Talking NYC in London: Post #4, “Hard Line Brainstorm”

This is the 4th in a series of posts about the “Approaching Downtown” symposium at the Courtauld Institute, London, in mid-July. It is drawn from my notes of a remarkable several days of talk about the late 20th century art and culture of downtown NYC. This day’s talks began with a Basquiat exegesis, rambled over some critical terrain, and concluded with a music listening session and a screening of Vivienne Dick’s recent film.

On the second day of the symposium I actually made it on time for the breakfast rolls.
Natalie Phillips (Ball State U) rolled out an iconographic analysis on the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat, something rather obvious which I’ve never seen performed. He was a kind of transcriber – every one of his images comes from another source, so Phillips hunted for his sources. Her book will have three chapters, one on catalogues, indices, etc., another on graffiti, and the third on the body.

Basquiat questions the biases of catalogues. This got a little obscure, but Phillips tracks the repetitive series of numbers on some works to music catalogues of different jazz artists, both white and black. As I understood it, Basquiat was evidencing the industrial racism of the music business in the form of their own codes.

Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop

“I argue he never gave up graffiti,” she said. (Basquiat’s relationships with graffiti artists was explored in a recent show at MFA in Boston [link below]. It has been averred that J-MB couldn’t acknowledge his friendships and connections with graf artists at the time without imperiling his delicate position as an accepted high artist.)
Phillips reads the painting Victor 25448 as a reflection on the death of Michael Stewart. (The well-known work made on Keith Haring’s wall and shown recently at the Guggenheim NYC was a reaction to the killing.) Stewart was rousted by police for writing in the subway late at night, hogtied and suffocated. He was not a graffiti artist, but, Phillips contends, a ‘toy’, or wannabe novice writer. Ergo, the broken brown body in the painting is labelled as a toy: “Ideal”.
In the Warhol-Basquiat-Clemente collaborations there is one in which Basquiat paints over Clemente entirely. This Phillips says, signifies dominance of the “king” over another writer.

The New Excluded

Curiously, the mention of Clemente was the only time the name of a neoexpressionist painter, one among the market leaders of the 1980s artworld, came up during this symposium. I thought that curious for a gathering of art historians, although the cultural studies-ish focus of these days’ talks was fine by me. But it means things have changed. In my time, professors explained to me that the principal sponsor of this symposium, the Terra Foundation, was “object oriented”, so I could forget about applying to them for support.
Perhaps in the wholesale return to figuration, artists of those days unwittingly reduced themselves to illustrators of the texts of a different kind of discourse. (What? Please explain; no you explain.) Or perhaps the next turn in scholarly fashion simply hasn’t creaked into motion. I do recall someone told me she wants to work on Richard Hambleton.

Return to the Text

Andrew Strombeck (Wright State U), author of DIY on the Lower East Side: Books, Buildings, and Art after the 1975 Fiscal Crisis (2020), Skyped in to maintain that David Wojnarowicz’s writing was already about nostalgia – for the 1970s. He wrote about precarious people, Strombeck said, who “would make it onto the page only marginally”.

I instantly thought of the key work in the video program I put together for the Wojnarowicz show in Madrid in ‘19, the video document of a performance of his “Sounds in the Distance” text which took place in Bill Rice’s backyard. Woj did his time on the road, like many of his generation, and unlike most also plunged into the life of the street. The lumpen precarious included his younger self. The book “Sounds” is a record of some of his meetings.
As I understood Strombeck, downtown writing more broadly is “concerned with how to manage these people”. Again, as in the earlier discussion on ‘ventriloquism’ [in post #3 on the London conference], are these the people who don’t, won’t, can’t speak for themselves?, or simply aren’t heard?

On the Road and in the Commune

I think North Americans hang on to a nomadism, what used to be called a ‘pioneer spirit’ – a dissatisfaction with the familiar, a chance of adventure, of betterment, or simple curiosity. All of this drives people to the road. And even, finally, to chance the Big Apple.
A sense of responsibility for others sharing one’s life space reflects the collective nature of most of the significant downtown creative projects, the “safety in numbers”, “we’re in it together” spirit of the epoch. As well as DIY, it was and still is, and maybe even more now, DIT – do-it-together.
I’ll leave aside Strombeck’s theoretical rabbit-hole, the notion of “interpretive delirium”, as per Michel de Certeau’s discussion of the moment in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) when he discovers the footprint on the beach. Academics love these asides.

"It's Your Fault"

I was struck by his provocation that, “By depicting the Lower East Side as a decadent landscape you [meaning LES wrtiers] reinforce the city commissioner’s view of it as a dead zone needing erasing.”
In these terms Strombeck discussed Catherine Texier’s Love Me Tender (1987), a novel about a young dancer working in a strip joint and her several lovers. Texier apparently writes that the cities are full of useless zombies, just like the elites said. (Maybe why Penguin published that emigre French romantic author?) Less convincingly, Strombeck indicts the indie magazine Redtape’s “Cracked Mirror” issue, with its multiple contributors in the same brief.

In my view, the abandoned styles of living in a busted-up proletarian multi-ethnic neighborhood licensed bad behaviors by artists from middle class backgrounds. What have artists to do with the heavenly motions of big capital which presage an impending doom of their bohemian utopia? Drunkenness can lead to double consciousness as easily as double vision. NYCers, I think, have always been fatalistic about the big monkies who swing in the realms high above them. At least they don’t mis-identify the piss that rains down below as rain.

