In Search of Historical Colab. With this post I return to the series from my memoir research in NYC in late 2019. This is the 12th – it’s out of sequence because of intervening events. As I previously blogged, these were the passing of Barbara Ess and the exhibition of the Moore+ collection in Milwaukee this spring.
This 12th memoir post finishes the account of my delvings in the NYU library among the Andrea Callard papers, an early secretary of the Colab artists group. In late 1979 the group is on the verge of a split. The culprit (?) is the now-famed New Cinema project of No Wave filmmakers. After much rancour, Colab is saved by the bell – two spectacular exhibitions which have left a mark on NYC art history.
In late 1979, after a mere year and a half of life the Colab artists’ group teetered on the edge of oblivion. A meeting September 16, 1979 at Jenny Holzer’s house (Andrea Callard papers, box 1, folder 3) took up the matter of a basic split among members as to what Colab should be about – and where the grant money should be going.
Slapdash Cinema History
A storefront screening room on St. Marks Place called the New Cinema received $400. Colab members could get in for $1. This project turned into something of a hit after Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman wrote up the filmmakers as "No Wavelength: The Para-Punk Underground”.
Over the years, the quirky productions of these neo-populist filmmakers languished in obscurity. Only a few of them trickled out into the home video market, distributed by the later Colab project MWF Video Club (1986-2002).
Interest in this wild moment of ad hoc film and video production smoldered underground. In 2008 the mix of No Wave music and film was fondly recalled in Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore’s 2008 book No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York. 1976-1980.
Mudd Club owner Steve Mass is executed by 'esoterrorists' Eric Mitchell and Anya Phillips in "Kidnapped" 1978
The film-to-video productions shown at New Cinema have since had an after-life as museum and art-house revivals (some links are in the bibliography below). After the short-lived New Cinema, several of the films were screened again folded during film nights at the basement Club 57. The Club was celebrated in a MoMA exhibition of 2017-18 “Club 57: Film, Performance, and Art in the East Village, 1978–1983” (with catalogue). The exhibition was organized by the MoMA film department.
Fuck You, Buddy
But back in ‘79 there was discontent with this project within the Colab group. The lead organizer Eric Mitchell was entirely disinterested in accepting artists’ films for screening. Even Scott and Beth B, whose work had recently screened at Max’s Kansas City, weren’t in the project. None of the Potato Wolf collaborative work for cable TV was shown. New Cinema was a project focussed on Eric and his close friends.
I saw many of the films the New Cinema showed. I even wrote an admiring review of “Kidnapped” for a short-lived mini-glossy magazine called Cover. “Men in Orbit” was really funny. But I couldn’t understand the way many of these filmmakers behaved towards their fellow artists. Between sharpeening their hard-boiled bohemian poses on others, and their single-minded careerism, many in the New Cinema crowd – (I called them the “glamour faction”) – could be quite annoying.
As it happens, I grew up in LA. My dad was on the fringes of the business. I knew that many TV and movie people were toxic and forgettable. Why replicate their behavioral models within our collaboration?
The film industry was (and remains) a hard, shitty business littered with busted careers and wasted lives. As it turned out, very few of these art filmmakers got the Hollywood deals they aimed for. (Exceptions: Beth B and Amos Poe got one picture; Jim Jarmusch, an NYU film grad who was on the fringes of No Wave got famous.)
“All of Us or None”?
This irritation led to the proposal by theater artist “C. Lindzee” (Lindzee Smith?) that “all projects funded by Colab have open participation by Colab members”.
The amended proposal, “Collaborative Projects does not hold as a general principle that all projects that receive money must be open to the participation of all members, but that each project be considered for funding on its own merits as determined by the membership” was defeated by two votes. A competing proposal, “All projects funded by Collaborative Projects are open to the participation of all Colab members” was a dead tie. No vote was held on a proposal that the majority of funds go to projects with open participation.
The even split between pressure to collectivize and the resistance of individualists threatened the group’s existence. An undated record of discussions among officers (folder 5) seems to come out of that period. It concerns the split, the “inability to see Colab as cohesive group”. There is a lot of disconnected heavy thought in these notes, but there’s a grim tentative conclusion – “If ‘members’ cannot decide 1. who are members 2. what a quorum is 3. which collaborative projects to undertake then we decide that the ‘workshop’ is a failure, we take our administrative [illegible] and divide $ up equally, mail checks and letters to everyone and then see if collaborative works ensue, if any more meetings are held, etc. see how many cash their checks, then burn checkbook, records, etc. Sign blood pact w CF, AC, TO”. (That is Coleen, Andrea and Tom. Andrea: Uli was the treasurer. But, the records no longer exist.)
