Burying the Rivington School

This long read text follows on from the preceding post on E.F. Higgins III and the Rivington School artists as he and they were recently discussed in Istvan Kantor’s four-book series on the Lower East Side underground. The two books I take off from here are about Ray Kelly and Kevin Wendall. Both artists are deceased.

Istvan Kantor, JUNK: The MetaLphysical Art of Cowboy Ray Kelly (Autonomedia, 2025)
ISBN: 978-1-57027-443-5, paperbound / 336 pages, $17.95

Istvan Kantor, Neu Bred: The Art of FA-Q; from Street Art to Prison Art (Autonomedia, 2024)
4.5 x 7 inches, 244 pages / ISBN 10 / ISBN 13: 1570274274 / 9781570274275

A Prejudiced Observer

I’ll say at the start what I alluded to in the previous post on this blog: I am twice invested in the Riv Skool and squatter stories of resistance during the key late 20th century period in NYC. These two movements embody two dimensions of the struggle against gentrification – aesthetic and political, as me and Jim C (James Cornwell) detailed in the text “The Art of Battle for Bohemia” (2002)*. I’ve continued my engagement with squatted and occupied spaces as loci of creative resistance since those days. (See my other blog “Occupations & Properties”.)
Second, I am invested materially, as I bought a lot of the Riv Skool artists’ works, both at the wild and crazy art auctions held in the East Village during the ‘80s and ‘90s, and directly from artist friends. This material mostly languished in storage since my parents, for whom I collected, were not interested in it. All of this artwork along with related documents has been donated to the Southern Illinois University museum and library.

Poster printed for a Rivington School art auction. Collection 98Bowery.com

I knew these people; Robert Parker well, whom Kantor does not much discuss, and FA-Q. Kevin Wendall came from Cleveland, a fountainhead city of punk. He visited me at ABC No Rio early on (‘81, ‘82 or so), and gifted me with a large work on paper depicting a long-necked head. He loved ABC, and what we were doing. I saw and chatted with him at the No Se No and other Riv Skool hangouts over the years, and later acquired a group of his works on paper. I was at the famous last virtual visit with Kevin in the hospital when he could no longer speak, and all of us assembled assured him of our love and respect for him and his work.

A Neoist Art History

Istvan writes “bio-novels”, interlarding his Neoist art project with his subjects in a (self-confessedly) repetitive manner, so in a sense, all his books are about him. Parts of these books are definitely skimmable. But he does try hard to make a full picture of his subjects, and spells out how he did so. Despite his often irksome insistences the international Neoist and mail art networks Kantor sketches out through his travels and art projects globally are revealing. The Riv Skool in NYC was very international, and the principal artists of the school showed more around the world than they did in NYC, especially in Asia.
Conventional art historical writing, attuned first to the written record, would have examined these exhibitions and the history of the reception of these artists’ work. Questions like, Might FA-Q’s dramatic mural scale work in Japan have influenced artists like Yoshitomo Nara, then in school? Kantor isn’t on this track. He goes straight for the “bio”. He queries those who knew his subjects and can tell about them. (He did try for an archive. Wendall’s prison notebooks are held by Ori Carino, son of Toyo Tsuchiya. Kantor says he didn’t show them to the author.)

Blackballed by the Artworld

Kantor’s bio-novel approach yields a fascinating result in his book on Richard Hambleton.** In large measure, this is because there has been so little written about an artist of indubitable importance and high market value. He’s been blacked out of critical discourse. Even the spectacular spring ‘26 show at Howl! of paintings Hambleton gifted to Arturo Vega, evidence of a lifelong major exercise in painterly beauty, passed with scant comment. It will come; Richard was one of the great artistes maudit of this period. While the academy and its offshoots prefers redemption of the empire over its self-willed dissipation, the market doesn’t care. Hambleton’s 2009–2010 return to the open market from his drug-addicted “seclusion” was bankrolled by Giorgio Armani. Haute bohème reclaimed bohème des abîme.
The Riv Skool at large was just too prickly for the NYC artworld to handle. Hambleton was a sometime passerby, but as an artist with market standing, he kept his distance, as did Jean-Michel Basquiat with his graffiti artist peers. They were criminals.
(During his long drug-greased slide down, maybe at his lowest point, Richard lived in the 2B Gas Station workshop space before its demolition. That’s when I acquired artwork from him that is now at the SIU museum.)
The artworld and its academic armatures are irredeemably bourgeois. The creative output of the working class – outsider, folk, “art brut” – the gutter flowers of the neo-expressionist period – is uninteresting to them. The influential partisans of the neo-conceptual appropriationist and geometric abstraction movements denigrated the neo-expressionists as retrograde symptoms of a revanchist epoch. The “quiet part” was the question, What art style best expresses continued American dominance?

