I had an event to attend in New York City last week, but I couldn’t afford the hotel when the event was actually being held. So, I got a room for my wife and me a few blocks north, on 7th Avenue and 53rs Street. Venturing out for coffee the next morning, I was thrilled to see a sculpture directly across the street, a giant rendering of the word HOPE in red and green letters.
The sculpture is, of course, by pop-artist Robert Indiana, and is a version of his famous LOVE print from 1964. With its simple, Didone letters and bright, primary colors, it’s one of the most instantly recognizable images in art history. Later, Indiana transformed the image into a sculpture which was installed in Central Park for decades. Later still, he made parallel sculptures using other words, like the HOPE version I saw (and photographed, below).
For me, seeing that particular sculpture, in that particular spot, literally right outside my randomly chosen hotel, seemed like a profound instance of synchronicity. This is because I had been reading Prudence Peiffer’s excellent non-fiction book The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever, which illuminates the history of Coenties Slip (pronounced koh-ENT-tees), a semi-abandoned industrial area of lower Manhattan that had once been a small pier jutting into the East River. The slip was filled-in during the early 19th Century and became a locus for sail-making, one of the most skilled and highest-paying trade jobs of the era. Sail-making requires a lot of open warehouse space, and in the early 1960s, those same warehouses (long since abandoned) became cheap studio space for struggling artists and actors, and it is these brave figures that Peiffer’s book illuminates. Chief among them were Robert Indiana, James Rosenquist, Agnes Martin, Elsworth Kelly, and Lenore Tawney.
I’ve always been fascinated by history books that focus on a particular place and time that, for some reason, becomes a focal point of artistic thought and innovation. (Another example is David McCollough’s The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris.) Perhaps my fascination has its roots in the fact that I grew up in Gainesville, Florida, which has itself, in a small way, been a gathering place for various artists, especially in music. Tom Petty grew up here, and the Eagles and Stephen Stills also have strong connections. As with Coenties Slip, the reasons Gainesville became a sort of mecca were less spiritual than practical. That is, Gainesville is a college town in the South. Rent is cheap, there are lots of college kids who will pay to hear music, and one has access to an endless supply of great, home-grown marijuana. For Coenties Slip, artists were attracted both to the cheap studio space (in which many of them also lived, secretly and illegally) as well as the more relaxed cultural and sexual mores of New York City.
Specifically, Coenties Slip, like NYC itself, was a bit of a gay haven. Many of the male and female artists there, including Indiana, Kelly, and Tawney, were gay, and the 1960s were still a time of increased persecution and ostracization of gay people. (As the book explains, the freedoms and cultural currency that gay people began to enjoy in the 1920s and 1930s were quashed and eliminated in the post-war paranoia of the 1940s and 1950s.) So, perhaps inevitably, many artists who happened to be gay found themselves gravitating to Coenties Slip, where they could define new identities for themselves, both artistically and personally. The most extreme example of this was probably Indiana himself, who changed his name from Robert Clark to Robert Indiana, taking the name of the state in which he was born and which, one suspects, he regarded as the most iconic of American places.
Of course, once all those artists were assembled in a small, isolated space like Coenties Slip, they formed a funky little community. They helped each other survive in lean times, and they gave each other emotional support. Most importantly, they influenced and inspired each other’s art. Peiffer describes this dynamic as “collective solitude”:
The Slip offered a release from societal expectations but also community; its siting as a sociopolitical refuge is a part of how we can think about collective solitude. Its isolation allowed for that community to be self-selecting—whoever was invited down for one of Tawney’s parties, or the fellow artists who had also chosen to live at the “end” of the city. Martin enjoyed holding court, lecturing a group at a party on Gertrude Stein or on truth and beauty, but then she needed to be away from everyone. Tawney and Martin were captivated by the story and writings of St. Teresa of Avila, who wrote in sixteenth-century Spain about the power of prayer and one’s “interior castle”—the soul’s space of devotion and care. In her clear, descriptive writing, Teresa, who suffered from what she called divine “raptures,” writes of the “great noise” in her head during her visions, “so that I consider it almost impossible to finish what I am commanded to write.” Tawney and Martin both meditated, and read widely across cultures about spirituality and beauty. D. T. Suzuki’s free lectures on Zen philosophy at Columbia University in the 1950s had influenced many New York artists, including Reinhardt and Cage; Martin also read the ancient Taoist philosophers Chuang Tzu and Lao Tzu on a daily basis. With Youngerman, Kelly, and Indiana, they read and practiced the I Ching.
As an example of this collective solitude idea, take Indiana’s LOVE sculpture, which had its origins in Indiana’s failed relationship with boyfriend.
After Kelly and Indiana broke up, Indiana made a not very subtle painting, FUCK, in which the U is tilted, much like the O in his later LOVE. Kelly was horrified. Indiana started using other related words, including FOUR (another reference to love in its numerical makeup, and a departure, like Mate, from the three-letter imperatives of his earliest word paintings). In 1963, he began Column Love, one of his herm sculptures using found nineteenth-century columns from the neighborhood, with LOVE stenciled in white around its width and seven rows high, and COENTIES SLIP at its base.
Other Slip based artists had other challenges. Some, like the brilliant Agnes Martin, struggled with debilitating bouts of schizophrenia, during which her Slip-mates would be forced to take her to New York’s notorious mental institution, Bellevue.
Allow me to end this post with yet another instance of synchronicity regarding the book. On the same trip to New York, I happened to be chatting with a writer friend of mine and her husband, who looked to be in his late fifties and had an unmistakable New York accent. I mentioned that I had been reading a book about this old section of downtown called The Slip. His eyes widened. “Coenties Slip!” he yelled. “I used to hang out there as a kid. It’s where they used to make sails. And where the artists lived.”
Indeed.
Ash Clifton, Writer 