This post comes out of research for my last book, Art Worker. (The e-book is now available to order.) Last month I posted Joe Lewis' recollections of Fashion Moda spoken during an event in Los Angeles for an exhibition of John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres, two of the principal artists at the South Bronx art space. Joe was co-director. This post reports in two parts the interview I had with Stefan Eins in 2019, the artist best known as the founding genius of Fashion Moda.
Fashion Moda was an artist's concept. It was also a place, a situation, an open house for creativity. Fashion Moda was a project conceived by Stefan Eins during the heroic era of alternative spaces in NYC, the 1970s. “The Moda” as it was called by its habitues ultimately failed to institutionalize. (If indeed that is a failure; more recent project art is short-term.) During its decade-plus years of existence, however -- 1979 to 1993 – Fashion Moda played a central role in the cultural revival in the South Bronx, and a pivotal role in the story of late 20th century contemporary art in NYC.
In 1979 Stefan signed the lease on a blasted-out storefront. Amidst a truly ruined neighborhood of firetrap social clubs, storefront churches, parking lots and trainyards, the concept with the international name – Fashion 时髦 Moda МОДА – found a home.
The NYC artworld had already relocated from its traditional center – 57th Street, midtown – to the place where artists were living, the derelict factory zone of Soho downtown. This geographical shift in spaces for living, working and showing art re-tuned spatial sensibilities, sculptural feeling, and the “window” of the painted image to an industrial scale.
When capital reclaimed Soho for luxury lofts and fashion stores, the artists and galleries were bought out or evicted. They moved east. The East Village art scene of the 1980s, which colonized the working class barrio of Lower East Side, refocussed art-making again on the cafe bistro scale of the School of Paris, and the delicate registers of 57th Street modernism – but that was the '80s.
Yes, we’re talking real estate. Without which nothing. Said the ancient: “Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the earth.”
Stefan started his kind of project early in the ’70s. The Austrian artist rented a storefront on Mercer Street, near Canal Street. He could live, work and show all in the same place. That was the 3 Mercer Store. It was around the corner from a related project by George Maciunas, the Fluxus Shop at 359 Canal Street.
There is little trace on the internet or in art history of this project. (Only scholar-dealer Marc H. Miller, who bought ephemera from Stefan, posts about the 3 Mercer Store.) But this tiny store became a key center for young artists to show during the middle ’70s in Soho.
I met Stefan in ’75, just walking by the store. I went in and talked to him. He showed me his work. As his luck would have it, I was a young punk writing for Artforum. And I wrote up his store.
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On my research trip in 2019, I ran into Stefan Eins on 57th Street at an opening of Tom Otterness’ work. Natty as ever, he asked me to call on him. After some bumps – he was having surgery, I had a cold – we sat down in his hotel room in midtown.
Stefan was an art organizer, a kind of project artist/curator before that was an artworld thing. His was the kind of early innovative art work that enlarged possibilities for art in the present. At his 3 Mercer Street in Soho artists could do what they wanted, this at a time when commercial galleries were closed to many. Some performed: Geoffrey Hendricks did a haircut performance; Mitch Corber recited poetry under the influence of onions. Others showed artworks gallery-style, like my first roommate Mike Malloy who put up his interactive shelf sculptures. Tom Otterness showed large photostatic prints; Judy Rifka photocopies of drawings derived from her studies of dance. The 3 Mercer Store wasn’t a gallery, but some of the shows were covered in the art press.
Those artists and more would join Colab, and I met some of them at Stefan’s. That’s what I recall clearly. Most of what happened there is lost to the record. Stefan didn’t keep many records then. One poster of the 3 Mercer Store lists items for sale by dozens of artists who subscribed to the concept.
