PDF of exhibition brochure in Google drive
Saturday, July 3, 2021
Virtual Reality tour
of "Alan Moore Project"
PDF of exhibition brochure in Google drive
Sunday, June 27, 2021
Political Aspects of the Alan Moore Project Exhibition
June 2021, Walkers Point Center for the Arts, Milwaukee
This is the background text of a talk I will give in discussion on July 10th, 2017 at 7PM CST.
I want to talk about the political content and implications of the art in the collection now exhibited at the WPCA. This is the collection of my family in Milwaukee. My mother, the late Joan W. Moore, was professor of sociology at UWM, a founder of the Urban Studies program there. Her research interests in sociology and social sciences included important contributions in the areas of crime, drugs and gangs. I collected most of this art in New York City where I worked as a critic, video artist, and organizer with the Colab artists group and ABC No Rio cultural center on the Lower East Side. Most of the artwork comes from those years in the 1970s-2000, with a group of later works from political artists in the ‘90s-2010s.
The issues that arise in considering this art are:
a) a commitment to social issue subject matter, and reacting to the rise of Reagan in the 1980s;
b) integrating the all-white artworld through founding multi-ethnic art spaces and programmatic inclusion of graffiti artists;
c) developing strategies of public art, and producing street propaganda for social movements, and imagery around popular struggles
This exhibition includes work from three collections, my parents, my own and a two groups: one called Collaborative Projects and the other ABC No Rio. The collecting began in 1980 and continues to this day, with an emphasis on the last decades and the turn of the 21st century.
Seen all together the work has a clear political trajectory. It starts in the front door of the WPCA with a poster showing the fallen Vendome column in Paris during the Commune of 1871, celebrating its 150th anniversary this year. The image is invoked by a group called the Artists Meeting for Cultural Change (AMCC). This was a discussion group, an open assembly meeting in New York City’s Soho art district in the early 1970s to discuss many of the artists’ political concerns, and practical problems that all artists were facing then. (Problems which have not much changed in the intervening nearly 50 years.)
The principal accomplishment of the AMCC was the anti-catalog, a copy of which is sitting here. (It’s a free 90-page PDF online.) This document was prepared to contest the Whitney Museum’s Bicentennial exhibition of the Rockefeller collection of American [sic!] art, a show which included only one African-American and only one woman artist.
The anti-catalog was a critique of the museum institution, and the rich private collector who controlled museums. The book included texts on native American art, African-American art, and art by women, as well as critiques of pervasive class bias in the art world, and critiques of cultural institutions. In terms of US art history, the anti-catalog was a prophetic document. [Wallach, 1998]
The AMCC wrote, “We share the belief that culture should no longer exist merely as an extension of the economic interests or the personal ‘tastes’ of the wealthy and powerful. Nor can we hope to transform culture outside of a struggle to transform the society from which it springs.”
The artists who organized the AMCC came out of an earlier formation, the Art Workers Coalition. Convened in 1969, the AWC was far more directed in its political intentions, primarily contesting the Vietnam War and institutional indifference and collaboration with the war machine. (The same publisher, Primary Information, which produced recent new anti-catalog reissue also published a number of AWC documents as well, available as downloadable PDFs.)
The AWC’s focus on conditions of creative labor has inspired a number of more recent artists groups, like W.A.G.E. (Working Artists and the Greater Economy) and the Gulf Labor Artist Coalition (contesting institutional use of contracted ‘slave’ labor). Antique AWC poster designs reappeared at Occupy Wall Street, which had a substantial proportion of artists involved in its organization.
The First Room
The first room just inside the front door contains work by the artists’ group Colab (Collaborative Projects, Inc.), formed in 1978 and dissolved in 1989. Early Colab members attended AMCC meetings. The group was formed primarily to execute projects together, especially in video and film. I was a member. We incorporated in order to receive state and federal funds then available to artists groups. Like the AWC and the AMCC, Colab was an assembly-based organization, deciding things in open meetings which averaged 30 to 40 artists. Their intentions, however, were not political; they were productive.
Few of these artists had political affiliations, although they shared the general politicization of thinking young people during the Nixon years, and anger and despair at the right wing administration of Ronald Reagan.
