A photo of a bum on the Bowery, 1970s, by Meryl Meisler. It looks like the Bowery at Delancey Street, a perfectly reasonable place to take a snooze in the ‘70s.
This is the 14th post from my memoir project, an account of my 30 years in the NYC artworld. This post continues the summary of the not-yet-published book. The focus this time is on my time on Houston Street near the Bowery, starting in the mid-1970s in the apartment of Robin Winters.
In 1977 I moved from a room in Marc Miller’s loft to a studio apartment on Houston Street, controlled by Robin Winters. Both places were on the Bowery, the classic locus of seasonal vagrants in the USA, but they were worlds apart. From Marc’s sun-lit top floor loft, very much separated from the street, I was suddenly living just above the noise and smoke of a dirty boulevard, with the cries of the afflicted clearly heard. I stayed there for 18 years.
When I think of life on Houston Street, the French phrase nostalgie de la boue ("nostalgia for mud") comes to mind. But that wasn’t it. It was the sordid glamour of the low life, that’s sure, in one of its last major Manhattan pockets. This was serious subaltern history that we were connecting to by being here. But it wasn’t too close.
Pages from Martha Rosler's book “The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems” (1974-1975)
I was drinking and smoking, but I wasn’t just another alcoholic in his SRO (single room occupancy) room, watching as the evening light filters through a glass of whiskey and fades to night. The serious sites of drug-taking, and frenetic socializing with faux and truly dangerous people was a couple blocks away at the raucous music club CBGBs. I didn’t go there very often.
The nostalgia I indulged then was for some kind of deracinated modernism, as represented by Dada and Surrealist automatic writing strategies. I tried these for a couple of years, together with the absolutely contradictory effort of writing narrative film scenarios. Very soon I was involved with the nascent artists group Colab.
So the “boue” was living cheaply, poorly, really, and punishing myself with poetic and artistic endeavours.
“Boue” Mask
That’s a kind of mud, although it isn’t a social ambit. The neighbors were bums and criminals, but I didn’t have much to do with them. Nick the Trader, who stood on the street all day long out front of the storefront below my window did that for me. Up the street Steve Stollman whose day labor workforce was made up of domesticated bums also filtered Houston Street’s daily strangeness.
I didn´t have the kind of upbringing that made any of this natural for me. What I’d absorbed in college wasn´t the “boue” of criminality, although many of my friends then were deep in the drug trade, which they didn’t talk about and I didn’t know about. It was politics.
Now, 50 years on, it’s offensive to read the Wikipedia cite of that phrase to Tom Wolfe – "It was at this party that a Black Panther field marshal rose up beside the north piano—there was also a south piano—in Leonard Bernstein’s living room and outlined the Panthers’ ten-point program to a roomful of socialites and celebrities, who, giddy with nostalgie de la boue, entertained a vision of the future….”
To call the Black Panthers’ 10 point program “mud” is reactionary. That this was cited to a 1989 magazine piece, shows he was reactionary even 20 years later. As I have written in a post on my other blog, what the Panthers wanted is what everybody wants, including the Zapatistas.
What we lived on Houston Street was a strange ambience of poverty while conspiring and working to build up a collective creative platform for multivarious art-making. That we succeeded has something to do with the anything-goes atmosphere of Robin Winters' Houston Street digs.
597 Broadway group show photo: back row left to right -- me, Joost Rameau, Willoughby Sharp, Dan Graham, Robin Winters; front row, l to r -- Scott Billingsley (Scott B), Jim Cobb, Lee Lozano (Leefer), Gerry Hovagimyan (GR). Photographer unknown; thanks to Stephen Zacks
Robin Winters was a forceful charismatic personality in full flower as a promising young performance artist when I met him in ‘76. After I left Marc Miller’s Bowery loft, Robin invited me to move in next door to him at 73 East Houston Street. Dick Miller and Teri Slotkin were moving out.
In late 2019 we sat down to talk at Robin’s Broadway loft. He opened it to the public as the Key Club, and there was a show of Robert Hawkins’ paintings on paper. There were images of sexy cavemen, and many paintings depicting a fire in a wax museum where figures of artists were being carried to safety from the flames….
