Fine Arts Building, NYC (1974-1978) @fineartsbuildingnewyork - Tumblr Blog

INTRODUCTION TO THE FINE ARTS BUILDING

The year 2014 marked the twentieth anniversary of the opening of the restaurant Nobu New York at 105 Hudson Street in Tribeca, featuring Japanese cuisine created by Chef Nobu Matsuhisa. After meeting him in Los Angeles, the actor, director, and producer Robert De Niro was motivated to bring Chef Nobu and his culinary artistry to New York City in 1994, to open his original, flagship location in downtown Manhattan. The restaurant was a prominent establishment on the corner of Hudson and Franklin streets and occupied the ground floor of an impressive, eleven story Beaux-Arts building, ensconced in marble on the exterior of the first and second floors, in terra cotta on the upper floors, and lavishly decorated with Renaissance Revival columns and window adornments. While Nobu New York served as a hive for actors, musicians and socialites like Madonna, Jay-Z, Rihanna, Lady Gaga, Tom Hanks and Kate Winslet downstairs, paying an average of $93 per person for their meals, the upper floors were filled with luxury loft apartments selling for as much as $5.5 million. Though the economics had escalated dramatically, the building at 105 Hudson Street had a long and rich history of fostering the intermingling of artists from many disciplines, most significantly during the 1970s when the building became known for a brief time as the Fine Arts Building.

The Fine Arts Building (FAB) was previously referred to as the Pierce building and the Powell building.[1] It was originally designed in 1892 by Carrère & Hastings, the architects of the main branch of the New York Public Library at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, built between 1902-1911, and the mansion which houses the Frick Collection on 70th Street and Fifth Avenue, built for industrialist Henry Clay Frick in 1913. The building was designed for a Boston-based chocolatier, the Baker Chocolate Company, which was run by Henry Pierce. Built as a seven-story building, the chocolate company operated on the lower floors and the upper floors were leased to other food companies. In 1903 the building was purchased by candy manufacturer Alexander Powell, who subsequently added four stories, as well as huge bronze letters deeming it the “Powell Building.”[2]

[Postcard featuring the New York Public Library ca. 1920; the building was designed by the architects of the Fine Arts Building.]

The neighborhood was referred to then as Washington Market and contained New York’s main food market, out of which hundreds of wholesale food vendors operated. The area was filled with warehouses and factories due to its convenience to the Hudson River piers and rail transportation and was described in The New York Times in 1872 as a “dirty, degraded little rat hole.”[3] Nearly a century later in 1967, the city moved the vendors of Washington Market to the new Hunts Point Market in the Bronx, literally paving the way for the construction of the World Trade Center between the years 1966-1977, and making way for a dramatic change to the area.[4] The desertion of the food industry from the neighborhood and the influx of office space created by the twin towers left an abundance of unoccupied warehouse buildings and loft spaces. In 1974 the Fine Arts Building, though not yet carrying this moniker, was 50 percent vacant.[5]

[Engraving showing Washington Market in 1888, with dozens of horse-drawn produce carts ready to unload; The market’s closing in 1967 paved the way for changes in Tribeca. (published in Harper's Weekly Dec. 1888).]

Leonard Julian Pretto (known as Julian), arrived in New York City in 1968 after majoring in Art History at the University of Illinois with a specialization in architecture.[6] Pretto assisted at numerous galleries including Richard Gray Gallery in Chicago and Richard L. Feigen in New York, and was active in setting up and managing the New York gallery space for Turin-based art dealer Gian Enzo Sperone.[7] While in New York, Pretto began dabbling in real estate and combining that activity with his interest in art by capitalizing on underutilized real estate as a space for temporary exhibitions.[8] In some instances, he managed an entire building in exchange for free living space for himself, as was the case with 10 Beach Street, near the current intersection of Walker and Varick streets in Tribeca. Pretto saw the building and felt strongly that he would like to live in it.[9] He proposed this to the owner, then worked to fill all five floors with paying tenants, eventually leading to the building’s profitable sale.[10] Gallerist Hal Bromm, who acquired a loft for himself at 10 Beach Street through his friendship with Pretto, recalled,

That is what Julian did all the time. He loved to do that. He would go to real estate owners and say, ‘you have an empty space, why don’t you let me do an exhibition here?’ Today we would call it a pop-up gallery, but that word did not exist back then. He would…say, ‘your space is empty and it is for rent. It will help you if I put an art show in this space.’ And most of the time they had nothing to lose. So Julian would have at his disposal an empty ground floor loft to put an art show in. And he did shows like that over and over and over.[11]

[Julian Pretto and Susan Penzner at the opening of Self-Portraits at the Fine Arts Building in 1975 (detail of photograph by Marcia Resnick, published on 98bowery.com).]

Pretto pursued this dualistic path of art and real estate throughout his career. An exhibition focused on Pretto’s legacy at MINUS SPACE gallery in Dumbo, Brooklyn in 2013 said in its press release,

Renowned for his sophisticated eye, keen ability to recognize new talent, and uncommon generosity, Pretto was beloved by the artists he exhibited and widely-respected in the greater contemporary art world. During his 30-year career, Pretto presented the work of well over 100 artists spanning multiple generations, strategies, and styles at an array of small, often temporary alternative gallery spaces in Manhattan’s Tribeca, Soho, and West Village neighborhoods.[12]

In addition to pop-up exhibitions, Pretto ran multiple galleries of his own in downtown locations including a three-story gallery in a former speakeasy at 176 Franklin Street during the late 1970s, and at locations including 103 Sullivan Street, 50 and 54 MacDougal, 251 6th Avenue, 69 Wooster, and 142 Greene Street during the late 1980s-early 1990s.[13] The New York Times said Pretto was “sometimes known as TriBeCa’s Heiner Friedrich,” an acknowledgment of his significant impact on the art world and the neighborhood.[14]

During the mid-1970s however, the City Planning Commission had only just begun referring to the “Triangle Below Canal Street” as “TriBeCa,” and the name did not immediately catch on among residents, who continued to call it Washington Market or a variety of other designations including “Lo Cal,” “the Lower West Side,” or even “SoSo (for South of Soho).”[15] Regardless of its name or the fact that it was shaped more like a trapezoid than a triangle, the neighborhood was becoming attractive to artists who were migrating from SoHo, its predecessor as artists’ enclave, which was becoming over-run with boutiques, restaurants and crowds.[16] Pretto was quoted in The New York Times envisioning the neighborhood’s future as an “international art center” stating,

TriBeCa is really where SoHo was in the late 1960s, when things were not so chic…the people here [in Tribeca] are resisting the fast changes that come with fashion, because they drive up rents.[17]

Pretto found the Beaux-Arts building at 105 Hudson Street very appealing and extremely attractive architecturally.[18] In 1974, as its food-importer tenants were gradually leaving, Pretto convinced the owner, who had been trying to sell the building, that he could run it at a profit by filling it with commercial and short-term residential tenants, including artists and art-related businesses (i.e. art framers, art movers, etc.).[19] Pretto rented the lower floors out as “non-living” artist studios, galleries and office spaces for a yearly fee of $4 per square foot, or roughly $90 per month.[20] He renamed the building the Fine Arts Building and began inviting artists, critics and others to organize free shows and performances in the building’s spacious, unoccupied rooms on the upper floors.[21] He himself ran a commercial gallery called Julian Pretto Gallery on the fifth floor, as well as overseeing what functioned as a nonprofit space on the ninth floor, called the Fine Arts Building Gallery.[22] Pretto used the income from renting out the studio and office space to both finance the nonprofit gallery and to cover the building’s expenses.[23] Assisting him in the administration of the building were four unpaid staffers, working in exchange for free studio space.[24]

Alternative spaces for artistic production and exhibition proliferated wildly in New York City during the decade of the 1970s, though what has been deemed the “alternative space movement” is generally considered to have begun to emerge in the late 1960s. Important precursors can also be found in the 1950s, if you consider the cooperative galleries on Tenth and Twelfth Streets in Greenwich Village and the gathering of Abstract Expressionists and “public lectures, screenings, and poetry readings” held at the Eighth Street Club (or “The Club”) in those years.[25] Fluxus artists, including George Maciunas, also served to advance the notion of cooperative living and combined living and working spaces, called Fluxhouses, in the early 1960s. The phenomenon of alternative art spaces for artists continues today and has been described by the artist and writer Jacki Apple as “a series of cycles in which each generation declares its independence from market-based institutions.”[26]

An aversion to the commercialization of art was certainly true of many of the spaces which arose in the 1970s, though politics and changing aesthetics and form in art-making also drove the need for their formation. One theory for the eruption of such spaces in the 1970s, which came “at the end of an economic boom, when protests over the Vietnam war were shaking the art community and disrupting international exhibitions (such as Documenta and the Venice Biennale),” is that they arose out of a consciousness that had developed among artists that “individuals acting in concert could actually have an impact on ‘the system.’”[27] The “art system” needed overhauling in many ways—in order to address the inordinately dominant power structures surrounding the exhibition of art and the lack of equilibrium across gender and race, as well as to accommodate the expression of diverse political beliefs. Separately, collaboration, experimentation in new art forms, and the abandonment of traditionally established medium-specific categories generated new clusters of activity thereby necessitating new outlets. Alternative spaces responded to and effectively served the needs of artists, both in terms of their politics and their artistic practice. In a 1977 article on the subject, the critic Kay Larson anticipated the impact alternative spaces would have, in that they “will undoubtedly bring changes: changes in local communities exposed to experimental art, changes in esthetics (the cross-fertilization of ideas), [and] changes in the distribution of power within the art showing system.”[28]

The history of more than 130 alternative projects, programs and spaces active in New York City since 1960 was covered extensively in Lauren Rosati and Mary Anne Staniszewski’s 2012 publication_ Alternative Histories: New York Art Spaces, 1960 to 2010_, and in the corresponding exhibition held at the cultural center Exit Art in 2010.[29] Many lasting institutions founded during the 1970s are featured in the catalogue, such as 112 Workshop—which became 112 Greene Street and now White Columns (1970), The Kitchen (1971), Artists Space (1972), the Clocktower Gallery (1972), Franklin Furnace (1976), Printed Matter (1976), P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center—now The Museum of Modern Art’s PS1 (1976), and The Drawing Center (1977). While the Fine Arts Building is mentioned in relation to organizations which operated within its walls for a time (i.e. Artists Space), it is appropriately not included as one of the featured programs in the book which tend to be singular organizations with relatively focused missions and administration, and in some cases operating with government funding.

[Facade of downtown alternative art space, 112 Workshop, on Greene Street in Soho ca. 1970 (published with the essay “Alternate Realities” on daviddeitcher.com).]

[Exterior of alternative space, Franklin Furnace, at 112 Franklin Street in Tribeca, 1978, featuring an installation by artist Dara Birnbaum (photograph by Jacki Apple; courtesy of Franklin Furnace).]

[Exterior of alternative space, the Clocktower Gallery (© Clocktower Productions)]

[Exterior of The Kitchen’s third and current space in Chelsea after operating in Soho from 1973-1986 and before that in Greenwich Village from 1971-1973 (photograph published on the Kitchen.org).]

[Cover of Artforum magazine in October 1976 featuring the alternative art space P.S.1’s inaugural exhibition, Rooms, which included many artists who also exhibited at the Fine Arts Building (image ©Artforum).

