One of the most compelling figures in the sordid history of New York's art community in recent decades is art dealer and aesthetic provocateur Colin de Land, who was perhaps even more outré than that family of freaks who defined his milieu. In an all-too-short life, he launched careers and nurtured deep idiosyncrasies that so indelibly changed our cultural landscape that his presence can still be felt today. Perhaps even more monumental than his legacy -- which includes two wonderfully fabled loves (with dealer Pat Hearn and artist Kembra Pfahler), the colonizing of new psychic and psychological spaces for the commerce of art, and a little fair he helped put together now known as The Armory Show -- is the veritable maelstrom of memories de Land inscribed upon the many who sort of (but never fully) knew him.
With the same slapdash and chaotic yet concise casualness that marked all of de Land's creative endeavors, Dennis Balk has collected a small sum of those memories in a poetic scrapbook, Colin de Land: American Fine Arts. Ostensibly a photo book (aptly published by powerHouse), and episodic in its intensity and conviviality, the book reveals de Land much as he was -- a fearless leader of pathological risk-takers, a voyeur no one could take their eyes off, a self-taught genius in the esoteric art of thrift couture and a wastrel of such laconic decadence that he made ill health magnetically sexy. With some 50-plus anecdotal contributions from luminaries of the contemporary art world -- including Francesco Bonami, Gavin Brown, Mark Dion, Andrea Fraser, Mary Heilmann, Mariko Mori and John Waters -- the collection reminds the reader how enigmatic de Land was while also offering up myriad insights into the curious way in which he looked at things.
Photograph of Colin de Land by Hiroshi K for Esquire Japan, 2001, from Colin de Land: American Fine Arts.
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