Kenny Scharf: A Surviving 80s Musketeer Returns to the LES
Al Diaz and Kenny Scharf at the opening of MYTHOLOGEEZ at Totah Gallery in the Lower East Side. Photo via Al Diaz
For a time they were The Three Musketeers of a white-hot art scene that erupted with such irrepressible momentum that it effortlessly consumed every established notion of what contemporary art should look like and where it should come from. Then it consumed itself.
In the early 1980s, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf formed the vanguard of one of the 20th century’s most fertile art movements, turning the shunned and sequestered neighborhoods of the Lower East Side into the epicenter of new wave style, street art chutzpah, and heedless artistic creativity.
Scharf, now 65 and the only member of the triumvirate to survive beyond the 1990s, has long since quit the Lower East Side. But his legacy is being revisited in a new show now open at Totah Gallery on Stanton Street, a major retrospective that opens in November at the Brant Foundation, and the November opening of Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy, the art amusement park that features rides and attractions created by Scharf, Basquiat, Haring, Salvador Dalí, David Hockney, Roy Lichtenstein and others at The Shed in Hudson Yards.
Scharf’s unfolding ‘Autumn in New York’ seems thoroughly removed from the days he and his colleagues explored the dodgy and dirty streets, teaming night clubs, pop-up art galleries and cosmic caverns in a long-ago Lower East Side where poverty, crime and creativity coexisted in near-equal measure. Still, Scharf speaks warmly about those days, as do other survivors of a scene that ignited and collapsed before those who were in it knew what had happened.
Perhaps the biggest factor in the development and decline of the creative petri dish that was the Lower East Side of the period was money, or, more accurately, the lack of it in the beginning and a surfeit of it at the end.
“Back then, there was some kind of event or happening every single night, every day,” Scharf said during a panel discussion organized last year by the Basquiat estate. “There was an urgency about going out and seeing people and seeing music or some art show, whatever it was. There was an urgency about it and everybody was ‘Oh, we have to go there, that’s what’s happening tonight.’ It was unlike anything. Now I’m, like, will you come to this thing, ‘Oh, I don’t know, I’d rather just stay home and sleep,’” he said.
“It was cheap as fuck,” said Al Diaz, Basquiat’s partner in the SAMO© graffiti team and another of the era’s legendary survivors. “It was so affordable; I didn’t know anybody who had a real job. People worked here and there, they were bartenders or doormen at the Mudd Club or wherever. I had a bunch of friends from high school who were like 19 years old and they had apartments in the East Village,” he said.
Jeffrey Deitch, who lived in a $165-a-month apartment on Thompson Street in Soho during the early 1980s, agreed that creativity flourished in inverse proportion to the need for money.
One of the few remaining Sharf murals in the wild, though recently defaced, on Norfolk Street in the LES. Photo by Lisa Freeman.
“Our time period is really ’78 into the ’80s and this was a paradise for creative people,” he said during the panel discussion last year with Scharf. “Things were so inexpensive you didn’t have to worry about money and the most important thing was, if you were an aspiring artist, writer, filmmaker, you didn’t need a job,” he said.
At the same time, things were happening at a fevered pace, with pop-up music, parties and art events in vacant storefronts, abandoned basements, lofts, studios and apartments.
“There were floating parties put on all over the place. People would rent a space and just open it up as a gallery or party place or whatever. I remember one in a basement on St. Marks, Kenny was there and Jean Michel and lots of others and everyone who was there remembers it because there was spilled Pabst Blue Ribbon mixed with cement powder all over the floor, so everyone was coated in cement when we left at four or five in the morning. That was kind of typical,” Diaz said.
Then, as quickly as it appeared, this ’80s bohemia vanished with the opening of a thousand Gucci wallets, as monied collectors became aware of Basquiat’s meteoric rise and came for their share of the scene’s bounty. Soon, wealthy people invaded the neighborhood, driving up rents and prompting cheap restaurants and other businesses to flee, replaced by pricier enterprises.
“During that time there was a lot of influx of money, it was cocaine time. That whole invasion came in, the gentrification, they started coming down flashing money. All those fancy galleries started opening up in the East Village, that’s when the flavor started to fade. It started to become visibly more bourgeois,” Diaz said.
“Unfortunately for me it wasn’t that fun any more,” Scharf said. “For me it lost a lot of the romanticism and the fun of it. … At the same time, I was going along with it. Of course, I had ambition and I wanted to make money and show in galleries and museums and everything, but at the same time I felt a little bit sad,” he said.
