Memoir #18: Stefan Eins Part 2: Fashion Moda and the Hidden Dimensions

Stefan Eins at home in 2019
Continuing the series of blogs of material not included in my 2022 memoir "Art Worker". In this second part of my interview with Stefan Eins, we get to the meat of the matter, Fashion Moda. Stefan tells how he got tired of Soho. He meets Joe Lewis. Shows in “Rooms”, the exhibition that opened P.S. 1. I interject ruminations on Colab, the famous F/M store at Documenta, and art historical “consequences”. Then we veer off into Stefan's real concern, the extra dimensions and the world of the unseen that is revealed to him through material signs in the everyday environment. Which is kind of what it’s always been about. This is an interview as tug of war with extensive interpolations.

AM: So you got tired of 3 Mercer Store [see part one], and you met Joe Lewis.
SE: Yes. We met at 3 Mercer…. He lived in Little Italy. It was walking distance….
AM: ...So how did the project of Fashion Moda develop with Joe?
SE: Soho was so interconnected in its traditions, the tradition of modern art…. I went to the Bronx in my belief that creativity is a basic human trait, and [you don't have to] abide by rules that are made by somebody else, or different societal information. I wanted to be independent from that. I also wanted to focus on a group of people that are not really considered on that level…. And to envision a situation where I'm distancing myself from a modernist tradition, I wanted to go to the Bronx, and finding there graffiti, hiphop, break dancing, etc…. It was extremely special that I found that sort of situation there. And in an amazing manner, it proved me to be right.... Then of course my local friends, Keith Haring showed there very early on. Jenny Holzer came there. It hooked up with all that too.

Stefan has always known where the canonical bread is buttered.

AM: There was a show in Soho in 1976 at the Razor Gallery of the United Graffiti Artists organized by Hugo Martinez. He was a sociology graduate student at Hunter College and he worked with some graffiti artists, got them a studio, got them to put stuff on canvas. Did you see that show?
SE: I might have seen it, but if I did I don't really remember it. I didn't go to the Bronx for that, but in the end it became a very important component of what I did there.
AM: … So how did you find the place? You're going up there, looking around....
SE: It was a year after the riot. There was a riot in '77. [This followed on from a two day city-wide blackout of electricity in July of that year.] It destroyed shops in the Hub. And I found this empty storefront which was a perfect place to exhibit, high ceilings, etc. I got in contact with the owner. He met me in his Wall Street office, and he gave me a good price. I ended up fixing up the building, because it was really so broken….
AM: So you just went up there on the subway, looking around. Did you go with Joe?
SE: No. I went by myself. I was friends with Joe downtown. He had a studio in that area too. Then I didn't want to be the only white person in a mostly African-American and Hispanic neighborhood, and that's why I wanted Joe to be part of it.
AM: And he was into it…. I know I was at 3 Mercer a lot. It was very comfortable to hang out there. You never knew who might be there, and always something interesting…. I didn't get to Fashion Moda as often as I would have liked. Peter Mönnig and Becky Howland did shows up there. I saw them. I saw Jane Dickson’s collaborative City Maze, a bunch of things. I didn't hang out.
SE: The artists didn't really hang out there that much. They came for exhibitions. But hanging out on a daily basis... It was too much of a train ride, an hour and a half….

Fashion Moda exterior with mural by John "Crash" Matos. Photo by Lisa Kahane.

Lisa Kahane was the photographer for Fashion Moda. Hers are the iconic photos, the neighbors crowding around John Ahearn for the opening of his show of portrait heads, the kids grinning while racing around in the City Maze, the gallery’s different facade paintings, and more. (I’m in one I think, a long shot of an art opening on the street, my hair still red.) Her book, Do Not Give Way to Evil (2008), contains some of these photos of what they called “the Moda”, but the emphasis is on the borough itself. Her title is the borough’s motto in Latin – Ne cede malis. The vacant buildings, the vast rubble-strewn lots of that ravaged district are all in those images, the kind of wholesale urban abandonment – 75,000 buildings – most closely associated today with Detroit. Lisa’s own essay recalls that the South Bronx was so wasted and deserted that the horizon was visible. Even so, life was on the streets, and Lisa photographed people with their full knowledge and complicity. They’re smiling.
The South Bronx, she writes, was “an unimaginable wasteland. It was frightening and fascinating…. As material culture disappears, social process becomes more important. The empty space was a catalyst to creativity. The culture created in the Bronx and the other tortured neighborhoods of New York City in the 1970s and 80s is so strong it’s now an international style.”
The ruins of the borough attracted politicians, most memorably Ronald Reagan in 1980 who posed in front of John Fekner’s mural “BROKEN PROMISES / FALSAS PROMESAS”. Fekner had stencilled the words in 1980 for the People’s Convention, a big open-air counter-convention to the Democratic Party meeting in the city. John and others from Fashion Moda dialogued with the organizers about which issues needed to be expressed. “DECAY” – “SAVE OUR SCHOOL” – and “BROKEN TREATIES. LAST HOPE”. [Kahane, 2008]

Murals by John Fekner in a vacant lot. From Juztapoz magazine.

We talked about the artists who showed at 3 Mercer and Fashion Moda who also joined the Colab artists group.

AM: ... The Colab story is very complex. There were a lot of people circling around….
SE: That's why it became important. It was another step away from this modernist structure.
AM: Yes, but it was not accepted by institutional and market structures…. Autonomous organization of artists is accepted so long as you are on the margin…. You have to enter the market and the institutions on their own terms.
SE: But we're getting credit for what we have done. I'm getting credit…. You can do your own thing, you know. You are not dependent on them…. What the MoMA [Museum of Modern Art, NYC] is doing now is what we did then…. They still call it modern art. But the structure, that openness in the presentation started with what we did during that time period.... But they shouldn't call it ‘modern art’ since it's not modern art anymore….
AM: The transformation of the MoMA I think began with the coming together with P.S. 1…. [Alanna’s Heiss’s Institute for Art and Urban Resources got hold of the building in 1971; it affiliated with the MoMA in 2000.]
SE: When did that start?
AM: P.S.1 started publicly with the “Rooms” exhibition in 1976. “Rooms” was incredibly influential on everybody – artists, alternative space people, institutions and real estate developers. They didn't say, ‘Oh, great we have this space,’ and paint everything white, they just accepted the space like it was. It was a found site….
SE: I was in the first PS1 show.... I did a doll, I think. A foam rubber doll with broken dried leaves over the head. The hands were also dried leaves tied to it. ... There were a lot of people in that room. I was also in a one-person show at PS1 years later. It dealt with other dimensionality. You can go to my website and other dimensionality is addressed. I have a copy. Hold on.

As I transcribed this interview, it became clear to me that I was trying to get information out of Stefan that he had no great interest in recalling. He’s always been a big picture person, disinterested in details. The dirt of art history, who did what when and where doesn’t concern him, and during my visit it was obsessing me. The interview is a clear struggle between what he wanted to tell me and what I wanted to hear. He really only wanted to talk about his art now. I was doing interviews for my book, so I had an agenda. He pulled out a book and we looked at it together. It contains contains photographs of recent works he has exhibited. They show patterns on the sidewalk, which he interpreted.

SE: ….and I don't think that's a coincidence. It's a response by other dimensionality to my thinking about it. The shadow is exactly here. The two cigarettes are right here next to each other. So that's an amazing coincidental reality. And I do not rule out that it was created by other dimensional intelligence. I have a whole website now that deals with other dimensions…. And that's also magical, and I am glad you are here, and talking about my life magic. I left Vienna when the Vienna Actionist movement came to be accepted. I probably might have mixed with them if I had stayed there. But I didn't do that, so I sort of missed out on it. Then I met an American woman who had moved to Vienna as a 15 year old, became part of the Actionist movement, has kids with one of their major artists. Speaks perfect Vienna dialect. She moved back to New York ten or 15 years ago. And we did projects together, and continue to do projects together…. Just Google “Stefan Eins other dimension,” and she's part of that project....

Stefan made some cable TV shows under the Fashion Moda name. I’ve seen those tapes. It’s basically Stefan moving objects around in the studio room for half an hour of air time. They’re odd, and utterly incomprehensible. Stefan said he recently went up to the Fales library to see those tapes, and feels there is an extra-dimensionality at work in those videos.
The idea that an art can be a slick documentation of the traces of an invisible force that produces tailored meaning for one person alone is too close to paranoia for me. Stefan’s recent art makes me uncomfortable. (He explains it after a fashion in a couple of articles; the Artslant one is the best [Eins and Hegert, 2011].) I liked much better his graffiti-inspired phase when he used aerosol paint. He did one performative instant installation with short sprays and broken wooden slats on the floor of Scott Pfaffman’s gallery at the MWF Club’s Fossil Lounge in 2000 that was entrancing. That was a one-off which probably six people saw. He may not have done anything like that again. Who knows? Stefan always did his own thing.
I tried to get him to talk about the Fashion Moda stores he did with Jenny Holzer at Documenta in 1982. He was also in attendance at Colab meetings, and participating in shows throughout the ‘80s, long after most early members had left. Beyond a bare bones narrative of the Documenta store, Stefan had no interest in discussing any of this.

