This is the 16th post from my memoir project, an account of my 30 years in the NYC artworld. The focus of this post is on my time in the mid-1970s as I discovered the artists’ community of SoHo. I fell in with a group of dancers…. The printed book, “Art Worker”, is scheduled for May ‘22 delivery, and a launch at the Miss Read festival in Berlin. The posts on this blog come from research I did in 2019 in NYC.
The last interview I posted here was with Robin Winters. Robin is a fascinating conversationalist, and our talk ranged over many subjects. He was in the middle of a series of shows of other artists in his studio he called the Key Club. When we met, Robert Hawkins was sitting on the sofa amongst his paintings of cave men and fires in a wax museum where figures of sainted artists were being carried to safety or going up in flames… a trans-historical mise en scene!
Another part of my past was around the corner – oddly enough, in the same building but cut off from the Broadway side. On Mercer Street, Julie Harrison still lives in the loft she moved into as a young dancer and art student 40-odd years ago.
I didn’t know Julie so well then, although she was close to some good friends. Julie seemed a little wild. It turns out I didn’t know the half of it!
Now she is thoroughly settled on Mercer Street. She’s a mom. She travels and makes visual art. She lives with a publisher and archivist. Everywhere in the front of the loft are piles of carefully annotated plastic boxes of dead artists’ files. It’s nothing like the open space I recall from the ‘70s. We sat down to talk in the living area in the back.
A Conversation with Julie Harrison
Alan Moore: I remember the balalaika orchestra rehearsing here. Two dozen Russian musicians tinkling away…
The perfofmance on a ladder
Julie Harrison: Yes. We rented out the space for classes, rehearsals, and performances. I moved to New York in fall of ‘76…. and moved into the loft in February of ’78. Cara [Brownell] had gotten this place the year before. I bought out Peggy Kaye’s share [in those days, it was called “key money” or “fixture fee,” which amounted to what the person spent to build a kitchen, etc]. … Cara and I lived together for a year. We were lovers for a while, then we split up. She left and I stayed.
AM: I remember you guys doing an amazing performance on a ladder. Falling on each other with sudden stops. It looked so dangerous.
JH: Prudencio en Transito at Franklin Furnace [in 1979]. Part of it was on a ladder, and a hammock, and there was a little television up in the corner like they used to have in bodegas and restaurants. That was after Cara and I spent four months in Mexico, Guatemala and Belize. We traveled around. We met Robert Cooney down there, and the three of us traveled together shooting Super 8 film. I reshot it on video, and that was the video that we showed in that performance. …
So, Cara moved out. Neil Zusman moved in, he lived here for a year. We became lovers. Then I went off to Italy and came back, married to Robert Kleyn. ...
We had a performance space in the loft. Many people performed here. Demi [Fritz Demmer] performed here, Liz Pasquale, and others.
AM: I ran into Fritz just a few days ago at the 11th Street bar…. I ran into Fritz just a few days ago at the 11th Street bar…. I met him back then at the Art-Rite office. He was in my film “Party Noise” (1979). He had one of the best scenes, with Paul McMahon….
Here on Mercer Street, I remember hanging out with all these dancers. … Eric Bogosian came over here.
JH: Eric was the dance curator at the Kitchen. … Charlie Morrow would get us together and we’d do some chanting things….
So, Cara and I started teaching contact improv[isation]…. We taught kids dance classes in Saratoga, we’d travel up there. When I think back on it. it seems like years and years, but we were only together for a year. …
First, I found Nancy [Toft]. She was married to [Jon] Gibson, the clarinetist. I had heard she needed dancers, so I went and performed with Nancy Toft and 30 other dancers at P.S. 1. That’s where I met Peggy Kaye. P.S. 1 was very raw and rough then. Through Peggy I met Cara. I ran into Peggy on Mercer Street. They had sanded the floor to make a 1000 square foot dance space, and the rest was completely raw. … Cara and I started working together because she had studied with Ken Jacobs in Binghamton… Ralph Hocking and Ernie Gehr also taught up there… a small group of people at that time affiliated with the Anthology Film Archives, then on Wooster Street. Cara was the only person I knew that wanted to put film and video and performance all together. And we did this great piece [Ellipsis] up in Binghamton at the Experimental Television Center that had seven monitors and five cameras set up….
