frame 51 April 2024

Belonging Elsewhere
by Jane Rankin-Reid

Tasmania-based writer, curator and art critic Jane Rankin-Reid is a writer of fiction, biography, memoir and critical essays. Her essays from the late-1980s on Jean-Michel Basquiat have been widely re-printed, and her work as a correspondent and columnist has been published in the press around the world.

‘Belonging Elsewhere’ is an excerpt from Jane Rankin-Reid's ‘The Colour of Night’, an unpublished memoir of 1980s downtown New York. 

In the beginning of our late 1970s downtown lives, my generation of young artists, writers and performers made many nocturnal discoveries; situational sentiment, lost innocence, gossip, mystery, objects and ideals. My New York memoir, The Colour of Night, written in a series of three notebooks, began with my unexpectedly vivid recollections of a late 1980s summer evening stroll through the darkened city streets with a pair of artists. Everything radiated from the rediscovery of that precious time of casual ambling. Winding our way through the night, we sensed New York’s dormant potency, relishing in its temporary emptiness and the relief from its hungry necessities for those few short hours.

All these years later in Tasmania, writing my way through the last days of my ninety-three-year-old mother’s life, the vista of the seascape lapping at the foot of my clifftop home gentles my spirits. The land is fan shaped. The waves surge below. I am an islander. I need to see the water that surrounds and separates us. At night, there is a single light visible in the wide spanning distance, an automated marine beacon blinking at the edge of the wilderness. Sometimes I lie awake listening to the sound of the waves. With the sea on my shoulders, I am often apart, but never alone.

My mother features quite frequently in my memoir, although I keep shading her loveliness behind my own pained exasperation. Her duality was exasperating. People adored her kindly manners, subversive humour and sweet tinkling laughter. Though her prancing, intellectual games were lost on quite a few of her admirers, many wished she could be their mother too. She was wise and tolerant. For a country girl raised by colonial Victorians, she could be an unusually progressive paragon of bohemian grace and gentility. Even so, my mother’s parenting was somewhat hit-and-miss. When I was just a few months old, she took me to a picnic and forgot to bring baby food supplies. Even in her nineties, she’d giggle when telling stories of her many maternal failures. “I gave her the corner of a blanket soaked in coffee to chew on”, she’d say, before becoming overcome with laughter. “As if it made any difference. Honestly, I could have given my children soap and they wouldn’t have noticed!” This outlook was to be expected from someone who could not cook much more than a port wine flavoured jelly. But my mother’s dangerous parental style was no less loving for its lapses. She would occasionally defend me fiercely. A snooty local friend rang to inquire about where to get her daughter an abortion. “Why are you asking me?”, my mother had said. “Because your girl behaves like a wild animal, so she must have had many abortions”, the woman replied, or words to that affect. “Do you think my daughter would be so stupid as to tell me if she’d mucked things up so badly?”

There were also secrets aching with sadness in the last weeks of her life. I was desperate to connect with the truth before she passed away. But because my dying mother would not tell me about my brothers’ lives and deaths, I felt I needed to recreate them as companions of a kind, especially during those last days of her life. My puppet brothers became imaginary witnesses to all that was to be endured. And so it was that they slipped effortlessly into my New York remembering’s.

Fingering through the fine threads of lapsed friendships, recovering snippets of dialogue. These became absorbed into the sound of my deceased brothers’ ‘voices’. Though they could never have known each other because one died before the other was born, it seemed imperative to shape their unlived chorus, at least while my mother lived on. I imagined them speaking with a kind of casually efficient intelligence, affirming their depth of connection, as men, as brothers.  

Reconnecting with the human highlights of my years spent in New York in the early 1980s brought up many unexpected images. Memories of the two small boys sleeping in a cardboard box on top of a pile of garbage. The resonant sound shifts of a basketball bouncing past the empty lane behind the Puck building were as clear as the afternoon I first heard them. The twang of smacked rubber hitting the concrete sidewalk echoing through the shaft of space, before softening back into the walls of the street fronting buildings. Recollections of a lover stuffing the skirt of my dress into my arse as it billowed over a street grate. The tall, elegant elderly woman clicking past my gallery window every morning in black patent leather high heels with a brilliant enamel jewel mysteriously attached to the side of her clean-shaven head. Reclusive pianist and composer Glenn Gould drumming out a reverie on the bonnet of a parked car. The whirr of Warhol’s Polaroid snapping me one snowy winter morning, arms above my head raising the gallery grate on Madison Avenue. Looking up from my book to see him staring in at me through the gallery windows. Watching Park Avenue from a penthouse at dawn as it filled with bright yellow taxis. The glint of Richard Nixon’s rooftop pool of carp. A bar stool floating to the floor in slow motion at daybreak. The familiar Bowery tramp in a lace apron dancing outside my window way uptown on East 82nd Street. My New York memories are composed of undiscovered vignettes of mystifying poetic dissonance.