The Fashion Moda store at Documenta followed along from the Times Square Show gift shop. By ‘82, there had been a couple of iterations of the A More Store artists multiple vending project. Selling little art things is what Stefan was doing at 3 Mercer, so it’s also fair to credit him with planting the idea firmly in the younger artists’ heads. At Fashion Moda, Rigoberto Torres was working with John Ahearn. Rigoberto’s uncle had a shop fabricating plaster cast sculptures, mystical figures for botanicas. Tom Otterness started making his series of small plaster “Otterness objects” in the Bronx. He and Cara Perlman set up the TSS gift shop. Kiki Smith and Ellen Cooper set up the A More Store shop in Soho that winter. Two years later the concept went to Germany for Documenta as the Fashion Moda store.
Jenny Holzer, working with Stefan Eins, wrangled the store into Documenta. In addition to the t-shirts Stefan mentions in this interview, many Colab artists sold objects there. [FN – Neuberger] At the time, I was irritated that a collaborative effort had been appropriated by an individual, and was curated. According to the conception of proper behavior that had evolved within the group, that was a crime. Yet Stefan’s projects – 3 Mercer Store and Fashion Moda, over which he maintained close authorial control – meant things and opened possibilities to people who didn’t feel bound by those norms of collective behavior.
It would have been nice if the store at Documenta had been been there as a collective event, linked to the collective assembly of Colab. It wasn’t. It was linked to Fashion Moda, which didn’t really do the store thing.
The artists’ store was a strong concept for a period of populist art. Keith Haring opened the Pop Shop in 1986. A More stores continued to be produced yearly until 1988. Kenny Scharf opened the Scharf Shack in an altered newsstand in 1995. George Maciunas opened the FluxStore in 1964. To track back further would bring us to numerous department stores in major U.S. cities which sold modernist artists’ work in their furniture departments. Public galleries worldwide now augment their budgets with artists editions. Every museum special exhibition now exits through the gift shop.
The Documenta exposition’s artistic director Rudi Fuchs was criticized for his conservative approach. A look at the catalogue today shows that his Documenta cleaved to minimalism, the tried and true stock of most western museums. He also promoted a host of male neo-expressionist painters, nearly all of whom, like the style itself, have fallen into historical obscurity.
As I learned later, Coosje van Bruggen, married to Claes Oldenburg, selected the U.S. artists in the Documenta. It was a prescient mix of artists working in diverse modes. Van Bruggen, Eins said, was responsible for the inclusion of the Fashion Moda stores. Her husband also contributed a multiple. In her fine essay on the Fashion Moda stores, Gabi Lewton-Leopold observes: “Fashion Moda, representing a populist approach toward art making and exhibiting, was on the opposite end of the spectrum from Fuchs’s vision for the exhibition.” [Lewton-Leopold, 2012]
Stefan Eins had many collaborators at Fashion Moda over the years. Joe Lewis was the most important early partner. William Scott, the “junior director”, was the neighborhood hookup. The ever watchful Lisa Kahane was on the scene. The full story of that extraordinary venture remains to be told.

LINKS

Stefan Eins’ website has been demounted, likely for non-payment
See Wayback Machine for this content

Joe Lewis art
https://joelewisartist.com

Lisa Kahane, art and life in the city
http://www.lisakahane.com

Lisa Kahane, Do Not Give Way to Evil: Photographs of the South Bronx, 1979-1987 (Power House Books, Brooklyn, 2008)

John Fekner
https://www.johnfekner.com
See also "John Fekner, New York State Of Mind" Juxtapoz online, 2022
https://www.juxtapoz.com/news/magazine/john-fekner-new-york-state-of-mind/
[FN – Neuberger] A number of the objects of the Fashion Moda store at Documenta 7 were donated to the Neuberger Museum of Art of Purchase College. An exhibition in 2012 showed these works, including many by Colab artists. A gallery handout tells the story.

[Lewton-Leopold, 2012] Gabi Lewton-Leopold, “The Fashion Moda Stores, 1982: Selections from Documenta 7,” Neuberger Museum of Art, March 4, 2012-May 6, 2012

R.H. Fuchs, Documenta 7 (Kassel, 1982)

See Amy Raffel, Art and Merchandise in Keith Haring’s Pop Shop (Routledge, 2021)

Remembering Leonard Abrams

This isn’t the post that was supposed to come next. But the sudden death of my longtime friend, Lower East Side homeboy and East Village macher Leonard Abrams has put his life on the front burner. I didn’t interview him; I didn’t expect him to shuffle off. But I remember him very well.

East Village Eye staff in the hallway of the Cable Building, mid-1980s. Leonard at center, grinning. (Photographer unknown)

Leonard Abrams was a smalltimer. He worked with modest means and did small things. He didn't have backing, no Warbucks behind him. No renovated premises in prime real estate. (Well, for one brief moment – but before the renovation, actually.) But he had some extraordinary strokes of luck.
I met the East Village Eye magazine in 1979 in a studio on Avenue B, in the middle of heroin highway. It felt like an abandoned bank lobby. Leonard was on good terms with the neighborhood dealers. After all they were working Joes, trying to make a living.
He came from community newspapers, the kind of ad-rag flyers that used to be everywhere in urban USA. Print culture has changed so much that it’s hard to explain how these things worked. I was in that circuit as a production worker. That was an early freelance haute proletarian ambience. We were precarious but very happy to work very little for a princely wage. When I walked into the Eye offices on Avenue B I spied the machine I knew.
“Oh, that’s a Compugraphic.”
“Do you know how to work it?” Leonard asked.
So began many years of work with that ad rag of the Lower East Side. Leonard’s was an ad rag with a difference. The capital came from a group of friends. The man who did the photostats was an old hand of the underground press. Lannes Kenfield’s stat room was littered with old copies of the East Village Other and many of the other lefty pubs he’d worked on in days of yore. His best buddy was Tuli Kupferberg. The Eye’s newsstand guy, Buzz, was also a vet of the underground press. He put the Eye on the newsstands around lower Manhattan, which was the bread and butter – along with the ads – which made the whole thing work. Still, the writers and photographers rarely got paid. Typesetters like me got paid; Lanny got paid; the printer got paid or you didn’t get your paper. That’s why I wasn’t really a writer during those years.
I worked with an artists group called Colab. One of our gang, the weird brilliant artist Christof Kohlhoefer was the Eye’s first art director. Christof had worked with Sigmar Polke, studied with Joseph Beuys. That meant nothing to anyone on the Lower East Side, but Leonard gave him a free hand with the design, which came to be an important definer of NYC punk aesthetic. Leonard let him do his own artwork as inserts, and invite in his friends to do the back covers and centerfolds.
The early Eye pimped Colab big time, as the organization came out of the shadows of artists’ lofts and did events in public spaces. The ‘zine featured our Real Estate Show, the Times Square Show, and a number of subsequent exhibitions at ABC No Rio. Sure, it was the Village Voice cover review of the 1980 TSS and Artforum’s big takeout by Lucy Lippard that put the group over for a time, and set some of its artists into career position. But the Eye was and remained our friend.
Leonard did his first Eye parties at the Mudd Club. Which was not an advertiser.
After Walter Robinson came on board as art editor – I’d worked with him at Art-Rite; he’d also been in Colab – the Eye started to be read by art people. The Eye became a smalltime art magazine. Supermarkets, laundromats and real estate agents didn’t advertise, but cafes and art galleries did. That was becoming the neighborhood. In time nightclubs took out full pages. This rag was a going business.
Yasmin Ramirez interviewed Martin Wong. David Wojnarowicz had a column, as did Cookie Mueller. Marc Miller, who also had a column, did a feature on white graffiti art collectors. Carlo McCormick turned up just in time for the East Village art gallery boom, and helped to make it happen.
Although musicians had a hand at the beginning and a continuing influence, the Eye didn’t go head over heels into rhapsodic saturation coverage of music. Other rags did that. Richard Fantina, who was among the founders of the Eye, went sideways to the New York Rocker (1976 to 1982). The Eye had Steve Hager as news editor for a flash, all whiskers and bravado, before he went to High Times. Hager wrote two books on the downtown scene, Hip Hop: The Illustrated History of Break Dancing, Rap Music, and Graffiti (1984), and Art After Midnight: The East Village Scene (1986), and the Eye became the first – as Leonard always loved to brag – to print the term “hip hop”, in its “Chilly Xmas” issue of January 1982. I pulled numbers of that same issue from the trash later as the office closed down.
I first heard “hip hop” several years earlier in Edit DeAk’s loft from the lips of DJ Johnny Dynell. He’d made it into a disco ditty. That the term didn’t make it into print before 1982 is an index of how segregated the white print media was. (That can’t be right; is it?!)