The Interview
Alan Moore: … So as I recall, … at some point Dick decided that he couldn’t be there anymore on the Bowery with the drugs and the alcohol and had to get away.
Robin Winters: Right. So you moved in after they were there. … I got those two apartments from Marcia Resnick and Pooh Kaye. I paid a $350 key fee to them at the time. I had the big apartment, and first I rented to Dick and Teri, and then to you. At some point I went away to Europe and Larry Fox had it, then there was an Irish guy who had it briefly. I didn’t ever really give it away, but somehow it went away from me anyway when Larry and Terry [Fox] were there. I can’t remember the whole process of it.
AM: … At one point Larry told me, ‘You have to leave, we’re taking over your place.’ … And he’s sitting there with a gallon of wine which he drinks everyday, telling me this and I’m like, ‘No.’… So I started paying rent directly to Tryel Realty…
RW: I paid rent to a guy named Louie who lived in Brooklyn who was blind. He’d gone blind in the building, he bumped his head on a pipe in the basement [and dislocated his corneas]. Louis Rosenstroch.
AM: He lost the building. I heard from Nick that Tryel Realty bought it for $55,000.
RW: And Reverend [William] Mountain still lived upstairs….
AM: He was Jesuit, and above it all. … For years I paid Tryel with certified checks. They claimed they never received them. When they lost the building, I got evicted by a crooked judge.
RW: And Larry, I don’t know where he is. He took so many photos. He had cans and cans and cans [of negatives?]. He shot performances, but also the Bowery at that time period when it was really the Bowery, and he was part of it in the sense that he was so alcoholic. Terry I stayed in touch with until he died. He gave me a show in California…. I brought all those paintings in my truck with Dick Miller across country. I taught him how to drive, which was a harrowing experience. Driving through Texas in a rainstorm and Dick was freaking out screaming at me but he didn’t want to pull over because he was afraid …
AM: Panhandle winds can really be intense.
RW: You wrote a lot when you were there. I just remember reams and reams of your writing, and the typewriter constantly going. Ilona Granet lived there for a short period.…
AM: She got a nice place up the street.
RW: When I was living over there I had this as my studio…..
[We chatted some about a performance he had done as part of the 597 group show which I reviewed for Artforum. (The one that Max Kozloff saw as a bad call on my part.) Robin had done an “unreasonable” performance, ass painted red, sitting on a bucket of shit. I sat in on the meetings, feeling out a role different from the ostensibly objective art critic.]
RW: ... I asked you at one point what are you gonna do? And you handed me your Artforum card. And I was like, ‘No way man.’ …. I was like, ‘Either you’re part of us or you’re not.’
AM: This was for a show [a group exhibition at 597 Broadway].
RW: Well it was for a show, and we were just having meetings about what we wanted to do, … I was like, ‘No, you actually have to be partisan here, rather than a cold observer.’ And I don’t know if that’s a memory for you or not, but my feeling was that it affected you in such a way that you actually got way more involved, just in general. You became partisan in that sense….
AM: Well Max Kozloff got rid of me. … I already thought that sense that you’re empowered to pass judgement on art is highly corrupting. … I didn’t like it. And I’d met Mike and Edit who were doing Art-Rite which was totally different. We’re down with the community. We’re looking at what’s being done and expressing our opinions, but we’re not dictating the rules of engagement….
AM: I wanted to ask about your performance on the street on the Bowery….dealing with the reality of the Bowery… With your friendship with Nick you entered into the criminal spirit of the Bowery. And I kind of continued that, living there, coming home and finding a giant TV in the apartment.