Brian O’Doherty, critic, artist, and head of the visual arts section of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) during the 1970s, is credited by many with establishing the very expression “alternative space.”[30] The NEA was founded by the Federal government in 1965 and though their contribution to the arts started minimally, the organization grew to become a key funding source for arts and cultural institutions. By 1977, NEA contributions to the arts had grown to over $100 million per year, with $3.5 million of that going to visual arts.[31] The non-profit institution Artists Space was reported to have come into existence (by way of the Committee for the Visual Arts) in 1972 “precisely because money was available,” though it also had a solid mission and well-executed program in support of young, emerging artists.[32] Government funding allowed many organizations such as Artists Space, to “detach themselves from the commercial gallery network and eliminate buying and selling from artshowing.”[33] Most alternative art spaces were less interested in selling work like commercial galleries or in assembling permanent collections like museums, but instead functioned like service organizations for artists.[34] They were described as “neutral, non-judgemental, non-authenticating, openly experimental and sympathetic” spaces for new ideas, unconcerned with salability and operating without the pressure of museum trustees with corporate connections.[35] They were also very commonly artist-run from the top-down, in terms of directors and/or board members, and employed democratic decision-making processes as compared to museums.[36] The Fine Arts Building was similar to and a part of the alternative space movement that exploded during the 1970s in that it provided an open space for artistic experimentation, however it remains separate based on at least one key distinction—it was not a singular organization with a unified mission and administration, but simply an architectural structure and environment in which many varied and separate entities—artists, writers, musicians, performers, guest curators, and commercial and non-profit organizations—co-habitated and interacted in a fluid, unregulated, and continually evolving way.

Though Pretto capitalized on the neighborhood’s economic situation in terms of free real estate, he passed up opportunities to obtain government money for his venture, saying at the time that he rejected “the scrutiny that public funding brings, and the necessity to account for every step.”[37] Pretto asserted that his non-profit gallery within the Fine Arts Building, the Fine Arts Building Gallery, “has no formal existence. It is a nonprofit hobby, philanthropy.”[38] The journalist Phil Patton observed in 1977 that, “alternative spaces began with the notion of delivering space into the hands of artists, but the economic facts of life…dramatically shaped their subsequent evolution.”[39] The sheer existence of administrative oversight and funding runs somewhat counter to the avant-garde spirit behind many alternative programs and perhaps brings them closer to museum and commercial gallery models. Critic Jerry Saltz voiced that concern in 1977 when he said,

Webster defines ‘alternative’ as ‘a choice between one or the other.’ It’s not both. In other words, a space that begins to develop the characteristics of other institutions is no longer an alternative. It is that which it now resembles. [40]

Without such hindrances, the Fine Arts Building operated freely as a governless support structure for the microcosm of diverse, experimental projects, events and art forms that arose and operated within its walls.

A “free-spirited atmosphere reigned” in the Fine Arts Building and it “fostered the camaraderie and networking that helped nourish radical new directions” in art.[41] Artist, historian, curator and journalist Marc H. Miller’s work was included in two exhibitions at the Fine Arts Building, and his website 98 Bowery: 1969-1989, View from the Top Floor has existed as the primary source of information on the building, as well as a source on the downtown New York scene. Miller recalls that “hand-drawn flyers advertising cheap rents” were used to fill the building with “creative types” and “on Saturdays the building bustled with openings and parties, and its halls were filled with artists, writers, and musicians.”[42] In addition to the visual arts, guest performances featured artists across all disciplines, such as Tony Ingrassia of the Ridiculous Theater Company, cabaret performer Lil Picard, and composer, singer, filmmaker, choreographer, and director Meredith Monk.[43] A number of avant-garde theater companies, including the Ridiculous Theater Company, the Performance Group and the Ontological-Hysteric Theater, maintained offices in the Fine Arts Building.[44]

[Artists John Cage and Marc H. Miller in an artwork which was exhibited at the Fine Arts Building; Miller’s website 98bowery.com is a primary source of information on the FAB and the downtown arts scene (artwork © Marc H. Miller).]

[Artist, writer and legend Lil Picard and artist/bookdealer Ira Joel Haber; Picard appeared in the Fine Arts Building (image published on Haber’s blog on the occasion of the exhibition Lil Picard and Counterculture New York at the Grey Art Gallery at NYU in 2010).]

[Meredith Monk in “Education of Girl Child,” 1973; Monk appeared at the Fine Arts Building (image published on Duke University’s blog, The Thread, in 2012).]

Many well-known artists and players in the downtown art scene had studio or office space in the building, including “intense and cryptic” performance artist Ralston Farina and artist, critic, and administrator Joe Lewis, prior to his co-founding the art space Fashion Moda with Stefan Eins in the South Bronx in 1978.[45] Lewis was also associated with the artists group Collaborative Projects Inc. (Colab) and has since lectured extensively on public art, community-based art making and the alternative space movement.[46] Though many published accounts refer to the studio spaces in the Fine Arts Building as “non-living,” anecdotal evidence supports that some artists were in fact living in their studios. David Ebony, now Managing Editor of Art in America magazine, reportedly “ran a gallery out of his live-in studio” and “hosted memorable performances such as [artist] Robin Winters washing the feet of visitors.”[47] Other commercial galleries in the building included “Ellen Sragow, Photo Works, and Marina Urbach’s C Space, which specialized in European And South American artists.”[48] Pretto at one point planned to convert six spaces into apartments for foreign art dealers who were visiting New York.[49] While there is no confirmation he set up the apartments, Pretto did successfully invite European dealers to bring work to the Fine Arts Building Gallery. He chose “galleries which had themselves shown young American artists in Europe” including Konrad Fischer (Düsseldorf), Nicholas Logsdail’s Lisson Gallery (London), Yvon Lambert (Paris) and Ugo Ferranti (Rome).[50] He was quoted at the time alluding to the need for “more flavor from Europe.”[51] One floor of the building reportedly had “a crash pad for assorted youth and European travelers” and “the basement became a rehearsal space for rock groups like the Erasers who lived in the building.”[52]

[Ralston Farina during a performance; Farina had a studio in the Fine Arts Building and was included in numerous exhibitions in the building (photograph reproduced in an undated press release from Art Performances Inc., accessed in The Museum of Modern Art Library Performance Artists Files). ]

[Joe Lewis (who had a studio in the Fine Arts Building) in a performance at 5 Bleecker Street as a part of the exhibition Income and Wealth, 1979 (Photo courtesy of Coleen Fitzgibbon, published on Hyperallergic.com).]

[Robin Winters (who performed at the Fine Arts Building) in his studio at 591 Broadway in 1983 (photo by Peter Bellamy, published in Bomb Magazine, Fall 1983).]

[Exhibition announcement for Galerie Yvon Lambert, one of the European galleries Pretto invited to hold an exhibition at the Fine Arts Building in 1976 (original accessed at The Museum of Modern Art Library).]

[The Erasers (who rehearsed and lived in the Fine Arts Building) and Bettie Ringma (who exhibited there) pictured at CBGBs (published on 98bowery.com).]

As he had done with the building’s owner and some staffers at the Fine Arts Building, Pretto occasionally employed a barter model with artists. Conceptual artist Roberta Allen recalls that she traded one of her works with Pretto in exchange for her studio space in the Fine Arts Building, which she used to prepare for her 1977 solo exhibition at John Weber gallery.[53] The painter and printmaker Ellen Lanyon, who knew Pretto from Chicago, recalls bumping into him on the street while visiting New York and explaining that she needed a space to rent cheaply in order to meet with dealers while she was in town. Pretto immediately took her to the Fine Arts Building and set her up with a lease on office space in one of the upper floors. Pretto was himself living in a space on one of the lower floors at the time. Lanyon eventually shared her office with three or four other women from Chicago who used it on the same basis that she did, and occasionally she stored the works of her husband, abstract artist Roland Ginzel, there when he had shows in New York.

[Roberta Allen (who had studio space in the FAB while preparing for her 1977 exhibition at John Weber Gallery) in a work titled Pointless Acts #5, 1976 (Courtesy of MINUS SPACE Gallery, © Roberta Allen).]

[Ellen Lanyon (who had office space in the FAB) in an undated photograph (Image published on Romanovgrave.com with a collection of memories posted by friends of Lanyon following her passing in 2013).]

The Fine Arts Building has a “u-shaped” footprint, creating a lightwell on the back side to allow more light into the building. From her office space and through the lightwell, Lanyon was able to see the artist Robert Morris in a huge space on the other side of the building “casting plaster and doing all kinds of stuff.” She also remembers that the artist John Baldessari had an office down the hall from hers. Lanyon has described a general sense she had of the importance of both the people and activity in the space. In recalling the Fine Arts Building, Lanyon said, “that building, that was the beginning, the heart of Tribeca, the moment.”[54]

[Flyer for 1977 John Baldessari exhibition in the Fine Arts Building (original accessed in The Museum of Modern Art Library).]

The first exhibitions held in the Fine Arts Building were group shows organized by young, guest curators recruited by Pretto, beginning as early as the summer of 1974. He said he wanted to “help put the building on the map and keep myself in the art business.” These shows were not held within the spaces of established organizations in the building, but in empty spaces used temporarily for each exhibition. Lanyon has said of Pretto, “In my mind, he was the inventor of the pop-up gallery.” One of the early exhibitions in November 1975, called Not Photography, was organized by Edit DeAk, editor of Art-Rite magazine and previously an assistant at Artists Space. The show included forty artists in total, such as Hannah Wilke, Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol and Christo, all “whose medium is not photography but whose pieces in this show used photography, or the technology of it, in some way.” The next big exhibition, Self-Portraits, featured nearly fifty artists and was put together by Susan Penzner, “who ran a gallery out of her uptown apartment, sold advertisements for Artforum, and was a hostess at the popular art hangout One Fifth Avenue.” A third exhibition that fall of 1975, called Lives, was curated by Jeffrey Deitch, then a twenty-two year old assistant at John Weber Gallery, and subsequently an art advisor, dealer, gallery owner and most recently director at the Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art for three years. Deitch alluded in 1975 to the experimental freedom at the Fine Arts Building stating, “This is permitting the kinds of shows that should be in the Museum of Modern Art. But they can’t do shows without the accompanying scholarly rigor. We can.”

[Edit DeAk, curator of Not Photography at the FAB (photo by Marcia Resnick, published on 98bowery.com).]

[Handwritten exhibition announcement for 1975 Self Portraits exhibition at the FAB (original copy accessed in The Museum of Modern Art Library). ]

[From left to right: Susan Penzner, curator of Self Portraits, artist Marcia Resnick, and Jeffrey Deitch, curator of Lives at the opening of Self-Portraits in the FAB, 1975 (photo by Marcia Resnick, published on 98bowery.com).]

The Fine Arts Building allowed for the exhibition of experimental work by large groups of artists as it was being made, without being bogged down or filtered by intellectual critique. The critic Annette Kuhn said, “It is exciting to have large shows put on by the best of the under-30 thinkers. This place has been needed for a long time.” The building continued to gain a reputation as an outlet for exciting curatorial projects. The critic and theorist Rosalind Krauss even curated an exhibition in the building called New Sculpture Plans and Projects during the summer of 1976. By then, the Village Voice called the Fine Arts Building “a ‘must-see’ for the entire season” and called Pretto an “impresario of the more adventurous art shows of the season.” Though Kuhn described one Fine Arts Building exhibition as a “hole-in-the wall venture,” citing “cheap wine,” “some misinstallations,” and “ill-equipped lofts,” she noted that the scene invoked “a strong conviction that history is being made.” She went further to affirm, “which it is.”

