This is the 5th 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 rich talks explored entrepreneurs and illegals in the East Village, concepts of art & law, queer counter-publics and homonormativity, and a workshop on “antagonisms”.
On the third day, I was set to speak in a panel that mixed illegality and entrepreneuralism. (“Same or different?”) Kristen Galvin (U of Colorado, CO Springs) spoke on Tish and Snooky of Manic Panic on St. Marks Place, storekeepers of trash and glam threads who built a global hair dye empire during the punk era.
This was fun stuff. These women performed at CBGBs as the Sic F*cks dressed as Nazi nuns, and ran a “rock and roll rummage sale” store by day. Manic Panic was a kind of community center, punk tourist attraction, art supply store, and a drag queens’ shopping center, Galvin said.
In her survey of East Village feminist business, Galvin included Club 57 run by Ann Magnuson, with her thrift and dumpster scavenging aesthetic. Among the rules of the club: “keep an eye out for old drunken Polish men”.
NYC garbage has always been a treasure trove for artists, and its use has been a style statement. Street trash was Jack Smith’s daily lode. The most extreme example I knew was musician Glenn Branca, who wore clothes he found on the street without washing them.
Patti Astor, mistress of the Fun Gallery, the pre-eminent venue for vendable graffiti art, figured in Galvin’s talk. Astor said the ‘80s was her “art school period” – “no more white walls, white people”. They were all “bugging out on each others’ style”. She was less than the complete businesswoman, however. Astor saw the Sidney Janis Gallery’s landmark post-graffiti show as predatory and speculative, pumping and dumping.
“Illegal Art”
Colby Chamberlain picked up his talk on Exit Art’s “Illegal America” show with which Jeanette Ingberman and Papo Colo began their exhibition project. Ingberman did a masters in art and law. Art is is an abstraction, she reasoned; law is also. When art expands it conflicts with law.
Chamberlain showed Papo Colo’s fake diploma from the “Univertatis Portoricencis”. (Another Puerto Rican artist, Adal Maldonado, conceived a Puerto Rican embassy with poet Pedro Pietri. They issued passports.)
He quoted Ingberman on “illegal poetics” in which the “artist exposes him/her to a vulnerable position outside the confines of the art world”. The show poster is a photo of Ingberman holding a lamp in a Statue of Liberty pose; it’s a construction site work light (note the hook on it).
Chamberlain whizzed through several examples of illegalisms, and what Edward Fry, fired from the Guggenheim for showing Hans Haacke’s Shapolsky piece, called “post-liberal art”.
These included a 1972 self-incriminating concept work by Dennis Oppenheim, “Evidence of 153 Misdemeanors”, and an action by Richard Mock, who stole a panel from Christo’s Running Fence and put grapes on it Cesar Chavez gave him. (Chavez’s UFW union was leading a national boycott of the fruit.) Chamberlain also worked on George Maciunas, Fluxus macher and wildcat Soho co-op developer.
Lawyer Jerald Ordover represented Maciunas, and also the artist provocateur, Jean Toche of the Guerrilla Art Action Group (GAAG), when the Belgian ex-pat was arrested and interrogated by the FBI (at the request of the Guggenheim museum management, as I recall).
The Blogger Speaks
I was in this panel, and talked about “Occupation Culture” in NYC, that is, artists involved in and alongside the Lower East Side squatting movement in the 1980s and ‘90s. It was a combination for me of two key concerns, downtown NYC art and squatting. (I blog elsewhere on the latter – “Occupations & Properties” at blogspot.com.) I drew the title of my talk from my book, Occupation Culture (2015; URL of free PDF online).
“Squat art” (such as it was) was presaged by the radical (in different ways) art places of ABC No Rio, the Rivington School, and the Garden of Eden.
Bullet Space opened a gallery in a squatted building under the direction of Andrew Castrucci, which showed art in a more normative manner. Bullet is best known for a series of posters, and a broadsheet polemic for squatting – “Your House Is Mine”. The noise musician and muralist Peter Missing and his bandmates ‘terrorized’ East Village yuppies with aggressive graffiti. Seth Tobocman and friends started the political graphic magazine World War 3 Illustrated, which supported the LES squatters. Tobocman later joined the movement himself, and produced an epic graphic novel, War in the Neighborhood (2000).
