Gail Thacker Fugitive Moments Howl Happening: An Arturo Vega Project
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 the art and the viewer. More to be experienced than described, Howl! 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. For more than a decade, Howl! Festival has been an annual community event—a free summer happening in and around Tompkins Square Park, dedicated to celebrating the past and future of contemporary culture in the East Village and the Lower East Side. The history and contemporary culture of the East Village are still being written. The mix of rock and roll, social justice, art and performance, community activism, gay rights and culture, immigrants, fashion, and nightlife are 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 become the work of art. As Alan Kaprow, the “father” of the happening, said: “The line between art and life should be kept as fluid and indistinct as possible.”
Gail Thacker Fugitive Moments
In cooperation with Daniel Cooney Fine Art Published on the occasion of the exhibition January 9–February 6, 2019 Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project Howl! A/P/E Volume 1, No. 28
G’night Sleep Tight Don’t Let the Bed Bugs Bite, 1995 Chromogenic print, 23› x 19fl inches
Summoning Spirits: An Interview with Gail Thacker Jane Ursula Harris To keep up even a worthwhile tradition means vitiating the idea behind it which must necessarily be in a constant state of evolution: it is mad to try to express new feelings in a “mummified” form. —Alfred Jarry We live in an era where the instantaneity of digital photography encourages us to take and retake pictures, deleting our “mistakes” and all their aberrant potential in the process. In Camera Lucida (1980), Roland Barthes famously called these accidents the “punctum” of a photographic image, or “that which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me),” setting up a dialectic between the contingency of their allure and the photographer’s aesthetic and narrative intent, or “studium.” While such analog concepts may seem outdated these days, Gail Thacker’s inimitable photographic practice reminds us of their experiential and ontological value, summoning the accident, in particular, like a shaman summons spirits. It’s notable that Thacker came of age artistically and culturally at a time when the publication of Barthes’ book coincided with her participation in what was later deemed The Boston School—the group of snapshot-based photographers, led by Nan Goldin, who in the 1980s helped upend notions of fine art photography. Yet from the start, Thacker’s approach to her chosen medium was that of a painter. Through alchemical and time-based interventions, the intimate portraits she created of friends and lovers, first in Boston and then in New York, presciently reflected this through their surface manipulations and narrative staging. Using a Polaroid Pack camera and 665 Positive/Negative film, which she actively exposed to methods of decay and erosion, Thacker’s early formal experiments sought the latent slippages between fact and fiction, life and death, and the physical and temporal nature of her medium. In recent work, Thacker’s commitment to documenting her community of fellow artists—many of them performers she’s collaborated with for decades—remains steadfast as does her penchant for experimentation. You’ve talked about the essential role of the pataphysical— this notion that there are no universals, and that all solutions are JUH:
imaginary and so equivalent—one as good as the next. I see its presence in the absurdist, entropic, post-utopian, and melancholic threads that run throughout your work. But I wonder how it plays out for you both in your work and its process? Let me start with Alfred Jarry and the influence of his philosophy called pataphysics…the science of imaginary solutions. It examines the particular instead of the general. Defying definition, all points of view are considered. As a pataphysician, all creation starts with the curious. Polaroid’s 665 Positive/Negative film allows me the freedom to explore, and look for what I consider to be hidden jewels—what most people think of as a mistake and is often overlooked. This philosophy changed my approach to photography and my attitude towards art. The unintentional becomes the very content. GT:
JUH:
How so?
