Shaman, 1984. 23" X 29". Mixed Media on paper.
Locker Room - 209 East 23rd. Street.
For Bob Weir (1947-2026)
I'm not at all sure what the building at 209 East Twenty Third Street housed prior to The School of Visual Arts but it must have been utilitarian and production oriented. There were so many strange, oblique spaces as I've mentioned before. There was a stairway in a corner of the Twenty Third Street building that was located directly in back of the cashier's station in the cafeteria, behind an old warped door that didn't close all the way. The stairwell began there, terminating one flight up into a cavernous locker room. It was truly something to behold - old paint-caked radiators, chairs pilfered from classrooms, rows of well worn gymnasium type lockers practically into infinity, most unused. As soon as you got to the top of the stairs to your left (facing North), there was a long row of enormous aqua tinted windows - the kind with chicken wire between panels of textured, industrial glass. A dim singular light bulb lit the rest of the room. It was the perfect place to go get high. A true realm unto its own, with a perpetual haze of marijuana smoke illuminated by those tinted windows that filtered city light through decades of soot with a smell to match. An ethereal dream space suspended between planes of existence like a bardo. This realm was continuously presided over by a protective deity of sorts named Doug. Doug was from a monied family in Westchester, NY., a Commercial Arts major I was told by no one in particular. You could count on Doug being there no matter the time of day from first thing in the morning at around eight until around Seven in the evening - there was Doug - joint or hash pipe tightly in hand, balancing a sketch book and baggy of grass on his lap. The other remarkable thing about Doug was his sound. He was the first true Dead Head I had ever met plus he was also a Taper. There was always a long melodic, spacey Grateful Dead jam coming from his state of the art Sony cassette recorder. As you stood there getting high you'd get sucked into a long entrancing Grateful Dead jam. You simply could not help yourself, it crept into your psyche until you lost all track of time and space. Doug would rattle off all the details of a particular jam - date, time, circumstance. One day it hit me that these were tapes he made at Dead Shows he was present at. They were his clear, crisp detailed field notes. He was the first and only Taper I'd ever meet. Tapers had their own high stature among Dead Heads. They surrounded the soundboard at Dead Shows, their microphones jutting up into the airspace like thin, disembodied phalluses. Tapers were so revered that they even had their own syndicated magazine called Relix which came out of Brooklyn. Doug was a Taper whose journeys took him far both externally and internally. Even venturing out, yearly, to The Bay Area for the notorious Grateful Dead New Year's shows. It was after one of these News Year's excursions that he returned terribly fragile from a rather intense acid trip that had lasted a bit way too long. He was still working it out at the beginning of that Spring s Semester. I felt bad for him.
The Twenty Third Street Locker Room was graced with its own soundtrack - the long, meandering, melodic Grateful Dead jams supplied by our fellow classmate Doug. I honestly don't think I ever saw Doug anywhere else on campus....maybe a couple times on East Twenty Third Street and that was it. In fact, after graduating from SVA in June 1984, I never saw him again.
(from The Patron Saint of SVA)
**About the art... both of these were done at SVA in early 1984 for assignments in Robert Weaver's Fine Art of Illustration class. Robert and I had a rather rocky beginning. After I did the Shaman piece we got along famously and I aced his class.
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