For Wild Style director and New York visual artist Charlie Ahearn Charlie Ahearn, documenting hip-hop culture’s early days has been the project of a lifetime. BY ANDY THOMAS
I n 1978,eighteen-year-old graffiti writer and budding neighborhood folk hero Lee Quiñones painted his now-iconic Howard the Duck mural on a handball court wall outside Junior High School 56 on NewYork’s Lower East Side. That same year, while shooting kung fu movie The Deadly Art of Survival in the area, Charlie Ahearn pointed his Super 8 camera at the mural for what would become that film’s opening tracking shot.Two years after spotting the Howard the Duck mural—and a fleeting run-in with the elusive Quiñones that further piqued his curiosity—Ahearn would cast the young artist as the semi-autobiographical lead, Zoro, in hip-hop’s first and most influential film: Wild Style. Ahearn himself had arrived in New York City from upstate Binghamton in 1973 to attend the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program, falling in with a new breed of guerrilla filmmakers then beginning to populate the city’s downtown arts scene. Creating DIY films on cheap 16mm Bolex and Super 8 cameras and screening them inside nightclubs, neighborhood community centers, and other non-traditional venues, Ahearn and no-wave cinema peers like Amos Poe and Vivienne Dick used the gritty streets of New York as their canvas, and the people who inhabited them as their stars. The seeds of Wild Style itself were planted in June 1980, when Ahearn and his cohorts in Collaborative Projects (a.k.a. Colab)—the arts activist collective that also included his twin brother, John Ahearn, and wife, Jane Dickson—transformed an abandoned massage parlor at West 41st Street and Seventh Avenue into the wildly influential The Times Square Show . Hailed by the Village Voice as the “first radical art show of the ’80s,” Times Square proved to be a watershed moment for graffiti art, with Lee Quiñones and Fred “Fab 5 Freddy” Braithwaite—who had first worked together as members of the Fabulous 5ive writers crew— featured alongside the likes of Kenny Scharf, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Keith Haring. Of the many connections made during the show’s thirty-day run, among the most notable was the one between Ahearn
and Braithwaite, who had been asking about the filmmaker after catching a screening of The Deadly Art of Survival. It was then that Braithwaite—deeply immersed in early hip- hop culture, with his finger on the pulse of both the downtown and South Bronx scenes—floated to Ahearn the idea of making a film that would capture the full breadth of this nascent phenomenon. The first feature film to document the four elements of hip- hop—graffiti, breakdancing, MCing, and DJing— Wild Style was shot predominantly in the Bronx, with appearances by Busy Bee, the Cold Crush Brothers, the Rock Steady Crew, and Grandmaster Flash, among other pioneers. Mixing narrative drama and documentary performance footage of these burgeoning icons, it was a portal into this nascent culture seen and embraced by young people across the world. For both its creator, Ahearn, and protagonist, Quiñones, Wild Style became a foundational work, one which they have continued to revisit through new projects over the years. The two reunited once more this past fall in London, where each was the subject of separate solo shows at theWoodbury House gallery in Mayfair, with Ahearn presenting collages and paintings based primarily on photos he took while making Wild Style in the early ’80s. The twin exhibitions coincided with the release of a new 4K restoration of the film’s original 16mm print. Brilliantly packaged on Blu-ray and 4K UHD by Arrow Films, the edition includes brand- new commentary and interviews along with previously unseen footage, bringing fresh insights to one of the twentieth century’s most influential cultural documents. Following the opening of the Wild Style exhibition, where Ahearn was joined by Quiñones and a cast of creators whose lives were changed by the film, Wax Poetics visited the director at Woodbury House for a conversation about his artistic practice. As he toured the exhibition and regaled us with the stories behind the images on display around him, he exuded the same zealous enthusiasm that drove him to make Wild Style five decades earlier.
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( opening spread ) Charlie Ahearn at the Wild Style production office in 1983. Photo by Jane Dickson. “I remember us setting up this shot as a spoof in the tradition of the director surrounded by his business desk answering his phone, a pen in hand writing—but no paper visible.” ( opposite top ) Advertisements for The Deadly Art of Survival , courtesy of Arrow Films. ( opposite bottom ) Lee Quiñones’s Howard the Duck mural in 1978. Photo by Charlie Ahearn, courtesy of Arrow Films.
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