Art-Rite cover by Christo
This is the 14th of my ongoing series of memoir blog posts. They foreshadow the forthcoming book to be published in Spring, 2022 with the Journal of Aesthetics & Protest. This time I interview Walter “Mike” Robinson on his experiences as co-founder -editor and -publisher of the famous giveaway neighborhood art magazine Art-Rite. I fondly recall my time working with him and his fabulous comrade, Edit DeAk, on this local global artistic project.
Introduction – I arrived in NYC in 1974 to work for Artforum magazine. But the real fun in the art magazine “business” was being had by the publishers of Art-Rite. During my 2019 research trip, I spent too much time in the library. I realized I needed to have some formal conversations with old friends and comrades. The resource of living memory is fragile, and our cohort has a limited shelf life.
You Ain’t Talkin’ and I Ain’t Askin’
There are many fine excuses not to do interviews. Texts are built upon texts, and historians often just follow the periodicals of the day. “Rough draft of history” – the normative canon proceeds from the familiar journals. A kind of cowardice, then, is professionally sanctioned. You don’t have to talk to live people who may mislead you. Maybe art historians also prefer mute inanimate objects which reveal themselves through semiotic systems which only the hierophant can read.
Print is always friendly. With old texts and images there are no culture shocks, “cancel” flags, or the kind of ego-damage that can come from talking to cranky old artists. There’s no reminders of past failings, no slights, only the mild pleasures of discovery and the consensual idea in the discipline that you’re piecing together the verifiable story.
The Earliest
From my earliest times in NYC, I could have hunted up ex-Artforum colleagues like Angela Westwater, now a well-known gallerist, or Robin White, who like Walter Robinson was an early founder of Printed Matter, which has always been my favorite art and bookstore.
Walter when he was Mike; '70s, photographer unknown
But no, the career path of the critic was not mine. I shed too many skins, and my tracks were weirder. Besides, Amy Newman’s Challenging Art (2000), an oral history of Artforum has covered those years thoroughly; it’s clearly a labor of love. And Artforum was so serious, I just couldn´t face it.
For that time I went straight to Walter Robinson. He didn’t know Artforum, but he and Edit DeAk were the co-editors of Art-Rite, which was a great project to work on. I spent as much time in that Wooster Street loft as I decently could, helping to write collaborative texts, and later assisting with production. (I was a typesetter, like Walter.)
Walter later was closely involved in Colab and the East Village Eye and after that Artnet.com, but we didn´t talk about that.
Walter Robinson: “Leave Me Out of It”
When we talked in early October of ‘19, Walter was painting in his studio in a building full of artisans. It’s several blocks walk from the Queens Plaza subway complex, where an insane high-rise building spree has been going on for several years. I know the area from my hostel stays. Already the subway platform going into Manhattan is jammed, and those apartment skyscrapers have yet to fill up.
Later that year, when Primary Information reprinted every issue of Art-Rite as a book, the journal was celebrated at a book launch. Walter then described his co-publisher Edit DeAk as “sexy, with an accent like Zsa Zsa Gabor, but serious, not goofy”. [Bloch, 2019]
Edit DeAk in full glamour. Photo by Timothy Greenfield Sanders, 1981.
After her passing, Marc Miller ended up with most of her library which he sold on. It was thick with her reading in aesthetics and philosophy in both Hungarian and English.
Walter Robinson: I had such an adventure with Edit. And the end of the adventure was the end of the ‘70s. I packed up two suitcases and moved to Ludlow Street where Ulli [Rimkus], my green card marriage, found the apartment. And left everything behind. I consciously was, like, I’m leaving this decade behind, including most of my library, any Art-Rite archives and even a few paintings. And I’m starting a new life. … I’m traveling light. Now at my age I regret very much travelling light. …
We had a personal relationship that had ended badly, and she had a thriving night-time social life that I envied, and couldn’t keep up with, both because I didn’t have the aptitude and because I had a day job …. You continued to work with Edit in the ‘80s.
