Loren Munk is unmissable. Dressed in white bespeckled painter’s pants, this 73-year-old artist shambles into New York’s galleries with a slightly crazed look. He walks around with his little camera, quietly narrating what he’s seeing. When he recognizes someone, he might train the camera on them. I gave up trying to avoid him long ago.
Munk is a kind of archivist of the art scene. On his YouTube channel, you can watch hundreds of past shows. He is represented by no gallery, and works in a basement in Brooklyn, from which emerges the fruits of his weird obsessions. These are colorful, crazily annotated maps of the New York neighborhoods where artists (as well as their associates: collectors, patrons, critics) lived and showed their work. They are encyclopedic compendiums of a world that is both microscopic in size and vast in history.
His new show at Ruttkowski; 68 is organized by the free countercultural-rag-that-could, The Brooklyn Rail. The cartographic canvases on display are local histories in which the past is overlaid on a geographic present, their tangle of colored lines resembling some cross between a subway map, a conspiracy board, and a family tree of our ancestors. It’s all here; artists and places known to one generation might be unrecognizable to another. What Munk seems to be saying is that they’re all part of the same thousand-headed organism.
In the corner of one work is a thought balloon marking 33 Union Square where Valerie Solano rode up the elevator and shot Andy Warhol on June 3, 1968. One whole painting is devoted to East 10th Street: I spotted Robert and Mary Frank’s home, which was down the block from Harold Rosenberg, who lived across the street from Diane Arbus and Helen Frankenthaler, who were around the corner from Elaine de Kooning on Broadway, who was near Willem de Kooning and Milton Resnick. I saw the locations where Stuart Davies, Winslow Homer, George Innes, and Clyfford Still lived. I never knew Mabel Doge’s avant-garde salon, at 25 Fifth Avenue, wasn’t far from my current place in Greenwich Village. And here’s the tiny shithole apartment on Avenue B where I lived in 1985, near the residence of my late compadre Peter Schjeldahl.
The show is a mystic library, full of places that no longer exist. There’s Executive Gallery, Area X, B-Side Gallery, and Art City. You may never have heard of these spaces, but they thrived for a while. There are specters, too: Here’s the late Colin De Land and Pat Hearn, who helped start the behemoth that grew into the Armory Show. There’s Fun Gallery, where Keith Haring and Kenny Sharf showed; Gracie Manson, who discovered David Wojnarowicz; International With Monument at 111 East 7th Street, where Peter Halley and Jeff Koons got started. (I remember walking in on Koons polishing stainless-silver sculptures the night before his opening.) Richard Prince’s rented storefront is here, which he used to present one photograph, Spiritual America, an appropriation of another photograph of a young Brooke Shields nude. Munk lets us revisit all this once again.
Soho is rendered as a ganglia of lines leading to hundreds of names and their addresses. In the middle is the nerve center of that world: 420 West Broadway, where Leo Castelli, Sonnabend, John Weber, and Charles Cowels galleries were located. I went here every other day to hang out, see shows, talk to artists and dealers. Paula Cooper’s first space at 99-100 Prince Street, which opened in 1968, is represented; my wife worked here. We find the addresses of Alex Katz, Lee Bontecque, Eric Fischl, Nam June Paik, Don Judd, Jennifer Bartlett, John Wesley, Dorthea Rockburne, On Kawara, Marisol, Elizabeth Murray, Christo, Richard Serra, and Joan Jonas (who is still living here). The city should place memorial plaques on these buildings.
Roots of the New York School: The Foundations of American Modernism is a madly didactic abstraction that looks further back in time to artists and collectors like Duchamp, Rothko, Betty Parsons, Peggy Guggenheim, and Lee Krasner. There’s one whole section devoted to Arshile Gorky; as de Kooning once said, “I come from 36 Union Square,” Gorky’s studio. These ingenious paintings make us ask, What is a home anyway? Is it a dot on the map, an address? Or perhaps it is more than that, the ghostly evidence that we were once here, that we lived and did the work.