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Pier Groups: Art and Sex Along the New York Waterfront
In 1970s New York City, the abandoned piers of the Hudson River became a site for extraordinary works of art and a popular place for nude sunbathing and anonymous sex. Jonathan Weinberg’s provocative book―part art history, part memoir―weaves interviews, documentary photographs, literary texts, artworks, and film stills to show how avant-garde practices competed and mingled with queer identities along the Manhattan waterfront. Artists as varied as Vito Acconci, Alvin Baltrop, Shelley Seccombe, and David Wojnarowicz made work in and about the fire-ravaged structures that only twenty years before had been at the center of the world’s busiest shipping port. At the same time, the fight for the rights of gay, lesbian, and transgendered people, spurred by the 1969 Stonewall riots, was dramatically transforming the cultural and social landscape of New York City. Gay men suddenly felt free to sunbathe on the piers naked, cruise, and have sex in public. While artists collaborated to transform the buildings of Pier 34 into makeshift art studios and exhibition spaces, gay men were converting Pier 46 into what Delmas Howe calls an “arena for sexual theater.” Featuring one hundred exemplary works from the era and drawing from a rich variety of source material, interviews, and Weinberg’s personal experience, Pier Groups breaks new ground to look at the relationship of avant-garde art to resistant subcultures and radical sexuality.
- GenresPoliticsNonfictionGay
232 pages, Hardcover
Published May 3, 2019
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
July 5, 2024
A blissful, if not orgasmic, convergence of all the things I’ve been reading lately—at least intermittently. In any case, I enjoy reading art criticism for its sake. I’m frightened of this “hermetic clan of freedom seekers,” as Glenn O’Brien describes them in his introduction to a book of Alvin Baltrop’s photography, “who dared to improvise on their desires and create a cult that embraced the myths of an ancient and feral masculinity”—but I’m also jealous of the hedonism they enjoyed and wish I’d been there so I could have participated in it. There’s a lot behind this, but I can’t say more about it—it’s hard to say more about work so of a place I’ve never been. I can only fetishize and idealize. Weinberg stresses the point that sex on the piers was far from utopia. Quoting Baltrop: “The casual sex and nonchalant narcotizing, the creation of artwork and music, sunbathing, dancing, merrymaking and the like habitually gave way to muggings, callous yet detached violence, rape, suicide, and in some instances, murder.” But I imagine that a genuine, though still remote possibility of being killed by the man you’ve picked up makes the sex even better.
(I just thought I’d file this passage away here.)
Leonard Fink, David Wojnarowicz.
In 1982, not long after Fink and Wojnarowicz had their photographic encounter, Michel Foucault sat down to talk with Jack O’Higgins about homosexuality in words that, for the philosopher, were unusually personal and improvisational. Did Foucault ever wander the piers? Given his documented interest in the leather scene of Paris and San Francisco, I would like to think that he must have ventured to the Manhattan waterfront. Certainly, he was speaking from personal experience when he mused that the most erotic aspect of anonymous or casual gay sex was not the act itself but the memory of it as you were leaving the scene: “it is when the act is over and the boy is gone that one begins to dream about the warmth of his body, the quality of his smile, the tone of his voice.” “This is why the great homosexual writers of our culture (Cocteau, Genet, Burroughs) can write so elegantly about the sexual act itself,” he claimed, “because the homosexual imagination is for the most part concerned with reminiscing about the act rather than anticipating it.” Although such a sweeping generalization risks limiting and stereotyping the many varieties of sexual desire and identity, Foucault’s words speak to an aspect of Wojnarowicz’s memoirs, which, after all, were profoundly influenced by at least two of the writers Foucault cites, William Burroughs and Jean Genet. Wojnarowicz sought out a friendship with Burroughs, and he was so obsessed with Genet that he pursued a man on the waterfront simply because he resembled the French author. He associated the waterfront deeply with these two authors, comparing the interlocking rooms and passageways of the pier sheds, and the anonymous sex that went on there, to “live films of Genet and Burroughs,” unwinding in a “stationary kind of silence.”
