A Complicated Elegy: Nicolo Gentile and John Knight at GCADD
Hey, hey, hey-hey-hey-hey!
Macho, macho man
I’ve got to be a macho man
- The Village People, 1978
Hey! Ho! Let’s go!
- Ramones, 1976
New wave killed disco and no wave killed punk—at least according to twentieth-century American underground oral tradition. But while proverbial death at the higher-brow hands of Blondie or Arto Lindsay makes for entertaining genre mythos, this simplification trivializes the staggering economic, political, and social complexities that mutated American culture in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Clandestine venues—punk clubs, gay bars, and cruising corridors—had manifested amidst a late 1970s milieu of urban disinvestment, rapid deindustrialization, and a burgeoning “family values” political right. Simultaneously, back-to-back economic recessions and an historic military loss in Vietnam had kickstarted a crisis in American masculinity.
As pillars of red-blooded, blue collar machismo toppled left and right, startlingly flamboyant expressions of new male archetypes gained footing: the rugged camp of the Village People; the self-harming, writhing nudity of Iggy Pop; the gawky, androgynous-greaser-chic of the Ramones. In tandem, the era’s bleeding edge cinema was transgressive, experimental, and audaciously exploitative, cementing a libertine, lawless complexion. That gauzy but gritty temporal aura feels deceptively familiar to me, an aesthetic and emotional hybrid of John Waters, Lizzie Borden, and John Carpenter. But it’s an uncanny familiarity. Call it retroactive subcultural osmosis, because I wasn’t alive for any of it.
By the time I was born in 1982, that exciting and seductive celluloid fantasy had burned up. Reagan was expanding the War on Drugs while deliberately ignoring the escalating HIV/AIDS crisis—both of which would have devastating effects upon populations who found affirmation and communion in underground nightlife. It wasn’t new wave, no wave, or even influxes of yuppies buying condos that decimated queer and punk communities. It was calculated neglect at the federal level, reactionary municipal austerity, a for-profit healthcare system, and engineered hyperincarceration.
But during a small window at the apex of the 1970s, per old timers on the Lower East Side, it was an anarchic bacchanal. You can’t even imagine it, they used to tell me. But I feel like I can.
Nicolo Gentile, Tough Love, detail, 2021. Nickel-plated steel ball chain, automotive enamel. John Knight, Laconic phrase and Fragments of a fallen sky, detail, 2021. Interior paint and spray paint on wall. Courtesy of Granite City Art and Design District. Photo: Kalaija Mallory.
Nicolo Gentile, born 1991, and John Knight, born 1986, similarly understand this explosive epoch only through documentation, storytelling, and abstraction. The queer, punk, BDSM, and DIY cultures they (we) inherited were derivative, the byproducts of subcultural gentrification. Even as local scenes had teeth, Hot Topic and Queer Eye were exponentially sanitizing unorthodoxy through the transformational power of the free market. In their respective artistic practices, Gentile and Knight candidly deploy the anachronistic influences of a bygone era, though neither traffic in sentimentality. Instead, both artists agitate abutments of the abject and the amusing, recalling comparative literature scholar Svetlana Byom’s notion of reflective nostalgia. As opposed to restorative nostalgia—the mindless, indiscriminate attempt to rebuild an irretrievable sense of home—a reflective nostalgia involves critical examinations of the past. Here, humor and irony find purchase. Think David Lynch, as opposed to MAGA.
Today, surreptitious urban sites of social and cultural rebellion have long been sanitized, intellectualized, and commodified. So why do their mythologies continue reverberating so vividly? Perhaps it is that, for all their kitsch and revelrous dissonance, queers and punks had impeccable taste. They understood the staying power of considered, stratified aesthetics, from projected and performed aboveground iconography to subtler ingroup semiotics. A leather jacket broadcasts different intentions in different clubs.
Nicolo Gentile, Tough Love, detail, 2021. Nickel-plated steel ball chain, automotive enamel. John Knight, Laconic phrase and Fragments of a fallen sky, detail, 2021. Interior paint and spray paint on wall. Courtesy of Granite City Art and Design District. Photo: Kalaija Mallory.
Gentile and Knight work double-entendre and covert signaling into a lather in “SHOW TITLE,” their two-person exhibition at Granite City Art and Design District. The exhibition’s tongue-in-cheek refusal of a moniker is itself a twofold provocation, at once an easy joke about pretentious naming conventions in contemporary art, and an authoritative command to identify oneself publicly by rank, honorific, or occupation. But such obsessions with pedigree, Gentile and Knight contend, aren’t limited to the professional classes. Subterranean scenes are equally consumed with their own idiosyncratic taxonomies. Are you a top or a bottom? A punk or a hardcore kid? Femme or masc? Anarchist or communist? These identifiers have remained integral, and evolved in complexity, through two new generations of misfits desperate for alternative social architectures in a world made flat, algorithmic, and surveilled.
