Reviewed in this article:
New York: 1962-1964 (The Jewish Museum, July 22-January 8)
Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel (Directed by Maya Duverdier, Amélie van Elmbt)
It Was All a Dream: Biggie and the World That Made Him (By Justin Tinsley; Abrams, 2022)
A trio of new works tracks some 60 years in the cultural life of New York City: an extraordinary exhibition at the Jewish Museum showcasing the “new art” that emerged in 1962; a eulogistic documentary about the Chelsea Hotel; and a hagiography of hip-hop legend Biggie Smalls. Beyond chronicling the city and its scenes, these works capture what, since Walt Whitman, has been New York’s clearest aesthetic through line: that we “behold this compost and behold it well!” From Robert Rauschenberg, whose art of litter and filth is prominently featured in the Jewish Museum’s new survey, to Biggie Smalls, a sensitive narrator of urban catastrophe, the artists featured in these works turn to waste and detritus to reconfigure the ruins of their present into something different altogether—sometimes into something sublime.
Entering the Jewish Museum’s New York: 1962-1964 exhibition, a large neon sign—‘Liquor Store’—glows over a room wrapped in a giant wallpaper-photograph of the corner of 8th Street in Greenwich Village in 1962, signaling the curator’s intentions: to envelop us in the neon illumination of three years that saw an America in transformation. It was then that Robert Rauschenberg created his famous “combines”—mixed-media sculpture-paintings that mined materials from the gutters and dime stores of New York City—and Andy Warhol printed silkscreen copies of pictures pulled from tabloids and magazines. It makes sense to immerse the exhibition’s viewers first in these shots of the Village; it had long been an epicenter of America’s avant-garde. Newer to the avant-garde in the ’60s, however, and in many ways the subject of the exhibition itself, was the Jewish Museum. Under the leadership of Alan Solomon, who served as the museum’s curator from 1962 to 1964, the Jewish Museum exploded onto the avant-garde art scene as one of the foremost institutions of what Solomon called the “new art,” which drew inspiration from “the rawness and disorder” of the city. For Solomon, Rauschenberg epitomized this moment—especially, as Solomon put it, in the artist’s “optimistic belief that richness and heightened meaning can be found anywhere in the world, even in refuse found in the street.”
The new exhibition at the Jewish Museum achieves just this effect—and gives new meaning to today’s trash-strewn streets of New York City, our own age’s genius for producing garbage and waste.
The show also demonstrates the awesome impact that Solomon and the Jewish Museum had in supporting these artists. Under Solomon’s auspices, the Jewish Museum held the world’s first museum retrospectives of Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Solomon was also central in Rauschenberg receiving the International Grand Prize for Painting at the Venice Biennale, a prize that underscored New York’s position as the capital of the 20th century.
Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel similarly mines the past to intervene in our city’s present. A meditative (if occasionally ponderous) film about the Chelsea Hotel and its current renovation—an enormous redevelopment project that transforms the storied dump into a luxury hotel—the film teases out the hotel’s history through dream-like vignettes and ghostly recordings. Built in the late 1800s with 250 guest rooms, the hotel housed generations of writers, painters, and musicians who came through New York: In 1953, Dylan Thomas was rushed from his room at the Chelsea to the hospital, where he later died of pneumonia; in the early 1960s, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso would regularly be seen hanging around, getting stoned (“you could get high in the elevators on the residue of marijuana smoke,” Arthur Miller wrote) and hawking copies of Fuck You magazine; Arthur C. Clarke finished 2001: A Space Odyssey while staying at the hotel; Larry Rivers’ paintings hung in the lobby (fare for a room, in all likelihood); and Leonard Cohen was moved to song by what he did with Janis Joplin at the Chelsea (Joplin, for her part, is said to have written “I’m the best fuck in the world” on the wall of her own Chelsea Hotel bedroom). Such is the storied lore of the Chelsea.
The film’s focus, though, is the dregs of that lore: a building now bustling with construction crews, covered in tarp, upcycled into yet another product in the gift shop of the city’s history. These efforts at renovating the building, however, have encountered tremendous resistance from the hotel’s last tenants—a group of artists and weirdos who have managed to hold onto their rooms for decades. “There are people here who are remnants of another time in New York when Manhattan was a bohemian and avant-garde center,” one tenant muses, construction crews pounding at the door. “Now I think that time is gone.”
That time is gone, of course, but the filmmakers, Amélie van Elmbt and Maya Duverdier, enact just the kind of aesthetic intervention that the exhibition at the Jewish Museum chronicles so well. The final residents of the Chelsea, sweet and strange and lost, are the waste of an earlier era. “We’re not people,” one resident laments. “We are ghosts.” This is not a judgment of these people so much as a description of the place they’ve been forced to occupy in the world, tiptoeing around an active construction zone as a gleaming new hotel goes up all around them. (And what could better capture the feeling of living through the city’s constant renovations?) All but left behind by the rest of Lower Manhattan’s frenzied creative destruction, Van Elmbt and Duverdier turn to these ghosts as a way of capturing (and perhaps reanimating) the commitments of the hotel’s earlier inhabitants, who lived in a time when being proximate to beauty was a holy calling.
By the 1980s and 1990s, the Chelsea was already becoming a cultural artifact (even as Madonna went there for a photo shoot and Ethan Hawk was among the hotel’s tenants). Meanwhile, across the crime-ridden city that would soon elect Rudolph Giuliani mayor, Chris Wallace (also known as Biggie Smalls or the Notorious B.I.G.) was rapping and making demos but mostly working in the drug trade—a booming business during the height of the crack epidemic. It is this twinned history of hip-hop’s growth into the planet’s most popular music form and its emergence in the cradle of the crack epidemic and America’s war on drugs that is at the center of Justin Tinsley’s new book, It Was All A Dream: Biggie and the World That Made Him (Abrams Press, 2022).
Tinsley, a senior reporter with ESPN’s The Undefeated, paints a vivid picture of the world that Biggie was born into. Biggie’s mother, Voletta Wallace, immigrated to the United States from Jamaica as a teenager and became a primary school teacher in Brooklyn, where Biggie was born. Voletta raised Chris in Clinton Hill, a neighborhood shaped by legacies of housing discrimination and the city’s assault on the crack scourge—a disastrous response that exacerbated a public health crisis. While Tinsley’s book doesn’t add much to the growing literature on race in the postwar city or on hip-hop’s late-century transformations, it does a fine job braiding these histories together to show how Biggie brilliantly lifted the world of violence and terror that stalked the streets of Brooklyn into something lyrical. By focusing on the urban crisis in the background of Biggie’s life as a drug dealer and then as a rap icon, Tinsley shows how Biggie’s music and storytelling lived at the tense intersection between poetry and violence. “Shit, it’s hard being young from the slums,” Biggie lisps in “Things Done Changed,” the second track of his first album. “Eatin’ five-cent gums, not knowing where your meal’s coming from.” In one line of verse, Biggie captures a generation’s trauma while transforming it into mellifluous wordplay, the artist turning his ruined city into a song.
Sugarcubes
New York: 1962-1964 (The Jewish Museum, July 22-January 8)
5/5. I’m going back again before it closes.
Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel (Directed by Maya Duverdier, Amélie van Elmbt)
3/5. Slow but beautiful—a moving film about urban ruins, art, and aging
It Was All a Dream: Biggie and the World That Made Him (Justin Tinsley)
2/5. Not much here you can’t find in the 2021 documentary Biggie: I’ve Got a Story To Tell, currently available to stream on Netflix