James Romberger / Marguerite Van Cook / ClockWork Cros / The Nuclear Family
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, 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 on 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.”
James Romberger / Marguerite Van Cook / ClockWork Cros / The Nuclear Family
Published on the occasion of the exhibition April 7–May 1, 2016 at Howl! Happening An Arturo Vega Project Howl! A/P/E Volume 1, No. 10
Marguerite Van Cook / About our / their show James Romberger / Marguerite Van Cook / ClockWork Cros
This show presents both individual and collaborative works from a family of New York-based artists. It offers a complex interaction in which elements from the artists’ private lives flow between their works. The discourse is domestic in that it resides within their common home and also informs issues from the greater social and national/international spheres. The show explores the meaning of history, memory and personal experiences that move between a larger past and a more intimate present. What is revealed through this celebration of individual and collective expression is a subtle flow of familial dialogues, unspoken conversations and collective taste. Elements of each artist’s practice can be found in the work of the others. While each artist’s works are unique, there are happy agreements, affordances and mutual pleasures in their work. All the same, their life is never free from artistic anxieties. In part, this show explores what it means to be “happy” and how we exist within and without society. It looks at concepts of pleasure, luxury and the construction
of comfort. The constitution after all guarantees the pursuit of happiness, but perhaps not for artists who choose to comment on society. “At times we choose to collaborate, at other times we work alone, but we always work, and we are always a family.” James Romberger’s masterfully drawn, closely-observed pastels of cityscapes and remembered travels tell the extraordinary story of his interest in place and people. While Romberger is known for his critical gaze, alternately, in certain recent works he discovers sublimity in the shadows. His stunning use of light speaks to a romantic impulse that aggravates the realism of his depictions. In his still life drawings, one sees the strong traces of his familial relationships and a clever commentary on the social influences that inform home life. Marguerite Van Cook’s new work connects memory, love and anxiety as it revisits her interest in the tensions and conflicts between men and women and the complicated roles of mother and artist. She utilizes elements from home life—fabrics, wallpapers and objects that embody the domestic—to test the boundaries of motherhood and personhood, particularly addressing the maternal figure as revolutionary force: a historical understanding that has often been forgotten.. She explores the philosophies of comfort and discomfort, of pleasure and anxiety through her paintings, prints and multimedia installations. ClockWork Cros is a Surrealist clockmaker whose work with the dimensions of time and personality raises complex questions about celebrity, achievement and the face as modern totem. His work is elegant, modern and contemporary. His clocks challenge ideas about disposability, longevity and reputation. The clocks problematize the consumption of celebrity, even as the artist also includes inspirational figures such as scientist and artists—a move that reframes the question of human worth. His work for this exhibition positions itself in the space of discontent and revolution; it is both historical and current. His work is post-postmodern and flawlessly sails across media platforms and technology, while looking back to a time of the handmade, or perhaps one could say towards a future. The show affords an unusual opportunity to see a family at work.
Still Life a Conversation with Marguerite, 2016 James Romberger Pastel on paper 20 x 26 inches
Blanket Memory, 2016 Marguerite Van Cook Printed blanket 60 x 80 inches
Candleboy, 2016
Still Life w/Secret, 2016
Marguerite Van Cook Digital print on paper 23.25 x 35.25 inches
James Romberger Pastel on paper 20 x 26 inches
My Boys, 1989 Marguerite Van Cook Acrylic on denim (vest)
Marguerite Reclining, 1997 James Romberger Pastel on paper 38 x 50 inches
Gassed Up Shorty, 2016
Nice Alley, 2016
ClockWork Cros Mixed media 22 x 15 inches
James Romberger Pastel on paper 26 x 37.5 inches
Wu Tang Kings (King Method), 2015 ClockWork Cros Digital print on paper 53 x 41 inches
Wu Tang Kings (King Rae), 2015 ClockWork Cros Digital print on paper 53 x 41 inches
Secret of Antonella, 2016
Mama, 2016
Marguerite Van Cook Digital print on paper from video still 40 x 20 inches
Marguerite Van Cook Mixed media 10 x 14 inches
Cocktail 2 Us, 2016
Lustre Cherub, 2016
Marguerite Van Cook and ClockWork Cros Mixed media 12 x 6 x 6 inches
Marguerite Van Cook Digital print on paper 43 x 41 inches
Collapsed Roof, 1995
Melting Salvador Dali, 2016
James Romberger Pastel on paper 38 x 50 inches
ClockWork Cros Mixed media 8 x 16 inches
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The Late Child and Other Animals, 2015 Marguerite Van Cook and James Romberger Watercolor on xerox 11 x 17 inches
Revolution Wallpaper, 2016
Grandmamas 1, 2016
Marguerite Van Cook Detail of printed wallpaper 8 x 9 inches
Marguerite Van Cook and ClockWork Cros Digital print 48 x 68 inches
Basketball Boy, 2001 Marguerite Van Cook Oil on wood 18 x 24 inches
