Memoir #6 – Goodbye to the Burning Ruins of Youth

Dragged out punks relax by toxic fireplace; somewhere around lurks Richard Hambleton... A 1995 video by Corey Shaff (20+ min.) documents the Gas Station in its last days. (Via Gallery 98.com)

This is the sixth post from my memoir project, an account of my 30 years in the NYC artworld, and it concludes the summary of the not-yet-published book. This time the East Village art scene has crashed. Bohemian stragglers refuse to quit. They get “rentrified” out. I move to Staten Island, and try to adjust to rural calm. Get hooked up with anarchists, communists, and radical eggheads.

Exile on Staten Island

MWF Video did some shows at the 2B Gas Station, another Rivington School outpost, where the artist Mary Campbell had a studio. Linus Coraggio, a welder, and designer in metal, was the big man there. Mary and I started a relationship. We married, then both of us lost our apartments. After a long period of on-site harrassment (which was more harrassing for the harrassers than for me), I lost my apartment on Houston Street in a court case before a judge who was later jailed for massive bribe-taking. Mary was kicked out of her Brooklyn perch; a new owner claimed the whole building for his residence.

Times Up activist bicycle group meeting at Steve Stollman's Houston Street loft in the 1990s. In the days of the Critical Mass, Times Up often drew the cops.

We didn’t even look in Manhattan. And at the height of a price rise we couldn’t find anything affordable in Brooklyn.
We moved to Staten Island. I lost my typesetting job, and didn’t want to take a corporate job. Typesetting was changing with “author-generated keystrokes”. Even then it was all coding. So I went back to school in art history at the City University, Graduate Center. I thought I could maximize my years of experience in the artworld as an academic. I wrote some papers based on my experiences, but mostly the curriculum covered classic modernism and 19th century art. I started collecting antique photographs in stores upstate.

Jones Woods, an unbuilt area near our house in former "Linoleumville", Staten Island.

Leafy Green with Signs of Life

Our neighbors on Staten Island were artists, and we joined their community. Much of it centered around the Snug Harbor cultural complex. Old buildings and deep NYC history are very present on Staten Island. The borough has the most parkland of any in the city. Ex-Village Voice critic John Perrault had been the very clued-in director of the art center at Snug Harbor. His successor, Olivia Georgia, produced a number of important exhibitions of performance art.
Mary Campbell teamed up with Vivian Vasser to start a performance troupe called Day de Dada. The merry band began a decade long run of Dada parades, mail art exhibitions, and participatory performance projects.

Mary Campbell as the Eternal Knitter, at Day de Dada festival, 2002. (From MaryCampbell.net.)

Photographer and critic A.D. Coleman participated in Day de Dada events as the “derriere guard”, a role he began in the Avant-Garde Festival of 1975. (I reviewed it then for Artforum.) In 2017, Mary and Viv reprised one of Charlotte Moorman’s Avant-Garde festivals held on the oldest Staten Island ferryboat.

Commune Days

Mary and I broke up, but I stayed nearby to help care for our son. I met a group of anarchists in our neighborhood. We produced an eco-fest, including an ecologically themed exhibition called “Green Home” at Frank Shifreen’s loft on Jersey Street. I later moved into the Ganas commune, worked on their festivals, and watched the genesis of the Everything Goes Book Cafe, built by an artist from the East Village theater scene.

The public face of the Ganas commune -- The "Everything Goes Book Cafe" on Staten Island

Staten Island is provincial, and I learned how that works. It’s not a lack of information; it's an active rejection of outside influences. Mary and Viv’s Day de Dada was a way to deal with that, to do engaged art and gradually educate a conservative audience by cajoling them with a spirit of zany fun.

My Inglorious Academic Career

My first teaching job was at a community college in the Bronx. I designed a simple and nomadic method of teaching the art history survey course – library study in groups, then oral reports; visits to the Metropolitan Museum for direct observation midterm and final exams. I wanted to write my dissertation on Collaborative Projects, but David Little beat me to it. I wrote what would be published as Art Gangs (2011), on a series of artists’ groups, 1969 to 1984, among them Colab. The book was published by the anarchist press Autonomedia.

Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri at the Creative Time Summit, 2009

On my way in and out of Manhattan, I checked out a group meeting in an office near the Staten Island ferry terminal. The 16 Beaver group, run in the collective studios of Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri, was a meeting place for politically engaged artists studying in NYC institutions, and visiting the city from abroad. Their orientation was towards radical theory. So many artists and intellectuals went through 16 Beaver. It was a fascinating place, a boiler room for politically committed creative people.

A New War in the 21st Century

Through the Staten Island anarchists’ contacts, I produced an event at 16B for Ben Morea. Ben was a key anarchist revolutionary during the 1960s, a leader in the Black Mask/Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers group. He had gone underground in ‘68. Rene and Ayreen went on to work with Ben in Europe.

European theorists Brian Holmes and Franco Berardi did seminars at 16 Beaver. Yates McKee wrote Strike Art (2017), which tells about 16 Beaver’s important role in the Occupy Wall Street movement.
After I filed my dissertation, Gregory Sholette invited me to Chicago. I met his students at the Art Institute, including Nato Thompson, Josh MacPhee and Dara Greenwald. All of them would become important players in the 21st century New York artworld. Dara and Josh founded Interference Archive. Nato came to NYC and started the annual Creative Time Summit. He invited me to speak on my research into squatting in Europe.
But that’s another story, which isn't a memoir, but hopefully more like a utopian future past. I told it in Occupation Culture (2015).
This ends the summary part of my postings to the “Art Gangs” blog. In the months to come I’ll post about my research trip to New York last year – archival work and interviews.

NEXT: Return to Gotham

Memoir #5 –The Material Mirage of a Populist Artworld

Right: View of the Terminal Show in Brooklyn, 1983

This is the fifth post from my memoir project, an account of my 30 years in the NYC artworld. This post continues the summary of the not-yet-published book. The focus this time is on the East Village art movement, as viewed from the E.V. Eye in the El Bohio cultural center, hanging out at the Rivington School heavy metal sculptors joint, and the big building shows in Loisaida and Brooklyn which saw swarms of artists.

High Tide and Flipping Buildings

The East Village art movement was in full tide in the mid-1980s. After the surprise success of the Fun Gallery, which opened in 1981, over 100 art galleries opened in the Lower East Side. The district saw a wave of popular creativity as hundreds of artists took their shot in the galleries which were largely run by artists.
The East Village Eye office where I worked was in the middle of near Avenue B, near Tompkins Square Park. This vacant city school had been occupied by a group of Puerto Rican activists called CHARAS. It was home to the Nuyorican Poets Theater while Miguel Algarin was building the Poets Cafe. I worked for Miguel, which served me well when I was robbed in Tompkins Square Park carrying proofs of his book.
Like many NYC cultural projects, El Bohio was largely run by women. They worked on the neighborhood magazine, Quality of Life in Loisaida, the film and the art programs.
The East Village Eye office was a center of the scene, specializing in fashion, art and literature. Publisher Leonard Abrams and his crew were an endless source of drama as editors battled over small stakes. I typeset and sold ads for the paper. That was my day job as I worked at ABC No Rio. I met gallery owners at Civilian Warfare, Ground Zero, and others, and attended many exhibitions.
A New York art career is phasic. Mine, like many another was a series of ‘afters’. The East Village gallery scene ended abruptly. The formerly neglected and rundown Manhattan barrio became the focus of intense property speculation. Artists had been used as pawns in what would become a global playbook for gentrification. The populist moment came to an abrupt end, and participation in East Village galleries became reputational kryptonite for many artists. Walter Robinson, then working at Art in America, called this the revenge of the artworld’s old guard who had lost business to the insurgent sector.