The Eye crew soon moved uptown – 10 blocks uptown to CHARAS El Bohio, the abandoned public school turned social center on East 9th street. There should be a bronze plaque on that Lower East Side building. Instead it’s being tossed around like a bruised fruit between competing real estate interests, a game begun by Mayor Rudy. He didn’t like that it was run by recalcitrant Puerto Rican nationalists with politics on their minds. The damage Giuliani did by putting El Bohio up for auction has still not been undone.
Being there was peachy for me. I could relate to the Puerto Rican vanguard of politicos and poets who had taken that building over from the city. They had inspired my group to take what became ABC No Rio during the Real Estate Show occupation. El Bohio was a locus of culture, with artists, theater groups, political groups and community organizations sharing rooms there. Among the hybrids at El Bohio was P.A.D.D., the political art group, and Times Up!, the bicycle advocacy group who organized Critical Mass rides, built zany bike-floats like dragons and pirate ships, and held events in support of community gardens menaced by eviction.
Which is why Rudy closed it, of course. And why the City will never take it back as a center until every last person who remembers what El Bohio was and what it meant for the Lower East Side is dead and gone. Then it can be safely redeveloped, shorn of any messy, unpredictable political whiskers still hanging on to it.
But I digress.
As a publisher, Leonard was a realist. Winners are winners and losers are losers. Most people are losers. As a longtime loser himself, he was never mean about it. He was wily about letting people down. And he dropped a lot of people. Staying with the changes and keeping it fresh is an axiom of magazine publishing.
He wanted to take the Eye upscale. He took the office from El Bohio west to Broadway, to the historic Cable Building on the corner of Houston Street, luxury digs for sure. (Before the renovation crapped it up.) Down the hall was Richard Fantina’s type shop Strong Silent Type, where I would later work. The Eye HQ also hosted two spin-offs, Eyetype, run by another Eye co-founder, Celeste-Monique Lindsey, and Philippo’s New York New Papers distribution.
I’d hoped for another – Evil Eye Books, like Jan Wenner’s Straight Arrow, but Leonard would not take the bait and get involved. Me and ex-Eye book editor Josh Gosciak did one publication under the name of that fictional entity: A Day in the Life: Tales from the Lower East (Autonomedia, 1990). Cover by Martin Wong. It’s good as anthologies go; it’s being remaindered today.
I recall Jay McInerney hulking around the new Eye office in his lambswool coat – (he didn’t take it off) – and not making eye contact with anyone. He was clearly thinking, “What am I doing here? I should be in the New Yorker!” But Leonard was putting him on the cover, so he had to pay a courtesy visit. Kathy Acker also made the Eye cover, which I’ll guess mattered a lot more to downtown people than Jay-boy.
Downtown losers could be champion carpers. It’s salutary to remember the amount of shit served up to winners like Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat from their own community. Those who dished it out should be ashamed, although the veil of selective memory has likely allowed them to forget and forgive themselves. I can’t recall Leonard carping about anything. Angry he could get, and decisively nasty. But bitching and moaning was not his thing.

Photo by Liza Bear
Later, as I did my turn in the archives of the NYPL, I learned that New York City once had dozens of newspapers and magazines in a babel of languages serving every conceivable community. I see the Eye as continuing directly that legacy of print. They served an immigrant and indigenous community of passionate artists.
But communities are like truffles – they grow only to be uprooted and eaten by pigs. In the end the Eye was murdered – or so I call it, mainly by a short-lived upstart competitor monthly called the The Talk, so ephemeral it doesn’t rate a webpage today. Word was it was funded by a would-be press baron as a bauble for his wife, specifically (as paranoid me believes) to clear the field of the competition. I forget the unverified details, but remember the tactics well. The Talk offered every advertiser in the Eye super-discounted rates for bigger ads. Our paper was already weakened by the raising of the drinking age from 18 to 21 at the end of ‘85. With significantly fewer customers many nightclubs closed, and of course their advertising ended. This new competitor spelled the end for the Eye.
Thereafter Leonard wrote a few things for Details, but he seemed to have no real ganas to be a writer. He launched a party project, the Hotel Amazon. He produced this not at El Bohio, but at the more culturally focussed Clemente Soto Velez center, down the street from ABC No Rio. I didn’t hang out at this club; my clubbing days were over. But I loaned some décor for the project, a painting on cardboard by Walter Robinson depicting the “Jungle” component of my project with Terry Mohre called the “Studio Melee”. (Walter painted the backdrop, and David Wells built the mobile element of the jungle.) Maybe that unsigned mural painting is in someone’s house today. More likely it’s in Fresh Kills, making gas. But it served a purpose.
The Hotel Amazon was a big deal, another site where future big names got their start. The project wasn’t run in midtown by mob-connected coke heads. It was in a social center named for a Puerto Rican communist. The club is recalled in a painting by Chris “Daze” Ellis in the Martin Wong collection at the Museum of the City of New York, and by ephemera, the invitation cards which we set at Eyetype.

Like others who find themselves at loose ends, Leonard went back to school, taking an MA in visual anthropology at Fordham. His thesis project was the documentary film Quilombo Country (2006). This look at the Afro-indigenous rural communities of Brazil struck into a vacancy in Anglophone literature. I was at the CUNY Grad Center then, and looked it up: there was nothing in English on these survivals of historic mestizo communities of fugitive slaves and indigenous peoples. They’ve since been recognized globally as a serious movement of land occupation with centuries of history. Leonard’s film was a first step in this direction, and was purchased by African-American history departments around the USA.
Thereafter Leonard drifted into what he called his secret business – “Don’t tell anybody that I’m doing this” – distributing santeria-like sacred objects to Latin-American botanicas throughout the tristate region. He’d go down regularly to D.F., where there were factories which made them and stock up. I recall the molded acrylic resin pyramids with a scorpion entombed within, so creepy. And the featureless lingam-like concrete figure with cowrie shell eyes. (I bought one of these.) This was a strange materialist commercial spirituality, which maybe led an old friend overseas to insist that Leonard would have an afterlife as a ghost, that he would reappear. Maybe from handling so much spiritually conceived merchandise.
Leonard asked me to look around in Spain where I live now for stock for the botanicas. I couldn’t find any. The syncretic stuff he was dealing in is distinctly American. But I recommended some mounted relics, called relicarios, shards of the bones and clothing of the saints. Those were big in Spain in centuries past, although few today even in churches are still “venerated”. So they’re being dumped regularly in auction houses.
“Too expensive for my clients,” he pronounced. A practical lad.

I doubt that Leonard lost money on the Hotel Amazon. Making community with parties you don’t tend to lose money. The problem for NYC and cities like it is one doesn’t make enough money with small recherché themed parties in marginal locations, not enough to satisfy your backer, not enough for the mafiosi to skim, or to pay off the police, or to pay your buddies’ cocaine bills. Nope, it’s just not a way to get rich, or to show that you are.
You can only break even, tread water, and do essentially capitalist community service, bringing people together who had been excluded or little regarded, catching the wave as all successful cultural entrepreneurs must do. That was him. Leonard will be remembered alongside Romany Marie with her cafe central for modernist writers and artists in the early 20th century.
Leonard spoke at a presentation of my memoir at the Howl gallery last year. It was a strange discourse. Howl never put it online as they said they would, and I didn’t take notes. But the theme of it as I recall was exactly how I began this text; Leonard spoke of the East Village as a home for losers. It was an odd speech I didn’t fully understand. (He read it, so there’s a text.) But in the end, I’ll take him at his word. We all were somehow losers who made it through the jungle of winners’ rule. Like the other Leonard’s novel title said, we were all together “Beautiful Losers”.

* * *

So that’s my story of the mensch Leonard Abrams. I have just watched the “viewneral” this afternoon (in Spain) of 5 April, 2023. It was pretty brief. Of the folks who turned up, I remember Pooch from those Avenue B days. He turned into Leonard's lifelong friend, and told some stories. Thomas Walker concluded the service, the son of Sybil. "My mother reached out to him while she was on her deathbed," and Leonard lived with Thomas to get him through his grief. A tall young man today, he wore a black leather jacket and sunglasses “for Leonard”. He was verklempt for long moments. And then concluded, "This isn't his kind of event. He was into soirees. See you at the soiree."

The last hurrah:
Hannah Gold, "The Archives of the East Village Eye Go to the New York Public Library: Leonard Abrams started the paper, which chronicled the cultural life of downtown New York, in 1979. After trying for eight years to place its archives, he handed them off to the library last fall", February 7, 2023
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-archives-of-the-east-village-eye-go-to-the-new-york-public-library

Leonard celebrating the acquisition of the Eye archives by the New York Public Library at a party last month. Photo by Stacie Joy from the EV Grieve

Memoir #17: Stefan Eins – from Soho to the South Bronx – Part One

Stefan Eins in NYC, October 2019

This post comes out of research for my last book, Art Worker. (The e-book is now available to order.) Last month I posted Joe Lewis' recollections of Fashion Moda spoken during an event in Los Angeles for an exhibition of John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres, two of the principal artists at the South Bronx art space. Joe was co-director. This post reports in two parts the interview I had with Stefan Eins in 2019, the artist best known as the founding genius of Fashion Moda.

