The Grain of His Skin

An archive on the artist Tony Greene (1955 - 1990). Commentary by Richard Hawkins unless noted otherwise. Contact: [email protected]

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With Nayland Blake, Matias Viegener and Liz Kotz.

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Installation shot. Tony Greene: Room of Advances, MAK Center, Schindler House, West Hollywood. Curated by Judie Bamber and Monica Majoli. Through September 7 2014.

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Installation shot. Tony Greene: Room of Advances, MAK Center, Schindler House, West Hollywood. Curated by Judie Bamber and Monica Majoli. Through September 7 2014.

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Installation shot. Tony Greene: Room of Advances, MAK Center, Schindler House, West Hollywood. Curated by Judie Bamber and Monica Majoli. Through September 7 2014.

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Installation shot. Tony Greene: Room of Advances, MAK Center, Schindler House, West Hollywood. Curated by Judie Bamber and Monica Majoli. Through September 7 2014.

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Installation shot. Tony Greene: Room of Advances, MAK Center, Schindler House, West Hollywood. Curated by Judie Bamber and Monica Majoli. Through September 7 2014.

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Tony Greene: Melancholy in paint, given new dimension at MAK Center

Tony Greene’s paintings look not so much painted as extruded. Impasto doesn’t even begin to describe the raised filigrees of flowers and other motifs layered over tinted photographs of tender young men, taxidermy stags and barren landscapes. Reminiscent of Victorian ironwork — a form that emulated nature even as the Industrial Revolution swept it away — Greene's paintings possess the same sense of nostalgia for a vanished world.

Yet, with their melancholy physicality, the works actually rhyme with the old house, highlighting the decaying wood, the cracks in the floors, the dingy wall panels. As the paintings are ruins of innocence lost to an early death, the Schindler House is itself a ruin of a utopian ideal of living. In this sense, it’s the perfect place for Greene’s elegiac impulses. Together, they form a memorial to the faded notion that life is perfectible.

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The Tony Greene moment: Art life after death

When painter Tony Greene died of an AIDS -related illness in 1990, it was far from certain that anyone beyond his circle of friends and colleagues would remember him or his work.

"His work is so important because it comes at a time when artists were responding to the AIDS epidemic," Monica Majoli adds. This included Greene himself, who was fighting the disease throughout the late 1980s. "But he does it in a way that is so different from much of what was being produced, which tended to have more of an activist bent. He acknowledges the issue of mortality and crisis, this horrible reality that he's facing. But he also acknowledges his sexuality and his desire. He doesn't cover it up."

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The public, political and cultural response to the AIDS crisis, as well as its manifestation in art production in three American cities: New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles, will be discussed in a panel including Gregg Bordowitz, Marlene McCarthy, Nayland Blake and Liz Kotz and moderated by Matias Viegener.

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July 29 2014 - His Broken Lines at the Hammer Museum

This discussion explores Greene’s work, the politics of queer art production in Los Angeles during the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the stakes related to queer curatorial and artistic practices. Moderated by David Frantz, curator of Tony Greene: Amid Voluptuous Calm, with Monica Majoli, artist and curator; Lawrence Rinder, director, UC Berkeley Museum and Pacific Film Archive; Matias Viegener, artist and writer; and artist Millie Wilson.

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The curators of four exhibitions featuring the work of Tony Greene: Judie Bamber and Monica Majoli (Schindler House), David Evans Frantz (Made in LA/Hammer), Richard Hawkins and Catherine Opie (Whitney Biennial), and John Neff (Iceberg Projects) will discuss the reemergence of the late artist’s work, its relevance today, and how it can be framed in a contemporary discourse.  They will also offer a contextualization of the artist’s work in the realm of his personal world. 

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"Made in LA" best in show: 5 must-see pieces at the Hammer biennial (from the Los Angeles Times)

"BEST SHOW-WITHIN-A-SHOW: "Tony Greene: Amid Voluptuous Calm." The show-within-a-show conceit can get irritating pretty fast, making a museum exhibition feel like an erratic art fair rather than a considered look at the art of an age. But this thoughtful tribute to the California artist who died of AIDS-related complications in 1990 at the tender age of 35 feels just right in this moment. Organized by David Frantz, curator at the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives here in L.A., the exhibition places Greene's paintings — of vintage male pin-ups obscured by natural motifs and other patterns — among the work of his peers.

