Nick Waplington: Before the Clean Up
March 6 - April 5
“S M I L E R S, in its East Village basement, honors the legacy and persistence of the New York City club scene in its second exhibition—BEFORE THE CLEAN-UP. Nick Waplington and Lizzi Bougatsos coexist as foils in this exploration of a clandestine, oft-mythologized subculture—both participants but playing radically different roles, with Bougatsos channeling a range of active subjects and Waplington as one of the few documentarians given access to a thriving 1990s underground ecosystem. Waplington’s photographs from the era are energized through Bougastos’s improvisational sculptural elements, some likened to the items—and reticence—one sheds as the night takes over.
Nick Waplington (born 1965) is a photographer known for capturing a broad spectrum of uncannily charged imagery—from British suburbanism, to life in the occupied West Bank, to a beach riot spurred by a plane crash in Southern California, to the focal point of this exhibition: the New York club scene. Immersion is key in Waplington’s process, as his nomadic approach to life and his personal attachment to varied subjects give his work a timeless, soulful vibration. The images on display were taken in various fabled venues including Limelight, The Sound Factory, Save the Robots, Body & Soul, and Paradise Garage. His club photos are not straightforwardly candid and subject engagement is often present in the eye-contact and cooperative, vampish postures that Waplington captures from on and off the dance floor. The vigor of his execution is palpable, as the acute angles from which Waplington shoots his subjects require unstinting physicality and movement. There are also images of individuals completely consumed by the moment, whom Waplington does not disrupt; rather, his photos eloquently communicate a fleeting, blissful transcendence that is difficult to describe with words alone.
Lizzi Bougatsos (born 1974) is an experimental musician (Gang Gang Dance, I.U.D.) and visual artist who employs her body, voice, and irrepressible energy as medium. Born and raised in New York, Bougatsos has been a downtown cultural figure for decades, both influencing and experiencing the various mutations of subculture that flourish in the absence of the mainstream gaze. Embracing the euphoria of bodily expression, Bougatsos’s clothing and personal style are as much a part of her artistic rituals as the spontaneous movements and vocal textures for which her musical performances are known. To this presentation, she contributes a grouping of sculptures whose language borrows from the intermixing ingredients—including music, performance, and fashion—of Bougastos’s prolific identity as a creator. Throughout the space, Bougatsos also scatters ephemeral and atmospheric elements of herself, with the accumulation of what remains after uninhibited revelry in mind.
Nightclubs and dance spaces are sanctuaries for those seeking freedom of self-expression, to be lost in the music, and a crowd which protects those outside of the deemed-normative. They are a space to remove the armor one erects to survive in polite society. Like any utopian idea, there will always be those attempting to undermine its principles. In the 90s, spearheaded by Mayor Giuliani, the city endeavored to demonize nightlife as a lingering and degenerative symptom of the economic hardship of the 70s and 80s, going so far as to resurrect an archaic bit of legislation called the “cabaret law” that banned more than three people dancing in a club without a license. In a twist of hypocrisy, members of the conservative right who (even more so now) crusade to control bodies and sexual identity are said to have engaged in unchecked predatory behavior① in the same clubs that Giuliani sought to scapegoat for the city’s crime and blighted reputation. This exhibition harkens to a moment before the attempted “clean-up” and intends to redeem for the present any form of rebellion against the artistic or political status-quo.
In pairing Waplington and Bougatsos, both of whom share a feverish devotion to their work, the essential dynamic between photographer and subject is enlivened. Expressions of queerness, femininity, and masculinity mingle with Waplington as not quite a wallflower, but a trusted observer of a vulnerable and diverse community with the keen ability to be both unobtrusive and deliberate, and Bougatsos as an off-the-wall flower—representing the unruly body, the delinquent silhouette, the sensuous and bold. Club culture does not exist to contradict the veneer of clean streets that sells “New York” to tourists. Rather, it would prefer to remain the secret pulsing heart of creativity—a perpetuator of New York’s eternal magnetism—and endures in fierce resistance to forces that tamper with liberation.”