During the late 70s, artist Kitty Brophy struggled in a male-dominated art world while falling in love with one of the rising stars of the downtown scene

EDITORIAL NOTE: Lessons of New York is an oral narrative series told in parts and based primarily on interviews with artists who were involved in the Lower East Side scene during the 70s and 80s.

Recorded and edited by Rachel Cole Dalamangas

 

NEW YORK, 1978

KENNY SCHARF: My first girlfriend in New York was Kitty Brophy. She went to high school with Larry Ashton, my roommate in Santa Barbara at University of California. She had just moved to New York to go to school at Parsons. Larry came to visit, and this Arizona girl, I met her and she immediately moved in with me at my apartment on 55th Street. That night we met, we went to of all places—we were pretending we were sophisticated—to The Plaza for drinks. She grabbed me under the table and she was like a crazy, fun girl. She’s a great artist.

KITTY BROPHY: I had a lot of premonitions and psychic moments when I was young. I always knew I was going to live in New York City. I knew I was going to be an artist. I knew I was going to be a model. I just knew it would all happen.

After I was accepted to all these art schools, I narrowed the decision down between Parsons and RISD. I knew RISD would be a much better school, but I wanted that glamorous New York City life. In a way, I knew I was making the wrong decision about art school, but was making the right decision about where to live and I did have an amazing life in the city.

My mom put me on a plane in Phoenix, Arizona. I was 18 years old. My aunt Mickey lived in Princeton, and her husband was a famous writer, and they picked me up at the airport and took me to my dorm and dropped me off. Mickey was an actress and had lived in New York when she was young. She saw the adventure that I was about to have and was excited for me.

Kenny Scharf was the first person I met in New York. He was this darling California guy who looked like Shaun Cassidy. We met through Larry Ashton who was a really close friend of mine in Phoenix growing up. He’s a few years older than I am. He introduced me to Kenny and it was love at first sight for me. Kenny had a blond shag and he was tan and he was so cute and he had the greatest butt.

Basically, I was living with Kenny right away. I had been living in a dorm. Have you ever seen that movie Pitch Perfect? Remember when Anna Kendrick’s character walks into her room and the Korean girl is sitting there and won’t talk to her? That was my experience. I had a Korean roommate and a Greek roommate, and they wouldn’t acknowledge me or say hello. It was just like that. It was so funny because here we were living in New York, the greatest city in the world, and these girls would just go to school and then go back to the dorm. And I was the sort of person who wanted to learn everything, see everything, do everything.

So, I started crashing at Kenny’s apartment on 55th Street. It was bizarre . . . that part of the city had nothing to do with our life, which started to be more and more downtown. He had a job nearby at a salad bar. I can’t believe the amount of food we stole from that place . . . I was an accomplice. I would come in and sit down with this huge purse and we’d just fill it up. I also had bags and we’d fill them up with food, yogurt, cases of Perrier or whatever. Once, Kenny stole a plant.

One Sunday, I went to Penn Station to take the train to visit my grandfather on Long Island. He was in town from L.A. and staying at his sister’s house. I put on a corduroy skirt and a nice coat. I had been in a real serious depression. The night before I had stood on the edge of my 13 story dorm building and contemplated jumping off of it, but something just told me not to. I had a chemical imbalance that started when I was 14. It was a horrible way to live. I’d experience intense mania followed by serious suicidal depressions that would last for weeks, then maybe one week of normalcy before the cycle started over again. It was different back then because people didn’t really talk about these issues. It was very taboo still. Now, of course, it’s different. But, the next morning, I still had to get up and go meet my grandfather for lunch in Long Island and pretend like everything was normal because he was funding my schooling.

I was sitting in Penn Station waiting for my train and it was very crowded. This huge guy who was out of his mind, I think he was probably on heroin and PCP, he had on a big overcoat and he was just gross. He walked over to me and just started molesting me and I was floored and didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t even scream. I was thinking, “This guy is going to fucking kill me. He’s going to rape me and kill me in the middle of Penn Station.” And all these other people were just watching. Nobody did anything and I was gasping and couldn’t breathe. Finally, I turned to a young guy sitting next to me and said, “Can you get the police?” The young guy ran and came back with a police officer. But by then the guy who attacked me had moved on. What really got me was how when the police showed up, all these people rushed forward to tell the police their version of the story. I asked the young guy, “Why didn’t you help me?” And he was like, “Oh, I thought you knew that guy.” Like some huge, dirty, derelict guy in an overcoat is my friend? They did capture him and they told me he had been going around all morning doing that and pulling knives on people too. He even broke through the handcuffs when they arrested him. I missed my train and had to use a payphone to call my grandfather and make up a story about why I was late. I went home to Kenny’s on 55th Street that night and told him all this and he looked at me like, this is just too much.

The illustration program at Parsons just killed me creatively. The teachers basically just wanted us to do what they wanted us to do. And they wanted us to paint like them but not as good as them because they were afraid that we would get good and take their jobs someday. That was during the time of super-realism and photo-realism. My work is the exact opposite. The teachers were biased toward the male artists and there weren’t many girls in art school. Most of the girls who were there were in fashion or in graphic design.

