Me and Becky Howland in Berlin for the "Real Estate Show Revisited" exhibition in 2014
Last year and early this, before the Virus, before the death of George Floyd and then of my mother, all the epochal events that have turned our times to shit – I wrote a book. Two books, actually, both of them memoirs. Was it “shit”, really, that our times have been turned into? Events have surely sucked us into a different world, with a new awareness of the catastrophe, and an inability to go on as before. That “before” was the time of my memoirs.
To get back on track amidst these massive ongoing disruptions and new demands in my own and collective life is challenging. The track is swiftly covered by new sand.
The first of these memoirs will be a physical book. The second, which came out of my research trip to New York City in the fall of 2019 I will mine for a blog over the course of the coming months.
What Makes You Think Your Life Is Memoir Material?
As a fresh-faced kid, I wrote for Artforum and Art-Rite in the mid-1970s, then joined the artists’ group Colab early on. I organized the Real Estate Show and ABC No Rio, and participated in the Times Square Show in 1980. Writing and typing for the East Village Eye , I had a ringside seat at the downtown New York art show.
As a video artist during the No Wave era and after, he produced numerous shows for Colab’s artists’ TV series, I launched the MWF Video Club artists’ distribution project which persisted until 2002.
In the ‘90s I settled down, took a PhD in art history, and published Art Gangs in 2011, a history of NYC artists’ collectives from 1969 to 1984.
From a wet-behind-the-ears critic in 1974 to a precarious academic 25 years later, this memoir charts some 30 years in New York City’s art world. For me, this gradually became a political world as first Reagan and then the Bushes took over the country’s government and wrought their dire mischiefs.
Beyond authorial vanity, I dearly hope this project describing my life in autonomous cultural organizing will be of some use to those trying the same today.
A Summary of the First Book, Maybe Titled “Art Worker”
Part One – A Critic Changes His Stripes
Arrival in New York City to work for Artforum
Art Worker starts with my first visits to New York City as a child, my mother’s city, then as a tourist on the way to Europe. We stayed with a friend from our university in California, an aspiring artist. He was first in Soho and, upon our return, in the Lower East Side. In 1974 I took an internship with Artforum magazine, and worked for the editor John Coplans. I had a journalism background with the university student paper, covering art in Los Angeles, and earthworks in the west. The NYC Artforum office of those years was an intense place. [Newman, 2000] I researched for John Coplans’ crusading articles against the Pasadena Art Museum. I lived in a bunkbed in Soho with weird roommates. I soon became a reviewer for Artforum, and socialized with my fellow art writers.
Artforum editor John Coplans with Angela Westwater and... some intern. (Photo via Artforum.com)
These years saw encounters with well-known artists and art venues – Gordon Matta-Clark, the AIR womens’ gallery, Jean Dupuy, Stefan Eins, Willoughby Sharp and Liza Bear of Avalanche magazine. I met and liked Fluxus artists, many through René Block’s gallery. I hung out at 112 Greene Street, wrote about their shows, and talked with Gerry Hovagimyan (later GH). I began to work with Art-Rite editors Edit deAk and Walter “Mike” Robinson who had started a kind of community-based giveaway art magazine. [Art-Rite, 2019] I organized an exhibition of Joseph Beuys multiples at my home school of UCR in California. Working with Block and Ronald Feldman galleries, it was the first institutional exhibition of that artist in the U.S.. Together with Edit and Mike of Art-Rite, we produced a catalogue.
Escape from Soho
I began to meet artists my own age (early- to mid-20s), a group who later formed Collaborative Projects – aka Colab. This well-known assembly-based artists’ group lasted over 10 years, and was the linchpin of my life in NYC. I wrote about the nascent group for Artforum, and got fired by Max Kozloff, who succeeded Coplans as editor. I was then rooming with Marc Miller, an artist and art historian on the Bowery. I started to make art myself, and earned money at the trade of typesetting after my writing career ended. I ended up working as a freelance typesetter for a circuit of left magazines.
I soon moved to an apartment on Houston Street next door to Robin Winters. There I found myself in the thick of the artist founders of Colab, and around the corner from CBGBs. Many of them I had already met at Stefan Eins’ 3 Mercer Store since they showed there before the group formed. After incorporating as a non-profit, Colab won government grant monies to enable their diverse activities.
Robin Winters. (Photo by Tom Warren)
Stefan Eins. (Photo via 98Bowery.com)
The Houston Street apartment was on a street of criminals. I consorted with my neighbor Nick the Fence, and met early telephone hackers. I hung out with a carpenter up the street, Steve Stollman, whose shop made newsstands and became a center of bicycle activism.
The first Colab project I worked on was the “All Color News” cable television show. The group included the Ahearn brothers, John and Charlie, Tom Otterness, Scott and Beth B and others. This led on to the “Potato Wolf” live cable TV show, which engaged me strongly. I worked closely wth Mitch Corber, a performance artist, who had made a provocative trip to Harlem in blackface makeup. We hitchhiked to New Orleans and back. During the mid-’70s I regularly hitched across the country between NYC and LA.