Alan Moore: She called me up to help with her writing. I would go over and take dictation. I worked on her Francesco Clemente article, and it was a frustrating process because I’d try to put things into sentences –
WR: And she’d say, “No no, that’s not it!” It’s so fascinating.
AM: She would then take the article over to Ingrid [Sischy at Artforum] and they would totally rewrite it. [The published version] was nothing like what we worked on.
WR: What do you want to know about Art-Rite that I should try to remember?
AM: Just the mise en scene was amazing. This enormous loft, the ping pong table in there, and Peter Grass playing like a demon. The fact that you and Edit were a couple, and then Peter was her husband. The whole escape in the trunk from Yugoslavia. The debriefing by the CIA, which is actually online.
WR: … That part of the story I’d forgotten.… Peter told me – I went up for Edit´s memorial. Peter has a church in Catskill, NY. He’s so fabulous. He’s 72, he’s cranky, he’s Hungarian. He’s like he was, only crankier…. He told me the story of how he met Edit…. Basically he’s a Jew, she’s Catholic. Her parents forbid her to see him. They sent her to a convent away from the city to study. So Peter would travel there, a long trip, to go to Sunday service, to mass, in hopes that she’d be there. And sometimes she wouldn’t be there, they’d keep her out from mass. Then she’d be there, and they’d meet in the cemetery and fuck around the gravestones. It’s like a real awesome love story.
AM: At one point Peter had a studio in a small kind of shed on the roof of the building. He cooked me a kidney on his Primus stove there. I also remember Yuri.
WR: Yes, and Katja, his girlfriend. She’s still around, with Richard Algus. They still live together.
AM: Yuri set up my unemployment, as if I was working for him.
WR: That guy was able to do that?
AM: Yeah. He said, “You send me the documents. I’ve done it before. You’ll be my studio assistant.”
WR: Those immigrants. Yuri was a great photographer… His philosophy of photography was Cartier-Bresson’s significant moment.…
Walter Robinson, stencil painting on paper (1979?)
AM: Edit was making films, you were making films. All these weird people were coming over….
WR: I think she really bloomed during the ‘80s. Did you have a sense of her drug addiction in the ‘80s? It was just starting.
AM: Not really, until she was involved with this guy named Flip, who was really [skanky, i.e. an obvious junkie] …. Paul Tschinkel knew him. It was he who told me Flip was dead, which I repeated, and frightened Edit. It wasn’t true.
WR: I wonder if Flip was the guy I found her in bed with. That was what prompted me to leave.
AM: A sexually handsome guy.
WR: Jack Smith used to come over. And Johnny Dynell, when I was there. Marina [Abramovic] and Ulay [Frank Uwe Laysiepen, d. 2020] came and stayed, when they visited America. They had this huge ugly German shepherd. They’d get a big bowl of tripe and feed the dog. Christof [Kohlhöfer] and Ulli came over. Because when we went to Germany we just cold-called Christof to stay at his house for a few days. Then he returned the favor and stayed with us for six months.
Christof Kohlhoefer on a 2014 visit to NYC. Photo by Coleen Fitzgibbon.
AM: How did you know him?
WR: We visited his show at Gallery Krinzinger, and said could we meet him? Christof was slim, androgenous in a Living Theatre way (it was in fashion then), and earnest: he talked our ears off that first night, in his slow, heavily German-accented English, when all we wanted to do was bed down.
Then he came to visit. In the ‘70s he was quite the character. Christof was a big influence on me, largely for his uninhibited manner and constant creativity. He was unafraid, and I admired that (being a Protestant square from Oklahoma).
…Tom Otterness reminded me, Christof always had a car. Even if you don’t have any money, the definition of being alpha is you have to have a car. So he would cruise all the way up 1st Avenue to Harlem and then turn around and cruise all the way down 2nd Avenue. That’s what we’d do on Saturday night, go for a drive.
