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/

Memoir #4 – Hard Left & Punks Take a Bow

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.

“Power Strike” by the Black Cat Collective; the poster was also printed in the East Village Eye. It diagrams how to turn back a Con Ed power meter.

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.

The Cardboard Air Band at ABC No Rio: Left to right, Bebe Smith, Kiki Smith, Ellen Cooper, Bobby G and Walter Robinson

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.

”Colab Hits the Ritz”, poster by Becky Howland, 1983

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

Memoir #3 – Some Women and Our Places

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

Memoir #2 – Art After Midnight & On TV

This is the second post from my memoir project, written before Covid hit. The focus is my life in the NYC artworld. I wrote two books; the first will be printed, and parts of this the second will be posted on this blog. In this post, we are deep into a flash-forward history of the artists’ group Colab in its golden years, the early 1980s.

Cover of Steven Hager, Art After Midnight, 1986

Nightclubs were critical in building the culture of downtown NYC during the ‘70s and ‘80s. The Mudd Club began with close participation by ex-Colab member Diego Cortez. The Real Estate Show and ABC No Rio’s Cardboard Air Band performed there. Tina L’hotsky, a No Wave filmmaker, was “Queen of the Mudd”.
Nightclubs in the ‘80s held regular art exhibitions. The role of the doorman, promotions, drink tickets, and the mechanics of filling the club with patrons gave artists a privileged role. They were the early evening crowd.
I wish there was a clear history of Colab, but there is not. That seemed important to me, and I searched hard for a cogent story of the group – an “institutional history” as I thought of it. After the Times Square Show in 1980, the group seemed to have many opportunities. But artists started to leave, working to prepare their shows in the galleries they were newly welcomed into. Even so, Colab continued for eight more years. They formulated a “Rule C” of collaboration, to specify who could get funds from the group. They launched the A More Store multiples project, to “cut out the middleman”. A few years later, the art bookstore Printed Matter produced the A More Store catalogue. In 2016 Printed Matter published A Book about Colab, capping a long relationship.

Colab/Printed Matter artists multiple catalogue, 1983

”No Thanks”

The New Museum offered Colab a show in 1981. It didn’t work out. Fashion Moda did a show at the New Museum as part of that same series. To this day, the museum blames Colab for cancelling their participation. As a result, the group lost credibility with institutions.
For a time, ABC No Rio was part of Colab. It was run by a troika of me, Becky Howland and Robert Goldman, aka Bobby G. Bobby moved into the basement, and faced all the difficulties of the delapidated building in a rough neighborhood. He had many adventures fighting the junkies in the hallway. Almost from the start, No Rio was in conflict with the city agency which owned and (mis)-managed the building. Bobby started painting in the basement, and Becky built a sprawling backyard sculptural installation called Brainwash.

ABC No Rio in 1980; stencil for "Animals Living in Cities" by Anton Van Dalen

Art stars emerged after Diego Cortez’s 1981 “New York New Wave” show at P.S. 1. It was a mass media and market friendly followup to the subcultural Times Square Show. Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat became breakout stars, and changed the landscape of downtown NYC art. Today much of the art history of the period is organized around their careers, which have been the focus of numerous exhibitions.

Part Two – My Film and TV Career
“Party Noise” and Potato Wolf TV

In this section, I take a closer look at the moving image production that was so important for early Colab.
Video art was big in the 1970s. I was writing about it for Artforum. Galleries were showing video. Liza Bear and Willoughby Sharp of Avalanche were involved in the avant-garde technological edge of video as communication, which had a strong influence on Colab. Public access cable TV was becoming available.
The pre-Colab All Color News cable TV project was an ambitious program of live shows in-studio and films converted to video. Cara Perlman and Bobby G were the first producers of the Potato Wolf live television series.
I began to make films at the same time as Edit DeAk and Mike Robinson of Art-Rite were playing around with Super-8 film. I produced “Party Noise”, a serial melodrama about artists’ lives, intended for Potato Wolf. I had earlier shot small films with friends at the “Punk Art” show in D.C. Like many other tyro filmmakers of the time, I went to bars to find actors and musicians to work with. That first film effort included Scott Johnson and Paul MacMahon.

