Like a lot of other artists in the 80’s I opened a gallery in the east village.  The name of the gallery was Virtual Garrison. The address was 19  2nd Ave. at 1st street.  It was open for 2 years.  Recently I’ve been trying to discuss the East Village scene to some younger dealers.  Indeed, I just remarked to Rob Murphy the other day that during our Springtime walk around of the Chelsea art galleries all the works being exhibited seemed to be a triumph of the East Village style or styles. Rob agreed.  The East Village scene started with Alan Moore staging an anarchist artist occupation of the Essex street market on New Year’s day and having a show called “The real Estate Show.” This was an extension of the Soho raw space look but with the political twist of squatting in abandoned buildings.  The art works were a mishmash of poster style propaganda paintings, punk and neo-surrealism etc. Much of the work was by Colab artist’s fresh from their success at The Times Square show that was held in a former whorehouse on 42nd street.  

A Matter of Time

This Summer has been an interesting and difficult one for me.  I think there are only two seasons, Summer and Winter with a two week buffer on either end where the weather is temperate.  Indeed, buried under our collective sense of time there’s a natural rhythm of the season’s that marks the passage of time.  Climatologists are now predicting that the transition points where the Earth’s axis shifts towards and away from the Sun will be the occasion for highly disruptive storms as a consequence of global warming.  

My niece, Casey Jones, (yes that’s really her name) is a really gifted young fashion designer fresh out of Philadelphia College of Textiles.  Her first gig is working for L.A.M.B the Gwen Stefani line of clothes that premiered big-time this Friday on the runways in New York.  There was an article in the New York Times magazine a while back that talked about what’s happening to fashion and refers to the L.A.M.B. line.  Seems that clothing lines are being launched that are tagged to celebrities, which is nothing new. What is new is that they cater to an accelerated business cycle where the line is produced in limited quantity, a media buzz is created, and when the sales of the line start to fall, the company is trashed or sold.  What happens with the young people working on the line is that they are given the lowest wages possible and the longest working hours possible. There’s no job security because they know that as soon as the line goes stale they’re out of a job.  

It should be apparent that an artist makes art about their social group.  Many artists use art to gain access to a higher social class. In this way art is a tool for the individual perhaps freeing them from the circumstances they are born into.  This is especially true for people who grow up poor or disenfranchised or of modest circumstances. It’s also true of middle class children who make art to escape the restrictions of the middle class, but what about activist art?

There's a bit of back story to Matta-Clark and New Orleans. This has to do with Tina Girouard and Richard Landry who are both from New Orleans as is Keith Sonnier. They formed a Cajun contigent in the 112 Greene street scene.  Landry, a musician, played with Phillip Glass. Girouard, a dancer and mixed media artist, often collaborated with Gordon Matta-Clark. 

I just finished being interviewed by the San Diego curator about Gordon. Since this summer I’ve been called upon by Jane Crawford and Bob Fiore to speak about Gordon, now the San Diego curator and coming up the Whitney curator. It’s emotionally very taxing because it asks me to go back 30 years and bring up memories I’ve put away. On reflecting a bit about the question; “What would Matta-Clark do?”, I find it a helpful exercise.