A number of lasting institutions occupied spaces in the Fine Arts Building, including Printed Matter, Artists Space and the New Museum, as well as others which are not still in operation, such as Art Information Distribution, which published slide lectures on 1970s art, radical film, recent painting and video art in the mid-1970s. Printed Matter opened a store selling artists books in the Fine Arts Building in 1977. The organization had begun to form the previous year “by a group of like-minded artists and arts administrators (including Carl Andre, Edit DeAk, Sol LeWitt, Lucy Lippard, Walter Robinson, Pat Steir, Mimi Wheeler, Robin White and Irene von Zahn).” Printed Matter, Inc. is now “the world’s largest nonprofit organization dedicated to the promotion, appreciation, and distribution of artists’ publications.”

[Notice of address for The New Museum in the Fine Arts Building (photo published on 98bowery.com).]

The New Museum was founded by Marcia Tucker in early January 1977. Upon being fired from her role as Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Whitney Museum of American Art in December, Tucker rented a tiny space in the Fine Arts Building, enlisted a small volunteer staff and one lawyer as an advisor, in order to conceive and establish a new museum devoted to contemporary art. She wanted to create an institution with a “collaborative structure, something that’s fair, something that is not inherently sexist, racist, homophobic.” Though she recalls three people sharing one desk and has described their time at the Fine Arts Building as “using plastic spoons to build a castle,” she also believes that the institution’s success lay on the fact that it started as a small operation, which (in contrast with an established museum such as the Whitney) allowed them to be “fiercely independent.” While Tucker searched for a permanent exhibition space outside the Fine Arts Building, they “began visiting artists in their studios, setting up resource files of information about contemporary artists and their work, and organizing exhibitions.”

[(right) Marcia Tucker, Founding Director of the New Museum (which she founded in a small two-room office space in the Fine Arts Building) ca. 1973-75; (left) Memory (an exhibition organized while at the FAB and held off site at C Space), 1977]

Artists Space was formed in 1972 by critic Irving Sandler and arts administrator Trudie Grace to support emerging and under-recognized artists. In addition to hosting exhibitions, they created the Unaffiliated Artists Slide File, making the work of young New York artists accessible to curators, collectors and gallery personnel; the Independent Exhibition Program, providing funding to artists for public exhibitions; the Visiting Artists Program, providing an honorarium for artists’ speaking engagements; and an Emergency Materials Fund, providing small grants to artists who have been invited to show in non-profit institutions. After residing at 155 Wooster since inception, Artists Space lost its lease and moved to the Fine Arts Building in December 1976. They took over much of the second floor and had the longest tenure of any arts organization in the building as well as the most prolific program of exhibitions, performances, film screenings, and public events.

One seminal Artists Space exhibition held in the Fine Arts Building was Douglas Crimp’s Pictures exhibition in 1977. The exhibition addressed the pervasive use of art forms that were directly concerned with representation including, as Crimp stated in his catalogue, “film and photography, most particularly—and even to the most debased of our cultural conventions—television and picture newspapers.” The exhibition’s lasting importance is evidenced in its continual revisitation, including by Crimp himself, who published a revised version of his catalogue essay in the journal October in 1979, by Artists Space which re-hung the exhibition in 2001, and by Douglas Eklund, photography curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who expanded the concept in 2009 to what he titled The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984, including a total of thirty artists compared to Crimp’s original five.

[Installation view of Douglas Crimp’s Pictures exhibition at Artists Space in the Fine Arts Building, 1977 (photo: D. James Dee, published on artistspace.org).]

[Installation view of Pictures exhibition at Artists Space in the Fine Arts Building, 1977 (photo: D. James Dee, published on artistspace.org).]

[Opening reception of Pictures exhibition at Artists Space in the Fine Arts Building, 1977; Maureen McFadden of National Distillers and Chemical Corporation (sponsor), (left),Founder Irving Sandler (middle), Director Helene Winer (right) (photo published on artistsspace.org).]

[Opening reception of Pictures exhibition at Artists Space in the Fine Arts Building, September 23, 1977 (photo published on artistsspace.org).]

Beyond hosting intellectually rigorous exhibitions with lasting historical significance, Artists Space consistently broke the mold with performance, film, video and audio art exhibitions while in the Fine Arts Building, as well as dipping their toe into hosting Punk/New Wave shows typically found at seedy dives like CBGBs on the Bowery or at the Kitchen, a nonprofit space for video, performance and experimental music. In May of 1978, ten New Wave bands performed during a week-long festival in the Fine Arts Building. Bands included James Chance and the Contortions, Daily Life, DNA, the Gynecologists, Mars, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Terminal, The Communists, Theoretical Girls and Tone Death. It was remarked that the “weighty aesthetic issues” typically tackled at Artists Space, “almost overshadowed the urge to boogie,” but not quite. Experimental musician Brian Eno is said to have “looked on from the front” during the Contortions, while Chance “put on an incredible display of punk rock outrageousness, plunging into the audience repeatedly, picking fights along the way” and Lydia Lunch of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks “left the field in shambles with a set of gem-hard brilliance.” The Soho Weekly News stated the obvious in pointing out that the bands’ “avant-garde aspirations limit their audience and make it impossible for them even to consider playing a place like the Palladium” but that was the intention. Their indifference to the mainstream and their dedication to experimentation is what found them to be right at home in the Fine Arts Building.

[Flyer for week-long festival of New Wave bands at Artists Space in the Fine Arts Building, 1978 (photo published on 98bowery.com).]

[James Chance and the Contortions, at CBGBs, 1978 (photo by Eugene Merinov).]

[Teenage Jesus and the Jerks (photo published on NRGM, Finnish independent music magazine’s website).]

[Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, June 17, 1979, Gordon Stevenson, Bradley Fields and Lydia Lunch; the band also performed at the Fine Arts Building (photo published on photographer Tom Warren’s website)]

[Artwork titled “Lydia Lunch, Delancey Street Loft, 1978,” by Godlis which was exhibited in “No Wave,” at KS Art; Lunch performed at the Fine Arts Building the same year this photo was taken (artwork © Godlis, photo published by the New Yorker).]

The Fine Arts Building was a place where anything could happen. The building fostered interdisciplinarity and multimedia art practice. It provided a fluid, shifting and collaborative environment where artists, artworks and curators fluctuated in an open-ended manner. There were no boundaries in terms of media or practice within its walls. The Fine Arts Building was both a product of, and facilitated a number of historic changes to the art world in the 1970s—the disappearance of hierarchies among fine art media, the emergence of video, film and performance, and the acknowledgement of imbalance across gender, race and other social and political differences.

What follows are three disparate chapters, each an in-depth exploration of a key exhibition from a different year during the Fine Arts Building’s reign as hub of an energetic art scene between 1974-1978. Individually, each exhibition demonstrates the fluidity between media, between disciplines and between art and life that was emblematic of the 1970s, as well as active within the Fine Arts Building. Each chapter provides a window into the plurality of art forms percolating at the time. Special focus has been given to interdisciplinary and intermedia tendencies found within the artists’ individual practices and artworks, and to the blurring of boundaries between individual media and between personal life and artistic practice.

Footnotes below

1977 ARTISTS SPACE “SUPER 8 FILM EXPOSITION”

Over four weeks during the summer of 1977, more than fifty artists’ works were screened in the Super 8 Film Exposition held at Artists Space in the Fine Arts Building (FAB) at 105 Hudson Street in Tribeca. Artists Space, a non-profit arts institution still active today, was founded by arts administrator Trudie Grace and art critic Irving Sandler in 1972 in order to create an open, democratic outlet for art “that doesn’t receive proper exposure” and functioned as a hub “where multidisciplinary activity could take place.”[79] Having moved from its original location in SoHo to the Fine Arts Building in Tribeca at the end of the prior year, Artists Space was under the direction of Helene Winer, who organized the exhibition. Having come to Artists Space from museums in Los Angeles and London, Winer spearheaded an evolution from single artist shows to group exhibitions such as Super 8. Though the original conception of the organization was that the artists would select other artists for exhibition, it had evolved, by this time, to include curators and critics in the process. It has been said that Artists Space exhibitions grew like chain letters, by introduction from one artist to another.[80]

Artists Space certainly had room in the Fine Arts Building for sprawling group exhibitions. They occupied 6,000 square feet on the second floor, including “three gallery rooms, a projection room, a visiting artists studio, offices, a slide library and space for performances and installations.”[81] The Super 8 Film Exposition maximized use of the space by having a different schedule each week, including two three-hour screenings on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons and again in the evenings. The films varied in length from 45 seconds to one hour. Some were displayed as part of installations, others used double projection, and several were continuously looped on projectors.[82] This style of exhibition, which functioned as an open forum event-series, was introduced in the early 1970s, by way of Swiss curator Harold Szeemann’s Documenta 5 in Kassel, Germany, in the summer of 1972.

[Equipment set-up for the Super 8 Film Exposition at Artists Space in the Fine Arts Building, 1977 (photograph published on artistsspace.org).]

[Schedules I and II (of IV) for the Super 8 Film Exposition (image published on artistsspace.org and accessed at the NYU Fales library, Downtown Collection).]

The Super 8 exhibition was described in press releases as a “precedent setting event that takes a comprehensive look at artists’ recent and growing interest in Super 8 film as a viable art medium.”[83] Artists Space acknowledged the inclusion of a “broad range of work, from short casual filmic notations to long, carefully considered works of high technical quality.”[84] Not everyone agreed about the quality of the works on offer; film critic Amy Taubin in particular had a hard time with the show. While she highlighted a small number of works she found interesting in a review disparagingly titled “Enervating Super 8” for the SoHo Weekly News, she believed that some works suffered simply by the circumstances of their surroundings, and then criticized much of the work as “shoddy and stupid; made with a minimum of effort, craft, intelligence, or strategy.”[85] More than thirty five years have passed since the Super 8 Film Exposition at Artists Space and, as an example of one of the many large group shows held in the Fine Arts Building, the exhibition warrants revisitation. An exploration of the circumstances surrounding the artists and works in this nearly forgotten exhibition can provide a deeper understanding of the characteristics and manifestations of the New York art scene in the 1970s as it played out within the Fine Arts Building.

The plurality of artistic production in the 1970s has been much written about, both by those with the hindsight of three subsequent decades and by critics who were attempting to assess the landscape during the time. As the dominance of painting and sculpture lessened and artists began ignoring rigid categories of media, art of many different forms came forth: conceptual, body, performance, anti-form, process, environmental (land), and political, to name a few. In 1977, the year of this exhibition, Rosalind Krauss wrote,

Unlike the art of the last several decades, its energy does not seem to flow through a single channel for which a synthetic term, like Abstract-Expressionism or Minimalism, might be found. In defiance of the notion of collective effort that operates behind the very idea of an artistic ‘movement,’ ‘70s art is proud of its own dispersal.[86]

Krauss referenced the term “Post-Movement Art,” the title of a book by Alan Sondheim published that same year, as an attempt to categorize the diverse, factionalized art of the time. Krauss was not convinced that the unifying element of 1970s art was simply “willful eclecticism,” and instead she suggested the notion of the index, as indicated by a “pervasiveness of the photograph as a means of representation,” also evidenced in the use of film as a medium.[87]

Lucy Lippard had previously set the stage for a lack of emphasis on the physical and/or finished art object as the end result of artistic production with her 1973 publication, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, in which she wrote, “conceptual art, for me, means work in which the idea is paramount and the material form is secondary, lightweight, ephemeral, cheap, unpretentious and/or “dematerialized.” Krauss and Lippard’s assessments have relevance to the Super 8 Film Exposition in both their content and methodological approach. In the spirit of Lippard’s book, an annotated chronology, which contained a collection of articles, interviews, documents and fragments of texts in an attempt to acknowledge a direction that art was taking, this investigation of the Super 8 Film Exposition will not seek to place the artists or their works into a particular style, but to acknowledge the divergent activities of the many individual artists who were included in what Artists Space appropriately deemed a “broad survey.”

