Art History at the Water’s Edge

Abstract

The publication in 2019 of two books on the artistic and sexual cultures of New York’s derelict waterfront in the 1970s is a cause for celebration, and both Jonathan Weinberg and Fiona Anderson are to be praised enthusiastically for the dazzling breadth and depth of original archival research they each present. These books are important markers in the continuing critical reassessment of the intersection of artistic production and sexual politics in the 1970s, a decade that has figured in art history and queer studies as an object of fantasy, of desire, an object mourned, and is more widely characterised by various mythologies that are used to support a range of problematic historical narratives, most egregiously, as a decade of sexual decadence followed by the inevitable retributions of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and the necessary disciplines of neoconservatism in the 1980s. Weinberg and Anderson are both aware that these perceptions of the 1970s are the product of a partial and homophobic conception of subsequent history that serves reactionary forces, to include the privatization and gentrification of urban space and the increased fracturing of solidarity in queer communities due to economic inequality. Both return to the ruined pier buildings stretching the length of the lower west side of Manhattan, following their industrial abandonment in the 1950s and prior to their demolition in the 1980s, to contest these narratives. Weinberg and Anderson, then, make significant contributions to understanding of the AIDS epidemic by questioning its imaginative effects on its immediately preceding history, providing new perspectives on the vexed question of the experience of temporal deterioration in marginalised communities due to mass death. At a moment when art history is looking to ‘decentre’ its epistemological and ontological bases in a particular canon of Euro-American art, Weinberg and Anderson offer reconfigurations of artistic production in 1970s New York from the perspective of the waterfront, a liminal place, neither land nor water, through narratives that fuse visual art, literature, amateur photography and sexual activism. The fact that these books take such a similar focus and appeared in such rapid succession – so much so that neither author was able to cite the other’s work – seems to invite their comparison. Yet this temptation is to be resisted as far as possible, as it would betray the particular pleasures, insights and socio-political resources of each text, let alone the multiplicitous nature of sexual, social and creative experimentation on the piers themselves.