 Sponsored by Reading Rhythms On December 18, 1974, Peter Hujar ate breakfast, met with an editor from Elle magazine, talked to Susan Sontag on the phone, spent the afternoon photographing a recalcitrant Allen Ginsberg, got Chinese takeout with the critic Vince Aletti, worked in the darkroom, practiced harpsichord, and fell asleep listening to the conversations of sex workers on Second Avenue floating up to his window. As he recounted to his friend Linda Rosenkrantz the next day, “I didn’t do anything.” This month in the NYR Online, Andrew Durbin writes about Hujar, his eventful day, and Peter Hujar’s Day, Ira Sachs’s film adaptation of Rozenkrantz’s transcript of that long-ago conversation. Hujar, Durbin contends, was “one of the greatest portrait photographers of the second half of the twentieth century,” adept at depicting “affinity, coterie, and the city itself, from parades and protests to backstages and bedrooms, usually his bedroom.” In its best moments, Durbin writes, Sachs’s film is “not unlike one of these portraits, capturing an individual in a particular moment in time.”  Andrew Durbin; It joins a recent spate of books and exhibitions about the photographer, including a 2018 retrospective that traveled Europe and the United States; a reissue of Hujar’s only photobook, Portraits in Life and Death; the publication of Rosenkrantz’s transcript in 2022; the Fraenkel Gallery show “Peter Hujar Curated by Elton John”; and, forthcoming in April 2026, The Wonderful World that Almost Was, Durbin’s own dual biography of Hujar and his sometime partner, the artist Paul Thek. Durbin is also the editor in chief of Frieze magazine and the author of two novels, MacArthur Park (2017) and Skyland (2020). He previously wrote for the Review about Hervé Guibert and Isa Genzken, and his work has appeared in the London Review of Books, The Believer, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications. This week I emailed him to ask about Hujar, biopics, and the art world.  Advertisement Daniel Drake: When did you first encounter one of Peter Hujar’s photographs? Andrew Durbin: In high school a friend of mine introduced me to Anohni and the Johnsons’ second album, I Am a Bird Now, after it won the Mercury Prize. The cover features Hujar’s stunning Candy Darling on Her Death Bed from 1973. I was just beginning to discover Warhol and the Factory, but I had never seen an image so sumptuous and heartbreaking before; I didn’t even fully understand what I was looking at. At the time, Peter was pretty unknown outside of New York, and I was living in South Carolina, so it was difficult to find out more about him or Candy other than the sparsest details. In the South, queer lives were routinely dismissed, threatened, erased, killed. Peter’s portrait of Candy in her final months and Anohni’s music showed me how beautiful and resilient those lives could be, even in death. Hujar—along with Paul Thek, David Wojnarowicz, Joe Brainard, and other figures from the 1980s New York art scene—are having something of a revival recently. Why do you think that is? For one, they made beautiful work that never flinched from saying something meaningful about the world, which can’t be said about some artists in their generation who are still living and working today. (Jeff Koons and David Wojnarowicz would be the same age, if David was still alive.) I also think people are craving authenticity right now. These artists refused to comply with expectation; they avoided the cocktail circuit. The economic pressures artists and writers face today are so ruinous—there’s no room for slumps, breaks, or simply time to think. I don’t know if we’ve ever lived in a moment when artists were as self-conscious about the state of their own markets; that’s just horrible for art. Look at the discourse around painting. It’s almost entirely oriented around its market position and the security it provides galleries. As a result, so much looks the same.  