The Art of Bill Beckley

Rose color glasses tint any recent overview of the grimy 1970s “Downtown” Manhattan art world. Bill Beckley (billbeckley.com) was one of the few (perhaps only) Romantics that emerged from a socially enmeshed but competitive milieu that flourished below Houston Street. Beckley's circle included the various media-nomadic artists showing at 112 Greene Street, whose art was acknowledged by an international network of frugally operated contexts through exposure in publications like Avalanche (NY), Flash Art (Milan), and Interfunktionen (Cologne). Beckley's early work involved performances and installations that, like those of his older peer Dennis Oppenheim and close friend Gordon Matta-Clark, were dependent upon the photograph to document and commodify the event or temporal physical intervention. In post-minimal lingo, photographs were sometime referred to as “bi-products” and were generally black and white, accompanied by typewritten texts or urgent handwritten descriptions situated below the images. Beckley and others (this period in art is an era of “lists”) opted to employ these display strategies as a means of introducing content other than reportage, that is the story or tale. “Narrative Art” identified itself as a warmer offshoot of conceptual, land, or body art. Beckley's self-authored stories were physically compact but referentially broad, incorporating images of animals, rainbows, and nature juxtaposed with neutrally intoned erotic musings and noirish observations. Learning on the job, Beckley out-distanced the pack by adopting the most advanced imaging technologies available, specifically the print material Cibachrome, which had a glossy surface that could replicate the depth of painting, a medium bereft of big ideas in at least the first half of that transitional decade. When encountering Beckley's ambitiously scaled multi-paneled units (derived from Jasper Johns), the blasé gallery goer re-engaged as reader, narrator, and implicated witness.

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