Shadowman

Look at this. Pathetic.

The story of Richard Hambleton is as mysterious

as his black shadow figures.

Richard's paintings--

They're dark, they're beautiful, they're chaotic.

Richard was one of the most interesting, enthralling, ecstatic artists

coming out of New York in the '80s.

At that time, he was much more successful than Basquiat.

Basically, he was the only artist that I couldn't buy.

The man's a genius. He really is.

He's such a crazy dreamer visionary

that often it seems like madness.

I think there's a certain amount of passion involved in what I do

He was an absolute wild man.

He was sexy, he was attractive.

He was not normal. The guy was weird.

This work isn't-- You know, it's conceptual.

My brain is going to fall apart if I don't get it out.

He's so self-destructive.

But he won't die.

How can somebody so dark and dingy be heroic?

But somehow he is.

One of the big mysteries about Richard Hambleton

is why he does some of the things he does.

In the midst of becoming the most important thing in New York,

with Basquiat, with Keith Haring,

he leaves.

He removed himself from the scene,

and when you remove yourself from the scene, you disappear,

and when you disappear, you're invisible, and that's what happened to him.

Richard!

You gonna open up?

Richard, it's Andy. I'm out at the front.

Can you please answer the door?

Be right down.What's going on there?

I just woke up.Oh, really?

I'm so tired. I just slept.

Have a good sleep?Yeah.

All right.

I built every little thing in this place.

The fire department went through and they said,

"You don't live here, do you? You don't sleep here?"

I was in almost every publication in the world.

Lifemagazine, Peoplemagazine.

Voguemagazine,I had like five pages.

You know, this wasn't planned.

What everyone says to me, when Richard Hambleton comes up,

like, "Oh, he's still alive?"

I'm like, "Yeah, he's around."

They're like, "We haven't heard him or seen him in 20 years."

What made you hide for 20 years?I wasn't hiding.

What were you doing?I was painting. I was working.

I was barely surviving.

An artist can't get it together without collectors and galleries.

What was it like not doing an art show for 25 years?

-It was frustrating. -It was frustrating, right?

I wanted to show, basically, I don't know why.

I kept trying to get things together.

I kept being ripped off by people, and I was in the street, like, living--

-You were homeless, right? -Yeah, basically.

There's a lot of artists that have patrons that don't show for 10 to 15 years.

But they keep-- They do keep working.

This is that seascape. Where are these paintings now?

That was in his show in Milan

and where it went from there, it was sold.

Who knows?

And that was quite some time ago.

-Where did you grow up? -Vancouver.

His whole childhood is kind of a mystery.

I know he started when he was very little.

He drew and painted when he was just a kid.

He was just doing it.

Richard's a formally trained artist. He went to school.

But he moved away from that real quickly.

He's always on the fringe.

I created a murder scene...

which was experienced by the public as a murder.

They'd wake up, walk outside and think, "Who died here?"

I was lucky enough to get a grant from the city of Vancouver,

so I did the serial murder down the West Coast.

You know, it was a mission.

Richard went from Canada to Seattle,

San Francisco, Los Angeles.

Then he worked his way across the United States to New York.

I was down in Tribeca one evening.

Of course, Tribeca at that time was nothing like it is now.

In fact, parts of it were totally bombed out.

There was nothing there but rubble.

But I saw one of these cutouts there,

and it had the red paint in it.

And it looked like blood.

I was like, "We gotta get out of here.

This is a dangerous part of the city."

It was a murder mystery narrative.

What made you want to do them?

-I wanted to paint realism. -

With a 25% increase in murder,

New York again led the nation in the number of murders last year.

Violence has become epidemic.

When people see that one person can do it, then they think they can too.

The whole thing was a psychological experiment.

How can he affect society with his art?

I think what Richard was trying to tell people is that there are no boundaries.

No one's really protected.

The moment you step outside, we're all possibly victims.

At that time, there wasn't any kind of concept of public art.

I remember stumbling on one of them and thinking it was a real crime scene.

And then, at another time stumbling on another one,

and I started to realize, well, maybe this is something else.

But not really having any language for it.

It was kind of like beyond art.

It was performance. It was also street art.

It was a drama.

It came with a story attached to it.

It's more than just aesthetics, it's more than just painting and surface.

It was like a murder mystery story.

Image Mass Murderwas a mass murder. It was done in 15 cities.

Doing it in all those cities was part of the work, you know.

The first thing I did, usually, was figure out

where the city hall was, where the public library was

and just get to know the city and then go out and do it.

He doesn't want to reveal himself yet,

so he develops this imaginary character.

He becomes a private investigator, R. Dick Trace it.

And he actually sets up an office

on the East Coast when he gets here.

One of the names I was using, Mr. Reeee, 'cause that's what it became.

It became a mystery.

I really began to think I was murdering people.

Going back to a hotel room covered in paint-- blood-- in blood-red paint.

And it was--

Getting a cheap hotel room, putting maps of the city on the wall.

Planning out where I was going to do it.

My friends laid their bodies down.

I traced over my friends.

Made the front page of the San Francisco news.

I made the news.

That was part of the work.

I wanted to make the news. It was part of the murder mystery.

Playing with language.

Playing with the media, you know.

It was part of the work.

It really caused a huge sensation in the art world

and also amongst the police

because they thought that it was actually a murder.

They were wondering who was murdered, who was behind it,

which got him in a lot of trouble.

I put up a wanted poster too. A fake FBI poster related to this.

And the public wanted to know who did it.

I was told I'd never get a grant again.

The place to be, if you wanted to become a rich and famous artist,

is New York.

Just like any aspiring starlet had to go to Hollywood.

It's all about being part of a scene, a club,

going to all the openings, the art parties,

schmoozing, networking, hanging out.

The first day I came to New York, I went to Club 57

'cause the director, Kai Eric, he introduced me to Jean-Michel Basquiat

the first day I got here.

And he was actually wearing a crown...

just like in the movie.

He kind of came to New York

with the strategies of a pretty serious conceptual artist.

And like most of us, he became just enthralled

by this god-awful mess

that New York City was at that time.

Pretty much immediately started to practice on the streets.

My first exposure to Richard's work

was a piece called I Only Have Eyes for You,

which was this life-sized man, sort of in this Napoleonic stance,

in funny, strange places.

They would give me a start.

I Only Have Eyes for Youwas this other piece I did,

which started in 1980.

This photo image of someone standing around the city.

He's all dressed up and he doesn't know where he's going.

There's a lot of people out there just waiting...

maybe for you.

"I only have eyes for you."

He's like one of the first artists to actually take an image of himself...

put it on the street like that.

It was done on blueprint paper so it would slowly fade

over the course of three to six months.

And as the weather grabs them,

they just wash out and turn into a ghost silhouette.

This image is a life-size photo.

It was 1980.

I knew it was a new decade, and I knew things were going to be different.

New York in the early '80s was a very different place than it is now.

You have to remember that Times Square then was raunchy.

There were prostitutes and drug dealers roaming the streets.

Simultaneously with that,

in the East Village and Lower East Side was a totally different kind of scene.

Well, it was like one big nonstop party.

The rents were really cheap.