published May 5, 2023
‘A point often insisted upon in these recollections is that Hujar had little interest in the institutionally recognized vanguard art of his time, namely Minimalism and Conceptualism. Wojnarowicz spoke to the untimeliness of Hujar’s work when, with Conceptual and post-Pictures generation photography in mind, he wrote that it “blows a hole through the artworld sanctioned view of photography in the later part of the twentieth century.”4 There are, though, materials emerging from the archive that provide opportunity for a nuancing of the critical narrative. The art historian Marcelo Gabriel Yáñez and the publisher Primary Information have done valuable work toward this end by collating and publishing every issue of Newspaper, a textless journal published by Stephen Lawrence and edited with Peter Hujar and Andrew Ullrick (a currently unidentified figure; Yáñez speculates that the name could be a pseudonym for Hujar himself) during the late 1960s and early 70s when Hujar and Lawrence were lovers sharing an apartment at 188 Second Avenue in the East Village, an apartment that also served as the journal’s offices registered, resonantly, as Affinity, Reality, Communication Inc.
The journal looks like a conceptual object. Images from gay and straight porn, mainstream and countercultural news media, advertising (sometimes commissioned adverts, though they are placed within the journal without being obviously so), work by artists including—amongst many others—Paul Thek, Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Ray Johnson, Andy Warhol, Yayoi Kusama, Peter Beard and, in every issue, several images by Hujar himself, are arranged within the foundational structures for Minimalism and Conceptualism, the series, and the grid. Yáñez has written that Newspaper “championed a method of chaotic reading of images.” “The apparent chief concern for Hujar and Lawrence in arranging the pages of the magazine,” he writes, “was that images were brought together from disparate contexts, mixed up, and placed together in a way that forced meaning and correspondence beyond their apparent lack of connection and/or hierarchical distinctions.” ‘
‘…Lawrence and Hujar produce a comic queer configuration of conceptual art that speaks specifically to a gay art-world-adjacent coterie in downtown New York, to the high into low/low into high strategies of “camp.” The journal’s first titled issue has at its center a piece by the British artist Gerald Laing that presents a game in which the viewer is asked to match the portraits on the right-hand page with the penises printed in ink on the left. The portraits are all characters from the queer art scene of the time, and the piece invokes a kind of salon joke that separates those inside from those outside. Indeed, the journal muddies every category it engages: advertising is inseparable from non-commercial images, art from porn, war photographs from images of domestic life, and all in a format that can be found bogged in the gutter or raised onto the pure white walls of MoMA. ‘ – John Douglas Millar.