Posts from the “1980s” Category

Robert Giard: Particular Voices: Photographs of LGBTQ Writers, Artists and Activists, 1980s – 90s

Posted on June 6, 2019

Robert Giard. Pamela Sneed, NYC 1992.

In 1985, Robert Giard (1939-2002) went to see The Normal Heart – Larry Kramer’s largely autobiographical play about the rise of the AIDS crisis. The set was austere. Newspaper headlines, statistics, and the names of those who had died were painted on the walls of The Public Theater.

“The fact that we knew so many of those people was deeply moving and motivating,” remembers Jonathan Silin, Giard’s life partner, co-president of the Robert Giard Foundation, and executor of the Robert Giard Estate.

Inspired, Giard set forth on a journey to photograph LGBTQ writers, artists and activists across the United States, creating over 600 portraits between 1985 and 2002. Giard’s sitters include Stonewall veterans Stormé DeLarverie and Sylvia Rivera, Samuel R. Delany, Edward Albee, Edmund White, Eileen Myles, Quentin Crisp, Allen Ginsberg, Jacqueline Woodson, and Gertrude Stein, among many others.

A new exhibition, Particular Voices: Photographs of LGBTQ Writers, Artists and Activists, 1980s – 90s, presents a selection of 53 portraits from Giard’s archive, curated to illustrate the photographer’s inclusive spirit, inquisitive mind, and generous heart.

Read the Full Story at AnOther

Robert Giard. Sylvia Rivera, Brooklyn, 1999.

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, AnOther, Art, Exhibitions, Photography

Niki de Saint Phalle: The Female Gaze in a World of Men

Posted on May 30, 2019

Vogue 1971. Portrait of artist Niki de Saint-Phalle painting one of her large Nanas sculptures in her studio outside Paris. (Photo by Jack Nisberg/Condé Nast via Getty Images)

“Very early on I decided to become a heroine,” said artist, filmmaker, and feminist Niki de Saint Phalle (1930–2002). “What did it matter who I would be? The main thing was that it had to be difficult, grandiose, exciting.

De Saint Phalle shaped her destiny from a young age after realizing those closest to her would destroy her if they could. Physically abused by her mother and sexually abused by her father as a child, de Saint Phalle refused to become a victim of the petty bourgeois who raised her to be a housewife and mother.

“I could not identify with Mother, our grandmothers, our aunts, or Mother’s friends. Their territory seemed too restrictive for my taste,” de Saint Phalle said. “I want the world that belonged to men… Very early I got the message that men had the power and I wanted it. Yes, I would steal their fire from them.”

Read the Full Story at Jacques Marie Mage

Niki de Saint Phalle (kneeling) by Dennis Hopper, 1963

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Jacques Marie Mage, Painting, Women

Vivien Goldman: Revenge of the She-Punks

Posted on May 29, 2019

Debbie Harry, London 1979. © Janette Beckman

Vivien Goldman still remembers what it was like to be the only woman in the room when she began working as a music journalist in London during the early 1970s. “My whole generation was very into music and there was a very vibrant music press known as ‘the inkies,’” Goldman recalls. “It’s a relic now, but it was started by young rebels.”

“There were hardly any women in the field. When you look back it’s insane. I remember big battles at editorial meetings. There was real hostility to my ideas of covering more women and encouraging women. People would say things like, ‘Women don’t make music. Women aren’t into music.’ I was like, ‘Look at me! I’m here in front of you!’ But it was a phalanx of the patriarchy.”

For Goldman, punk was and forever will be a liberating force for women – one which she explores across time and around the globe in the captivating new book Revenge of the She-Punks: A Feminist Music History from Poly Styrene to Pussy Riot (University of Texas Press). Taking a lateral approach, Goldman weaves a fascinating tapestry that threads together themes of identity, money, love, and protest over five decades.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Poison Ivy, The Cramps © Janette Beckman

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Huck, Photography

Kim Gordon: Lo-Fi Glamour

Posted on May 22, 2019

Sound for Andy Warhol’s Kiss LP cover

At age 13, Kim Gordon and her best friend would put “Heroin” by the Velvet Underground on the turntable and give it a spin. Pretending to be high, they’d start to nod, moving in slow motion until the choreography left them lying on the floor.

Restless in West LA, Gordon looked east to Andy Warhol’s Silver Factory – the artist’s famous New York City studio – for inspiration while growing up. She was unaware of the future that was to come, which included, among other things, an invitation to re-score Warhol’s 1963–64 silent film Kiss, which features appearances by Jane Holzer, Gerard Malanga, Marisol, and Pierre Restaney.

