Laurie Simmons

DS

Something that many people probably don’t know about you is that you’ve been the executor of the estate of Jimmy DeSana since he passed away from AIDS-related illness in 1990. I’ve had the pleasure of working with you and your team for the past four years while I’ve been organizing the first survey of his work, which will open at the Brooklyn Museum in a few weeks. Although DeSana was quite well-known and received a fair amount of critical attention during his lifetime, it has taken over thirty years for a museum to organize a survey of his work. I'm curious why you think it's taken this long?

LS

I feel like I want to throw that question right back at you, since you’re the curator. Why do you think it's taken so long?

DS

I could spend hours talking about why I think it has taken so long! I’m sure part of it has to do with the content of his work, which, even today, continues to push against certain forms of respectability politics that are enforced by large swaths of the culture industries. Even while working on the show we've gotten pushback from publications—including a major newspaper that many people would probably identify as being progressive, or liberal. But I also think it's much bigger than that. Alexandra Juhasz and Ted Kerr’s new book, We Are Having This Conversation Now: The Times of AIDS Cultural Projects, tries to periodize different AIDS cultures and histories in the United States. They identify several eras of silence, both during the first decade of the pandemic in the US, and then again from the mid 90s to the mid 2000s, after the introduction of antiretroviral therapy. DeSana’s work, and that of so many others, was largely forgotten during this second period of silence. Kerr and Juhasz argue that we’re now in a period of revisitation and historicization of those first generations of the pandemic. So, it makes sense that younger artists, critics, and scholars, many of whom did not experience the traumas of the first decades of the pandemic, are just now discovering DeSana’s work and creating more complicated histories.

But, of course, just because there are these eras of silence doesn’t mean that there wasn’t important work happening in the interim. For instance, you continued to care for the estate and champion DeSana’s legacy, as did so many others. This is an important, although not widely discussed, component of the HIV/AIDS pandemic—the number of people who not only cared for their friends while they were living with HIV/AIDS, but who also continued to care for their legacy after they passed away. I'm curious to hear about your experience of caring for DeSana’s work and archive. What did that look like when you first took on the estate, and how has it changed over the past thirty years?

LS

Well, to be really frank about it, the estate was left in complete chaos. Jimmy was diagnosed with HIV in 1985, but his spleen had ruptured the year before. Anyone who lived through that era knows what it felt like to wonder which of your friends was going to be diagnosed next. I have a sister who's an ER doctor, and when I asked her about Jimmy’s spleen, she said “It's not good. It's really not good.” He was officially diagnosed the next year when the test became available, although we already suspected he had been infected. He died in the summer of 1990.

On his deathbed—it was a very protracted death—he asked me if I would be the executor of the estate. I have a rule that if someone asks you for something when they're dying, you say yes. At the time, I had a four-year-old child and our family was just trying to make ends meet. Shortly after his death, his work was delivered to our home. Box after box after box arrived; darkroom equipment arrived. Nothing had been archived in any way. Jimmy tried to work up until the moment he died, which meant he wasn't organizing things—he wasn't leaving notes. On his deathbed, he actually gave me some instructions about how to finish certain works. I took really copious notes about what to do, but I can't read any of them. I wrote them in some sort of code, or shorthand. I have no idea what it means now. I was just trying to look busy, because it was so emotional. We never really talked about his death, but he told me everything that he wanted me to do.

I would say that it took about ten years to make sense of the chaos. There were thousands of negatives, thousands of slides, thousands of contact sheets, photos in all sizes and various mediums, all in no particular order. I started to kind of have a second job, which was organizing the stuff. The other interesting thing is that my family and I have moved seven times. So every time we move, we pack up the DeSana estate and take it along with our work. It's been very present in my life for thirty-two years, while my friendship with Jimmy lasted only eighteen years. We were best friends, but the length of time I've cared for the work is almost double the number of years of our actual friendship.

DS

I hadn’t really thought about the fact that you’ve been caring for the work for longer than you knew Jimmy. Do you feel like your relationship to his work has changed?

