The big project this year was an exhibition of my collection in Milwaukee. “Friends, Neighbors & Distant Comrades” closed in September. This was the third exhibition of this assemblage of art and ephemera in the city where it the collection is stored since my mother's death in 2020.
The installation, directed by Michael Flanagan in the gallery at MIAD (Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design), was superb. Thanks to the sale of a small work by Martin Wong, I was able to invite several friends to speak and present – Seth Tobocman and Susan Bietila, James Love Cornwell (aka Jim C), Robert Goldman (aka Bobby G), Andrea Callard, Jack Waters and Peter Cramer, and Mysoon Rizk all gave talks at MIAD during the show.
Becky Howland's Flaming Oil Tanker, related to her early '80s installation at ABC No Rio, Brainwash
So far as I know, this has been the only recent show attempting a historical overview of the downtown NYC art scene of the '80s and '90s. The collecting I did coincided with my tenure in the city, 1974-2009. And, while no group of objects can fairly represent the incredible diverse vitality of that period of creative production, this assemblage did a fair job.
The installation was roughly arranged into thematic sections. This first blog post on the project reproduces the wall texts from the show:
“Friends, Neighbors and Distant Comrades” –
The Sections of the Exhibition
This third show of my family’s art collection is organized to be a kind of occluded x-ray of a remarkable period of artistic production in the bohemian districts of New York City at the end of the 20th century. It is installed and listed here roughly chronologically – although many different things happened at the same time – to give the viewer a sense of the unfolding of an urban artworld from its countercultural roots. It includes paintings, drawings, sculpture, and publicity materials, posters and flyers of a kind that were common means of artists communication in the centuries before the internet.
The basic narrative behind all these works, the conditions of production from which they came, is “DIY”, do-it-yourself, aka autonomous self-organization. This was the golden age of the “alternative space.” Most of the work in the show was made and shown in artist-organized spaces, not in galleries and museums.
At Home with Joan and Burt:
Between Milwaukee and Los Angeles
The installation begins with an evocation of my parents, the patrons. (This homage was perforce the theme of the first show, in my mother’s house, in 2020.) We may imagine my parents at home, comfortable in their chairs, the oriental carpet Joan’s father left her spread out in the living room, books close at hand. While their son lived in New York City and bought art for them there, Burton and Joan W. Moore collected art and decorative objects on their own. As a sociologist teaching at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Joan’s specialty was Mexican Americans, specifically, Chicano/a gangs in Los Angeles. Burt was a writer and a Californian. Their collecting therefore focused on Mexican artisanal art, and some work by Chicana/o artists. That work is hanging here.
Campaign poster for Oscar Acosta's 1970 run for sheriff in Los Angeles; anonymous artist. Oscar was a friend of my mother.
This poster, by the Black Cat poster collective, hung in my mother's office.
Arriving in 1970s NYC
I arrived in New York City from California to work at the national magazine Artforum in 1974. He was mostly ignorant of the city’s artworld but found his feet fast. He was naturally drawn to the artists of Fluxus, although the zenith of that movement had passed. Younger artists, his peers, were starting their own projects. Among them was Stefan Eins, an Austrian emigre who ran a “store” in his studio exhibiting his friends. Alan left Artforum and went to work with the more convivial Art-Rite, a community art “zine” in Soho. The artists he met during these years of the ’70s, whose work he acquired for his parents, went on to form the art groups and take part in the movements of the 1980s.
Poster for Lil Picard's event at 3 Mercer Street store, 1975
Colab and the Times Square Show 1980s
Colab was the first group I became involved with. Formed in 1978 by artists from the Whitney Studio Program, the same class as the editors of Art-Rite, Colab was an assembly of some 40 people, with a diverse and constantly changing membership. The group generated many projects of publication, cable TV production, performance and art exhibition. Most of their work in the late ’70s revolved around independent film and video.
The artists of the Colab group had a hit with the “Times Square Show,” which received close attention from the NYC artworld. Burt and Joan began to collect NYC art at that time. The couple visited the show and bought a few pieces, which are on display here.
Not long after, disaffected Colab member Diego Cortez curated “New York/New Wave” at P.S. 1 in 1981. This show launched the careers of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, and set off the art market frenzy of the decade. Both Basquiat and Haring had been minor players in the Times Square Show.
In 1983, Colab produced a show in a vacant Washington, D.C., hotel called the “Ritz Project”. Much of the artwork had a strong political content. It was too much for Ronald Reagan’s city, and the exhibition was soon shut down. The sudden chaotic conclusion of this project left many works behind in storage – several of which are shown here.
