Memoir #13: Busting Moves, Breaking Locks

The view from the window of 156 Rivington Street in 1980

So I was packing boxes to ship from Madrid to Milwaukee, USA – 30 in all, they just went out last week. They’ll go on a ship, to be a bit greener. Such a delay to get back to this blog, what with taxes, yada yada. And now I find that my folder of blog posting papers has disappeared. Must be on its way to USA. Miao! I am forced to start again, from what’s on the computer. I was about to tell the story of the near-breakup of the Colab artists’ group in ‘79, based on my reading of Andrea Callard’s files at NYU in late ‘19. It was to be called “#12 All for One or Fall Apart?”. This phase of Colab’s story was to be a complex write, really, and it proved to be a stumbler. So for now I’ll leave it for later, and number this post 13.

The gist of #12 was that Colab in late ‘79 was on the verge of falling apart. 1980 saw some sudden dramatic events that changed the situation completely.
This post is about ABC No Rio, our pride and joy in Loisaida, NYC. I've told the story of the Real Estate Show, of how we got ABC, rather completely in a special issue of House Magic: Bureau of Foreign Correspondence, no. 6 “The Real Estate Show Revisited”, April 2014 – still only $4!.

That Big, Loud Squat We Did

A group of us artists occupied a city-owned building with a fast throw-up exhibition. We called it the Real Estate Show. The building was in a boulevard location just off the Williamsburg Bridge, above a subway station exit. We got a huge rise out of the city HPD (angry assistant commissioner on the scene), coverage in the New York Times, Joseph Beuys came to our streetside press conference. And the city gave us a “relocation”, i.e., another place to put our art show.
Why they dealt with us so quickly given our near-totally uninformed and creampuff nature as activists was always a mystery to me. It’s because, as a city official we talked to explained to Bobby G, “You didn’t open a can of worms. You opened a can of pythons.”
How so?

Orchard Street in 1926. Via boweryboyshistory.com

The Scandal of the SPURA

Our motivation in doing that action was indignation at the housing situation in lower Manhattan with so many vacant buildings, and the impossibility of procuring space to show work. In truth we had little notion of the real politics and economics of housing that surrounded us.
As well as being a charming little commercial building, 125 Delancey Street, the original site of the Real Estate Show, looked at its outset as if it could become more than a show of angry art. It could be a venue for organizers and a meeting place for people concerned with housing. A lot of people were being evicted by the city only a block away.
125 Delancey was on the edge of the SPURA, an urban renewal zone notorious in the history of US urban renewal. Historian Barry Goldberg explains:
“In 1965, the New York City Board of Estimate, an eight-member body that once had authority over the city’s budget and land-use matters, but has since been declared unconstitutional, approved a plan to create the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area (SPURA). At the time, the site was one of lower Manhattan’s most racially and ethnically diverse communities, a fourteen-block area of small businesses and tenements in the heart of New York’s Lower East Side. Over 1,850 families lived there and roughly 80% were low-income. In 1967, the city took possession of – and began to demolish – the old SPURA buildings. Housing authorities provided a written guarantee to displaced residents that they would have priority rights to one of the roughly 1,800 new apartments built on the site.”
Nothing like that happened. 50 years of fighting over the area ensued. Sheldon Silver, a powerful pol, went to jail over his role in the long-term land-parking of what had been thousands of families’ homes. Our Real Estate Show came along 10 years into that stagnation, “‘one of urban renewal’s grandest failures,’ a string of vacant lots and abandoned land that embodied the city’s broken promise and broader neglect of low-income communities.”
(Goldberg was reviewing Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani, Contested City: Art and Public History as Mediation at New York’s Seward Park Urban Renewal Area, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018.)

What's there now? A 2,000,000 square feet billion dollar development called Essex Crossing, part of the new gold coast Lower East Side. The luxury condo part has the same address as the Real Estate Show – 125 Delancey Street.

Big Talk, How’s the Walk?

The Committee for the Real Estate Show had boldly announced its action to the press:
“"This is a short-term occupation of vacant city-managed property. It is pre-emptive and insurrectionary. The action is dedicated to Elizabeth Mangum, a middle-aged Black American killed by police and marshals as she resisted eviction in Flatbush last year. The intention of this action is to show that artists are willing and able to place themselves and their work squarely in a context which shows solidarity with oppressed people… It is important to show that people are not helpless--they can express their resentment with things-as-they-are in a way that is constructive, exemplary, and interesting… It is important to try to bridge the gap between artists and working people by putting artwork on a boulevard level… It is important to do something dramatic that is neither commercially oriented nor institutionally quarantined – a groundswell of human action and participation with each other that points up currents of feeling that are neither for sale nor for morticing into the shape of an institution.”

