Ryan McGinley Tries to Photograph What It Means to Be Alive
I remember seeing Ryan McGinley’s breakout exhibition, “The Kids Are Alright,” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, in 2003. He was just twenty-five—one of the youngest artists ever to be granted a solo show at the Whitney. The pictures were frenetic snapshots of his raucous life: drug-fuelled nights that smeared into mornings; lithe nude bodies; puke and cum; the non-stop thrum of adventure. There was a pinch of Nan Goldin and a dash of Larry Clark in the images, but unlike the work of those forebears, which was freighted with the heavy weight of fast living’s consequences, McGinley’s pictures eclipsed any shades of darkness with a blazing exuberance. In his version of the city, the dust from Ground Zero had been shaken off, and everybody who was anybody was downtown being hot and bad. I was in college at the time, and certain that I would never be that cool.
A few years later, McGinley’s work took an Edenic turn. He and his friends would pile into vans and light out for the territory in the grand tradition of American road-tripping. McGinley photographed models cavorting naked (always naked) through sand dunes in the Mojave Desert and pine forests in Vermont, in a frigid ice cave in upstate New York and perched above a rushing waterfall in Tennessee. Fireworks—plumes of smoke and pinwheeling streaks of sparks—were often deployed to amp up the atmospherics, lending his scenes the feel of a barn-burning bacchanal. In McGinley’s world, it seemed, the good times were always rolling, like some impossible perpetual-motion machine lubricated with youth, beauty, and sex, only now the device had been set to “escapism mode.”
McGinley’s newest body of work, “Night Shift,” which is currently on view at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in Soho, marks a kind of homecoming, in more ways than one. The exhibition is his first in New York in eight years, and the first project in decades to find him prowling the city in the wee hours, as he did in his not-so-misspent youth. (The title cheekily refers to the fact that all of the pictures were taken between nine at night and five in the morning, the party animal’s nine-to-five.) Shot with jittery long exposures, aided by strobes and a small crew of assistants, McGinley’s photos show subjects roaming through the sleeping city, hanging from the underside of a bridge or the back of a garbage truck, frolicking in the spray from an open fire hydrant, or wandering down a tangle of train tracks in a Long Island City rail yard. McGinley told me recently, during a conversation at Jeffrey Deitch, that a good portion of his attention in recent years has been taken up by L.G.B.T.Q. activism—mostly attending marches and immortalizing them on film. He sees the new series, which features mostly queer models, as an extension of that work, bringing, as he put it, “a sense of joyfulness and almost, like, taking ownership of the city, taking up space.” He added, “We’re creating something that’s beautiful, which feels political to me.”
McGinley grew up in a middle-class Irish Catholic family in northern New Jersey, as the youngest of eight children. During his childhood, he spent “every day in the woods, in the dirt,” with his brothers and sisters, and those memories of goofing off in nature provided a blueprint of sorts for his later work. “If you are on my photo shoots, I’m really re-creating my childhood,” he told me. But the joy in his images was hard-won, born out of family tragedy. McGinley’s older brother, Michael, was an artist and an out gay man who lived in New York, and the first person to turn McGinley on to artists such as Keith Haring and Andy Warhol. But when McGinley was a teen-ager, Michael became sick with AIDS and moved home to New Jersey. McGinley and his mother cared for Michael during what McGinley recalls as a “really, really slow, painful death” that included several attempts to end his life. He died in 1995, at the age of thirty-four. McGinley told me, “I think about it every day—when I wake up, during the middle of the day, at the end of the day. I think of my brother all the time.” As a result, he said, “I want to photograph what it’s like to be alive, and to be in the moment, and to not take life for granted.”
Most of the works in “Night Shift” strike a celebratory tone similar to that of his road-trip project, and they can sometimes push to the brink of cheesiness, or perhaps naïveté, given the distinctly uncarefree times in which we’re living. A pair of models jaunting across the Williamsburg Bridge with their arms slung across each other’s shoulders has the giddy fizz of an advertisement. A shot of two streakers at the base of the Unisphere at the former World’s Fair grounds, in Queens, one caught mid-twirl holding a clear plastic umbrella, reads like a risqué remake of “Singin’ in the Rain.” (Shockingly, McGinley told me that he encountered the police only once, while shooting a car wash near the West Side Highway. They got on their loudspeaker and yelled, “You call this art?”) But the strongest pictures in the series allow sombre notes to sneak in. In one scene, a pair of revellers dance naked just outside the fence of the Calvary Cemetery, thumbing their noses at the reaper while the Manhattan skyline towers in the distance. In another, three figures are arranged in a stunning tableau in the bowl of Central Park’s Bethesda Fountain, which serves as the setting for the final scene in Tony Kushner’s seminal AIDS-era play, “Angels in America.” I asked McGinley if this nod was intentional, and he told me that it was. But there was more to it than that. “I think about my brother as an angel a lot,” he said. “He’s protecting me.”
McGinley started this new project a little more than a year ago, as the cherry trees bloomed. The very first picture he took shows a glowing, ghostly man skipping down a sidewalk beneath a spray of blossoms. The morning of “Night Shift” ’s opening, McGinley was looking for an old picture of his brother, to set as his iPhone background, and discovered one of Michael sitting under a cherry tree, covered in pink flowers. “Sort of like a good omen,” he said.