Family Group, 2016 Marguerite Van Cook Ink on aluminium sheet 20 x 24 inches
Nicole Rudick / Nuclear Family
Marguerite Van Cook and James Romberger came of age artistically in the 80s, in New York’s East Village. Their views of the city, of artmaking, and of family crystallized amid a freewheeling artistic community galvanized by a sense of collaboration and steeped in unfettered, socially engaged experimentation. This environment set the trajectory of their work for the next three decades. Both Romberger and Van Cook arrived in the East Village in the early 80s and met soon after. In the first half of the decade, Romberger made comics for Seth Tobocman’s political anthology World War 3
Illustrated and composed pastel drawings of a neighborhood he initially found “frightening, chaotic and alien”—scenes of ghetto palms rising from tarred rooftops and of junkies searching garbage for found treasures on Fifth Street. The layered environments of Van Cook’s films, performances, and paintings from this period refer back to her cerebral art school studies of structuralist film and semiotics, which had been filtered through the physicality of playing in the punk band The Innocents after university. Together, Van Cook and Romberger produced Ground Zero, a science-fiction comic strip set on the streets of New York that ran in the East Village Eye, and in the mid 80s embarked on a project with David Wojnarowicz, a gritty autobiographical comic book published in 1996 as 7 Miles a Second. The galleries in the East Village (a mix of dealer- and artist-run spaces) positioned themselves as distinctly “anti-SoHo” and tended toward group exhibitions over solo shows; many chose names that reflected this aesthetic and political stance, among them Nature Morte, Fun Gallery, and Civilian Warfare. Van Cook and Romberger opened their own gallery, Ground Zero, in 1984, and hosted an array of group shows and projects by artists such as Wojnarowicz, Martin Wong, Calvin Reid, Richard Kern, Peggy Cyphers, and Mike Osterhout. “We do and show what we like,” the couple told The New York Times in 1985. “When we can’t do that anymore, we’ll go on to do something else.” After the gallery closed in 1986, Romberger and Van Cook went on to do much else: painting, drawing, films and comics as well as sculpture, collage and photography, both individually and in collaboration with each other. Their son Crosby was born in 1985, and by his early teens he had joined the family business of making art out of life. Though the East Village art scene soon fell apart, a victim of gentrification, incursions from the high-end art world, and the ravages of AIDS, its participatory spirit took root in Van Cook and Romberger’s familial approach to artmaking. It’s possible to parse the different strands of their work—for instance, Van Cook’s themes of reflection, doubling, and transience; Romberger’s engrossing, sensitive views of the contemporary city; or Crosby’s fascination with the intersection of temporality, identity, and celebrity culture—yet much is gained by considering it collectively. Their art engages with different aspects of the personal, social and political, and yet because their identities
were partly shaped within the family circle, their concerns appear in various guises in one another’s art. This may be nowhere more evident than in Crosby’s work, which frequently draws on the hip-hop and graffiti culture that was born in New York in the 80s. His series of clocks that feature “melted” human faces seem apocalyptic and demarcate a kind of cruel transience that could easily refer back to the decimation by AIDS of his parents’ East Village cohorts, particularly Wojnarowicz, who took the infant Crosby out for walks in his stroller. Romberger and Van Cook have shown the influence of family more literally: portraits of Van Cook appear throughout Romberger’s work, and Crosby is the subject of numerous paintings by Van Cook, in works that span his life. What’s more, Romberger’s more recent pastels incorporate visual elements from Van Cook’s and Crosby’s work: turns toward abstraction, for instance, or simply the hands of a clock. Van Cook, for her part, circles around notions of motherhood—in history, as subjects of art, as lived experience—and weaves domestic elements such as sewing, fabric, and wallpaper into her constructions. Overlapping interests come to the fore, too, in the work they make together. Post York is a father-son venture: a comic book, published in 2013, by Romberger that includes a flexi disc containing a song by Crosby. Both story and song are set in a post-flood New York City, an apocalyptic wasteland through which a solitary young man must make his way. The comic’s character is based on Crosby, but it could easily have been a variant of Wojnarowicz’s struggles as chronicled in 7 Miles a Second, an account of his youth spent hustling in the city’s less friendly quarters. But in its multigenerational construction, Post York also reflects The Late Child and Other Animals, Van Cook’s 2015 memoir, created with Romberger, of her mother’s survival in Britain during World War II and of her own youth, as a child born out of wedlock. Van Cook has described feeling an abiding urge to “construct rather than to deconstruct…to make something rather than nothing.” Romberger expresses a corresponding impulse in the preface to Post York, where he writes that the book is in part for Crosby, “who must deal with the world that I am leaving him.”
