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.
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/
No comments:
Post a Comment