The project became the centrepiece for a new exhibition, titled Kim Gordon: Lo-Fi Glamour. Featuring paintings, drawings, and never-before-seen female figurative works, the show highlights Gordon’s lifelong love of the artist.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Exhibitions, Huck, Music

Mariette Pathy Allen: Rites of Passage

Posted on May 20, 2019

Cori and poodle, 1987. © Mariette Pathy Allen, courtesy of the artist.

The many expressions of identity that exist on the gender spectrum is a subject of tremendous depth and breadth, though it has largely existed underground in realms secreted away from the masses. It has given birth to a culture so innovative and rich that, 50 years after Stonewall, the underground has emerged and center itself with impeccable aplomb.

Over the past half-century, artists like Mariette Pathy Allen have been deep in the trenches, using their work to fight for dignity, respect, and rights — taking on the tyranny of ignorance, bigotry, and oppression.

In celebration, The Museum of Sex presents Mariette Pathy Allen: Rites of Passage, 1978–2006, a stunning survey of the artist’s archive that includes photographs, interview transcripts, personal correspondence, and materials from her career working with trans, genderfluid, and intersex communities over the past four decades.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Sunday morning during a Drag Ball, 1984. © Mariette Pathy Allen, courtesy of the artist.

Harlem Drag Ball, 1984. © Mariette Pathy Allen, courtesy of the artist.

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Exhibitions, Feature Shoot, Photography

Tom Bianchi: 63 E. 9th Street. NYC Polaroids 1975–1983

Posted on May 15, 2019

untitled, nyc099 by Tom Bianchi

After discovering the Pines on Fire Island in 1972, Tom Bianchi found himself drawn into New York’s flourishing gay scene which emerged in the years following Stonewall.

“I was having an affair with the playwright Edward Albee, which brought me in and out of New York,” Bianchi says from his home in Los Angeles. “I thought New York was too difficult a place to live – too expensive and too crazy – but my contacts lead me to imagine I could live there and be a New Yorker. What was thrilling was the sexual availability of the gay community at that time: we were just bursting at the seams.”

In 1975, Bianchi moved to the heart of Greenwich Village and took a job as in-house counsel at Columbia Pictures. That year, Bianchi received a Polaroid SX-70 camera during a corporate conference and began documenting the lives of his friends and lovers in the early years of Gay Liberation – images which are now compiled in the new book, 63 E. 9th Street. NYC Polaroids 1975–1983.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

untitled, nyc079 by Tom Bianchi

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, AnOther Man, Art, Books, Manhattan, Photography

Miron Zownir: NYC RIP

Posted on May 15, 2019

NYC 1983 © Miron Zownir

Hailed by Terry Southern as the “Poet of Radical Photography,” Miron Zownir took up photography in the late 1970s when he arrived in West Berlin. Moved by the spirit of punk, Zownir embraced the utopian vision of anarchy and nihilistic self-destruction that flourished openly on the streets and in the sex clubs, drug dens, and nightlife of West Berlin and London.

It was a spirit that continued to guide his photography when he moved to New York in 1980, just as the city reached new heights of decadence just before the advent of AIDS. Using his camera as his guide, Zownir made his way from his digs in the East Village to explore the streets of New York at its most outlaw.

Before gentrification erased all that had come before, Zownir captured New York’s seedy years when prostitutes walked the streets, movie theaters screened porn around the clock, live sex and peep shows took loose change, and the West Side piers were the ultimate destination for anonymous sex—but also art interventions by Vito Acconci, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Peter Hujar in the years following Stonewall.

Zownir’s photographs show New York after a decade of “benign neglect” and landlord-sponsored arson that reduced large swaths of the Bronx, Brooklyn, Harlem, and the Lower East Side to rubble. Real estate was affordable—if not outright cheap—after white flight had sent the middle class out to the suburbs. In their absence, artists like Zownir arrived, mixing and mingling with locals with roots going back generations to create a powerful document of an era that has otherwise disappeared.

In Zownir’s pictures, we see the people who often fall through the cracks from the eye of one who understands the struggle and pays respect in the tradition of Bruce Davidson, Nan Goldin, and Larry Clark. In advance of a presentation of his work by Galerie Bene Taschen during Photo London (May 16-19), Zownir takes us on an incredible journey though the New York underground.

Read the Full Story at VICE Online

NYC 1981 © Miron Zownir

NYC 1982 © Miron Zownir

Categories: 1980s, Art, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Photography

Gustav Mesmer: Icarus of Lautertal

Posted on May 10, 2019

The call to make art isn’t so much a choice as a force compelling creation, no matter the price. Few can resist the possibility that something lays beyond the sheer will it takes to render something out of nothing at all. For all that is given, the possibility of return is a draw: fame, wealth, and legacy.