ABC No Rio and Fashion Moda
The epochal 1980 Times Square Show exhibition in the seedy, vibrant central amusement (and prostitution) district of Manhattan was preceded by two independent art spaces affiliated with the Colab group – Fashion Moda, which opened in the South Bronx in 1978, and ABC No Rio, begun on the Lower East Side in 1980. Stefan Eins and Joe Lewis ran Fashion Moda. Alan was a co-director of ABC, along with Becky Howland and Bobby G (Robert Goldman).
ABC No Rio was used by Colab continuously for meetings and shows through 1989, when the group disbanded. Fashion Moda closed in 1993. ABC No Rio continues active to this day “in exile” as a new building is pending construction.
East Village Art Movement
Colab’s success with a rough, socially conscious style of work was a kind of starting gun for a feverish period of art and radical culture in New York City.
Artists poured into the city from across the country and around the world to develop the scene in the city. They were attracted by cheap rents and a burgeoning number of art galleries and nightclubs in the working-class district of the Lower East Side, the city’s traditional bohemia. The East Village was the place to be in the 1980s.
Requiems
The AIDS pandemic began to hit in NYC in the late ’70s, and slowly built throughout the ’80s. The U.S. government under Ronald Reagan was unconcerned for several years as gay men and IV drug users began to die in large numbers. Among them were many artists, luminaries of the art scene like Keith Haring, David Wojnarowicz and Martin Wong. Large numbers of other artists, young and old, popular and little-known, also died. Loisaida’s street people, addicts and the homeless, also began to disappear. As the ’80s rolled on, rents on the Lower East Side began to rise dramatically; gentrification had begun. The writing was on the wall. The scene would soon be over.
Preparing works in storage
Rivington School and the Subterraneans
In a very public area of the Lower East Side, a wild art performance scene began to bubble around a former Latino drug den and social club called No Se No. It was kicked off by “99 Nights” of daily events. The Rivington School of metal sculptors, fueled by alcohol and testosterone, soon colonized a nearby vacant lot with a jungle of welded steel and carved stone. This anarchistic scene lasted from 1983 to 1987, and several of the artists became involved in the Lower East Side squatters movement.
Linus Coraggio frames a photo of the Rivington School sculpture garden
Graffiti Art Movement
Mostly it was white artists who arrived in NYC from all over in the ’70s and ’80s to pursue their careers. But an indigenous art movement was already there and gaining steam – graffiti “writing” on subway trains and hip-hop culture in the South Bronx. These artists, mostly people of color, began to show their work in East Village art galleries in the ’80s, boosted by the early graffiti writing of art stars like Haring and Basquiat. The South Bronx art space Fashion Moda played a key role in the process of integrating the graffiti writers into the NYC artworld and beyond to Europe.
Issues of the aerosol art zine IGT designed by Phase II
Return to Order
This section of the show has a multiple sense: It includes artists active in the East Village and some in Colab whose work was more formal in nature and did not directly engage volatile social themes. The theme also alludes to the first invasion of Iraq in 1990, and a new cycle of wars with the reassertion of U.S. hegemony in the Middle East, which is most definitely a political question.
What is more, the “order” of culture in lower Manhattan was basically festive; nightclubs were very important. Throughout the ’90s, artist-made film and video became more visible through screenings in clubs, self-organized festivals and new distribution networks like Colab’s MWF Video Club. New social concerns began to emerge through inventive cultural activism. And the queer community, badly impacted by AIDS, became more assertive.
To the Streets for Global Justice
The final section of this exhibition takes its title from the many artists who became involved in large demonstrations against the series of summit meetings of world leaders of government and business in capitals around the western world in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s. The demonstrators demanded Global Justice within the emerging neoliberal economic order. These demonstrations were colorful and telegenic parades as artists provided pageantry and made publicity posters to mobilize in a period when social media was only beginning to emerge. The Just Seeds co-op formed to distribute political artists’ poster works. Activist artists also moved into cultural institutions in a bid to amplify their cause.
Rocky Dobey, “Take the Capitol”, poster for G-8 protest in Ottawa, 2002
The "Smalls" in Vitrines
The small objects in the show are contained in large vitrines, and listed separately.
Entering into the art market was very important for most young NYC artists in the 1970s and '80s. Self-organization, independent exhibitions in friends' lofts – all of these were strategies that for many substituted for acceptance into galleries.
Exhibitions in state-funded alternative spaces were non-commercial. The shows of the Colab group also had no commercial aspect; nothing was for sale. The Real Estate Show was a political act, an art squat. Both ABC No Rio and Fashion Moda received state funds, and neither sold art.
