Clayton Patterson Outside In Howl! Happening An Arturo Vega Project
Published on the occasion of the exhibition June 19–August 14, 2015 at Howl! Happening an Arturo Vega Project
Howl! A/P/E Volume 1, No. 3
Clayton Patterson Outside In Howl! Happening An Arturo Vega Project
Curated by Ted Riederer
Ai Weiwei On Clayton
I first met Clayton in 1988 during the Tompkins Square riot. He was this person who appeared at every demonstration with his wife, Elsa. Both of them were always there, filming all the time. He was the only person doing this kind of video at the time, his wife always standing close by, watching him and giving him supplies, such as batteries or tapes. He used to have a lot of fun and was addicted to his work. His work is concerned with the truth, with facts. He has relentlessly devoted himself to a kind of culture that examines authority. He has devoted himself to recording what is really going on, to giving his true account. For this reason he has been taken to court many times. Once, right before he went into the courtroom, he showed me the palms of his hands where he had written in ink, “Dump Koch.� I captured that moment with my camera and brought it to the New York Times. That became the first photo of mine that ever appeared in the New York Times. I consider Clayton a friend and I really like his style. His style is like no-style. I should say it is antistyle.
John Strausbaugh Visions of Wild Utopia
teeth for filming a confrontation with squatters at Avenue D and East 4th Street. He was arrested thirteen times over the years “just for taking pictures,” resulting in one misdemeanor conviction.
When Clayton Patterson and Elsa Rensaa moved to the Lower East Side from Canada, in 1979, he began to document the neighborhood with photographs, video and audiotape, and collected ephemera. “I didn’t realize it at the time,” he would tell the New York Times some thirty years later, “but I was capturing the last of the wild, free, outlaw, utopian, visionary spirit of the Lower East Side.”
Begun in 1986, his storefront Clayton Gallery & Outlaw Art Museum, at 161 Essex Street, has exhibited a galaxy of work rarely if ever seen in mainstream commercial galleries, by graffiti artists, tattoo artists, comics illustrators, filmmakers, photographers, rappers and rockers, clothing designers, and a few heroes of the underground, like Herbert Huncke and Taylor Mead.
He did more than record. He has participated in and affected Lower East Side culture as an artist and a gallery owner, an editor and a publisher, an organizer, a promoter, provocateur, and, over the last few years, a historian and eulogizer. Any one piece of that is best understood in the context of all the others.
Another important aspect of Clayton’s work has been to act as what the Germans call a Kulturträger, someone who makes the connections that preserve and transmit a culture that might otherwise not be properly recognized or perish altogether. In that capacity he introduced journalists to some of the Lower East Side and Greenwich Village’s most remarkable yet uncelebrated cultural figures. Like the artist Boris Lurie, a concentration-camp survivor and cofounder of the 1960s No!art movement, which savagely critiqued the crass commercialism and elitism of the contemporary art world. And the extraordinary poet, artist and visionary Lionel Ziprin, who was a living link to deep Lower East Side history, from its Orthodox mystics to its psychedelic pioneers. And Robert Delford Brown, who transformed his life into a performance and his home on West 13th Street into the First National Church of the Exquisite Panic, Inc. And Baba Raul Canizares, a Cuban Santeria priest; street artist Jim Power, who adorned the East Village with his mosaics; artist and filmmaker Ari Roussimoff; and Steve Bonge, an artist, photographer, actor, car and motorcycle customizer, and Hells Angel. (Clayton, Roussimoff and others organized the Tattoo Society of New York, and Clayton played a key role in tattooing’s legalization in the city.)
Through the 1980s and ’90s, Clayton and his cameras were a constant, ubiquitous public presence Downtown (Manhattan below 14th Street, a distinct cultural zone at the time, not just a geographical designation). Something like the works of Jacob Riis and Weegee before him, his shots appear to capture moments of real life as they’re happening, unglamorized and unromanticized. His archive comprises hundreds of thousands of photographs, thousands of hours of video and hundreds of audio interviews, plus a large collection of heroin bags he picked up off the streets, graffiti stickers he peeled off walls, books, articles, posters, postcards, and tattoo art. The photo-portraits present a kind of mosaic of the neighborhood as it was, one face at a time: tenement kids and homeless people, poets and politicians, drug dealers and drag queens, rabbis and santeros, beat cops, graffiti writers, hookers, junkies, punks, anarchists, squatters, mystics and crackpots. Most of his subjects are gone now, pushed out by the inexorable encroachment of luxury condos, boutiques and restaurants in the 21st century. “It’s not an archive of the rich and cool,” he has said. “These are real people. But until you see the photographs, you won’t even remember they were here.” In 1988, Clayton began using his cameras not just to document events but to play a part in them, when he and Elsa shot three and a half hours of videotape showing uniformed police officers attacking political protesters at Tompkins Square Park. Their startling tape was instrumental in having the night classified as a “police riot” and spurring subsequent departmental reforms, as well as helping a number of victims win lawsuits against the city. It was an early, inspirational example of using the newly available video equipment to hold law enforcement accountable—“Little Brother is watching Big Brother,” as Clayton said on Oprah’s show. After that, there was hardly a cop in the neighborhood who didn’t know and dislike Clayton, while he developed an uncanny knack for showing up with his camera at, it seemed, every drug bust, tenant eviction and political rally. In 1992, a police officer used his baton to knock out a few of Clayton’s
As the old, outlaw Lower East Side recedes before the new, upscaled one in the 21st century, Clayton has turned from documentarian to historian, organizing and editing massive, indispensible books on the neighborhood’s “tragic, glorious, sometimes depressing” history as remembered and explained by people who lived it and shaped it. They include the film Captured, on the neighborhood as an incubator for underground film and avant-garde video, and two books: Resistance, on its radical political and social history, and the self-explanatory Jews: A People’s History of the Lower East Side. “For over a hundred years,” Clayton has said, “the Lower East Side was a magic crucible where people were inspired to great art and ideas. The Lower East Side probably changed the history of America five hundred times. Artists and intellectuals were drawn here because they could afford to live and create here. When Lou Reed moved here in the ’60s, he rented an apartment on Ludlow Street for something like $38 a month.” Today, studio apartments in “the Ludlow” start at $3,400 a month. “I don’t think there’ll be any more Lou Reeds on Ludlow Street. All of the geniuses who were here because of the cheap rents are gone.” Gone, maybe, but for anyone who explores even a corner of Clayton’s large body of work, not forgotten.