We’re Out of Here
The problems were resolved as I recall by the abrupt wholesale disappearance of New Cinema interested people from Colab meetings.
My feelings as I remember them were thanks that all those conflictive angry people were gone. Now we might get something done.
There’s a real sense of drama reading these files from before the big events of the Real Estate and Time Square shows. Those two high-profile actions – the first in January, the second in June of 1980 – broke open all sorts of possibilities for the group and its members, and mooted a lot of the earlier conflicts. Although the same kinds of conflicts would surface later, those events clearly saved Colab from disintegration.
Real Estate Show propaganda collage, 1980
The Real Estate Show and the Times Square Show have both received some attention in later historically based exhibitions. The Real Estate Show story and the founding of ABC No Rio are sketched in the blog post #13 here, “Busting Moves, Breaking Locks”.
It’s also recounted in the online version of the 1985 catalogue “ABC No Rio Dinero” mounted by Marc Miller. And again, exhaustively and in the context of earlier Lower East Side occupations in my zine “House Magic” #6 – again on the occasion of an exhibition in 2014 – “The Real Estate Show Revisited”.
Times Square, Again and Again
I tell my Times Square Show story in the book I’ll publish next year. But the most complete picture of the genesis and production of that watershed artist-organized exhibition is given in the website for the 2012 show "Times Square Show Revisited" at Hunter College, which includes some 30 interviews. The show is introduced by a text I quote:
“The Times Square Show was staged during June of 1980, at the corner of 41st Street and Seventh Avenue in New York City. In the barrage of media attention that was to accompany the exhibition's run, Village Voice writer Richard Goldstein heralded the TSS as "The First Radical Art Show of the 80s." Instead of a carefully controlled environment, the viewer experienced a profusion of art and activity contained within a maze of rooms and hallways that took up all four floors plus the basement of a vacant building that formerly housed a massage parlor. There was no pristine, white-walled gallery space and no obvious, systematic way to identify the individuals who made the works on view.”
The website includes redactions of 30 interviews by Shawna Cooper. These conversations show the tremendous variety of perspectives on this event, which included so many artists and performers. Everytime I read one I learn something new.
Pincus Liked It
Since I just stumbled on it, and I worked for him and liked him a lot, I'll quote from the late Robert Pincus-Witten’s review of the Hunter College show (he also taught there once) in Artforum of December, 2012. He quotes in turn his own journal notation of June 25, 1980:
“The unrepentant raunch of the Times Square Art Show—post-punk “Boonies,” plus porn, plus disco freak goes inner-city social Soul realist. Astonishing froth and media-hype, wonderful in a way one would never dream, even from the extolling newsprint of the Voice and Soho News. Installed at 41st and Seventh Avenue, in an old souvlaki joint-cum-massage parlor that out-grosses any alternative space yet conceived. Four floors of extravagant bad taste, which is of course, already codified and imitated—in short, its own good taste. Black artists . . . graffitists galore, neo-Feminists inquiring after bondage porn. Pleated fans depicting penetration, moving sex tales coupled with explicit anecdotes of all kinds; in short, the resolute antithesis of any high art notion associated with Formalism—with the proviso that this, too, this outrageous post-and-anti-Formalism, has its own recognized modes. An irony—Clyfford Still’s death notice in today’s Times. What would he have said? And who still cares?”
The artworld tables were turning. That show was a big deal.
Oh, and BTW, probably the most historically significant film deal happened there when Charlie Ahearn and Fab Five Fred Brathwaite agreed to make Wild Style.
A Closer Look
The TSS installation itself needs closer examination. It is recorded mainly in the photos Andrea Callard took of the show, which repose in the NYU library. Many surprises await researchers. I’ll note only a few of mine as I peered through a loupe at the slides in the binders. First, I searched for the mural by Jean-Michel Basquiat in the Fashion Lounge that so impressed Jeffrey Deitch. I remember looking for it when we were required to paint over the interior of the soon-to-be-demolished building we had “defaced” with our exhibition. I couldn’t find it.
J-M Basquiat’s aerosol mural in the TSS Fashion Lounge behind a rack of clothes splashed with house paint
There is a photo of it in that Artforum review by Pincus-Witten. Although Ted Stamm didn’t photograph it head on, the painting is distinctively J-MB. Jean-Michel had a bit of a rough start as a painter, but this aerosol work is exuberant.
