Good Night, Salty Prince

Nick Zedd with his paintings in Mexico, D.F. Photo by David Barajas

Nick Zedd is gone. I’m sad. I’m surprised. I’m not surprised, but I so wish he wasn’t. A true blue bohemian and an artist of perverse genius. I knew him slightly over many years. We did business, such as it was. Nick was the top-selling artist for our MWF Video Club for many years. To call the money we made “chicken feed” is insulting to poultry. MWF did frequent screenings, but not of his films. Nick needed to control his own screenings for the money they brought him, just as he always tried to control his own distribution.* He sold entirely online when that became possible. Towards the end, he couldn’t pay to keep his website online.
Rent. The demon which Jack Smith, Nick’s early master, saw embodied in the “lobster landlord”. Jack, who was clearly insane, was an impeccable artistic mentor for pedigree, but a wretched example of how to live as an artist in the USA world. He inadvertently named an anthology “Hatred of Capitalism”. Sweet. Mad. (Nick apparently adapted the title for a later zine.)
Nick was a little more adaptable than Jack, but not much. He followed first in the footsteps of horror movie schlockmeisters. It was after his outing as a no-budget Ed Wood that Nick worked with Jack Smith. Jack was also a lover of genre. Orientalist fantasy was the source of his exoticism, and a lifelong infatuation with the short-lived Dominicana movie star Maria Montez.

Maria Montez, Jack Smith's muse

Nick Zedd’s early features were obviously terrible, but they were antic and funny. More importantly they were reviled by guardians of morality. They were in-your-face populist Super-8, the kind of art that makes kids realize they can do it themselves. He made numerous shorts. “The Bogus Man” prefigured his enchantment with conspiracy theories. A line from the film – “Why do I have to see this?” – is also the title of one of the few critical texts on Nick’s work.
I think Nick realized then that his job was to queer genre – horror, monster, splattercore murder, porn, outer space opera – all the crappy drive-in type movies-for-fast-cash of the ‘50s and ‘60s that came back into vogue as camp in the ‘90s. They made the fortune of the distro company Rhino, and the entertainment criticism of “Mystery Science Theater 3000”. They were the movies we loved to laugh at.

Greer Lankton, puppet master for "Bogus Man". Photo by Nan Goldin

It was hard to laugh at Nick Zedd. He had no tongue in his cheek. He was within it, emerging from the deepest of dark shadows. You don’t know me, you don’t understand me, you don’t like me, I don’t like you – but maybe you can be useful for me – a perfect ‘80s artworld attitude.
Nick Zedd comes out of the same moment as Quentin Tarantino and David Lynch. But those connected major auteurs twisted genre; Nick Zedd bent it, crumpled it, and threw it away.
Whereas the commercial genre movies of the mid-century reflected white American anxieties in an almost transparent manner – (J. Hoberman has written a series of books on precisely this cathexis of film and popular imagination) – the same stream of genre films today are successfully terrifying. They’re no longer semi-transparent reflections of anxieties, but prognostications of disaster – plague, war, exquisitely rendered planetary catastrophe. You want it, you got it. American death drive.
At the heart of many of those flicks are the characters of a patriarchal family struggling to survive the madness and return to sanity. That’s nice if you’re a boomer daddy. But what of the freaks?, those who don’t slot neatly into suburbia, or have taken great pains to escape it. Nick’s movies were made for them, and with them.
Beneath his crusty glowering persona, Nick was a hopeless romantic. For the “Wild World of Lydia Lunch” he followed the corrosive punk singer/ranter to the UK after she spurned him. Despite that their affair was over, and she had kissed him off in her trademark no uncertain terms, Nick made lemonade from his disjointed footage. A phone message from the diva, demanding that he get lost, was in the soundtrack. Not a romcom.

Connecting with strong women for his film projects led him to work with Kembra Pfahler in what may be his masterpiece War Is Menstrual Envy (1992). Kembra’s full-body reveal and beyond rock band, The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, was also named for a B-movie horror star. "Do you think about war everyday?" Kembra asks. "I do."

Kembra Pfahler and Steven Oddo in War

His long-running cable TV series “Adventures of Electra Elf and Fluffer” was co-written with its star, Reverend Jen. A “fluffer” in the porn industry is the PA whose job is to get the stud hard. Jen’s Fluffer was a little dog. The Reverend Jen is a voluntary elf, or an elf by election. Elves may look cute, but as any fantasy reader knows, they are really tricky.

Reverend Jen, "Graveyard of Make Believe"

In 2013 Nick Zedd participated in the MWF Video Club “assembly” at the New Museum, part of the XFR STN events. He sat in the ring of admiring fellow artists, his hair glowing orange, dressed in his long leather duster, one leg over the other. He eloquently expressed his contempt for the NYC world of culture and art within which he had undeservedly not succeeded. “NYU destroyed downtown New York, but at least they paid me to get out of town.” (NYU speculated in lower Manhattan property and evicted many; Fales library collection bought his archive.) It was delightful to hear him say what we all felt.
The New Museum did not pay to bring Nick from Mexico. I did. I learned during the course of that show how much an artist, once given a show at a museum, may have to pay to realize it. (In the unspoken terms of this sickly trade, the gallery pays because the museum show amps up the artist’s prices.) On the New Museum website, various foundations are credited with the event.
Nick was happy to come. He had to be in town anyway, he said, to pay a fine for putting a poster on the street for a film screening in his old neighborhood, the Lower East Side. Otherwise they’d put out a warrant for his arrest.

Nick’s community was strange looking people, the wierdest performers, aberrant has-beens, punks alienated by choice – casualties of normality and an underground of performers who would never be called upon by Hollywood of Broadway. Reverend Jen called them “sublebrities”. Even Lydia Lunch, clearly an incendiary talent, has never had a mainstream role. Nick became the filmmaking tribune of the NYC underground. His reward was that the monied mainstream pretended he didn’t exist.
It’s been nearly 10 years since the MMA’s “Punk: Chaos to Couture”. But that didn’t mean anything for artists like Nick. It means the posh bourgeois can dress like he did 30 years ago in countless variations on the styles mostly working class young people evolved among themselves.
The kinds of things that “system friendly” artists and filmmakers get – residencies, grants, museum exhibitions, gallery support – did not come to Nick. (Nor I imagine did he much seek them.) Finally he ran out of time to wait.
Honestly, when I met him for the first time he creeped me out. He was nothing like any other artist MWF was dealing with. His goth-punk appearance and sepulchral mien, and his weird little fans as they showed up for that first screening at the Colab “Exposion” show in ‘88 were an absolute unfit with the normal art crowd in Soho.
What I didn’t know then but was soon to learn was that the art punk movement had not ended with our crowd of No Wavers. (Nick wrote about some of them in his Underground Film Bulletin.) In fact the subculture was spreading throughout the country and abroad. And filmmaking was part of it, in large measure thanks to Nick Zedd’s work. He pounded pavements to sell his tapes to video stores all over NYC. He toured tirelessly with his films, playing clubs around the country and across the border. As he details in his drily humorous memoir Bleed, he was often censored, his shows shut down, even arrested and deported. For years not even art institutions or filmatheques would touch him, a fact that he was rather proud of.
Nick explained and rationalized his approach to filmmaking in the famous manifesto he wrote, the Cinema of Transgression. He was a critic with his own magazine – a zine, in fact, and an early version of the type – a film fanzine produced on photocopy machines. His writing style was corruscating, full of contempt, and always on the attack.
After some years banging away his films, once “banned at the Anthology Film Archives” were showing there. Jonas Mekas supported legions of filmmakers. Finally even the MoMA came around. The highbrow curators had finally retired.
With his strong caricatural persona and harsh critical voice, Nick found comrades-in-arms – a real Cinema of Transgression gang. This loose group was supported by the New York Underground Film Festival. Many of them followed Nick’s route of selling their films on VHS video, which was what we had begun the MWF Video Club to do.
Working with Richard Kern, Nick made one of my favorite shorts, “The King of Sex”. Kern was into porn, another genre of film. (Now he’s a successful softcore photographer specializing in young girls.) In this film Nick swaggers into a hotel room full of semi-clad babes apparently waiting to embrace him. Instead of the expected “action”, however, he just starts scowling and jumping up and down on the bed. So nothing “happens” as it should in a porno; there is only the setup. Finally instead of the expected profanation of the sacred human rite of reproduction, there is a bunch of kids playing – a punk pajama party.

