ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to AnnieLaurie Erickson for giving me complete artistic freedom; to Jonathan Traviesa for taking me under his wing in my first year with generosity and patience; and to art historian Michael Plante for his seminars. The best thing that happened to me in graduate school happened twice. It is hard to imagine what this experience would have been like without Dr. Plante’s classes. I learned, but even more important, I began to understand.

ii TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ii Thesis 1 Notes 10 Images 13 He was the kind of guy I’d rob banks for...

1 David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives

For five years I lived in Philadelphia and worked for the Religious Society of Friends. The Quakers, as they are commonly known, are pacifists; naturally they have the largest collection of military literature in the world. While I ate lunch I would browse such light fare as the Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla, the Mujahideen Poisons Handbook, or the torture manuals of Sendero Luminoso, Peru’s Shining Path. One day I found a book from the African Resistance Movement, a militant group that had helped bring

2 down apartheid. The book had detailed guides on how to make explosives from household items, how to form rifle teams, and how to train yourself to shoot straight on a moving train. It went beyond tactics and suggested a total world view: SLEEP ON THE FLOOR & YOU CAN’T FALL OUT OF BED THE WALL THAT SEPARATES TWO PRISONERS ALSO CONNECTS THEM NOT LOSING IS WINNING I had found it: the guide to the underworld. Here was everything I had ever wanted to know about life on the hard path. It took me years, but as I eventually learned, the guide to the underworld is not a book. It is a man. I have since met him--in fact I’ve met him many times. It was Alex, the skinny white boy in an impeccable fitted baseball cap who greeted me right on time on 14th Street, gave me a flawless hip-hop handshake, then guided me down dark hallways like an eel moving through undersea caves. It was Abraham, a pockmarked Panamanian who had a mirror that said “SEX” above his bed and who made my charges in Seattle municipal court disappear. But mostly, it was Spartak, or the Meat, who I had the bad fortune of meeting in Russia in 1989, and who formed my most indelible impression of Soviet power. He retains a hold on me even now. According to the internet, he is still alive, and this fact haunts me hour to hour. It takes me a long time to say it, but Wojnarowicz said it in one sentence: “He was the kind of guy I’d rob banks for.” I can tell you about Spartak’s neck. It was milky, it was long, it was roped with muscle, it was exactly like the rest of him--in fact I can talk about his neck all day, and it takes me a long time to get to the point that Wojnarowicz arrives at so quickly. Wojnarowicz talks a lot about men: the ones that are “cowboys,” the ones who lean against “stone walls,” who have “rough, tight lines,” “drunken half smiles,” and “roping-the-steer cowboy

3 voices.” I have made my way with these men my whole life, gotten high with them, had three-ways with their girlfriends, and fallen in love with them, stupidly, then half-saved myself, but I am no closer to understanding the hold they have on me. I see them as the masculine “other” that I could possess or gain some small part of; but I also see them clearly as another me, as containing the very thing that I contain. I will die without understanding this. Do I hate myself? Of course; all the best people do. I rely on Wojnarowicz not for his understanding, because I’m not sure he understood, but for his description of our condition. I owe him for finding the majesty in abjection and the sovereignty in poverty. My words aren’t as good as Wojnarowicz’s, so I rely to some degree on pictures.