AM: Edit had a car. I drove it long before I had a license.
WR: That huge Cadillac convertible. What a nightmare. Not only did she not have a license or registration, she couldn’t drive.
AM: We drove out to a party at Hal Bromm’s house.
WR: We were very young, in our 20s, and in your 20s you don’t know that you can’t do all this shit. So [on their trip to Europe] we saw Michael Werner, and we heard about all these artists like Anselm Kiefer, way before anybody in New York heard about him, and we visited Gerhard Richter. I remember absolutely nothing about the visit. I was so unprepared for what I was doing.… It was for a “European Issue” of Art-Rite, which we never got around to publishing, I’m sorry to say. I still have somewhere the b&w photos I took for it.
Art-Rite was a triumvirate, but the team of three editors didn’t last long. The downfall was something of a soap opera. Glamorous Edit and debonair Peter lived together in a big loft on Wooster Street in SoHo, but they had something of an “open relationship” which wasn’t a familiar concept then to me. Josh, who had been my roommate in college, began a surreptitious affair with Edit, and soon was confiding his troubles to me. Young love, you know? And before long, something sparked between Edit and me and we started carrying on behind Josh’s back. Not ideal but hormones what can you do? He soon caught us out and that was the end of that. He left New York, went to business school and is now a successful banker. I take credit. Gwen Allen has the story in her book, Artists’ Magazines, MIT 2011.
East Village Eye centerfold by Christof Kohlhofer, October 1979
AM: I remember meeting that guy once, and it was something of a strained meeting. …
WR: Another thing that happened there a lot was slide shows with music at the loft. Christof would show his slides, he has this amazing collection.
AM: It was in the Moore College of Art catalogue [Philadelphia, 1983].
WR: We did that show. I think Nan Goldin got the idea for the Ballad of Sexual Dependency [photographic series] from those events… because slide shows with music became her thing for a long time. …
[Edit and Mike launched something called Ghost Films, and Edit shot numerous reels of Super-8. I never saw more than a few of them, but Patrick Fox worked to organize them, and the MoMA did a screening. Gallery 98 has posted various items from Edit´s archives, which reveal the diverse filmic events which took place ad the Wooster Street loft. All this activity remains somewhat mysterious.]
WR: Edit wasn’t a great cook but she was a brilliant hostess, and would regularly have dinners for all kinds of people — later, in the ‘80s, she presided over even more of a salon I think. Her gang included James Nares and John Lurie, and Lisa Rosen would come over, Sophie VDT [Vieille] was there. DJ Johnny Dynell was a good friend, and eventually she became a regular at the Mudd Club. I had a job but didn’t make much money. I don’t know what those people did for money.
AM: They were comped. You read Duncan Hannah’s memoir, at a certain point everybody’s getting comped.
WR: It’s certainly true that at the Mudd Club you got comped in, and you got to drink for free. … I was always gonna write a memoir called Leave Me Out of It, ‘cause it was just going to be interviews with people about what they remembered.
AM: Excellent title.
WR: … One thing about Edit and her stories that used to annoy me – 25 years later when people asked what happened back then, she’s got all her stories rehearsed and me I don’t remember anything. … I don’t have the same attitude towards my accomplishments in the ‘70s. I don’t reminisce about them. …
Walter in his studio. Photo by Peter Bellamy, 1983
Post Script
We made this interview some time ago. In the interim, I have thought a lot about that scene of the turn of the ´70s into the ´80s, which has been much written about. Just recently, a key mover in that scene died, Diego Cortez, an occasional in Edit´s crew and a founder of the Mudd Club. (Raymond Foye has edited a nice tribute.)
There´s an interview with the two of them in our 1985 book ABC No Rio Dinero, entitled “The Night Time Is the Right Time”. They talk about the ephemeral irreproducible nightclub scene of the era, and its social and artistic effects.
