Peter Hujar: Hudson River II, 1975
What’s Next
Now comes the new phase. Peter is dead, and I don’t know how to live up to bragging that I could make him successful if I had another life.
Because he’d taken you up on it.
First I had to get him out of his personal ghetto. Then I had to get him out of a gay ghetto. Then I had to get him out of the downtown ghetto. At first, there was a big Mapplethorpe problem. Robert was still alive, and at the apex of his fame when we did a show at the Gray Gallery.
That was in 1990?
New York Times wrote a long review, titled “Mapplethorpe Precursor Shown”. And I knew that my job was to get rid of that headline.
One of the great curators of that era, Rudi Fuchs, became the director of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. He wanted to do a series of exhibitions of great artists who were totally unknown, starting with Peter Hujar. This was the first moment that Peter moved out of his isolated position.
At this point Susan was involved with Annie Leibovitz. She was then represented by James Danziger, and she told James something like “you’re too stodgy, you need a little edge. Get that from Peter.” So James undertook representation.
And that was a good relationship until James closed the gallery. I did not know how Peter’s reputation had been growing. Within a week of this being known, I received calls from three galleries offering to represent the work. Five years before I was being told it could only be sold at little boutiques to gay customers, at low prices.
That must have felt good.
My main reason for choosing Matthew Marks was that it seemed like natural habitat for Peter. His list of artists was very grand, but it was also very Peterish. I believe there was also help there. Nan Goldin, who revered Peter, told Matthew that he should wake up and look at this work, because it was totally undervalued. And Matthew did very well by Peter. Until the big recession, when he began to do very poorly by him.
Around this time, I made a very surprising discovery that almost all the people who came to Peter’s shows were under 35.
Peter Hujar: Two Queens in a Car, 1976
Those were his followers?
Most of them had been children when he died! I finally began to see that the word he and I had functioned in had died. “Downtown” was gone, and never to return. But there was a myth growing around that world in which Peter played a considerable role. He had become kind of a mythical figure.
When a certain kind of original artist appears on the scene, it takes a generation to understand them. That was true of Peter. Suddenly there is a new generation that gets it. They get it in a funny way, because they’re having fantasies about how wonderful downtown was.
I have that fantasy.
In fact it was just a slum. A smelly slum. But it was filled with interesting people. And nutcases and drug addicts. So I realized there was an audience for Peter that I knew nothing about.
The Archive is active on Tumblr, and I’m wondering if that has to do with the age of his audience, as you perceive it.
Absolutely. I used to get all huffy, thinking, “these people are pirating his work, I’m getting no commission”. Ultimately, he’s being seen.
Do you think that’s because of the quality of the work or the mythology around Peter?
Both. I believe that what I’m doing, for any artist, has to be done. It’s true of literature as well. If you do not have somebody fighting for you, you’re in trouble. And most artists leave it to their widow, or their lover. Nice people, and the artist loved them, but usually incompetent. One of the prime fantasies is that you’re going to be discovered after you die. The truth is, it doesn’t work unless someone makes sure you’re discovered. If you’re Vincent, you’ve got to have your Theo.
Richard Avedon knew that all along. The largest or second largest number of works in Dick’s collection were by Peter. One of them was a picture of T.C., which I personally consider to be Peter’s greatest female nude. She was a stripper who used to come and have coffee with him, and tell him her troubles.
Peter Hujar: T.C., 1975
So he had a great admirer in Avedon.
And a complicated friend. I’ll tell you a story about this: In the late ‘70s the Metropolitan Museum put on a huge exhibition of Avedon pictures. It was jammed. One limo after another. Peter called me and asked if I’d go to the opening with him. I realized later why he had asked me. If he was going be ignored by Avedon, he did not want to be alone. So we got there, and in the big hall Avedon was at one end, and all of New York society lined the corridor. Peter was quite stiff and worried. We walked about ten feet in and Avedon threw up his arms and yelled, “Peter!” and ran toward him and embraced him while camera flashes went off. I never saw Peter again for the rest of the night.
That’s terrible!
I was thrilled! It was best thing that could happen had happened. In front of everybody he had been treated like a big deal. He needed that, and he never got it.
So, the way the archive works is that you have his best interest in mind as a friend?
I’m old enough that in the next ten years, somebody else will have to run this show. At least I’m somebody who knew him and cared about him. I feel morally bound to do what he wanted me to do. I would sit by his bedside and make notes about what he wanted me to do. I’ve lived with his work every day for 25 years, and I get it. I am not in the dark any more. But I think by the time I shuffle off, there will be lots of people who get Peter.
I should tell you about the dreams.
Dreams?
Ever since I’ve had this job I have had a recurring dream, about every six months:
I’m informed that Peter is back from the dead. And he’s down in SoHo waiting to talk to me. So I head down to SoHo as fast as I can and I think, “Oh, I’ve gotta give him his work back.” And there’s a twinge of regret. I’m not thrilled about doing it. I get there and Peter would be pissy as no one in the world could be pissy. He’d say, “Well, what have you been doing?” I’d explain, and he’d say, “I want my work back. How could you have done this?” He would be insulting, close to abusive. I noticed that as he became more successful, he would get less pissy in the dreams. In the last few years, he’d gotten to be outright friendly.
In my last dream, though, which is now over a year ago, I get the news, I rush to him, and he’s pissier than ever before. He tells me in a very annoyed way, “I want my work back now.”
I take a deep breath, and I say, “OK Peter. First of all, I want to tell you something from the bottom of my heart, which is that I think it’s wonderful you’re back from the dead. I’m deeply pleased that you are getting back all those years you were cheated out of. I will start shipping your work to you tomorrow. But before we separate, I’d like to have a word with you about your tone.”
He says, “What do you mean?” and I say, “In the 25 years since you died, I have managed to pull your work out of the dank little hole where you left it. And as a result of its great quality and my efforts, it is now prominently represented in the major museums of the world. You receive critical respect and deference on three continents. You are pursued by the most important collectors of photography in the world. You are greatly admired. If there is something in that state of affairs that you find less than satisfactory, I suggest you go fuck yourself.”
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