Poster by Fly-O
Unusual as a prominent woman in the movement, Fly-O was an enthusiastic squatter and punk musician. A prolific zine-maker, she became a kind of vernacular historian of the movement. In recent years, mainstream institutions as well as ABC No Rio and the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space (MoRUS) have presented exhibitions on the squatting movement in NYC.
Tag Team for the Queer Community
Gavin Butts (Northumbria U), author of No Machos or Pop Stars (2022), a book on post-punk in Leeds, UK, reviewed early ‘70s queer culture and its study, that is, before the emergence of mainstream gay culture.
He paraded Jackie Curtis as “a figure of queer counter-publicness”, with her hair backlit in a classic Hollywood-style studio photo; described the Shirley Clarke movie, Portrait of Jason – (ABC No Rio’s own Jack Waters starred in a recent remake) – and Jayne County’s days with the Ridiculous Theatre. Formerly Wayne (the county wherein is Detroit), she asked: “Are you man enough to be a woman?”
I didn’t know about the queer use of what was called “wrecking” drag – or “scare” drag in NYC – a transvestite outfit that contained at least one element of gender-appropriate attire. Apparently there were laws in some U.S. jurisdictions, like the sumptuary laws of medieval times, that required men and women to dress according to their gender. (Now only workplaces can require that.) I was reminded of Penny Arcade’s insistence that art and crime go together. She – aka Susanna Ventura – also acted as a teen in the Ridiculous Theatre.
Butts noted that in 1972-73 glam rock broke public queerness with albums like Lou Reed’s “Transformer” and David Bowie’s “Ziggy Stardust”. He cited a text by Will Straw (1995) on the concept of scene as a model for academic research on pop music.
Hot Peaches in Wonderland
David Getsy (U of Virginia) picked up the theme. (He has written on Stephen Varble, and will soon publish on Scott Burton.) He lamented that “homonormativity and transphobia” became the new mass culture of gayness. 1973 was a key year for the gay movement, with the delisting of gayness as a psychiatric disorder. Getsy focussed on the Hot Peaches street theater group which produced a version of Alice in 1973 in which “wonderland” is the gay trans underground.
Hot Peaches trouupe, from Facebook
The work was directed at a gay audience, albeit performed at least once at the antique bur-lee-Q venue Sammy’s Bowery Follies. Author Jimmy Camicia lived in Berlin in the 1960s, and was impressed by German gay culture. His Alice used a “subcultural dialect” – heterosexuals would find it hard to follow the dialogue.
Camicia said, “Children can never play gay games, so I want us to do that.” The piece celebrated the underground as the heart of queer NYC. Very little video of the group survives. Getsy played a clip of a queen declaring: “New York is quite different than wherever you came from”.
Roll Call of the Black Avant-Garde
Cynthia Oliver (U of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) read the names of black dancers in a theatrical recitative “roll call”. One among them was Rudy Perez who worked with the Judson Dance Theatre. (I wrote about his work in ‘75.) Oliver cited Richard Schechner long-time editor of TDR on the “conservative avant-garde” (was he writing on it, or was he of it? I think the latter).
Herself a dancer and choreographer, Oliver was following questions posed at a recent Schomburg Library conference – “When did the avant-garde become black?” and “Does abstraction belong to white people?” These questions arise from the perception of modernism as a variant species of colonialism.
‘I Don’t Like You, but I Need You’
(A bit out of sequence here) James Boaden (U of York) and Johanna Gosse (U of Idaho) headed a workshop on “Poor Relations and Intimate Antagonisms”. They rolled over some interesting territory, such as how the “curatorial narrative” of the downtown NYC scene evolved, in shows like “Mixed Use Manhattan” (at Reina Sofia, Madrid), and “Pioneers of the Downtown Scene” (at the Barbican, London). The theme of those shows was “buck up and do it in an age of austerity.”