ABC No Rio, 156 Rivington St., NYC, in 1980. ©1980 Becky Howland, all rights reserved.
Writing in 2012, Deborah Frizzell quotes this as “Colab’s manifesto”, which it certainly is not. While the text did call out “racism, class differences, [and] predatory capitalism”, ABC was going to be an art center. We didn’t get active in housing struggles. No one came to us to ask us to host their meetings. Not until over a decade later did ABC No Rio get busy on that. The place became an active node in the movement of LES squatters. But by then the original group of us was long gone.

Next: Running the Place

LINKS and CITATIONS

House Magic: Bureau of Foreign Correspondence, no. 6 “The Real Estate Show Revisited”, April 2014 paper copy available at: https://printedmatter-linkedbyair.herokuapp.com/catalog/41685
It is also an online PDF somewhere.

Barry Goldberg, "Art, history, and urban contestation: a review of Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani’s Contested City", n.d.
Metropole blog, at https://themetropole.blog/2019/10/24/art-history-and-urban-contestation-a-review-of-gabrielle-bendiner-vianis-contested-city/

For a brief exposition of the situation, see:
Wikipedia, "Essex Crossing"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essex_Crossing

Deborah Frizzell, “Whose World is This? Jane Dickson and Charlie Ahearn”, exhibition brochure, University Gallery, William Paterson University of New Jersey (2012); accessed on academia.edu


Lugnut, "X is for...", from the current online exhibition "Polemic"

Good Night, Barbara

Barbara Ess, Rio Grande, 2012

This is the 12th blog post in my memoir project. It is a detour to mark a recent and painful passing.

Cara Perlman, an ex-Colabber and a filmmaker who runs Seaperl Productions, appeared to me in a dream. She said, "Hey, we're all dying. You better get busy." And so it happens…
Barbara Ess, 1944-2021, was celebrated with obituaries in Art News and the NY Times, as befits a long-time professor of art, esteemed photographer. And erstwhile influential musician.
Barbara was one of a number of people circulating around Colab in its earliest days, more specifically a crowd of bold exciting woman artists. I met her at Coleen Fitzgibbon’s storefront ca. 1978 during the Just Another Asshole magazine assembling/exhibition event which she produced with Jane Sherry.

Just Another Asshole, We

Imagine calling a magazine “Just Another Asshole”! Punks were post-Beat for real. So many Beats were serious assholes – and nearly all male chauvinists. So this is a magazine full of other assholes. Perfect. So are we all, and so should we be aware of how we use our assholery properly or improperly, against each other.

I saw Barbara again in her apartment a few blocks from mine. I was bringing her my layout for JAA. Barbara lived there with Glenn Branca (1948-2018), the cult composer.

Glenn was revered by many young musicians. Howie Seligman fondly recalls performing as one of the 100 guitarists at the World Trade Center for a Branca concert. When I met Glenn at their kitchen table, he was filling his role as the punk Beethoven. He was shabbily dressed (as ever), and glowered rather than conversed.

More Famous than Me

Paul McMahon, who acted as a musician (he was) in my uncompleted movie “Party Noise”, was in a band called Daily Life with both Glenn and Barbara. Paul recalls, "Glenn was always wearing dirty, black clothes, in layers, like really dirty and sort of tattered, though elegant, somehow. He claimed he found everything on the street, abandoned for whatever reason. He’d just put it on without washing it first."

Daily Life, the band; faces scratched out

"Barbara’s songs were like screamed mantras,” Paul writes: “‘No work, no job, no love and no money’, ‘Be my mother be my father be my sister be my brother’ repeated over and over with a steady, on the beat, rhythm led by her bass."

Barbara had a nervous intense manner. I noticed as she spoke how much we seemed to resemble each other physically. In our subsequent brief encounters over the years there was this same odd tension.

Babies and Tintypes

I saw her again years later when she came out to Staten Island to do a pinhole camera photo of our baby Taylor in front of the white rosebush. She was doing babies, probably with a pinhole Polaroid since I saw a proof of our featureless infant in front of an explosion of white spots. I was never able to get a copy.
Barbara called me some time later to ask if I’d do a talk to her class at Bard College about my collection of antique photos. I accumulated many of these as I drifted through countless country antique stores, fingering sheafs of old images, enchanted by the dead. I studied up on what I knew about old photography, which was almost nothing, but she never called back.

Barbara Ess, Untitled, 1991

Famous For Being Unknown

Barbara was a key actor in that late ‘70s circle of artist musicians. Her final days with a suddenly diagnosed fast-acting cancer, rather like being hit by an intercellular truck, were reported on social media by her friend Virge Piersol. They were both in the seminal [?! oh, how wrong] avant-girl band Y Pants which Barbara started. That group was one of many in the music/art underground celebrated in Thurston Moore’s book No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York. 1976-1980 (2008).
These were people who really had no interest in making it in the “music industry”, still the game-controller in those days.
Ed Halter, a film historian and Ess’s colleague at Bard, notes that Y Pants was praised by conceptual art and No Wave art rock fanboy and producer Dan Graham for their “percussive primitivism and girl vocal teasing playfulness”.

