Fire in the Belly

by Cynthia Carr

  The success of “The Famous Show” inspired the bar owner to start charging Gracie a thousand dollars rent, quite high for 1982. She stayed one more month.

  She contacted astrologer Esther Stanway, known as “The Star Lady,” to ask, “Should I open an art gallery?” (Each question cost two dollars.) The Star Lady sent back a page-long handwritten letter: “By all means follow the high road to bringing expression in beauty to a weary, disillusioned world.… This studio must be unique and with a high degree of SERVICE offered. It must follow without fail a SINGLE PURPOSE and bring a form of ART into every home now drab and without color.… Do place beauty upon a commonplace article and send this message into the world and your efforts will be rewarded fourfold.”

  Gracie found an empty storefront renting for five hundred dollars at 337 East Tenth, facing Tompkins Square Park, and moved there in March 1983, with Sur Rodney Sur as her co-director.

  I met David in 1982, late one night at the Artforum office. He was not supposed to be there. Keith Davis, the magazine’s designer, let him in and brought him to the back room where the two of us were working, alone and on deadline. David had come by to borrow money from Keith.

  I knew nothing then of David’s painting, his writing, his band—only that he was the guy doing those stencils I’d seen around the neighborhood. David set something down, some paper he and Keith discussed. He had one of the deepest voices I’d ever heard, but I don’t remember any specific topic apart from money. I do remember his body language, his focus. He was a force, and made a strong impression quickly. He wasn’t there long. David and I became acquaintances.

  My colleague Keith proselytized constantly at the Artforum office for the East Village scene—especially for Civilian Warfare. (As I recall, the editors ignored him.) Keith had become friendly with Dean Savard. He knew many artists besides David and eagerly collected their work. One night at a Fun Gallery opening, he even persuaded all the graffiti artists present to “tag” his leather jacket.

  Then, in November 1982, Artforum published Rene Ricard’s “The Pledge of Allegiance,” an article about Fun Gallery and its artists. Ricard made a case for Lee Quinones and Futura 2000. He found a way to appreciate the unbearable lightness of Kenny Scharf. But the pictures on the wall were just part of the story. Ricard’s piece was really about stardom, illusion, and the shifting tectonic plates that determine what is valued in the art world. In hindsight, it reads like a warning: “The feeling of new art is fugitive, like the Fun: here for the moment, gone forever. It’s only truly valuable before it’s surrounded by the mystique of money, while it’s still owned by culture, before it becomes booty.”

  Jean Pierre Delage shared hundreds of David’s letters and postcards with me when I saw him in Paris, but he withheld some from 1982. That’s when he had an affair with Jesse Hultberg from 3 Teens, and David was furious. “I made a big mistake,” JP said.

  Jesse had been visiting Paris with his parents, and according to him, it wasn’t even an affair. “I never tried to have a relationship with Jean Pierre. I stayed in his apartment for a couple of days because my parents were staying somewhere in the Fifteenth [Arrondisement] and I liked his place better.” When Jesse returned to New York, he and David had a big argument—Jesse pointing out that David hadn’t exactly been faithful. “David overreacted big-time in typical David fashion,” Jesse said. “He was a hypersensitive person, and you could cross his limit by just looking at him the wrong way.” He and Jesse remained friends, however.

  David and JP did not break up either. Not ever—said JP. For years, they continued to visit each other. But the contact changed. David continued to write to him about once a month. JP told me that he did not know where he’d put those subsequent letters.

  In the last piece of their correspondence I have from 1982, dated November 5, David told JP that he was busier than he’d ever been in his life—and that he’d quit the band. It was around the time that the 3 Teens record finally came out—a record financed by Bobby Bradley, manager of the Pyramid Club, as a kind of money-laundering scheme. All two thousand copies were sold.

  It was an autumn of such ferment and portent. The movie Wild Style screened for the first time. Keith Haring’s show at Tony Shafrazi Gallery made him an international star. A young photographer from Boston named Nan Goldin hauled her slide show, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, to Club 57 and the Pyramid. Limousines clogged East Tenth Street outside Jean-Michel Basquiat’s opening at Fun. As for David—along with the three-man exhibit at Civilian, the cock-a-bunnies at P.S. 1, and his painting hung from the ceiling at “The Famous Show”—he was getting ready for his first one-man exhibition at Alexander Milliken, opening December 4, 1982.

