Edit DeAk, Pat Place of Bush Tetras, and a friend in 1981. Photo by Paula Court
This is the third post from my memoir project, an account of my life in the NYC artworld. This post continues the summary of the not-yet-published book. The focus this time is on some of my relations with women, the nexus of Times Square where Colab did their 1980 show, and the increasing political turn of much of our work.
“Les Girls”
Women have played key roles in my life. They were also the backbone of Colab, its administrative muscle, although most of them did not achieve the success of many of their male peers. I was a feminist ally in college in California (UCR) as part of an activist political group. I strived to realize these ideals in my relationships, but I could not fathom the east coast intellectual currents of Lacanian feminism. I lost my first artist girlfriend to the great Southwest. I met a weaver on the Grey Rabbit bus to Boston, but this affair also did not last. She didn’t like my NYC friends.
"Vivienne in the green dress," NYC, 1980. Photo by Nan Goldin
I met Vivienne Dick at the Ear Inn, a Fluxus hangout, where she was a waitress. She put a piece in X Magazine, then started making films. I lost her to a head-banging No Wave bass guitarist. She worked first with the singer and ranter Lydia Lunch in two shorts. Lunch had a powerful presence, and strong narrative instincts. She had an influential career in late ‘70s underground films, with Vivienne, then with Beth and Scott B, and in the ‘80s with Richard Kern. In the forthcoming book I analyze her dark appeal.
Lydia Lunch, n.d.. Photo by Marcia Resnick
I started the MWF Video Club with Sophie Vieille, a fashion artist. She was well-connected with people in Colab I didn’t know well, and developed titles for us with No Wave cinema artists. MWF was unlike other art video distribution projects, like EAI, VDB, and MoMA which scorned consumer distribution. Many artists did not want to go with us for that reason. We had Colab TV’s Potato Wolf series, and other artists’ television works in our list. For many years we were the only distro for Glenn O’Brien’s “TV Party”. He could never believe we weren’t making money off him.
Video Distribution and David Wojnarowicz
The poet Michael Carter, editor of the Lower East Side journal Red Tape, joined MWF. He was friends with an emerging crew of filmmakers called the Cinema of Transgression who were involved in consumer sales to a national audience of punks. The group was named by Nick Zedd, who sold with MWF. Two of them, Richard Kern and Tommy Turner, made films with David Wojnarowicz (d. 1992).
Michael Carter, my long-time collaborator on MWF Video Club, in Prague in 1993. Photo by Robert Carrithers
Decades later, the Wojnarowicz retrospective exhibition came to Madrid in 2019 where I live. I prepared a screening for the Reina Sofia museum, and researched his life. I learned he was a regular along with other artists of Colab at Tin Pan Alley, a bar near Times Square. [A link to my blog post on this research from May ‘19 is in the list below.] The bar was run by a feminist activist, and was a center for late-night workers, hookers, drag queens, and minor criminals. It became popular as a subcultural hangout. Jane Dickson lived in the neighborhood with her husband Charlie Ahearn. Cara Perlman, Nan Goldin, Kiki Smith and Ulli Rimkus all worked there. (Ulli later started the Max Fish bar on the Lower East Side.)
Wojnarowicz had cruised as a child hustler in Times Square. What was it like for him being there years later as an artist? In his diaries Wojnarowicz writes about about revisiting NYC streets over the years. Tin Pan Alley embodied the nexus of art and crime which has been erased from Times Square by its redevelopment.
Wojnarowicz was working with Kiki Smith when I visited her studio. Kiki worked on the Potato Wolf shows, culminating in her work with a collective of Colab women to make the show “Cave Girls”, a fantasy documentary about a tribe of technologically advanced prehistoric women. Some scenes of “Cave Girls” were shot on film in the backyard at ABC No Rio. “Cave Girls” had a deluxe screening at ABC.
The MWF Video Club had a reprise at the New Museum in 2014, when they organized XFR STN. This was a show as activity, containing a technical setup to convert analog video recordings to digital media, and rescue old computer files (digital forensics). The project won a prize, and led to the formation of the XFR Collective of moving image archivists. The collective today is working on the MWF Video Club archive, converting many titles and uploading them to Archive.org.
