For the Artists: Critical Writing, Volume 1

By Greg Masters and Barry Kornbluh

This collection of art reviews, critical essays and interviews with artists chronicles an exhilarating time in the artworld of 1980s Manhattan when a burgeoning gallery scene in the East Village evolved to rival the more established gallery outposts on 57th Street.

And, Greg Masters, writing for a number of publications, covered it all – the well-known names and the upstart younger painters, photographers, sculptors, film-makers and creative folks working in various media.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Dec 2, 2013
• ISBN: 9781543906073

Book preview

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INTERVIEWS

Rudy Burckhardt: Poet of the Visual Arts

February [1987] is Rudy Burckhardt Month in New York City. The legions of adoring friends and the uninitiated public will have the opportunity to see the art works of this witty, intelligent and worldly Renaissance man in several settings. Photos and paintings will be on exhibit at one uptown and two downtown galleries, the Museum of Modern Art will screen 62 of his films spanning 50 years, and a book of his photos along with transcribed conversations will arrive soon [Conversations with Rudy Burckhardt About Everything, published by Annabel Levitt’s Vehicle Editions, 1987].

For those unfamiliar with his work, Rudy is the master celebrator of the ordinary. He transforms the common moment into a heightened cadenza of breathless attention. His source is the richness of daily life: a country fair, pedestrian activity, an enacted dream script or a pond at sunset all get montaged in his films. Particular details are zeroed in on in his photos, or skillfully embellished in his heavy impastoed forestscapes or lightly brushed city slivers. Rudy Burckhardt is the poet of visual arts.

For more than 50 years, Rudy has been making personal films, photos and paintings that blend mortal dailiness with fractured myths. A quiet, understated power gently persuades. No other artist is so perfectly in tempo with the rhythms of the ordinary day. He knows the city, he knows the woods around his summer home, and he’s preserved for us the tropical innocence and back-alleyed street dance, from his extensive traveling to his Times Square musings. He filters the cacophony of charged city streets down to the clear jazz of Gabriel’s Trumpet. He lovingly attends the beauty present in overlooked crannies and the more obvious sights passed by on strolls around. Permeating it all is a slapstick spirit of spontaneous invention practically dormant since silent comedy-era wackiness. Motifs reappear in his other media, sometimes fruit stars, not to mention his hilarious, frenzied stand-up performances at past St. Mark’s Poetry Project New Year’s benefits and in his other films.

The secret of his excellence is his incredibly disciplined and formal eye that enables him to instantly edit every time he’s behind the camera. He knows what to focus on: a foot stepping off a curb, for example. He knows how to gently grab an image so that it still suggests its natural context. He undercuts any pretense with a self-deprecating humor and a playful, urbane quirkiness. He never inflates a situation or shies away from his honest obsession, like naked women.

Rudy’s media – lyrically montaged films, black-and-white good neighbor views, and canvas fantasies of fractured classics – open and reflect the world the way a poem does: editing out mere reportage and using only the heightened impressions, the effects of a dream time. He consistently arrives at the essential fragments of an experience.

His perspective is that of a loving pedestrian god of the sidewalks and breeze-blown dandelion, an observer of details we might have missed. His art is about desire, bewitched noticing and, most of all, love.

Studio Visit

Visiting his loft, I entered as Rudy was trying to dissuade a young man from making an hour-long documentary about him for Swiss television. Rudy was just interested in having his films shown and this guy, I noticed, was adamant about the package deal, proposals and contexts. Rudy offered tea.

Call it a portrait, not a documentary, he said. When you make a documentary you show things the way they are. You don’t fix it up. That’s the way I make films. I don’t use a script. Why should I conform to what they want...The color of TV I think is terrible. Film has color. With videotape you can change the color by turning the knobs – some people want it bright, some just brown. But it’s convenient, cheap. In order to make a video, it’s so much cheaper. A film print is $300. Once you have a master, a video is $20. But TV is in slots. You have to put something in for 10 minutes or half an hour. With films, they can be whatever length they want to be...

So the Swiss guy left finally, disheartened that his project was stalled.

I’ve only been able to talk in public the last few years, said Rudy. "In my old age, I’ve gotten more devil-may-care. And even able to make people laugh. If you have an audience of 15 or 20 that are really with you, it’s more gratifying than a big audience of 500 with a lot of dead weight.

