Stephen Varble

Stephen Lloyd Varble (1946-1984) was a notorious performance artist and playwright in lower Manhattan during the 1970s. His work challenged both mainstream conceptions of gender and the established, institutionalized art world.

Life and work

Varble was born in Owensboro, Kentucky in 1946.[1]. He attended the University of Kentucky (B.A.) and moved to New York in 1969 to go to film school at Columbia University, where he received an M.F.A. in Film Directing in 1971.

While in graduate school, Varble completed the book The Elegant Auctioneers for publication by Hill & Wang. The majority of the book was authored by Wesley Towner, with Varble writing the final chapters and editing of the manuscript after Towner's death in 1968. The book is a history of art collecting and art auctioneering in the United States from the late nineteenth-century to the 1950s and 60s.[2] He also assisted the young art historian Douglas Crimp with the lighting of his first exhibition, a show of Agnes Martin's work at the School of Visual Arts in 1971.[3]

In the early 1970s, Varble also worked briefly for Andy Warhol's Interview magazine[4] After receiving a grant from the City University of New York, he directed and produced the vocational film Heavy Duty: A Film Study of the Classroom Paraprofessional (1971). He was active as a playwright in the early 1970s, and his Delicate Champions was put on as part of an experimental series at the Forum at Lincoln Center in 1971. In 1973, Varble directed his play Silent Prayer at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in the East Village of Manhattan (14-18 and 21-25 March 1973). The production was designed by Geoffrey Hendricks (who also played the silent "God" character in the play), with music by David Walker and lights by Laura Rambaldi. In addition to writing and directing the play, Varble also designed the costumes for the production (with assistance from John Eric Broaddus).[5] Notably, Eric Concklin, a regular at La MaMa and first director of Harvey Fierstein's Torch Song Trilogy, starred in the role of the father.[6]

In these years, Varble was a participant in the network of New York Fluxus artists due to his romantic relationship with Geoffrey Hendricks. With Hendricks, he collaborated on a number of performances including works for Charlotte Moorman's Avant-Garde Festivals, Jacki Apple's "Identity Exchange" (1973), and Alison Knowles's Identical Lunch (1973).[7] The two also performed in Europe in 1972, including Silent Meditation for the International Carnival of Experimental Sound (ICES), Hybrids at the Arts Club in London, and Silent Mediation for the Neue Galerie Aachen.[8]

Varble became most known in the mid-1970s for his public interventions in genderqueer costumes made from street trash, food waste, and found objects. After breaking with Hendricks, Varble became increasingly interested in creating confrontational events that disrupted business and that presented him in costumes that complicated assumptions about gender. The works that brought him to public notoriety were his "Costume Tours of New York," which involved Varble leading onlookers through unauthorized tours of SoHo galleries, boutiques, and museums. He targeted sites of luxury commerce, and his performances attacked issues of class and gender.[9] While his costumes often took the form of dresses, they would also combine male and female elements together. His most notorious such intervention was the Chemical Bank Protest in which he confronted a bank that had allowed a check to be forged against his account. Wearing a costume made from netting, fake money, breasts made from condoms filled with cow's blood, and a toy fighter plane as a codpiece, he made a scene at the bank. On being rebuffed, he punctured the condoms and started writing bad checks with the blood that spilled out.[10]. The novelist Fernanda Eberstadt was Varble's protégé in these years, and recalled some of his performances in a memoir published in 2018.[11]

Varble had two exhibitions during his lifetime. First, he staged one for himself in a loft on Franklin Street, New York, in 1976. For its Gala Ending, he put on a collaborative performance with the assistance of Warhol stars and performance artists, including Mario Montez, Jackie Curtis, Agosto Machado, Taylor Mead, Ruth Truth, and John Eric Broaddus.[12] Second, he had a single commercial gallery exhibition in 1977 when Brooks Jackson Iolas Gallery in New York put on what Varble antagonistically titled "The Awful Art Show."[13] Varble was a subject for many famous photographers, including Peter Hujar, Jimmy De Sana, Allan Tannenbaum, Jack Mitchell, Fred McDarrah, Greg Day, Rose Hartman, and Anton Perich.

