The Lonely City (29 page)

I wonder now: is it fear of contact that is the real malaise of our age, underpinning the changes in both our physical and virtual lives. St Patrick’s Day. In the morning Times Square was filled with drunken teenagers in green baseball caps, and I walked right down to Tompkins Square Park to escape them. By the time I turned for home it had begun to snow. The streets were almost deserted. At the top of Broadway I passed a man sitting in a doorway. He must have been in his forties, with cropped hair and big cracked hands. When I paused he started to speak unstintingly, saying that he had been sitting there for three days, saying that not a single person had stopped to talk to him. He told me about his kids –
I got three beautiful babies on Long Island
– and then a confusing story about work boots. He showed me a wound on his arm and said
I got stabbed yesterday. I’m like a piece of shit here. People throw pennies at me.

It was snowing hard, the flakes whirling down. My hair was soaked already. After a while, I gave him five bucks and walked on. That night I watched the snow falling for a long time. The air was full of wet neon, sliding and smearing in the streets. What is it about the pain of others? Easier to pretend that it doesn’t exist. Easier to refuse to make the effort of empathy, to believe instead that the stranger’s body on the sidewalk is simply a render ghost, an accumulation of coloured pixels, which winks out of existence when we turn our head, changing the channel of our gaze.

8

STRANGE FRUIT

IT GOT COLDER AND THEN
it got warmer, the fizz of pollen in the air. I left Times Square, moving instead to my friend Larry’s temporarily vacant apartment on East 10th Street. It was good to be back in the East Village. I’d missed the neighbourhood, the community gardens decorated with fairy lights and scrap sculpture, the way you could hear a dozen languages a minute on Avenue A. Urbanity: providing, as Sarah Schulman puts it in
Gentrification of the Mind,
‘the daily affirmation that people from other experiences are real’, though the old diversity of race and sexuality and income was palpably imperilled by the unstoppable rise of condos and fro-yo outlets, the escalating rents.

Larry’s apartment was packed with an ecstatic clutter of Americana, a collection that included but was by no means limited to a lovingly assembled library of celebrity biographies – P for Dolly Parton, H for Keith Haring – alongside perhaps a hundred empty bottles of Jack Daniels, dozens of crocheted blankets, musical instruments and throw cushions, a bust of Elvis in sunglasses and a lanky blow-up alien embracing a bloated scarlet King Kong.

Arising from out of this joyful disorder were Larry’s artworks, chief among them a cape he’d been working on for all the time I’d known him. This cape was patchworked from hundreds of discarded embroidery projects gathered in thrift stores and rummage sales over decades, many of them unfinished. After stitching them together, Larry had begun to embellish the empty spaces with millions of sequins, each one of them hand-sewn. Aeroplanes, butterflies, ducks, a train drawing behind it a skein of coloured smoke: all these endearing leavings, these absolute discards of culture and good taste, had been drawn together, alchemised into a celebration of the anonymous, the domestic and the homespun.

The cape was an imposing presence in the apartment. It was huge, for a start, perhaps the brightest, most intensely coloured object I’d ever laid eyes on. I liked living alongside it. It felt nourishing, somehow, a totem object of a kind of collaboration that had not involved actual contact, actual proximity, but that had nonetheless created links, drawing together a community of strangers, scattered through time. I liked the way it gestured too at the invisible presence of the body, partly because it was so obviously a garment, hanging in the empty space of Larry’s studio, and partly because it had been made by dozens of human hands, attesting in every stitch to human labour, to the human desire to make things not because they are useful but because they are pleasing or consoling in some way.

Art that repairs, art that longs for connection, or that finds a way to make it possible. It was around this time that I came across Zoe Leonard’s extraordinary work of mourning,
Strange Fruit (for
David). Strange Fruit
is an installation, completed in 1997 and now part of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s permanent collection. It’s made from 302 oranges, bananas, grapefruits, lemons and avocados, their contents eaten and their torn skins dried before being sutured back together with red, white and yellow thread, embellished with zippers, buttons, sinew, stickers, plastic, wire and fabric. The results are exhibited sometimes together and sometimes in small groupings, laid in state across the gallery floor, where they continue on their implacable business of rotting or shrinking or mouldering away, until in time they will turn to dust and vanish altogether.

This piece, which is clearly part of the vanitas tradition in art, the practice of depicting matter as it passes from radiance to decomposition, was made in memory of David Wojnarowicz, who had been a close friend of Leonard’s. They first met back in 1980, when they worked together at the nightclub Danceteria, the after-hours headquarters of the downtown New Wave scene. Later, they were both members of ACT UP, and were for a time also in the same affinity group, which is to say that they’d made art and talked about art and attended protests and been arrested together for over a decade.

David’s death in 1992 coincided with a period in which ACT UP began to fragment and factionalise, its membership buckling under the strain of trying to transform entrenched and toxic systems while caring for and mourning beloved friends. Many people withdrew around that time, among them Leonard, who left New York, travelling to India before spending stints in off-season Provincetown and then in Alaska.
Strange Fruit
was made
during those years of solitude, arising if not in response to then certainly as a consequence of the mass losses of the AIDS years, the exhaustion of labouring to bring about political change.

In an interview in 1997 with her friend, the art historian Anna Blume, Leonard talked about how the first fruits came into being.

It was sort of a way to sew myself back up. I didn’t even realize I was making art when I started doing them . . . I was tired of wasting things. Throwing things out all the time. One morning I’d eaten these two oranges, and I just didn’t want to throw the peels away, so absentmindedly I sewed them back up.

