Speaking of go-go dancing platforms and light strings, I cannot get out of my head the confluence of Jack Pierson showing Silver Jackie at Pat Hearn less than a month after Felix Gonzalez-Torres showed “Untitled” (Go-Go Dancing Platform) at Andrea Rosen.
Pierson’s show was called Diamond Life, and it was the 30-yo artist’s nostalgic lament for the squalid glory of his lost youth. In the main gallery of Hearn’s third-floor Wooster St walkup, Pierson staged a recreation of his apartment from his early 20s Miami beach bum era. And in the back was this tiny, abject, artificially aged stage—Pierson’s always called it a stage, I think—which called out his punk and performance art days in Boston.
The Aspen Art Museum re-staged Pierson’s first five shows in 2016. David Rimanelli wrote most generously about Silver Jackie in 2021, when it was on the cover of Artforum. Rather than influence or interaction, or two nearly simultaneous critiques of Michael Fried’s Minimalist theatricality (derogatory), the more I look at these two ostensibly similar works, the more I think they were two artists who happened to be dancing at the same time, but to their own tunes.