Colab artists engaged social issues in their work. Their art was mostly representational, not abstract. The group’s members made films and videos and played music, doing a wide variety of group projects that few of them would continue once they had settled into a specific mode of creative production.
The strongest political line of Colab artists was expressed in the Real Estate Show on January 1, 1980 when a group of us occupied a vacant building owned by the city. We were evicted, but given another city-owned storefront to use. ABC No Rio was started as a cultural center which exists to this day. In 1985, we wrote of it as “a place concerned with the relationship of art and artists to social reality, of artists who try to make work that is not voyeuristic but engaged.”
Another artists’ space allied with Colab where many members worked was Fashion Moda, opened in the South Bronx in 1978 by Stefan Eins. Eins earlier had run a storefront studio at 3 Mercer Street in Soho. He showed and sold artists’ work there, but did not operate like an art dealer (taking a commission, organizing publicity, etc.).
The South Bronx neighborhood where Fashion Moda opened was a desolate area, famous for its many abandoned buildings, vacant lots, and boarded-up storefronts. Fashion Moda opened its doors to a community of people of color which, as it happened, was experiencing a cultural explosion in the form of hip hop. Fashion Moda held the first important show of graffiti art, organized by John “Crash” Matos, the subject of the cast sculpture in this exhibition.
The sculptors John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres’ live casting technique made their art practice a performance, leading both to a career in public art. Other Colab artists also made public art. Most, however, pursued gallery careers in the mainstream art world with greater or lesser success.
Artists from both ABC No Rio and Fashion Moda came together along with innumerable others in the summer 1980 Times Square Show. This show is famous as the public debut of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, and included graffiti artists alongside the mostly white artists.
One project of the Colab group was the A More Store, an annual sale of artists’ multiples and small works during the holiday season. This came out of the Times Square Show gift shop. Many artists made small objects to sell cheaply – a cabinet here holds numerous examples of the things artists made to make some money, whether they were well known or not. It was the novelty of the item in its decorative value that was the key to a successful store item.
The front room of the show contains numerous works by artists who worked at ABC No Rio. No Rio also became a subcultural hub and a venue of hardcore punk music. During this later period of the ‘80s and ‘90s, ABC shared personnel with the Rivington School artists, a group which squatted a vacant lot and built a huge junk metal sculpture. Linus Coraggio’s metal frame here encloses a photograph of the “sculpture garden”, and a goofy jagged portrait of “JMB” (Basquiat?) by a painter called FA-Q represents this very male and often drunken band of outsider artists.
Room Two
The next room contains more conventional artistic work, much of it involved with abstraction. This work is by artists who exhibited in the East Village during the “art gallery movement” as it has been called of small mostly artist-run galleries that really kicked off the full-scale gentrification of the Lower East Side. While many of the artists expressed social content in their work, the goal of this movement of short-lived galleries was to expose as many artists as possible during the super-heated rich people’s economy of the Reagan ‘80s.
The west wall of the gallery is hung with works that my parents collected, mainly Mexican and Chicano/a artists from their time in Los Angeles. Some of these pieces are explicitly political, engaging hard experiences of Latinx workers, like Judy Baca’s mural commemorating the mineworkers of Colorado. In the center, above, is a poster “Rompe la Dependencia,” by an early NYC political poster group, the Black Cat Collective. This loose group of anonymous artists produced political posters for the street for decades, starting in the 1970s.
Their work prefigures the more straightforwardly political graphic art and poster groups active in the 21st century, like the Just Seeds cooperative and World War III magazine. A sample of this work is on the next wall, to the south. In the center is a print by Leon Golub, an older artist active with the AWC and AMCC, who took as his subjects racist mobs (this image in particular) and South African mercenary torturers.
The hallway immediately outside contains a sign made for the street by feminist artist Ilona Granet. There is also a sign by the RepoHistory group, a group dedicated to producing public markings of important sites of peoples history. The first work is a poster of “Truisms” by Jenny Holzer, an ambiguous set of inflammatory statements she gleaned from polemics both left and right and posted on NYC streets in the late 1970s.