I had been celebrated in the large public high school I went to in Arizona. I’d been in the gifted program where we got to do whatever we wanted. My high school teachers had been all like, “Your work is great, this is wonderful.” I just flourished. I was awarded artist of the year. I was already drawing S&M art in high school, drawings in which the women were empowered and the guys were tied up.

So I went from encouraged and creatively free-flowing to Parsons where everything I did, the teachers were like, “This is shit. You can’t do this.” There was one teacher at Parsons in particular who called my work “fake naïve,” and I was like, “What does that mean?” And he said, “Why don’t you study Grandma Moses and learn how to do real naïve?” He wasn’t referring to my pen and ink stuff, because my pen and ink stuff was my personal outlet. Those drawings were very indicative of my mental state during that time. I never showed them to anybody except a few other people.

It was so bizarre for me to go to New York City where it was so much about pushing the men and encouraging the guys and there was really no support for women. I mean think of how few women succeeded in the art world back then. You can count them. And here I was doing these delicate little ink drawings, things from my heart and my damaged brain, and no one knew what to do with them. Kenny liked them. Keith Haring liked them a lot and he was very encouraging. But art at that time was getting to be bigger bolder faster funner.

Not all women have that story. There are women who say, “Oh no, it was a great time to be a woman artist.”

I mean, Kenny had it tough too at art school. But he was strong enough. He had the confidence and the strength to deal with that criticism. One of his teachers was the wonderful illustrator, Sue Coe. He was also very smart because he learned technique. That was something I didn’t learn in part because the teachers I had didn’t teach that at Parsons—maybe I just took the wrong classes. Kenny learned as much as he could about how to paint. He was doing video and silk-screening and photorealism and oil in school.

Kenny was perfect for me, and we were eager to go out and experience everything. We’d go to Xenon and get all dressed up in spandex. This was back in the era of Rocky Horror Picture Show and David Bowie. People were flirting with gender identity. I never labeled myself as gay or straight or anything. I’d put makeup on Kenny and we’d put our spandex on and go out. We went to Studio 54, but it was so over our heads. Mick Jagger, Andy Warhol, Halston, these people were there but they were older and much more sophisticated. I remember going there and feeling so young and so wowed. This was before our whole scene started downtown at the end of 1978. We loved disco, but as soon as clubs opened downtown, we never really cared that much about going uptown anymore. We were just new to New York and the nightlife was in transition.

I was one of the few non-punk or retro-dressed girls in the East Village scene. I had been a debutante in Phoenix. I was the girl who would wear the hot pants and mini-skirts and high heels and makeup. Like, I wouldn’t let anyone kiss me when I was out at night because I didn’t want my lipstick to get messed up. I never drank in public, mostly because I didn’t want to spend the money, and later I was put on Lithium for my manic depression so I couldn’t drink at all, and quaaludes were all over and cheap so that was pretty much my thing until I got into coke in the ’80s.

John Sex and Wendy Wild, and Kenny and me, we used to double date. It’s so funny to call it “double dating.” We didn’t “date” in our group, but we did hang out all the time. John wasn’t John “Sex” yet and Wendy wasn’t Wendy “Wild.” That was later. John was this guy from Long Island with blond hair. The nicest guy. He would wear like these little tiny cut-offs. He was so creative and made these amazing silk-screens. Wendy was just this girl from Long Island with long, dirty blond hair and she was cute and fun. Nobody in our group was stuck up. We were always doing something. Like, “Let’s party!” “Let’s make a video!” “Let’s put on a show!”

Then all of a sudden John and Kenny were fooling around, and Wendy and I were like, “What just happened here?” The story I heard later was that Kenny hooked up with John at GG Barnum’s, which was this amazing transsexual nightclub with trapezes. The drag queens were incredible. I loved them. We’d be in the ladies’ room and they’d be in there, and we’d be putting on our make-up together. I was in awe of them. They were like super women.

Back then nobody was monogamous. Kenny wasn’t. I hadn’t ever been either. I wasn’t the kind of girl in high school who had a steady boyfriend for years. That kind of thing to me was uninteresting. And at the time, Kenny was blossoming and I encouraged him. I was in love with him and he was in love with me, so I just said, “You need to be who you are.” Wendy was pretty open too. But we were also hurt. Kenny and John were these young guys and suddenly the whole world opened up to them. I didn’t expect monogamy with Kenny, but I did want to be the main girl. Kenny would tell me, “Kitty, I just want you to know I love you. I really, really love you.” And that was my tip off he was going to go get with someone else. It was very funny.

I had terrible social anxiety so it was very hard for me to ever get up on stage. I did Acts of Live Art and a few other things on stage. Kenny didn’t have that problem. He’s the biggest show-off and that was part of my attraction to him. He was the most engaging person. He would just walk up to anyone he thought was interesting and say, “Hi, who are you?” And that’s how we met Klaus Nomi. Klaus was a lovely, lovely person. He was actually a baker at the time. He was a bit older than us.

But then later it became an issue for me. It was very, very hard to live in Kenny’s shadow because I had been a promising artist in high school and then suddenly I was just Kenny’s girlfriend. Our relationship happened even before Kenny was famous. I mean, Kenny was famous before Kenny was famous. And I was like, “I’ve never just been somebody’s girlfriend.” You know? Even after we broke up later, for the longest time, people kept referring to me as “Kenny’s girlfriend.” On the one hand, I could stay in obscurity and do whatever I wanted artistically. I had incredible freedom. I was never stuck or pigeonholed or dictated to. On the other hand, no one knew anything about me or my art. People weren’t mean to me, but that was how it was especially when Kenny started making it.

