From Artnet.
James Nares,
an Artist Known for Mapping New York’s Changing Landscape, Is Now Navigating a
Deeply Personal Transition of His Own
Max Lakin,
July 15, 2019
The late,
great writer Glenn O’Brien once said that James Nares might sound a bit
British, but he’s a New Yorker at heart. Nares does speak with a latent,
languid London accent, but there are few artists whose work has embodied the
thrum of New York like his.
You can make
the argument, as Nares has, that the defining characteristic of the city is its
streets. Much of the artist’s work has located itself there, specifically the
street surface, the textural layer of the concrete and asphalt and all the
visual information caked into it. Since his arrival to New York in 1974, the
street has been Nares’s great protagonist and, in the intervening years, he has
spent a lot of time looking down.
“The surface
of the city, it’s just something that never goes away,” Nares said. “It’s a
history of sorts. And it’s a less protected history, less cared for. I guess
that appeals to me in a way. It’s pretty democratic. It’s walked on. It’s used.
It wears its history on its face, endless layers upon layers of road paint.”
The subject
matter of Nares’s newest body of work, the granite paving stones that make up
lower Manhattan’s sidewalks, would be familiar to anyone who’s ambled through
Soho or gawked from the curb as another glassine condo rises over Tribeca. Yet
in “Monuments,” Nares’s recent show at Kasmin gallery in New York, the sidewalk
is made new, even alien. Over the last year, he has made wax frottage rubbings
of the oldest examples, some upwards of 200 years old, pressing the impressions
with 22-carat gold leaf. Laid by immigrant artisans and mottled with
traction-giving grooves and gouges, the paving stones can resemble brutal
abstractions or primitive runes. Gilded and hoisted onto the wall, they’re
strange and sweet monoliths, tributes to the anonymous workers whose hands
still shape the contours of the city. It’s a touching tribute to the city and
its capacity to fold time.
In a way,
“Monuments” is a corrective, an acknowledgement of the people who contributed
to the city’s texture in a tangible way, and, as a byproduct of the sour
political tenor of the moment, a rather pointed statement about the immigrant
labor from which this country benefits. Like gravestone rubbings, they’re a
devotional act. “We could do two big ones in a day,” Nares said of the process.
“It’s amazing how tiring it was, scrubbing the sidewalk. I joked that we were
paying homage to our ancestors, the guys who made the marks in the first place,
just a group of us bullshitting around, talking about this and that, which is
just how I imagine them doing it,” he said. “I imagine them as masons from
different countries who were mixing and making these things together. It’s my
imagination which is the most important thing at that point. I’m close enough,
I think, to the truth, whatever it is. Intimate touches, that’s all we have.”
For an artist
so consumed with gesture and mark making, “Monuments” is different. The works
are chiefly the marks made by someone else, anointed. They’re less about
process than about seeing. They’re a gift, really, one that allows us to see
ourselves. “I’m not a great sentimentalist,” Nares said. “I’m a realist when it
comes to New York. I was reading Edith Wharton’s letters, and she was saying,
‘Goddamnit, I don’t recognize the neighborhood I grew up in.’ But I like to
acknowledge those things, and it does make me sad when those things are
obliterated. We do do it very callously. I think possibly having a European
background enables me to attach myself to the importance of things made a long
time ago—an awareness of history that isn’t as endemic to this country. But
it’s a conundrum, because that’s also what makes things so great here, the
ability to make it new, and have another one, the next model.”
To a large
degree, the works are also monuments to Nares’s time in New York. It’s perhaps
fitting that this happens to be a time of personal transition for Nares.
“Monuments” accompanies a retrospective, the artist’s first, at the Milwaukee
Art Museum, titled “Moves,” on view now through October 6. And he’s preparing
to move from his studio of 10 years in West Chelsea, where the rent is set to
double (a parallel New York narrative), to a new space in Long Island City,
Queens.
Much more than
that, Nares is embracing a side of himself personally that he has to this point
in his life repressed. In May, at a lunch at Kasmin, Nares publicly presented
as a woman for the first time, and with artist friends like Walter Robinson and
Julian Schnabel looking on, spoke rawly about the pain he had been suppressing
for so long. (Nares still uses male pronouns and his given name
professionally.)
“It’s
coincidental that these things have all sort of come to a head at the same
time,” Nares said at his studio a few weeks later. “It’s been a large and
basically unacknowledged part of me for as long as I can remember, and I think
it’s in many ways the cause of much suffering in my life, addictions and all
that stuff. I mean, I’m an addict because I’m an addict, I don’t believe any
circumstance made me an addict, but if there were things that I could tie to
the kind of suffering that I was trying to mitigate with my substance abuse,
this would certainly top the list. But I’ve neglected it for all my life,
though that’s not quite true, when I was living in London, my very first show
in a gallery was pictures of myself presenting the way I do now. It was just
something I did and never did publicly again.”
