Memoir #9: Uptown and Downtown, Then and Now

Screenshot of the recent talk in the "Cultural Activism Seisiún" -- My presentation is about 8 minutes in and lasts 20 minutes.

I was invited to speak to John Halpern and Emily Harris’s online “Tuning Fork” group recently. I’m uncomfortable with being what the Reverend Jen called a “sublebrity”, but hey, I’ll have a book to push, so I roughly outlined that (about 8 to 26 minutes in the YouTube). In the first several of these numbered blog posts that's what I did, outlining the book to come. This memoir “string” will roll out on this blog well into 2021.
A number of folks attended, or were included in the talk. Zoom is blowing up with online Virus-era educational meetings, but it makes it hard to be just a spectator. Everyone’s name is pasted up there, as it is in the recording. (‘S why some folks use weird fake names; you can change it.) It emulates a real meeting, in a way, except for the recording part.
John was doing actions in NYC around the time we did the Real Estate Show, 1980. I had met John Halpern and some of the other attendees not so long ago – in the flesh, not onscreen – during my trip to NYC in late ‘19. We had gone to an art opening…

Tom Otterness, Cone Fixing Cylinder, 2014, installed in the lobby at Marlborough on 57th Street. (Photo from worleygig.com)

Last Tango on 57th Street

I thought I was in town then mainly to mine the archives, repeating the habits of my grad school days. But running around is what one does in New York City. Most writers I know have made a career of it. So we dragged out to the art openings. The big one was Tom Otterness’ show at the Marlborough Gallery on 57th Street. The gallery was closing the oldest of their branches and moving to Chelsea, and this was to be the last show in the NYC artworld’s old stomping grounds.

Big Bronze Someones

Tom’s openings always draw a Colab crowd, and a score of the old gang was there. The atrium downstairs was plopped with his giant bronze sculptures. It was quite the scene, with swells arriving, and a TV crew awaiting someone. Not any of us. I did not inquire.
Along came tall, lanky John Halpern wearing his trademark broad-brimmed hat. John figured in the Real Estate Show story on New Year’s Day, 1980. He and his friends had occupied a vacant lot in Little Italy at the same moment as we took 125 Delancey Street. They were camping out there in the cold, and seeing in the new year. Becky Howland, me and some pals visited them there after our show closed for the night. John was already notorious for a radical art action – planting fake bombs on the Brooklyn Bridge.

John Halpern makes the papers back in the day

Bombs Away – For Peace

John and his artists’ collaborative staged Bridging in 1977 atop all seven access bridges to Manhattan. They stood up and fired off yellow flares. The media covered this spectacular action extensively, which was the point. In August of 1979 he had planted another symbolic bomb on the Brooklyn Bridge, and was arrested. Both actions were responses to histrionic media coverage of terrorism. A peace activist was involved in the first of these. John today teaches meditation.

Back in the Hole

The 24-hour performance in 1979-80 we attended comprised digging a 10-foot hole on Spring Street between Mott and Elizabeth Streets in Soho, where 12-15 people planned “to stay in the hole to see the New Year in, ‘discussing art and politics’”. Christy Rupp was along with us to visit them. She is quoted in the same New York Times text stating that Halpern’s group action was “an art exhibit about the state of real estate and why so much of it in NY is unavailable as either housing or art-space”. That was 40 years ago. Things are better now, right?
(See citations in note below – Well you may ask why New York Times reporters were always showing up at these events. I don’t know. We asked them and they came, which isn’t that usual.)
Some neighborhood people came by and told John’s group that they shouldn’t be doing that, and should leave as soon as possible. Mafiosi? Or just locals fronting? Artists living in Little Italy then didn’t care to push the question. The site is now a housing project. After our visit to the hole, John came along to the Delancey Street building where our show had been closed, jumped on the extension roof and painted a sprawling graffiti on the wall.

