Talking NYC in London, Post #2: Harlem, Free Jazz Space, and Club Kids

Ornette Coleman and friends at Artists House

This is the 2nd in a series of posts about the “Approaching Downtown” symposium at the Courtauld Institute, London, in mid-July. It is drawn from my notes of a remarkable several days of talk about the late 20th century art and culture of downtown NYC. Today was the day to unpack some of the aspects of downtown NYC which were overlooked by mainstream media at the time – which was, in truth, a major theme of this gathering.


Among the more welcome discoveries in the talks for me was a presentation by Amy Tobin (U of Cambridge) on the work of Candace Hill-Montgomery. She was one among a handful of black artists who participated in our group Colab’s watershed 1980 Times Square Show. She collaborated on the room dedicated to the notorious 1968 police murder of Fred Hampton. Hill-Montgomery also exhibited a blowup of the famous horrific photo of a chained-up black victim of KKK murder, a work she called “Unknown Relative”. The artists who worked on the Hampton installation were Hill-Montgomery, David Hammons, Bill Stephens and Angela Fremont. At that moment in 1980, the case against the Chicago police officers who assassinated Fred Hampton was being reopened.
Recently the charismatic Black Panther leader and the informant who helped the police set up the killing have become the subject of a Hollywood movie.

Site-Specific

Tobin showed Hill-Montgomery’s “Reflections on Vacancy”, a work in Harlem in which she put mylar sheets over empty windows in a vacant building, then followed their decay in an on-site process installation.
There are no photos online of this work for me to grab. Tobin is recovering an artist who has long remained in the shadows. Even the Times Square Show installation, while it’s often mentioned is not imaged online. It was a chaotic environment, difficult to snap.

Fashion Moda in the South Bronx

Tobin pulled her images from the Fashion Moda artists’ file at Fales Library’s Fashion Moda papers. That’s the underknown South Bronx art project space opened by Stefan Eins with Joe Lewis in 1978. CH-M’s work at Fashion Moda was in the large street-level display window. She was “thinking about the death of young people in the neighborhood”.

Candace Hill-Montgomery's installation at Artists Space


In those archives Tobin found a photo of Hill-Mongomery’s “Black and White Enclosure” (1979), a fence on a vacant lot enclosing an improbable parked boat. In her show at Artists Space, a white picket fence sits before a background mural of Harlem at night. These seem like understated ironic comments on the distance between devastated poor neighborhoods in NYC and the mostly white suburban enclaves that surround major cities throughout the USA.
Tobin spoke of the de facto segregation in the art world at the time which Hill-Mongomery and other black artists faced. Later in the symposium, during a virtual reading and talk event, CH-M said it was hard for her to get downtown to meetings and events because she was living uptown, working as a teacher and taking care of two children.

“Space Is Freedom”

Bentley Brown (NYU) talked about the world of his artist painter father, the black bohemia of jazz loft studios. He traced a line from the rent parties of Harlem days to the embrace of loft living as an aesthetic by avant garde jazz musicians.
Ornette Coleman purchased the first and third floor lofts at 131 Prince Street from George Maciunas, the famous Fluxus “developer”. Coleman opened Artists House there, a convivial site of musical improvisation. One visitor was enraptured by the scene, the habitues, the conversations – “I couldn’t believe someone lived like this.”

Kicked Out Like All the Rest

Brown told us that Coleman lost control of his Artists House loft spaces through processes that are still unclear. That same kind of mysterious loss happened to Steve Cannon of Tribes toward the end of his life. It happened to an entire building given over in the 1970s for public use to the CHARAS group at 7th Street and Avenue A which housed a free jazz improv space as its last vestige into the 1990s (as told by Fred Good to Clayton Patterson in CP’s 2007 compilation Resistance).
In tracking the places of jazz music, Brown showed a 1959 photo of a Coleman concert at the Five Spot taken by Bob Parent.
I knew Bob Parent in his day job as an art director for the Guardian indie left weekly. He told us that during his trips to Cuba they called him “Arbolito” because he had so many cameras hanging from him. I didn’t know his off-work job as a jazz photog.
Parent devised special diffused light equipment because he didn’t like to use a flash. He died suddenly, and his archive was in disarray; today it seems to have vanished.

Ted-ucate Yourself

A 2019 installation of Ted Joan's work arranged by David Hammons

Parent’s photo of the Five Spot shows a poster for a show by Ted Joans on the wall. We had a chance to see the remarkable Global Surrealism show at the Tate in London which included the enormous room-length “exquisite corpse” Ted Joans carried with him around the world, with a mix of poets, artists and musicians contributing to the collaboration.

Bentley Brown concluded his talk with the question: “Why don’t we allow black artists to be avant garde?” Why must they always be chained to the subject matter of their experiences?

“Illegal America”

In discussion, Colby Chamberlain (Cleveland Institute of Art) spoke on the exhibition that began the long-running alternative space, Exit Art. Jeanette Ingberman and her partner Papo Colo did the “Illegal America” show as their first show in their first space. (Exit Art had at least three incarnations.) I saw this show with my partner Becky Howland when we were running ABC No Rio. We were amazed to find the Real Estate Show occupation was among the venerable examples of transgressive art actions featured there.

Exit Art's "Illegal America" catalogue, with the dollar bill seal

Among the images Colby showed was our RES co-conspirator Peter Mönnig sitting in traffic inside a pickle barrel. Surely a classic, like a rodeo clown playing with the unconscious “bulls” of the roadway. Another of our partners in crime, Ann Messner was in that catalogue too, probably her film of stealing shirts at a department store sale.
Chamberlain worked at Exit Art with Jeanette Ingberman. He wrote on the Fluxhouse co-ops of George Maciunas. He presented later on day three on illegalisms in art.
“There’s an alternative history of Soho”, he said, a could-have-been. “Everyone was living within the pale of law.” This is part of the structure of feeling of downtown, of “constant precarity and exposure”. But getting along just fine, by adhering to unwritten rules and norms.
Bentley Brown commented, “Your delinquency is your survival.”