Peter Fend in an undated video (1981?)

Is Fend Bucky?

The world-redesigning ecological artist Peter Fend worked on Potato Wolf, producing his own shows and appearing in others. TV was a vehicle for him to promote his ideas. These included bio-remediation of vast terrains, redrawing borders on bio-regional lines, and replacement of fossil fuels. His ambition to effect change in the real world using strategies of art far exceeded others in Colab. He saw collaboration as the way to realize his ideas, and created his own group. Space Force/OECD ended up selling satellite data to network television. Fend credited his work with Colab in an interview with October magazine.
Live TV production with Potato Wolf was thrilling. All that preparation climaxed in 30 intense minutes of live cablecast. Many Colab artists participated. Mitch Corber played a central role, due both to his enthusiasm and his technical capabilities. He had a very personal style of editing. His talent for animating situations always came with a side dish of provocations. His actions were problematic during these years, and he alienated many. Despite these problems, he and I had a long working relationship.

Joseph Nechvatal and Gregory Lehmann in "Strife", 1983

Cardboard Consciousness

Due to the centrality of impromptu sets in the cablecasts, Potato Wolf developed a “cardboard consciousness” as an aspect of its work. The aesthetic broadened. My major studio TV projects were “Reptile Mind” and “Strife”. These were political allegories, future fictions of a revolutionary anarchist city. During shooting, my brother was killed, and I lost the heart to go on with the rather humoresquely conceived production.
Some while later, Colab and Potato Wolf did a show at Hallwalls in Buffalo. We built sets and backdrops for live shoots in the gallery. Terry Mohre and I then conceived the idea of a Studio Melee. Paul McMahon invited Colab to show the Buffalo work in an NYC gallery. We built an interactive coin-operated video installation called “The Jungle”.

Studio Melee and MWF Video Club

Based on this work, Studio Melee received a federal arts grant. We rented a studio in Brooklyn to work on a large-scale version of the concept of a participatory video-making machine. The studio was full of asbestos, so we broke the lease and found another one in then-desolate Bushwick. We fixed it up. By then we’d lost a bunch of money and energy, and could not realize our ambitious concept. We did one final show at City College. The management of the studio space, renting to other artists, ended in a disastrous loss of artwork, tools and papers to sublettors. Failure is hard. But we’d bitten off more than we could chew. We basically wanted to make a self-actuated autonomous Disneyland.

Terry Mohre in the "Studio Melee" at Hallwalls, 1982

I spent a month in Berlin as part of an exchange show with John Fekner, Peter Moennig, Anne Messner and others. I worked with David Blair to produce an installation based on the history of television, work he has continued to elaborate with his Wax or The Discovery of Television Among the Bees. The Berliners returned to NYC later in a show at the Storefront for Art & Architecture.

Sophie Vieille (aka Sophie VDT) in the window of the fashion lounge at the Times Square Show, 1980. Photto by Francine Keery

Colab changed as its membership turned over. Some of us worked to distribute Colab video productions. We formed the Monday/Wednesday/Friday Video Club to rent and sell artists’ and independent video on VHS. Every Monday evening MWF held salons in my tiny apartment on Houston Street.
The MWF Video project never caught fire, but it gimped along, lasting into the early 21st century as a passive distributor of artists’ videotapes.

NEXT: Some Anecdotes of Video Distribution

MWF Video Club's printed catalogue, 1986

The Prescient Fire of Cinema

Picture: John Coplans (at right), my and Lizzie’s ex-boss at Artforum, portrays a police chief in Born in Flames.

