Johnny Saganaka Snowy Wilderness

My relationship to casual nudity — what a great question! If I work backward from the present moment, I can say that “casual nudity” — this wonderful phrase of yours! — is currently a central pillar of my existence. On an everyday level I am one of those people, in a very modern way of being a person in the bosom of Babylon (as the Rastafarians call modern industrial civilization — Allen Ginsberg called it Moloch), who strips off their clothes as soon as they walk in their apartment door. And on a creative level — so much of my own art, as a painter and as a writer, and increasingly as a model and performer, as well as my art as a curator, is about naked bodies and what they do… what we do with them. But most importantly, perhaps, casual nudity is important to me on a philosophical level, on a political level, and thus on a personal, psychological level. And that brings me all the way back to my earliest youth.

The philosophical level is that there is no greater questioning of everything our civilization stands for than that posed, so absurdly and thus so powerfully, by our own ever-present, omnipresent naked bodies. There may be entirely practical reasons to clothe ourselves that do not touch on the sexual — to work iron and work stone, to violently pump oil from the bowels of the earth through our metastatic veins of industry, to shelter the skin from beating sun and blazing cold, clothes might be strictly necessary. But in attempting to reflect upon why we wear clothes so constantly, and are required to do so by society, I do think sexuality rears its head immediately in a way that bears out Sigmund Freud’s prescience in finding the way to frame the problem that he did, perhaps no more pithily than in the two-word title of one of his books, Civilization And Its Discontents: clothing exists to repress our consciousness of sex, first and foremost, and of our bodies themselves, beyond and surrounding that most complex facet of our being.

The personal, psychological level is that I come from a tradition that would strenuously object to me calling sex anything like the most complex facet of our being. Patriarchs of my parents’ families were preachers of a certain kind of Christianity on both sides — that of the British Empire at its height, Methodism and Episcopalianism — and flanking these hierophants were a lot of equally logocentric figures: professors and professionals, so that for me, the creed of these People Of The Book came from 1 John: “In The Beginning Was The Word, And The Word Was With God, And The Word Was God.”

Sex and nudity were not entirely proscribed in this worldview but they were rather distinctly repressed, or transcended, sublimated — whether actively or passively — in favor of devotion to The Word. It was not the most miserable relationship to sex in the world but it did rather neatly recapitulate the exile from Eden. My babyhood and early childhood were full of full-on naked moments, but as I grew older I was definitely taught to conceal my nakedness. I never saw my parents naked, never saw my siblings naked after the age of five, and I still really haven’t, to this day. It’s giving very Genesis 9:20–27:

Who were the Canaanites? Well, they were the pagans, apparently — and I find that moving, because if you read into the literature on why it was considered so wrong for Ham to merely see his father’s nakedness, you find all of these fusty biblical commentators alluding to the fact that the Canaanites were one of the peoples the invading Israelites were attempting to conquer, and part of how they did it was to demonize the Canaanites’ pagan religion and way of life, which I am thus forced to picture including nudity and yes, some kind of Daddy-worship, some kind of sensual, pleasurable initiation into masculinity.

I guess I am allowing my answer to get this enamored of my family’s cultural background because I want to explain the intensity of my attachment to nakedness — the way it has built up in a recursive feedback loop, a dialectic, a dynamic of shame and pride at having discovered the secret of life between my legs, essentially, and in so doing discovering that the secret to life, in so many cases, is to do the opposite of what your parents taught you.

My situation was pretty extreme, or at least pretty unique, and so was my solution. I grew up surrounded by so many books — a good portion of them on anthropology and art, two worlds in which nakedness was far from verboten, was in fact common and honored. So that while it might seem a simplistic path to Sex, Magic, and Revolution, to tune into the comfortability of the Cave Of Nakedness and then try to turn that Cave Of Nakedness inside out to encompass the whole world… that’s what feels right to me. And it starts at home, by taking the time to be naked, and making the time to have good sex.

I started URSA NYC because I have a certain obsession with art-gallerizing. I really don’t think that’s too strong of a word, although perhaps it’s a little too mean to myself. A much nicer and no less true way to say it would be to say that I love art-gallerizing. That’s why I started URSA.