Melting Andy Warhol, 2016 ClockWork Cros Mixed media 8 x 15 inches
Two Knockouts installation, 2014 ClockWork Cros Mixed media
Heavenly Vices, 2005 Marguerite Van Cook
Your Face Here, 2016
Forgive Me, 2006
ClockWork Cros Mixed media 48 x 72 inches
ClockWork Cros Alarm clock, wax, rope, clothed wire, electrical tape 16 x 7 x 7 inches
Carlo McCormick / Then as Now
Long before that September aggression took down the ugly towers, formally ushereing in the terror of a new millennium, and having the unfortunate effect of having America decide that it actually loves New York City, there was an earlier ground zero in town. One could suppose with our predisposition for violence and war, as well as our ever-escalating accumulation of armaments and appetite for atrocity, there have been many ground zeros, with likely more to come. Ground zero marks the spot of impact, a place where things began or came to an end, and while it is more easily imagined as a bomb-like crater in the ground, it can also be a modest hole in the wall coffeehouse or bar where new ideas and strategies of an equally explosive nature are hatched. For my generation our Ground Zero was a gallery by that name on the north side of Tomkins Square Park in the East Village. Much was born there, and in full honesty just as much came to an untimely end there, murdered in the massacre of creativity. Regardless of the endless malapropisms of George W. Bush, that president who got us into two wars in a frenzy of fear without ever quite being able to pronounce the word nuclear, it is wonderfully the very same word that describes our most unthinkable of weapons
as our most basic of social units. And somehow when I think of the Van Cook-Rombergers these terms converge for me into the nuclear bomb family. Or is that the nuclear family bomb? This then is a story from that time before, when most Americans quite rightly loathed New York, and the feeling was reciprocal. And because it just so happens to be the easiest way to weave time into an epic narrative, it is the story of a family that lived before and after the invasion of normalcy in New York City. Maybe not quite the stuff of those sprawling multigenerational sagas that become bestseller books and blockbuster movies, it is perhaps something of the sidewalk stoop reminiscences by which the memories of a neighborhood are passed down to weave a more solid identity of place against the urban onslaught of change. Ground Zero’s brief and brilliant lifespan occurred within the equally short-lived heyday of the East Village art scene. Part of an impossibly unsustainable overgrowth, the gallery James Romberger and Marguerite Van Cook launched was more rooted by their tenure in the neighborhood, something more like the thorny undergrowth that could not be so easily cleared away by the commerce paths of the art market. Their gallery was part of a spectacular flowering, but one too fecund to last, a time like the overripeness of late summer evenings redolent of decay and almost wistful in its abiding sense of mortality. No doubt Marguerite and James might see it quite differently, but their whole project seemed reactive to the populist, commercial, touristic and kitsch tendencies within the scene. It was anything but friendly in that way. It was hardcore, the sum of all our antisocial aspects exponentially magnified by the community of our collective discontent. It’s hard to fathom what exactly the mandate of Ground Zero might have been, though I suspect if you asked James and Marguerite back then they would have said it was just about showing their friends and the art they believe in. Surely there couldn’t have been much of a business plan as the art was the most difficult work of that time in just about every way imaginable, but if we would ascribe a single aesthetic to the art, then the absolute negation of ground zero would be as apt descriptor as any. Yes, the gallery was largely an experimental laboratory for the work of its artist-owners, but what
they allowed there was often beyond the pale. Mike Osterhout, one the scene’s most irascible conceptual artists, created an ominous and uninviting installation called “Hell” that consisted of covering the walls with red satin drapes and the floor with gravel from which emerged a single propane-fueled flame. Even more outré was the collaboration between Richard Kern and David Wojnarowicz that featured Kern’s gory and gruesome film You Killed Me First amidst an equally ghastly and grizzly installation by Wojnarowicz that recreated the dining room/abattoir of the film’s family slaughter with gut-wrenching fidelity. You Killed Me First was the story of the ultimate in dysfunctional family dinners, starring Wojnarowicz as the emotionally remote dad, Karen Finley (who I remember telling me in this time that the only reason to go home for the holidays was for more “material” for her trauma-informed performance art) as the shrill mom, and Lung Leg as the abused and misunderstood daughter who screams the films title as she finally slaughters her family. And it’s hard not to laugh about this now as the kind of living room drama that might play out in the lives of this family of James, Marguerite and Crosby. This was the kind of ‘home-movie’ that played well in