Typically I wrap my negatives in plastic after a photo shoot and put them in a warm, dark environment. The materials naturally follow the second law of thermodynamics, inviting entropy and disorder to create an uncontrollable outcome. Each negative becomes unique, as well as the resulting Polaroid, which in itself becomes an art object. The result is a tension between a celebration of life, art, and beauty via the subject matter, and the negative’s reminder of life’s inevitable decay and impermanence. GT:
And there’s a willingness, maybe even a reckless one, to court the unexpected and unintended consequences of the unwashed negative. That involves a degree of trust in the process and also a yielding to it. How does this allegiance to the mutability of your medium reflect your relationship to death (you lost many loved ones to the AIDS epidemic) and the uncertainty of life? JUH:
Life is reckless, therefore uncertain. These accidental occurrences represent the risks we take and the shadow of death that looms around us all. My process is almost a battle against time, a way to bring joy into the darkness I’ve found myself enveloped in—both because of my personal experience with the AIDS crisis and addiction, and the aging and death of friends and colleagues. The negative’s reaction to these conditions reminds me of time and all the veiled things I cannot stop. The longer they sat, the more severe GT:
the negatives reacted to the decay process. Should I allow the possible destruction of an important image? Of course I should! My life was all about the risk. It always has been. The damage, decay, beauty, and renewal. How does the current work reflect similar aims while also advancing them? I’m thinking of the different ways of making these images vis-à-vis the manipulations before and after printing. . GT: Yes, similar aims. Except now I am now pushing away from the subjective, as the painting and abstract elements I am adding enhance the dialogue between surface and subject. The dance of life and death intrinsic to the process continues, but the Polaroids themselves remain living things, and they are indeed dying. I am feeling my way towards drawing and painting, by almost feeding these images a life force to beautify and decorate their rapid decline. The C-prints will survive, but the Polaroids—I’m not sure they will last a thousand years. There are two separate components: the positive image and the negative of the images. They both take a separate and similar journey. The actual Polaroid is more fragile. Light will cause the Polaroid to fade, but as it fades, blacks become gold and whites pull apart into shadows. JUH:
Collaboration is an essential part of your process. How do you choose your subjects, and how do they influence the final portrait? JUH:
I photograph other artists, so often there is a cross-pollination of energy as someone shares their essence with me. This moment is what I call collaboration. It is not a structured environment where the subject decides on the direction of the actual photo. It is something more. It is a sacrifice of self when they allow me to enter that private space where the soul lies. I look for that, and this is why I photograph people I am close with: those who can let their guard down and allow me in. I need that person to share with me their life force, that which makes them whole. GT:
Many of these people are performers, so there is a theatrical flavor to a lot of my work. After I click the shutter, the next phase of the creative dance can take place. This area is more personal…where I am alone in my studio or darkroom, and there I collaborate with the mother of invention…time. I carefully cultivate the effects time has
on the basic elements that construct the Polaroid. As time passes, the meaning and “truth” of the portrait can emerge and change. Sweeps of emulsion paint the surface of the photograph, and after that my paintbrush interacts with the photo’s decomposition. At this point, the memory inscribed in the image becomes reimagined; the moment captured in the portrait transforms itself into something else. Photography as we know it is seen as proxy for a memory, but in my process this notion is destabilized as that moment becomes abstracted through a physical and entropic interpretation of time and decay. There are certain people you’ve worked with over and over again. What makes a good subject for you, or impels you to keep taking their portrait? JUH:
It is my journey and whomever is on the ride—if they will let me photograph them—I will. Rafael Sánchez is a good example. We experienced the horrible death of Mark (Morrisroe), we bonded and found a safe place together in art and creation. I call it a lifeboat during the AIDS crisis. Rafael started cross-dressing, and I always had my Polaroid camera with me. It was life happening, and it saved us emotionally. We believed in the power of play and both grew as artists because of it. GT:
Death was all around us. Young, beautiful, talented people were dying. It was like the plague, and at first there was very little help. So that “it” space for me was healing. We were saying yes: I am here, I am gender fluid, so fuck you. Rafael was like the tin soldier of freedom, prancing to the Meatpacking District to lip-synch his favorite rock ‘n’ roll songs, shining in high heels and lipstick. Such a beautiful image. Your work is associated with portraiture, but you’ve also shot landscapes and street scenes, and often create mises-en-scène that seem to reflect your work as a theater director. Is portrait photographer too narrow a definition? JUH:
Yup, too narrow of a definition. I am an artist with a camera. Basically, I am a horrible photographer. Don’t ask me to do your headshot. LOL! GT:
Scooter In Kevin’s Dress, 2018 Chromogenic print, 23› x 19fl inches
John Kelly as the Starfish, 2009 Chromogenic print, 23› x 19fl inches
Hapi as Puddlez, 2018 Chromogenic print, 23› x 19fl inches
Happy Birthday at Kelly’s, 2018 Chromogenic print, 23› x 19fl inches
Shani & Francois, The Libation Bearers, 1999 Chromogenic print, 23› x 19 inches
365*
Urban Boy, “Can I fill your cup?” The question is raised and also a glass: and through the glass light passes both ways. “Who are you?” I am the name that is a word and the word is my name. The word equals a number and that number is the one; the one that touches all the days. Aeons, half human/half book…they seek to know. When they are lost they sing: “The word is adorable!”
