Jane Dickson’s Peep Shows
Provocative and Tawdry at Howl! Happening Gallery
Jane Friedman opened Howl! Happening Gallery in the East Village of Manhattan in 2015. The name itself is a significant nod to the poet Allen Ginsberg’s masterpiece poem. Jane Friedman said of Ginsberg, “I always felt that Allan’s words directed us to a different path.” The commitment of the gallery is to be on that different path resurrecting the creativity, electricity and imagination that belonged to the East Village during the Punk era. Howl! Happening Gallery, located at 6 East First Street, is not far from the former creative center of the punk movement – CBGB. Jane Friedman is once again capturing the magic and letting creativity flourish as she did managing The Patti Smith Group, Television, John Cale and turning the club Hurrah! into such a cool music haven. When we talked to Jane Friedman, she had this to say about the curation of the Howl! Happening Gallery, “It just happens, I get excited, I let it flow. Howl! celebrates art, music, happenings and iconic clubs from that era but with a fresh vision.” The New York Times called Jane Friedman an art patron, but we feel she is a unique provocateur with her finger feeling for the pulse. She makes all kinds of art happen. Jane said she is turned on by, “People with great ideas and creativity but also bad ideas by people with great passion.” She gives artistry its necessary breathing room and always has.
Currently, at the Howl! Happening Gallery is Jane Dickson’s moody exhibit of paintings called Hot, Hot, Hot: Times Square Peep Shows. Dickson reveals Times Square during a time of lawlessness, squalor and the world of tawdry peep shows. It was an exciting and dangerous place. Jane Dickson’s paintings are dark like the hallways of the peep show galleries and textured with found materials including, astroturf, sandpaper and brillo, to give the art quirky texture and depth. You have to imagine standing in front of a circular wall with individual curtained private booths, stepping into one and putting your quarter into a slot. The shade on your window drops, and for a few minutes, you are facing a peep show. The circular stage revolves slowly and you are watching a dimly lit woman performing erotically on a pole or with a hairbrush. You can barely see the other customers across from you, all absorbed in the show.
Carlo McCormick said, “It is quite likely the sun shone upon Times Square as it does everywhere else, but we never saw it, nor does there seem to be much trace of daylight in Dickson’s paintings from that time. What the place promised was utterly nocturnal, made of neon glares and shifty shadows, never quite natural, just as artificial as the flesh it offered.” The paintings are sensual in a rough way and somehow sympathetic to the beautiful women who turned on countless patrons. She captures these women in pre-cosmetic days and celebrates their bodies and lives.
Jane Dickson worked and lived at 43rd Street and 8th Avenue and raised two children at the height of the insanity, danger and magnificent decadence of seedy Times Square. Her impressions of the era and her experiences are reflected in the paintings. Check out the Howl! Happening Gallery and Jane Dickson’s tribute to the people who worked at Show World and other sex venues plus the men with raincoats who frequented them.
Coming at the end of February to the Howl! Happening Gallery are the sensual paintings of Helen Oliver.
