The forgotten visual art of Alan Vega
It is very telling about the way Alan Vega lived his life that up until the release of a 2008 deluxe reissue of his musical work, everyone believed he was ten years younger than he actually was. This epitomises how the renegade of the demimonde defied red tape and remained ahead of the times and often ahead of detection. He was a man who didn’t seem born anyhow, in so much as he just seemed to crawl up from some New York gutter and crack on with the business of living, remaining a reprobate maverick forevermore.
With music, it is harder to hide, but in the world of visual arts, it is easier for the creator to go overlooked as their work is scoured over. This was the way he liked to operate. After all, his first introduction to the art world was via the radical NYC collective known as the Art Workers’ Coalition. The goal of the group was mainly to pressure the city’s museums into reform. Essentially they wanted to make the art world more open and inclusive, and in order to achieve this, they ironically barricaded the Museum of Modern Art. Unless everybody can get in, then nobody can.
It was during this time that he met his friend, Martin ‘Rev’ Reverby, and the pair would continue on in this creative iconoclastic vain thereafter. In August 1969, they witnessed The Stooges, and life would never be the same for them again. As Vega once said himself, “It was when I saw Iggy Pop, that’s what did it for me. That changed my life pretty much.” Suicide would soon form, and Vega became, well, not quite a household name, but definitely a basement one.
All the while, he continued to practice visual art. Originally, he studied at Brooklyn College under the artist Ad Reinhardt, known for preaching the peculiar concept of black on black. Vega, however, was less confined in his artistic exploration. He began with surrealist drawings invoking the scenes of medieval battles. The thought was perhaps to project the disorder of today onto the past or maybe vice versa to show the dominoes of the world. Alongside these, he also dabbled in abstract paintings, clearly searching for his niche in the world.
Much like with Suicide, this would arrive with sparse, decay-like rubble and the shrapnel of society. In junkyard sculptures, cables would be rapped around TV screens, with bits of jagged 2×4, smashed lightbulbs, unknown rigs, and more adorning the mass of urban disposal. This might sound nonsensical, but it reflected the decay all around him in New York.
As Richard Hell, the punk pioneer and adopted citizen of the Big Apple, once said: “Things always change, and New York teaches you that.” It was changing faster than the racetrack rabbit in the 1970s and not always for the better. Between 1969 to 1974, the city lost 500,000 manufacturing jobs. Subsequently, a million homes depended on welfare, rapes and burglaries tripled, drugs ran rampant, and murders hit a high of 1690 a year. However, a lot of art comes from chaos and defiance—New York was a creative cocktail of both. Vega was gulping it down.
As Fran Lebowitz wrote: “When you leave New York, you are astonished at how clean the rest of the world is. Clean is not enough.” A great deal of artists relished in the glut of grime, and it resulted in a weird cultural zenith. Punk arose and pop culture toppled the bourgeoisie approach to art once and for all, and the seeding grounds for hip-hop would soon flower. In short, there was a hive of NYC artistry.
As Edmund White wrote in City Boy: “I was lucky to live in New York when it was dangerous and edgy and cheap enough to play host to young, penniless artists. That was the era of ‘coffee shops’ as they were defined in New York—cheap restaurants open round the clock where you could eat for less than it would cost to cook at home. That was the era of ripped jeans and dirty T-shirts, when the kind of people who are impressed by material signs of success were not the people you wanted to know.”
That sense of defiance and creating something from this rubble was also present in Vega’s art. Not all of the lightbulbs in his statues of decay were broken, some were illuminated. Like the rest of the wreckage, he had salvaged these from the streets. This means that in some way, his creations were mini New Yorks, literally made of it in order to represent it in a tangible way. In order to weave the city’s ties to pop culture into place, he would also toss in a few images of celebrities, clipped from magazines to show the throwaway nature of fame too.
This collaging element would also show up in other elements of his work – not least Suicide’s prominent use of field-recorded sounds and proto-sampling – which he continued to delve into on the side. However, his exhibitions formally stopped in 1983. His fame had grown, and spinning plates proved difficult. Perhaps by design, his visual arts fell into obscurity away from the underground world. Alas, it is a mark of tireless creative pursuit that he continued to explore in the background, forever working, forever trying to tap into the background and changing as he did so.