I never felt bitter or angry about it. I just felt sad about it because that was the era of women’s lib. I grew up in the ’70s and I was that first generation where women could do everything, or at least we thought that way. In hindsight, the reality was very different.

 

How does one tell a story through a photograph? Let us turn to Giasco Bertoli’s most recent show “Locations,” at Galerie Nuke, Paris , and count the ways. The Switzerland-born artist first began photographing at age 12, when he received his first camera, a Kodak pocket Instamatic 200. His work came of age during a pivotal time for photography—as it evolved from a commercial medium to a subtler and less idealized one. And much of his work reflects this transformation. Giasco believes in the power of a story—and in the power of a photograph to tell a story. The results are works that tend to blend the everyday with images and memories from his adolescence. In “Locations,” Giasco photographs various film locations—each locale from a vital scene to its corresponding film. And though it’s been years since some of these films were released, the photographs are nonetheless powerful, demonstrating the lasting and indelible strength of these iconic and particularly memorable films. Giasco’s projects in zingmagazine include a survey of tennis courts “15 love” in issue #15; and Cathedral interiors “in a year of 13 moons (1978)” in issue #17.

Interview by Rachel Hodin

 

All of t­he photos in “Locations” are shot at different film locations. Did you have to research the precise address of each location before? Or was it more like you recalled the locations from memory?

I researched different New York film locations on the Internet—locations that were first scouted by site hunters.

 

There was a really fascinating article about memory in a recent New Yorker that demonstrated just how much it’s subject to change. Two quotes that stuck out to me: “The very act of remembering something makes it vulnerable to change” and “’Memory works a little but more like a Wikipedia page . . . You can go in there and change it, but so can other people.’”

I don’t know much about this subject. To me memory is a diary we all carry about with us and sometimes a perfect memory can be ruined if it’s put into words. A photograph captures a moment that’s gone forever, and impossible to reproduce.

 

All of the shots are in New York. I know you moved from New York to Paris when you were much younger, and haven’t moved back since; how would you compare the two cities?

Everybody knows that there’s just something about New York—this inexplicable quality to it, whether it’s from the heat, the music, or the money. In Paris, we don’t really have all of that; here it’s much more romantic with its nice boulevards lined with pristine trees and the Eiffel Tower. To Europeans, New York City feels almost like a movie. For example, the taxis—if you think about the taxi driver, the guy who drives around all day, waking up early to start his shift with steam rising from the streets. Even the loud music New York City is known for—rap music emanating from passing cars. There’s just this unique power to NYC that emerges particularly in photographs, if you find the right shot. It’s a mysterious, yet strong quality. Perhaps it’s more compatible with my work because it’s more international than Paris. In fact, in “Locations,” I was aiming to reach a more international audience—of dreamers, movie dreamers and cinema lovers from around the world. I always want my work to reach an international audience, and in Paris—with its picturesque trees and romance and its charming street lamps—that’s less likely to happen.

 

Obviously “Locations” is a product of recalling pleasant memories. Are there any memories you wish you could erase?

Memories are killing. We must not recollect on certain memories from our pasts—memories of those who are dear to us. Or rather, we must think of these memories and continue to remember them. For if we don’t, we run the risk of these memories surfacing in our minds, all on their own, little by little.

 

Did any of these films figure prominently in your childhood?

My childhood is so far away; we would have to go back to the ’70s, when most of these movies had yet to even come out. No—these movies were selected much more naturally, almost accidental. In fact I decided on most of them while sitting on my couch, chatting with a friend. The selection was more about mixing our memories, and my personal fascination with these films. They all define a city, rather than an era, and during the making of “Locations” I actually discovered quite a bit about these films. For instance I had no idea that the outside of Victor Ziegler’s mansion in Eyes Wide Shut is really the Consulate General of the Republic of Poland in New York City.

 

Who is the most magnetic person you’ve watched on screen?

The list is too long. The first film I ever saw in theaters was Little Big Man, with Dustin Hoffman and Faye Dunaway—two irrefutably magnetic actors. I think Christopher Walken in The Deer Hunter is magnetic too, and Orson Wells in the Third Man. I like Harry Dean Stanton in general; Marlon Brando in Last Tango in Paris; Takeshi Kitano in Hana-Bi; and a young Gerard Depardieu was of course magnetic as well . . .

 

How about the most arresting subject you’ve photographed?

This is a really tough one because an arresting subject—that could be a lot of things. It could be the tennis courts book I shot; there was this one particular shot of a tennis court that I captured, just as it was getting dark out and the sky was very blue. I mean, just physically experiencing that in such an empty space was arresting in itself. But probably the most arresting subject was this ballad to NYC—“Locations” —because it’s my most recent project. For two to three days my girlfriend and I walked around these various locations as we also went shopping; we were able to mix work with pleasant, amateur tourism. We went to Brooklyn and we saw Tony Manero’s house from Saturday Night Fever, and it looked entirely different. We visited Queens too. We were really able to discover NYC through this “Locations” series. More so than arresting, it was just a nice journey—a nice touristic journey. And I like to be a tourist in my work; I think it adds some lightness to it.