Workshop Your Feelings

Jennifer Doyle (U of Calif., Riverside) and Ricardo Montez (New School, NYC) jointly led a workshop called “A Geography in Solution: Downtown as a Structure of Feeling”. The term is from Raymond Williams, which Doyle said is much like the “sense of a scene”. [See note below]
She’s been closely involved for years with a Los Angeles art space called Human Resources, near Chinatown. It sounds like a classic experimental alternative space, with its own particular culture and, of course, a large accumulation of “art trash”. (At ABC No Rio we called that a “permanent collection”.)

Corey Fogel performing at Human Resources, Los Angeles

Mixed in with the process of historicization, i.e. writing histories, is what Doyle called the “chronopoetics of extractive capital”, a kind of retrospective FOMA, a feeling that “you’re always too late” on the scene.
Doyle spoke of the special “structure of feeling” around the Human Resources art space and its management, She’d been thinking to do a series of interviews with long-time participants. Some involved in the place were opposed to that project, seeing this as a violation of the culture of the place.
Hearing this, I was moved to cry out, “Don’t listen to them!”

Who and What Is “Downtown”?

Ricardo Montez worked on Nelson Sullivan, the videotista associated with the Alig-era “club kids”. Once on YouTube I watched his documentation of the flash mob party these flaming creatures instigated at the MacDonalds in Times Square. Nelson Sullivan “produced himself as downtown”, Montez said, like the perennial nightlife creature and columnist Michael Musto. (I noticed in NYC in May of ‘22 a print copy of a revivified Village Voice; Musto had a text in it.)

Still from a Nelson Sullivan video

This was also a rare moment to gripe about the (by now stuffed) elephant in the room, the uninhabitability of NYC today and its gentrification, which can only be compared to a mountain top removal kind of strip mining, with its attendant devastating runoff and pollution.
We were reminded that the trans artist Tourmaline, who we’d seen earlier in a video dancing on the balcony of the Whitney, was among those who fought against the gentrification of the West Side piers when young queer people were fenced out.
Montez claimed that the Whitney Museum has “appropriated downtown”, citing the recent David Wojnarowicz show (which came to Madrid). Someone quoted Gary Indiana on the rapacious real estate practices of NYU, for which the staff of the Fales collection are ritually constrained to apologize. (I know of no book or article that describes these practices. Citation, please?)
I was reminded of Nick Zedd’s classic line when the Fales purchased his archive, and he moved to Mexico City – “NYU destroyed New York, but at least they paid me to leave town.”

NOTE on the “structure of feeling”:
* Stuart Hall defines the term further in Familiar Stranger (2017)> He learns the 'structure of feeling' through his diasporic experience, realizing that he does not share the English "habitus -- a way of life, forms of customary behavior, a structure of common sense, taken-for-granted assumptions, affective identifications and presuppositions about the society, and how things work" (p. 205-207), and therefore cannot work as a professor of English literature. This is both my advantage and my handicap vis a vis having lived the times in NYC which were under discussion in London. The knowledges I have are special and unshareable -- (although by now rather gummed over by decades of study of secondary material). At the same time, I cannot see from outside that nimbus of experiences to ask the questions and ken the relationships that matter for the moment in which an historical account will appear.

NEXT – “Art Gangs” continues with talks about Charlotte Moorman and the Avant Garde Festival, Helio Oiticica and Mario Montes, Heresies, and that old New Museum/Colab kerfuffle.

REFERENCES

I couldn’t find a citation online for the 1980 reopening of the Fred Hampton murder case; only this precis of the early history of the case --
https://peopleslawoffice.com/about-civil-rights-lawyers/history/the-fred-hampton-murder-trial/

Images of the Times Square Show installations (without Candace Hill-Mongomery’s work, among many others)
https://collaborativeprojects.wordpress.com/times-square-show-1980/

Bob Parent, jazz photographer; as of 2019, the archive was in limbo…
https://www.allaboutjazz.com/the-bob-parent-archive-project-a-photographers-legacy-quietly-grows-by-aaj-staff

Yuko Otomo, “Let’s get TEDucated! Tribute to Ted Joans”, June 2015
http://www.arteidolia.com/tribute-to-ted-joans-yuko-otomo/

“Approaching Downtown” NYC in London: Post #1

Still from Vivienne Dick’s film "Guerillère Talks" (1978; on Mubi)

I was recently in London at a meeting to discuss the cultural history of late 20th century in downtown New York City. I’m going to blog some notes from that symposium. The experience of those few days was so full, so overflowing with realizations, correspondences, and the kind of frisson one gets from realizing new avenues of inquiry that I’ll only be able to share some of it. (I’ll probably get some names wrong; please comment or email me, and I’ll fix them.)
Most of the scholars there were young. My mind teemed with plans, like them. But what is possible for them is no longer so for me. We’ll see. Even what I can start and not finish might be useful.

Punkademics

The gathering took place at the venerable Courtauld Institute of art history. It was a surprising host for students of all this punky funky trashy stuff we swam with in late century NYC. But so it was. It’s old stuff now; send in the “punkademics”.

Greer Lankton's doll in Nick Zedd's film “Bogus Man” (1980; on Mubi)
Actually, this study has been going on for some years, and professors are making their names on it. New archival resources are slowly accumulating. It’s a kick to meet people who aren’t MA or early-stage PhD students, who, when you ask them, “Did you see this or that archive?” Answer: “Of course.” And tell you about another one.
I’ve been away from academia for so long (I last taught a class in ‘07; last formally presented in ‘11) that a lot has changed. And this is Europe so the frames of reference are different from the USA. White scholars are working on black artists. I picked up Stuart Hall’s memoir at the airport, and quickly realized there’s more to the black experience than our canonical Brooklyn story.

Rolling Luggage

I arrived late from the airport and missed both Vivienne Dick’s film "Guerillère Talks" (1978), and the presentation of Marci Kwon (Stanford U) on Martin Wong and Cyle Metzger (Bradley U) on Greer Lankton. My Colab pal Joseph Nechvatal heard them, and told me Kwon talked about Martin’s wild bohemian life in San Francisco before he moved to NYC. In the discussion, it was mentioned that the Greer Lankton doll Nick Zedd used in his film “Bogus Man” is now in the collection of Iggy Pop.