Y Pants: Left to right, Virge Piersol, Barbara Ess, and Gail Vachon

Poets Who Know It

Barbara also performed with Barbara Barg (1947-2018), another super-cool woman poet I knew through work-work (typesetting). The wave of poets who made up art-rock bands during those years has been documented by Daniel Kane in his book "Do You Have a Band?" Poetry and Punk Rock in NYC (2017).
The Ess/Barg collaboration was on the first issue of Tellus, the audio cassette magazine started by Joseph Nechvatal, Claudia Gould, and Carol Parkinson. They recorded at PASS, the studio Carol managed. Joseph was in Colab, so the ABC No Rio Cardboard Air Band also recorded for Tellus at PASS. I wrote some CAB songs, but I wasn’t really into the music track.
I was minimally trained on guitar by a guy who was fired from Creedence. So now that’s another thing to regret from those days, that I didn’t whip out my toy piano, kalimba and broken bongos and join in the party on stage. Or at least been more of a fan-boy of art-rock.
Unlike me, Barbara was not a hanging-out person, so although her path during those late ‘70s-early ‘80s years intersected with a lot of my friends, I didn’t see her outside of specific contacts.

Long Time Gone

The search term "Barbara Ess" leads to a wormhole of independent music afficionadoes as well as the more well-groomed artworld that admires -- and sells -- her pictures. Izzy Leung, once her student at Bard, wrote for Aperture the journal of canonical photography, about her recent show around the aesthetics of surveillance.

Her themes were deep. Leung quotes her: “I asked someone once, how is the world where you are not? You never know… When you walk out of a room, what’s it like when you’re not there?”

Bomb magazine remembers her with a quote: “When I try to get clever I fail, so I stick with the basic issues of human life on earth - sex, death, relationships, discovering who you are, being hurt and confused.”

Just another lovable person, and a wonderful profound artist.

LINKS

Paul McMahon, "Daily Life"
http://paulmcmahon.tv/daily-life/

Barbara Ess & Barbara Barg - “You Who Know Pain (No Wave)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffd-PRhS-aA

Daniel Kane in his book "Do You Have a Band?" Poetry and Punk Rock in NYC
introduction on Issu
https://issuu.com/columbiaup/docs/kane-punk-poetry-excerpt

Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tellus_Audio_Cassette_Magazine

Y Pants music
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToXqAkGauoQ

Just Another Asshole #6
sold out
Just Another Asshole was an influential and now-legendary mixed-media publication series edited by Barbara Ess from 1978 to 1987.
https://primaryinformation.org/product/just-another-asshole/

Ed Halter, commentary from Meshes of the Afternooon blog at:
http://mylifeandprophecies.blogspot.com/2008_01_15_archive.html

Barbara Ess, Peekaboo, 2014. Courtesy the artist and Magenta Plains, New York

Memoir #11: Library Stories

Coleen Fitzgibbon, "La Maffia", 1979, exhibited at the 1980 Times Square Show

In Search of Historical Colab. This is the 11th in a series of posts from my memoir research in NYC. This post continues the account of delvings in the NYU library among the files of Andrea Callard, an early secretary of the Colab artists group. She wrote the record of the group’s struggles in the period 1977-79.

We Got the Money – How Do We Share It Out?

Colab became real when the federal NEA grant money arrived. Once the money came in, the question was how to split it up fairly and efficiently. A division among members was made, with each having so many shares. Members could vote their shares towards projects they preferred. “The group evolved to agree that when three or more individual artists planned to collaborate on a project,” Andrea wrote to me, “they would propose it to the group and ask for money. Sometimes, grant money was divided into $200 allotments and three or more people would take those for their projects.”
The record – In the Colab “Red Book” (folder 12) is minutes of a meeting of September 21, initialed by Michael McClard, which specifies that the grant monies received went out as $200 allotments which “can only be used on projects involving three or more people, two of whom must be from Collaborative Projects Inc.”

Odd Bits In There

The folders at NYU aren’t all in chronological order, and many notes are undated. For 1978 there’s not so much. One odd item – folder 1 contains a flyer from the “Friends of Astrid Proll Campaign”. She was the RAF member who fled Germany, and hid out in London squats. (She edited a book about her years there in 2010; Jon Savage wrote the intro.) Proll was exposed by a tabloid in ‘78, and fought extradition for a year. Her support campaign was organized by radical feminists. Many of us were fascinated by the radical left Europeans the mainstream media called “terrorists”.

The English way with news stories

Just Another Asshole

Folder 1 contains notes on “Colab direction” – “what do members really want?” The “basic need,” Andrea wrote, is “direct financial aid to artists who collaborate”. Another flyer invites contributors to the journal Just Another Asshole, organized by Barbara Ess and Jane Sherry. “Everything submitted will be included”. You can send it, or “come to 5 Bleecker St while the magazine is being compiled and compose your piece on the spot”.