 

“Locations” seems to evoke a similar appreciation for film and movie theaters displayed in the film Cinema Paradiso. Do you have a favorite film?

I’ve seen thousands of films, so many films. I even made one myself. As for my favorite film? Of course that depends on a lot, like the period of the film. I saw all of the films featured in “Locations,” and appreciate each and every one of them. For instance Dressed To Kill, The Warriors, Two Lovers, Manhattan, Carlito’s Way, Afterhours, Saturday Night Fever, Serpico, Raging Bull, Once Upon a Time in America, Goodfellas . . . I think cinema has played a huge role in shaping my imagination. I always found myself pretty comfortable in the darkness of a movie theater—I always felt like I could learn more from characters in movies, as opposed to characters in reality. I like to think I have a better understanding of reality through watching films. For me, the works of directors like Bresson, Bunuel, Kubrick, Cassavetes, Fassbinder, Fellini, Godard, Kaurismäki, Herzog, Pasolini, Rossellini, Truffaut, Antonioni, and Vigo mimic real life experiences.

 

The photos here are noticeably empty—they almost look abandoned. They aren’t particularly explicit either. Was this intentional? I find that, usually, the less explicit something is, the more aptly it’s able to convey inexplicable ideas like death.

There’s something about an abandoned-looking place or house that makes it look like it has a life of its own. I really like it.

 

Can you tell me some of your favorite films from the past year? And any recommendations you have for films everyone must see?

I recently saw Black Coal, Thin Ice, which won the last Berlin Film festival; it’s a great film.

In general, I would recommend Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Barry Lindon, The Shining, and Eyes Wide Shut. I like the Coen brothers’ films too—they’re fun, sulfurous and quirky. I love western movies—John Ford, Sergio Leone, and Clint Eastwood—and Howard Hawks and Nicholas Ray too. And among the many films I love, I’m particularly taken with The Last Detail, a 1973 comedy-drama directed by Hal Ashby, and The Mass is Ended by Nanni Moretti.

 

I saw you did a video for the fashion brand Lutz Huelle. Personally I think fashion films are an untapped resource in the broader category of films. What are your thoughts on contemporary fashion films/shorts?

I don’t know—some fashion short films make pretty advertising, but I find fashion to be mostly boring and a bit depressing these days.

 

I also heard you’re working on writing your first feature film. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

It is finished. When You’re Smiling, it’s a 10-minute short film freely adapted from a Bukowski novel.

 

Obviously stories are important to you; do you have a favorite writer, short story, novel, or poem?

I always liked the Italian poet Sandro Penna; Pasolini said he was the greatest Italian poet of the 20th century. I like the writer and film critic Serge Daney, whose L’Amateur de tennis helped inspire my tennis court series. Sadly, he died from HIV 20 years ago. I like to think he would have liked my tennis court project. The two books that are on my bedside table right now are Kitano by Kitano by Michel Temman and Big Bad Love by Larry Brown.

 

Any particular artists you were influenced by—for this series or in general?

The influence here was drawn purely from films—a lot of films—and many directors too. I guess it is a cinephile project, meant for the guy who loves movies and going to the movies, stories, shots, etc etc.

 

Did you use any noteworthy camera techniques?

Just an old Nikon F3 and Kodak color film—very simple—and a Fuji 4.5×6 millimeters.

 

Willard Boepple’s sculptures flirt with the viewer. Maybe it’s the topsy-turvy flutes and cylinders that seem to grow from a so-called bookshelf or the playful twists of shadow that fall from a tower that cause these objects in Boepple’s live/work space in SoHo to radiate a sense of teasing vitality. The compositional spontaneity conjures plant life and music to the mind. Then again, the very same sculptures are borrowed—at least distantly—from functional objects such as stepladders, and thus echo architecture and industry. Visual associations arise from the suggestion of trumpets and antennas, scrolls of light and debris, but are never satisfied as metaphors. In this way, Boepple’s work taunts the mind into a heightened contemplation of what existing feels like, and delivers perhaps the most effective experience of engaging with abstract art. What is it like to have a body? What is the relationship between a being and its environment?

This July, Boepple will exhibit a monoprint series at Lori Bookstein Fine Art based on his resin sculptures. The monoprints came about when Boepple met the master printer Kip Gresham in Cambridge, England over ten years ago. Additionally, a monograph of Boepple’s work will be published this fall.

Interview by Rachel Cole Dalamangas

 

The critic David Cohen has written on your work as a reaction to Plato. How is your work a response to Plato’s notion of forms?

I look to the world of objects for my sculpture, objects made for people to use. Objects designed by people for people to use imply the figure, they have to do with the hand, arm or leg. The height of a chair has all to do with the body’s proportions, a step ladder has to do with how we behave in gravity and the distance between the ankle and knee. A handle has all to do with the length and reach of the arm and hand. This vocabulary of forms really interests me. It’s part of our landscape, we grow up with it, it’s our visual environment—everything around us that is made that isn’t natural comes out of the measures, needs, demands, tastes, inclinations, uses of the body. I think we know much more about that visual world than we realize. There is so much knowledge that is not rationalized or indexed. But when the handle is too low or the step is too shallow . . . what is it about what’s right and what isn’t? What is it about a window that’s a little too high? It looks wrong. We feel it right off the bat. We don’t necessarily articulate it or understand why, but we feel it. We have this accumulated vocabulary of proportions and shapes and sizes. I’m interested in that as source material for abstract sculpture making. I don’t work from the figure directly at all, but I’m very interested in what it’s like to be in the world as a human being, as bodies.

