Jimmy de Sana was part of the lower Manhattan avant-garde art scene of the 1970s–the punk, pre-santized, heroine-fuelled geographies of SoHo and Chelsea–from which emerged a new language of the Real; sex, gender, pornography, feminism and AIDS. Cindy Sherman and Peter Hujar were making photographs at this time whilst De Sana made portraits of Laurie Anderson, Debbie Harry, Billy Idol and The Talking Heads. De Sana's practice includes an examination of the notion of the body as sculpture and often utilizes bondage and S&M imagery. The Grey Art Gallery at N.Y.U whose Down Town collection holds an unrivaled archive of the period has curated De Sana's work into shows in 2006 and 2010 along side work by Mabou Mines, Richard Foreman, Richard Hell as well as Carolee Schneeman whose 1975 performance Interior Scroll is aped in De Sana's 1979 photograph, Ribbon, which shows a naked young man in a bondage mask with a bright orange ribbon unfurling from his crotch.
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Carolee Schneeman Interior Scroll 1975 |
