Basquiat. Haring. Wojnarowicz. Recent York’s downtown art scene of the 70s and 80s produced among the art world’s biggest names, their lives and times well documented. But what does the long-lasting era appear like through the lens of an artist who never made it?

Make Me Famous, a latest documentary directed by Brian Vincent, tells the story of 1 Edward Brezinski: an intense and peculiar painter who ran in all the identical circles because the scene’s legendary figures, but who, despite his unwavering pursuit of fame and acclaim, just couldn’t manage it.

The film is each an exploration of why, and an alternate portrait of the scene at large: one where Basquiat, Haring et al mill around within the background of archive footage somewhat than the foreground, and where stories of shoddy makeshift galleries, “ravenous artists,” and wild nights out at Club 57 and Max’s Kansas City are told through latest and funny perspectives.

Because the doc sees its UK theatrical release, we take a have a look at among the things we learned about art, industry, and attempts to “make it” in downtown Recent York within the 70s and 80s.

A LOT OF STUFF WENT DOWN AT THE MAGIC GALLERY

It never made the canon of now-famed East Village sites, but Edward Brezinski’s Magic Gallery – which he ran out of his decrepit apartment opposite a men’s shelter on Third Avenue – epitomised what “the scene” was all about. That’s, a bunch of passionate and impoverished art weirdos who were too rag-tag for SoHo, and so made their very own.

Here, Brezinski showcased a mish-mash of mediums and mayhem: it was a spot where David Wojnarowicz could do things that “no other gallery would let him do” (like staging desiccated corpses around a blood-soaked dinner table); where the author and cultural critic Gary Indiana set himself on fire; where the famous poet Miguel Piñero did “intense” readings, and from where the gallerist and art dealer Annina Nosei – who discovered Jean-Michel Basquiat – once fled almost immediately upon arrival, so discomfited was she by its chaos and filth.

THE ESTABLISHMENT HAD NO INTEREST IN EXPERIMENTAL OR PROVOCATIVE ART – UNTIL IT DID 

Such mediums can have been labours of affection for East Village oddballs throughout the 70s, but “you couldn’t make money throwing wine in people’s faces or doing piano concert events within the nude,” says the author and actor Eric Bogosian. “I used to be at Robert Mapplethorpe’s first sexual gallery show and he didn’t sell one piece.”

“That’s not what art dealers wanted; they wanted minimalism and earth works and plywood things,” adds the late artist Duncan Hannah, referencing the pared-back works of artists like Ellsworth Kelly or Donald Judd. (Actually, what Brezinski arguably became most famous for was a supposed protest against conceptual art later in 1989: he ate a doughnut that was on display at Robert Gober’s first major show in SoHo, professedly mistaking it for – well – only a doughnut, as an alternative of $8,000 art. The donut had been treated with toxic resin, and Brezinski ended up in hospital.)

“To strive to be a painter [in the 70s] was suicide,” continues Hannah. But when Julian Schnabel began bringing home broken plates from his restaurant job and piecing them together as canvases for expressionist portraits in 1978 – fusing elements of conceptual art with Fifties abstract painting – renowned art dealer Bruno Bischofberger snapped them up.

“Painting got here back with a vengeance,” says Hannah. “Suddenly, within the early 80s, to be a young painter was the right thing to be.” Galleries began popping up seemingly overnight: Civilian Warfare, Recent Math, FUN, and various others that – unlike Brezinki’s Magic Gallery – went on to realize nostalgic cultural status.

NO ONE’S SURE WHAT DETERMINED WHICH MEMBERS OF THE SCENE WOULD ‘MAKE IT’

There was loads of talent flying around – but probability, timing, and the whims of gallerists and dealers played an enormous role. And likability and charisma probably didn’t go amiss, either. “Everybody type of started off on the road,” says the painter Frank Holliday. “After which certain people became very successful. And it became very hierarchical.”