The scene around the Cin of T artists was a hard one, as C. Carr tells in her book on David Wojnarowicz. Lots of drugs and bad behavior. Party-goers pay the consequences. Nick died from a fierce combination of illnesses.
As I said, I didn’t know him well at all. He didn’t really want to be known by me. Nick was an actor, and he played his role consistently until the end. His was a persona compacted of equal parts gunfighter, vampire, and crypt-keeper, with a liberal soupçon of transvetitism. He looked like he might want to hoodoo you, but really, he was a soft-shelled crab.
When he would look up at me, during some moment of talk, with a look of childish hope, as if at last, or maybe only this once, his dreams might be on the brink of being fulfilled – I knew there was a real person under there. I’ll miss him. Another New York diaspora artist I won’t get to see in hirs new habitat.
Twenty years ago, Nick Zedd wrote: “Everything that is valuable you discover by doing. Movies of the future should succeed in denying the possibilty of defining what they are…. Film can overthrow the powers that be only by making no concessions to the general public or the dominant ideas of our epoch. This means insurrection. I’m here to berate anyone who needs to be inspired.” – Nick Zedd in Clayton Patterson, ed., Captured: A Film/Video History of the Lower East Side (2005)

* To explain – the MWF Video Club idea came out of Colab; it was to be a distribution co-op. We dubbed product, deducting for costs (tape, label, machine wear), and split the take with the artist. Still, at wholesale discounting, mostly to Facets Multimedia, that money was small. Nick sold in quantity, however, and we dubbed as close to his master as possible – 5 at a time. Pirate operators like Kim’s Video (much revered today; much reviled then) dubbed from what Nick and MWF sold them and did not pay artists.

REFERENCES & LINKS:

MWF Video Club, a Collaborative Projects project
http://www.brickhaus.com/amoore/

David Harvey, “The Art of Rent: Globalization, Monopoly and the Commodification of Culture” (2009)
http://geographie.ens.fr/IMG/file/proprietes_resistance/Harvey%20art%20of%20rent.pdf

Emily Colucci does a deep dive into Zedd’s “transgression” on her blog, Filthy Dreams
“’Why Do My Eyes Have To See This’: The Cinematic Transgression of Nick Zedd”, July 21, 2013
https://filthydreams.org/2013/07/21/why-do-my-eyes-have-to-see-this-the-cinematic-transgression-of-nick-zedd/

Kembra plays a shopper at a record store (2010)
YouTube -- Kembra Pfahler (Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black) - What's In My Bag? (7:04 min.)
"Do you think about war everyday?" Kembra asks. "I do."

Reverend Jen (Jennifer Miller), Reverend Jen's Really Cool Neighborhood (2003)
Print only if you can find it. An excellent read.

New Museum: Moving Image Artists’ Distribution Then & Now
https://www.newmuseum.org/calendar/view/192/moving-image-artists-distribution-then-now
The site notes Nick's presence at the 2013 XFR STN events, but Colab’s MWF Video Club is not listed as a sponsor, as it should be

“Q-and-A with Nick Zedd” – a short interview while he was in town then
EV Grieve Thursday, July 18, 2013
https://evgrieve.com/2013/07/q-and-with-nick-zedd.html

the best recent article on Nick, interviewed in Mexico City, D.F. for Vice
Avi Davis, “Why Cinema of Transgression Director Nick Zedd Stayed Underground”, June 6, 2014
https://www.vice.com/en/article/dpwd7v/a-new-breed-of-asshole-0000327-v21n5?fbclid=IwAR1X1a30-YHNVCdSTDd8F1xoyqWRsBiFUumNgyw4pTkh5sgx6Mw4j0Qf3lY

En Espanol – Mauricio Guerrero Martínez, “#WARPPresenta: Entrevista con Nick Zedd, el padre del cine de transgresión”, 16 agosto, 2019
https://warp.la/editoriales/warppresenta-entrevista-nick-zedd
Fotos: David Barajas

Nick Zedd - Ubu Web -- better than YouTube for his un-remixed works
https://ubu.com/film/zedd.html

Memoir #15 – A Talk with Robin Winters

A photo of a bum on the Bowery, 1970s, by Meryl Meisler. It looks like the Bowery at Delancey Street, a perfectly reasonable place to take a snooze in the ‘70s.

This is the 14th post from my memoir project, an account of my 30 years in the NYC artworld. This post continues the summary of the not-yet-published book. The focus this time is on my time on Houston Street near the Bowery, starting in the mid-1970s in the apartment of Robin Winters.

In 1977 I moved from a room in Marc Miller’s loft to a studio apartment on Houston Street, controlled by Robin Winters. Both places were on the Bowery, the classic locus of seasonal vagrants in the USA, but they were worlds apart. From Marc’s sun-lit top floor loft, very much separated from the street, I was suddenly living just above the noise and smoke of a dirty boulevard, with the cries of the afflicted clearly heard. I stayed there for 18 years.
When I think of life on Houston Street, the French phrase nostalgie de la boue ("nostalgia for mud") comes to mind. But that wasn’t it. It was the sordid glamour of the low life, that’s sure, in one of its last major Manhattan pockets. This was serious subaltern history that we were connecting to by being here. But it wasn’t too close.

Pages from Martha Rosler's book “The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems” (1974-1975)

I was drinking and smoking, but I wasn’t just another alcoholic in his SRO (single room occupancy) room, watching as the evening light filters through a glass of whiskey and fades to night. The serious sites of drug-taking, and frenetic socializing with faux and truly dangerous people was a couple blocks away at the raucous music club CBGBs. I didn’t go there very often.
The nostalgia I indulged then was for some kind of deracinated modernism, as represented by Dada and Surrealist automatic writing strategies. I tried these for a couple of years, together with the absolutely contradictory effort of writing narrative film scenarios. Very soon I was involved with the nascent artists group Colab.
So the “boue” was living cheaply, poorly, really, and punishing myself with poetic and artistic endeavours.

“Boue” Mask

That’s a kind of mud, although it isn’t a social ambit. The neighbors were bums and criminals, but I didn’t have much to do with them. Nick the Trader, who stood on the street all day long out front of the storefront below my window did that for me. Up the street Steve Stollman whose day labor workforce was made up of domesticated bums also filtered Houston Street’s daily strangeness.
I didn´t have the kind of upbringing that made any of this natural for me. What I’d absorbed in college wasn´t the “boue” of criminality, although many of my friends then were deep in the drug trade, which they didn’t talk about and I didn’t know about. It was politics.
Now, 50 years on, it’s offensive to read the Wikipedia cite of that phrase to Tom Wolfe – "It was at this party that a Black Panther field marshal rose up beside the north piano—there was also a south piano—in Leonard Bernstein’s living room and outlined the Panthers’ ten-point program to a roomful of socialites and celebrities, who, giddy with nostalgie de la boue, entertained a vision of the future….”
To call the Black Panthers’ 10 point program “mud” is reactionary. That this was cited to a 1989 magazine piece, shows he was reactionary even 20 years later. As I have written in a post on my other blog, what the Panthers wanted is what everybody wants, including the Zapatistas.
What we lived on Houston Street was a strange ambience of poverty while conspiring and working to build up a collective creative platform for multivarious art-making. That we succeeded has something to do with the anything-goes atmosphere of Robin Winters' Houston Street digs.

597 Broadway group show photo: back row left to right -- me, Joost Rameau, Willoughby Sharp, Dan Graham, Robin Winters; front row, l to r -- Scott Billingsley (Scott B), Jim Cobb, Lee Lozano (Leefer), Gerry Hovagimyan (GR). Photographer unknown; thanks to Stephen Zacks

Robin Winters was a forceful charismatic personality in full flower as a promising young performance artist when I met him in ‘76. After I left Marc Miller’s Bowery loft, Robin invited me to move in next door to him at 73 East Houston Street. Dick Miller and Teri Slotkin were moving out.
In late 2019 we sat down to talk at Robin’s Broadway loft. He opened it to the public as the Key Club, and there was a show of Robert Hawkins’ paintings on paper. There were images of sexy cavemen, and many paintings depicting a fire in a wax museum where figures of artists were being carried to safety from the flames….

