Memoir #10: The Scratchings of a Library Rat

This is the 10th post from my memoir project, an account of my 30 years in the NYC artworld. The last post in this blog had me running around town during the 2019 research trip. Now begins the part where I actually hit the books/papers during a two month stay in the city.


Bombing around the city is fun. But it was the Fales collection I’d come to NYC to visit in that fall of ‘19. I’d presented my credentials and detailed my interests to the research librarians at NYU and NYPL.

In Search of Historical Colab

Andrea Callard and Coleen Fitzgibbon have been chipping away at the work of Colab history and the recovery of our videotapes for years.They held a series of oral history interviews a decade or so ago, and produced a DVD compendium of collaborative video work for the XFR Station show at the New Museum in 2013. Coleen mounted a website, and Andrea prepared and deposited her Colab files along with her creative work at NYU in ‘03.

Andrea was Colab secretary during some of its earliest years (1978-80), so a close look at her Colab files in the NYU research library was first on my list of archival tasks. But there had been big changes there. The NYU special collections are now all lumped together, and the premises renovated. They had reopened bare days before my arrival, and access procedures had changed. Online requests are required for everything, and the new system was still squeaky.

Cranking on NYU

NYU is constructed of different colleges, and so were the research collections. Now one can no longer bumble among the different archives and their collections, each in their own rooms and with distinct customs. The precincts of the Fales collection, with its oil paintings, oriental carpets, and shelves of antique books is gone. It’s harder to wander mentally through the holdings, since the analog (paper) guides are gone. Nor can one go to Tamiment labor history archive with its vitrine exhibitions of old labor movements which would spark new connections. Their policies were looser than Fales, so you might have a whole box put upon your desk. (Fales librarians were super-retentive.) These are now old ways of research. One labors today in antiseptic central precincts as anti-haptic and featureless as cyberspace.

Back room at Fales Library, NYU

Riches Out of Reach

The Fales collection is a treasure trove, but it can no longer be known directly. Whatever you might want must be submitted in advance online, and prepared from online descriptions. There is scant ‘item level description’ of folders, leaving one to guess what might be in them. A folder may contain only one card, or it might contain an undiscovered 12 page manuscript – you can’t know until you open it yourself. The people were nice and helpful for the most part, although there is still that certain kind of archivist who really only wants to serve you one folder at a time, and wants you to sit at the desk until it comes. And when you go to lunch the box goes back to general storage, so you have to wait for it to come back out on the truck. These folks clearly aspire to work for the Vatican.

“Let Me Out of Here, Baby”

Colab remains a deep mystery, a formative experience locked up in multiple memories and multiple conclusions: A crossroads, where all of us made our devil’s bargain. I’d been there, but the spells are now all long forgotten. During my week in scholarly lockup at NYU I hoped to recover some.
I didn’t find what I was hoping for in those files. That’s often the case with research. But I found a lot that doesn’t fit the picture of the group that anyone has drawn so far – those accounts aren’t granular -- and much that contradicted my own recollections. In the course of my interviews, which I’ll blog here in the months to come, I found still more dangling anomalies.

“Established 1978”

The group called Colab began to coalesce around 1977. The core of it was art students who had already met at art schools like San Francisco Art Institute, RISD, Chicago Art Institute, or in the recently-established Whitney Independent Study Program. They were inspired by the older artists who talked to them about the Art Workers Coalition of 1969-70, about European politics and cultural organization, about institutional prejudices in NYC and the realities of the art market. Some of those young artists also worked for the older ones. Out of this cloud of artists working in various disciplines who knew each other from living downtown, a group formed. Many really didn’t believe in such a formation. Some opposed the not-for-profit incorporation which was necessary to apply for funds. Others hated meetings. So they drifted away, sometimes starting with a project and not continuing.

Triangulating between a timeline Andrea and Coleen prepared, the recent A Book About Colab (Printed Matter, 2015), and the files at NYU might produce the clear account I hoped for. Into that you’d have to add the untranscribed oral histories Andrea and Coleen made some years ago, and new ones, specifically to flesh out the matter of the arguments that divided the first group and demotivated many others to continue. What did the group promise? And what did it fail to deliver to so many?
Andrea’s Colab box did not present anything like a clear administrative history of Collaborative Projects. There is still no account of how the group functioned, the arguments, and how it evolved. I mean a synoptic close-to-accurate account. Maybe that’s a project for the future.

Palimpsest – A Mortal Return

So many times after living it I have gone back over and reordered people, events, art and performance in my mind. I’m quoted in A Book About Colab (2015), from my book Art Gangs (2011), revised from the dissertation Collectivities (2000). Marc Miller and I compiled and published ABC No Rio Dinero with its Colab sections in ‘85. Earlier I worked on the Colab books prepared to support grant applications which document each period of activities.
(The Colab books I allude to are not all together in one place, accessible to scholars. There are three of them I know of – the “Red Book”, the “Black Book”, and a third book unnamed.)
While the group lived, I harried my comrades with various broadsides and missives. I’ve jumped houses, cities, now continents with concomitant losses, so I have only some of these books and papers now. I was opinionated, approving some actions and people and disparaging others in letters and manifestos. Later, as Marc and I edited our book, I was more scrupulous and dispassionate. After academic training even more so. In my dissertation, begun 20 years after the lived facts, I tried to chain Colab into a broader academic narrative of New York artists’ left collective formations.

Other Observations

My search for Colab past at NYU would be through the records of Andrea Callard. I didn’t find the coherent story I expected. Instead I found surprises.