At the 1980 Times Square Show, Tom Otterness and Cara Perlman organized a "gift shop" where artists could sell their low-cost hand-crafted multiple objects. Unlike gallery editioned multiples of the 1960s and '70s, these were usually a series of more or less identical artworks quite often unnumbered and unsigned. They appealed to buyers by their novelty and interest, since the artists were young and unknown.
Later that same year, Kiki Smith arranged for the "A More Store" to sell small artworks by Colab members and their friends in the art district of Soho during the holiday season, and Colab store projects continued yearly until the end of the group (1989). Most of the works in vitrines in this exhibition are from those Colab sales projects.
In time, most non-commercial art spaces have come to sell artists’ editions to support their programs. The artists book store Printed Matter, rooted in sales, was among the first. The strategy was also popular among individual artists who created branded merchandise – Keith Haring opened his own store called the Pop Shop (1986-1990); KAWS dolls are everywhere. Artists continue to organize collective store projects, for example the Buddy store in Chicago (@hi-buddy.org).
NEXT: Accounts of the visiting artists’ presentations – Seth Tobocman and Susan Bietila, Robert Goldman (Bobby G), Andrea Callard, Jack Waters and Peter Cramer, and Mysoon Rizk
References, Online:
Alan W. Moore's website:
https://alanwmoore.net/
The Hunter College Art Galleries “Times Square Show Revisited” exhibition, 2012
Website includes extensive artist interviews
http://www.timessquareshowrevisited.com/accounts.html
online book ABC No Rio Dinero (1985 print; e-version 2010)
http://98bowery.com/return-to-the-bowery/abcnorio-colab.php
MWF Video Club transferred content online
https://archive.org/details/mwf_video_club
References, Print:
Max Schumann (ed.) A Book about Colab (and Related Activities), Printed Matter, Inc, 2016
XFR STN exhibition brochure PDF (New Museum, 2013)
http://www.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/view/xfr-stn
Lauren Rosati and Mary Anne Staniszewski, eds., Alternative Histories: New York Art Spaces, 1960-2010 (MIT Press, 2012)
Alan W. Moore, Art Gangs: Protest and Counterculture in New York City (Autonomedia, 2011); Art Worker: Doing Time in the New York Artworld (JoAAP, 2022)
Carlo McCormick, The Downtown Book: The New York Art Scene, 1974–1984 (Princeton University Press, 2006)
Julie Ault, Alternative Art, New York, 1965-1985 (University of Minnesota Press, 2002)
Selected Filmography
Downtown 81 (1981/2000; 1:11)
Edo Bertoglio [Glenn O'Brien], director
Basquiat himself stars in this film, conceived by his friend O’Brien. Made in ‘81, but released later, it is very artisanal.
Mubi.com and Archive.org
Wild Style (1983; 1:21)
Hailed as the first hip-hop movie, Wild Style captures New York's early hip-hop culture. Stars graffiti writers Lee Quiñones and Lady Pink (Sandra Fabara), along with Patti Astor. Includes Busy Bee Starski, Fab Five Freddy, The Cold Crush Brothers, and Grandmaster Flash. Directed by Charlie Ahearn.
Amazon Prime video
156 Rivington (2003; 56 min.)
This documentary traces the history of ABC No Rio from the Real Estate Show, and profiles later activities in the space. Directed by Andrea Meller.
Archive.org
Blank City (2010; 1:34)
Documentary about the “do-it-yourself" independent filmmaking of the punk era in late '70s and ‘80s downtown NYC. Beth & Scott B, Nick Zedd, and others are interviewed. Directed by Celine Danhier. Vimeo.com
Shadowman (2017; 1:22)
Interviews and footage of street artist Richard Hambleton, known for his evocative paintings in dark corners. Chronicles his heavy drug addiction, and fall from prominence. Directed by Oren Jacoby Amazon Prime video
Filmin.es
Boom for Real (2017; 1:19)
Detailed documentary on the rise of Jean-Michel Basquiat, including interviews with those who knew him. Directed by Sara Driver.
Amazon Prime video
Make Me Famous (2022; 1:33)
A portrait of a forgotten striver in the East Village art scene of the 1980s, as recalled by those who knew him. This “in search of” documentary takes a very different view of the epoch. Directed by Brian Vincent.
In theatrical release; screened during this exhibition.
Other video and film….
The MWF Video Club collection on Archive.org, and Colab Video on YouTube contain extensive video content of varying lengths produced and/or distributed by Colab during from 1986-2000. Archival uploads are ongoing to the Archive.org site.
Pedro Linares (family), Tourist with camera, n.d. [acquired 1981]