The Interview

Alan Moore: … So as I recall, … at some point Dick decided that he couldn’t be there anymore on the Bowery with the drugs and the alcohol and had to get away.
Robin Winters: Right. So you moved in after they were there. … I got those two apartments from Marcia Resnick and Pooh Kaye. I paid a $350 key fee to them at the time. I had the big apartment, and first I rented to Dick and Teri, and then to you. At some point I went away to Europe and Larry Fox had it, then there was an Irish guy who had it briefly. I didn’t ever really give it away, but somehow it went away from me anyway when Larry and Terry [Fox] were there. I can’t remember the whole process of it.
AM: … At one point Larry told me, ‘You have to leave, we’re taking over your place.’ … And he’s sitting there with a gallon of wine which he drinks everyday, telling me this and I’m like, ‘No.’… So I started paying rent directly to Tryel Realty…
RW: I paid rent to a guy named Louie who lived in Brooklyn who was blind. He’d gone blind in the building, he bumped his head on a pipe in the basement [and dislocated his corneas]. Louis Rosenstroch.
AM: He lost the building. I heard from Nick that Tryel Realty bought it for $55,000.
RW: And Reverend [William] Mountain still lived upstairs….
AM: He was Jesuit, and above it all. … For years I paid Tryel with certified checks. They claimed they never received them. When they lost the building, I got evicted by a crooked judge.
RW: And Larry, I don’t know where he is. He took so many photos. He had cans and cans and cans [of negatives?]. He shot performances, but also the Bowery at that time period when it was really the Bowery, and he was part of it in the sense that he was so alcoholic. Terry I stayed in touch with until he died. He gave me a show in California…. I brought all those paintings in my truck with Dick Miller across country. I taught him how to drive, which was a harrowing experience. Driving through Texas in a rainstorm and Dick was freaking out screaming at me but he didn’t want to pull over because he was afraid …
AM: Panhandle winds can really be intense.
RW: You wrote a lot when you were there. I just remember reams and reams of your writing, and the typewriter constantly going. Ilona Granet lived there for a short period.…
AM: She got a nice place up the street.
RW: When I was living over there I had this as my studio…..
[We chatted some about a performance he had done as part of the 597 group show which I reviewed for Artforum. (The one that Max Kozloff saw as a bad call on my part.) Robin had done an “unreasonable” performance, ass painted red, sitting on a bucket of shit. I sat in on the meetings, feeling out a role different from the ostensibly objective art critic.]
RW: ... I asked you at one point what are you gonna do? And you handed me your Artforum card. And I was like, ‘No way man.’ …. I was like, ‘Either you’re part of us or you’re not.’
AM: This was for a show [a group exhibition at 597 Broadway].
RW: Well it was for a show, and we were just having meetings about what we wanted to do, … I was like, ‘No, you actually have to be partisan here, rather than a cold observer.’ And I don’t know if that’s a memory for you or not, but my feeling was that it affected you in such a way that you actually got way more involved, just in general. You became partisan in that sense….
AM: Well Max Kozloff got rid of me. … I already thought that sense that you’re empowered to pass judgement on art is highly corrupting. … I didn’t like it. And I’d met Mike and Edit who were doing Art-Rite which was totally different. We’re down with the community. We’re looking at what’s being done and expressing our opinions, but we’re not dictating the rules of engagement….
AM: I wanted to ask about your performance on the street on the Bowery….dealing with the reality of the Bowery… With your friendship with Nick you entered into the criminal spirit of the Bowery. And I kind of continued that, living there, coming home and finding a giant TV in the apartment.
RW: I stored a ton of stuff including Super-8 cameras that everybody in Colab used. Ten bucks apiece. People who were using them were throwing them like footballs…

Nick in my apartment holding a copy of "X" magazine, ca. 1977; photographer unknown; processed by Coleen Fitzgibbon

That performance was called “To Gandy Dancers and Roustabouts: Look for the Man in the Yellow Hat”. … I did “Industry” in my studio on Broadway, first thing in the morning, from 9 to 12, 50 cents admission. I had 50 chairs set up, and I was in there working. Nobody came. Lee Lozano came, a bunch. I’ve got good pictures of her with me in there. Then in the afternoon I did “To Gandy Dancers...”. Basically all I did was wear a yellow hat and hang out with the bums. I think at one point I gave them spray bottles and some long underwear that I’d painted to wash car windows, a little bit of costuming, but essentially the performance was just me being there and spending time with people…. One person who came was Jeffrey Deitch. He would sit and talk to me on his lunch break….

Painting by Robin Winters, 1980

Then in the evening I did “Blind Dates and Double Dates: Silent Food for Speechless Fools”. … I didn’t have my name on any of those pieces. It was just the title of the piece. … I thought at that point in my life that I could live outside the law and be honest, so to speak, in that selling stolen goods and selling drugs and living somewhat of the criminal life was a way to subsidize my art-making without working in a factory or a restaurant or working with a gallery. Because I didn’t want any of those things. But then at a certain point somebody called me up who’d been robbed. And they were like, ‘Hey, we heard that you have stuff. … You know anything about our stuff?’ And then it dawned on me that it had consequences, and that it was connected to real people… That really freaked me out. It’s as immoral as any other position in life.
AM: I heard that Nick had acquired a full 16mm film rig that had been taken from some production company that was in town.…
RW: I saw him get deliveries of guns from who knows. He had suitcases full of 9mms. He had all kinds of stuff going on there. He was like the black sheep of a cop family, apparently. That’s what he told me one time…. He was also in X Magazine….
AM: He had very developed conspiracy theories. A one-person early FourChan. He hated the English. He would fulminate against the British Empire, that it was responsible for all the crime and evilness in the world. … Not the most frequently encountered conspiracy theory. It’s kind of covered over.
RW: … there was also the people underneath 10 Bleecker where Coleen had her space. There was a plumber, a little short Puerto Rican guy with a high-pitched voice, short and fat, and had a limp ‘cause he’d been machine gunned in the Second World War. He was a Fagin completely. He trained his two sons to be thieves. They had a van, and they were all stealing stuff together. He had some business with Nick as well….

Installation shot of the Dog Show at Robin's loft on Broadway, ca. 1977

AM: …. I was talking to Coleen about the founding moments of Colab, and she laid out this scenario of how that idea came about in the context of the Whitney program [Whitney Independent Study Program, or WISP] among a number of people who were inspired by Yvonne Rainer, and Vito Acconci and stories of the Art Workers Coalition [in the Whitney Independent Study Program]. Does that square with what you recall?
RW: I wouldn’t say Yvonne or Vito for me at all… I would say more the Fox and Red Herring and AWC and the Artists Meeting for Cultural Change [AMCC]. They did things like they glued the gallery locks shut in Soho at one point….
AM: I heard that was Stephen Antonakos with his little gang….
RW: I assumed it was AMCC. And I was friends with Christopher D'Arcangelo. [The self-professed anarchist artist suicided at 24, in 1979.] But we’d already started doing stuff when Chris was active. I knew Tom [Otterness] from the WISP. Coleen I met through Jackie [Ochs]. She was living next door. I didn’t know her in the WISP. She had a heart issue, and had been hospitalized and was staying next door to Jackie. And Diego [Cortez] I knew through Coleen, I guess. They were like the Chicago contingent. Michael McClard and Betsy Sussler and I were all the Californians. She went to the San Francisco Art Institute. [That venerable school closed in 2020.] I moved here before either Michael or Betsy. But they moved the year after. Kathy Bigelow was also there and she’d moved the year before. She was in the WISP too. Not Betsy or Diego. [Julian] Schnabel was in it too. It wasn’t all a bunch of political rabble rousers. … I think I was there the third year. …
During that “Silent Food...” [performance] there were a lot of dinner parties with a lot of talk about – it wasn’t just about government support, although that becomes part of the story, that we formed for government support, but I don’t feel that way. I think that was secondary… the whole Green Corporation having meetings to get money from the government was not really what –
AM: That’s the emerging line [in recent historical writing on Colab], and that’s one of the reasons I want to write this book, to contest that, and to complicate it.
RW: Of course we wanted that too… but it never felt like we started it for that reason… It felt like it was much more of an emotional response to the world of not being included, or being not part of the system that was happening, and wanting to do things – it wasn’t even a matter of outside the system, it was just a matter of wanting to do things.
AM: It was a very rigid system.
RW: Right. It wasn’t as though we had a chance.
AM: Working at Artforum, I felt myself to be one of the art police. That was the name of Andy Baird’s magazine.
RW: You were one of the gatekeepers, you mean.
AM: I had my badge, you know. Which is kind of looney. What system are you protecting? You get a gig, you have a nice first show, and then you do the same stuff.
RW: Then you’re in the system…. I was working for Don Judd, I worked at Castelli, I worked at Sonnabend, I did installations for all those people. So for me it was a closed system. I didn’t see it as having a possibility at all. Brice Marden was who they wanted, not me. …
RW: … I was never an official of Colab in any way whatsoever. … There was a moment … at Hunter College we’re doing one of these Colab talks [for the Times Square Show Revisted exhibition in 2012] … Andrea and Coleen are sitting in the audience, and Diego and I are on the panel, and I said, ‘I was at the Julliard School at the time studying acting, and Colab hired me to be an artist.’ … and Diego was like, ‘Isn’t that the same year we got married, Robin?’ And watching Andrea and Coleen shitting bricks. They’re like, ‘That’s not true!’… so there’s a level of a fictional side of what Colab is …. I lied totally… I was just playing with the theatricality of being a group…
AM: There was a spin off, the Offices [of Fend, Fitzgibbon, Holzer, Nadin and Winters].
RW: Well also Coleen and I, we were X&Y Offer, and we’d done a lot of that stuff before the Offices. … One of our posters said “practical solutions to your problems” … and then the Offices used one of those phrases… the cliché for the Offices…. So it sort of morphed into the Offices from what Coleen and I were doing. …
AM: I was looking recently at a posting about Michael Asher’s invitation to the Offices to appear at Cal Arts…. And some comment understood this as Colab, or as very much coming out of Colab.
RW: I wouldn’t disagree. But it was a different thing. We were more stressing the idea that artists could be useful, productive members of society like architects. That we had use value that was not really the way artists were seen. … ‘Cause of like the way the Whitney doesn’t pay people, they pay patronage, they pay exposure. And we were like, no, we are legitimately able to advise you and we’re good for that as a job, even if it didn’t work. …
The Colab thing, after the Times Square Show there was a lot of talk about Colab being a platform for people to get galleries. I read things like that. That all of a sudden Tom Otterness had Brooke Alexander, and we used Colab as a stepping stone to enter the gallery world. Which is so far from the truth, so far as I am concerned.

