Nelson Sullivan
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Nelson Sullivan was a video artist in New York City during the 1980’s. He was ubiquitous on the downtown scene during that decade. His underground footage includes drag queens RuPaul, The Lady Bunny and Lahoma Van Zant. He also followed the artists Warhol, Haring and Crudo.
Nelson Sullivan was born in Kershaw, South Carolina in 1948. His family were upper-middle class, and from an early age he was given music lessons, with an eye toward a career as a classical pianist. After graduating from college in Georgia in 1970, he moved to New York, part of the post-Stonewall wave of young gay men who were then heading to either San Francisco or Manhattan to partake of the more emancipated lifestyle they had been reading about in newspapers and magazines. He landed a studio apartment in the West Village and soon made a decision to pursue a career as a composer. By days Nelson worked at Patelson's, the famous classical music store behind Carnegie Hall. He moved regularly from apartment to apartment over the next ten years, never getting one quite large enough to comfortably fit his piano into. In 1980 he saw a building on the corner of Gansevoort and 9th Avenue in the Meat Packing District with a For Rent sign on the door. The price was right, and the dilapidated old duplex was soon the center of a unique, revolving universe of friends and scene-makers. It also became a hotel, way-station, and half-way house for people either visiting or moving to the city from elsewhere. Artists, musicians, and performers dropped by at all hours to hang out, and it was this feeling of an ongoing 24-hour salon that first gave Nelson the idea to begin videotaping his life.
Like many people in the early 1980s, Nelson recognized an unlimited potential in the advent of the cheap, new, handheld video cameras then coming on the market. Using first a cumbersome VHS-loading camera and later upgrading to a 8mm video camera, he shot over 1900 hours of tape over a period of 7 years, capturing himself and his friends in the glossy facade of Manhattan's Downtown life that has been perpetuated in urban legend. He sought to tape all of New York’s citizens including the outcasts, the wannabes, the has-beens, and the never-will-be’s. Whether his subjects were on the way up, or trapped in a downward spiral, Nelson strived to candidly capture life under the shadow of the Statue of Liberty. Downtown was his world, had been for many years, and so he taped anything and everything that interested him there--outrageous performances in bars and clubs, swinging house parties, chaotic gallery openings, park and street festivals, late-night ruminations of his friends, absurd conversations with taxi drivers, prosaic sunset walks with his dog on the then-still-existing west side piers, and a variety of curious behaviour on the part of people met on the streets of New York City.
As well as being a frequenter of the galleries, clubs, and bars of the Lower East Side and Greenwich Village, Nelson was on the periphery of the Warhol crowd's later incarnations, headquartered a bit further north at 17th and Broadway, and at Max's Kansas City on Park Avenue South. He counted among his friends a variety of that scene's characters, such as Andy's young friend Benjamin Liu, the singer Joey Arias, fashion designer Alexis Del Lago, and the actress Sylvia Miles. All of these, with perhaps the exception of Sylvia Miles, were to one degree or another drag queens. In fact Nelson's fascination with his friends' crossdressing was to become a leitmotif of his work. In the '80s New York was the center of a revolution in drag-as-performance that climaxed years later with the rise of RuPaul to mainstream status, but continues even today. RuPaul was a friend of Nelson's. They knew each other from Atlanta, and for years he would stay at the duplex on 9th Avenue whenever he came to New York, before finally moving there in 1986. Other friends who traveled up from the south were also part of the new drag underground, including Lurleen Wallace, Lahoma van Zandt, and The Lady Bunny. With their bizarrely disingenuous Southern wit and blinding '70s retro outfits, they struck a chord in a downtown that had run its black and grey post-punk attitude into the ground. They made the Pyramid their clubhouse, putting on parties and shows that packed the place. Warhol himself ventured down occasionally, and future stars like John Sex, Lypsinka, and Deee-Lite joined in the fun onstage as well.
A prolific, yet relatively unknown videographer, Nelson Sullivan was a visionary. His revolutionary style is a combination of cinematic and in-camera editing techniques. Carrying the camera at arm's length, he was able to gracefully move about his subjects, embracing them on tape. His technique is so fluid that viewers often see Nelson walk across the screen and wonder who's pointing the camera. Nelson's relationship with his audience is so synergetic at times as to simulate personal memory as opposed to dispense information.
Sullivan knew he lived in interesting times, and he worked hard to capture more than a video freak-show. Nelson chronicled the rise and fall of many of his friends and peers including Ethyl Eichelberger, John Sex, Keith Haring,Tom Rubnitz, Michael Alig and countless other denizens of a demimonde being ravaged by AIDS, heroin, and anomie. Nelson himself died tragically from a heart attack on July 4, 1989 - only three days after quitting his full time job to so that he could produce his own cable television show of his footage.
His video archives are currently stored in Atlanta, Georgia with his childhood friend, Dick Richards. Sullivan's videos have gained worldwide recognition since his death and has been shown at museums and galleries around the world including New Museum, New York City; the Paris Tout Court (International Festival of Short Films); The Cantonal Museum of the Fine Arts, Lausanne, Switzerland.