"I never knew many photographers. I find painters brighter than most photographers. There’s always exceptions. Most good photographers have painted also, like Cartier-Bresson made drawings. With still photography, you have to get inflated with yourself – you snap a few pictures here or there in a frenzy and the rest of the time you have nothing to do. The best thing you can do with a photo is make a joke – some sort of visual joke. I don’t think I ever said that before. The reason I like painting is it’s occupying, it takes time.

"[Édouard] Vuillard had a dreary life. He lived with his mother in a house filled with junk. Sounds like it was a boring life, but when you look at his paintings, you can see he was happy when he painted. If he’d have been a photographer, he couldn’t do that. Filmmaking is something else again. Truffaut said shooting film is a fever. But that’s shooting feature films. For a few weeks, everyone has to get into that fever. It’s a little like that with the films I make. It takes time. It becomes more like a poem or piece of music.

"One thing I never could do if I tried was glamour photography. I once tried to do fashion photographs. [Willem] De Kooning and I both tried at the same time. Elaine [de Kooning] was the model. She was incredibly beautiful. She went to Klein’s and got some fancy ballroom dresses, and I took photos and de Kooning made some drawings. The next day she brought them back. You had to make sure you didn’t take the tags off. De Kooning and I both went to Harper’s Bazaar and showed them to [art director] Alexey Brodovitch, and he took one look at my photos and looked down his nose. He liked de Kooning’s drawings, though. De Kooning got the job and he did some drawings of hair-dos, little girls’ heads with different hair-dos. It took him two weeks to make them and then he’d get paid $100 or something, so he decided it wasn’t worth it.

"I had started taking photos of paintings in galleries after the war. My Swiss money was gone, and I got some veteran’s benefits. I was Leo Castelli’s photographer for galleries and museums. I was Leo Castelli’s photographer for 15 years. By the time Castelli opened his gallery [in 1958], I’d been shooting for around 10 years and had a reputation. ARTnews had this series, ‘So and so paints a picture,’ and it ran every month for awhile and I took a lot of photos for that. [Editor] Tom Hess made the magazine lively. He and Elaine de Kooning were a great team. Tom was in total admiration of Bill de Kooning. That was nice to see. And he stayed that way. He was steady. He knew what he liked. For those articles, I was with a writer and I did the photos. People like Jackson Pollack, Hans Hofmann, Larry Rivers, De Kooning, Fairfield Porter, Alex Katz. They paid $75 for the photos. Writers got the same. It was much more work for the writers … I painted a little in Switzerland. One was a balcony, an ornate balcony. I think it was my best painting. I have no idea where that painting is."

When asked what his intentions are in making art, Rudy answered quickly, "To keep busy. I didn’t have a job. Instinctively, I always like to make pictures of things. Since I couldn’t draw well I used a camera because a), you want to remember things and b), you wanted to show them to other people. If you saw something gorgeous or funny you could show it to other people. That’s communication.

"I was very innocent for a long time about [my] career. I never thought about it. I lived on money inherited from my father. When the war came around, I never thought I’d get drafted. My money was running out. I thought: What should I do? Become a camera salesman in a store? I had no thoughts of selling photos. I vaguely thought of working for Life, but I never expected to get there. If you were a Life photographer, you were on top. The magazine was really big. Imagine people having the nerve to call something Life or Time. Just a bunch of pictures. But when something violent happens, you have to be there. When there was an accident, I always looked the other way. My photos were always everyday happenings. I never had women crying or a sick baby, much less a crime or accident. It’s about ordinary stuff.

The Army took care of me for three years. After the war, I didn’t have any money left. I didn’t have any de Koonings to sell. Edwin [Denby: poet, dance critic and lifelong friend] and I were acquiring them, but we had no intention or thoughts of selling them. American paintings weren’t worth anything then anyway. Veteran benefits were very generous. You got readjustment allowances. Every month, you’d show them your book and they’d give you the difference between what you made and $100, so you could live on that. Rent was $25 a month for a studio. Then you got the GI Bill, and I used that for studying painting for three years. They also gave living allowances. I went with Edith, my first wife, and Jacob, still a little baby, to Italy to study painting. Things were so cheap there. You could rent a house for $15 a month. I was never really broke. I hated the Army. It was frightening when I got drafted, but I would never have met those people leading a sheltered life.

