Imagination II (1977), by Mary Overlie. Photo: Theo Robinson.
The glory of the lone artist, however, was losing its luster. In his book Another Little Piece of My Heart: My Life of Rock and Revolution in the ’60s, cultural critic Richard Goldstein wrote this in reaction to Norman Mailer’s novel Armies of the Night: “[I]t seemed like a violation of the countercultural ethos that I’d come to share. We kids saw politics as a collective activity, something we did together. Radicals in Mailer’s generation had struggled to maintain their individuality, but we fought to maintain community.”35
During this period, 112 Greene became a hangout for all kinds of artists and dancers, including Barbara Dilley, Douglas Dunn, Nancy Lewis, and Steve Paxton. Rachel Wood was a member of Dilley’s group, the Natural History of the American Dancer. This all-woman group also included Carmen Beuchat (who was also dancing with Brown), Cynthia Hedstrom, Mary Overlie, Suzanne Harris, and Judy Padow.
GU at 112 Greene Street, 1972. From left: Paxton, Lewis, Overlie (as guest), Rainer (face hidden), Scott in chair. Photo: Babette Mangolte.
The works that took up space at 112 Greene broke all existing conventions of art-making etiquette. Louise Sørensen, in the introduction to 112 Greene Street: The Early Years, wrote that “112 Greene Street was synonymous with a remarkably concentrated period of the New York art world where creativity and idealism went hand in hand—a product, no doubt, of the 1960s counter-culture.”36 It was a non-gallery gallery. As conceptual artist Bill Beckley recalled, it “was a raunchy kind of place where you sometimes couldn’t tell the mess from the art or vice versa.”37
SoHo was a counterculture in both art and leisure. Its artists were decidedly uncommercial, not looking to make money from their art. Beckley felt they were “redefining” art. “It was the cusp of modernism and postmodernism.”38 Some called them “post-minimalist.”39 The social life mingled with the art life. According to Rachel Wood, “[W]e had incredible parties: rock ’n’ roll music, dope and alcohol, and dancing like mad for hours.”40
Padow, who also lived at 112 Greene, described how the group named the Natural History of the American Dancer emerged from those parties: “It’s a party but everyone’s dancing and improvising. It got formed almost like an outgrowth of the lifestyle at 112 Greene Street. There was not a fine line between having dinner and performing eating dinner. Someone sitting on a sofa would rise up and suddenly you’d notice that someone else has risen. The cues … the picking up of someone else’s gestures would happen at a spontaneous level.”41
Paxton, however, doesn’t feel that 112 Greene held a corner on this kind of social life. Asked, via email, if he felt 112 provided the soil for endeavors like Grand Union, he replied: “The times were that soil, I believe. The transition of SoHo into artists’ spaces rendered it especially fertile; a failing industrial area was transformed into a colony of activist artists, musicians, poets, dancers [having] huge parties, pranks, hijinks, performances and a confluence of a new generation of artists.”42
Douglas Dunn often went to the dancing parties at the Byrd Hoffman School for Birds on Spring Street, the studio of experimental theater director Robert Wilson. Daily improvisation sessions there also bled into social parties. “These places were so cheap and it was so much fun and so interactive. Grand Union was sort of an extension of this kind of familiarity and intimacy of artists at that time.”43 The sexual revolution was still young, and the calamity of AIDS hadn’t hit yet. “There was plenty of erotic energy in the mix and sometimes it ended up being physical connections and sometimes it didn’t,” Dunn said. “It was one of the driving forces, not just in Grand Union but in SoHo in that era. Sometimes these relationships fed the work and sometimes they distracted from it.”44 A graphic that reflects that randiness, with a certain elusive humor, is the flyer that Paxton designed for the February 1971 performances at Bob Fiore’s loft on East 13th Street.
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The 112 Greene Street denizens, like many young artists, tended to be skeptical of capitalism and against the war in Vietnam. According to artist Mary Heilmann, “Most of us came to 112 as bohemian outsiders and almost Marxists—against capitalist culture.”45 According to Rachel Wood, Jeffrey Lew was so opposed to art making as moneymaking that one of his criteria for accepting a work of art at 112 Greene was that it not be intended for sale.46 It was more honorable to make work that was embedded in the life they were living. In 1972 Matta-Clark made a piece called Walls Paper, for which he photographed walls of decaying buildings, made giant prints of them, and mounted them up on the walls of 112 as a new kind of wallpaper.47 Also in 1972, he made a performance piece in a dumpster on Greene Street. Beckley’s memory: “[Y]ou saw the umbrellas peeking up from the dumpster, moving around. That was pretty good.”48 As with Trisha Brown, this was part of the aesthetic of bringing art outside the gallery or theater and into the streets.
Flyer designed by Steve Paxton based on a Japanese wood print, 1971. Photo: Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.
Another urban project of Matta-Clark’s brought graffiti writers down from the Bronx. He photographed sides of subway cars, mounted them on long panels, and set them up as an exhibit on a Mercer Street sidewalk. According to Terry O’Reilly, who assisted him, “Originally he set up his camera on subway platforms and photographed the trains when they came to a stop. This did not work well, so he went out to the train yards and broke into the yards just like the kids would do and photographed their work.”49 Matta-Clark’s application to exhibit these images at the Washington Square Art Fair was rejected, so he parked his delivery truck and invited his graffiti friends to decorate the truck. At the same time, he displayed some of his train-sized photographs of their work, which he called photoglyphs, right there on the sidewalk and called it the Alternatives to Washington Square Art Fair; he exhibited more photoglyphs at 112 Greene. This celebration of the “ordinary” predates the art world’s love affair with graffiti.50 (But I note that Twyla Tharp had already gotten the idea to have graffiti writers onstage as part of the set design for Deuce Coupe, which premiered with the Joffrey Ballet in 1973.)
Matta-Clark’s anarchistic streak was reinforced by others at 112 Greene Street. As the casually organized “Anarchitecture” group—which included Matta-Clark, Harris, Nonas, Carol Goodden, Jene Highstein, Tina Girouard, and Laurie Anderson—they would get together and discuss architecture, space, language, and the possibility of subverting existing norms.51 They held an exhibit of their work in March 1974 at 112 Greene Street. Each artist contributed anonymous photographs that she or he felt represented her or his “idea of anarchitecture, such as liminal or overlooked spaces, and they made the works look anonymous.”52 It was the last show at 112 Greene.
The sense of possibility in SoHo was heady. Highstein (who found mover’s work for his cousin Philip Glass in SoHo) called 112 Greene “a free-for-all…. It really was an open forum. It didn’t have any structure. It was just a room, a big room where anything could happen.”53 Like Trisha Brown at 80 Wooster Street, the artists were finding ways to fit their actions into the existing architecture. Sculptor Richard Nonas, who helped Brown outfit her performers in harnesses for her gravity-defying equipment dances, said, “There was no separation between the works and the space.”54 And, possibly because there was no profit on the horizon, things were fluid. Multidisciplinary artist Tina Girouard (video, installation, fabric, paintings) recalled that the exhibitions would change continually, becoming more like performance.55 Suzanne Harris, who had performed with Brown, produced a double installation of Flying Machine and The Wheels in 1973. For the first, she invited viewers to strap themselves to ropes attached to a specially made ceiling. Next to it was a contraption made of four large wheels that audience members could set in motion.56 “The base of it stayed stable but the different parts rotated,” Beckley recalled.