An abstract sculpture has the gift and burden of being in the world without explanation. A painting hangs on the wall and we read it as art whether we like it or not, whether we know what it is or not, we know it’s art. It’s rectangular usually, it hangs on the wall, it has a light on it—oh, it’s art. An abstract sculpture plopped on the floor or on the table—what the heck is that? I’m really interested in the resonance we create with a sculpture that makes us notice it or respond to it emotionally or somehow see something in it that it generates.

 

Is there a relationship in your sculpture to architecture?

Yes, but my work isn’t functional. I don’t make functional things.

 

I’m interested in the process by which you find these forms and shape them into an abstract sculpture. How much does the process start in the mind or how much does in start in the physical making of it, which is a Platonic question too.

Process evolves and varies. I work intuitively and in response to certain material stuff, the fact of what’s in front of me, whatever it is. I’m a constructor, I tend to work additively building things rather than chipping away. In the context of the vocabulary of form I described, I will typically begin the sculpture with some kind of construct or object as a starting off point. Step ladders, for example were kind of the beginning of this thinking really. I worked in the early days more out of constructivism and cubist collage. The step ladder really was the beginning. I was looking for a way to make vertical abstract sculpture that didn’t read as figure. You take a pole and stick it in the ground and we read a figure immediately. It’s our ego, our self-centered nature as an animal. So how to make something abstract and vertical that did not do that? Did not simply fight the figure-ness of verticality always?  That was the problem I was chewing on and I came upon the step ladder as a form that is both absolutely vertical—it’s meant to get you up—and yet does not read as a figure. It reads much more architecturally and functionally. The late ’70s, early ’80s, I made a series of them, which began this exploration and it was from then that I moved into other objects. More furniture-y. Book shelves, room structures, and the like. With the ladder sculptures, I would actually build the wooden ladders as the beginning proposition and start responding to that, very intuitively, very directly. Let’s take out all the steps. Let’s turn it upside-down. Let’s turn it inside-out. Let’s see where we can go with this thing. Somehow make it speak, make it come alive. Mysterious process, but very much the way I work in the studio.

 

Plato also proposed a series of dualities: mind/body, good/bad, abstract/material. Is your tendency to move away from function and representation a rebuttal to Platonic dualities?

The first one for me is alive/not-alive. I can’t say that I ever consciously work against some ideal or toward some idea. The idea such as it is begins with that beginning object notion. Let’s see if we can make a sculpture out of this or the idea of this door handle or footstool, a half-open window. It’s like I’m looking for an idea, something new in the world. Looking for signs of life. When the thing comes alive—that mystery of all mysteries—is when you’re dealing with something, is when something starts to happen.

There are two rules in art. The first is it needs to be alive. The second is it has to be good. But the first rule is first, because without that live-ness it can’t be good. Very often the live thing leads to horror—oh my god, what a mess and what have I done and what am I thinking? But when you generate those sorts of reactions in yourself or anyone else, something is cooking, something is happening.

 

What are signs of life in art?

What are signs of love? I don’t know. Therein lies the center of the mystery. What is it? We just know it when it happens. We know it when we feel it. But what is life is the question you’re asking. I hope and I think that art when it is wonderful and it is great, teaches us about that live-ness. It is about that quality of vividness of two people being together and responding to each other.

 

So an indication of live-ness is when some sort of exchange develops between an object and a consciousness?

Exchange sounds a little clinical. Some form of communication is at work. When we talk about music . . . music for some reason is very easy for us to talk about in our culture. I think because we don’t doubt that it’s art. We argue and have taste and have standards of good and bad, but you never question what it is. Yet, when you think about it, it is entirely abstract. Music is entirely, internally relational. It’s about sounds juxtaposed to each other in some kind of rhythm. It moves us or doesn’t. We don’t see that way. We’re not as visually comfortable. We want to know what something represents.

 

Your work has been described as musical, which adds a synaesthesiac quality.

I think more key at least in my ambition for my work is the relational . . . one bit relates to another. The logic that it creates. That’s what it’s about. Thick and thin. High and low. Long and short. Oblique and acute. Therein lies the magic of music.

 

Has music influenced your work?

I listen to a lot of Bach, but I like a wide-range of music . . . Bob Dylan. I played the cello badly as a kid. My parents are musicians. My mother is a pianist. I grew up around music.

 

I’m always curious—what do abstract artists get up to as kids? I mean, what were your creative inclinations growing up?

I always wanted to be an artist. I don’t know where that came from or why. When I was young—maybe 12 or 13—I got to know Richard Diebenkorn who was a neighbor and friend of my family. He was very encouraging to me. I used to muck around in my basement where I painted and did stuff. Whenever he came by, he always wanted to have a look and see. Where, this came from, I have no idea. I went to Skowhegan young. I was too young really, but it was a wild adventure. I continued to paint badly through college.