In Wojnarowicz’s journals, as in Genet’s novels, the briefest sexual encounters are described in such explicit detail that they seem jotted down on the spot, though given the circumstances, they must have been recorded hours or even days after the fact. The significance of a blow job or of merely brushing against a stranger’s body is amplified by memory. As in Samuel Delany’s memoir, The Motion of Light in Water, images of the surrounding Hudson merge with the experience of touching bodies: “This desire, so small a thing, becomes a river tracing the drift of your bare arms, dark mouth, and memories of strangers.” In Wojnarowicz’s stream of consciousness, the real river just outside the window becomes the liquid of ejaculation: “Something silent and recalled, the sense of age in a familiar place, the emptied heart and light of the eyes, the white bones of streetlamps and autos, the press of memory turning over and over and I’m coming.” Studying Wojnarowicz’s waterfront stroll in Fink’s photograph, I wonder if he was in reverie about a recent sexual encounter. As he looks back down the street, is he cruising for sex, hunting for yet another adventure with a stranger to provide the material for more memories and more writing?
I realize that in spending so much time unpacking this seemingly bland photograph, I am beginning to fixate on Wojnarowicz less as an artist and more as someone I might have known. I cannot escape the sensation that not only have we met before but we share some kind of deep connection. I find myself having to resist calling him simply David, a liberty I would never take with Vito Acconci or Gordon Matta-Clark. Of course, it is not just Fink’s photograph that creates this sensation of familiarity but the nature of the art and personae that Wojnarowicz forged in his brief career. To engage fully with his work is to feel as if nothing is withheld of the artist’s feelings and life experiences. X-Rays from Hell, another of his memorable titles, encapsulates his project of exposing the injustice of the American system, but it also signals his broader attempt to convey what it feels like to strip off the skin of appearances. If Wojnarowicz often positioned himself as a deeply alienated figure driven by anger, his sense of alienation is countered by the way his art is about connections to strangers—not just the men he has sex with on the waterfront but the strangers who make up the audience for his vividly autobiographical art. But in fact Wojnarowicz’s journals leave out all kinds of crucial information about his life and art. Cynthia Carr, in her wonderful biography, notes that Wojnarowicz rarely mentions Tom Rauffenbart, his longtime companion, in his journals, nor does he write much about the making of art itself. Nevertheless, the effect of his writings, in their stream-of-consciousness style, is to make the reader feel that he is telling all. I am well aware that any autobiographical enterprise contains elements of fiction—that it is a construction designed to make us love and admire its author—still, the best of the genre, and I count Wojnarowicz’s journals among the best, makes us feel as if we are the author’s confidant.
(I just thought I’d file this passage away here.)
Leonard Fink, David Wojnarowicz.
In 1982, not long after Fink and Wojnarowicz had their photographic encounter, Michel Foucault sat down to talk with Jack O’Higgins about homosexuality in words that, for the philosopher, were unusually personal and improvisational. Did Foucault ever wander the piers? Given his documented interest in the leather scene of Paris and San Francisco, I would like to think that he must have ventured to the Manhattan waterfront. Certainly, he was speaking from personal experience when he mused that the most erotic aspect of anonymous or casual gay sex was not the act itself but the memory of it as you were leaving the scene: “it is when the act is over and the boy is gone that one begins to dream about the warmth of his body, the quality of his smile, the tone of his voice.” “This is why the great homosexual writers of our culture (Cocteau, Genet, Burroughs) can write so elegantly about the sexual act itself,” he claimed, “because the homosexual imagination is for the most part concerned with reminiscing about the act rather than anticipating it.” Although such a sweeping generalization risks limiting and stereotyping the many varieties of sexual desire and identity, Foucault’s words speak to an aspect of Wojnarowicz’s memoirs, which, after all, were profoundly influenced by at least two of the writers Foucault cites, William Burroughs and Jean Genet. Wojnarowicz sought out a friendship with Burroughs, and he was so obsessed with Genet that he pursued a man on the waterfront simply because he resembled the French author. He associated the waterfront deeply with these two authors, comparing the interlocking rooms and passageways of the pier sheds, and the anonymous sex that went on there, to “live films of Genet and Burroughs,” unwinding in a “stationary kind of silence.”
