I’m writing a memoir. “What makes you think your life is interesting enough for a book?” a woman at a New York commune’s Friday dinner asked. It’s not me, I replied, it’s my passage through some scenes over years. I lived the last quarter of the 20th century in lower Manhattan, participating in the art and media world under different hats.
I lived in and around Soho and the Lower East Side, met innumerable artists and worked with dozens. Some became famous. Always I wrote, for Artforum, Art-Rite, the East Village Eye and for myself.
I was a critic, an editor, a graphic arts worker, a video artist, a video distributor, and an art historian. My collective engagements, with the artists’ group Colab and the cultural center ABC No Rio, turned into political positions. At the end of the century I moved to suburbia, returned to graduate school, and produced Art Gangs, the book which gives this blog its title.
My planned memoir will illuminate aspects of that extraordinary period in cultural life and production which are less explored. I was politicized, which is a deprivileged tendency in the art world. I will argue for and explain about the political turn in downtown art and culture, and the significance of collective action by artists.
While a good deal of this book is already written, I spent September and October of ‘19 with my partner in an apartment in Crown Heights, visiting libraries, gallery events and talking with old friends and comrades. I had prepared for the trip in Milwaukee in August, reading memoirs of the period and catalogues about Jean-Michel Basquiat.
The Model of the Period
Jean-Michel is the late 20th century New York Apollo, the demi-god whose trajectory and career has become the lens through which the late ‘70s and ‘80s downtown culture is viewed. I had the singular fortune of a collaborative moment with him, which was recalled in an exhibition earlier this year at the Schunck Kunsthalle in Heerlen, The Netherlands – “Basquiat: The Artist and His New York Scene.”
That it was “his” scene was affirmed in Sara Driver’s film Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years… (2018; streaming on multiple platforms). Howl! Happening gallery in NYC celebrated Sara's film with a very differently conceived exhibition, “Zeitgeist: The Art Scene of Teenage Basquiat”. In that one, everybody piled on.
Howl! gallery has become the locus for much of the commemorative exhibitionary work of the people involved during late 20th century downtown culture. And, as I was to discover, a sort of Lower East Side social club and senior center for some extraordinary artists.
The practice at Howl gallery is a continuous historical reflection generalized through exhibitionary procedure, mobilizing of personal archives, and expanded through panel discussions. Here I should wax philosophical, quote Walter Benjamin on history and memory, etc. Yes, surely it is that, as it always is. (Quote Herodotus here.) But it’s also a cohort growing old – and those who didn’t. Reflections overtake cultural workers as, in a sense, they run out of subjects and recycle their motifs, experiences, making sense of their lives and products as they drift slowly into temporal distance.
People didn’t pay attention then, but it was important! Even this artist who died was very significant for us then. So said Carlo McCormick about Nicolas Moufarrege, as an artist writing criticism; Moufarrege had a show up at the Queens Museum this fall.
Ambition Meets Resources
I want to write an “expanded memoir”… although I’m not sure what that means. At first I’d thought to catch up with what’s been written by academics about the period I lived. But I think now most of that is in journals, not books, and I have not kept up.
Upon arriving in NYC, I realized I was unprepared to make use of the archives and libraries where I had reserved places. Moreover they were all in the process of transition, both physical and in their conditions of use. Bad timing. Access to archival collections has been both complicated and tightened, and, in the case of MoMA, was simply closed.
But my trouble wasn’t with libraries. It was with my own plan and intention. I want to write a useful book, clear in intention, that marks out experiences I feel are important for students of the period to understand, and to investigate further. So the ‘expansion’ is into questions, doors opening along the way of what I write, or which are left unopened only shown, or just a handle jiggled before moving on.
Trouble in the Library
Andrea Callard was Colab secretary during its earliest years. So a stint with her Colab files in the NYU research library was first on my list of archival tasks. NYU has aggregated their research collections. They had fortunately reopened after a renovation bare days before my arrival, however their access procedures have changed, requiring online requests for everything. The new system is still a little squeaky, and I myself had not changed gears.
The kind of bumbling around among the different archives and their collections that I recall from working there before is no longer possible. In years past one would enter the Fales collection, with its oil paintings and oriental carpets, and page through a book describing the collections, order folders from a box, be reminded of another connection, and other another box. Or go to Tamiment with its vitrines of extraordiary old political news, sparking new connections, and have a whole box put onto your desk.
