“I was supposed to go into the art world, but when I moved to New York, none of the girls in my class got into any gallery. We were all rejected—it was only the boys. And I was punk rock, I got pissed off, and I was like, Fuck you all, I don’t want your fucking art world.”
Kim Hastreiter was standing inside the Jeffrey Deitch gallery in SoHo where she curated a show (since closed) called My Amazing Friends that featured the work of, well, her amazing friends (Jean-Paul Goude, Maira Kalman, Ruben Toledo, and Lisa Yuskavage, among others) recalling her past. “Then I found this other world in the Mudd Club where people were making movies and fashion, everything mixing together. I thought, This art is better than being in Mary Boone. They kept wanting me to make more of the same paintings, and I was like, How many times can you say the same thing?’”
As the saying goes: When a door closes a window opens, and Hastreiter’s window led to a magical world: New York City in the 1970s, where she became a fixture of the downtown scene, eventually cofounding the legendary Paper magazine with her friend David Hershkovits. The show at Deitch had been staged in celebration of Stuff: A New York Life of Cultural Chaos, a new book that is part personal memoir, part oral history of New York City in the ’70s and ’80s, and part sneaky how-to guide to living a life steeped in creativity, creation, curiosity, and collaboration. But Hastreiter didn’t exactly set out to put together a multilayered biography; rather, the book revealed itself to her as she was putting it together.
“I sold Paper the same week my mother died,” she explains. “My mother was living in this assisted-living facility, and we had to move everything out, and at the same time, I had to move everything out of my Paper office—32 years worth of stuff. And we packed it all up, and everything was delivered to my one-bedroom apartment. It was crazy.” Faced with “nothing to do” for the first time, she began sorting through everything, giving away most of her mother’s stuff to friends (“My dog walker still wears my mother’s winter coat when she comes, and I love seeing it”) and sending some of her things to auction (“I had a Philippe Starck lamp with a gun on it and I was like, Hmm, okay, a bad vibe“).
With the money she made from selling the magazine, she bought a studio in her building and moved all of the work-related stuff there. “I’m anti-storage. I refuse to get storage because you pay every month and then you die and you don’t even know what’s in there.” Among the treasures she found was the press release announcing that Prince had changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol (that thus meant the world referred to him as the Artist Formerly Known as Prince). She hired two interns to properly organize and archive her belongings; the project took a year. “I would just ask my friends, ‘What do I do with this stuff? Should I make a movie or a documentary?’ My friend Alexandra Cunningham from the Cooper-Hewitt was the one that said, ‘You need to do a book but make it a memoir about your stuff,’” she explains, adding she still has six other book ideas she wants to do. (Well, there is a lot of stuff!)
It is a book that, like the writer, contains multitudes. It starts as a straightforward memoir told by the everyday objects of family life. This is Hastreiter, the daughter of Gloria and Walter, who grew up in New Jersey, spent a semester hitchhiking through Europe and Morocco, went to school in Nova Scotia and California, and in 1976 drove to New York with her friend Joey Arias in a pickup truck with a dragon painted on the side (the Dragon Wagon). In a few pages, and without the need for three or four thousand words on her early days, her curiosity and openness to experiencing life and creating is obvious.
Then we switch gears. Now, Hastreiter is navigating the downtown Manhattan scene of the ’70s and ’80s, which means it is also an oral history of a crucial cultural point in time. She’s going dancing at Mudd Club, Danceteria, and the Paradise Garage; she becomes a style editor at the niche SoHo Weekly News, at the behest of Bill Cunningham; she meets and befriends people like Keith Haring, Stephen Sprouse, and Willi Smith through friends of friends or because they’re neighbors or she just sees them out on the street. We learn about all the different things she collects, like New York City Greek coffee cups, and, as the years go on, old computers, 9/11 newspaper clippings and paraphernalia, Obama-era merch, and “stuff with money literally on it” because “showing off the idea of status has forever seemed like a big joke” to her.
She remains a punk at heart and collects objects that fuck with perceived notions of acceptability and class. Early on in the book, she declares, “I collect people too!,” and interspersed throughout are homages to her many super-talented friends: Ingo Maurer, Bethann Hardison, Danny Bowien, Tauba Auerbach. She often hosts soup parties where she just gets a bunch of cool people together to get to know each other, like a worker bee cross-pollinating different flowers in a garden. (Hastreiter is also an avid gardener.)
The most unexpected section of the book deals with death: the death of her loved ones, her friends, a notion of freedom that once existed but no longer does in a post-9/11, post-COVID, post–everything else world. “I had laid out the book, and at the end it was just like, ‘I’m dead now’, and it was a full page. And my friend Karen Kimmel, who is one of the smartest people and an amazing artist, looked at it and was like, ‘You cannot end the book that way,’” she remembers. “She has kids, and I don’t have kids. So to me, it was like, Everything’s horrible, and I’m going to die soon, but she was like, ‘There are so many great kids, it’s not really over!’ So she shocked me a bit, and I rethought it.” She moved all of the “young people” to the end of the book and wrote a letter to the younger generations that begins “NOT THE END (TAG, YOU’RE IT).”
It is perhaps an eternal feeling inextricably connected with youth, to feel like the coolest things have all already happened, that everything has been co-opted and that the unbridled creativity of a long-gone New York will never once again occur. It’s not true, of course, and as you reach the end of Stuff, you are confronted with the radical notion that as long as you have ideas and go after them, that’s really all that matters. Hastreiter is the opposite of a gatekeeper, opening her own life and leaving breadcrumbs behind so that as many people as possible can find them and make their way back into a life of creation.
“I was supposed to be an artist, and I ended up doing Paper,” she says. “In the foreword, Jeffrey wrote, ‘Kim is a conceptual artist, and her collecting project is her art,’ so the one thing I realized through the book is that I am an artist also.” She continues, “I’m a manifester. I see things how they should be.”
Kim Hastreiter will be celebrating the launch of Stuff: A New York Life of Cultural Chaos, on Friday, March 14 at Bookmarc, from 6 to 8 p.m.