In conclusion, this collection is a kind of cross-section of some 40 years of art production mostly in NYC which engages political and social themes. Much of the work comes from a period that marked a decisive turn in art in NYC away from the dominance of highly theorized modes of abstract art making to a re-introduction of social and political content. Today much of what these artists were doing has been more broadly developed as a coordinated set of practices which are regularly used to support social movements.
– Alan W. Moore, June 2021
REFERENCES:
the anti-catalog – download of 90-page PDF at: primaryinformation.org/an-anti-catalog/
Art Workers' Coalition - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Workers%27_Coalition
Alan Wallach, “Rereading An Anti-Catalog: Radical Art History and the Decline of the Left,” 1998
unpublished paper online at: primaryinformation.org/an-anti-catalog/
Working Artists and the Greater Economy
wageforwork.com
Gulf Labor Artist Coalition | Who's Building the Guggenheim ...
gulflabour.org
"Occupy Wall Street, which had a substantial proportion of artists involved"
Yates McKee, Strike Art, (Verso Books: London, 2016)
review by Paloma Checa-Gismero
field-journal.com/issue-4/review-yates-mckee-strike-art
Collaborative Projects Inc. (Colab), by Alan Moore & Marc Miller
98bowery.com/return-to-the-bowery/abcnorio-colab
Stephen Zacks, “Where Can We Be? The Occupation of 123 Delancey Street”, August 2015
placesjournal.org/article/where-can-we-be-123-delancey-street/
Alan Moore and Marc H. Miller, “The ABCs of ABC No Rio And Its Times”, 1985
98bowery.com/return-to-the-bowery/abcnorio-introduction
Fashion Moda - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fashion_Moda
Allan Schwartzman, Street Art (Dial Press, NY, 1985)
Tiernan Morgan, “35 Years After Fashion Moda, a Bronx Gallery Revisits the Landmark Space”, August 6, 2015
hyperallergic.com/227683/35-years-after-fashion-moda-a-bronx-gallery-revisits-the-landmark-space/
Lawrence, “Interviews – Justseeds (including Swoon & Chris Stain)”, May 4, 2010
arrestedmotion.com/2010/05/interview-justseeds-including-swoon-chris-stain/
Steven Heller, “World War 3 Has Raged for 35 Years”, July 3, 2014
theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/07/world-war-3-the-dawn-of-comic-books-as-protest-art/373878/
Greg Sholette, "REPOhistory'
gregorysholette.com/repohistory/
///////////////////////
For more specific information about this collection and Alan W. Moore’s research, visit alanwmoore.net (under construction)
The issues that arise in considering this art are:
a) a commitment to social issue subject matter, and reacting to the rise of Reagan in the 1980s;
b) integrating the all-white artworld through founding multi-ethnic art spaces and programmatic inclusion of graffiti artists;
c) developing strategies of public art, and producing street propaganda for social movements, and imagery around popular struggles
This exhibition includes work from three collections, my parents, my own and a two groups: one called Collaborative Projects and the other ABC No Rio. The collecting began in 1980 and continues to this day, with an emphasis on the last decades and the turn of the 21st century.
Seen all together the work has a clear political trajectory. It starts in the front door of the WPCA with a poster showing the fallen Vendome column in Paris during the Commune of 1871, celebrating its 150th anniversary this year. The image is invoked by a group called the Artists Meeting for Cultural Change (AMCC). This was a discussion group, an open assembly meeting in New York City’s Soho art district in the early 1970s to discuss many of the artists’ political concerns, and practical problems that all artists were facing then. (Problems which have not much changed in the intervening nearly 50 years.)
The principal accomplishment of the AMCC was the anti-catalog, a copy of which is sitting here. (It’s a free 90-page PDF online.) This document was prepared to contest the Whitney Museum’s Bicentennial exhibition of the Rockefeller collection of American [sic!] art, a show which included only one African-American and only one woman artist.
The anti-catalog was a critique of the museum institution, and the rich private collector who controlled museums. The book included texts on native American art, African-American art, and art by women, as well as critiques of pervasive class bias in the art world, and critiques of cultural institutions. In terms of US art history, the anti-catalog was a prophetic document. [Wallach, 1998]
The AMCC wrote, “We share the belief that culture should no longer exist merely as an extension of the economic interests or the personal ‘tastes’ of the wealthy and powerful. Nor can we hope to transform culture outside of a struggle to transform the society from which it springs.”
