Nightclubs were critical in building the culture of downtown NYC during the ‘70s and ‘80s. The Mudd Club began with close participation by ex-Colab member Diego Cortez. The Real Estate Show and ABC No Rio’s Cardboard Air Band performed there. Tina L’hotsky, a No Wave filmmaker, was “Queen of the Mudd”.
Nightclubs in the ‘80s held regular art exhibitions. The role of the doorman, promotions, drink tickets, and the mechanics of filling the club with patrons gave artists a privileged role. They were the early evening crowd.
I wish there was a clear history of Colab, but there is not. That seemed important to me, and I searched hard for a cogent story of the group – an “institutional history” as I thought of it. After the Times Square Show in 1980, the group seemed to have many opportunities. But artists started to leave, working to prepare their shows in the galleries they were newly welcomed into. Even so, Colab continued for eight more years. They formulated a “Rule C” of collaboration, to specify who could get funds from the group. They launched the A More Store multiples project, to “cut out the middleman”. A few years later, the art bookstore Printed Matter produced the A More Store catalogue. In 2016 Printed Matter published A Book about Colab, capping a long relationship.
”No Thanks”
The New Museum offered Colab a show in 1981. It didn’t work out. Fashion Moda did a show at the New Museum as part of that same series. To this day, the museum blames Colab for cancelling their participation. As a result, the group lost credibility with institutions.
For a time, ABC No Rio was part of Colab. It was run by a troika of me, Becky Howland and Robert Goldman, aka Bobby G. Bobby moved into the basement, and faced all the difficulties of the delapidated building in a rough neighborhood. He had many adventures fighting the junkies in the hallway. Almost from the start, No Rio was in conflict with the city agency which owned and (mis)-managed the building. Bobby started painting in the basement, and Becky built a sprawling backyard sculptural installation called Brainwash.
Art stars emerged after Diego Cortez’s 1981 “New York New Wave” show at P.S. 1. It was a mass media and market friendly followup to the subcultural Times Square Show. Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat became breakout stars, and changed the landscape of downtown NYC art. Today much of the art history of the period is organized around their careers, which have been the focus of numerous exhibitions.
Part Two – My Film and TV Career
“Party Noise” and Potato Wolf TV
In this section, I take a closer look at the moving image production that was so important for early Colab.
Video art was big in the 1970s. I was writing about it for Artforum. Galleries were showing video. Liza Bear and Willoughby Sharp of Avalanche were involved in the avant-garde technological edge of video as communication, which had a strong influence on Colab. Public access cable TV was becoming available.
The pre-Colab All Color News cable TV project was an ambitious program of live shows in-studio and films converted to video. Cara Perlman and Bobby G were the first producers of the Potato Wolf live television series.
I began to make films at the same time as Edit DeAk and Mike Robinson of Art-Rite were playing around with Super-8 film. I produced “Party Noise”, a serial melodrama about artists’ lives, intended for Potato Wolf. I had earlier shot small films with friends at the “Punk Art” show in D.C. Like many other tyro filmmakers of the time, I went to bars to find actors and musicians to work with. That first film effort included Scott Johnson and Paul MacMahon.
Peter Fend in an undated video (1981?)
Is Fend Bucky?
The world-redesigning ecological artist Peter Fend worked on Potato Wolf, producing his own shows and appearing in others. TV was a vehicle for him to promote his ideas. These included bio-remediation of vast terrains, redrawing borders on bio-regional lines, and replacement of fossil fuels. His ambition to effect change in the real world using strategies of art far exceeded others in Colab. He saw collaboration as the way to realize his ideas, and created his own group. Space Force/OECD ended up selling satellite data to network television. Fend credited his work with Colab in an interview with October magazine.
Live TV production with Potato Wolf was thrilling. All that preparation climaxed in 30 intense minutes of live cablecast. Many Colab artists participated. Mitch Corber played a central role, due both to his enthusiasm and his technical capabilities. He had a very personal style of editing. His talent for animating situations always came with a side dish of provocations. His actions were problematic during these years, and he alienated many. Despite these problems, he and I had a long working relationship.
Joseph Nechvatal and Gregory Lehmann in "Strife", 1983
Cardboard Consciousness
Due to the centrality of impromptu sets in the cablecasts, Potato Wolf developed a “cardboard consciousness” as an aspect of its work. The aesthetic broadened. My major studio TV projects were “Reptile Mind” and “Strife”. These were political allegories, future fictions of a revolutionary anarchist city. During shooting, my brother was killed, and I lost the heart to go on with the rather humoresquely conceived production.
Some while later, Colab and Potato Wolf did a show at Hallwalls in Buffalo. We built sets and backdrops for live shoots in the gallery. Terry Mohre and I then conceived the idea of a Studio Melee. Paul McMahon invited Colab to show the Buffalo work in an NYC gallery. We built an interactive coin-operated video installation called “The Jungle”.
Studio Melee and MWF Video Club
Based on this work, Studio Melee received a federal arts grant. We rented a studio in Brooklyn to work on a large-scale version of the concept of a participatory video-making machine. The studio was full of asbestos, so we broke the lease and found another one in then-desolate Bushwick. We fixed it up. By then we’d lost a bunch of money and energy, and could not realize our ambitious concept. We did one final show at City College. The management of the studio space, renting to other artists, ended in a disastrous loss of artwork, tools and papers to sublettors. Failure is hard. But we’d bitten off more than we could chew. We basically wanted to make a self-actuated autonomous Disneyland.
Terry Mohre in the "Studio Melee" at Hallwalls, 1982
I spent a month in Berlin as part of an exchange show with John Fekner, Peter Moennig, Anne Messner and others. I worked with David Blair to produce an installation based on the history of television, work he has continued to elaborate with his Wax or The Discovery of Television Among the Bees. The Berliners returned to NYC later in a show at the Storefront for Art & Architecture.
Sophie Vieille (aka Sophie VDT) in the window of the fashion lounge at the Times Square Show, 1980. Photto by Francine Keery
Colab changed as its membership turned over. Some of us worked to distribute Colab video productions. We formed the Monday/Wednesday/Friday Video Club to rent and sell artists’ and independent video on VHS. Every Monday evening MWF held salons in my tiny apartment on Houston Street.
The MWF Video project never caught fire, but it gimped along, lasting into the early 21st century as a passive distributor of artists’ videotapes.
NEXT: Some Anecdotes of Video Distribution
MWF Video Club's printed catalogue, 1986
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