Folder 2, also undated, includes an announcement for a meeting at Coleen’s 5 Bleecker store. There members could present “receipts for Colab activities – repayment only at meetings”. Some comments made during the meetings are randomly recorded: “bitter feelings for fools” (has to be Robin Winters); and “everything important happens in irregular ways”. That’s for sure.

All “money should be dished out according to policy – no money should be spent without the calling of an emergency meeting and the agreement of 10 or more members who can forfeit future shares”. It also developed that a quorum, a particular number of members, was required for an official group decision. “If I were making those notes these days instead of in 1978-80,” Andrea wrote me, “they would be dated and detailed.”

1978 Was a Happening Year

1978 was when things really started to take off in Colab. Everyone was busy. The “Red Book” (folder 12) was the first one assembled by the group to support Colab’s grant application to the federal NEA. It records activities 1977-78, and contains important selected records.
The Red Book notes numerous loft film screenings and self-organized group exhibitions. On the cable TV front, the All Color News group is meeting. The Potato Wolf live series is beginning. These meetings are open, and people come and go. Liza Béar’s Slow Scan video project happens. She invites her older artist friends and a few kids from Colab. The artists who will (or won’t) show films at the New Cinema next year are casting and shooting – John Lurie and James Nares, Men in Orbit; Tina L’hotsky and Michael Oblowitz, “Snake Woman”; Michael McClard, Motive; Cara Perlman and Jane Sherry, “Topless”; me with “Party Noise”; Eric Mitchell, Kidnapped and Red Italy; and Nares with Rome ‘78.

Still from "X Magazine Benefit", Moore/Fitzgibbon, 1978/2011, James Chance performing

Who Said What? Who Knows?

By March of ‘79 Colab has already purchased 3/4” video editing machines and they were being heavily used (folder 6). A catalogue of videos for distribution was being planned. (This was never realized; seven years later we would start MWF Video Club.) The Potato Wolf artists television series was producing; I made “Shipwreck” for them.
The next day in the archives I found folder 32, which contains an announcement for a March 16 (1979?) meeting at Kiki Smith’s place on South Street. It announces the “distemper agenda”, which concerned the fierce dust-up over the showing of Tom Otterness’ “Shot Dog Film” on the uncurated Redcurtain cable TV show run by Colab. The Kitchen’s Media Bureau and the state’s NYSCA had decided “not to fund Colab cable TV shows”. The officers wrote: “The NEA supports our position of showing non-censored, non-curated work but they receive 50-100 letters / day from taxpayers who complain about Co-lab’s dog. They need to defend their operation to Congress.” Discuss.
In a separate folder on the “Shot dog incident” (folder 37), Andrea’s notes make it clear that the Media Bureau, funded by NYSCA, pulled $1,500 of Colab funding that year. She notes that our choice was to “go along with NEA” or “withdraw our 1980 application”. (The agency demanded a disavowal.) A letter from Jim Sutcliffe deplores that Colab didn’t support a “policy of no editorial censorship in our organization”.

Rupert and the Dog

This wrenching incident was provoked and stoked by the New York Post newspaper. It had recently been acquired by Rupert Murdoch, who had English tabloid habits – always banging on the hot button – and rightward tendencies. (The Post had always been a Democratic paper; Rupert fixed that.) The incident caused dissension within Colab, rollicked our relationship with funders, and despite his oft-expressed remorse, did lasting damage to Otterness’ subsequent and highly unprovocative career.
Folder 35 contains an undated flyer stating “negotiations are being made with Annette Kuhn, Administrator for Cultural Affairs, NYC to acquire a space from the city”. This was well before the Real Estate Show (December 31, 1979-January 1, 1980), when a group of us just took one of the City’s innumerable buildings.
Annette was a friend of Marc Miller from the NYU graduate art history program. She was tight with Mayor Ed Koch, and had been appointed a functionary of the “art commission”, with an office in City Hall. I remember talking with her there, but I don’t think she ever took us seriously. She and others of her Voice colleagues looked upon us with some amusement, as if to say, “Oh yeah?”

Squat Theatre company in Paris, 1976, shortly before travelling to NYC

Annette’s Salon

During the 1970s Annette Kuhn wrote the “Culture Shock” column for the Village Voice, covering events in the NYC artworld. In her work for Mayor Ed Koch, she is noted as a “mayoral aide” running a “task force” to study the future use of the Tweed Courthouse, a building then in disrepair. (Paul Goldberger, “The Tweed Courthouse: From Venality To Disrepair...”, New York Times, June 14, 1978.) In ‘79 I met with her in her office in City Hall, just off the little-trafficked public art gallery that used to be there. The meet was inconclusive.
Years later in the ‘00s she ran a monthly salon in her Tribeca loft. She bought John Morton’s fiberglass building artwork from the Real Estate Show, and later another giant piece by Dick Miller. She wasn’t involved at all back then in the negotiations which our gang, called the Committee for the Real Estate Show, had with the HPD that led to ABC No Rio. So far as I know, she kept her mouth shut about her prior knowledge of our aims. I never talked to her about this before her death.