Visual and textual innuendo abound in “SHOW TITLE.” And yet the installation itself is remarkably un-camp. It’s clean, smooth, objectively anti-ostentatious. Filtered consciously through Gentile and Knight’s time-abstracted relationship with primary sites of punk and kink, the installation, heaped with irony, distills those cultures’ unwieldy semiotics into a sober conceptual minimalism. The result is post-industrial-hormonal, a clinical nostalgia prank, evoking equal parts contemporary art exhibition, gentrifier-friendly coffee roastery, and confusing millennial lifestyle brand pop-up. “SHOW TITLE” offers a self-aware sneer, mocking the relentless recuperative appetite of an antiseptic, wholly cynical neoliberal capitalism that reincarnated CBGB as a Newark International Airport eatery and YASS KWEEN’d the NYPD for rolling up to Pride in armor-plated, rainbow-colored SUVs.
Nicolo Gentile, Tough Love, detail, 2021. Nickel-plated steel ball chain, automotive enamel. Courtesy of Granite City Art and Design District. Photo: Kalaija Mallory.
Free market flattening obscures the possibility that queerness is a horizon far beyond shallow representation, a moving goal post, a constantly redefined threshold limited only by the imaginations of those who authentically claim it. Gentile points to this phenomenon by offering up a threshold in the form of a feature ubiquitous at sex clubs and cruising sites: the curtain. Tough Love, 2021, is an architecturally scaled, nickel-plated ball chain curtain emblazoned with an image of two men passionately kissing (appropriated from a 1977 drawing by American artist Rex) . Its title invokes care-rooted discipline—or constructive feedback, as in an art school critique session—as well as the titillating dynamics of a dominant/submissive relationship. The sculptural intervention’s shimmering drapery looks viscous, suggesting a portal or wormhole, a means by which to transcend the limits of spacetime. One could imagine traveling back to the 1980s to discuss aesthetic theory and new queer politics with a young Felix González-Torres, years before his untimely death from AIDS-related complications in 1996 at the tragic age of 38. Or perhaps one might jettison into the future, beyond the heteronormative horizon of what’s conceivable now, in search of a post-puritanical liberatory age.
Nicolo Gentile, Schott Bros, detail, 2021. Paraffin wax, leather dye, cotton wick. Courtesy of Granite City Art and Design District. Photo: Kalaija Mallory.
Stuck in the corporeal present, passing through Gentile’s beaded threshold reveals Schott Bros, 2021, a convincing wax replica of one of the titular company’s classic leather jackets puddled upon a single wooden pallet. James Dean, outlaw biker clubs, skinheads, and fighter pilots have all adopted this marker of American masculinity. So have beefy leather daddies and gangly, pimple-faced punks. Gentile’s iteration leans toward the brawny, rugged queer locus on the masculinity spectrum. During the exhibition’s vernissage, the artist lit several wicks protruding from the wax jacket, alternately suggesting a somber prayer ritual for the victims of HIV/AIDS, or a cheeky nod to wax play, a practically cartoonish kink situated barely one spice note to the left of vanilla. Again, Gentile employs gallows comedy, careening between the funereal and the funny.
Object-wise, the jacket’s implied utility (wearability) complicates its rarified status as an authored sculpture. Could there be others, in different sizes, hidden tactfully in a backroom inventory? If the jacket is only artificially scarce, then it becomes stripped of its individuality, anonymized. But rather than depress the jacket’s import, Gentile’s depersonalization excites, conjuring the taboo arousal of anonymous hookups, specifically those in gay cruising culture. In Queer & Now, 2021, wheatpasted to a wall outside the gallery, Gentile makes explicit reference to the seductive world of nameless intimate encounters. Part of a takeaway edition formatted as backpage personal ads, the offset lithographs on newsprint include “interviews with Leathermen, Act Up members, and art fags.” The publication’s bold header includes the same Rex drawing of two men kissing from Tough Love.
Nicolo Gentile, Queer and Now | Issue 1, installation view, 2021. Offset lithography on newsprint. Courtesy of Granite City Art and Design District. Photo: Kalaija Mallory.
The three walls framing Gentile’s discrete objects are bathed with Fragments of a fallen sky, 2021, Knight’s temporary, site-specific monochromes. In bold red and yellow, the painting’s various sections invoke the iconography of sundry far-left and far-right youth political movements, many of whom spring forth from the same punk and metal undergrounds. These schisms are fascinating to witness, as the performed masculinity within them is so often reactive to participants’ perceptions of their own economic, social, and political positions. Fragments of a fallen sky draws its title from the 1998 debut 7” of From Ashes Rise, an influential crust band formed in Nashville, who soon relocated to Portland, Oregon, where Knight, Gentile, and I would all meet in art school a decade later. From Ashes Rise were anarcho-punk and categorically opposed to political oppression. Yet despite any heavy band’s individual politics, their aggressive sound and typically brutal visuals might attract all stripes of angry young men, from avowed antifascists to future cops. Red and yellow (and blue) side by side.