We joined up with Jean Dupuy who was doing these Grommet performances. He’d invite people to do a three or five minute piece. … We did something on Broadway and then at P.S. 1. They had built these walls and a tower, and we were involved in that. …
Soup & Tart
[AM intervention – I wrote about Jean Dupuy for Artforum, when he lived on 13th Street. I attended his Soup & Tart event at the Kitchen, a “marathon performance soiree” in 1974. I was with him in a kitchen upstairs when he cooked down two massive pans of leeks for the soup. At the time, I didn't realize the depth of his involvement with Fluxus. The 13th Street building was torn down, and in ‘76 Jean moved into the last of the artists' co-ops that George Maciunas, the Fluxus animateur, formed in New York City. Nam June Paik among others lived there. Dupuy and his partner Olga Adorno (my only client for Library News, my personalized anthology of automatic texts) produced the Grommet Gallery projects in that space on Broadway.
[Jean later rented the front half of the space to Emily Harvey, who opened a gallery. It persists as a foundation there today, charmingly dedicated to “supporting ideas resistant to frameworks of easy legibility” (emilyharveyfoundation.org, Grommet Gallery; accessed April 2020). The Village Voice dance critic Sally Banes, in her book Subversive Expectations: Performance Art and Paratheater in New York, 1976-85 (1998), describes a Grommet performance – 20 different events were performed simultaneously for an hour, each viewed through a metal eyelet stuck into a canvas curtain. Most centered on private acts. I recall viewing Jean and Olga fucking through one.]
The Breakup – and the New Partner
Julie Harrison: Cara and I broke up, and Diane Torr and I started working together in ’79. … We took a performance on the road and hitchhiked up to Massachusetts and Maine. We got picked up by these teenagers who were going to take daddy’s sailboat out to Nantucket. Diane said, Why don’t we go with you? We’ll cook. When we got there, we got a job in Nantucket as dishwashers, and we stayed there for a few weeks and met Buckminster Fuller, who was our hero, through the Nantucket Island School of Art and Design. … So when Diane and I stopped working together she started the drag thing. Neil and I were working together in 1980, going up to the Experimental TV Center.
[AM intervention – I met Diane at a party in a housing project, at the apartment of her then-boyfriend, who was some kind of Brit, probably a Scot. She was hosting her annual Burns Night performance. Haggis was consumed. I may indeed have met Cara Brownell through her. Diane Torr is best known for her work as a “drag king” – female-to-male gender-crossing, which she explored as a performer and writer. She told me some of her story, her years in a Bristol reformatory, hanging out at Oxford and sneaking into classes, and teenage years in the London counterculture. She came to NYC to study with Merce Cunningham, but shucked it for a more gritty scene. After her student visa expired, she stayed on as illegal, working strip clubs for money. Continuing as a feminist performer, she was instrumental in founding the Women’s One World (WOW) Cafe. I didn’t follow her theater career. I didn’t see much theater at all in NYC. She moved to Glasgow in 2002. I missed her when at last I traveled to see her. She died in 2017.]
AM: What did you do with Diane?
JH: We did a performance called It’s About Time. It was very unorganized. We had a date to perform and we put something together. We did this circle dance where we started walking together and then we started beating each other up, it became this brawl. Another part of it was making these Egyptian shapes, and dinosaur shapes. And we had a film. Virge Piersol shot a film of the two of us leaning against a wall….
AM: You guys all cycled through Colab.
JH: I started with Colab as soon as Cara did. Cara heard about it from you, I think. I don’t know how you two met. Do you remember that?
AM: I do not…. Maybe also through Diane.
