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拍品專文
“Painting is forbidden. The joys and pleasures of being a painter are almost identical to those of being a serial killer: the solitary quest, the thrill of the hunt, the compulsion of trying to complete an imaginary set, to live totally in the imagination, the suspense, the urgency, and finally the uncontrollable spasms…” – Martin Wong
In his autobiographical, trompe l’oeil painting, My Secret World, 1978-81 (1984), Martin Wong depicts his bedroom from outside of the building, surrounding two windows with his iconic brick motif and peering into the personal world of the artist. On one window, the details of the hotel he lived in are “chiseled” into the lintel, with his signature details on the sill. On the right window are the artwork’s details, along with the inscription: “It was in this room that the world’s first paintings for the hearing impaired came into being,” Through the window, the viewer sees two paintings of a Magic Eight ball and dice hung right above the bed, and over a stack of suitcases hangs a depiction of the present lot, considered Wong’s first painting featuring American Sign Language, titled Psychiatrists Testify: Demon Dogs Drive Man to Murder from 1980.
In this present lot, Wong combines two of his signature compositional motifs: red brick and ASL hand signals. An additional inscription, painted on what appears to be a plaque, similar to what is affixed to traditional frames, reads “Painting for the Hearing Impaired.” The gesticulating hands, grounded with stylized bright white shirt cuffs adorned with ruby red cuff links, spell out: “PSYCHIATRISTS TESTIFY DEMON DOGS DRIVE MAN TO MURDER.” The man referenced in the work is serial killer David Berkowitz, better known as “Son of Sam,” a serial killer who terrorized New York City in the summer of 1977, the year before Wong moved to New York. Berkowitz was indicted for eight shootings and confessed to all of them. Psychiatrists who examined him stated that Berkowitz claimed to have been obeying the orders of a demon manifested in the form of a dog belonging to his neighbor “Sam.” The case was subject to intense media coverage, lending a kind of celebrity status to the notorious killer, which many peopled felt he enjoyed. In response to this media swarm, the New York Legislature enacted the “Son of Sam Laws,” which worked to prevent criminals from financially profiting off the publicity brought on by their crimes. Berkowitz’s case rattled New York and the rest of the country, still fresh in everyone’s minds the year Wong arrived in the city.
Often described as a social realist and documentarian, Wong earned the street moniker, “Human Instamatic,” referring to his days as a portrait artist in Eureka, California, during the late 1960s to early 1970s, where he would offer five dollar sketches to passerby on the street. The Instamatic was a series of inexpensive, easy-to-load cameras produced by Kodak in the early 1960s. The cameras were an instant hit, introducing a generation to low-cost photography. After moving to New York, Wong would continue to capture the world around him, finding beauty in the urban landscape of dilapidated brick buildings to the friends he made and the local people living around him in “Loisaida,” how the Puerto Rican communities referred to their Lower East Side neighborhood. As Antonio Sergio Bessa describes, the artist was an “engaged chronicler of the everyday in the Loisaida…we observe Wong becoming the voice of the community that he chose to embrace…” (A. S. Bessa, “Dropping out: Martin Wong and the American Counterculture,” Martin Wong: Human Instamatic, exh. cat., New York, Bronx Museum, 2015, pp. 19-21). Whether in literal depictions of friends hanging out on fire escapes or through text and symbols, Wong turned the contents of everyday life, good or bad, into visually rich compositions. Paintings could celebrate the love between individuals, such as No Es Lo Que Has Pensado… (t’s Not What You Think…) (1984), a chronicle of neighborhood characters, such as Sweet ‘Enuff, the 1987 portrait of firemen and skateboarders, or stylized interpretations of rattling newspaper headlines, like the present lot. In a 1984 exhibition at Semaphore Gallery in New York, Wong scrawled out his artist’s statement on a piece of cardboard: “Taking down to street level at this time, I wanted to focus in close on some of the endless layers of conflict that has us all bound together…Always locked in, always locked out, winners and losers all…”
“By using the manual alphabet to spell out words in his work, Wong recognizes that painting is a language of signs that combines the visual and physical, while acknowledging that art, no matter how accessible, is not universal. By depicting stylized versions of hand signs, Wong signals that there is a gap between the viewer (reader) and the art (signs) that the artist (messenger) must try and transcend without betraying or simplifying his subject.” – John Yau, “All the World’s a Stage: The Art of Martin Wong,” in Martin Wong: Human Instamatic, exh. cat., New York, Bronx Museum, 2015, p. 42.
Wong nurtured an interest in systems of communication. Poet and critic John Yau notes, “As someone growing up in San Francisco’s Chinatown, Wong was aware that language could be both a form of communication and a barrier, particularly to those who are unfamiliar with it. Moving to a neighborhood in the East Village where many residents spoke Spanish must have reinforced this early memory” (J. Yau, “All the World’s a Stage: The Art of Martin Wong,” Martin Wong: Human Instamatic, exh. cat., New York, Bronx Museum, 2015, pp. 41-42). The incorporation of ASL hand signals, legible only to those who understand the visual language or are willing to learn how to decipher, explores the relationship between seeing and reading, while also recalling communication through gang signs or the underground codes used by the gay community. Furthermore, the stylized, cartoon-like hands recall graffiti tags that plastered the walls of the Lower East Side; in addition to being a visual artist, which some of his peers were actually not aware of, Wong was a passionate collector of graffiti art, and in 1993, would donate his collection of some three hundred works to the Museum of the City of New York.
