In Search of Historical Colab. This is the 11th in a series of posts from my memoir research in NYC. This post continues the account of delvings in the NYU library among the files of Andrea Callard, an early secretary of the Colab artists group. She wrote the record of the group’s struggles in the period 1977-79.
We Got the Money – How Do We Share It Out?
Colab became real when the federal NEA grant money arrived. Once the money came in, the question was how to split it up fairly and efficiently. A division among members was made, with each having so many shares. Members could vote their shares towards projects they preferred. “The group evolved to agree that when three or more individual artists planned to collaborate on a project,” Andrea wrote to me, “they would propose it to the group and ask for money. Sometimes, grant money was divided into $200 allotments and three or more people would take those for their projects.”
The record – In the Colab “Red Book” (folder 12) is minutes of a meeting of September 21, initialed by Michael McClard, which specifies that the grant monies received went out as $200 allotments which “can only be used on projects involving three or more people, two of whom must be from Collaborative Projects Inc.”
Odd Bits In There
The folders at NYU aren’t all in chronological order, and many notes are undated. For 1978 there’s not so much. One odd item – folder 1 contains a flyer from the “Friends of Astrid Proll Campaign”. She was the RAF member who fled Germany, and hid out in London squats. (She edited a book about her years there in 2010; Jon Savage wrote the intro.) Proll was exposed by a tabloid in ‘78, and fought extradition for a year. Her support campaign was organized by radical feminists. Many of us were fascinated by the radical left Europeans the mainstream media called “terrorists”.
Just Another Asshole
Folder 1 contains notes on “Colab direction” – “what do members really want?” The “basic need,” Andrea wrote, is “direct financial aid to artists who collaborate”. Another flyer invites contributors to the journal Just Another Asshole, organized by Barbara Ess and Jane Sherry. “Everything submitted will be included”. You can send it, or “come to 5 Bleecker St while the magazine is being compiled and compose your piece on the spot”.
Folder 2, also undated, includes an announcement for a meeting at Coleen’s 5 Bleecker store. There members could present “receipts for Colab activities – repayment only at meetings”. Some comments made during the meetings are randomly recorded: “bitter feelings for fools” (has to be Robin Winters); and “everything important happens in irregular ways”. That’s for sure.
All “money should be dished out according to policy – no money should be spent without the calling of an emergency meeting and the agreement of 10 or more members who can forfeit future shares”. It also developed that a quorum, a particular number of members, was required for an official group decision. “If I were making those notes these days instead of in 1978-80,” Andrea wrote me, “they would be dated and detailed.”
1978 Was a Happening Year
1978 was when things really started to take off in Colab. Everyone was busy. The “Red Book” (folder 12) was the first one assembled by the group to support Colab’s grant application to the federal NEA. It records activities 1977-78, and contains important selected records.
The Red Book notes numerous loft film screenings and self-organized group exhibitions. On the cable TV front, the All Color News group is meeting. The Potato Wolf live series is beginning. These meetings are open, and people come and go. Liza Béar’s Slow Scan video project happens. She invites her older artist friends and a few kids from Colab. The artists who will (or won’t) show films at the New Cinema next year are casting and shooting – John Lurie and James Nares, Men in Orbit; Tina L’hotsky and Michael Oblowitz, “Snake Woman”; Michael McClard, Motive; Cara Perlman and Jane Sherry, “Topless”; me with “Party Noise”; Eric Mitchell, Kidnapped and Red Italy; and Nares with Rome ‘78.
Who Said What? Who Knows?
By March of ‘79 Colab has already purchased 3/4” video editing machines and they were being heavily used (folder 6). A catalogue of videos for distribution was being planned. (This was never realized; seven years later we would start MWF Video Club.) The Potato Wolf artists television series was producing; I made “Shipwreck” for them.
The next day in the archives I found folder 32, which contains an announcement for a March 16 (1979?) meeting at Kiki Smith’s place on South Street. It announces the “distemper agenda”, which concerned the fierce dust-up over the showing of Tom Otterness’ “Shot Dog Film” on the uncurated Redcurtain cable TV show run by Colab. The Kitchen’s Media Bureau and the state’s NYSCA had decided “not to fund Colab cable TV shows”. The officers wrote: “The NEA supports our position of showing non-censored, non-curated work but they receive 50-100 letters / day from taxpayers who complain about Co-lab’s dog. They need to defend their operation to Congress.” Discuss.
In a separate folder on the “Shot dog incident” (folder 37), Andrea’s notes make it clear that the Media Bureau, funded by NYSCA, pulled $1,500 of Colab funding that year. She notes that our choice was to “go along with NEA” or “withdraw our 1980 application”. (The agency demanded a disavowal.) A letter from Jim Sutcliffe deplores that Colab didn’t support a “policy of no editorial censorship in our organization”.
