Memoir #9: Uptown and Downtown, Then and Now

Screenshot of the recent talk in the "Cultural Activism Seisiún" -- My presentation is about 8 minutes in and lasts 20 minutes.

I was invited to speak to John Halpern and Emily Harris’s online “Tuning Fork” group recently. I’m uncomfortable with being what the Reverend Jen called a “sublebrity”, but hey, I’ll have a book to push, so I roughly outlined that (about 8 to 26 minutes in the YouTube). In the first several of these numbered blog posts that's what I did, outlining the book to come. This memoir “string” will roll out on this blog well into 2021.
A number of folks attended, or were included in the talk. Zoom is blowing up with online Virus-era educational meetings, but it makes it hard to be just a spectator. Everyone’s name is pasted up there, as it is in the recording. (‘S why some folks use weird fake names; you can change it.) It emulates a real meeting, in a way, except for the recording part.
John was doing actions in NYC around the time we did the Real Estate Show, 1980. I had met John Halpern and some of the other attendees not so long ago – in the flesh, not onscreen – during my trip to NYC in late ‘19. We had gone to an art opening…

Tom Otterness, Cone Fixing Cylinder, 2014, installed in the lobby at Marlborough on 57th Street. (Photo from worleygig.com)

Last Tango on 57th Street

I thought I was in town then mainly to mine the archives, repeating the habits of my grad school days. But running around is what one does in New York City. Most writers I know have made a career of it. So we dragged out to the art openings. The big one was Tom Otterness’ show at the Marlborough Gallery on 57th Street. The gallery was closing the oldest of their branches and moving to Chelsea, and this was to be the last show in the NYC artworld’s old stomping grounds.

Big Bronze Someones

Tom’s openings always draw a Colab crowd, and a score of the old gang was there. The atrium downstairs was plopped with his giant bronze sculptures. It was quite the scene, with swells arriving, and a TV crew awaiting someone. Not any of us. I did not inquire.
Along came tall, lanky John Halpern wearing his trademark broad-brimmed hat. John figured in the Real Estate Show story on New Year’s Day, 1980. He and his friends had occupied a vacant lot in Little Italy at the same moment as we took 125 Delancey Street. They were camping out there in the cold, and seeing in the new year. Becky Howland, me and some pals visited them there after our show closed for the night. John was already notorious for a radical art action – planting fake bombs on the Brooklyn Bridge.

John Halpern makes the papers back in the day

Bombs Away – For Peace

John and his artists’ collaborative staged Bridging in 1977 atop all seven access bridges to Manhattan. They stood up and fired off yellow flares. The media covered this spectacular action extensively, which was the point. In August of 1979 he had planted another symbolic bomb on the Brooklyn Bridge, and was arrested. Both actions were responses to histrionic media coverage of terrorism. A peace activist was involved in the first of these. John today teaches meditation.

Back in the Hole

The 24-hour performance in 1979-80 we attended comprised digging a 10-foot hole on Spring Street between Mott and Elizabeth Streets in Soho, where 12-15 people planned “to stay in the hole to see the New Year in, ‘discussing art and politics’”. Christy Rupp was along with us to visit them. She is quoted in the same New York Times text stating that Halpern’s group action was “an art exhibit about the state of real estate and why so much of it in NY is unavailable as either housing or art-space”. That was 40 years ago. Things are better now, right?
(See citations in note below – Well you may ask why New York Times reporters were always showing up at these events. I don’t know. We asked them and they came, which isn’t that usual.)
Some neighborhood people came by and told John’s group that they shouldn’t be doing that, and should leave as soon as possible. Mafiosi? Or just locals fronting? Artists living in Little Italy then didn’t care to push the question. The site is now a housing project. After our visit to the hole, John came along to the Delancey Street building where our show had been closed, jumped on the extension roof and painted a sprawling graffiti on the wall.

Beuys Again

During Joseph Beuys’ Guggenheim retrospective in 1979 Halpern was shooting Transformer/Joseph Beuys (released in 1988). Beuys’ presence at the Real Estate Show press conference must have been part of the media draw. John Halpern continued involved with the circle of folks around JB’s Free University projects, people who had taken the German artist’s ideas about social sculpture to heart. Decades later, in 2014, John participated in the Real Estate Show Revisited exhibition at the James Fuentes Gallery. He and Julie Martin did a series of video interviews with participants there.

Meanwhile…

Back on 57th Street, videographer Mitch Corber, Sylvia and their pal Les Weichselbaum arrived and started video interviewing John about his 1977 headline socal sculpture. Nice to see we still have our own media, hence our incuriosity about the TV crew and who they were awaiting.
John is Coleen Fitzgibbon’s step-brother. She is married to Tom Otterness. (I interviewed Coleen, and will blog it here soon.) I chatted with John as we walked towards the elevators and the crowd upstairs. The giant bronze Otterness sculptures deployed around the atrium were mostly of two simplified figures, one male and the other female. Archetypal, but also personal.
“Doesn’t that look like it’s about Tom’s relationship with Coleen?”
“Yes, exactly,” John said. “Tom told me, ‘We spent enough on therapy to buy a house, but if we didn’t there would have been no people to live in it.’”
Love in the NYC artworld is hard work.

Howl Gallery show of "Zeitgeist" in 2018; Al Diaz graffiti on the wall in back

Let’s Go Downtown

After 57th Street, we fell downtown to the East Village, to an opening of Al Diaz. Al was Jean-Michel’s partner in the Samo© graffiti project when they were teenagers. He re-emerged as an artist at the Howl! gallery show organized in 2018 for the premiere of Sara Driver’s film, Boom for Real. That show was called “Zeitgeist: The Art Scene of Teenage Basquiat”, and included a lot of folks who were around then. Al’s Samo-type slogans were featured prominently on a wall. More than raking over the ashes, that was a pretty great show.
The opening we went to in ‘19 was a show of new collaborations Al had done with other artists. I reminded him of an interview Jim C and I had done with him many years ago, in which we talked about his Samo years. James Love Cornwell, aka Jim C, ran the Nada Gallery on Rivington Street. He completed a master’s thesis on the East Village in the ‘00s, and our talk with Al Diaz was part of his research. We collaborated on the article “Local History: The Battle for Bohemia in the East Village,” in Julie Ault, ed., Alternative Art New York, 1965-1985 (2002).
Al didn’t remember our talk “I was strung out during those years,” he said. Re-invention is a serious struggle.
I later asked Jim to send Al the transcript. He was happy to see it, and he IM’d me: “Thank you Alan. This is really great. Hugo [Martinez] apologizes to me for snubbing me when I asked to be included in the UGA [United Graffiti Artists, showed in Soho in 1975]. Pretty wonderful history!!!!” La felicidad de la historia.