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For my thesis show, I’ve rebuilt the facade of 86 Duke Street, Liverpool, England [Figure 1]. By the time I had found it, the building was already in ruins, and now it’s gone. I lost something in there, and this may be an attempt to get it back. Inside, there are pictures playing in the darkness, and music. It’s not a literal interior, but a psychological one. The company is mostly men. Here is Brandon Nutchild shooting up for the last time before probation starts [Figure 2]. Here is Josh Dellabella about to bring the belt down on a runner on a New Orleans sidewalk [Figure 3]. Here is Jascha Jacobson after his luck ran out for the sixth and final time [Figure 4]. These are pictures of men doing things in secret: buying, selling, synthesizing, cooking, eating, smoking, huffing, slamming, kissing, screwing. They are white men, able-bodied, strong, who are beautiful or who once were. They are home, or in squats, warehouses, workplaces, surrounded by the tools of their trade. Sometimes they fight. Sometimes they die. Mostly they engage in recreation. This is what I’m curious about. Who are these men? Who are my people and why? Why am I drawn to illegalism? Do I dare show you the beauty and power that resides there? How much shall I show? And how much keep in secret? Will I leave these relationships damaged because of the pictures? Will I suffer because of them? How much punishment can we bear? Do we, in the end, demand punishment? And you, when you look upon these men, what do you see? Do you want to fuck them? Do you want to condemn them? Do you recognize them? Do you want to punish them? Do you want to save them? Do you believe in evil? Do you believe alcohol is good for you in small quantities? Do you believe in the war on drugs? If you could do any drug, get high on anything, right now, what would it be? Are these men criminals? Are they sociopaths? Am I? Artists often ask whether I’m exploiting my subjects. I ask them if it looks that way; Yes, they say, it does. The people in the pictures gave their consent. Some of them were high at the time. Will they later regret it? It’s possible. I’m not running for humanitarian of the year, and any photographer running for that office is deluded. Sontag was right; I am

4 complicit. We all are.

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The facade has a few antecedents. In 1961, Claes Oldenburg bypassed the gallery system and took his art directly to the public with The Store, an installation at 107 E. 2nd St. on Manhattan’s

5 Lower East Side. Two years later, Christo started building his Store Fronts, showing them at Leo Castelli in New York, the Stedelijk in Holland, and finally at Documenta IV in Kassel,

6 Germany, in 1968. They are spare, minimal, and--naturally--wrapped. In 1973, General Idea announced plans to build something called the 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion [sic], which they continued to

7 publicly build and flamboyantly destroy over subsequent years. The General Idea pavilion is probably the closest in spirit to my own. I love the idea of adding to it by attacking it, wounding it, and repairing it--by giving it experience. We’re both putting the cart before the horse. First, build the scenery; then, enact the drama for which the stage has been set. And at the closing reception, while bands played, a dozen graffiti artists attacked the building with spray paint, adding a thin layer of vandalism that, like the building itself, could be considered “real”: real vandals, real spray paint, an irreversible act. The pictures have obvious antecedents, as well, among them Barbara DeGenevieve’s homemade porn, Amos Badertscher’s portraits of Baltimore street kids, Larry Clark’s Tulsa, and Jim Goldberg’s Raised by Wolves. They’re genre pictures. The well-worn subject matter--what Sontag called “another person’s pain or misfortune”--

8 lends itself to moralizing. Doomed beauty. This sort of photography is supposed be formally beautiful--that’s the approved way to sell moral turpitude. The most well known work in the genre forms a kind of ne plus ultra of High Modernism. So, how to subvert the genre? I’ll start by renouncing good form, I thought; more and more it seems to me like a parlor trick that anyone can learn. What we need now is the storyteller--the person who can bring some meaning to this life, which is discouraging, filled with hardship, and lacking any obvious purpose. Stories help us go on, help us shoulder the unbearable burden. Form cannot. Antonin Artaud made the point memorably, saying that “if there is one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the

9 stake, signaling through the flames.” If I’m going to be signalling through the flames, I’d better include an exit so frightened viewers don’t get burned up. And yet the renunciation of form is itself nothing new. Perhaps the subversive act would be to renounce the renunciation--although I would then need to renounce that renunciation, on and on, through an infinite regression. In the meantime, I’ll do my best to depict what’s around me with accuracy and sincerity. The pictures are sometimes good, with gravity, relevance and urgency, but not usually. Most of them are disposable, like the world. I make this into a stance--“No more pretty pictures!” I tell my students--but it could be that I just lack the talent of a Wojnarowicz. Sometimes enlightened amateurism is the best one can hope for.

