Painting New York’s Underbelly

New York City in the 1970s wasn’t an easy place to live. Subway stations and dark alleys beckoned bad news; infrastructure had crumbled. It was a metropolis, bathed in neon and coated in grime, teetering on the edge of ruin. Survival of the fittest, dodgy characters leering from shadows and stoops, soundtracked by a whining chorus of police sirens and ambient chaos.

It was also exciting. In 1978, Jane Dickson, a young artist a couple of years out of college, answered a job listing in the back of the New York Times. A company was looking for someone to programme a billboard above Times Square. “Artist wanted, willing to learn computers,” it read. 

“Baudelaire said an artist must be of their time and, to do that, they should walk the streets,” Dickson said in an interview with The Guardian years later. “Often I was having palpitations. Any city at night is dangerous for a woman, but Times Square and the streets around it had this almost seductive glow. They were glitteringly attractive in a visual way. I tend to make paintings of the things that I am afraid of. That’s why they are so vivid.” 

Part of the coterie of underground artists that made the New York of that era a transgressive paradise, Dickson’s grainy paintings of strip clubs, sex shops, kitsch hotel signs and men lurking under streetlights offer a detached view of the seedier corner’s of a city in flux. The critic and curator Carlo McCormick called it, “Sodom on the Hudson.”

Dickson worked nights and weekends at the billboard, which gave her time to go to clubs after work and sleep in during the day. Her lunch break started at 9PM and she watched the New Year’s Eve countdown several times from a solitary window high above teeming streets of revellers. After a couple of years, she and her husband, the filmmaker Charlie Ahearn, moved into a Times Square loft, with a clear view of a pay-by-the-hour motel. More than once they had their window shot at by punters who didn’t fancy having their photo taken by Dickson’s ever-present camera, a favourite method for note-taking prior to painting.

“I didn’t realise that Times Square would become my subject,” says Dickson. “I worked there until 1983, when they tried to promote me to art director, after I had begun selling paintings. I knew that job would kill my painting, so I quit.” 

In series like Peep and Witness, Dickson captured a haze of nighttime indiscretions, what the writer and critic Chris Kraus called the “forgotten world of Times Square. Featuring solitary, ambient figures against a deep and complexly lit urban backdrop, both the photograph and paintings evoke speed, chaos, and loneliness.” 

While the area still possesses a sense of neon immorality, the Times Square, and New York, of today is a very different proposition—a lost world. There are more hot dog stands and Hard Rock Cafes; fewer degenerates and flop houses. The signs for places like The Hi-Hat Lounge and Peepland replaced by chain delis and toothpaste adverts. 

“I wanted to capture things that were passing quickly,” she said in The Guardian interview. “Things that were glittery, exciting, but a little bit out of control. I thought of myself very much as an artist of the everyday. Now my everyday is history. It’s kind of depressing.”

Dickson is still working as an artist, with recent gallery exhibitions reappraising the groundbreaking work that made her a counterculture star during the 70s and 80s. To view a Dickson painting now is to be transported to a more dangerous, less sanitised corner of the most-watched city on earth. You might not want to have been walking around alone at night during that period, but it looked interesting, didn’t it? 

In her book, Jane Dickson In Times Square, a brilliant compendium of photos and paintings from that time, she writes a simple provocation: “I’m not making images that tell you what to think. I see painting as a space where you can sift through your own ideas: is this pornography? Is that bad or good? Sexy or gross?

“From your viewpoint or mine?”