[New York Peasant by Wilfrid: February 1, 2010]
I've been neglectful recently about reporting on my comings and goings and general immersion in the city's social whirl. But I might mention that I've been up to broad-shouldered and manly things over the last week or so: watching boxing, attending a new Tony Fitzpatrick show, and so on.
Scroll down for Tony Fitzpatrick at Pierogi.
The heritage of Piers Egan, the sainted Liebling, and Bert "The Hat" Sugar weighs heavily upon me as I mention my attendance at the opening round of this year's Golden Gloves tournament. The Golden Gloves has promoted amateur boxing since its founding in 1923, and I thought the ambience might make a refreshing change from the professional ring - which these days means paying hundreds of dollars for a seat in the upper rafters of the Garden.
And so I joined the modest throng of milling coves gathered around a ring in the main room of the B.B. King Blues Club on 42nd Street. Almost everyone was there to support a fighter they knew, and the room was thronged with exclusive but mutually convivial crews of Puerto Ricans, African Americans, Greek Americans and so on, each there to cheer on the representative of the tribe. Being British I had no dog in the race, and so took up a neutral position at the bar.
It was here that I ran into Jimmy Glenn, one of the greatest living New Yorkers. He is a long-time trainer, an expert cut man (he used to patch up Mike Tyson on the rare occasions it was necessary) as well as being proprietor of the city's best unfancy bar, Jimmy's Corner. Although his own fight days are long behind him, he effortlessly crushed my hand like a grape in greeting. He was there, it turned out, to supervise the corner of Shemuel Pagan, a young fighter who has already made something of a name and who seems on the brink of a professional career.
The first few fights of the night were predictable - in the sense that one could identify the winner before the first round was over - and lacked suspense - because it was evident that nobody was going to be knocked out or even badly beaten. Pagan's bout with Tyrell White was an altogether different affair. The young contender came out of his corner like a crouching tiger and overpowered White immediately, driving him to the canvas with heavy body blows. As so often in the boxing game, the best was over all too quickly.
I saw Jimmy again at the bar after the fight. Someone offered him a drink. The great New Yorker looked surprised. "No, I have to go to work." Of course. He has a bar to run.
Tony Fitzpatrick at Pierogi
Slender though the connection may be, Tony Fitzpatrick, hard-knuckled Chicago artist and poet, was once a boxer himself. A bar-tender too, and a cab-driver. One of the paradoxes of his art is the way in which icons of masculinity - vintage match-books, showgirls, neon-lit cocktail bars and hard graft - are sheltered by an unfailingly poetic starry night sky. His pictures are packed with information - drawings, cut-outs, press clippings, memorabilia - but the skies, as well as the succinct poems pasted word by word around the margins of the image - mitigate claustrophobia: they expand the pictorial space. (How can words do that? Fitzpatrick's words are simple, slow; you take a breath between each phrase; they slow down the experience of looking.)
The title of the Pierogi show is "Drawings for Crazy Horse." To his pantheon of real and imagined Chicago hardmen - not least his own father - and good-time girls, Fitzpatrick has added the Oglala chief as a symbol, it seems, of rugged independence and rootedness in the land (and, paradoxically, the sky). Crazy Horse is alone in a vast landscape - He is whistling miles of furious black ice - and yet he doesn't appear in these pictures. One finds stars - beautiful, crystalline stars - flowers which fall from the sky like stars, arrows, and in one balanced meditation, a framing pair of antlers. Crazy Horse among his objects, in his landscape.
At the same time, perhaps ironically, Fitzpatrick urbanizes the prairies and the skies above them with the paraphernalia of commerce and nightlife. Crazy Horse is pursued by ads for Frenchy's Place and the Wabash Hotel. You can take the art out of Chicago...
Speaking of which, the Crazy Horse series either ovelaps with, or is part of, Fitzpatrick's "No. 9" series (perhaps all will become clear when we have a complete set of works in book form). "No. 9," a tattoo the artist wears, refers to the ninth ward of New Orleans, a city which increasingly informs his art, as well as to a song, "Number Nine" which expresses the notion of having nine lives and currently living the last of them. Fitzpatrick wryly wonders whether he is not living his own ninth life.
The "No. 9" works have been shown in New Orleans and elsewhere, and I hope we'll see an extensive show in New York some time soon. In the meantime, trace the trail of Crazy Horse at Brooklyn's Pierogi Gallery through February 7.
You can learn more about Fitzpatrick's art - including his current interest in Japan - by following hi wordpress blog. Here's a useful page in which he discusses the New Orleans works. I also just learned that he's put together a theater piece on hoboes and railroads, "This Train" - busy guy.