Beuys Again

During Joseph Beuys’ Guggenheim retrospective in 1979 Halpern was shooting Transformer/Joseph Beuys (released in 1988). Beuys’ presence at the Real Estate Show press conference must have been part of the media draw. John Halpern continued involved with the circle of folks around JB’s Free University projects, people who had taken the German artist’s ideas about social sculpture to heart. Decades later, in 2014, John participated in the Real Estate Show Revisited exhibition at the James Fuentes Gallery. He and Julie Martin did a series of video interviews with participants there.

Meanwhile…

Back on 57th Street, videographer Mitch Corber, Sylvia and their pal Les Weichselbaum arrived and started video interviewing John about his 1977 headline socal sculpture. Nice to see we still have our own media, hence our incuriosity about the TV crew and who they were awaiting.
John is Coleen Fitzgibbon’s step-brother. She is married to Tom Otterness. (I interviewed Coleen, and will blog it here soon.) I chatted with John as we walked towards the elevators and the crowd upstairs. The giant bronze Otterness sculptures deployed around the atrium were mostly of two simplified figures, one male and the other female. Archetypal, but also personal.
“Doesn’t that look like it’s about Tom’s relationship with Coleen?”
“Yes, exactly,” John said. “Tom told me, ‘We spent enough on therapy to buy a house, but if we didn’t there would have been no people to live in it.’”
Love in the NYC artworld is hard work.

Howl Gallery show of "Zeitgeist" in 2018; Al Diaz graffiti on the wall in back

Let’s Go Downtown

After 57th Street, we fell downtown to the East Village, to an opening of Al Diaz. Al was Jean-Michel’s partner in the Samo© graffiti project when they were teenagers. He re-emerged as an artist at the Howl! gallery show organized in 2018 for the premiere of Sara Driver’s film, Boom for Real. That show was called “Zeitgeist: The Art Scene of Teenage Basquiat”, and included a lot of folks who were around then. Al’s Samo-type slogans were featured prominently on a wall. More than raking over the ashes, that was a pretty great show.
The opening we went to in ‘19 was a show of new collaborations Al had done with other artists. I reminded him of an interview Jim C and I had done with him many years ago, in which we talked about his Samo years. James Love Cornwell, aka Jim C, ran the Nada Gallery on Rivington Street. He completed a master’s thesis on the East Village in the ‘00s, and our talk with Al Diaz was part of his research. We collaborated on the article “Local History: The Battle for Bohemia in the East Village,” in Julie Ault, ed., Alternative Art New York, 1965-1985 (2002).
Al didn’t remember our talk “I was strung out during those years,” he said. Re-invention is a serious struggle.
I later asked Jim to send Al the transcript. He was happy to see it, and he IM’d me: “Thank you Alan. This is really great. Hugo [Martinez] apologizes to me for snubbing me when I asked to be included in the UGA [United Graffiti Artists, showed in Soho in 1975]. Pretty wonderful history!!!!” La felicidad de la historia.

Photo from realgraffitihistory.com via Michael Lawrence and Herb Migdol

Let’s Grab a Drink After

Nearby Al’s show work by the hot international street artist JR was showing at a new multi-story French gallery, a blazingly white glass and steel monolith planted in the old neighb, a true neoliberal-era carbuncle. After the openings we went along to Ulli Rimkus’ bar Max Fish at its new location. Howie Solo joined us there.
We talked about erstwhile ‘70s downtown macher R.L. Seltman. Where did he go? It’s a sad story, Howie said. R.L. married a Japanese woman and moved east in the ‘80s. She later died. He was around during the Rivington School days, and was instrumental in starting the Storefront for Art & Architecture. He was a competitor with Ray Kelly for Arleen Schloss’ affections. (He lost.) It was R.L. who invited Howie and his band the Agents to play the Times Square Show after-party at 597 Broadway. The band was getting antsy and wanted to leave, but at last the people arrived and the party, called the Dark Dance, began. I must have been there, but I don’t recall it.


