The writer and actress Cookie Mueller and her partner Vittorio Scarpati were icons of the New York downtown scene in the 1980s. Tragically, the pair passed away from AIDS-related illnesses in 1989, but both documented their struggle with the disease and its surrounding stigma. The intimate, brutal and darkly comic sketches and texts that they produced toward the end of their lives are presented in this moving exhibition, having initially been published as a book of the same name. Accompanied by Mueller’s crafted words, Scarpati’s felt-tip notepad sketches range from surreal philosophical musings to unflinching depictions of his own deteriorating body.
Reimagined as an exhibition, Putti’s Pudding features forty–five original felt–tip pen on notepad drawings made by Scarpati when he lost the ability to speak, accompanying texts by Mueller, and a public programme of talks, readings, screenings and performance.
By the summer of 1989, Vittorio Scarpati was in the final months of his life. As Mueller explains in the introduction to ‘Putti’s Pudding’:
“As I write this, his life more or less hangs in the balance, both his lungs are collapsed, a complication of bouts with the pneumonia specific to AIDS. He’s attached by tubes to two machines called pneumothorax suction pumps. A tube the circumference of an American nickel coin is affixed into a chest incision that goes into the pleural lining of his lungs. Bubbling with water like tropical fish aquariums, these strange looking clear plastic machines drain the excessive fluid from his lungs while also inflating them, thus keeping him breathing. Out of sheer boredom with time passing, Vittorio asked for pens and pads to draw. With his indomitable spirit and vitality he set about rendering his reality though his talent.”
The resulting works tell a moving story, depicting the brutal, uncertain, ghostly nature of living with AIDS in the 1980s. However, Scarpati’s drawings also radiate life. Something accounted for, and indeed celebrated, in Mueller’s accompanying writing.
Putti’s Pudding, Studio Voltaire, London, 9 September – 5 November