The Prototype of the Fax Machine

Another series of later folders contains announcements for early shows of 1977 (many of the best are reproduced in A Book About Colab), and a treasure trove of the QWIP facsimile transmissions from Colab’s experiments with this new technology. Before fax machines or the Internet, Liza Bear obtained six QWIP machines from the Exxon Corporation. You’d just plug them into the telephone.
Various members used them in their individual studios for a few weeks at a time then moved the machines to someone else. The machine would transmit drawings, texts, photos, and collages over the phone lines. The receiving machine would deposit carbon powder on special paper. There are many between Andrea and Robin Winters – (there was one in our apartments on Houston Street) – some by Robert Cooney and Cara Perlman who lived downstairs, and others in the Colab circle. The electrical connection made by the telephonic machine reinforced, preceded and echoed social connections. They describe meals, and some of Andrea’s botanical experiments. They seem to me very Fluxus – like, about what we eat and with whom.

Fax About What

Among the more various QWIPs from 1977-78 (in folders 46-50) I found my own “Writing Doctor” piece for the Doctors and Dentists show. I used a pile of old prescription pads I found on the street, most for narcotic painkillers. There’s one about the NEA taking Colab’s money away. A lot about sex. A number of Art-Rite number 21s, Judy Rifka’s totally hand drawn issue (it became a “you draw it” issue as, overwhelmed, she handed some blanks off to other artists). A drawing by Tom Otterness I recall, captioned “Co-Lab Cure / Blind Justice / Blind Force / The Leader”, and one prefiguring the Potato Wolf TV series: “Famous fish brings networks to bottom of sea”.

Still from "All Color News", 1978

The drawings and collages for QWIPs were put into a plastic sleeve, stuck onto a drum, spun, scanned and transmitted. With the sleeve holding the elements, changeable collages could be made without fixing the elements onto the paper. Some of the QWIPs were annotated and sent back. There is one with Scott and Beth B shown as a tourist couple with numerous snarky comments. The prints are remarkably stable, if dim, dull, and grimy-looking as they were originally. This series is remarkable in the social information it contains. It tells about relationships within Colab in ways I can’t imagine anything else now does.

Film, a Deadly Art

Folder 49 contains QWIPs from me about the Terrorist News Annual project dated February 17, 1979, which I produced at Coleen’s 5 Bleecker Street store. There’s one image of with a blown-up fragment of film of heads on pikes from the lost Super-8 film – lost, lost, all lost… like the deaths it records.
Notes in both folders 1 and 2 concern the May ‘79 meeting. Charlie Ahearn is showing his first feature, The Deadly Art of Survival, at Liza Béar’s Center for New Art Activities. Lindzee Smith’s Nightshift theatre group is staging a play by the German playwright, actor and Communist activist F.X. Kroetz, Men’s Business. An actor and director, Lindzee was at the center of a cadre of Australian artists who circulated through Colab. He was married to Betsy Sussler, who started X Motion Picture Magazine in 1977. The project continued in ‘78 and ‘79 as an open publication of Colab. Betsy dropped out of Colab, and went on to found Bomb magazine.

Aussies in Tribeca, Hungoricans Uptown

The Kroetz play was translated by the prolific translator, editor and publisher Michael Roloff (d. 2019). It was produced at the Squat Theater, the 23rd Street venue run by the Hungarian exile theater collective in 1979 (roloff.mysite.com, accessed April 2020; the site includes portions of his unpublished memoirs of his downtown NYC years). Both Roloff and the Squat Theatre were part of a bubbling emigre theater scene downtown during these years.
Folder 1 also shows that Willoughby Sharp was doing his own thing – “Sharpcom” – at 93 Grand Street, the building he still owned. R.L. Seltman, a key figure in the Little Italy scene of A’s and Storefront for Art & Architecture, was working with Ear Magazine, a publication of the New Wilderness Foundation, a Fluxus-related joint.

Willoughby and Liza during Avalanche magazine days

Never-To-Be Schemes

Folder 2 contains an April/May ‘79 list of Colab committees. Groups were working on making a video catalogue, getting space for the group – “projects – make abandoned building into hotel for transient or visiting artists”, a “type shop” and a “writers center”.
I have no recollection of these committees ever meeting. But they prefigure roles I would later play in Colab with the Real Estate Show and the MWF Video Club. Notes from June of ‘79 (also folder 2) reveal that Beth B and Charlie Ahearn want a video projector. They were both excluded from showing at the New Cinema; they didn’t get that device.
Issues around the editing equipment are discussed. The folder includes a list of members of Colab with many names now crossed out. The QWIP facsimile project arranged by Liza Béar was already over – “bring them back at the next meeting”.
July of 1979 (folder 3) is the most substantively annotated meeting of all. It’s a “financial planning meeting for NEA funding period August ‘79 - April ‘80”. The video decks must be sold because they can no longer be housed. We lost the front room space at Marty the Seltzer Man on Broome Street. Curiously, one of Marty’s home-delivered antique seltzer bottles exploded on Marc Miller’s porch in Brooklyn, mauling his leg. The resulting lawsuit spelled the end of Marty’s storefront.