As I post these chunks of memoir, I saw Born in Flames, the 1983 film by Lizzie Borden which was recently remastered and streaming on Filmin.es. It’s a classic – and rather unique, as the Village Voice wrote, "perhaps the sole entry in the hybrid genre of radical-lesbian-feminist sci-fi vérité".
My own “Strife” was in production when Born came out. That work, despite its anarchist topic and its weirdness was a more conventional cartoon with a stereotypical plot line. Born in Flames struck me with both its shocking newness for its times, and its immediate relevance to contemporary politics.
It’s a work of political imagination, a fulfilled wish for both a socialist government and revolution-within-a-revolution. The politics of the city Borden sketches with her minimal No Wave cinematic means are liberal. Socialists, not Democrats are in charge, but women are still oppressed. They revolt. (In one scene they “steal” a couple of U-Haul trucks, a classic no-budget cinema move.) They hijack TV stations. Guns are brandished, but never fired. As it has been for a century, real corporeal violence in the USA is suffered, not inflicted, by the oppressed.
It’s a fake docu-drama, but what makes it so striking to me for its moment is its bi-racial cast. The lead protagonist are mostly black; the retardataires are mostly white. It is so perfectly balanced in its construction of an imaginary aspiring left of nearly 40 years ago that it seems ripe for a full-budget remake.
Born in Flames coincidentally fulfills the criteria for an exibition project Gregory Sholette initiated recently. His charge to artists for his Imaginary Archive was: "Provide me with a document about a past whose future never arrived." In his YouTube video explaining the several iterations of the project ("IA Imaginary Archive overview 2020"), he calls it a library of "what if" histories, “an ersatz para-archive” of “an alternative future, or some parallel universe… What would the content of such an archive reveal abouit other ways the world might be constructed?”
Put these questions to Born in Flames and you have the makings of a seminar. And a plan of action.

I: Welcome to My Memoir: The NYC Artworld of the 1970s

Me and Becky Howland in Berlin for the "Real Estate Show Revisited" exhibition in 2014

Last year and early this, before the Virus, before the death of George Floyd and then of my mother, all the epochal events that have turned our times to shit – I wrote a book. Two books, actually, both of them memoirs. Was it “shit”, really, that our times have been turned into? Events have surely sucked us into a different world, with a new awareness of the catastrophe, and an inability to go on as before. That “before” was the time of my memoirs.
To get back on track amidst these massive ongoing disruptions and new demands in my own and collective life is challenging. The track is swiftly covered by new sand.
The first of these memoirs will be a physical book. The second, which came out of my research trip to New York City in the fall of 2019 I will mine for a blog over the course of the coming months.

What Makes You Think Your Life Is Memoir Material?

As a fresh-faced kid, I wrote for Artforum and Art-Rite in the mid-1970s, then joined the artists’ group Colab early on. I organized the Real Estate Show and ABC No Rio, and participated in the Times Square Show in 1980. Writing and typing for the East Village Eye , I had a ringside seat at the downtown New York art show.
As a video artist during the No Wave era and after, he produced numerous shows for Colab’s artists’ TV series, I launched the MWF Video Club artists’ distribution project which persisted until 2002.
In the ‘90s I settled down, took a PhD in art history, and published Art Gangs in 2011, a history of NYC artists’ collectives from 1969 to 1984.

From a wet-behind-the-ears critic in 1974 to a precarious academic 25 years later, this memoir charts some 30 years in New York City’s art world. For me, this gradually became a political world as first Reagan and then the Bushes took over the country’s government and wrought their dire mischiefs.
Beyond authorial vanity, I dearly hope this project describing my life in autonomous cultural organizing will be of some use to those trying the same today.
A Summary of the First Book, Maybe Titled “Art Worker”
Part One – A Critic Changes His Stripes
Arrival in New York City to work for Artforum

Art Worker starts with my first visits to New York City as a child, my mother’s city, then as a tourist on the way to Europe. We stayed with a friend from our university in California, an aspiring artist. He was first in Soho and, upon our return, in the Lower East Side. In 1974 I took an internship with Artforum magazine, and worked for the editor John Coplans. I had a journalism background with the university student paper, covering art in Los Angeles, and earthworks in the west. The NYC Artforum office of those years was an intense place. [Newman, 2000] I researched for John Coplans’ crusading articles against the Pasadena Art Museum. I lived in a bunkbed in Soho with weird roommates. I soon became a reviewer for Artforum, and socialized with my fellow art writers.