  It would prove not to be a good fit for either artist or dealer. The gallery card shows one of the Hujar stencil pieces. “I was really happy with some of the images I made,” David told me. “Things dealing with homosexuality, and guys arming themselves as defense against government’s intrusion in their sexual lives, things dealing with myth—self-created myth.” Alexander Milliken liked David’s work enough to buy two pieces for himself (Falling Man and Culture in Variation I), but David complained about the gallery director’s ambivalence—that some days Milliken said he was glad he’d done the show and other days he said showing David’s work was a mistake.

  “I wasn’t sure I liked the work,” Milliken said, “and I wasn’t sure I didn’t like it.” Milliken was in a transitional phase himself, uncertain about which direction he wanted to take the gallery. He asked David and artist Richard Hambleton (who’d also been part of “Fast”) to curate a show for January ’83 called “Three Part Variety.” David brought in Kiki Smith, Chuck Nanney, Jean Foos, and his only remaining friend from RedM days, Dirk Rowntree (who was Foos’s boyfriend). He and Hambleton also invited Tseng Kwong Chi and Nicolas Moufarrege, among others.

  Milliken wanted to see what would come in. “To see if anything grabbed me,” he said. “It didn’t. It didn’t. And I remember I was almost embarrassed at some point to have some of that stuff up. I was heading in another direction.” He realized that he didn’t like raw work. It wasn’t just David, or the “Three Part Variety” artists. He wouldn’t have wanted to show Julian Schnabel either. Or Francesco Clemente. Ultimately he found his new direction with furniture artist Wendall Castle and metal sculptor Albert Paley, “artists who were masters of their medium,” as Milliken described them.

  He and David parted by mutual agreement.

  David was still constantly broke. The Midtown incarnation of Peppermint Lounge closed late in ’82. Jean Foos got David a job at Art News, where she was working as a freelance production artist. She couldn’t remember his exact task there, but it involved making phone calls. He lasted a day or two, then quit.

  He was a workaholic who couldn’t hold a job. Or, he just knew how he should not be spending his time. Though as Foos said, “I don’t know how he managed.” His share of the rent on East Fourth Street was only about $125. But still.

  David told me, “The thing I carried till I was twenty-seven, twenty-eight, was always the sense that I was one step away from the street. It had to do with a lot of depression from being a busboy or a janitor. Really feeling like I had all this stuff that I was carrying that I wanted to express or to communicate somehow, and I wasn’t finding the forms for it. Or the form I did find wasn’t enough to lift me out of that kind of [menial labor]. I didn’t know how to go about it. Peter was really helpful in encouraging me to show work even though it was really raw and rudimentary. I would always be one step away from the street. I couldn’t last in certain jobs. It just was horrifying to me or made me feel dead.”

  He went back to journal writing early in 1983—for two days. He recorded nothing but a few anxious dreams: A little kid with explosives tries to toss them under the robes of some adult, but only blows off his own hands. Jesse and Brian tell him they’re moving away, leaving him. He’s homeless. He’s traveling long distances but he’s lost. “I
t was miles and miles back that I took a wrong turn.”

  David had met artist Mike Bidlo at “The Famous Show.” Bidlo was then just establishing himself as an appropriation artist, re-painting existing modern masterpieces and re-presenting incidents from artists’ lives. For example, in Jack the Dripper at Peg’s Place (1982), he carefully re-created the art-historical moment—in a room at P.S. 1—when Jackson Pollock urinated into Peggy Guggenheim’s fireplace. For “The Famous Show,” he covered a readymade suit with Pollock drips and hung it on the wall. He’d also added Pollock drips to a vintage black satin gown of Gracie’s for her to wear to the opening.