Having attested to the many forms of art in the 1970s and no single predominant style at a macro level, it is pertinent to consider, for individual artists, the lack of specificity in individual artistic practice, and the experimentation and cross-fertilization between media or disciplines that occurred as a result of this fluidity. In looking at this exhibition, it is clear that a certain level of trust existed among members of the artistic community, which allowed for experimentation, even when working in an unfamiliar medium. This trust allowed artists to approach an artwork as “an assignment” or exercise, rather than a finished product, resulting in medium-fluidity for many artists and, in some cases, nearly forgotten works that were simply an exercise in experimentation at the time.

[Colab Meeting at Peter Fend's Broadway Loft, 1983; Many of the artists associated with Colab exhibited at the Fine Arts Building and in the Super 8 Film Exposition (photograph by Albert DiMartino, published on 98bowery.com).]

Trust among one’s peers is recognized as a beneficial and perhaps essential component to a productive creative practice. Though the art of the 1970s has been proclaimed as “post-movement,” a sense of community did certainly unify the artists working and showing in New York at the time. Though not unified by a single politics like the clusters of artists in Zurich, Berlin, New York or Paris at the origin of Dada in the early 20th century, the New York art scene in the 1970s was similarly a small community that lived, worked, exhibited, and played within the nucleus of studios, galleries, clubs and alternative spaces throughout downtown Manhattan, such as Artists Space. An ongoing dialogue was fostered between artists about the work they were creating and the venues in which they were showing work. Evidence of this community and their participation in the Super 8 Film Exposition resides in the inclusion of sixteen artists in the show who would go on to form or become associated with the organization Collaborative Projects Inc., including experimental filmmaker Coleen Fitzgibbon, Charlie Ahearn (who later produced the hip hop film, Wild Style), collage maker Andrea Callard, sculptor Tom Otterness, artist and critic Walter Robinson and conceptual artist Robin Winters. Colab “banded together as a union of artists to raise funds, organize exhibitions, and share equipment.”[88] Though possessing a strong connection to filmmaking and video, the artists of Colab practiced in every medium. They came together in 1977 with a pragmatic mission and “the desire for a peer group social scene rather than because of esthetic affinity.”[89] Other Colab-associated artists in the Super 8 Film Exposition included notable No Wave filmmakers Beth B. and Scott B., publisher and editor-in-chief of BOMB magazine Betsey Sussler, Australian multi-media artist Tim Burns, filmmaker Jacki Ochs, multi-media artist Judy Rifka, painter and filmmaker James Nares, artist and designer Seth Tillet, performance artist/videographer Mitch Corber and visual artist Virginia Piersol.[90] An early mission statement for the group said,

We are functioning as a group of artists with complementary resources and skills providing a solid ground for collaborative work directed to the needs of the community-at-large. Specifically we are involved in programs facilitating development, production, and distribution of collaborative works. These works will be realized in various media including film, video for distribution and cablecasts, and live cable TV broadcasts, as well as other more conventional art media such as graphics and printed materials.[91]

In addition to a sense of community and collaboration at the time, there was also an increasing ease of access to, and artistic use of communication technologies such as photography, film, sound, and video. Artists Space conveyed the premise for this show in press releases by pointing out that while Super 8 film had “primarily been a ‘home movie’ activity, the relatively low cost and portability of Super 8 equipment encouraged artists to work with it rather than 16mm film or video.”[92] Furthermore, as Douglas Crimp attested in the catalogue essay for “Pictures,” an exhibition he curated at Artists Space later that same year, photographic representation had become an inescapable part of our ability to grasp the world and its increasing complexities. There was “extensive use of media that have the power of replicating the world around us—photography, film, video” and specifically a surge of interest in the moving image.[93] Artists were reaching toward film as a way to extend their aesthetic interests.

Few of the artists in the exhibition are considered to be purely filmmakers, although maybe those who Taubin considered to be the most successful are — namely Ericka Beckman, who has continued working in film throughout her career. Beckman had two films in the show, White Man Has Clean Hands and Pointing To. Taubin noted that White Man Has Clean Hands “combined a highly complex structure with a sensuous relationship to the individual images.”[94] She commended Beckman’s understanding of “the potentialities and limitations of Super 8 as material (that is grainy, that depth and spatial relations tend to be ambiguous or flattened by it).”[95] About the film, Beckman said,

White Man was an experiment. I was asking if language can express action in any meaningful way. I chose a structure for this film. In the first half, a set of images followed verbal commands. Each image served as an object to answer a command. Then I let the images play without the verbal framework. In the first half of White Man, seeing the image is shortened or constrained by having to answer to verbal demands. The relaxation of structure in the second half, releases emotional and narrative qualities in the images themselves and their positions. White man can’t be blamed for the action. White man can’t see.[96]

[Ericka Beckman, WHITE MAN HAS CLEAN HANDS, 1976, Super 8 film, 30 minutes (film still of artwork © Ericka Beckman, published on erickabeckman.com).]

Beckman was experimenting with the language of film, in a manner similar to Hollis Frampton and other late 1960s structural filmmakers.[97] Frampton experimented with the use of montage as both logical function and cinematic construction in his 1970 film Zorns Lemma.[98] J. Hoberman pointed out that one of Beckman’s major thematic preoccupations in her Super 8 films included “ the coordination of the self in the physical world,” which is similarly evidenced in Pointing To, in which she and others are shown to use their bodies to respond to verbal communication of spatial information and the visual representation of that same information. Beckman says her films bring to life the “performance of the image” and considers them “born of performance art.[99] But she further acknowledges interdisciplinarity when speaking to her method of “layering on to the black space” of her films “in the way one would work with a canvas.” In that way, she has said she very much considers film to be a plastic medium.[100]

[Ericka Beckman, POINTING TO, 1975, Super 8 film, 2.5 minutes (film still of artwork © Ericka Beckman, published on erickabeckman.com).]

Film presented itself as both a new artistic medium, as well as a documentary tool for performance art. A number of artists also co-mingled performance and film, both in their practice and in the works they showed in this exhibition, including Vito Acconci and Jean Dupuy. The latter is noted as having “performed” his piece for the show, titled Central Park. Conceptual and performance artist Dennis Oppenheim included a series of works in the show called Aspen Projects in which he recorded performative actions that evolve as exchanges or interactions between his body and natural elements such as rocks, leaves, glass and wood. Two reels of short films were projected side by side and looped. In some pieces, Oppenheim’s gestures involve self-negation (where he covered himself with rocks or leaves) and others worked in reverse, as he leaves traces of himself (by dragging his fingers across a dusty mirror).[101] Some are more disturbing to watch and play with the psychological associations connected with viewing a disturbing image, as when he catches his nail on wood and slowly tears it off using the tension between the two materials or compresses a poison oak plant with his bare hands. Oppenheim has always worked fluidly between media, from writing to action or performance to video, film, photography, and installation.

[Dennis Oppenheim, Aspen Projects, Compression: Fern #2, 1970, 5:22min, color, silent (film still of artwork © Dennis Oppenheim, published on eai.org).]

[Dennis Oppenheim, Aspen Projects, Pressure Piece #1, 1970, 1:40min, color, silent (film still of artwork © Dennis Oppenheim, published on eai.org).

Performance artist, composer and musician Laurie Anderson also exhibited multidisciplinarity in her work titled, At the Shrinks. A piece she showed a number of times in different iterations—it was on loan to Artists Space from Holly Solomon Gallery—it essentially functioned as a fake hologram. She did this by using an eight-inch high figurine, upon which she projected the Super 8 film. The clay "sculpture" had been carefully molded to conform to the proportions of her filmed body. Anderson said that “part of the point of this installation was to make someone else talk for me . . . it was a way of doing a performance without being there."[102] In essence, the work is a film, but also a performance, and it allows a sculpture to act as a surrogate for the performer. In the piece, Anderson speaks of visiting her psychiatrist and the constraints upon seating choice and vantage point for her as a patient. She comes to the conclusion that she and the psychiatrist see things from a totally different angle, both literally and figuratively. The film installation illustrates the anecdote. The content and the form of her piece are interconnected. Anderson is playing with the space in which the projection is shown. Reality’s subjectivity is disclosed, both in the narrative and in the images shown.[103] This multimedia piece is indicative of Anderson’s interdisciplinary practice. In reviewing a 1984 retrospective of her work at the Queens Museum in The New York Times, critic Grace Glueck championed this medium fluidity by stating,

There must be a few artistic skills that the multitrack performance artist Laurie Anderson lacks - come to think of it, she doesn't really dance - but so much territory is covered by those skills she has that what's missing doesn't count. Drawing, sculpture, photography, film making, writing, acting, storytelling, violin playing, composing, graphic design, electronic effects - the mind boggles at this unaccustomed reach.

[Laurie Anderson, At the Shrinks, (A Fake Hologram), 1977, Super 8 film installation, 3:13min (still from video © Laurie Anderson, published on li-ma.nl).]

Carolee Schneemann, whose film Kitch’s Last Meal was included in the exhibition, has also worked across various media from very early on in her career—painting, collage, performance, film, writing, photography and installation—yet she describes herself first and foremost as a painter. She says that all of her work has been devoted to exploring the painterly issues of relationality, figure-ground, and similitude.[104] Reflecting on her film Fuses of 1965, she wrote of the hesitation she felt in teaching herself a “complex and demanding medium,” adding that she was,

compelled to make this film myself, much as I had been compelled as a painter to increasingly incorporate dimensional materials: to structure found film footage and slides, to compose sounds, design electronic systems, and to train performers for my theater and environmental pieces.[105]

Schneemann was comfortable experimenting across multiple media and trusted herself to create and exhibit works of a deeply personal nature which put forth discourses on the body, sexuality and gender. While Fuses contained images of lovemaking between Schneemann and her lover, the composer James Tenney, in Kitch’s Last Meal she created a filmed domestic diary of the ordinary course of a week of her life, including her cat eating. She followed specific conditions in the filming and editing and sustained that over a period of several years until the cat eventually died, and is captured in the film post-mortem. The piece is 5 hours long and she exhibited ongoing versions of it as it was produced, using double projection (one on top of the other, not side by side) so that it would not be “too programmatic.” She used a tape deck and speakers for the audio and described the sound by saying,

Against the banality and constancy of the Super 8 double projection, the sound is made week to week, based on what dominates my thought or environment: one tape is composed of “Sorrows and Outrages” (feminist and political); another is composed of the daily domestic conversations between the couple; another is all the sounds made in the course of preparing a breakfast. Another is made by the microphone hung outside all day and recording sounds of which the cat will be most aware -- many “ghosts” and “invisible” noises.[106]

Schneemann used the Super 8 medium as a device to create both a narrative and a documentation based on private space and life. Though Schneemann trusted herself and her peers enough to experiment in new media and to use her body in her work, she did feel neglected by feminist film historians as a result. One section of the audio for Kitch’s Last Meal expressed that sentiment. The text was the same as that used in her 1975 performance Interior Scroll, in which she stood naked on a table and extracted a paper scroll from her vagina while reading it. It was a veiled letter to the critic and art historian Annette Michelson “who couldn’t look at my films.”[107] Though Taubin included Kitch’s Last Meal as one of the show’s standouts in her review, describing it as “moving in its desperate attempt to hold to some continuity of existence,” she still qualified that praise with the addendum, “though I have some reservations about it.”[108]

[Carolee Schneemann, Interior Scroll, 1975. Ilfachrome print (© Carolee Schneemann. photograph by Anthony McCall).]

