'BIG CITY FALL' at P.P.O.W Gallery

Friday, 24 November 2006 21:19

New York City - Recently I was watching the Edo Bertoglio and Glenn O’Brien film Downtown 81.  The film stars the artist Jean Michel Basquiat, and for its entirety he ambles through the Lower East Side from loft to club and back again.  One scene in particular struck me and this is why I refer to it in this press release for the upcoming PPOW exhibition Big City Fall.  In the scene, Basquiat is walking down Clinton Street on the other side of Delancey.  The background that encompasses him looks bombed out, like it could be 80’s Beirut or present day Kabul.  A lone brown brick tenement building stands next to an empty lot strewn with bricks and rubble, and the sky is bright blue but it may as well be ominous red.

The scene behind Basquiat is the exact location of Martin Wong’s painting Sweet Oblivion. Early in his career, Wong often referred to himself as ‘the human instamatic,’ even creating a few paintings with that tag as a calling card. Sweet Oblivion is one of his paintings that now stand in as a record of the neglected city several years after the fiscal crisis of ’75 and the blackout of ’77.  Viewing the painting now, post 9/11, it recalls the title of a David Wojnarowicz essay In the Shadow of the American Dream, Someday this will all be Picturesque Ruins.  In the Wojnarowicz essay, as well as in the installation in this exhibition, erected for the first time since the mid-eighties, his concern lay within the dying culture of America.  Whereas Wong’s painting reflects the urban blight of the area, Wojnarowicz’ cityscape foreshadows his mortality.