frame 37 June 2023
The Colour of Night: Jane Rankin-Reid
An Exclusive Extract
We are delighted to share an exclusive extract from Jane Rankin-Reid’s latest book, The Colour of Night.
Excerpt from Chapter 2
It was a humid evening in August, late 1980s, and we couldn’t stop talking about the summer light as we made our way to David Bowe’s studio on West 29th. Our three silhouettes, inked and lengthened on the empty streets, bodies intermittently lit by blazes of streetlight, leaked then of colour in that sticky nighttime gloom. We’d eaten at The Odeon, smoking throughout an entire meal of steak frites and beer, bathed in the air conditioning. Downstairs, in the mirrored anteroom outside the bathrooms, the redolent smell of New York restaurant basements: industrial-strength insecticide, stale ashtrays, scraps of uneaten food. There were chairs stacked patiently against the walls down there, as if awaiting a future party.
David paid the bill.
We wandered through Tribeca and Battery Park City, over to the elevated tracks, up the rusted iron steps and into the abandoned tunnels of a former railway.
Inside, the curved cement walls were crowded with sleeping bodies, strewn and coupled, flickering long shadows. It was as if the night had pressed a tenderness into the concrete wrapped softly around them. Without thinking, our voices dropped to whispers and our verbal gambling quietened. We moved steadily through this vast, hollowed-out night-time space in a tidy clot, respectful that this disused railroad tunnel was, to many, a home.
Someone reached for my hand. The conversation came with us, a faithful new friend unwilling to abandon our company.
***
“David Wojnarowicz painted one of his earliest murals at Pier 34. The abandoned piers in those years of the late ‘70s, early ‘80s, were an amalgam of sexual, social, political, art, and real-estate anarchy. A Utopia of anarchy. For about 12 years, we went there to sexualize, picnic, sunbathe, socialize, absorb the murals and artwork as though we were in a modern-day Pompeii or Boscotrecase. It was heaven… Vistas down to Ellis Island, up to the George Washington Bridge. We thought it would be like that forever. It showed me a new way to live. Oh, the glory of it all . . . It changed my life.”
Eugene Fedorko, 2018
Those hours spent walking through the empty nighttime streets are etched into my recollections of New York. We were in our mid-thirties, at a point of embarking upon significant life changes. Within days, we three would be scattered to the ends of the Earth. It was an accidental gathering – one of those ‘let’s catch up for dinner’, kind of goodbyes. Arrangements made in the torpid afternoon hours of our separate lives, stranded in an empty city during the hottest month of the year.
My companions, the artists David Bowes and Wolfgang Staehle, enjoyed inventively probing language in an intuitive streetwise argot. Bluff cover for David’s winsomeness. His paintings – scenes of invented histoires – had won acclaim over the previous decade. I knew Wolfgang’s work less well but had heard that his conceptual electronics and sound pieces placed him at the edge of a dynamic, cyber-focused media movement. The Thing, at the time one of his most famous pieces, was at the forefront of a technological connectivity we could barely imagine in the 1980s.
David Bowes ca 1990 by Sylvie Ball
Wolfgang Staehle
Like David, Wolfgang was an experimental innovator. Both earned a reasonable living yet neither were front-row waiting-list kinds of artists. This was probably their secret to staying sane. It was certainly why they were hanging out with me that evening in the middle of summer when everyone who was anyone had left town.
David told me, in that typical New York way, that Wolfgang’s work was ‘kick ass’.
This world of ours, this way of speaking about art and the life around it, was all I thought I knew in those days. Knowledge, opinions, attitudes: art was everything to us. For critics and artists living in the downtown district, art was also what had made our rents skyrocket and our futures miserably certain. That night though, I was unaware that within days I’d be leaving New York and that the language of ideas I’d spoken since my younger adult years would be lost to me for many decades ahead, as if forever.
Both David and Wolfgang had a way of abstracting ordinary street detritus into dreamlike artworks, disposing of them just as quickly. Treating ephemeral objects’ destinies as little more than fluid shifts in conversation. To listen to them meant following their eyeline, figuratively and literally. What lay around them was matter, prancing with energy, theirs to experiment with, to reshape perceptions of the immediate world and to shift our sightlines up, down and sideways. Seeing the city of New York through artists’ eyes is a distinctive, intimate privilege. I kept every memory they made for me that night.
We stopped at an empty cinema lobby and took turns playing with the brightly lit ‘trick claw’ machine installed near the entrance. There were neon-furred unicorns, cows, bears and mice in a heedless pile at the base of the cabinet. Somehow, they all eluded our clueless hunting skills. The game’s ‘pay for power’ invitation to operate the menacing overhead claws was incongruous and stupefying. Players were virtually powerless. It took great skill trying to maneuver the remote metal grabbing device to pick up the trapped prey. At that hour of night, the pile of toys remained undisturbed. ‘When we were kids’, David told us, ‘my brothers and I called these “Poverty Bears”’. They’d apparently played these games for hours when they were young. We tried a couple of rounds, sinking more quarters into the coin slots after every loss until, bored with not winning, we moved on. At each of David’s stories of growing up in America, Wolfgang and I were reminded of the differences in our childhoods, in Germany and Tasmania. Of foreign toys and family traditions that had never touched either of us. I felt alien listening to David’s stories, anecdotes which became more and more intimate with each he told. The emotional artifacts of 1950s American childhoods could be loaned to outsiders but never truly claimed as our own.
A few doors further down the street from the cinema lobby, David found an empty cardboard box from a toy factory, decorated with black, pelt-shaped silhouettes of the Poverty Bears, probably from a nearby assembly plant. In the artist’s hands, retrieving the flattened graphic decorated box form gave it an energy more than the random significance of its discovery. I kept his gift of an instantaneous artwork for the next 30 years. My private Rauschenberg/Bowes cartoon Carboard intervention.
As we walked that night at times on the sidewalk, at others in the middle of the street, the artists’ historically faithful banter tripped lightly through an essential canon of willful artistic delights. Man Ray, Francis Picabia, Marionette, Sigmar Polke, A.R. Penke, Joseph Beuys and Max Ernst first; fewer familiar faces followed, as we strayed further afield into less familiar worlds. Like remembered phrases of poetry, there were pictures to be named and hung in mind. Subjects of decay as metaphor, rap as jazz, and the little we knew of cyber culture in those quiet days before the internet. We told stories of encounters with legendary artworld identities, writers we read, and the things we loved, and which mattered to us.
I look back now and realise that we were talking about ourselves without quite saying how we felt.