LINKS

Burning TV set from “Mean Streets”, by Edward Grazda, published by Powerhouse Books.
https://timeline.com/edward-grazda-new-york-bfd633224748

A photo of a photo of a bum on the Bowery, 1970s, by Meryl Meisler. This looks to be the Bowery at Delancey Street, a perfectly reasonable place to take a snooze in the ‘70s.
https://monovisions.com/meryl-meisler-les-yes-photographs-of-the-lower-east-side-in-the-70s-80s/

Martha Rosler, from her book "The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems" (1974-1975), photos of Bowery storefronts; the text is synonyms for drunk.
“The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems” (1974-1975)

Occupations & Properties blog, “On Learning and Un-learning”, October 19, 2021
http://occuprop.blogspot.com/2021/10/on-learning-and-un-learning.html
Report on the exhibition and seminar coinciding with the arrival of the Zapatista contingent in Madrid, “On the Precipice of Time: Practices of Insurgent Imagination”. A talk with the editors of a book “When the Roots Start Moving: First Mouvement: To Navigate Backward, Resonating with Zapatismo”

Burning TV set on the Bowery, 1970, from “Mean Streets”, by Edward Grazda, published by Powerhouse Books

Memoir #14: A Talk about Art-Rite with Walter Robinson

Art-Rite cover by Christo

This is the 14th of my ongoing series of memoir blog posts. They foreshadow the forthcoming book to be published in Spring, 2022 with the Journal of Aesthetics & Protest. This time I interview Walter “Mike” Robinson on his experiences as co-founder -editor and -publisher of the famous giveaway neighborhood art magazine Art-Rite. I fondly recall my time working with him and his fabulous comrade, Edit DeAk, on this local global artistic project.

Introduction – I arrived in NYC in 1974 to work for Artforum magazine. But the real fun in the art magazine “business” was being had by the publishers of Art-Rite. During my 2019 research trip, I spent too much time in the library. I realized I needed to have some formal conversations with old friends and comrades. The resource of living memory is fragile, and our cohort has a limited shelf life.

You Ain’t Talkin’ and I Ain’t Askin’

There are many fine excuses not to do interviews. Texts are built upon texts, and historians often just follow the periodicals of the day. “Rough draft of history” – the normative canon proceeds from the familiar journals. A kind of cowardice, then, is professionally sanctioned. You don’t have to talk to live people who may mislead you. Maybe art historians also prefer mute inanimate objects which reveal themselves through semiotic systems which only the hierophant can read.
Print is always friendly. With old texts and images there are no culture shocks, “cancel” flags, or the kind of ego-damage that can come from talking to cranky old artists. There’s no reminders of past failings, no slights, only the mild pleasures of discovery and the consensual idea in the discipline that you’re piecing together the verifiable story.

The Earliest

From my earliest times in NYC, I could have hunted up ex-Artforum colleagues like Angela Westwater, now a well-known gallerist, or Robin White, who like Walter Robinson was an early founder of Printed Matter, which has always been my favorite art and bookstore.

Walter when he was Mike; '70s, photographer unknown

But no, the career path of the critic was not mine. I shed too many skins, and my tracks were weirder. Besides, Amy Newman’s Challenging Art (2000), an oral history of Artforum has covered those years thoroughly; it’s clearly a labor of love. And Artforum was so serious, I just couldn´t face it.
For that time I went straight to Walter Robinson. He didn’t know Artforum, but he and Edit DeAk were the co-editors of Art-Rite, which was a great project to work on. I spent as much time in that Wooster Street loft as I decently could, helping to write collaborative texts, and later assisting with production. (I was a typesetter, like Walter.)
Walter later was closely involved in Colab and the East Village Eye and after that Artnet.com, but we didn´t talk about that.

Walter Robinson: “Leave Me Out of It”

When we talked in early October of ‘19, Walter was painting in his studio in a building full of artisans. It’s several blocks walk from the Queens Plaza subway complex, where an insane high-rise building spree has been going on for several years. I know the area from my hostel stays. Already the subway platform going into Manhattan is jammed, and those apartment skyscrapers have yet to fill up.
Later that year, when Primary Information reprinted every issue of Art-Rite as a book, the journal was celebrated at a book launch. Walter then described his co-publisher Edit DeAk as “sexy, with an accent like Zsa Zsa Gabor, but serious, not goofy”. [Bloch, 2019]

Edit DeAk in full glamour. Photo by Timothy Greenfield Sanders, 1981.

After her passing, Marc Miller ended up with most of her library which he sold on. It was thick with her reading in aesthetics and philosophy in both Hungarian and English.

Walter Robinson: I had such an adventure with Edit. And the end of the adventure was the end of the ‘70s. I packed up two suitcases and moved to Ludlow Street where Ulli [Rimkus], my green card marriage, found the apartment. And left everything behind. I consciously was, like, I’m leaving this decade behind, including most of my library, any Art-Rite archives and even a few paintings. And I’m starting a new life. … I’m traveling light. Now at my age I regret very much travelling light. …
We had a personal relationship that had ended badly, and she had a thriving night-time social life that I envied, and couldn’t keep up with, both because I didn’t have the aptitude and because I had a day job …. You continued to work with Edit in the ‘80s.
Alan Moore: She called me up to help with her writing. I would go over and take dictation. I worked on her Francesco Clemente article, and it was a frustrating process because I’d try to put things into sentences –
WR: And she’d say, “No no, that’s not it!” It’s so fascinating.
AM: She would then take the article over to Ingrid [Sischy at Artforum] and they would totally rewrite it. [The published version] was nothing like what we worked on.
WR: What do you want to know about Art-Rite that I should try to remember?
AM: Just the mise en scene was amazing. This enormous loft, the ping pong table in there, and Peter Grass playing like a demon. The fact that you and Edit were a couple, and then Peter was her husband. The whole escape in the trunk from Yugoslavia. The debriefing by the CIA, which is actually online.
WR: … That part of the story I’d forgotten.… Peter told me – I went up for Edit´s memorial. Peter has a church in Catskill, NY. He’s so fabulous. He’s 72, he’s cranky, he’s Hungarian. He’s like he was, only crankier…. He told me the story of how he met Edit…. Basically he’s a Jew, she’s Catholic. Her parents forbid her to see him. They sent her to a convent away from the city to study. So Peter would travel there, a long trip, to go to Sunday service, to mass, in hopes that she’d be there. And sometimes she wouldn’t be there, they’d keep her out from mass. Then she’d be there, and they’d meet in the cemetery and fuck around the gravestones. It’s like a real awesome love story.
AM: At one point Peter had a studio in a small kind of shed on the roof of the building. He cooked me a kidney on his Primus stove there. I also remember Yuri.
WR: Yes, and Katja, his girlfriend. She’s still around, with Richard Algus. They still live together.
AM: Yuri set up my unemployment, as if I was working for him.
WR: That guy was able to do that?
AM: Yeah. He said, “You send me the documents. I’ve done it before. You’ll be my studio assistant.”
WR: Those immigrants. Yuri was a great photographer… His philosophy of photography was Cartier-Bresson’s significant moment.…

Walter Robinson, stencil painting on paper (1979?)