Fashion Moda was an artist's concept. It was also a place, a situation, an open house for creativity. Fashion Moda was a project conceived by Stefan Eins during the heroic era of alternative spaces in NYC, the 1970s. “The Moda” as it was called by its habitues ultimately failed to institutionalize. (If indeed that is a failure; more recent project art is short-term.) During its decade-plus years of existence, however -- 1979 to 1993 – Fashion Moda played a central role in the cultural revival in the South Bronx, and a pivotal role in the story of late 20th century contemporary art in NYC.
In 1979 Stefan signed the lease on a blasted-out storefront. Amidst a truly ruined neighborhood of firetrap social clubs, storefront churches, parking lots and trainyards, the concept with the international name – Fashion 时髦 Moda МОДА – found a home.
The NYC artworld had already relocated from its traditional center – 57th Street, midtown – to the place where artists were living, the derelict factory zone of Soho downtown. This geographical shift in spaces for living, working and showing art re-tuned spatial sensibilities, sculptural feeling, and the “window” of the painted image to an industrial scale.
When capital reclaimed Soho for luxury lofts and fashion stores, the artists and galleries were bought out or evicted. They moved east. The East Village art scene of the 1980s, which colonized the working class barrio of Lower East Side, refocussed art-making again on the cafe bistro scale of the School of Paris, and the delicate registers of 57th Street modernism – but that was the '80s.
Yes, we’re talking real estate. Without which nothing. Said the ancient: “Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the earth.”
Stefan started his kind of project early in the ’70s. The Austrian artist rented a storefront on Mercer Street, near Canal Street. He could live, work and show all in the same place. That was the 3 Mercer Store. It was around the corner from a related project by George Maciunas, the Fluxus Shop at 359 Canal Street.
There is little trace on the internet or in art history of this project. (Only scholar-dealer Marc H. Miller, who bought ephemera from Stefan, posts about the 3 Mercer Store.) But this tiny store became a key center for young artists to show during the middle ’70s in Soho.
I met Stefan in ’75, just walking by the store. I went in and talked to him. He showed me his work. As his luck would have it, I was a young punk writing for Artforum. And I wrote up his store.

############

On my research trip in 2019, I ran into Stefan Eins on 57th Street at an opening of Tom Otterness’ work. Natty as ever, he asked me to call on him. After some bumps – he was having surgery, I had a cold – we sat down in his hotel room in midtown.
Stefan was an art organizer, a kind of project artist/curator before that was an artworld thing. His was the kind of early innovative art work that enlarged possibilities for art in the present. At his 3 Mercer Street in Soho artists could do what they wanted, this at a time when commercial galleries were closed to many. Some performed: Geoffrey Hendricks did a haircut performance; Mitch Corber recited poetry under the influence of onions. Others showed artworks gallery-style, like my first roommate Mike Malloy who put up his interactive shelf sculptures. Tom Otterness showed large photostatic prints; Judy Rifka photocopies of drawings derived from her studies of dance. The 3 Mercer Store wasn’t a gallery, but some of the shows were covered in the art press.
Those artists and more would join Colab, and I met some of them at Stefan’s. That’s what I recall clearly. Most of what happened there is lost to the record. Stefan didn’t keep many records then. One poster of the 3 Mercer Store lists items for sale by dozens of artists who subscribed to the concept.

3 Mercer Store poster, 1975. gallery.98bowery.com

Stefan’s interest was in the situation he had created. It was his studio, but it was also a store in the old architectural mode of artisan stores – the shop in front, living quarters in the back. In 1975 when I wandered in, there was no show on. It was only him, with his crowbar and airpump and bottle of water. He showed me how he worked them. A fog in the botle and a wisp of water vapor above it resulted after some hand pumping. “Magic!” I wrote about them as art between object and performance.

gallery.98bowery.com

This was clearly Duchampian – minimal variety, in the vein of the Rotoreliefs, which Duchamp first offered for sale at a fair for inventors in 1935. (That event, the Concours Lépine, continues to this day.) That stream of Duchampian influence on post-modern artists wasn’t even so clear to me then. When I wrote about Jean Dupuy for Artforum, he referenced the modernist master explicitly, and was deeply interested in word play and games.
Stefan wanted to sell art, but in a way unlike what the numerous art galleries popping up then in Soho were trying to do. He wanted a mass audience. He hooked up with Neke Carson and Jaime Davidovich to sell objects at the New York novelty fair. Stefan had a bird made of light plastic which flapped its wings and flew – miraculous!, and a poster of a UFO. (The crowbar and air pump-water bottle trick were not so commercial.)
One artist who clearly got what he was doing was Sherrie Levine. She had bought a collection of childrens’ shoes in California and brought them to New York when she moved there. “In 1977,” she told an interviewer, “Barbara Ess introduced me to Stefan Eins who was running the Three Mercer Street Store. He was looking for artists who wanted to show things ... that weren’t the kind of thing you find in a gallery, but which made reference to the store. Barbara told him about the shoes, and we did a show that took place on two weekends. Two shoes sold for two dollars, and they sold out immediately.”

Mike Malloy. gallery.98bowery.com

“Constance Lewallen: This reminded me of Oldenburg’s store but actually it was quite different, because you sold things you bought and he sold things he made.
“Levine: Right. It was a Duchampian gesture.”
Sherrie Levine’s shoes reappeared as a Parkett edition in 1992.

Sherrie Levine, "Two Shoes", 1992

My text for Artforum on Eins’ minimally material performative conceptual artwork, and another article in Art-Rite helped him to get a state grant for 3 Mercer. When the money came in, Stefan took me and Edit DeAk to the Russian Tea Room. That next grant bankrolled the rental of the riot-ravaged South Bronx storefront that would become Fashion Moda.
After doing a store in Soho with underground success, Stefan opened “not an art gallery but ‘a collection of science, invention, technology, art and fantasy’” way uptown. Lucy Lippard wrote Fashion Moda together with Colab and ABC No Rio. So did Grace Glueck in the New York Times. Fashion Moda was a big success. It closed in 1993.
Stefan lives in an “other dimensional” world. Many of his works are dated years ahead. (I have a painting from the 1980s dated 2020.) Interviewing him can be frustrating. It’s not really a conversation. His statements are often preceded by long silences. His memory may now be vague on particulars, but he has never really cared for them. He knows what he wants to say and does not care to expand upon it. He asserts historical relevance in the most sweeping terms.
Stefan's midtown hotel room where I met him is small: one room to live in, with a bathroom and some kind of tiny kitchen. It was wall to ceiling artworks, mostly collages recently made.

Stefan Eins: My stuff is on the internet too. You should go on the website. I give you my card.
I explained that I was writing a memoir, and my interview project this fall was involved with that. Art Gangs (2011) was scholarly. This is more personal.
Alan Moore: I want to go back and look at my years here.
SE: You have a distance.
AM: Yes. The people, the groups, the movements that i was involved with. What I perceive is --
SE: You probably know Stefan Eins. You know who he is?
AM: …. I was going a lot to 112 Greene Street then. Living on Broome Street with a cocaine dealer in a tiny bunkbed, and 3 Mercer was around the corner.... so somebody told me or I may have just wandered in. You had that back room with the oriental carpet on the table. Sehr gemütlich. Smoking some reefer. People are dropping in. It was like a social club.
SE: Yes, great. Fashion Moda too had that level. Galleries in general have components of being social clubs. If you are invited in. And you have the money to buy…. I think that is what modern art was about. The mercantile level.
AM: At the time I was working for Artforum. The weight of the artworld was in midtown, on 57th Street.
SE: It was the center, the vicinity of the MoMA....
AM: I was also going to René Block's gallery, and learning about his artists and the Fluxus movement. I’ve seen a book here, Ich kenne kein Weekend (2015), about René’s work in Berlin. He was really important for the Fluxus movement. In the U.S. the emphasis is on George Maciunas. I don't know if you knew him? There is a biography of him called Mr. Fluxus. René Block was important in promoting this kind of performative art life esthetic, which I found very congenial as against this kind of militarized, imperialist minimal art, arrogant, insistent on its own sublimity...
SE: That's why I did my own spaces.

This went on for a bit. I talked about René and Irene Von Zahn, Richard Hayman at the Ear Inn, Lil Picard, the Fluxus circle. Stefan did not comment. This was along the lines of an earlier not-so-productive interview years earlier. Stefan refuses to be connected with anything Fluxus… while I am sure he was. (Could it be that I was the one connected to Fluxus? And that my admiration of the movement primed me for Stefan’s work? Nah.)

