Kenny Scharf, Keith Haring, Futura 2000. Courtesy of Barry Blinderman
The Director of Semaphore Gallery in Soho, Barry Blinderman was also a freelance writer for Arts Magazine, where he wrote very early articles on Keith Haring and Robert Longo, among others. In the fall of 1981, he curated a very popular exhibition called The Anxious Figure, reflecting the new figuration by artists like John Ahearn, Jedd Garet, Ed Paschke, Longo, Haring, and others. He speaks with NYC, 1981 about the art scene as it was happening on the streets and in the galleries, in the studios and the clubs.
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Miss Rosen: Please talk about the art scene, as it was downtown in 1981. I am very interested in the relationship between the street and the gallery, and the way in which outsider artists migrated into the mix of curators, collectors, and critics. Could you speak about how the door was opened to this new generation of artists?
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Barry Blinderman: In 1980-81, some of the most vanguard art being created in New York wasn’t on view within the white-walled sanctuaries of SoHo. At lower Manhattan nightspots such as Mudd Club or Club 57, young artists, musicians, filmmakers, poets and other performers congregated to collaborate on one- or two-evening events. I first met Keith Haring at Club 57, which occupied a church basement on St. Mark’s Place, and a few years later I met Martin Wong at Danceteria on the West Side. It was a time when you could keep up with what was going on by scanning the layers of posters that decorated walls and construction sites downtown. New Wave rock bands, many featuring art school dropouts, were exhibiting some of the most innovative artwork in the form of concert announcements. Cryptic messages by SAMO and other graffiti poets began to appear at regular intervals between the East Village and Tribeca.
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In addition to the clubs, guerrilla art spaces and organizations flourished: ABC No Rio on Rivington Street, Group Material, Colab (Collaborative Projects), and Fashion Moda in the South Bronx, organized theme exhibitions and performances that were open to virtually any artist. It was at Fashion Moda that I first saw the work of the charismatic trickster Rammellzee, the progenitor of “Iconoclast Panzerism,” and his young disciple A-1.
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The Times Square Show, organized by Colab in a former Midtown massage parlor, brought together over 100 artists. Some were art-school trained, like Jenny Holzer, Keith Haring, John Ahearn, Tom Otterness, and Jane Dickson, and others got their training on the streets and subways, such as Fab 5 Freddy, Lee Quinones, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Museums like the New Museum (Events: Fashion Moda, December 1980-January 1981) and P.S.1 (New York/ New Wave, February-April, 1981) soon followed suit with large, well-publicized exhibitions mixing the talents of “studio” artists and street artists. Graffiti artists first shown at Fashion Moda and the Times Square Show were within a year or so offered exhibitions at Fun Gallery, named by Kenny Scharf and run by Bill Stelling and underground film star Patti Astor. Fun showed Dondi, Futura 2000, Fab 5 Freddy, and many other graffiti artists, along with Haring, Basquiat, and Jane Dickson. European collectors showed up to Fun’s openings in limousines and snapped up plenty of work, and seasoned American collector Hubert Neumann, who later held a symposium on graffiti art, visited and bought there as well.
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The more established galleries soon followed suit, most notably Tony Shafrazi Gallery and Barbara Gladstone in SoHo, and Sidney Janis on 57th Street. A little later, in 1985, we showed Lady Pink at Semaphore EAST on Tompkins Square, and then Futura 2000 at Semaphore Gallery, Soho, in 1986.
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Keith Haring’s championing of graffiti artists, both through exhibitions he curated at clubs and his public acknowledgment of their influence upon his own art, was also a factor in their greater acceptance by the art world. For example, in his first exhibition at Shafrazi in 1982, he showed work he had co-created with LAll, a teenager at the time. When I watched Keith paint a frieze a few hundred feet long at P.S. 22 on the Lower East Side in the summer of 1981, I felt it was one of the most important exhibitions of the year. I still have a video of him drawing some of this monumental project with a refillable marker. On the walls below this frieze were spray-paintings by Lady Pink, Futura, Lee, Dondi, and several others.
nstallation shot of Keith Haring and Tseng Kwong Chi at Semaphore EAST, October, 1984. Photograph courtesy of Barry Blinderman.
Miss Rosen: Keith Haring is an excellent example of this confluence between public to private space. Can you speak about why you think Haring best exemplified the spirit of the times, and why his work resonated so deeply with people from all walks of life?
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Barry Blinderman: Keith Haring was, quite simply, a phenomenon, the kind of artist that comes around just once in a great while. From the very start, he was driven to share his art with as many people as possible. While a student at School of the Visual Arts in 1978-79, he opened his first-floor studio on 23rd Street to passersby as he painted huge drawings on photo backdrop paper on the floor. Performance was of the essence to him, and not long after, in December 1980, he carried this impulse into the greatest uncommissioned public art project New York had ever seen—the chalk drawings on covered-over ad spaces in subway stations.