 

When you were 37, you were hospitalized with a severe case of Guillain-Barre syndrome, and though you recovered, you continue to live with legs that are paralyzed below the knee and limited function of your arms below the elbow. Have these circumstances influenced how you make art?

I have no answer really. Changing the way you work changes your work and inevitably my physical situation has altered my work. That said, I cannot see or say how. I was just starting with the stepladder sculptures—I showed some at Acquavella in 1981 just before I got ill. When I was able to get back to work, I picked up where I left off with them. A lot of people have asked, “Were you making stepladders because you were learning how to walk and climb?”—the metaphor was irresistible. But I started work on the step ladders beforehand. It was not a response to the illness.

I was in the hospital so damn long I had assistants come in and worked verbally because I couldn’t move. Getting back to work was a gift. Illness is so boring. You lie there like a dead fish and well-meaning people look down on you and kind of shout at you because they think you’re deaf and they are asking about your body all the time. Boring. Healing was so slow, incremental. A news flash would go down the hospital hallway that I moved my eyes or moved my shoulder. So when I had some former students (from the Boston Museum School) come in with balsa wood and a glue gun, I could think about making a little something. It was life saving.

 

How does your upcoming monoprint show at Lori Bookstein fine art relate to your sculpture? How did your making monoprints come about?

My wife and I lived in England for three years beginning in 2001 and I didn’t have a proper sculpture studio, so I thought I’d try out some new media for me. I met the printmaker Kip Gresham—I’d never made a print in my life—and told him I was interested in trying to make some prints that related to my resin sculptures. The resin is translucent in these pieces—you can see into them, through layers of color that live in the light. For the first few sessions, we took shapes right out of the sculpture and used them as templates then filled them, built them up with color.

 

Fabiola Torralba is a dancer, educator, artist, and activist.  After several years of community organizing and cultural work in San Antonio, two bachelor’s degrees, and some ethnographic fieldwork, she decided to return to her first love. Fabiola then trained under Erica Wilson-Perkins at Palo Alto College receiving an Associates of Arts in Dance with additional training under the Urban Bush Women, the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, and David Grenke of ThingsezIsee’um Dance/Theater among others. She collaborates frequently with local artists, schools, galleries, and non-profit organizations on multi-disciplinary, educational, and performance based projects. Previous works include, En Rumbo, entre nos, Zapatos Viejos, This Bridge We Call…, XVoto, Me Gustas Cuando Callas, and nos(otros) ¡somos!, a full length bilingual multimedia performance that presents multiple facets of the immigration experience by first voices. Fabiola utilizes movement as a vehicle for community building, civic engagement, and social-cultural awareness. She enjoys exploring interdisciplinary collaborations and the intersections between art, story, and action.

At the beginning and end of summer 2013, Torralba produced and performed in nos(otros)!somos! accompanied by a related solo installation at Lady Base Gallery.

Interview by Josh T Franco

 

How did you recruit the performers for nos(otros)!somos!? Did you have the idea then find them, or vice versa?  

My primary objective was to find immigrants to invite to participate. Given that many do not identify themselves so openly and that I knew few myself, I simply asked people that I knew to participate and then asked them to identify people that they knew to invite as well. I set the parameters of the project in terms of vision and scope, facilitated its development, and co-directed the program. The rest was all magic.

 

What is the show’s relationship with the environment you created at Lady Base Gallery simultaneous with the first performance?

The initial performance of nos(otros) !somos! held inside of Gallista Gallery was part of the closing reception of my solo installation exhibit titled nos(otros). I felt the need to express my identity as a Mexican immigrant woman given the limited dialogue that exists in U.S. mainstream media on immigrants and my need to be recognized beyond stereotypes, romanticized notions, and politically influenced jargon.

The installation pieces were largely based on stories that I came across in my experiences working among immigrants and as a U.S. based immigrant in Mexico and Guatemala. Each of the pieces in the installation exhibit different aspects of the immigrant experience as I relate to them personally through the stories of other immigrants. These are immigrants who had traveled to the U.S. and had returned to their home, immigrants who currently reside in the U.S., and Mexican natives who aspire to migrate to the U.S.

Part of my goal was to complicate or problematize the dominant narrative of immigrant experiences. I wanted to share these images because they provide multiple facets of the immigrant experience that complicate and speak to the multiplicity of immigrant identity.

Another part of my goal in sharing these stories was to provide a space where immigrants could speak for themselves. Being that I was fortunate to have witnessed these first hand I wanted these stories to be told because I want these realities, these people, these voices to be recognized and heard. As a person that is now U.S. based, I also felt the responsibility to do so and in a way that would be more accessible to viewers than formal academic or literary processes.

Lastly, my experience as an undocumented immigrant has been largely marked by silence and erasure. The way that I’ve learned to understand my own experience has always been in relation to the experiences of other people.  My sharing of these stories is a way to tell, understand, and come to terms with my own. Given that I had the opportunity to capture a crowd with the installation exhibit of nos(otros) and that I had the full support of Sarah Castillo of Lady Base Gallery to explore my creative capacities I wanted utilize the moment to share as many stories as possible by opening up the space for other immigrants to speak for themselves.