Rupert and the Dog
This wrenching incident was provoked and stoked by the New York Post newspaper. It had recently been acquired by Rupert Murdoch, who had English tabloid habits – always banging on the hot button – and rightward tendencies. (The Post had always been a Democratic paper; Rupert fixed that.) The incident caused dissension within Colab, rollicked our relationship with funders, and despite his oft-expressed remorse, did lasting damage to Otterness’ subsequent and highly unprovocative career.
Folder 35 contains an undated flyer stating “negotiations are being made with Annette Kuhn, Administrator for Cultural Affairs, NYC to acquire a space from the city”. This was well before the Real Estate Show (December 31, 1979-January 1, 1980), when a group of us just took one of the City’s innumerable buildings.
Annette was a friend of Marc Miller from the NYU graduate art history program. She was tight with Mayor Ed Koch, and had been appointed a functionary of the “art commission”, with an office in City Hall. I remember talking with her there, but I don’t think she ever took us seriously. She and others of her Voice colleagues looked upon us with some amusement, as if to say, “Oh yeah?”
Annette’s Salon
During the 1970s Annette Kuhn wrote the “Culture Shock” column for the Village Voice, covering events in the NYC artworld. In her work for Mayor Ed Koch, she is noted as a “mayoral aide” running a “task force” to study the future use of the Tweed Courthouse, a building then in disrepair. (Paul Goldberger, “The Tweed Courthouse: From Venality To Disrepair...”, New York Times, June 14, 1978.) In ‘79 I met with her in her office in City Hall, just off the little-trafficked public art gallery that used to be there. The meet was inconclusive.
Years later in the ‘00s she ran a monthly salon in her Tribeca loft. She bought John Morton’s fiberglass building artwork from the Real Estate Show, and later another giant piece by Dick Miller. She wasn’t involved at all back then in the negotiations which our gang, called the Committee for the Real Estate Show, had with the HPD that led to ABC No Rio. So far as I know, she kept her mouth shut about her prior knowledge of our aims. I never talked to her about this before her death.
The Prototype of the Fax Machine
Another series of later folders contains announcements for early shows of 1977 (many of the best are reproduced in A Book About Colab), and a treasure trove of the QWIP facsimile transmissions from Colab’s experiments with this new technology. Before fax machines or the Internet, Liza Bear obtained six QWIP machines from the Exxon Corporation. You’d just plug them into the telephone.
Various members used them in their individual studios for a few weeks at a time then moved the machines to someone else. The machine would transmit drawings, texts, photos, and collages over the phone lines. The receiving machine would deposit carbon powder on special paper. There are many between Andrea and Robin Winters – (there was one in our apartments on Houston Street) – some by Robert Cooney and Cara Perlman who lived downstairs, and others in the Colab circle. The electrical connection made by the telephonic machine reinforced, preceded and echoed social connections. They describe meals, and some of Andrea’s botanical experiments. They seem to me very Fluxus – like, about what we eat and with whom.
Fax About What
Among the more various QWIPs from 1977-78 (in folders 46-50) I found my own “Writing Doctor” piece for the Doctors and Dentists show. I used a pile of old prescription pads I found on the street, most for narcotic painkillers. There’s one about the NEA taking Colab’s money away. A lot about sex. A number of Art-Rite number 21s, Judy Rifka’s totally hand drawn issue (it became a “you draw it” issue as, overwhelmed, she handed some blanks off to other artists). A drawing by Tom Otterness I recall, captioned “Co-Lab Cure / Blind Justice / Blind Force / The Leader”, and one prefiguring the Potato Wolf TV series: “Famous fish brings networks to bottom of sea”.
The drawings and collages for QWIPs were put into a plastic sleeve, stuck onto a drum, spun, scanned and transmitted. With the sleeve holding the elements, changeable collages could be made without fixing the elements onto the paper. Some of the QWIPs were annotated and sent back. There is one with Scott and Beth B shown as a tourist couple with numerous snarky comments. The prints are remarkably stable, if dim, dull, and grimy-looking as they were originally. This series is remarkable in the social information it contains. It tells about relationships within Colab in ways I can’t imagine anything else now does.
Film, a Deadly Art
Folder 49 contains QWIPs from me about the Terrorist News Annual project dated February 17, 1979, which I produced at Coleen’s 5 Bleecker Street store. There’s one image of with a blown-up fragment of film of heads on pikes from the lost Super-8 film – lost, lost, all lost… like the deaths it records.
Notes in both folders 1 and 2 concern the May ‘79 meeting. Charlie Ahearn is showing his first feature, The Deadly Art of Survival, at Liza Béar’s Center for New Art Activities. Lindzee Smith’s Nightshift theatre group is staging a play by the German playwright, actor and Communist activist F.X. Kroetz, Men’s Business. An actor and director, Lindzee was at the center of a cadre of Australian artists who circulated through Colab. He was married to Betsy Sussler, who started X Motion Picture Magazine in 1977. The project continued in ‘78 and ‘79 as an open publication of Colab. Betsy dropped out of Colab, and went on to found Bomb magazine.
