Hudson In New York: Feature Gallery's Gay Gaze
Village Voice, December 27, 1988

It wasn't an ordinary art opening. Feature's main gallery was packed with men in leather biker jackets, boots and the coded signifiers of desire--keys, chains, and cuffs dangling from the appropriate loops. Their dress seemed an elaborate homage to Tom of Finland's homoerotic drawings hanging on the walls but known mainly through reproduction in porno magazines. Or perhaps art was imitating a life no longer possible but once inspired by art like this. The gathering of the thirty- or fortysomethingish clan was a poignant reminder of how distant the heyday of that Saint-ed past now seems: As one friend observed wistfully, "You'd think there'd be some sexual tension..."

In Feature's rear gallery, a group show called HoHoHoMo offered decidedly more "mainstream" gay artworks by five artists who usually show in East Village or Soho-style venues: Arnold Fern, Richard Hawkins, Kevin Larmon, Johnny Pixchure, and Kevin Wolff. If the juxtaposition of their "high art" and Tom of Finland's pop cultural "artifacts" is rare, the regular exhibition of gay art in a mixed, mainstream context is unprecedented in the art world. Hudson, the pioneering integrationist behind Feature, is beginning to garner a national reputation. Just a few months ago, he moved his four-and-a-half-year-old gallery from Chicago to its present location on Soho's Broome Street.

Despite its much ballyhooed liberalism and generous financial response to AIDS, the art world may be only slightly less homophobic than most professional communities. The number of lesbian and gay artists who populate it is, of course, legion. Those who make gay and lesbian art are few and their exhibition opportunities are slimmer than Oprah Winfrey. Plenty of dealers feel comfortable showing conceptually oriented artworks such as Kevin Larmon's canvases with overpainted gay porno backgrounds. Tenderly drawn images of homosex lovemaking are something else entirely.

Gay galleries come and go in New York, most notably gone is the ambitious Robert Samuels Gallery. Ghettoization has been their modus operandi, whether they've focused exclusively on homoerotic art or on more "high art" gay production. Feature is not one of these: gay group shows and Tom of Finland's suave and soulful drawings are atypical Feature fare. In the case of Tom of Finland, Hudson wished his drawings did not trigger art world homophobia: "If you want to discuss Tom's work in terms of simulation or codification you can. It's the [gay] content that's being discriminated against."

That only 20 percent of artists he shows make gay art seems natural to him. "Of course, I want to see gay representations, but that's not all I want to see. I like diversity." Much of Hudson's reputation derives, on fact, from his knack for spotting the moment's best and brightest artists of any ilk. Debora Duez Donato, director of the State of Illinois Art Gallery in Chicago, observed that "Hudson had the best--the toughest--eye in town."

Hudson opened his Chicago gallery on April Fool's Day, 1984, with a Richard Prince show, then featured Haim Steinbach, Sherrie Levine, and Jeff Koons during the next year and a half. At that time, these artists were still emerging. Hudson asserts that he sold Steinbach's work before any other dealer and gave Jeff Koons an early show. "Richard Prince told me I sold more of his work than Baskerville + Watson or Richard Kuhlenschmidt [/Simon Gallery in Los Angeles], but that wasn't much. No one was buying or talking." He paused. "Collectors only have ears, not eyes."

No longer drawn to the Koons/Steinbach brand of commodification-oriented art, Hudson is currently attracted to what he terms "Softer-edged, less slick art with a poetic criticality about it." That difficult-to-imagine characterization makes sense in connection with upcoming shows: Peter Huttinger's ambiguous abstractions of festering surfaces and objects, and Jeanne Dunning's photographic gender-plays on woman with facial hair and images of hard-to-identify orifices.

Hudson's taste for aggressively edgy art also applies to his own work as a performance artist. The 38-year-old MFA-painter with the shaved head danced professionally with Contemporary Dance Theater and the Judy Gregg Dance Company from 1974 to 1980. By 1979 his choreographic gestures and theatricalization of everyday activities led to solo performance works. The five-minute climax of one performance: While walking between two rows of chairs to the accompaniment of a punky rendition of Strawberry Fields Forever, he carried signs citing the consequences of AIDS and recited Tennyson's Charge of the Light Brigade ("Into the valley of death rode the six hundred").

