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