AM: Edit was making films, you were making films. All these weird people were coming over….
WR: I think she really bloomed during the ‘80s. Did you have a sense of her drug addiction in the ‘80s? It was just starting.
AM: Not really, until she was involved with this guy named Flip, who was really [skanky, i.e. an obvious junkie] …. Paul Tschinkel knew him. It was he who told me Flip was dead, which I repeated, and frightened Edit. It wasn’t true.
WR: I wonder if Flip was the guy I found her in bed with. That was what prompted me to leave.
AM: A sexually handsome guy.
WR: Jack Smith used to come over. And Johnny Dynell, when I was there. Marina [Abramovic] and Ulay [Frank Uwe Laysiepen, d. 2020] came and stayed, when they visited America. They had this huge ugly German shepherd. They’d get a big bowl of tripe and feed the dog. Christof [Kohlhöfer] and Ulli came over. Because when we went to Germany we just cold-called Christof to stay at his house for a few days. Then he returned the favor and stayed with us for six months.

Christof Kohlhoefer on a 2014 visit to NYC. Photo by Coleen Fitzgibbon.

AM: How did you know him?
WR: We visited his show at Gallery Krinzinger, and said could we meet him? Christof was slim, androgenous in a Living Theatre way (it was in fashion then), and earnest: he talked our ears off that first night, in his slow, heavily German-accented English, when all we wanted to do was bed down.
Then he came to visit. In the ‘70s he was quite the character. Christof was a big influence on me, largely for his uninhibited manner and constant creativity. He was unafraid, and I admired that (being a Protestant square from Oklahoma).
…Tom Otterness reminded me, Christof always had a car. Even if you don’t have any money, the definition of being alpha is you have to have a car. So he would cruise all the way up 1st Avenue to Harlem and then turn around and cruise all the way down 2nd Avenue. That’s what we’d do on Saturday night, go for a drive.
AM: Edit had a car. I drove it long before I had a license.
WR: That huge Cadillac convertible. What a nightmare. Not only did she not have a license or registration, she couldn’t drive.
AM: We drove out to a party at Hal Bromm’s house.
WR: We were very young, in our 20s, and in your 20s you don’t know that you can’t do all this shit. So [on their trip to Europe] we saw Michael Werner, and we heard about all these artists like Anselm Kiefer, way before anybody in New York heard about him, and we visited Gerhard Richter. I remember absolutely nothing about the visit. I was so unprepared for what I was doing.… It was for a “European Issue” of Art-Rite, which we never got around to publishing, I’m sorry to say. I still have somewhere the b&w photos I took for it.
Art-Rite was a triumvirate, but the team of three editors didn’t last long. The downfall was something of a soap opera. Glamorous Edit and debonair Peter lived together in a big loft on Wooster Street in SoHo, but they had something of an “open relationship” which wasn’t a familiar concept then to me. Josh, who had been my roommate in college, began a surreptitious affair with Edit, and soon was confiding his troubles to me. Young love, you know? And before long, something sparked between Edit and me and we started carrying on behind Josh’s back. Not ideal but hormones what can you do? He soon caught us out and that was the end of that. He left New York, went to business school and is now a successful banker. I take credit. Gwen Allen has the story in her book, Artists’ Magazines, MIT 2011.

East Village Eye centerfold by Christof Kohlhofer, October 1979

AM: I remember meeting that guy once, and it was something of a strained meeting. …
WR: Another thing that happened there a lot was slide shows with music at the loft. Christof would show his slides, he has this amazing collection.
AM: It was in the Moore College of Art catalogue [Philadelphia, 1983].
WR: We did that show. I think Nan Goldin got the idea for the Ballad of Sexual Dependency [photographic series] from those events… because slide shows with music became her thing for a long time. …

[Edit and Mike launched something called Ghost Films, and Edit shot numerous reels of Super-8. I never saw more than a few of them, but Patrick Fox worked to organize them, and the MoMA did a screening. Gallery 98 has posted various items from Edit´s archives, which reveal the diverse filmic events which took place ad the Wooster Street loft. All this activity remains somewhat mysterious.]

Edit with the boyz -- Fab 5 Freddy, Keith Haring, and Futura (?). Photographer unknown, n.d.

WR: Edit wasn’t a great cook but she was a brilliant hostess, and would regularly have dinners for all kinds of people — later, in the ‘80s, she presided over even more of a salon I think. Her gang included James Nares and John Lurie, and Lisa Rosen would come over, Sophie VDT [Vieille] was there. DJ Johnny Dynell was a good friend, and eventually she became a regular at the Mudd Club. I had a job but didn’t make much money. I don’t know what those people did for money.
AM: They were comped. You read Duncan Hannah’s memoir, at a certain point everybody’s getting comped.
WR: It’s certainly true that at the Mudd Club you got comped in, and you got to drink for free. … I was always gonna write a memoir called Leave Me Out of It, ‘cause it was just going to be interviews with people about what they remembered.
AM: Excellent title.
WR: … One thing about Edit and her stories that used to annoy me – 25 years later when people asked what happened back then, she’s got all her stories rehearsed and me I don’t remember anything. … I don’t have the same attitude towards my accomplishments in the ‘70s. I don’t reminisce about them. …

Walter in his studio. Photo by Peter Bellamy, 1983

Post Script

We made this interview some time ago. In the interim, I have thought a lot about that scene of the turn of the ´70s into the ´80s, which has been much written about. Just recently, a key mover in that scene died, Diego Cortez, an occasional in Edit´s crew and a founder of the Mudd Club. (Raymond Foye has edited a nice tribute.)
There´s an interview with the two of them in our 1985 book ABC No Rio Dinero, entitled “The Night Time Is the Right Time”. They talk about the ephemeral irreproducible nightclub scene of the era, and its social and artistic effects.
I saw in Madrid a show of Fernando Pessoa and the artists he supported as a critic and aesthetician under some of his many pseudonyms. After seeing “Pessoa: All Art Is a Form of Literature”, I thought, “What a great exhibition Edit´s critical favorites would make!” In fact, I proposed it to some curators in Budapest, where she was from. I guessed that her peculiar point of view came from engagement with neo-Surrealist aesthetics in her home country. (That proposal was a non-starter, of course, given the present homophobic authoritarian government in Hungary.)
But with the long hindsight of decades it is pretty clear now that an exhibition centered around the multi-various productions – critical positions, curatorial work, transgressions and artistic products of Edit, Diego, and one must include the maliciously perceptive Rene Ricard, an occasional member of their crew – would be pretty interesting. I assign it to the unnamed student as a dissertation topic, then you can write the lead essay for the catalogue.

Now? As Then?

The other thing I like to think about is what lessons for today might be drawn from the dynamic and exciting artistic environments that we all shared in the late analog years? Art-Rite was supported by advertisers, almost all of them art galleries, and subscribers by mail. Today´s digital art publications have an entirely different “revenue model” – i.e., means of subsistence. The digitals have as well a radically different means of sensual address. It´s 100% visual; there is no tactility to a website.
Fragments of the Art-Rite idea, the idiosyncrasy, whimsy and artistic collaboration of the project survive in zine culture. But the localism of Art-Rite, its community in the Soho neighborhood of what Kostelanetz called “an artists colony”, seems like a doomed-to-fail politically unsustainable project in the era of hyper-gentrification.
So, finally, I don´t know what lessons the Art-Rite example has to offer. I only know it sure was fun.