Selling in the Bargain Basement

The Riv Skool generated their own market infrastructure. Alongside the No Se No social club storefront, other galleries sprang up run by School participants – Jim C’s Nada Gallery, Toyo Tsuchiya’s studio, Freddy the Dreamer, maybe more? Higgins ran occasional art auctions, where works were sold for small money. Given the incessant over-production among NYC artists, especially during this period of ballooning in-migration, ‘small money’ is realistic pricing.
Most of the work made by Riv Skool artists during those years has vanished from the after market. Works of this kind tend to be held by friends or families of the artists if they are held at all (much is trashed). Since they do not enter the art gallery circuits which certify value through exhibitions, they cannot reliably constitute growth assets. Art press supported by gallery ads does not cover them. Academics can’t advance their careers writing about these marginal figures.
But hell, fuck capitalism. What really matters is art's capacity to generate what Stefania Consigliere calls "fables of re-enchantment", ways of navigating the bleak consumerist landscape which relentlessly imposes itself upon us. Where's the adventure? For all their glaring flaws, and the ruination they did to themselves through drugs and alcohol, the Riv Skool artists were verified adventurers.

What Was Street Art Then?

Hambleton is promoted as the “Godfather of Street Art” (the title of a book on him by Rizzoli, 2022). And street art was more or less the religious practice of the Rivington School. “Street art” – the form, and the understanding of it, has morphed considerably from the 1980s. In the Riv Skool’s time making marks on public surfaces along the streets were artists’ conditions of publicity, very local and art-specific, visible especially to fellow artists. They were “getting up”, as the graffiti writers put it – posting, tagging, joining the highly analog stream of street-based communication.
The walking street was a primary means of communication in the geographically small artists’ communities of lower Manhattan. Every corner was a bulletin board, with current music shows, exhibitions, etc. flacked with dramatic flyer designs. In bars and other locales small-sized drop cards reiterated the messages. In some places these became racks with an array of printed publicity cards. Nightclub touts would hand out invitation cards with their initials in the corner, as they’d get a kickback for each patron who used it.
All these circuits of analog publicity were paralleled by messages strictly aesthetic or political – what was then called street art. The graffiti artists, who mainly worked inter-borough trains and corner murals in their own neighborhoods had shown this was a road to fame. Keith Haring, Samo© (Basquiat and Al Diaz), Richard Hambleton, Jenny Holzer, and most of the Rivington School artists posted, drew and painted their distinctive messages in Soho where other artists would see them.

The Big Beat-Down

This was an aesthetic built upon a practice obsoleted now in large measure by repression. Bill posting and graffiti in NYC have always been illegal. It still happens as it always has, by commercial bill posters. As the Lower East Side’s East Village was gentrified, enforcement ramped up. Even as the graffiti artists were having their train paintings ‘buffed’ by a chemical wash, artists were being prosecuted for posting their bills on lampposts. As late as 2013, filmmaker Nick Zedd was tagged with a criminal prosecution for posting a handbill for a film screening in his old East Village neighborhood. He returned from Mexico to appear at the “XFR STN” exhibition at the New Museum coincident with his court date; if he didn’t appear he’d soon have an arrest warrant.

Non-Drinker in a Crowd of Drunks

Istvan Kantor, a teetotaler, regards the Riv Skool as a broad aesthetic, cultural and art-political project. He welds – (“metal-physically”) his Neoist project on to theirs. “Them” was also him, since he was the self-appointed spokesman for the Riv Skool, approved by Cowboy Ray Kelly.
Kantor’s elaborated tale of interlocking networks was intriguing and convincing in the Higgins book. This was lacking the book on Ray Kelly. In that book Kantor chews relentlessly over his rationales for the Rivington School’s importance. But he misses the national dynamics at play.
My perception, marinated in years of hindsight and Trump is that the geographic linkings Ray Kelly and Ed Higgins brought to NYC’s Lower East Side were those of the American west. “The Cowboy” fronted an exaggeratedly antagonistic regional image. E.F. Higgins III fronted a plaid-shirted, duck-hunting, lumberjack loud Michigander persona.
Kelly was an educated artist and former teacher, who had worked as assistant for years to Mark Rothko. He knew the NYC art game, and decided not to play that. Ray Kelly returned to NYC from a hometown retreat after Rothko’s suicide, stuck a hat on his head and played the role of the Texan Easterners love to hate. This again is a very old antagonism. Although Wild Bill’s shows drew crowds, those folks who ‘lit out for the territories’ to fight the Indians for land were not beloved of the Eastern establishment. While the Southerners were only ex-slavers and racist oppressors, westerners were truly savages.

