Dancing on Paper: Grace Jones, Antonio Lopez, and Surface Aesthetics

• In Event: Remembering the 1980s through Black and Latinx Performance

Abstract

Deeply influenced by the neon-like energy (and surfaces) of fashion, art, street culture, and queer nightlife in the late 1970s and 1980s, Nuyorican artists Antonio Lopez and Juan Ramos, under the signature of "Antonio," created iconoclastic images of women of color, whose careers they championed, including models Pat Cleveland, Tina Chow, and Jamaican-American performer Grace Jones. Born in Puerto Rico and raised in East Harlem, like his eventual partner and collaborator Ramos, Lopez injected the Eurocentric form of fashion illustration with the propulsive force of hip-hop and the decadent sheen of disco; Lopez's bold graphics electrified the form with sass, swagger, and unabashed sex appeal. An avid record collector, nightclub habitué, and fan of the nascent form of hip-hop, especially break-dancing, Lopez's artistic praxis was akin to "dancing on paper," as famously described by a close friend. Lopez's career as the doyen of fashion illustration included his tenure as the in-house illustrator for Andy Warhol's Interview magazine, commissioned portraits of singers Diana Ross, Tina Turner, and Patti Labelle, and album covers for funk siren Betty Davis. This paper uses the figure of Antonio Lopez, and his drawings and Polaroid portraits of his close friend/frequent collaborator Grace Jones, to consider more broadly the affective life-worlds of American dance music culture-specifically, the underground cultures and performance spaces that emerged in New York City in the sweaty transition between the late 1970s and early 1980s, a milieu that Jones features prominently in. I attempt to construct an alternative interpretative framework that privileges skin, surface, and sensation as overlooked sites in an expanded sensorium. In doing so, I hope to open other multi-sensorial optics, what Rizvana Bradley terms "other sensualities" that offer themselves up as "techniques of knowing in art and performance," while gesturing toward the new geometries of being and potentialities that Grace Jones's performances and Antonio Lopez's art summon.

Author

• Uri McMillan, University of California-Los Angeles