Just outside the Fashion Lounge, there was a painted photocopy of Becky Howland’s drawing of the Shah of Iran raising a sword from the RES Field Office. Just beneath it in the photo is a fragment of a Samo graffiti, the Basquiat/Al Diaz collaborative project during that time.
I wandered that show countless times, but these sheets were like a trip to another place, alongside but not congruent with what I recall. The “Love and Death” room, with its dresses with cheap plastic boobs pasted to the wall, ropes, collages of bondage and porno with restraint, and slogans painted in red – “sold / cunt / heat”, and in black “witch / old maid / hag” – I recall the anger in this room was overwhelming. It was hard to be in it. These rooms had been the site of sex work, and some of the artists involved in that room had done that labor.
Erotic Psyche
Only recently, one of that team, Aline Mayer, visited Pompeii and wrote on Facebook that she found herself sensitive to the vibes of the female sex slaves who had worked in the rooms of the Wolf Brothel there. After TSS Aline worked with Bradley Eros and others to produce the Erotic Psyche show at ABC No Rio, where the audience was more friendly than the multitudes around Times Square.
“Promethea” performance with Erotic Psyche, 1988; alinemare.com
The publicity signboards I made for the show are in those photos. Artworks that my parents bought from the show are also documented. (They were in the Spring 2021 show in Milwaukee, discussed in earlier blog posts.)
Box 1, folder 55 has Andrea’s texts from that period with more surprises, mainly of the numerous side acts by non-Colab people (often spelled wrong) – performance by the mysterious writer and professional sadist Terence Sellers, video (?) by master alt-mechanic Mark Pauline of Survival Research Labs, San Francisco, a “feature film by Jim Jarmish” (sic), and a long text with drawings by R.L. Seltman. (For the occasion, RL produced that work based on his project of walking every street in Manhattan. – Andrea)
R.L. was a macher in the Little Italy art scene, north of Soho, west of the Lower East Side, and literally large. He had a hand in generating the Storefront for Art & Architecture, Arleen Schloss’s A’s salon and No Se No social club, locus of the Rivington School, among other venues.
Andrea was in touch with him, and he sent her a lengthy text about his experiences around the Times Square area. It’s a fascinating read. Like many artists, he was drawn to the area. He tells of inadvertently launching a bomb scare, and stepping over a dead body as he emerged from a movie theater. He interviewed a porn film producer. Another dead body (heart attack) and the people hurrying by it. “Each time I intersected with [the Times Square area] I would witness a crime.”
Next: “Weird Creatures of the State”
LINKS
Jim Hoberman, "No Wavelength: The Para-Punk Underground" in the Village Voice, May 1979
http://www.luxonline.org.uk/articles/no_wavelength(1).html
MWF Video Club collection list
http://www.brickhaus.com/amoore/
some downloadable files
https://archive.org/details/mwf_video_club
“Club 57: Film, Performance, and Art in the East Village, 1978–1983”
https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/3824
Eric Mitchell, the enfant terrible of Colab film
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Mitchell_(filmmaker)
ABC No Rio Dinero book online
https://98bowery.com/return-to-the-bowery/abcnorio-the-book
“House Magic” 6 “The Real Estate Show Revisited”, April 2014
https://sites.google.com/site/housemagicbfc/
Shawna Cooper interviews: "Making History: Accounts of the Times Square Show"
http://www.timessquareshowrevisited.com/accounts.html
MORE:
John Lurie interview with Andrea Callard about "Men in Orbit"
https://wp.nyu.edu/orphanfilm/2021/02/18/men-in-orbit-1979/
Céline Murillo, “’I’ll play in yours if you play in mine’: Co-creation in COLAB’s films (New York, 1978-1985)” September 17, 2020. She writes on "Kidnapped" and "Wild Style"
https://asapjournal.com/ill-play-in-yours-if-you-play-in-mine-co-creation-in-colabs-films-new-york-1978-1985-celine-murillo/
PRINT:
Ron Magliozzi and Sophie Cavoulacos, Club 57: Film, Performance, and Art in the East Village, 1978-1983 (MoMA, 2017)
Thurston Moore, Byron Coley et al. No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York. 1976-1980 (Abrams, 2008)
Basquiat signboard for TSS in front of Lisa Kahane’s photo in the "Basquiat the Artist and His New York Scene" show, Schunck, Heerlen, NL, 2012. Photo Christy Rupp
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