{"id":114334,"date":"2017-08-23T13:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-08-23T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=114334"},"modified":"2017-08-24T16:06:05","modified_gmt":"2017-08-24T20:06:05","slug":"jack-piersons-dreamy-erotic-hungry-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/08\/23\/jack-piersons-dreamy-erotic-hungry-years\/","title":{"rendered":"Jack Pierson\u2019s Dreamy, Erotic Hungry Years<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Jack Pierson, Grease Monkey<\/em>, 1990. Courtesy the artist and Cheim & Read, New York.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

This October, Damiani will release\u00a0<\/em>The Hungry Years<\/a>, a collection of photographs from the eighties by the artist Jack Pierson. The images, taken during the height of the\u00a0AIDS<\/small>\u00a0epidemic and featuring many of his friends, are striking for their dreamy introspection, their melancholy, and their celebratory homoeroticism.\u00a0Pierson has worked in many forms, including sculpture, word sculpture, bookmaking, drawing, painting, and photography. (<\/em>The Paris Review published a portfolio<\/a> of his word pieces in our\u00a0Summer 1992\u00a0issue<\/a>.)<\/em>\u00a0Eileen Myles, a friend of Jack\u2019s, wrote<\/i> the\u00a0<\/em>introduction to<\/em>\u00a0The Hungry Years, which we\u2019ve published\u00a0below, along with a selection of Jack\u2019s\u00a0photographs. \u2014C.L.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Last year we were in my apartment and Jack was talking about going on a trip to Florida in the eighties\u00a0and I\u2019m of course thinking that Florida means something particular to someone (like Jack) who is from New England because New England sadly has about as much past as America has got\u2014it\u2019s branded by that New and of course New England is anything but new. Really it just wants to be old and it isn\u2019t so you see those of us from New England just traveling around the world, shaking off those chains of the sharp quickening weather and that sad desire to be classy or old usually betrayed by our quaint speech\u2014wicked or our loafers, or deliberately well-worn clothes in New England\u2019s endless imitation of \u201creal,\u201d which is a copy of those who we think know about something older\u2014we think they own stuff, Harvard and the Swan Boats and that Swan Boat accident and all that cold-weather food. So when this person goes south and not because he\u2019s training for the Red Sox and not old but maybe he\u2019s running away from something, hitching a ride on somebody else\u2019s vacation, their buddy\u2019s family owns something down there, maybe a deal of some kind is going on, or their parent\u2019s place on the beach is empty for a while anyhow they go. According to Jack he took some pictures in response to I\u2019m guessing the lightness, the eeriness of the bright buildings and the palms and the Florida tendency to be another America, professing to be new not old and failing at it. And explaining himself about that first burst he took he said, \u201cand I kept using the camera there.\u201d I love that there. What is that. Not Florida. But some new world you\u2019re in. What if you got knocked out of your world for this reason or that. You\u2019re kind of in between. You look around and you think this place is good. Not Florida but the world. Shit happens so fast. They\u2019re going to pick up a couple of guys for a purpose, Leo\u2019s friends and the guys\u2019 bags are packed and they\u2019re standing under a telephone pole like it\u2019s a mast. Everything looks like a movie in a way in this already in-between world of Jack\u2019s. The white buildings surrounding the little men accidentally their white shirts and the blue creeping up or falling down and there\u2019s also a lot of ground. What\u2019s important is the anticipated meeting with the two but it hasn\u2019t happened yet and it looks Pasolini somehow but I\u2019m not going to bother with that. If the world is a film and I don\u2019t have to stage it but I decided to keep using the camera there. Here\u2019s another picture. The kid has a boner and he\u2019s so comfortable with it. Does he even know as the darkness of the trees confront him but he\u2019s not there yet. Jack\u2019s is a poetry of almost. The kid\u2014he sees me, he sees us and I\u2019m looking back with my camera. In a way the most exciting thing is the joy of the person seeing or saying. The night the beautiful dyke tips her head, we were all so drunk and she\u2019s got one of those George Washington hairdos you know kind of a triangle and she tips her head that way when she explains I know god. No kidding. I\u2019m not going to pretend that I\u2019m not one of the pretty boys or performers. I am also under that tent. My head is tipped as I\u2019m standing there in my young thin torso (I\u2019m a pale redheaded guy, kind of butch\u2014till I open my mouth) and as we all know head tipping is speech. It\u2019s colloquial. Raquel\u2019s tiny white-girl nails freak everybody out when they see this picture. Whoa. And white bands of morning come up across her baggy jean legs she looks kind of Matt Dillon-y and was explaining the way she liked it with \u201cher ladies.