Hudson usually creates just a single performance piece each year. His newest, The Back Way, will debut in January as part of Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibition's Against Nature. He makes paintings and constructions, too. The varied activities required to present and produce art all seem to be constituent parts of Hudson's routine. "We've got to have art," he grinned. "It's like another bodily function."

Keith Haring: A Tribute
Contemporanea, 1990

For many of us, last season's most significant event was Keith Haring's death on 16 February. It wasn't simply that AIDS had decimated another brilliant talent. In life, the world's best-known artist had come to embody the vitality and public spirit that still flourish in contemporary New York. Haring's death seemed emblematic of deepening social malaise. Goodbye eighties, hello fin de siècle.

Haring's intertwined art and life symbolize much that is central to contemporary culture. Andy Warhol's heir, Haring made art that successfully bridged the once-gaping divide separating high art and popular culture. Although Andy yearned to make his art accessible, he thought of accessibility in terms of headline-hugging content rather than price tags. When Keith first opened his Pop Shop in 1986, it was to make art affordable and to keep his designs from being ripped off. He viewed the shop's mostly two-dimensional wares as art: subway advertising spaces, t-shirts, posters and canvas were all the same to him.

Haring had his first New York solo show in 1981, and by the time he had appeared in simultaneous exhibitions at the Tony Shafrazi and Leo Castelli galleries in 1983, he was a star. His timing (and luck) had been remarkable. He came to New York in 1977, at the moment when the late modern order was crumbling. Graffiti, hip-hop, and street culture, a lively club scene, nascent art-world internationalism, budding neo-expressionism, and the transformation of ethnicity into something that would come to be known as multiculturalism, were all components of the emerging eighties. The decade would nourish many young artists, none more than Haring.

Starting in the early eighties, Haring and the downtown scene led parallel lives, growing together from the streets and club-cum-galleries of the Lower East Side and the East Village; to the glitzy, Wall Street-fueled, Warhol-Palladium period of the mid-eighties; to the reemergence of activism about AIDS, the environment, and homelessness that has become such a conspicuous feature of today's art world. It is difficult to avoid constructing narratives about Haring, the art and media star. One alternative is to trivialize a body of art that has survived its fifteen minutes of media glare, to dismiss it as merely of sociological interest. But this is no longer possible in the media age--the distinctions between an artist, an artwork, and their social milieu have completely collapsed.

When Haring began drawing in the subway in 1981, he was already the veteran of two exhibitions that had helped define New York's so-called "New Wave": the Times Square Show, a circuslike extravaganza held in a decaying, midtown massage parlor; and Events, an exhibition organized by Fashion Moda (the Bronx alternative space) for the New Museum of Contemporary Art. The attention that he got in the subway for his chalk images of crawling babies, dogs, flying saucers, and TV sets was instantaneous. It never died down.

At first, that attention came from the art press. A snippet of a review of Haring's debut at Shafrazi suggests the seriousness and intensity with which his work was initially scrutinized: "Females are seen at birth, or as icons...the emotional climate is euphoric, totally unmediated." Semiotics, calligraphy, and art brut were frequently invoked by New York's leading critics in conjunction with Haring's work. From 1982 to 1984, the graffiti bandwagon spiced an art discourse hopelessly mired in international Neo-Ex.

But starting in late 1983, press attention began to come almost exclusively from the general media. Why had the art press moved on? Some critics, of course, had never like the work, while others mistook Haring's simplicity for simplemindedness. The spotlight had shifted, and the basic Haring story (in which the pot-smoking, small-town boy who had learned cartooning from his father left commercial art school after seeing a Pierre Alechinsky retrospective and reading William S. Burroughs) had already been plotted.

Other astute art observers sensed that Haring had actually stopped being a gallery artist--despite the certification of well-placed collectors and museums. Exhibitions were regularly staged, including Haring's first foray into fabricated steel sculpture, presented at Castelli on Greene Street in 1986. Such works, however, lacked the site-specificity that had become so crucial to Haring's work.

