This is the 13th in a series of posts based on my memoir research in NYC in the fall of 2019. These results are not part of the book to be published. They will appear only on this blog. For some of the preceding posts, I was working in the NYU research library, examining Colab materials. Now I’m going to set up some of the interviews I did during that period, which will be posted this fall. The first problem then was to get out of the library…
While working in the NYU library I’d buy a sandwich and eat it outside. Washington Square Park and the streets around NYU’s central hive are too crowded for comfort. I ate my lunch in a hidden spot, a blocked-off staircase into the NYU housing projects, behind the overgrown Time Landscape of naturist artist Alan Sonfist (1978).. A few homeless had left their stuff there, and a pedestrian passed from time to time. It’s a verdant alleyway, a quiet untraveled green and shady bower.
Happy Boozhee Wonderland
Soho is one block south. Once I would have sat on one of the commodious metal loading docks there and eaten my lunch like the workers in Soho past. Now there are too many people. And they’re not the kind of people it’s much fun to watch. They’re tourists, and they’re watching you eating your sandwich ‘cause it’s so colorful.
The Soho I remember, the first place I landed in New York in 1974, is mostly gone. My little cubbyhole in Jack’s loft, from whence I traveled to the Artforum offices on 57th Street to do my internship was above the Broome Street Bar. The bar is gone. The traffic island out front of it which was a garden of rusting metal sculptures, 112 Greene Street and Food, Artists Space, Edit DeAk’s fabulous loft, the 420 West Broadway flagship of the ‘70s art establishment and almost all the major art galleries, the fascinating and educational ethnic art stores Craft Caravan, Jacques Carcanagues, Leekan Design, even the New Museum which once ruled Broadway – all are gone. Soho is a not-so-interesting luxury shopping mall. The barrio still has no parks.
Rene Block with Joseph Beuys felt suit
In that fall of 2019 what remained of the vanished landscape of ‘70s Soho was the Ronald Feldman Gallery. Ronald loaned to my Joseph Beuys show at UC Riverside in 1975, and later supported Fashion Moda, the South Bronx-based art space with benefit exhibitions. He’s still on Mercer Street. Ronald has retired, but the gallery maintains a commitment to art seasoned with politics. A show of Hannah Wilke’s work was up there then, the beauty who took an alt-feminist position in her photoworks. I remember her as gay and charming in a classic Manhattan manner when Edit invited me along to lunch with her uptown.
Hannah Wilke
Up Above the Shopping Mall
A few old comrades still perch in Soho, paying the controlled rents set by the loft laws of the 1970s. One of Colab’s founders, Robin Winters retains a corner of his old loft, high above Victoria’s Secret. (The store broke their lease during Virus times, I’m told.) The building constructed a new labyrinthian entrance on Mercer Street through which holdout tenants must enter so that the lingerie store could have all the Broadway frontage. Robin has been holding exhibitions in his front room, just as he did for Colab in the late ‘70s, in a project he calls the Key Club.
We attended one, a young artist’s homage to Gordon Matta-Clark and Food restaurant cast as a kind of vegetarian cannibal feast. Julie Harrison still lives in that building as well, and raised two kids in her loft.
I interviewed both, and will present transcripts here soon.
Just north of Houston Street, Wayne’s Mercer Street Books miraculously survives. Across the street from that invaluable used bookstore full of new review copies, NYU has finally swallowed the two small public parks where my baby son played with the neighbors’ kids. They built an extension of their gymnasium or something. I listened to the venerable bookseller Wayne Conti rant about this for a while.
Wayne Conti of Mercer Street Books -- beaten but unbowed
Punch You, Macho
I was able to show my partner the woman among the old studio photos of boxers on the wall at Fanelli’s bar. Some of the staff sneaked it past old Joe years ago, as the gal who posed for it told me one night at Annette Kuhn’s salon. Fanelli’s is no longer the hangout of the heavy metal sculptors of the upstairs Max Hutchinson gallery. But the bar is still a half-decent scene (pre-Virus, natch).
Jeffrey Deitch’s double venue gallery is still there, and still a major attraction. The Deitch gallery hosted a benefit show for ABC No Rio some years ago. But the gallery is strictly 21st century. I met Jeffrey on the street, all dandified in his cream-colored suit, high-stepping out for a walk to get his sandwich lunch. We talked a little business, which has so far come to nothing.
The wall of Mike Fanelli's boxing heroes in the bar. Can you spot the woman?
Nothing to See Here
Soho is now an "arty" district, not an art district. There are glitzy commercial art stores selling expensive furniture and posters of Warhol and Banksy images, high fashion clothing stores in vast empty ground floor spaces and twinky sandwich shops. Soho businesses turn over fast, and the district oscillates between tourist traps for international herds of bourgeoisie and the kind of Saudi royal-owned shopping mall Douglas Davis once described, with the last few aging artists peering down from their rent-controlled lofts at the herds of shoppers.