Curated by
Marcelle Polodnik, the Milwaukee Museum retrospective cycles through the
movements of Nares’s career, beginning with the early, no-budget Super 8 films
he made in the mid-1970s, like Block, a stuttering shot of a hand tracing the
length of a Manhattan city block (incidentally, the southern wall of the Church
Street post office, the only structure on the northern perimeter of the World
Trade Center to remain in tact after September 11), and Pendulum, in which
Nares swings a water-filled copper sphere—an ersatz wrecking ball—through a
pre-gentrified Tribeca and films it slicing through the air; to his road paint
canvases, which he made using a modified pavement line-striping machine; into
his calligraphic, single brushstroke paintings, sinuous whorls of cadmium and
cobalt and vermillion, which, because of the physicality involved—he made some
made by suspending himself in a rig above the canvas—are as much body art as
anything. “Those paintings have a kind of sensual quality, which my work hadn’t
expressed before in quite the same way,” Nares said. “There’s a strong
representation of my feminine aspect. They’re very sensual.”
At just 66
years old, Nares hadn’t really been in a retrospective frame of mind, even as
Polednik had periodically broached the idea over the past six years, but
installing the Milwaukee show proved to be a cathartic experience. “It was
exciting to see some old friends,” he said of his early works. “The threads are
all up here, you know. But I realize that the threads have never been made
clear before. Even my kids were saying, ‘Wow, papa, you made this?’ People
hadn’t seen the work and hadn’t had the connective tissue put in front of them,
the thread unraveled.”
The Milwaukee
show presents an uncanny sense of overlap, the past and present looping into
one another. Street, Nares’s 2012 film, in which he trawled Manhattan in a car
fixed with a Phantom Flex high-speed camera and slowed the gathered footage to
an immaculate, yearning 61 minutes, has echoes of the Super 8 films that made
New York’s street level strange, but also the work to come, like Portraits,
tightly cropped short films of individual sitters shot similarly, so that every
muscle ripple reverberates like an earthquake.
Seeing Street
and Pendulum in the same space illuminates their shared feeling, an illusion of
controlled chaos that gives way to an ecstatic reverie. Pendulum inhabits the
obliteration of the city in the ’70s, it’s kinetic destruction, but also its
capacity to incubate art, and, by extension, a future. So too does Street trace
a particular moment of the life cycle of the city. As ebullient as it is,
there’s the understanding that this version of New York is not long for the
world, and that the people sliding through it won’t necessarily be here to see
the next. In it, and in all of it, there is a birth and death.
After raising
a family, and a number of marriages, Nares has gradually grown more comfortable
presenting publicly as a woman. “I’ve been more open about it. There are all
these corny expressions—‘live my truth’—I don’t think what I was living before
was untrue, but I’ve reached a point in my life—I have three beautiful
daughters and a lovely stepson who I adore, and I’m 66 today — it’s time to
just give myself a break. I had told my kids, and they were all immediately
supportive, which was amazing. And [my daughter] Zarina asked me if she could
see some photos of myself, and she said, ‘Oh, these are great, can I post one
on Instagram,’ and I said, ‘yeah, sure,’ forgetting for a crucial moment the
power of social media. The next thing I knew I was getting phone calls from
everybody. I sort of went from 0 to 100 overnight, and so the cat was out of
the bag, and it was like, well, you know, maybe that’s better.”
The changes in
Nares’s life are an evolving process. “There was always this terrible fear,
until very recently,” he said. “Something shifted, and it shifted quite
quickly. I’ve tried dodging it and I’ve tried mostly hiding it, and now there’s
a great feeling of congruence between the way I am and the way I show myself.
I’m also, I’m realizing, part of what allowed it to happen. My generation of
artists sowed many seeds that have come to fruit with these younger
generations. If I think back to, like, Mapplethorpe, Jack Smith, I was part of
the work that was done, even if I wasn’t addressing it directly, I was there, I
was supportive, and in a way I’m reaping that.”
Because
Nares’s work touches a handful of art historical movements, from Minimalism to
No Wave, with a few stops in between, categorization is, fittingly, perhaps not
the most useful effort. “I was aware of those things, those divisions and
subgroups,” Nares said. “And I understand why those divisions appear, because
that’s sort of the natural way people reduce or define or pare things down to a
readily understandable tag so you can reference it in conversation or whatever,
and I understand also how people get pissed off, you know, ‘I’m not a pop
artist!’ or whatever it is. At this point, I don’t know what I am. The
categories did kind of break down in the last I-don’t-know-how-many years,
there has been a rupture, which appeals to me, because I’m just that way
myself. I have too many interests. It all just percolates in my mind and every
now and then something floats to the top, and that’s what I do.”