At right: Frank O'Hara
Next, during a panel on the New York School of poets “in and out of NYC”, Daniel Kane (Uppsala U), the author of [Do You Have a Band?: Poetry and Punk Rock in NYC, 2017], talked about Patti Smith. Patti’s idea of herself as a shaman or a seer is antithetical to community. She explicitly rejected collaboration with the community of NYC poets to reach for stardom, Kane said, citing her correspondence. She is “a poetry-referencing rock star”.
(I saw her recent concert in Madrid. It was a boring hash of old hits. The high moment was her soaring reading of a verse by Ginsberg. I later saw Iggy Pop. He’s no poet, but he’s not a boring act.)

Not that issue of the Rat
TAZ and ‘Sentimental Spit’

Discussion turned on the question of community, of coterie, a word with a rural etymology. As if, like cotters, the group of poets only occupy their positions in return for their labour of maintaining the scene. A good part of the New York School was about rejecting other poets, especially the rhythm and clarity of, say, Vachel Lindsay. Of Dylan Thomas, with his sentimental narrative content, Frank O’Hara said, “I can’t stand all that Welsh spit.”
Kane referenced the TAZ – the “temporary autonomous zone” concept as a touchstone of community. (He didn’t cite the recently deceased Peter Lamborn Wilson, nor did he seem to grok the demotic nature of that idea.)
Rosa Campbell (U of St. Andrew) and Rona Cran (U of Birgmingham) presented on women poets in the NY School of poets, especially Barbara Guest. Of course they didn’t get much attention, but the tables have been turning for some time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89pOmcTVbTY 1960s TV series, “USA: Poetry” episode with Frank O'Hara and Ed Sanders

“I Wouldn’t Kick Her Out of Bed…”

Campbell glossed Ed Sanders’ ‘60s-period remarks on various fuckable poet women in his mimeo journal “Fuck You” (a magazine of the arts). Later I told her about the women’s issue of Rat, the Lower East Side underground newspaper that was snatched away from its sexist male editors. (The takeover was narrativized in the World War 3, Shameless Feminists issue by participant Susan Simensky Bietila and others in 2019.)

The “Floating Bear” poetry newsletter
Women produced numerous literary magazines during this period. Rona Cran zeroed in on Diane Di Prima, who sustained the “Floating Bear” newsletter all by herself, typing, copying, distributing. “The unglamorous work of creating community fell to women.” Since her move to San Francisco Di Prima has certainly recouped her fair share. City Lights has been releasing her collected works.
Diarmuld Hesler (U of Cambridge), author of Wrong a biography of Dennis Cooper, spoke on Cooper’s early poems. Cooper was part of the Beyond Baroque group of poets in Los Angeles, who performed on the Venice boardwalk. He ran a small magazine called “Little Caesar” publishing NYCers. With this, Cooper created “an imaginary transcontinental community”. Hesler also spoke about a group in Washington, D.C. around the early ‘70s magazine “Mass Transit” which he said should be “considered as another center of NY School poetry”.

Tourmaline in Salacia, 2019 film
“When You Leave New York…”

This kind of thinking is old hat, and just as influential. Really most NYC artists came from elsewhere, traveled, moved away, or stayed for just a short time. New York is a port city, Joseph Nechvatal observed; ceaseless comings and goings are its principal characteristic. Even though only the rich or high-end workaholics can really think of moving there now, de-centering NYC by emphasizing its national and international networks is still hard work.
Rona Cran asked what happened to the sociability of the NY poets when the AIDS plague hit? I immediately thought of the ABC No Rio open mic crowd, the slam poets, who were younger than the classic NY School, and for whom the plague was brutal. Winchester Chimes died of it, although he was very much a rhyming, rhythmic subject-oriented poet, the kind NY School disdained.
Cran said the situation spoke to the seriousness of poetry. She cited Adrienne Rich – “poetry must speak of extremity.”
Darius Bost (U of Illinois) showed a video by Tourmaline, “The Atlantic Is a Sea of Bones” (2017), performed at the Whitney Museum. Tourmaline was a trans hustler who slept as a homeless person on the Hudson Piers back in the day. Bost showed Katsuo Naito’s “West Side Rendezvous” (2011), documentary photos of street sex workers in the age of AIDS. Naito lived in Harlem, and knew some of his subjects from that neighborhood. Many are long dead. This is the neglected underside, Bost said, of black feminist poetics and the vogue aesthetic.

This is a deep history, of the kind that the RepoHistory public art project sought to excavate. Pier 17, now the South Street Seaport, was the port of disembarkation for slaves. It was near the Wall Street slave market.
I was tipped to this whole London event by Fiona Anderson, a co-organizer of the conference. She wrote Cruising the Dead River: David Wojnarowicz and New York's Ruined Waterfront (2019). We corresponded when I organized a screening of films Woj had collaborated on for the Reina Sofia iteration of his retrospective in Madrid. (I blogged a bunch about this here then, in the Spring of ‘19; some of it made it into my new book, Art Worker.)

From Katsuo Naito’s “West Side Rendezvous” (2011)
And that was just part of the first day!

TO BE CONTINUED

REFERENCES

Anna Zarra Aldrich, “I smell a RAT” (2018), on the women’s takeover of the underground newspaper
https://blogs.lib.uconn.edu/archives/2018/04/25/i-smell-a-rat/

Muna Mire, "Tourmaline Summons the Queer Past", 2020
https://www.frieze.com/article/tourmaline-summons-queer-past

Images from Katsuo Naito’s “West Side Rendezvous” (2011) at:
https://intolerablefashion.typepad.com/intolerable-fashion/2011/07/images-from-katsu-naitos-west-side-rendezvous-.html

RepoHistory sign, “Who owns your life?,” by Carin Kuoni

Memoir #16: Dances of the Past (Part One)

Master contact improvisor Steve Paxton is in this photo somewhere

This is the 16th post from my memoir project, an account of my 30 years in the NYC artworld. The focus of this post is on my time in the mid-1970s as I discovered the artists’ community of SoHo. I fell in with a group of dancers…. The printed book, “Art Worker”, is scheduled for May ‘22 delivery, and a launch at the Miss Read festival in Berlin. The posts on this blog come from research I did in 2019 in NYC.