LS

I believe in the work more now than I did when I received it in 1990. I believe in it even more than when Jimmy and I were friends. You know, we had our competitions, our little arguments, our criticisms of each other's work. In a way, I take it so much more seriously now, and believe in it so much more, because it has grown over time and become more relevant. It's become fresher, in a way. I'll often find a photo that I've never seen before, and I can still literally have my mind blown by it. I can literally see something and say, “Oh my God.” So, I think that my feelings—the depth of my feelings and my belief in the work—has grown exponentially.

DS

How did you and DeSana meet?

LS

It was the summer of 1973. I was with a bunch of people on the A train, going out to the beach at Coney Island. Jimmy was this very small, handsome man. He was wearing chinos, a white tailored shirt, a white Panama hat. He had a white spray-painted Yashica camera and a tiny rhinestone necklace, both around his neck. Whoever introduced us said, “You two are both looking for a live-and-work space, so I thought you should meet.” We said “Hi, let's find a place together.” We ended up finding a 200-foot-long skinny, dark space in Soho for—don't hate me—$300, so $150 each. We had a wall built to divide the loft into separate apartments. Another one of the amazing coincidences was that the person who built the wall, a total stranger at the time, ended up being my husband!

DS

Did you realize it was him when you met again later?

LS

Yes, Carroll and I met again in 1975, and then we got together in 1977. Anyway, back to our apartment! Jane Kaplowitz (now Rosenblum) was living in a loft at 547 Broadway—a floor became available in her building, so that's how we ended up on Broadway between Prince and Spring streets. Jimmy took the Mercer Street side because it had a freight elevator—he didn't want me to have to operate it. In return, I gave him one extra window that looked out into this dirty airshaft. I always regretted that he had that extra window, because there was one month out of the year when a sliver of light would come into that window. I kind of never got over that.

DS

And he set up a darkroom in the apartment?

LS

We both did.

DS

But Jimmy studied photography in college, whereas you didn’t, right?

LS

I learned most of what I know about photography from Jimmy—I’ve never had any formal training. If I couldn’t constantly ask Jimmy for help—like, “Are my chemicals too hot?” or, “How long do I expose this?”—I would call this hotline for photographers, which always had a guy on the other end who sounded exactly the same as an astronaut. He had that kind of voice. I called so many times a day that it got to the point where I would disguise my voice. I used a Southern accent sometimes—I even tried an English accent, because I was so embarrassed. I was trying to learn so fast, I was desperate.

DS

What made you interested in photography?

LS

Everything that was going on in New York in the early 1970’s was ephemeral, conceptual, process, and performance-based art. So, everything I saw that I liked was documented by a camera, such as Gordon Matta Clark’s architectural interventions, for instance. Plus, I also had started to develop a real passion for fashion photography. It seemed like photography was turning up in all of these odd ways. Like a number of other women in my generation, I felt that painting wasn’t an option—the door was closed to me somehow. It's hard for people today to understand how radical or rebellious picking up a camera as an artistic tool felt in the 1970s.

Once I decided I was going to use a camera, I realized I had to really learn the history of photography. That sounds like a big job. But at that point, photography was only one-hundred and thirty years old, so you could really sift through a lot of it fairly quickly. When I found out what was going on at the Museum of Modern Art under John Szarkowski’s curatorial leadership—what those photo rooms looked like in the 1970’s—I thought, I really don't want to be a part of that. It was a bunch of men making small black-and-white pictures. That wasn’t my world. I mean, I liked what Helen Levitt was doing. I liked what Judy Linn was doing. But I just thought, “This is not for me.” Of course, I've grown to love a lot of that work. But there is this moment where you have to reject everything in order to push yourself forward.

DS

It seems like your attraction to photography was bound up with gender, both in terms of rejecting the male dominated sphere of painting as well as rejecting the male dominated mode of street photography that was being promoted at MoMA, and in most other photo galleries, in the 1960’s and 1970’s.

LS

I would say that’s true.

DS

What was the work in photography that you were drawn to then?

