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Making a Scene
John Haberin New York City
Club 57 and the East Village
Duncan Hannah: Twentieth-Century Boy
For a time, artists had a cheap place to hang out. Every now and then, they might even have made art.
MoMA sure thinks so but, hey, you never know. Its show's very title, "Club 57: Film, Performance, and Art in the East Village," makes art almost an afterthought. Club 57, the museum argues, emerged from a basement to influence East Village art. Duncan Hannah, for one, had a pop-up show there, as he notes in journals from the punk scene. 
Yet he, too, had a mixed allegiance between the scene and his art. On canvas, Hannah finds himself caught between England and America, Modernism and pleasure.
Shattered
Maybe museums these days are just desperate for the vitality of the 1970s, but they have a point: the avant-garde had lost its authority, but only because so much else had thrust it aside. If Modernism was losing momentum, it is because it was making not too few but too many scenes. A return to Club 57 unfolds not in a gallery, but in the lobby of MoMA's theater, where some of its products and performances play out as well. The space may never have looked so much like a theater lobby before at that, with posters more than painting. If the display looks more crowded and disorganized than the multiplex nearest you, this was a wild scene.
It might not have been your scene, but that says something, too. It opened in 1978, when the buzz from CBGB was already fading, and Modernism was breaking apart. You could have been a striver, determined to be the next Frank Stella on the rise in Soho, even if nobody was buying your beliefs or your art. You could have been asking to reinvent painting in your own image, like the Neo-Expressionism of Julian Schnabel and Robert Longo soon to come—or you could have been looking to kill it once and for all, like the "Pictures generation." You could have been partying or performing elsewhere, like Alan Vega at the Mudd club or Andy Warhol at the Factory. That dispersal still defines art, with Modernism not so much irrelevant as shattered into warring but overlapping camps.
If "anything goes" applies to art now, it applies in spades to downtown New York and to Club 57. It had a basement on St. Marks Place, where rents were dirt cheap, and the street was still the heart of the East Village rather than one souvenir stand after another. Ann Magnuson, a sometime artist, describes it as a dance hall and a watering hole as much as a gallery. Or maybe it was always a theater, with its audience as the cast. Magnuson curates this exhibition along with Ron Magliozzi and Sophie Cavoulacos of the Modern's film department. She shared direction then with Keith Haring, when he and Kenny Scharf were taking street art indoors.
Art like theirs could be fun, accessible, and way cool, at the expense of having much to say. That, though, was about to change, between the election of Ronald Reagan and the AIDS epidemic. Few are as glib as John Ahearn, with his hyperreal sculpture, but his sordid characters put a face on a city in crisis. Politics here mostly means sexual politics, if mostly through the eyes of men. The club's most prolific poster artist took the name John Sex. Others may not get any more profound, but they do get angrier and more painful.
David Wojnarowicz confronts the AIDS crisis, while Richard Hambleton, Donald Baechler, and Jean-Michel Basquiat contribute a painting apiece. None of them, though, are large, mature, or representative works (like the Basquiat from barely a year later shown here). Others stick to figures contorted or dancing. You could call the whole affair a throw-away. Yet it still helps explain what was happening to art while Mick Jagger sang "Shattered" on the radio and films played in an East Village basement. By the time the club died, in 1983, there was no looking back.
So is this art? I want to take the show seriously, despite its closing on April Fool's Day. Then, too, I am happy to leave it to passer-bys on the way to a movie in the museum. What could suit it more than another dark basement? Club 57 did not encompass art's response to AIDS or the explosions of East Village art all around it, but still the damage and success did it in. Others ever since are busy picking up the pieces of modern and postmodern art.
Scotch tape and spit
On a winter afternoon at St. Mark's Church, Duncan Hannah caught Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, and Robert Lowell, "held together with Scotch tape and spit." Hannah was not an American poet in and out of a madhouse, but he might well have said the same about himself. He calls his notebooks from the 1970s Twentieth-Century Boy, but he might just as well have called them Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'n' Roll. It may be a cliché, but it has the advantage of being true. Besides, much of them amounts to clichés broken by name after name, for a young artist with a knack for landing at the center of things. He had a good eye, though, and he somehow managed to land on his feet.
The book takes him from high school in Minneapolis into his late twenties. His teachers at Bard and then Parsons praise his talent, but slam him for not working hard and not taking the time to find himself. In practice, he was hardly working at all at first, and he was finding himself pretty much everywhere but in art. As a teen in Minneapolis, he attended more concerts and had sex with more girls than I can count. In New York, he fit in easily with emerging punk rockers and made alcohol his drug of choice. He came to realize that alcohol was consuming him as well—and he stopped hopping into bed after bed long enough to make art, to turn from collage to representation, and to fall in love.
His growth appears, too, in his prose. Hannah could pull off one-liners and lyricism, as he tells of a "nocturnal walk" on PCP, "through narrow winding streets, . . . coated with soot and sweat in the sweltering summer heat, listening to the baying hounds of bohemia." Those, though, took him time, too. A good half the book reads like one long list. It could do with a bit of Lowell's "hesitant, wobbly delivery" that February in church. One could well lose patience before getting to the decent parts.