The last interview I posted here was with Robin Winters. Robin is a fascinating conversationalist, and our talk ranged over many subjects. He was in the middle of a series of shows of other artists in his studio he called the Key Club. When we met, Robert Hawkins was sitting on the sofa amongst his paintings of cave men and fires in a wax museum where figures of sainted artists were being carried to safety or going up in flames… a trans-historical mise en scene!
Another part of my past was around the corner – oddly enough, in the same building but cut off from the Broadway side. On Mercer Street, Julie Harrison still lives in the loft she moved into as a young dancer and art student 40-odd years ago.
I didn’t know Julie so well then, although she was close to some good friends. Julie seemed a little wild. It turns out I didn’t know the half of it!
Now she is thoroughly settled on Mercer Street. She’s a mom. She travels and makes visual art. She lives with a publisher and archivist. Everywhere in the front of the loft are piles of carefully annotated plastic boxes of dead artists’ files. It’s nothing like the open space I recall from the ‘70s. We sat down to talk in the living area in the back.

A Conversation with Julie Harrison

Alan Moore: I remember the balalaika orchestra rehearsing here. Two dozen Russian musicians tinkling away…

The perfofmance on a ladder

Julie Harrison: Yes. We rented out the space for classes, rehearsals, and performances. I moved to New York in fall of ‘76…. and moved into the loft in February of ’78. Cara [Brownell] had gotten this place the year before. I bought out Peggy Kaye’s share [in those days, it was called “key money” or “fixture fee,” which amounted to what the person spent to build a kitchen, etc]. … Cara and I lived together for a year. We were lovers for a while, then we split up. She left and I stayed.
AM: I remember you guys doing an amazing performance on a ladder. Falling on each other with sudden stops. It looked so dangerous.
JH: Prudencio en Transito at Franklin Furnace [in 1979]. Part of it was on a ladder, and a hammock, and there was a little television up in the corner like they used to have in bodegas and restaurants. That was after Cara and I spent four months in Mexico, Guatemala and Belize. We traveled around. We met Robert Cooney down there, and the three of us traveled together shooting Super 8 film. I reshot it on video, and that was the video that we showed in that performance. …
So, Cara moved out. Neil Zusman moved in, he lived here for a year. We became lovers. Then I went off to Italy and came back, married to Robert Kleyn. ...
We had a performance space in the loft. Many people performed here. Demi [Fritz Demmer] performed here, Liz Pasquale, and others.

Liz Pasquale in 1979

AM: I ran into Fritz just a few days ago at the 11th Street bar…. I ran into Fritz just a few days ago at the 11th Street bar…. I met him back then at the Art-Rite office. He was in my film “Party Noise” (1979). He had one of the best scenes, with Paul McMahon….
Here on Mercer Street, I remember hanging out with all these dancers. … Eric Bogosian came over here.
JH: Eric was the dance curator at the Kitchen. … Charlie Morrow would get us together and we’d do some chanting things….
So, Cara and I started teaching contact improv[isation]…. We taught kids dance classes in Saratoga, we’d travel up there. When I think back on it. it seems like years and years, but we were only together for a year. …

Fritz Demmer's Art-Rite issue #20, 1978

First, I found Nancy [Toft]. She was married to [Jon] Gibson, the clarinetist. I had heard she needed dancers, so I went and performed with Nancy Toft and 30 other dancers at P.S. 1. That’s where I met Peggy Kaye. P.S. 1 was very raw and rough then. Through Peggy I met Cara. I ran into Peggy on Mercer Street. They had sanded the floor to make a 1000 square foot dance space, and the rest was completely raw. … Cara and I started working together because she had studied with Ken Jacobs in Binghamton… Ralph Hocking and Ernie Gehr also taught up there… a small group of people at that time affiliated with the Anthology Film Archives, then on Wooster Street. Cara was the only person I knew that wanted to put film and video and performance all together. And we did this great piece [Ellipsis] up in Binghamton at the Experimental Television Center that had seven monitors and five cameras set up….
We joined up with Jean Dupuy who was doing these Grommet performances. He’d invite people to do a three or five minute piece. … We did something on Broadway and then at P.S. 1. They had built these walls and a tower, and we were involved in that. …

Soup & Tart

[AM intervention – I wrote about Jean Dupuy for Artforum, when he lived on 13th Street. I attended his Soup & Tart event at the Kitchen, a “marathon performance soiree” in 1974. I was with him in a kitchen upstairs when he cooked down two massive pans of leeks for the soup. At the time, I didn't realize the depth of his involvement with Fluxus. The 13th Street building was torn down, and in ‘76 Jean moved into the last of the artists' co-ops that George Maciunas, the Fluxus animateur, formed in New York City. Nam June Paik among others lived there. Dupuy and his partner Olga Adorno (my only client for Library News, my personalized anthology of automatic texts) produced the Grommet Gallery projects in that space on Broadway.

Jean Dupuy looks at Olga Adorno, via documentsdartistes.org

[Jean later rented the front half of the space to Emily Harvey, who opened a gallery. It persists as a foundation there today, charmingly dedicated to “supporting ideas resistant to frameworks of easy legibility” (emilyharveyfoundation.org, Grommet Gallery; accessed April 2020). The Village Voice dance critic Sally Banes, in her book Subversive Expectations: Performance Art and Paratheater in New York, 1976-85 (1998), describes a Grommet performance – 20 different events were performed simultaneously for an hour, each viewed through a metal eyelet stuck into a canvas curtain. Most centered on private acts. I recall viewing Jean and Olga fucking through one.]