Who’s to Blame for Negative Urban Outcomes?

Strombeck also cited the late critic Craig Owens, that the “art galleries capitalize on ideas of risk and danger”. Literary artists, he seemed to argue, were as much compradors in gentrification as the artists whose gallery infrastructure enabled by landlords actually effected it.
This is an old canard, which enraged critics Walter Robinson and Carlo McCormick at the time. The article by Craig Owens which Strombeck cites follows directly that pair’s huge takeout on the East Village art scene in Art in America, in essence arguing that the artists were all guilty. Gregory Sholette fretted that all the political artwork in the Owens piece was uncredited.
For me, the come-to-Grundrisse Marxists of the haute theorie crowd mostly ignored the vigorous activism that was contesting the bleak situations they so glumly described. Both on home ground, and near abroad, they could have pitched in on organizing a good deal more. Even then, had everyone put their queer shoulders to the wheel, it’s hard to imagine the heavenly motions could have been much slowed. (By “motions” I allude not to old Yahweh, but rather to the gods of Greek colonists and mercenaries.)
Finally, this is a book I have to read. In the pre-text Strombeck writes that NYC’s 1975 fiscal crisis [is] now recognized as a template for the austerity politics of the past four decades, and he “directly considers the era’s aesthetic production in terms of the crisis”. It sounds like a synthetic doxa for left cultural studies of the period.

“Hard Line Brainstorm”

Felix Vogel (U of Kassel) spoke on the Art & Language group in the mid-’70s. He moved off a text by Corrine Robbins in a 1976 issue of the Soho Weekly News, “Go Marxist or Move to Texas” (odd, A&L historian Michael Corris eventually did – although he certainly remained Marxist!).
Vogel read Mel Ramsden’s unpublished text “Hard Line Brainstorm” (1975, unpublished; estate of Sarah Charlesworth) where Ramsden writes, “the means of authority ‘stand above’ [artistic] production”, leading artists to a “passive vulnerability” to manipulation.

Still from "Struggle in New York", Zoran Popovic’s 1976 A&L-based film; note posters for "The Fox" pasted to the windows.

Mel Ramsden was probably the sharpest analyst in that crowd. I recall Anna Chave opening our eyes to the not-so-quiet political subtexts in Minimal art through a Ramsden text in The Fox.
Vogel reported Zoran Popovic’s 1976 A&L-based film Struggle in New York for its critique of the newly launched art center P.S. 1 – “if P.S. 1 is an alternative, why does it pose no threat to the ruling class?” It is simply “hiding the real working class community and replacing it with artists”. (The film’s script was published in 2020.)
I think that’s a little hard on Alanna Heiss. It was precisely her ‘in’ with the elites on her board (like Brendan Gill) that enabled her to colonize so much vacant property with adventurous artists. The initial residency program put scores of international artists into studios there, seeding a new “loose collection of international vagabonds”, as Vogel described Soho. Unlike Charlotte Moorman’s, Heiss’s was an authoritarian project, but she was at least a philosopher queen.
Finally, Vogel believes his research into the A&L-to-AMCC continuum of the mid-1970s, the period of the deflation of the anti-Vietnam war movement, can help define the “locally specific relationship between art and politics” of this time. That could be helpful.
I’d like to see the era of Pattern & Decoration painting in NYC look like something besides expatriate commie tourists kicking cans around the basement of the Empire.

Whispers about Vietnam

Catherine Quan Damman (NYU) spoke about the overlooked work of Anthony Ramos, “About Media” (1977). Ramos was a student of Allan Kaprow at Cal Arts who did time in prison as a conscientious objector (CO) during the Vietnam War. His work concerned President Jimmy Carter’s post-war pardon of Vietnam War draft resisters.

Damman spoke about the black artist’s reputation for honesty and authenticity, and the “labor of authorial construction”. Unfortunately, the room was stifling, the fans were whirring, and despite our pleas the speaker could scarcely be heard.

Aporias

I also have few notes for Jeannine Tang’s (New School) talk on Julie Tolentino, lesbian cult performer and principal motivator of a venue called the Clit Club. I confess that, though I love the name, I never went; nor might I have been allowed in if I had. WOW (Women’s One World) cafe and Dixon Place were as far as I went, and mostly to see Diane Torr.
I noted the cool-looking figural calendar, and the curious affective questionnaire sent to people involved with the Clit Club – how did it smell? What did you wear? Issues Tang was concerned with included performance art in a context of mutual disaffection, and how art history recognizes friendship.

Tellus: The Cassette Magazine

Joseph Nechvatal, my old comrade from Colab days, did an hour-long “listening session” drawn from the archive of the Tellus audio magazine project. Nechvatal DJ’d from his laptop; the entire run of the cassette journal are online at Ubuweb.net.
He told how he got into this. “The [Sony] Walkman really did it for me. You could have your own private soundtrack of the city.” Cassette tape was already part of the mail art scene, being sent around.

As he played the selections, Nechvatal made wry comments on the sound art and music scene of the day. He played an early Lamonte Young piece, the Dia Foundation-supported musician for whom he worked for a time. Of the No Wave selections he said, “if you knew how to play an instrument it was held against you”. He played “noise scapes”, and a work by Julius Eastman who “slows it to a heroin pace”.
The later issues of Tellus threw a wider net. “We got bored with downtown, so we went international…. New York is a port, a place of fluidity…. It’s a mental space of networks.”

