It was a normal New York City evening, I was out and about in Chinatown making my rounds to see some gallery shows before attending a viewing of John Palmer’s Ciao! Manhattan staring one of my sartorial north stars, Ms. Edie Sedgwick. I still can’t quite put into words my thoughts about this film. The narrative was one of the most abstract I’ve seen on the big screen. Susan, aka Edie, recounts her party girl New York mishaps in a permanently drunken, semi-nude state while the menagerie of directionless aids living at her family’s home take orders from her mother to babysit her daughter. As Susan tells her nearly unbelievable tales of her past life, the muted, warm 1970’s California scenery is cut with the stark, graphic black and white world of 1960’s New York. It was hard to fully enjoy this film for many reasons. All of the auxiliary characters are extremely unlikeable, the story feels like a second-hand hallucination with the amount of times the viewer is pulled back and forth from the past to the present, and witnessing Edie in such a terrible state throughout the film’s duration pulled at my heartstrings. She passed away shortly after filming ended and her marriage to Michael Post began in 1971 of an barbiturate overdose. There is an underlying eeriness when watching the film, especially hearing her recount events that mirrored her reality and ultimately led to her untimely death. Edie was one of the most brilliant pop cultural stars of the 1960s and continues to be a mainstay on countless moodboards. Who do you look to when you want to attempt the signature graphic eyeliner look of this era, the answer is probably her or Twiggy. Want to dress mod with edge? Throw on some chandelier earrings, the shortest black shift dress you have, a pair of fishnets and you too can be psychically transported to the Silver Factory in your mind,
Okay, enough about Ciao! Manhattan and onto the real reason for this dispatch. On my list of shows to see for the day was Bettina New York 1965 - 1986 at Ulrik Gallery, which was the first solo exhibition since 1980, where her work was presented at the OK Harris Gallery in Soho (wild to me that her renaissance is occurring 44 years after, but such is the way the art world works). The primary projects on view in this show were One Constant. Euclidean to NonEuclidean Curve (1972-73) and Phenomenological New York (c. 1970s-1980s). In addition to these projects a selection of works from other series she produced were on view to illuminate her multidisciplinary practice and bridge the visual narrative between her sculptures, photographs, paintings, and films.
When I entered the gallery on the final day of the exhibition, I was taken aback, looked at the door for signage to alert me to what was going on, and I nearly left. I was in utter befuddlement because the lights of the gallery were turned off and all of the sculptures were packed away. Did I come too late? It was later in the afternoon, but the works should still be on view, no? Did I miss something? In the larger area of the gallery, folding tables replaced the pedestals that displayed her sculptures as various ephemera from her life and career were carefully being stored away by archivists. I later learned that this was a performance organized by Bettina’s archival savior, the artist Yto Barrada, who has been keeping her memory and materials alive and well for the past five years (author's note: it's worth taking a look at Yto’s work as there is a strong stylistic connection between these two artists). As an archivist, I found this delightful as much of what we do is unglamorous in action, but severely important. We deserve so much more honor than we typically receive for making sure history is properly documented and locked down for the future. After taking in the performance that reflected my life, the thought of “what is the point of staying if I can’t see the remaining works ‘on view’” crossed my mind. I was initially drawn to see this show to see Bettina’s photograph, which a few remained hanging on the wall but I could not take in their beauty. What kept me in the gallery were projections of her films on a rotational loop onto an otherwise unadorned wall.
The films and photographs are categorized within her series titled Phenomenological New York that was produced throughout the 1970s - 1980s. This, along with another series titled The Fifth Point of the Compass (1977-85) were about the beautiful city she called home, New York, New York. She wanted to capture abstracted perspectives of the city streets from both an “anthropological” and “phenomenological” standpoints, documenting the surreality of metropolitan life where everyone's actions mimic one another but perspectives shift from eye to eye. Metal buildings are made malleable, the city grid is obstructed in a refracted lens, Bettina highlights the nonlinear movement of a city inconstant flux. She has said that, “[It’s] important to understand that when a person is given this reward of seeing something changing before their eyes, and being able to capture it, and make it concrete so that others may understand also—then this is a responsibility.”
The series One Constant. Euclidean to Non-Euclidean Curve from 1972-73 were the works i just missed seeing. This consists of wooden sculptures, silver gelatin prints, xerox prints, and handmade books. The packed away sculptures that I don’t have the liberty to describe since I didn’t see them start with a wooden circle that are built up with various wooden strips and carefully situated dowels that are rotated around a single, central point of her choosing. One the object is turning the way she wants, they are left for the viewer to admire their facets at nearly every angle (the mirror surfaces they rest on also help with this). These sculptures are physical manifestations of her fascination with the architectural distortions of the city that the luckiest ones can find if you look carefully enough, “You see I was back in New York, trying to find this invisible secret. And there is a mystery here. It keeps us here. […] I found it there in the architecture. And I started photographing distortions in the architecture—not straight reflections […] And, then I found out that [with] movement, along the wall of the building, the reflections changed. Every time you move, it’s changing. And so, I was shooting a fourdimensional sequence of one single constant, which was the building, which was changing as I moved.”
Bettina, iconically only going by her first name, worked as a textile designer and traveled throughout Europe in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1972, she became a resident of the Chelsea Hotel, living and working there for about 50 years. Her inherent eye for pattern emerges in her work to uncover the rhythm of the world that often goes unnoticed in the metaphorical and physical structures of everyday life. Bettina’s oeuvre does not adhere to a singular artistic grouping ( i.e. abstraction, minimalism, or any -ism that may come to mind when viewing her work) because she threads her own fluid grid, allowing slack for movement and conceptual experimentation while developing an archive of a recognizable city through her unique aspect. “Each work is but an element in a process to be woven into a vast world of interrelational hidden meanings whereby each is relative to the other, incidental to each other, interdependent upon each other, unified and shaped according to each other, materialized according to each other into a greater whole.”
This city never fails to be the most interesting place to exist in. Quiet icons in the making, shiny silver superstars, and 9-5ers getting by on this giant grid living in the same frame yet moving at different speeds. In New York, everyone is a facet in the diamond of life.