Now What? Big Plans…

Membership is asked: “What do you think Colab should DO in the next year? NEA plans to send us $10,000 to foster exhibition, media, and publication activity”. Suggestions flew: an exhibition fund; a film/video production fund; “print a video catalogue and set up distribution procedure” (again, the seed of the MWF Video project); “buy big ads in national newspapers in which to make statements”; continue cable programs - “perhaps we could sell series of cable shows to companies outside NYC” (a recurrent fantasy, which no artist, not even Andy Warhol TV could realize); “use our ‘arts organization’ legal status to technically sponsor artists (and others) from other countries so that they can avoid the marriage route – as they make ‘unique and invaluable contributions to our community’”.
There is also a narrative description of this meeting. Michael McClard’s proposal for video distribution meets “considerable disagreement”, with “little faith” in our administrative capability, doubts that there would be sales, that advertising could work, and more. Andrea notes: “The cost/advantages discussion took on the quality of a personality free-for-all during which the idea of starting a social club at which beer was sold to make money came up.” That’s what would be done at ABC No Rio one year later.

Colab Ain’t So Unknown

It’s remarkable what a fruitcake’s worth of diverse activities early Colab contained.

Lindzee Smith

The Colab group itself has been noted for its shows in numerous contemporary articles, museum exhibition catalogues, and art history survey textbooks. But direct historical reckoning has been slow in coming. Shawna Cooper’s “Times Square Show Revisited” at Hunter College, CUNY (2012; timessquareshowrevisited.com) was the first small Colab-specific show. The “TSS” was invoked and many artworks included in the 2019 "Basquiat: The Artist and His New York Scene" exhibition at Schunck Museum in Heerlen, NL, because Jean-Michel debuted at that show.
The “Real Estate Show Revisited” series of related exhibitions was one organized more or less by ourselves, with the collaboration of galleries and small institutions. (I edited a zine of reminiscences and precedents for the action, as House Magic #6.)
The A More Store of artists’ multiples, a Colab staple around holiday time for many years, was recreated at the Printed Matter store for the launch of the 2015 A Book About Colab.
We had one exhibition survey of the group on the line a few years ago, but that fish got away.

Thanks again to Andrea Callard for her comments and amendments to this text.

NEXT: #12 All for One or Fall Apart?

LINKS

Astrid Proll, ed., Goodbye to London: Radical Art and Politics in the Seventies
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9253229-goodbye-to-london

Squat Theatre Digital Archive Project
http://squattheatre.com/collection

That website has an amazing bibliography and timeline
http://squattheatre.com/bibliography.html

House Magic 6 (2014 Spring) “Real Estate Show Revisited”
https://archive.org/details/house_magic_6/house_magic_6/page/n3/mode/2

Memoir #10: The Scratchings of a Library Rat

This is the 10th post from my memoir project, an account of my 30 years in the NYC artworld. The last post in this blog had me running around town during the 2019 research trip. Now begins the part where I actually hit the books/papers during a two month stay in the city.


Bombing around the city is fun. But it was the Fales collection I’d come to NYC to visit in that fall of ‘19. I’d presented my credentials and detailed my interests to the research librarians at NYU and NYPL.

In Search of Historical Colab

Andrea Callard and Coleen Fitzgibbon have been chipping away at the work of Colab history and the recovery of our videotapes for years.They held a series of oral history interviews a decade or so ago, and produced a DVD compendium of collaborative video work for the XFR Station show at the New Museum in 2013. Coleen mounted a website, and Andrea prepared and deposited her Colab files along with her creative work at NYU in ‘03.

Andrea was Colab secretary during some of its earliest years (1978-80), so a close look at her Colab files in the NYU research library was first on my list of archival tasks. But there had been big changes there. The NYU special collections are now all lumped together, and the premises renovated. They had reopened bare days before my arrival, and access procedures had changed. Online requests are required for everything, and the new system was still squeaky.

Cranking on NYU

NYU is constructed of different colleges, and so were the research collections. Now one can no longer bumble among the different archives and their collections, each in their own rooms and with distinct customs. The precincts of the Fales collection, with its oil paintings, oriental carpets, and shelves of antique books is gone. It’s harder to wander mentally through the holdings, since the analog (paper) guides are gone. Nor can one go to Tamiment labor history archive with its vitrine exhibitions of old labor movements which would spark new connections. Their policies were looser than Fales, so you might have a whole box put upon your desk. (Fales librarians were super-retentive.) These are now old ways of research. One labors today in antiseptic central precincts as anti-haptic and featureless as cyberspace.