“In a crazy city, if one is to survive, he’s got to be more crazy.”
-- Dream Home film (2010)

In his somewhat flailing textuations in the latter pages of the Kelly book, Kantor paints the Riv Skool scene and the sculpture garden as a “loser’s revolt” against the institutional and mercantile art scene of NYC.
He also sees the project as embodying aspects of Joseph Beuys’ social sculpture – “as both a collective sculpture and a social space separated from the rest of society”.
It was an emphatic chaotic communication, a collective work of “community based art production”.
Kantor sees the Rivington School project and its artists through the lens of Neoism, particularly his own experience promoting the movement. As an international movement, Neoism is a complex and contested terrain. "Neoism" as per a (somewhat polluted) account on Wikipedia, is a "subcultural network" involving many participants (also briefly Stewart Home), including Istvan Kantor who used the name Monty Cantsin in NYC. "Definitions of Neoism were always disputed." The Riv Skool emblem was the “6 o’clock” sign, a two-headed vertical arrow in a circle. This signified the moment drinking begins (PM) and the time the party ends (AM). It also connotes the timeless temporality of ‘zero work’, a part of the Neoist radical political mythology.
It is beyond doubt that the efforts of Kantor and his fellow Neoists had a strong influence on the Lower East Art scene. I shall not try to parce them here. A no-job-to-follow thesis awaits the brave “punkademic” student scholar.

“Metal-Physicalists” Don’t Say Nothin

Calling silent Cowboy Ray Kelly’s work and that of his comrades “metal-physical” is Kantor’s attempt to write the Rivington School project into contention with more critically validated strains of art during the period. In scrambling for theoretical purchase, Kantor assigns the “metal-physical” tag to the kind of busy-ant practice of city-wide scavenging and obsessive welding that built the short-lived but spectacular Rivington School sculpture garden.

Photo by Linus Coraggio. (98Bowery.com.)

Kantor hammers often on the Riv Skool as opposition to the NYC artworld. This opposition echoes down the ages: One line tracks back to the Florentine Renaissance, with the Medici academy which trained Michelangelo confronting the craft guilds which controlled the art trade. The dialectic of struggle between the working class of artists valorizing skill and hard labor, and the bourgeois and aristocratic artists (and their patrons) prioritizing learning and allusion has rolled forward ever since. High-falutin’ art criticism of the kind Riv Skoolers disdained treats art as material philosophy, with ethics the measure in its political dimensions.
So what is the politics of alcoholism? What philosophy in heroin and crack? The only recourse is an appeal to the saints of bohemia – Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and other bases Patti Smith has already covered. But the Rivs were not so haute.
In practice, the Rivs and the Sohoites had much in common. “Make shit happen” was a Riv Skool motto. Kevin Wendall painted it on his jackets and shirts. Finally what happened was work – incessant construction of the collective sculpture, alcohol consumption (the work of dissipation), and performative outbursts of homosocial violence and hyperactive performance. That kept the thrill-seekers coming and the shebeen bar solvent.
That ethic of work-obsesssion aligns with earlier generations in artistic Soho. In a 1976 essay,† Lucy Lippard described the busy-bee artists of Soho who valued work above all else – art as life as work as aesthetic, specifically the work of making art, and the work of making the raw industrial space of the Soho district habitable. But they had it easy in Soho. The only laws they broke in their fine 19th century cast-iron buildings were housing codes.
Later artists took this insistence on the primacy of work as gospel as they confronted the trashed-out and the much less habitable abandoned buildings of the LES as living places. Here working class skills were highly valued. Electrician and musician Michael Shenker was a squatter demi-god, a key player in “kraaking” many buildings. Everyone learned how to do what needed to be done, as the artist Fly describes in her mini-zine “Cement Mixing Squatter Bitches”.