The artists who organized the AMCC came out of an earlier formation, the Art Workers Coalition. Convened in 1969, the AWC was far more directed in its political intentions, primarily contesting the Vietnam War and institutional indifference and collaboration with the war machine. (The same publisher, Primary Information, which produced recent new anti-catalog reissue also published a number of AWC documents as well, available as downloadable PDFs.)
The AWC’s focus on conditions of creative labor has inspired a number of more recent artists groups, like W.A.G.E. (Working Artists and the Greater Economy) and the Gulf Labor Artist Coalition (contesting institutional use of contracted ‘slave’ labor). Antique AWC poster designs reappeared at Occupy Wall Street, which had a substantial proportion of artists involved in its organization.
The First Room
The first room just inside the front door contains work by the artists’ group Colab (Collaborative Projects, Inc.), formed in 1978 and dissolved in 1989. Early Colab members attended AMCC meetings. The group was formed primarily to execute projects together, especially in video and film. I was a member. We incorporated in order to receive state and federal funds then available to artists groups. Like the AWC and the AMCC, Colab was an assembly-based organization, deciding things in open meetings which averaged 30 to 40 artists. Their intentions, however, were not political; they were productive.
Few of these artists had political affiliations, although they shared the general politicization of thinking young people during the Nixon years, and anger and despair at the right wing administration of Ronald Reagan.
Colab artists engaged social issues in their work. Their art was mostly representational, not abstract. The group’s members made films and videos and played music, doing a wide variety of group projects that few of them would continue once they had settled into a specific mode of creative production.
The strongest political line of Colab artists was expressed in the Real Estate Show on January 1, 1980 when a group of us occupied a vacant building owned by the city. We were evicted, but given another city-owned storefront to use. ABC No Rio was started as a cultural center which exists to this day. In 1985, we wrote of it as “a place concerned with the relationship of art and artists to social reality, of artists who try to make work that is not voyeuristic but engaged.”
Another artists’ space allied with Colab where many members worked was Fashion Moda, opened in the South Bronx in 1978 by Stefan Eins. Eins earlier had run a storefront studio at 3 Mercer Street in Soho. He showed and sold artists’ work there, but did not operate like an art dealer (taking a commission, organizing publicity, etc.).
The South Bronx neighborhood where Fashion Moda opened was a desolate area, famous for its many abandoned buildings, vacant lots, and boarded-up storefronts. Fashion Moda opened its doors to a community of people of color which, as it happened, was experiencing a cultural explosion in the form of hip hop. Fashion Moda held the first important show of graffiti art, organized by John “Crash” Matos, the subject of the cast sculpture in this exhibition.
The sculptors John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres’ live casting technique made their art practice a performance, leading both to a career in public art. Other Colab artists also made public art. Most, however, pursued gallery careers in the mainstream art world with greater or lesser success.
Artists from both ABC No Rio and Fashion Moda came together along with innumerable others in the summer 1980 Times Square Show. This show is famous as the public debut of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, and included graffiti artists alongside the mostly white artists.
One project of the Colab group was the A More Store, an annual sale of artists’ multiples and small works during the holiday season. This came out of the Times Square Show gift shop. Many artists made small objects to sell cheaply – a cabinet here holds numerous examples of the things artists made to make some money, whether they were well known or not. It was the novelty of the item in its decorative value that was the key to a successful store item.
The front room of the show contains numerous works by artists who worked at ABC No Rio. No Rio also became a subcultural hub and a venue of hardcore punk music. During this later period of the ‘80s and ‘90s, ABC shared personnel with the Rivington School artists, a group which squatted a vacant lot and built a huge junk metal sculpture. Linus Coraggio’s metal frame here encloses a photograph of the “sculpture garden”, and a goofy jagged portrait of “JMB” (Basquiat?) by a painter called FA-Q represents this very male and often drunken band of outsider artists.
Room Two
The next room contains more conventional artistic work, much of it involved with abstraction. This work is by artists who exhibited in the East Village during the “art gallery movement” as it has been called of small mostly artist-run galleries that really kicked off the full-scale gentrification of the Lower East Side. While many of the artists expressed social content in their work, the goal of this movement of short-lived galleries was to expose as many artists as possible during the super-heated rich people’s economy of the Reagan ‘80s.