NEXT: Serenades of a Library Rat

REFS and LINKS

Cultural Activism Seisiún: The Tuning Fork – A series of conversations with cultural activists worldwide
https://www.instituteforculturalactivism.org/

John Halpern quoted in WikiPedia, “John Halpern (artist)”

RL Seltman in 1980, from a film poster via 98bowery.com

Christy Rupp quoted in Judith Cummings, Laurie Johnston, “Notes on People: Wide Brush Needed to Cover Artists' Interests,” NYT, January 1, 1980, p. 26

Natasha Kurchanova, "Lower East Side: The Real Estate Show Redux", posted 5 December 2014
https://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/lower-east-side-the-real-estate-show-redux

Coleen Fitzgibbon
http://www.coleenfitzgibbon.com/

Zeitgeist: The Art Scene of Teenage Basquiat
https://www.howlarts.org/event/zeitgeist-the-art-scene-of-teenage-basquiat-2/

Artnet, "Al Diaz, Basquiat’s Graffiti Partner, Has Resurrected the SAMO© Tag for His First-Ever European Collaboration", August 28, 2019
https://news.artnet.com/partner-content/al-diaz-basquiat-graffiti-samo-tag

Memoir #8: The Invisible Underground

This is the 8th post from my memoir project, an account of my 30 years in the NYC artworld. This post continues a recounting of the researches I made in late 2019, during a two month stay in the city.
Image: Jorge Brandon, El Coco Que Habla, as painted by Bobby G aka Robert Goldman in 1982

I’ve always thought poetry was a bad bet. It’s the high road to invisibility, a demanding discipline and an impossible life course. To make it you’d better be a genius, rich, or die young. All three is best. Still I was corrupted early by an over-qualified junior high school teacher who wanted us all to write sonnets. I was the only one who could.
Poetry in New York City is a strange scene, entwined all at once with academia, bohemia, rock ‘n’ roll and art in many mysterious ways.
My relation to the New York poetry scene has been tangential. I’m a fan. And after my brief stint as an avant-garde text producer in the later ‘70s, that’s all I’ve been. Good poetry is oxygen for writers in other genres. Even the bad stuff, viewed live, is a glimpse into motivation, drive, the expressive impulse that makes the words appear. Readings are a chance to hoist a brew in congenial company. Even if you don’t know them, the poets are friendly, especially if you aren’t claiming a spot to read.

The Unbearables

Michael Carter, my partner in the MWF Video Club, introduced me to the Unbearables group. He loved their elaborate mythology, which seems lifted from a novel by Roberto Bolaño (or vice versa?). Rooted in the camaraderie of early spectacular actions, [cite below: Bollen, 2012] the untangling of the ganglia of this writers and poets collective would reveal a lot about the LES culture of the ‘80s and ‘90s.
In addition to Jim Feast, with his ties to the Autonomedia publishing project, it includes Ron Kolm, a peripatetic bookstore manager whose collectings and promotions formed the nucleus of the NYU Fales Library’s downtown collection. As the story is told, Ron convinced the librarian Marvin Taylor to change his focus, and the stodgy research collection of Victorian English literature bloomed into a major scholarly resource on the history of the district the university helped destroy.
I allude to the relentless expansionist real estate policies of NYU, which has gobbled up Washington Square Park as its de facto campus, and sited new dormitory buildings on the once-cheaper lands to the east. Sure, the inexorable processes of capitalism bear the responsibility – that is to say, nobody. NYU has been all in on that, and the school has picked over the juicier bones of the neighborhood. Filmmaker Nick Zedd, who sold his archive to the NYU Fales Library, remarked: “NYU destroyed downtown, but at least they paid me to get out of town.” He lives today in Mexico City.

RIP Steve Cannon

After Malena and I settled into our tiny flat in Crown Heights in the fall of ‘19, one of the first sojourns we made was to the Clemente Soto Velez cultural center on Rivington and Suffolk street for an evening memorial to the writer and animateur Steve Cannon. CSV is in an old gothic-style public school building ceded to a Puerto Rican organization which runs it as a cultural complex. It houses theaters, galleries, artists studios, and offices. Among them is the office of ABC No Rio “in exile”, during the period when their new building is being constructed. Director Steven Englander was sitting there nearly every day. ABC’s zine library and archive are also temporarily housed there.

