Models+and+Subjects+11+09

Alan W. Moore
 * Models and Subjects**

[//This paper was delivered at the “Re-Membering Loisaida” conference produced by the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at the Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center November 20th, 2009.//]

My thanks to Yasmin Ramirez and Libertad Guerra for inviting me to speak here. It has been a real struggle to get it together. Unlike most of my texts, this one just gets bigger and bigger… so really today I will give you only a bit of it, a teaser if you will.

I never lived in Loisaida. I worked there, for a time, as a storefront proprietor and as a production employee. So, while I later gravitated back to the land of the eggheads, I never took my degree in “hangoutology.”

In 1974 I moved to New York. I lived for a year in a closet in Soho, my horizons in 1974 defined by my internship for //Artforum// magazine. I was learning to be a critic, a line guard of quality and artistic integrity, even though to be sure i knew nothing about either. I met a lot of fascinating people, from many countries, but finally being a critic turned out to be a job I could not do.

While living there I fell in with the artists who were starting the artists’ organization called Colab. They were my peer group. This organization began to cohere in 1977. I knew there were Puerto Ricans in New York. I’d grown up in Los Angeles, which is very largely Mexican. My mother, a sociologist, studied them as an ethnic group. The artists of Colab were diverse, but nearly all were white, Anglo or Jewish. But they did different things. The “diversity” of the group was stylistic.

One of the first projects that got under way was a cable TV show shot in part on Super-8 film called “All Color News.” Scott and Beth B produced a segment on the Fraunces Tavern bombing by the FALN. They visited the police, rephotographed some grisly morgue pictures, and interviewed the chief of the Arson and Explosions squad. In later work the Bs continued to work with this material, but what they did had nothing to do with the FALN. They were interested in the psychopathology of repression, not the dreams and nightmares of liberation movements.

The Bs’ work was part of a general fascination among Colab artists with “terrorism” (that’s in quotes) – the revolutionary violence of the RAF, the Red Brigades, and the FALN – all lumped up into a violent political movement with an inherent glamour of opposing the state. These were militant underdogs which we tried to understand, or at least to depict. I produced a journal called the “Terrorist News Annual,” although that was more a performance than a publication. Of these groups, somehow the foreigners were more safe. By instinct, we knew to avoid any close engagement with the FALN. Indeed, this interest was playing with politics. Diego Cortez – not, by the way, the real name of this Chicago artist – called it “eso-terrorism.” The widespread revolutionary activism we found so stirring, involved living lives beyond limits which most of us would never even approach. These movements cried out for recognition, for remembrance and acknowledgement in the avalanche of media blackout, criminalization, exile, imprisonments and judicial killings. What they stood for, why they did it never seemed to be a fit subject for discussion. Nor did we very much help to open that discussion. Semiotext(e) published their Autonomia issue [1] about the Italian radical movement, but I did not study it. Only recently did I learn of the fierce state repression and exiles of that movement in 1977.

Colab started a series of theme shows in different member artists’ studios. A group anchored by me and my friends assayed a dramatic experiment in this vein and tried on the subject of real estate. To make it special we occupied a vacant city-owned building for the show. This was a perfect building, a very public showroom at 123 Delancey Street, right above the subway stop, plate glass windows all around, on the approach to the Williamsburg Bridge. It was the kind of very public space unofficial artists don’t get anymore in global cities. After one delirious day, we were shut down. At the streetside press conference the next day, Joseph Beuys showed up with his entourage and the press.

We were covered in the New York Times. Then, much to our surprise, we got a “relocation” (as a veteran of the Italian social center movement later told me, “Oh, they gave you an aseneo”) – to a tiny little storefront right beside the bridge which became our “field office.”

This was around the corner from Clinton Street, a bustling and solidly Spanish shopping street of small interesting stores. There we collected ourselves, recovered from the shock of success, and goofed around for a while running performances. One night, a handsome voluble guy named Felix Perez and his friend with coke bottle glasses and an albino pit bull came to our door. Felix offered to “protect” us. He was a very personable fellow. and we worked well with Felix. Later he ran the bar at our evening events – with a “speed rack” of liquor set up so it could be whisked out of sight if police came along to investigate our events. They never did – which in itself was significant – we were doubtless being used to “better” the neighborhood, although we weren’t really thinking that way at the time. Over time we learned more of Felix’s story. He was a Vietnam vet, and said he’d packed body bags with heroin over there. He liked hanging out with us, and even acted in a couple of the cable TV shows we did, preparing the props at our space. But Felix wasn’t an artist.

