Tag Archives: RuPaul

LINDA SIMPSON AND REYNALDO RIVERA

Across his body of work, Reynaldo Rivera depicts people enmeshed in their own private worlds who completely transcend their surroundings through the force of imagination and their inner lives. This remains true, whether the subject is photographed in a garden, a public toilet, or a house party in pre-gentrified Echo Park. I think this is a primary difference between Rivera’s work and Nan Goldin’s, to whom his portraits of drag queens, trans women, and other friends might be compared. Goldin’s subjects in The Ballad of Sexual Dependency are downwardly mobile: middle class kids who took a wrong turn, captured in louche dens of bohemian squalor during emotionally intimate scenes… Rivera’s photographs of drag performers taken in Latino gay bars in LA between 1989 and 1997 reflect a different kind of collaboration. He sees his subjects less as they “are” than how they most wish to be seen, lending himself to their dreams and illusions of glamour. And why shouldn’t these dreams be realized?Chris Kraus*

This week, Linda Simpson and Reynaldo Rivera will present their new books—The Drag Explosion and Reynaldo Rivera: Provisional Notes for a Disappeared City—and join artist and editor Alex Jovanovich in conversation.

See link below to register for the online event.

AN EVENING WITH REYNALDO RIVERA and LINDA SIMPSON

Artforum / Bookforum

Tuesday, December 15.

4 pm on the West Coast; 7 pm East Coast.

*Chris Kraus, from her introduction to Reynaldo Rivera: Provisional Notes for a Disappeared City (South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2020).

Linda Simpson (images in color, from top): RuPaul, 1992; group of drag performers, including Lady Bunny (far left); Dean Johnson, 1987; RuPaul; event card image courtesy and © Artforum and Bookforum. Images © Linda Simpson, courtesy of the artist.

Reynaldo Rivera (images in black and white, from above): Echo Park (self-portrait), 1996; Vaginal Davis, Downtown, 1993; Cindy Gomez, Echo Park, 1992; Elyse Regehr and Javier Orosco, Downtown LA, 1989). Images © Reynaldo Rivera, courtesy of the artist

SUSANNE BARTSCH ON TOP

“Bartsch picked up where Warhol left off.” — RuPaul

History is made at night. In her capacity as party-throwing club-kid den mother and AIDS fundraiser par excellence, Susanne Bartsch provided a sanctuary of free expression for those pushed to society’s margins while engaging in what Ingrid Sischy called “the most serious political action of our time.”

Sischy was referring to the 1989 Love Ball at Roseland, a Design Industry Foundation for AIDS event that brought Harlem’s vogue balls to midtown Manhattan, introduced Madonna to the uptown cultural practice, and raised $400,000 to help fight the disease that was decimating Bartsch’s circle.

Prior to hosting events in clubs all over town, Bartsch was the proprietor of the eponymous SoHo boutique that was the first in town to import the clothes of Vivienne Westwood and John Galliano. As one of the most imaginative exemplars of sartorial self-adornment of the last half-century, Bartsch was honored with a 2015 Fashion Institute of Technology exhibition Fashion Underground—The World of Susanne Bartsch.

The riveting documentary SUSANNE BARTSCH—ON TOP (directed by Anthony Caronna and Alexander Smith) brings this only-in-New York story to the screen with new interviews, extensive documentary footage, and home movies of Bartsch’s family life at the Chelsea Hotel.

Bartsch—whose personal aesthetic and Swiss accent recall a Dada/Weimar-era ballet mécanique—was the leader of a very fast pack, and this cinematic tribute is a moving critique of gender norms and an inspiration for boundary-breakers everywhere.

 

SUSANNE BARTSCH—ON TOP

Through September 13.

Monica Film Center, 1332 2nd Street, Santa Monica.

VOD release on September 11.

See: New York is Burning

and: Fashion Underground—The World of Susanne Bartsch

Top: Susanne Bartsch (right) and RuPaul at the opening of Fashion Underground—The World of Susanne Bartsch.

Above: Bartsch and her husband, fitness entrepreneur David Barton.

Below: Bartsch applying an eyepiece. Image credit: The Orchard.