Part Three – Lower Manhattan and Beyond
How to Be Political
In many ways, the Times Square Show was a women’s show. The exhibition was full of political art, especially by ‘second wave feminist’ artists. One major strain of content was rage about violence towards women. Performance artist Diane Torr performed in the “rape room”. She also worked with Disband, an a capella women’s group. Like other women’s bands of the day, Disband wrote songs in response to the cat-calling of girls on the streets.
Diane Torr and Ruth Peyser's performance at the Times Square Show, 1980. (Not positive, no.) Photograph by Caterina Borelli
The second major strain of content was sex positivity and queer aesthesis, an embrace of non-normative lifestyles. Terence Sellers, dominatrix, writer, and friend of early punk trendsetter Anya Philips performed at the TSS. Eva de Carlo made the installation Nest as a prospective site of unspecific bacchanales. Jack Smith appeared in a TV ad for the show, and his troupe performed.
“Uh Oh,” Republicans Are Coming
I was taking political positions at the time. There was great unhappiness among us with Ronald Reagan’s regime, especially with U.S. support for brutal counter-revolutions in Central America. We knew refugee artists. Politics, however, was not trending in the lower Manhattan artworld during the early ‘80s. It was trumped by careerism as new money flowed into the downtown artworld, encouraged by art’s ‘coolness’ and new Reagan tax shelters. Yet ABC No Rio was a political place. We were there as an open door white-run art space in a Hispanic barrio. That seems an impossible position today, but then it was okay. ABC No Rio has remained a place where strongly political projects are possible in an entirely gentrified lower Manhattan.
We were inspired by Stefan Eins’ Fashion Moda in the South Bronx. Downtown white artists, including ABC No Rio artists, went to work there. Graffiti, or aerosol art, began its artworld acceptance after an exhibition there, right before the Times Square Show and the opening of the Fun Gallery.
Crowd outside Fashion Moda and John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres doing life casting inside, 1979. Photo by Christof Kohlhöfer
For ABC No Rio and Fashion Moda, the issue was integration. This goes back to the 1969 Art Workers Coalition, and the Black and Puerto Rican artists’ caucuses. Most graffiti writers were people of color. Both Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat were associated with graffiti during their rise. Their success helped to open a path for many “writers” to become artists in the mainstream artworld. Even so, their path was steep and difficult.
Graffiti on Canvas
There were differences between graffiti artists and other mainly white artists. There were also differences within the writers’ community itself. This was revealed at a panel discussion I organized during Martin Wong’s retrospective. The Chino-Latino painter was the most important collector of early NYC graffiti art.
I knew of “Fab Five Freddy” Brathwaite’s key role as an interlocutor between worlds. I learned of Rammellzee’s rich ideology of graffiti, as propounded in an interview with Edit deAk. I worked for David Schmidlapp and the IGTimes graffiti magazine (they preferred “aerosol art”). The murder of Michael Stewart by transit police for writing on the subway traumatized our downtown community.
Almost no graffiti artists came to ABC No Rio, where I worked. They were all on the path of commercial success. Our gallery engaged politics by participating in networked political exhibitions around anti-nuclear and anti-gentrification themes, and in support of Central American resistance.
Poster protesting the police assault on Michael Stewart, before his death. (Probably by David Wojnarowicz)
NEXT: Hard Left – And a Ruckus in D.C.
LINKS
Vivienne Dick, an esteemed Irish filmmaker
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1997609/
Vivienne Dick en Espanol, with links to some films
http://pov.com.mx/vivienne-dick-el-espiritu-no-wave-en-super-8/
Lydia Lunch article en Espanol, also with links to some films
http://piñataproductions.com/lydia-lunch-im-not-punk-although-im-more-punk-than-you-punks/
Kiki Smith & collective, "Cave Girls", 1981
https://archive.org/details/03CaveGirlsH264
Diane Torr's interview re. Times Square Show, 2011
http://www.timessquareshowrevisited.com/accounts/diane-torr.html
MWF Video Club, our last catalogue (defunct; no orders)
http://www.brickhaus.com/amoore/
May 2019 blog post on Wojnarowicz in Times Square
http://artgangs.blogspot.com/2019/05/wojnarowicz-in-madrid-2-old-times-square.html
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