Photo from realgraffitihistory.com via Michael Lawrence and Herb Migdol

Let’s Grab a Drink After

Nearby Al’s show work by the hot international street artist JR was showing at a new multi-story French gallery, a blazingly white glass and steel monolith planted in the old neighb, a true neoliberal-era carbuncle. After the openings we went along to Ulli Rimkus’ bar Max Fish at its new location. Howie Solo joined us there.
We talked about erstwhile ‘70s downtown macher R.L. Seltman. Where did he go? It’s a sad story, Howie said. R.L. married a Japanese woman and moved east in the ‘80s. She later died. He was around during the Rivington School days, and was instrumental in starting the Storefront for Art & Architecture. He was a competitor with Ray Kelly for Arleen Schloss’ affections. (He lost.) It was R.L. who invited Howie and his band the Agents to play the Times Square Show after-party at 597 Broadway. The band was getting antsy and wanted to leave, but at last the people arrived and the party, called the Dark Dance, began. I must have been there, but I don’t recall it.


NEXT: Serenades of a Library Rat

REFS and LINKS

Cultural Activism Seisiún: The Tuning Fork – A series of conversations with cultural activists worldwide
https://www.instituteforculturalactivism.org/

John Halpern quoted in WikiPedia, “John Halpern (artist)”

RL Seltman in 1980, from a film poster via 98bowery.com

Christy Rupp quoted in Judith Cummings, Laurie Johnston, “Notes on People: Wide Brush Needed to Cover Artists' Interests,” NYT, January 1, 1980, p. 26

Natasha Kurchanova, "Lower East Side: The Real Estate Show Redux", posted 5 December 2014
https://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/lower-east-side-the-real-estate-show-redux

Coleen Fitzgibbon
http://www.coleenfitzgibbon.com/

Zeitgeist: The Art Scene of Teenage Basquiat
https://www.howlarts.org/event/zeitgeist-the-art-scene-of-teenage-basquiat-2/

Artnet, "Al Diaz, Basquiat’s Graffiti Partner, Has Resurrected the SAMO© Tag for His First-Ever European Collaboration", August 28, 2019
https://news.artnet.com/partner-content/al-diaz-basquiat-graffiti-samo-tag

Memoir #8: The Invisible Underground

This is the 8th post from my memoir project, an account of my 30 years in the NYC artworld. This post continues a recounting of the researches I made in late 2019, during a two month stay in the city.
Image: Jorge Brandon, El Coco Que Habla, as painted by Bobby G aka Robert Goldman in 1982

I’ve always thought poetry was a bad bet. It’s the high road to invisibility, a demanding discipline and an impossible life course. To make it you’d better be a genius, rich, or die young. All three is best. Still I was corrupted early by an over-qualified junior high school teacher who wanted us all to write sonnets. I was the only one who could.
Poetry in New York City is a strange scene, entwined all at once with academia, bohemia, rock ‘n’ roll and art in many mysterious ways.
My relation to the New York poetry scene has been tangential. I’m a fan. And after my brief stint as an avant-garde text producer in the later ‘70s, that’s all I’ve been. Good poetry is oxygen for writers in other genres. Even the bad stuff, viewed live, is a glimpse into motivation, drive, the expressive impulse that makes the words appear. Readings are a chance to hoist a brew in congenial company. Even if you don’t know them, the poets are friendly, especially if you aren’t claiming a spot to read.

The Unbearables

Michael Carter, my partner in the MWF Video Club, introduced me to the Unbearables group. He loved their elaborate mythology, which seems lifted from a novel by Roberto Bolaño (or vice versa?). Rooted in the camaraderie of early spectacular actions, [cite below: Bollen, 2012] the untangling of the ganglia of this writers and poets collective would reveal a lot about the LES culture of the ‘80s and ‘90s.
In addition to Jim Feast, with his ties to the Autonomedia publishing project, it includes Ron Kolm, a peripatetic bookstore manager whose collectings and promotions formed the nucleus of the NYU Fales Library’s downtown collection. As the story is told, Ron convinced the librarian Marvin Taylor to change his focus, and the stodgy research collection of Victorian English literature bloomed into a major scholarly resource on the history of the district the university helped destroy.
I allude to the relentless expansionist real estate policies of NYU, which has gobbled up Washington Square Park as its de facto campus, and sited new dormitory buildings on the once-cheaper lands to the east. Sure, the inexorable processes of capitalism bear the responsibility – that is to say, nobody. NYU has been all in on that, and the school has picked over the juicier bones of the neighborhood. Filmmaker Nick Zedd, who sold his archive to the NYU Fales Library, remarked: “NYU destroyed downtown, but at least they paid me to get out of town.” He lives today in Mexico City.

RIP Steve Cannon

After Malena and I settled into our tiny flat in Crown Heights in the fall of ‘19, one of the first sojourns we made was to the Clemente Soto Velez cultural center on Rivington and Suffolk street for an evening memorial to the writer and animateur Steve Cannon. CSV is in an old gothic-style public school building ceded to a Puerto Rican organization which runs it as a cultural complex. It houses theaters, galleries, artists studios, and offices. Among them is the office of ABC No Rio “in exile”, during the period when their new building is being constructed. Director Steven Englander was sitting there nearly every day. ABC’s zine library and archive are also temporarily housed there.

