Remembering Holly Woodlawn, Muse To Lou Reed"s "Wild Side"

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. We"re going to remember Holly Woodlawn, who died of cancer Sunday at the age of 69. She inspired the first verse of Lou Reed"s 1973 hit, "Walk On The Wild Side."

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WALK ON THE WILD SIDE")

LOU REED: (Singing) Holly came from Miami, Fla., hitchhiked her way across the USA, plucked her eyebrows on the way, shaved her legs, and then he was a she. She says, hey, babe, take a walk on the wild side. Said, hey, honey, take a walk on the wild side.

GROSS: Holly Woodlawn was a trans-woman who was one of the last of the Andy Warhol superstars. She made her debut in the Warhol-Paul Morrissey film "Trash," playing the girlfriend of a drug dealer. In this scene, Woodlawn has brought over a prep school boy she"s just picked up who"s looking to buy some drugs. Woodlawn figures she can get some from her boyfriend, played by Joe Dallesandro.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "TRASH")

HOLLY WOODLAWN: (As Holly Sandiago) Listen, hey, you got anything?

JOE DALLESANDRO: (As Joe Smith) No.

WOODLAWN: (As Holly Sandiago) Because he wants to...

DALLESANDRO: (As Joe Smith) Nothing, nothing.

WOODLAWN: (As Holly Sandiago) He"s got bread.

DALLESANDRO: (As Joe Smith) Yeah, I know, but I don"t have anything. That"s great.

WOODLAWN: (As Holly Sandiago) He"s cute.

DALLESANDRO: (As Joe Smith) Yeah, really great.

WOODLAWN: (As Holly Sandiago) Nothing, huh?

DALLESANDRO: (As Joe Smith) Aren"t you glad I cleaned up?

WOODLAWN: (As Holly Sandiago) He looks nice. He looks nice, doesn"t he?

DALLESANDRO: (As Joe Smith) Yeah, he looks great. He"s a little kid, ain"t he?

WOODLAWN: (As Holly Sandiago) So what? He"s got bread.

DALLESANDRO: (As Joe Smith) Yeah.

WOODLAWN: (As Holly Sandiago) Bread, bread.

GROSS: Recently, Holly Woodlawn appeared in a couple of episodes of the series "Transparent." I spoke with her in 1991 after the publication of her memoir, "A Low Life In High Heels." Woodlawn"s birth name was Harold Eisenberg (ph). According to her memoir, the name Holly was inspired by the character of Holly Golightly in "Breakfast At Tiffany"s." The Woodlawn part came from Woodlawn Cemetery. I asked her what Harold Eisenberg was like before he became Holly Woodlawn.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)

WOODLAWN: I was, what, shy and skinny, and I had buckteeth and, you know, and gawky-looking and stupid-looking (laughter). I didn"t like the way I looked, you know. And then one day, I moved to New York and, you know, and discovered makeup. People started telling me how pretty I was. So, you know, why not?

GROSS: Do you remember the first time you put on a woman"s clothes?

WOODLAWN: Well, actually, it came in spurts, you know. As the Lou Reed songs goes, you know, Holly came from Miami. I shaved my legs in - what? - in Atlanta, Ga., and plucked my eyebrows there. And I think in, like, North Carolina I did something else. You know, I put on a blouse. And, you know, in Philadelphia, the land of brotherly love, pantyhose. And by the time I landed in New York City, I was a full-blown woman.

GROSS: What did you like about it?

WOODLAWN: Well, first of all, the fact that, you know, I was more comfortable and the attention that I got.

GROSS: You got more attention dressed as a woman than as a man?

WOODLAWN: Yeah, and I just felt more comfortable, you know, inside, inside, you know, sort of like my soul, so to speak. You know, I felt freer. It was easier for me to speak, just be. And as Harold, you know, quote, unquote, "I just was always nervous," you know.

GROSS: Why did you hitchhike across the USA?

WOODLAWN: Because I only had $11.

GROSS: Why did you leave home?

WOODLAWN: Let"s see. You know, I was 15. I was - my parents, they just found out that I was hanging around with the wrong kind of people, you know, in their eyes. You know, they had just discovered that I was gay, and I was, you know, hanging out with these madmen, insane queens in Miami Beach. And they found out. And I had to go to summer school. And I wanted no part of that. And so some friends of mine said, listen, we"re going to New York and you got to come with us. It"s fabulous over there. The streets are paved with diamonds, you know, that diamond dust. And so I, you know, I said to them, sure, why not? I did. And it wasn"t easy at first, but, you know, I sort of stayed on.

GROSS: Well you made a living hustling at first.

WOODLAWN: I did everything at first. I mean, you know...

GROSS: When you were hustling, you were hustling as a woman, right?