The Breakup – and the New Partner

Julie Harrison: Cara and I broke up, and Diane Torr and I started working together in ’79. … We took a performance on the road and hitchhiked up to Massachusetts and Maine. We got picked up by these teenagers who were going to take daddy’s sailboat out to Nantucket. Diane said, Why don’t we go with you? We’ll cook. When we got there, we got a job in Nantucket as dishwashers, and we stayed there for a few weeks and met Buckminster Fuller, who was our hero, through the Nantucket Island School of Art and Design. … So when Diane and I stopped working together she started the drag thing. Neil and I were working together in 1980, going up to the Experimental TV Center.

[AM intervention – I met Diane at a party in a housing project, at the apartment of her then-boyfriend, who was some kind of Brit, probably a Scot. She was hosting her annual Burns Night performance. Haggis was consumed. I may indeed have met Cara Brownell through her. Diane Torr is best known for her work as a “drag king” – female-to-male gender-crossing, which she explored as a performer and writer. She told me some of her story, her years in a Bristol reformatory, hanging out at Oxford and sneaking into classes, and teenage years in the London counterculture. She came to NYC to study with Merce Cunningham, but shucked it for a more gritty scene. After her student visa expired, she stayed on as illegal, working strip clubs for money. Continuing as a feminist performer, she was instrumental in founding the Women’s One World (WOW) Cafe. I didn’t follow her theater career. I didn’t see much theater at all in NYC. She moved to Glasgow in 2002. I missed her when at last I traveled to see her. She died in 2017.]
AM: What did you do with Diane?
JH: We did a performance called It’s About Time. It was very unorganized. We had a date to perform and we put something together. We did this circle dance where we started walking together and then we started beating each other up, it became this brawl. Another part of it was making these Egyptian shapes, and dinosaur shapes. And we had a film. Virge Piersol shot a film of the two of us leaning against a wall….
AM: You guys all cycled through Colab.
JH: I started with Colab as soon as Cara did. Cara heard about it from you, I think. I don’t know how you two met. Do you remember that?
AM: I do not…. Maybe also through Diane.
JH: She and I joined Colab in ’77. Right at the beginning. The original list of Colab in ’77 has my Varick Street address on it. … We have disputed this. Coleen doesn’t think Colab was started until the fall of ’77, but I put my Varick address down, so it had to be the spring. Then I went away for the summer.… She has different memories, and she will dispute that.… A few years ago we were meeting and discussing possibilities. … We started the So-Called Committee when the Printed Matter show happened [coincident with the launch of A Book About Colab, 2016]… But then we started working on the traveling exhibition. ….
AM: That was Barry Blinderman at the Uni in Normal, Illinois. But he pulled the plug on that. He retired. Now he’s doing music in LA. You, Cara and Diane cycled through Colab but you didn’t see anything in the group for you, or you got frustrated or what?
JH: No no, I was fairly involved with Colab. I did Potato Wolf shows. The thing is, I was working on my masters degree at NYU. I was in graduate school from 1977 to 1980. … and was extremely busy. When did we start topless dancing to make money? Diane started doing it a little later, in New Jersey. Cara started first. She told me about it. I tried it and said, “Wow, this is easy, this is good money. Not a problem.” So we topless go-go danced ’78 through ’80. … So, I was go-go dancing, I was in graduate school, I was making performaces and I was doing Colab stuff….
Cara and I programmed videos at the Times Square Show. … [which must have been how I showed “Party Noise” there, not on the printed program]. I wasn’t really doing any visual art at that time. I was making photographs. … not documentary, but conceptual, performance time-based. I was also working for Willoughby Sharp in graduate school. … My work for him was a little scam … he would say he’s paying me, and NYU would pay half of that. … I was his private secretary. Sometimes I’d just take naps at his place.

Liza Bear and Willoughby Sharp ca. 1972

AM: He was trying to set up a LIP [Live Injection Point into Manhattan Cable TV for video programming].
JH: Yes, that was in 1977. He had the basement of 112 Franklin Street. We had three television cameras on dollys that we could roll around. … We had a LIP that Duff Schweninger set up. … Cara and I did a few recordings of us dancing around and doing contact, I was taking photographs from monitors. Yoshiko [Chuma] was involved with us there…. Jon Gibson performed down there. And Jacob Burckhardt [and Michael Galasso who had worked with Robert Wilson]. There were three events there. I don’t think we were ever able to broadcast it live. We did record them. …
At this point Willoughby had sublet his loft and he had a little teeny apartment at the end of the loft on Franklin Street. … We would do the slow scans with his whole Toronto crowd, and people in Hawaii and San Francisco…

REFERENCES

Note: This is a disjointed interview, which covers a lot of ground. Some of the big things Julie references quickly are explicated in the following sources… but not all of them.

Wendy Perron, “How Grand Union Found a Home Outside of SoHo at the Walker”, n.d.
https://walkerart.org/collections/publications/side-by-side/how-grand-union-found-a-home-outside-of-soho-at-the-walker

Contact Quarterly Dance & Improvisation Journal
https://contactquarterly.com/contact-improvisation/about/

Liza Bear and Willoughby Sharp, "The Early History of Avalanche", 2005; PDF
https://primaryinformation.org/files/earlyhistoryofavalanche.pdf

Stephen Bottoms, “Diane Torr Obituary,” Guardian, June 29, 2017, accessed online April 2020. Bottoms co-authored a book with Torr, Sex, Drag and Male Roles (2010)

"basement at 112 Franklin Street"...
Benjamin Olin, “Sculpting the Teleculture: The Franklin Street Arts Center and the Live Injection Point,” Art Journal 78, no. 3 (Fall 2019): 76-95.

various authors, “The Second link : viewpoints on video in the eighties”, Walter Phillips Gallery, 1983, 116 pp. PDF – https://www.barbaralondon.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/1983-The-Second-Link_catalog-1.pdf

Gated academic texts:

On Franklin Furnace – Alan Moore and Debra Wacks, “Being There: The Tribeca Neighborhood of Franklin Furnace” TDR, Vol. 49, No. 1 (Spring, 2005), pp. 60-79 (20 pages)

[In the next part of our talk, Julie recalls her new media work with Willoughby Sharp and the Machine Language group, performances at A’s and PS 122, and her work in contact improvisation. She also expresses her disappointments with Colab.]