Artforum editor John Coplans with Angela Westwater and... some intern. (Photo via Artforum.com)

These years saw encounters with well-known artists and art venues – Gordon Matta-Clark, the AIR womens’ gallery, Jean Dupuy, Stefan Eins, Willoughby Sharp and Liza Bear of Avalanche magazine. I met and liked Fluxus artists, many through René Block’s gallery. I hung out at 112 Greene Street, wrote about their shows, and talked with Gerry Hovagimyan (later GH). I began to work with Art-Rite editors Edit deAk and Walter “Mike” Robinson who had started a kind of community-based giveaway art magazine. [Art-Rite, 2019] I organized an exhibition of Joseph Beuys multiples at my home school of UCR in California. Working with Block and Ronald Feldman galleries, it was the first institutional exhibition of that artist in the U.S.. Together with Edit and Mike of Art-Rite, we produced a catalogue.

Escape from Soho

I began to meet artists my own age (early- to mid-20s), a group who later formed Collaborative Projects – aka Colab. This well-known assembly-based artists’ group lasted over 10 years, and was the linchpin of my life in NYC. I wrote about the nascent group for Artforum, and got fired by Max Kozloff, who succeeded Coplans as editor. I was then rooming with Marc Miller, an artist and art historian on the Bowery. I started to make art myself, and earned money at the trade of typesetting after my writing career ended. I ended up working as a freelance typesetter for a circuit of left magazines.
I soon moved to an apartment on Houston Street next door to Robin Winters. There I found myself in the thick of the artist founders of Colab, and around the corner from CBGBs. Many of them I had already met at Stefan Eins’ 3 Mercer Store since they showed there before the group formed. After incorporating as a non-profit, Colab won government grant monies to enable their diverse activities.

Robin Winters. (Photo by Tom Warren)

Stefan Eins. (Photo via 98Bowery.com)

The Houston Street apartment was on a street of criminals. I consorted with my neighbor Nick the Fence, and met early telephone hackers. I hung out with a carpenter up the street, Steve Stollman, whose shop made newsstands and became a center of bicycle activism.
The first Colab project I worked on was the “All Color News” cable television show. The group included the Ahearn brothers, John and Charlie, Tom Otterness, Scott and Beth B and others. This led on to the “Potato Wolf” live cable TV show, which engaged me strongly. I worked closely wth Mitch Corber, a performance artist, who had made a provocative trip to Harlem in blackface makeup. We hitchhiked to New Orleans and back. During the mid-’70s I regularly hitched across the country between NYC and LA.

No Wave and Punk Art

The punk music scene was happening at CBGBs near my apartment. I got to know Diego Cortez, artist and emerging macher on the No Wave scene. He was punking out, and getting into music management. We went pub crawling with Kathy Acker. Diego was impatient with group process, and quit Colab.
Marc Miller organized the “Punk Art” show in Washington, D.C. A group of us went down to shoot short films there. Artists in Colab were fascinated by the European terrorist movements. This interest was reflected in Colab’s X Magazine project. My graphic arts trade provided resources for making that journal. I produced the Terrorist News Annual zine, working with Robert Cooney and James (now Jamie) Nares. We filmed secretly at the socialist Guardian newspaper offices where I worked the nightshift.

X magazine made 3 issues

A benefit concert for X Magazine featured a number of No Wave bands and I filmed it. Diego went to Germany with Anya Phillips to attend the trial of RAF member Holger Meins. Semiotext(e) magazine produced two issues on German and Italian autonomous left movements, edited by Sylvere Lotringer, Diego’s roommate. Enter radical theory. I attended the “Schizo-Culture” conference and read Foucault and Deluze and Guatarri.

