Printed+Matter+show+Fall+2011

**"A Show About Colab and Related Activites"**
//Printed Matter artists' bookstore, NYC Fall 2011//

Review in Hyperallergic blog 1970s Flashback to the Birth of Alternatives by Howard Hurst on October 28, 2011

Installation view of "A Show About Colab and Related Activites" on view at Printed Matter in Chelsea, Manhattan (all photos by the author)

This week there has been some talk about the Occupy Museums protest. Lee Rosenbaum points out the flaws in the whole thing here. As Rosenbaum suggests, when dealing with this sort of reoccurring institutional critique it is helpful to reference the work of artists and activists from the 1960s and 1970s. Maybe this kind of reflection will lead more people to invent their own communities and methods of production or at the very least make coherent and specific demands.

An up close look at works by Colab (click to enlarge) The current exhibition A Show About Colab and Related Activities at Printed Matter in Chelsea is a perfect example of the positivity that can result from discontent. First known as the Green Corporation and subsequently named Collaborative Projects, Inc. Colab was a loosely organized group of artists that functioned from the late 1970s through the early 1980s, serving as a platform, agency and collective for art making.

The current exhibition consists of original artworks and ephemera (including meeting minutes, flyers, posters and publications) that document and sample from the slew of work produced under the organization’s moniker. Colab was organized according to principles of democracy; the meetings and membership were open and leadership was elected on a regular basis. Group consensus (however fragmented) was the order of the day. This frantic, creatively explosive energy defines Colab’s working practice: the group spawned a number of art shows, a mail art project, a slew of publications and a number of local access television shows among others. They also experimented with a number of state of the art communication methods, including QWIP machines (a pre-fax technology) procured from the EXXON corporation.

While this milieu might best be defined by an anything goes, anti-organizational mentality, Colab did make effective use of federal and state arts funding. This is all the more impressive considering the radical nature of many of their projects.

The Times Square Show is often written about and referenced. It pushed individual artists into the public spotlight and defined a “we don’t need you” approach to the commercial gallery world. The documentation of this seminal show is fascinating. I have to admit that the gritty printed images bold blocked print and faded colors strike an immediate chord. They are pleasurable to look at in a way that is simple and refuses navel gazing. Advertisements and artwork from concurrent exhibitions include The Real-estate Show and early-pre Colab exhibitions like The Batman Show. They scream out, reaching beyond nostalgia and suggest the sustained power of youth (most of the members were in their twenties at the time). They are also evidence of an enormous mountain of material from this period that is often overlooked in favor of Times Square flash.

Colab's works feel vibrant and alive in Printed Matter's anti-establishment bookstore

The show feels vibrant and alive in Printed Matter’s zine and art book filled, anti-establishment bookstore. I can imagine hating a hypothetical, ultra-curated version of this show, expensively matted and displayed at the New Museum. Fortunately that won’t happen, and Printed Matter’s Max Schumann has given the topic a fitting treatment.

In following with Colab’s ethos, the exhibition includes a roster of artist statements collected for the show. The resulting voices feel raucous, revolutionary and highly appropriate considering the subject at hand. There is a general sense of accomplishment but also of work yet to be done. On the subject sculptor Tom Otterness writes, “Out of the art world & on to the streets.” With a prevailing sense of bitterness and anger Joe Lewis posits that, “ … beneath the veneer of self-empowerment and cultural rejection i.e. the gallery system — quickly picked off those they believed could draw a profit — isn’t that what’s it all about?” Judy Rifka remarks, “Colab. Art that goes to the core, peeling away the legitimacy of a hegemony that had taken hold of its exhibition and definition.”

These voices echo in a space designed for argument and debate. As an organization that has overlapped with and participated in Colab projects, Printed Matter is an example of the alternative style spaces left over from this time period. In his press release Schumann suggests:

“As the historical connections of our present predicaments to that period become ever more clear, the directness and urgency of Colab’s many voices, the DIY ethics of necessity, and the carnival like spirit of resistance and play stand as a model (or maybe better, an anti-model) for the political and cultural struggles of today.”

I completely agree. Occupy Museums should take note of this example. Sometimes there is a point where you have to stop complaining and instead just buckle down and do it yourself.

A Show about Colab and Related Activities opened on October 15 and will be on view until November 30 at Printed Matter (195 Tenth Avenue, Chelsea, Manhattan).

Tagged as: Chelsea, Collaborative Projects INC, Joe Lewis, Judy Rifka, Lee Rosenbaum, Max Schumann, Occupy Museums, Printed Matter, Tom Otterness

http://hyperallergic.com/38908/1970s-flashback-to-the-birth-of-alternatives/

Above is the "big group shot" by Lisa Kahane of all us aging Collaborators who made it to the opening... (Oh, wait! Lisa is in the shot!)

//“A Show About Colab (and Related Activities)”// //PRINTED MATTER INC.// //195 10th Avenue// //October 15–November 30//

//View of “A Show About Colab (and Related Activities),” 2011.// //From photocopied flyers, the word jumps out: OCCUPATION. On January 1, 1980, Colab (aka Collaborative Projects) rang in the decade with the “Real Estate Show,” a group exhibition illegally installed in a vacant city-managed building on a derelict stretch of Delancey Street. As a poster later wheat-pasted to the property stated, “This was to be the beginning of an exchange about landlord speculation, tenants’ rights, property misuse, projected housing development, arbitrary urban planning, etc.—a citizen’s center.” The police padlocked the building the next day.//

//This “Insurrectionary Urban Development” and the subsequent “Times Square Show” (famously held, with permission, in a former massage parlor) usually garner Colab a mention in survey texts. “A Show About Colab (and Related Activities)” ventures past the group’s landmarks and explores the surrounding territory. During this unwieldy autumn when another occupation and citizen’s center has sprung up downtown, there’s good reason to revisit Colab. The organization was decidedly nonhierarchical, with open membership and rotating committee positions, and its DIY ethic of establishing alternatives to everything can be seen in the range of its affiliated undertakings: not just guerrilla exhibitions, but film distribution (the New Cinema on St. Mark’s Place, which incubated No Wave), publications (X Motion Picture Magazine), retailing (A. More Store), television (All Color News, Nightwatch, Potato Wolf), and telecommunications (Liza Béar and Keith Sonnier’s pioneering Send/Receive, Qwip, and Slow Scan initiatives).//

//One undeniable pleasure of exhibitions rich in historical material is spotting the small-type names that now loom large. The screening schedule for the “Times Square Show” lists a midnight film by “Jim Jarmish” and another entry laconically titled “SLIDE SHOW by Nan Goldin.” (Also, don’t miss Jack Smith’s oracular warble in the late-night television advertisement for his “Palace of Exotic Landlordism.”) Yet that pleasure is also a danger: It dissolves Colab into a history of prominent proper names, what lately we might call the 1 percent, or what one “Real Estate Show” document dismisses as “the intellectual gambling of elitist art circles.” Better, perhaps, to focus on a cluster of flyers announcing Colab meetings, the material remainder of a social density sustained by hand-to-hand exchanges. On one, a drawing by Tom Otterness represents a committee restructuring proposal as a hilarious hermaphrodite automaton. Here we get a glimpse of the process, not the product: the conditions in the distillery that led to creative ferment.//

//— Colby Chamberlain All rights reserved. artforum.com is a registered trademark of Artforum International Magazine, New York, NY// //http://www.artforum.com/?pn=picks§ion=nyc#picks29319// //http://sendreceivesatellitenetwork.blogspot.com//