Steve Cannon at Tribes. Photo by Sarah Ferguson

Steve Cannon died in early 2019. The apartment of the blind novelist, teacher and poet was a famous locus for bohemian poets, writers, musicians and artists, a public salon he called A Gathering of the Tribes. After all the other hot spots had faded away and all the places to go had closed, there was still Steve’s. His memorial at CSV was a big affair. Poets read, and musicians performed. Steve’s musician friends, Billy Bang and Butch Morris, are also no longer alive, but a set by the Sun Ra Arkestra rounded out the night. They’re the big band backup for the late Afrofuturist composer. They did that thing with the costumes, and the weird space-age noises, but for their final numbers they sat back and romped like Duke Ellington, doing “Stranger in Paradise.”
Ubiquitous on the poetry scene, Mitch Corber was front and center with his camera, alongside Sylvia, recording the poets. At one point the flimsy chair he sat on collapsed, and he grinned ruefully at the crowd behind him.
The poet Steve Dalachinsky circulated, handing out cards for the readings and performances that would continue throughout the fall in the gardens of the LES to honor Cannon. Dalachinsky – a scenester, a back patter, hand shaker, a connector, and animateur; poet, deeply learned jazz aficionado and skilled bohemian hustler… I didn’t know that would be the last time I’d see him. He died a week after that gig.
Then there was a round of memorials for him.

The Stuck and the Drifting

Functionally blind, Steve Cannon was stuck in his apartment. Dalachinsky was everywhere. The outpouring of memorials for him was even greater than for Cannon. Penny Arcade wrote: “With the death of Dalachinsky there is a line of demarcation like where the trees get thinner and thinner near the shore. Who now will rail against the politics of art? Who will represent, who will model the life of the living poet?”
That night he kind of annoyed me. I was lumbering towards Jim Feast, who was on his way out when Steve grabbed him first. Jim is one of the venerable Unbearables group of poets with Steve, and part of the Autonomedia publishing collective After I’d stood there for a time, Dalachinsky turned, gave me a firm handshake and walked off...

Steve Dalachinsky in his studio in New York May 15th, 2019. Photo by Fernando García Delgado

ABC No Rio Then

When we began at ABC No Rio in 1980 we were lucky to stumble onto an important clutch of poets to begin the readings series there. Josh Gosciak couldn’t bring the old anarchists from the housing projects, but he did organize Amiri Baraka, Miguel Piñero, Miguel Algarín, Bimbo Rivas, Pedro Pietri, Jorge Brandon and more of the Nuyorican school poets to read at our place. Some of the white poets’ music bands also played ABC, like the Avant Squares, Homer Erotic, and Jill Kroesen. (There’s a book about them: Daniel Kane, "Do You Have a Band?": Poetry and Punk Rock in New York City, 2017; haven’t seen it.) This push started ABC as an important poetry venue for the decades to come.

Josh, who is today at Medger Evers CUNY where Steve Cannon once taught wrote a text on poetry on the Lower East Side for the ABC No Rio book. (Part of it is online, along with some of the poetry we published then.) He ran Contact II magazine, and published the only chapbook of the incendiary Native American talent Diane Burns.
Perhaps because there’s no money to be made, the downtown NYC poetry scene has always been an indiscriminate bohemia. In case it isn’t clear yet – the poetry scene is where artists of color have been hiding in New York City for a long time.
LINKS

MWF Video Club
http://www.brickhaus.com/amoore/

See Katrien Bollen, "Guerrilla Warriors on the Brooklyn Bridge: A Case Study of the Unbearables’ Poetic Terrorism
(1994-2000)" in ZAA Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik A Quarterly of Language, Literature and Culture, 2012
here and there on the internet

Curiously, no one really wants to write about this – a rare exception: Anonymous, "NYU hasn't destroyed the West Village... yet"
https://www.brickunderground.com/blog/2013/01/nyu_hasnt_destroyed_the_West_Village_yet