Scheming Up an Occupation

I participated in some of Colab’s early loft exhibitions – “Doctors and Dentists”, the “Manifesto Show”, and others. I also did performances with Tom Otterness and Robert Cooney in Tribeca. I met Becky Howland, and we became lovers. I met her roommates Ann Messner and Peter Moennig, and Tribeca neighbors Christy Rupp and Joseph Nechvatal.
Me, Becky, Peter, Ann and Bobby G (Robert Goldman) conspired to make the “Real Estate Show,” an exhibition as occupation of an abandoned city-owned building on January 1, 1980. Our issues were gentrification and lack of spaces for artists. Many Colab artists participated. The occupation was shut down, but we made the newspapers, and city officials negotiated. They offered us a storefront to work in. We opened ABC No Rio in February of 1980. Colab voted us money. We strived to run a white art venue in a working class Hispanic barrio without being agents of gentrification (an impossibility).

The Real Estate Show. (Photo by Anne Messner)

We publicized our shows by putting posters up on the street for our events. Lower Manhattan was a rich environment of street art, matching the riot of graffiti art in the subways. This popular art movement among young NYC people of color was starting to leak into the white artworld. Stefan Eins opened Fashion Moda in a ruined storefront in the South Bronx in 1978, and Colab artists began to come uptown. The first formal art exhibition of the new wave of graffiti artists took place there. John Ahearn developed his live casting sculpture practice with Rigoberto Torres, a Bronx artist. Tom Otterness began his multiple sculpture practice. Justen Ladda painted monumental murals in an abandoned school.

Colab’s Times Square Show and After

John and Tom found a rental building and started organizing the “Times Square Show” for the summer of ‘80. Colab unanimously voted money for the project. I was working on publicity in the lobby when Jean-Michel Basquiat walked in. We made a sign together. He went upstairs to hang out in the Fashion Lounge, painted on the wall and wrote SAMO© there. It was the first exhibition of this ill-starred wunderkind.
The TSS was a hit, with coverage in the Village Voice newspaper, and major art magazines, with articles by Jeffrey Deitch and Lucy Lippard. This was unprecedented for an autonomous exhibition, and it has come to be seen as epochal. Both federal and New York State grants came in to Colab and ABC No Rio. Soon after, cultural venues began to sprout on the Lower East Side, especially in the East Village. It was a rough disturbed neighborhood, as I saw almost daily walking up Avenue B to work at the East Village Eye magazine, through what was a busy open-air drug market.

TSS poster by Jane Dickson and Charlie Ahearn

We made shows at No Rio, and had performance events of all kinds. Nuyorican poets read there. I produced a literary anthology with the poetry curator, Josh Gosciak. We also used the place as a workshop to make props for Potato Wolf TV at evening “painting parties”.
Other artists’ spaces and groups active on the Lower East Side (LES) included Group Material on 10th Street and the PAD/D political art group. The problem of gentrification, inspiration for the Real Estate Show, was becoming pressing on the LES. No Rio collaborated on the “Not For Sale” project which sought to network artists to contest the process.
I was working at the East Village Eye as a typesetter. The art editors were first Walter Robinson and then Carlo McCormick. The Eye moved to El Bohio, a large former school run as a social center by Puerto Rican activists. Later the Eye moved to Broadway, closer to my apartment. The last art editor before the magazine folded was me.

NEXT: Art After Midnight

NOTES and LINKS

Amy Newman, Challenging Art: Artforum 1962–1974 (2000)
http://www.caareviews.org/reviews/31#.X573B1Ao82w

Walter Robinson, Edit DeAk, Joshua Cohn, eds., Art-Rite (2019)
https://www.printedmatter.org/catalog/54596/

"All Color News" on Ubuweb
https://ubu.com/film/colab_news.html

Punk Art Exhibition, 1978
https://98bowery.com/punk-years/punk-art-show

Coleen Fitzgibbon and Alan Moore, "X Magazine Benefit [Full Movie]" – YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgsa45uXBFU

­ The Real Estate Show, NYC, 1980
https://98bowery.com/return-to-the-bowery/abcnorio-the-real-estate-show/#real-estate-show

The East Village Eye
https://www.east-village-eye.com/index2.html