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Barbara Nitke's 'American Ecstasy'
Throughout the show’s three month run, Nitke, who now teaches at SVA and works as a mainstream film photographer, has hosted several talks. On March 30, she and porn expert Casey Scott played clips from hardcore films that appear in American Ecstasy like Sexcapades (1983) and Viva Vanessa (1984), all by legend Henri Pachard. Nitke was his go-to photographer.
She entered the industry in 1982 through her husband, a financier who helped make The Devil In Miss Jones (1973). In 1982, Nitke started off as an on-set photographer working on Part Two. “I realized early on that I had access to this world, and I could do a documentary,” Nitke told me. “I saw it as an art project.” She struck a deal that she could pull slides, and did interviews on set.
“I did have a theory back then, that if you were going to do sex work, especially in front of a camera, you probably had a trauma in your life,” Nitke said, “which I totally disproved to myself.”
Every photo in American Ecstasy tells many tales, beginning in the stars they depict. One of the most striking shots in the show centers on Stacey Donovan, still fresh from Seventeen, riding her seated co-star reverse — her body poised mid-air precariously over his visibly glistening head. Donovan’s dirty blonde fringe obscures her downcast eyes, and the hands on her hips read defiant. “What I found interesting about her is she did not like sex,” Nitke remarked.
In White Women (1986), though — as we saw the night Nitke and Scott offered everyone an authentic porn dinner of soggy baked ziti — Donovan uses poppers to seduce a lovesick rockstar into fucking. She fakes an orgasm as he finishes, and when he promptly leaves, she desperately gets herself off. Nitke considers it a classic Pachard touch. She calls him “a sensitive guy who was also a shithead,” as well as a director who sought to portray female desire and experience.
Although porn migrated to meet LA’s pretty young starlets in the mid-80s, Pachard preferred seasoned performers like Sharon Mitchell and Vanessa Del Rio, both in American Ecstasy. One photo from Nasty Girls (1983) captures Mitchell before a moment of immense professionalism, where she improvisationally licked fluids from her necklace because her co-star accidentally busted outside of her mouth. Del Rio, seen flexing on stage, knew and demanded her worth.
These were hour-long films that fans had to leave home to buy. Although the plots that connected their sex scenes were flimsy, Nitke believes that if porn had been allowed to grow, it may have become an artform, like horror did. Instead, she witnessed prosecution from numerous angles — feminists like Andrea Dworkin, who saw porn as objectification and violence, alongside Jerry Falwell’s moral majority, who pushed the Reagan administration to pursue aggressive new venue shopping tactics while sticking obscenity suits on porn producers.
But, try as Mike Johnson’s “Covenant Eyes” might, vices prevail. For most who aren’t asexual or otherwise celibate, arousal is on the hierarchy of needs. And, like the rest of culture, the internet tessellated porn into infinite online niches. Some are exploratory and healthy, yet the wider machine says porn is giving teens hardcore tastes and dysmorphia. No wonder they’re not having sex. In a final blow of poetic justice, abstinence-only education IRL just makes porn more powerful.
Not that adults who had first kisses before Pornhub are much better off. I suffered when my middle school boyfriend called Megan Fox hot growing up, so the lover I brought to Nitke’s talk felt my hands sweat in his. Another colleague I ran into there walked out before it was over. We crossed paths again at a birthday party that night and discussed our various discomforts. In a world saturated with viscerally violent imagery, it’s fascinating that porn can still make people squirm. Nitke herself went through four literary agents and the illustrious editor Judith Reagan before self-publishing American Ecstasy in 2012 to avoid censoring its central hardcore stars.
As an exhibition, American Ecstasy encapsulates the fuzzy glamor of porn’s halcyon days. It can even get guests to check their baggage at the door by arresting them with the alluring abandon of a fledgling genre playing with the archetypal elements of sex, beauty and power, uninhibited.
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Unrequited at 59 Wooster
The Alexander Gallery is haunted by the phantoms of the past. I imagine curating a show in a space like this is equivalent to checking in at the Chelsea Hotel, hosting a party at CBGD (impossible, thank you wholesale), or ordering the Bacon Burger at JG Melon. It’s a New York time capsule, nostalgically self-indulgent, and rightly so.
When you inherit a legacy like this, it’s easy to fall into the trap of repetition. At times, the motive behind this repetition is that of pressure, a sense of honor, or frankly, fear — the anxiety about living up to whatever was created before your arrival; the feeling of stepping into shoes too big but wearing them anyway. Sure they might walk you down the same path, but that's precisely the problem. Thus, one needs more than a microdose of either confidence or naivete to escape the dead end.
Chris Lloyd, I Shall Cut Off My Eyelids To See Better, 2024.
Cristine Brache, Blue Mood, 2024.
“You’ve got to have a serious ego problem to own a gallery,” quipped Alexander, ticking off the qualities above. He has an unsanitized perception of himself as a tastemaker. Nevertheless, his indifference prods the question: does every artist embody this trait? Underneath the imposter-syndrome’s standing reservation, which resides in every other creative, hides a desire to be looked at, to be perceived. Is that egoism or is it a survival instinct?
The outcome of the ego is not what defends Spy Project’s arrival in New York. Perhaps it is the fact that Brooke Alexander is indeed Pietro Alexander’s uncle, but it’s also more than that. Truth is that the exhibition stands independently, removed from the pressure of legacy. With ease, the space’s saturated history presents both established and emerging artists. Rooms are filled with creatives united in nothing but their allied urge — “need” as Apple puts it — to leverage the relics of New York’s post industrial landscape and channel it into not only their practice, but into their way of life.