In his autobiographical, trompe l’oeil painting, My Secret World, 1978-81 (1984), Martin Wong depicts his bedroom from outside of the building, surrounding two windows with his iconic brick motif and peering into the personal world of the artist. On one window, the details of the hotel he lived in are “chiseled” into the lintel, with his signature details on the sill. On the right window are the artwork’s details, along with the inscription: “It was in this room that the world’s first paintings for the hearing impaired came into being,” Through the window, the viewer sees two paintings of a Magic Eight ball and dice hung right above the bed, and over a stack of suitcases hangs a depiction of the present lot, considered Wong’s first painting featuring American Sign Language, titled Psychiatrists Testify: Demon Dogs Drive Man to Murder from 1980.
In this present lot, Wong combines two of his signature compositional motifs: red brick and ASL hand signals. An additional inscription, painted on what appears to be a plaque, similar to what is affixed to traditional frames, reads “Painting for the Hearing Impaired.” The gesticulating hands, grounded with stylized bright white shirt cuffs adorned with ruby red cuff links, spell out: “PSYCHIATRISTS TESTIFY DEMON DOGS DRIVE MAN TO MURDER.” The man referenced in the work is serial killer David Berkowitz, better known as “Son of Sam,” a serial killer who terrorized New York City in the summer of 1977, the year before Wong moved to New York. Berkowitz was indicted for eight shootings and confessed to all of them. Psychiatrists who examined him stated that Berkowitz claimed to have been obeying the orders of a demon manifested in the form of a dog belonging to his neighbor “Sam.” The case was subject to intense media coverage, lending a kind of celebrity status to the notorious killer, which many peopled felt he enjoyed. In response to this media swarm, the New York Legislature enacted the “Son of Sam Laws,” which worked to prevent criminals from financially profiting off the publicity brought on by their crimes. Berkowitz’s case rattled New York and the rest of the country, still fresh in everyone’s minds the year Wong arrived in the city.
Often described as a social realist and documentarian, Wong earned the street moniker, “Human Instamatic,” referring to his days as a portrait artist in Eureka, California, during the late 1960s to early 1970s, where he would offer five dollar sketches to passerby on the street. The Instamatic was a series of inexpensive, easy-to-load cameras produced by Kodak in the early 1960s. The cameras were an instant hit, introducing a generation to low-cost photography. After moving to New York, Wong would continue to capture the world around him, finding beauty in the urban landscape of dilapidated brick buildings to the friends he made and the local people living around him in “Loisaida,” how the Puerto Rican communities referred to their Lower East Side neighborhood. As Antonio Sergio Bessa describes, the artist was an “engaged chronicler of the everyday in the Loisaida…we observe Wong becoming the voice of the community that he chose to embrace…” (A. S. Bessa, “Dropping out: Martin Wong and the American Counterculture,” Martin Wong: Human Instamatic, exh. cat., New York, Bronx Museum, 2015, pp. 19-21). Whether in literal depictions of friends hanging out on fire escapes or through text and symbols, Wong turned the contents of everyday life, good or bad, into visually rich compositions. Paintings could celebrate the love between individuals, such as No Es Lo Que Has Pensado… (t’s Not What You Think…) (1984), a chronicle of neighborhood characters, such as Sweet ‘Enuff, the 1987 portrait of firemen and skateboarders, or stylized interpretations of rattling newspaper headlines, like the present lot. In a 1984 exhibition at Semaphore Gallery in New York, Wong scrawled out his artist’s statement on a piece of cardboard: “Taking down to street level at this time, I wanted to focus in close on some of the endless layers of conflict that has us all bound together…Always locked in, always locked out, winners and losers all…”
“By using the manual alphabet to spell out words in his work, Wong recognizes that painting is a language of signs that combines the visual and physical, while acknowledging that art, no matter how accessible, is not universal. By depicting stylized versions of hand signs, Wong signals that there is a gap between the viewer (reader) and the art (signs) that the artist (messenger) must try and transcend without betraying or simplifying his subject.” – John Yau, “All the World’s a Stage: The Art of Martin Wong,” in Martin Wong: Human Instamatic, exh. cat., New York, Bronx Museum, 2015, p. 42.
Wong nurtured an interest in systems of communication. Poet and critic John Yau notes, “As someone growing up in San Francisco’s Chinatown, Wong was aware that language could be both a form of communication and a barrier, particularly to those who are unfamiliar with it. Moving to a neighborhood in the East Village where many residents spoke Spanish must have reinforced this early memory” (J. Yau, “All the World’s a Stage: The Art of Martin Wong,” Martin Wong: Human Instamatic, exh. cat., New York, Bronx Museum, 2015, pp. 41-42). The incorporation of ASL hand signals, legible only to those who understand the visual language or are willing to learn how to decipher, explores the relationship between seeing and reading, while also recalling communication through gang signs or the underground codes used by the gay community. Furthermore, the stylized, cartoon-like hands recall graffiti tags that plastered the walls of the Lower East Side; in addition to being a visual artist, which some of his peers were actually not aware of, Wong was a passionate collector of graffiti art, and in 1993, would donate his collection of some three hundred works to the Museum of the City of New York.