Many of the artists who were in the Super 8 Film Exhibition came from a painting background, identified themselves primarily as painters or continued with a painting focus long after. Charles Clough, for example, is largely known for his gestural painting, but in the mid-1970s, he experimented with various media as a result of the trust and collaboration in his artistic community. Before moving to New York City in 1978, Clough formed, along with Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo and others, the art organization Hallwalls in Buffalo, NY. Intended to provide opportunities for exchange between them and artists in other cities, the organization’s focus was interdisciplinary and included not only visual artists, but also musicians, writers, filmmakers, and video and performance artists.[109] Among those they invited to Buffalo were conceptual and performance artists Willoughby Sharp and Vito Acconci.[110] At the time, Clough was experimenting with the use of photographic elements in his work, sometimes including magazines or collaged reproductions of paintings by contemporary masters. Clough is included among a group of artists known for appropriating mediated images to subvert narrative structures, now commonly referred to as “the Pictures generation,” a term stemming from Crimp’s original exhibition of only five artists.[111] Clough referred to his incorporation of second-generation images as,

bits of photographs which constitute my personal image bank (part of the public media pool), my mulch pile, cess pool, primal soup from which I evolve my many cultures...The photography shows faith in technology. That anything of value will become an image multiplied many times and from this plenitude of pictures will come sweet inspiration.[112]

Clough had two films in the exhibition, Drawing and Paint Boy, that he wanted to be shown in reverse after having been shown normally. When submitting the works, he included a handwritten note to Winer that spoke casually of their conceit,

I made these two films in 1974 as excuses to make films. They show how I was working them with pens and paint. I hope that you can show them both forward and backwards. Sorry about the fucked up sprocket holes. Thanks for showing them. - Charles Clough.[113]

[Charles Clough (who exhibited at Fine Arts Building and had strong ties to the “Pictures Generation) pictured with artist Robert Longo (photograph published in Buffalo State College’s Magazine at 1300elmwood.buffalostate.edu).]

The Super 8 Film Exposition reflected on the mediation process of 1970s image world that would be expressed months later in Crimp’s better-documented Pictures exhibition in the same space. Furthermore, in a number of works, the exhibition presented film as a raw material, an extension of the legacy of non-narrative experimental filmmaking that preceded it.

Prominent abstract and monochrome painter Marcia Hafif had a film in the Super 8 Exposition titled Bob and Nancy. Though Hafif actively argued against the sentiment among critics and artists at the time that “painting was dead” or that experimentation with the medium had been exhausted, she was still inspired to work with film in 1976.[114] It seems Hafif experimented with film rarely in the 1970s and then with video a number of times in the late 1990s. Bob and Nancy was created as an homage to Jean-Luc Godard and specifically inspired by the structure of his film, Masculin Féminin in 15 Acts.[115] Perhaps this link to the history of film and the use of a more narrative structure is what garnered the appreciation of Taubin, who said in her review that she liked “parts” of it. Hafif noted that the film could not have been made without the help and cooperation of her friends, who responded and contributed to the script in advance, acted in the film, and even loaned their houses as a filming location.[116] Film represents the par excellence medium of collaborative artistic production; it is inherently a collaborative process.

[Painter Marcia Hafif who created a film for the Super 8 Film Exposition, photographed in 2009 by Zurich photographer Vera Hartmann, designed by Frédéric Dedelley (© Vera Hartmann).]

Still others in the exhibition described their painterly connection to film in different ways. James Collins’ work in the 1970s consisted of films and photographs of the artist looking at females and he said,

I was a painter in the 60’s and am still a painter in the 70’s. The only difference is then I worked with abstract elements, canvas and paint, today I work with people and photography. I may have changed the subject and medium but my aspirations are still the same.

He described projecting his films as an “instant painting with light.” In this exhibition, he looped two two-minute films titled Watching Sheila and Imagining Sheila. He spoke of using Super 8 film as a means to convey emotion, but also as a reason to get “out of the house” and away from the “private aspect of painting.” In the spirit of this desire to collaborate and interact with others as part of his experimentation and artistic process, he jokingly said he planned to make a t-shirt that read, “IF IN DOUBT, GO OUT.”

[James Collins, Watching Sheilah, 1974, color photograph; Collins said, “watching women has been an obsession all my life, in ’73 it became my art.” (still from film, Courtesy Gallery Gaetan, Geneva, Switzerland, 1974, reproduced in James Collins, Flash Art International No. 1 March, 1978, published by Giancarlo Politi in Milan with the collaboration of the I.C.A. London).]

Painter and filmmaker James Nares also took to the street for his film, Pendulum Study, a twenty-minute black and white film of a large, concrete sphere suspended by wire and swinging through an empty alley in Tribeca. He said the film is about “things in motion and motion in things.”[117] Nares has been recognized for his “short sculptural-related minimal art films” and through these interdisciplinary works he was able to explore concepts such as, movement, artistic repetition, and rhythm.[118] A member of Colab, Nares created notable No Wave film Rome 78 and is also known to have played guitar in the No Wave group James Chance and the Contortions and with Jim Jarmusch in the Del-Byzanteens.

[James Nares, still from the film Pendulum, 1976 (© James Nares, courtesy of Paul Kasmin Gallery, published on the New York Times Magazine blog).]

[The band the Contortions backstage at Max's Kansas City, early 1978. left to right:George Scott, James Chance, Adele Bertei, James Nares, Pat Place, Chiko Hige (photo by Patty Heffley).]

The handful of artists reviewed thus far strongly exhibited multidisciplinary practice, having worked fluidly between media and created works that were multi-media in nature or origin. Other artists had multi-media works in the exhibition, including Jared Bark, who included a film/performance called Krishna Concrete and laser artist, holographer, and musician Peter Van Riper.[119] Anti-form sculptor Alan Saret, installation artist Anthony McCall, environmental artist Cathey Billian, photographer Marcia Resnick as well as conceptualist, video artist and photographer William Wegman also all had films in the show. Though more than fifty artists were included in the the Super 8 Film Exposition at Artists Space in 1977, their works cannot all receive close examination today. Many were not preserved, restored, or made accessible to the public. Even the exhibition itself is not recorded on many of the artists’ current CVs. A number of artists remember participating in the show, but do not recall the works they contributed. These works exist now, in name only, in Helene Winer’s archival folders and notes from the preparation of the exhibition.[120] The implication is that some of the artists may have viewed these works as “projects” or “assignments” on a path to further artistic development. Medium fluidity was encouraged and the artists trusted that they could share this experimental output in large group shows with their peers, such as the Super 8 Film Exposition. Well-respected filmmaker and film preservationist Bill Brand had an untitled work in the show and today recalls,

I was certainly shooting Super 8 film in those days, but most of my released work was 16mm. I vaguely remember shooting something just for the show but it was not something I list as a film completed and released. I think I showed a reel of Super 8 sound film I shot when I went to the dentist and pointed the camera in my mouth as I was getting a filling drilled. It was, in part, my response to the then current Super 8 Punk fashion of represented violence. It was pretty cringe worthy, I expect!!![121]

Despite Brand’s sentiment today that the piece might have been “cringe-worthy,” the Super 8 Film Exposition represents an articulation of a crucial time in the 1970s, in which artists had broken free from the constraints of critic Clement Greenberg’s medium-specificity and were embracing an experimental approach and practice of fluidity between media. Artists Space and the environment within the Fine Arts Building fostered both a community and a physical space in which artists felt free to exhibit such work.

Footnotes Below

“PAINTING,” A MULTI-MEDIA EXHIBITION ASSERTING PAINTING’S EXPANSIVE NATURE AND RELEVANCE

The early to mid-1970s were a time of great artistic experimentation in New York City. The proliferation of downtown alternative art spaces, such as 112 Greene Street, the Kitchen and the Clocktower, provided new venues for the exhibition of art of all forms from radical painting to film, video, performance, and conceptualism. The massive eleven story Fine Arts Building (FAB) provided such a space for showing experimental work through not only its many “alternative” tenants, but also its commercial galleries and even in its empty spaces. In 1974, when gallerist Julian Pretto began inviting guest curators to assemble shows in empty areas of the building, he was not only supporting artists, but also providing a space for a slew of young curators to organize and hold exhibitions very early in their careers.[122]

[Cover image of Annina Nosei’s Discussion. New York: Out of London Press, 1980.]

Annina Nosei (Nosei-Weber at the time, having been married to gallerist John Weber) was one of such guest curators. Born and raised in Rome, she came to the United States on a Fulbright grant to study and teach after writing her master thesis on Duchamp. In 1968 she published a collection of interviews with major American artists entitled “Challenge to the System: An Inquest into the Artistic Situation in the United States.”[123] Active as a curator and critic, in 1976 she organized an exhibition to be held at the FAB called Painting,.

[Exhibition announcement for Annina Nosei’s Painting, exhibition at the Fine Arts Building January 17-27, 1976; Marilyn Lenkowsky was handwritten on to the announcement (original copy accessed at the NYU Fales Library, Downtown Collection).]

Simply titling an exhibition Painting, had significance. In name alone, regardless of intention, the exhibition was entered into a long-running and highly contentious debate between those who proposed we had reached the “end” or “death” of painting and those who, vehemently opposed to such an idea, asserted painting’s continued and infinite significance both in theory and in practice.

The “death of painting,” or the idea that painting had ceased to be useful or relevant as a medium of artistic expression was not a new argument, a point which has been well rehearsed by defenders of the medium. From as early as the first century when “Petronius declared painting dead in Satyricon,” to Delaroche’s response to the invention of the daguerreotype in 1839, and then to artistic statements made by Malevich, Duchamp, Rodchenko and Reinhardt in the twentieth century, antagonistic claims toward painting have persisted. Painting’s supporters faithfully rebuked such statements as naive, objectionable and firmly invalid, citing as evidence artists’ continued interest in investigating the medium.

In the case of photography, painting’s attack came in reaction to technological advancement, not surprising today considering the cycle of adoption and abandonment of an endless stream of new electronics and applications. During the Renaissance, it was painting that provided technological advancement in the form of Brunelleschi’s invention of linear perspective, allowing for the realistic portrayal of depth on a two-dimensional surface. By the 19th century, the ability to capture and represent reality using photographic means incited questioning around the necessity of painting.

[Demonstration of Brunelleschi’s method of linear perspective using reflective material and pinholes in order to render the illusion of space on a two-dimensional surface (image in public domain).]