The Fluxus shop on Canal Street

SE: You were in touch with all the Colab people.
AM: That happened slowly. And also through your space, because you were showing these guys.
SE: Tom Otterness showed there before anywhere else.
AM: Did Jenny Holzer show at 3 Mercer?
SE: We did Documenta together.... She came there regularly. She did show there, yeah. She did presentations there.
AM: Do you remember what kind of work she did?
SE: Writing already.
AM: I know you had the little shoes of Sherrie Levine.…
SE: I wanted to be independent. And I did my own thing there. I produced art that was not necessarily focussed on doing one piece at a time. It was focussed on doing art or projects that can be sold on a mass market level.…
AM: You were working with Neke Carson and Jaime Davidovich. You did a catalogue?...
SE: Yes. We did projects that were not standard artworld presentations. My interest was not in just doing painting and sculpture. My interest was in doing all kinds of projects which are not that. My crowbar is somewhere around here. It could lift 20 times the weight. So that unusual miraculous component was important to me. It still is….
I think what I have done at 3 Mercer, not doing painting and sculpture – and that really was the modernist tradition, more or less, and doing Fashion Moda I think was the beginning of contemporary art. It was the end of modern art….

Next: Memoir #18: Stefan Eins #2: Fashion Moda and the Hidden Dimensions

In the next post, we get to the meat of the matter, Fashion Moda. Stefan gets sick of Soho. He meets Joe Lewis. Shows in “Rooms”, the exhibition that opened P.S. 1. I interject ruminations on Colab, the famous F/M store at Documenta, and art historical “consequences”. Then we veer off into Stefan's real concern, the extra dimensions and the world of the unseen that is revealed to him through material signs in the everyday environment. Which is what it’s always been about.

LINKS AND REFERENCES

Alan W. Moore, Art Worker: Doing Time in the New York Artworld (2022; Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, LA & Leipzig) – in paper and e-book
https://bit.ly/3eICWX0

Joe Lewis' recollections….
“Art Gangs” blog post: “Long-Closed in the Bronx, but Well-Remembered: Joe Lewis on Fashion Moda”
http://artgangs.blogspot.com/2023/01/gone-but-well-remembered-joe-lewis-on.html

Fashion 时髦 Moda МОДА
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fashion_Moda

Excellent overview by the Deitch-connected artist and writer, Francesco Spampinato "Fashion Moda” in Waxpoetics no. 55, May 2013
http://www.francescospampinato.com/writings/articles/

“Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the earth.”
(A remark of Archimedes quoted by Pappus of Alexandria, Collection or Synagoge, Book VIII, c. AD 340)

Marc H. Miller . "Stefan Eins: Behind 3 Mercer Street and Fashion Moda". Gallery 98, 2018
https://gallery.98bowery.com/exhibition/stefan-eins-the-3-mercer-street-store-fashion-moda-1972-80/

Neke Carson, artist
http://nekecarson.com/cvs.html

Jaime Davidovich - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Jai...

Sherrie Levine and Constance Lewallen, “Sherrie Levine,” n.d., journal of contemporary art, at jca-online.com/slevine.html, accessed May 2020.

Sally Webster's 1996 essay for Lisa Kahane's exhibition at the Lehman College Art Gallery, "Fashion Moda: A Bronx Experience", has been dismounted.
https://lehmangallery.org/lisa-kahane-a-partial-view-of-fashion-moda/

Long-Closed in the Bronx, but Well-Remembered: Joe Lewis on Fashion Moda

Left to right: Joe Lewis, Rigoberto Torres, John Ahearn onstage at the Broad museum, Los Angeles, January 2023

I’ve been promoting the idea of a book/catalogue of the legendary South Bronx art space Fasion Moda. No success so far, but there was this event which reminds us of the important radical role this art space played from its start in 1978 to its closnig in 1993. The door was open at Fashion Moda, not just for spectators but for participants as well. The place was an exemplary model for a new kind of public creative culture.

This is a partial transcript of a public conversation between John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres at the Broad Museum in Los Angeles, with interventions by Joe Lewis, co-director of Fashion Moda. The YouTube video begins with a film showing of the two artists casting subjects for their sculptures, a practice they began at Fashion Moda.

[12:10 in the YouTube recording] Joe Lewis:
Just to give you an idea about the territory where this happened, this is Fashion Moda, with my partner Stefan [Eins; Joe indicates photograph on the screen]. The South Bronx at this moment in time looked like Dresden. There were little pockets of community, but generally speaking it was just barren, basically.
My partner, Stefan, who was Austrian, I met him downtown and we talked a lot about politics, history, commercialism, etc., etc. And he knew he was in a bubble. And I knew that downtown [NYC artworld] was a bubble because a specific group had a stranglehold over the development of aesthetic criteria. We also believed that you didn’t have to be trained to an artist, and at that time you didn’t have to come to New York to be an artist either.
I had a residency up in the Bronx at a chemical company, and I said, “Hey, come up to the Bronx and check it out.” And he did, and found this burned-out storefront basically, put on a roof, put on a front, borrowed electricity from the city [laughter], and Fashion Moda was born….
Fashion Moda was a place where people mixed who would not normally mix under any circumstance. It wasn’t an experiment. It was an interactive creative process where different ideas and world collided to create [new ones]. Most important, the guiding principle was that no specific group of people had a stranglehold over aesthetic criteria, the creation and implementation of it, which has been proven I think in the first video [shown at the public event] by graffiti, rap, MCing, break dancing, is ubiquitous. You can’t go anywhere in the world without finding it. And this was created by teenagers, primarily of color. And today it is everywhere – Timbuktu, South Korea, whereever you want to go.
The logo of Fashion Moda was in English, [Spanish], Russian, and Chinese the word “fashion”, and that kind of set out our global view of the world, that art could be made anywhere. And at this time you have to remember there were only a handful of galleries, a handful of museums. If you had a solo show before you were 50 you were considered a whiz kid. It was Eurocentric and male, period. So it took another two or three decades for this idea of globalism to seep into the contemporary art [mechanism].
By definition we had no definition. This is really problematic for most people. Because people consistently asked us, “Whzt is Fashion Moda?” Year after year, even the neighborhood kids would stick their heads in and say, “What’s this space gonna be?”

Mural by John "Crash" Matos on the front of Fashion Moda in the early 1980s. Photo by Lisa Kahane.

Well, by definition Fashion Moda had no definition. We were not a gallery because we thought galleries represented colonialist ventures. We were not an alternative or artists space because we thought of them as post-colonial. I look at today’s Decolonize This movement with nostalgia.
But when pressed for a definition my partner would say, “Fashion Moda is magic.” This is the territory whee John [Ahearn] and Rigoberto [Torres] met….
[1:03:07 – Speaking about the relationship between John and Rigoberto:]
There’s a real sense of humility in the relationship, and … I think it’s something we miss today in this world. I think about this, whaddyacall it, social practice. This was like social practice at the best possible time and way. We were bringing people together. We weren’t saying, “I wanna do this, I wanna do that. You should have this” – I mean, that’s where I believe it’s gone, the academicization of social practice has made it something that is not a tool; that has made it something else. I think it’s about the creative process. Fashion Moda was like, you didn’t have to be trained, you didn’t have to have a stellar vocabulary to be involved in the creative process. In those days no one recognized that. A couple of biennales ago you had outsider artists mixed in with the folks at the Arsenale, right. We did that in 1978.
John Ahearn:
May I point out that Rigoberto’s uncle [who ran a sculpture factory producing devotional icons] had work often at Fashion Moda, work from his factory. Stefan loved them.
Joe Lewis:
We had no boundaries from that…..
[1:09:21]
John and Rigoberto, but also Fashion Moda changed the trajectories of many people’s families’ lives. If you look at just the graffiti folks, Crash [John Matos], who did the [mural on the front[ of Fashion Moda, which we have a picture here of, I have a video clip of him showing Prince Albert in Monaco how to tag with a spray can. And Prince Albert the II makes a heart. I mention this because – and you [pointing to Rigoberto] went to junion high school with Crash – Crash at 19 curates “Graffiti Success for America” at Fashion Moda, and this had Lady Pink, Lee, all the best – all the OGs now. And that group of people, as well known as they’ve gotten, through the graffiti world. They’ve done Louis Vuitton, La Scala, Ferrari. This is stuff which at that time we had no idea was gonna happen. But those people have all remained connected to their neighborhoods. Crash has a gallery, he does stuff all over up in the Bronx, all over the world actually…. That impetus has continued to change the trajectory of many lives, and continues to go out like dropping a stone in a pond…. And this is a byproduct that we never even imagined when we started doing this….
[14:05] [An audience member recollects living upstairs from Rigoberto and John’s storefront studio in the Bronx]

Joe Lewis:
I have a funny story about that at Fashion Moda. Jane Dickson, who is his brother’s [Charlie Ahearn, filmmaker] partner, did a piece called “City Maze” in Fashion Moda. She built a maze [of cardboard],….and she asked Crash, “Can you come in and paint this cardboard maze?” So the day that show closed I was sitting there with Robert Colescott, who I was trying to get to have a show here at Fashion Moda. We’re sittnig there, the kids are banging on the window, school has let out, and 50 kids, they’re banging on the window, and Robert Colescott is sitting there like this [Joe hunches over]. We open the door, and they come in, and they trash that maze. And Robert Colescott was like, “You want me to have a show here?” We never had a show of Robert Colescott at Fashion Moda. We did show him at the New Museum [“Events”, curated by Fashion Moda in 1981]. When wrlds collide…. What happened because of Rigoberto and John, how they created community, it was a creation as well. There are select communities, created communities, and my definition of community is whoever’s in the room that night, that’s the community, right….