LS

I was drawn to the fashion photographers of the moment like Deborah Turbeville, Helmut Newton, Guy Bourdin and Chris von Wagenheim, and then also others from the past like Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Martin Munkácsi, Lillian Bassman, Horst P. Horst, and Irving Penn. I’d discovered Man Ray and Rodchenko. And, of course, when I discovered the lens based work of my contemporaries Cindy Sherman, Louise Lawler, and Sarah Charlesworth, I was also very excited.

DS

There weren’t a lot of places to exhibit photographic work in the 1970’s—even the kind of work that was being shown at MoMA, but especially for the kind of work you and your peers were making. As a result, DeSana ended up doing a lot of commercial work and contributing to publications, although all of them were essentially underground or artist-run. He also started documenting bands and performances, as well as doing install shots of exhibitions. Did you consider pursuing that kind of work yourself? You mentioned taking an interest in fashion photography earlier—was that something you tried to pursue?

LS

I tried to do some commercial photography, and I tried to photograph artwork. I photographed toys for Shackman, a company that sold dollhouse miniatures. That's what sort of got me into miniatures. I have to say now, in hindsight, I was terrible at all of that stuff. But I really tried. One of the differences between Jimmy and myself was that Jimmy had a camera around his neck every moment of the day. It was such an important part of his identity. I would not go out with a camera—I would not wear a camera around my neck. I didn't like that self-image. Also, I didn't want my camera ripped off in New York in the 1970’s. I didn't like being a woman alone in the street with a camera. So, I had tremendous admiration for women who would get out there in the street. But it was not something I was personally interested in. I wasn’t drawn to that specific street photographer identity. Jimmy, on the other hand, had an ink pad and a camera stamp to sign photos with. Everything that he touched had a camera on it. So, that was another difference between the two of us.

DS

I've heard both you and others say that DeSana always had a camera on him. But there are very few photographs or negatives in his archive that seem to be casually made on the street, or with friends at parties. You would think that if somebody was always carrying a camera on them for nearly twenty years, there would be tons of pictures that they took while out and about in the world. But almost all of DeSana’s photographs were staged. He wasn’t making pictures like the ones you were seeing at MoMA during these years, but he also wasn’t going the route of Peter Hujar or Nan Goldin, who were producing these intimate documents of bohemian life in New York.

LS

Jimmy was tremendously shy. So, I think having a camera, and being able to lift the camera, even if he wasn’t really using it, was a way for him to be involved in the room—but also a way to keep his distance. It was a part of the persona he created.

DS

DeSana’s shyness has been one of the more interesting and challenging aspects of his life that I’ve encountered while working on the show. He knew and photographed a lot of people, but it seems like not many people knew him very well—or at least people who are still alive, aside from you and a few others. I got a lot of conflicting information. I remember one time being up at your house and going through the archive. We were talking about something, and you couldn’t remember or you didn’t have an answer, and then you said, “Oh, I'll call Duncan Hannah who lives nearby and knew Jimmy.” Duncan came over and you two started arguing over which one of you was his best friend.

LS

Well, I said, “You know, I was Jimmy's best friend.” To which Duncan replied, “No, I was Jimmy's best friend.” This went on, back and forth. But we came to the conclusion that Duncan was his nighttime best friend, and I was his daytime best friend. I didn’t really go out—I'd go to openings and parties, but just long enough to meet boys if I could, and then go home and work. Other friends stayed out late, doing drugs, drinking, and dancing, but I wasn't doing that. I was home working.

Jimmy was very regimented with his schedule. In hindsight, it seems like he never slept, because I would go home and he would stay out all night. I know Jimmy would go to the West Side Highway and visit the trucks, but we never talked about it. His life was very compartmentalized.

DS

How have your social circles in New York impacted your work, or impacted the reception of your work?

LS

Like many artists, I naturally found people who were doing similar things, or who were interested in similar things, especially around photography—like irreverently making prints that had dirt all over them or sending prints to the drugstore and not caring about print quality, or not knowing a lot about cameras and taking great pride in it. I felt like I was using the camera—the camera was not using me. I was just doing what I needed to do in the moment to make this work. Jimmy was part of that to some extent, but he was also more of a photographer. I mean, it was a very small world back then, but the groups felt very distinct. It's hard for me to explain.