Wes Wood Tattoo Society of New York
If one were to look around and inquire where all these tattoo shops came from, it would not be unreasonable, to copy a McCarthy-era phrase, to find Clayton Patterson’s Tattoo Society of New York under every bush and behind every tree. Clayton is an archivist of the Lower East Side, an activist, an organizer, a photographer, a promoter, a germinator of ideas and causes, and this forever-optimist’s monthly meetings of the TSNY were certainly the seedbed for events that were unfolding in the world of tattoo. I discovered Clayton when I passed his Essex Street storefront and saw a hat, custom-embroidered, announcing that I too could have a hat, a baseball cap, embroidered with anything I wanted. What an idea. I lingered before his storefront before, sort of like Frost, wondering whose woods these were. Clayton’s storefront on Essex Street was a good spot to linger: odd things inside and a display in the window of recent pictures of locals, a lot of young people enthusiastic for life, oblivious in youth to things that would shape their destinies. Everybody stopped to see if his or her picture was up. A landmark. Seeing that embroidered cap, I ventured in and ordered a cap with my name of course, a parachute and a plane, because I was skydiving during the mid ’80s. In 1987 I went back, and this time Clayton invited me to sit down and chat. Maybe he saw my tattoos, because he started talking about his TSNY, which he started with Ari Roussimoff in 1986, taking over with his wife Elsa Rensaa when Ari moved on. He invited me to attend. The TSNY had actual meetings, more like gatherings, at places like the Pyramid Club and Chase and CBGB’s 313 Gallery, different venues. This was in ’88. In a city that outlawed tattooing as a violation of the health code, TSNY was radical. No stranger to activism, having been hooked in 1959 by the Freedom Train going through Fredonia, New York, I had been active on a range of issues in the ’70s with marches in NY and Washington, D.C. When I was a member of the Chelsea Coalition we chained ourselves inside the fences of Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant on Long Island. Maybe it was the activism to make things better in society that drew me to Clayton. He too is optimistic that we can make things better. I started attending the meetings. TSNY was improbable. It was a window into an entire culture revolving around tattoo. It comprised all fellow travelers, a universal awakening under one roof, which rubbed everyone who had any kind of interest in tattoo or body modification. There was no secret organization, there were no dues, there was no membership, though I treasure my 1988 “membership” card. TSNY created hooks that pulled everyone together. Here I was, with a couple of tattoos, connecting with existing and emerging tattooists. Little did I think I too would become part of a who’s-who for my contributions to the tattoo industry, along with Sean Vasquez, Emma Griffiths, Marcus Pacheco,
Timothy Hoyer, Ritchie Sean, Med, Tommy Houlihan, Andrea Easton, Skull and the established tattooists like Spider Webb, Mike Perfetto, Jonathan Shaw, Tony Polito, Mike Bakaty and son Mehai, Angelo Scotto, Coney Island Vinny, Bear, Richie Montgomery, Tony the Pirate, Big Joe, Shotsie Gorman—all legends within tattoo. But I learned and interacted as well with tattoo enthusiasts—anyone could come: it was open to all, a daring idea. Clayton believed in that. Who could forget Kaufman; George Bauer with flag tattoos; performer and Coney Island attraction Mike Wilson; photographer and tattooist Steve Bonge; body-modification photographer Efrain Gonzales; magazine photographer Pulsating Paula; tattoo historian Mike McCabe; organizer and promoter Matty Jankowski? Matty Jankowski, whom I met at a TSNY meeting, became manager of my tattoo shop, Sacred Tattoo. I gave him freedom and he created the link between art and tattoo in New York, utilizing the basement space at 365 Canal Street to curate art shows supporting creative artists—daring forays into new media linking art with tattoo, staging body-art performances by employees and Disgraceland. Matty created links to the museum world, the fashion elites and the establishment. If not for NYTS, this would never have happened. By 1996 I had been on a roll creating idea after idea advancing the technology of tattoo and making it available in a city that outlawed tattoo as dangerous to public health. New York was emerging as a tattoo center. It wasn’t LA or Portland but we were getting there, half underground, and TSNY was growing. In November 1996 we were alerted that the New York City Council had introduced a bill to legalize tattooing and that the public’s chance to comment would take place on December 2nd. You can imagine the panic. I immediately called Clayton after receiving Eve Colombo’s fax, and the two of us went into high gear to find out more. Clayton discovered that Kathryn Freed was a cosponsor. He had worked with her on a some local issues in the past, so he got a quick connection and access to set up some meetings with her, the council and eventually even the DEP and DHMS. The meetings under the umbrella of the TSNY established a consensus among all interested parties and successfully brokered those demands into changing the bill, which was adopted in 1998. In my opinion, the Tattoo Society of New York was fated to play this dominant role in shaping the existence of tattoo in New York.
Daniel B. Levin Clayton Patterson: Little Brother Is Watching Big Brother
My history with Clayton goes back to my teenage years. I met Clayton and Elsa through a friend and was introduced to the Clayton Gallery & Outlaw Art Museum, where I eagerly attended various shows and events over the years. I related to Clayton’s photography, his love of New York City and the unique culture and characters he documented. I left New York City for college in 2000 to study film and photography, and in my first week of freshman year, 9/11 occurred and forever changed the city we loved. Change is undeniable, and it puts great value on properly documenting the past and present. Each time I came home, I found it challenging to comprehend how fast and extreme the gentrification was. During my four years of school, seven high-rise buildings went up within a three-block radius of my childhood loft on 26th street in Chelsea. Chelsea had undergone a considerable real-estate surge, and I sensed that the same was about to happen to Clayton’s Lower East Side. It was against that backdrop that we decided to make a documentary about his life’s work. Captured (2008) was the first time that Clayton’s diverse catalogue of work and his history had been compiled in one cohesive story. Making that film was important for both of us. I was able to make my first feature film, and Clayton was able to share his 30-year odyssey. Clayton’s work remains important and historic, and his documentation and dedication are unparalleled. What began as a love for photographing residents of the neighborhood and members of the counterculture in the 1980s transformed into activism: a message to be vigilant and communicate one’s own story. In the 1980s, Clayton was documenting the fringe of society, including the homeless and squatter communities in and around Tompkins Square Park, which led him to the park on August 6th, 1988. Clayton’s video of the 1988 Tompkins Square Park police riot proved a pivotal moment for video activism and Clayton’s artistic message alike. Clayton became a police target and part of the controversy. Following his arrest for refusal to hand over his riot tape to authorities—out of fear for its disappearance and on the grounds that it was his art—he gained national attention and declared on Oprah that now “little brother is watching big brother.” This proclamation became his rallying cry to empower people to use the camera as a tool to hold authorities accountable, document situations and defend one’s community. In 1988, Clayton was using a new technology, the Prosumer video camera, which had just become available to the public. Since then, cameras have become increasingly accessible, and the proliferation of the cell-phone camera has enabled citizens—as seen in recent tragic cases like those of Eric Garner and Walter Scott—to have a say and keep a watchful eye. The influence of Clayton’s riot tape carries