New York, Our Time

Having missed the first screening, I caught the second by Vivienne Dick, of her 2020 film New York, Our Time. For this project she hunted up old friends from her days in the city in the late ‘70s. They spoke with her in relaxed conversation about their lives then and now – “like a sandwich of time”. Lydia Lunch did a kind of performative set piece: “This is to the ghosts.”
She also talked to some of her friend’s children: “You can’t live alone” in NYC today, said one, because of the expense of rent. “Neoliberal New York is unbearable.”
The film had a very relaxed femisocial feeling, like kitchen table conversation. It was anti-documentary; despite that some of her conversants are known figures, they aren’t identified. They were all friends, not this one and that one. Vivienne has a great still listening style. Her friend Andrew, who I met in Madrid later, said that was due to “spiritual training”.
I dug seeing Dick’s short takes of the period, dressing up to go out nightclubbing. Of her film, she said, “It’s kind of ethnographic, except I’m in it.”
Somehow it’s hard to grasp New York, Our Time. The film is so quiet, ruminative, and largely undeclarative about things one somehow wants to shout about. In a way, the informality of it defeats opinion.
“I like to get that kind of feel to the film, that it is just messing around,” Dick said. “Years ago, in New York when I saw quite a lot of American independent film, I was very impressed with some of the work I saw that was just like that. People playing around with the camera, making like films in their kitchen. That really grabbed me.” (Dick to McCann, 2022)

NEXT: Tish & Snooky's hair dye empire, queer counter-publics and homonormativity, roll call of black dancers, and a chicken wearing trousers.

REFERENCES

Boston MFA show, "Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation" October 18, 2020–July 25, 2021
https://www.mfa.org/exhibition/writing-the-future

On the lesser known of Basquiat’s celebrity collaborations, one might look up – Susanne Kleine, Ménage à trois: Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente (2012); preface by Robert Fleck and interviews by Dieter Buchhart with Bruno Bishofberger, Tony Shafrazi and Francesco Clemente. In which the living get the last word.

Allen Frame, Kirsten Bates, et al., “Sounds in the Distance”; performance document based on David Wojnarowicz’ text
1984 | 00:38:00 | United States | English | Color | Stereo | 4:3 | 3/4" U-matic
https://vdb.org/titles/turmoil-garden

Marc H. Miller, “Redtape Magazine, 1982-1992”, Dec 6, 2017
https://gallery.98bowery.com/news/redtape-magazine-1982-1992/

Nina Kennedy, “Remembrances of the Clit Club”, April 10, 2021
http://fem-entertainmentnews.infemnity.com/2021/04/remembrances-of-clit-club.html

Julie Tolentino Wins 2020 Queer|Art|Prize for Sustained Achievement
https://www.artforum.com/news/julie-tolentino-wins-2020-queer-art-prize-for-sustained-achievement-84210

Ruairí McCann, “New York Our Time—An Interview with Vivienne Dick”, February 2022
https://ultradogme.com/2022/02/22/vivienne-dick/

Still from Vivienne Dick's New York Our Time

Talking NYC in London: Post #3, “Mystical Persuasion”

This is the 3rd in a series of posts about the “Approaching Downtown” symposium at the Courtauld Institute, London, in mid-July. It is drawn from my notes of a remarkable several days of talk about the late 20th century art and culture of downtown NYC. This day’s talks began with a discussion of the Avant-Garde festivals, and the hermitic artist Helio Oiticica, and tailed out before lunch in a strange workshop on appropriation.
On the second day of the Approaching Downtown symposium, Saisha Grayson (Smithsonian American Art Museum) spoke on Charlotte Moorman and the annual Avant-Garde Festival as a “free eruption of artists happenings”. This annual gathering put the “neo” in neo-avantgarde during the decades of the 1960s and ‘70s. Famous as the topless cellist who played Nam June Paik’s bizarre “TV Cello”, an instrument constructed of small video monitors, the festivals were Moorman’s babies.
Moorman, Grayson said, has seemingly “mystical powers of persuasion” on government bureaucrats, to get them to go along with her plans. These very outre events took place in large public venues with a multitudinous cast of artists doing curious things. Artists of the international Fluxus movement were heavily represented.

9th Annual New York Avant Garde Festival Poster; design Jim McWilliams

A photo Grayson showed of a big technology-centered Avant Garde Festival held in the Armory looked amazing. Advanced artists of all kinds had a long leash during the 1960s. Perhaps they represented modernity itself, which no one in power, irrespective of their politics, could be seen to oppose. I asked if these productions in NYC influenced similar events in Latin America? Before 1968, a series of remarkable festivals were held there, extraordinary effulgences which one would think the new dictatorships would be inclined to repress. After 1968 they did so.

Women Make Art Communities

Grayson tracks the later NYC public art initiatives Creative Time and Alanna Heiss’s Institute of Art & Urban Resources, which ran P.S. 1 and the Clocktower, directly out of Moorman’s Avant-Garde festivals. That Charlotte is forgotten (?) she ascribes to the “gender dismissal” of the women who “created the avant-garde community”. (This was a consistent theme in this conference.)
Alanna Heiss herself once cited the example of the London Art Labs for her IAUR projects. The AVG fests were closely involved with Fluxus, which was not in good odor among “serious people” in NYC in the ‘70s. In any event, like P.S. 1 with its early residencies, the AVG fests were always very international affairs.
The AVG fests were DIY, run by volunteers. Grayson noted the impact that the streams of corporate funding in the 1980s had on the “art ecology” of downtown NYC. New corporate-centric models of art organization superseded Charlotte’s “love-run always collective anti-curatorial anti-authoritarian model”.

