Home / Arts & Life / Alan Vega Ignored the Art World. It Won’t Return the Favor.

Alan Vega Ignored the Art World. It Won’t Return the Favor.

During this period he made two critical connections — Mr. Rev, then a jazz musician, and Ivan Karp, whose OK Harris art gallery was one of the first in SoHo. Vega (then still known as Alan Bermowitz, his given name growing up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn) had taken to arranging junk electrical parts to form assemblages that sprawled across the floor. Mr. Karp, who was exhibiting now-celebrated artists like Duane Hanson, Malcolm Morley and Richard Pettibone, offered him a show — the first of several. He also offered Suicide a stage.

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Alan Vega’s “Stars” (2016)

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Estate of Alan Vega and INVISIBLE-EXPORTS

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“Prophesy” (2016) by Mr. Vega.

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Estate of Alan Vega and INVISIBLE-EXPORTS

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“Dukes God Bar” (2016) by Alan Vega.

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Estate of Alan Vega and Invisible-Exports

For Vega, it was a critical moment. A year earlier, he had caught Iggy and the Stooges at their first show in New York. Iggy was a ferocious performer, cutting his bare chest, leaping headfirst into the audience. Vega was in awe. “It changed his perspective totally,” Mr. Rev recalled in a phone interview. “He said to himself he could no longer be an artist unless he performed. That was the transition.”

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Liz Lamere and Dante Vega Lamere, her son with Vega, at their home. Behind them are works from Alan Vega.

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Will Glaser/The New York Times

Suicide’s first album came out in 1977, the year New York hit rock bottom. The city had only narrowly averted bankruptcy. A power blackout sparked a looting spree. The serial killer known as Son of Sam was terrorizing the city. In the East Village, tenements that hadn’t been torched became squats. “There was kind of a ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ vibe to New York,” recalled Mr. Lindsay. “You’d walk by a building and wonder what was going on in there — what kind of devil worship or orgy.”

Suicide fit right in. The highlight of their self-titled debut was “Frankie Teardrop,” a harrowing number about a young factory worker who, unable to feed his family or pay the rent, turns a gun on his infant son, his wife and himself. Bruce Springsteen told Rolling Stone it was “one of the most amazing songs I ever heard.” A video version by the artists Walter Robinson and Paul Dougherty and the critic Edit deAk is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art.

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A jacket that belonged to Alan Vega.

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Will Glaser/The New York Times

Vega was invited to edit an issue of Art-Rite, the punked-out art ’zine Mr. Robinson and Ms. deAk were publishing. But he wouldn’t show again in Manhattan until 1983, when Ms. Gladstone, who was exhibiting Robert Mapplethorpe and Anish Kapoor, put him in a group show. When she gave him a solo show the following year, Mr. Schnabel bought one of his light sculptures.

“I thought it was a cool thing to have,” Mr. Schnabel said recently in a phone interview. It put him in mind of a phrase that’s been applied to the avant-garde films of Jack Smith, but could just as well describe the work of the Fluxus artists of the ’60s or the Swiss sculptor Jean Tinguely: “The sheer beauty of junk.”

Ms. Gladstone wanted Vega to keep making art, but he objected to having to “crank out these pieces,” Ms. Lamere recalled. Yet he kept making them, regardless, cannibalizing one assemblage to complete another. The disregard for his own work was typical: After his final show at OK Harris, he tore down his sculptures and dumped their parts on the street. “He would never cherish an object,” declared Mathieu Copeland, the curator who organized Vega’s only full-scale retrospective, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Lyon. “For him, it was all about the energy.”

Nearly 20 years would pass before his next gallery show, at Deitch Projects in 2002. It came because a group of much younger artists caught Vega in a 2000 New Year’s Eve performance and came back raving about how cool he was. In 1975, as a young gallery assistant, Mr. Deitch had seen his work at OK Harris and come away equally stunned. He considered it “one of the greatest art exhibitions I saw in New York in the ’70s” — on a par with Vito Acconci, the transgressive pioneer of performance art, who likewise stepped away from art.

In Vega’s case, the line between art and not-art was always blurry. “The aesthetic of his sculpture, the aesthetic of his music — one fit right into the other,” Mr. Deitch said. “It was the same aesthetic” — the beauty of junk. You can see it in Jean-Michel Basquiat, in paintings that present “a collage of all these found elements in an energetic assemblage that has its own inner logic,” as Mr. Deitch put it. You can sense it in Tony Oursler, whose installations feature found objects and disturbing video projections. “He was very anti-form,” Mr. Deitch said of Vega, “but he was also conceptually rigorous. That’s one reason why he inspires so many artists and musicians today.”

Mr. Oursler and his friend Mike Kelley played the first Suicide album nonstop in 1977-78, when they were students at the California Institute of the Arts and had a band called the Poetics. “We’d never heard anything like it,” Mr. Oursler said. “He was slipping between art and music in a wonderful way.” Mr. Oursler had heard that the light sculptures in the OK Harris shows smelled like “smoldering junk” when they were plugged in. “I had this image in my mind for years. It inspired me without ever having to see it.”

In recent years, even as he was recording his final album with Ms. Lamere, Vega returned increasingly to sculpture. After the Lyon show, in 2009, there were solo exhibitions in Paris and at Invisible-Exports; group shows in Moscow, Milan, Copenhagen and Geneva; and a Semiotext(e) conference at MoMA PS1 in New York. There was also a stroke, in 2012, and congestive heart failure, which was discovered at the same time, and after that a series of mini-strokes. On May 20 last year, he fell in his kitchen and broke his hip. He got a partial replacement, but there were complications. He spent weeks in the hospital, then went to a rehab center in Brooklyn. “But his heart was starting to do weird things,” Ms. Lamere said. And then “he just passed in his sleep.”

Several months before his death, Vega unexpectedly took up painting again, for the first time in decades. He was up all night, doing the series of portraits that will be shown at Invisible-Exports. “They didn’t have any faces,” Ms. Lamere remarked. “I said — and he didn’t correct me — that they were like spirits.” Human shapes, but with a void. Though they never talked about it, the two had a tacit understanding: “We kind of knew he was preparing to go into the other world.”

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