through from the Rodney King video to these recent police headlines, which have all cemented videography as an activist tool to monitor a system that constantly monitors its citizens but does not adequately monitor itself. It’s sad to think that while technology has changed, police misconduct and abuse of noncriminals and the poor and powerless have not. Watching the riot tape and using it as the climax of Captured influenced my camera work. There is a moment on the riot tape that I always identify as the “film school” shot of Captured, one that should be taught and studied in documentary classes. It comes toward the end of the riot, when Clayton nimbly moves between both sides of the protest line. Because Clayton is a neighborhood figure, he knows all the players involved in the riot, from the protesters to the cops. The shot begins as he follows a priest from the police side of the line to the protest side. The priest confronts one of the protesters who is yelling “Fascists!” at the police and notifies him that there is going to be a meeting. A bottle is thrown offscreen, tensions flare and the police surge past. The cops notice Paul Garrin filming on the roof of a van. They pull him down and strike him against a wall. The “white shirt” cops struggle to maintain control, but the looks of confusion and concern on the officers’ faces reveal the unfolding state of the chaos. This one shot not only tells the whole story of the riot in a microcosm but is also a remarkable feat of documentary filmmaking. To have such access—the result of Clayton’s knowledge of his community—and to have the ability to move through that scene from both sides yet not have his camera seized while someone else in front of him does is remarkable. The scene plays in Captured for almost a minute uncut. Uncut takes in documentaries are a testament to skilled camera work, and to pull this off during a scene of such upheaval is masterful. In 2010, I found myself in a similar situation in Newark while filming the show Brick City, for the Sundance Channel. We gained extensive knowledge and access to the community, the police and the politicians, and found ourselves in the middle of a protest regarding police brutality, which ended with a scuffle between police and protesters. As I filmed the scene, I kept thinking back to and focusing on the Thompson Square Park riot tape, and tried my best to echo Clayton’s fluid one-minute shot. My long uncut takes ended up making the show, shots which I captured with Clayton’s guidance. I made Captured to shine a light on Clayton and Elsa’s diverse and extensive work. Elsa is a huge part of the equation and an extraordinary artist in her own right. From running tapes and batteries back and forth on the night of the riot to her own beautiful and intricate acrylic paintings, Elsa is an indispensible part of an amazing artistic duo. It’s been almost 10 years since we began making Captured, and since then I have grown professionally in the televisionand-film business. I will always look back on Captured as one of my greatest achievements. I believe Clayton’s work must be saved, preserved and appreciated. I still dream of the day when tourists venture down to the Lower East Side to visit the Clayton Gallery & Outlaw Art Museum, to see and purchase his work and to speak with the artist himself for a
fuller understanding and appreciation of New York City and the Lower East Side. Clayton’s archives are New York City’s archives and should be valued as such. Clayton is an inspiration, an educator, a collaborator, mentor and friend. With all the change that has happened in New York City, I can continue to progress knowing that the creative, chaotic, colorful and grimy New York City that I grew up in still lives in Clayton Patterson’s collection of exceptional street photography and video and his ever-influential archive. Captured (2008), a film By Ben Solomon, Daniel B. Levin and Jenner Furst: www.capturedmovie.com
Jose “Cochise” Quiles My Encounter with a Legend
I first took notice of Clayton Patterson—the man who wore black, resembled a biker and sported a menacing skullcap— photographing and documenting the chaotic encampment scene in Tompkins Square Park, in the summer of 1988, right after the infamous Tompkins Square Park police riot. I later discovered that Clayton, along with his wife, artist Elsa Rensaa, fashioned and produced these classic hats at their place the Outlaw Art Museum. I had just been released on parole for an assault charge and was looking to form my own street gang and leave my mark on the streets of the Lower East Side. Gangs and crime were all I’d ever known. I had invited prospects from midtown, the South Bronx and Brooklyn to join my newly formed Satan’s Sinners Nomads street gang, and we all met up at the notorious Tompkins Square Park. Eventually, the park would become our rendezvous and place of recruitment. Our membership continued to multiply, and when the opportunity arose for our gang to inhabit the upper half of a newly renovated brownstone occupied by squatters, we took it. It was through Stacy—a neighborhood punk-rocker junkie and the girlfriend of one of the Satan’s Sinners, Rocco—that we gained possession of her half of the tenement apartments. One day, for some reason, Stacy decided to badmouth Clayton Patterson and classify him as a snitch in cahoots with the NYPD. According to Stacy, Clayton was selling out the dwellers of the Tompkins Square Park tent city by secretly handing over some of the photographs and video footage he had shot during the park protests and thus gaining favor with law enforcement. When I heard this, I knew she was fabricating the whole story. But we had to make sure. I decided to take a few Sinners to investigate the matter. We were astounded to find out that Clayton lived in a museum on Essex Street between Houston and Stanton Streets. We
noticed that the top half of the building was decorated with exquisite skulls and other strange and phantomlike figures, obviously painted by him. Below was a large window with numerous photographs of smiling children and other neighborhood locals, neatly displayed on a board. I even saw one of Spider, a dweller of the tent city and a member of the Satan’s Sinners Nomads. The front door was covered in graffiti, the symbolism of the streets, and as I rang the doorbell and banged on the door, I wondered what sort of activity went on in there. The door flew open, and standing there before us stood the man himself, dressed in black and sporting his signature skullcap. I asked if he was Clayton Patterson—though I already knew—and if he was sharing his photos of park dwellers with the cops. Clayton, unmoved by our presence, answered, “Not sure where you’re getting your information from, but I can tell you I shot the riot tape that helped get the night classified as a police riot. I have been arrested and beaten a bunch of times for documenting police brutality and no, I do not work for the police.” As Clayton spoke, something in my gut told me that he was telling the truth. When we left, we headed toward Tompkins Square Park and asked Spider and other park dwellers about their relationship with Clayton Patterson and his work. The answers were all positive. Numerous tent-city dwellers spoke of how Clayton’s photos and documentation helped their cause and the movement for the homeless and anti-gentrification activities. I came to the conclusion that Stacy wanted us to hurt an innocent man whose work had blessed the community many times over. Rocco was ordered to cease further relations with Stacy, and she faded away. To this day, no one knows her whereabouts. In the process of time, Clayton Patterson and I became good friends. We gave him full access to the Satan’s Sinners Nomads, and his documentation of the Sinners eventually opened some doors for us. When Clayton found out about my interest in art, he encouraged me to pursue it and invited me to participate in some exhibitions where I was able to sell some artwork. He introduced me to Herbert Waide Hemphill Jr., one of the founders of the Folk Art Museum, in New York City. Hemphill purchased some of my work. In time, through Clayton’s Outlaw Art Museum, I would meet all kinds of people, including Charles Gatewood, Bill Heine, Lionel Ziprin, David Peel, Roy Sundance (former managing editor of the Outlaw Biker magazine), G.G. Allin and the Murder Junkies, Anne Ardolino, Thom deVita, Michael “the Pope of Dope” Cezar, Thom Corn, Aaron Rose and many others. I was fascinated by Clayton’s style of art. I discovered that he worked in a variety of mediums, such as painting, etching, drawing, and sculpture. Clayton’s sculpture style is similar to so-called outsider or folk art. He incorporates found objects and vibrantly paints them and creates great wonders with them. His embroidered masterpieces are legendary. His embroidered caps have been worn by celebrities, including Matt Dillon and Rob Reiner. Unfortunately, there would come a time where I would find myself in prison again, this time for two attempted murders.
I was sentenced to a 12-to-24-year prison stint and did 18 years of that. But even in prison, I never forgot Clayton’s words to me just before I was sent up north to Sing Sing. He said, “Cochise, don’t forget, do art. Don’t forget to do art!” Through the years, I worked toward change and participated in all sorts of programs and eventually got my GED and peer counseling certificates from the University of the State of New York, the Education Department, and became a teacher’s aide. I worked to reach gang members incarcerated in the facility where I was doing time. But I also did art that cried out against gang violence. Thus I never forgot the words of wisdom from a legendary artist from the Lower East Side: “Just do ART.”
Jochen Auer
Clayton Patterson: Was kann ich sagen außer DANKE FÜR 20 Jahre Freundschaft, Respekt, Verständnis, Hilfe, Unterstützung, Diskussionen, Input, was auch immer . . . Danke dafür, dass Du IMMER hinter mir stehst!! DANKE FÜR ALLES, MY BEST FRIEND! Clayton Patterson: What can I say except thank you for 20 years of friendship, respect, understanding, help, support, discussions, input, whatever . . . Thank you, that you’re always behind me! THANK YOU FOR EVERYTHING, MY BEST FRIEND!