Advertisement Your review seems to say that a successful biopic should not get bogged down with doing an impression of the subject, of Hujar, but of evoking something of his sensibility. What might the point of such an experience be? What, in the best case, can an audience get out of a fictionalized biography? I came to this film with a lot of prior knowledge after working, for the past five years, on a book about Peter and his relationship to Paul Thek. But yes, understanding an artist’s sensibility is crucial. Peter’s friend Susan Sontag writes that the “basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis and extension of sensations.” When we think about art this way, as “adventures in sensations,” she contends, Rauschenberg might be roughly equivalent to the Supremes. That’s still a fun argument, sixty years later. At times, Peter Hujar’s Day seems overly concerned with its own idea rather than with the feelings—and person—it hoped to evoke; the idea is fairly easy to grasp, a day-in-the-life, but I wasn’t sure what the film actually feels about its subject, other than reverence, which has its limits. But then, I am not sure what a “better” biopic might look like, and I admire Ira Sachs’s willingness to experiment with the genre—to drop us in, without explanation, and to avoid constructing a narrative dependent on recreation. Janet Malcolm calls biography an “unholy practice” for good reason; it succeeds only insofar as it fails in interesting ways. As a critic, an editor, and, I have to assume, an art-lover, what’s your sense of how art—not just the art market but art-making—is adapting to or coping with the unfolding fascist catastrophe of the current moment? Art is such a vast field, it’s hard to characterize its response as anything other than varied. The pressure campaign on public museums is intense, and, like universities, many of these institutions are struggling to stand up for themselves or artists. That’s depressing. What we’re not seeing is more of the silly “Dear Ivanka”–style protests of 2016, which at the time underscored the empty gestural politics of the art world—as if addressing the Trumps as art collectors might somehow lead to a change of heart. Ten years later, people are clear-eyed, even if they’re feeling more powerless. After many years in New York, where your novels are set, you moved to London to edit Frieze. How do you find the two cities’ literary and art worlds compare? Sometimes I think leaving New York has allowed me to see the city more clearly. I still love what everyone loves about New York—the energy, the density, the ambition. What I appreciate most now is how fully it embraces experimentation and difficulty in a way London never will. That said, I love London’s space, the distances between points—it’s a bunch of villages huddled along an old river, and I’m charmed by the cultural mishmash. Calling yourself a “Londoner” is so much more awkward than saying you’re a “New Yorker” because London means so many things to so many people. As for the difference between the two literary and cultural worlds, I don’t know, I don’t want to generalize. I’m more aligned to New York. But I was too in thrall to New York; now I feel like I know how to love it again. Who are some of your favorite artists working right now? I have so many! Stewart Uoo does not receive enough of the attention he deserves—he is my favorite artist of my generation, and one of the most daring. Looking at his work over the years has taught me everything I needed to know about the state of play. I also love Evelyn Taocheng Wang, who has been redoing Agnes Martin lately, and Tolia Astakhishvili, one of those rare artists whose hugely complex installation work really holds my attention for long periods of time. Here in the UK, I really admire Jack O’Brien. I’ve never seen an artist work with some of the materials he uses, like plastic wrap. I’m also glad to see some older artists—Suzanne Jackson, Stephen Prina, Takako Yamaguchi—finally receive their due, too. I have so much respect for Nayland Blake, Lukas Duwenhögger, Trisha Donnelly, Robert Gober, Kara Walker, and on and on.  Advertisement More by Andrew Durbin at nybooks.com This May Have Been LifeIra Sachs’s adaptation of Peter Hujar’s Day quietly captures the careful attention its subject brought to his intimate, delicate photographs.  Reverent VulgarityIsa Genzken’s sculptures—precision-engineered, playfully assembled, or readymade—show a winkingly subversive artist engaged in a dire Dadaist game.  Hervé Guibert: Living Without a Vaccine“Guibert’s gripping revelation, in the character of Muzil, of Foucault’s final days, which had been kept secret by the privacy-obsessed French press, caused a stir in the country, abetting the author’s rise to fame late in his young life.” For everything else we’ve been publishing, visit the Review’s website. And let us know what you think: send your comments to editor@nybooks.com; we do write back.   You are receiving this message because you signed up Update your address or preferencesView this newsletter onlineThe New York Review of Books |
sábado, 22 de noviembre de 2025
‘Adventures in Sensations’
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