Marvin (Not the Martian)

Marvin Taylor absolutely hates nostalgia. He also happens to work in a library. Surprisingly, this isn’t much of a problem.  Marvin works at Fales Library and The Grey Art Gallery, New York University’s fine arts museum, which is located at 100 Washington Sq. East.

His left foot in a cast, his right in a Converse sneaker, Marvin, 48, stops every few moments as he shuffles around the gallery. Around him are black-and-white pictures, along with a few videos, from the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s. The Grey Gallery is the nation’s leading archive of art from downtown New York during the '70s and '80s.



It was Marvin’s dislike for nostalgia, he says, that allowed him to focus on the emerging punk scene in the ’80s.while most artists looked to the past, always remembering the ’60s.“You can’t be critical if you’re being nostalgic,” he says. Marvin even hates The Beatles.

Marvin said he had always been drawn to libraries as a kid, and describes himself as “naturally rebellious.” So working at a gallery filled with what he calls “jarring” art seems like the perfect fit. “If work can jar you out of your pre-conceived notions, it’s good – that’s my definition of art,” says Marvin.

Near him are the works of David Wojnerowicz, Robert Mapplethorpe and Fred McDarrah. One photograph a black-and-white of a naked man and women, facing away from each other, with a coat hanger stuck between their butt cheeks, goes for $3,000, according to Marvin. McDarrah’s photographs of grafitti, or “flicks” are about $1,000 each, and Mapplethorpe’s shot of Patti Smith chopping off her hair next to a black cat is valued at $35,000.

Other pictures cover the first gay pride parades, the Stonewall Riots and the AIDS epidemic of the ’70s and ’80s. Some photos, like Wojnerowicz’s shot of his dead lover’s sickly, sunken face are hard to forget. The shot was taken immediately after Wojnerowicz’s lover died of AIDS. A video goes along with the photograph, and is equally moving.

Other videos currently on display at the gallery range from a very zany, very ’80s music video that takes place inside a beehive, to a bizarre 1964 film, “Meat Joy,” which features footage of young men and women smearing chicken and fish all over their half-naked bodies. Marvin chuckles as a few NYU students stare at the film, eyes wide in shock. “This one jars people the most, I think,” he says.