Agathe Snow
Agathe Snow My Encounter with a Legend
When Clayton described his sculptures to me over the phone, all he said was they are made from Bowery garbage and the like—that they were in the same mind as his photographs and his writing, part social statement or sometimes just imagination. And with that I drifted: it got me thinking about Bowery garbage, and how there is no garbage like Bowery garbage. I’ve seen guys in suits and women in high heels and designer outfits tug at some find on the sidewalk, a spoof, a laugh, a prop, something not even realized, unconscious, an improvised weapon, even. It calls to you, and you—whoever you are—pick it up, drag it for a few steps, a couple of blocks, to the place where you find a cab and run back to safety. That garbage walks and talks, and it has many lives. When it is dumped on the Bowery, you can be sure it has done what it was supposed to do for as long as it could and then it failed at that. But it is never over quite yet. It can still be this and another that, and if all else fails it can be made into art. How many generations of artists have coveted those very treasures? And I found it funny that even Clayton did not escape that fate. The Clayton I know I had seen for years before ever saying a word to him. The Clayton I know, I know from the hats, the photographs, the books, the activism, the LES. Always around. For decades, he and Elsa, his partner, have been combing the streets below 14th Street—that might even be too far north—let’s say 10th Street, between the Bowery west and the river east and as far south as Canal. When I went to meet him at his home/studio/gallery, I saw the sculptures for the first time as sculptures and not just as the piles of colors stuffed all over the space that I’d seen through the window on Essex. I found out that they had been kept in that state since 1981, when the last one was made and the space could not accommodate one more. And just as your grandmother might pull a real treasure from an old sock stuffed in a box somewhere, brushing away the dust and there goes a real jewel and a story so hidden in the past, so before-your-time that it might have belonged to a whole other person than dear old Grandma—well, the same thing happened for me that day with Clayton and his sculptures. The colors, like candy, draw you in and beauty draws you in and then you think maybe there is a way to work that thing: could it be an old pinball machine? Then you are faced with the reality that no, this is not a game to be played, that there is no working mechanism—no, this is art, and it is monstrous, and by then you are trapped, you have been bitten, and all the lights switch on and there you see a landscape of toys and broken objects and teeth and dentures and bullets and religious trinkets. And they tell a story or could it be they create a map of a place or of Clayton’s soul? One thing is for sure: there is something in there for you, something you need to register and remember for another time, and you will know exactly what that thing is when that time comes. Step right up! SEE where this leads, SEE the path to hell, the gates of hell! SEE the war—it is fought tooth and nail! SEE an all-out war between cowboys and Indians! Scars! Bites! SEE that accumulation and riches are a first-class ticket straight to hell, no coming back! SEE religion and the men of religion—the ones who put a name and a face to hell, who of course are to blame! SEE it is not man but the system that is rigged and filthy and only an all-out war will make things right! SEE disillusion at times, because the forces that be are mighty! SEE that hope and community are the only redemption, that each life matters and that together we move mountains! After I left, what kept coming back to me was Clayton’s insistence on calling the sculptures dirty. Whether he meant that they looked dirty or that what they were made of was dirty, there was no doubt in my mind that he
thought the subject matter, the inspiration behind the sculptures, was that of a dirty, filthy place. Another thing he said was that they are like the photographs. I kept saying no, they are beautiful and no, the photographs pick up what is there—there is no setup, no artifice. The sculptures were made to say something. They were set up so they had very little to do with chance. Even as Clayton said of them that the sculptures were made of Bowery garbage, many of the sculptural components, such as the dentures or plaster teeth, had been produced by Clayton way back when. All the elements were changed, in a way: new finish, new colors. So, from a structural point of view, I did not see how his photos and his sculptures were the same. Then I asked myself “Who does Clayton speak to? Who are these sculptures and photographs meant to speak to? Who are they aimed at?” He doesn’t speak to the Wall Street types, uptown types or the fine-art world. He speaks to the people of downtown, the people he photographs. So what is he really saying? What is the dirt, to him? It sure isn’t the people he photographs or the way they live/ survive on the LES. Even though there are plenty of characters living lost on the streets, plenty who might seem to have wasted their lives, and plenty who’ve gone through bad times, none of them appear in the photos. On the contrary, no one is made to stare his life in the face with all its bad choices. Many artists have chosen to depict such moments, but not Clayton. Nor does he romanticize people. There is nothing of the voyeur, the documentarian, the investigative reporter or the passerby photographer in him. No, Clayton shares the stage with all his subjects. And while he may see them when they are not at their best or intoxicated or whatever condition one could get into, he is there and he only shows his people when they are most at ease, at home on the streets, at home with what’s happening on the streets, at home in their actions. It is a community he photographs. It is people who, although unknown to one another, have very few degrees of separation between them. And while there are thousands of stories among them, Clayton sees and tells one story, the one that is common to all, the one that binds them. Which got me thinking that his audience is that ever-changing group that he sees as a community and, in dire times, as an army, always at the ready. So now, after many days and nights, I can’t argue with Clayton and tell him that the photos and the sculptures are different or that the sculptures, and by extension the photographs, are not dirty. Now I think I see his point. What I thought of as the layers of human emotional sediment, as the generations piling up, he thinks of as dirt and dust. And as garbage, but that is only camouflage: our uniforms, our war paint. And that’s a good thing. SEE dirt as camouflage! SEE guerrilla warfare revisited! SEE a place where each has a role to play! SEE those dirty landscapes? They are not a cry, a lament or a cautionary tale against the pitfalls of a life of bad choices. SEE a gate to hell? SEE that road? It is not one of desperate, rampant mental-health issues and addiction. It is a road for solitary travelers that is paved with ego, gold and greed. It is not our road. SEE this? It is a battleground, a plan for attack, like one a general would present to his troops, in 3D, showing different battalions and their positions. SEE Clayton’s world? In Clayton’s world, that war is ongoing and his dream army is made of those he photographs, generation after generation, the Jews, the tattoos, the drag queens, the parties, the scenes, the riots, the neighborhood kids, the openings, the funerals, the installations, the paintings, the graffiti. SEE all this? It is what makes the LES one story in Clayton’s eyes. Now can you SEE a man covered with dust, finally ready to shake it off and shine?
Troy Pattersonei Hat Tricks
Joseph Beuys’s Felt Suit of 1970 hangs on the wall of cultural history as apparel that serves the eye and the mind but not the body. “The suit is meant to be an object which one is precisely not supposed to wear,” Beuys once advised his interviewers. With one hand we can point to the work as an exemplar of conceptual art that draws on traditions of crafting fabric. With the other we can point to the products of haute couture—choose an Alexander McQueen fantasia, say—as examples of craft so visionary as to demand the status of transcendent art. And with our hands thus occupied, we must use the head to gesture toward the baseball cap which, however humble, presents an unparalleled instance of applied art put to the service of crafting self-presentation. With the nodding head, we wonder about the forces at work when Clayton Patterson crafts demotic artwork with a demonic edge on the canvas of the cap’s folk tradition. The baseball cap emerged in the U.S. in the middle of the 19th century to preserve the public dignity of gentlemen playing the nascent national pastime. It has evolved, early in the 21st, into a plaything of everyday fashion, with people of all classes wearing it with a variety of logos or none, so that options for self-expression range from rooting with team insignia to sloganeering by way of political statements to swanning about in an unadorned hat that communicates only a belief in basic form. In designing caps with a distinct vocabulary of decoration—the skulls-and-bones, street-art demons and pop fragments and quizzical runes embroidered by his wife, Elsa Rensaa—Patterson (no relation to me) occupies a singular headspace. Though clearly set apart from the fashion industry, he nonetheless stakes a claim as the creator of the first designer-brand baseball cap. Consider his enterprise—Clayton Caps, headquartered at his studio at 161 Essex Street—a practice of outsider art in the rag trade. This project began in 1986. The timing was fortuitous in that the New York garment industry had recently seen itself trimmed. With so much manufacturing moved overseas, Patterson and Rensaa were able to buy machinery on the cheap at bankruptcy sales. A few years later, the project would have lacked novelty; in 1991, the New York Times was able to report the cap’s definitive breakthrough, citing the sartorial triumphs of uptown rap artists, the counterfeiting of Canal Street knockoff artists, and the stratosphere of East 57th Street luxury: “At the Chanel Boutique in Manhattan, baseball caps of quilted black leather are $810.” A few years earlier, the project would have unthinkable; the cap had only recently escaped its off-field destiny as the headgear of delinquents and juveniles and juvenile delinquents. In the late 1970s, the cultural marketplace elevated it into the world of democratic style, not least because the explosion of television sports touched off a new era of pro-sport merchandising. But the special energy of Clayton Caps, with their designs evoking the cartoons of
Keith Haring and the mysteries of cults, has less in common with the dynamics of fandom than with other caps that ascended around the same time. The most notable subgenre among them was the foam-and-mesh company cap, also known as a gimme cap, because it was and is often doled out, by the likes of John Deere and Caterpillar, as a promotional freebie. Good old boys and blue-collar men proved eager to appropriate logos as statements of group identity and self-identification. As worn by artists and gallerists and publishers and directors, the Clayton Cap was an emblem of a different sort of grittiness, distinctly post-industrial. The anarchic embroidery spilled all over the front of the crown around to its sides and down the brim to its underside, as if to evoke an overspill of graffiti. Patterson’s political activism enhanced the cap’s profile and informed its aesthetic, with the rich colors of the threading merging rebellion and joy. Should we class the cap as art? (That the custom orders are signed by hand indicates a desire for them to be read in that tradition.) Should we cite it as an amazing outlier of casualwear craftwork? (It is practical, after all.) Should we conclude that what is special about the Clayton Cap is its nonchalance in dissolving these distinctions? Protection against the elements, it is elemental in itself, a figure on the urban landscape.
