Circle Game, 1969 Gallery, New York, NY
June 21 - July 28, 2019
“When Martin Marafioti (aka Anthony Malone) visits my studio, he brings all the issues he’s made thus far of his For Everard zine, and stories of the arduous routes he’s taken to make them. He has consulted with research librarians
of a college to help him access archives and yearbooks; he has visited the gravesites and childhood homes of the deceased. Many times, he has left a request for identification and information on a public Facebook account and waited several months sometimes for someone to respond.
He finds scant sentences in peripheral people’s biographies, allowing the dead to come slowly into focus. He works by way of chain of context clues and blind hunches, as the history The Everard bathhouse fire requires. Many visitors of the baths would sign in with a fake name, or a friend’s name. Newspapers initially reported varying numbers of casualties, incorrect (and misspelled) names, and ill-researched information about the victims. And within this obstructed history, Martin is making memorials for each of the nine who died decades ago, each its own half-letter folded zine.
Since last fall, I’ve been working with and around imagery from the 1977 bathhouse fire, and periodically meeting with Martin to discuss his project, especially the challenges and pitfalls of working with images of a tragedy decades old. His final zines are space made for the dead, to honor them, to ensure that they are remembered in a meaningful, albeit humble way. Friends and family members weigh in on how the person would have wanted their zine to be laid out visually, allowing collaboration to enter the process.
Generally, my paintings involve imagery sourced from queer photo archives, Pompeii tiles, gay Tumblr (R.I.P.), snapshots of my partner, hagiographic icons, ... Taking a step back, within this grouping of seemingly disparate interests, there is a common thread of a desire for and a negotiation of safety.
There is a queer inflection to this negotiation and the Everard fire can be used as an encapsulation. The Everard was a gay bathhouse on 28th and Broadway. By the time Koch closed it down in the ‘80s, the baths had been operating for almost a century, and rebuilt from two fires. Somewhere in the 1910s or ‘20s, it shifted to becoming a primarily homosexual venue.
The fire that killed nine was exasperated by the fact that the windows to the Everard were boarded shut, both to make the space as dark as possible during the day and (I’m projecting) to keep the eyes of the straight world out. Nothing in the bath was up to code; in fact the owner at the time of the fire had received an extension from the city, past the original deadline, for upgrading the facilities. Like any underground gay space of the time, it’s been claimed to have been run by the mob with heavy police involvement.
This balancing of and subjection to danger in pursuance of a safe space is the contradiction I’m exploring within my paintings, whether this is shown in a cruising scene or in work dealing with the treatment and recovery of my partner’s cancer. Figures often protect each other, some sleep. Often the figures are moving from one state or condition to another. There is an ambiguity to both the space and the tone of the work. ‘Tender’ is an apt word, for both of its definitions: intimacy and pain.
. . .
I was lucky enough to recieve a studio visit with queer theorist Jaspir Puar at the end of last year. I gave her one of the For Everard zines and she told me to read Venus in Two Acts by Saidiya Hartman, and drew connections to the concepts of speculative fiction. We spoke about Tourmaline’s film work. Tourmaline and Sacha Wortzel’s Happy Birthday Marsha! is exuberant, filled with a fantastical joy in the face of state violence. The short film enacts a fable-like telling of the crescendo leading to the Stonewall riots, focusing on Marsha P. Johnson’s vitality. During a Q&A at BAM, Tourmaline described the decision to stray from definitive historical fact, in favor of fiction, as a political one. She argued that queer people, especially black trans women, are constantly forced to prove their existence, to nail it down with historical ‘proof’ after ‘proof’, none of which are ever sufficient. They aren’t allowed to mythologize their history in the way dominant culture does.