The group that I hung out with had our sights set on a kind of path that was prescribed, almost like going to medical school: you come to New York, you make your work, and you try to get a show in an alternative space like Artists Space or PS1. You would have been embarrassed to have a show in a commercial gallery. I never would have done that. Nor would any of my friends. So, we would have a series of shows at alternative spaces, and then finally we would find a gallery where we thought it was okay to show. There was no money involved back then. So, it wasn't like there was this carousel with a golden ring that we were reaching for. It was all about protecting your work. I mean, I hate to say it, but the “coolness” factor around your work was also important; how you dealt with it, and who you hung out with. Jimmy was part of a much scruffier group. He used to bring Ray Johnson and others to my studio, and I thought they were just so odd. We had many mutual friends, but I also had my own friend group, which included people like Cindy Sherman, and my painter friends who were friends with my boyfriend at the time, who is now my husband, Carroll Dunham. But the art world was small enough that everybody ended up in the same place anyway.

DS

Part of the reason I wanted to ask you about social circles is because so much of the discourse around your work, and around Jimmy’s work, has become codified in an art historical narrative that tends to focus on a very specific set of exhibitions and essays, such as Douglas Crimp’s Pictures show at Artists Space in 1977 and his subsequent essays. As numerous historians and critics have pointed out, these texts and shows have become canonized in a way that has tended to obscure a lot of the complexity of artistic production during this era, leaving many artists out of the conversation, such as DeSana. How did you feel about labels like “Pictures Generation,” and some of these critical interpretations of your work over the years, such as theories of representation, or even feminist readings?

LS

Interestingly, the first show I had at Artists Space in January ’79 was comprised of photos of tiny dollhouse interiors, which I sort of saw as a very flattened space, like Indian miniatures, almost abstract. The first thing that was ever written about my work was an article in The Village Voice by the critic Ben Lifson, who said I was a feminist artist. I was really shocked to be written about that way, and that interpretation kind of followed me, especially because of the doll thing. The most interesting part of that was that I'd associated feminism with the generation of women before me, who had separated themselves from the rest of the art world with galleries like A.I.R. They made it possible for us to do what we do, which is very important. At the time, I just was so turned off by all those women who were using hair or menstrual blood in their work. So being called a feminist sort of felt like I was being grouped with an older generation of artists, whereas I was interested in finding a new path forward. It was really jarring to me to suddenly be put in that category, although I've come to both really appreciate the previous generation of women artists and understand how historically meaningful it was.

Jimmy’s work, like his life, was very compartmentalized. He had three separate threads: the S/M work, which documented the darker aspects of his nightlife and, you know, involved a lot of really hard to look at—they're hard to look at for me…

DS

But they're humorous, too.

LS

They are funny, and they're also very lyrical and very, very beautiful. Then he started producing a group of works that were a bit more accessible, called Suburban. In his mind, those photographs were things that he could show in galleries. Then there were the photographs he took of downtown figures. He was the first person to ever photograph the Talking Heads, and a number of other bands. He documented the music scene, and then also did commercial work for the Soho Weekly News, and The Village Voice, whenever he could. Except for Submission, all of those beautiful portraits and artwork came out of a need to make a living.

DS

Both your work and DeSana’s dealt with domestic spaces and suburbia. When I look at it now, I can’t help but think of constructions of whiteness and assimilation, conformity, and confinement. Is this something you were thinking about at the time? Were you thinking about making work in the wake of the liberation struggles of the 1960s?

LS

I absolutely was thinking about whiteness and assimilation, conformity and confinement, although my language at the time would’ve been slightly different. My parents were first generation Jewish Americans who were performing "American Life" almost perfectly, in a way that was practically interchangeable with the family sitcoms we watched on TV. The imitation was flawless and appearances were everything—the better you were at playing the part, the more quickly you would be perceived as a real American. I was way more aware of the play-acting part than the reality. I assumed everyone was playing a role—not just my family and community. We were all meant to wave flags at the fourth of July parade and dip Easter Eggs in dye and dance the latest dances and eat the newest TV dinners, but then we would also attend synagogue, where the music was all in a minor key and the language was strange and the customs were thousands of years old. Of course, I took all of this for granted.