Creative Time's "Art on the Beach" project, 1982; Scott Pfaffman's multiple rocket-shaped barbeque pits are featured on the landfill that today houses Battery Park City

Is it too much to call the clampdown of bureaucratic procedures on the loose dogs of art in NYC and in South America (aka, Rockefeller-land) during the ‘70s and ‘80s part of an American (south and north) fascist revival? Nixon time, Reagan time, Clinton time. Maybe not, if “mystical powers” are ascribed to an important animateur of earlier times. That means, ‘we don’t know how she did it, nor how someone like her could do that kind of thing today’.
The state of dominance of private capital over public goods everywhere and every time which we call ‘neoliberalism’ (although too many pretend they don’t know what that means), is the global achievement of today’s soft authoritarianism.

Running and Hiding

Still from Helio Oiticica's "Cosmococa" film project in NYC's Wall Street district

Anne-Grit Becker (Humboldt U, Berlin) presented on work by “Helio Oiticica in exile”. The artist fled to NYC to escape the Brazilian dictatorship. Although he was known, and had shown Nests (Ninhos) at MoMA in 1970, he found it hard to connect. He considered the NYC art scene to be reactionary.
Oiticica lived at 81 2nd Avenue. In the event, he did find collaborators. He shot film with Mario Montez, a drag queen who also worked with Jack Smith and Jackie Curtis at La Mama. The strange film he shot around Wall Street he called “Cosmococa”, one among his "quase-cinema" projects which were not shown publicly. Becker said Oiticica used a collaborative production strategy he called “chance-play”.
Oiticica was a great enthusiast of cocaine, and used lines of the powder in photo collages. Perhaps the paranoia noted as an effect of that drug heightened his hermit-like posture.
Brazil in the ‘60s was renowned for the expansive inventive art and music movement called Tropicalia. The production of extravagant feature films was an important part of it. Becker mentioned a film by Oiticica collaborator Neville D’Almedia, called Mangue-Bangue, which shows how that took a turn under repression.


Fearless Underworlds

After long obscurity, this film is now in the MoMA which describes it thus:
“Shot in 1970 in Mangue, Rio de Janeiro’s poorest red-light district, and the city’s financial district, Neville D’Almeida’s Mangue-Bangue, presents a portrait of the ‘normality’ of marginalized and criminalized bodies during Brazil’s military dictatorship. Introducing humorous or odd figures in place of the heroic, revolutionary male protagonist and confronting the spectator with explicit scenes of genitalia, defecation, and drug use, the film was never released… until it reappeared in the Collection of MoMA in 2006.”
Tough luck MoMA doesn’t have a streaming channel.

The Yours/Mine WTF? Hour

The late morning was taken up with a workshop on appropriation. It was a rather sprawling, amorphous activity with speakers part presencial and part virtual, plus an online part, on an app called MURAL.
I was still somewhat buzzed on all the Charlotte Moorman talk, and so expecting the unexpected, the discontinuous and the notionally disruptive. Pipes were banging around outside the lecture room as workers moved them around. Serendipitous echoes of Yoshi Wada – “Riffs and Relations”.
The workshop presenters used the MURAL platform, an online bulletin board, to create a diagram of appropriations. With a sudden new learning curve, and a subject not dear to me I did not participate. But the discussion was interesting, and fortunately did not head back to the market leaders of the period’s neo-pop concept painting.

Book in Black

Leah Pinese (U of Chicago) and Abbe Schriber (U of South Carolina) spoke first on African-American artists and the European modernist tradition, specifically the question, or accusation of “belatedness or derivativeness” directed at African-American artists.
I’d supposed the upsurge of neglected black artists in shows like “Soul Nation” at the Whitney had put paid to this conceit, but categorizing and boundary policing are key operations of racism, both conscious and unconscious. Moreover the fortresses of art theory were meticulously constructed in the 1960s and ‘70s in a relatively unwoke period, and their ruins must still be clambered over.
A key example given for us to discuss was Glenn Ligon’s 1991-93 “Notes on the Margin of the Black Book” of photos of nudes by Robert Mapplethorpe, a very ‘meta’ exhibition of the photos together with Ligon’s notes – a black artist commenting on a white artist’s picturing black male bodies.
David Getsy, who spoke later on gay theater, said that “Appropriation brings a moralism with it, a moral question is attached to it” – appropriation operates across an unequal power dynamic.

Back in Print

Two feminist publication projects were discussed. Eau de Cologne, art dealer Monik Strueth’s German feminist magazine. And Heresies, of course, the submarine of radical feminist art influence. Surprised to learn that it started out zine-like, a cut-and-paste job until a typographer joined the “mother collective”.
The presenters showed pages from the 1982 issue #14 by women of color; #8 was an issue of Third World women. I’m glad this important early politically-attuned journal is getting attention.