Serious Crime: How Rivington School Began

In his forthcoming book,*** Stephen Zacks confirms the story Ray Kelly alludes to in Kantor’s book, when he tells how the burgeoning avant-garde performance scene moved from Little Italy across Sara Delano Roosevelt Park to the Lower East Side. The mob boss John Gotti told him to get out of the neighborhood (p. 266). The Ravenite Social Club was down the street from the Storefront for Art and Architecture, and they didn’t like the goings-on there. From that point on, events were centered on the A’s Salon run by Ray’s partner Arleen Schloss. (She and Ray were married, and owned the building.) And the No Se No social club, which consorted with the Storefront to produce the “99 Nights” performance series. The latter morphed into the Rivington School, with its sculpture garden and string of artist-run galleries.

Ray Kelly, Buster the dog, and Linus Coraggio. (98Bowery.com.)

Problem Children

As Kantor’s “bio-novels” make clear, many of the Riv Skool artists came from difficult family backgrounds, in which an excess youthful dose of religion played a major role. This put me in mind of Leonard Abrams’ talk of the “broken-open people” who came to NYC in those years to “show everyone their wounds” and “make a project out of their brokenness, to use it as a starting point for some kind of narrative about the condition of all of us. Of course every good artist’s drive depends upon the kinds of wounds that tear the facade away from themselves and those around them.”†† While I don’t recall that the East Village Eye ever published on the Rivington School (the Village Voice ran Sarah Ferguson’s articles on the group), he nailed a lot of the Lower East Side art movement psychology in this text. It’s a good argument for the importance of the art that many Riv Skool folks produced.
Can one find such free zones of creative energy today? Rule-less enclaves where a proletarian inventiveness runs wild? I think of some of the large Dutch squats of the turn of the century can fill the bill. Certainly festivals like Burning Man and the Rainbow Gatherings. Maybe even now amidst the abandoned pleasure grounds around the Salton Sea, like Slab City, and on scattered patches of private land traces of this energy can be found. But in big cities there are few to none. Unless governments cultivate and/or tolerate them. (I heard of one such on a former industrial area in Zurich where Peter Missing was hanging out.) Riv Skool served a larger civic purpose, whether the artists liked it or not. Wild though they seemed, they tamed in a sense or normalized an abscess of crime, drug use and sale, and a sex worker stroll, and recast it as a zone of creative work, howsoever whacko it may have been.
As this essay straggles to its close, I hope it’s clear how many pathways of further inquiry remain around this brief few-years flash of weirdness on the Lower East Side. Scores of interesting questions arise from these books. The role of drugs? Punk? Music? Theater and dance? Video documentation, just coming into its own then? The art styles themselves? For me a key question is the complexion of bohemia in those times. For scholars this has always been a matter for sociology and literary criticism. Pierre Bourdieu is best known for his analysis – not of bohemia but more generally the stuctures of cultural production. Lesser known is César Graña, who wrote (with Marigay) On Bohemia: The Code of the Self-Exiled in 1990.
The wild hugger-mugger of fin de siècle NYC has been studiously avoided by U.S. cultural historians, save for the "punkademics" who mostly work on the English scene.
I'm hopeful that the very extensive archival collections that have been assembled here and there, with remnants from these scenes now increasingly valued by antiquarians, will be mobilized in new vectors of explanation and encouragement for art workers today.

NOTES

* Alan W. Moore with James Cornwell, "Local History: The Art of Battle for Bohemia in New York", in Julie Ault, ed., Alternative Art New York, 1965-1985 (University of Minnesota Press, with Drawing Center, 2002); Clayton Patterson et al., eds, Resistance: A Radical Social and Political History of the Lower East Side Seven Stories Press, 2006.

** Istvan Kantor, Hero in Art: The Vanished Traces of Richard Hambleton (Autonomedia, 2020)

†† Alan W. Moore, "Leonard Abrams, "¡Presente!" @artgangs.blogspot.com, April 17, 2024 post includes Leonard's essay "The Broken-Open People".

† Lucy Lippard, "The Geography of Street Time: A Survey of Street Works Downtown", in Rene Block, ed., New York - Downtown Manhattan: SoHo (Akademie der Künste, Berlin, 1976).

*** Stephen Zacks, A Beautiful Ruin: The Rebirth of New York City Before Financialization —Wild Actions, Cultural Rebellions, and Radical Organizing in Abandoned Space, 1956-89 forthcoming from Inventory Press, 2027

Sculpture by Linus Coraggio; photo by unknown photographer. Collection of Sharp Museum, Southern Illinois University.