Anton van Dalen, "Luxury City", 1986. Part of PADD portfolio Concrete Crisis. Anton crossed paths with most of the political art groups in the LES
This is the fourth 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 is on ABC No Rio’s political engagements, the general politics of the Colab group, and the period of “getting over” in the early ‘80s.
Hard Left
My main gig during the first years of the 1980s was ABC No Rio. That venue came out of the Real Estate Show occupation, and from the start in 1980 we were a political space. One of our first shows was of a group of communist poster artists from San Francisco. We collaborated with the PAD/D group (Political Art Documentation and Distribution), which began as an archiving project. (Gregory Sholette, active in that group, wrote about its processes of study, archiving and exhibition.) They held regular meetings at El Bohio and presentation events at the Franklin Furnace, and set up distribution conditions for political art nationally.
Among the artists of Colab there were two strains of politics, one soft (liberal) and one hard (left), and this played out in our NYC artworld of those days. Stefan Eins always denied that Fashion Moda was political; for him it was scientific. Even so, F/M’s placement as a notable contemporary art venue in the South Bronx was strong cultural politics. Its presence responded to demands for the decentralization of cultural resources first declared 10 years earlier by the Art Workers Coalition in 1969.
Reagan Years
I was familiar with left politics from my trade work as a typesetter. The Reagan years mobilized the left, and with it many artists. Group Material emerged to make themed group exhibitions with a close blend of art and politics. Lucy Lippard, a founder of PAD/D, supported their work with reviews in the Village Voice. Until she was fired.
Posters put up on the streets at night by the Black Cat poster collective, which organized for a time at Fashion Moda, were examples of autonomous left political art. A recent exhibition in Australia of the collective’s work of 30 years by Robert Cooney brought this clandestine group to the light. Their methods echo those of political artists today.
Colab after the TSS
Colab continued after the Times Square Show, but the group was immediately upstaged by a former member. Diego Cortez’s large group show “New York New Wave” at P.S. 1 kicked off recognition for numerous artists. Busy careers began for many involved in Colab. These years of luxury and careerism in the arts were flush with collector cash. ABC No Rio was not part of that world.
Colab did a number of shows immediately – one in Chicago with collaborative murals, another in Coney Island, working with a group of artists there. Becky Howland and I visited Los Angeles to show and talk about ABC No Rio. We had local shows as well. No Rio’s sublimely silly Cardboard Air Band had a gig at the Mudd Club. We lip-synched to pre-recorded songs and ‘played’ painted cardboard instruments. A big ABC No Rio production at the Kitchen in 1983, the “Island of Negative Utopia,” capped the early Colab involvement in ABC No Rio.
Is Colab (Still) Punk?
Colab planned a big show in Washington, D.C., at the invitation of the Washington Project for the Arts. John Morton, who produced “Murder, Suicide and Junk” at ABC No Rio, was the lead organizer. He was a well-known avant-punk musician in Cleveland.
What is a punk? Was Colab punk? Many of us, including myself, ‘punked out’ at one point. I was a big fan of the MC5 in college, a group thought of as proto-punk.
After some musicians gained careers from punk and its arty cousin No Wave in the later ‘70s, the movement spread around the country. Regional hardcore punk scenes developed, with little-to-no radio play or coverage by mainstream media. DIY media, zines and cassettes proliferated as the counter-media of an underground economy. The dance style was mosh pits and stage-diving. The national scene was very different from the earlier New York scene. At the No Wave art punk concerts I attended, nobody moved.
The NYC hardcore scene in ‘83, the year of the Ritz show, was not on the radar of people in Colab. The bands were far more political than No Wave had been. ABC No Rio in the ‘90s would become an important venue in the circuit of subcultural hardcore punk.
Trouble in D.C.
Becky Howland’s poster for the Ritz show spotlights pollution. “Colab Hits the Ritz” was something of a return, since some of us were in the 1978 “Punk Art” show, also sponsored by Washington Project for the Arts. The “Punk Art” show was histrionic but actually quite unpolitical, whereas Colab’s show in ‘83 had lots of critical political content. Reception by the local art press was loudly negative.
It clearly ruffled feathers in government. The show was closed for “safety reasons” by order of the city. Colab soon began to have problems with the federal arts agency, the NEA. John Morton and Holly Block, then officers of Colab, faced big bureaucratic hurdles.
NEXT: High Tide of East Village Art
LINKS
Tiernan Morgan, "Artist Anton van Dalen on the East Village, Saul Steinberg, and Pigeon Keeping", September 6, 2016 https://hyperallergic.com/315184/artist-anton-van-dalen-on-the-east-village-saul-steinberg-and-pigeon-keeping/
Tiernan Morgan, “Art in the 1980s: The Forgotten History of PAD/D”, Hyperallergic, April 17, 2014 https://hyperallergic.com/117621/art-in-the-1980s-the-forgotten-history-of-padd/
See also Gregory Sholette. "A Collectography of PAD/D Political Art Documentation and Distribution: A 1980's Activist Art and Networking Collective" (PDF) at www.gregorysholette.com
Justen Ladda, "Book Burning", 1981. This huge mural was painted on the stage in the auditorium of an abandoned school in the South Bronx
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