In 1937, the author of The Waste Land, in his introduction to Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, wrote “the few books worth introducing are exactly those which it is an impertinence to introduce.” In light of my appreciation for this riddle of introductions, I question if it is possible or reasonable (for me) to attempt a qualification for this catalog now in your hands. Nonetheless there’s a profound draw to say something about my oldest and dearest living colleague. An artist in whose hands the photographic medium is aligned with the tampering and capturing of souls—an alchemical energy exchange between her and her subjects. Yet Gail is not exactly a photographer, and these are not exactly photographs...not in the conventional sense anyway, as her pictures are more like paintings made of light. (Now we are getting somewhere.) As an oft subject/person in her work, I see Gail as an observer-activator in the world. And through this tool at her disposal—the camera—like an eye within an eye both stubborn and supple, she walks you through the looking-glass…the bellows of her rigged out Polaroid 110 Pathfinder mirror like the black box theater she runs on Bond Street. And there you are—and yes, I can say it—in a place of magic. Gail’s work emanates from this place. And she follows the light and the dark wherever it goes, wherever she sees it: from above, below, behind, and right between the eyes. I’ve witnessed this over the years from the other side of her ‘lens,’ and on more than one occasion wondered how I got into these pictures and this world which has introduced me to aspects of my own ‘being’ I would have missed otherwise. I think of Gail’s ‘camera’ and her practice as a pineal body…visceral, mystical, navigating, and experiential. Something seeing but more—receiving, responding, and marking. Entropic yet signaling. In the end, these observations are riddles of their own impertinence. I can only abide by their sincerity, and express my gratitude for the proximity to the world Gail creates in her works—and for her beautiful, dedicated spirit.
* abraxaxabraxaxabraxaxabraxax mother protect this child
Rafael Sánchez New York City, January 2019
Doug, 2018 Chromogenic print, 23› x 19fl inches
Jorge, 2018 Chromogenic print, 23› x 19 inches
Sarah, 2009 Chromogenic print, 23› x 19 inches
Colin, 2000 Chromogenic print, 23› x 19 inches
Marsha P. Johnson, 1993 Chromogenic print, 23› x 19 inches
Alice on Bike, 2005 Chromogenic print, 23› x 19 inches
Elizabeth (The Dancer), 1999 Chromogenic print, 23› x 19 inches
Dave Navarro Majestic, 2018 Chromogenic print, 23› x 19 inches
Untitled, 2009 Chromogenic print, 23› x 19 inches
Rafael Performing at Jackie 60, 1997 Chromogenic print, 23› x 19fl inches
Gail Thacker: HOMO BULLA Kelly Long I had a dream, once, as wild and as weird as the place from which Gail Thacker dispatches her Polaroid pictures. It was dark there too, but the darkness was tender, and not unsafe. There were characters I thought I knew: The Hermit, The Hanged Man, The Lovers, and Death. They were the gatekeepers of greater and lesser secrets, with unruly outlines that grew slack and began to drift before my eyes. The mythology of Gail Thacker, the artist, begins with death, and it begins with a gift. The death was that of Mark Morrisroe, the photographer whose frenetic production was cut short when he succumbed to AIDS in 1989, at the age of 30. The gift was also his: a box of Polaroid 665 Positive/Negative film, which he gave to his friend, Thacker, shortly before he died. It was through the 665 negatives that time entered the picture, like a hungry stray through an open door. After photographing, Thacker set aside the unrinsed film—for days, weeks, years—and allowed time to have its hand in the work. It settled in, it created distortions: oil slicks in shades of pastel and neon; coronas, pitting the surface of the image; a scattering of starlight; haptic fizz. In some images, the world itself seems to buckle and dislodge. It is often difficult to guess where the hand of the artist ends and time’s longer labor begins. In 1997, Thacker took a photograph of Rafael Sánchez—another artist and co-conspirator—applying makeup before a production at Jackie 60 (the Meatpacking District’s most wayward gay nightclub of the 1990s). It bears an uncanny resemblance to Joos van Cleve’s 1528 painting of Saint Jerome in His Study (or any number of 16th century Saint Jeromes, really). The priest’s inkwell and quill are doubled by Sánchez’ face paint and brushes; the Vulgate Bible on its wooden stand is matched by a tabletop mirror, from which Sánchez looks up to stare hotly into the camera’s eye. The vanitas skull to which the priest gestures is transposed upon Sánchez himself: his theatrical makeup and bull’s horns casting him somewhere between mischievous Puck and a devil, halfway done. HOMO BULLA (“man is a bubble”), the inscription hung on the back wall of the saint’s study, finds its correlate in the smattering of pinpoint dots across Sánchez’s dressing room wall and his painted face. The corruption is gentle—barely there— but it speaks. This place, this person, are time’s subjects too.
