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.
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 New corporate-centric models of art organization superseded Charlotte’s “love-run always collective anti-curatorial anti-authoritarian model”.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
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