Rivington School sculpture garden. Photo by Toyo Tsuchiya

Junk Metal Paradise

Over the years as I walked a route from my apartment to ABC No Rio, I passed a slowly rising tangle of junk sculpture called the Rivington School. I knew some artists there, and I became a regular spectator of their scene. This began as a kind of eastward drift of the Little Italy galleries of the late ‘70s – Kwok, Public Image, and the Storefront for Art & Architecture, especially Arleen Schloss’s A Space, just east of Sara D. Roosevelt Park. Arleen had ties to the old Cageian avant-garde. Her husband Texas sculptor Ray Kelly started the No Se No social club, along with two artists involved with Fluxus and mail art.
These artists flowed into the empty spaces that were briefly available. Other galleries opened on Rivington Street. Ray, Ed Higgins and others started to weld what became an enormous metal sculpture collage on a vacant lot on the corner. The Rivington School group came together as a very macho scene, with lots of drinking and drugs. They roasted pigs, to the disgust of their vegetarian neighbors. It was photographed by the Japanese emigre artist Toyo Tsuchiya. Stone sculptor Ken Hiratsuka, and Robert Parker with his iron forge worked there. Several of those artists moved on to squat buildings in the East Village during the squatters’ movement of the 1990s.

Arleen Schloss

Next door to the sculpture garden Adam Purple controlled a big squatted building, tending his extraordinary radial Garden of Eden. Unlike the drunken metal melee next door, Purple’s was a radical green scene, all recycling and composting of human excrement. Bicycle activists and designers worked there, regularly swinging by Steve Stollman’s Houston Street storefront.

Big Building Shows

1983 was a big year downtown. David Wojnarowicz and Mike Bidlo organized a guerrilla exhibition in the cavernous, doomed ship terminal on the west shore of the Hudson River. For us, management of ABC No Rio passed to other hands with the “Seven Days of Creation” continuous performance exhibition.
Many other big building art exhibitions were organized in Brooklyn as artists moved ever eastward. These shows in derelict commercial buidlings recalled the early 20th century shows of the Society for Indepedent Artists and the Salons of America, another populist moment in U.S. art. Artist and landlord Frank Shifreen organized large-building shows in Gowanus, Brooklyn.
The Plexus group put on big shows at CUANDO, another Puerto Rican social center on Second Avenue. One of them honored short-lived performance artist Ralston Farina whom I’d known in Tribeca. The last show at Cuando, which had been inactive for decades, was “Art from Ashes” after the 9/11 attack. The smoking ruins of the recently destroyed World Trade Center were visible from the roof. Afterwards the building was redeveloped.
I love big shows. They are intoxicating. The artist-organized ones prefigured the art fairs that have dominated the 21st century market art world. The “third wave” of Colab was nearly all new people. I stepped back to work on my own video projects, and the MWF Video Club.
Marc Miller and I made the ABC No Rio Dinero book (1985), a historical synthesis that marked the closure of our era there. Of course we had the book party at Danceteria.

LINKS

"East Village USA" exhibition at New Museum, 2004-05
https://archive.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/421

"It’s All True: The East Village Eye Show" at Howl! Happening Gallery, 2016
https://www.howlarts.org/event/its-all-true-the-east-village-eye-show/

“The explosive rise—and inevitable downfall—of the East Village art scene”
2019 interview with Marc Miller and Barry Blinderman, plus photo gallery
https://www.documentjournal.com/2019/09/the-explosive-rise-and-inevitable-downfall-of-the-east-village-art-scene/

Allison Meier, “A 1980s Art Experiment on an NYC Pier: From 1983 to '84, David Wojnarowicz and Mike Bidlo took over a decrepit Hudson River pier to create a collaborative and ephemeral alternative art system”
https://hyperallergic.com/338169/something-possible-everywhere-pier-34/

Shannon Geis, “Thirty Years After Famed Show, Art Carries On At Brooklyn Army Terminal”
https://turnstiletours.com/thirty-years-after-famed-show-art-carries-on-at-brooklyn-army-terminal/