WOODLAWN: Actually, no. I was hustling more as a transvestite, you know, in between.

GROSS: So people could tell? They were never, like, surprised...

WOODLAWN: No. Oh, no, no.

GROSS: ...When they found out what was underneath?

WOODLAWN: Yeah, that"s why I never got in trouble because, you know, they knew.

GROSS: It"s amazing the way you used to travel back and forth between worlds. You know, like you got this job as a salesgirl at Saks. You had modeling jobs in other stores. But you went to beauty school as a man.

WOODLAWN: Yeah, but that was in the beginning when I first was sort of like - I was doing the transition from a man to a female. But I was going to beauty school. I was living in Brooklyn, and I was going to school in Manhattan. And I was living in Brooklyn as this guy"s wife and going to school as Harold Eisenberg. And so what I would do is I would take the subway from Brooklyn to New York as a woman, go into the bathroom, change into Harold, go to school, and then do the opposite on the way back. And after a while it just got so tiring that one day I just went to school as Holly. And, well, so much for that. They, you know, threw me out. I was also doing hormones until I had b*****s.

GROSS: You were doing hormones because you were thinking of having a s*x change operation at the time?

WOODLAWN: Yeah, actually, twice, twice. We saved up the money. And both times I just couldn"t do it. I had this money in my hand. And instead of - when was I - John Hopkins Hospital. Instead of going, you know, going through with it, I just decided to go shopping.

(LAUGHTER)

WOODLAWN: I did.

GROSS: Why did you decide not to go through with it after saving and preparing for so long?

WOODLAWN: It"s so final. It"s just one of those things that, you know, there"s no turning back. And I just didn"t feel I knew yet what I really wanted to be.

GROSS: Well, looking back now, do you have any regrets about not changing yourself physically?

WOODLAWN: No, not at all, no. I"m pretty much happy the way I am.

GROSS: What have you been doing for money?

WOODLAWN: I was working in a novelty shop as a cashier.

GROSS: Was it an interesting shop or interesting people came in?

WOODLAWN: Oh, yeah, yeah. John Waters used to come in there. Debbie Harry. All my friends would come in and say, Holly, what are you doing here? And I said, well, I"m writing a book.

GROSS: Did you like people to know that you were Holly Woodlawn when you worked in the shop? Or did you want to be more anonymous? Did you ever feel bad about having to work that kind of job?

WOODLAWN: Not really. You know, it was just fun having something to do. But, you know, for the past two years, you know, this book has really taken up most of my time. Of course I lived on the advance.

GROSS: Right.

WOODLAWN: And my parents helped me out a lot, too.

GROSS: You know, it"s interesting, you describe in your book how your parents have really stuck with you. I guess there was a lot of friction when you initially...

WOODLAWN: Yeah.

GROSS: ...Ran away from home or hitchhiked away from home, and so on. But you say that over the years they have stuck with you.

WOODLAWN: Oh, yeah, we"re the best of friends. My parents just - my father just read the book. He thinks it"s hysterical and doesn"t believe a word of it.

GROSS: (Laughter) OK, well, I wish you the best.

WOODLAWN: Thank you.

GROSS: Thank you very much for talking with us.

WOODLAWN: It was a pleasure.

GROSS: Holly Woodlawn, recorded in 1991. She died Sunday at the age of 69. Tomorrow on FRESH AIR, I"ll talk with Jeffrey Tambor about playing a trans-woman on the Amazon series "Transparent."

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "TRANSPARENT")

JEFFREY TAMBOR: (As Maura Pfefferman) When she was little, she used to accuse me of wearing her clothes.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTRESS: (As character) Did you?

TAMBOR: (As Maura Pfefferman) Of course I did.

GROSS: The complete season two of "Transparent" will be up on Friday. Tambor also co-starred in "Arrested Development" and "The Larry Sanders Show." I hope you"ll join us.

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Source: http://www.npr.org/2015/12/09/459057674/remembering-holly-woodlawn-muse-to-lou-reeds-wild-side

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Holly Woodlawn (19462015)

POSTED December 6, 2015

The performer Holly Woodlawn, best known for her starring roles in Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey films such as Trash (1970) and Women in Revolt (1972), died today in Los Angeles at the age of sixty-nine according to a report from the AP in US News.

Famously associated with Warhols coterie of superstars, including Jackie Curtis and Candy Darling, she was also name-checked in the first line of Lou Reeds 1972 song Walk on the Wild Side. Woodlawn also appeared as the character Aunt Holly in Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernsts 2012 short film She Gone Rogue, which was included in the 2014 Whitney Biennial. Most recently she played Vivian on the TV show Transparent.

For more on Holly Woodlawn, see Artforum.coms 500 Words with her from May 2013, where she memorably mused: You know the song from Cabaret, Money Makes the World Go Round? Well, no, just two things make the world go roundart and music. Without that, were dead.