Forty-five years after the downtown triumvirate came together, the historical importance of the work of Basquiat and Haring can hardly be questioned. Scharf, meanwhile, is approaching that status with works featured in major museums and galleries around the world and paintings that routinely fetch six-figure price tags. His current show at Totah reveals an artist whose work continues to mature, but who has remained true to the artistic values and playful style he honed in lower Manhattan so long ago.
David Totah of Totah Gallery with Kenny Scharf’s L R R L. Photo by Lisa Freeman
“This is exactly where he was with Basquiat and Keith Haring back in the day,” said David Totah, whose Totah Gallery is currently hosting Scharf’s latest LES incarnation MYTHOLOGEEZ. Totah is located just around the corner from the Norfolk Street site of one of the last Scharf murals to survive in the wild. The piece was defaced this summer by next-generation graf artists, but that is and has always been the state of play in the street art world.
The works on offer at Totah, which have six-figure price tags, were mostly painted this year, but they all are done in Sharf’s signature style, they are masterworks of space-age surrealism, with smiling blob figures racing about, or engaging with viewers from psychedelic netherworlds and swirling, tie-dyed universes. Like all of Scarf’s oeuvre, these new works absolutely refuse to stand still.
Kenny Sharf’s Fuzzy Blobz at Totah. Photo by Lisa Freeman
Several of the works, like Fuzzy Blobz and Hairy Blobz, both oil and acrylic on linen, suggest an evolution in Scharf’s work. Both feature maelstroms of red and blue blob creatures dashing here and there, but, as their titles suggest, the sleek, sinuous geometry normally associated with Scharf’s work gives way to softer, more organic, feathered lines and contours.
In a rare venture into the realm of American politics, L R L R, features elongated, speeding blob figures racing in opposite directions, red ones heading to the right, blue to the left, obviously. But the eyes and the mouths of each are invested with little figures of the opposite color, suggesting the possibility that there may be some hope for shared direction amid today’s rank partisan divisions.
Kenny Sharf’s Cosmic Cavern installation at Totah Gallery. Photo by Lisa Freeman
As a further homage to the 80’s scene, Scharf transformed the basement of the gallery into an immersive black-light and day glow Cosmic Cavern like those he created at countless locations over the years, from the loft he shared on 39th St. with Haring, to the essential avant-garde EV art showplace Fun Gallery, to the Whitney and MoMA.
Meanwhile, the show at Brant will assemble 70 paintings, sculptures and objects from Scharf’s expansive career, beginning with work created in the 1970s when the artist was plying his trade on the streets and in the galleries that existed within blocks of the Brant Foundation’s East Village location.
Among them: His seminal 1984 painting, When the Worlds Collide (1984), which was included in the 1985 Whitney Biennial. The work is a worthy example of the artist’s still maturing style with a smiling bright red protagonist with a planetary landscape in his mouth and a waterfall flowing over his left shoulder. It is vintage Scharf in its fearless mix of surrealist figuration and neo-expressionist soundings as smiling, friendly faces interact boldly with spinning black balls, swirling tornados, pink clouds and patches of darkness.
Kenny Scharf’s When the Worlds Collide, 1984, from the coming show at The Brant Foundation. Photo via Brant Foundation
“This painting is my idea of showing how everything exists at the same time. There’s peace; there’s chaos…everything exists all together,” he said. In it, Scharf offered a nod to his friend Haring, positioning a stylized Haring-esque radiant baby in the painting’s lower left.
Kenny Scharf, painted chair swing ride, from Luna Luna_ Forgotten Fantasy, coming to The Shed. Photo via The Shed
Surfing the wake of the Brant exhibition, Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy is a vibrant revival of a long-lost treasure trove of 20th-century art that opens on Nov. 24 at The Shed, the remarkably cool art and entertainment venue in the otherwise dreary Westside commercial and residential development known as Hudson Yards. The installation consists of amusement park attractions as imagined by some of contemporary art’s greatest practitioners.
Originally conceived by artist André Heller, Luna Luna debuted in 1987 in Hamburg, Germany, as an avant-garde fairground, a sort of pop art Disneyland that would travel the world. That never happened and the priceless collection vanished into obscurity, stored away in Texas for 36 years.
Unearthed, revived and reinvigorated, Luna Luna captivated audiences in Los Angeles beginning last December and now brings its riotous charm to New York City. The reimagined boardwalk attractions include Sharf’s swing ride, Basquiat’s ferris wheel and Haring’s merry-go-round.
Scharf’s current show MYTHOLOGEEZ runs at Totah Gallery, 183 Stanton St., through Nov. 9. The Brant Foundation show runs from Nov. 13 through Feb. 28 at its East Village location, 421 East 6th St. Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy runs from Nov. 20 through Jan. 5 at The Shed, 545 W 30th St.
Originally published by The Lo-Down.
