I’ve been promoting the idea of a book/catalogue of the legendary South Bronx art space Fasion Moda. No success so far, but there was this event which reminds us of the important radical role this art space played from its start in 1978 to its closnig in 1993. The door was open at Fashion Moda, not just for spectators but for participants as well. The place was an exemplary model for a new kind of public creative culture.
This is a partial transcript of a public conversation between John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres at the Broad Museum in Los Angeles, with interventions by Joe Lewis, co-director of Fashion Moda. The YouTube video begins with a film showing of the two artists casting subjects for their sculptures, a practice they began at Fashion Moda.
[12:10 in the YouTube recording] Joe Lewis:
Just to give you an idea about the territory where this happened, this is Fashion Moda, with my partner Stefan [Eins; Joe indicates photograph on the screen]. The South Bronx at this moment in time looked like Dresden. There were little pockets of community, but generally speaking it was just barren, basically.
My partner, Stefan, who was Austrian, I met him downtown and we talked a lot about politics, history, commercialism, etc., etc. And he knew he was in a bubble. And I knew that downtown [NYC artworld] was a bubble because a specific group had a stranglehold over the development of aesthetic criteria. We also believed that you didn’t have to be trained to an artist, and at that time you didn’t have to come to New York to be an artist either.
I had a residency up in the Bronx at a chemical company, and I said, “Hey, come up to the Bronx and check it out.” And he did, and found this burned-out storefront basically, put on a roof, put on a front, borrowed electricity from the city [laughter], and Fashion Moda was born….
Fashion Moda was a place where people mixed who would not normally mix under any circumstance. It wasn’t an experiment. It was an interactive creative process where different ideas and world collided to create [new ones]. Most important, the guiding principle was that no specific group of people had a stranglehold over aesthetic criteria, the creation and implementation of it, which has been proven I think in the first video [shown at the public event] by graffiti, rap, MCing, break dancing, is ubiquitous. You can’t go anywhere in the world without finding it. And this was created by teenagers, primarily of color. And today it is everywhere – Timbuktu, South Korea, whereever you want to go.
The logo of Fashion Moda was in English, [Spanish], Russian, and Chinese the word “fashion”, and that kind of set out our global view of the world, that art could be made anywhere. And at this time you have to remember there were only a handful of galleries, a handful of museums. If you had a solo show before you were 50 you were considered a whiz kid. It was Eurocentric and male, period. So it took another two or three decades for this idea of globalism to seep into the contemporary art [mechanism].
By definition we had no definition. This is really problematic for most people. Because people consistently asked us, “Whzt is Fashion Moda?” Year after year, even the neighborhood kids would stick their heads in and say, “What’s this space gonna be?”
Well, by definition Fashion Moda had no definition. We were not a gallery because we thought galleries represented colonialist ventures. We were not an alternative or artists space because we thought of them as post-colonial. I look at today’s Decolonize This movement with nostalgia.
But when pressed for a definition my partner would say, “Fashion Moda is magic.” This is the territory whee John [Ahearn] and Rigoberto [Torres] met….
[1:03:07 – Speaking about the relationship between John and Rigoberto:]
There’s a real sense of humility in the relationship, and … I think it’s something we miss today in this world. I think about this, whaddyacall it, social practice. This was like social practice at the best possible time and way. We were bringing people together. We weren’t saying, “I wanna do this, I wanna do that. You should have this” – I mean, that’s where I believe it’s gone, the academicization of social practice has made it something that is not a tool; that has made it something else. I think it’s about the creative process. Fashion Moda was like, you didn’t have to be trained, you didn’t have to have a stellar vocabulary to be involved in the creative process. In those days no one recognized that. A couple of biennales ago you had outsider artists mixed in with the folks at the Arsenale, right. We did that in 1978.
John Ahearn:
May I point out that Rigoberto’s uncle [who ran a sculpture factory producing devotional icons] had work often at Fashion Moda, work from his factory. Stefan loved them.
Joe Lewis:
We had no boundaries from that…..
[1:09:21]
John and Rigoberto, but also Fashion Moda changed the trajectories of many people’s families’ lives. If you look at just the graffiti folks, Crash [John Matos], who did the [mural on the front[ of Fashion Moda, which we have a picture here of, I have a video clip of him showing Prince Albert in Monaco how to tag with a spray can. And Prince Albert the II makes a heart. I mention this because – and you [pointing to Rigoberto] went to junion high school with Crash – Crash at 19 curates “Graffiti Success for America” at Fashion Moda, and this had Lady Pink, Lee, all the best – all the OGs now. And that group of people, as well known as they’ve gotten, through the graffiti world. They’ve done Louis Vuitton, La Scala, Ferrari. This is stuff which at that time we had no idea was gonna happen. But those people have all remained connected to their neighborhoods. Crash has a gallery, he does stuff all over up in the Bronx, all over the world actually…. That impetus has continued to change the trajectory of many lives, and continues to go out like dropping a stone in a pond…. And this is a byproduct that we never even imagined when we started doing this….
[14:05] [An audience member recollects living upstairs from Rigoberto and John’s storefront studio in the Bronx]
Joe Lewis:
I have a funny story about that at Fashion Moda. Jane Dickson, who is his brother’s [Charlie Ahearn, filmmaker] partner, did a piece called “City Maze” in Fashion Moda. She built a maze [of cardboard],….and she asked Crash, “Can you come in and paint this cardboard maze?” So the day that show closed I was sitting there with Robert Colescott, who I was trying to get to have a show here at Fashion Moda. We’re sittnig there, the kids are banging on the window, school has let out, and 50 kids, they’re banging on the window, and Robert Colescott is sitting there like this [Joe hunches over]. We open the door, and they come in, and they trash that maze. And Robert Colescott was like, “You want me to have a show here?” We never had a show of Robert Colescott at Fashion Moda. We did show him at the New Museum [“Events”, curated by Fashion Moda in 1981]. When wrlds collide…. What happened because of Rigoberto and John, how they created community, it was a creation as well. There are select communities, created communities, and my definition of community is whoever’s in the room that night, that’s the community, right….
LINKS:
Joe Lewis moderated the talk of John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres at the recent exhibition at the Broad museum in Los Angeles, which was streamed and is on YouTube."The Un-Private Collection: John Ahearn + Rigoberto Torres + Joe Lewis"
https://www.thebroad.org/events/un-private-collection-john-ahearn-rigoberto-torres-joe-lewis
Fashion Moda
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fashion_Moda
Jane Dickson "City Maze" video (7:32); rap by Fab Five Freddy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmN4f2_Lmvc
Francesco Spampinato, "Head Space"; brief article on Fashion Moda's classic period
http://www.francescospampinato.com/files/spampinatofashionmodawaxpoetics.pdf
Stefan Eins in 1987. Photo by Lisa Kahane.