I’d question how austere the NYC ‘70s was for artists in a period of low rents, liberal government subsidy, and a smaller progressive art community. For me, in the last half of that decade, it seemed like pretty warm water. Oh, yeah, the subways were dirty and property tax revenue was low. Que pena, but not for us.
Said Gosse: To ignore antagonisms leads to a “bloodless” history. She was talking about artistic antagonisms, using as examples the crankiness of Ray Johnson, and the art that both Carolee Schneeman and Hannah Wilke made about their breakups and sex partners. As historians, she said, we should “own our prurience… our desire to know and to see”. She cited Joan W. Scott, “Evidence of Experience” – to deny antagonisms is to reaffirm the “smooth neoliberal order”.
Actually, my first boss John Coplans, learned me that the artworld was a field of warfare. As a one-time colonial soldier, I think he knew the neoliberal order is anything but smooth.
What-Aboutism
The methodological challenge the workshop posed is to navigate and acknowledge the uneven archival field – what archives get saved (and are accessible), and who is still alive to tell about past times.
Of course, there is also the question of who and what is consistently looked away from, in particular the upsurge of activist institutional critique of the affect and depradations of the American empire. But what people might all the time be upset about is not normally on the agenda.
I didn’t crank about politics and blithely ignorant attitudes during the workshop. I only recalled from my experience as reasons for instances of antagonism among artists were withholding of important career information (curators and dealers making visits, looking for x or y, etc.), exclusion from important exhibitions, and acting within institutional circles as the sole representative of a collective project.
Here’s hoping that with the vastly expanded field of artistic action, the sorts of antagonisms that arise between the different active positions within the artworld are somehow softening around the edges. Maybe a critic or a curator doesn’t have to be the artist’s natural enemy any more.
Who Are You to…
I also didn’t crank about artists who resent scholars making a career out of their work when they remain poor, or simply pumping them for info about the famous people they knew. To which I might add from my experience with the SqEK group of scholars who study squatters, the resentment of those activist ‘subjects’ who are quizzed by scholars who then publish their findings in inaccessible academic journals.
My own related personal gripe is students who ask for info then don’t share their final work. Some artists I know won’t talk to them. Research is a transaction. People aren’t that in love with hearing themselves talk to strangers.
Someone said, “I’m not interesting enough to be a historical subject.” I think that’s false modesty. As a historian studying, learning and writing your stories, you are a subject, whether you believe it or not, and will be seen as such by those coming after.
NYC Definitions
For many of the scholars at this conference, the Fales collection at NYU library has been a basic resource. In the end, the peops from NYU talked – Lynn Gumpert (Grey Art Gallery, NYU) and Nicholas Martin (Fales Library, NYU) – about their institution, its pasts and its plans. (Martin is a curator of arts and humanities, and manages some galleries.) Of the definitive “Downtown Show” (2007?) with its catalogue and useful website, the question for Gumpert was, “How do you present something so anti-institutional?” In the end, curator Carlo McCormick came up with the narrative structure of the show.
NYU has had a recent gift of some 200 downtown works, and they’ll build a study center in Fall of ‘24. To a question about their acquisitions policy, Martin said, “We don’t have to go looking.”
I asked what is their relation to the autonomous archives that have arisen recently. I’ve seen that the MoRUS storefront on the LES has been full of NYU student volunteers over the years, and school groups regularly visit the Interference Archive in Brooklyn. Said Martin, “The more the merrier, so that things don’t end up in the dumpster.” I had hoped he would say they want to work with them.
Marvin Taylor, the primary assembler of the current collection and its vision, was venerated. (I know that Ron Kolm, who was early on the scene at Fales with shopping bags full of small press books, gave Taylor a good strong push.)
Marci Kwon said that Taylor’s was the first class she took at NYU, so David Wojnarowicz shaped her view of art history. Buenos noches, modernismo!
NEXT:
In the next and last of this series of posts on the London conference, I’ll report on talks devoted to artists’ television and video art, including a look at the one-season wonder of the "Willoughby Sharp Show", VJing in Danceteria's Congo Bill VIP lounge, Glenn O’Brien, Dara Birnbaum and more.
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