Rudy brings me to the back of the loft and starts bringing out paintings and placing them against the walls. It’s such a mess here. I only find things I’m not looking for. Suddenly one corner of the room immerses us in the dark overgrowth of a forest floor, and it’s clear to see the hours of joyous activity spent in making these paintings. Who makes paintings like these? No one!

(Cover, Feb. 1987)

No Picnic: A Film by Philip Hartman and Doris Kornish

After a year of post-production work, the independent feature film, No Picnic, finally premiered at El Bohio [part of CHARAS, an alternative arts/social space in a former public school on 10th Street and Avenue B in the East Village]. The film was shot almost entirely in the downtown Manhattan neighborhood and the cast of more than a hundred was largely made up of local faces.

No Picnic is the story of a former rock ‘n’ roll musician’s search for the woman in a photograph that lands at his feet at the site of a hit-and-run, and it is also a sweeping indictment of the callous tidal forces of real estate overhaul, set harsh against the local history and village pace of the East Village.

The film’s main character, Mac (played to split T-shirt perfection by David Brisbin), is tired of his job supplying 45s to the jukeboxes of bars, and he is about fed up with his lack of romantic luck and the changing complexion of the downtown scene. As he receives postcards from his brother, who is on a sexual sojourn across America, bragging of his exploits state by state, the state of Mac’s beloved neighborhood is undergoing an exploitation of its own. An illegal-alien neighbor (the tenement Ariel, Anne D’Agnillo) climbs through his window while he tries to relax in the tub with a beer, and continues to pressure him to marry her so she can secure a green card. Though amusing in her wackiness, she too is ultimately a disappointment to Mac when she succumbs to landlord pressure, leaving Mac the last holdout on the building’s rent strike. He heads for a Mets game.

The film has the same kind of refreshing energy as the first burst of French New Wave films. Frames and sequences are packed with familiar, but rarely focused-on details, like a key getting stuck in a mailbox or a sidewalk chat. The interweaving threads of the narrative are just one element in the unfolding investigation of modes and lifestyles. The glamour is in the exposition, the fabric of the passing moments, the character’s adjustments to a day’s sequence. Each gorgeous black-and-white frame is a celebration of the moment, not mere build-up for the next shot. The locals are glimpsed.

My friend and neighbor, the poet Lorna Smedman, commented: "Doris and Phil have a very strong sense of the neighborhood, an appreciation of what has made the East Village eccentric and human. The film represents our kind of lifestyle, which seldom gets represented in mainstream culture. It’s like Lynn Tillman’s book Haunted Houses. 1980s bohemian. I want my landlord to see this film."

The following interview took place as the filmmaker’s two-year-old son, Leon, expounded on the nature of his shirt.

Greg Masters: Who are your influences in filmmaking?

Philip Hartman: In retrospect, I would say this film seems like a cross between Bresson and Woody Allen. [The director of photography] Peter Hutton and I both admire Bresson a lot. No superfluous camera movements. That kind of spare black and white. But there’s no comedy in Bresson. There’s a lot of humor in this film – smiling in the face of adversity. I think that’s one thing that’s weird about it.

GM: Richard Hell [who supplies two songs to the film and makes a brief appearance] told me what he thought was interesting about the film was that it was a genre search movie that, at the same time, was a politically conscious depiction of the neighborhood.

PH: On the surface it’s film noir, but it’s in this context of the East Village neighborhood. That’s one thing we’re interested in. People’s need for community.

Doris Kornish: We felt that if we didn’t make this film, nobody else was going to. Also, it had to be made then. It’s already too late. Every location in the film is gone. Street corners have changed. Empty lots are no longer empty. Bars, restaurants are gone.

GM: Phil, before making this film you wrote a few scripts for major studios.

PH: That never got made.

GM: What made you want to direct a film?

PH: The fact that we couldn’t get any of those others produced.

GM: Were they commercial ventures?

PH: They’re all in the same vein. Commercial with political meaning, critiquing a social situation and positing an improvement. But all of them, no matter how hard I try to write a normal role, they get kinda weird.

GM: Can I ask you what the budget was for No Picnic?

PH: What are we saying the budget is right now?

DK: $110,000.

PH: We shot it for $50,000.

GM: And all the post-production stuff is another $50,00060,000?

