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
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.)
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/
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