LINKS

A precis of my forthcoming memoir, “Art Worker”
https://alanwmoore.net/memoir/

An exhibition arranged with NYU, “Learn to Read Art: A Surviving History of Printed Matter,” 2014-15 displayed the project’s history. I didn’t see it. I recall that Hurricane Katrina damaged their archives severely, which may explain the “surviving” in the title.
Max Schumann with Maya Harakawa, “Learn to Read Art: A Surviving History of Printed Matter”
Brooklyn Rail, February 2015
https://brooklynrail.org/2015/02/art_books/max-schumann-with-maya-harakawa

Lauren O’Neill-Butler, review of “Learn to Read Art: A Surviving History of Printed Matter”
Artforum, February 2015
https://www.artforum.com/print/reviews/201502/learn-to-read-art-a-surviving-history-of-printed-matter-49831

Art-Rite book
edited by Walter Robinson, Edit DeAk, and Joshua Cohn
https://primaryinformation.org/product/art-rite/

Mark Bloch, “ArtSeen: Art-Rite Book Launch,” at: brooklynrail.org, December 2019

Marc Miller, Galery 98 "Edit DeAk" page
http://gallery.98bowery.com/tag/edit-deak/

“The Night Time Is The Right Time”, Diego Cortez and Edit deAk talk, 1980
excerpt online; the original printed version is longer, and the ms. in my papers is longer still
https://98bowery.com/return-to-the-bowery/abcnorio-the-neighborhood#evmusicart

Pessoa: All Art Is a Form of Literature
Reina Sofia museum, Madrid
https://www.museoreinasofia.es/en/exhibitions/pessoa

Raymond Foye, ed., A Tribute to Diego Cortez - The Brooklyn Rail
https://brooklynrail.org/2021/09/in-memoriam/A-Tribute-to-Diego-Cortez

A curious afternote -- a jewelry designer worked at Getty Research where Edit's files are. She charts the change in the artworld which she noted in the archive. Short, curious.
Bazooka Grooves, "Justice for Edit DeAk", n.d.
https://bazookagrooves.com/justice-for-edit-de-ak/

Jack Smith, Boiled Lobster Color Slideshow (at 149 Wooster Street). Poster, 1976

Memoir #13: Ancient Soho

Time Landscape, by Alan Sonfist, 1976

This is the 13th in a series of posts based on my memoir research in NYC in the fall of 2019. These results are not part of the book to be published. They will appear only on this blog. For some of the preceding posts, I was working in the NYU research library, examining Colab materials. Now I’m going to set up some of the interviews I did during that period, which will be posted this fall. The first problem then was to get out of the library…

While working in the NYU library I’d buy a sandwich and eat it outside. Washington Square Park and the streets around NYU’s central hive are too crowded for comfort. I ate my lunch in a hidden spot, a blocked-off staircase into the NYU housing projects, behind the overgrown Time Landscape of naturist artist Alan Sonfist (1978).. A few homeless had left their stuff there, and a pedestrian passed from time to time. It’s a verdant alleyway, a quiet untraveled green and shady bower.

Happy Boozhee Wonderland

Soho is one block south. Once I would have sat on one of the commodious metal loading docks there and eaten my lunch like the workers in Soho past. Now there are too many people. And they’re not the kind of peop­le it’s much fun to watch. They’re tourists, and they’re watching you eating your sandwich ‘cause it’s so colorful.
The Soho I remember, the first place I landed in New York in 1974, is mostly gone. My little cubbyhole in Jack’s loft, from whence I traveled to the Artforum offices on 57th Street to do my internship was above the Broome Street Bar. The bar is gone. The traffic island out front of it which was a garden of rusting metal sculptures, 112 Greene Street and Food, Artists Space, Edit DeAk’s fabulous loft, the 420 West Broadway flagship of the ‘70s art establishment and almost all the major art galleries, the fascinating and educational ethnic art stores Craft Caravan, Jacques Carcanagues, Leekan Design, even the New Museum which once ruled Broadway – all are gone. Soho is a not-so-interesting luxury shopping mall. The barrio still has no parks.

Rene Block with Joseph Beuys felt suit

In that fall of 2019 what remained of the vanished landscape of ‘70s Soho was the Ronald Feldman Gallery. Ronald loaned to my Joseph Beuys show at UC Riverside in 1975, and later supported Fashion Moda, the South Bronx-based art space with benefit exhibitions. He’s still on Mercer Street. Ronald has retired, but the gallery maintains a commitment to art seasoned with politics. A show of Hannah Wilke’s work was up there then, the beauty who took an alt-feminist position in her photoworks. I remember her as gay and charming in a classic Manhattan manner when Edit invited me along to lunch with her uptown.

Hannah Wilke

Up Above the Shopping Mall

A few old comrades still perch in Soho, paying the controlled rents set by the loft laws of the 1970s. One of Colab’s founders, Robin Winters retains a corner of his old loft, high above Victoria’s Secret. (The store broke their lease during Virus times, I’m told.) The building constructed a new labyrinthian entrance on Mercer Street through which holdout tenants must enter so that the lingerie store could have all the Broadway frontage. Robin has been holding exhibitions in his front room, just as he did for Colab in the late ‘70s, in a project he calls the Key Club.
We attended one, a young artist’s homage to Gordon Matta-Clark and Food restaurant cast as a kind of vegetarian cannibal feast. Julie Harrison still lives in that building as well, and raised two kids in her loft.
I interviewed both, and will present transcripts here soon.
Just north of Houston Street, Wayne’s Mercer Street Books miraculously survives. Across the street from that invaluable used bookstore full of new review copies, NYU has finally swallowed the two small public parks where my baby son played with the neighbors’ kids. They built an extension of their gymnasium or something. I listened to the venerable bookseller Wayne Conti rant about this for a while.

Wayne Conti of Mercer Street Books -- beaten but unbowed

Punch You, Macho

I was able to show my partner the woman among the old studio photos of boxers on the wall at Fanelli’s bar. Some of the staff sneaked it past old Joe years ago, as the gal who posed for it told me one night at Annette Kuhn’s salon. Fanelli’s is no longer the hangout of the heavy metal sculptors of the upstairs Max Hutchinson gallery. But the bar is still a half-decent scene (pre-Virus, natch).
Jeffrey Deitch’s double venue gallery is still there, and still a major attraction. The Deitch gallery hosted a benefit show for ABC No Rio some years ago. But the gallery is strictly 21st century. I met Jeffrey on the street, all dandified in his cream-colored suit, high-stepping out for a walk to get his sandwich lunch. We talked a little business, which has so far come to nothing.

The wall of Mike Fanelli's boxing heroes in the bar. Can you spot the woman?

Nothing to See Here

Soho is now an "arty" district, not an art district. There are glitzy commercial art stores selling expensive furniture and posters of Warhol and Banksy images, high fashion clothing stores in vast empty ground floor spaces and twinky sandwich shops. Soho businesses turn over fast, and the district oscillates between tourist traps for international herds of bourgeoisie and the kind of Saudi royal-owned shopping mall Douglas Davis once described, with the last few aging artists peering down from their rent-controlled lofts at the herds of shoppers.
Tourist mecca, shopping mall – except for its fine architecture, Soho today is something of a dreary trudge. On weekends, however, artists again crowd the streets of Soho to set up temporary stands of their work. (They had to fight for this right against Mayor Giuliani who of course sought to close them down.) A couple of years ago I met Matthew Courtney there, onetime MC of the ABC No Rio Open Mic and an AIDS survivor. Matthew was crouched in a cast iron corner, selling his meticulous paintings on paper.
Just as in Greenwich Village before, the living part of the Soho arts district clings on like a weekly surge of crabs and seabirds on the rocks of commerce.

Matthew Courtney selling his work on the streets of Soho. Photo by Mason Plumlee

The Big Man of the Avant Garde

Richard Kostelanetz, who lived in a Fluxhouse there for many years, wrote of old Soho in its glory days as an “artists colony”. Richard is a polymath and a publishing demon. He produced two books of recollections, the second more rambling than the first. I recommend them as the best account I know of Soho, when it was full of now-forgotten creative strivers, many of them aligned with an international avant-garde. It’s the same vision Rene Block describes in his Berlin-New York anthology in 1976.