Aside: A Chat with Lynne

I had a chance to buttonhole Lynne Gumpert of the NYU Grey Gallery about a bee in my bonnet when I was writing my memoir [Art Worker, JoAAP 2022]. That was the strange event from 1981, the decision to drop Colab from the “Events” show at the New Mueum. Lynne worked there then, and has written that Colab pulled out. When I finally queried her on this, she said she didn’t remember it. She was probably just writing what Marcia Tucker was saying then. “She was mercurial.”
Finally, I’m guessing that Marcia Tucker figured she already had most of the artists she was interested in participating in the Fashion Moda show, so why mess with Colab? So she manufactured her own excuses not to try to work with the assembly, and all those insignificant weirdos.
Lynne also said Marcia Tucker wrote a much more extensive memoir than the one that was published ( A Short Life of Trouble: 40 Years in the New York Art World, 2010). The longer ms. is in her papers at the Getty. Maybe she wrote what she thought about Colab, among other things.
Why this matters to me is it set a pattern: When the most adventurous of NYC art institutions would not deal with a populist group like Colab, finally nobody else would either. To this day.

Talking Puppets

Somone spoke on the “archive effect”, as a kind of ventriloquism, a ‘speaking-for’ others. (The reference was to a book I don’t know, which “examines the problems of representation inherent in the appropriation of archival film and video footage for historical purposes”.)
Okay, complex, sure, but if historians and documentarians do not speak for cultural producers who do not or cannot speak for themselves, no one will. Odd objects in the flea market, severed from their roots, are mute on their back stories. While history classically favors the period document, hedge against the revisionism of late-life memory, the floodgates of popular historicizing have been thrown open by social media, which allows nostalgists worldwide to indulge themselves fully.
Personal testimony on all phases and kinds of cultural production is available as never before. Do academics dare to use it?
As for that ‘archive effect’ – I think a ‘speaking-for’ is the historian’s job. For me, working contemporary, I’ve tried my whole career to improve my listening. I hope I’ve gotten better, so that finally, my ‘speaking-for’ is not ‘speaking-over’ the actors and participants themselves.
Along the way, someone mentioned a book on Chinese copiest painters in the artists’ village, Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade. That’s the industrialization of appropriation; it sounds fascinating.
NEXT: Jean-Michel’s iconography; collective production, scene or star?; and Mel Ramsden’s “Hard Line Brainstorm”…

REFERENCES:

Documents of the 4th & 7th Annual New York Avant Garde Festivals
by Jud Yalkut, important video/film documentor of the period
https://www.eai.org/titles/4th-7th-annual-new-york-avant-garde-festivals

Gonzalo Aguilar, “Nota sobre Helio Oiticica y Mario Montez”
https://www.lafuga.cl/nota-sobre-helio-oiticica-y-mario-montez/565

For the milieu in which Oiticia moved during those years, see also:
Juan Antonio Suárez, “Xcentric 2017: Nuevos Narciosos despues de Cocteau: Las fiestas lisergicas de Jose Rodriguez Soltero – sobre el Lower East Side puertorriqueño y el underground queer
http://www.elumiere.net/exclusivo_web/xcentric_17/solterosuarez.php

MoMA note on Neville D’Almeida’s Mangue-Bangue:
https://post.moma.org/neville-dalmeidas-mangue-bangue-1971-producing-evidence-against-oneself/

Heresies Magazine Collection
Heresies was a feminist journal published from 1977 to 1992 in New York. The Heresies Collective was a group of feminist artists who brought their different perspectives to the revolutionary New York art scene of the 1970s.
https://archive.org/details/heresies_magazine

Talking NYC in London, Post #2: Harlem, Free Jazz Space, and Club Kids

Ornette Coleman and friends at Artists House

This is the 2nd in a series of posts about the “Approaching Downtown” symposium at the Courtauld Institute, London, in mid-July. It is drawn from my notes of a remarkable several days of talk about the late 20th century art and culture of downtown NYC. Today was the day to unpack some of the aspects of downtown NYC which were overlooked by mainstream media at the time – which was, in truth, a major theme of this gathering.


Among the more welcome discoveries in the talks for me was a presentation by Amy Tobin (U of Cambridge) on the work of Candace Hill-Montgomery. She was one among a handful of black artists who participated in our group Colab’s watershed 1980 Times Square Show. She collaborated on the room dedicated to the notorious 1968 police murder of Fred Hampton. Hill-Montgomery also exhibited a blowup of the famous horrific photo of a chained-up black victim of KKK murder, a work she called “Unknown Relative”. The artists who worked on the Hampton installation were Hill-Montgomery, David Hammons, Bill Stephens and Angela Fremont. At that moment in 1980, the case against the Chicago police officers who assassinated Fred Hampton was being reopened.
Recently the charismatic Black Panther leader and the informant who helped the police set up the killing have become the subject of a Hollywood movie.

Site-Specific

Tobin showed Hill-Montgomery’s “Reflections on Vacancy”, a work in Harlem in which she put mylar sheets over empty windows in a vacant building, then followed their decay in an on-site process installation.
There are no photos online of this work for me to grab. Tobin is recovering an artist who has long remained in the shadows. Even the Times Square Show installation, while it’s often mentioned is not imaged online. It was a chaotic environment, difficult to snap.

Fashion Moda in the South Bronx

Tobin pulled her images from the Fashion Moda artists’ file at Fales Library’s Fashion Moda papers. That’s the underknown South Bronx art project space opened by Stefan Eins with Joe Lewis in 1978. CH-M’s work at Fashion Moda was in the large street-level display window. She was “thinking about the death of young people in the neighborhood”.

