Continuing the series of blogs of material not included in my 2022 memoir "Art Worker". In this second part of my interview with Stefan Eins, we get to the meat of the matter, Fashion Moda. Stefan tells how he got tired 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 kind of what it’s always been about. This is an interview as tug of war with extensive interpolations.
AM: So you got tired of 3 Mercer Store [see part one], and you met Joe Lewis.
SE: Yes. We met at 3 Mercer…. He lived in Little Italy. It was walking distance….
AM: ...So how did the project of Fashion Moda develop with Joe?
SE: Soho was so interconnected in its traditions, the tradition of modern art…. I went to the Bronx in my belief that creativity is a basic human trait, and [you don't have to] abide by rules that are made by somebody else, or different societal information. I wanted to be independent from that. I also wanted to focus on a group of people that are not really considered on that level…. And to envision a situation where I'm distancing myself from a modernist tradition, I wanted to go to the Bronx, and finding there graffiti, hiphop, break dancing, etc…. It was extremely special that I found that sort of situation there. And in an amazing manner, it proved me to be right.... Then of course my local friends, Keith Haring showed there very early on. Jenny Holzer came there. It hooked up with all that too.
Stefan has always known where the canonical bread is buttered.
AM: There was a show in Soho in 1976 at the Razor Gallery of the United Graffiti Artists organized by Hugo Martinez. He was a sociology graduate student at Hunter College and he worked with some graffiti artists, got them a studio, got them to put stuff on canvas. Did you see that show?
SE: I might have seen it, but if I did I don't really remember it. I didn't go to the Bronx for that, but in the end it became a very important component of what I did there.
AM: … So how did you find the place? You're going up there, looking around....
SE: It was a year after the riot. There was a riot in '77. [This followed on from a two day city-wide blackout of electricity in July of that year.] It destroyed shops in the Hub. And I found this empty storefront which was a perfect place to exhibit, high ceilings, etc. I got in contact with the owner. He met me in his Wall Street office, and he gave me a good price. I ended up fixing up the building, because it was really so broken….
AM: So you just went up there on the subway, looking around. Did you go with Joe?
SE: No. I went by myself. I was friends with Joe downtown. He had a studio in that area too. Then I didn't want to be the only white person in a mostly African-American and Hispanic neighborhood, and that's why I wanted Joe to be part of it.
AM: And he was into it…. I know I was at 3 Mercer a lot. It was very comfortable to hang out there. You never knew who might be there, and always something interesting…. I didn't get to Fashion Moda as often as I would have liked. Peter Mönnig and Becky Howland did shows up there. I saw them. I saw Jane Dickson’s collaborative City Maze, a bunch of things. I didn't hang out.
SE: The artists didn't really hang out there that much. They came for exhibitions. But hanging out on a daily basis... It was too much of a train ride, an hour and a half….
Lisa Kahane was the photographer for Fashion Moda. Hers are the iconic photos, the neighbors crowding around John Ahearn for the opening of his show of portrait heads, the kids grinning while racing around in the City Maze, the gallery’s different facade paintings, and more. (I’m in one I think, a long shot of an art opening on the street, my hair still red.) Her book, Do Not Give Way to Evil (2008), contains some of these photos of what they called “the Moda”, but the emphasis is on the borough itself. Her title is the borough’s motto in Latin – Ne cede malis. The vacant buildings, the vast rubble-strewn lots of that ravaged district are all in those images, the kind of wholesale urban abandonment – 75,000 buildings – most closely associated today with Detroit. Lisa’s own essay recalls that the South Bronx was so wasted and deserted that the horizon was visible. Even so, life was on the streets, and Lisa photographed people with their full knowledge and complicity. They’re smiling.
The South Bronx, she writes, was “an unimaginable wasteland. It was frightening and fascinating…. As material culture disappears, social process becomes more important. The empty space was a catalyst to creativity. The culture created in the Bronx and the other tortured neighborhoods of New York City in the 1970s and 80s is so strong it’s now an international style.”
The ruins of the borough attracted politicians, most memorably Ronald Reagan in 1980 who posed in front of John Fekner’s mural “BROKEN PROMISES / FALSAS PROMESAS”. Fekner had stencilled the words in 1980 for the People’s Convention, a big open-air counter-convention to the Democratic Party meeting in the city. John and others from Fashion Moda dialogued with the organizers about which issues needed to be expressed. “DECAY” – “SAVE OUR SCHOOL” – and “BROKEN TREATIES. LAST HOPE”. [Kahane, 2008]
Murals by John Fekner in a vacant lot. From Juztapoz magazine.