I could well understand if you did, for he has published some four hundred fifty pages. He has edited them for grammar and edited out some of their delirium, but he has kept their division into notebooks of varying duration, along with their pasted photos and vaguely relevant titles. A diarist can write only about what he saw, which here means Television's weekly shows at CBGB and Richard Hell's stubborn incompetence on bass, but not Hell's replacement by Fred Smith and the band's incredible first record. It means snap judgments about movies, books, and bands. It means a lot of parties and a lot of names. For those with patience, though, it starts to pay off.
He managed his way past bouncers and ticket takers almost everywhere, gaining a part in underground films, questions from Andy Warhol, and advice from David Hockney on painting. He hung out with one of Television's guitarists, watched Patti Smith dancing in the aisles, and got a call-out from Smith on stage. It helped that people found him endlessly attractive—and not just women. A man's violent advances in London scared him, but in no time he was milking his appeal for free tickets and free meals. As with Rick Barton, the exposure to male desire also taught him to say no. It may have helped him to restrain himself, too—and, every now and then, return to painting.
His sheer eclecticism is payoff for hanging in there with him. His tastes run to the glam of Brian Ferry and Lou Reed—and to what, in describing the New York Dolls, he calls "power!" Yet he could appreciate Leo Kottke, Ned Rorem, and jazz, and he could call out pretension when he saw it in music or art. The ultimate payoff, though, comes in thinking through the parallel tracks of his budding self-awareness. His appearance at Club 57 and the infamous 1980 Times Square Show, along with Jenny Holzer and Kiki Smith, amounts to further name-dropping, but they are good names, and the book has a reasonably satisfying ending with Hannah's first solo exhibition. It can almost sustain, like that high on PCP, "a fine emotional haze."
Tell her no
Who will inherit England—and could it be a middle-aged American male? If the second question sounds laughable, the first was serious enough that a great critic, Lionel Trilling, took it for the subject of a great novel, E. M. Forster's Howard's End. As it happens, Hannah counts Forster as a touchstone. His paintings might well belong to Forster's England, to everywhere, and to nowhere, with an assist from the movies. Could it be enough to recover the good old days of painting? Maybe not, but it could expose their dark undercurrents. Hannah still aims for both.
If anything, he keeps growing closer to England, if not quite to Forster's 1910. He calls his recent work "Adrift in the 21st Century," but one might never know that it had set sail. Penguin classics, though not Howard's End, look thoroughly worn in his trompe l'oeil—with a cover style that I cannot swear made it to the United States. A tea shop has shut its doors, but its successor remains unclear. People loll about by sporty old cars, bike past thoroughly quaint post boxes, or punt on a lake in a suitably picturesque park. Even there, the man has not shed his tie or his companion her heels.
Their morals, too, belong to a past time, before the sexual revolution, second- or third-wave feminism, or the audacity of harassment in Donald J. Trump's America. A man and woman meet furtively at a corner. A still younger man touching an erect woman wearing only a G-string could be groping her, posing her, or confirming her suitability for art. Fashions range from the caps and furs of the age of flappers to the preposterously high hairdos of mods and rockers. One of the latter takes little pleasure in the album covers beside her on the floor. The only legible one is of the Zombies, a name that could apply to Hannah's entire cast.
His very format, easel paintings, seems only right for an amateur painter from a long-gone past. Hannah speaks of his admiration for Edward Hopper and Winslow Homer, and the gallery compares him to Fairfield Porter. Yet their sharp lighting and deep colors have given way to a soft but uneasy glow—and their particulars of cities, seas, and suburban landscapes to a restive nowhere a continent away. The sexual tensions may recall Balthus, but without his columnar forms or iconicity. The figures draw just as much on old commercial illustrations as on fine art, and they seem all the more remote and familiar because of it. Are they nearly strange enough?
One can search for clues in work from the late 1970s and 1980s. Here Hannah's nowhere lies in the movies, but also closer to home in America. A woman at a window raises her top to expose her breasts, perhaps even to you. A self-portrait looks much like James Dean on a facing wall. A text painting, interrupted by a revolver, has a cryptic narrative suggestive of film noir, but the gun need never go off. Life is dangerous enough as it is.
Hannah feels adrift even then. A graduate of art schools in New York, he assembles receipts and documents from a visit to Paris. The hastier brushwork fits with portraiture from the time, like that of Alice Neel, but with muter colors and an absence of bravura. It, too, refuses a place in the present. Can he ever quite recapture or unsettle painting, despite the stereotypes and soft focus? I want to say yes—even if the Zombies have already answered with "Tell Her No."
"Club 57" ran at The Museum of Modern Art through April 1, 2018, with additional posters at Alden Projects through February 11. Duncan Hannah ran at Invisible-Exports through December 10, 2017, and at Half through December 9. Hannah's Twentieth-Century Boy was published in 2018 by Knopf and Penguin Random House. A related review looks at East Village art.