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. ✶ ✶ ✶ 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. ✶ ✶ ✶ 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.