\u201d Long time since we\u2019ve seen Raquel aka Rocky around. I kind of think she might be dead, she was very young but this is her crack at a feature. She takes it. It is hers. If I wasn\u2019t in shade when I turn around in that three-quarter portrait you might think what a jerk but the light is blinding on the beach and if I can explain being a man at all it\u2019s a slight smile and the animal knows he\u2019s safe in this exact second everything is good. I wanted to hold that monument by myself. A tad darker than chill and my dad had it, too. Finally there\u2019s nothing odder than a man. The buff portrait of a man basically exposing his nuts as the foam of the sea is crashing around and the clouds pile high in feminine adoration of him and his muscles which are also pretty feminine. When a woman has her shoes off under the table and she\u2019s selling a man a line of shit even the dog knows hooray I can get away with something now. Loretta has incredible grace. You know just what she means. This is a person capable of winking, of working, of flirting. She likes her eyes dark they are dark and she is sizing you up. Am I Jack? There\u2019s more than one Vanessa Thibault but in the moment in her gold bikini on the boat Vanessa was sensing some danger. Oh no, she said in that deep Vanessa voice. That\u2019s not good. In the eighties\u00a0you really didn\u2019t see women with pumped up tits so the frame, her entire body did all the work, then the makeup and the unerringly tough but full of doubt personality. Once you put tits on the whole thing went right off the rails. I met her on a boat and the world as it was doing then as never before was giving it up and I was borrowing the intimacy which was my need. Even my disability I suppose. That\u2019s why I love and know so many people who we used to call crips. I mean if you were going to spend your life on wheels you might as well make a joke and join the world. Wealth is certainly a disability. The dying part on the lawn drives you nuts and the only other thing in the picture that\u2019s dying is you. That\u2019s why the rich are so sad. They can\u2019t control that. A hustler on the other hand is selling his sadness. That look in his eyes. What do you call that stuff that is not chenille. Those raised stripes on a bedspread. Cotton and used to be on motel beds everywhere before everything went synthetic. And before boys worked out so you just had to be skinny and starve and be pretty enough but not too too much. You clearly prefer the ones that look like a kid you went to grade school with. Him grown up but still him. Him again. Sitting on the edge of your bed. We\u2019re always thinking right. This filmmaker was talking about the problem of the cinematographer who gave her more beauty than she could stand. Enough! I use part of the palm trees on a not so beautiful day and if you slap on an address like Ocean and 5th\u00a0you know what I mean. The world is abstract, like a piece of music sometimes and allowing that then punctuating it with a fact is the style I want in the movie of this. Or at least I started this way. There is nothing hungrier or hornier than a drive-in. Now it\u2019s just kitsch but in the eighties\u00a0the sixties and the seventies were still in very good shape. We were supposedly meeting there in the day to arrange things for later on and of course to be seen. You\u2019ll never not catch a guy looking up. Every man I know is a queen. I mean on any given day. Okay maybe just right now. The hairdo like a coxcomb. Is Chantal\u2019s jean jacket bleached. A young face is all flesh and yet she is clenched. Her nature is clenched, cold hands ciggy hanging down. The blur of the world is the history of art. You know like if this were in a museum it would be those geometric-looking castles and trees going back up there toward infinity. I write about this. I love photography because it makes choices for you and the person or what you\u2019re looking at makes some more and finally you are kind of what stops the action of the swirling world. I saw that, I ask that. The incredible oldness of the young. The younger they get the older they get. Babies are like old women and men in ridiculous dresses. It\u2019s like they\u2019ve arrived still knowing what they had from before. For a little while. The world demanding they forget about that. Tory was empty by Sunday afternoon. I mean if you see a fuzzy photograph like this quart of milk and the fruit know that what you are getting is a rough drawing. Fuzzy is an action in time. Feeling is the subject of my work. I didn\u2019t say that but it feels right at this moment you know to drop it in. It feels true right. And obviously the grotesquerie and the staid mockery of a yellow wall. I\u2019m flirting with the guy by calling him last real cowboy. Fear in his eye I think confirms it and it\u2019s voluptuous, too, somehow don\u2019t you think. I don\u2019t know who I am. We\u2019re just passing through these frames, these arcades wandering through the world in our bodies. Sad animals. And we prefer certain bodies like we prefer certain woods. Animals have preferences. Everybody does. Preference is animation. Giving it a soul\u2014time does it for a body or a rusted ceiling with so many of these bulbs missing and each leaves a small black hole. The tawdry side of life is celestial. The rich may not know that at all. They begin forgetting everything. Like babies. Considering who we are about to have for president I think we live in hell. I would really like something sweet. That\u2019s too bad there aren\u2019t any dates left. Coffee does not do the trick. But I continue to swill. One lamp or two reflected