In Wojnarowicz’s journals, as in Genet’s novels, the briefest sexual encounters are described in such explicit detail that they seem jotted down on the spot, though given the circumstances, they must have been recorded hours or even days after the fact. The significance of a blow job or of merely brushing against a stranger’s body is amplified by memory. As in Samuel Delany’s memoir, The Motion of Light in Water, images of the surrounding Hudson merge with the experience of touching bodies: “This desire, so small a thing, becomes a river tracing the drift of your bare arms, dark mouth, and memories of strangers.” In Wojnarowicz’s stream of consciousness, the real river just outside the window becomes the liquid of ejaculation: “Something silent and recalled, the sense of age in a familiar place, the emptied heart and light of the eyes, the white bones of streetlamps and autos, the press of memory turning over and over and I’m coming.” Studying Wojnarowicz’s waterfront stroll in Fink’s photograph, I wonder if he was in reverie about a recent sexual encounter. As he looks back down the street, is he cruising for sex, hunting for yet another adventure with a stranger to provide the material for more memories and more writing?
I realize that in spending so much time unpacking this seemingly bland photograph, I am beginning to fixate on Wojnarowicz less as an artist and more as someone I might have known. I cannot escape the sensation that not only have we met before but we share some kind of deep connection. I find myself having to resist calling him simply David, a liberty I would never take with Vito Acconci or Gordon Matta-Clark. Of course, it is not just Fink’s photograph that creates this sensation of familiarity but the nature of the art and personae that Wojnarowicz forged in his brief career. To engage fully with his work is to feel as if nothing is withheld of the artist’s feelings and life experiences. X-Rays from Hell, another of his memorable titles, encapsulates his project of exposing the injustice of the American system, but it also signals his broader attempt to convey what it feels like to strip off the skin of appearances. If Wojnarowicz often positioned himself as a deeply alienated figure driven by anger, his sense of alienation is countered by the way his art is about connections to strangers—not just the men he has sex with on the waterfront but the strangers who make up the audience for his vividly autobiographical art. But in fact Wojnarowicz’s journals leave out all kinds of crucial information about his life and art. Cynthia Carr, in her wonderful biography, notes that Wojnarowicz rarely mentions Tom Rauffenbart, his longtime companion, in his journals, nor does he write much about the making of art itself. Nevertheless, the effect of his writings, in their stream-of-consciousness style, is to make the reader feel that he is telling all. I am well aware that any autobiographical enterprise contains elements of fiction—that it is a construction designed to make us love and admire its author—still, the best of the genre, and I count Wojnarowicz’s journals among the best, makes us feel as if we are the author’s confidant.
January 14, 2020
Weinberg manages a nice balance of memoir and art/queer history. Not surprisingly, the book makes me wish I was there, though he doesn't sugarcoat the darker aspects of the piers. I really enjoyed this, though I would have liked more material on the lesser known figures (most likely there just isn't much documentation available). 4.5 stars.
May 13, 2021
’In other words, queer theory is very much a product of specific subcultural experiences of the gay underworld of the 1970s and ‘80s, in which anonymous sexual encounters were celebrated for the anibourgeois and antihegemonic potential.’
December 18, 2019
The book produced by the curator Jonathan Weinberg looks the relationship between queer identity, sexuality and art as it occurred on the abandoned piers that sat along New York's west side in the 1970s and 1980s. It is a fascinating chronicle of all the diverse people who came together to document and produce art in and around the piers. The best thing about the book is how Weinberg helps contextualize the artists and photographers whose work focused on or was produced in the actual piers themselves.
