‘I become my art; my art becomes me.’

Trip-hopping through a weekend of art, film and queer culture including the fabulous new Nan Goldin activist biopic by Laura Poitras.

Oct 25, 2022

‘Hibiscus (2019). ‘I ask for the substance to run through my body, proving to me I’m alive after death.’ — Castiel Vittorino Brasiliero.

October 24 --

Happy Almost Hallow’s Eve folks,

Here in Brooklyn, the neighborhood goblins and curious creatures have appeared, lit up jack ‘o lanterns in the windows. The late afternoon feels like deep fall, with all the colors resplendent in the drizzle of afternoon rains. It’s beautiful.

I announced a coming refocus for the overall theme of this ‘stack and that’s planned for the week of November 1. Meantime, I had another wonderful weekend of great New York culture, the kind that confirms why I wanted to return and what it is that makes the city so dynamic and vital for me: a mix of people and ideas that are stimulating, combined with revisits with old friends that resurface at community events. Good times….

On Saturday I finally headed for a new art spot in Tribeca, Gallery 125 Newbury, formerly the location of the fantastic Pearl River Market. In the 90s, I used to go to Pearl to buy thin men’s T-shirts and cotton sheets and cheap men’s slippers and other treasures. The gallery is a new venture of Arne Glimcher, a powerhouse art scene curator and dealer who put Pace Gallery on the art world map in 1960, then turned over the blue-chip Pace gallery to his son Marc. Arne has returned to his roots, says a press release, wanting hand-on curatorial experimentation. Basically, he wants to show artists he loves and champions, and new discoveries. His circle includes Kiki Smith and Bob Gober and other 60’s to 90s art stars who are still making great work, and pioneers such as Hannah Wilke. I’d been looking forward to the show, Wild Strawberries.

Artist: Castiel Vittorino Brasiliero.

I walked up Walker Street in Tribeca to get there and was immediately waylaid by two shows that were terrific. At Mendes Wood DM gallery, Castiel Vitorino Brasiliero’s solo show is a knockout. It features large, bold, naked photographs of the artist lying in her grandfather’s bed while he was in hospice care. Dried hibiscus flowers and ginger — elements with spiritual and healing properties in the Brazilian-Bantu tradition — surround her body. For Brasiliero, this ritual is a path toward spiritual balance with her ancestors, treating bodily traumas, her relationship with her grandfather, and experiences with gender-based violence, reads a program note.

Her large site-specific installation, blending soil and paintings on fabric and canvas, reminded me a little bit of Jean-Michel Basquiat in the use of rough letters and words in Portuguese, Spanish and English. (These days, Basquiat seems to be everywhere as a source of visual reference for younger painters. Maybe Brasiliero didn’t intend that at all; it’s just a coincidence.) Her Corpoflor (2016-ongoing) series on transmutation is described as ‘a dynamic, experimental ontology; an investigation on a flux of memories and affectations arising from the artists’ inner sphere….’ The Brazilian artist, born in 1996, is the recipient of multiple arts awards.

Faith Wilding at Bortolami Gallery.

At nearby Bortolami gallery, pioneer feminist painter Faith Wilding presents her latest eco-feminist works, Being like Leaves, her first NYC show in almost 20 years. The pieces are beautiful, including large-scale leaves affixed to the gallery wall, and complex, multi-dimensional watercolor and drawing works. Wilding is among the women artists who founded the Feminist Art Program at Fresno State College and Cal Arts, and by the mid-1970s, she’d secured her place in the pantheon of feminist artists alongside Judy Chicago. Now 79, she continues to present complex, abstract works with layers of movement and forms that reflect her interest in botany and the female body. Wilding won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2009, among her accolades.

Up at 125 Newbury, a busy passers-by crowd on Canal Street filtered in and out of the gallery, taking in an intergenerational show. I loved a huge hanging Kiki Smith man cast in translucent resin; I hadn’t seen it before. There were also rather intense anatomical forms that captured the gristly meat of the human body, every muscle and sinew. Although I admire Bob Gober and know his work and participation in 1990s downtown NY gay male cultural life and activism, I was very turned off by his piece, so I won’t show it here: a torso impaled in the nether region (ass, vagina?) by a pale, hairy male lower leg with a white sock and hard shoe. Was it a comment on rape? Birth? Maybe. Provocative? Yes. It was definitely a comment on male power and violence, but I wondered if Gober was aware of how much recoil a woman – me, in this case – would feel by seeing it. It felt like such an offensive male attack on the senses.

I far preferred the humorous, smooth porcelain vaginas that Hannah Wilke made famous, presented in a glass case beside a famous photograph of Wilke with little vaginas on her face, S.O.S. Starification Object Series (Curlers) (1974). Beside it was a giant shucked oyster-shaped pink vagina resplendent with shiny wet pearls. That was a bit much for me too. Clearly, Arne Glimcher is an inner 70’s womanist. I do share his appreciation for rough textures and surface and reconfigured objects. I liked a pin-covered book and box cube by Lucas Samaras; his early 1960’s pin box objects are very appealing. The gallery issued a thick broadsheet about its inaugural show that includes a reprint of Wilke’s photo. I spotted her famous quote, I become my art; my art becomes me. The show is up until Nov. 18th.

Hannah Wilke - auto portrait.