Back room at Fales Library, NYU

Riches Out of Reach

The Fales collection is a treasure trove, but it can no longer be known directly. Whatever you might want must be submitted in advance online, and prepared from online descriptions. There is scant ‘item level description’ of folders, leaving one to guess what might be in them. A folder may contain only one card, or it might contain an undiscovered 12 page manuscript – you can’t know until you open it yourself. The people were nice and helpful for the most part, although there is still that certain kind of archivist who really only wants to serve you one folder at a time, and wants you to sit at the desk until it comes. And when you go to lunch the box goes back to general storage, so you have to wait for it to come back out on the truck. These folks clearly aspire to work for the Vatican.

“Let Me Out of Here, Baby”

Colab remains a deep mystery, a formative experience locked up in multiple memories and multiple conclusions: A crossroads, where all of us made our devil’s bargain. I’d been there, but the spells are now all long forgotten. During my week in scholarly lockup at NYU I hoped to recover some.
I didn’t find what I was hoping for in those files. That’s often the case with research. But I found a lot that doesn’t fit the picture of the group that anyone has drawn so far – those accounts aren’t granular -- and much that contradicted my own recollections. In the course of my interviews, which I’ll blog here in the months to come, I found still more dangling anomalies.

“Established 1978”

The group called Colab began to coalesce around 1977. The core of it was art students who had already met at art schools like San Francisco Art Institute, RISD, Chicago Art Institute, or in the recently-established Whitney Independent Study Program. They were inspired by the older artists who talked to them about the Art Workers Coalition of 1969-70, about European politics and cultural organization, about institutional prejudices in NYC and the realities of the art market. Some of those young artists also worked for the older ones. Out of this cloud of artists working in various disciplines who knew each other from living downtown, a group formed. Many really didn’t believe in such a formation. Some opposed the not-for-profit incorporation which was necessary to apply for funds. Others hated meetings. So they drifted away, sometimes starting with a project and not continuing.

Triangulating between a timeline Andrea and Coleen prepared, the recent A Book About Colab (Printed Matter, 2015), and the files at NYU might produce the clear account I hoped for. Into that you’d have to add the untranscribed oral histories Andrea and Coleen made some years ago, and new ones, specifically to flesh out the matter of the arguments that divided the first group and demotivated many others to continue. What did the group promise? And what did it fail to deliver to so many?
Andrea’s Colab box did not present anything like a clear administrative history of Collaborative Projects. There is still no account of how the group functioned, the arguments, and how it evolved. I mean a synoptic close-to-accurate account. Maybe that’s a project for the future.

Palimpsest – A Mortal Return

So many times after living it I have gone back over and reordered people, events, art and performance in my mind. I’m quoted in A Book About Colab (2015), from my book Art Gangs (2011), revised from the dissertation Collectivities (2000). Marc Miller and I compiled and published ABC No Rio Dinero with its Colab sections in ‘85. Earlier I worked on the Colab books prepared to support grant applications which document each period of activities.
(The Colab books I allude to are not all together in one place, accessible to scholars. There are three of them I know of – the “Red Book”, the “Black Book”, and a third book unnamed.)
While the group lived, I harried my comrades with various broadsides and missives. I’ve jumped houses, cities, now continents with concomitant losses, so I have only some of these books and papers now. I was opinionated, approving some actions and people and disparaging others in letters and manifestos. Later, as Marc and I edited our book, I was more scrupulous and dispassionate. After academic training even more so. In my dissertation, begun 20 years after the lived facts, I tried to chain Colab into a broader academic narrative of New York artists’ left collective formations.

Other Observations

My search for Colab past at NYU would be through the records of Andrea Callard. I didn’t find the coherent story I expected. Instead I found surprises.

Everything I wanted was in Andrea’s box number one. There are no notes in it from the very beginnings of the group. The 1978 “Red Book” includes this note under “Green Corporation [earliest name for the group]… History of Organization”: “First meeting: March, 1977. Weekly meetings with an average attendance of thirty people continued through June, 1977.” After meeting with the artists’ accountant Rubin Gorewitz, “we decide to become a production-oriented organization”. (box 1, folder 12) They immediately began the process of incorporation as a non-profit organization – no incorporation, no grant money.

First Projects

The earliest projects, All Color News cable show, X Magazine, and the loft studio exhibitions began in 1977. The earliest notes I saw were from a September ‘77 meeting of the All Color News group, taken by Beth Horowitz (later Beth B). Beth, along with Teri Slotkin, and Betsy Sussler, are the earliest officers who appear. They’re all women, a pattern Colab would follow. (Andrea recalls that the first officers included Betsy, Liza Béar and Beth, and perhaps Michael McClard; Katy Martin was an officer very briefly.)

