Alan Vega, Dream Baby Dream
Deitch Projects, New York
2017

A year after the passing of Alan Vega, who I first knew as Alan Suicide, we will present Dream Baby Dream, a memorial exhibition to commemorate Alan’s life and work. The exhibition has two components: video projections of historic performances by Suicide, and a selection of Alan’s sculpture and works on paper from the 1960s to his last works in 2016. We will also feature interviews with Alan, along with videos documenting his artwork. The following tribute is adapted from a text I wrote for Kaleidoscope Magazine after Alan’s death:
One of my formative artistic experiences was an encounter with the work of Alan Suicide at the O.K. Harris gallery in 1975. The impact began with the black press-type sign with the artist’s name on the entrance wall. Instead of the meticulously aligned letters that had become standard in every SoHo gallery, the name Alan Suicide was half scratched out in an early manifestation of punk attitude. It was a simple gesture, but shocking in its disruption of the expected protocol. Stepping into the gallery, I was confronted by an assemblage of discarded TV picture tubes, Christmas lights, broken radios, and various electronic debris dragged in from the street. Dangling wires were plugged in, activating the lights and popping tubes. The structures were as anti-form as possible, but surprisingly dense. They fused Punk, Pop and Pollock.
Another one of my formative experiences was seeing Alan and Marty Rev’s band Suicide perform at Max’s Kansas City in the spring of 1976. Half of the audience seemed to embrace Alan’s confrontational performance; the other half was infuriated. Alan described his approach in a 2002 Village Voice interview with Simon Reynolds: “Back then, people went to shows to forget their everyday life for a few hours. With Suicide, they came off the street and I gave them the street right back.” Alan’s unhinged performance was riveting, but what really astonished me was what happened when Alan and his band mate Marty walked off the stage. Marty’s noise box was still sounding. The music kept playing without anyone playing it. Those early Suicide concerts changed the concept of musical performance, influencing the development of electro pop and electronic dance music.
Alan Vega, a.k.a. Alan Suicide, died at the age of 78 on July 16th, 2016. Friends who I spoke with about his death were incredulous to learn that he was 78. He always maintained the stance and the style of someone who was in his twenties. He was one of the inventors of the Punk aesthetic in art and music, and in 1970, may have been the first to describe his sound as punk. His first Suicide show, at the Project of Living Artists on 729 Broadway was advertised as “Punk Music by Suicide.” Punk describes only one part of Suicide’s artistic and musical direction, however. With his black beret and his hipster lingo, and his immersion into assemblage, Alan also created his own extension of Beat culture. His music also drew deeply on rockabilly and on the Doo-Wop that he would have heard on the Brooklyn street corners when he was a teenager in the 1950s. In his way he was also a Pop artist.