Writings on Thacker’s work have focused on their relationship to death, drawing parallels between the distortions created by time on the photograph’s surface and the human body’s inevitable decline. As Barbara P. Hitchcock remarked in an essay written upon the occasion of Thacker’s 2018 solo exhibition at Daniel Cooney Fine Art, “the decay of the Polaroid negative becomes a metaphor for our own mortality.”1 Jonathan David Katz foregrounded the work’s simultaneous incorporation and refusal of death, investing the photographs with the profound agency to “image their own dissolution,”2 while also positioning time as Thacker’s “co-author.”3 Thacker herself has claimed, about each photograph, “I manipulate it—I turn it into itself,”4 affirming both her own creative dexterity, and the work’s ongoing self-determination to become what it already is (or inevitably will be). This queering of the temporality supposed by the memento mori is not unrelated to postmodernism’s rejection of entropy and its objects,5 but it seems to have higher (or at least more human) stakes. Thacker, the friends and lovers she photographs, and time itself engage in world-building through these images, but theirs is a world that also exists before them—elsewhere, but proximate. Like death, like a dream.
Barbara P. Hitchcock, “Fugitive Moments, Consummate Memories,” Between the Sun and the Moon: Gail Thacker’s Polaroids, New York: QCC Art Gallery Press, 2017, p. 14. 1
Jonathan David Katz, “The Death of Representation and the Representation of Death,” Between the Sun and the Moon: Gail Thacker’s Polaroids, New York: QCC Art Gallery Press, 2017, p. 16. 2
3
Ibid., p. 17.
Never Apart, “Gail Thacker NYC Artist Visit,” Vimeo video, 10:20, December 4, 2018, https:// vimeo.com/304508211 4
Robert Smithson’s aversion to “energy drain” and Gordon Matta-Clark’s belief in “metamorphic potential” come to mind. 5
Judy’s Sister, When We Called Her a Name She Shot Us a Moon, 1982 Polaroid, 3≠ x 4≠ inches
Mark in His Apartment, 1989 Polaroid, 3≠ x 4≠ inches
Rafael on Break at Gowanus Canal, 2003 Polaroid, 3≠ x 4≠ inches
Snow Day Manhattan Bridge, 2008 Polaroid, 3≠ x 4≠ inches
Kenny Kenny with a Tutu, 2008 Polaroid, 3≠ x 4≠ inches
Walter, 2012 Polaroid, 3≠ x 4≠ inches
Bird with Lynelle, 2006 Polaroid, 3≠ x 4≠ inches
Pictures In Passing Carlo McCormick We live in the moment, but we dwell there in cohabitation with our memories. For all the urgency of now, there remains the deep echo of the past creeping across the present like a lingering shadow, remnant and reminder, a companionship for the solitude of being and a haunting that never quite leaves you alone. However, unless one enjoys the benefits of Proust’s memory, the past remains imperfect, a recollection that is as much about the current as the elapses, a reminiscence framed by the consciousness that it is in fact no longer there, somehow at once lost yet also recovered, the trace of what was palpably present and persistently elusive like a figment of the imagination. Art, in its material form a kind of cultural artifact, speaking to its time within the construct of history, offers an ideal negotiation of life’s perpetual convergence of tenses, the ideal noun for the verb. Whether of recent mintage or decades old vintage, somehow the photographs of Gail Thacker split the infinitive, allowing the moments she captures to slip immediately into a distance of passing and the former to seep into the immediate. Thacker’s Polaroid pictures are a theater of memory, staged and posed and then in some crucial way abandoned to the impromptu—a slip in the script, the pratfall of being. Her methodology of deferring the immediacy of the instant photo, forgoing the tasty gratification of the present for the intoxicating ripeness of that fruit left too long on the vine, allowing her negatives to ferment and stew in the amniotic juices of their chemical awakening, embraces the aging of the pictorial within the freshness of new revelation. Born of chance and in many ways determined by what she cannot truly control, they remain more incidental than accidental, purposeful but poetically open-ended in their riotous risks, a way of grasping ever so tightly