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When I saw the very first of these: space ships looking like sombreros zapping babies, dogs, and pyramids, I was living on the Upper East Side, taking the #6 train downtown every day to my gallery in SoHo. There would be new ones every day, as others got covered up by new ads. I had no idea who was doing them, and at first thought it was some secret campaign—and in essence it was. I got hooked, traveling the subway sometimes for no other reason than to see his latest drawings.
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Here, for perhaps the first time, was sophisticated contemporary art that could be understood by anyone—much more accessible even than Warhol, whose appeal did not extend to children, minorities, and everyman straphangers. And, unlike standard graffiti, it was meant to be impermanent, ever-changing, and done right out in the open, not covertly in deserted train yards after dark. And unlike just about any other artist, he never had to show his slides to a dealer. They all came to him. It was nothing short of brilliant, and there has never been anything like it since.
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Haring’s interest in promotion began with the “crawling baby” buttons he carried with him at all times, handing them to anyone expressing interest while he was drawing in the stations. This eventually grew into the idea for the Pop Shop, which granted him access to audiences barely reached by a fine artist. You could wear a Haring tee shirt or hat, put colored magnets on your refrigerator, grab a poster. Some said he’d sold out, but these days so many artists have followed in his footsteps in the area of marketing.
Martin Wong in front of the billboard for his first show at Semaphore, 1984. Photograph courtesy of Barry Blinderman.
Miss Rosen: As a writer for Arts Magazine, you had the opportunity to speak directly with some of the most dynamic figures of the era. At the same time, as Director of Semaphore Gallery, you had the opportunity to show their work, and engage directly with the public. How did being a director and a critic inform and shape your understanding of the artists you engaged with
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Barry Blinderman: I really have to thank Richard Martin, the late editor of Arts magazine for taking a chance and opening the door for me and other young critics at the time like Dan Cameron and Peter Halley. He imposed little or no control over what I wanted to submit, and offered nothing but encouragement. One of the first reviews I published, on Warhol’s Ten Jews series at the Jewish Museum (February 1981), led to my interview with Warhol published in October 1981. Between those two articles, I got to write an essay on Robert Longo, which became his first cover story, Keith Haring’s first art magazine interview, and an interview with Roger Brown. Meeting Warhol, and being able to get responses from him about his influences and working process, was one of the most exciting encounters I’ve ever known. And that interview has made its way into an anthology of selected Warhol interviews edited by Kenneth Goldsmith.
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In the same year, 1981, I’d published the pieces on Longo and Haring, I curated my first theme exhibition at Semaphore Gallery in SoHo, called The Anxious Figure. It was one of the first exhibitions to address the new figuration appearing in the work of Jedd Garet, John Ahearn, Longo, Haring, Mike Glier, and others, mixed in with paintings by artists of the preceding generation like Alice Neel, Robert Colescott, and Peter Dean. So basically I was showing for a brief time some of the work I was writing about, getting to work with artists from different angles, and getting to know them pretty intimately. The Anxious Figure got a lot of publicity, including a feature article in the Village Voice by Peter Schjeldahl entitled “Anxiety as a Rallying Cry,” a nod to my exhibition title. As my gallery became more prominent, and we began advertising our own exhibitions in Arts, I was faced with a potential conflict of interest as someone who was both a critic and a dealer. So by the end of 1982, it was time to stop publishing in the magazine.
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At Semaphore, and later at Semaphore EAST, I began exhibiting several emerging artists on a regular basis, including Martin Wong, Tseng Kwong Chi, Duncan Hannah, Walter Robinson, Robert Colescott, Nancy Dwyer, and Mark Kostabi. I also included Donald Baechler, Joseph Nechvatal, Mimi Gross, Cara Perlman, and Jane Dickson in two- or three-person exhibitions. Annie Herron, later a pioneer in Williamsburg, became director of Semaphore EAST and organized early one-person shows for Lady Pink, Ellen Berkenblit, Felix, Lori Taschler, and Bobby G. The opening show at Semaphore EAST, by the way, in October 1984, was a two-person show with Keith Haring and Tseng Kwong Chi. Kwong Chi exhibited light boxes with color transparencies of Keith’s subway drawings in situ, and Keith had us paint the entire gallery black so he could fill every inch of the gallery with chalk drawings interacting directly with the installation of light boxes. For some reason, the show received very little critical attention, but for me it was an amazing moment. I wish we could have preserved it somehow.
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In 1987, I closed Semaphore and took the position of Director of University Galleries of Illinois State University, in Normal, Illinois, where I’ve been ever since. I’ve had the privilege of organizing large traveling exhibitions for many of the artists I worked with in New York, including Jane Dickson, Duncan Hannah, Martin Wong, Keith Haring, and just last fall, Walter Robinson, the first show in our brand new space off campus. My writing these days consists mostly of catalogue essays for either our publications or those by other museums and galleries.
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First published at NYC, 1981 in 2015
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Barry Blinderman in front of billboard for our summer 1984 exhibition. Photograph courtesy of Barry Blinderman.