Downtown ‘81| Interview with Lee Quiñones
“New York is my kinda’ town… if you can make it there, you can sell people your unwanted hair...”
By 1980, ‘The Big Apple’ was the nerve centre for avant-garde music, photography and art. It was a city fizzing with restlessness and cultural insurgency; and at the crux of the movement were the wayward and defiant youth. Self-expression was no longer confined to the gallery or the canvas - with people painting on anything and everything, from subways and trains, to billboards and brick walls. Music was sound, and sound was subject to reconfiguration through experimental noise, dissonance and atonality. Through this adventurous spirit came the emergence of hip hop and no wave: the talented yet unruly offspring of punk, funk and free jazz. These subcultures were a direct and largely mutinous reaction to the commercial progression of rock and roll...an emphatic two-fingered salute to the conglomerate music labels holding power at the time.
It was out of the spontaneity and chaos of this mould that Downtown 81 would eventually arise from the dust and rubble of a dilapidated Lower East Side of Manhattan. Swiss fashion photographer Edo Bertoglio and his then-partner, Morrocan-born artist Maripol, had recently teamed up with music columnist Glen O’Brien to document the flourishing art scene that they were witnessing first-hand. Originally titled New York Beat, the film required its own modern-day Lancelot: a freewheeling romantic who wields a clarinet and a spray can as gallantly as a knight wields a sword.
That hero turned out to be a young Brooklyn-born graffiti writer and budding musician by the name of Jean-Michel Basquiat. The camera tags along with the 19-year-old Basquiat as he wanders the New York streets with a general purpose for aimlessness...an habitual rover that appears as indifferent to the bourgeois art dealers and gallery folk than he is to the hookers, pushers and strung-out junkies that he encounters along the way.
The film’s rhythmic and free-flowing style is by no means anchored by its plot; and this is all-the-better considering the story’s overt simplicity. As truth would have it, O’Brien had penciled a rough script only as a means of stringing together the various live performances peppered throughout the film. The majority of the artists in Downtown 81 had already been featured in his popular column, Glen O’Brien’s Beat, in Interview, the magazine founded in the late 60’s by artist Andy Warhol and British journalist John Wilcock. In many ways the casual handling of the plot is a triumph here, as it allows Downtown 81 to wander off the leash and roam where it may, making for a whole new sensory experience.
A grainy snapshot of a bygone era, much of the outdoor locations we see in Downtown 81 are almost unrecognisable in their contemporary gentrified state. Add to that the twin tragedies of Basquiat’s untimely death at age 27 from a drug overdose, and the fact that the film almost never saw the light of day, having been shelved for almost 2 decades before its release, and it seems only a matter of time before the National Film Registry recognises its cultural, historical and aesthetic significance.
Read the exclusive interview with NYC artist Lee Quiñones, who featured alongside Basquiat in Downtown ‘81 for Privilege of Legends here.
Jean-Michel Basquiat on location for the groundbreaking Downtown ‘81