Raymond Pettibon, Untitled (Hitchcock’s “the birds”…), 2024. Untitled (Shall I consider…), 2024.
Katherine Auchterlonie, Feuillet-Beauchamp Notation of a Good Make-Out Session, 2023.
Kay Kasparhauser, Blood, 2024.
It feels like a family affair. The curation isn't trying to overcome some grand endeavour by suppressing the works under an artificial title. "Unrequited" is a title as blank as the gallery’s walls, granting them permission to tickle our thoughts again and again; (almost) all works are alike only in their differences — exception being the artist who sent in doubles, in which case the pieces aren’t neighboring, but placed at a screaming distance across the rooms, perhaps to provoke that very same tickling effect.
Textile collages by Alison Peery talk to Peter Alexander’s turn to velvet from 1984; Montana Simone’s pieces assert authority not only in scale but through their almost aggressive acquisition of steel while Kay Kasparhauser’s medium reads as hair, moss, and “Kay’s blood;”. Malik Al Maliki’s outlandish treatment of woodblocks tempers the violence within Raymond Perribon’s vocal acrylics, whereas within Sasha Filimonov’s panel — reminiscent of domestic Eastern European propaganda — the artist has installed a portable gun, which, when activated, is almost as arresting as the female figures concealed behind the thick layers of wax on Cristine Brache’s works. The effect quite literally blurs the line between dehumanizing and dream state.
Cristine Brache, Purple Bunnies, 2024.
Montana Simone, Choke Collar, 2024.
Sasha Filimonov, nightlight, 2024.
Unrequited is being at the library but only reading one page in each book. It’s scrolling Netflix but instead of watching one film, you pace through one trailer after the other. It's like being hungover at that brunch-buffet Sunday morning, suddenly finding yourself seated with a plate of croissants, bacon, bananas, strawberries, scramble eggs, yogurt, cream cheese, avocado, pancakes, ryebred, ham, turkey, Manchego, granola and roasted tomatoes…. But does it leave you overfed? Do you walk out feeling nauseous? A group show is always a slippery slope.
Spy Project’s New York debut isn’t mimicry as the mannequins at the flagship next door. It’s not imitating the legacy which it finds itself ensconced, nor is it posing for the sake of being seen. Unrequited sits you down for family dinner, where conversations traverse generations, opinions are opposing, and no one hesitates to voice their views.
Before I left the gallery on Wednesday afternoon, Apple pulled up the window to invite the neighbors smoking on the fire escape across the street to the opening the following evening. They looked like they’ve absolutely nothing in common yet there they were, making sense in one another.
- Photography by Daniel Arnold
Spy Projects, a contemporary art gallery in Los Angeles founded by Pietro Alexander in 2021, is temporarily visiting New York. The exhibition, Unrequited, will be on view through May 31st, 2024, at 59 Wooster Street.
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Wishing Well
Gal Schindler, Wishing Well, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.
Raised on the work of de Kooning, Lee Krasner and Milton Avery, Schindler’s work exudes a sense of fluidity and ambiguity. Further citing influences ranging from old-style Disney characters and antique botanical wallpaper, the artist combines a charming illustrative style with gestural strokes and a unique scratching technique to depict figures reclining languidly leaning in and against their pastel backdrops, merging into one indecipherable composition.
Gal Schindler, Fire Fountain, In the Meantime, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.
At the heart of Schindler's practice lies an exploration of the human form. Her nudes serve as conduits for a multitude of emotions, embodying the fragility and mutability of the human, and particularly female, experience. Further drawing on influences from her childhood, the artist references intricately depicted anatomical drawings, her loose figures and strokes blurring the boundaries between flesh and canvas.
Undoubtedly spring-like in their palette, Schindler’s works are both optimistic and uplifting, with the artist referencing themes of renewal, regeneration and growth in her playful alternatives to traditional nudes depicted under a male gaze. There’s a sense of performativity, appealing to both a female and a younger gaze by creating fluid figures that defy categorization. Schindler’s paintings are sweet without being saccharine and sensual without being overtly sexual, instead, they occupy a liminal space between categories, appealing to anyone who may be a little ground down by moody palettes and sterile compositions. The transitory nature of Schindler’s composition speaks to the flux of the human form and an inability to contain and categorize the human form.
Gal Schindler, Live the Questions Now, Paint the Rain, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.
Gal Schindler, Crystal Clear, A Promise, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.
Wishing Well is a playful collection of fairy-tale figures that lean between sensual characters and traditional forms, with the transitory nature of the compositions creating a sense of impermanence that comes from the artist's unique technique of scratching into wet paint to create transitory forms. Schindler's works occupy a realm between landscape and figuration, where bodies float in a nebulous non-space. Beginning with instinctual colour planes, the artist overlays rapid structural lines, leaving behind traces of gesture and memory. The resulting figures blend seamlessly with their visual surroundings, their forms emerging from the depths of the canvas like reflections on still water, calling to mind the “Wishing Well’ in question. Life ripples on still water, Schindler’s figures remain distorted and alluring, half-emerging and half-hidden, they occupy somewhere between imagination and reality.
Wishing Well is on view at Ginny on Frederick, 99 Charterhouse St, Barbican, London EC1M 6HR, United Kingdom until May 24th, 2024.