Haring had always painted on everything, especially the walls of the clubs, galleries, and museums hosting his exhibitions. This cover-the-earth sensibility was both his art and this trademark; with it, he could transform even art objects of traditional format into environmental installations. Haring's decorative exuberance was most recently displayed in New York in the virtuoso celebration of polymorphous sexuality that he painted for a 1989 exhibition commemorating the twentieth anniversary of gay liberation at the Lesbian and Gay Community Center.

Haring's real calling was as a community artist. In 1982, he printed and distributed 20,000 free posters for the 12 June antinuclear rally in Central Park. One third of his sixteen-page, single-spaced resume is devoted to "special projects." A few excerpts from 1988-89: Artist-in-residence for the Chicago and Iowa City public schools; designer of a logo and t-shirts for "Young Scientists' Day" at Mount Sinai Medical School; painter of the "Easter at the White House" mural donated to Washington Children's Hospital; designer of a first-day cover and lithograph for the United Nations' "International Volunteer Year;" designer of a poster for a New York Public Library Literacy Campaign; painter of a permanent mural on the exterior wall of San Antonio church in Pisa.

This list certainly attests to Haring's concern for children and his long-standing desire to be a positive role model for them. It fails, however, to convey the cultural and racial inclusiveness that was second nature to him--this he expressed in works about South Africa, his choice of a non-White lover, and the "Crack is Wack" murals targeted at people of color--and his increasing gay and AIDS activism. He had been donating t-shirt and poster designs to ACT-UP since 1988, and his sculpture Totem garnered $70,000 at the group's fundraising auction on 3 December 1989.

New York Mayor David Dinkins acknowledged these political activities at Haring's memorial "tribute," an elaborately staged affair held at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine on 4 May. This "tribute" was oddly impersonal, showcasing performers such as Jessye Norman, Jock Soto, and Heather Watts of the New York City Ballet, and Haring-chum Melissa Fenley; estate-plumping pontification from too many dealers and art historians, and some moving moments from Keith's sister Kay and friends Kenny Scharf, Ann Magnuson, and Fred Brathwaife.

A few references were made to the conjunction of the memorial with what would have been Haring's thirty-second birthday, but too few to the significance that Keith's birthdays had held for him. It was his habit to let loose with elaborate birthday bashes that featured performances by friends such as Madonna, John Dex, and Grace Jones. Birthday parties and memorial services are, of course, quite different. Memorials are a form of portraiture, and this final likeness seemed largely official.

Queer TV Diary
Village Voice, 1993

How I spent last week:

Dear TV Diary,
It never occurred to me until last night that TV stands for televison and transvestite. There was Archie Bunker giving mouth-to-mouth to a cross dresser whom he (naturally) mistook for a woman. Unlike the de-sexualized drag of Milton Berle or Redd Fox, the queer text here was anything but sub-. Archie: "This freak took my breath under an assumed sex." Meathead: "The majority of transvestites are heterosexuals." Loved the good-liberal uplift, but who chose the Betty Ford drag? Paul Lynde?

Dear TV Diary,
When I came out in the seventies, the only queer TV I noticed was Monty Python's men in tights and/or frumpy wigs. (Phil Donahue travelled a slightly higher road then.) Less has changed than we think: Just turned off a smirking David Letterman who grilled Mariel Hemingway about her infamous smack-on-the-lips with Roseanne. "How could they have come up with that? A married woman?" Mariel invoked her 1982 film role as a lesbian athlete in Personal Best to point out that in the real (sex) world anything goes. I vainly hoped that Dave would ask how lesbians actually do it.

Dear TV Diary,
When was the moment when queers got to represent themselves? (Note: Find out and get big-bucks book-contract for The Cathode Closet.) Must have been AIDS and mid-eighties' hunger for independently produced (cheap) product. Emmy award-winning Before Stonewall was first aired on PBS in 1986 and, presumably, every June since. This year's press release calls it "part of public television's continuing effort to provide universally available programs that reflect the diversity of American life." I call it a history primer for queers in training.

Dear TV Diary,
May have to give up sleeping. Between Stonewall 25 and public television's queer docu-fest, my VCR and I are worn out. Especially enjoyed the POV-presentation of Francine Rzeznik's and Teodoro Maniaci's One Nation Under God and Peter Friedman's Fighting In Southwest Louisiana. The first is a disturbing look at the Hitlerian "ex-gay" or "change" ministry, two of whose male and married founders--get this--fell in love with one another. The second portrays Danny Cooper, an HIV+ salt-of-the-earth who delivers mail and shatters stereotypes. But neither compared with Blanche Weisen Cooke's taped, New York Public Library lecture about Eleanor Roosevelt and her queer circle. Dressed in tux-drag, BWC elegantly embodied subversion and erudition.