Tourist mecca, shopping mall – except for its fine architecture, Soho today is something of a dreary trudge. On weekends, however, artists again crowd the streets of Soho to set up temporary stands of their work. (They had to fight for this right against Mayor Giuliani who of course sought to close them down.) A couple of years ago I met Matthew Courtney there, onetime MC of the ABC No Rio Open Mic and an AIDS survivor. Matthew was crouched in a cast iron corner, selling his meticulous paintings on paper.
Just as in Greenwich Village before, the living part of the Soho arts district clings on like a weekly surge of crabs and seabirds on the rocks of commerce.
Matthew Courtney selling his work on the streets of Soho. Photo by Mason Plumlee
The Big Man of the Avant Garde
Richard Kostelanetz, who lived in a Fluxhouse there for many years, wrote of old Soho in its glory days as an “artists colony”. Richard is a polymath and a publishing demon. He produced two books of recollections, the second more rambling than the first. I recommend them as the best account I know of Soho, when it was full of now-forgotten creative strivers, many of them aligned with an international avant-garde. It’s the same vision Rene Block describes in his Berlin-New York anthology in 1976.
Richard Kostelanetz in his Queens loft. Photo by Joe Carrotta for The New York Times
I also read Adam Gopnik’s recent memoir. Gopnik is a good writer and a nice boy who got his start working for Kirk Varnedoe at the MoMA. Eloquent, handsome, a brilliant curator, Varnedoe died youngish. I recall him telling an audience that those who loved art were a “self-selecting elite.” It’s true, and comforting if you aren't rich enough to collect it.
Gopnik still lives with his family in the “cheap” part of Soho, the old Italian district west of West Broadway. He fondly recalls the Sunday promenade in the district during the 1970s, 420 West Broadway with Castelli and Sonnabend, Bykert, Dia and all the rest. Lunch at the Spring Street Bar. This is consumption Soho, an all’s-right-with-the-white-creative-world Soho. Too comfortable by far.
“You Don’t Know Me but You Don’t Like Me” – Buck Owen
Many artists hated what that gave birth to. Hiding in vacant warehouses as illegal residents during the ‘60s and ‘70s was one thing, the emergent haute bourgeois art world Gopnik loved was another. (Even that has long decamped from Soho to Chelsea.) The whole art gallery system was a focus of the Art Workers Coalition critique in the late ‘60s, and in the mid-’70s the Fox journal spin-off of Art & Language kept up the attack. Artists Meeting for Cultural Change picketed the museums again. A band of guerrillas glued the locks of Soho’s galleries shut.
Come the ‘80s and the action critique continued. Dan Asher splashed blood in a gallery and David Wojnarowicz brought bones from a butcher shop to the staircases of the palatial 420 gallery building in two separate incidents.
More decorous was the many-years Whitney Counteweight produced by Bill Rabinovitch and friends, a remnant of the spirit of the co-op galleries of the ‘50s and ‘60s. The rebellion here was simply pointing to the vast community of working artists who never make it into the gallery and fashion-driven precincts of the Whitney Museum for their biannual exhibition. (In 2010 the Bruce High Quality Foundation and Vito Schnabel – yes, his son, who runs a gallery – presented a hipper take-off on the idea, the "Brucennial" on West Broadway.)
The era of artists’ self-organized co-op galleries was at last recalled in a revelatory 2017 show “Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952–1965” at NYU’s Grey Art Gallery. A few of these persist, although not in Soho.
My cohort was lucky even to have a rump chunk of this time when artists really kind of had the run of New York City. And Gopnik’s execrable memoir contained at least one clear truth for artists and writers – “we were all stowaways aboard the ship Manhattan”.
NEXT: Not so sure right now… this line is usually wrong.
LINKS:
Allison Meier, “The Origins of Manhattan’s Tiny Plot of Precolonial Terrain”, Hyperallergic, November 14, 2016 Alden Projects on the Lower East Side is marking 50 years since Alan Sonfist proposed reclaiming land in New York City for memorials to lost nature.
https://hyperallergic.com/337906/time-landscape-alan-sonfist/
Wayne Conti – much-celebrated as dying, but still there
Wayne Conti of Mercer Street Books -- survivor!
https://noho.bid/neighborhood-spotlight-reflecting-30-years-noho-wayne-conti-mercer-books
"Mercer Street Books & Records", March 27, 2018
Jeremiah's Vanishing New York, a.k.a. The Book of Lamentations: a bitterly nostalgic look at a city in the process of going extinct
http://vanishingnewyork.blogspot.com/2018/03/mercer-street-books-records.html
On Richard Kostelanetz
Corey Kilgannon, "The Bibliomaniac of Ridgewood", April 4, 2018, New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/nyregion/the-bibliomaniac-of-ridgewood.html
“Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952–1965”, NYU Gray Gallery, 2017
https://www.nyuad-artgallery.org/en_US/our-exhibitions/main-gallery/inventing-downtown-archive/
Jeffrey Deitch with Kembra Pfahler (left) at some swanky function
