R.J. Gilmour's Reviews > Pier Groups: Art and Sex Along the New York Waterfront

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