Arts review: two new shows from the Asia Society and the Kitchen

By Steve Barnes Was New York ever really the edgiest city in the world? Two new shows make a case for it having deserved that title in the 1970s, ‘80s and early ‘90s. “Ai Weiwei: New York Photographs” (up at the Asia Society through August 14) and “The View from a Volcano: The Kitchen’s Soho Years 1971-85” (up at the Kitchen through August 27) show a city in political, artistic and sexual ferment—with a sense of energy and adventurousness that seems in rather short supply these days. The anything-goes attitude at the Kitchen in its early days allowed for an amazingly wide range of performers and artists to show their works there. In the current exhibit, the walls of the Kitchen’s galleries are covered with flyers, photographs and program notes from many of the shows that served to define the whole idea of performance art. Audiences were presented with such offerings as “The Last Video Tapes of Marcel Duchamp” and “Harrisburg Mon Amour, or Two Boys on a Bus—played by Taylor Mead,” as well as groundbreaking works by choreographers such as Karole Armitage, Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane. The Kitchen saw itself as a challenger to the established art world, a trait made humorously clear in the program notes for “Dubbed in Glamour,” which starred the John Waters regular Cookie Mueller. (A photograph of the wonderfully surly Mueller hangs above those program notes on the gallery wall.) The show touted itself as being “an expose of the energies of Para-Soho luminaries, that part of the art world which never had a loft, is younger than the art world and hangs out in the clubs.” Part of that youthful energy showed itself in the Kitchen’s adventurous music programming. The exhibit is dotted with video monitors that allow gallery goers to sample performances from Rhys Chatham, the Bush Tetras, and the very young Talking Heads. There’s also an “audio jukebox” at which works from many of the other musicians whose careers were nurtured at the Kitchen can be heard—Steve Reich, Sonic Youth, Pauline Oliveiros and Arthur Russell (who made a very interesting transition from art-music renegade to dance-club icon), just to name a few.
And last, but certainly not least, is the Kitchen’s central place in the birth of video art. Steina and Woody Vasulka, the Kitchen’s founders, were among the earliest video artists, and a monitor showing several of their works is at the exhibit’s entrance. (To get a rough idea of the kind of minimalist psychedelia they were up to, have at look at
http://www.vasulka.org/Videomasters/pages_stills/index_42.html. A room at the back features such central figures in video art’s history as Charles Atlas, Dara Birnbaum and Bill Viola. While the Kitchen was revolutionary in its way, its energies were contained on stages and gallery walls. “Ai Weiwei: New York Photographs” shows what happened when a group of Chinese expatriates met up with those energies as they were lived out on the street of New York City in the 1980s and ‘90s. Ai Weiwei has had a long career as a sculptor, installation artist and photographer, but his biggest claim to fame for many people stems from his recent political problems. A man always dedicated to thumbing his nose at authority (or giving it the finger, as he did in a series of photographs in which the “up yours” is delivered to such sites as the Eiffel Tower and the White House), he was detained by Chinese authorities on April 3. After a long and very public campaign for his release, he was let go on June 22. The Asia Society exhibit takes us to many of the iconic sites of New York sexual and social history. We go onstage with the drag queens at Wigstock, hit the streets with the participants in the Tompkins Square Park riots, and look into the eyes of some very nervous African-American cops patrolling a demonstration about the Tawana Brawley controversy. We also get intimate looks at such figures as Chen Kaige (director of the 1990s arthouse hit Farewell My Concubine), Allen Ginsburg, a very beautiful Bai Ling, and the communal life lived by a group of young Chinese artists as they tried to make ends meet. You also get a very strong sense of time passing in these pictures. Early on, we see a shot of Allen Ginsburg sitting in his apartment with filmmaker and musician Harry Smith. Close to the show’s end, Ginsburg shows up again, this time at Smith’s memorial service. The homeless people and stray dogs in abandoned buildings give way to people playing pool in a suburban basement and Bill Clinton stumping on the Lower East Side during the 1992 presidential campaign. And perhaps the most striking thing is what a good photographer Weiwei is. His eye for movement and composition is strong and very instinctual, giving even the most casual-seeming shots a lovely sense of balance. He even has the ability to turn sets of shots blown up from contact sheets into unified individual compositions. All in all, these two shows give a nice picture of a New York City in which there was really a community of outsiders—gays, straights, punkers, artist, writers. To look at them gives you a renewed sense that if this isn’t the edgiest city in the world any more, it certainly used to be. Steve Barnes is a freelance writer based in New York City. His work has appeared in such publications as ARTnews and the Wall Street Journal. ]]>