Andrew Weiner Unconsumed: For Clayton Patterson
“We are not intended after all to be consumed.” —Lionel Ziprin, Sentential Metaphrastic Clayton Patterson loaned me some of his books recently. Two were oral histories of the Lower East Side, the first (Resistance) dealing with radical activism and the second (Captured) with underground media. The third (Front Door Book) collects some of the countless photographs that Clayton has shot of LES residents posing by the door to his studio at 161 Essex Street; the book is easy to summarize but its impact transcends description, and I’d be happy if you stopped reading this essay right now and took the rest of your day to pore over it. I’ve been spending as much time with these books as I can, and my sense is that they only begin to indicate the extent of the contributions that Clayton has made since moving to New York almost forty years ago. These include street tapes, snapshots, hats, conversations, agitprop provocations, tattoos, sculptural assemblages, research, community mobilization, photomontage, something like conceptual art, and a whole range of archival and historical activities. It speaks to Clayton’s achievement that there isn’t really any one person he could be properly compared to, even though
the names that come to mind are eminent ones, many of whom he’s known and worked with. It’s similarly hard to know how to categorize his output, given the way it traverses art and activism and documentary and performance and life and and and. No matter what we call this work—and it might be that one of its lessons is that such distinctions are infinitely less important than the fact of the work itself—I think what Clayton has done (and is still doing) is singular, irreplaceable, generous, and deserving of all the thoughtful consideration we can give it. While I was looking through Front Door Book yesterday a three-by-five photograph fell out of it. The photo looks like it could have been taken at any time in the last thirty years. It depicts a young Dominican man working in a bodega. He’s been taking boxes of cereal down so he can clean the shelves. It’s clear from his unguarded expression and faintly emerging smile that he knows and trusts the photographer. I e-mailed Clayton to ask about the picture and he wrote back five minutes later: it was Miguel in the early ’90s, when he would have been about 15, in the bodega, the one next to Arlene’s Grocery, where he worked until it was sold a couple of years ago. It matters that Clayton took the time to recognize this kid back then as someone worth knowing and acknowledging and photographing—there’s a democratic ethics in that gesture that could easily be overlooked. It also matters that he continues to remember Miguel–this speaks to Clayton’s status as something like a living archive of the LES. Clayton is of course well-known for the video footage he shot of the Tompkins Square Park police riot in August 1988, in which members of the NYPD brutalized protesters of a curfew targeting the occupation of the park. The tape was a watershed moment in the development of citizen journalism, anticipating not only the 1991 Rodney King video but also the more recent, global uptake of cell-phone documentary as a tool of popular protest. It led to successful legal actions against the NYPD; it also captured a pivotal moment in the militarization of urban policing, a pernicious and often deeply racist phenomenon whose widespread implementation has only recently begun to be resisted, as in last year’s uprisings in and around Ferguson, Missouri. Yet however significant the riot tape was, and indeed still is, it stands as only one of the many archival projects and actions that Clayton has carried out. Some of these concern the history of similarly eclectic, even heterodox practices as a kind of indigenous activity on the Lower East Side. One prominent figure in this genealogy is Harry Smith, whose activities as a self-styled anthropologist led him to collect Seminole textiles, Ukrainian easter eggs (pysanky), gourds, string figures, and the paper planes he found on the streets of Manhattan. It was Smith’s collection of out-of-print 78s that became the basis for his Anthology of American Folk Music (1952), which had an immeasurable impact on the revival of folk in the ’60s and the subsequent development of huge swaths of pop and rock. Another important LES archivist was Lionel Ziprin, a poet, numerologist, mystic, part-time comic-book author, and lifelong student of Kabbalah. Together with Smith, Ziprin
set out to document the soundscape of the local Jewish diaspora, recording untold hours of Orthodox liturgical chanting, Yiddish storytelling, and Arabic song. Yet another, whom Clayton credits with teaching him how to take advantage of the video camera, was Nelson Sullivan, a South Carolina transplant turned downtown scenester who spent his nights shuttling between openings, nightclub acts, drag balls, and illicit parties, taping everything he could. Drawing on these precedents, Clayton has committed himself to recording the intensely diverse assortment of characters and events that exists throughout his neighborhood. There are tapes of Ziprin reading his work, poems with titles like “Math Glass” and “What This Abacus Was”; tapes of the Dinkinsville encampment in Tompkins Square Park, whose residents were attacked in the 1988 police riot; tapes of local street artists like the Mosaic Man; tapes of hardcore shows and tapes of drag performances; tapes of buskers, parades, and street gangs; tapes of shock performers like Steven Oddo and G.G. Allin; tapes of interviews with filmmakers ranging from Emile de Antonio to Nick Zedd. This body of work is intimately connected to the storied underground film and video culture of the Lower East Side, a subject that Clayton has carefully documented in Captured. It is impossible to imagine a history of the U.S. experimental and avant-garde film scene that didn’t include the many filmmakers who lived and worked in the neighborhood, gathering into various networks around local institutions like Anthology Film Archives. Some favored an outré outsider aesthetic of camp, trash, or excess; others devoted themselves to the quasi-modernist pursuit of austere formalism and rigorous self-reflexivity. The mid-’60s innovations that came to be known as expanded cinema had strong links to the LES: the artist Aldo Tambellini and the collective USCO staged screenings in the neighborhood, and the DOM on St. Mark’s Place hosted the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, an immersive spectacle that paired Warhol’s films with the drone-rock of the Velvet Underground. Later in the ’60s, LES residents with links to post-minimalist art and media theory would come together to experiment with the portable video cameras that had just hit the consumer market. The results ranged from hybrid sculptural installations that were promoted as “video art” to the scrappier, more activist projects known as “guerrilla television”; important figures in this field included the Commediation group (Les Levine, Ira Schneider, Frank Gillette), the Videofreex, and People’s Video Theater. Such practices often transgressed, negated, or simply ignored the conventional distinctions between art and other spheres of society. While they were centered around audiovisual media, they formed part of a broader spectrum of practices that aimed to radically transform the prevailing social, economic, political, and cultural order of the post-war U.S. Some aimed to dismantle the ostensibly autonomous or elite institutions of modern art from within, as in the case of The Event of the Screw, a 1962 protest that Aldo Tambellini staged at MoMA together with a local Puerto Rican singing group called the Belltones. Others sought to contest the exclusionary tendencies of the mainstream
media by forming underground newspapers like the East Village Other or literary journals like UMBRA, an AfricanAmerican poetry magazine that published Ishmael Reed and Calvin Hernton. Still others sought to effect revolution by instituting alternative economies, as in the case of the Diggers’ Free Store, or by using performance to transcend the boundaries dividing art and life, the premise upon which the Living Theater was founded. Moving to the LES in the immediate aftermath of the 1960s, Clayton belonged to a generation of like-minded radicals who applied the lessons and innovations of this history to the distinct situation that the neighborhood faced in subsequent eras under the threat of defunding, gentrification, increased homelessness, the so-called War on Drugs, and AIDS. Using techniques ranging from squats and occupations to guerrilla video and anarchist street theater, these activists contested the oppressive effects of the emergent socioeconomic order that we now call neoliberalism. Grasping the institutional linkages between real-estate speculation, structural racism, and police bias, they used whatever means they could to block the gears of the machine that they saw poised to take over their neighborhood. In Clayton’s case, these included his teeth (many of which were knocked out in a police assault), his time (much of which was dedicated to representing himself in legal cases contesting evictions and NYPD brutality), and his art (which occasionally took the form of elaborate collages submitted as amicus curiae briefs in his court appearances). It is hard not to view the photos in Front Door Book without thinking of this ongoing transformation, which has made Manhattan into a luxury good for the global 1%, steadily replacing the tenements of the Lower East Side with designer condos and boutique hotels. How many of the teenagers pictured then can now manage to live or even work in the place where they grew up? How many lost friends to drug-related violence that was shunted away from more-affluent parts of the city? Yet no matter how sobering and necessary such questions may be, they do not dominate the experience of reading the Front Door Book. Instead, one comes away with a profound respect for the encounter between the photographer and the people pictured, in which a common space and time are established, negotiated, shared, and recorded. Clayton has referred to this project as “the people’s photography,” a phrase that deftly captures this quality of mutuality and commonality. So if Clayton can be thought of as a living archive of the LES, I think it is this sort of archive: one that extends the everyday into decades, one that belongs to those it depicts, one that opens art and life to each other and to whoever walks past the front door. The life in this archive is invaluable but not precious; it is bruised, tattooed, no stranger to risk, not afraid to speak back to the judge. This life sustains itself across generations through sharing stories, secrets, last cigarettes, and joint acts of defiance. Ultimately, this archive is not an institution or a collection of objects or even a set of ideas; rather, it is a gesture of radical generosity, a gift to the future, a photograph you find in a book someone loans you.
