers learn that uncomfortable = bad instead of expansive, they develop an equation of passivity with the art-going experience. In the end, the definition of what is “good” becomes what does not challenge, and the entire endeavor of art-making is undermined. Profit-making institutions then become committed to producing what the Disney-funded design programs call “Imagineers,” the craftsman version of Mouseketeers, workers trained to churn out acceptable product, while thinking of themselves as “artists.”
The Gentrification of the Mind Page 8