Interview and portrait by Sarah Dobai

SD The last show you curated (with Gary Schneider) was Eyes Open
in the Dark (2025), the acclaimed survey of Peter Hujar at Raven Row, and you are currently working on a biography of Hujar, to be published with Fitzcarraldo Editions. With this new exhibition, you’ve said that visiting the photography critic Vince Aletti at his home became an entry point. Could you say more?

JDM Vince's apartment is an extraordinary archive of New York underground culture. His living room is piled high with canyons of books and magazines and artworks. Vince started out working in the radical Peace Eye Bookstore. Then he worked at The Village Voice, and later moved on to The New Yorker. When you look at his trajectory, you see a movement from the back room of a weed-infested anarchist bookshop to institutional recognition for his writing, but all those dimensions feel present when you visit. The title of the exhibition came from Vince's habit of offering apple juice to his guests and that resonated with the idea of the squeezed big apple. I think Moyra Davey was the first person I asked after Vince. Her film Horse Opera (2022), is in part a homage to Hujar’s extraordinary pictures of animals. She made the film during lockdown, and it’s partly about visiting her horses in upstate New York, and forms of sociality that Covid shut down, which echoed aspects of the AIDS crisis. Horse Opera ended up being central to the exhibition, because it explores and mourns the kinds of bonds and social forms we were celebrating in the show.

SD The exhibition happened in an old coach house in Glasgow’s West End that belongs to the painter France-Lise McGurn. How important was the domestic status of the space to the idea of the show?

JDM France-Lise often makes work with her daughter at home, because she doesn't have any choice. It's about what’s possible within a certain domestic setup. Many of Moyra Davey’s films are set in her apartment, and in her photographs the residue of domestic labour or the lack of it is in the frame, as with her images of dust, for instance. Hujar used his loft at 189 Second Avenue as his studio; his water closet was the dark room. There are some beautiful images in Hujar’s contact sheets of the loft apartment, and no one he knew remembers it looking like that. He was making fictions, not recording what was given.

SD The installation of the work in the house brought a pervading quality of intimacy. Is the exhibition’s staging of intimacy a form of resistance to the professionalisation of art and the market’s impact on audiences?

JDM We both wanted to pay homage to the DIY culture that we still revere. I think the Hujar works speak to that quite strongly. Vince felt like young Puerto Rican fashion was very interesting and more put-together than the grungy Lower East Side look of the time. However, you weren’t seeing Puerto Rican faces in Vogue, so Vince wanted to do a feature for The Village Voice about the fashion around Alphabet City and below 14th Street. In the end, The Village Voice didn't run it, but Vince had colour slides made of these works. Slides are a cheap way to keep photographs, and the whole feel of these projected images has a theatricality and an appealing vulnerability.

SD Both your exhibition and Wojnarowicz’s show at Modern Institute draw a line between Glasgow and New York. You mentioned that many of the artists who came out of Glasgow in the 1990s looked to the New York scene of the previous decades.

JDM  Glasgow is an Atlantic city, like Liverpool, so you have this history of music coming over directly from New York. There was a degree of Lower East Side cosplay going on in Glasgow in the late 1990s and early 2000s. There is something interesting about the way in which an artistic community uses other histories to ground itself. New York in the 1970s looked to the decadence and cabaret culture of Weimar; that end-of-world seriousness and play with gender were very important. Everyone was reading Rimbaud, Artaud and Baudelaire – Paris was laid over the grids of Manhattan. Then, in Glasgow in the 1990s, people were looking to the Lower East Side of previous decades – so it became this kind of doubling of historical mirrors created by a shared concern with what you needed to sustain something like a bohemian culture in tough circumstances. I think any kind of affective and historical web of that kind contains political elements or potential. In Glasgow, they were referencing a style, but more so an attitude: that you could open a gallery in a burnt-out storefront and make something exciting happen. With the Modern Institute show at Carlton Place, things have come full circle, with Wojnarowicz’s work installed in a semi-derelict building on the south side of the river. Of course, the fact that the Modern Institute is now a three-venue commercial gallery with the means to stage institution-quality exhibitions echoes that
time. In other, perhaps more complex ways too, the Lower East Side was the laboratory for the hyper-financialisation of art after all.

SD  Can you say more about the importance of bohemianism to your work?

JDM Bohemianism is an idea that is misunderstood and worth defending. Karl Marx defined the bohemian, the ragpicker and the clochard as essentially useless and untrustworthy, incapable of making the revolution, and probably counterrevolutionary. For me, the bohemian choice to live a life according to an aesthetic is not merely some kind of middle-class testing of the limits or acting out. Artists in New York in the 1970s and 1980s were putting their lives on the line to live a certain kind of life. The work they made has enormous value and critical potential in our entirely mapped and coded present, and it deserves respect. Choosing to live outside the city walls is a political choice, and the sheer absurdity of living your life at the margins according to an idea of beauty has to have some kind of negative valence as an example. The curator Joel Smith wrote that the brutality of Hujar’s photography is what's outside the frame pressing upon the subject, and the beauty there is them bearing up against it. The conditions under which artists are working now are becoming harder; a wholly unimaginative brutality defines the present, total philistinism. It feels to me that our whole world is a failure of imagination. This show was an attempt to spit into the eye of the (cosmic) drone. It points to other occluded or destroyed worlds of sociality that occasionally come into sight through an art show or on a dance floor. New worlds are born of the fragments left over from the old. .