3 Mercer Store poster, 1975. gallery.98bowery.com
Stefan’s interest was in the situation he had created. It was his studio, but it was also a store in the old architectural mode of artisan stores – the shop in front, living quarters in the back. In 1975 when I wandered in, there was no show on. It was only him, with his crowbar and airpump and bottle of water. He showed me how he worked them. A fog in the botle and a wisp of water vapor above it resulted after some hand pumping. “Magic!” I wrote about them as art between object and performance.
gallery.98bowery.com
This was clearly Duchampian – minimal variety, in the vein of the Rotoreliefs, which Duchamp first offered for sale at a fair for inventors in 1935. (That event, the Concours Lépine, continues to this day.) That stream of Duchampian influence on post-modern artists wasn’t even so clear to me then. When I wrote about Jean Dupuy for Artforum, he referenced the modernist master explicitly, and was deeply interested in word play and games.
Stefan wanted to sell art, but in a way unlike what the numerous art galleries popping up then in Soho were trying to do. He wanted a mass audience. He hooked up with Neke Carson and Jaime Davidovich to sell objects at the New York novelty fair. Stefan had a bird made of light plastic which flapped its wings and flew – miraculous!, and a poster of a UFO. (The crowbar and air pump-water bottle trick were not so commercial.)
One artist who clearly got what he was doing was Sherrie Levine. She had bought a collection of childrens’ shoes in California and brought them to New York when she moved there. “In 1977,” she told an interviewer, “Barbara Ess introduced me to Stefan Eins who was running the Three Mercer Street Store. He was looking for artists who wanted to show things ... that weren’t the kind of thing you find in a gallery, but which made reference to the store. Barbara told him about the shoes, and we did a show that took place on two weekends. Two shoes sold for two dollars, and they sold out immediately.”
Mike Malloy. gallery.98bowery.com
“Constance Lewallen: This reminded me of Oldenburg’s store but actually it was quite different, because you sold things you bought and he sold things he made.
“Levine: Right. It was a Duchampian gesture.”
Sherrie Levine’s shoes reappeared as a Parkett edition in 1992.
Sherrie Levine, "Two Shoes", 1992
My text for Artforum on Eins’ minimally material performative conceptual artwork, and another article in Art-Rite helped him to get a state grant for 3 Mercer. When the money came in, Stefan took me and Edit DeAk to the Russian Tea Room. That next grant bankrolled the rental of the riot-ravaged South Bronx storefront that would become Fashion Moda.
After doing a store in Soho with underground success, Stefan opened “not an art gallery but ‘a collection of science, invention, technology, art and fantasy’” way uptown. Lucy Lippard wrote Fashion Moda together with Colab and ABC No Rio. So did Grace Glueck in the New York Times. Fashion Moda was a big success. It closed in 1993.
Stefan lives in an “other dimensional” world. Many of his works are dated years ahead. (I have a painting from the 1980s dated 2020.) Interviewing him can be frustrating. It’s not really a conversation. His statements are often preceded by long silences. His memory may now be vague on particulars, but he has never really cared for them. He knows what he wants to say and does not care to expand upon it. He asserts historical relevance in the most sweeping terms.
Stefan's midtown hotel room where I met him is small: one room to live in, with a bathroom and some kind of tiny kitchen. It was wall to ceiling artworks, mostly collages recently made.
Stefan Eins: My stuff is on the internet too. You should go on the website. I give you my card.
I explained that I was writing a memoir, and my interview project this fall was involved with that. Art Gangs (2011) was scholarly. This is more personal.
Alan Moore: I want to go back and look at my years here.
SE: You have a distance.
AM: Yes. The people, the groups, the movements that i was involved with. What I perceive is --
SE: You probably know Stefan Eins. You know who he is?
AM: …. I was going a lot to 112 Greene Street then. Living on Broome Street with a cocaine dealer in a tiny bunkbed, and 3 Mercer was around the corner.... so somebody told me or I may have just wandered in. You had that back room with the oriental carpet on the table. Sehr gemütlich. Smoking some reefer. People are dropping in. It was like a social club.
SE: Yes, great. Fashion Moda too had that level. Galleries in general have components of being social clubs. If you are invited in. And you have the money to buy…. I think that is what modern art was about. The mercantile level.
AM: At the time I was working for Artforum. The weight of the artworld was in midtown, on 57th Street.
SE: It was the center, the vicinity of the MoMA....
