Stephen Varble

Stephen Lloyd Varble (1946 – January 6, 1984) was an American notorious performance artist and playwright in lower Manhattan during the 1970s. His work challenged both mainstream conceptions of gender and exposed the materialism of the established, institutionalized art world.

Personal life

Varble was born in Owensboro, Kentucky in 1946[1] and was raised in a deeply religious household. 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 college, he became deeply involved in the local LGBT community.

In the early 1970s, 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).[2] 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.[3]

While he publicly identified as a man, some anecdotal evidence and personal writings imply that his conception of his own gender was less rigid. Because of this, some interpret Varble’s gender nonconforming art to be public exploration of fluid identity.[4]

He was unabashedly against many aspects of capitalism, particularly wealth inequality and the commodification of art. This disapproval fueled many of his most impactful works. In 1977, Varble retreated from the public eye and moved in with his lover Daniel Cahill. During the final seven years of his life, he dedicated himself to filming an unfinished epic titled Journey to the Sun. He died from HIV/AIDS-related complications on January 6, 1984, at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City.

Artistic career

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.[5] 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.[6]

In the early 1970s, Varble also worked briefly for Andy Warhol's Interview magazine[7] 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, 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).[8] 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.[9]

Stephen Varble’s first street performances were tame, compared to his most iconic works. Early outings feature him walking through Manhattan blindfolded, made vulnerable to the world around him. He also created a dress from slides of Hendrick’s family, metaphorically claiming his past.[10]

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 and class, not only within the art world but society at large. 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.[11] While his costumes often took the form of dresses, they would also combine male and female elements together. For example, one of the most iconic images of Varble features him wearing long strands of pearls draped down his hips and legs, contrasted by a pearlescent codpiece ironically fashioned to look like male genitalia. With these elements, Varble draws attention to things the viewer may expect him to hide, asserting his rejection of binary gender roles.[12]

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 entered the bank and demanded that he be reimbursed for the money that was stolen from him. Upon being rebuffed, he punctured the condoms with a fountain pen and used the cow’s blood to sign checks for $0,000,00.00, or ‘none million dollars’. According to some sources, his outburst was met with applause from visitors to the bank.10] Shortly thereafter, Varble wrote to the bank offering to become Chemical Bank’s PR representative and demanded an outrageous salary. This offer was quickly rejected.[13] The novelist Fernanda Eberstadt was Varble's protégé in these years, and recalled some of his performances in a memoir published in 2018.[14]

In 1975, he produced a series of performances called ‘Gutter Art’, which was performed in front of various high class boutiques. “Gutter Art” consisted of Varble stopping outside in a limousine, which was provided by his dedicated patron Morihiro Miyazaki, dressed in elaborate silk gowns. He would then retrieve dishes and silverware from its trunk, douse them in black ink, then sit in the gutter and wash them. This biting commentary on class inequality was highly controversial, and garnered him both positive and negative attention.[15]

Varble had two exhibitions during his lifetime. First, he staged one for himself in on the eve of his eviction from his 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.[16] This performance included, among other things, a giant pink satin skirt which allegedly covered most of the loft. Attendees joined Varble in tearing the skirt to shreds.[13] 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."[17] When informed that he would be required to include artwork that could be sold, Varble produced chaotic line drawings, complete with anti-capitalist text. Each drawing was priced absurdly high to ensure that no one would even consider purchasing them.[10]

Varble was also 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 stepped away from performance art around 1977, and instead began working on a video epic titled Journey to the Sun'.[18] The video remains unfinished, but hours of footage were filmed, mainly within his and Cahill’s apartment. Its music includes compositions by his long-time friend Robert Savage and music Varble composed himself on an early home synthesizer, the Alpha Syntauri.[19] The work is an homage to Greta Garbo, with whom Varble identified. The surviving tapes of Varble's Journey to the Sun project are archived and distributed by the Video Data Bank at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.[20] During his more reclusive period, he also produced several line drawings. Many of them included use of vitamins and enemas, perhaps showing that Varble was aware of his declining health.[13] From these drawings, Varble also produced a series of Xerox works to be distributed freely and cheaply.[13]

Exhibitions

Solo

Group

Bibliography

References
  1. 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. 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
  3. See Geoffrey Hendricks interviewed by David J. Getsy 20 April 2016 at https://vimeo.com/177397203
  4. Moss, Hilary. "A '70s Performance Artist Finds a New Audience." New York Times T Magazine, 26 September 2018.
  5. Birmingham, Stephen (October 25, 1970). "A collector's item about collections". The New York Times. Retrieved August 14, 2018.
  6. Douglas Crimp, Before Pictures (Brooklyn: Dancing Foxes Press, 2016), 57.
  7. For example, "I am James Purdy," interview by Stephen Varble, Interview (December 1972): 28-29.
  8. La MaMa Archives Digital Collections. "Production: Silent Prayer (1973)". Accessed August 14, 2018.
  9. 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
  10. Cotter, Holland, "Stephen Varble: The Street Was His Stage, the Dress Was His Weapon," New York Times (11 January 2019): C15, C20.
  11. 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.
  12. [Adrian-Diaz, Jenna. "The Rediscovered Legacy of Soho’s Most Outrageous Genderqueer Performance Artist". Vulture. September 26, 2018. https://www.vulture.com/2018/09/stephen-varble-sohos-most-outrageous-performance-artist.html.]
  13. Getsy, David J. "Stephen Varble's Xerographic Dreams", in Stephen Varble: An Antidote to Nature's Ruin on this Heavenly Globe, Prints and Video from the Early 1980s, exh. cat. (Lexington, Kentucky: Institute 193, 2018), 3-28.
  14. Fernanda Eberstadt, "I Bite My Friends," Granta 144 (August 2018) https://granta.com/i-bite-my-friends/
  15. [Werther, Janet. "Discovering Stephen Varble". The MIT Press. Volume 41, no. 3, September, 2019. 17-27.]
  16. Gregory Battcock, "Divitiae Virum Faciunt," SoHo Weekly News (May 1976): 18.
  17. 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.
  18. 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.
  19. Maxim, Tyler (29 October 2018). "Video by Stephen Varble". Screen Slate.
  20. "Stephen Varble: Videoworks | Video Data Bank". www.vdb.org. Retrieved 2020-12-03.
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