RW: I stored a ton of stuff including Super-8 cameras that everybody in Colab used. Ten bucks apiece. People who were using them were throwing them like footballs…
That performance was called “To Gandy Dancers and Roustabouts: Look for the Man in the Yellow Hat”. … I did “Industry” in my studio on Broadway, first thing in the morning, from 9 to 12, 50 cents admission. I had 50 chairs set up, and I was in there working. Nobody came. Lee Lozano came, a bunch. I’ve got good pictures of her with me in there. Then in the afternoon I did “To Gandy Dancers...”. Basically all I did was wear a yellow hat and hang out with the bums. I think at one point I gave them spray bottles and some long underwear that I’d painted to wash car windows, a little bit of costuming, but essentially the performance was just me being there and spending time with people…. One person who came was Jeffrey Deitch. He would sit and talk to me on his lunch break….
Then in the evening I did “Blind Dates and Double Dates: Silent Food for Speechless Fools”. … I didn’t have my name on any of those pieces. It was just the title of the piece. … I thought at that point in my life that I could live outside the law and be honest, so to speak, in that selling stolen goods and selling drugs and living somewhat of the criminal life was a way to subsidize my art-making without working in a factory or a restaurant or working with a gallery. Because I didn’t want any of those things. But then at a certain point somebody called me up who’d been robbed. And they were like, ‘Hey, we heard that you have stuff. … You know anything about our stuff?’ And then it dawned on me that it had consequences, and that it was connected to real people… That really freaked me out. It’s as immoral as any other position in life.
AM: I heard that Nick had acquired a full 16mm film rig that had been taken from some production company that was in town.…
RW: I saw him get deliveries of guns from who knows. He had suitcases full of 9mms. He had all kinds of stuff going on there. He was like the black sheep of a cop family, apparently. That’s what he told me one time…. He was also in X Magazine….
AM: He had very developed conspiracy theories. A one-person early FourChan. He hated the English. He would fulminate against the British Empire, that it was responsible for all the crime and evilness in the world. … Not the most frequently encountered conspiracy theory. It’s kind of covered over.
RW: … there was also the people underneath 10 Bleecker where Coleen had her space. There was a plumber, a little short Puerto Rican guy with a high-pitched voice, short and fat, and had a limp ‘cause he’d been machine gunned in the Second World War. He was a Fagin completely. He trained his two sons to be thieves. They had a van, and they were all stealing stuff together. He had some business with Nick as well….
Installation shot of the Dog Show at Robin's loft on Broadway, ca. 1977
AM: …. I was talking to Coleen about the founding moments of Colab, and she laid out this scenario of how that idea came about in the context of the Whitney program [Whitney Independent Study Program, or WISP] among a number of people who were inspired by Yvonne Rainer, and Vito Acconci and stories of the Art Workers Coalition [in the Whitney Independent Study Program]. Does that square with what you recall?
RW: I wouldn’t say Yvonne or Vito for me at all… I would say more the Fox and Red Herring and AWC and the Artists Meeting for Cultural Change [AMCC]. They did things like they glued the gallery locks shut in Soho at one point….
AM: I heard that was Stephen Antonakos with his little gang….
RW: I assumed it was AMCC. And I was friends with Christopher D'Arcangelo. [The self-professed anarchist artist suicided at 24, in 1979.] But we’d already started doing stuff when Chris was active. I knew Tom [Otterness] from the WISP. Coleen I met through Jackie [Ochs]. She was living next door. I didn’t know her in the WISP. She had a heart issue, and had been hospitalized and was staying next door to Jackie. And Diego [Cortez] I knew through Coleen, I guess. They were like the Chicago contingent. Michael McClard and Betsy Sussler and I were all the Californians. She went to the San Francisco Art Institute. [That venerable school closed in 2020.] I moved here before either Michael or Betsy. But they moved the year after. Kathy Bigelow was also there and she’d moved the year before. She was in the WISP too. Not Betsy or Diego. [Julian] Schnabel was in it too. It wasn’t all a bunch of political rabble rousers. … I think I was there the third year. …
During that “Silent Food...” [performance] there were a lot of dinner parties with a lot of talk about – it wasn’t just about government support, although that becomes part of the story, that we formed for government support, but I don’t feel that way. I think that was secondary… the whole Green Corporation having meetings to get money from the government was not really what –
AM: That’s the emerging line [in recent historical writing on Colab], and that’s one of the reasons I want to write this book, to contest that, and to complicate it.