Grand Union Dance Company

Mondo Kim’s Midnight Show

In which the blogger reflects on the news that Kim’s Video in NYC will be recreated in the lobby of a theater in NYC. Says, that’s nice, but really consumption-oriented businesses are not that productive, and there are other models of presentation of moving image content which are more productive and generate more creative activity than video stores.

“Kim’s Video Is Back”!
I read this article with a weird mix of excitement and dismay (New York Times, “Kim’s Video Is Back In NYC” By Gabe Cohen 3/31-4/6, 2022). Mondo Kim’s was a legendary video store with an encyclopedic collection of rental moving image content – callin’ ‘em “movies” is not enough. (Like my grandma said it, “moon pichas” is closer.)
My gang then was involved in the VHS video distribution project MWF Video Club. We launched around the same time as Kim’s Video, and they were among our very first, and our most local client to buy artists and indie film and video art on tape.
Kim was a Korean dry cleaner who was expanding his video rental sideline. (Repeat customers important for both video rental and cleaning your clothes, a clear business synergy.) Kim hired an Arab emigre whose name I sadly don’t remember – call him Ahmed – who set up his new store. Ahmed was gegarious and friendly, and told me it was his plan to put the films in order by director, not star or genre. We talked video, and film on video many times. Ahmed bought numerous MWF titles for Kim’s, and because these videos wear out, they’d buy more after a year or so.
Then they stopped buying completely.
Why? By that time Ahmed had been fired. His set-up work was finished, and Kim was running the place himself. Usually he wasn’t there when we went to visit. If you could catch him in his place, he’d just say, “No”, not interested.

Facets Multimedia in Chicago

I figured maybe Kims was just ordering from Facets Video. Milos Stehlik and his pals had built this multimedia empire in Chicago as a non-profit, and they were distributing a lot of MWF videos, even the very obscure ones. They’d get a wholesale discount, and (like us), they’d discount to stores. So I figured Kim was just bundling all his orders with Facets.

Yongman Kim in 2014 when his last store closed. “I am the loser,” he said. “Netflix is the winner.” (Photo Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times)

Nick Zedd, who did the footwork with the stores more assiduously than us in order to sell his own videos, and hung out with people who worked there told me, “No” – Kim’s wasn’t buying anything. They were just dubbing their replacement copies – and the copies they would sell – off the ones they’d already bought.
So much for supporting independent artists. But Kim’s was never about that. It was about collecting, assembling the biggest collection of videos of anybody.

Big Fat Pile of VHS

Kim at least was not a philistine. When the store closed in 2014, he told the NY Times that he “ began his library by soliciting thousands of free titles from the Bulgarian and Czechoslovakian cultural consulates.” A clever start. “ ‘My personal style was more French and early Russian realism,’ he said. ‘I still believe the silent is the real form of film. Because too much dialogue builds barriers between people and nations.’”

When Kim’s went out of business, the businessman sought to arrange for a disposition of the collection that kept it together, and kept it in rental circulation. The form of his business had become Kim’s obsession. It was a setup no institution could accept. Some Italians apparently gratified Kim’s desires, and promised to set up a “Kim Museum” in Salemi, Sicily. The strange and improbable story of the immigration of the collection, told in the late Village Voice in 2012, reveals that at one point in the collection’s history, a streaming project was considered, copyright be damned. Indie artists usually can’t really afford to enforce their copyright if their work is stolen, even if they find out about it. Axiom #2: The artist will always get fucked.

“Obsessed Human Beings”

Tim League, of the Alamo Drafthouse theater chain says in in Cohen’s Times story that he’s been collecting the inventories of closed video stores for years. “They’re the work of some 20, 30 years of an obsessed human being’s collection,” he said.
Sure, but they are or were also businesses, and some businesspeople are megalo. They don’t understand themselves as they are, human traffickers in the products of other peoples’ creativity.

Other Models

A far more constructive project of moving image distribution was the Two Boots pizza chain’s Pioneer Theatre with a video store in the front of it. Again, like the Alamo chain featured in the Times text, it was a food service and cinema combine. (This is now common throughout the USA.) With a difference: Two Boots dealt directly and fairly with indie filmmakers over the years the place was operating. Rent killed it at last.
This came from the fact that both Phil Hartman and his partner Doris Kornish were involved with making films, and knew the Lower East Side community of filmmakers. The Pioneer was suited to their needs, which were to have a gathering place, and an actual movie theater to premiere new work. All the work lived in the video store, available in person, “on demand”.

Monday/Wednesday/Friday

The MWF Video Club started as a video rental operation. It was a later project of the artists’ group Colab, realizing a long-held ambition of the group to distribute their moving image work. MWF was artist-centric. It was set up as a rental cabinet, really, in my apartment in 1986. (Steve Stollman built it.) We did weekly Monday salons to screen work and develop stock. Artists working in moving image came because of their interest to meet each other and share their work at a time when there was almost no access to see it any other way. We were scheduled to open downstairs with a proper store, but an eviction forestalled that.
So the project took a turn towards sales, consumer VHS sales, with my house as the back office. (Our last catalogue is still online, thanks to Pam Payne.) It persisted until the very early ‘00s, through a regular series of screenings, many in nightclubs. Grant money paid artists for some of those, but most were our own aggregations of sales stock, i.e., we showed what we were selling. The screenings often got hybrid, including performances and wall exhibits.
MWF Video Club finished in the early ‘00s. It’s ghost flickered back into view briefly at the Trenton State U art gallery in NJ, and for the first 2010 "Lumen" video and performance festival on Staten Island. MWF Video occupied one of the shipping containers the organizers made available. We had the necessary gear in storage -- a rotating VHS display fixture, numerous boxed-up sales stock, VCR players and monitors, and the all-important soft rewind machine.