LINKS:

Joe Lewis moderated the talk of John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres at the recent exhibition at the Broad museum in Los Angeles, which was streamed and is on YouTube."The Un-Private Collection: John Ahearn + Rigoberto Torres + Joe Lewis"
https://www.thebroad.org/events/un-private-collection-john-ahearn-rigoberto-torres-joe-lewis

Fashion Moda
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fashion_Moda

Jane Dickson "City Maze" video (7:32); rap by Fab Five Freddy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmN4f2_Lmvc

Francesco Spampinato, "Head Space"; brief article on Fashion Moda's classic period
http://www.francescospampinato.com/files/spampinatofashionmodawaxpoetics.pdf

Stefan Eins in 1987. Photo by Lisa Kahane.

Talking NYC in London: Post #5, I Talk Squats, and Learn About ‘Homonormativity’

Tish & Snooky, back in the day

This is the 5th in a series of posts about the “Approaching Downtown” symposium at the Courtauld Institute, London, in mid-July. It is drawn from my notes of a remarkable several days of talk about the late 20th century art and culture of downtown NYC. This day’s rich talks explored entrepreneurs and illegals in the East Village, concepts of art & law, queer counter-publics and homonormativity, and a workshop on “antagonisms”.

On the third day, I was set to speak in a panel that mixed illegality and entrepreneuralism. (“Same or different?”) Kristen Galvin (U of Colorado, CO Springs) spoke on Tish and Snooky of Manic Panic on St. Marks Place, storekeepers of trash and glam threads who built a global hair dye empire during the punk era.
This was fun stuff. These women performed at CBGBs as the Sic F*cks dressed as Nazi nuns, and ran a “rock and roll rummage sale” store by day. Manic Panic was a kind of community center, punk tourist attraction, art supply store, and a drag queens’ shopping center, Galvin said.
In her survey of East Village feminist business, Galvin included Club 57 run by Ann Magnuson, with her thrift and dumpster scavenging aesthetic. Among the rules of the club: “keep an eye out for old drunken Polish men”.
NYC garbage has always been a treasure trove for artists, and its use has been a style statement. Street trash was Jack Smith’s daily lode. The most extreme example I knew was musician Glenn Branca, who wore clothes he found on the street without washing them.

Patti Astor, mistress of the Fun Gallery, the pre-eminent venue for vendable graffiti art, figured in Galvin’s talk. Astor said the ‘80s was her “art school period” – “no more white walls, white people”. They were all “bugging out on each others’ style”. She was less than the complete businesswoman, however. Astor saw the Sidney Janis Gallery’s landmark post-graffiti show as predatory and speculative, pumping and dumping.

“Illegal Art”

Colby Chamberlain picked up his talk on Exit Art’s “Illegal America” show with which Jeanette Ingberman and Papo Colo began their exhibition project. Ingberman did a masters in art and law. Art is is an abstraction, she reasoned; law is also. When art expands it conflicts with law.
Chamberlain showed Papo Colo’s fake diploma from the “Univertatis Portoricencis”. (Another Puerto Rican artist, Adal Maldonado, conceived a Puerto Rican embassy with poet Pedro Pietri. They issued passports.)
He quoted Ingberman on “illegal poetics” in which the “artist exposes him/her to a vulnerable position outside the confines of the art world”. The show poster is a photo of Ingberman holding a lamp in a Statue of Liberty pose; it’s a construction site work light (note the hook on it).

Chamberlain whizzed through several examples of illegalisms, and what Edward Fry, fired from the Guggenheim for showing Hans Haacke’s Shapolsky piece, called “post-liberal art”.
These included a 1972 self-incriminating concept work by Dennis Oppenheim, “Evidence of 153 Misdemeanors”, and an action by Richard Mock, who stole a panel from Christo’s Running Fence and put grapes on it Cesar Chavez gave him. (Chavez’s UFW union was leading a national boycott of the fruit.) Chamberlain also worked on George Maciunas, Fluxus macher and wildcat Soho co-op developer.
Lawyer Jerald Ordover represented Maciunas, and also the artist provocateur, Jean Toche of the Guerrilla Art Action Group (GAAG), when the Belgian ex-pat was arrested and interrogated by the FBI (at the request of the Guggenheim museum management, as I recall).

The Blogger Speaks

I was in this panel, and talked about “Occupation Culture” in NYC, that is, artists involved in and alongside the Lower East Side squatting movement in the 1980s and ‘90s. It was a combination for me of two key concerns, downtown NYC art and squatting. (I blog elsewhere on the latter – “Occupations & Properties” at blogspot.com.) I drew the title of my talk from my book, Occupation Culture (2015; URL of free PDF online).
“Squat art” (such as it was) was presaged by the radical (in different ways) art places of ABC No Rio, the Rivington School, and the Garden of Eden.
Bullet Space opened a gallery in a squatted building under the direction of Andrew Castrucci, which showed art in a more normative manner. Bullet is best known for a series of posters, and a broadsheet polemic for squatting – “Your House Is Mine”. The noise musician and muralist Peter Missing and his bandmates ‘terrorized’ East Village yuppies with aggressive graffiti. Seth Tobocman and friends started the political graphic magazine World War 3 Illustrated, which supported the LES squatters. Tobocman later joined the movement himself, and produced an epic graphic novel, War in the Neighborhood (2000).

Poster by Fly-O

Unusual as a prominent woman in the movement, Fly-O was an enthusiastic squatter and punk musician. A prolific zine-maker, she became a kind of vernacular historian of the movement. In recent years, mainstream institutions as well as ABC No Rio and the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space (MoRUS) have presented exhibitions on the squatting movement in NYC.

Tag Team for the Queer Community

Gavin Butts (Northumbria U), author of No Machos or Pop Stars (2022), a book on post-punk in Leeds, UK, reviewed early ‘70s queer culture and its study, that is, before the emergence of mainstream gay culture.
He paraded Jackie Curtis as “a figure of queer counter-publicness”, with her hair backlit in a classic Hollywood-style studio photo; described the Shirley Clarke movie, Portrait of Jason – (ABC No Rio’s own Jack Waters starred in a recent remake) – and Jayne County’s days with the Ridiculous Theatre. Formerly Wayne (the county wherein is Detroit), she asked: “Are you man enough to be a woman?”
I didn’t know about the queer use of what was called “wrecking” drag – or “scare” drag in NYC – a transvestite outfit that contained at least one element of gender-appropriate attire. Apparently there were laws in some U.S. jurisdictions, like the sumptuary laws of medieval times, that required men and women to dress according to their gender. (Now only workplaces can require that.) I was reminded of Penny Arcade’s insistence that art and crime go together. She – aka Susanna Ventura – also acted as a teen in the Ridiculous Theatre.
Butts noted that in 1972-73 glam rock broke public queerness with albums like Lou Reed’s “Transformer” and David Bowie’s “Ziggy Stardust”. He cited a text by Will Straw (1995) on the concept of scene as a model for academic research on pop music.

Hot Peaches in Wonderland

David Getsy (U of Virginia) picked up the theme. (He has written on Stephen Varble, and will soon publish on Scott Burton.) He lamented that “homonormativity and transphobia” became the new mass culture of gayness. 1973 was a key year for the gay movement, with the delisting of gayness as a psychiatric disorder. Getsy focussed on the Hot Peaches street theater group which produced a version of Alice in 1973 in which “wonderland” is the gay trans underground.

Hot Peaches trouupe, from Facebook

The work was directed at a gay audience, albeit performed at least once at the antique bur-lee-Q venue Sammy’s Bowery Follies. Author Jimmy Camicia lived in Berlin in the 1960s, and was impressed by German gay culture. His Alice used a “subcultural dialect” – heterosexuals would find it hard to follow the dialogue.
Camicia said, “Children can never play gay games, so I want us to do that.” The piece celebrated the underground as the heart of queer NYC. Very little video of the group survives. Getsy played a clip of a queen declaring: “New York is quite different than wherever you came from”.

Roll Call of the Black Avant-Garde

Cynthia Oliver (U of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) read the names of black dancers in a theatrical recitative “roll call”. One among them was Rudy Perez who worked with the Judson Dance Theatre. (I wrote about his work in ‘75.) Oliver cited Richard Schechner long-time editor of TDR on the “conservative avant-garde” (was he writing on it, or was he of it? I think the latter).
Herself a dancer and choreographer, Oliver was following questions posed at a recent Schomburg Library conference – “When did the avant-garde become black?” and “Does abstraction belong to white people?” These questions arise from the perception of modernism as a variant species of colonialism.