We talked about the artists who showed at 3 Mercer and Fashion Moda who also joined the Colab artists group.
AM: ... The Colab story is very complex. There were a lot of people circling around….
SE: That's why it became important. It was another step away from this modernist structure.
AM: Yes, but it was not accepted by institutional and market structures…. Autonomous organization of artists is accepted so long as you are on the margin…. You have to enter the market and the institutions on their own terms.
SE: But we're getting credit for what we have done. I'm getting credit…. You can do your own thing, you know. You are not dependent on them…. What the MoMA [Museum of Modern Art, NYC] is doing now is what we did then…. They still call it modern art. But the structure, that openness in the presentation started with what we did during that time period.... But they shouldn't call it ‘modern art’ since it's not modern art anymore….
AM: The transformation of the MoMA I think began with the coming together with P.S. 1…. [Alanna’s Heiss’s Institute for Art and Urban Resources got hold of the building in 1971; it affiliated with the MoMA in 2000.]
SE: When did that start?
AM: P.S.1 started publicly with the “Rooms” exhibition in 1976. “Rooms” was incredibly influential on everybody – artists, alternative space people, institutions and real estate developers. They didn't say, ‘Oh, great we have this space,’ and paint everything white, they just accepted the space like it was. It was a found site….
SE: I was in the first PS1 show.... I did a doll, I think. A foam rubber doll with broken dried leaves over the head. The hands were also dried leaves tied to it. ... There were a lot of people in that room. I was also in a one-person show at PS1 years later. It dealt with other dimensionality. You can go to my website and other dimensionality is addressed. I have a copy. Hold on.
As I transcribed this interview, it became clear to me that I was trying to get information out of Stefan that he had no great interest in recalling. He’s always been a big picture person, disinterested in details. The dirt of art history, who did what when and where doesn’t concern him, and during my visit it was obsessing me. The interview is a clear struggle between what he wanted to tell me and what I wanted to hear. He really only wanted to talk about his art now. I was doing interviews for my book, so I had an agenda. He pulled out a book and we looked at it together. It contains contains photographs of recent works he has exhibited. They show patterns on the sidewalk, which he interpreted.
SE: ….and I don't think that's a coincidence. It's a response by other dimensionality to my thinking about it. The shadow is exactly here. The two cigarettes are right here next to each other. So that's an amazing coincidental reality. And I do not rule out that it was created by other dimensional intelligence. I have a whole website now that deals with other dimensions…. And that's also magical, and I am glad you are here, and talking about my life magic. I left Vienna when the Vienna Actionist movement came to be accepted. I probably might have mixed with them if I had stayed there. But I didn't do that, so I sort of missed out on it. Then I met an American woman who had moved to Vienna as a 15 year old, became part of the Actionist movement, has kids with one of their major artists. Speaks perfect Vienna dialect. She moved back to New York ten or 15 years ago. And we did projects together, and continue to do projects together…. Just Google “Stefan Eins other dimension,” and she's part of that project....
Stefan made some cable TV shows under the Fashion Moda name. I’ve seen those tapes. It’s basically Stefan moving objects around in the studio room for half an hour of air time. They’re odd, and utterly incomprehensible. Stefan said he recently went up to the Fales library to see those tapes, and feels there is an extra-dimensionality at work in those videos.
The idea that an art can be a slick documentation of the traces of an invisible force that produces tailored meaning for one person alone is too close to paranoia for me. Stefan’s recent art makes me uncomfortable. (He explains it after a fashion in a couple of articles; the Artslant one is the best [Eins and Hegert, 2011].) I liked much better his graffiti-inspired phase when he used aerosol paint. He did one performative instant installation with short sprays and broken wooden slats on the floor of Scott Pfaffman’s gallery at the MWF Club’s Fossil Lounge in 2000 that was entrancing. That was a one-off which probably six people saw. He may not have done anything like that again. Who knows? Stefan always did his own thing.
I tried to get him to talk about the Fashion Moda stores he did with Jenny Holzer at Documenta in 1982. He was also in attendance at Colab meetings, and participating in shows throughout the ‘80s, long after most early members had left. Beyond a bare bones narrative of the Documenta store, Stefan had no interest in discussing any of this.