The results immediately recalled David’s own stitched works, which recur in a variety of mediums, among them objects, photographs, performances and scenes in films. A cut loaf of bread, the two halves loosely darned back together, so that the space between them is filled with a cat’s cradle of scarlet embroidery thread. A famous photograph of his own face, his lips stitched shut, the points where the needle has apparently entered marked with dots of what looks like blood. These are among the signature works of the AIDS crisis, pieces that attest to silencing and endurance; to the isolation of being denied a voice. Sometimes the sewing seems redemptive, but more often it is used to expose and draw attention to censorship and hidden violence, to the kind of sundering and shunning that was going on everywhere in David’s world.

The fruit are recognisably objects from the same war. The title
picks up on the ugly slang word
fruit
for gay men, the strange produce, the outcasts of society. And it alludes too to Billie Holiday’s song about lynching: hatred and discrimination enacted physically, with extreme violence, on the twisted and burned bodies hanging in the trees. Billie Holiday, who gave voice to loneliness both personal and institutional, who lived and died inside it, a life short on love and brutalised by racism. Billie Holiday, who was called
Blackie
to her face and made to take the back door even in venues where she was herself the headline act, wounds that she attempted to medicate with the poisonous ameliorators of alcohol and heroin. Billie Holiday, who in the summer of 1959 collapsed in her room on West 87th Street while eating custard and oatmeal, and who was taken first to the Knickerbocker and then to the Metropolitan Hospital in Harlem, where she was left – as so many AIDS patients would be in the years that followed, particularly if they too had black or brown skin – on a gurney in a corridor, just another dope case.

The worst thing about this act of dehumanisation and denial of care was that it had happened before, back in 1937, when a stranger telephoned to tell her that her father Clarence was dead and where should they ship the body, the blood still staining his white dress shirt. Pneumonia, she recorded in her autobiography,
Lady Sings the Blues:
‘And it wasn’t the pneumonia that killed him, it was Dallas, Texas. That’s where he was and where he walked around, going from hospital to hospital trying to get help. But none of them would even so much as take his temperature or take him in. That’s the way it was.’

She sang the song ‘Strange Fruit’ in protest against his death,
its lyrics seeming ‘to spell out all the things that had killed Pop’. And then all those same things killed her too. She never got out of the Metropolitan. She was put under arrest for possession of narcotics, and spent the final month of her life dying in a hospital room guarded by two policemen, the humiliations metered out to the stigmatised being apparently unlimited.

In its work, ACT UP attempted to address at least some of these things, to untangle and challenge the systemic forces that made some bodies matter less than others, that made the bodies of homosexuals and drug addicts and people of colour and the homeless seem expendable. In the late 1980s, it was agreed by the ACT UP floor that their work should broaden out beyond gay men, to become more inclusive and to address the needs of other populations, among them drug users and women, particularly prostitutes.

Leonard’s own work, which she describes in the ACT UP Oral History Project, was centred around needle exchanges, then a radical way of preventing the spread of AIDS. Though needle exchanges had briefly been established in New York City by Mayor Koch, under the zero tolerance ethos of the Giuliani administration they had become illegal, as they were in many other places both in America and globally. Leonard helped to establish a project that provided clean works and AIDS education for addicts, an activity for which she was arrested, charged, tried and risked a lengthy jail sentence in order to challenge the legality of syringe possession laws.

Strange Fruit
is needlework of a different kind. It isn’t activism, not like attending a protest or willingly breaking the law, and yet it deals with some of the same forces. It takes the pain of exclusion and loss and isolation, and holds them, quietly. It is political,
yes, but it is also personal, attesting to experiences that are the inescapable consequence of embodiment. Speechless,
very silent,
the fruit convey in their smallness, their particularity, the pain of breakage, of vanishing, of longing for something beloved that has departed and will not come again.

Their entreaty survives even the translation to a computer screen. Looking at them as .jpgs – a sutured orange, a banana wound absurdly with string – it is hard not to feel a tug of emotion, both in response to the damage and to the inadequate, attentive, hopeful, stubborn work of mending that had been done to them, stitch by stitch, zipper by button.

I was not the only person to find the fruit affecting. In a monograph for
Frieze
about Zoe Leonard’s work, the critic Jenni Sorkin describes seeing the installation for the first time while wandering irritably around the Philadelphia Museum of Art some time around the beginning of the millennium. ‘From a distance,’ she writes, ‘it looked like detritus. Then I got closer and stopped being annoyed and instead became very sad and felt suddenly very alone – despair hit me like a truck. The sewn fruit was absurdly, inexplicably, intimate.’

Loss is a cousin of loneliness. They intersect and overlap, and so it’s not surprising that a work of mourning might invoke a feeling of aloneness, of separation. Mortality is lonely. Physical existence is lonely by its nature, stuck in a body that’s moving inexorably towards decay, shrinking, wastage and fracture. Then there’s the loneliness of bereavement, the loneliness of lost or damaged love, of missing one or many specific people, the loneliness of mourning.

All this, though, could be conveyed with dead fruit, with drying skins on a gallery floor. What makes
Strange Fruit
so deeply touching, so intensely painful, is the work of stitching, which makes legible another aspect of loneliness: its endless agonising hope. Loneliness as a desire for closeness, for joining up, joining in, joining together, for gathering what has otherwise been sundered, abandoned, broken or left in isolation. Loneliness as a longing for integration, for a sense of feeling whole.

It’s a funny business, threading things together, patching them up with cotton or string. Practical, but also symbolic, a work of the hands and the psyche alike. One of the most thoughtful accounts of the meanings contained in activities of this kind is provided by the psychoanalyst and paediatrician D. W. Winnicott, an heir to the work of Melanie Klein. Winnicott began his psychoanalytic career treating evacuee children during the Second World War. He worked lifelong on attachment and separation, developing along the way the concept of the transitional object, of holding, and of false and real selves, and how they develop in response to environments of danger and of safety.