CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 7/8/2015

What Nerve!

"Disclosing Enclosure" (1968), by Art Green, is reproduced from What Nerve! Alternative Figures in American Art, 1960 to the Present, the companion publication to the exhibition on view at Matthew Marks through August 14. Green was a key member of the Chicago-based Hairy Who, who will appear on a panel and sign both What Nerve! and advance copies of the brand new book, The Collected Hairy Who Publications 1966-1969 tonight at the 523 West 24th Street gallery. "I never went to a museum as a child. My parents were not museum people," Green is quoted in What Nerve! "My father had a very low opinion of artists and would always snort when some artist was on radio or TV, as if it were beneath contempt. I had no idea of high art. In high school I took this quiz and didn’t know Renoir from Monet. My father was an engineer with a railroad. On Saturday he’d work on complicated drawings on big sheets of drafting paper. I liked the complexity. I wanted to be an inventor. I remember wanting to do impossible things.
I built a thing in my room that would control the whole universe. It had gyroscopes and magnets. I told a friend who liked the Lone Ranger that I could make silver bullets with my chemistry set. I spent an hour trying, and he finally turned and said, 'I don’t think you can make silver bullets after all.'"