AM: I was also going to René Block's gallery, and learning about his artists and the Fluxus movement. I’ve seen a book here, Ich kenne kein Weekend (2015), about René’s work in Berlin. He was really important for the Fluxus movement. In the U.S. the emphasis is on George Maciunas. I don't know if you knew him? There is a biography of him called Mr. Fluxus. René Block was important in promoting this kind of performative art life esthetic, which I found very congenial as against this kind of militarized, imperialist minimal art, arrogant, insistent on its own sublimity...
SE: That's why I did my own spaces.
This went on for a bit. I talked about René and Irene Von Zahn, Richard Hayman at the Ear Inn, Lil Picard, the Fluxus circle. Stefan did not comment. This was along the lines of an earlier not-so-productive interview years earlier. Stefan refuses to be connected with anything Fluxus… while I am sure he was. (Could it be that I was the one connected to Fluxus? And that my admiration of the movement primed me for Stefan’s work? Nah.)
SE: You were in touch with all the Colab people.
AM: That happened slowly. And also through your space, because you were showing these guys.
SE: Tom Otterness showed there before anywhere else.
AM: Did Jenny Holzer show at 3 Mercer?
SE: We did Documenta together.... She came there regularly. She did show there, yeah. She did presentations there.
AM: Do you remember what kind of work she did?
SE: Writing already.
AM: I know you had the little shoes of Sherrie Levine.…
SE: I wanted to be independent. And I did my own thing there. I produced art that was not necessarily focussed on doing one piece at a time. It was focussed on doing art or projects that can be sold on a mass market level.…
AM: You were working with Neke Carson and Jaime Davidovich. You did a catalogue?...
SE: Yes. We did projects that were not standard artworld presentations. My interest was not in just doing painting and sculpture. My interest was in doing all kinds of projects which are not that. My crowbar is somewhere around here. It could lift 20 times the weight. So that unusual miraculous component was important to me. It still is….
I think what I have done at 3 Mercer, not doing painting and sculpture – and that really was the modernist tradition, more or less, and doing Fashion Moda I think was the beginning of contemporary art. It was the end of modern art….
Next: Memoir #18: Stefan Eins #2: Fashion Moda and the Hidden Dimensions
In the next post, we get to the meat of the matter, Fashion Moda. Stefan gets sick of Soho. He meets Joe Lewis. Shows in “Rooms”, the exhibition that opened P.S. 1. I interject ruminations on Colab, the famous F/M store at Documenta, and art historical “consequences”. Then we veer off into Stefan's real concern, the extra dimensions and the world of the unseen that is revealed to him through material signs in the everyday environment. Which is what it’s always been about.
LINKS AND REFERENCES
Alan W. Moore, Art Worker: Doing Time in the New York Artworld (2022; Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, LA & Leipzig) – in paper and e-book
https://bit.ly/3eICWX0
Joe Lewis' recollections….
“Art Gangs” blog post: “Long-Closed in the Bronx, but Well-Remembered: Joe Lewis on Fashion Moda”
http://artgangs.blogspot.com/2023/01/gone-but-well-remembered-joe-lewis-on.html
Fashion 时髦 Moda МОДА
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fashion_Moda
Excellent overview by the Deitch-connected artist and writer, Francesco Spampinato "Fashion Moda” in Waxpoetics no. 55, May 2013
http://www.francescospampinato.com/writings/articles/
“Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the earth.”
(A remark of Archimedes quoted by Pappus of Alexandria, Collection or Synagoge, Book VIII, c. AD 340)
Marc H. Miller . "Stefan Eins: Behind 3 Mercer Street and Fashion Moda". Gallery 98, 2018
https://gallery.98bowery.com/exhibition/stefan-eins-the-3-mercer-street-store-fashion-moda-1972-80/
Neke Carson, artist
http://nekecarson.com/cvs.html
Jaime Davidovich - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Jai...
Sherrie Levine and Constance Lewallen, “Sherrie Levine,” n.d., journal of contemporary art, at jca-online.com/slevine.html, accessed May 2020.
Sally Webster's 1996 essay for Lisa Kahane's exhibition at the Lehman College Art Gallery, "Fashion Moda: A Bronx Experience", has been dismounted.
https://lehmangallery.org/lisa-kahane-a-partial-view-of-fashion-moda/
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