by the virtue of letting go. Highly emotive, uncomfortably psychological, slippery and elusive when it comes to the task of representation, Thacker invokes her subjects in the immaterial as a conjuring, impressionistic intimate, subjective in ways that eschew the inherent realism of photography. With the emulsive freedoms she allows and the pictorial liberties she takes, it is hardly any wonder to find out she studied as a painter, that her subjects are artists and performers, or that her day job is running a theater. Does it help to know, as many of us do, the personae that populate Thacker’s photographs? Perhaps not, for most have been as unlikely and
unearthly in their life as they have in her art. But what is explicit, undeniable, and essential in her oeuvre is that these are pictures of a community, founded in the commonality of their collective otherness and bound by an ongoing dialogue that extends far beyond the collaboration in the frame. Each image certainly tells a story, enigmatic as its account may be, but together they weave a tapestry of another kind of narrative about place and time, the nature of companionship, and the frailty of attachments. Arriving in New York City in 1982 at the onset of AIDS’ rapid and ruthless assault on our culture’s body politic, Gail Thacker found a way to address not only what was there and so alive in her scene but also what was disappearing before her eyes, finding in the discovery of something so vital the shroud of loss—a manner of celebration through the lens of death, an unbound joy filled with mourning as the carnivalesque revelry circles back in a danse macabre. By emphasizing the unfixed nature of her photographs, she calls to mind the temporality of experience with a sensibility of rapturous ephemerality that contains the spiritual and psychological crisis of form and meaning within the dis-ease of a wider social and biological failure. As her images are spun from their photographic negative, the meanings they convey speak in a language of persistent positivity. Distressed, oxidized, and bereft of those quotidian details that typically situate photography in its historical moment, these are tableaux of transgression and transcendence, fashioned from the remnants of an analog medium as it ebbed and evaporated into the dematerialized flow of the digital age, suffused with a chemical alchemy and spirited by a potent magic. Excess distilled into essence, an art of obsession that lingers even as it moves on; here beauty is manifest on the margins of difference, away from the ideals into the fantasies of polymorphous identity, disavowing the normative standards to find the exceptional within the exceptions. To say these pictures are unforgettable is to acknowledge the persistence of memory that has little to do with the mimesis of photographic representation and everything to do with the melancholia of remembrance.
HOWL! COMMUNITY Arturo Vega Foundation Lalo Quiñones Jane Friedman Donovan Welsh BG Hacker BOARD OF ADVISORS Dan Cameron Curt Hoppe Carlo McCormick Marc H. Miller Maynard Monrow Lisa Brownlee James Rubio Debora Tripodi 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
Founder and Executive Director: Jane Friedman Gallery Director: Ted Riederer Director of Education Programs: Katherine Cheairs Program Coordinator: Sam O’Hana Collection Manager: Corinne Gatesmith
Gail Thacker
Fugitive Moments Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project In cooperation with Daniel Cooney Fine Art Published on the occasion of the exhibition January 9–February 6, 2019 Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project
© 2019 Howl Arts, Inc. Howl! Archive Publishing Editions (Howl! A/P/E) Volume 1, No. 28 ISBN: 978-0-9995847-8-1 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, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of Howl! A/P/E. © 2019 Jane Ursula Harris © 2019 Kelly Long © 2019 Carlo McCormick © 2019 Rafael Sánchez Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project 6 East 1st St. NY, NY 10003 www.HowlArts.org 917 475 1294 Editor: Ted Riederer Copy Editor: Jorge Clar Design: Jeff Streeper
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