The Creative Power of Barbara Ess

Toward the back of White Columns’s outstanding recent exhibition Barbara Ess – Archives—past the photo of a baby whose chimerical eyes interrupt an otherwise glazed expression, past flyers advertising outrageously stacked lineups of bands at legendary New York City clubs—two typed white pages hang on a wall. Each is undated. Each is titled, in capital letters, STATEMENT. The one on the right begins with a one-line paragraph: “The natural subject of photography is voyeurism.” The one on the left repeats the same thing. Except, in Ess’s red pencil, a spiral almost closes itself around the word voyeurism. A circle fully traps the word natural, which Ess also pencils within quotation marks. Another red line leashes it to a large question mark.

Words like natural and voyeurism seem germane to the life and work of Barbara Ess. Before her death in 2021, she played a crucial role in establishing downtown Manhattan as both scene and a style. In an ecosystem of big lofts, low rent, and high ambitions, Ess blossomed. That’s her in those band posters; in the feminist trio Y Pants, she and the artist Virginia Piersol and the filmmaker Gail Vachon played Mickey Mouse drum kits and kiddie-size pianos for what was fittingly advertised as “amplified toy rock,” at CBGB and the epochal 1981 Noise Fest—a nine-day marathon at White Columns’s previous location on Spring Street, organized by Thurston Moore in part to debut his new band, Sonic Youth. Ess kept excellent binders of this ephemera and asked the writer and curator Kirby Gookin to hold a parallel, backup archive.

The Archives exhibition pins the contents of those binders to the gallery’s walls, which, after all, are flyers’ natural habitat. Certain kinds of people built certain kinds of lives assessing these kinds of layered invitations; the walls of bars were social calendars. Walking past their recreations, I wonder if I would have been invited, would have gone, would have met someone and lost them. At the entrances of the kind of record store that would sell Y Pants’ music, flyers used to pile up like Félix González-Torres mounds, never seeming to lose their mass as if they were themselves alive. All this ephemeral is melancholic. I’m grateful it survived. And I feel I’m somehow eavesdropping.

Ess made things of what she saw people doing on all those nights out: a publication called Just Another Asshole (JAA). Edited with her longtime partner, the experimental-music linchpin Glenn Branca, JAA quickly became a who’s who of the downtown scene. The pair invited artists—among them Kathy Acker, Barbara Kruger, David Wojnarowicz, Lynne Tillman—to do whatever the hell they wanted on its newsprint pages or within a cassette tape. JAA was a mixed-media zine that could take most any format. In terms of chronology, ambition, and result, you could slip it between publications such as File and Visionaire. At White Columns, a display table offers a 1987 Village Voice review of issue seven by Vince Aletti, which quotes Ess saying that the zines “aren’t about craft, they’re about sensibility.” Aletti eyes the issue’s photographic contributions by Louise Lawler and Laurie Simmons, writing, “The new portraitists use the medium as a distancing device, subverting the notion of sympathetic portraiture by refusing to pierce the façade.” Today, that kind of po-faced posing seems like the birth of a New York style, one that has sympathy for the notion that a facade is as close to the truth as you can get.

The exhibition presents just one example of the pinhole photography Ess later became known for, as Aperture published a monograph of this work in 2001, and, more recently, Magenta Plains gallery has begun exhibiting the pictures. But this example is a doozy: The undated Portrait of Cookie Mueller centers the writer and actor in a circle of light like a Renaissance saint. Mueller turns over tarot cards for an unseen subject. The inquisitive light of the pinhole makes it all but impossible to look away. Mueller couldn’t have known how soon her own life would be extinguished nor how subsequent generations would take her up as a role model and icon. Perhaps in this pinhole, Mueller is peeping into a similar cult-hero future for Ess.

And it came true: as AIDS and gentrification ravaged the downtown scene, Ess joined the radical feminist group Women’s Action Coalition (WAC) in 1992. Its mission statement, displayed on a table next to a pamphlet emblazoned with WAC’s eye-catching logo of an eye with the acronym arranged into an iris, reads, in part, “We will exercise our full creative power to launch a visible and remarkable resistance.” WAC taught women and other feminists that what matters isn’t only that you organize, but how you organize. Sensibility is political. Ess spent the next two decades as a professor in the photography program at Bard College. A sample classroom assignment in the show is titled “Tell Us Something About Yourself.” Twenty-six prompts follow, including “Use the photograph to bring us closer. Use the photograph as your mother. Use the photograph as your lover. Use the photograph to keep us away.” Barbara Ess – Archives uses her photographs, uses what she made, to tell us about herself, and how all the playing around downtown became a posture, then a politic, then a pedagogy. She made it feel like a natural progression, and it deserves a look.

Barbara Ess – Archives was on view at White Columns, New York, from September 12 through October 21, 2023.