Richard Kostelanetz in his Queens loft. Photo by Joe Carrotta for The New York Times

I also read Adam Gopnik’s recent memoir. Gopnik is a good writer and a nice boy who got his start working for Kirk Varnedoe at the MoMA. Eloquent, handsome, a brilliant curator, Varnedoe died youngish. I recall him telling an audience that those who loved art were a “self-selecting elite.” It’s true, and comforting if you aren't rich enough to collect it.
Gopnik still lives with his family in the “cheap” part of Soho, the old Italian district west of West Broadway. He fondly recalls the Sunday promenade in the district during the 1970s, 420 West Broadway with Castelli and Sonnabend, Bykert, Dia and all the rest. Lunch at the Spring Street Bar. This is consumption Soho, an all’s-right-with-the-white-creative-world Soho. Too comfortable by far.

“You Don’t Know Me but You Don’t Like Me” – Buck Owen

Many artists hated what that gave birth to. Hiding in vacant warehouses as illegal residents during the ‘60s and ‘70s was one thing, the emergent haute bourgeois art world Gopnik loved was another. (Even that has long decamped from Soho to Chelsea.) The whole art gallery system was a focus of the Art Workers Coalition critique in the late ‘60s, and in the mid-’70s the Fox journal spin-off of Art & Language kept up the attack. Artists Meeting for Cultural Change picketed the museums again. A band of guerrillas glued the locks of Soho’s galleries shut.
Come the ‘80s and the action critique continued. Dan Asher splashed blood in a gallery and David Wojnarowicz brought bones from a butcher shop to the staircases of the palatial 420 gallery building in two separate incidents.
More decorous was the many-years Whitney Counteweight produced by Bill Rabinovitch and friends, a remnant of the spirit of the co-op galleries of the ‘50s and ‘60s. The rebellion here was simply pointing to the vast community of working artists who never make it into the gallery and fashion-driven precincts of the Whitney Museum for their biannual exhibition. (In 2010 the Bruce High Quality Foundation and Vito Schnabel – yes, his son, who runs a gallery – presented a hipper take-off on the idea, the "Brucennial" on West Broadway.)
The era of artists’ self-organized co-op galleries was at last recalled in a revelatory 2017 show “Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952–1965” at NYU’s Grey Art Gallery. A few of these persist, although not in Soho.

My cohort was lucky even to have a rump chunk of this time when artists really kind of had the run of New York City. And Gopnik’s execrable memoir contained at least one clear truth for artists and writers – “we were all stowaways aboard the ship Manhattan”.

NEXT: Not so sure right now… this line is usually wrong.

LINKS:

Allison Meier, “The Origins of Manhattan’s Tiny Plot of Precolonial Terrain”, Hyperallergic, November 14, 2016 Alden Projects on the Lower East Side is marking 50 years since Alan Sonfist proposed reclaiming land in New York City for memorials to lost nature.
https://hyperallergic.com/337906/time-landscape-alan-sonfist/

Wayne Conti – much-celebrated as dying, but still there

Wayne Conti of Mercer Street Books -- survivor!
https://noho.bid/neighborhood-spotlight-reflecting-30-years-noho-wayne-conti-mercer-books

"Mercer Street Books & Records", March 27, 2018
Jeremiah's Vanishing New York, a.k.a. The Book of Lamentations: a bitterly nostalgic look at a city in the process of going extinct
http://vanishingnewyork.blogspot.com/2018/03/mercer-street-books-records.html

On Richard Kostelanetz
Corey Kilgannon, "The Bibliomaniac of Ridgewood", April 4, 2018, New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/nyregion/the-bibliomaniac-of-ridgewood.html

“Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952–1965”, NYU Gray Gallery, 2017
https://www.nyuad-artgallery.org/en_US/our-exhibitions/main-gallery/inventing-downtown-archive/

Jeffrey Deitch with Kembra Pfahler (left) at some swanky function

Memoir #12: How Are We Together?

Times Square Show collage by Teri Slotkin

In Search of Historical Colab. With this post I return to the series from my memoir research in NYC in late 2019. This is the 12th – it’s out of sequence because of intervening events. As I previously blogged, these were the passing of Barbara Ess and the exhibition of the Moore+ collection in Milwaukee this spring.
This 12th memoir post finishes the account of my delvings in the NYU library among the Andrea Callard papers, an early secretary of the Colab artists group. In late 1979 the group is on the verge of a split. The culprit (?) is the now-famed New Cinema project of No Wave filmmakers. After much rancour, Colab is saved by the bell – two spectacular exhibitions which have left a mark on NYC art history.

In late 1979, after a mere year and a half of life the Colab artists’ group teetered on the edge of oblivion. A meeting September 16, 1979 at Jenny Holzer’s house (Andrea Callard papers, box 1, folder 3) took up the matter of a basic split among members as to what Colab should be about – and where the grant money should be going.

Slapdash Cinema History

A storefront screening room on St. Marks Place called the New Cinema received $400. Colab members could get in for $1. This project turned into something of a hit after Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman wrote up the filmmakers as "No Wavelength: The Para-Punk Underground”.
Over the years, the quirky productions of these neo-populist filmmakers languished in obscurity. Only a few of them trickled out into the home video market, distributed by the later Colab project MWF Video Club (1986-2002).
Interest in this wild moment of ad hoc film and video production smoldered underground. In 2008 the mix of No Wave music and film was fondly recalled in Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore’s 2008 book No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York. 1976-1980.

Mudd Club owner Steve Mass is executed by 'esoterrorists' Eric Mitchell and Anya Phillips in "Kidnapped" 1978

The film-to-video productions shown at New Cinema have since had an after-life as museum and art-house revivals (some links are in the bibliography below). After the short-lived New Cinema, several of the films were screened again folded during film nights at the basement Club 57. The Club was celebrated in a MoMA exhibition of 2017-18 “Club 57: Film, Performance, and Art in the East Village, 1978–1983” (with catalogue). The exhibition was organized by the MoMA film department.

Fuck You, Buddy

But back in ‘79 there was discontent with this project within the Colab group. The lead organizer Eric Mitchell was entirely disinterested in accepting artists’ films for screening. Even Scott and Beth B, whose work had recently screened at Max’s Kansas City, weren’t in the project. None of the Potato Wolf collaborative work for cable TV was shown. New Cinema was a project focussed on Eric and his close friends.
I saw many of the films the New Cinema showed. I even wrote an admiring review of “Kidnapped” for a short-lived mini-glossy magazine called Cover. “Men in Orbit” was really funny. But I couldn’t understand the way many of these filmmakers behaved towards their fellow artists. Between sharpeening their hard-boiled bohemian poses on others, and their single-minded careerism, many in the New Cinema crowd – (I called them the “glamour faction”) – could be quite annoying.
As it happens, I grew up in LA. My dad was on the fringes of the business. I knew that many TV and movie people were toxic and forgettable. Why replicate their behavioral models within our collaboration?
The film industry was (and remains) a hard, shitty business littered with busted careers and wasted lives. As it turned out, very few of these art filmmakers got the Hollywood deals they aimed for. (Exceptions: Beth B and Amos Poe got one picture; Jim Jarmusch, an NYU film grad who was on the fringes of No Wave got famous.)

“All of Us or None”?

This irritation led to the proposal by theater artist “C. Lindzee” (Lindzee Smith?) that “all projects funded by Colab have open participation by Colab members”.
The amended proposal, “Collaborative Projects does not hold as a general principle that all projects that receive money must be open to the participation of all members, but that each project be considered for funding on its own merits as determined by the membership” was defeated by two votes. A competing proposal, “All projects funded by Collaborative Projects are open to the participation of all Colab members” was a dead tie. No vote was held on a proposal that the majority of funds go to projects with open participation.
The even split between pressure to collectivize and the resistance of individualists threatened the group’s existence. An undated record of discussions among officers (folder 5) seems to come out of that period. It concerns the split, the “inability to see Colab as cohesive group”. There is a lot of disconnected heavy thought in these notes, but there’s a grim tentative conclusion – “If ‘members’ cannot decide 1. who are members 2. what a quorum is 3. which collaborative projects to undertake then we decide that the ‘workshop’ is a failure, we take our administrative [illegible] and divide $ up equally, mail checks and letters to everyone and then see if collaborative works ensue, if any more meetings are held, etc. see how many cash their checks, then burn checkbook, records, etc. Sign blood pact w CF, AC, TO”. (That is Coleen, Andrea and Tom. Andrea: Uli was the treasurer. But, the records no longer exist.)