As a dancer and choreographer, I also wanted to facilitate a space where these realities could be explored through performance directly through the body. Hence the creation of

nos(otros)!somos!, a multi-media live performance that presents multiple facets of the immigrant experience by first voices.

 

I noticed Tomas Ybarra-Frausto was in the audience at the second performance. This made me think about the piece within Chicano/a art history, and I thought about how it blurs the line (which seems bleakly solid the more I learn) between Chicano/a and Mexican art. How does the whole performance, the cast, the context, relate to this distinction?

I’m not sure that I can readily call out the differences between Chicano/a and Mexican art but I know from being a Mexican immigrant who was raised in the Westside amongst a majority Mexican American community adopted into a working class Tejano family that major differences do exist between Mexicans and Mexican Americans. Nationality for one is a major difference along with legal status and language.  Naturally these and amongst other factors shape identity and cultural expression.

I have felt this distinction myself within the Chicano community, a feeling of silence and difference. It’s not a conversation that is always welcomed. Personally, I think it may be because many individuals still have their own work to do with their own internalized racism. The conversation can also easily lend itself to addressing questions of privilege and status which becomes even trickier in a state that doesn’t even admit its own history of colonization. Regardless, Chicanos have worked hard to reconnect with their heritage and situate themselves within their Mexican identity and continue to do this work by mobilizing, educating, and building community.

I created the space for nos(otros) !somos! specifically for immigrants because I felt that there was no space for us to tell our stories. Though the topic of immigration had become popular on a national level over the past five years or so, it is often a conversation that is shaped by U.S. nationals and not by immigrants themselves via policy, academia, and mainstream media. In the moments where there have been immigrants speaking on their own behalf it is only a sector of the population that is covered as news but these do not represent us all. Not all immigrants are DREAMERS, or Mexican nationals, or men that migrate to care for their families on their own. I had also felt that within the literature that I read as a Mexican American Studies student that immigration or migration was often romanticized or idealized. It was a topic that many did not have first hand experience with amongst my student peers and within the organizing community that I was a part of. Naturally, I felt alone. As I became more and more involved in local actions in support of immigrant solidarity efforts along with Chicanos and Mexican Americans, I realized that regardless of their families history of migration or ethnic identity, that I was living it alone and that this difference was valid and needed a place of its own.

I wanted immigrants speak on their own behalf because I didn’t want to feel alone anymore. I also wanted a space for us to speak for ourselves to break the silence and erasure that is so much a part of being undocumented. I also wanted a diversity of voices and experiences to be shown because we are not a homogeneous community and many have already been left out of the conversation.

 

Can you discuss a bit about the difference in the two venues in which you’ve now shown the work?

Lady Base is a gallery that supports the artistic practices of Women and LGBTQ artists of San Antonio. It is located inside of the Gallista Gallery in the South Side of the city and is run by Sarah Castillo, an artist and graduate student in the Bilingual Bicultural Studies program at the University of Texas at San Antonio. For more information visit http://ladybase210.wordpress.com/.

The Esperanza Peace and Justice Center is a non-profit cultural arts organization committed to social justice and the celebration of the artistic and cultural expression of diverse voices. For more information visit www.esperanzacenter.org.

 

To see what Torralba is up to now, check out her blog. 

 

Street artist Kenny Scharf on the ups and downs of friendship, the absurdity of life

Recorded & edited by Rachel Cole Dalamangas

 

People need to be made more aware of the need to work at learning how to live because life is so quick and sometimes it goes away too quickly.
—Andy Warhol

 

NEW YORK, 1976

I was invited into the Time Square show by John Ahearn who came to my show called “Celebration of the Space Age” at Club 57 in 1979. I didn’t ask anyone for permission, I just brought Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat with me and said, “You guys have to be in this show—join me.” Jean-Michel’s painting made a huge sensation, he got noticed and got into the “New York New Wave” show at PS1. He had a show in Italy, and boom—his career took off. I believed in him, for sure.

My friendship with Jean-Michel was very rocky. He had a double personality. He kind of turned on me more than once. He used to make me completely uncomfortable. Just tried to torture me sometimes. Once, I was at a party and there were lots of people and music and whatnot. It was a very crowded room and I felt really uncomfortable, like, something just felt really weird. And I turned around, from across the smoky room, he’s beaming an evil eye into the back of my head. I felt that and I caught his eye doing that, and I just started sweating. And it would happen a lot. It would always be the same thing and he was trying to make me feel intimidated and it worked.

About a month after I had the show at Fiorucci, Jean-Michel was making a painting with John Sex, and they made this wet oil painting and cars were driving over it—it was so cool and punk rock—and Jean-Michel was kind of spastic and he decided he wanted to have a show at Fiorucci. So he goes up to Fiorucci with these wet oil paintings and in that spasticky manner he used to have, he managed to get wet oil paint all over the clothes, and they kicked him out.

I heard later that Jean-Michel kind of had a problem with me because I didn’t sleep with him. I went to visit him at this apartment he had in Chelsea. He had his art, these collages, on the wall in the kitchen and I was just totally blown away by this crazy energy they had coming from them. The colors on these collages were amazing. That’s when he came onto me. I had just arrived to New York. I’d never done anything with another guy. I was scared.