  Bidlo’s work was conceptualism with an edge, but based on art history, and he cared about the craft of it. When I first met him at his studio in the early eighties, he showed me “the paper Pollock drew on.” He’d found the artist’s original supplier on Long Island. To do the drip paintings, he’d studied how to thin the paint with just the right amount of turpentine and stain the canvas to simulate thirty years of aging. So—worlds apart from David? Actually, they shared a certain attitude. Bidlo told me that his project was “a pie in the face of the art world—all that sacredness and hermeticism. Like Les demoiselles d’Avignon [a Picasso in 1907, a Bidlo in 1983]. You can’t even smoke in front of that painting. All the classics of modern art—they’re removed from the people.” In 1983, he also repainted Pollock’s Blue Poles outside the Met—on pieces of masonite, which he then distributed to spectators. He went on to paint a Blue Poles in Germany “so they could have one too. Evey country should have a Blue Poles.”

  One night Bidlo and David got to talking about “the horrible constrictions of being a young artist trying to show in New York,” as Bidlo put it. And David told him about Pier 34. So Bidlo and David came to collaborate on opening the pier to other artists. David must have known that the art-for-art’s-sake purity of the project could be lost, but maybe he didn’t. He had such an idealistic view of other artists. At least he did then.

  Early in 1983, Pier 34 came alive with working artists. (The site’s most persistent documentarian, Andreas Sterzing, began photographing there in March.) David’s best-known work from the pier was cartoon imagery painted directly on the wall. He did the large gagging cow, a pterodactyl whose wings reach across two walls, and a masterfully deconstructed cartoon strip featuring superheroes and Krazy Kat, generic courage and catastrophe, and a final word-balloon: “Every day my mind grows keener, my good arm stronger, my silly government more futile.” He painted the edges of broken windows. He planted grass in rooms with dirt floors. (He would say later that these were the gestures he loved most.) The room with a big Luis Frangella head on the wall overlooking an emerald green lawn was particularly striking.

  He told Marisela La Grave: “This is the real MOMA.”

  On an intact window, David painted an art dealer cockroach declaring, “My name is Tony Shafrazi.… My name is Mary Boone.… I am your hope.” And above that the message: “Artists: stay in control of your work … heart + minds.”

  In May, Richard Goldstein ran a small item on the pier in his Village Voice column—just a deep caption under Hujar’s photo of the gagging cow. He did not reveal the location. But that was spreading by word of mouth, and the scene began to spiral out of control.

  Bidlo and David decided that “the intentionality of the show should be established.” So they prepared a statement, written mostly by David. A first draft in his handwriting appears on a paper he found in the abandoned structure—a customs declaration from the New York Cuba Mail Steamship Company:

  Some of us bring in materials to work with. Some work exclusively with found materials. People are affected by light, by wind from the river, by the subtle deterioration of the surroundings, by the movement of strangers through broken doorways, by the shift of sky and water from blues to greys in the evenings, by elements of risk and danger, by suddenly discovered work where hours before there was none.

  It’s a celebration of freedom reminiscent of his paens to the sex pier. Here there was no electricity and no running water, but also no rent, no curator, no dealers, and no sales. All work was anonymous.

  In the final version of this statement, released to the few reporters who were then interested, he and Bidlo added:

  In the Fall of 1982 we felt we needed to do something. We had several possibilities. One of them was to start off a show that would allow anyone the chance to explore any image in any material on any surface they chose. This is something no gallery would tolerate, nor be large enough to accommodate. It would be a show that by its very nature would not be considered a show. What we are weary of is the tendency in artists in building a show to be more interested in division and selection rather than anything resembling a sense of community.… People who lived in this city for years said it was the first time they experienced fulfillment in terms of contact with the art scene and strangers. People shared supplies, energy, thoughts. Given the surfaces to work with—crumbling walls of plaster, earth floors, metal walkways and hundreds of windowpanes—the work came out in rampages of raw energy.

  The police became aware of the art activity when a dead body was found one day—not an artist, but someone who’d been dumped at the pier, shot and stabbed. The authorities then tried to seal the entrances. Nevertheless, said the statement from Bidlo and David: “Work continues … new people arrive every day … word spreading about a show that can’t be considered a show.” They acknowledged that there had been difficulties, frictions. “Everyone had to in some way learn to give up the desire for possession. Possession of territory, of walls, of materials, of approach to creative impulse.” But not everyone could do that.

