We need Outlaw Art now more than ever before

outlaw-art-kaufman-2016-11-17-v01vilprint_webweb — “History Keeps Me Awake at Night (for Rio Chmielorz)” (1986), by David Wojnarowicz. Wojnarowicz was a seminal figure of the 1980s East Village art explosion. He was not only a brilliant painter and filmmaker but a pioneer spokesperson of ACT UP! and a peerless author. His memoir, “Close To The Knives,” is a harrowing account of his slow disintegration from AIDS.

BY ALAN KAUFMAN | Last Gasp, legendary San Francisco publishers of underground comics and art, have just released my latest book, “The Outlaw Bible of American Art,” an anthology spanning more than half a century of underground visual culture.

"Aldo Painting in His Studio Lower East Side," by Don Snyder. Aldo Tambolini led the early ’60s Greenwich Village art collective known as The Group Center, which, among many "firsts," organized a Festival of the Art in cooperation with the Lower East Side Neighborhood Association (LENA). This inaugural coming out for the artists of the L.E.S. helped to place the neighborhood permanently on the cultural map. — “Aldo Painting in His Studio Lower East Side,” by Don Snyder. Aldo Tambolini led the early ’60s Greenwich Village art collective known as The Group Center, which, among many “firsts,” organized a Festival of the Art in cooperation with the Lower East Side Neighborhood Association (LENA). This inaugural coming out for the artists of the L.E.S. helped to place the neighborhood permanently on the cultural map.

Fourth in my “Outlaw” anthology series, which includes volumes on poetry, literature and essays, the “Outlaw Bible of American Art” contains a generous and even disproportionate number of visual artists from the Lower East Side, the East Village and the West Village, proving once more that the Village has been and continues to be the epicenter of underground art in America.

Allen Ginsberg, poet laureate of the Beat Generation, made his home base in the East Village. His photographs of fellow Beats form an intimate record of a small group of brilliant writers, including Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, who really did manage, for a time, to change the world.

"Lucy With Head in Toilet" (1997), by Richard Kern. Kern's "New York Girls" is a classic work of underground photography. — “Lucy With Head in Toilet” (1997), by Richard Kern. Kern’s “New York Girls” is a classic work of underground photography.

But just as significantly, the book offers a radical new take on the history of American art. It is an alternative canon — a roll call of often overlooked and forgotten creators — and an antidote to the soulless vacuousness of Andy Warhol, the vapid commercialism of a John Currin.

It is, too, a course correction to the corporate commodification and self-betrayals of the co-opted underground itself, in which, say, a skateboarding wheatpaster like Shepard Fairey willingly courts his own commercial appropriation in order to become a designer brand.

outlaw-art-kaufman-2016-11-17-v02vilprint_webweb — “Wall Street Bloodbath” (1987), by Sue Coe. Called by some the Goya of American art, Coe was a resident of the East Village for years befoe leaving the city. Her gorgeously stark paintings and illustrated books document political injustices, as well as the horrific abuses visited upon animals. Coe has become a leading spokesperson for animal rights.

Outlaw art cannot be commodified. Its refusal is too vehement, its esthetic terms too volatile. Artists like Boris Lurie, a Buchenwald survivor who launched the NO!art movement, or David Wojnarowicz who battled on the front lines of ACT UP!, or Annie Sprinkle, who made her body the Bunker Hill of a sexual revolution, or Clayton Patterson, who weathered repeated incarceration over the Tompkins Square Riots to defend the Truth, or Ana Mendieta or Sue Coe or Joe Coleman or Thomas Nozkowski, could and will not be soiled because their art is stamped with refusal and freedom, a rejection of limits and embrace of possibility that strike me as succinctly Outlaw.

Sonia Gechtoff was largely overlooked by the mainstream narrative of Abstract Expressionism, in no small part because it was, principally, a boys' club. One of the first to reside in Westbeth, the West Village artists' community, she lived next door to Diane Arbus and was the last to see Arbus alive before her tragic suicide. Today, Getchoff has begun to receive the acclaim she has long deserved, as a pioneering woman Abstract Expressionist. — Sonia Gechtoff was largely overlooked by the mainstream narrative of Abstract Expressionism, in no small part because it was, principally, a boys’ club. One of the first to reside in Westbeth, the West Village artists’ community, she lived next door to Diane Arbus and was the last to see Arbus alive before her tragic suicide. Today, Getchoff has begun to receive the acclaim she has long deserved, as a pioneering woman Abstract Expressionist.

“Portrait of Carl Panzram” (1993), by Joe Coleman, collection of Iggy Pop. Now legend among artists of the East Village, Joe Coleman is known for his explosive art performances, as well as paintings that have gained him a place in the firmament of art history. He occupies a place apart and alone, singular, a kind of dark, macabre chronicler of the depths of human depravity, part Mark Twain, part Hieronymus Bosch.

While fully aware of the tradition of mainstream art, their art flies in the face of conformity, to express the inexpressible, articulate the unacceptable, or voice the outrage that lies buried deep within the soul under the conditions of modern life. Outlaw artists are, as Sartre said of Baudelaire: “Not revolutionaries but men [and women] in revolt.”

Why art? And why do I call it “Outlaw”?

My mother, a Holocaust survivor, imparted to me the sense that civilization is

Annie Sprinkle spent some of her most formative years as a Village artist. She not only explored the intersection of art and sexuality through daring public performances but became a leading advocate for sexual freedom, a role she continuess to this day.

not to be trusted; that beneath the surface of seemingly normal existence dwell monsters awaiting their turn. Those whom she saw most willing to defy those monsters were often outlaws — armed partisans, Communists, artists, Zionists, renegade priests, even criminals. One thinks of Samuel Beckett, who served in the French resistance during the war, or Albert Camus, who edited the underground newspaper Combat.

Nick Zedd is the legendary underground filmmaker who first coined the term "Cinema of Transgression." His films — including "Ecstasy in Entropy," starring Brenda Bergman, above — still serve as the bottom line in experimental underground cinema. — Nick Zedd is the legendary underground filmmaker who first coined the term “Cinema of Transgression.” His films — including “Ecstasy in Entropy,” starring Brenda Bergman, above — still serve as the bottom line in experimental underground cinema.

Boris Lurie, a survivor of the Buchenwald concentration camp, made his permanent home in the Lower East Side, from which he launched his NO!art movement, along with Sam Goodman and Stanley Fisher. A true visionary, for a time, Lurie and his movement caught the attention of such art world notables as Tom Wolfe, Harold Rosenberg and Dore Ashton. But his star faded due, in no small part, to his shocking frankness about the savagery and root causes of the Holocaust. He left behind a wealth of great paintings and today interest in his iconoclastic work is again on the rise internationally.

Today, new monsters walk our earth from Trump to Putin and Kim Jong-un. In this strange, hostile world, language is subordinated to digital pyrotechnics. A disaffected population walks facedown in their iPhone screens.

Images, to be meaningful to them, must have the depth of language, the power of “War and Peace.”

In the work of Outlaw artists there is that and more. And though some of these works are probably 50 years old, they still seem freshly avant-garde, works produced in drafty cold-water lofts by artists grappling not just with art but with existence itself. Corrupting art world success has not ruined such efforts. It’s all there still and will be forever: the struggle to be alive, the quest for deeper meaning, the fury and sublime inspiration of the Outlaw Artist.

“The Outlaw Bible of American Art” (Last Gasp), 688 pages, color and black-and-white images throughout, $39.95. Kaufman’s other books include “Drunken Angel” and “The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry.”