Artists and Anarchy in NYC: The Forlorn Future of Living in the City

In 1991, nine days after they concluded their deliberations, a jury of Daniel Rakowitz’ peers determined that he, a part-time cook and “professional marijuana-guru” living in Manhattan’s East Village, was mentally ill and thus was not accountable for the slaying of Monika Beerle. They also exonerated him for supposedly dismembering her body parts, cooking those body parts into soup that he served to the homeless, and for leaving her bleached skull in a bucket of kitty litter at the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Today the story has been mythicized, often extrapolated beyond belief. “Yeah, I tasted the soup,” a homeless man once claimed to me, “and I liked it too.” At the time, however, the event marked what was for many the culmination of the violence and depravity that had plagued Manhattan’s Lower East Side for years.

Today’s New York, of course, is nothing like it was 30—or even 15—years ago. For one, Rakowitz simply couldn’t afford to live in his old neighborhood in 2008. Furthermore, the old culture and climate of downtown Manhattan doesn’t exist anymore.

Artist Dash Snow’s 2005 installation, “This Was Your Life,” takes the events of Rakowitz’s life as inspiration and tries to recreate the East Village of yesteryear. The piece is an amalgamated portrait of junkie life: a cheap leather couch held up on cinder blocks, a fake plastic tree, snakeskin boots, and a framed news clipping detailing the aforementioned events.

The Saatchi Gallery now features this installation (along with other works by Snow) and calls it “a portrait of a monster as a sad, pathetic, ridiculous cliché.”

I’m not so sure of the extent to which Snow is conscious of these clichés. Perhaps that’s because Snow has assumed a lifestyle that’s not far off from Rakowitz’ (except for the homicide bit). In recent years, Snow has gained notoriety for being as elusive as he is shocking. He doesn’t have a cell phone or a computer, has purposely impaled his doorbell with a screwdriver so as not to be bothered, and uses a periscope perched on his window to verify the identities of those who knock. He is perhaps best known as either the subject or photographer of illicit acts. Almost one full year ago I visited one of his new installations, made with Dan Colen, at a gallery in my neighborhood. “Nest” was an adaptation of the “hamster nests” that the two artists had previously created privately in hotel rooms. Over three days, Snow shredded 2,000 phonebooks in a large room that was then torn apart. Paint poles were stuck into the walls, bottles into the sheetrock, and bodily fluids were spread everywhere in between.

A press release for the show states, “The artists themselves are not interested in the destruction that lies in their wake per-se, but seek rather a total freedom of expression, and an expression of the relationship with each other and members of their community.” When considered from this perspective, their work doesn’t seem quite as heedless. Artists making art indistinct from the ways in which they live their lives certainly has precedence, most notably in Nan Goldin and her documentation of the chemical highs and lows of her uninhibited friends in pre-AIDS New York.

Much of the reason that Goldin’s work has been elevated to the level it currently occupies, however, is the cultural relevance of her subject matter. Her pictures tenderly tell the story of the pained collapse of the demimonde she inhabited. One by one, the subjects of her photographs overdosed or died of a disease that people then knew little about. They demonstrated a calculus that today is commonly understood—that makes for E! True Hollywood Stories, not gallery exhibitions—one which draws a correlation between reckless youth and a forlorn future.

That said, shocking art on the whole is not as shocking as it was thirty years ago, for the simple reason that the means of communicating one’s story to the masses have been democratized—perhaps even bastardized in the case of social-networking and video-sharing websites. At any rate, it suffices to say that Snow’s work is not as relevant as Goldin’s was in her time.

History, as it is wont to do, has repeated itself. In an interview for an exhibit of his photos at Austrian museum the Kunsthalle Wien, Snow’s contemporary and friend, Ryan McGinley, places the recurrence of these contemporary art themes into context. “When you live in downtown Manhattan each generation of kids that are involved in that culture seem to be all doing the same thing. When I first moved to New York I never wanted to leave. I think I might have left the city once over a period of seven years. All I wanted to do was stay out late and roam the streets of New York.”

Due in great part to these photos, McGinley received a 2007 ICP Infinity Award, and—at 24—became the youngest photographer to have a solo show at the Whitney Museum.

But then he left New York. And he cast a group of young beautiful people to help him make his new road-trip project, “I Know Where the Summer Goes.” They’re not models, but they might as well be. This new work leaves behind documentary photography for a style that is at once organic and fictional. For the project, which just showed at Team Gallery, McGinley designed a careful itinerary for his subjects that structured their cross-country drive. The result is a body of work that maintains the casualness of his previous photos and his preoccupation with youth culture, but forgoes many of the clichés that those at the Saatchi Gallery claim Dash Snow to have portrayed. McGinley has poeticized youth using a new vocabulary.

As we approach the 2008 ICP Infinity Awards this summer—as well as the one-year anniversary of my finding questionably-stained phonebook bits in the cuffs of my jeans after leaving “Nest”—I think of these things. I look forward to more artists extricating themselves from the futile pursuit an anachronistic lifestyle—or, rather, I hope people learn to get out of New York more often.

—Columnist Ruben L. Davis can be reached atrldavis@fas.harvard.edu.