Aussies in Tribeca, Hungoricans Uptown
The Kroetz play was translated by the prolific translator, editor and publisher Michael Roloff (d. 2019). It was produced at the Squat Theater, the 23rd Street venue run by the Hungarian exile theater collective in 1979 (roloff.mysite.com, accessed April 2020; the site includes portions of his unpublished memoirs of his downtown NYC years). Both Roloff and the Squat Theatre were part of a bubbling emigre theater scene downtown during these years.
Folder 1 also shows that Willoughby Sharp was doing his own thing – “Sharpcom” – at 93 Grand Street, the building he still owned. R.L. Seltman, a key figure in the Little Italy scene of A’s and Storefront for Art & Architecture, was working with Ear Magazine, a publication of the New Wilderness Foundation, a Fluxus-related joint.
Willoughby and Liza during Avalanche magazine days
Never-To-Be Schemes
Folder 2 contains an April/May ‘79 list of Colab committees. Groups were working on making a video catalogue, getting space for the group – “projects – make abandoned building into hotel for transient or visiting artists”, a “type shop” and a “writers center”.
I have no recollection of these committees ever meeting. But they prefigure roles I would later play in Colab with the Real Estate Show and the MWF Video Club. Notes from June of ‘79 (also folder 2) reveal that Beth B and Charlie Ahearn want a video projector. They were both excluded from showing at the New Cinema; they didn’t get that device.
Issues around the editing equipment are discussed. The folder includes a list of members of Colab with many names now crossed out. The QWIP facsimile project arranged by Liza Béar was already over – “bring them back at the next meeting”.
July of 1979 (folder 3) is the most substantively annotated meeting of all. It’s a “financial planning meeting for NEA funding period August ‘79 - April ‘80”. The video decks must be sold because they can no longer be housed. We lost the front room space at Marty the Seltzer Man on Broome Street. Curiously, one of Marty’s home-delivered antique seltzer bottles exploded on Marc Miller’s porch in Brooklyn, mauling his leg. The resulting lawsuit spelled the end of Marty’s storefront.
Now What? Big Plans…
Membership is asked: “What do you think Colab should DO in the next year? NEA plans to send us $10,000 to foster exhibition, media, and publication activity”. Suggestions flew: an exhibition fund; a film/video production fund; “print a video catalogue and set up distribution procedure” (again, the seed of the MWF Video project); “buy big ads in national newspapers in which to make statements”; continue cable programs - “perhaps we could sell series of cable shows to companies outside NYC” (a recurrent fantasy, which no artist, not even Andy Warhol TV could realize); “use our ‘arts organization’ legal status to technically sponsor artists (and others) from other countries so that they can avoid the marriage route – as they make ‘unique and invaluable contributions to our community’”.
There is also a narrative description of this meeting. Michael McClard’s proposal for video distribution meets “considerable disagreement”, with “little faith” in our administrative capability, doubts that there would be sales, that advertising could work, and more. Andrea notes: “The cost/advantages discussion took on the quality of a personality free-for-all during which the idea of starting a social club at which beer was sold to make money came up.” That’s what would be done at ABC No Rio one year later.
Colab Ain’t So Unknown
It’s remarkable what a fruitcake’s worth of diverse activities early Colab contained.
The Colab group itself has been noted for its shows in numerous contemporary articles, museum exhibition catalogues, and art history survey textbooks. But direct historical reckoning has been slow in coming. Shawna Cooper’s “Times Square Show Revisited” at Hunter College, CUNY (2012; timessquareshowrevisited.com) was the first small Colab-specific show. The “TSS” was invoked and many artworks included in the 2019 "Basquiat: The Artist and His New York Scene" exhibition at Schunck Museum in Heerlen, NL, because Jean-Michel debuted at that show.
The “Real Estate Show Revisited” series of related exhibitions was one organized more or less by ourselves, with the collaboration of galleries and small institutions. (I edited a zine of reminiscences and precedents for the action, as House Magic #6.)
The A More Store of artists’ multiples, a Colab staple around holiday time for many years, was recreated at the Printed Matter store for the launch of the 2015 A Book About Colab.
We had one exhibition survey of the group on the line a few years ago, but that fish got away.
Thanks again to Andrea Callard for her comments and amendments to this text.
NEXT: #12 All for One or Fall Apart?
LINKS
Astrid Proll, ed., Goodbye to London: Radical Art and Politics in the Seventies
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9253229-goodbye-to-london
Squat Theatre Digital Archive Project
http://squattheatre.com/collection
That website has an amazing bibliography and timeline
http://squattheatre.com/bibliography.html
House Magic 6 (2014 Spring) “Real Estate Show Revisited”
https://archive.org/details/house_magic_6/house_magic_6/page/n3/mode/2