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In 1973, an arsonist burned down a New Orleans gay bar with everyone inside. Thirty-two people died, making the UpStairs Lounge fire the largest mass killing of gay people in American history (a macabre record broken in 2016 by the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida). When I was invited to be a part of Prospect.1, I knew what my subject matter would be. But how do you make art about mass slaughter? After months of work, I settled on recreating the entrance to the bar, in a stylized, symbolic way: viewers could walk through a red portal, then head right through the swinging bar doors and into 1973. It wasn’t an exact recreation, and it wasn’t a restaging of the scene. It was something weirder than that, a kind of fantasia on the fire, where police reports and pop culture merged in a fever dream. To get there, you had to pass through a door. And again, in 2013, when I rebuilt the house that Abraham Lincoln shared for four years with another man, it gave viewers a chance to go through a door. On the other side: another world, private yet hiding in plain sight. This is what Guy Debord called “the public secret,” a fact widely sensed, yet one which, when made

10 explicit, causes moral panic. In those earlier installations, the architectural elements are literal: they refer to specific places at a specific time. But I wondered what would happen if I showed architectural elements without clear referents. The result is the thesis show. The facade looks realistically old and worn, the front covered in decades of handbills. Some of the posters are reprints of actual fliers from Liverpool and London clubs in the Eighties and Nineties, some are my own design, and some are outright fakes that incorporate my own photographs. My intent wasn’t to clearly telegraph a single time and place, but to confuse the viewer, to create an impressionistic haze of other times and other places. And inside: a place the Other dwells. In the back room, the viewer can see a more literal world--in the pictures, it’s definitely New Orleans in 2017 and 2018--but the room itself forms a vaguely defined psychological interior. It’s a place where a hidden subculture, usually just beneath the threshhold of our vision, comes into view, and where the disavowed parts--even sex and death--can be viewed without penalty. And then, a return to the dominant world, which lies waiting just outside. There’s also a maquette of the facade, a small model that I actually made after the large version [Figure 5]. The goal was to draw attention to the artifice of the architecture. The big one is as arbitrary as the little one. They’re the same.

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At this moment, a good friend of mine is in O.P.P., two are on probation and wearing ankle monitors, and several more are evading warrants. I have always enjoyed the company of criminals and the ambience of small-time gangsterism, and one of the people I’ve turned to to understand this fixation is art historian Richard Meyer. In Outlaw Representation, Meyer talks about Warhol’s mugshot magnum opus, Thirteen Most Wanted Men:

By endowing the mugshot with grandeur... Warhol insisted on

the men as icons and as objects of desire. 11

Meyer deftly interprets Warhol’s disaster pictures, lacing them with desire and dark allure--dark homosexual allure. What did the thirteen men do? It’s hardly worth going into. They did bad things, and now they’re going in the can for life. That’s the boring part. Here’s the interesting part: if history is any guide, they’ll get love letters, tons of them--certainly more than I do, and I’m not a spree murderer--and some of them will even get married, in prison, to women on the outside who’ve fallen for them hard. There’s a name for this phenomenon: hybristophilia. Scholars have written a lot of books about it, but the literature is dry and surprisingly bloodless. (The women want to cure the men; only they can see the little boy inside, etc.) 12 It seems that when straight women desire convicts, their reasons are rather anodyne. In fact, their reasons are so wholesome that the literature on hybristophilia can be safely read by a child without supervision. But when men desire murderers--get out the straitjackets, boys. The only person who ever addressed this honestly--and fearlessly--might have been Jean Genet. “Men doomed to evil possess the manly virtues,” he wrote, his voice booming like an oracle off the very first page of The Thief’s Journal. 13 Genet was an orphan, a juvenile delinquent, a hustler, a thief, and finally, at the ripe old age of 35, an elder statesman on the sex appeal of criminals. The book is principally about the beauty of bad men, a sort of Most Wanted Men of Europe between the wars. What makes the consummate man? Hegel said it was work--“The consummate man labors.” 14 Not so for Genet. The consummate man steals. But so many things had to come together: “The beauty of their faces, the strength and elegance of their bodies, their taste for crime, the right opportunity, the moral vigor capable of accepting such a destiny, and finally, punishment.” 15 These men are a comfort to me as they were to Warhol, and as they were to Genet. They are handsome, but “not with regular good looks, with something else,” 16 said Genet, and it’s that something, that something, that I’m still trying to get at: the majesty of their carriage, the severity in their regalia, along with the strange quality of their eyes, the sideways seeing that notices everything. I’ll keep trying. I’ll fail. No matter; I’ll happily spend my remaining years in glory’s opposite. 17