We’re Out of Here

The problems were resolved as I recall by the abrupt wholesale disappearance of New Cinema interested people from Colab meetings.
My feelings as I remember them were thanks that all those conflictive angry people were gone. Now we might get something done.
There’s a real sense of drama reading these files from before the big events of the Real Estate and Time Square shows. Those two high-profile actions – the first in January, the second in June of 1980 – broke open all sorts of possibilities for the group and its members, and mooted a lot of the earlier conflicts. Although the same kinds of conflicts would surface later, those events clearly saved Colab from disintegration.

Real Estate Show propaganda collage, 1980

The Real Estate Show and the Times Square Show have both received some attention in later historically based exhibitions. The Real Estate Show story and the founding of ABC No Rio are sketched in the blog post #13 here, “Busting Moves, Breaking Locks”.
It’s also recounted in the online version of the 1985 catalogue “ABC No Rio Dinero” mounted by Marc Miller. And again, exhaustively and in the context of earlier Lower East Side occupations in my zine “House Magic” #6 – again on the occasion of an exhibition in 2014 – “The Real Estate Show Revisited”.

Times Square, Again and Again

I tell my Times Square Show story in the book I’ll publish next year. But the most complete picture of the genesis and production of that watershed artist-organized exhibition is given in the website for the 2012 show "Times Square Show Revisited" at Hunter College, which includes some 30 interviews. The show is introduced by a text I quote:
“The Times Square Show was staged during June of 1980, at the corner of 41st Street and Seventh Avenue in New York City. In the barrage of media attention that was to accompany the exhibition's run, Village Voice writer Richard Goldstein heralded the TSS as "The First Radical Art Show of the 80s." Instead of a carefully controlled environment, the viewer experienced a profusion of art and activity contained within a maze of rooms and hallways that took up all four floors plus the basement of a vacant building that formerly housed a massage parlor. There was no pristine, white-walled gallery space and no obvious, systematic way to identify the individuals who made the works on view.”
The website includes redactions of 30 interviews by Shawna Cooper. These conversations show the tremendous variety of perspectives on this event, which included so many artists and performers. Everytime I read one I learn something new.

Pincus Liked It

Since I just stumbled on it, and I worked for him and liked him a lot, I'll quote from the late Robert Pincus-Witten’s review of the Hunter College show (he also taught there once) in Artforum of December, 2012. He quotes in turn his own journal notation of June 25, 1980:
“The unrepentant raunch of the Times Square Art Show—post-punk “Boonies,” plus porn, plus disco freak goes inner-city social Soul realist. Astonishing froth and media-hype, wonderful in a way one would never dream, even from the extolling newsprint of the Voice and Soho News. Installed at 41st and Seventh Avenue, in an old souvlaki joint-cum-massage parlor that out-grosses any alternative space yet conceived. Four floors of extravagant bad taste, which is of course, already codified and imitated—in short, its own good taste. Black artists . . . graffitists galore, neo-Feminists inquiring after bondage porn. Pleated fans depicting penetration, moving sex tales coupled with explicit anecdotes of all kinds; in short, the resolute antithesis of any high art notion associated with Formalism—with the proviso that this, too, this outrageous post-and-anti-Formalism, has its own recognized modes. An irony—Clyfford Still’s death notice in today’s Times. What would he have said? And who still cares?”
The artworld tables were turning. That show was a big deal.
Oh, and BTW, probably the most historically significant film deal happened there when Charlie Ahearn and Fab Five Fred Brathwaite agreed to make Wild Style.

A Closer Look

The TSS installation itself needs closer examination. It is recorded mainly in the photos Andrea Callard took of the show, which repose in the NYU library. Many surprises await researchers. I’ll note only a few of mine as I peered through a loupe at the slides in the binders. First, I searched for the mural by Jean-Michel Basquiat in the Fashion Lounge that so impressed Jeffrey Deitch. I remember looking for it when we were required to paint over the interior of the soon-to-be-demolished building we had “defaced” with our exhibition. I couldn’t find it.

J-M Basquiat’s aerosol mural in the TSS Fashion Lounge behind a rack of clothes splashed with house paint

There is a photo of it in that Artforum review by Pincus-Witten. Although Ted Stamm didn’t photograph it head on, the painting is distinctively J-MB. Jean-Michel had a bit of a rough start as a painter, but this aerosol work is exuberant.
Just outside the Fashion Lounge, there was a painted photocopy of Becky Howland’s drawing of the Shah of Iran raising a sword from the RES Field Office. Just beneath it in the photo is a fragment of a Samo graffiti, the Basquiat/Al Diaz collaborative project during that time.
I wandered that show countless times, but these sheets were like a trip to another place, alongside but not congruent with what I recall. The “Love and Death” room, with its dresses with cheap plastic boobs pasted to the wall, ropes, collages of bondage and porno with restraint, and slogans painted in red – “sold / cunt / heat”, and in black “witch / old maid / hag” – I recall the anger in this room was overwhelming. It was hard to be in it. These rooms had been the site of sex work, and some of the artists involved in that room had done that labor.

Erotic Psyche

Only recently, one of that team, Aline Mayer, visited Pompeii and wrote on Facebook that she found herself sensitive to the vibes of the female sex slaves who had worked in the rooms of the Wolf Brothel there. After TSS Aline worked with Bradley Eros and others to produce the Erotic Psyche show at ABC No Rio, where the audience was more friendly than the multitudes around Times Square.

“Promethea” performance with Erotic Psyche, 1988; alinemare.com

The publicity signboards I made for the show are in those photos. Artworks that my parents bought from the show are also documented. (They were in the Spring 2021 show in Milwaukee, discussed in earlier blog posts.)
Box 1, folder 55 has Andrea’s texts from that period with more surprises, mainly of the numerous side acts by non-Colab people (often spelled wrong) – performance by the mysterious writer and professional sadist Terence Sellers, video (?) by master alt-mechanic Mark Pauline of Survival Research Labs, San Francisco, a “feature film by Jim Jarmish” (sic), and a long text with drawings by R.L. Seltman. (For the occasion, RL produced that work based on his project of walking every street in Manhattan. – Andrea)
R.L. was a macher in the Little Italy art scene, north of Soho, west of the Lower East Side, and literally large. He had a hand in generating the Storefront for Art & Architecture, Arleen Schloss’s A’s salon and No Se No social club, locus of the Rivington School, among other venues.
Andrea was in touch with him, and he sent her a lengthy text about his experiences around the Times Square area. It’s a fascinating read. Like many artists, he was drawn to the area. He tells of inadvertently launching a bomb scare, and stepping over a dead body as he emerged from a movie theater. He interviewed a porn film producer. Another dead body (heart attack) and the people hurrying by it. “Each time I intersected with [the Times Square area] I would witness a crime.”

Next: “Weird Creatures of the State”

LINKS

Jim Hoberman, "No Wavelength: The Para-Punk Underground" in the Village Voice, May 1979
http://www.luxonline.org.uk/articles/no_wavelength(1).html

MWF Video Club collection list
http://www.brickhaus.com/amoore/
some downloadable files
https://archive.org/details/mwf_video_club

“Club 57: Film, Performance, and Art in the East Village, 1978–1983”
https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/3824

Eric Mitchell, the enfant terrible of Colab film
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Mitchell_(filmmaker)

ABC No Rio Dinero book online
https://98bowery.com/return-to-the-bowery/abcnorio-the-book

“House Magic” 6 “The Real Estate Show Revisited”, April 2014
https://sites.google.com/site/housemagicbfc/

Shawna Cooper interviews: "Making History: Accounts of the Times Square Show"
http://www.timessquareshowrevisited.com/accounts.html

MORE:

John Lurie interview with Andrea Callard about "Men in Orbit"
https://wp.nyu.edu/orphanfilm/2021/02/18/men-in-orbit-1979/

Céline Murillo, “’I’ll play in yours if you play in mine’: Co-creation in COLAB’s films (New York, 1978-1985)” September 17, 2020. She writes on "Kidnapped" and "Wild Style"
https://asapjournal.com/ill-play-in-yours-if-you-play-in-mine-co-creation-in-colabs-films-new-york-1978-1985-celine-murillo/

PRINT:

Ron Magliozzi and Sophie Cavoulacos, Club 57: Film, Performance, and Art in the East Village, 1978-1983 (MoMA, 2017)

Thurston Moore, Byron Coley et al. No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York. 1976-1980 (Abrams, 2008)

Basquiat signboard for TSS in front of Lisa Kahane’s photo in the "Basquiat the Artist and His New York Scene" show, Schunck, Heerlen, NL, 2012. Photo Christy Rupp