The folks at public television sure don't cotton up to queer fiction, do they? (Note: Give up fantasy about taping My Beautiful Laundrette and Taxi Zum Klo from broadcast.) Too bad PBS caved in to Rev Donald "bash a queer, make a buck" Wildmon re. a sequel to Tales of the City. But what can you expect from new PBS pres Ervin Duggan, former Bush appointee to the FCC and National Association of Evangelicals darling? Heard that Showtime is going to do Tales II. Will the corporate role in securing queer civil rights be greater than the judicial one? (Note: Consider removing "Gay Rights: A Movement Not A Market" button from my biker jacket.)

Dear TV Diary,
Hooray for the generation gap! MTV's The Real World is An American Family for a youthful audience and older voyeurs. MTV transported seven tremulous twenty-somethings (a first live away from home for some) to an opulent San Francisco Victorian. The one-of-everything, bomber crews of World War II-flicks have become todays's multi-culti casts. With queers. The first guy to appear was a cute, gay Cubano from Miami named Pedro, who turned out to be HIV+. The first woman was Cory, who's so sensitive that she asked Pedro whether he left a girlfriend--or boyfriend--for MTV's summer in paradise.

Pedro's HIV made waves during the first two episodes. Rachel, a passive-aggressive Catholic Hispanic who apparently flunked AIDS 101, flipped out because her housemates are blase about HIV, not to mention hospitable to Pedro. Episode one ended with her rushing from a gathering at which Pedro was the center of attention because she feared infection. "They're all so in adoration of his [AIDS-educator] accomplishments, to bring that up I'd have to be the bitch," she whined. Meanwhile Puck, the grungy bicycle messenger-slob, provided plenty of comic relief by picking his nose and then running his finger through the communal peanut butter. The producers kicked him off the show for sanitary reasons. At MTV--unlike some other places--dirt is not a metaphor.

"May I Speak Phrancly"
Village Voice, January 4, 1994

My first hit of Phranc came when I spied the lesbian, Jewish folksinger on the cover a California queerzine a few years ago. Her flattopped, T-shirted, surfer-boy good looks made me swoon. (As did her resemblance to my junior-high heartthrob, Chuck.) Although not really a folkie, I was drawn to Phranc's witty lyrics about girlfriends, Gertude Stein, even Tippi Hedren--"Alfred Hitchcock had it easy/Tippi Hedren had it hard." During the first half of her epochal "Hot August Phranc" show, she expanded the range of her cultural crit with a valentine to Martina and an amusingly comfortless litany of childhood marching orders called "Who told you everything would be all right?" (My fave: "You're going to go blind if you sit so close to the TV set.")"

After intermission, the self-described butch bulldagger returned to Dance Theater Workshop's floor transformed into hypermasculine pop singer Neil Diamond. And I do mean transformed: silver lamÈ shirt, luxuriant sideburns and chest hair, a pastel-clad backup band, and a pelvis and torse so rigidly fused that in motion they defied gravity. Forget parody, homage, or even Lily Tomlin, and think instead of Stanislavski and the Ritz Brothers. Phranc/Neil remained in coolly steamy character even when suggestively fingering her crotch during Diamond's piquant "Longfellow Serenade."

She also expertly wrung the latent subtexts from such Diamond classics as "Solitary Man" and "I Am...I Said" (and wrung them bone dry). And when she sang "Girl You'll Be a Woman Soon" I yearned for her to direct it at me, not that jerk-off down the row. I felt unsure of who I was or wanted to be (perhaps the nearly nude, flower-delivery girl who appeared with a birthday bouquet for Phranc); I was under the influence of an adrenaline rush of desire. I screamed along with dyke friends who'd formed a rooting section at the top of DTW's risers. Hello macho lesbians, goodbye gender distinctions. I hadn't felt this giddily queer since cutting class to see Paul Morrissey/Andy Warhol films in high school.