How to Do This

The principles of work are given as: “A diversity of political and esthetic convictions is desirable. The major criteria for selected projects is social relevance. Decisions are reached governing our collaboration by operating on a democratic premise and using a democratic process”. (box 1, folder 9)

Christof Kohlhoefer in a Potato Wolf show

Talking with Andrea at her house soon after my sojourn at NYU, she pulled out copies of her Colab notes. Andrea spoke of Liza Béar and the first (second?) set of officers’ “executive decision” to buy 3/4” video editing decks with the first grant Colab received. Liza’s Center for New Art Activities non-profit was the sponsoring organization for Colab’s first grant. She perhaps felt entitled to determine how to spend the funds. But, there was a furor over that followed by a “turning point towards democracy” in the group. Andrea said also that those decks were heavily used to edit media works by various artists. Like the QWIP machines, they moved around to various people’s studios every few months. In Andrea’s notes, there is a log of who used the decks while they were with her.

News Team Colab

Folder 9 contains numerous plans for the ACN, including the scheme of color-coded content that gave the program its name. The idea of the All Color News embodied the idea that the news should be for all colors of people and events.
Among these papers is a tumbling manifesto, typed in all capital letters by James Nares. It’s a brief for guerrilla filmmaking. The “newsteam,” he writes is “…licensed by society to investigate and report the facts”, but they also purvey propaganda and manipulate opinion. The artists making ACN should be conscious of the “‘act’ of being a newsman/woman”, of “using our invested authority to gain access to events and places” and should “violate standard forms of behavior in our pursuit of information.”
The “strategy” of the TV program “is to start with a simple idea, a base from which to move, and then get out into the action and see what happens.” A list of his segment proposals includes “Pier. An hour or so with the guys lying around Roman orgy style at the far end of the southern gay pier hangout. Bodies in the sun.” This sounds like a seed of his great Super-8 feature film, Rome ‘78.

Libidinal Economies

I remember the Colab meetings of 1977 as being at first and at times intoxicating in the depth of artistic, political and social intelligence evident in the group discussions. Everyone was handsome, everyone was sexy. But they were also soon rivened with conflict. The axis of the early battles seemed to me to move between two couples, Robin Winters and Coleen Fitzgibbon, and Liza Béar and Michael McClard. Liza had edited the final issue of Avalanche magazine featuring all those artists, along with Diego Cortez. As I recall, he tended to stand outside the battles, making wry comments until his final decisive resignation.

Diego Vanishes

This theatrical moment and the letter he wrote on that occasion is nowhere noted in these files. Andrea writes, “I don’t believe Liza and Diego remained active in Colab after 1978 when I became secretary. Michael may have continued for a while. I recall that he visited and advised me on my Ailanthus tree film which was difficult to complete.”
As I recall, sharpest arguments in those early meetings revolved around representations made to curators by one or another as Colab which were not made public to the group. (This is actually what got Willoughby Sharp expelled from the Art Workers Coalition.) Andrea recalls that the most typical arguments were about “how to focus our group energy. There would be people with loud voices and there would be people others listened to and those might be different people.”

Steve Mass (left) with Diego Cortez

Hard Work

An undated text in folder 7 reflects the emotional toll this took on Andrea, a gently-spoken person who I’ve never seen angry. She is reflecting and speculating on the processes of Colab, with “cold and rainy characterizations”. “[O]ne lady has a machine gun mouth” – “supports lover’s space age vision”. “[H]e pretends to himself to want to work with others which he is incapable of doing”. “Americans aren’t set up to collaborate and cooperate: they’re competitive and ego ridden”. The “group doesn’t share a big vision, no active focus. Funding of an exclusive nature is unattractive to the egalitarian slice… those who have been unable to deal with their careers as such… those who don’t want others to achieve success of an individual nature at cost to the group. Practical needs to make and sell vs political needs to join & do. Private backbiting undermines public structure”. She elevates the conflict from the petty, concluding that it is a question of “mass audience vs private encounters with art”. This candid assessment pins the weaknesses of both factions.

Thanks to Andrea Callard for her comments and amendments to this text.

NEXT: Historical Colab Continued

LINKS

Guide to the Andrea Callard Papers 1966-2000, Fales Library, NYU
http://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/fales/callard/

Collaborative Projects Inc. Colab - WordPress.com
“Colab is the commonly used abbreviation of the New York City artists' group Collaborative Projects…” It’s trademarked, but we could never hold onto it
https://collaborativeprojects.wordpress.com

“Tamiment labor history archive”
I link to an article recalling the late director, Michael Nash, and his work documenting Occupy Wall Street Evan Neely, “The Generosity of the Archivist”, August 31, 2012
The photo at the head of this post, of an obsoleted card catalogue planted with flowers, also comes from the Social Text blog, credited to Flickr user Aureusbay.
https://socialtextjournal.org/the-generosity-of-the-archivist/

A Book About Colab (Printed Matter, 2015)
https://www.printedmatter.org/catalog/42508/

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