New York has recently become the most expensive city in the world. Although the street life here can feel like walking around in an airport mall most of the time, the city is still dirty and dark deep in its overpriced bones. Carbon-colored dust languishes beneath the subway tracks, stuck to every overturned, neglected edge. There was a time when a dirty atmosphere reigned throughout New York; in Bill Rice’s paintings, he almost seems to be the co-author of his strange concoctions of dirty air and darkest night, shot through with flashes of color. The eerie streets and balconies casually hint at danger, but soon reveal themselves as nostalgic recordings of his utter rapture with the residents of the men’s detention shelter across from his birthplace on East 3rd Street and the surrounding empty lots , the humpback cars and growling lorries passing though like strange beasts seen through the blinds of the Bar and, before that, of the Old Hundred, where he always claimed the same place for the evening, almost like a sentinel.
Bill Rice’s paintings, currently In view at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, are glimpses of East Village life – the former East Village of crime, abandonment and cruising, obscure characters with good muscle tone, surreptitious oral favors in the parks and alleys, sales in front and hangings outside. Its surfaces are slowly built up from thin layers of oil paint with the occasional putty-like vector or colored stripe or, occasionally, skeletal architecture or a diamond-shaped fence pattern. Looking at his works, we’re constantly on the move, wandering, scanning the neighborhood he’s lived in since 1953, when rent control was still in place and you could get by with a few welfare checks and a little luck.
This extraordinary and largely unrecognized work comes from an unusual place in relation to the hyper-commodified present: Throughout his career, Rice has held to the cherished beatnik philosophy of not selling or promoting himself. However, he was one of the most generous minds in the East Village community of the 1960s, 70s and 80s, which produced such important figures as Robert Gober, Gary Indiana, Allen Frame, Nan Goldin, Beth B, David Wojnarowicz, and Taylor Mead. All of these artists, and many more, came through Rice’s wide circle. A polymath, he performed in Jim Neu plays with local stalwarts of the scene, such as Black-Eyed Susan; appeared in films by Robert Frank, Jim Jarmusch, Amos Poe and Jacob Burckhardt, among others; and collaborated with Ulla E. Dydo on research for the book Gertrude Stein: Rising language, 1923-1934.
Bill Rice was extremely influential in an environment whose importance grows more and more as it goes back in time. I have long argued that he should be featured in the United States pavilion at the Venice Biennale, perhaps the first to be represented who has not played the game, working outside the expected standards of a career and international gallery representation. One could imagine several rooms of these mysteriously celebratory paintings, a dark room showing a selection of films he was in and a video monitor showing tapes – many of which still exist – of evening performances he hosted in the parking lot at next to its first-floor apartment, featuring a full lineup of fluid, cross-disciplinary artists and performers. Rice’s life and art testify to the creative effervescence present in the abandoned, smoky hells of the East Village during one of the most important incubations of American art and a kind of paradise before the arrival real estate agents.
Bill Rice: Around the Corner continues at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects (208 Forsyth Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan) through May 13. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
