Detail of “Cheez Doodles” by Robert Goldman, aka Bobby G, 1981
So the show of my parents’ collection in Milwaukee, with admixtures from other hoards, is over. The curators who helped me sort the stuff out last year called the show “The Alan Moore Project”. Very descriptive, I guess, of what that was for Milwaukee at the Walkers Point Center for the Arts, a place that caters to youth of color and member artists. Still, it felt weird to be a collector showing a collection. It’s yet another artworld role I’m filling.
I travelled to USA with my partner to do this show. It was monster work for this old body, and stressful for our relationship. I was often struck with melancholy and anxieties throughout.
As we hung the work, it refracted memories, senses and forms of what that 40-years-gone world was to me.
First the bubbling weirdness of the late ‘70s No Wave, all the ground seepage of unfulfilled desires breaking through. That was the epoch of the “desiring machine” going into operation, before the Spectacle chewed it up.
Then came the grisly ‘80s with Cowboy Reagan riding down unruly herds running amidst the smoking ruins of imperial wars. Collective helplessness. These are the beasts which continue to stalk and lay waste to this day.
There is a lot of beauty in the work as well. After all, it is art.
Help! I Own It
A collection is a significant burden. This is a mass of stuff, not a house full of beloved things. I am uncomfortable being the owner of such a large assemblage of works. The burden chafes. It feels like a great weight, a debt of responsibility.
"Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth... But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven," Jesus said.
Surely it is to heaven we aspire – the beyond of the archive. And that is how I have conceived of this great pile of leavings of some lifetimes. It is a historical resource for those who might care to know, to understand a late 20th century cultural period.
That understanding is a resource for going forward, so it necessarily lies forever beyond me. It is for others to divine. I had the experience.
So after the show the question remains – how to get rid of it all?
Consolidation Intention
The first task is to put it all together and put it forward. While it seems like old hat to me, these cultural movements happened long ago. Outside some academic circles and the old folks themselves, they aren’t very well remembered. Unlike the often-revisited movements (motions) of the artworld as it is and has been, which regularly receive institutional attention in the eternal internal necessity to valorize private collections, self-organizing artists histories do not top the list of shows curators want to do.
So I’m pitching this show for NYC, to carry these coals back to Newcastle. Here’s the proposal:
The Pitch
“Over some three decades, an academic family in Milwaukee collected art in New York City from cadres of the most rebellious among the creatives of Lower Manhattan. They began buying at the epochal 1980 Times Square Show, an exhibition in the then-raucous lumpen amusement district that changed the course of contemporary art. This was an art that foregrounded social content at the moment of Reagan’s ascendancy, was full of humor, and found new ways to engage the formal themes that had previously dominated New York art. Most of these artists were associated with the autonomous art group Colab, the Lower East Side space ABC No Rio, Fashion Moda in the South Bronx, and later the Rivington School on the LES.
“This moment is variously described as populist, regressive, a time of de-skilling, and a turn to the political in art. The end of the 20th century was also the time of gentrification, the end of the traditional bohemia of the Lower East Side and the beginning of the luxury magnet New York City has become. Now, with some distance it can be fruitful to re-examine the work of this time, to trace its continuities, and to try to describe some of the features of creative production during a time now long gone.
“The exhibition project of the Moore collection with admixtures from the ABC No Rio collection offers a chance to appreciate this period of dynamic creativity and to interrogate the role that the artists, their work and their demi-institutions played in constructing the foundations of the current artistic moment.”
Money must be raised. We’ll see how it goes.
Other Parts in There
As mentioned, there are parts of the ABC No Rio collection in Milwaukee. Jack Waters, together with Peter Cramer, tended that for many years. Jack wrote a text about the collection, the shows they made with it, and some of his experiences during the time they worked at ABC.
I think it’d be cool to mount vitrines in this prospective show, each dedicated to a different phase of collective experience.
[Jack Waters on the ABC No Rio Collection]
https://alanwmoore.net/project/colab-abc-no-rio/
Coleen Fitzgibbon, “Welcome to the 80s”, 1980, mixed media on paper
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