Tabboo!,
Tabboo! 1982–1988. New York: Gordon Robichaux/Karma Books, 2021. 140 pages.
ONCE UPON A TIME in the early 1980s, New York City’s East Village was cheap and scary, a petrified forest of desiccated industry. Among the ruins, fantastic creatures built worlds of fantasy and devised strategies to survive. They made themselves at home. One of these creatures was Stephen Tashjian, who had come to New York with a gaggle of friends, each full of promise, after graduating from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. Some were photographers: Mark Morrisroe, the prolific punk, and Jack Pierson, the moody glamorpuss. Others, like Pat Hearn, Tashjian’s bandmate in Wild and Wonderful (by all accounts as advertised), with whom he lived in one of those fabled ’80s SoHo lofts before Hearn started her famed gallery, did a little of everything.
Copy
What might be called the Art Fair Industrial Complex has been an ambivalent force on both art markets and art itself in recent years: in one view, fairs offer their attendees chances to see international work they wouldn’t otherwise have access to; in another, the vast mall of it all dulls context into commerce.
Such questions were put on hold with COVID-19 but as signs of life return the Istanbul Design Biennale takes place through May 2021, overlapping with the projected return of Art Basel Hong Kong in March it’s worth thinking about how such massive enterprises use space once it’s safe to inhabit them, and what the ethics of such inhabitation might be.