I kind of grew up knowing I would make an art gallery one day. Along with a few other things that I have slowly and relatively methodically done throughout the long self-imposed apprenticeship of my life: being a poet, being an academic, being a journalist, starting a magazine, writing a book, being a radio host, becoming a painter, writing and acting in and directing movies and plays, recording music and releasing records, teaching all of these things.

I joke around — with more than a grain of truth — that I have an art gallery “as an abuse of The Golden Rule.” One of the big reasons I have a gallery is to put into practice all of these ideas I have about how the world should be, how we should treat each other as artists and yes, as people. Well, what is really going on, I would say, is an art gallery committed to providing an immersive experience of queer, sex-positive art — and it takes that sociable, ethical orientation to do it right.

The current show is SILVER, LAKE by Adam Chuck — a really special show of over 400 oil paintings (and one oil-painted sculpture) that is growing every week as Adam works in residency inside the gallery, making more of his miniature paintings on Mylar on paper almost every day.

It’s a show that really began when I first saw a few of Adam’s beach paintings via Instagram in the Freedom Summer of 2020, and felt that special buzz that lets you know you are in the presence of greatness.

There are a couple of interlocking reasons for the books. One reason — and the least of the reasons in many ways — is that making a catalog for each show is one way for us to help our artists get where they may want to go by keeping a foot in the way the conventional art world does things while we do so many other things differently.

Another more important reason for the books is that much more than being available to potentiate access to the mainstream art world for artists, they can give lovers of art access to the ineffable experience of the shows at any time beyond the period in which the show hung in the gallery. I often say that to me, if each piece an artist makes is like a song, a gallery show is like a long-playing album — I want the rarified genre of the gallery show to be made just as accessible as music is in that way, a repeatable experience, as savorable and comparable and reliable as the albums in a lifetime of listening.

Which brings me to kind of the last reason why the books are important to me: in my culture, writing a book about someone is the ultimate way to honor both them and yourself. “In The Beginning Was The Word”? Well, “As It Was In The Beginning, So Shall It Be In The End.”

When I was a baby bear growing up outside of Chicago, one of my favorite movies was The Muppets Take Manhattan. It’s the story of Kermit The Frog as the auteur of a musical revue that he is trying to get to Broadway — and when he finally moves heaven and earth to really take it there, he stays true to his original intentions and tells all his Muppet bestiary of chosen family: You’re Not Just Going To Come To The Show, You’re Going To Be IN The Show!

That spirit of inclusivity is a big part of what inspires me to say yes with particular relish to shows — the Steven Harwick show, SKiNFLiCK, Adam Chuck’s SILVER, LAKE, the forthcoming Patrick Arias show — that include lots of images of a lot of real people who we live among in what I call “The Downtown Demi-monde.”

From that standpoint, including orders of magnitude of people in the shows at URSA feels really good, like a full-circle moment of gratitude and respect for the scene — especially when I get to meet the subjects of the portraits in person, which ends up planting seeds for possible future shows, since so many of the people documented are queer sex-positive artists, and certainly future friendships.

Three things.

First, I really enjoy that we currently do gallery visits by appointment only. Unlike the misunderstandings of intentions that can arise in the traditional setup of holding open gallery hours — where visitors may wander in and just as quickly wander out without engaging — with the appointments it is clear that the visitors want to be there, and with that subtle but important change in context, I think we as gallerists feel more comfortable being a little vulnerable, presuming to give the visitor a little tour in addition to creating space for their own communion with the work.

Second, business-wise, URSA NYC is a merch-forward and media-forward gallery, for reasons of equity and inclusivity. We give 100% of the sales of original artworks to the artists. Making affordable merchandise — books, posters, t-shirts and clothing and accessories — is a better way for us to make money as a gallery (sharing 50% of the profits with the artist) that also makes the artist’s work available to become present in the lives of their base of friends, fans, and family who might not be able to afford to buy original works.

Third, a word about the name of the gallery. The four letters U-R-S-A come from the Latin word for “she-bear,” known to most of us from the constellations Ursa Major and Ursa Minor — the Mother Bear and the Daughter Bear — which contain The Big Dipper and the Little Dipper and have the civilizational significance that they are visible from any point on the planet Earth and can always be used to orient toward the North Star. On top of that, I myself am a bear, in homosexual and archetypal terms — even my dad was known as Bear growing up — and a motherly one at that. URSA NYC: for as long as I can stand it, If I Got It, You Got It! …Onward And Upward…