Lessons of New York is an unfinished collection of oral histories from the LES art scene of the 70s and 80s
Walter at zing #22 release party in Miami, December 2011
I first met Walter in 2013 when I interviewed him at his LIC studio for zing, shortly after moving from Denver to NYC. I was a walking cliché of a cliché – a young writer in New York.
After the interview, Walter asked what I was doing in the city, and when I told him, he said, “Well, I don’t see you becoming the next Susan Sontag,” then invited me to wander over to some LIC exhibit openings with him.
When I began collecting stories about the LES in the ’70s and ’80s—a sprawling, unfinished oral history for which I interviewed Walter again in 2015—he was incredibly supportive.
“I’m far too lazy for a project like this,” he said.
And, “I’m too shy to call all these people up,” he said, quick to pull out his phone to share contacts for subjects I wanted to interview.
When I occasionally ran into Walter at exhibit openings, he’d give me a cranky pep talk that vaguely had the tenor of a coach trying to motivate a lazy athlete.
“You gotta dig, really dig, ” he said.
“Are you still doing that thing? Keep going,” he said.
I didn’t keep going after about 2016.
I stopped writing about art, and saved the many hours of audio files I’d collected to a hard disk drive that went into a box of files I didn’t know what to do with, where it would remain for nearly a decade of life’s great ups and downs.
American poet Gertrude Stein said, “We’re always the same age inside” – awkward wisdom on mortality that makes me think of this story of Walter – the kid inside the ‘old man’ – newly arrived in New York, catching glimpses of the city through his eyes, looking past the ‘hill’ of Columbia, imagining what awaited him downtown.
Interview and editing by Rachel Dalamangas
WALTER ROBINSON:
You know there’s this notion that we know what we’re doing and we’re in control of our lives, but actually of course we’re not. We don’t know what we’re doing and we’re not in control of our lives. And how I ended up in New York I would say is just an accident. But there must have been something, some psychological thing.
Here I was in Oklahoma. Eldest son of a completely middle-class family. Typical angry, repressive, hard-working father.
And I could have stayed in Oklahoma and lived in Oklahoma and been bored, but somehow, I felt enough out of place unconsciously that I came to New York.
I came to New York in 1968. It’s not the typical story when people come to New York. Most people, you know, they pack their bags, and everything, you know? For me, eh, I just came for college and never left.
I was afraid of the city. You’re cloistered on the hill at Columbia at school and they would tell us, “Don’t go downtown. You’ll get mugged.”
I was really slow on the uptake. I discovered the art world when I was in college and started going to museums and started to go to galleries in SoHo and got caught up in the art business that way.
Where the Twin Towers stood it used to be nothing. It used to be a landfill. There was nothing there. It was like a beach. They’d do performance art there. Martha Wilson would curate it. I saw Sun Ra there.
When I got out of college and moved downtown, my rent was $220, and I think I had a job typesetting. Somehow I got into the typesetting business. Maybe it was freelance for Sing Out magazine. Or maybe it was part-time for this newspaper called The Jewish Beat. I made $6/hour, and I had more money than I knew what to do with.
By the end of the 70s in SoHo, there was this SoHo style painting. Painting that didn’t know what it was doing. Say the dean of SoHo painters was Ron Gorchov. That kind of abstraction. Judy Pfaff for instance is another. People who are still carrying on in abstraction even though it’s been bypassed by newer aesthetic developments.
In the early 80s, I moved to Ludlow Street, and I was hanging out with all my friends from Colab. I had a job. I worked at Art in America, and I guess I was looking for another extracurricular activity. I had been president of Colab and decided to quit I think in 1982.
I had my own painting by then. Now if I had been smart, I would have pursued painting 100%. That’s what I recommend to young people. Don’t get a job. Pursue your art 100%.
I was looking around for another project and somehow, I got the job of being the art editor of the East Village Eye. I guess Leonard asked me if I wanted to do it, and I said yes.
Carlo McCormick was already writing for them and that’s when I met Carlo. He was already writing about the piers. There were a lot of artists that would go over to the piers and insert artworks. I never even went over there. There’s this famous David Wojnarowicz painting of like a giant cow’s head with a tongue sticking out painted on a wall at the piers. They’re all marked out by now of course.
Self-Portrait (after Matisse), 2024
At the East Village Eye, we had a lot of fun writing nonsense.
I wrote a little review of a guy’s show just by looking in the window. I didn’t go in and look at the art and he got mad at me about that.
I had the whole Waltergate thing. You may know about Waltergate. When I stitched together a bunch of press releases and ran it as a column as if somebody had written it. The funny thing was that poor Barbara Gladstone complained and then the art critic Joe Matsheck who was a player in those days wrote in to support me. Judd Tully complained because he’d been misquoted. It was funny because Judd blamed Carlo because Carlo had written the column next to it. It’s all very confusing.
That whole [1983] Whitney Biennial was harshly criticized as being the “East Village Biennial.”
That’s when it became clear to me the scapegoat that the East Village was becoming for all things that people thought was bad about art. “The New Art’s too stupid or too gaudy or somehow meretricious.” “The East Village is only about money.”
Conservative forces, whether it’s Robert Hewes or writers for October magazine would attack the East Village and attack the Biennial as the East Village Biennial even though in fact there were only a few artists associated with the East Village in it. Most of the artists from the East Village have never been recognized by the museum structure.
The East Village represented these upstarts, these upstarts who are bad.
But you can’t say the same thing was true about Keith and Kenny and Jean-Michel. They were the triumvirate.
Keith was a star before anybody even knew who he was because he was doing his Radiant Child barking dog graffities all over on plywood in construction sites and on the subway and people really liked those. Even though there was a big graffiti movement, his stuff is really not that vandalistic. Like a lot of the graffiti writers would write all over the trains. So he was already very popular with the people.
And then when Jean-Michel had his first show, there was this intense buzz. Everybody loved that. Really came out with his first show at Anina Nosei in SoHo. Tremendous buzz about it. That was the show where he was supposedly locked in the basement and kept painting. Everybody just loved that stuff.
So Kenny’s adaptation of a Hanna Barbera look fit totally in with whatever it was that was happening this 80s – the American 80s painting revival.
It’s also part of the Tony Shrafrazi aesthetic.
Tony had a bunch of other artists that are kind of forgotten now. Like Brett De Palma, Ronnie Cutrone. I think what happened to Ronnie was that he wasn’t focused enough on the art business because he was too much of a drug addict. The art world can be harsh on people who are drug addicts, people who get a reputation for being junkies.
There’s nobody like Tony. He’s a little bit insane now, I think. He’s really enthusiastic about art. He’s very meticulous. That’s why he loves Jeff Koons so much. Because they share almost obsessive-compulsive meticulousness. Tony’s the kind of guy who has to have an assistant to wait around for him because he doesn’t really know how to lock up.
In the art business, you want to be known as the go-to person for something. The art world is full of go-to people.
You have to have your eyes on the brass ring and you have to go for the brass ring. You can’t be satisfied with sitting in the back of the background.
I was talking to a writer that used to work for me the other day. I had been looking back at my blog on Artnet from 10, 12 years ago. It was kind of like a diary. It seemed kind of like a waste of time, but really it was an investment in the future.
And I was saying to this young writer, “Why don’t you have a blog where you write once a day and post about what you saw or what you’re thinking about.”
But of course, when I was young, if someone said that to me, I would have thought, ‘I can’t do that. I don’t know what I think. I don’t know what to say.’
Now I’m old and I know what I think and I know what I want to say.