With their bric-a-brac materials and seemingly random construction, it’s a feat that one of Curtis Cuffie’s sculptures, exhibited at Buchholz-Gallery, still exists. Cuffie was born in 1955 in South Carolina and moved to New York as a teenager. Between the 1980s and 1996, he lived intermittently on the streets of the East Village, near Cooper Union and the Bowery, where he created his works. He became part of the downtown scene, befriending artists such as David Hammons, who championed his art.
Cuffie picked up trash and found objects, which he assembled into sculptures that he displayed on sidewalks, medians and chain-link fences. Subject to interference from the city’s police and sanitation departments, inclement weather, and interventions or changes by the artist, his works sometimes existed for a few days or less before new assemblages appeared overnight. He embraced the uncertainty of his surroundings, knowingly erecting sculptures in areas subject to police raids.
Cuffie’s playful and inventive constructions in the show’s 14 works invite viewers to perceive a sense of the body. In “Red Dress,” a flippant peacock feather suggests an eye, while a ruffled red tutu suggests lips. Some works recall the figure in their sole verticality, relying on the viewer to fill in the missing parts.
While the gallery’s sculptures command a sense of place, weathered textiles and precariousness allude to their ephemerality. An Untitled Work (c. 1992-2000) consists of a metal chair with its legs removed, a thin reclining metal tube in its seat, and a thin strip of fabric cut out like duct tape. This work merges the artist’s own precarious condition, as a black man who has spent time homeless, with a strong desire to occupy public space, despite constant threats or risks to his life and livelihoods.
Artist Pope.L spoke of “have-nots,” a condition of vulnerability that comes from having little or no income and/or being non-white in the United States. Cuffie’s works embody this tension, announcing their lack, as in “Every House Deserves a Happy Home, Every Home Deserves a Happy Family” (1996), while displaying the excess trash of New Yorkers.
The humor of the works is tempered by a feeling of sadness. They are defined both by the materials that compose them and by what they lack. The number of extant works by Cuffie is unknown. These works exist as memories of a collective history of the downtown New York scene of the 1980s and 1990s. Photographic documentation lends permanence to a work that resists it, but above all Cuffie’s sculptures lay bare the excesses of material culture while providing respite from the difficulties of his life and that of others in the transformations of his objects.
Curtis Cuff continues at the Buchholz Gallery (17 East 82nd Street, Upper East Side, Manhattan) through May 20. The exhibition was curated by Scott Portnoy. The artist’s first monograph will be published in June by Blank Forms in collaboration with Galerie Buchholz.