Steve Cannon at Tribes. Photo by Sarah Ferguson

Steve Cannon died in early 2019. The apartment of the blind novelist, teacher and poet was a famous locus for bohemian poets, writers, musicians and artists, a public salon he called A Gathering of the Tribes. After all the other hot spots had faded away and all the places to go had closed, there was still Steve’s. His memorial at CSV was a big affair. Poets read, and musicians performed. Steve’s musician friends, Billy Bang and Butch Morris, are also no longer alive, but a set by the Sun Ra Arkestra rounded out the night. They’re the big band backup for the late Afrofuturist composer. They did that thing with the costumes, and the weird space-age noises, but for their final numbers they sat back and romped like Duke Ellington, doing “Stranger in Paradise.”
Ubiquitous on the poetry scene, Mitch Corber was front and center with his camera, alongside Sylvia, recording the poets. At one point the flimsy chair he sat on collapsed, and he grinned ruefully at the crowd behind him.
The poet Steve Dalachinsky circulated, handing out cards for the readings and performances that would continue throughout the fall in the gardens of the LES to honor Cannon. Dalachinsky – a scenester, a back patter, hand shaker, a connector, and animateur; poet, deeply learned jazz aficionado and skilled bohemian hustler… I didn’t know that would be the last time I’d see him. He died a week after that gig.
Then there was a round of memorials for him.

The Stuck and the Drifting

Functionally blind, Steve Cannon was stuck in his apartment. Dalachinsky was everywhere. The outpouring of memorials for him was even greater than for Cannon. Penny Arcade wrote: “With the death of Dalachinsky there is a line of demarcation like where the trees get thinner and thinner near the shore. Who now will rail against the politics of art? Who will represent, who will model the life of the living poet?”
That night he kind of annoyed me. I was lumbering towards Jim Feast, who was on his way out when Steve grabbed him first. Jim is one of the venerable Unbearables group of poets with Steve, and part of the Autonomedia publishing collective After I’d stood there for a time, Dalachinsky turned, gave me a firm handshake and walked off...

Steve Dalachinsky in his studio in New York May 15th, 2019. Photo by Fernando García Delgado

ABC No Rio Then

When we began at ABC No Rio in 1980 we were lucky to stumble onto an important clutch of poets to begin the readings series there. Josh Gosciak couldn’t bring the old anarchists from the housing projects, but he did organize Amiri Baraka, Miguel Piñero, Miguel Algarín, Bimbo Rivas, Pedro Pietri, Jorge Brandon and more of the Nuyorican school poets to read at our place. Some of the white poets’ music bands also played ABC, like the Avant Squares, Homer Erotic, and Jill Kroesen. (There’s a book about them: Daniel Kane, "Do You Have a Band?": Poetry and Punk Rock in New York City, 2017; haven’t seen it.) This push started ABC as an important poetry venue for the decades to come.

Josh, who is today at Medger Evers CUNY where Steve Cannon once taught wrote a text on poetry on the Lower East Side for the ABC No Rio book. (Part of it is online, along with some of the poetry we published then.) He ran Contact II magazine, and published the only chapbook of the incendiary Native American talent Diane Burns.
Perhaps because there’s no money to be made, the downtown NYC poetry scene has always been an indiscriminate bohemia. In case it isn’t clear yet – the poetry scene is where artists of color have been hiding in New York City for a long time.
LINKS

MWF Video Club
http://www.brickhaus.com/amoore/

See Katrien Bollen, "Guerrilla Warriors on the Brooklyn Bridge: A Case Study of the Unbearables’ Poetic Terrorism
(1994-2000)" in ZAA Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik A Quarterly of Language, Literature and Culture, 2012
here and there on the internet

Curiously, no one really wants to write about this – a rare exception: Anonymous, "NYU hasn't destroyed the West Village... yet"
https://www.brickunderground.com/blog/2013/01/nyu_hasnt_destroyed_the_West_Village_yet

A Gathering of the Tribes
https://www.tribes.org/

Mitch Corber's Thin Air Video catalogue online
http://www.thinairvideo.com/Welcome.html
He is also on YouTube at mitchcorber2

A Tribute to Steve Dalachinsky (1946–2019)
https://brooklynrail.org/2019/10/in-memoriam/A-Tribute-to-Steve-Dalachinsky

Jim Feast recently interviewed for Fifth Estate
https://soundcloud.com/davidrovics/fifth-estate-live-with-jim-feast

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

Diane Burns, "Riding the One-Eyed Ford"
https://digitalcollections.poetshouse.org/digital-collection/chapbook-collection/riding-the-one-eyed-ford
see also Josh Gosciak, “Contact II, 1970s – 1990s: When Poetry Mattered More”

click “publisher” at the link above

Memoir #7: Return to New York

Facebook post for Milwaukee Home show of family art collection, October 2020

This is the 7th post from my memoir project, an account of my 30 years in the NYC artworld. The last post in this blog concluded the summary of the first 3 parts which I plan to publish. Now begins the part I will only post: a recounting of the researches and interviews I made in late 2019, during a two month stay in the city.

That seems now an eon ago; and it was, another age. As I was writing the 4th part of the book after the NYC trip, my mother’s health rapidly declined. After she died, I mounted an exhibition of the family art collection in the house, then sold it. Only now, nearly a year after the pause, have I been able to resume work on the memoir project.
That 4th part will not be published. I will mine it here for the blog posts to come.

Before the Storm I Was Among the Weeds

The first 3 books had the structure of living memory to ground them. The writing of the 4th book got out of hand. When I started to compile the research, I lost the structure among minutiae which I judge won’t interest most readers.
So, while it’s not a book it’s still a set of stories which now I’ll tell in this blog. It’s the story of that trip I took before the Covid virus descended and the world changed; before George Floyd was killed and BLM resurged; before Biden and Georgia; before the fascists rallied behind their leader in the last days of the Trump administration…
… I was meeting old friends and fingering moldy archives.

“Why You?”

“I don’t understand what your book is about,” my mother told me.
“What makes you think your life is interesting enough for a book?” a woman asked at the Ganas commune dinner.
At every step I’ve tried to bear these questions in mind.

Becky Howland's remix of the Colab logo

The answer to “why?” is simply, I was there.
My main engagement in downtown NYC of the ‘70s and ‘80s was with the artists’ group Colab. Colab is an important collective formation in recent U.S. art history, and the Lower East Side of the late 20th century was the last major North American bohemia. There’s a lot of driftwood in this river. And a lot of people working to pull it ashore.
As I wrote I checked facts online, in the vast shifting universal memory that is our present-day internet. It’s a wide door to the past, as recalled by a multitude. Nearly every fact I’ve pulled has clinging roots. I could not resist what I read as revealed truths. These many undreamt-of texts and websites added others’ perspectives to the narrative. In the end I was overwhelmed.

