Chuck Connelly.

Conner, Jill

HBO Documentary Films July 7, 2008

Chuck Connelly became a 1980s icon in New York's booming art scene and made millions from the sale of his paintings, which were frequently compared with those of Vincent van Gogh. In addition to representation at Lennon Weinberg Gallery, his paintings were included in MoMA's permanent collection. Nick Nolte, moreover, played Connelly in the first short of the anthology film New York Stories (1989), Martin Scorsese's "Life Lessons," written by Richard Prince. However, as his fame and fortune continued to increase throughout the decade, Connelly followed the path of many other artists at that time and began acting out his own reverence for such hard-drinking legends as Jackson Pollock, which ultimately destroyed his professional contacts with collectors, curators, and gallerists. HBO recently captured the artist's tawdry, un-glamorized life in The Art of Failure: Chuck Connelly Not For Sale (2008), which premiered on July 7. As part of the cable station's new documentary film series, this particular portrait of an artist not only deconstructs the myth of bohemia but also makes one wonder if any of it ever really happened in the first place.

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Connelly arrived in New York City during the late 1970s and settled in a small apartment in the East Village between Avenues B and C, just as the art scene was about to transform the area with eccentric performances by artists like Klaus Nomi, Colette, and Gracie Mansion. Even though it has been said that Connelly moved in the same circles as Julian Schnabel and Jean-Michel Basquiat, the association is at most relative since everyone then was stoned and roamed the streets like zombies. Enjoying the early patronage of diet guru Robert C. Atkins, Connelly somehow went on to garner wide attention, before decamping for Philadelphia in 1999 after having lived in Manhattan for nearly 20 years.

The Art of Failure opens with a series of flashbacks that portray a successful career along with more humbling moments showing the artist and his now ex-wife venturing from one New York gallery to another in an attempt to revive Connelly's evidently lifeless career. Although door-to-door "cold calls" do not effectively begin or advance one's art career, the film's director Jeff Stimmel exposes the standard caginess that permeates the city's high-end galleries. Conversely, the camera also spends a great deal of time capturing the daily life of Connelly, which often reads like an exaggerated reality show. As we are taken through the artist's growing drinking habit, he eventually becomes emblematic of his own struggle against anonymity as he spends less time making art and more time complaining about the very art world that rejected him, or vice versa.

Connelly attributes the stalling of his career to the stock market crash of 1987 and the art market's subsequent shift from neo-expressionism to neogeo. The Art of Failure questions the purpose of being an artist at a time when the success of the art market is so dependent upon the strength of auction houses like Christie's and Sotheby's. More importantly, it poses the question of how can art dare to achieve something meaningful. Given the large number of edgy artists who were either casualties of the era or simply passed over, it is not surprising to see an artist like Connelly render such a scathing critique.

Jeff Stimmel makes great efforts to keep his film treatment from becoming an idealization. Connelly also does not pretend to be nice, but maintains a very straightforward yet humorous point of view. With a recent mini-retrospective of his work at Chelsea's DFN Gallery (June 21-July 18), the artist is not only hopeful that this film will lead to sales but also cause others to see a different side of the New York art scene. In contrast to the 1960s, when art indeed served a strong political cause, the multitude of genres and styles that typified the 1980s is still sorting itself out. The Reagan era paralleled both the expanding art market and the growth of pluralism, pushing artists to find new ideas in a series of drug-induced phases that involved either cocaine, heroin, crystal meth, or alcohol--to name a few. This pharmaceutical solution proved critical in the fight against impending historical irrelevance.