"The title of my book, Pier Groups, is derived from Arch Brown's 1979 gay porn movie, which is set on the waterfront and in which Matta-Clark's Day's End briefly and specatacularly appears." 5
"There have been many permutations between my 2003 hybrid lecture/performance and the book you have before you. I dropped the performers and fashioned more traditional lectures and fragments of essays out of my initial research. In 2012, with the assistance of the artist and curator Darren Jones, I had the opportunity to turn some of my research into an exhibition any the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art. And in 2016 I curated a show at the Hunter College Art Galleries that focused on Pier 34 in 1983-84 when it was briefly taken over by Wojnarowicz and his friends and used as makeshift studios and exhibition spaces." 6
"To witness the waterfront's precipitous decline, ending in near abandonment in the 1970s, a mere twenty years after being the epicentre of the busiest port in the world, was to be given a premonition of what the end of modern commerce might look like. It was as if the entire logic of capitalism and the endless movement not only of things but of people coming in and out of the city might all be winding down." 9
"Public sex on the waterfront not only violated codes of conduct; it cut across boundaries of class, race, and ethnicity. For queer writers like Samuel Delany, Guy Hocquenghem, and Wojnarowicz, among others, this was central to its revolutionary potential." 11
"Equally germane is Foucault's 1967 lecture "Of Other Spaces," which introduces the intriguing concept of "heterotopias," spaces that "suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect." Unlike utopias, which are fantasies of ideal spaces and relationships, heterotopias actually exist, but they have an in-between and indeterminate quality that makes them seem phantasmal. Cemeteries, brothels, prisons, and nursing homes are among the places Foucault offers as possible heterotopias. They exist amid our everyday spaces, but upon entering them we feel as if we have been transported outside the rules and categories of normal life." 11-12
"Writing two years later, the literary scholar and queer activist Charles Shively was even more emphatic: anonymous public sex between gay men was an act of revolution. According to Shively, the "indiscriminate promiscuity" of sex in the trucks and in other clandestine locations created a radical equality that heralded a possible socialism of sexuality. Shouldn't equality and freedom extend to our bodies and their physical relationships as well as to the economy? Shively's answer was that "we need to be indiscriminate": "No one should be denied love because they are old, ugly, fat, crippled, bruised, or the wrong race, color, creed, sex or country of national origin. We need to copulate with anyone who requests our company; set aside all the false contraptions of being hard to get, unavailable-that is, costly on the capitalist market. We need to leave behind the whole mentality of measurement; it is a massive tool of social control." 24
"At almost exactly the same time that Wojnarowicz was photographing the Rimbaud series, Cindy Sherman was creating her famous film stills." 96
"A key trigger in the process was meeting the photographer Arthur Tress. Until Carr wrote her biography, Tress's role in Wojnarowicz's aesthetic formation had gone completely unnoticed, and even Carr does not make much of it. Yet Tress and Wojnarowicz were briefly lovers in April 1978, precisely the time that Wojnarowicz began to make complex visual art about his sexuality identity..." 100
"In an earlier waterfront memory, Wojnarowicz wrote about dangling his feet over the edge of the pier, 'like Huck Finn from his eternal raft.'...In this journal entry, Wojnarowicz captures the waterfront's paradoxical appeal. On the one hand, it offers a return to childhood innocence, Huck and Jim on the raft alone together, floating down the Mississippi, seemingly escaping the oppression of an unjust society and the decorum of bourgeois respectability and female companionship. On the other, where such childhood fantasies are chaste, the masculine world of the piers is overtly sexual. The male bonding of childhood becomes male coupling. What remains constant, however, is a freedom from responsibility. The piers function for Wojnarowicz as what Foucault calls a heterotopia: an in-between space of freedom where the normal rules of society no longer apply. In his journals, Wojnarowicz compares leaving the piers with Tress to returning from some exotic land filled with wild beasts..." 101
"...Wojnarowicz collection housed in New York University's Fales Library..." 115
"The title of my book, Pier Groups, is derived from Arch Brown's 1979 gay porn movie, which is set on the waterfront and in which Matta-Clark's Day's End briefly and specatacularly appears." 5
"There have been many permutations between my 2003 hybrid lecture/performance and the book you have before you. I dropped the performers and fashioned more traditional lectures and fragments of essays out of my initial research. In 2012, with the assistance of the artist and curator Darren Jones, I had the opportunity to turn some of my research into an exhibition any the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art. And in 2016 I curated a show at the Hunter College Art Galleries that focused on Pier 34 in 1983-84 when it was briefly taken over by Wojnarowicz and his friends and used as makeshift studios and exhibition spaces." 6