New York of the Constant Surprise

It’s always delightful to see old friends. In the intervening years the recollection and explication of our collective old times is now a minor industry. To please the old folks who still pull strings, to valorize the art already collected or yet to be sold, to distill lessons – these are all reasons to explore the past through exhibitions, discussions, and publications. And it’s a business. Marc Miller, whose prodding is to blame for this book project (although he denies it), vends ephemera, the momentoes of this late golden age in 20th century art.

I took a flight from Chicago on the last day of August, 2019. The plane flew along a broad green river towards the city, then made a dramatic approach up the Hudson past the great rocks of midtown and Wall Street skyscrapers. I had a window seat. Manhattan is incredibly grand from that perspective; I’d never seen it before. The man beside me never looked up from his laptop. On the way out I thanked the pilot, a young woman, on the amazing approach. On the airport bus a large black man was giving two younger workers an impromptu seminar on the economics of work. A couple argued over a baby in the loudest terms. NYC public transit is a warm bath of loquacious humanity.
There was a loud party out back of the hotel that night. My review of “No Name High Rise Hotel” near Queens Plaza – “Reception cursory. Ambience a mere gesture. Breakfast inedible.” The next morning my son Taylor picked me up to go to the flat in Crown Heights where I would meet Malena. Near the hotel was a grungy gas station plaza with a quicky-mart. I spotted a deal on tangerines outside. Inside it was a rundown deli counter banging out fast food, and a New York surprise – the shelves contained the dusty remains of a Cypriot food store, with long-expired exotic specialties. I bought some fresh dates and halvah.

The Old Neighborhood

September begins the art season when the swells return from their summer homes. I’d been collecting listing of relevant events and fun things to do.
Two interesting poets were reading at a bar on the Lower East Side – Steve Dalachinsky and Valery Oisteanu. Tommy Turner, whose film I’d recently showed in Madrid was having a party in Queens. The New York Anarchist Book Fair was kicking off at the Judson Church, where AK Thompson and Silvia Federici were doing workshops. Seth Tobocman was presenting the new issue of World War 3. A retrospective of Linus Coraggio was opening at the Howl! Happening gallery. Al Diaz, the other half of the SAMO© graffiti team with Jean-Michel Basquiat, was showing at the Van der Plas Gallery.

Linus Coraggio photographed by Steven Falke

My old traces and paths trodden – that was what I was here for this trip. I had to skip many interesting events around political art, social practice and activism.

Social Practice

A new anthology had come out in July, The Art of Direct Action: Social Sculpture and Beyond, that “concerns artists and collectives who have moved their artistic focus from representation to direct social action.” I’ve been following the rise of this pedagogical movement which links directly to the activisms I wrote about in Art Gangs (2012).

Sam Gould's "Beyond Repair," a printshop in a shopping center

Sam Gould in Minneapolis listed what he thought was most important in teaching social practice: 1) “The role and service of modeling and play within political life”. 2) “Thinking about what you are not, rather than what you are, when venturing into new work / endeavors”, and 3) “The importance of tension; make better problems”. Teaching or not, paying attention to this field is useful for thinking about what one is doing.
I skipped the Vera List Center for Art and Politics show of Caroline Woolard's furniture sculpture which “honors the work of facilitators”, “exquisitely rendered” though it was. Caroline was in the class at Cooper Union with the Bruce High Quality Foundation gang, but went her own way with a collectivizing storefront project nearby ABC No Rio. Now she’s back to making objects.

Decolonize This Place

We lunched with Olga Kopenkina and Gregory Sholette after failing to get into a packed New School classroom for a Decolonize This Place event. That group staged actions at the Whitney Museum, and earlier at the American Museum of Natural History. They were hosted for a time at Artists Space in a kind of reprise of the historical antagonism between the alternative and the institutional art spaces. One of their victories was still to come: in the spring of 2020 the Teddy Roosevelt equestrian statue with its demeaning ethnic attendants was at last removed from out front of the AMNH.

I told Greg and Olga when I came to NYC in the ‘70s I was impressed by the sense of an artworld community I saw among Fluxus artists, and among the crowd at 112 Greene Street that mixed artists, musicians, dancers. No one was ‘speciating’ and conserving their ‘medium specificity’ in order to appear ‘serious’. They were being together with a creative intention, serious indeed, but not cruelly competitive nor exclusionary. I was in town to search out the ‘70s roots of my postions, not now to pursue them.

Next: RIP Steve Cannon

LINKS

"vends ephemera" -- Marc Miller's Gallery 98 Bowery
gallery.98bowery.com

Karen van den Berg, et al., eds. The Art of Direct Action: Social Sculpture and Beyond
https://www.sternberg-press.com/product/the-art-of-direct-action/

Sam Gould in Minneapolis, of ex-Red 76, ran the Beyond Repair printshop in a shopping mall, and is now on to other projects...
http://thisisbeyondrepair.com/about/

Decolonize This Place
https://decolonizethisplace.org/

Steve Cannon in his apartment

Memoir #6 – Goodbye to the Burning Ruins of Youth

Dragged out punks relax by toxic fireplace; somewhere around lurks Richard Hambleton... A 1995 video by Corey Shaff (20+ min.) documents the Gas Station in its last days. (Via Gallery 98.com)

This is the sixth post from my memoir project, an account of my 30 years in the NYC artworld, and it concludes the summary of the not-yet-published book. This time the East Village art scene has crashed. Bohemian stragglers refuse to quit. They get “rentrified” out. I move to Staten Island, and try to adjust to rural calm. Get hooked up with anarchists, communists, and radical eggheads.

Exile on Staten Island

MWF Video did some shows at the 2B Gas Station, another Rivington School outpost, where the artist Mary Campbell had a studio. Linus Coraggio, a welder, and designer in metal, was the big man there. Mary and I started a relationship. We married, then both of us lost our apartments. After a long period of on-site harrassment (which was more harrassing for the harrassers than for me), I lost my apartment on Houston Street in a court case before a judge who was later jailed for massive bribe-taking. Mary was kicked out of her Brooklyn perch; a new owner claimed the whole building for his residence.