in a round mirror and we can see the tiny bolts holding it in place and the shape receives the illumination. It\u2019s a chintzy sunny rusty day in a motel. It\u2019s all theater. It\u2019s all activity. There\u2019s nothing dead about decor. And of course humans made it. Someone thinking for a moment that this is pretty. What was that, what did they call it the site a few years ago where people wanting to have sex were in all these little cubicles. It was like you could turn it. I did the worse thing which is my whole class went online and we sat there looking at these guys. My student, John, was one of them. It was his scene. Anyhow it was such a violation. I\u2019m thinking of it because Alexis and Mario appear to be in one of those rooms. We can\u2019t even see photographs as still anymore. It wasn\u2019t but it\u2019s different now. Isn\u2019t that the point. Whenever I felt it I kept using the camera there. Disco ball, fan hand. You know like when a queen puts her hand to her chest. Like this. Does a woman do that. What was the original of that gesture? Some old movie? I think photography, too. I really do. Signage gets old and implies something it never meant like the wasting of youth perpetrated by the falling down architecture of one of these helping institutions. Like Jack gives the photo a shove with his caption-y titles you know I just lift these public words off the wall and then I make my own words. You could say it\u2019s poetry. If you wanted to be a fucking idiot. What else could it be. Ads? For what purpose. Lucille Ball is a sign. The squalid nature of a plant exposing itself. Masculinity all plumped up on a bed. Not flaccid but yielding. The flora is engulfing. A glass motel holds day because of the dark encroaching fronds. The world is echoey and Jack takes a picture of that. When a woman is looking down at a counter, reading something, writing something it\u2019s prayer. Are you alone some guy might ask but it\u2019s way more beautiful than that. It\u2019s the torque in the guy\u2019s shirt as he looks at the television set and it\u2019s the color of a rusty night (with a big window) that you\u2019re never entirely in. And it\u2019s so precious to be inside of that. All of these (and in part because it was new) felt like unearned but graced entries. Lynelle looks up and she looks like Maria Falconetti. In a way despite the beautiful dot city lights this photo is all about neck. Janet\u2019s dark muscles such pathos as she turns. Like a homage to a time from inside the time. That thing still lives in the chemistry of the photo. The backward writing, the neon, the long dead flowers and someone looking out. The dark dark night that makes everyone feel like kids but we mean to go out in that soup and be adult in it which I think is new. \u2014Christmas 2016<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Janet and Lynelle<\/em>, 1990.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Neon Baltimore<\/em>, 1990.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

The World<\/em>, 1990.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Ocean Drive<\/em>, 1990.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Ocean and 5th<\/em>, 1990.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

The Call Back<\/em>, 1990.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Me, the cat, Speed<\/em>, 1990.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Eileen Myles is the author of twenty books, including the forthcoming\u00a0<\/em>Afterglow (a dog memoir). They live in New York and Marfa, Texas.<\/em>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  This October, Damiani will release\u00a0The Hungry Years, a collection of photographs from the eighties by the artist Jack Pierson. The images, taken during the height of the\u00a0AIDS\u00a0epidemic and featuring many of his friends, are striking for their dreamy introspection, their melancholy, and their celebratory homoeroticism.\u00a0Pierson has worked in many forms, including sculpture, word sculpture, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1228,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2384],"tags":[14414,3784,35,22174,30242,30240,24994,5365,22323,1886,24743,20492,30238,30241,5014,100,165,469,964,30239,75],"class_list":["post-114334","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-look","tag-1980s","tag-aids","tag-art","tag-color-photography","tag-damiani","tag-dreamy","tag-eighties","tag-eileen-myles","tag-fine-art","tag-florida","tag-homoerotic","tag-introduction","tag-jack-pierson","tag-maria-falconetti","tag-new-england","tag-photography","tag-poetry","tag-queer","tag-sculpture","tag-the-hungry-years","tag-writing"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nJack Pierson\u2019s Dreamy, Erotic \u2018Hungry Years\u2019<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Read Eileen Myles\u2018s introduction to \u2018The Hungry Years\u2019\u2014a collection of photographs by multimedia artist Jack Pierson.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/08\/23\/jack-piersons-dreamy-erotic-hungry-years\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Jack Pierson\u2019s Dreamy, Erotic Hungry Years by Eileen Myles\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"August 23, 2017 \u2013   This October, Damiani will release\u00a0The Hungry Years, a collection of photographs from the eighties by the artist Jack Pierson. 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