December 9, 2015

Marc Porter, the chairman of Christies Americas division at the auction house where he has worked for twenty-five years, is leaving for a new position at their competitor Sothebys, according to a report by Robin Pogrebin in the New York Times based on an account by Marion Maneker of Art Market Monitor. Porter will join Sothebys in a high-ranking business position, after a noncompete period of about a year, and will be involved in developing international clients. Christies global president, Jussi Pylkkanen, said in a statement that Porters job at Christies would be taken over by Brook Hazelton.

This announcement comes just after Sothebys offer of voluntary buyouts to staff in order to help cut costs, which were successful enough that the company will not have to resort to layoffs, according to a statement by a spokeswoman. Porter first joined Christies in 1990, was international head of private sales from 2012 to 2015, and widely expected to continue his career there but had been frustrated over Christies decision to dissolve his section into individual departments.

December 9, 2015

Kerry James Marshall, Great America, 1994

The NEA, in celebration of its fifty-year anniversary, is awarding $27.7 million to support 1,126 projects in forty-nine states. Within that amount, the Art Works program will give over twenty-six million dollars in awards.

Among the awardees of the recent Arts Works grant cycle, the MCA Chicago will get fifty thousand dollars to support a survey exhibition of the artist Kerry James Marshall; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, will receive seventy thousand dollars to underwrite Megacities Asia, which will feature artists like Choi Jeong Hwa, Subodh Gupta, and Ai Weiwei.

MASS MoCA, meanwhile, will receive fifty-five thousand dollars to commission new work by artists Richard Nonas and Nick Cave, while the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit will receive forty thousand dollars for a multidisciplinary project by the artist Sanford Biggers.

Museums arent the only arts groups being awarded grants. LAXART is being given twenty-five thousand dollars for a residency program accompanied by commissions, and BOMB magazine will get thirty thousand dollars for new publications.

We know from experience as well as through hard evidence that the arts matter and these projects will provide more opportunities for people to learn, create, and experience the value of the arts in so many different ways, said NEA chair Jane Chu.

December 9, 2015

According to a report by Gareth Harris in the Art Newspaper, a campaign called petition4art led by Korean artists, curators, and cultural figures has launched several petitions protesting the appointment of Bartomeu Mar, the former director of the Museu dArt Contemporani de Barcelona, or MACBA, as the new director of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul. Their concerns about Mars appointment stem from his role in the censorship of an exhibition at the MACBA last spring called The Beast and the Sovereign, a debacle that led to his resignation and the resignation of several high profile museum curators and directors from the International Museum Committees Board.

The first petition was created last month and gained more than 830 signatures, including from the Seoul-based filmmaker Park Chan-kyong and the Berlin-based artist Haegue Yang, opposing Mars candidacy. After Mars official appointment in Seoul earlier this month, replacing the museums acting director Kim Jeongbae, a second petition was launched on December 3 and has amassed 450 signatures so far. A spokesperson for petition4art said that the ministry of culture in South Korea must not attempt any kind of censorship We also ask the new director for a public declaration of ethics where he states clearly his will to stand against any kind of censorship and control or pressure from the authorities.

Mar has personally written to the petition4art group, saying he opposes all sorts of censorshipI believe that the only way art can play a role in society is by being produced, presented and received in freedom, without impositions or restrictions, and defended his initial decision to cancel the exhibition at MACBA by reasoning that exhibiting artist Ines Doujaks workdepicting the former Spanish King Juan Carlos I being sodomized by the late Bolivian labor leader Domitila Chngaraopened the museums board to legal action from the Spanish government for insulting the former monarch, whose image is protected by law.

December 9, 2015

The contested photos of artworks hosted on Wikimedia Commons

Benjamin Sutton reports in Hyperallergic that the Reiss Engelhorn Museum in Mannheim, Germany has filed a lawsuit against the Wikimedia Foundation in San Francisco for hosting and making available for download high-resolution images of public domain artworks from the museums collection. These include photos of works by Anna Dorothea Therbusch, Alexander Coosemans, Jacob Ochtervelt, Peter Anton von Verschaffelt, and Csar Willich.

While many photos of works from the museums collection are available on Wikimedia Commons, the institution is specifically asking the foundation to remove seventeen images of artworks that it commissioned from its in-house photographer, Jean Christen, claiming it has copyright to photos commissioned from a professional photographer who used a tripod and a special lighting rig.

In response to the suit, the Wikimedia Foundations legal director, Michelle Paulson, and general counsel, Geoff Brigham, said in a blog post: Copyright law should not be misused to attempt to control the dissemination of works of art that have long been in the public domain, such as the paintings housed in the Reiss Engelhorn Museum. The museum has also filed an additional lawsuit against Wikimedia Deutschland.