I saw in Madrid a show of Fernando Pessoa and the artists he supported as a critic and aesthetician under some of his many pseudonyms. After seeing “Pessoa: All Art Is a Form of Literature”, I thought, “What a great exhibition Edit´s critical favorites would make!” In fact, I proposed it to some curators in Budapest, where she was from. I guessed that her peculiar point of view came from engagement with neo-Surrealist aesthetics in her home country. (That proposal was a non-starter, of course, given the present homophobic authoritarian government in Hungary.)
But with the long hindsight of decades it is pretty clear now that an exhibition centered around the multi-various productions – critical positions, curatorial work, transgressions and artistic products of Edit, Diego, and one must include the maliciously perceptive Rene Ricard, an occasional member of their crew – would be pretty interesting. I assign it to the unnamed student as a dissertation topic, then you can write the lead essay for the catalogue.
Now? As Then?
The other thing I like to think about is what lessons for today might be drawn from the dynamic and exciting artistic environments that we all shared in the late analog years? Art-Rite was supported by advertisers, almost all of them art galleries, and subscribers by mail. Today´s digital art publications have an entirely different “revenue model” – i.e., means of subsistence. The digitals have as well a radically different means of sensual address. It´s 100% visual; there is no tactility to a website.
Fragments of the Art-Rite idea, the idiosyncrasy, whimsy and artistic collaboration of the project survive in zine culture. But the localism of Art-Rite, its community in the Soho neighborhood of what Kostelanetz called “an artists colony”, seems like a doomed-to-fail politically unsustainable project in the era of hyper-gentrification.
So, finally, I don´t know what lessons the Art-Rite example has to offer. I only know it sure was fun.
LINKS
A precis of my forthcoming memoir, “Art Worker”
https://alanwmoore.net/memoir/
An exhibition arranged with NYU, “Learn to Read Art: A Surviving History of Printed Matter,” 2014-15 displayed the project’s history. I didn’t see it. I recall that Hurricane Katrina damaged their archives severely, which may explain the “surviving” in the title.
Max Schumann with Maya Harakawa, “Learn to Read Art: A Surviving History of Printed Matter”
Brooklyn Rail, February 2015
https://brooklynrail.org/2015/02/art_books/max-schumann-with-maya-harakawa
Lauren O’Neill-Butler, review of “Learn to Read Art: A Surviving History of Printed Matter”
Artforum, February 2015
https://www.artforum.com/print/reviews/201502/learn-to-read-art-a-surviving-history-of-printed-matter-49831
Art-Rite book
edited by Walter Robinson, Edit DeAk, and Joshua Cohn
https://primaryinformation.org/product/art-rite/
Mark Bloch, “ArtSeen: Art-Rite Book Launch,” at: brooklynrail.org, December 2019
Marc Miller, Galery 98 "Edit DeAk" page
http://gallery.98bowery.com/tag/edit-deak/
“The Night Time Is The Right Time”, Diego Cortez and Edit deAk talk, 1980
excerpt online; the original printed version is longer, and the ms. in my papers is longer still
https://98bowery.com/return-to-the-bowery/abcnorio-the-neighborhood#evmusicart
Pessoa: All Art Is a Form of Literature
Reina Sofia museum, Madrid
https://www.museoreinasofia.es/en/exhibitions/pessoa
Raymond Foye, ed., A Tribute to Diego Cortez - The Brooklyn Rail
https://brooklynrail.org/2021/09/in-memoriam/A-Tribute-to-Diego-Cortez
A curious afternote -- a jewelry designer worked at Getty Research where Edit's files are. She charts the change in the artworld which she noted in the archive. Short, curious.
Bazooka Grooves, "Justice for Edit DeAk", n.d.
https://bazookagrooves.com/justice-for-edit-de-ak/
Jack Smith, Boiled Lobster Color Slideshow (at 149 Wooster Street). Poster, 1976
