Photographs by Robert Carrithers: Basquiat, Haring, the New York scene in the 1980s and the infamous Club 57.
At Fotograf Gallery, Školská 28, Prague
One
staircase led to heaven the other to hell” says Robert Carrithers of a
building in New York’s St. Mark’s Place Street, number 57. The
building whose basement housed, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Club
57 - a creative laboratory for all non-conformists and free-thinkers
from the East Village - actually belonged to the central offices of the
Polish Catholic Church.
At that time
New York was a city on the verge of bankruptcy and today’s luxurious
East Village resembled a war zone. Refined citizens had long ago left
the area as part of a progressive suburbanisation. The
area with burnt up brick buildings – a last ditch attempt by desperate
property owners to earn some money was more than often insurance fraud –
was left in the hands of drug dealers, immigrants and also artists
working in all disciplines. The police didn’t even bother
to patrol there, which was good for anyone annoyed by having the
authorities riding their back, artists and criminals alike. “It was often a matter of life and death. You had to have eyes in the back of your head and constantly watch what was happening in the street. It
was so intense that sometimes you would find a corpse lying on the
sidewalk,” recalls Carrithers, who moved to New York from Chicago in
1979. He wanted to study photography, film and acting there. The apartment that he could afford to rent was less than a 10-minute walk from Club 57.
The punk and
disco scenes concentrated around the CBGB and Studio 54 clubs were
losing their sense of novelty and originality, when out of nowhere a
performer like Klaus Nomi appeared. This was a man, who sang opera in the costume of a Dutch Pierrot. Club
57 was in fact founded by two friends, who loved vaudeville – Susan
Hannaford and Tom Scully – and was run by director and performer, Ann
Magnuson (pictured above), who hosted its first performance.
“This place
was fascinating in that, while artists had earlier met in bars or at
concerts, they chatted and they drank, but in Club 57 they created
something together. Here concerts mixed with exhibitions
and performances,” stresses Carrithers, when speaking of the community
that first made him feel at home. Ann Magnuson thought up theme parties for every other night of the week. She found the decor and the furniture in the streets. Keith Haring had his first installation there and created his signature work, as did Kenny Scharf and Jean Michel Basquiat.
Club 57 exorcised America’s evil spirit. It went wild from “camp” aesthetic. With
a Dadaistic fascination and vigour, it seized on the suburban
supermarket culture; stores that had become museums of the contemporary
lifestyle and its plastic kitsch. During one evening a
country-western evening might take place on piles of hay, the next a
burlesque event and an Elvis memorial, then a performance showing John
Sex performing with his python snake Delilah or a concert by singer,
Wendy Wild, and her group, The Mad Violets, which took the public on a
joint trip, when hallucinogenic mushrooms were thrown into the crowd. The group, Pulsallama, was also born here. This
was a group of twelve or thirteen girls, who sang in the style of Greek
chorales, and when doing so banged on beer bottles, pans, cowbells and
shot off kids‘ toy machine-guns. Pulsallama made it so far that in 1982 they were the opening act at several concerts by The Clash.
Even almost
thirty years after its closing in 1983, Club 57 is still a legend that
defined a period of pop culture and still inspires it. Many
of the artists tied to the institution were unable to face up to their
own wildness, drugs or the incontrollable rise of AIDs. They died. Others died only to become immortal (Haring, Basquiat). Others survived to become famous later (Ann Magnuson, Marc Shaiman, Scott Whitman). Robert Carrithers was one of them. He spontaneously documented everything that happened in the club. The performances, the birth of success, the first exhibitions and the backstage area. In
his moment shots and portraits, which will be shown for the first time
in the Czech Republic, barmen meet with writers, film-makers and future
celebrities. Thus a unique testimony was created; one that is as unbridled image-wise as the Club 57 program.
Robert Carrithers is an American photographer and film-maker, who lives in Prague. Besides
the Club 57 scene he documented the post-November cultural scene in the
Czech Republic and has been working for a long time on the series,
Bohemian Nude. He is preparing a documentary on the
Prague-Berlin-Australian, post-punk band, Fatal Shore. He also took part in the making of the documentary Autoluminescent
The Groovy Dada Lounge Revisited, Fotograf Gallery, Školská 28, Prague
21 March – 20 April 2012
Opening attended by the artist:
20 March, 18:00–21:00
Guests:
DJ Miki
Mark Steiner & His Problems
A showing of films of Cinema of Transgression by Nick Zedd
Curator: Pavel Turek
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