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…
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.
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.
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.
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)”
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
Nicely done Alan - good to see some info about the scene in NYC. Those must have been some interesting times. Mike Flanagan
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