Chelsea Peers

I spent the week looking at art.  There was the New Now sale at Phillips featuring several Afro-American contemporary superstars, complete with a pop-up basketball court--then Swann-- gallery viewings, photography in East Harlem,  and a small Chelsea space which auctions dusty and vintage treasures which smell of old New York. I travel alone.  Masked and mingling, anonymous-- my itinerary included no destination which required a fee or the presentation of mandated documents.  But somehow visuals seem acceptable with a mask. Crowd activities just don't feel right; it's as though everyone is partying and pretending to be 'back' but it's a kind of forced celebration.  I don't trust it.  Actually I don't trust myself these days. I'm liable to speak my post-pandemic mind and one thing that has emerged from the grief and the anger and the Black Lives Matter movement is a kind of naked honesty.   

Most of all I loved the dusty space with the stacks of estate canvases and once-discovered objects whose owners had passed away or been replaced by descendants who value space over things.  I lingered until they were sick of me.  Walking east from 11th Ave. an SIR truck passed.  I waved like an idiot, remembering all those fantastic rehearsals and evenings in studios which felt as though I'd 'arrived' as a musician.  One night there was a private performance of a reinvented Blondie with a tiny audience.  I was privileged.  

From the Highline the profusion of new architectural structures gives 'concrete jungle' a new meaning.  It's kind of fantastically overwhelming and feels nothing like the perpendiculars of tradition. The paths were packed with tourists photographing, taking selfies, shooting video.  Glass windows reveal fishbowl lives of the apparently rich occupants of these new buildings which require plenty of income.  No one seems to care that they are observed; it's a culture of posting and Instagram-- everything is up for public 'grabs' so why bother with curtains or shades? But it's also a visual carnival of shapes and profiles.

In between the new are the remnants-- the stalwarts of old buildings where long-time renters hang on to their little corner of a city which has grown like weeds around the stumps of their abodes.  Thousands of apartments tower over their modest 4-story existence, rob them of sun, expose them to the hordes of walkers trying to wrap their insatiable tourist heads around the spirit of New York.  

For me the greatest 'jolt' is the Hudson Yards... it's absolutely a transplanted vision grafted onto the hips of the Manhattan profile.  It was disorienting and although I've viewed it many times from the river, walking through its plazas and amusements was like being in another state.  I'm not the only person who found the Vessel an architectural failure, but its current status as a sort of empty morgue is more than ironic.  Who knew it would become a living blingy monument to death?  

In the 70's we'd sometimes climb a fence and explore the Yards.  I remember the SVA students had their annual exhibitions there-- warehouses and space-- accommodated performances and films.  One came often to my gigs... invited me shyly to see his work there, among the old tracks and the pitted earth.  It was  a sort of journey into a cavernous house with electric music and crowd-echo-- plastic cups of wine and hundreds of aspiring artists in their Doc Martens and plaid...  I felt 'old'; I was something over 30... and I searched out my painter, in a small dark corner where his work was a heart-stopping revelation... studies in white, like contemporary Vermeers, that took my breath away.  I was speechless.  He was drunk-- kind of a cliché for painters at their own openings... but I tried to convey my utter admiration for his work.  He was young, midwestern-- played drums in an indie band... had this sort of James Dean tormented innocence aura.

A few nights later he rang my doorbell.  People did that in those days.  He brought a bottle of cheap wine, and the painting, wrapped in a rag.  It was so beautiful.  Yes, we listened to Luna I think it was... his friends... and yes, we slept together.  He was passionate and intuitive the way painters were, in those days... I felt I'd been initiated into one of his works.  I felt painted, from the inside.  It was a one-night thing for me-- or maybe one week.  I waved at him across the subway tracks at Columbus Circle years later.  I think he designed windows for Tiffany and that sort of thing.  He was no longer a boy.  I still had my bass.. he threw me a salute and a midwestern kiss with his talented hand with which he now only rarely painted.

Walking through the Yards in late September sunset, Year-of-the-Pandemic + 1, I remembered this... the smell of the train tracks, and the faint aura of turpentine on his skin.  These things do not happen anymore-- meetings in the privacy of dark crowds and old underused warehouses where unknown history has unfolded, and few things were photographed.  The walls and the ceilings and floors have been removed like old debris... moneyed people occupy the piled homes with stainless steel kitchens and marble saunas... with gyms and theaters and adult play spaces.  

There are few urban fairy tales like this now, things that happen only in utter privacy and the dark.  Certainly not in this ironically masked culture when everything else is laid out in online platforms and Instagram posts.  And the painting--- someone stole it from my home one night; I gave a party-- I think I mentioned the tragic story in another blog.  One of my guests... put it under their coat, slipped it out the open door... I hope it is loved, wherever it is.  Occasionally I imagine I will see it at an auction, in a thrift shop or gallery... but in the context of this culture, it is a small thing.  It would surely be overlooked.  And as old as I have become these days... as poor and as unacknowledged, I felt kind of young walking through the sad newness of this architectural Disneyworld-- the plazas and the courts-- the arenas and playgrounds...  I am initiated... I am masked... but I am seeing.  I am experienced, I answer the Hendrix question.  Here we are now; entertain us.