home out of bounds, Marine was reckless not to escape but because her return was blocked. I folded up the violet shirt and sweater she’d left in my car and put them in the chest at the foot of my bed. They are still there. In the shirt pocket I found the crumpled wrapper of a Tootsie Pop.
This era came rushing back to me a few years ago when I walked into a New York gallery full of the photographs of Peter Hujar, who died of AIDS in 1986. I had been looking at thoroughly contemporary art in the several galleries that preceded this momentous entrance, art that was sleek, shiny, clever, art about design issues, fashion, disaffection, art that was in some ways about the smooth surface of the new city that had replaced the cityscape that so moved me in Hujar’s work. The very texture was different. In Hujar’s saturated black-and-white prints of animals, outcasts, eccentrics, and ruinous places, the world was rough in every sense. Its surfaces were porous, decrepit, sensuous, full of age and what seemed an ability to absorb: to absorb light, meaning, emotion. The city had mystery and danger of the sort urban renewal pledges to remove. Not far from the gallery was Chelsea Piers, now “a family place,” a high-end sports and exercise complex, pricy, regulated, safe, and predictable, full of healthy people simulating activities like golf and climbing that really only happen elsewhere. It is in a profound way synthetic, a synthesis of purposes and a simulation of places, though it may yet yield to ruin again.
The Chelsea Piers Web site steers clear of all the history beween 1976 and 1992, when its current phase began. “But the Chelsea Piers just sat there rusting in the harbor air until destiny called them back,” is all it said, but they didn’t just sit there. During those years every kind of sexual outlaw and pariah made themselves at home in this temporary autonomous zone, sadomasochists in leather and transvestites in fishnet and homeless people and junkies. Chelsea Piers was the place Peter Hujar photographed and his protégé David Wojnarowicz (who died of AIDs in 1992) cruised and wrote about: “Paper from old shipping lines scattered all around like bomb blasts among wrecked pieces of furniture; three-legged desks, a naugahyde couch of mint-green turned upside down, and small rectangles of light and wind and river over the far wall. I lean towards him, pushing him against the wall, lifting my pale hands up beneath his sweater. . . . In the warehouse just before dark, passed along the hallways and photographed the various graffiti on the walls, some of hermaphrodites and others of sharp-faced thugs smoking cigarettes . . .” Something about the emotional, erotic, aesthetic, and ethical intensity of Wojnarowicz seems inseparable from this kind of place, for if he—queer, punk, desperado, activist—was the quintessential artist of his time it was because the time was about this kind of place, one that was ruinous, bleak, but somehow still imbued with a romantic outlaw sense of possibility, of freedom, even the freedom to be idealistic, idealistic in the bitter vein of the Sex Pistols’ “No Future,” perhaps, but idealistic all the same.
“A nuclear error but I have no fear,” sang the Clash, “ ’cause London is drowning and I—I live by the river.” It was the era of Reagan’s nuclear brinksmanship, and the postnuclear ruins were in every imagination. “The living will envy the dead,” was the phrase Nuclear Freeze activists recited like a mantra, and books, articles, a made-for-TV movie anticipated what kind of ruin the Northern Hemisphere could become. I had always anticipated living in this postnuclear world, and when I thought of my future I wondered whether survival skills or a graduate degree was more germane. Though the ruins were imagined as prophetic architecture of the future, they were the essence of their time. The great industrial cities were becoming something else: San Francisco and
This era came rushing back to me a few years ago when I walked into a New York gallery full of the photographs of Peter Hujar, who died of AIDS in 1986. I had been looking at thoroughly contemporary art in the several galleries that preceded this momentous entrance, art that was sleek, shiny, clever, art about design issues, fashion, disaffection, art that was in some ways about the smooth surface of the new city that had replaced the cityscape that so moved me in Hujar’s work. The very texture was different. In Hujar’s saturated black-and-white prints of animals, outcasts, eccentrics, and ruinous places, the world was rough in every sense. Its surfaces were porous, decrepit, sensuous, full of age and what seemed an ability to absorb: to absorb light, meaning, emotion. The city had mystery and danger of the sort urban renewal pledges to remove. Not far from the gallery was Chelsea Piers, now “a family place,” a high-end sports and exercise complex, pricy, regulated, safe, and predictable, full of healthy people simulating activities like golf and climbing that really only happen elsewhere. It is in a profound way synthetic, a synthesis of purposes and a simulation of places, though it may yet yield to ruin again.
The Chelsea Piers Web site steers clear of all the history beween 1976 and 1992, when its current phase began. “But the Chelsea Piers just sat there rusting in the harbor air until destiny called them back,” is all it said, but they didn’t just sit there. During those years every kind of sexual outlaw and pariah made themselves at home in this temporary autonomous zone, sadomasochists in leather and transvestites in fishnet and homeless people and junkies. Chelsea Piers was the place Peter Hujar photographed and his protégé David Wojnarowicz (who died of AIDs in 1992) cruised and wrote about: “Paper from old shipping lines scattered all around like bomb blasts among wrecked pieces of furniture; three-legged desks, a naugahyde couch of mint-green turned upside down, and small rectangles of light and wind and river over the far wall. I lean towards him, pushing him against the wall, lifting my pale hands up beneath his sweater. . . . In the warehouse just before dark, passed along the hallways and photographed the various graffiti on the walls, some of hermaphrodites and others of sharp-faced thugs smoking cigarettes . . .” Something about the emotional, erotic, aesthetic, and ethical intensity of Wojnarowicz seems inseparable from this kind of place, for if he—queer, punk, desperado, activist—was the quintessential artist of his time it was because the time was about this kind of place, one that was ruinous, bleak, but somehow still imbued with a romantic outlaw sense of possibility, of freedom, even the freedom to be idealistic, idealistic in the bitter vein of the Sex Pistols’ “No Future,” perhaps, but idealistic all the same.
“A nuclear error but I have no fear,” sang the Clash, “ ’cause London is drowning and I—I live by the river.” It was the era of Reagan’s nuclear brinksmanship, and the postnuclear ruins were in every imagination. “The living will envy the dead,” was the phrase Nuclear Freeze activists recited like a mantra, and books, articles, a made-for-TV movie anticipated what kind of ruin the Northern Hemisphere could become. I had always anticipated living in this postnuclear world, and when I thought of my future I wondered whether survival skills or a graduate degree was more germane. Though the ruins were imagined as prophetic architecture of the future, they were the essence of their time. The great industrial cities were becoming something else: San Francisco and
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