Everything I wanted was in Andrea’s box number one. There are no notes in it from the very beginnings of the group. The 1978 “Red Book” includes this note under “Green Corporation [earliest name for the group]… History of Organization”: “First meeting: March, 1977. Weekly meetings with an average attendance of thirty people continued through June, 1977.” After meeting with the artists’ accountant Rubin Gorewitz, “we decide to become a production-oriented organization”. (box 1, folder 12) They immediately began the process of incorporation as a non-profit organization – no incorporation, no grant money.

First Projects

The earliest projects, All Color News cable show, X Magazine, and the loft studio exhibitions began in 1977. The earliest notes I saw were from a September ‘77 meeting of the All Color News group, taken by Beth Horowitz (later Beth B). Beth, along with Teri Slotkin, and Betsy Sussler, are the earliest officers who appear. They’re all women, a pattern Colab would follow. (Andrea recalls that the first officers included Betsy, Liza Béar and Beth, and perhaps Michael McClard; Katy Martin was an officer very briefly.)

How to Do This

The principles of work are given as: “A diversity of political and esthetic convictions is desirable. The major criteria for selected projects is social relevance. Decisions are reached governing our collaboration by operating on a democratic premise and using a democratic process”. (box 1, folder 9)

Christof Kohlhoefer in a Potato Wolf show

Talking with Andrea at her house soon after my sojourn at NYU, she pulled out copies of her Colab notes. Andrea spoke of Liza Béar and the first (second?) set of officers’ “executive decision” to buy 3/4” video editing decks with the first grant Colab received. Liza’s Center for New Art Activities non-profit was the sponsoring organization for Colab’s first grant. She perhaps felt entitled to determine how to spend the funds. But, there was a furor over that followed by a “turning point towards democracy” in the group. Andrea said also that those decks were heavily used to edit media works by various artists. Like the QWIP machines, they moved around to various people’s studios every few months. In Andrea’s notes, there is a log of who used the decks while they were with her.

News Team Colab

Folder 9 contains numerous plans for the ACN, including the scheme of color-coded content that gave the program its name. The idea of the All Color News embodied the idea that the news should be for all colors of people and events.
Among these papers is a tumbling manifesto, typed in all capital letters by James Nares. It’s a brief for guerrilla filmmaking. The “newsteam,” he writes is “…licensed by society to investigate and report the facts”, but they also purvey propaganda and manipulate opinion. The artists making ACN should be conscious of the “‘act’ of being a newsman/woman”, of “using our invested authority to gain access to events and places” and should “violate standard forms of behavior in our pursuit of information.”
The “strategy” of the TV program “is to start with a simple idea, a base from which to move, and then get out into the action and see what happens.” A list of his segment proposals includes “Pier. An hour or so with the guys lying around Roman orgy style at the far end of the southern gay pier hangout. Bodies in the sun.” This sounds like a seed of his great Super-8 feature film, Rome ‘78.

Libidinal Economies

I remember the Colab meetings of 1977 as being at first and at times intoxicating in the depth of artistic, political and social intelligence evident in the group discussions. Everyone was handsome, everyone was sexy. But they were also soon rivened with conflict. The axis of the early battles seemed to me to move between two couples, Robin Winters and Coleen Fitzgibbon, and Liza Béar and Michael McClard. Liza had edited the final issue of Avalanche magazine featuring all those artists, along with Diego Cortez. As I recall, he tended to stand outside the battles, making wry comments until his final decisive resignation.

Diego Vanishes

This theatrical moment and the letter he wrote on that occasion is nowhere noted in these files. Andrea writes, “I don’t believe Liza and Diego remained active in Colab after 1978 when I became secretary. Michael may have continued for a while. I recall that he visited and advised me on my Ailanthus tree film which was difficult to complete.”
As I recall, sharpest arguments in those early meetings revolved around representations made to curators by one or another as Colab which were not made public to the group. (This is actually what got Willoughby Sharp expelled from the Art Workers Coalition.) Andrea recalls that the most typical arguments were about “how to focus our group energy. There would be people with loud voices and there would be people others listened to and those might be different people.”

Steve Mass (left) with Diego Cortez

Hard Work

An undated text in folder 7 reflects the emotional toll this took on Andrea, a gently-spoken person who I’ve never seen angry. She is reflecting and speculating on the processes of Colab, with “cold and rainy characterizations”. “[O]ne lady has a machine gun mouth” – “supports lover’s space age vision”. “[H]e pretends to himself to want to work with others which he is incapable of doing”. “Americans aren’t set up to collaborate and cooperate: they’re competitive and ego ridden”. The “group doesn’t share a big vision, no active focus. Funding of an exclusive nature is unattractive to the egalitarian slice… those who have been unable to deal with their careers as such… those who don’t want others to achieve success of an individual nature at cost to the group. Practical needs to make and sell vs political needs to join & do. Private backbiting undermines public structure”. She elevates the conflict from the petty, concluding that it is a question of “mass audience vs private encounters with art”. This candid assessment pins the weaknesses of both factions.

Thanks to Andrea Callard for her comments and amendments to this text.

NEXT: Historical Colab Continued

LINKS

Guide to the Andrea Callard Papers 1966-2000, Fales Library, NYU
http://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/fales/callard/

Collaborative Projects Inc. Colab - WordPress.com
“Colab is the commonly used abbreviation of the New York City artists' group Collaborative Projects…” It’s trademarked, but we could never hold onto it
https://collaborativeprojects.wordpress.com

“Tamiment labor history archive”
I link to an article recalling the late director, Michael Nash, and his work documenting Occupy Wall Street Evan Neely, “The Generosity of the Archivist”, August 31, 2012
The photo at the head of this post, of an obsoleted card catalogue planted with flowers, also comes from the Social Text blog, credited to Flickr user Aureusbay.
https://socialtextjournal.org/the-generosity-of-the-archivist/

A Book About Colab (Printed Matter, 2015)
https://www.printedmatter.org/catalog/42508/