The materiality of McDiarmid’s art, its content, ideas and technique, are all influenced by the experience and the idea of ‘America’. Alphabet City (Figure 16.1), a work created in New York in 1983–84 and exhibited in David McDiarmid: New work at Roslyn Oxley Gallery, Sydney, in October 1984, refers not just to a geographical place—the zone around Avenues A, B, C and D east of First Avenue on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, close to where McDiarmid then lived—but to a condition of being in that space.
Acrylic on cotton bed sheet, 228 cm x 251 cm. Private Collection. Reproduced with permission of the McDiarmid Estate.
The making of this work coincided with the growth of the East Village and the Lower East Side generally as the radical edge of the New York art world, challenging Soho as the locale of the newest, most interesting and youthful art. The small shopfront galleries of the East Village showed work that, among other things, embraced the excitement and abjection of street life.
This painting forms part of a series of works by McDiarmid, known as the ‘bed-sheet paintings’ because they are executed on cotton sheets. The series adopts the style and iconography of subway graffiti of the 1970s and 1980s and the New York street memorials of the 1980s.[16] The work intersects with that of other artists working with graffiti-derived techniques at this time, such as Keith Haring and Jean Michel Basquiat.[17] McDiarmid’s work, however, is celebratory of the city in a way that the work of the American-born artists is not. McDiarmid’s Alphabet City is a celebration, by an insider who is also an outsider, of the diversity and cultural promiscuity of New York, encompassing as it does the idea of an excessive ‘everything’ from A to Z. The employment of the visual trope of a familiar yet fictitious New York skyline—with the then iconic twin towers of the World Trade Centre, Philip Johnson’s AT&T (now Sony) Building and the Empire State Building placed in a line—reveals a telescoped viewing position that is not in itself of New York. This work is a fictional postcard of a self-invented nomadic world located in downtown Manhattan and viewed from the vantage point of an insider–outsider member of a diasporic gay male community.
[16] Cooper, Martha and Sciorra, Joseph 1994, RIP New York Spray Can Memorials, Thames and Hudson, London.
[17] McDiarmid recounted later that he had known Haring socially and he acknowledged that their work intersected; he did not mention Basquiat. David McDiarmid, interviewed by Carmela Baranowska.