Attacks on the medium also came from within, from painters who felt they had made significant artistic advancements. As early as 1911, many painters began dispensing with recognizable subject matter, in the form of what may be Modernism’s greatest innovation — abstraction.[124] Liberated from the “encumbrances of illusionism,” artists displayed works with no discernible subject matter along with declarations of intent via manifestos, lectures and criticism.[125] Malevich exhibited a painting consisting of a black square on a white ground in his “desperate attempt to free art from the ballast of objectivity.”[126] Though Kazimir Malevich felt strongly about painting’s supremacy, the radical nature of abstract painting opened the door for future artistic innovation in other media as well. Alexander Rodchenko exhibited three monochrome canvases in 1921 titled, Pure Red Color, Pure Blue Color, and Pure Yellow Color and later stated that by doing so he had “reduced painting to its logical conclusion” and “affirmed: it's all over.”[127] Marcel Duchamp, originally a painter, put forth his readymade objects to challenge notions about art and artistic process, but also to indicate his belief that painting had become an industrial object itself. In the 1960s, Ad Reinhardt exhibited his “black or “ultimate” paintings, claiming them to be the last paintings that anyone can paint.

[Kazimir Malevich, Black Square, 1915 (artwork published on tate.org.uk)]

[Alexander Rodchenko, Pure Red Color, Pure Yellow Color/, Pure Blue Color, oil on canvas, 1921.]

Other theories about painting’s demise came from painters who had evolved their practice toward less rigid or medium-specific definitions. Allan Kaprow, considered the creator of “Happenings” in the 1950s and 1960s, expressed the theory that Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock had destroyed painting.[128] In his 1958 essay on the subject, he claimed the innovations put forward by Pollock — “the act of painting, the new space, the personal mark that builds its own form and meaning, the endless tangle, the great scale, the new materials” — had led us toward the finality of Modernism. He cited as evidence Pollock’s tendency toward the ritualistic in process, and in result, toward paintings which “ceased to become paintings and became environments.”[129] He noted the acceptance of these advances by art departments and textbooks as having contributed to the destruction of painting and pointed toward a future where craftsmanship and permanence should be forgotten and perishable materials should be used in art. This would set the stage for the rise of conceptualism and performance art.

The debate heated up significantly in the 1960s as a response to Minimalism and the reductive formalism of Clement Greenberg. In a 1965 essay titled “Specific Objects,” sculptor Donald Judd, who had abandoned painting, said “the main thing wrong with painting is that it is a rectangular plane placed flat against the wall. A rectangle is a shape itself; it is obviously the whole shape; it determines and limits the arrangement of whatever is on or inside of it.”[130] Judd’s polemic considered painting to be antiquated and linked to illusionism. He favored three-dimensional works which expanded into “actual space.”[131] Sculptor Robert Morris also designated painting to be “an antique mode” in his essay “Notes on Sculpture” and put forth for consideration as an advancement in art the experiential nature of viewing a Minimalist sculpture. Critic and art historian Michael Fried added in his essay “Art and Objecthood,” that Minimalist sculpture’s focus on the viewer’s experience (through “theatricality”) made art indistinguishable from one’s experience of the world and he contrasted this phenomenon to the “presentness” of viewing a painting which he described as requiring continual renewal.[132] Both Morris and Fried’s essays appeared in Artforum’s 1967 Summer issue, dedicated to American Sculpture.

[Robert Morris, installation in the Green Gallery, New York, 1964. Seven geometric plywood structures painted grey.]

Many Minimalist artists were also critics, asserting the dominance of Minimalist sculpture through such essays as well as disparaging reviews of painting exhibitions and articles about painting.[133] Frustrated with what she described as the “inescapable delusion” among such critics, the painter Jo Baer wrote a letter to the editor of Artforum in 1967 defending painting. By responding to specific points in both Judd and Morris’ arguments, Baer countered that if all sculptures are not simply statues or boxes, then all paintings are not simply pictures, meaning painting is not limited to or by illusionism as had been described. Baer stated that “the only limits to the materials of painting are those of technology and the eye’s discrimination in seeing reflected light.”[134]

The 1970s produced an onslaught of artistic experimentation, including the continuation of Minimalism and Conceptualism as well as experimental film and video, earthworks, audio works and performance. Among this plurality of art forms, the debate around painting continued to manifest itself both in discourse and artistic practice. By 1975, Max Kozloff, critic and executive director of Artforum, acknowledged that “evidence accrues of a great, unbreachable schism opening up...between painting and other art modes.”[135] The debate was so heated that both Artforum and Art-Rite magazines dedicated full issues to the subject that year, the former representing the critic’s perspective in the leading intellectual art journal, the latter a free publication produced by writers, curators and artists who were more collaborative and immersed within the artists’ perspective.

[Cover of Artforum’s special painting issue September 1975 (original accessed at The Museum of Modern Art Library).]

[Cover of Art-Rite magazine’s 1975 special painting issue (original accessed at The Museum of Modern Art Library).]

Artforum published their special painting issue in September 1975. The previous January, the magazine had mailed a brief but heavily loaded questionnaire to artists inquiring about the prospects for painting in the current decade. Introducing three questions by stating that painting had “ceased to be the dominant artistic medium,” Artforum claimed that artists who were making “the next inevitable step” worked with “any material but paint.”[136] They presumptuously asked painters to describe how this cessation had affected their need to paint. They asked what possibilities are exclusively provided by the medium of painting and what energies and ideas in painting are worthy of attention.

Painters’ inflamed responses were printed alongside Artforum’s hostile questionnaire. Beyond expressing anger at having been asked to defend their choice of existence, painters responded from diverse vantage points. Some staunchly defended painting as the best medium, believing it to be the most direct means of image-making and referring to its formal offering of a “stable, flat ground” with the greatest “flexibility of form.”[137] Digs were made at the money and resources consumed by the scale of many earthworks and the artistic and physical limitations imposed by the use of objects (light bulbs, car fenders, rope or broken glass) in Conceptual art. Artist Tony Robbins, who today works extensively in computer visualizations of four dimensional geometry, believed that “painting, more than film, video, or sculpture, is free to investigate such a space because only in painting is it possible to present space per se, free of objects and gravity.”[138]

Other artists cited painting’s historical link as a sign of the medium’s credibility. Painter Wolf Kahn said, “painting is valuable just because of its long history and, since it is so deeply embedded in Western civilization, of all the visual arts it needs the least justification.” Artist Allan McCollum felt strongly that “every new painting created is linked by its very nature to every other painting in existence.”[139] The painters and artists who responded believed painting to be part of an “infinitely varied and infinitely repetitive world tradition” that would live on indefinitely.[140] They took offense by Artforum’s proposed idea that art existed in a linear progression of innovations leading from painting to the “next inevitable step,” therefore rendering painting obsolete. Such an artistic mandate for innovation seemed out of line with the concerns and interests of painters who were focused on extending the limits of the medium itself or, as the painter Gene Davis said, “perhaps, working within those limits.”[141] Abstract painter Edwin Ruda said, “Painting is as painting does with its own brand of intelligence and discriminatory power...and with as many possibilities before it as after it.”[142]

Many pointed out that this “ludicrous” attack was coming from critics and did not necessarily exist between artists. In discussing a performance by Gilbert & George, abstract painter Stephen Greene said he was interested in the work formally and psychologically, regardless of medium. He did not feel threatened by it as a painter and said, “Whatever interests me, interests me no matter where I find it.”[143] Pointing to the debate on the merits of painting versus sculpture during the Renaissance, some who responded to Artforum felt there was simply no need to argue in support of one medium over another. Rudolf Baranik, of the New York School of painting felt that “the energies and ideas in painting which merit attention may seem technically unique, but they are not autonomous in a significant sense. Medium partisanship is always naive and can be harnessed for both—desperate forced innovation and nostalgic retrograde conservatism.”[144] Allan McCollum believed “all art, ultimately, complements all other art, however discordant and perplexing the differences may appear in the interim.”[145]

Because Artforum had linked painting’s demise to what they perceived to be painting’s two opposing ideologies, abstract and representational, some addressed abstraction in their response to Artforum. In a similar manner of logic to that used in the argument against medium partisanship, Greene stated, “there is no valid reason that either abstract or figurative painting has to triumph over the other.”[146] Paul Staiger acknowledged that “abstraction and representation as a central issue is of little use,” and that “painting was never bound up exclusively with any one set of problems.” He added that “the artist has always used his materials on a personal theoretical level” and that “there is no appeal to the great historical verdict.”[147]

At the swell of this continued debate and only a few months after the Artforum special painting issue, Nosei put on the exhibition Painting, at the Fine Arts Building. In doing so, she made a strong statement about the primary historical legacy and continued relevance of painting as an artistic medium of expression. The title Painting, or Painting comma, alludes to a list or series beginning with painting and continuing on without definition. This lack of specificity after the comma seems to indicate that subsequent items in this list don’t necessarily succeed, but build upon and/or continue from within painting. The title allows one to envision that harmonious artistic endeavors are present that both honor and stem from painting’s historical legacy. Nosei’s exhibition included not only painters who were actively exploring the boundaries and fluidity of the medium of painting, but also artists working in film, video or performance who referenced or built concepts and imagery from painting in those works. It seems she wanted to illustrate both continued experimentation within painting and the co-mingling between experimentation in other media and the legacy and tradition of painting. The inclusion of a plurality of media in an exhibition titled Painting, demonstrated her curatorial objective and encapsulated the debate around painting as it had manifest itself in artistic practice and discourse at the time.

Included in the exhibition was Marcia Hafif, an artist truly engaged with the dialogue around painting. Though her body of work also includes photography, film, sculpture, and installations, in 1972 she began a series of monochrome works that explore the methods and materials of drawing and painting. She has continued this exploration for over four decades, questioning “the discipline by exploring and experimenting with types of paint (acrylic, oil, egg tempera, ink, watercolor, enamel) and supports (canvas, wood, paper, wall).”[148] In 1978, Hafif articulated this investigation in an essay titled “Beginning Again” published in the September issue of Artforum. In the essay, Hafif lamented the current “options open to painting,” in which representation seemed to have lost credibility and abstraction had seemingly progressed to its end.[149] She felt the only way for artists to proceed was to “turn inward to the means of art, the materials and techniques with which art is made.” She wanted to “vivify it by beginning all over again,” through “an analysis—or deconstruction—of painting.”[150]

Her essay focuses on abstraction and Hafif discusses monochromatic thinking, the construction of support and ground, decisions about how the surface and edges are painted, and even how a monochromatic work should be hung. She concludes that “painting has been able to gather new energy by throwing things out and starting afresh.”[151] Hafif believes strongly in the potentialities of abstraction and the open, receptive nature of monochrome painting.

For Nosei’s exhibition, Hafif used Prussian Blue watercolor to paint directly on an entire wall, painting around an existing doorway. In relation to commentary later also expressed in her essay, it seems she had surpassed the notion of using abstraction to simply flatten out the canvas or to move shape to the edge by completely abandoning the use of canvas or stretcher as support and deconstructing the painting as an object. If abstraction served as a means to eliminate the figure-ground relationship of representation, but a monochromatic painting on a support became the figure on the ground of the wall, than Hafif sought in her wall paintings to eliminate that relationship. She wrote that “even one painting (hung) alone appropriated the wall to itself.”[152] By extending the wall painting all the way to the edges and meeting the adjacent walls, Hafif caused the wall itself to lose its quality as ground, transferring the composition from the wall to the surrounding architecture.[153]

[Marcia Hafif, Wall Painting: Prussian Blue, Julian Pretto Gallery, 1975, noted by Hafif to be very similar to the wall painting she created for the Painting exhibition (© Marcia Hafif).]

Wall painting represented only one area, in an inventory of fifteen major series, that Hafif has explored on the subject and history of painting, including as she lists them: “Pencil on Paper, Acrylic Paintings, An Extended Gray Scale, Oil Studies/Mass Tone, Watercolor, Egg Tempera on Wood, Ink Drawings, Wall Paintings, Neutral Mix Paintings, Broken Color Paintings, Black Paintings, Transparent Paintings, Roman Paintings, French Paintings, and Enamel on Wood.”[154] Obviously Hafif felt strongly that there was much about painting which remained to be investigated. She made clear in her essay that it would be individual artists who would decide whether or not continued investigation was necessary.

