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David Rimanelli |
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| In many ways, in both his art and his life, the artist James Nares exemplifies certain transformations indigenous to New York's turbulent art world. Born in London in 1953, Nares has lived in New York since 1974 and has been a near constant in the motley downtown scene, making his mark in painting, sculpture, music, photography and film, as well as in New York's densely imbricated social strata. Throughout his career, Nares has remained surprisingly resilient, indifferent to the gossip that accrues around almost any artist of note. "People are probably more interested in my sex life than in the way I make my paintings," he sardonically remarks. "I suppose anyone who spends much time in New York and gets anything out of the experience necessarily has a checkered career. The great thing about New York is you can always reappear: even after you think you've burned all your bridges or completely destroyed yourself, most people are more than willing to give you a second chance." |
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| To describe the New York of the mid-'70s as a different world is an understatement. For one thing, as far as the rest of the planet was concerned, New York was more or less dead, teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. Much of the city below 14th Streety remained terra incognita, a cluster of obscure, raw, verminous neigbborhoods - quite the contrary of the Disneyesque tourist trap that "Downtown" has since become. And yet, perhaps because it was cheap, this labyrinth of tenements and deserted industrial spaces proved a suitable home to New York's last thriving avant-garde. | |
| As the glitz of Studio 54 epitomized late-'70s decadence, Steve Mass's Mud Club, located in Tribecca - then pretty much the bowels of Manhattan - bred an even weirder art, music, sex, and drug scene. "I guess you could say I was a fixture at the Mudd Club even before it officially opened," Nares recalls. "I once appeared in the centrefold of the London magazine Time Out as a representative of the Mudd Club. I did a performance piece there that Steve Mass wanted to take on the road, but doing it once was enough for me." |
A sequence of Nares |
| The mood of radical, even hostile desublimation that the Mudd Club fostered also encouraged an almost hallucinatory blurring of the boundaries between art and life - a historic goal of the avant-garde, but pursued here without recourse to self-conscious manifestos. The only thing crazier than art was life. As the Nadar of that scene, photographer Nan Goldin recalls: "We were young, thin and drugs were still a good time." In such environs, Goldin took some of her first New York photographs, Gary Indiana penned his early plays, Phantoms of Louisiana and The Roman Polanski Story, Lydia Lunch spewed punk vitriol, and Nares played in the seminal no-wave band The Contortions, as well as in the more obscure Delbyzantines, with Jim Jarmusch. His art work included cast-concrete balls resembling pendulums, as well as figurative paintings, in which the brush stroke remained preeminent. Nares also co-founded Collaborative Projects Inc. - familiarly known as Colab - and worked on a number of underground films and videos. His best known Super 8 film, Rome 78, featured such fixtures of the demimonde as Lunch, John Lurie, and David McDermott playing hysterical, power-crazed egomaniacs in a deliriously ignoble imperial Rome. | |
| Nourished in this atmosphere of inter-genre experimentation, Nares has emerged in the '90s as an eloquent exponent of that typically ossified mode: abstract painting. Referring to his former artistic diversification, he explains that "there is something in everything I've done that connects to my painting. There's a cinematic element, there's a musical element. I've concentrated on painting since 1982, but I've only recently achieved a kind of painterly distillation." | |
| In a sense, his explorations of the Mudd Club and other venues were in fact years of apprenticeship, a kind of hectic, protracted adolescence that laid the ground for the mature artist. "Maybe it's just that I'm getting older," Nares says, "but I no longer feel the compulsion to chase after every glittering thing I see. I used to decide, 'I wanna be in a rock 'n' roll band, I wanna make a movie.' After a long experimental phase, I began to strip away everything that wasn't really mine, and what became the focus was my painting." | |
| During the last few years, Nares has elaborated a system of painting that might be characterized as a grammar, or syntax, of the individual brush stroke: it involves a panoply of references while retaining a precise, local character. Nares's looping, curvaceous strokes recall the poetic scribbles of Henri Michaux, the grandiosity of Abstract Expressionism, or the controlled graphics of Chinese calligraphy. At the same time, Nares distances his practice from the notion of pure, unmediated expressivity; in this way, his paintings bring to mind Gerhard Richter's cooly cerebral abstractions. Nares attempts to approximate a paradox in his painting, striving for an effect that is at once calculated and impulsive, the product of rote repetition as well as instantaneous and decicive action. Laying the canvas flat, he uses a brush of his own making ("I only make them because I have to," he says, "If I could purchase the brushes I needed, I'd be the happiest artist.") to execute a bold, over-size mark in a single movement. | |
| Stepping back from the painting, he then assesses the quality of this apparently spantaneous gesture; more often than not, he doesn't like the result and wipes away the paint. Nares repeats the process until he judges the effect sucesful. "My procedure is instantaneous, but it's also narrative and sequential," he explains, "In that way, it resembles photography or cinema as much as typical gestural abstraction. At the same time, the precise sequence of moves I execute over and over again in making the painting becomes a kind of dance." | |
| Nares is now painting new works on paper for a January show at New York's Paul Kasmin Gallery. His output is both decorous and exciting, preserving artistic integrity while adapting to the constraints of an art world that is radically different from the one he entered some 20 years ago. His is a '90s story: the volatile experimenter of yore has matured into an assured, self-conscious practitioner of the most traditional of artistic mediums; the urban nightcrawler of the Mudd Club is now a paragon of domesticity. (Nares lives with his wife of one year, the novelist Ameena Meer, and her daughter from a previous marriage; their first child is on the way.) | |
| "A while back I went into seclusion for about two years," Nares recalls. "It was a particularly focused period - a lot that was fragmentary in my painting seemed to come together then. I lived in a tiny, isolated house way out on Long Island, near Montauk. When I returned I hooked up with Ameena." Although the painter declines to elaborate on the reason for his retreat, one suspects it must have functioned as a kind of purgation, from which he could return to enjoy la vita nuova. |