Times Up activist bicycle group meeting at Steve Stollman's Houston Street loft in the 1990s. In the days of the Critical Mass, Times Up often drew the cops.

We didn’t even look in Manhattan. And at the height of a price rise we couldn’t find anything affordable in Brooklyn.
We moved to Staten Island. I lost my typesetting job, and didn’t want to take a corporate job. Typesetting was changing with “author-generated keystrokes”. Even then it was all coding. So I went back to school in art history at the City University, Graduate Center. I thought I could maximize my years of experience in the artworld as an academic. I wrote some papers based on my experiences, but mostly the curriculum covered classic modernism and 19th century art. I started collecting antique photographs in stores upstate.

Jones Woods, an unbuilt area near our house in former "Linoleumville", Staten Island.

Leafy Green with Signs of Life

Our neighbors on Staten Island were artists, and we joined their community. Much of it centered around the Snug Harbor cultural complex. Old buildings and deep NYC history are very present on Staten Island. The borough has the most parkland of any in the city. Ex-Village Voice critic John Perrault had been the very clued-in director of the art center at Snug Harbor. His successor, Olivia Georgia, produced a number of important exhibitions of performance art.
Mary Campbell teamed up with Vivian Vasser to start a performance troupe called Day de Dada. The merry band began a decade long run of Dada parades, mail art exhibitions, and participatory performance projects.

Mary Campbell as the Eternal Knitter, at Day de Dada festival, 2002. (From MaryCampbell.net.)

Photographer and critic A.D. Coleman participated in Day de Dada events as the “derriere guard”, a role he began in the Avant-Garde Festival of 1975. (I reviewed it then for Artforum.) In 2017, Mary and Viv reprised one of Charlotte Moorman’s Avant-Garde festivals held on the oldest Staten Island ferryboat.

Commune Days

Mary and I broke up, but I stayed nearby to help care for our son. I met a group of anarchists in our neighborhood. We produced an eco-fest, including an ecologically themed exhibition called “Green Home” at Frank Shifreen’s loft on Jersey Street. I later moved into the Ganas commune, worked on their festivals, and watched the genesis of the Everything Goes Book Cafe, built by an artist from the East Village theater scene.

The public face of the Ganas commune -- The "Everything Goes Book Cafe" on Staten Island

Staten Island is provincial, and I learned how that works. It’s not a lack of information; it's an active rejection of outside influences. Mary and Viv’s Day de Dada was a way to deal with that, to do engaged art and gradually educate a conservative audience by cajoling them with a spirit of zany fun.

My Inglorious Academic Career

My first teaching job was at a community college in the Bronx. I designed a simple and nomadic method of teaching the art history survey course – library study in groups, then oral reports; visits to the Metropolitan Museum for direct observation midterm and final exams. I wanted to write my dissertation on Collaborative Projects, but David Little beat me to it. I wrote what would be published as Art Gangs (2011), on a series of artists’ groups, 1969 to 1984, among them Colab. The book was published by the anarchist press Autonomedia.

Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri at the Creative Time Summit, 2009

On my way in and out of Manhattan, I checked out a group meeting in an office near the Staten Island ferry terminal. The 16 Beaver group, run in the collective studios of Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri, was a meeting place for politically engaged artists studying in NYC institutions, and visiting the city from abroad. Their orientation was towards radical theory. So many artists and intellectuals went through 16 Beaver. It was a fascinating place, a boiler room for politically committed creative people.

A New War in the 21st Century

Through the Staten Island anarchists’ contacts, I produced an event at 16B for Ben Morea. Ben was a key anarchist revolutionary during the 1960s, a leader in the Black Mask/Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers group. He had gone underground in ‘68. Rene and Ayreen went on to work with Ben in Europe.

European theorists Brian Holmes and Franco Berardi did seminars at 16 Beaver. Yates McKee wrote Strike Art (2017), which tells about 16 Beaver’s important role in the Occupy Wall Street movement.
After I filed my dissertation, Gregory Sholette invited me to Chicago. I met his students at the Art Institute, including Nato Thompson, Josh MacPhee and Dara Greenwald. All of them would become important players in the 21st century New York artworld. Dara and Josh founded Interference Archive. Nato came to NYC and started the annual Creative Time Summit. He invited me to speak on my research into squatting in Europe.
But that’s another story, which isn't a memoir, but hopefully more like a utopian future past. I told it in Occupation Culture (2015).
This ends the summary part of my postings to the “Art Gangs” blog. In the months to come I’ll post about my research trip to New York last year – archival work and interviews.

NEXT: Return to Gotham

Memoir #5 –The Material Mirage of a Populist Artworld

Right: View of the Terminal Show in Brooklyn, 1983

This is the fifth 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 the East Village art movement, as viewed from the E.V. Eye in the El Bohio cultural center, hanging out at the Rivington School heavy metal sculptors joint, and the big building shows in Loisaida and Brooklyn which saw swarms of artists.

High Tide and Flipping Buildings

The East Village art movement was in full tide in the mid-1980s. After the surprise success of the Fun Gallery, which opened in 1981, over 100 art galleries opened in the Lower East Side. The district saw a wave of popular creativity as hundreds of artists took their shot in the galleries which were largely run by artists.
The East Village Eye office where I worked was in the middle of near Avenue B, near Tompkins Square Park. This vacant city school had been occupied by a group of Puerto Rican activists called CHARAS. It was home to the Nuyorican Poets Theater while Miguel Algarin was building the Poets Cafe. I worked for Miguel, which served me well when I was robbed in Tompkins Square Park carrying proofs of his book.
Like many NYC cultural projects, El Bohio was largely run by women. They worked on the neighborhood magazine, Quality of Life in Loisaida, the film and the art programs.
The East Village Eye office was a center of the scene, specializing in fashion, art and literature. Publisher Leonard Abrams and his crew were an endless source of drama as editors battled over small stakes. I typeset and sold ads for the paper. That was my day job as I worked at ABC No Rio. I met gallery owners at Civilian Warfare, Ground Zero, and others, and attended many exhibitions.
A New York art career is phasic. Mine, like many another was a series of ‘afters’. The East Village gallery scene ended abruptly. The formerly neglected and rundown Manhattan barrio became the focus of intense property speculation. Artists had been used as pawns in what would become a global playbook for gentrification. The populist moment came to an abrupt end, and participation in East Village galleries became reputational kryptonite for many artists. Walter Robinson, then working at Art in America, called this the revenge of the artworld’s old guard who had lost business to the insurgent sector.