"To witness the waterfront's precipitous decline, ending in near abandonment in the 1970s, a mere twenty years after being the epicentre of the busiest port in the world, was to be given a premonition of what the end of modern commerce might look like. It was as if the entire logic of capitalism and the endless movement not only of things but of people coming in and out of the city might all be winding down." 9
"Public sex on the waterfront not only violated codes of conduct; it cut across boundaries of class, race, and ethnicity. For queer writers like Samuel Delany, Guy Hocquenghem, and Wojnarowicz, among others, this was central to its revolutionary potential." 11
"Equally germane is Foucault's 1967 lecture "Of Other Spaces," which introduces the intriguing concept of "heterotopias," spaces that "suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect." Unlike utopias, which are fantasies of ideal spaces and relationships, heterotopias actually exist, but they have an in-between and indeterminate quality that makes them seem phantasmal. Cemeteries, brothels, prisons, and nursing homes are among the places Foucault offers as possible heterotopias. They exist amid our everyday spaces, but upon entering them we feel as if we have been transported outside the rules and categories of normal life." 11-12
"Writing two years later, the literary scholar and queer activist Charles Shively was even more emphatic: anonymous public sex between gay men was an act of revolution. According to Shively, the "indiscriminate promiscuity" of sex in the trucks and in other clandestine locations created a radical equality that heralded a possible socialism of sexuality. Shouldn't equality and freedom extend to our bodies and their physical relationships as well as to the economy? Shively's answer was that "we need to be indiscriminate": "No one should be denied love because they are old, ugly, fat, crippled, bruised, or the wrong race, color, creed, sex or country of national origin. We need to copulate with anyone who requests our company; set aside all the false contraptions of being hard to get, unavailable-that is, costly on the capitalist market. We need to leave behind the whole mentality of measurement; it is a massive tool of social control." 24
"At almost exactly the same time that Wojnarowicz was photographing the Rimbaud series, Cindy Sherman was creating her famous film stills." 96
"A key trigger in the process was meeting the photographer Arthur Tress. Until Carr wrote her biography, Tress's role in Wojnarowicz's aesthetic formation had gone completely unnoticed, and even Carr does not make much of it. Yet Tress and Wojnarowicz were briefly lovers in April 1978, precisely the time that Wojnarowicz began to make complex visual art about his sexuality identity..." 100
"In an earlier waterfront memory, Wojnarowicz wrote about dangling his feet over the edge of the pier, 'like Huck Finn from his eternal raft.'...In this journal entry, Wojnarowicz captures the waterfront's paradoxical appeal. On the one hand, it offers a return to childhood innocence, Huck and Jim on the raft alone together, floating down the Mississippi, seemingly escaping the oppression of an unjust society and the decorum of bourgeois respectability and female companionship. On the other, where such childhood fantasies are chaste, the masculine world of the piers is overtly sexual. The male bonding of childhood becomes male coupling. What remains constant, however, is a freedom from responsibility. The piers function for Wojnarowicz as what Foucault calls a heterotopia: an in-between space of freedom where the normal rules of society no longer apply. In his journals, Wojnarowicz compares leaving the piers with Tress to returning from some exotic land filled with wild beasts..." 101
"...Wojnarowicz collection housed in New York University's Fales Library..." 115
May 14, 2020
Mr. Weinberg delves into the crypts the piers, trapped in between Manhattan's West Side Highway and the Hudson River were. This was a no-mans land neither at sea nor on land, and its particular geography is what makes the efforts of his work all the more valuable. He dove into a space others have walked past and forgotten, and concerns the archeologic history of the space with a regard and sensitivity, free of sentimentality or judgement. The artists; their lives and paths, their meetings and productions, and their causes in a time lost to AIDS and gentrifying real-estate maneuvers, is offered with academic precision, yet one that produces a subjective fleeting wistfulness for eras bygone that are lost to the tides of time.
November 15, 2020
This is an art history book about the art and the art scene that grew up around the abandoned Hudson River piers in the 1970s and early 80s when they were mostly a hangout for gay men cruising for sex. So there are some nude photos and some R-rated images here, but mostly it's an examination of how the milieu contributed to and was necessary for the art that emerged. It's a deep dive, but fascinating.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews