NIGHTS AND DAYS IN 1990s MANHATTAN
From 1990 to 1996 I lived in an apartment at the corner of Lexington Avenue and East 23rd street in Manhattan. The building was known in the 1930s as the George Washingtron Hotel. My apartment, no. 320, was where the English poet W. H. Auden lived, when he first moved to the United States shortly before the start of the Second World War. I liked to think that it was in my bedroom that Auden wrote his beautiful poem entitled "Lullabye" which began with these lines:
"Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arms.
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from thoughtful children."
At the western end of 23rd street, my soul mate the Australian artist Adam Nankervis lived, in the legendary Chelsea Hotel. I met Adam in the Chelsea Hotel. He was curled in a sofa in an apartment there, with his boots painted gold dangling above a much battered rococo settee which (I imagined) could have been left behind by the great French actress Sarah Bernhardt when she lived in the Chelsea Hotel. Adam Nankervis was introduced to me by visiting English artist Inigo Batterham, the morning after a party which American artists Carolee Schneemann, Nina Sobel and Diana Torr, gave for me in Caroline's loft in Manhattan.
It was inside the Chelsea Hotel that Adam, Erica Randlett and I rehearsed a performance which we gave at the MK Night Club on Fifth Avenue, with the assistance of photographer Alberto Alejandro. Our performance marked the closing of the MK Nightclub. The evening was curated by Louis Branco (director of the Rempire Gallery on Mercer street in Soho) and the brothers Ari and Christos Marcopolous. The title of our performance was "The Song of Songs of Solomon". The night of our performance was also the beginnning of the first Iraq War under the first president George Bush. A most ominous occasion, we thought.
Daily, throughout the 1990s, Adam Nankervis and I walked the length of East 23rd street from east to west and from west to east. On certain noondays, I stood in front of the Flatiron Building and for a uarter of an hour I sculpted the light.
On certain days, Adam and I created impromptu performances at Madison Square Garden, where we befriended a spritely squirrel we called Spunky.
The evenings we spent mostly in the lower East Side of Manhattan.
One night while walkiing down Lafayette street, we noticed that the cement on the sidewalk opposite the CBGB nightclub was still wet. We decided to do an impromptu beside the sidewalk and wrote our names and made drawings of the Sun and the Moon on the wet cement in celebration of the Mondrian Fan Club which Adam Nankervis and I co-founded.. Many years later, when we visited the site, we noticed that our names and drawings were still on the sidewalk, frozen in the now hard concrete. That impromptu inspired my performance entitled "O, How Many Suns and Moons I have Seen!", which is an integral part of my conitnuing series of art works collectively entitled "New York Epiphanies".
David Medalla
Founder & Director of the London Biennale