JH: She and I joined Colab in ’77. Right at the beginning. The original list of Colab in ’77 has my Varick Street address on it. … We have disputed this. Coleen doesn’t think Colab was started until the fall of ’77, but I put my Varick address down, so it had to be the spring. Then I went away for the summer.… She has different memories, and she will dispute that.… A few years ago we were meeting and discussing possibilities. … We started the So-Called Committee when the Printed Matter show happened [coincident with the launch of A Book About Colab, 2016]… But then we started working on the traveling exhibition. ….
AM: That was Barry Blinderman at the Uni in Normal, Illinois. But he pulled the plug on that. He retired. Now he’s doing music in LA. You, Cara and Diane cycled through Colab but you didn’t see anything in the group for you, or you got frustrated or what?
JH: No no, I was fairly involved with Colab. I did Potato Wolf shows. The thing is, I was working on my masters degree at NYU. I was in graduate school from 1977 to 1980. … and was extremely busy. When did we start topless dancing to make money? Diane started doing it a little later, in New Jersey. Cara started first. She told me about it. I tried it and said, “Wow, this is easy, this is good money. Not a problem.” So we topless go-go danced ’78 through ’80. … So, I was go-go dancing, I was in graduate school, I was making performaces and I was doing Colab stuff….
Cara and I programmed videos at the Times Square Show. … [which must have been how I showed “Party Noise” there, not on the printed program]. I wasn’t really doing any visual art at that time. I was making photographs. … not documentary, but conceptual, performance time-based. I was also working for Willoughby Sharp in graduate school. … My work for him was a little scam … he would say he’s paying me, and NYU would pay half of that. … I was his private secretary. Sometimes I’d just take naps at his place.
Liza Bear and Willoughby Sharp ca. 1972
AM: He was trying to set up a LIP [Live Injection Point into Manhattan Cable TV for video programming].
JH: Yes, that was in 1977. He had the basement of 112 Franklin Street. We had three television cameras on dollys that we could roll around. … We had a LIP that Duff Schweninger set up. … Cara and I did a few recordings of us dancing around and doing contact, I was taking photographs from monitors. Yoshiko [Chuma] was involved with us there…. Jon Gibson performed down there. And Jacob Burckhardt [and Michael Galasso who had worked with Robert Wilson]. There were three events there. I don’t think we were ever able to broadcast it live. We did record them. …
At this point Willoughby had sublet his loft and he had a little teeny apartment at the end of the loft on Franklin Street. … We would do the slow scans with his whole Toronto crowd, and people in Hawaii and San Francisco…
REFERENCES
Note: This is a disjointed interview, which covers a lot of ground. Some of the big things Julie references quickly are explicated in the following sources… but not all of them.
Wendy Perron, “How Grand Union Found a Home Outside of SoHo at the Walker”, n.d.
https://walkerart.org/collections/publications/side-by-side/how-grand-union-found-a-home-outside-of-soho-at-the-walker
Contact Quarterly Dance & Improvisation Journal
https://contactquarterly.com/contact-improvisation/about/
Liza Bear and Willoughby Sharp, "The Early History of Avalanche", 2005; PDF
https://primaryinformation.org/files/earlyhistoryofavalanche.pdf
Stephen Bottoms, “Diane Torr Obituary,” Guardian, June 29, 2017, accessed online April 2020. Bottoms co-authored a book with Torr, Sex, Drag and Male Roles (2010)
"basement at 112 Franklin Street"...
Benjamin Olin, “Sculpting the Teleculture: The Franklin Street Arts Center and the Live Injection Point,” Art Journal 78, no. 3 (Fall 2019): 76-95.
various authors, “The Second link : viewpoints on video in the eighties”, Walter Phillips Gallery, 1983, 116 pp. PDF – https://www.barbaralondon.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/1983-The-Second-Link_catalog-1.pdf
Gated academic texts:
On Franklin Furnace – Alan Moore and Debra Wacks, “Being There: The Tribeca Neighborhood of Franklin Furnace” TDR, Vol. 49, No. 1 (Spring, 2005), pp. 60-79 (20 pages)
[In the next part of our talk, Julie recalls her new media work with Willoughby Sharp and the Machine Language group, performances at A’s and PS 122, and her work in contact improvisation. She also expresses her disappointments with Colab.]
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