DS

I’ve been thinking a lot about how so much of the Pictures Generations work was really about constructions of whiteness, but that’s maybe for someone else’s dissertation! Instead, so much of the discourse around both your work and DeSana’s has focused on image cultures and gender and/or sexuality. I’m curious to hear how you think about your work in terms of formal concerns, like color and pattern, as well as in terms of affect.

LS

The first few years I exhibited my work I refused to talk about anything besides the formal concerns, as in the color, space and composition. I was defiantly anti-narrative. I came to New York at a time when artists were involved in complex systems for making things, and I tried to adhere to my own set of rules.

DS

I’m curious if DeSana would have done the same—he rarely spoke or wrote about his work, but maybe that was also part of his strategy. I think affect and forms of attachment are so central to DeSana’s later work. What did you make of that work, both at the time and then now?

LS

It's hard. I think he became much more spiritual as he was coming to terms with his death. He was also trying to make as much work as he could. He began using cutout images from photographs of his boyfriend, for instance—the work changed so radically. He could have easily turned his camera on other people that had HIV/AIDS, or turned his camera on himself and his own diminishing body. Instead, he turned toward a kind of spiritual place.

DS

I’m interested in the fact that he didn't turn his camera on himself or others, which was what so many photographers were doing at the time. For example, I think of Nicholas Nixon’s People With AIDS project. ACT UP protested Nixon’s project when it was exhibited at MoMA in 1988, because they felt it reinforced dominant representations of people living with AIDS—especially those found in the media—without providing any context or information about the pandemic and the lack of government response to it. These same criticisms were even leveled at people like Nan Goldin. At the same time, the pandemic brought greater visibility to queer subjects, which brought with it more acts of censorship and hatred from those individuals and groups who were instrumentalizing the idea of “family values” for political ends. So, DeSana’s decision to turn away from photographs of both his body and others’ bodies at this moment seems particularly pointed. In an interview you did with him shortly before he passed away, he talked about wanting to make work that was ambiguous, or about nothing. For me, there's a deeply political act in his refusal to represent bodies directly, or in his embrace of opacity in relation to a demand for greater visibility of queer bodies.

LS

Well, it was also denial about the fact that he was dying. I mean, he knew he was dying. But he—we—didn't spend a lot of time talking about it. It’s amazing, what we managed to communicate about his death without actually saying it aloud.

DS

There’s a lot of ambivalence and ambiguity in both of your work.

LS

I think we were both resistant to narrative, and in some way afraid of being storytellers. There were larger issues on our minds, and I think we both feared they would get lost in a story. And, of course, with Jimmy it was always about maintaining that sense of mystery.

DS

Someone recently asked me how DeSana’s work might have evolved if he had lived longer, or if he hadn't died from complications due to AIDS. I was actually kind of perplexed by that question, in part, because his work changed throughout his life, and especially as a result of his diagnosis. How could I predict what it would have looked like if he had lived longer? But, more importantly, the art world and artistic practices, especially in New York, changed so much as a result of the HIV/AIDS pandemic that the question really has much broader implications—like, what would all art look like today if the pandemic didn’t happen, or wasn’t still happening? I’m not sure if certain modes of artistic production—including social practice, or certain forms of activism—would have emerged or become dominant modes in the 1980s and 1990s without the pandemic.