Candace Hill-Montgomery's installation at Artists Space


In those archives Tobin found a photo of Hill-Mongomery’s “Black and White Enclosure” (1979), a fence on a vacant lot enclosing an improbable parked boat. In her show at Artists Space, a white picket fence sits before a background mural of Harlem at night. These seem like understated ironic comments on the distance between devastated poor neighborhoods in NYC and the mostly white suburban enclaves that surround major cities throughout the USA.
Tobin spoke of the de facto segregation in the art world at the time which Hill-Mongomery and other black artists faced. Later in the symposium, during a virtual reading and talk event, CH-M said it was hard for her to get downtown to meetings and events because she was living uptown, working as a teacher and taking care of two children.

“Space Is Freedom”

Bentley Brown (NYU) talked about the world of his artist painter father, the black bohemia of jazz loft studios. He traced a line from the rent parties of Harlem days to the embrace of loft living as an aesthetic by avant garde jazz musicians.
Ornette Coleman purchased the first and third floor lofts at 131 Prince Street from George Maciunas, the famous Fluxus “developer”. Coleman opened Artists House there, a convivial site of musical improvisation. One visitor was enraptured by the scene, the habitues, the conversations – “I couldn’t believe someone lived like this.”

Kicked Out Like All the Rest

Brown told us that Coleman lost control of his Artists House loft spaces through processes that are still unclear. That same kind of mysterious loss happened to Steve Cannon of Tribes toward the end of his life. It happened to an entire building given over in the 1970s for public use to the CHARAS group at 7th Street and Avenue A which housed a free jazz improv space as its last vestige into the 1990s (as told by Fred Good to Clayton Patterson in CP’s 2007 compilation Resistance).
In tracking the places of jazz music, Brown showed a 1959 photo of a Coleman concert at the Five Spot taken by Bob Parent.
I knew Bob Parent in his day job as an art director for the Guardian indie left weekly. He told us that during his trips to Cuba they called him “Arbolito” because he had so many cameras hanging from him. I didn’t know his off-work job as a jazz photog.
Parent devised special diffused light equipment because he didn’t like to use a flash. He died suddenly, and his archive was in disarray; today it seems to have vanished.

Ted-ucate Yourself

A 2019 installation of Ted Joan's work arranged by David Hammons

Parent’s photo of the Five Spot shows a poster for a show by Ted Joans on the wall. We had a chance to see the remarkable Global Surrealism show at the Tate in London which included the enormous room-length “exquisite corpse” Ted Joans carried with him around the world, with a mix of poets, artists and musicians contributing to the collaboration.

Bentley Brown concluded his talk with the question: “Why don’t we allow black artists to be avant garde?” Why must they always be chained to the subject matter of their experiences?

“Illegal America”

In discussion, Colby Chamberlain (Cleveland Institute of Art) spoke on the exhibition that began the long-running alternative space, Exit Art. Jeanette Ingberman and her partner Papo Colo did the “Illegal America” show as their first show in their first space. (Exit Art had at least three incarnations.) I saw this show with my partner Becky Howland when we were running ABC No Rio. We were amazed to find the Real Estate Show occupation was among the venerable examples of transgressive art actions featured there.

Exit Art's "Illegal America" catalogue, with the dollar bill seal

Among the images Colby showed was our RES co-conspirator Peter Mönnig sitting in traffic inside a pickle barrel. Surely a classic, like a rodeo clown playing with the unconscious “bulls” of the roadway. Another of our partners in crime, Ann Messner was in that catalogue too, probably her film of stealing shirts at a department store sale.
Chamberlain worked at Exit Art with Jeanette Ingberman. He wrote on the Fluxhouse co-ops of George Maciunas. He presented later on day three on illegalisms in art.
“There’s an alternative history of Soho”, he said, a could-have-been. “Everyone was living within the pale of law.” This is part of the structure of feeling of downtown, of “constant precarity and exposure”. But getting along just fine, by adhering to unwritten rules and norms.
Bentley Brown commented, “Your delinquency is your survival.”

Workshop Your Feelings

Jennifer Doyle (U of Calif., Riverside) and Ricardo Montez (New School, NYC) jointly led a workshop called “A Geography in Solution: Downtown as a Structure of Feeling”. The term is from Raymond Williams, which Doyle said is much like the “sense of a scene”. [See note below]
She’s been closely involved for years with a Los Angeles art space called Human Resources, near Chinatown. It sounds like a classic experimental alternative space, with its own particular culture and, of course, a large accumulation of “art trash”. (At ABC No Rio we called that a “permanent collection”.)

Corey Fogel performing at Human Resources, Los Angeles

Mixed in with the process of historicization, i.e. writing histories, is what Doyle called the “chronopoetics of extractive capital”, a kind of retrospective FOMA, a feeling that “you’re always too late” on the scene.
Doyle spoke of the special “structure of feeling” around the Human Resources art space and its management, She’d been thinking to do a series of interviews with long-time participants. Some involved in the place were opposed to that project, seeing this as a violation of the culture of the place.
Hearing this, I was moved to cry out, “Don’t listen to them!”

Who and What Is “Downtown”?