Alan Kaufman On Clayton Patterson
Today’s American art culture thrives on a concept of perpetual obsolescence. Like a stomachless butterfly, today’s artist flutters about the gallery floor for a single day and falls dead. The span of a career continues to shorten to the point where a reputation can be won and lost (only once) based on a single show, which, by tomorrow, is old news. America hates nothing more than old news. It hates yesterday’s fashions. It hates that artist who insists upon the integrity of the individual vision, who valorizes memory, who demands respect for the marginalized, who does not gloat at the trampling underfoot of the oppressed, who praises long-standing commitment to vision, ideals, effort. America regards such an outlook as profitless, and America despises that which yields no profit. America hates Clayton Patterson. Since 1979 he has performed the unparalleled feat of documenting through photograph and video, anthologies and art shows, the families, businesses, outlaws, artists, dreamers, losers and visionaries of New York City’s fastdisappearing Lower East Side. He has defied the authorities to defend the rights of free speech, for which he has been jailed 13 times. He has railed against the ruthless displacement of that which makes his neighborhood the emblematic melting pot of America’s ethnicities and lifestyles—a legacy which America is now doing all it can to erase. America hates Clayton Patterson because he refuses to let her forget the immigrants who landed on Ellis Island, the Jewish tailor who plied his trade behind smudged glass in a small Orchard Street storefront, the Puerto Rican grocer who hustled behind a counter dispensing goods wrapped in wax paper to customers who bought on credit, the Chinese man who sat on Elizabeth Street on a stool repairing the neighborhood’s shoes, the Vietnam veteran who made it his life’s work to cement beautiful mosaics to lampposts and walls, the Holocaust survivor who led a quixotic charge against the ramparts of devouring artworld greed, the gang leader who turned his life around to become an artist, author and activist on behalf of youth. To this day—although he is in his mid-sixties and has attained legendary status among Lower East Side locals—Clayton Patterson has not enjoyed a single retrospective or even a show in a major American museum, and his life’s work—one of the most comprehensive archives in existence today: a sociological treasure trove of documentation, a golden lode of photographs and artworks, an amazing contribution to human culture and education— remains without an institution to house and catalog it.
Patterson did it all with only his camera and the will to defy time itself in order to show the world what he knew to be true: that his Lower East Side was not only the birthplace of labor unions and communities, music clubs and synagogues, but the launching pad of successive waves of avant-garde art and political change. He has captured it gorgeously, in endless photographs: the transvestites, punk rockers, painters, writers, rabbis, poets, firemen, thinkers, gangsters, bikers, shopkeepers, priests and politicians who created, killed, raised families, lost love, betrayed, ascended, stole, built monuments, risked their lives and sometimes perished, all on this crazy magnificent stage of the Lower East Side. He showed that despite everything the Lower East Side would thrive, so long as there was one who loved and believed in it.
changes have led to many challenges in this community. Just walk down Bowery and not only can you see the change but you can feel it. Having lived in NYC for 14 years, I tried to have an unbiased observation. NYC is always in motion: people, mayors, drug dealers, artists, buildings come and go. Sometimes it is good and sometimes it is super boring. With this collection, I attempted to keep it honest and genuine but also raise questions about urban renewal. Some things we just need to let go in the hope that something special and fresh will bloom instead. But other things we must keep and do anything we can to retain their spirit.
Clayton Patterson loves and believes in an America that has forgotten that it could ever be deserving of love. But proof of that love, of deserving love, is there in the photos he has taken, the art he has made, the shows he has organized at his Outlaw Art Museum and in the thousands of local people of every age and persuasion who have posed smiling before his door at 161 Essex Street on the Lower East Side of New York City.
Even when pushing boundaries with my designs, I always respect and embrace the history and tradition of the themes I study and explore. The references and symbols of this subculture on the LES have been implemented in my collection, with memories from my youth and a modern sensibility in deep respect for the hardcore movement. My black clothes, which are all made in NYC, became a canvas for Clayton’s artwork and his message, with an attempt to look toward a new future. It was truly an honor to have worked with Clayton.
Siki Im
David Terra
Urban Renewal
Thank God for Saint Clayton
For my fall/winter 2015 collection, I explored the current and past landscape of the Lower East Side with its changes and challenges. During this exploration and research, I came across Clayton.
Back in 2005, I founded a magazine called Beyond Race to spotlight the independent, underground artistic culture of New York City and beyond. When my vision was in its infant stages, I made a list of the artists I wanted to cover. Clayton Patterson was at the top of that list. For years, Clayton had been a kind of icon to me. He represented New York cool and, of course, the Lower East Side. Clayton was someone I admired from afar, and in my own quiet way I would support what he was involved in, whether it was a book release at his gallery or one of the Clayton Presents screenings at the Pioneer Theater (RIP). I remember when I introduced myself to Clayton at the Pioneer: I explained to him what I was doing with the magazine and that I wanted to interview him. He agreed, and although it took some persistence, I finally got my interview. In the first issue of Beyond Race, we featured a four-page article about Clayton, “Thank God for Saint Clayton,” which was a reference to his having been canonized by Robert Delford Brown and Funky Paganism in the early ’80s.
I was immediately sucked into his work, especially the embroideries he and his partner Elsa Rensaa had created. The strong and vivid motifs of these artisanal chain-stitch embroideries told stories about the life and culture of the LES. They represented to me a truly modern-day folk art of NYC. I grew up listening to American hardcore and post-punk music from New York and played in hardcore bands. Bands such as Gorilla Biscuit, Sick of It All, and Warzone were the soundtrack of my youth in Germany. The fact that Clayton knew them and photographed them was very special to me. I felt that we connected right away. He would tell me stories of the old days, passing them down to the next generation. Like any dynamic neighborhood, the LES eventually saw gentrification. Hence, a shift of metropolitan community lifestyle and a population migration have occurred; the closing of community-run parks and venues, the dismantling of old buildings, and ever-increasing rents. In exchange, the LES has more glassy structures, cleaner streets and a reduction of crime. The sociocultural and economic
Soon after the premier issue of Beyond Race was printed, I asked Clayton if he would offer me guidance and advice as I worked to develop the magazine. He accepted, and over the next five years, Beyond Race grew from a local zine printed on black-and-white newsprint to a professionally designed, hundred-plus-page, internationally distributed magazine. Clayton was instrumental throughout, as he helped open many doors and made countless introductions. He also wrote
articles, took photographs and supported the events we curated. We became friends. One question I like to ask to younger, up-and-coming artists is, “Is there any person or artist you’d like to model your career after?” I once had someone flip the question on me, and my response was Clayton Patterson. Clayton is highly respected and has done many amazing things on his terms. He was an active player in the downtown art scene of the ’80s; an avid attendee of early New York hardcore matinees; a founding member of the Tattoo Society, which helped legalize tattooing in New York; the designer of custom-embroidered hats that went Hollywood and changed the fashion of the baseball cap; the resident photographer of the Wildstyle & Tattoo Messe; and perhaps most notably, the man who captured the Tompkins Square riot of ’88 on film, holding the NYPD accountable for their actions. With his extensive photographic archives of the past 35+ years in the LES and New York City, the encyclopedic books he’s published covering film, politics, LES and Jewish culture, his role in community organizations and counterculture activism, all the artistic projects he’s been involved in or influenced over the years, and his forever-selfless attitude towards helping others, Clayton is the godfather of all the New York City underground culture that matters. It’s been a full decade since I first met Clayton, and he’s consistently been in my life as a positive role model who always fights the good fight and never gives up. Clayton exists in my life as a mentor, friend and father figure. Over the years, I’ve seen him help many young artists in a kind of unofficial mentor role. It’s almost as if every New York City artist doing something creative and interesting needs to work with him at some point as a rite of passage. There is only one Clayton Patterson, and as long as he’s here, his life and art should be celebrated, because there will never be another. Thank God for Saint Clayton!
