Feeling a little like a 1970s sports reporter trying to interview Otis Houston Jr. Getting him to give a direct answer to a question is probably just as easy as getting Muhammad Ali to give sober information about his training or his next opponent.
Instead of conscientiously conveying information, Houston expires the at the Frieze Art Fair this spring as one of the great new discoveries the New York art scene was, inevitably, into the performative. The question becomes the keyword for a poem, meditation, rap or song.
For example, if you want to know what Harlem was like in 1969, when Otis Houston Jr. came to the Mecca of Black America from the south as a teenager, you learn about his encounter with the teachings of the Nation of Islam, whose preachers then populated New York’s 125th Street . The thought leads to Houston’s path into vegetarianism and back to the deep south, where his mother fed the family from a vegetable garden because meat could not be bought.
It is similar when asked about one of his more recent works that is now hanging on the wall of a hip gallery in Union Square. It is a towel on which he has sprayed “The world catches up with me” in blue paint – “The world is catching up with me”. The answer is a melodic proto-rap that is reminiscent of Ali in several ways. He tells of an impoverished boxer in the streets of Harlem who never ceases to believe in his chance, in the great fight that makes him rich and famous.
Otis Houston Jr. is the right artist at the right moment, says his gallery owner
It is of course Houston’s own story that he sings through the gallery, illustrated by another work. On another towel it says, sprayed in black, red and green paint: “I will prepare and some day my chance will come.” This day, this chance is here, the art world has taken notice of it. Otis Houston Jr. is the right artist at the right moment, his gallery owner Sam Gordon is sure of that. “It was a gift when a mutual friend told me about Otis two years ago,” says Gordon.
At that time, like many years before, Otis Houston Jr. stood day after day at a particularly busy intersection of Franklin D. Roosevelt East River Drive, the New York city freeway along the East River through which a sheet metal avalanche in the business district of Manhattan and back out into the suburbs in the evening.
What Houston was doing there can be called situationism or performance art, although he certainly didn’t know what to do with these terms. He hung up his sprayed towels, put together ready-made installations from bulky waste. He often sat there in his folding chair with a watermelon on his head, a parody of the racist cliché of the “Watermelon Man” that exists in many black quarters of the USA and that Herbie Hancock sang in the song of the same name.
The commuters knew Otis, they honored him, they waved, they photographed him for Instagram. Long before the art world discovered him, he was an underground star, a street artist like Keith Haring or Jean-Michel Basquiat. One could almost think that Houston would have chosen to be only a few hundred meters from Keith Haring’s “Crack is Wack” mural, which adorns a playground there – but it is nothing more than a charming coincidence.
The corner at FDR has found it, not the other way around – and so it is with art itself
Like its famous predecessors, perhaps even a little more, Houston has the quality of authenticity that is so rare and precious on the art market. A strategic positioning, a conscious reference to contemporaries and pioneers would be alien to Houston. It’s not like that. The corner on FDR Drive, he likes to say, has found it, not the other way around, and it is the same with art itself.
Strictly speaking, art found him while he was in jail for a drug offense, even though Houston says he “was always doing things”. But during his second stay in the notorious Sing Sing, a few dozen kilometers up the Hudson River, he received a formal art education along with a formal equivalent for university admission.
That was around 20 years ago, and when Houston talks about it, it sounds like a classic conversion story based on the example of Malcolm X, whom Houston likes to quote anyway. In prison he realized that he had to get a grip on his life, give up drugs and alcohol, take responsibility for his children. And art was the vehicle for that. Since then, Houston, who like many young black men from the south came to Harlem to make his fortune on the street, has worked as a janitor. And stood in his corner whenever he could.
What Houston is still doing is a little bit, also a revival of that Harlem in the late 1960s. Harlem was far from being gentrified, black culture flourished freely, and that included street culture in particular. Every corner of 125th Street was good for a spontaneous political speech, sermon, dance, and the stereotype of the music that kept blowing through the streets of Harlem was valid. The African-American cultural scientist Henry Louis Gates Jr. once called this tendency towards performance in black culture, including in daily interaction, “signifying”. Art and life merged in Harlem.
In the art world, this is exactly the right moment for all of this. The pandemic has de-globalized the company, at least temporarily. At Frieze and in the New York gallery scene, this year the focus is on the local, on the obvious. Above all, however, one is downright eager for everything that has been marginalized up to now. The most important spring exhibitions in New York museums were the Okwui Enwezor’s Show on “Grief and Grievance” (Anger and sadness) in black art in the New Museum and the Retrospective by Alice Neel with her portraits of the common people of New York in the Metropolitan Museum.
Of course, in spite of all the freshness and authenticity, Otis Houston Jr. is not naive, but knows exactly what it can mean to be absorbed by the art world. In one of his more recent works he sprayed the words on a hung door: “We are the canvas. Abstract. Original. Breathtaking … You see us, Admire us and when you reach out to us, we are gone.”
Not least because of this, Houston will probably never give up the corner at FDR. It is untouchable by the art business. His reward there is a brief interaction with a passer-by, a laugh, a word, a wave, a horn. He didn’t want more when he stood there 20 years ago. And that’s all he needs today.