I never wondered how the homeless man turned up outside my building eighty or so blocks up town, six months after I’d first watched him from a friend’s loft, dancing on the Bowery. I imagined myself having sex wearing his apron dress. I’d worn less. Dancing naked on an empty suburban football oval at midnight, walking barefoot across the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Eyelids licked open by a lover. Being awakened by a fleeing junkie burglar who’d surrounded my bed in flames.

Before landing in NY in early 1979, life in my old city had reached its end game. I had left Tasmania, then Sydney, to find myself. NY was fresh, dynamic and rebellious in its cultural ambition. History rewarded artistic risk and effort. No one dared expect me to calm down. The self-invention needed to survive in the city’s creative slipstream suited me. I felt that believing in NY meant it believed in me. There could be no greater affirmation.

I had little choice as a 22-year-old Tasmanian émigré but to try to find a career. But I was sick of myself. I hadn’t figured out how to write well enough to earn the right to be read. All I knew was that art enraptured me. I’d begun to meet some of the more prominent artists of the epoch and was naively astonished at how their personalities seemed to fit their work. Roy Lichenstein shook hands like a banker in a well fitted suit. James Rosenquist beamed an all-American astronaut kind of smile. Andy Warhol barely concealed his deceptive insatiability, while the searching power of David Hammon’s prescient silence was both intimidating and inspiring. From the Art Students League studios, we watched Salvador Dalí and his wife Gala make their elegant way down West 57th Street to the Russian Tea Room. He bore a silvered cane while she was draped in a pink feather boa. Other younger artists I met downtown were constantly seeking opportunities to cast their creative vision up against the city’s greatness. To belong to its avowed belief in the pursuit of excellence. No ambition was too large; no dreams were left unspoken.

In those early months in New York, I also learned it was a city whose residents loved and thought about in considerable depth. New York’s urban folklore was ancient, yet contemporary, endlessly renewing itself. Formed of a unique language of landmarks and incidents, the city’s persona was sealed into the hearts of its truest lovers. The evolution of NY’s neighborhoods and streets, its accretion of character types and architectural signifiers, scaled its narrative from pedestrian height up into the lights, past our consciousness, into the stratosphere. No wonder NY captivated us so readily.

Some nights we’d hear David Rattray, Rene Ricard, Eileen Myles or Kathy Acker reading at St Marks in the Bowery. One evening we heard ten poet friends reading in three different venues. A diary note from 1984 reads; “What do you wear to listen to despair?”, because NY made people unhappy too. To be without in the luxuriance of the mid 1980s artistic boom alienated many gifted but unrecognized downtowners. America’s mid-1980s upsurge of cultural capitalism came at a price. As the decade unfolded, downtown conversations became suffused with the subject of money and its excessive exploits. Art sold whence forever it had not. Artists became suddenly wealthy, and were photographed with cool hunting celebrities. Their galleries kept limousine accounts. The poets Edit DeAk and Rene Ricard and the notable graffiti writers they’d championed so insightfully were sidelined by vapid graduate school systems of artistic horizons. Sincerity was evaporating, everything was performative and oversimplified, consciousness was fawned over. Walking home after hearing celebrity post-structuralist Jean Baudrillard speaking at New York University, my husband Gianfranco told me he’d cribbed the tale he told the audience about a Japanese born, Paris-based Rolling Stone fan eating his lover. It was someone else’s story.

 “Sixty thousand a year”, Allen Ginsberg roared as he entered our loft for dinner with the legendary Lacanian French activist philosopher Felix Guattari. It was the fall of 1984, a few weeks before Gianfranco and I married. “Brooklyn College! I’m gonna hook you up man!” Felix was amused, though disinclined to take up the bearded Beat poet’s offer. Ginsberg was a fountain of advice as we sat down to eat, volubly extoling the virtues of various health cures as he devoured his serving of salad and cheese. Though he drank and smoked weed as energetically as the rest of us, we guiltily refilled our glasses out of sight while someone chopped up speed on the kitchen counter. Ginsberg and I did not much care for one another in those days. His voluminous persona was overwhelming to me. But a decade later, summoned to his bedside (with curator/author James Birch) upstairs at The Groucho, we shared tender memories of beloved friends we’d lost in the intervening years. It was close to the end of his life. When I said goodbye, Allen Ginsberg kissed my hand.  

 The Colour of Night, (unpublished) P 2-6 of Notebook 3 Ch 12