The exhibition takes us back to the gut-wrenching early days of the AIDS epidemic, when the waves of death among gay men were treated largely with institutional indifference. Doug Hammett's curious log terrarium contains HIV-positive blood and Judie Bamber's 1989 canvas of a goldfish out of water is acerbically titled "Oh Come on, It Doesn't Hurt That Much." A hair sculpture by Millie Wilson could be a drag queen's out-of-scale wig or a stand-in for a body that is no longer with us."

From the Los Angeles Times' Culture Monster

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Exhausted Autumn: A collection of fiction, criticism and testimony. Published on the occasion of Sweet Oleander, an exhibition of works by Tony Greene. Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, 1991. Edited by Richard Hawkins with contributions by Norm MacNeil, Brian Baltin, Tom Christie, Lawrence Gipe, Fred Fehlau, Dodie Bellamy, John Greyson, Liz Kotz, Millie Wilson, Hudson, Doug Ischar, Dennis Cooper, Matias Viegener and Robert Gluck. Designed by Wayne Smith.

Full downloadable PDF, courtesy of Liz Kotz

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... As part of a yearlong revival of the artist Tony Greene that began at this year’s Whitney Biennial, David Frantz, the curator of the One Archives Foundation, has assembled a show-within-a-show devoted to queer artists living in Los Angeles during the late ’80s and early ’90s. It’s a historical touchstone of supportive tribalism and a reminder that big institutions — and biennial surveys — will later reflect the communities that, by necessity, once formed outside of them.

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"Tony Greene: Room of Advances" is a posthumous survey of works by the late Los Angeles-based artist, Tony Greene (1955–1990). Curated by artists Judie Bamber and Monica Majoli, the exhibition assembles the largest collection of Greene’s works since an exhibition the exhibition "Sweet Oleander" at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions in 1991, the year following the artist’s death from AIDS at age 35. Recent national exhibitions, including the Whitney Biennial 2014 and Made in L.A. 2014, upcoming at the Hammer Museum, have reestablished his oeuvre within the canon of queer art. Working at a time dominated by conceptual and activist practices, Greene affirmed and interrogated the queer experience and homoerotic desire through painting. The artist developed a visual language characterized by dark, jeweled tones and swirling impasto layered over tinted photographs to create works at once sensual, provocative and haunting.

The Schindler House—with its history of utopianism made manifest in actual domestic living—is ostensibly the modern domestic interior longed for in Greene’s work. The interplay between opacity and transparency, interior and exterior that infuses Greene’s paintings is echoed in R.M. Schindler’s architecture and makes for a particularly felicitous pairing.

June 18 through September 7 2014.

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Tony Greene: Amid Voluptuous Calm - Hammer Museum

Amid Voluptuous Calm seeks to excavate Greene’s oeuvre, placing it in dialogue with other queer artists in Los Angeles whose work similarly tackled issues of desire, mortality, and trauma. This concise “show-within-a-show” only hints at the numerous ways visual art, poetry, activism, performance, and S&M converged, and how notions of queerness—a term just making its way into the lexicon—informed artistic production for a community of artists.

Featuring projects by Greene, Ron Athey, Judie Bamber, Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose, Doug Hammett, Doug Ischar, Monica Majoli, Millie Wilson, and the zine Infected Faggot Perspectives (produced by W. Wayne Karr and Cory Roberts-Auli), alongside documents and ephemera, the conceptual and aesthetic approaches presented are diverse. Sensual, devotional, honorific, and darkly humorous, the works featured in Amid Voluptuous Calm insist on unabashed queerness in the face of mortality.

From June 15 hrough September 7 2014.

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Installation snaps of "Tony Greene: Amid Voluptuous Calm" curated by David Evans Frantz within the Hammer Museum's "Made in LA 2014". And featuring works by Ron Athey, Judie Bamber, Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose, Doug Hammett, Doug Ischar (pictured), Millie Wilson (pictured) and the zine "Infected Faggot Perspectives".

http://hammer.ucla.edu/made-in-la-2014/tony-greene-amid-voluptuous-calm/