On Sunday afternoon, I stopped by a brief community gathering at La Mama on East 4th street, where the veteran sapphist performance duo Split Britches – Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw –organized a get-out -the-vote gathering of friends with an eye on the mid-term elections. It was one of several OG queer activist reunions this weekend. I saw old friends and colleagues from 90s ACT UP, the Lesbian Avengers, WAC and other protest flashpoints. They were busy signing index cards to would-be voters. They included Esther Newton, an OG butch and scholar and subject of the new biopic doc, Esther Newton Made Me Gay, by director Jean Carlomusto. The doc was showing as part of the New Fest and available by livestream only for one more day. Stream it today!

Split Britches had just performed their latest show, Last Gasp: A Recalibration, which they say is their last show, following a 2010 stroke that has impacted Shaw’s recall of words. Weaver and Shaw are well beloved as a butch-femme couple who helped put the lesbian WOW Café (Women’s One World) on the cultural map in the 80s and 90s. I used to see them at PS 122 regularly. I have a ticket to catch their new show this Friday – it’s closing week at La Mama. (see link below for tix).

Split Britches — Lois Weaver (femme) and Peggy Shaw (butch).

The show centers on how they got through Covid, the stroke and its aftermath, and how they view Trumplandia and our mad politics now. The duo lives in London, where MP Liz Truss was just unceremoniously canned after tanking the UK economy in a record week, following in Boris Johnson’s scandal-caked shoes. Today, Britain’s first brown MP, Rishi Sunak, a third-generation arch-Conservative Indian-Brit politician, stepped up to take the shaky reins of power. Let’s see how that goes. I bet Lois and Peggy will have something witty-snarky to say about that, too. If you’ve never seen Split Britches, get thee to La Mama. They’re a global lesbian and performance treasure.

Later, I saw some of the same crowd at the closing film and party for New Fest. The LGBTQ film festival always feels like a reunion of friends, but this one was especially buzzy. Laura Poitras and her doc colleagues were there to greet an enthusiastic crowd who’d heard the Oscar chat about All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, a film that captures artist Nan Goldin’s life and street activism with P.A.I.N, a direct-action protest group that’s successfully fought to make the Sackler family accountable for its role in profiteering off Oxycontin, a powerful, addictive opioid.

Director Laura Poitras (r) with P.A.I.N. activists at New Fest 2022.

Photo: AC d’Adesky. 2022

The film interweaves Goldin’s personal biography and work as a seminal photographer of downtown NY queer life in the 80s and 90s, including rapturous portraits of her trans friends—her adopted family. In tone and content, it captures the feeling of New York then, before and during the heady ACT UP days, and contrast it with life today, where a newly minted generation of activists, young and older, join Goldin in a remarkable, bold series of protests. As the film shows, the battle is highly personal the Goldin, who got addicted to oxy after having overcome earlier demons and a personal history of domestic abuse and childhood trauma.

Today, she is one of the most celebrated contemporary artists of our time, and her work is in the permanent collections of major museums all around the world. They are also the targets of her moral outrage and rage. We see P.A.I.N. activists invading the museums, scattering pill bottles across marble foyers and the placid Temple Dendur pool at the Met, staging die-ins, dropping faux ‘scrips for Oxy that detail the Sackler’s complicity in profiteering — even after the family was made publicly aware of its addictive power.

The doc is superb and moving. Poitras deftly intersects Nan’s personal story and evolution as an artist, and her pain at family silences and denial that also shaped her, with archival footage of the 90s and images from her constantly evolving Ballad of Sexual Dependency. In many ways, the film is a love letter to queer life and subculture, and to drag queens and a generation of gay male friends who died of AIDS, and Poitras said as much in her opening remarks.

I found the film even more personally compelling because it made me relive chapters of my early life in NY, including nights at Tin Pan Alley and later, at the Mudd Club. I was just out of Barnard college, early 80s. It took me back as if it were yesterday. Because, really, that’s how it feels. Like there’s only the thinnest line separating who we were yesterday and who we remain now, still fighting the battles that ACT UP made famous: HIV, drug addiction, anti-LGBTQ laws, the targeting of trans lives, the assault on women’s rights…. All of these remain hot-button frontlines.

All hats off to Laura Poitras, then. And a shoutout to her producer colleagues and to Shanti Avirgan, who served as the archival producer for this film (and Producer for the the Esther Newton doc). A huge brava to Nan Goldin who agreed to open herself up to tell a highly personal story, and the brave pasionarias at P.A.I.N. The film opens at NYC’s IFC on Nov. 23 - and other commercial theaters in the US.

As one young activist reminded the audience, the fight is not over. Safe shooting and harm reduction sites are open in Harlem but are critically needed across the US. These organizations need greater public support and funding and visibility to help a generation of Americans addicted to opioids survive. As the doc makes clear, oxy is a killer; it blocks opioid pain receptors in the brain. Without it, oxy users experience unbearable pain; detox is brutal. The Sackler oxy drug hit the market in 1995; ten years later, 20,000 people had overdosed on opioids. The epidemic has already taken over 400,000 American lives. Let’s hope this film spurs more urgent public action to end it.

Book cover, ‘The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.’ Photo: Nan Goldin.

A final word: as the film shows, the Sacklers avoided criminal prosecution via a legal bankruptcy judgment. Their name is mud. Several major museums —the Met, the Louvre, etc. — removed the Sackler patron name from their vaunted buildings. But not all. The fight is on.

Photos: Hyperallergic, 2022.

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