Soon we moved from Delancey Street altogether. The city offered us a vacant storefront on Rivington Street. It had been a beauty salon, but now water poured in regularly from the ceiling. When we got the keys, we saw that the former proprietors had pulled up a display case and burned incense upon it like an altar. They had conducted a full dress leave-taking ceremonial for the business they were giving up. The basement storefront was also soon abandoned. It was Badillo’s upholstery shop – I think I saw the guy once. So we kind of slithered down there… A live phone was still hooked up, a party line which worked for a week or so. And some artworks had been left behind – a modernist cityscape, in a 1920s Cubist style, and a picture of two gangsters, nattily dressed and signing to each other, with jackets marked Jesters and Latin Kings. Someone found a handmade drum decorated with metal strips on the street and brought it in.) All this scenery left behind bespoke an ubiquitous albeit mysterious Latin presence.

156 Rivington was a place where clearly ceremonies had taken place, networks had been developed, and where two aesthetic enterprises had preceded us – a beauty parlor and a reupholstery shop, both undone by floods of water and the press of the growing drug trade.

Since we had never really planned on being there, and our being there had come with an almost foolish ease, we regarded all this with fascination and deep respect. The milieu of ABC became a material for our work. Observing the faded sign of another defunct business across the street, we named the place after the remnants of that sign – “abogado notario.” (We came to call the place “No Rio”; today it is called “ABC,” a real linguistic difference.)

As we began, then, we mediated through artifacts, through what academics call material culture.

The storefront next to our namesake was a derelict formal wear store. It burned one night, and the next day we looted the heaps of scorched tuxedos, painting tropical motifs on the lapels of a bunch of the cleaner white ones. Our band was called the Cardboard Air Band, and we played the Mudd Club.

Tom Warren discovered a mother lode of neighborhood relics while he was nosing around the shattered archives of the photography studio in the abandoned building next door. (The owners of Gus’s photo studio had in fact built 156 as an adjunct building, but finally abandoned both.) The photos he found in many stages of retouching inspired Tom to open his own portrait studio exhibition at ABC No Rio. This project was the most directly successful attempt to engage the neighborhood, as people sort of naturally drifted back in for cheap Polaroid pictures. Ilona Granet’s artfully painted window sign, “Venga Ahora” remained up for the season.

Our experience of Puerto Rican culture was very much of the street, just as our address – I mean our pitch, our way of working, starting with the heavily trafficked corner of Delancey Street where we’d opened the Real Estate Show – was to the street.

For us this new Lower East Side was the street. We took what wa saw as our métier, as the reality to be dealt with. It was sort of like looking at documentary photography. I recall at the time I was entranced by Helen Levitt’s photos of the old Lower East Side. Some of our best friends in the neighborhood during this time were children, successors to those poor kids making something out of nothing who had charmed Helen Levitt.

While we were very sensitive to our position in the Latin neighborhood, and to a great extent our collective dccisions were determined by our sense of it, we were working in the dark. Still, just like any other storekeeper, we had something to sell.

Felix Perez wasn’t the only adult of the community to come into ABC. Felipe, the wacky cane-waving uncle of the Dominican kids upstairs who only came in stinking drunk became a problem we would have to warn people about. He was relatively harmless, but he was big.

We had regular visits from Ada, an elderly Jewish woman vending //schmatas// from a shopping cart full of old clothing. She spoke – loudly – a wild brew of English, Yiddish and Spanish. Later Jorge Brandon, El Coco que Habla, also dropped by with his shopping cart full of sign painting equipment.

Jorge was an artist, but he was incomprehensible to us, a total character. Even now as I have studied some Spanish, when I hear him on tape I cannot make out 10% of his discourse.

It took Josh Gosciak to hook us up with Puerto Rican literati. Josh was the editor with Maurice Kenney of Contact II, a literary magazine dedicated to resurgent multicultural literary movement. Kenney was a Mohawk poet from Akwesasne, an Indian like the magnetic Loisaidera Diane Burns. Josh arranged for important Nuyorican poets to read at ABC as part of our poetry, video and music series. Jorge Brandon came back in the series Josh organized, with his friends from CHARAS. As the great haggard and shabbily dressed orator droned on, our audience began to tire of the sonorously beautiful but regrettably unintelligible performance. Bimbo Rivas told us there was only one way to get the old man off the stage. “Give me five dollars,” he said, then he slipped out the door. Bimbo soon returned with an order of fried chicken, pieces of which he ostentatiously waved under Jorge’s nose. Pollo frito, it’s the only way to get the performer off stage…

Although we did not understand him, we loved the Talking Coconut. Robert Goldman, aka Bobby G lived in our basement after he left his loft in Brooklyn, and began a series of paintings of people in the neighborhood. He traced the outlines of his paintings of local youth in a electrifying lattice of silver paint. This painting of Jorge in his hat out front of ABC is one of my favorites works of his.