‘I Don’t Like You, but I Need You’

(A bit out of sequence here) James Boaden (U of York) and Johanna Gosse (U of Idaho) headed a workshop on “Poor Relations and Intimate Antagonisms”. They rolled over some interesting territory, such as how the “curatorial narrative” of the downtown NYC scene evolved, in shows like “Mixed Use Manhattan” (at Reina Sofia, Madrid), and “Pioneers of the Downtown Scene” (at the Barbican, London). The theme of those shows was “buck up and do it in an age of austerity.”
I’d question how austere the NYC ‘70s was for artists in a period of low rents, liberal government subsidy, and a smaller progressive art community. For me, in the last half of that decade, it seemed like pretty warm water. Oh, yeah, the subways were dirty and property tax revenue was low. Que pena, but not for us.
Said Gosse: To ignore antagonisms leads to a “bloodless” history. She was talking about artistic antagonisms, using as examples the crankiness of Ray Johnson, and the art that both Carolee Schneeman and Hannah Wilke made about their breakups and sex partners. As historians, she said, we should “own our prurience… our desire to know and to see”. She cited Joan W. Scott, “Evidence of Experience” – to deny antagonisms is to reaffirm the “smooth neoliberal order”.

Actually, my first boss John Coplans, learned me that the artworld was a field of warfare. As a one-time colonial soldier, I think he knew the neoliberal order is anything but smooth.

What-Aboutism

The methodological challenge the workshop posed is to navigate and acknowledge the uneven archival field – what archives get saved (and are accessible), and who is still alive to tell about past times.
Of course, there is also the question of who and what is consistently looked away from, in particular the upsurge of activist institutional critique of the affect and depradations of the American empire. But what people might all the time be upset about is not normally on the agenda.
I didn’t crank about politics and blithely ignorant attitudes during the workshop. I only recalled from my experience as reasons for instances of antagonism among artists were withholding of important career information (curators and dealers making visits, looking for x or y, etc.), exclusion from important exhibitions, and acting within institutional circles as the sole representative of a collective project.
Here’s hoping that with the vastly expanded field of artistic action, the sorts of antagonisms that arise between the different active positions within the artworld are somehow softening around the edges. Maybe a critic or a curator doesn’t have to be the artist’s natural enemy any more.

Who Are You to…

I also didn’t crank about artists who resent scholars making a career out of their work when they remain poor, or simply pumping them for info about the famous people they knew. To which I might add from my experience with the SqEK group of scholars who study squatters, the resentment of those activist ‘subjects’ who are quizzed by scholars who then publish their findings in inaccessible academic journals.
My own related personal gripe is students who ask for info then don’t share their final work. Some artists I know won’t talk to them. Research is a transaction. People aren’t that in love with hearing themselves talk to strangers.
Someone said, “I’m not interesting enough to be a historical subject.” I think that’s false modesty. As a historian studying, learning and writing your stories, you are a subject, whether you believe it or not, and will be seen as such by those coming after.

NYC Definitions

For many of the scholars at this conference, the Fales collection at NYU library has been a basic resource. In the end, the peops from NYU talked – Lynn Gumpert (Grey Art Gallery, NYU) and Nicholas Martin (Fales Library, NYU) – about their institution, its pasts and its plans. (Martin is a curator of arts and humanities, and manages some galleries.) Of the definitive “Downtown Show” (2007?) with its catalogue and useful website, the question for Gumpert was, “How do you present something so anti-institutional?” In the end, curator Carlo McCormick came up with the narrative structure of the show.
NYU has had a recent gift of some 200 downtown works, and they’ll build a study center in Fall of ‘24. To a question about their acquisitions policy, Martin said, “We don’t have to go looking.”
I asked what is their relation to the autonomous archives that have arisen recently. I’ve seen that the MoRUS storefront on the LES has been full of NYU student volunteers over the years, and school groups regularly visit the Interference Archive in Brooklyn. Said Martin, “The more the merrier, so that things don’t end up in the dumpster.” I had hoped he would say they want to work with them.

Marvin Taylor, the primary assembler of the current collection and its vision, was venerated. (I know that Ron Kolm, who was early on the scene at Fales with shopping bags full of small press books, gave Taylor a good strong push.)
Marci Kwon said that Taylor’s was the first class she took at NYU, so David Wojnarowicz shaped her view of art history. Buenos noches, modernismo!

NEXT:
In the next and last of this series of posts on the London conference, I’ll report on talks devoted to artists’ television and video art, including a look at the one-season wonder of the "Willoughby Sharp Show", VJing in Danceteria's Congo Bill VIP lounge, Glenn O’Brien, Dara Birnbaum and more.

Sammy’s Bowery Follies, NYC, 1949. Photo by Burt Glinn. The Hot Peaches performed at Sammy's.

Talking NYC in London: Post #4, “Hard Line Brainstorm”

This is the 4th in a series of posts about the “Approaching Downtown” symposium at the Courtauld Institute, London, in mid-July. It is drawn from my notes of a remarkable several days of talk about the late 20th century art and culture of downtown NYC. This day’s talks began with a Basquiat exegesis, rambled over some critical terrain, and concluded with a music listening session and a screening of Vivienne Dick’s recent film.

On the second day of the symposium I actually made it on time for the breakfast rolls.
Natalie Phillips (Ball State U) rolled out an iconographic analysis on the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat, something rather obvious which I’ve never seen performed. He was a kind of transcriber – every one of his images comes from another source, so Phillips hunted for his sources. Her book will have three chapters, one on catalogues, indices, etc., another on graffiti, and the third on the body.

Basquiat questions the biases of catalogues. This got a little obscure, but Phillips tracks the repetitive series of numbers on some works to music catalogues of different jazz artists, both white and black. As I understood it, Basquiat was evidencing the industrial racism of the music business in the form of their own codes.

Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop

“I argue he never gave up graffiti,” she said. (Basquiat’s relationships with graffiti artists was explored in a recent show at MFA in Boston [link below]. It has been averred that J-MB couldn’t acknowledge his friendships and connections with graf artists at the time without imperiling his delicate position as an accepted high artist.)
Phillips reads the painting Victor 25448 as a reflection on the death of Michael Stewart. (The well-known work made on Keith Haring’s wall and shown recently at the Guggenheim NYC was a reaction to the killing.) Stewart was rousted by police for writing in the subway late at night, hogtied and suffocated. He was not a graffiti artist, but, Phillips contends, a ‘toy’, or wannabe novice writer. Ergo, the broken brown body in the painting is labelled as a toy: “Ideal”.
In the Warhol-Basquiat-Clemente collaborations there is one in which Basquiat paints over Clemente entirely. This Phillips says, signifies dominance of the “king” over another writer.

The New Excluded

Curiously, the mention of Clemente was the only time the name of a neoexpressionist painter, one among the market leaders of the 1980s artworld, came up during this symposium. I thought that curious for a gathering of art historians, although the cultural studies-ish focus of these days’ talks was fine by me. But it means things have changed. 20-odd years ago, professors explained to me that the principal sponsor of this symposium, the Terra Foundation, was “object oriented”, so I could forget about applying to them for support.
Perhaps in the wholesale return to figuration, artists of those days unwittingly reduced themselves to illustrators of the texts of a different kind of discourse. (What? Please explain; no you explain.) Or perhaps the next turn in scholarly fashion simply hasn’t creaked into motion. I do recall someone told me she wants to work on Richard Hambleton.

Return to the Text

Andrew Strombeck (Wright State U), author of DIY on the Lower East Side: Books, Buildings, and Art after the 1975 Fiscal Crisis (2020), Skyped in to maintain that David Wojnarowicz’s writing was already about nostalgia – for the 1970s. He wrote about precarious people, Strombeck said, who “would make it onto the page only marginally”.

I instantly thought of the key work in the video program I put together for the Wojnarowicz show in Madrid in ‘19, the video document of a performance of his “Sounds in the Distance” text which took place in Bill Rice’s backyard. Woj did his time on the road, like many of his generation, and unlike most also plunged into the life of the street. The lumpen precarious included his younger self. The book “Sounds” is a record of some of his meetings.
As I understood Strombeck, downtown writing more broadly is “concerned with how to manage these people”. Again, as in the earlier discussion on ‘ventriloquism’ [in post #3 on the London conference], are these the people who don’t, won’t, can’t speak for themselves?, or simply aren’t heard?

On the Road and in the Commune

I think North Americans hang on to a nomadism, what used to be called a ‘pioneer spirit’ – a dissatisfaction with the familiar, a chance of adventure, of betterment, or simple curiosity. All of this drives people to the road. And even, finally, to chance the Big Apple.
A sense of responsibility for others sharing one’s life space reflects the collective nature of most of the significant downtown creative projects, the “safety in numbers”, “we’re in it together” spirit of the epoch. As well as DIY, it was and still is, and maybe even more now, DIT – do-it-together.
I’ll leave aside Strombeck’s theoretical rabbit-hole, the notion of “interpretive delirium”, as per Michel de Certeau’s discussion of the moment in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) when he discovers the footprint on the beach. Academics love these asides.

"It's Your Fault"

I was struck by his provocation that, “By depicting the Lower East Side as a decadent landscape you [meaning LES writers] reinforce the city commissioner’s view of it as a dead zone needing erasing.”
In these terms Strombeck discussed Catherine Texier’s Love Me Tender (1987), a novel about a young dancer working in a strip joint and her several lovers. Texier apparently writes that the cities are full of useless zombies, just like the elites said. (Maybe why Penguin published that emigre French romantic author?) Less convincingly, Strombeck indicts the indie magazine Redtape’s “Cracked Mirror” issue, with its multiple contributors in the same brief.