RW: Of course we wanted that too… but it never felt like we started it for that reason… It felt like it was much more of an emotional response to the world of not being included, or being not part of the system that was happening, and wanting to do things – it wasn’t even a matter of outside the system, it was just a matter of wanting to do things.
AM: It was a very rigid system.
RW: Right. It wasn’t as though we had a chance.
AM: Working at Artforum, I felt myself to be one of the art police. That was the name of Andy Baird’s magazine.
RW: You were one of the gatekeepers, you mean.
AM: I had my badge, you know. Which is kind of looney. What system are you protecting? You get a gig, you have a nice first show, and then you do the same stuff.
RW: Then you’re in the system…. I was working for Don Judd, I worked at Castelli, I worked at Sonnabend, I did installations for all those people. So for me it was a closed system. I didn’t see it as having a possibility at all. Brice Marden was who they wanted, not me. …
RW: … I was never an official of Colab in any way whatsoever. … There was a moment … at Hunter College we’re doing one of these Colab talks [for the Times Square Show Revisted exhibition in 2012] … Andrea and Coleen are sitting in the audience, and Diego and I are on the panel, and I said, ‘I was at the Julliard School at the time studying acting, and Colab hired me to be an artist.’ … and Diego was like, ‘Isn’t that the same year we got married, Robin?’ And watching Andrea and Coleen shitting bricks. They’re like, ‘That’s not true!’… so there’s a level of a fictional side of what Colab is …. I lied totally… I was just playing with the theatricality of being a group…
AM: There was a spin off, the Offices [of Fend, Fitzgibbon, Holzer, Nadin and Winters].
RW: Well also Coleen and I, we were X&Y Offer, and we’d done a lot of that stuff before the Offices. … One of our posters said “practical solutions to your problems” … and then the Offices used one of those phrases… the cliché for the Offices…. So it sort of morphed into the Offices from what Coleen and I were doing. …
AM: I was looking recently at a posting about Michael Asher’s invitation to the Offices to appear at Cal Arts…. And some comment understood this as Colab, or as very much coming out of Colab.
RW: I wouldn’t disagree. But it was a different thing. We were more stressing the idea that artists could be useful, productive members of society like architects. That we had use value that was not really the way artists were seen. … ‘Cause of like the way the Whitney doesn’t pay people, they pay patronage, they pay exposure. And we were like, no, we are legitimately able to advise you and we’re good for that as a job, even if it didn’t work. …
The Colab thing, after the Times Square Show there was a lot of talk about Colab being a platform for people to get galleries. I read things like that. That all of a sudden Tom Otterness had Brooke Alexander, and we used Colab as a stepping stone to enter the gallery world. Which is so far from the truth, so far as I am concerned.
LINKS
Burning TV set from “Mean Streets”, by Edward Grazda, published by Powerhouse Books.
https://timeline.com/edward-grazda-new-york-bfd633224748
A photo of a photo of a bum on the Bowery, 1970s, by Meryl Meisler. This looks to be the Bowery at Delancey Street, a perfectly reasonable place to take a snooze in the ‘70s.
https://monovisions.com/meryl-meisler-les-yes-photographs-of-the-lower-east-side-in-the-70s-80s/
Martha Rosler, from her book "The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems" (1974-1975), photos of Bowery storefronts; the text is synonyms for drunk.
“The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems” (1974-1975)
Occupations & Properties blog, “On Learning and Un-learning”, October 19, 2021
http://occuprop.blogspot.com/2021/10/on-learning-and-un-learning.html
Report on the exhibition and seminar coinciding with the arrival of the Zapatista contingent in Madrid, “On the Precipice of Time: Practices of Insurgent Imagination”. A talk with the editors of a book “When the Roots Start Moving: First Mouvement: To Navigate Backward, Resonating with Zapatismo”
Burning TV set on the Bowery, 1970, from “Mean Streets”, by Edward Grazda, published by Powerhouse Books