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I love Wojnarowicz for saying, in the same book: “I don't even know how to operate a camera on anything other than automatic. I read the manual as far as the page that explains how to turn the device ON... Years ago we would not know what lay beyond the bend in the road until we walked past it.” 18 Last semester, there was a young man in my class who was struggling with operating his camera. It was too complicated; it was intimidating. He came to me and we sat in private and he cried. I took Close to the Knives off the shelf, and I read that passage to him. He laughed through his tears. Perhaps a future generation will understand more. But I doubt it. NOTES

1. David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives (New York: Vintage Press, 1991), 72. 2. Wikipedia contributors, “African Resistance Movement.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 28 March 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Resistance_Movement 3. Wojnarowicz, 72-74. 4. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Rosetta Books, 2005), 4, 10. Sontag writes, “There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera... To photograph people is to violate them... It turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as the camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a sublimated murder--a soft murder.” Sontag loves photography; she loves a photographer; yet she is not naïve. Her relationship to photography is nuanced and ambivalent, with a high tonal range of moral shadings. 5. MoMA contributors, “Claes Oldenburg: The Store.” Retrieved 28 March 2018. https://www.moma.org/collection/works/61054 6. Jacob Baal-Teshuva, Christo and Jeanne-Claude (New York: Taaschen, 2001), 27. 7. Fern Bayer, The Search for the Spirit: General Idea 1968-1975, (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1997), 95. 8. Sontag, 9. 9. Antonin Artaud, The Theater and its Double, (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 13. 10. Andrew Hussey, The Game of War: The Life and Death of Guy Debord (London: Random House, 2001), 196. 11. Richard Meyer, Outlaw Representation: Censorship & Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century Art (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002), 136. 12. Wikipedia contributors, “Hybristophilia.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 28 March 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybristophilia 13. Jean Genet, The Thief’s Journal (New York: Grove Press, 1964), 10. 14. George Bataille, The Accursed Share, Vol. 3, “On Sovereignty” (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 22. 15. Genet, 12. 16. Ibid., 251. 17. Ibid., 256. 18. Wojnarowicz, 138. BIOGRAPHY

Age 1-6: Skylar is born in Greenwich Village and turned over to foster family the same day. Later adopted by two public-school teachers in the Bronx. He avoids other children, preferring the company of adults. Age 7-12: Father leaves. Mother’s descent into alcoholism and madness. Skylar becomes card-carrying member of the Communist Party. Age 13-18: Prep-school trip to Europe includes mountaintop encounter group with Swiss mystic. Takes citywide medal in backstroke (second place). Age 19-24: Year in U.S.S.R. Disillusionment with . Back in U.S., moves to San Francisco, pursues hedonism, dissolute lifestyle. Age 25-30: On long sailing trip, lands at small island near Seattle and stays 2 years, becoming the island baker. Starts gay film festival in nearby Seattle. Age 31-36: On bike trip to , Skylar is hit by a car. Choppered back to Paris, he spends 1 year convalescing as an illegal alien, paying the bills by translating film subtitles. Age 37-present: Moves to New Orleans 6 weeks before storm destroys city. Worst of times. But hurricane leaves much wood in streets. What can be done with it? he wonders. FIGURE 1

86 Duke Street [installation view] FIGURE 2

Brandon, Last Time Before Probation FIGURE 3

Josh and the Runner FIGURE 4

Death of Jascha Ivan Jacobson FIGURE 5

Maquette FIGURE 6

Portrait of the Man Who Five Minutes Earlier Had Broken My Ribs FIGURE 7

James, final hours FIGURE 8

Youth pastor huffs gas FIGURE 9

A Guide to the Underworld? Johannesburg, 1966