Josh was books editor for the //East Village Eye//, a monthly newsmagazine that had just started in 1979. (Yasmin Ramirez later wrote art criticism for the paper.) The editor was one Leonard Abrams, a great name in publishing, with which he had of course no connection. The //Eye// closely supported Colab and ABC No Rio, Fashion Moda and the emerging hip hop culture as it began to cross over.

The magazine started out in a ground floor apartment on Avenue B. There the publisher became rather too friendly with the local drug dealers, so it was a great improvement when the Eye moved to CHARAS. There were some great people there. Chino Garcia, Doris Cornish, Emily Rubin.

But I wanted very much to say a couple of things here. First about the texture and aesthesis of interculturality during this very important moment when the USA’s first ever major money-making black fine art star was rising into the heavens and the cultural landscape was changing.

For the ABC book we edited, [2] Tim Rollins of Group Material submitted a transcript of talks he’d had with a neighbor on 13th Street. Tim transcribed only Richard’s part of the talk, an extended rap, very conversational but gently probing as to the reasons for the artists’ presence on the block. In the course of the talk, Richard raises some questions, some possibilities for what a community based art space could do…

“We know each other,” Richard says to Tim Rollins, “and [we] get along and talk a lot together, but you’ve got to admit that we’re both straining to relate. Like you can’t even speak Spanish. We’re not enemies but we do have different histories. … Our people – the indigenous population, so to speak – see you new people all busting your ass” cleaning up the space, putting on shows, doing workshops for kids, “but we still don’t know why you’re doing it and why here? Like, you don’t even know us. There’s something unreal about it, right?”

Right.

Group Material opened their storefront on East 13th Street in 1980 with many of the same intentions as we at ABC. The show they made of precious artifacts gathered from their neighbors, called “Arroz con Mango,” set the pattern for the eclectic curatorial projects the group did. These carried Group Material to global fame as an artists’ collective.

Over 20 years later, Rollins recalled the show they called “The People's Choice (Arroz con Mango).” “We asked everybody on the block to bring in an object that had special value to them. That's when I realized: This is how you do it. This is what democracy might look like. It was full of fantasy and surprise and joy and humor and wit--all the things so often lacking in ‘political art.’” [3]

Well, there’s lots more to say on that. Suffice to say, the lessons learned from Puerto Rican culture in Loisaida helped a lot of gringo artists get famous.

The last thing I wanted to say concerns the phenomenon of the kind of place we are in today, which I first entered for Brian Piersol’s stage painting show called “Salsa and Colors.” Then this place was called Solidaridad Humana, and it, like ABC No Rio, existed in an uneasy relationship to the state.

The Real Estate Show was a symbolic occupation, a tactic developed first in the civil rights then in the student struggles of the 1960s. That it led to an //aseneo// to 156 Rivington Street was almost an accident. But the building occupations undertaken by Puerto Rican groups during the 1970s have a direct parallel in those done in Europe, beginning in the 1970s in Italy. I have recently been studying the phenomenon of the occupied social center. It is strong in Spain, in Barcelona and Madrid, where they are called “Centros Sociales Ocupados.” This movement seeks to take over large city buildings for political, social and cultural purposes. It is closely tied to the global justice movement, and is anti-neoliberal, pro-immigrant, and for obvious reasons completely blacked out of all but the underground media. (Yes, Virginia, there is still an underground.)

I began studying the New York City squatting movement closely with Clayton Patterson early in this century. (Although we began to work together on this in 1994.) And now I am confident to say that the large scale occupied building, managed in order to provide political and cultural provision, is a mode of autonomous, extra-state, “disobedient” political organization pioneered by Puerto Ricans in New York City in the 1970s.

The “insurrectionary urban development” that we alluded to in the manifesto of the Real Estate Show in 1979 was, in fact, being carried out by Puerto Ricans.

thanks very much for your attention…

writing 09/L symp/teaser for Lda symp

[1] cite this text

[2] Alan Moore and Marc Miller, //ABC No Rio Dinero: The Story of a Lower East Side Art Gallery// (Collaborative Projects, NYC; 1985). Nearly everything and everyone mentioned in this text is pictured in that book.

[3] “Tim Rollins talks to David Deitcher,” in //Artforum//, April 2003; Julie Ault says more on the “Arroz Con Mango” show in the same issue, in “Group Material talks to Dan Cameron.”