December 9, 2015

Stophomophobie.coms images of the vandalized photographs

Le Monde confirms that an outdoor photography exhibition celebrating the tenth anniversary of French LGBT association LAutre Cercle will be reinstalled in Toulouse.

Since opening on November 30, the show, Les Couples de la Rpublique (Couples of the Republic,) had been vandalized three times. It features forty photographs of gay couples by Olivier Ciappa installed on the gate of a city park. Stophomoophobie.com captured the vandalism in a recent post.

Addressing the situation on Sunday evening Toulouses mayor, Jean-Luc Moudenc, tweeted, Attacking a photographic work to defend ones personal opinion is highly condemnable.

December 9, 2015

According to La Voix du Nord, Frances Minister of Culture, Fleur Pellerin, has raised concerns about what is at stake for artists, writers, and freedom of expression as the powerful, and conservative, National Front political party rises.

Criticizing Marine Le Pen (the National Fronts presidential candidate), Pellerin said, She says will defend the creative freedoms, but at the same time she wants to control regional cultural institutions and their choices. This is called official art. When [Le Pen] says, do not be afraid of losing creative freedom, we should be afraid.

Referencing a law passed by the French government earlier this year protecting artistic freedom, Pellerin said, I defend the freedom of artists. Im not the minister of good taste or my own taste. I am the minister of culture and, in this capacity, I support all forms of expression, in compliance with the law. [The National Front] wants to decide what is beautiful and what is not, what people have the right to read in the media. It is a complete grip on peoples brains.

Pellerin isnt the only one issuing dire warnings about Le Pens party. Last week, over 650 artistsincluding Christian Boltanski, Annette Messager, and Cleste Boursier-Mougenotsigned a letter denouncing Le Pens politics, as Artforum.com reported here. They wrote, We work and create in France as well as elsewhere, the liberty of creation is first of all an openness towards othersthose who are not me, but who are equal to me, no matter what the color of their skin, their nationality, or their religion.

December 9, 2015

Jacob Waben, Vanity, 1622: one of the stolen artworks.

According to the Westfries Museum in Hoorn, outside Amsterdam, pieces from a group of twenty-four works that went missing in a burglary in 2005 are going up for sale, and the museum alleges that the ultra-nationalist militia in Ukraine alongside the far-right Svoboda (Freedom) partyare behind the offer. The Guardians Jon Henley reports that the works were central to the museums collection of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century art, according to the museums director, Ad Geerdink.

Dutch officials were approached by two members of the organization of Ukrainian Nationalists in Kievs Dutch embassy, who brought a photograph of a missing painting next to a copy of a recent Ukrainian newspaper as proof of their goods, and demanded around fifty-five million dollars in exchange for their return.

The group is one of over fifty militia organizations fighting against Russias invasion of the country. Museum officials suspect that pieces have already been sold: First they offered us twenty-four works, said Geerdink. Then it was a few less. And now they only want to sell us twelve.

The paintings actual value is estimated at around $570,000, according to the museum. We have offered the militiamen a small sum to cover their expenses, but have yet to hear back.

December 8, 2015

Artist Joan Jonas, choreographer Ohad Naharin, and architect David Chipperfield have been announced as new mentors in the 201617 Rolex Mentor and Protg Arts Initiative, according to the New York Times Roslyn Sulcas. Writer Mia Couto, filmmaker Alfonso Cuarn, theater director Robert Lepage, and composer Philip Glass have been chosen as well. Founded by Rolex in 2002, the initiative has mentors spend at least thirty days in 2016 working with their protgs, who each receive twenty-five thousand dollars at the programs outset, plus a possible additional twenty-five thousand dollars at the end of the mentorship, to produce new work. Previous mentor alumni include William Kentridge, David Hockney, Anish Kapoor, and Olafur Eliasson.

December 8, 2015

Barcelona has plans to convert Pablo Picassos former art school into a museum dedicated to director Woody Allen, but local trade unions are protesting the plans, according to The Guardians Stephen Burgen. The Escola dArts i Oficis de Barcelona, in the Gothic quarter of the city, appears in Picassos Les Demoiselles dAvignon, 1907.

A friend of Allen, Jaume Roures, who leads Spanish TV and film company Mediapro, suggested the idea, but the Comisiones Obreras trade union movement has launched a campaign to preserve the building as an educational establishment. According to Burgen, the museum dedicated to Allen would be geared towards tourists and not citizens, union leaders said.

Vicky, Cristina Barcelona, 2008, was filmed by Allen in Barcelona, costing the city council about one million dollars. Though the quantity raised eyebrows among locals, officials claimed it was worth the publicity generated by the film.

Source: http://artforum.com/news/id%3D56564

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