Snoopy Sleep And Woodstock Are In A Nope Mood Shirt
He’s the author of books including Jean-Michel Basquiat: Crossroads and, most recently, Hit Me With Music, a particularly gorgeous book of his photographs and stories of Marley, the Wailers, and other Jamaican musicians. Over a recent dinner at Miss Lily’s, we asked him to tell us just how all of this came to be. Vogue: Where do we even start? I guess the question is: When did your life start getting so interesting—or how did you come to meet Bob and Jean-Michel? Lee Jaffe: I left college toward the end of 1968 and moved to Brazil early the next year. It was a time when Brazil was ruled by a military junta, and people were disappearing, and there were a lot of people fighting against the government. I became friends with a Brazilian artist called Hélio Oiticica—you can make an argument that he’s the most important artist of the last 70 years; I think you can attribute his work as being the beginning of installation art—and I wound up in his house in Rio, which was kind of a cultural center. At that time, there were a lot of artists doing things against the government—musicians, too, like Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, though by the time I got there they’d already been imprisoned and had been released on the condition that they leave the country, and so they were living in England. Hélio had done an installation at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio in 1967 called “Tropicália,” and that became the name of an album by Caetano, a seminal album of that era. Soon, though, we were all exiled—I was arrested, just picked up off the street and thrown in jail. We were just told, “You guys better leave—you can’t be doing this.” Hélio and myself and another Brazilian artist whom I was working with a lot, Miguel Rio Branco, moved to New York.Snoopy Sleep And Woodstock Are In A Nope Mood Shirt
I was making conceptual art and was in this 1971 MoMA show—one of the first exhibitions of conceptual art at a major museum—which consisted of photographic documents of work that I and 25 or so other artists had created on Pier 18 at the southern end of Manhattan. My work was also part of a bunch of conceptual art shows in Europe, but soon I saw the conceptual art movement as a dead end. I revolted against the object-making of it all. Once the photographs of the art started becoming objects that were sold in galleries, it felt like a contradiction for me. Yeah. I had been invited to show in Paris by the gallerist Ileana Sonnabend, who owned the first gallery to feature conceptual artists. The idea was that I was going to have a show with Ileana, but instead I wound up making a movie, a 15-minute film with a French cast and crew, kind of a French Chelsea Girls—a lament of the dissolution of the utopian dream of 1968. This was now 1972, and there’s a lot of heroin around, and everything in the film takes place in this run-down mansion in Bussy-Saint-Georges. It starred a woman, Rita Renoir, who was a famous stripper and the vedette at the Crazy Horse; she had also been cast by Michelangelo Antonioni for his film Red Desert. People liked it, and from that, I planned to make my first feature film in Chile. It was going to follow this trip through the Andes that two of my best friends had made—Jeffrey Lew and Gordon Matta-Clark. The two of them had started a gallery in Soho called 112 Greene Street which, from the time it started in 1970 to the time it ended in 1977, was the most important gallery in the world. Philip Glass had his first performances there, Richard Serra showed there, and people like [the dancer and choreographer] Yvonne Rainer and [pioneering video and performance artist] Joan Jonas had their first things there; I was in the first show there. But Jeffrey and Gordon made this trip to find the roots that the indigenous people in the Andes were using.
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