Hairpin Turn on the Digital Highway

MWF Video distribution was defeated by the first digital turn, the format change from VHS to DVD. (That format sucks, BTW, as it is twice physically unstable with handling and delicate machines, not to mention its dubious longevity.) Orders dwindled to nothing, and MWF Video Club entered its ghost phase, its archival afterlife. After a long period of slumber in various storage spaces, the collection of some 600 videotapes in different formats was taken in hand by the XFR Collective of moving image archivists. They came together out of the New Museum project “XFR STN”, which won an award and had a lot of resonance with the Rhizome contingent of that institution itself.
(A PDF of the exhibition catalogue with numerous artists’ statements is in the LINKS section of this blog post.)
The XFR Collective has been working with the MWF archive for some time. First came the work of making an inventory, then selection for transfer of analog recordings to digital files. Many of the transfers XFR and the New Museum project made have been mounted to Archive.org as part of the “MWF Video Club” there. If anyone wants to watch them, they can, for free. BYO pizza.

“Only for Art”

The first free on-demand hosting of MWF videos, however, was made by Ubu Web, the incredible personal project of online hosting of avant-garde materials. Ubu Web put up a couple of Colab videos (Colab is the parent organization of MWF Video Club). Ubu Web addresses the problem of access to the insane amount of material they have by tweeting about it – UbuWeb at @ubuweb sends out regular tantalizing links into the social media ocean of aleatory distractions.

You Can’t Step into the Same Stream Twice

The "lively arts" and their recorded traces are in continuous flux. The commercial means of delivering this content to consumers also changes greatly over time.
Some of these varied means overlap in Milwaukee, a serious film-loving town. After my parents settled there, I visited over many years, and observed some of these changes.

Orientalism

The pride of cineaste culture in MKE is the Oriental Theater. Nearby was a great idiosyncratic personal video rental store of the kind Mr. League of Alamo Drafthouse loves so well. The Oriental is a grand Depression-era movie palace which happens to have a pretty deep stage. (Staten Island has two of these; one in the hands of Christians and the other I believe still abandoned.) It's a building from the era when cinema was emerging from vaudeville, and live acts were still draws for older popular audiences.

Interior of the main screen of the Oriental Theatre, Milwaukee

The theater is the locus of the well-regarded annual MKE Film Festival, a well-developed project with significant oligarch support. It's a non-profit, like the theater itself, and mobilizes screening venues all over town during its run.
It makes sense for a creatively minded business to seek funding support through an alliance with a non-profit. Since the days Ed Koch’s mayoral admin floated commercial rent control for NYC (in the ‘80s; it sank like stone), I’ve thought the only way to preserve culturally important “businesses” like bookstores and theaters is through publicly funded preferential subsidized rent. Whistle down the wind.

Rocky Horror Cosplays

The Oriental claims to be the oldest site of Rocky Horror Picture Show midnight screenings. On occasion they have expanded the screenings into live shows, using the deep stage of the Oriental. I saw another follies-type act there, I forget the theme... but it was a lot of silly fun. They also used film playing on the big screen in their acts, like, really, quite a lot of contemporary theater.
In the Oriental, the site of film consumption also sometimes serves as the site of live theater production, just as it did when the place was built in 1927.
This is the kind of business art needs to thrive, a business that does not valorize its own stock, its collecting, nor seek only new ways to excite customers, to “stimulate fandom" – but a business that is embedded organically in a community that creates as well as consumes lively and filmic arts.
I tried to propose an annual institutionalization of this practice as “Andy Warhol’s Birthday Party” (August 6). Warhol is the best known example of an artist whose practice embraced film at the heart of diverse others, music, painting, and being in general. And his foundation has the bucks.

Video, Film and Radio

The Oriental Theatre does this kind of combo act only sporadically. Another MKE venue more deeply embedded in its community and its creative context is/was the Riverwest Film & Video store in that ethnically mixed district. (That’s unusual for MKE, which is a super-segregated city.) That store was a combination film and video rental shop and stock supply house serving the local university film program students. In time they launched a low power radio project in the front of the store, a studio-in-a-store-window actually, which persists to this day, although the back house part of the storefront has withered. But it’s still there, keeping up with the needs of the barrio’s creative community.

Making, Not Taking – Production, not Consumption

MWF Video categories answered to what artists were producing around the moment when it was founded, and, since we started as a rental “store”, what artists wanted to see of each other’s work. We sold work in the categories of narrative and feature film, video art, documentary and artists’ television.

The artists’ television was mostly produced for Manhattan Cable’s public access channels. We bought our tape stock at Rafik’s Film & Tape, like many NYU film students. Rafik was extremely artist-friendly. He had a small screening room, and offered editing services. (After his passing, his business was co-oped, and continues today as a post-production and preservation facility.) Rafik was important in the history of NYC cinema; the story is told in Clayton Patterson’s anthology “Captured” (2005).
All the films MWF Video Club distributed long ago are still unavailable anywhere now. Wild Style is the exception, but then we didn’t have it exclusive, it was a sub-distribution from Rhino Video. It streams now on Amazon, along with some other ‘70s-era artists’ films I never had a chance to see. But very few of them.

Where’s the Mayonnaise in this Store?

In my own round of consumption, where do I find the newer films/MI [moving image] content I need to see today? Usually now in an art gallery, a museum, or spit out on someone’s social media with a link to YouTube or Vimeo. There are oceans of movies and sundry, moving pictures which I’d like to see – thought-provoking meditative stuff. And I likely never will. My recreation is on the streaming sites – Shitflix, which is reconfiguring global film production in its sickly violence-dependent deep-American image, and the more congenial if more obtuse Filmin.es (no English subs, sigh). This is almost entirely narrative cinema. (Filmin.es makes some important concessions to other forms of MI.)
But art films and obscure documentaries, much less video art works, don’t figure. You can find some on Vimeo, somme others on Ubuweb, a deeply personal project which serves an extraordinary range of “hard art” content.

Where Is my Edgar in the Video Hotel?