I'm curious if you've thought about that, or if you feel like your own work changed as a result of the trauma you and so many others experienced around the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

LS

I think that everybody's work changes in response to the moment they are in. I think people's work has changed in response to the four years of Trump’s presidency. Most of the artists I know are very in touch with the present cultural and political moment. Had Jimmy lived through all that his work most definitely would have reflected his experiences. Whatever the next category, crisis, or critical moment of culture was, I’m sure he would’ve been right there. People in my generation, my artist friends had many, many, many, many, many, many, many friends who died of AIDS-related illnesses, and were profoundly changed by that as a result. But, you know, over a million people have died of Covid in this country. There are so many people now whose lives have been impacted by those deaths. I don’t spend a lot of time comparing the two pandemics, since much is still unfolding, but I’m sure there’s a lot there to make sense of in the future.

DS

Speaking of work changing—you had a touring retrospective exhibition a few years ago. What was that experience like for you, revisiting all of your work and seeing it narrativized in an exhibition format? I’m curious if it changed your perspectives on either certain bodies of work, or even just your work more generally. Were you able to see how your own work responded to, or changed, at particular cultural moments? Or in response to the changing technologies associated with photography and the distribution of images?

LS

Both times I’ve planned retrospectives I’ve become fixated on what is not in the exhibition. Like, "How can I tell the story of my work when so much is left out?" That’s where a great curator comes in. How can someone make this feel linear and cohesive, when I know how many gaps and holes are in the timeline. This is as true for me as it is for the DeSana exhibition, even though he died at forty. Obviously, there is far more work than you were able to include in the Brooklyn Museum show. When it works and feels complete, that’s an amazing experience. One of the more gratifying experiences for me in my survey shows was including rarely seen series, or seeing series that I felt had been misunderstood at the time they were originally exhibted getting a stronger positive response. That's obviously very gratifying.

DS

You’ve recently revisited a body of work from 2007. What drew you to it?

LS

Well, Ellie and Era from 56 Henry approached me about doing a show—they were really drawn to this series called Color Pictures. It was something I shot immediately after my 2006 movie The Music of Regret. The movie was a musical—a puppet musical. I kind of brought out every single body of work I'd done up to that point. The characters were puppets that danced and sang songs, and it starred Meryl Streep. When I finished making that movie, I felt like I needed to start over. So, in 2007, I thought the best way to start over would be to start with naked people. I asked a lot of my friends if they would pose for me, and they wouldn't. I then found that I could download free porn on the internet. And, you know, this is before OnlyFans. The naked women that I found were so poignant—it was like, college girls with webcams. Each picture that I downloaded was like, “Oh my God, this could be my friend or my sister.” I felt emotionally drawn into these pictures and started putting them in empty sort of timeless dollhouse rooms. What's interesting about the fact that 56 Henry gallery wanted to show this work is that, out of all of the work I’ve made, it's some of the work that I find to be the most connected in spirit to Jimmy's work—which they had no way of knowing, of course. Those pictures are pretty big, and 56 Henry Street is a very small gallery. I thought, well, I could only put like two or three of the big pictures in the gallery. I am still old school enough to believe that there's a synergy between dealers who want to show your work and artists and the space that you're showing in. Before I knew it, I had twenty-five new very small works that were based on these pictures. So they are new. Well, the backgrounds are the pictures from 2007. But then there are objects added to them. They're sort of—you use the word assemblage, which I hadn't thought of. There are objects floating in resin. So, they've become sculptural objects. I keep saying they are old works, but my husband is saying they are new works. So, I'm gonna say it's new work.

DS

Recently you’ve been experimenting with AI technologies to produce new images. If you saw the use of photography as a potentially radical act in the 1970s, do you see these new technologies as potentially disruptive for artists and art in 2022?

LS

I'm not sure if you mean "disruptive" as a positive or negative. I tend to think that disruption is always ok. I generally feel that if the technology is here, let’s try it. I can’t pretend it doesn’t exist, and it also appeals to me. I love language, and, in the case of language generated prompts, I am just floored that I can "speak a picture.” I personally want to use it because it’s new and we don’t know where it will all end up. Its potential to be harmful and confusing is just as great as its potential to positively change the world. When I feel like I’ve had enough of it I will stop, or not. Is it art? I’ve never really asked or answered that question in terms of my own work, and I tend to really dislike that question in general. Since we’ve been talking about Jimmy, I can only imagine what a great time he’d be having with it.