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That 4th part will not be published.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.
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 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
No comments:
Post a Comment