Ricardo Montez worked on Nelson Sullivan, the videotista associated with the Alig-era “club kids”. Once on YouTube I watched his documentation of the flash mob party these flaming creatures instigated at the MacDonalds in Times Square. Nelson Sullivan “produced himself as downtown”, Montez said, like the perennial nightlife creature and columnist Michael Musto. (I noticed in NYC in May of ‘22 a print copy of a revivified Village Voice; Musto had a text in it.)

Still from a Nelson Sullivan video

This was also a rare moment to gripe about the (by now stuffed) elephant in the room, the uninhabitability of NYC today and its gentrification, which can only be compared to a mountain top removal kind of strip mining, with its attendant devastating runoff and pollution.
We were reminded that the trans artist Tourmaline, who we’d seen earlier in a video dancing on the balcony of the Whitney, was among those who fought against the gentrification of the West Side piers when young queer people were fenced out.
Montez claimed that the Whitney Museum has “appropriated downtown”, citing the recent David Wojnarowicz show (which came to Madrid). Someone quoted Gary Indiana on the rapacious real estate practices of NYU, for which the staff of the Fales collection are ritually constrained to apologize. (I know of no book or article that describes these practices. Citation, please?)
I was reminded of Nick Zedd’s classic line when the Fales purchased his archive, and he moved to Mexico City – “NYU destroyed New York, but at least they paid me to leave town.”

NOTE on the “structure of feeling”:
* Stuart Hall defines the term further in Familiar Stranger (2017)> He learns the 'structure of feeling' through his diasporic experience, realizing that he does not share the English "habitus -- a way of life, forms of customary behavior, a structure of common sense, taken-for-granted assumptions, affective identifications and presuppositions about the society, and how things work" (p. 205-207), and therefore cannot work as a professor of English literature. This is both my advantage and my handicap vis a vis having lived the times under discussion in London. The knowledges I have are special and unshareable -- (although by now rather gummed over by decades of study of secondary material). At the same time, I cannot see from outside that nimbus of experiences to ask the questions and ken the relationships that matter for the moment in which an historical account will appear.

NEXT – “Art Gangs” continues with talks about Charlotte Moorman and the Avant Garde Festival, Helio Oiticica and Mario Montes, Heresies, and that old New Museum/Colab kerfuffle.

REFERENCES

I couldn’t find a citation online for the 1980 reopening of the Fred Hampton murder case; only this precis of the early history of the case --
https://peopleslawoffice.com/about-civil-rights-lawyers/history/the-fred-hampton-murder-trial/

Images of the Times Square Show installations (without Candace Hill-Mongomery’s work, among many others)
https://collaborativeprojects.wordpress.com/times-square-show-1980/

Bob Parent, jazz photographer; as of 2019, the archive was in limbo…
https://www.allaboutjazz.com/the-bob-parent-archive-project-a-photographers-legacy-quietly-grows-by-aaj-staff

Yuko Otomo, “Let’s get TEDucated! Tribute to Ted Joans”, June 2015
http://www.arteidolia.com/tribute-to-ted-joans-yuko-otomo/

“Approaching Downtown” NYC in London: Post #1

Still from Vivienne Dick’s film "Guerillère Talks" (1978; on Mubi)

I was recently in London at a meeting to discuss the cultural history of late 20th century in downtown New York City. I’m going to blog some notes from that symposium. The experience of those few days was so full, so overflowing with realizations, correspondences, and the kind of frisson one gets from realizing new avenues of inquiry that I’ll only be able to share some of it. (I’ll probably get some names wrong; please comment or email me, and I’ll fix them.)
Most of the scholars there were young. My mind teemed with plans, like them. But what is possible for them is no longer so for me. We’ll see. Even what I can start and not finish might be useful.

Punkademics

The gathering took place at the venerable Courtauld Institute of art history. It was a surprising host for students of all this punky funky trashy stuff we swam with in late century NYC. But so it was. It’s old stuff now; send in the “punkademics”.

Greer Lankton's doll in Nick Zedd's film “Bogus Man” (1980; on Mubi)
Actually, this study has been going on for some years, and professors are making their names on it. New archival resources are slowly accumulating. It’s a kick to meet people who aren’t MA or early-stage PhD students, who, when you ask them, “Did you see this or that archive?” Answer: “Of course.” And tell you about another one.
I’ve been away from academia for so long (I last taught a class in ‘07; last formally presented in ‘11) that a lot has changed. And this is Europe so the frames of reference are different from the USA. White scholars are working on black artists. I picked up Stuart Hall’s memoir at the airport, and quickly realized there’s more to the black experience than our canonical Brooklyn story.

Rolling Luggage

I arrived late from the airport and missed both Vivienne Dick’s film "Guerillère Talks" (1978), and the presentation of Marci Kwon (Stanford U) on Martin Wong and Cyle Metzger (Bradley U) on Greer Lankton. My Colab pal Joseph Nechvatal heard them, and told me Kwon talked about Martin’s wild bohemian life in San Francisco before he moved to NYC. In the discussion, it was mentioned that the Greer Lankton doll Nick Zedd used in his film “Bogus Man” is now in the collection of Iggy Pop.

At right: Frank O'Hara
Next, during a panel on the New York School of poets “in and out of NYC”, Daniel Kane (Uppsala U), the author of [Do You Have a Band?: Poetry and Punk Rock in NYC, 2017], talked about Patti Smith. Patti’s idea of herself as a shaman or a seer is antithetical to community. She explicitly rejected collaboration with the community of NYC poets to reach for stardom, Kane said, citing her correspondence. She is “a poetry-referencing rock star”.
(I saw her recent concert in Madrid. It was a boring hash of old hits. The high moment was her soaring reading of a verse by Ginsberg. I later saw Iggy Pop. He’s no poet, but he’s not a boring act.)

