| funeral home second avenue new york by James Westcott |
| Four years ago I was leaving club in the East Village (alright, I admit it: it was Lit – a dive I never wanted to go to but always seemed to end up at) at about 4am. Walking down Second Avenue on my way home, I saw a young man repeatedly kicking the glass door of a funeral home. Wow, I thought: this guy must be really grieving, really drunk, or just really depraved. It was unspeakably early in the morning, but there were still plenty of people on the streets. No one seemed to be accompanying, or indeed obstructing, the vandal. He just kept kicking the door, then leaning his head on it and moaning, possibly crying. Then he unleashed another flurry of kicks. Maybe he’d just been bereaved and had been to a funeral that day arranged by this funeral home. Then maybe he’d gotten really drunk, and was taking his anger at his friend’s death out on the funeral home. |
| I don’t remember remembering the incident the next day or indeed until about a year later when the boho brat Dash Snow inexplicably exploded onto the art scene (actually maybe it’s obvious why: he takes decisively imperfect-moment Polaroids of his narcissistic and sociopathic über-cool underworld; and he is from the de Menils, one of the wealthiest families of collectors in the U.S.). Flicking through the book Live Through This: New York in the Year 2005, made by the Deitch Projects Gallery (as if 2005 was a particularly tough year for New York’s youngest and brightest artstars), I saw that very scene outside the funeral home captured in one of Snow’s salacious photos. A man – that man! – doing a flying kick into that very glass door. That night I had been the unwitting witness to… erm… art history in the making. Snow is obsessed with – or just childishly petulant about – death (for a new piece, he plans to ejaculate over human skulls), and that night he was photographing some howling angel-headed hipster raging against the dying of the light (yes, Snow’s strenuous bohemianism has a history) – or just some jerk fucking over a family business. |
| This photograph, easily lost in Snow’s oeuvre of abundant and exuberant throwaway Polaroids, seemed addressed specifically to me. The thrill of recognition was weird, flattering. If you know that the door being kicked in belongs to a funeral home, the photo becomes so much more fertile. But only me and Snow, and maybe a few other anonymous passers-by, witnessed the incident. And almost certainly only Snow and I witnessed both the incident and the photograph. (Possibly the vandal too, if he was one of Snow’s friends.) [...] |
| James Westcott is editor of artreview.com, and is writing a biography of Marina Abramovic for MIT Press. |
Excerpt from 'funeral home second avenue new york' by James Westcott. All text © James Wescott 2007. Full Version can be read in the soon to be released Photography Class Catalogue. |