Curated by Scott Hug, B-Out at Andrew Edlin Gallery, weaves together over 100 artists into an imaginative installation that illustrates a partial and subjective history of what it means to create outside the norm.
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From artist David Wojnarowicz’s glasses to advertisements for the Pyramid Club in the zine the East Village Eye, signs from Bronx nonprofit Fashion Moda to flyers advertising performances by punk and No Wave legends Richard Hell, Lydia Lunch and Patti Smith, the Fales Library and Special Collections at New York University is no ordinary library. Fales holds the Downtown Collection, an archive of art, books, photographs, videos, objects, journals and other materials from the New York City downtown scene’s iconic figures and art spaces.
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I feel naïve to have thought that art offered one of the only scared spaces to be freely expressive. Two weeks ago, I wrote a post that attempted to diplomatically depict the controversial saga that has unfolded over artist Brett Murray’s “The Spear”, a Communist propaganda style portrayal of South African president Jacob Zuma with his penis hanging out from his zipper.
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While at The Piers: Art and Sex along the New York Waterfront at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, one question kept popping up in my mind: What is with this obsessive nostalgia for the decaying, destroyed and often depressing New York of the past, particularly as connected to the emerging gay subculture and downtown art scene of the 1970s and ’80s?
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In the exhibition Canceled: Alternative Manifestations and Productive Failures at the Center for Book Arts, the documents, language and narrative of controversy, censorship and failure become a new form of work to consider.
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While at the landmark exhibition Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture at the Brooklyn Museum, I realized I had to start my review with a statement that will look simple and quite possibly stupid: Hide/Seek is more than David Wojnarowicz’s “A Fire In My Belly.”
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Here we go again. Almost a year after the controversy at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, Catholic groups in New York have started to raise alarm over David Wojnarowicz’s “A Fire In My Belly” (1986-7) that will appear in the Brooklyn version of Hide/Seek.
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Just in time for National Coming Out Day last Tuesday and the November opening of the controversial Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture at the Brooklyn Museum, Triple Canopy has published a selection of visual artist and writer David Wojnarowicz’s journals online. Giving readers a brief and fascinating look into Wojnarowicz’s life and thoughts, the publication of the journals follow Wojnarowicz’s imploring to turn the private into something public as a political tactic.
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The Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression has given out one of its annual “Jefferson Muzzle” awards to Smithsonian Secretary G. Wayne Clough for his removal of David Wojnarowicz’s “A Fire in My Belly” video and censoring of Hide/Seek at the National Portrait Gallery. That’s one trophy we assume won’t be going on display in his home.
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If the art world has been about globalism for quite a while I can say that is more true now than ever — if that’s possible.
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