Off the Grid | By: Vincent Inconiglios

In 1960, when I was a sophomore in Uniondale High School on Long Island, I was invited to New York City’s El Faro, the famous Spanish restaurant on Horatio and Greenwich Streets. Who knew that 10 years later I would find myself in a studio loft on Gansevoort Street, where Robert Downey, Sr., had just finished editing Pound and I’d begin a 50+-year journey?

After graduating from Miami University in Ohio, I taught art and, in 1968, spent a year as Artist in Residence at the Dayton Art Institute in Ohio. As important as the Ohio experience was, as well as my subsequent travels around the country, I wanted to relocate to the center of New York City’s dynamic art world and ended up just blocks from El Faro in what is now known as the Meatpacking District.

That weirdly vibrant area immediately affected my interpretation and experience of the city’s “grid” that suddenly angles north in the Meatpacking District. It was perhaps no coincidence that a soft grid had been a dominant feature in much of my work up to that point, but the Meatpacking District would provide many new angles: much more than a grid, it was a multi-layered collage. And there I landed, living and working in the middle of a real-life collage. 

In the early 1970s, Meatpacking was a 24-hour visual, sensual experience. It looked different. It smelled different. It constantly projected an opportunity for discovery. Every hour of the day was layered with the vocabulary of art in real life. There were artists, filmmakers, and photography studios throughout the District. And a little to the south, the Westbeth Artist Housing was just opening up, but there were only a handful of us artists who actually lived in the Meatpacking District.

From the start, I saw the streets of Meatpacking as off the grid. Spanning the transition point from downtown to uptown, it defied the structure that the Manhattan street network is known for. “Out My Window” became a series of large paintings that related to the grid of the windows through which I observed the street-level action.

But what I saw through my windows onto the Meatpacking District, and what I met on the street at different times of the day and night, were people and activities from the licit to the illicit—from meat to meatpacking, so to speak—that I’d translate into collage compositions with both abstract and figurative elements. The foreshadowing of the Gansevoort Girl series was a collage I created in 1976 that I thought of as “girls on the street,” which I titled “Lauren Bruce”. The collage included Lauren Hutton‘s head above Bruce Jenner’s chest, that year being the year he won the Olympics men’s decathlon, and Hutton was a top model, long before anyone could have predicted what the future held for Jenner. And it was simply a reflection of my encounters at street level.

In the early 1970s, I participated in “10 Downtown”, a selective artist studio tour, which brought many to my studio. Most of them had never visited Meatpacking, and many were afraid of the area—with its butchers and truckers, sides of beef and carcasses, and secret sex clubs. But through the decades, the strange collage was layered in Al Pacino filming Serpico, Fatal Attraction, and even Sex and the City. The many layers influenced my work in different ways. The strange juxtapositions on the street actually helped me focus and be more present in the quiet of the studio. I’d work on large abstract paintings with a sense of non-typical grids. I would also do collage masks and faces inspired by the streets and found objects. I referred to these as “my friends” who would hang out on my studio walls.

In time, the Meatpacking District transformed from butchers and truckers to sex clubs, to trolling businessmen in cars looking to hook up, to the fashionable shopping, dining, and tourist destination it is today. Simultaneously, the physical changes in and around Meatpacking elevated the “grid” from street level action— the High Line, the Whitney, Hudson River Park, Little Island, and more high rises—made me re-see the grid and the layers collaged in time. As a result, I found my work elevated from the simple horizontal to the vertical. And all of it influenced by memories of what was and what had raised my soft “grid” higher, prompting me to create a series of abstract aerial landscapes, and further articulate collages and layer materials. All became more complex as did the perspectives, like the cubist sensibilities at work with heightened visual angles.

This showed most prominently in my work in the Gansevoort Girl series. Today, I see the Meatpacking District as a palimpsest. And while the influx of repurposed structures, catering to tourists, shoppers, and gazers has almost virtually obscured the place that was, I find myself trolling the streets looking for signs of what was, photographing often minute details, colors, materials that were, the uncovered bit, discarded layers, along with what exists now all play principle roles in my current work.

The first book I purchased when I moved to the Meatpacking District in 1969 was The Meat Evaluation Handbook. So much in the place reminded me of the Soutine painting—sides of beef hanging down matter-of-factly all around. There still exist several relics that I’ve uncovered, photographed, collaged, and incorporated into paint, and they continue to be a force for creativity in my studio. Recently, an NPR interviewer asked me what has changed in the meat market over the many years I've been here. My answer: No Meat.