The west wall of the gallery is hung with works that my parents collected, mainly Mexican and Chicano/a artists from their time in Los Angeles. Some of these pieces are explicitly political, engaging hard experiences of Latinx workers, like Judy Baca’s mural commemorating the mineworkers of Colorado. In the center, above, is a poster “Rompe la Dependencia,” by an early NYC political poster group, the Black Cat Collective. This loose group of anonymous artists produced political posters for the street for decades, starting in the 1970s.
Their work prefigures the more straightforwardly political graphic art and poster groups active in the 21st century, like the Just Seeds cooperative and World War III magazine. A sample of this work is on the next wall, to the south. In the center is a print by Leon Golub, an older artist active with the AWC and AMCC, who took as his subjects racist mobs (this image in particular) and South African mercenary torturers.
The hallway immediately outside contains a sign made for the street by feminist artist Ilona Granet. There is also a sign by the RepoHistory group, a group dedicated to producing public markings of important sites of peoples history. The first work is a poster of “Truisms” by Jenny Holzer, an ambiguous set of inflammatory statements she gleaned from polemics both left and right and posted on NYC streets in the late 1970s.
In conclusion, this collection is a kind of cross-section of some 40 years of art production mostly in NYC which engages political and social themes. Much of the work comes from a period that marked a decisive turn in art in NYC away from the dominance of highly theorized modes of abstract art making to a re-introduction of social and political content. Today much of what these artists were doing has been more broadly developed as a coordinated set of practices which are regularly used to support social movements.
– Alan W. Moore, June 2021
REFERENCES:
the anti-catalog – download of 90-page PDF at: primaryinformation.org/an-anti-catalog/
Art Workers' Coalition - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Workers%27_Coalition
Alan Wallach, “Rereading An Anti-Catalog: Radical Art History and the Decline of the Left,” 1998
unpublished paper online at: primaryinformation.org/an-anti-catalog/
Working Artists and the Greater Economy
wageforwork.com
Gulf Labor Artist Coalition | Who's Building the Guggenheim ...
gulflabour.org
"Occupy Wall Street, which had a substantial proportion of artists involved"
Yates McKee, Strike Art, (Verso Books: London, 2016)
review by Paloma Checa-Gismero
field-journal.com/issue-4/review-yates-mckee-strike-art
Collaborative Projects Inc. (Colab), by Alan Moore & Marc Miller
98bowery.com/return-to-the-bowery/abcnorio-colab
Stephen Zacks, “Where Can We Be? The Occupation of 123 Delancey Street”, August 2015
placesjournal.org/article/where-can-we-be-123-delancey-street/
Alan Moore and Marc H. Miller, “The ABCs of ABC No Rio And Its Times”, 1985
98bowery.com/return-to-the-bowery/abcnorio-introduction
Fashion Moda - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fashion_Moda
Allan Schwartzman, Street Art (Dial Press, NY, 1985)
Tiernan Morgan, “35 Years After Fashion Moda, a Bronx Gallery Revisits the Landmark Space”, August 6, 2015
hyperallergic.com/227683/35-years-after-fashion-moda-a-bronx-gallery-revisits-the-landmark-space/
Lawrence, “Interviews – Justseeds (including Swoon & Chris Stain)”, May 4, 2010
arrestedmotion.com/2010/05/interview-justseeds-including-swoon-chris-stain/
Steven Heller, “World War 3 Has Raged for 35 Years”, July 3, 2014
theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/07/world-war-3-the-dawn-of-comic-books-as-protest-art/373878/
Greg Sholette, "REPOhistory'
gregorysholette.com/repohistory/
///////////////////////
For more specific information about this collection and Alan W. Moore’s research, visit alanwmoore.net (under construction)
Wednesday, April 21, 2021
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"
Friday, March 12, 2021
Good Night, Barbara
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."
"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
Tuesday, February 23, 2021
Memoir #11: Library Stories
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”.
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.
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?”
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”.
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.
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
Thursday, February 11, 2021
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.
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/
Saturday, January 30, 2021
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…
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.
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.
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.
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)”
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
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