DK: Yeah. We made up a budget and figured post-production would cost $20,000. That didn’t even pay for the mag stock. We sat at a café on Sixth Street and Avenue A and made out our budget on a napkin. We just had no idea. If we had to do it again, I don’t think we’d make a first film that had 125 characters in it and dozens of locations. We scraped together the money to shoot the film. Everybody got paid. But we didn’t have any money after that. In exchange for the money to complete the film, Grey City [Wim Wender’s film company in New York, also produced Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise] has all the distribution rights.

GM: So what’s holding them up?

PH: You have to ask them that. They’re very involved in producing films right now. They’re doing Doris Dörrie’s new film and John Huston’s new film. And they have a very small distribution arm. They’re preoccupied with producing. That’s the bind we’re in business-wise … We’ve been to a bunch of film festivals – Florence, Hof [in Germany], Antwerp, U.S. Film Festival at Sundance [where the film won the Best Cinematography Award]. It’s going to Brazil and Australia …The film’s about a very specific place and a very specific time, but it relates to places that are changing all over the world. That kind of wistfulness and helplessness and alienation is found everywhere.

DK: A lot of people like this film. I know a lot people won’t like it either, but we haven’t had to compromise all the time to the industry.

PH: I think both Doris and I feel that film should be used as a means to expedite social change. Look at the films Doris shows [at Charas/El Bohio Community Center, housed in former PS 64 in the East Village]. If I hadn’t met Doris, I don’t think it would have been as tough and grassroots a film.

GM: What’s next? Doris, I know you’ve been working on a film about Rudy Burckhardt.

DK: I started it three years ago. I felt like this guy had offered so much to so many people and I wanted to try to capture that on film and show what a great influence and how much he’s inspired these poets and painters and dancers and filmmakers. The film has interviews with people who totally worship him [after 10 years of shooting, the film, Not Nude Though, debuted in 2002; Elvis Mitchell called it a keen, fine documentary in the New York Times].

PH: Besides that, our next project is a film about the 60s and the 80s.

(Cover, May 1987)

Interview with Jean Holabird, 1991

Looking through a pile of watercolors, Jean Holabird sighs, drifting off for a moment in a nostalgia for the places where they were done – St. Ives [Cornwall, England], Menemsha [Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts], Kew Gardens in London. I’m admiring how her lines and wash on paper conjure a sense of place and project a mood. For Jean, the artwork is evidence of a moment spent serene in the activity of making an illusion.

Depicted are scenes of leisure – the café view, the promenade, the tourist’s target – in themselves, perhaps stale subject matter. But she creates a fresh beauty from this stimulus. A perception more concerned with interpretation than duplication is laid out on her paper or canvas. The fascination for her is in the way details converge and a composition arises from the confluence of elements.

On the occasion of an upcoming show, Standing Painted Screens and Palm Tree Studies, opening at Neo Persona on April 18 and running through May 18, 1991, we began a conversation discussing an earlier decade’s incarnation as a color-field abstractionist.

Greg Masters: How did you start out as a painter?

Jean Holabird: The first painter I ever saw was Toulouse-Lautrec and I thought, ‘That looks like fun.’ A friend of my parents took me to the Art Institute [of Chicago] to see this big Lautrec show. I was about 12. I still remember thinking, ‘Wow. I took art classes at the Art Institute and drew horses. I knew I could do better horses than he did.’ I drew horses constantly. I’d copy them out of books. Now I use plant life.

My father went to the Instituto Allende [in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico] when he was in college, so when we were teenagers he took us all down to Mexico together. It was great. We rented a house. That’s where I met Larry Rivers’ son, Steve Rivers. I had such a crush on him. He was travelling with this friend, and they had custom-made leather pants. We had never been to New York. We just never saw anything so cool as these guys. I saw Steve years later and I said, I was so in love with you, didn’t you know? He said, What, you were in love with me? I thought we were just hanging out having fun. I spent so much time agonizing over him. At that point, I hadn’t heard of very many artists. I had heard of Larry Rivers. It was one of the things that made me absolutely sure that New York was where I was going.

GM: This guy’s leather pants was your motivation to come to New York?

JH: Not exactly. Yeah, then I started making knot paintings. Other than that I’m completely normal. When you’re a student, you want to do something significant, so [at Barnard, 1964-66] I was doing this painting of a monk down in a basement somewhere. I was showing my deep feelings. The teacher came up to me and said: "What the