Varble stopped performance art around 1977, and instead began working on a video epic titled Journey to the Sun, that runs hours but remained unfinished at his death.[14] Its music includes compositions by his long-time friend Robert Savage and music Varble composed himself on an early home synthesizer, the Alpha Syntauri. The work is an homage to Greta Garbo, with whom Varble identified. He died from HIV/AIDS-related complications on 6 January 1984, at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City. [1]

Exhibitions

Solo

  • 2018-2019: Rubbish and Dreams: The Genderqueer Performance Art of Stephen Varble, curated by David J. Getsy for the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, New York, 29 September 2018 to 27 January 2019.
  • 2018: Stephen Varble, An Antidote to Nature's Ruin on this Heavenly Globe: Prints and Video from the Early 1980s, curated by David J. Getsy for Institute 193, Lexington, Kentucky, 20 October to 1 December 2018
  • 1977 Stephen Varble: The Awful Art Show, Brooks Jackson Iolas Gallery, New York, 29 March to 16 April 1977.
  • 1976 An Exhibition of Costumed Works by Stephen Varble, self-produced exhibition at Varble's loft on Franklin Street, New York, 10 April to 30 April 1976.

Group

Bibliography

References

  1. 1 2 Hale, Whitney (November 30, 2017). "Art Historian David Getsy to Give Talk on Kentuckian Stephen Varble's Genderqueer Performances". University of Kentucky News. Retrieved August 14, 2018.
  2. ↑ Birmingham, Stephen (October 25, 1970). "A collector's item about collections". The New York Times. Retrieved August 14, 2018.
  3. ↑ Douglas Crimp, Before Pictures (Brooklyn: Dancing Foxes Press, 2016), 57.
  4. ↑ For example, "I am James Purdy," interview by Stephen Varble, Interview (December 1972): 28-29.
  5. ↑ La MaMa Archives Digital Collections. "Production: Silent Prayer (1973)". Accessed August 14, 2018.
  6. ↑ Robert Viagas, "Eric Concklin, First Director of Torch Song Trilogy Plays, Dies in NYC," Playbill (6 December 2017). http://www.playbill.com/article/eric-concklin-first-director-of-torch-song-trilogy-plays-dies-in-nyc
  7. ↑ 2011 Geoff Hendricks Interview with Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle at http://sexecology.org/research-writing/geoffrey-hendricks/, Identical Lunch: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/152702, and 1972 Simultaneous Performance for Avant-Garde Festival: https://www.eai.org/supporting-documents/344/w.1241.0
  8. ↑ See Geoffrey Hendricks interviewed by David J. Getsy 20 April 2016 at https://vimeo.com/177397203
  9. ↑ See David J. Getsy, "Rubbish and Dreams: The Genderqueer Performance Art of Stephen Varble," The Archive [of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art]62 (Winter 2017): 3-7.
  10. ↑ Alexandra Anderson, "The Chemical Bank Encounter and Other Events in the Artlife of Stephen Varble, Village Voice (10 May 1976): 130-31
  11. ↑ Fernanda Eberstadt, "I Bite My Friends," Granta 144 (August 2018) https://granta.com/i-bite-my-friends/
  12. ↑ Gregory Battcock, "Divitiae Virum Faciunt," SoHo Weekly News (May 1976): 18.
  13. ↑ Discussed in a 2016 lecture by David Getsy, "Gutter Art: Stephen Varble and Genderqueer Performance on the Streets of 1970s New York" at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art.
  14. ↑ David J. Getsy, "Rubbish and Dreams: The Genderqueer Performance Art of Stephen Varble," The Archive [of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art]62 (Winter 2017): 3-7.


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