Not that issue of the Rat
TAZ and ‘Sentimental Spit’

Discussion turned on the question of community, of coterie, a word with a rural etymology. As if, like cotters, the group of poets only occupy their positions in return for their labour of maintaining the scene. A good part of the New York School was about rejecting other poets, especially the rhythm and clarity of, say, Vachel Lindsay. Of Dylan Thomas, with his sentimental narrative content, Frank O’Hara said, “I can’t stand all that Welsh spit.”
Kane referenced the TAZ – the “temporary autonomous zone” concept as a touchstone of community. (He didn’t cite the recently deceased Peter Lamborn Wilson, nor did he seem to grok the demotic nature of that idea.)
Rosa Campbell (U of St. Andrew) and Rona Cran (U of Birgmingham) presented on women poets in the NY School of poets, especially Barbara Guest. Of course they didn’t get much attention, but the tables have been turning for some time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89pOmcTVbTY 1960s TV series, “USA: Poetry” episode with Frank O'Hara and Ed Sanders

“I Wouldn’t Kick Her Out of Bed…”

Campbell glossed Ed Sanders’ ‘60s-period remarks on various fuckable poet women in his mimeo journal “Fuck You” (a magazine of the arts). Later I told her about the women’s issue of Rat, the Lower East Side underground newspaper that was snatched away from its sexist male editors. (The takeover was narrativized in the World War 3, Shameless Feminists issue by participant Susan Simensky Bietila and others in 2019.)

The “Floating Bear” poetry newsletter
Women produced numerous literary magazines during this period. Cran zeroed in on Diane Di Prima, who sustained the “Floating Bear” newsletter all by herself, typing, copying, distributing. “The unglamorous work of creating community fell to women.” Since her move to San Francisco Di Prima has certainly recouped her fair share. City Lights has been releasing her collected works.
Diarmuld Hesler (U of Cambridge), author of Wrong a biography of Dennis Cooper, spoke on Cooper’s early poems. Cooper was part of the Beyond Baroque group of poets in Los Angeles, who performed on the Venice boardwalk. He ran a small magazine called “Little Caesar” publishing NYCers. With this, Cooper created “an imaginary transcontinental community”. Hesler also spoke about a group in Washington, D.C. around the early ‘70s magazine “Mass Transit” which he said should be “considered as another center of NY School poetry”.

Tourmaline in Salacia, 2019 film
“When You Leave New York…” This kind of thinking is old hat, and just as influential. Really most NYC artists came from elsewhere, traveled, moved away, or stayed for just a short time. New York is a port city, Joseph Nechvatal observed; ceaseless comings and goings are its principal characteristic. Even though only the rich or high-end workaholics can really think of moving there now, de-centering NYC by emphasizing its national and international networks is still hard work.
Rona Cran asked what happened to the sociability of the NY poets when the AIDS plague hit? I immediately thought of the ABC No Rio open mic crowd, the slam poets, who were younger than the classic NY School, and for whom the plague was brutal. Winchester Chimes died of it, although he was very much a rhyming, rhythmic subject-oriented poet, the kind NY School disdained.
Cran said the situation spoke to the seriousness of poetry. She cited Adrienne Rich – “poetry must speak of extremity.”
Darius Bost (U of Illinois) showed a video by Tourmaline, “The Atlantic Is a Sea of Bones” (2017), performed at the Whitney Museum. Tourmaline was a trans hustler who slept as a homeless person on the Hudson Piers back in the day. Bost showed Katsuo Naito’s “West Side Rendezvous” (2011), documentary photos of street sex workers in the age of AIDS. Naito lived in Harlem, and knew some of his subjects from that neighborhood. Many are long dead. This is the neglected underside, Bost said, of black feminist poetics and the vogue aesthetic.

This is a deep history, of the kind that the RepoHistory public art project sought to excavat. Pier 17, now the South Street Seaport, was the port of disembarkation for slaves. It was near the Wall Street slave market.
I was tipped to this whole London event by Fiona Anderson, a co-organizer of the conference. She wrote Cruising the Dead River: David Wojnarowicz and New York's Ruined Waterfront (2019). We corresponded when I organized a screening of films Woj had collaborated on for the Reina Sofia iteration of his retrospective in Madrid. (I blogged a bunch about this here then, in the Spring of ‘19; some of it made it into my new book, Art Worker.)

From Katsuo Naito’s “West Side Rendezvous” (2011)
And that was just part of the first day!

TO BE CONTINUED

REFERENCES

Anna Zarra Aldrich, “I smell a RAT” (2018), on the women’s takeover of the underground newspaper
https://blogs.lib.uconn.edu/archives/2018/04/25/i-smell-a-rat/

Muna Mire, "Tourmaline Summons the Queer Past", 2020
https://www.frieze.com/article/tourmaline-summons-queer-past

Images from Katsuo Naito’s “West Side Rendezvous” (2011) at:
https://intolerablefashion.typepad.com/intolerable-fashion/2011/07/images-from-katsu-naitos-west-side-rendezvous-.html

RepoHistory sign, “Who owns your life?,” by Carin Kuoni