But for the outsider artist, the reward is the act itself, creating a cycle of momentum nothing short of phenomenal. For Gustav Mesmer, the “Icarus of Lautertal”, as he came to be called, art was a way the medium through which he could express and resolve the conflict of being on earth and off at the same time. And that was enough.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Feature Shoot

Dawoud Bey X David Hammons

Posted on May 8, 2019

David Hammons in his Harlem Studio, 1984. Gelatin silver photograph (24”x20”) Photography Dawoud Bey / courtesy of Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago and Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco

The New York art world has long operated on heavily stratified lines, placing white men at the centre of commercial representation and institutional investment. For the better part of the 20th century, it marginalised or erased the work of anyone else, forcing artists outside those narrow demographic to fend for themselves – or infiltrate from within.

Linda Goode Bryant decided to do just that when she opened Just Above Midtown (JAM) in the sweet centre of the city’s gallery district in 1974. Located at 50 West 57 Street, JAM was unlike anything that had come before – or since.

JAM was dedicated to black artists exclusively when no one else was. Goode Bryant elevated black arts at the pinnacle of power and prestige by presenting the most innovative and unconventional conceptual work of the time. By showcasing the work of artists such as Dawoud Bey, David Hammons, Lorraine O’Grady, Howardena Pindell, Adrian Piper, Lorna Simpson, and Ming Smith, Goode Bryant created a space where a new generation of black artists could connect, commune, and collaborate.

JAM exhibitions sharpened the cutting edge, pushing possibilities of art. For Greasy Bags and Barbecue Bones, his first solo show in 1975, David Hammons glued black hair to fat-drenched brown paper bags from a fried chicken spot, embracing the materials of black culture while simultaneously subverting the soulless commodification of art.

It was everything for which JAM stood for. Liberated from the restraints of content and form, black artists could soar into the stratosphere, creating work that now, 45 years later, is being recognised in a special tribute Linda Goode Bryant’s JAM Gallery at Frieze New York, curated by Franklin Sirmans, director of the Pérez Art Museum Miami.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

David Hammons, Bliz-aard Ball Sale I, 1983. Archival pigment photograph (44”x33”) Photography Dawoud Bey / courtesy of Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago and Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Dazed, Exhibitions, Manhattan

Warhol’s Women

Posted on May 7, 2019

Andy Warhol. Judy Garland (Multicolor), 1978. Acrylic and silkscreen on canvas, 40 x 40 inches (101.6 x 101.6 cm) © 2019 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Tim Nighswander

Andy Warhol turned appropriation into fine art, perhaps the most profoundly American aspect of his practice. Where Dada subverted the known, Warhol exalted it, creating a pantheon of iconography that charmed, rather than challenged, the status quo – while simultaneously being edgy enough to avoid becoming camp, corn, or schmaltz.

Warhol is America looking back at itself, with a nod and a wink, taking art in the age of mass reproduction to the next level when he began making silkscreens in August 1962. Marilyn Monroe’s tragic death sparked it off. She was his first, perhaps his greatest, and far from his last, as he transformed The Factory into an art world machine.

Andy’s Marilyn is a Mona Lisa of sorts — her many incarnations and moods a psychic x-ray into the person none of us ever knew. Using a publicity photography by Gene Korman for the 1953 film Niagara, Warhol took the manufactured image and remade it into something beautiful and grotesque.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Andy Warhol. Judy Garland (Multicolor), 1978 Acrylic and silkscreen on canvas, 40 x 40 inches (101.6 x 101.6 cm) © 2019 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Tim Nighswander

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, Art, Exhibitions, Feature Shoot, Photography, Women

Camp: Notes on Fashion

Posted on May 7, 2019

Ensemble, Jeremy Scott (American, born 1975) for House of Moschino (Italian, founded 1983), spring/summer 2018; Courtesy of Moschino. Image courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Photo © Johnny Dufort, 2019

Last night, in New York City, the likes of Billy Porter, Ezra Miller, and Janelle Monae brought it to the pink carpet, as the camp-themed 2019 Met Gala got underway.

On Thursday, the exhibition itself – Camp: Notes on Fashion – opens to the public at The Met Fifth Avenue and The Met Cloisters in NYC. Bringing together four centuries of OTT fashion and art, the show uses Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay Notes on Camp to frame the ways designers have embraced camp’s tongue-in-cheek spirit in their métier.

If you have plans to be in the city before the end of September, Notes on Fashion is a must-see. And if you don’t, here are five reasons that needs to change.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Camp: Notes on Fashion. Photo courtesy of The Met

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Dazed, Exhibitions, Fashion