Somehow we are still at the beginning of a truly accessible, comprehensible universe of moving image content. Maybe a virtual environment, a “metaverse” of film-topia?, through which one could wander, encounter guides, have conversations about “content areas” which intrigue you, and through those contacts – with a person behind an avatar? an encyclopedically informed, mannered AI like E.A. Poe in “Altered Carbon”?
There is no AI, no algorithm that’s going to deliver me into my personal paradise of moving image content consumption. Not a lot of money to be made off of me. And of course where you see some moving image work is critical. It is site specific, this consumption, from living room couch to museum gallery. That’s sort of behind the video store idea that Alamo is resurrecting.
It’s also behind the video lounge, the video club, and the museum, where there’s never enough time to absorb more than a fraction of the esoteric moving image content presented in large exhibitions. But it almost never streams.

Frankensteining Super Fans

Times writer Cohen quotes one of the Alamo crew working on the Kims Video redux project: for them, “browsing is the main event” – “[F]lipping through covers, studying the artwork and reading the back of the boxes, is a — maybe the — fundamental part of a video store visit”. Now it’s featured – “a basic difference between the new Kim’s Video project and the original idea of a video store.” They are hoping that the store will make “superfans” out of young people. Their project, they believe, will “reinvigorate film culture” which “desperately needs” it.
Fandom is self-organized knowledge around particular clusters of creative work. These realms of knowledge are active and productive, generatinig zines, fan fiction, cosplay, memes and endless coded social interactions. I’m a fan of moving image art and eccentric indie documentary work. (This blog post is itself “fan crit”.) This complex of MI is altogether more complex than the slick, vendable, commercial narrative cinema.
To fan it is more difficult both in terms of access to its products and staying informed about interesting things to see. Only by reading, and staying within insitutional ambits of art exhibition do I see and discover things I’d like to see in entirety. And then, usually, I can’t; they’re not available online, or require subscriptions.
There is a real need for guidance in the jungle forests of accessible moving image content. However, to seek to generate “intense fandom” is simply to seek to intensify the consumer experience.

No Suggestions

I can’t offer any real business solution to these questions. “Business” itself is the problem. Filmin.es is supported by EU cultural subsidy, as was/is Facets Multimedia. Going it alone on a for-profit basis is for Marvel Comics enterprises, not for independent artists. NetFlix, the prime example, is a narrative monoculture – meat, potatoes, string beans; meat, potatoes, string beans. It’s bad school lunch.
People laugh about the “metaverse”, but we can’t doubt it will become a major new capitalist tool. Still, maybe there might be a virtual grindhouse row with an endless geography of cinemas and museum warehouses any one of which the flaneur could enter into at will to discover new content, new interpretations, new artists. Maybe there’d be also some seedy lounge bar in that VR too, a place where one might enter into some productive conspiracies.

LINKS

“Kim’s Video Is Back In NYC”
By Gabe Cohen | April, 2022
https://drafthouse.com/news/kims-video-is-back-in-nyc

FACETS, est. 1975, is a nonprofit that connects people to independent ideas through transformative cinema.
https://facets.org/about/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facets_Multi-Media#Facets_Video

Milos Stehlik, Founder of Facets Multimedia in Chicago, Dies at 70
by Alissa Simon, July 2019
https://variety.com/2019/film/news/milos-stehlik-facets-multimedia-chicago-dies-dead-obituary-1203260777/

My obituary of Nick Zedd
http://artgangs.blogspot.com/2022/03/good-night-salty-prince.html

Tom Roston, “Passing of a Video Store and a Downtown Aesthetic”, July 24, 2014, NY Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/27/movies/kims-video-closes-and-a-village-sensibility-dies.html

Karina Longworth, “The Strange Fate of Kim’s Video”, September 12, 2012
https://www.villagevoice.com/2012/09/12/the-strange-fate-of-kims-video/

Pioneer Theater closes / Monday, November 10, 2008
http://vanishingnewyork.blogspot.com/2008/11/pioneer-theater.html

Colab Inc | Avant Garde Artist Collective 1977-Present ...
https://collaborativeprojects.wordpress.com/

MWF Video Club Collection catalogue
The MWF Video Catalog website is no longer active.
http://www.brickhaus.com/amoore/

XFR Collective
https://xfrcollective.wordpress.com/

“XFR STN” (Transfer Station) at New Museum, an open-door artist-centered media archiving project.
https://www.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/view/xfr-stn

A Report on “XFR STN”: LOCKSS-Ness Monster: “What Have We Done?!”, ca. 2013
by David J. Kim, with an introduction by New Museum Digital Archivist Tara Hart, tagged with David J. Kim, Tara Hart, MWF Video Club, Colab, Archive, Education
https://www.newmuseum.org/blog/view/a-report-on-xfr-stn-lockss-ness-monster-what-have-we-done

"XFR STN" exhibition publication – recollections of Colab TV & MWF artists
https://www.academia.edu/75653161/_XFR_STN_exhibition_publication

MWF Video Club collection on Archive.org
https://archive.org/details/mwf_video_club&tab=collection

Ubu Web videos of Colab
https://ubu.com/film/colab.html
UbuWeb tweets at @ubuweb

Matt Wild, “I finally saw The Rocky Horror Picture Show with a live cast at the Oriental Theater”, June 11, 2015
https://milwaukeerecord.com/film/i-finally-saw-the-rocky-horror-picture-show-with-a-live-cast-at-the-oriental-theater/

"Expanded Cinema"
by Gene Youngblood (1970), the first book to consider video as an art form, was influential in establishing the field of media arts.[1] In the book he argues that a new, expanded cinema is required for a new consciousness.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expanded_Cinema

Unsurprisingly, there was a documentary on the place
Review: Emir Cakaroz’s ‘Riverwest Film & Video’ is an Intriguing Fly-on-the-wall Look at a Community Staple BY Tom Tolan
https://www.milwaukeemag.com/review-riverwest-film-video-intriguing-fly-wall-look-community-staple/

Riverwest Radio low power station in the window of the video store
https://www.riverwestradio.com

Clayton Patterson, ed., “Captured: A Film/Video History of the Lower East Side”
https://www.sevenstories.com/books/3977-captured

NEXT – My memoir blogging continues with an interview with artist Julie Harrison

The kind of video/theater blend I mean: scenography by Jan Pappelbaum for Professor Bernhardi, Berlin, Germany

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