our demimonde of bohemian transgression. There are other memories I might associate with Ground Zero and this most atypical family, all so vague as to be highly doubtable today. I remember some LSD shows, and even taking this family with me on a show I curated down in Richmond, Virginia around then where all the artists were given a nice dose of acid and let loose to wreak havoc on the gallery. It was in all a spectacular explosion of id over the boundaries of ego, but while all the other artists sprawled their madness all over the walls, James and Marguerite took a more modest space in the midst of it all, fuming with whatever anger was fueling them that day, creating an otherworldly little smudge of minuscule drawings and tiny texts which we all presumed constituted some sort of horrific fight/bad trip the two happened to be having never so much uttered as allowed a given form in a smear of amorphous confusion. They say it takes a village to raise a child, and indeed if some of these stories make you think of the need for child services please know that, however unorthodox as it must have appeared, Crosby was loved and looked after by many. Nothing about the whole family,
child-rearing thing could have been easy for any of them, not that it ever really is, but the neighborhood wasn’t exactly child-friendly back then. Heterosexuality wasn’t quite the norm, serious coupling suspect of bourgeois sensibilities, and people with children dismissed as breeders. The few playgrounds the neighborhood had were more frequented by junkies shooting up than toddlers actually playing, and while everything about this lawless zone seemed so well suited to our radical childishness, little of it would seem safe or sane for an actual child. And when it came time for that soul-crushing homogenizing process we call schooling, they were the very first enrollees in a new kind of school here that would try to reflect our community’s social enlightenment rather than its economic impoverishment. Many years later my kid would go to that same school, now quite a hard place to get into, as would even the child of our neighbor and You Killed Me First auteur Richard Kern. Perhaps in all that we’ve learned from the art Marguerite and James have made and shown over the years we’ve also learned so much more about what to do (and, by worst example, not to do) in terms of raising a kid in the city and in a way that reflects our values without unduly scarring them. Even though they live in spitting distance from my place, I don’t see James or Marguerite all that often these days. I do however see Crosby with some frequency, he’s a super cool kid making amazing shit and hitting the scene with an intensity and integrity you just can’t fake. Sometimes, when I squint I can see both his parents, still fighting and making love within him. And sure, in those times I see how he’s just as crazy and full of crap as we were, but by any measure I know of, he came out great. All our lives have gone on since that misspent youth, and for many that did involve having families that were biological and lifelong in ways that were both decidedly different from and yet profoundly inspired by that communal family we all cobbled together out of our mutual discontent those many decades ago now. Few of us however ever had this dysfunctional conversation that is a family in so public a way, or shared so generously the gift and curse of the nuclear family with everyone around us. That they continue to be a family in their amazingly weird way, and that they can now share this conversation as a body of collaborative work made between them, is something like that impossible gift that just keeps on giving.
Crosby Katzenjammer, 1993
Melusine, 2015
Marguerite Van Cook Acrylic on canvas 48 x 48 inches
James Romberger and Marguerite Van Cook Watercolor on xerox 12 x 17 inches
Post York, 2012 Crosby and James Romberger Ink on paper, two pages 14 x 20 inches
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FRONT AND BACK COVER
Not Of 9 (red wave), 2010
Sanctuary, 1988
James Romberger Ink on paper 50 x 60 inches
James Romberger and Marguerite Van Cook Acrylic on canvas 60 x 80 inches
OPPOSITE PAGE AND BACK COVER
Prosperina, 2016
INSIDE FRONT COVER
Marguerite Van Cook Detail of printed fabric 42 x 108 inches
Melting Clocks installation, 2014
HOWL! COMMUNITY
James Romberger / Marguerite Van Cook / ClockWork Cros / The Nuclear Family Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project April 7–May 1, 2016
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 Social Networks Manager: Michelle Halabura Videographers: Darian Brenner and Jasmine Hirst Gallery designed by Ted Kofman
ClockWork Cros Mixed media
ISBN: 978-0-9961917-9-1 © 2016 Howl Arts, Inc. Howl! Archive Publishing Editions (Howl! A/P/E) Volume 1, No. 10 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 Photos © Karen Ogle, page 5 © Michael Della Polla, page 35 Essays © 2016 Marguerite Van Cook © 2016 Nicole Rudick © 2016 Carlo McCormick Marguerite Reclining, 1997 from the collection of Ellen Marie Donahue Editor: Ted Riederer Copy Editor: Jorge Clar Design: Jeff Streeper for Modern IDENTITY
The Arturo Vega Project: Jane Friedman
Š 2016 Howl Arts, Inc. Howl! A/P/E Volume 1, No. 10 HowlArts.ORG