The Fashion Moda store at Documenta followed along from the Times Square Show gift shop. By ‘82, there had been a couple of iterations of the A More Store artists multiple vending project. Selling little art things is what Stefan was doing at 3 Mercer, so it’s also fair to credit him with planting the idea firmly in the younger artists’ heads. At Fashion Moda, Rigoberto Torres was working with John Ahearn. Rigoberto’s uncle had a shop fabricating plaster cast sculptures, mystical figures for botanicas. Tom Otterness started making his series of small plaster “Otterness objects” in the Bronx. He and Cara Perlman set up the TSS gift shop. Kiki Smith and Ellen Cooper set up the A More Store shop in Soho that winter. Two years later the concept went to Germany for Documenta as the Fashion Moda store.
Jenny Holzer, working with Stefan Eins, wrangled the store into Documenta. In addition to the t-shirts Stefan mentions in this interview, many Colab artists sold objects there. [FN – Neuberger] At the time, I was irritated that a collaborative effort had been appropriated by an individual, and was curated. According to the conception of proper behavior that had evolved within the group, that was a crime. Yet Stefan’s projects – 3 Mercer Store and Fashion Moda, over which he maintained close authorial control – meant things and opened possibilities to people who didn’t feel bound by those norms of collective behavior.
It would have been nice if the store at Documenta had been been there as a collective event, linked to the collective assembly of Colab. It wasn’t. It was linked to Fashion Moda, which didn’t really do the store thing.
The artists’ store was a strong concept for a period of populist art. Keith Haring opened the Pop Shop in 1986. A More stores continued to be produced yearly until 1988. Kenny Scharf opened the Scharf Shack in an altered newsstand in 1995. George Maciunas opened the FluxStore in 1964. To track back further would bring us to numerous department stores in major U.S. cities which sold modernist artists’ work in their furniture departments. Public galleries worldwide now augment their budgets with artists editions. Every museum special exhibition now exits through the gift shop.
The Documenta exposition’s artistic director Rudi Fuchs was criticized for his conservative approach. A look at the catalogue today shows that his Documenta cleaved to minimalism, the tried and true stock of most western museums. He also promoted a host of male neo-expressionist painters, nearly all of whom, like the style itself, have fallen into historical obscurity.
As I learned later, Coosje van Bruggen, married to Claes Oldenburg, selected the U.S. artists in the Documenta. It was a prescient mix of artists working in diverse modes. Van Bruggen, Eins said, was responsible for the inclusion of the Fashion Moda stores. Her husband also contributed a multiple. In her fine essay on the Fashion Moda stores, Gabi Lewton-Leopold observes: “Fashion Moda, representing a populist approach toward art making and exhibiting, was on the opposite end of the spectrum from Fuchs’s vision for the exhibition.” [Lewton-Leopold, 2012]
Stefan Eins had many collaborators at Fashion Moda over the years. Joe Lewis was the most important early partner. William Scott, the “junior director”, was the neighborhood hookup. The ever watchful Lisa Kahane was on the scene. The full story of that extraordinary venture remains to be told.
LINKS
Stefan Eins’ website has been demounted, likely for non-payment
See Wayback Machine for this content
Joe Lewis art
https://joelewisartist.com
Lisa Kahane, art and life in the city
http://www.lisakahane.com
Lisa Kahane, Do Not Give Way to Evil: Photographs of the South Bronx, 1979-1987 (Power House Books, Brooklyn, 2008)
John Fekner
https://www.johnfekner.com
See also "John Fekner, New York State Of Mind" Juxtapoz online, 2022
https://www.juxtapoz.com/news/magazine/john-fekner-new-york-state-of-mind/
[FN – Neuberger] A number of the objects of the Fashion Moda store at Documenta 7 were donated to the Neuberger Museum of Art of Purchase College. An exhibition in 2012 showed these works, including many by Colab artists. A gallery handout tells the story.
[Lewton-Leopold, 2012] Gabi Lewton-Leopold, “The Fashion Moda Stores, 1982: Selections from Documenta 7,” Neuberger Museum of Art, March 4, 2012-May 6, 2012
R.H. Fuchs, Documenta 7 (Kassel, 1982)
See Amy Raffel, Art and Merchandise in Keith Haring’s Pop Shop (Routledge, 2021)
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