John Knight, Fragments of a fallen sky, 2021. installation view, 2021. Interior paint on wall. Courtesy of Granite City Art and Design District. Photo: Kalaija Mallory.
Knight punctuates the red and yellow walls with Laconic phrase, 2021, a multi-part, terse text work, stenciled in black spray paint, outlining three potential futures for disillusioned, low-income urbanites. The first of these phrases—the only one visible before crossing the gateway of Gentile’s Tough Love—reads WORK AT FACTORY. Appropriately, the typeface mimics that of the nearby US Steel Works Granite City compound.
Nicolo Gentile and John Knight: SHOW TITLE, installation view. Pictured: Nicolo Gentile, Tough Love, 2021; John Knight, Laconic phrase and Fragments of a fallen sky, 2021. Courtesy of Granite City Art and Design District. Photo: Kalaija Mallory.
Within industrial environments, red and yellow signify various corporeal dangers. In these warehouses and factories, masculinity is performed through (sometimes treacherous) labor, and political and cultural schisms have been known to explode. Since the 1970s, the masculine identity associated with American factory work has practically disappeared, as industrial production was offshored, automated, or deemed archaic. Subsequently, the economic, social, and political positions of factory laborers have been volatilized. There no longer appears to be a blue collar pathway into the American middle class. And despite the feigned nonplus of pearl-clutching Democrats, the birth of a reactionary politics within the (white) labor class should surprise no one.
JOIN THE MILITARY and GO TO PRISON read the two remaining futures detailed in Laconic phrase. Such self-effacing, limited horizons represent one side of the work’s punchline. Named for Laconia, the ancient Greek region that included Sparta, laconic phrases are pithy, dry, and blunt, a sort of proto-working class humor expressed by Spartan warriors in conscious opposition to the more loquacious tendencies of the Athenians. One might draw a parallel here with American populist antagonism directed at so-called professionals, academics, and experts. On the other side of Laconic phrase’s punchline is that contradictory cocktail of homophobia and homoeroticism embedded in blue collar labor and various circles of macho punk. There exists among certain sects of aggressively hetero American men a notable obsession with the film 300, a Spartan battle epic. Curiously, homosexual relationships were not uncommon between an elder Spartan erastês and his erômenos mentee. Repression is a hell of a drug. For disaffected teenage males in American urban settings, the factory, military, or prison long summed up their potential pathways, breeding a casual nihilism. Following deindustrialization in the 1970s, an already claustrophobic trifecta of opportunity was reduced to a binary. Out of these conditions sprang American punk culture, warts and all.
Nicolo Gentile and John Knight: SHOW TITLE, installation view. Pictured: Nicolo Gentile, Schott Bros, 2021; John Knight, Fragments of a fallen sky and Laconic phrase, 2021. Courtesy of Granite City Art and Design District. Photo: Kalaija Mallory.
There exists a simmering but instructive tension between Knight’s examination of disaffected, predominantly heteronormative working class masculinity and Gentile’s charting of a subversive, more sensual one. Within the space of the gallery, the former literally surrounds the latter, a reminder of the potential violence with which openly queer people must contend daily. Of course, there have always existed considerable overlaps between punk, queer, and kink cultures, notably so in contemporary art. Consider the work of Nayland Blake, Kembra Pfahler, Vaginal Davis, or David Wojnarowicz. But outside of visual art, for decades, these subcultural interactions might have primarily occurred under the cover of night, with much discretion. American youth today enjoy a somewhat more permissive environment, one connected online, where fluidity in the titles one shows is becoming normalized. This includes ever-evolving expressions of politics, sexuality, gender, and cultural affinity. It is, in many ways, a safer world for self-identified weirdos.
“SHOW TITLE” recognizes these meaningful gains, but refuses to be placated by them. Genuine critique, after all, is a tough sort of love. This safer world means that participating in subcultures involves significantly less risk, in part because social tolerance has progressed, but equally, if not more so, because acceptance and representation have proved more financially lucrative than xenophobia. To live as a gay man, openly or in secret, was once in very concrete ways a death sentence. To be punk was far less dangerous, but certainly no picnic, especially in a small town. Belonging to these cultures then produced different kinds of bonds, ones forged by a shared sense of risk and recognition. Neoliberal capitalism has softened the corners of unwieldy subcultures not towards true inclusion or care for the marginalized, but in pursuit of managing dissent and generating profit.
Gentile and Knight caricature this design-minded, sanitized aestheticization of queerness and punk through an acerbic minimalism. The distance generated through their respective practices of formal and conceptual abstraction acknowledges that subcultural explosions are inherently fleeting, and that to overtly romanticize what were, in so many ways, truly volatile decades would be misguided. This represents a considered practice of reflective nostalgia. Coupling measured reverence with scathing levity, Gentile and Knight find moving ways to mediate darkness. “SHOW TITLE” pumps, prods, and puts the screws on diverse performances of American masculinity, generating a complicated elegy for a generation lost to HIV/AIDS, drug addiction, and imprisonment.
Sean J Patrick Carney is a writer in Berkeley, California.