A number of artists included in the Painting, exhibition were interested in exploring the spatial boundaries of painting through three-dimensional works, three of whom—Ron Gorchov, Marilyn Lenkowsky and Ellen Phelan—were subsequently included in a 1980 exhibition on the subject at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.[155] In the early 1970s, Gorchov had developed a saddle-shaped support with rounded edges, over which he stretched the canvas. He has said that he found this device so interesting, that he was unable to do anything else for a time after, and felt compelled to focus on refining the support.[156] With his shaped canvas, Gorchov modified the traditional rectangle, affecting the painted surface in a way that it both recedes and advances simultaneously “curving in as well as out from the wall.”[157] Critic Phong Bui placed Gorchov within a consensus of collective thinking in which artists who questioned the viability of painting were experimenting with the canvas. He noted that these artists sought to “revive the relevancy of painting, without taking a defensive stand.”[158]

[Ron Gorchov’s studio circa 1975 (published in Art-Rite magazine 1975, accessed at The Museum of Modern Art Library).]

Gorchov has stated that the choices he makes when painting (form, content, color) are completely spatial. He expressed that “painting is about space and proportions and where things go” and stated that “form, if it is not the right color, it is not in the right place.”[159] Gorchov paints his canvases with both opaque strokes and thin, airy washes and renders two prominent symmetrical forms or marks in contrasting color to the monochromatic background. Though composed symmetrically on the canvas, the forms are biomorphic and asymmetrical. Gorchov was interested in the correspondence between the painted surface and overall structure. Bui points out that Gorchov desired “to create formidable structures that are comparable to sculptural objects” without violating “the integrity of the painting surface as a two-dimensional domain.”[160]

[Installation view showing Gorchov’s curved support and canvas, 2006 (photo published by MoMA PS1 on the occasion of a 2006 exhibition titled Ron Gorchov: Double Trouble).]

Critic Roberta Smith noted that in the second half of the 1970s, Gorchov pushed American abstract painting away from Minimalist austerity toward something more explicitly expressionistic. Gorchov worked to push forward the boundaries of the medium of painting. He said that painting “is an ideal way to criticize the work you already admire because that way you can take the best things in it and try to make your work be the next consequential step.”[161] He considered artistic progression to be compatible with his philosophy, and has pursued decades of such progression within the medium of painting.

Marilyn Lenkowsky was similarly stretching canvas over three-dimensional wood frameworks in 1976. Typically triangular in shape, hung on the wall and monochromatic, her loose painterly brushstrokes built up and remained visible on the surface in contrast to the imperceptibility of the artist’s hand found in works of Minimalism.[162] It has been said that one is always aware of form in her work, due to the distinct edges, but also that the image (or color) seemed to have soaked in and to be coming from within the material.[163]

[Marilyn Lenkowsky next to one of her triangular works which explored painterly boundaries through three-dimensional paintings (image published in Art-Rite magazine 1975).]

In speaking about influences upon his work in 1977, Gorchov said that after the painter John Graham and sculptor Tony Smith, it was younger artists who had the biggest influence on him, like Lenkowsky and Lynda Benglis. In discussing her own work in relation to Gorchov and other artists who were present for an interview in Art-Rite magazine’s special painting issue in the Spring of 1975, Lenkowsky said, “there is art that projects and art that searches—art that’s interested in finding something out. And all the people here want to find stuff out by doing art.” Lenkowsky was aware that she and her peers were relentlessly investigating art’s boundaries though she laughed at the quest’s potential futility. As she stated, “sometimes it seems funny to me or ludicrous that I’m spending my whole life doing something that I don’t even have a concept for—and I’m looking for something and I don’t even know if I’ll find it and if I found it, if I’d know it...”[165]

In contrast to Gorchov and Lenkowsky’s relative focus on shaped support, Ellen Phelan’s painting investigation has been broadly cast throughout her decades-long career across a number of areas, including abstraction, deconstruction, three-dimensionality, plein air landscape painting, and figuration. Her experimentation in these areas did not occur linearly, but with concurrent phases, looping back, and seamless fluidity between dimensions, medium and realm. Before moving to New York, Phelan had already begun dealing with “the problem of image/object” by taking “the canvas off the stretcher, folding it into zigzag shapes, and painting on both sides,” which she equated with Robert Morris’s felt pieces.[166] She became acquainted with Gorchov in 1973, and like other artists including Lenkowsky, was working with structural ideas.[167] In 1975, she showed what are referred to as her fan pieces, essentially floor-standing painted structures on canvas, supported from behind by wooden bars. The pieces resemble hand-held paper fans, though fully splayed and human-sized. Many thought of them as sculptures, but Phelan has said she considered them paintings and described them as her way of “stretching painting.”[168] They were a continuation of her earlier deconstructive work, but painted on only one side and relating to the shallow space of Cubism.[169]

[Ellen Phelan, Fan, wood and Pariscraft, ca. 1975 (image published in Bomb magazine Summer 2004).]

While Phelan created and showed other three-dimensional pieces in the late 1970s including tall vertical floor standing sculptures, in 1976 she spent the summer in the Adirondacks and began drawing and painting landscapes. Despite a perception by some that landscape drawing was kitsch or ironic, Phelan ignored the pressure of academic criticism and pursued what interested her in painting. At the same time, she continued to work in abstraction, creating paintings on modular groupings of L-shaped or square aluminum panels or on canvases with cutouts through to the wall like early metallic paintings by Frank Stella. Phelan’s cut-out paintings were large, horizontal canvases of gestural abstraction, with the perimeter of a rectangle cut-out in the center. Even when working in abstraction, Phelan was interested in juxtaposing painterly and geometric forms.[170]

Phelan later began a response to what she called the “prohibition against figuration” as she painted dark, mysterious portraits of her childhood dolls. She also created paintings from drawings or photographs and revisited her interest in painting still-lifes and landscapes. Critic Ken Johnson summarized that "Ellen Phelan has painted her way through a number of phases over the last three decades...what has remained consistent, besides an always assiduous care for the craft of painting, has been the Modernist tension between material surface and illusory depth and a postmodernist play between romance and irony."[171]

Painter and art historian Tom Wolf also dealt with abstraction and representation throughout his career. His piece in the Painting, exhibition was a large diptych made of two panels of plexiglass. Wolf painted on both sides of the plexiglass, a technique he continues to practice today. On the far side he painted a plane tilted in perspective and on the front he painted a dark but translucent colored layer of paint so that what was painted on the back showed through to the front. At the time of this exhibition, his work was abstract and quite flat, however over time it has become more spatial and perspectival. A couple of years after the Painting, exhibition, Wolf began depicting a representational image on the backside so that the viewer looked through the transparent colored layer of paint to another painted image underneath. He has experimented with painting this image by scaling it up from a photograph, or by over-painting and incorporating the actual photograph into the work. He determined that the paintings would be more effective if the images underneath were recognizable, hence the use of photographs. He continues to experiment with that juxtaposition today.

[Tom Wolf in his studio in 2014 holding a work similar to the ones included in the Painting, exhibition at the Fine Arts Building.]

A student of Tom Wolf’s at the time, Evriah Bader, was also included in the show. Her small, three-dimensional woodworks were narrow plywood panels, one foot long and less than one half inch wide. On the surface, Bader rendered letters and symbols with a typewriter covering the surface though illegibly. They were described as odd and intimate, structured visually and independent of language.[172] Bader was included in a number of shows around the time of the Fine Arts Building exhibition, although she is not practicing today. Along with others from Nosei’s show—Hafif, Judy Rifka and Daniel Buren—Bader showed work in the inaugural Rooms exhibition at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in June of the same year and in the following year, her non-representational works were included in the Hallwall’s exhibition New Abstract Objects which also included Phelan.

In Art-Rite’s special painting issue, letters exchanged between Bader and artist and art historian, Alan W. Moore, were published discussing Bader’s works, her practice, and her future. With abbreviations for paintings (“ptgs”) and references to a recent party, they read like letters between teenagers. Describing them as “blotched” on all sides with paint, Moore goes on to discuss the visible layers of plywood in Bader’s works as looking as though one could flip through them and find more paintings. He asserts that in these works Bader is saying “‘no’ to the whole idea of the ptg [sic] as a privileged image, a single surface made particular by paint.” The thin nature of the pieces, for him, referenced illusionistic space—a door ajar, a crack of color. Bader responded by addressing her painting’s relationship to the wall saying,

I find greater pleasure in denying objects their usual precedence in our perception and alternating instead between peripheral vision and a sense of focus. More than to acknowledge, you have to confront the wall (and by extension, the world). As i [sic] see it, it’s the wall, not my paintings, that is the “literal” part of the interaction.[174]

In regards to the scale of her work she said,

when a thing is as tiny as half an inch wide (which is actually pretty big), knowing that it exists, being aware of it, is as important as seeing it. Once you know, you can never not know, and that goes just as much for knowing what's painted on a surface that you can’t quite see as it does for knowing what the sides are like when you’re looking at the front.[175]

This notion is quite true in that the concept of Bader’s narrow wooden paintings linger with you, long after looking, even if witnessed in documentation only. Furthermore, Bader’s references to scale and the perception of scale in relation to the spectator’s body echo the concerns of the Minimalists.

[Evriah Bader, Untitled, ca 1975, (photograph by Yuri, image of artwork reproduced in 1975 Art-Rite magazine).]

Bader further commented in her letter, “to make more and add more to the world is an increasingly suspicious proposition: the emphasis is always on more.”[176] In Nosei’s files, the following quote existed beside Bader’s name,

I have had to do much grappling with I and am understandable[sic] a little reluctant now. She, a less frightening opponent, is worse; source of myth. Perhaps my future is the out. Current plans; the reinforcement growing more peripheral. The tangibles, so easily equipped, may suit themselves. No presence in bulk alone. I believe in economics.[177]

Perhaps this aversion to adding more to the world provides some explanation as to why she has not continued practicing as a visual artist today.

Another artist in the Painting, exhibition, Judy Rifka, has worked fluidly within the space between abstraction and representation and continues to do so today. Her work often includes a gestural line indicating drawing, whether the line is formed with graphite, paper, or painted canvas. The images may be either complete abstractions or loose representations of hands, bodies, or settings. At times she has projected and traced onto the canvas or cropped and repeated images. She has worked with unorthodox materials such as mesh and cardboard, collaging and constructing her paintings on plywood, on the wall, and on paper. She has created shaped canvases, extended her paintings from support to the wall and created objects, large and small, which exist in the space between painting and sculpture. Rifka has always had an experimental approach to her work, showing in downtown nightclub, the Mudd Club, and at the performance space, Franklin Furnace. She exhibited along with the more than one hundred artists who participated in the 1980 “Times Square Show.” Associated with Collaborative Projects Inc. (Colab), Rifka is also a video artist and has collaborated throughout her career on projects across all media—film, performance, graffiti and digital art.

[Judy Rifka, Tone Poem XDLTE, 2013, Collage (image of artwork courtesy of Trestle Projects on the occasion of the 2014 exhibition Judy Rifka: Star Street).]