Now everything must be submitted in advance online, and all must be prepared from the online descriptions. Contact with the material is entirely e-mediated. Moreover, there is no ‘item level description’ of folders, leaving one to guess what might be in them. A folder may contain only one card, or it might contain an undiscovered 12 page manuscript – you can’t know until you open it yourself. The people were nice and helpful for the most part, although there is always at least one type of archivist who really only wants to serve you one folder at a time, and wants you to sit at the desk until it comes. And when you go to lunch the box goes back to general storage, so you have to wait for it to come back out on the truck. Those are sqeaks.
So bumble one will, and bumble I did, although not in the way that I had hoped. Seated in the newly built antiseptic room with an overlook of the NYU housing project and its tree-lined streets I realized that I was going institutionally insane, and in fact wasting my time.
Into the Weeds with Early Colab
I have read things written about Colab that I think are basically not true. So I was with Andrea’s files to refresh my vague memories of those years of meetings. (My own papers from those years were destroyed by subtenants in a 1987 loft disaster.) After working with Andrea’s Colab box, I realized that during Colab’s first years there were very few written minutes, or even written agendas. In my ‘reconstructed memory’, I think what happened is that Andrea read aloud from her notes and asked if anyone had anything to add. Coleen Fitzgibbon mentioned that she had some audio recordings of early meetings, so that might indeed be verified.
The actual agendas of monies to be voted (or not) to ABC No Rio in 1980 are in Robert Goldman’s papers in his house, not at NYU, and not in ABC No Rio’s institutional archives, which I also visited.
Finally I realized that Andrea’s Colab box couldn’t answer many of my basic questions. Ergo, there is no administrative history of Collaborative Projects, no account of how the group functioned and how that evolved. So that’s a project for the future.
“Established 1978”
The group called Colab began to coalesce around 1977. The core of it was art students in the newly-established Whitney Independent Study Program. They were inspired by the older artists who talked to them – about the Art Workers Coalition of 1969-70, about European politics, about institutional prejudices and the realities of the art market. Most of those young artists also worked for the older ones. Out of this cloud of people, young artists working in various disciplines who knew each other from living downtown, a group formed. Many people didn’t believe in such a formation. Some opposed the not-for-profit incorporation which was necessary to apply for funds. Others hated meetings. So they drifted away, sometimes starting with a project and not continuing.
For example, I discovered – (again, not noted in the archival descriptions!) – a long text by James Nares about All Color News, the early cable TV news show that straddled Colab’s nascent period. Nares did not participate in ACN, although nearly 40 years later s/he made a film called The Street.
Well, that’s a start… on a planned series of posts around my researches in NYC in fall ‘19. Blogs turn into books, as happened with Occupation Culture, so the same thing is gonna happen here. Stay tuned….
LINKS
Curt Hoppe’s “Downtown Portraits”, Spring 2019
https://www.howlarts.org/event/curt-hoppe-downtown-portraits/
Image is from Bowery Boogie blog review of show at Bernaducci Gallery, May 2019;
https://www.boweryboogie.com/2019/05/standing-tall-with-curt-hoppes-downtown-portraits/
“Basquiat: The Artist and His New York Scene,” spring 2019, at Schunck, Heerlen, NL
https://basquiat.schunck.nl/exhibition/?lang=en
See also: review by 'Camee' at: https://www.amsterdamstreetart.com/basquiat-the-artist-and-his-new-york-scene/
Sara Driver, “Boom for Real” (2018)
https://www.boomforrealfilm.com/
(streaming on multiple platforms)
“Zeitgeist: The Art Scene of Teenage Basquiat”, at Howl arts gallery, 2018
https://www.howlarts.org/event/zeitgeist-the-art-scene-of-teenage-basquiat-2/
“Nicolas Moufarrege: Recognize My Sign” at Queens Museum, 2019-20
https://queensmuseum.org/2019/06/nicolas-moufarrege
Defacement, painted by Jean-Michel Basquiat on the wall of Keith Haring’s studio in 1983, is about the death of Michael Stewart
https://www.guggenheim.org/exhibition/basquiats-defacement-the-untold-story
NYU’s finding aid for Andrea Callard papers
http://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/fales/callard/
“All Color News” sampler at Ubuweb, ca. 1978
http://www.ubu.com/film/colab_news.html
nearly 18 minutes of James Nares’ "The Street" (2013), with audio by Thurston Moore
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2kMMpkN_F0