No Wave and Punk Art
The punk music scene was happening at CBGBs near my apartment. I got to know Diego Cortez, artist and emerging macher on the No Wave scene. He was punking out, and getting into music management. We went pub crawling with Kathy Acker. Diego was impatient with group process, and quit Colab.
Marc Miller organized the “Punk Art” show in Washington, D.C. A group of us went down to shoot short films there. Artists in Colab were fascinated by the European terrorist movements. This interest was reflected in Colab’s X Magazine project. My graphic arts trade provided resources for making that journal. I produced the Terrorist News Annual zine, working with Robert Cooney and James (now Jamie) Nares. We filmed secretly at the socialist Guardian newspaper offices where I worked the nightshift.
X magazine made 3 issues
A benefit concert for X Magazine featured a number of No Wave bands and I filmed it. Diego went to Germany with Anya Phillips to attend the trial of RAF member Holger Meins. Semiotext(e) magazine produced two issues on German and Italian autonomous left movements, edited by Sylvere Lotringer, Diego’s roommate. Enter radical theory. I attended the “Schizo-Culture” conference and read Foucault and Deluze and Guatarri.
Scheming Up an Occupation
I participated in some of Colab’s early loft exhibitions – “Doctors and Dentists”, the “Manifesto Show”, and others. I also did performances with Tom Otterness and Robert Cooney in Tribeca. I met Becky Howland, and we became lovers. I met her roommates Ann Messner and Peter Moennig, and Tribeca neighbors Christy Rupp and Joseph Nechvatal.
Me, Becky, Peter, Ann and Bobby G (Robert Goldman) conspired to make the “Real Estate Show,” an exhibition as occupation of an abandoned city-owned building on January 1, 1980. Our issues were gentrification and lack of spaces for artists. Many Colab artists participated. The occupation was shut down, but we made the newspapers, and city officials negotiated. They offered us a storefront to work in. We opened ABC No Rio in February of 1980. Colab voted us money. We strived to run a white art venue in a working class Hispanic barrio without being agents of gentrification (an impossibility).
The Real Estate Show. (Photo by Anne Messner)
We publicized our shows by putting posters up on the street for our events. Lower Manhattan was a rich environment of street art, matching the riot of graffiti art in the subways. This popular art movement among young NYC people of color was starting to leak into the white artworld. Stefan Eins opened Fashion Moda in a ruined storefront in the South Bronx in 1978, and Colab artists began to come uptown. The first formal art exhibition of the new wave of graffiti artists took place there. John Ahearn developed his live casting sculpture practice with Rigoberto Torres, a Bronx artist. Tom Otterness began his multiple sculpture practice. Justen Ladda painted monumental murals in an abandoned school.
Colab’s Times Square Show and After
John and Tom found a rental building and started organizing the “Times Square Show” for the summer of ‘80. Colab unanimously voted money for the project. I was working on publicity in the lobby when Jean-Michel Basquiat walked in. We made a sign together. He went upstairs to hang out in the Fashion Lounge, painted on the wall and wrote SAMO© there. It was the first exhibition of this ill-starred wunderkind.
The TSS was a hit, with coverage in the Village Voice newspaper, and major art magazines, with articles by Jeffrey Deitch and Lucy Lippard. This was unprecedented for an autonomous exhibition, and it has come to be seen as epochal. Both federal and New York State grants came in to Colab and ABC No Rio. Soon after, cultural venues began to sprout on the Lower East Side, especially in the East Village. It was a rough disturbed neighborhood, as I saw almost daily walking up Avenue B to work at the East Village Eye magazine, through what was a busy open-air drug market.
TSS poster by Jane Dickson and Charlie Ahearn
We made shows at No Rio, and had performance events of all kinds. Nuyorican poets read there. I produced a literary anthology with the poetry curator, Josh Gosciak. We also used the place as a workshop to make props for Potato Wolf TV at evening “painting parties”.
Other artists’ spaces and groups active on the Lower East Side (LES) included Group Material on 10th Street and the PAD/D political art group. The problem of gentrification, inspiration for the Real Estate Show, was becoming pressing on the LES. No Rio collaborated on the “Not For Sale” project which sought to network artists to contest the process.
I was working at the East Village Eye as a typesetter. The art editors were first Walter Robinson and then Carlo McCormick. The Eye moved to El Bohio, a large former school run as a social center by Puerto Rican activists. Later the Eye moved to Broadway, closer to my apartment. The last art editor before the magazine folded was me.
NEXT: Art After Midnight
NOTES and LINKS
Amy Newman, Challenging Art: Artforum 1962–1974 (2000)
http://www.caareviews.org/reviews/31#.X573B1Ao82w
Walter Robinson, Edit DeAk, Joshua Cohn, eds., Art-Rite (2019)
https://www.printedmatter.org/catalog/54596/
"All Color News" on Ubuweb
https://ubu.com/film/colab_news.html
Punk Art Exhibition, 1978
https://98bowery.com/punk-years/punk-art-show
Coleen Fitzgibbon and Alan Moore, "X Magazine Benefit [Full Movie]" – YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgsa45uXBFU
The Real Estate Show, NYC, 1980
https://98bowery.com/return-to-the-bowery/abcnorio-the-real-estate-show/#real-estate-show
The East Village Eye
https://www.east-village-eye.com/index2.html
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