A Gathering of the Tribes
https://www.tribes.org/

Mitch Corber's Thin Air Video catalogue online
http://www.thinairvideo.com/Welcome.html
He is also on YouTube at mitchcorber2

A Tribute to Steve Dalachinsky (1946–2019)
https://brooklynrail.org/2019/10/in-memoriam/A-Tribute-to-Steve-Dalachinsky

Jim Feast recently interviewed for Fifth Estate
https://soundcloud.com/davidrovics/fifth-estate-live-with-jim-feast

ABC No Rio book online, poetry
https://98bowery.com/return-to-the-bowery/abcnorio-poetry

Diane Burns, "Riding the One-Eyed Ford"
https://digitalcollections.poetshouse.org/digital-collection/chapbook-collection/riding-the-one-eyed-ford
see also Josh Gosciak, “Contact II, 1970s – 1990s: When Poetry Mattered More”

click “publisher” at the link above

Memoir #7: Return to New York

Facebook post for Milwaukee Home show of family art collection, October 2020

This is the 7th post from my memoir project, an account of my 30 years in the NYC artworld. The last post in this blog concluded the summary of the first 3 parts which I plan to publish. Now begins the part I will only post: a recounting of the researches and interviews I made in late 2019, during a two month stay in the city.

That seems now an eon ago; and it was, another age. As I was writing the 4th part of the book after the NYC trip, my mother’s health rapidly declined. After she died, I mounted an exhibition of the family art collection in the house, then sold it. Only now, nearly a year after the pause, have I been able to resume work on the memoir project.
That 4th part will not be published. I will mine it here for the blog posts to come.

Before the Storm I Was Among the Weeds

The first 3 books had the structure of living memory to ground them. The writing of the 4th book got out of hand. When I started to compile the research, I lost the structure among minutiae which I judge won’t interest most readers.
So, while it’s not a book it’s still a set of stories which now I’ll tell in this blog. It’s the story of that trip I took before the Covid virus descended and the world changed; before George Floyd was killed and BLM resurged; before Biden and Georgia; before the fascists rallied behind their leader in the last days of the Trump administration…
… I was meeting old friends and fingering moldy archives.

“Why You?”

“I don’t understand what your book is about,” my mother told me.
“What makes you think your life is interesting enough for a book?” a woman asked at the Ganas commune dinner.
At every step I’ve tried to bear these questions in mind.

Becky Howland's remix of the Colab logo

The answer to “why?” is simply, I was there.
My main engagement in downtown NYC of the ‘70s and ‘80s was with the artists’ group Colab. Colab is an important collective formation in recent U.S. art history, and the Lower East Side of the late 20th century was the last major North American bohemia. There’s a lot of driftwood in this river. And a lot of people working to pull it ashore.
As I wrote I checked facts online, in the vast shifting universal memory that is our present-day internet. It’s a wide door to the past, as recalled by a multitude. Nearly every fact I’ve pulled has clinging roots. I could not resist what I read as revealed truths. These many undreamt-of texts and websites added others’ perspectives to the narrative. In the end I was overwhelmed.

New York of the Constant Surprise

It’s always delightful to see old friends. In the intervening years the recollection and explication of our collective old times is now a minor industry. To please the old folks who still pull strings, to valorize the art already collected or yet to be sold, to distill lessons – these are all reasons to explore the past through exhibitions, discussions, and publications. And it’s a business. Marc Miller, whose prodding is to blame for this book project (although he denies it), vends ephemera, the momentoes of this late golden age in 20th century art.