Rivington School sculpture garden. Photo by Toyo Tsuchiya

Junk Metal Paradise

Over the years as I walked a route from my apartment to ABC No Rio, I passed a slowly rising tangle of junk sculpture called the Rivington School. I knew some artists there, and I became a regular spectator of their scene. This began as a kind of eastward drift of the Little Italy galleries of the late ‘70s – Kwok, Public Image, and the Storefront for Art & Architecture, especially Arleen Schloss’s A Space, just east of Sara D. Roosevelt Park. Arleen had ties to the old Cageian avant-garde. Her husband Texas sculptor Ray Kelly started the No Se No social club, along with two artists involved with Fluxus and mail art.
These artists flowed into the empty spaces that were briefly available. Other galleries opened on Rivington Street. Ray, Ed Higgins and others started to weld what became an enormous metal sculpture collage on a vacant lot on the corner. The Rivington School group came together as a very macho scene, with lots of drinking and drugs. They roasted pigs, to the disgust of their vegetarian neighbors. It was photographed by the Japanese emigre artist Toyo Tsuchiya. Stone sculptor Ken Hiratsuka, and Robert Parker with his iron forge worked there. Several of those artists moved on to squat buildings in the East Village during the squatters’ movement of the 1990s.

Arleen Schloss

Next door to the sculpture garden Adam Purple controlled a big squatted building, tending his extraordinary radial Garden of Eden. Unlike the drunken metal melee next door, Purple’s was a radical green scene, all recycling and composting of human excrement. Bicycle activists and designers worked there, regularly swinging by Steve Stollman’s Houston Street storefront.

Big Building Shows

1983 was a big year downtown. David Wojnarowicz and Mike Bidlo organized a guerrilla exhibition in the cavernous, doomed ship terminal on the west shore of the Hudson River. For us, management of ABC No Rio passed to other hands with the “Seven Days of Creation” continuous performance exhibition.
Many other big building art exhibitions were organized in Brooklyn as artists moved ever eastward. These shows in derelict commercial buidlings recalled the early 20th century shows of the Society for Indepedent Artists and the Salons of America, another populist moment in U.S. art. Artist and landlord Frank Shifreen organized large-building shows in Gowanus, Brooklyn.
The Plexus group put on big shows at CUANDO, another Puerto Rican social center on Second Avenue. One of them honored short-lived performance artist Ralston Farina whom I’d known in Tribeca. The last show at Cuando, which had been inactive for decades, was “Art from Ashes” after the 9/11 attack. The smoking ruins of the recently destroyed World Trade Center were visible from the roof. Afterwards the building was redeveloped.
I love big shows. They are intoxicating. The artist-organized ones prefigured the art fairs that have dominated the 21st century market art world. The “third wave” of Colab was nearly all new people. I stepped back to work on my own video projects, and the MWF Video Club.
Marc Miller and I made the ABC No Rio Dinero book (1985), a historical synthesis that marked the closure of our era there. Of course we had the book party at Danceteria.

LINKS

"East Village USA" exhibition at New Museum, 2004-05
https://archive.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/421

"It’s All True: The East Village Eye Show" at Howl! Happening Gallery, 2016
https://www.howlarts.org/event/its-all-true-the-east-village-eye-show/

“The explosive rise—and inevitable downfall—of the East Village art scene”
2019 interview with Marc Miller and Barry Blinderman, plus photo gallery
https://www.documentjournal.com/2019/09/the-explosive-rise-and-inevitable-downfall-of-the-east-village-art-scene/

Allison Meier, “A 1980s Art Experiment on an NYC Pier: From 1983 to '84, David Wojnarowicz and Mike Bidlo took over a decrepit Hudson River pier to create a collaborative and ephemeral alternative art system”
https://hyperallergic.com/338169/something-possible-everywhere-pier-34/

Shannon Geis, “Thirty Years After Famed Show, Art Carries On At Brooklyn Army Terminal”
https://turnstiletours.com/thirty-years-after-famed-show-art-carries-on-at-brooklyn-army-terminal/

Memoir #4 – Hard Left & Punks Take a Bow

Anton van Dalen, "Luxury City", 1986. Part of PADD portfolio Concrete Crisis. Anton crossed paths with most of the political art groups in the LES

This is the fourth post from my memoir project, an account of my life in the NYC artworld. This post continues the summary of the not-yet-published book. The focus is on ABC No Rio’s political engagements, the general politics of the Colab group, and the period of “getting over” in the early ‘80s.

Hard Left

My main gig during the first years of the 1980s was ABC No Rio. That venue came out of the Real Estate Show occupation, and from the start in 1980 we were a political space. One of our first shows was of a group of communist poster artists from San Francisco. We collaborated with the PAD/D group (Political Art Documentation and Distribution), which began as an archiving project. (Gregory Sholette, active in that group, wrote about its processes of study, archiving and exhibition.) They held regular meetings at El Bohio and presentation events at the Franklin Furnace, and set up distribution conditions for political art nationally.
Among the artists of Colab there were two strains of politics, one soft (liberal) and one hard (left), and this played out in our NYC artworld of those days. Stefan Eins always denied that Fashion Moda was political; for him it was scientific. Even so, F/M’s placement as a notable contemporary art venue in the South Bronx was strong cultural politics. Its presence responded to demands for the decentralization of cultural resources first declared 10 years earlier by the Art Workers Coalition in 1969.

Reagan Years

I was familiar with left politics from my trade work as a typesetter. The Reagan years mobilized the left, and with it many artists. Group Material emerged to make themed group exhibitions with a close blend of art and politics. Lucy Lippard, a founder of PAD/D, supported their work with reviews in the Village Voice. Until she was fired.