Though fully embracing the freedom to work across all media, when asked in 1975 about the importance of having a given area to express thought, Rifka pointed out that people who reacted against painting “still use our wall to project their slides against.”[178] She said, “I’m not concerned about being a painter doing painting; I’m much more interested in being an artist, with indications of everything I say and do being art, and also that drawing is the natural vehicle between physical existence and pictorial existence.”[179] Collage is also a consistent element in Rifka’s work. It has been noted by critic Robert Curcio that Nosei displayed a strong interest in collage as a curator. He recalled her discussion of language and collage as “connective tissue” and her belief that collage is “a method of production fused with the artist’s specific personal language, all speaking to the viewer and the world for them to decipher.”[180]

[Judy Rifka, Tone Poem XDLTE, 2013, Collage (image of artwork courtesy of Trestle Projects on the occasion of the 2014 exhibition Judy Rifka: Star Street).]

Demonstrating both experimentation across multiple forms, but stemming from painting, as well as the use of collage was the artist Carolee Schneemann. Nosei included Schneemann’s film, Fuses, in the Painting, exhibition at the Fine Arts Building. Schneemann had created the film a decade prior and described the process as “painting frame by frame.”[181] She discussed the elements present in the work as, “breaking frame, collage, montage, superimposition, fugal sequence.”[182] In regards to subject matter, Schneemann’s film featured her and her boyfriend, the composer James Tenney, having sex, however the images are somewhat abstracted due to her manipulation of the film.

When asked by filmmaker and critic Kate Haug whether a nude woman artist can be both image and image maker, she replied that she, “had to get that nude off the canvas.”[183] Schneemann was not comfortable with painting’s tradition of the nude as “frozen flesh to art history’s conjunction of perceptual erotics and an immobilizing social position.”[184] After filming the sexual act over time, as well as capturing footage of observation by her cat, Schneemann is said to have then stained, burned, and drawn on the film, cutting and layering images to create the final work.[185] Curator Maura Reilly observed that film was a natural extension of the canvas for Schneemann and called Fuses a filmic painting.[186] Schneemann herself said in 1993, “I’m a painter. I’m still a painter and I will die a painter. Everything that I have developed has to do with extending visual principles off the canvas.”[187]

In addition to painterly film, Nosei also included video in the exhibition. Ernest Gusella, like many of the artists active in the Fine Arts Building, displayed interdisciplinary tendencies, excelling in music, biochemistry and visual art. He received a gold medal in undergraduate painting at the San Francisco Art Institute and initially supported himself by working commercial art assignments and teaching, while painting hard-edge, abstract, shaped canvases.[188] After moving to New York and creating fiberglass works for a time, he stopped painting upon seeing his work “mixed in with a bunch of other artists’ work in the gallery. He said, “it all looked like commercial trash.”[189] Gusella has spoken of his evolution from painting as a result of “an old artistic fantasy” in which one could use sound to create images. He wanted to combine sounds and visuals, feeling frustrated and confined creatively. He said, “painting was frozen,” and pointed out that “the Greeks believed that music is the highest art because it can’t be captured.”[190] Gusella first started experimenting with video after encountering Woody and Steina Vasulka and Nam June Paik at the experimental art space, The Kitchen. He described a collaborative and encouraging environment among those gathering there. Of his initial experimentations, he recalled that he “started with black and white video, put mirrors in front of an oscilloscope, and used the Putney synthesizer to create the sound....I’d make a kind of permutation...multiplying the image. It was all abstract because I came out of abstract painting.”[191]

[ Ernest Gusella, Videotape, 1974 (image of artwork published on Video Data Bank at the School of Art Institute of Chicago).]

Gusella’s piece in the exhibition, titled Video Taping, is a distorted-looking, silent video with a split-screen; with one image appearing on half of the screen and its negative image on the other half. The visual is Gusella removing tape which has been applied to a sheet of glass between himself and the camera. Part performance, part exploration of abstract image perception, Gusella uses the technical aspects of video as the subject of his art.[192]

[Ernest Gusella, Videotape, 1974 (image of artwork published on Video Data Bank at the School of Art Institute of Chicago).]

Artist and critic Douglas Davis observed a common criticism of video artists stating that they are unable “to create new image-systems devoid of the memories of painting” and noted that others complained artists were jumping on the video bandwagon as “an electronic extension of Duchamp” in attempt to demolish the art object. Gusella was aware of such hostility toward video at the time, acknowledging that filmmaker Jonas Mekas called it “old wine in new bottles,” but he felt strongly that continued experimentation could go on indefinitely.[194] He said, “It’s like the prophet said, there’s nothing new under the sun...It’s only how different people respond to the wheel that keeps spinning around.”[195]

As many of the painters in the Painting, exhibition explored the spatial boundaries and characteristics of painting; those working in film, video, and performance from a painterly tradition considered also the temporal aspects of painting. Painter and video artist Hermine Freed observed as early as 1976 that “our sense of time has been so radically altered in the last quarter-century that it seems impossible today to consider visual perception without its temporal component.”[196] In video, but also in film and performance, the process is also the product and the works are communicated both visually and temporally.[197]

One artist in the exhibition, performance artist Ralston Farina was particularly focused on the element of time and declared it specifically to be his medium. His mission statement, preserved in The Museum of Modern Art’s library reads,

I am a time artist. My medium is time. My art reflects the surprises and the unexpectedness of everyday events. I’ll pour a box of dog biscuits and portable radios fall out...The timing will surprise you and the music will make you laugh. I use stylistic tendencies as a painter would color. Every show I do is different and of the time.

Farina was interested in programming his audience’s memory and, as critic Holland Cotter observed, he wanted his works “to exist only for as long as it stayed in a viewer's mind.” Cotter noted that this evanescence worked in contrast to the commercialization of the art world (and specifically painting) where art is geared to be sold and preserved.

[Exhibition announcement for time-based performance by Ralston Farina at Artists Space in the FAB; Farina was also included in the 1976 Painting exhibition (original flyer accessed in The Museum of Modern Art Library Performance Artist Files).]

Conceptual artist Daniel Buren, who created a work in situ for the exhibition, was also opposed to galleries and museums as “safes” for works of art. By consistently using pre-fabricated, alternating white and colored vertical stripes in widely varied conceptual installations since 1966, Buren has sought to challenge the notion of art exhibition from within these institutions. In some ways, there are similarities between Buren and other painters in the exhibition in their transformation of architectural space, but on the other hand his disdain for cultural institutions and traditional painting separates him. Buren said that “the ambition of the work...aims at nothing less than abolishing the code that has until now made art what it is, in its production and in its institutions.” Lest his philosophy be misconstrued as coinciding with Duchamp, it was pointed out by curator, critic, and dealer Jeffrey Deitch that Buren has positioned himself against the readymade or the idea that a gallery space or cultural institution could endow “an ordinary bottle rack with sacred art status” or “turn cheap art materials into valuable aesthetic commodities.

[Daniel Buren, Souvenir photo: “Within and Beyond the Frame” work in situ 1973 fabric, paint, steel cables; Work in situ for Daniel Buren’s solo exhibition at the John Weber Gallery in New York in October and November 1973. (© Daniel Buren / ADAGP, Paris).]

Douglas Crimp used Buren’s work as a primary example in his seminal essay titled “The End of Painting” in 1981. He commented,

It is fundamental to Buren’s work that it act in complicity with those very institutions that it seeks to make visible as the necessary conditions of the artwork’s intelligibility. That is the reason not only that his work appears in museums and galleries, but that it poses as painting. It is only thereby possible for his work to ask: What makes it possible to see a painting? What makes it possible to see a painting as a painting? And, to what end is painting under such conditions of its presentation?

Crimp goes further to interpret Buren’s intentions, “For he knows only too well that when his stripes are seen as painting, painting will be understood as the “pure idiocy” that it is.”

Crimp’s essay, which appeared in the magazine October, aggressively challenged the medium of painting. He heavily criticized Barbara Rose’s 1979 exhibition titled American Painting: The Eighties considering it a desperate attempt to affirm painting’s significance without asking critical questions. He closed his statement by saying that once Buren’s works are visible and interpreted clearly, “the end of painting will have finally been acknowledged.”

Connections can be construed between all the artists in the 1976 Painting, exhibition both in terms of the focus of their work and personal connections in the mid-1970s art scene in New York City. Hafif and Phelan had studios next to each other at PS1. Gorchov and Lenkowsky were friends and later married. Bader was Wolf’s student. Buren and Rifka were included in PS1’s Rooms exhibition. They all participated in the downtown arts scene, among which the Fine Arts Building played an important role. But most importantly, each of these artist sought to tease out, advance or investigate painting and its practice, to predict and participate in its evolution and future and to assert or refute its end.

Despite their efforts and Nosei’s astute curatorial approach to the Painting, exhibition, it would be idealistic to imagine that a single exhibition would resolve the issue. The debate continues today, as it has since the first century, and likely will ad infinitum. Regardless of the debate, painting continues and is certainly not dead. As the painter R.B. Kitaj said, “Passions for pictures like the Tempesta [sic] and for picture-making will always live in the race of men and women...Artists have always painted and drawn the human figure and they always will. Many people will understand this...the impulse is in our bones.”

Footnotes below

CONCLUSION

By the summer of 1977, Pretto had brought the Fine Arts Building (FAB) to eighty-five percent occupancy, making it attractive to potential buyers who witnessed the vitality of both the building and the surrounding neighborhood, which included Franklin Furnace, the Clocktower Gallery, the Franklin Street Arts Center, and other energetic art spaces. Real estate developer Joseph Cazana bought the Fine Arts Building for twice the amount the owner had sought three years earlier, prior to Pretto filling it with artists. The sale signaled success for the world of real estate, but meant an unfortunate end to the Fine Arts Building as a space dedicated solely to artistic activity. The building’s fifth floor and above were converted to a residential cooperative and the second through fourth floors were retained as offices. Though Artists Space still had time on their lease and remained fully operational in the building until 1984, all other entities quickly moved to other locations. Miller observed,

The young artists and fledgling galleries that helped develop the building and neighborhood were priced out and had to seek new quarters. Most migrated to the East Village and the Lower East Side where a new phase in the evolution of the art of the period began.[293]

As artists and art activities moved out of the Fine Arts Building, the perpetually migrating center of the New York art world shifted geographically, as it continues to shift today.

The history of the Fine Arts Building remains as an embodiment of the 1970s New York Neo-Avantgarde. The building’s story encapsulates the plurality of art forms and the multimedia and interdisciplinary practice that was common among artists during the decade. The Fine Arts Building fostered ground-breaking experimentation within its walls, as it was coalescing throughout the broader art world. Its fluid physical spaces and governless organizational structure encouraged the fluidity of medium and practice that became evident in the works displayed. The Fine Arts Building is also an emblem of a historic moment in time, following the major structural changes that occurred in the late 1960s-early 1970s as artists broke free from formalist critique and medium-specific hierarchies, and preceding the rapid commercialization of art and Postmodern tendencies which would follow in the 1980s. The artistic activities within the Fine Arts Building still have strong resonance today as contemporary artists continue to investigate the implications of Duchamp’s readymade, the boundaries of painting and of all available media, the dematerialization of the art object, and Conceptual art and its focus on the non-visual. Though the plurality of available aesthetic supports has proliferated considerably to include installation art, relational aesthetics, new media and postmedia art, to name a few, the spirit of the avant-garde continues. Just as the experimentation and fluidity of both medium and practice in the Fine Arts Building harkened back to historical avant-gardes, so this reference loop continues today.

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Fine Arts Building, NYC (1974-1978)