Jean-Michel was really sweet, charming, funny. He adored Keith, he was always nice to Keith, which was really hard on me. It was one of those things where I liked Jean-Michel so much and when he would be sweet to me, I would be all forgiving and then he would turn on me again.

One time, years later, Jean-Michel and I were both in Italy at the same time and he apologized. And I was like, “I can’t believe you’re apologizing. I never knew what this was about. Why were you so mean to me?” And he said, “Because I’m jealous of you.” And I said, “Why?” Because he was famous at that point, I wasn’t really famous at all then. I wasn’t selling my work. Nobody cared about what I was doing. I was like, “Why would you be jealous of me?” And he said, “Because you’re happy.” I just had this incredible moment of empathy for him and was completely forgiving him for all the stuff and the very next day, it was like my heart was open and he took a knife and just went, “Rrrrrrr-nuh.” Immediately, he turned on me the very next day after apologizing. After that, that was it. I shut down. I swear it was like a month before he died, we kind of connected again. I felt sadness in him and he seemed really in such a sad place that I couldn’t keep that thing I was carrying anymore. Then he died.

John Sex was my first guy. John had moved from Long Island to New York with Wendy Wild together as a couple. I was living with Kitty [Brophy] as a couple. I met John at SVA and the four of us would go on double dates. We’d go to music venues like everybody did. Me and John Sex left the girls and ran off one night. There was a place called GG Barnum’s. It was this disco back then and it was crazy wild and all these dancers were above the dance floor on these nets. And the dancers would jump off and land almost on top of your head, this circusy kind of thing. Then they had these drag queens come on stage and do a show. By then, John and I were really drunk, and we got so excited that we jumped the stage during the show. We went back in the dressing rooms and the bouncers got us and threw us out and that’s how our thing started. Drunk and allover the ground.

Wendy was kind of distraught about what was happening to her boyfriend. Not long after that, Kitty went back to Arizona leaving me to continue my New Wave Punk Rock Bisexual studies.

John and I were involved awhile off and on. He was an amazing person in my life. Really amazingly smart and talented. He taught me a lot about art and Dada. One day he decided that art was bullshit and he threw all his art away in the garbage and announced that he himself was art and he only did performance art after that and became the John Sex persona that people know him as. But nobody knows that he was a really amazing visual artist.

I met Andy Warhol twice. The first time I met him was right after the “New York New Wave” show at PS1. I was in this group show that Andy Warhol was in and I went to this opening at a club called Peppermint Lounge, and Andy showed up there and I went right up to him and said, “Hi, we’re in a show together.” It didn’t impress him much. He said, “Oh, that’s so great,” and wasn’t even listening. He had these rude guys with him and he pointed to one of them and he said, “Make out with him.” And I was kind of like, stunned a little bit, shy and uncomfortable. I can’t remember if the guy did or didn’t honestly. I have the feeling that I chickened out and didn’t go with that. So that was it and he didn’t know who I was. Then later, Keith became famous and was invited to The Factory on Union Square for lunch and I just invited myself to go with him. I was creaming in my jeans. It was everything I could have dreamed, not only meeting Andy, but having lunch with him. I was used to a diet of bad pierogis and pizza and donuts, and they had food delivered from some nice place. So many celebrities were going to The Factory then. Andy was taking their picture and the celebrities were getting into Interview magazine. All of a sudden, I went from only knowing East Village celebrities in my sphere, to, “Oh, there’s Farrah Fawcett, or there’s Arnold Schwartzeneger.”

The artist David McDermott and the artist Peter McGough were around the scene then. And there was this guy Diego Cortez, who was the curator of the PS1 “New York New Wave” show, and his boyfriend was named Johnny Rudo. And Johnny Rudo had this loft in Time Square that he was renting from the artist Jimmy DeSana. Jimmy was a very interesting artist who died very early of AIDS, and he did these really intense sadomasochistic photographs that were very Mapplethorpy. So Johnny Rudo called me and was like, “I’ve got this room in this crazy place. There’s space for studio work and whatever, do you wanna come here?” So I left my East Village place and then two weeks later, Johnny Rudo couldn’t handle me. He was intimidated by my intense procreation of art making. I just got there and started hot gluing this and finding trash and painting that and taking over and celebrating the fact that I had some space to work. I was overwhelming him. I got home from school one day and all my bags were packed, and Johnny had brought David and Peter over. I was like, “What’s going on here?” And they were like, “We are here to kick you out. Johnny Rudo doesn’t like you. His dad is a lawyer. And we are here to kick you out.” I just looked at them and was like, “I got news for you. Someone’s leaving and it’s not me.” And the next thing I knew, Johnny Rudo put his tail between his legs and ran away, and David and Peter left too. So I called Keith and I was like, “Keith, I got this great place.” Because Keith was living in this weird men’s shelter, sharing a room with three old men. Keith was like, “Okay.” So Keith came up. There was even a painting that David McDermott and Peter McGough did of this scene. On one side, it’s me with space ships and dinosaurs, and on the other side is them with all their doilies and clocks, and they’re making a face at each other.

Life is just little crazy stories.

EDITORIAL NOTE: Lessons of New York is an oral narrative series told in parts and based primarily on interviews with artists who were involved in the Lower East Side scene during the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. 

Read Part I of Lessons of New York.