“Power Strike” by the Black Cat Collective; the poster was also printed in the East Village Eye. It diagrams how to turn back a Con Ed power meter.

Posters put up on the streets at night by the Black Cat poster collective, which organized for a time at Fashion Moda, were examples of autonomous left political art. A recent exhibition in Australia of the collective’s work of 30 years by Robert Cooney brought this clandestine group to the light. Their methods echo those of political artists today.

Colab after the TSS

Colab continued after the Times Square Show, but the group was immediately upstaged by a former member. Diego Cortez’s large group show “New York New Wave” at P.S. 1 kicked off recognition for numerous artists. Busy careers began for many involved in Colab. These years of luxury and careerism in the arts were flush with collector cash. ABC No Rio was not part of that world.
Colab did a number of shows immediately – one in Chicago with collaborative murals, another in Coney Island, working with a group of artists there. Becky Howland and I visited Los Angeles to show and talk about ABC No Rio. We had local shows as well. No Rio’s sublimely silly Cardboard Air Band had a gig at the Mudd Club. We lip-synched to pre-recorded songs and ‘played’ painted cardboard instruments. A big ABC No Rio production at the Kitchen in 1983, the “Island of Negative Utopia,” capped the early Colab involvement in ABC No Rio.

The Cardboard Air Band at ABC No Rio: Left to right, Bebe Smith, Kiki Smith, Ellen Cooper, Bobby G and Walter Robinson

Is Colab (Still) Punk?

Colab planned a big show in Washington, D.C., at the invitation of the Washington Project for the Arts. John Morton, who produced “Murder, Suicide and Junk” at ABC No Rio, was the lead organizer. He was a well-known avant-punk musician in Cleveland.

”Colab Hits the Ritz”, poster by Becky Howland, 1983

What is a punk? Was Colab punk? Many of us, including myself, ‘punked out’ at one point. I was a big fan of the MC5 in college, a group thought of as proto-punk.
After some musicians gained careers from punk and its arty cousin No Wave in the later ‘70s, the movement spread around the country. Regional hardcore punk scenes developed, with little-to-no radio play or coverage by mainstream media. DIY media, zines and cassettes proliferated as the counter-media of an underground economy. The dance style was mosh pits and stage-diving. The national scene was very different from the earlier New York scene. At the No Wave art punk concerts I attended, nobody moved.
The NYC hardcore scene in ‘83, the year of the Ritz show, was not on the radar of people in Colab. The bands were far more political than No Wave had been. ABC No Rio in the ‘90s would become an important venue in the circuit of subcultural hardcore punk.

Trouble in D.C.

Becky Howland’s poster for the Ritz show spotlights pollution. “Colab Hits the Ritz” was something of a return, since some of us were in the 1978 “Punk Art” show, also sponsored by Washington Project for the Arts. The “Punk Art” show was histrionic but actually quite unpolitical, whereas Colab’s show in ‘83 had lots of critical political content. Reception by the local art press was loudly negative.
It clearly ruffled feathers in government. The show was closed for “safety reasons” by order of the city. Colab soon began to have problems with the federal arts agency, the NEA. John Morton and Holly Block, then officers of Colab, faced big bureaucratic hurdles.

NEXT: High Tide of East Village Art

LINKS

Tiernan Morgan, "Artist Anton van Dalen on the East Village, Saul Steinberg, and Pigeon Keeping", September 6, 2016 https://hyperallergic.com/315184/artist-anton-van-dalen-on-the-east-village-saul-steinberg-and-pigeon-keeping/

Tiernan Morgan, “Art in the 1980s: The Forgotten History of PAD/D”, Hyperallergic, April 17, 2014 https://hyperallergic.com/117621/art-in-the-1980s-the-forgotten-history-of-padd/

See also Gregory Sholette. "A Collectography of PAD/D Political Art Documentation and Distribution: A 1980's Activist Art and Networking Collective" (PDF) at www.gregorysholette.com

Justen Ladda, "Book Burning", 1981. This huge mural was painted on the stage in the auditorium of an abandoned school in the South Bronx

Memoir #3 – Some Women and Our Places

Edit DeAk, Pat Place of Bush Tetras, and a friend in 1981. Photo by Paula Court

This is the third post from my memoir project, an account of my life in the NYC artworld. This post continues the summary of the not-yet-published book. The focus this time is on some of my relations with women, the nexus of Times Square where Colab did their 1980 show, and the increasing political turn of much of our work.

“Les Girls”

Women have played key roles in my life. They were also the backbone of Colab, its administrative muscle, although most of them did not achieve the success of many of their male peers. I was a feminist ally in college in California (UCR) as part of an activist political group. I strived to realize these ideals in my relationships, but I could not fathom the east coast intellectual currents of Lacanian feminism. I lost my first artist girlfriend to the great Southwest. I met a weaver on the Grey Rabbit bus to Boston, but this affair also did not last. She didn’t like my NYC friends.

"Vivienne in the green dress," NYC, 1980. Photo by Nan Goldin

I met Vivienne Dick at the Ear Inn, a Fluxus hangout, where she was a waitress. She put a piece in X Magazine, then started making films. I lost her to a head-banging No Wave bass guitarist. She worked first with the singer and ranter Lydia Lunch in two shorts. Lunch had a powerful presence, and strong narrative instincts. She had an influential career in late ‘70s underground films, with Vivienne, then with Beth and Scott B, and in the ‘80s with Richard Kern. In the forthcoming book I analyze her dark appeal.

Lydia Lunch, n.d.. Photo by Marcia Resnick

I started the MWF Video Club with Sophie Vieille, a fashion artist. She was well-connected with people in Colab I didn’t know well, and developed titles for us with No Wave cinema artists. MWF was unlike other art video distribution projects, like EAI, VDB, and MoMA which scorned consumer distribution. Many artists did not want to go with us for that reason. We had Colab TV’s Potato Wolf series, and other artists’ television works in our list. For many years we were the only distro for Glenn O’Brien’s “TV Party”. He could never believe we weren’t making money off him.

Video Distribution and David Wojnarowicz

The poet Michael Carter, editor of the Lower East Side journal Red Tape, joined MWF. He was friends with an emerging crew of filmmakers called the Cinema of Transgression who were involved in consumer sales to a national audience of punks. The group was named by Nick Zedd, who sold with MWF. Two of them, Richard Kern and Tommy Turner, made films with David Wojnarowicz (d. 1992).