This is actually the crux of Make Me Famous: less a bid to necessarily frame Brezinski as a long-lost genius than an exploration of how some members of a community managed to catapult to colossal fame and riches, while others were condemned to erasure.

In any case, a bitter and “offended” Brezinski deeply resented the short straw he drew. A lot in order that after gallerist Nosei (the one who discovered Basquiat) said she’d come to one in every of his shows, after which never turned up, he threw red wine over her at a SoHo opening and supposedly threatened to kill her.

It’s ironic that “ravenous” Brezinski actually foreshadowed one in every of the art world’s highest-grossing trends with a stencil show on the Magic Gallery. “Today, Banksy and Mr Brainwash are very expensive and celebrated and purchased all around the world,” says artist Mark Kostabi. “Brezinski had his finger on the heart beat way back within the 80s.”

THE AIDS EPIDEMIC ALTERED THE SCENE IRREVOCABLY

In fact, we’re conversant in this widely-covered aspect of the era. But hearing artist Marguerite Van Cook’s accounts of individuals stabbing themselves through the center, or impaling themselves on fence railings, after being diagnosed with AIDS is harrowing still.

Following the “condomless” years of free love, where to be on the scene meant to cavort around Limbo Lounge, Studio 54 and the Mudd Club with out a care, “there was a period where, mainly, the social scene was funerals,” says Kenny Scharf, solemnly. “Visiting people in hospitals.”

“By 1986, I had attended more funerals of friends than my parents had of their friends,” says the gallerist Patrick Fox.

JEFF KOONS WAS ‘PART OF THE MOVEMENT THAT SHUT THE EAST VILLAGE DOWN’ 

When the likes of Koons and Haim Steinbach showed up within the East Village, the moment shifted to a kind of art whereby “you couldn’t just find [stuff] in the rubbish and put it together and paint on it,” says artist Robert Hawkins. “There wasn’t that appropriation that the poor East Village artists were doing.”

It was the type of art you needed money to make and money to purchase, and it served to reframe art as an inherent commodity – the antithesis of the East Village ethos (“The East Village shouldn’t be collected,” says the late Richard Hambleton, AKA the godfather of street art. “It should just be documented”).

Kostabi recounts the gallerist Jeffrey Deitch saying that the explanation the likes of Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, and Richard Prince are “more successful than artists who are only pretty much as good if not higher… is that they’re businessmen. They’re artists, but they’re also businessmen.”

In fact, capitalism did its thing. Rents escalated. By 1985, the neighbourhood’s seminal FUN Gallery was forced to shut on account of waning market interest, and by 1988, almost all the East Village galleries that had popped up since 1980 had either moved to SoHo or Chelsea or closed.

ARTISTS FROM THE ERA HAVE CONSIDERED FAKING THEIR OWN DEATH TO CASH IN

When the costs of names like Basquiat, Keith Haring and Peter Hujar skyrocketed after their deaths between 1987-90, it’s no wonder other artists from the scene wondered “what if”. “Paintings I sold in 1982 for $5,000, just like the ones of Jean Michel-Basquiat, are actually sold at auction for $110 million,” says gallerist Nosei.

After the deaths of Haring and Basquiat, Kenny Scharf was struggling to sell anything. He owned a spot in Brazil without electricity. “I assumed, perhaps I should just go there and say that I died.”

Scharf could also be being facetious. But because the documentary draws to a detailed, we learn there is no such thing as a death certificate for an Edward Brezinski; no records of a post-mortem within the French Riviera where he supposedly died in 2007, nor anyone, it seems, who can discuss his passing with certainty.

You’d must be pretty eccentric to commit to faking your individual death. But when there’s one thing you possibly can take away from this doc, it’s that Edward Brezinksi was just that. So – was he posthumously recognised, and the worth tags on his works inflated accordingly? Not exactly. But he’s within the MoMA now. And he has a documentary in addition.

Make Me Famous premieres on February 17 at Bertha DocHouse in London, followed by a Q&A with artists David McDermott and Robert Hawkins. It’ll even be screening on the ICA.

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