Fly Orr in the ABC No Rio Zine Library, before 2016 (building demolished)
This is the third post about the preparation of the “ABC No Rio 45 Years” exhibition to take place at the Emily Harvey Foundation in April of ‘25. To prepare , a group got to work on a timeline of the place and its activities. This proved a big task, and it will still be going on when the show opens in April. This post gets into the weeds over archival stuff, online databases, and the like. But the first product representing the vast occluded history of ABC No Rio is already online.
Marco Lanier is an archivist already working with Allied Productions, a partner on the “ABC 45” project. Marco took on the task of preparing the timeline. He put together a 125+-page – and growing – document of all the events he could find that took place at ABC No Rio from 1980 to 2024.
An impossible timeline…
by Marco Lanier
As part of the ABC No Rio 45 Years exhibition, I was tapped to create a chronology representing ABC No Rio’s expansive 45 years of activity. Those even vaguely familiar with the space will understand how difficult this task could be! How could one possibly encapsulate ABC through a rational sequencing of events? Conceived as a tool to guide and inform the exhibition’s collective curation, I sought to reconcile this tension and do my best to build a generative tool that would fulfill this purpose and contribute to any number of potential future projects.
In the early days of the project, as we were trying to figure out what the timeline might look like, I began to speculate on where it could go. I wanted a tool that was flexible, extensible, manipulable, and open to additions or edits. I was curious how the data I created as part of this work could be used to create a digital timeline or form the basis, down the road, for some kind of archival database or access platform (something like The Kitchen’s On File platform).
Thanks to David Potocnik, we have a digital timeline in the works – that’s up in beta form, and we are continuing to discuss ways to make this a friendlier tool despite our limited resources. The timeline, in the end, is a spreadsheet, filled with hundreds of entries that can be manipulated and rendered into various text-based and digital formats.
I oriented my research for the timeline towards archival collections spread across NYC. I wanted to know where the material history of ABC No Rio ended up, why and which materials made it to different archives, and how this related to the history of ABC itself.
In the end, I spent time combing through collections at MoMA, NYU’s Fales and Tamiment collections, Allied Productions’ archives, and ABC No Rio’s archives at The Clemente center. This process was arduous and manual, consisting of numerous research visits, pages of notes, dozens of accumulated photographs, and hours synthesizing this information into timeline entries.
Photo by Marco Lanier
ABC’s archives at the Clemente remain the most complete record of the space’s activity–though access was impeded for many months due to an elevator install and asbestos removal. Despite this, the archive is not lethargic. The recent and ongoing work of Scout, Claudia, Gavin, Steven (rest in power), and other volunteers to care for the zine and archive collections has preserved a pretty clear picture of ABC’s history.
This timeline is missing a lot! But we hope to open it up to the ABC community through the exhibition, giving space for folks to collectively contribute their own experiences and stories into No Rio’s historical record. Thanks to David, the digital timeline will also offer those outside of New York a chance to engage with the exhibition. My hope is that the tool will offer infrastructure for future digital, historical, and archival projects at ABC No Rio. FINIS
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Hanging Out in the Library
Claudia and Scout had been working in the Zine Library at ABC, a project which the late Steven Englander always held close. The “exile” office where he worked during the long years waiting for the new building construction to begin, is in the Clemente. That is a large cultural center with theaters, galleries, and many artists studios. Steven’s office there is stuffed with shelves of boxes of zines, which volunteers have been working with for years. As the new director, Gavin Marcus recalled, this was also an opportunity for people to hang out with Steven and listen to his stories.
Photo by Marco Lanier; drawing by Matthew Courtney
The Zine Library is a long-running project. It “began in the Spring of 1998,” the website relates, “when we rescued the Blackout Zine Library from a squat in the South Bronx which was to be evicted. Since then numerous individuals have donated their personal collections, and zine editors and publishers regularly send us issues.”
Foreign Content
I collect European squatting materials for the Interference Archive, and recently I sent a batch of zines to ABC as well. I sent some political zines, like the crusty @quedate_en_madrid (Stay in Madrid), which blasts local right-wing politicos.
“Quedate en Madrid” caricatures Madrid's rightwing mayor, a big evictor of social centers. He's wearing an Aznar t-shirt
The zine scene is popping in Spain. (I blogged about this in “Occupations & Properties”, events that took place in occupied social centers.) The gal who calls herself a “Punk con Cabeza” tables every week at Madrid’s rastro, the flea market. She’s strictly old school, with no online presence. She bangs out new copies of old Spanish punk zines from all over the country on a photocopy machine, and virtually gives them away at the anarchist book fairs here. I grabbed a bunch last year.
Punk is a very strong subculture in Spain. The MACBA museum in Barcelona did a show of it in '16 (the catalogue is online in ESP and ENG, URL in links below).