  By summer, Andreas Sterzing observed, the energy had changed. The pier was two stories high with thirty or forty rooms fronting a warehouse as big as a football field—but it just wasn’t big enough. By the time I made it down there myself, with Keith Davis, he was telling me stories about artists having fistfights over which space they were going to get. Some had painted over other people’s work. Collectors were coming in with saws and cutting chunks out of various walls. There’d been parties. And fashion shoots. I remember hearing that someone had spilled champagne down a shaft into the Holland Tunnel. Still, Keith told me, I should pick a wall and paint my masterpiece. I declined, but artists continued to work there for as long as it stood. David had fled the hubbub, however, absconding to Pier 28 farther south. Bidlo didn’t work at either pier. He had a studio at P.S. 1 and made some Pollock canvases that he brought over and stuck on a wall.

  David and Bidlo had once joked about having an opening at Pier 34. They never did because they knew it was too dangerous. Unknown to them, however, a group calling itself the Anonymous Artists Alliance distributed leaflets inviting everyone to a wine and cheese party at the pier on June 4, 1983. Port Authority police raided the gathering, arrested four people, and confiscated the one freestanding work of art they found: a statue of a figure slumped over with its head on its knees. (Neither David nor Bidlo was present.) Richard Goldstein reported in his Voice column that four revelers had broken through a locked door and entered the venting tower over the Holland Tunnel, which set off alarms. Police again tried sealing the Ward Line Pier, which worked about as well as sealing the sex pier. The artists were soon back. But a petition had been filed in federal district court to demolish the place. Goldstein reported that the structure was sitting atop “piles so eroded that the state’s chief engineer warned of its possible collapse.”

  Years later, in 1999, when Artforum devoted a special issue to East Village art—its rise and fall—the editors chose a photograph of David at the pier for the cover. At first, I thought it odd that they’d selected a space outside the neighborhood, but I supposed it illustrated that the East Village scene was a state of mind. And many of those involved in the Ward Line Pier Project ended up showing in those galleries. The pier was definitely the neighborhood’s satellite, embodying the scene’s best aspirations, then shar
ing its meteoric fate in an even more condensed period of time. Piers 34 and 28 were both torn down in 1984.

  That spring—while the pier had its brief golden age, while Gracie Mansion opened her storefront space on Tompkins Square Park—nearly everyone was still oblivious about the mysterious new illness called AIDS. The notable exception was writer Larry Kramer. In March 1983, he published his landmark piece, “1,112 and Counting,” in the New York Native, the city’s gay newspaper. “If this article doesn’t scare the shit out of you, we’re in real trouble,” Kramer began. “If this article doesn’t rouse you to anger, fury, rage, and action, gay men may have no future on this earth.” He wrote that between January 13 and February 9 of that year, there’d been 164 new diagnoses—and 73 more deaths. Nearly half of all AIDS cases in the country were in New York City. Doctors didn’t know what caused it or how to treat it. And no one was doing anything.

  Letters came in to the Native denouncing Kramer as “alarmist.”

  In April, AIDS was mentioned in the East Village Eye for the first time. Cookie Mueller had been writing her health advice column, “Ask Dr. Mueller,” for about six months by then, addressing concerns like “I have herpes,” “I have amoebas,” “I have so much pain in my sinuses,” and “What should I do if someone OD’s in my presence?” That April, she wrote that she didn’t want to comment on AIDS because it was too serious. “But there is one thing I have a burning desire to say and then I won’t even mention it again. If you have AIDS, seek help from doctors other than ones connected with the A.M.A.” She had three friends with AIDS, she wrote, who’d been “virtually cured” by chiropractor-nutritionists, and she’d give out those names to anyone who contacted her. At this point in the epidemic, it wasn’t even bad advice. Medical doctors didn’t have a clue.

  That same month, Mayor Ed Koch finally agreed to meet with representatives from the New York AIDS Network. Gay Men’s Health Crisis, part of that network, could send two people, and GMHC’s president decided that Larry Kramer would not be one of them. An outraged Kramer resigned from GMHC on April 14. On April 20, Koch met for the first and last time with the AIDS Network and said he would declare “a state of concern” during the week of the GMHC fundraiser. But the city would provide no actual services.