Martin himself works under the pseudonym, Anthony Malone. The name is taken from a character in Andrew Holleran’s (another pseudonym) book, Dancer from the Dance. The protagonist’s mysterious disappearance late in the book is worrisome as he was last seen going to the Everard the night of the fire. This fuzziness of not knowing if someone you knew died in the tragedy is not fictional. On our most recent visit, Martin showed me the mock-up of his
zine dedicated to one of the Everard victims, Brian Duffy. Brian was my age, 30, when he died in the fire. He was visiting New York from Boston. A friend who covered his restaurant shift suspected he might have been heading to the Everard that night, and when he learned of the fire, worried that Brian was among the dead. When his fears were confirmed, he and other friends broke the news to Brian’s partner. Martin has been in contact with Brian’s sister. Brian
had enrolled in, but did not attend, Pratt Institute. His sister means to send some images of his artwork if she can find them.
A black and white picture Martin took of Brain’s gravestone shows, in its top-right corner, a flowering plant he placed there on his visit. Two of the flowers seem to mirror each other like the flowers carved into the stone.
. . .
In 2015, Marcelo Yáñez was organizing the closet of Danny Fields, a famous music publicist and writer of the ‘60s through the ‘80s, whose recently acquired papers needed to be transported to Yale. There on the floor, yellowed and brittle was a newsprint tabloid carrying the self-evident name “Newspaper.” He began a deep dive that would lead to him becoming the expert on an obscured project. Steve Lawrence and Peter Hujar started the project in 1969, eventually publishing nine issues with one spin-off. Some eBay listings and a blog post were all Yáñez could initially find. Candy Darling pixelated in repose over a spread. Little was even known about Lawrence, exemplified here:
“NEWSPAPER AND THE PICTURE NEWSPAPER. THESE AMAZING PAPERS WERE PUBLISHED BY STEVE LAWRENCE OF WHOM SO LITTLE IS KNOWN OR RECORDED ONLINE THAT THIS NEXT SENTENCE MAY WELL BE THE SUM OF IT ALL... HE WAS TALL AND HANDSOME, WORKED AS AN ART DIRECTOR FOR RECORD LABELS, WAS A FRIEND AND A ONE TIME LOVER OF PETER HUJAR, AND HE DIED IN THE 80s*. AND HE WAS BRILLIANT!”
As Marcelo delved into the history of the project, he simultaneously started a new volume, curating new issues of Newspaper with contemporary artists. The hybrid became a living, malleable research project. As he expanded the pool featured in the new publication, more and more people approached him with early issues and information. Marcelo mounted shows of the featured artists in New York and Athens, Georgia. He began to meet friends of Lawrence and piece together the puzzle. The Peter Hujar archives actually learn about Newspaper in part due to Marcelo’s research.
This past summer Marcelo and his boyfriend, Michael, came to my studio. They were shooting a roll of Super 8 film on a camera they had luckily found that morning on the street, deciding they needed to finish it on the same day as the discovery. Every now and then I’d hear the stutter of that antiquated camera, recording the visual but not the sound of our visit. I was working through archival photographs then, held at the LGBT Center. I spent hours looking at and taking quick cellphone photos of the images found in boxes stored in the archives. Later, I would spend more time looking and looking at what I had saved, sometimes translating moments into a painting. One of the pieces that I made had its dominant scene comprising of a group of people sleeping with scattered individuals keeping watch. Mimicking the sleepers, I painted fragments of ‘dead’ profiles of activists performing a die-in floating above the main scene. Marcelo helped me to put feelings into words and to understand a connection between Sentinel Theory and working with this queer archive. The urge to protect and continue a legacy. The fear of something being lost acting as an impetus to create. I called the painting The Gate, highlighting the structure intruding from the top and pointing to a desire to protect the figures rendered beneath.
. . .
Recently, I’ve begun working for the painter Billy Sullivan. During one of our first meetings, I brought him an issue of Newspaper and talked about the project and Marcelo. He remembered the first edition of the magazine, and how it became too glossy in later issues. He told me stories about Hujar and Wojnarowicz. When Lawrence came up, Billy lit up. He had been friends with this figure who online can be summed up in vague sentences, some only naming his profession.”
Photography: 1969 Gallery
trio, 2019
Oil on canvas
48 x 50 inches
circle game, 2019
Oil on canvas
50 x 48 inches
doorway, 2019
Oil on canvas
48 x 24 inches
day and night, 2019
Acrylic and oil on canvas
30 x 22 inches
gay angels, 2019
oil on canvas
47 x 47 inches