Hanging on Strings, Most Likely
Of course there will be zines in the “ABC 45” show. Folks who have worked in the ABC Zine Library have already organized shows of the collection in other venues, like "Zines+ and the World of ABC No Rio" at the Center for Book Arts in 2014. ABC regularly tables at events, like the East Village Zine Fair 2024 organized by Printed Matter on St Marks (they have now closed), and the 8-Ball Community. ABC has tabled every NYC Anarchist Book Fair.
Fly Orr (@fly_peops), an ABC No Rio’stalwart during the squatting era, has achieved some renown with her zine work. Her collection of zines is in the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and her papers have gone to Columbia University.
It’s All There & It’s All Been Done
This “ABC 45 Years” show is conceived around the timeline. I imagined it would flow around the walls, like in a natural history museum, with different colors for different streams of activity. The artwork and artifacts of ABC’s colorful history would plug into it along the way. “What would that look like?” Marco wondered.
I spent last summer printing out and pasting up the provisional timeline Marco had prepared, that huge listing of events and incidents of all types – art shows, poetry readings, film and video screenings, eviction orders, demonstrations, monies raised, punk music concerts, anarchist book sales, silkscreen workshop, darkroom, full-building art shows called “Ides of March”, annual “haunted house” for kids….
We certainly missed quite a lot, maybe even most of it. Many years were entirely blank.
It’s not clear how it will look on the wall in the end. There will be a large format un-bound book which will have the timeline of a year on one page with the facing page blank for adding notations on-site, and pasting in photos and mailed-in art and what not.
How to Get the Stuff
The problem of assembling such a timeline/scrapbook for our “ABC 45 Years” show, to basically expand the timeline, is how to get those paste-ins for the big book? Mail art can be the answer. It was a key activity of the Fluxus movement, which the Emily Harvey gallery supported, and the foundation continues to exhibit. Mary Campbell, one of the Day de Dada performance group, has produced numerous mail art events. They’re part of the international neo-Fluxus movement. Our exhibition venue, Emily Harvey Foundation, arose from the classic movement. So we turned to Mary to design a mail art project.
All This History Shit
The first organizing group for the “ABC 45” project dissolved in disenchantment with the historical project itself. Playing with history has become so much a part of contemporary art practice in recent years I forgot not everyone is into it.
I know the historical project is suspicious; it’s inherently fraudulent, to timeline a project as dynamic as ABC No Rio. As Stefan Tanaka writes in “History Without Chronology”, "history must embrace the richness and variability of different times that exist throughout our lives, [which] are evident in nonmodern societies and historical writings about them.... To conflate time and chronology is to succumb to what Michel de Certeau calls an alibi — to make ‘use of time without reflecting on it’ ”.
We can’t just wine and dine Chronos without giving due attention to Kairos.
Still, timeline organization has explanatory value. For people who don’t know ABC to get a picture of what this “anti-institution”, this self-constituted and self-sustained center of the “culture of resistance”, has been and will be – the past of the place needs to be told. The overall project of ABC No Rio needs situating historically not only as an art and entertainment venue, but as the outcome of a global militant movement of occupation for cultural and political provision – called, variously, “squatting”, “occupation”, and “commonsing”.
The often valorized Lower East Side commonsing movement is not jusut the squats and their present-day low-income co-op owners (some ex-squatters) – it’s also the activity centers – ABC No Rio, MoRUS, Bullet Space, La Plaza Cultural. That last, as the MoRUS museum serves to remind, is an outcome of the “avant-gardening” of public green space. All of it was and is DIY, and done well.
LINKS
The Architect’s Newspaper, “ABC No Rio is moving back to 156 Rivington Street”, 8 ago 2024 The new 4-story building will have galleries, a kitchen, offices, a darkroom for photographers, a print shop, a zine library, a computer lab, a rooftop garden, ...
https://www.archpaper.com/2024/08/abc-no-rio-156-rivington-street-paul-castrucci-architects/
ABC No Rio Zine Library
https://abcnorio.org/facilities/zine_library.html
"Zines+ and the World of ABC No Rio"
https://centerforbookarts.org/book-shop/catalogs/zines-and-the-world-of-abc-no-rio
Fly archive at Columbia
https://library.columbia.edu/about/news/libraries/2023/2023-noteworthy-acquisitions-digitization-conservation.html
Ian Karp, “Rebel voice: Inside the Fly Zine Archive, a chronicle of punk, queer, and DIY counterculture”, July 29, 2021
https://new.artsmia.org/stories/rebel-voice-inside-the-fly-zine-archive-a-chronicle-of-punk-queer-and-diy-counterculture
"PUNK. Its Traces in Contemporary Art" - MACBA Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2016 https://www.macba.cat › exhibitions
Catalogue PDF at
https://www.madrid.org/bvirtual/BVCM019193.pdf
Day de Dada performance group website
Posts Tagged ‘mail art’
https://daydedada.wordpress.com/tag/mail-art/
Stefan Tanaka, “History without Chronology”, 2019
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3998/mpub.11418981
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