Michael Carter, my long-time collaborator on MWF Video Club, in Prague in 1993. Photo by Robert Carrithers

Decades later, the Wojnarowicz retrospective exhibition came to Madrid in 2019 where I live. I prepared a screening for the Reina Sofia museum, and researched his life. I learned he was a regular along with other artists of Colab at Tin Pan Alley, a bar near Times Square. [A link to my blog post on this research from May ‘19 is in the list below.] The bar was run by a feminist activist, and was a center for late-night workers, hookers, drag queens, and minor criminals. It became popular as a subcultural hangout. Jane Dickson lived in the neighborhood with her husband Charlie Ahearn. Cara Perlman, Nan Goldin, Kiki Smith and Ulli Rimkus all worked there. (Ulli later started the Max Fish bar on the Lower East Side.)
Wojnarowicz had cruised as a child hustler in Times Square. What was it like for him being there years later as an artist? In his diaries Wojnarowicz writes about about revisiting NYC streets over the years. Tin Pan Alley embodied the nexus of art and crime which has been erased from Times Square by its redevelopment.
Wojnarowicz was working with Kiki Smith when I visited her studio. Kiki worked on the Potato Wolf shows, culminating in her work with a collective of Colab women to make the show “Cave Girls”, a fantasy documentary about a tribe of technologically advanced prehistoric women. Some scenes of “Cave Girls” were shot on film in the backyard at ABC No Rio. “Cave Girls” had a deluxe screening at ABC.
The MWF Video Club had a reprise at the New Museum in 2014, when they organized XFR STN. This was a show as activity, containing a technical setup to convert analog video recordings to digital media, and rescue old computer files (digital forensics). The project won a prize, and led to the formation of the XFR Collective of moving image archivists. The collective today is working on the MWF Video Club archive, converting many titles and uploading them to Archive.org.

Part Three – Lower Manhattan and Beyond
How to Be Political

In many ways, the Times Square Show was a women’s show. The exhibition was full of political art, especially by ‘second wave feminist’ artists. One major strain of content was rage about violence towards women. Performance artist Diane Torr performed in the “rape room”. She also worked with Disband, an a capella women’s group. Like other women’s bands of the day, Disband wrote songs in response to the cat-calling of girls on the streets.

Diane Torr and Ruth Peyser's performance at the Times Square Show, 1980. (Not positive, no.) Photograph by Caterina Borelli

The second major strain of content was sex positivity and queer aesthesis, an embrace of non-normative lifestyles. Terence Sellers, dominatrix, writer, and friend of early punk trendsetter Anya Philips performed at the TSS. Eva de Carlo made the installation Nest as a prospective site of unspecific bacchanales. Jack Smith appeared in a TV ad for the show, and his troupe performed.

“Uh Oh,” Republicans Are Coming

I was taking political positions at the time. There was great unhappiness among us with Ronald Reagan’s regime, especially with U.S. support for brutal counter-revolutions in Central America. We knew refugee artists. Politics, however, was not trending in the lower Manhattan artworld during the early ‘80s. It was trumped by careerism as new money flowed into the downtown artworld, encouraged by art’s ‘coolness’ and new Reagan tax shelters. Yet ABC No Rio was a political place. We were there as an open door white-run art space in a Hispanic barrio. That seems an impossible position today, but then it was okay. ABC No Rio has remained a place where strongly political projects are possible in an entirely gentrified lower Manhattan.
We were inspired by Stefan Eins’ Fashion Moda in the South Bronx. Downtown white artists, including ABC No Rio artists, went to work there. Graffiti, or aerosol art, began its artworld acceptance after an exhibition there, right before the Times Square Show and the opening of the Fun Gallery.

Crowd outside Fashion Moda and John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres doing life casting inside, 1979. Photo by Christof Kohlhöfer

For ABC No Rio and Fashion Moda, the issue was integration. This goes back to the 1969 Art Workers Coalition, and the Black and Puerto Rican artists’ caucuses. Most graffiti writers were people of color. Both Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat were associated with graffiti during their rise. Their success helped to open a path for many “writers” to become artists in the mainstream artworld. Even so, their path was steep and difficult.

Graffiti on Canvas

There were differences between graffiti artists and other mainly white artists. There were also differences within the writers’ community itself. This was revealed at a panel discussion I organized during Martin Wong’s retrospective. The Chino-Latino painter was the most important collector of early NYC graffiti art.
I knew of “Fab Five Freddy” Brathwaite’s key role as an interlocutor between worlds. I learned of Rammellzee’s rich ideology of graffiti, as propounded in an interview with Edit deAk. I worked for David Schmidlapp and the IGTimes graffiti magazine (they preferred “aerosol art”). The murder of Michael Stewart by transit police for writing on the subway traumatized our downtown community.
Almost no graffiti artists came to ABC No Rio, where I worked. They were all on the path of commercial success. Our gallery engaged politics by participating in networked political exhibitions around anti-nuclear and anti-gentrification themes, and in support of Central American resistance.

Poster protesting the police assault on Michael Stewart, before his death. (Probably by David Wojnarowicz)

NEXT: Hard Left – And a Ruckus in D.C.

LINKS

Vivienne Dick, an esteemed Irish filmmaker
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1997609/

Vivienne Dick en Espanol, with links to some films
http://pov.com.mx/vivienne-dick-el-espiritu-no-wave-en-super-8/

Lydia Lunch article en Espanol, also with links to some films
http://piñataproductions.com/lydia-lunch-im-not-punk-although-im-more-punk-than-you-punks/

Kiki Smith & collective, "Cave Girls", 1981
https://archive.org/details/03CaveGirlsH264

Diane Torr's interview re. Times Square Show, 2011
http://www.timessquareshowrevisited.com/accounts/diane-torr.html

MWF Video Club, our last catalogue (defunct; no orders)
http://www.brickhaus.com/amoore/

May 2019 blog post on Wojnarowicz in Times Square
http://artgangs.blogspot.com/2019/05/wojnarowicz-in-madrid-2-old-times-square.html