Rivington Starchild Rivington Street: A Star Is Born
I was born in Queens, NYC, in 1984. When I was nine, after I became accustomed to brand-name cereals, Saturday morning cartoons and American holidays, my stepfather took my mother, my newborn sister and me to live in the Dominican Republic. Unable to fully grasp the move, I complied with my surroundings and wore my first pair of khaki pants and a blue button-down to my first day of Colegio La Zurza. This was my new home—at least, it was what I was being told was my home. Within a few weeks, I felt like an alien. The jokes had new nuances. Spanish, which was the only
language spoken in our home, was never the language I preferred to express what toys I wanted for Christmas or what TV dinner I preferred. I had been torn away from a culture that paid loads of advertising dollars to make sure that a kid like myself knew a golden arch meant I need to eat, now; but I no longer had McDonald’s. There began my infatuation with America and my yearning for anything that would identify me as a GRINGO. I visited NYC during summer breaks and Christmas vacations, it becoming more evident during each ride back to JFK that I was not supposed to leave. I was meant to be in the Dirty Old Town. It also became evident that I was not just an American, but more: I was a New Yorker. My New York City was Puff Daddy and Biggie, Uptowns (Air Force Ones), blow-out haircuts, Mobb Deep, Nas, Wu-Tang, Vons, fire pumps and Mountain Gears. From my new island, I closely monitored every trend, every new rap record, every Source and Vibe magazine, all to make sure I was up-to-date with the happenings of the city. This developed into a deeper love for my city and a devotion that to this very day grows vast and deep as I turn any corner in any remote city of the world. When I met Clayton Patterson, I went to him with a tall order, in search of my real father. Clayton, based on what I had told him about my dad, thought he might have photographed him at some point during the early ’80s. I was almost sure to not find a photo of “el Guli” (my father’s alias). Big Dominican drug dealers wouldn’t be willing to get their photos taken for any cultural archive. Rivington Street was where my father made most of his earnings. He would point out the street name to my mother and say “My kid will be a star: his name is going to be Rivington.” El Guli was murdered six months after I was born. Clayton passed me a few photo albums and his Front Door Book. I marveled at the quantity of profiles Clayton had shot over the years. Girls in Cross Colours, hoop earrings and dark lipstick. Dudes in Polo and Nautica logo Ts, Tommy Hilfiger jeans and Eastland boots. This was the New York I once felt I belonged to. These kids were there to walk those streets in style, and Clayton was there to capture it all. The idea of finding my father in one of these photos still remains a possibility, since I’ve only managed to scratch the surface of Clayton’s archive, but my New York dreams were fulfilled immediately. In Clayton I found someone who (like myself) was fascinated by the particularities of the city’s gangsters, its squatters and cross-dressers. I found someone with the eye to capture the subtleties that made our experience as New Yorkers different from that of residents of any other major city. Some years after this initial meeting, Clayton and I reconnected. I have a band, DAMEHT, that is dedicated to what New York City represents. Our idea to embody the city’s seminal cultural movements was also a very tall order. We needed not just to manipulate the process but to capture it in our style, our songs, our daily routine of loitering and coffee drinking. We needed to be as Clayton was during his police-riot tapings, present and rolling. Clayton has become our guide to evoking the city’s spirit. Clayton became a guru/ mentor and, most important, he became one of my dearest friends. An outlaw artist and friend to the misfit. On the other
hand, Clayton thrived and fueled his purposes. Sitting in his storefront at 161 Essex, I have gotten to know Clayton Patterson through endless conversations on art history, outlaw culture, Lower East Side happenings and what drove him to dedicate his life to documenting this particular ‘hood. Clayton speaks about contribution as no one I have ever met. He is a contribution to the people of the Lower East Side. Through working with Clayton, I have explored a type of originality that redefined my previous ideas of the elusive term. Through meeting his circle of friends and collaborators, I became aware that everything that I had thought was my very own brilliant idea was common ground that we all shared. In fact, his circle would help me refine my new approach to an old idea. It’s the same trans-generational conversation that Comte de Lautréamont had with André Breton. The same conversation that Dizzy Gillespie had with Basquiat, and that we all have with each other. The higher blessing is to have these artists around to share stories and engage in conversations with.
Clayton Patterson Elsa
As Elsa, referring to our relationship, says in Captured: “It was not love at first sight.” Because I was going out with a friend of hers. All of that changed. We started living together in 1972 and we are still living together. My major blessing going to art college was meeting Elsa Rensaa. I was the visionary who set the goals. Elsa was the tactician who figured out how to make it all work. I was chaos and she was order. As long as my goal had achievement, merit and purpose, she was willing to go along with my adventures. I had big plans, but getting started was not all that easy, because I came from the bad end of the working class. I left home between grades 9 and 10. In and out of high school. Not sure I ever graduated, but was accepted into an art college. My first exposure to the middle class almost killed me. But it was here I met Elsa. Elsa is a wonderful soul, an inspired and highly talented artist, who needs to be understood and discovered outside of me. She is a recluse—never saw much of a point in being social. She is pleasant, friendly, good to be around, but she’s always had enough of her own projects to keep her occupied. I became the front person, and she was content to be somewhat invisible. As she says in Captured: “We are Clayton,” which is true. She saved my life. Without her, who knows where I would have ended up? Everything I have become I owe to her friendship, guidance, inspiration, love and belief in me. Elsa was born in Norway and her father moved to Canada
after WW2. Her father was a fisherman who came from a small fishing village above the Arctic Circle in Norway. Like many immigrants, he started as a laborer, and in his case, did track work for the railway. Working hard, saving money, learning a new language, studying, going to school, he eventually made his way into the University Manitoba engineering department. After graduating, he moved to Edmonton, Alberta, and partnered with Fred Minsos, a Danish architect. As a team, they were able to secure a number of government projects: they designed and built bridges and water towers, designed the main terminal of Edmonton International Airport, the 1967 Stanley Milner Library, and so on. He was awarded a government-of-Canada gold medal for engineering. Elsa’s was an intellectual family that focused on education and achievement and not on money. They were comfortable middle class. The Alberta government was a combination of socialism and capitalism. The majority of her father’s work was on government projects, and her sister worked in a teaching hospital on a set salary. Elsa’s father would support any area of study she was interested in pursuing. Elsa’s love was art. She graduated with honors and got a job as the commercial artist in the largest printing company in Western Canada. She also became a four-color stripper. In commercial printing, only four printing plates are used. All the colors are made from combinations of four colors—CMYK: cyan, magenta, yellow, and key (black). A stripper is an expert on how these color combinations work. It can be a mystery how different experiences and chance situations can become vehicles of change. In 1972, for my birthday, Elsa gave me a 35mm single-lens reflex Pentax camera she’d purchased as one of those drugstore lossleader items offered to attract customers. It was that camera that got me inside the Pyramid and opened the door to so many of my later adventures. In 1976, I got accepted into the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. I specialized in printmaking. Elsa was not interested in getting a degree, but she took stone lithography courses. Since she understood how four-color printing worked, she decided to experiment and see how many printing passes it would take to make multicolored prints. After some experimentation, she learned how light and how dense to make a drawing to achieve different color combinations, and which colors to use to get maximum color results. Our printmaking experience gave us entry into NYC. We moved here in 1979. We got jobs working at a fine-art printing shop. Reagan was elected president and he made fine-art prints a tax shelter. Paloma Picasso sold to a major corporate art company the reproduction rights to a number of her father’s artworks. The company turned some of them into hand-pulled lithographs. In the French fine-art print world, there is a specialist known as a chromist. A chromist
is craftperson who can reproduce an original artwork as a fine-art print. There were few chromists in NYC. Elsa fit the bill. Elsa produced many Picassos. The job paid well. I worked as a building manager for our landlord. I was the hook-up guy. Someone needed a plumber, I got a plumber, and so on. I learned something about running a building. In 1982, we lived on the Bowery. Working for this landlord, I saw the Chinese money crossing Canal Street and knew we would not be able to afford to pay rent in NYC as working artists. We spent a year looking for a building to buy. We found a two-story building on Essex Street. We went to 42 banks and could not get a mortgage. I had a plan: two stories, the first floor had a sewing factory. The first-floor rent would cover the mortgage payments. Elsa, alone, went up to the vice president of Citibank’s corporate office and talked to his secretary. After a few phone calls, we got the mortgage. In 1986, a small baseball-cap-making and embroidery business existed on Ave A. I was a ready-made customer. I experimented with a couple of color combinations. He was making an embroidery patch for Savage Skull. It was a moment of inspiration—he could draw with his embroidery machine. My next request was something he had never done before. But with a little work and persuasion, I was able to create the Clayton Cap. The owner retired. The garment business was leaving NYC. At the bankruptcy auctions we were able to buy all the sewing machines needed to manufacture the Clayton Cap. In the past, Elsa had taken craft courses. She was skilled with a sewing machine. She learned how to use the antique embroidery machine and became an expert cap maker. I created the rough designs and she transformed the images into embroidery. Again the two of us working together at home. We survived by making the caps. We generated some fame and loyal customers. The Clayton Cap introduced many changes to the American baseball cap. On the night of August 6–7, 1988, the night of the police riot, Elsa was my right-hand person. She would take tapes home and charge batteries. She made it possible for me to make our historic 3h33’ video. During the years of political turbulence on the LES, Elsa was always my backup, my right hand, the person I gave the camera to as I was being arrested. I got arrested, she never did. She supported me in just about all of the political work. She organized the photo-and-video archive. In 1986, Ari Roussimoff and I had created the Tattoo Society of New York. In 1990, Ari moved on and Elsa and I ran the TSNY. The TSNY, Wes Wood, and Councilwoman Kathryn Freed worked on legalizing tattooing in NYC. By the end of 1997, tattooing was once again legal in NYC and the society took a hiatus. In 1998, Steve Bonge, Butch Garcia, and Wes Wood created the New York International Tattoo Convention. Elsa and I both worked for the convention. Elsa designed the invitation for the first several years.