I took a flight from Chicago on the last day of August, 2019. The plane flew along a broad green river towards the city, then made a dramatic approach up the Hudson past the great rocks of midtown and Wall Street skyscrapers. I had a window seat. Manhattan is incredibly grand from that perspective; I’d never seen it before. The man beside me never looked up from his laptop. On the way out I thanked the pilot, a young woman, on the amazing approach. On the airport bus a large black man was giving two younger workers an impromptu seminar on the economics of work. A couple argued over a baby in the loudest terms. NYC public transit is a warm bath of loquacious humanity.
There was a loud party out back of the hotel that night. My review of “No Name High Rise Hotel” near Queens Plaza – “Reception cursory. Ambience a mere gesture. Breakfast inedible.” The next morning my son Taylor picked me up to go to the flat in Crown Heights where I would meet Malena. Near the hotel was a grungy gas station plaza with a quicky-mart. I spotted a deal on tangerines outside. Inside it was a rundown deli counter banging out fast food, and a New York surprise – the shelves contained the dusty remains of a Cypriot food store, with long-expired exotic specialties. I bought some fresh dates and halvah.

The Old Neighborhood

September begins the art season when the swells return from their summer homes. I’d been collecting listing of relevant events and fun things to do.
Two interesting poets were reading at a bar on the Lower East Side – Steve Dalachinsky and Valery Oisteanu. Tommy Turner, whose film I’d recently showed in Madrid was having a party in Queens. The New York Anarchist Book Fair was kicking off at the Judson Church, where AK Thompson and Silvia Federici were doing workshops. Seth Tobocman was presenting the new issue of World War 3. A retrospective of Linus Coraggio was opening at the Howl! Happening gallery. Al Diaz, the other half of the SAMO© graffiti team with Jean-Michel Basquiat, was showing at the Van der Plas Gallery.

Linus Coraggio photographed by Steven Falke

My old traces and paths trodden – that was what I was here for this trip. I had to skip many interesting events around political art, social practice and activism.

Social Practice

A new anthology had come out in July, The Art of Direct Action: Social Sculpture and Beyond, that “concerns artists and collectives who have moved their artistic focus from representation to direct social action.” I’ve been following the rise of this pedagogical movement which links directly to the activisms I wrote about in Art Gangs (2012).

Sam Gould's "Beyond Repair," a printshop in a shopping center

Sam Gould in Minneapolis listed what he thought was most important in teaching social practice: 1) “The role and service of modeling and play within political life”. 2) “Thinking about what you are not, rather than what you are, when venturing into new work / endeavors”, and 3) “The importance of tension; make better problems”. Teaching or not, paying attention to this field is useful for thinking about what one is doing.
I skipped the Vera List Center for Art and Politics show of Caroline Woolard's furniture sculpture which “honors the work of facilitators”, “exquisitely rendered” though it was. Caroline was in the class at Cooper Union with the Bruce High Quality Foundation gang, but went her own way with a collectivizing storefront project nearby ABC No Rio. Now she’s back to making objects.

Decolonize This Place

We lunched with Olga Kopenkina and Gregory Sholette after failing to get into a packed New School classroom for a Decolonize This Place event. That group staged actions at the Whitney Museum, and earlier at the American Museum of Natural History. They were hosted for a time at Artists Space in a kind of reprise of the historical antagonism between the alternative and the institutional art spaces. One of their victories was still to come: in the spring of 2020 the Teddy Roosevelt equestrian statue with its demeaning ethnic attendants was at last removed from out front of the AMNH.

I told Greg and Olga when I came to NYC in the ‘70s I was impressed by the sense of an artworld community I saw among Fluxus artists, and among the crowd at 112 Greene Street that mixed artists, musicians, dancers. No one was ‘speciating’ and conserving their ‘medium specificity’ in order to appear ‘serious’. They were being together with a creative intention, serious indeed, but not cruelly competitive nor exclusionary. I was in town to search out the ‘70s roots of my postions, not now to pursue them.

Next: RIP Steve Cannon

LINKS

"vends ephemera" -- Marc Miller's Gallery 98 Bowery
gallery.98bowery.com

Karen van den Berg, et al., eds. The Art of Direct Action: Social Sculpture and Beyond
https://www.sternberg-press.com/product/the-art-of-direct-action/

Sam Gould in Minneapolis, of ex-Red 76, ran the Beyond Repair printshop in a shopping mall, and is now on to other projects...
http://thisisbeyondrepair.com/about/

Decolonize This Place
https://decolonizethisplace.org/

Steve Cannon in his apartment