In my view, the abandoned styles of living in a busted-up proletarian multi-ethnic neighborhood licensed bad behaviors by artists from middle class backgrounds. What have artists to do with the heavenly motions of big capital which presage an impending doom of their bohemian utopia? Drunkenness can lead to double consciousness as easily as double vision. NYCers, I think, have always been fatalistic about the big monkies who swing in the realms high above them. At least they don’t mis-identify the piss that rains down below as rain.

Who’s to Blame for Negative Urban Outcomes?

Strombeck also cited the late critic Craig Owens, that the “art galleries capitalize on ideas of risk and danger”. Literary artists, he seemed to argue, were as much compradors in gentrification as the artists whose gallery infrastructure enabled by landlords actually effected it.
This is an old canard, which enraged critics Walter Robinson and Carlo McCormick at the time. The article by Craig Owens which Strombeck cites follows directly that pair’s huge takeout on the East Village art scene in Art in America, in essence arguing that the artists were all guilty. Gregory Sholette fretted that all the political artwork in the Owens piece was uncredited.
For me, the come-to-Grundrisse Marxists of the haute theorie crowd mostly ignored the vigorous activism that was contesting the bleak situations they so glumly described. Both on home ground, and near abroad, they could have pitched in on organizing a good deal more. Even then, had everyone put their queer shoulders to the wheel, it’s hard to imagine the heavenly motions could have been much slowed. (By “motions” I allude not to old Yahweh, but rather to the gods of Greek colonists and mercenaries.)
Finally, this is a book I have to read. In the pre-text Strombeck writes that NYC’s 1975 fiscal crisis [is] now recognized as a template for the austerity politics of the past four decades, and he “directly considers the era’s aesthetic production in terms of the crisis”. It sounds like a synthetic doxa for left cultural studies of the period.

“Hard Line Brainstorm”

Felix Vogel (U of Kassel) spoke on the Art & Language group in the mid-’70s. He moved off a text by Corrine Robbins in a 1976 issue of the Soho Weekly News, “Go Marxist or Move to Texas” (odd, A&L historian Michael Corris eventually did – although he certainly remained Marxist!).
Vogel read Mel Ramsden’s unpublished text “Hard Line Brainstorm” (1975, unpublished; estate of Sarah Charlesworth) where Ramsden writes, “the means of authority ‘stand above’ [artistic] production”, leading artists to a “passive vulnerability” to manipulation.

Still from "Struggle in New York", Zoran Popovic’s 1976 A&L-based film; note posters for "The Fox" pasted to the windows.

Mel Ramsden was probably the sharpest analyst in that crowd. I recall Anna Chave opening our eyes to the not-so-quiet political subtexts in Minimal art through a Ramsden text in The Fox.
Vogel reported Zoran Popovic’s 1976 A&L-based film Struggle in New York for its critique of the newly launched art center P.S. 1 – “if P.S. 1 is an alternative, why does it pose no threat to the ruling class?” It is simply “hiding the real working class community and replacing it with artists”. (The film’s script was published in 2020.)
I think that’s a little hard on Alanna Heiss. It was precisely her ‘in’ with the elites on her board (like Brendan Gill) that enabled her to colonize so much vacant property with adventurous artists. The initial residency program put scores of international artists into studios there, seeding a new “loose collection of international vagabonds”, as Vogel described Soho. Unlike Charlotte Moorman’s, Heiss’s was an authoritarian project, but she was at least a philosopher queen.
Finally, Vogel believes his research into the A&L-to-AMCC continuum of the mid-1970s, the period of the deflation of the anti-Vietnam war movement, can help define the “locally specific relationship between art and politics” of this time. That could be helpful.
I’d like to see the era of Pattern & Decoration painting in NYC look like something besides expatriate commie tourists kicking cans around the basement of the Empire.

Whispers about Vietnam

Catherine Quan Damman (NYU) spoke about the overlooked work of Anthony Ramos, “About Media” (1977). Ramos was a student of Allan Kaprow at Cal Arts who did time in prison as a conscientious objector (CO) during the Vietnam War. His work concerned President Jimmy Carter’s post-war pardon of Vietnam War draft resisters.

Damman spoke about the black artist’s reputation for honesty and authenticity, and the “labor of authorial construction”. Unfortunately, the room was stifling, the fans were whirring, and despite our pleas the speaker could scarcely be heard.

Aporias

I also have few notes for Jeannine Tang’s (New School) talk on Julie Tolentino, lesbian cult performer and principal motivator of a venue called the Clit Club. I confess that, though I love the name, I never went; nor might I have been allowed in if I had. WOW (Women’s One World) cafe and Dixon Place were as far as I went, and mostly to see Diane Torr.
I noted the cool-looking figural calendar, and the curious affective questionnaire sent to people involved with the Clit Club – how did it smell? What did you wear? Issues Tang was concerned with included performance art in a context of mutual disaffection, and how art history recognizes friendship.

Tellus: The Cassette Magazine

Joseph Nechvatal, my old comrade from Colab days, did an hour-long “listening session” drawn from the archive of the Tellus audio magazine project. Nechvatal DJ’d from his laptop; the entire run of the cassette journal is online at Ubuweb.net.
He told how he got into this. “The [Sony] Walkman really did it for me. You could have your own private soundtrack of the city.” Cassette tape was already part of the mail art scene, being sent around.

As he played the selections, Nechvatal made wry comments on the sound art and music scene of the day. He played an early Lamonte Young piece, the Dia Foundation-supported musician for whom he worked for a time. Of the No Wave selections he said, “if you knew how to play an instrument it was held against you”. He played “noise scapes”, and a work by Julius Eastman who “slows it to a heroin pace”.
The later issues of Tellus threw a wider net. “We got bored with downtown, so we went international…. New York is a port, a place of fluidity…. It’s a mental space of networks.”

New York, Our Time

Having missed the first screening, I caught the second by Vivienne Dick, of her 2020 film New York, Our Time. For this project she hunted up old friends from her days in the city in the late ‘70s. They spoke with her in relaxed conversation about their lives then and now – “like a sandwich of time”. Lydia Lunch did a kind of performative set piece: “This is to the ghosts.”
She also talked to some of her friend’s children: “You can’t live alone” in NYC today, said one, because of the expense of rent. “Neoliberal New York is unbearable.”
The film had a very relaxed femisocial feeling, like kitchen table conversation. It was anti-documentary; despite that some of her conversants are known figures, they aren’t identified. They were all friends, not this one and that one. Vivienne has a great still listening style. Her friend Andrew, who I met in Madrid later, said that was due to “spiritual training”.
I dug seeing Dick’s short takes of the period, dressing up to go out nightclubbing. Of her film, she said, “It’s kind of ethnographic, except I’m in it.”
Somehow it’s hard to grasp New York, Our Time. The film is so quiet, ruminative, and largely undeclarative about things one somehow wants to shout about. In a way, the informality of it defeats opinion.
“I like to get that kind of feel to the film, that it is just messing around,” Dick said. “Years ago, in New York when I saw quite a lot of American independent film, I was very impressed with some of the work I saw that was just like that. People playing around with the camera, making like films in their kitchen. That really grabbed me.” (Dick to McCann, 2022)

NEXT: Tish & Snooky's hair dye empire, queer counter-publics and homonormativity, roll call of black dancers, and a chicken wearing trousers.

REFERENCES

Boston MFA show, "Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation" October 18, 2020–July 25, 2021
https://www.mfa.org/exhibition/writing-the-future

On the lesser known of Basquiat’s celebrity collaborations, one might look up – Susanne Kleine, Ménage à trois: Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente (2012); preface by Robert Fleck and interviews by Dieter Buchhart with Bruno Bishofberger, Tony Shafrazi and Francesco Clemente. In which the living get the last word.

Allen Frame, Kirsten Bates, et al., “Sounds in the Distance”; performance document based on David Wojnarowicz’ text
1984 | 00:38:00 | United States | English | Color | Stereo | 4:3 | 3/4" U-matic
https://vdb.org/titles/turmoil-garden

Marc H. Miller, “Redtape Magazine, 1982-1992”, Dec 6, 2017
https://gallery.98bowery.com/news/redtape-magazine-1982-1992/

Nina Kennedy, “Remembrances of the Clit Club”, April 10, 2021
http://fem-entertainmentnews.infemnity.com/2021/04/remembrances-of-clit-club.html

Julie Tolentino Wins 2020 Queer|Art|Prize for Sustained Achievement
https://www.artforum.com/news/julie-tolentino-wins-2020-queer-art-prize-for-sustained-achievement-84210

Ruairí McCann, “New York Our Time—An Interview with Vivienne Dick”, February 2022
https://ultradogme.com/2022/02/22/vivienne-dick/

Still from Vivienne Dick's New York Our Time