She always made art. Her paintings have an original style. They are exquisite, and artists are amazed at how far she has been able to push the use of acrylic paint. Because oil paints are slower drying, most artists model and blend colors using oil paints. Through experimentation, Elsa discovered a way to get the desired effect using acrylics. Her work operates on a number of different levels. Her attention to detail is awe-inspiring. The work is tight, wellthought-out, always pushing for a level of perfection. If something does not satisfy her, she does the whole thing over again. Our art lays bare a lot about who we are. Exposes a truth we believe in. Whatever truth we may be seeking. A work of art goes beyond surface. It exposes our inner being, our soul, our loves and hates, our imagination, our beliefs, our character, our integrity. If you want to get a glimpse into who Elsa Rensaa is, look at her paintings.
Anne Ardolino
Clayton’s Lower East Side Sideshow Why do they do it? Call him? Perhaps because he comes. He’s had his ears pierced by sirens his skull cracked by the wooden dildo of an impotent police officer, his teeth broken from the bone, and both of his eyes blackened (for seeing the truth). Balancing on the tips of the toes of madmen, he’s run with them past the devil, just to get there in time. Meanwhile, take it from me, no one believes they’ll be part of this odd theater, the decision only made during the most lonely, last minute hour, when it finally occurs to them they want the tragedy documented after all, their own “syllable of recorded time” recorded. And is he an emotional pawnbroker? The jury’s still out on that one. © 2001
I started writing this poem many years ago—in fact, I keep adding to it as things happen. It was done as a protest against police brutality. In particular, I was left permanently enraged after my friend Clayton Patterson was nearly beaten to death by an out-of-control policeman. (And what was Clayton’s crime? Videotaping a fire). Meanwhile, he was not in anyone’s way, nor had he broken any laws. Apparently, this policeman was angry at Clayton over the videos he had taken of the Tompkins Square police riots. And so, this poem is dedicated to each and every ROGUE police officer who ever existed—in this or any other lifetime. Suck Death Suck Death, Bite down hard on it, Break your fucking teeth on it, Choke on it As it slides down your gullet Into your belly, Then out through your blood strings, To every part of your existence, And may tiny little droplets of it, Ooze from your pores, Making your skin Shine with the grease. SUCK DEATH YOU FUCKING PIGS.
Fuhrman the vermin, Volpe the plunger, Michael Dowd and his sleazy crowd Should not be allowed To step on the ground. We should construct giant toilets. We should have public flushings. And take that thin blue line, Sharpen it to a fine Point, And then stick it where the sun don’t shine. © 1985–?
No Room (Poem to Clayton Patterson) Some hapless creature was murdered at four this morning I heard it flash orange across the sky as the screams echoed widely over the first arch of Dawn, and I understood it was already too late. Even so, out of respect, I would have collected the bones, put flowers over the eyes, but they’d have never fit in my basket you remember the one I made for my dreams, woven from the threads of unexplainable beauty I found being neglected in the middle of night, way back in the days when I roamed free and could see in the dark and could live on my own blood. Ah, but things change, don’t they, Clayton? I need that basket myself now, for somewhere to put the mess, the one I can’t clean, since I don’t take coke anymore. Why, I haven’t even dusted my piano since the old cat died, but in my defense, it might not be unfair to ask, “How could I take a chance on tossing something he may have touched and in this way made sacred?” © 2001
Howl! Happening takes its name from the unpredictable, free-form happenings of the ’60s and ’70s, where active participation of the audience blurred the boundary between art and viewer. More to be experienced than described, Happening will curate exhibitions and stage live events that combine elements of art, poetry, music, dance, vaudeville, and theater—a cultural stew that defies easy definition. The history and culture of the East Village/LES are still unfolding. The mix of rock and roll, social justice, art and performance, community activism, gay rights and culture, fashion, and nightlife is even more relevant now. While gentrification continues apace and money is king, Howl! Happening declares itself a spontaneous autonomous zone: a place where people simultaneously experience and connect with the creative community. As the father of the Happening, Alan Kaprow, declared: “The line between art and life should be kept as fluid and indistinct as possible.”
HOWL! COMMUNITY Arturo Vega Foundation Lalo Quiñones Jane Friedman Donovan Welsh BG Hacker BOARD OF ADVISORS Curt Hoppe Marc H. Miller Dan Cameron Carlo McCormick James Rubio Anthony Cardillo Debora Tripodi Lisa Brownlee
Howl! Board of Directors Bob Perl, President Bob Holman, Vice President BG Hacker, Treasurer Nathaniel Siegel, Secretary Brian (Hattie Hathaway) Butterick Riki Colon Jane Friedman Chi Chi Valenti Marguerite Van Cook, President Emeritus Gallery Director: Ted Riederer Program Director: Carter Edwards Creative Consultant: Susan Martin Archive Manager: Mikhail Torich © 2015 Howl Arts, Inc. Howl! Archive Publishing Editions (Howl! A/P/E) Volume 1, No. 3
Clayton Patterson, Outside In Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project June 19–August 14, 2015 ISBN: 978-0-9961917-2-2 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of Howl! A/P/E. Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project 6 East 1st St. New York, New York 10003 www.HowlArts.org 917 475 1294 All photography © Jason Wyche except pages 6–7 which appears courtesy the Studio of Ai Weiwei © Ai Weiwei. 7 Letter Words © Clayton Patterson, Pictograms made from the letters in the name “Clayton.” By the artist. All artwork depicted in this catalog remains the property of Clayton Patterson and Elsa Rensaa. Essays © Ai Weiwei, © John Strausbaugh, © Wes Wood, © Daniel B. Levin, © Jose “Cochise” Quiles, © Jochen Auer, © Agathe Snow, © Troy Patterson, © Andrew Weiner, © Alan Kaufman, © Siki Im, © David Terra, © Rivington Starchild, © Clayton Patterson, © Anne Ardolino.
Editor: Ted Riederer Copy Editor: Mike DeCapite Design: Jeff Streeper, Modern IDENTITY
The Arturo Vega Project: Jane Friedman, Director
Howl! Happening An Arturo Vega Project www.HowlArts.org info@HowlArts.org
HOWL! ARTS INC. ARCHIVE PUBLISHING EDITIONS NYC