sculptural aspects of 112 to the dance.”57 Others who presented performances or exhibits at 112 Greene were Vito Acconci, Alice Aycock, Jared Bark, Joseph Beuys, Keith Sonnier, and William Wegman. The Grand Union performed there in February 1972 with Mary Overlie as a guest.
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Since they didn’t want to make a living from their art, this cluster of close-knit friends, having given many dinner and dance parties, figured out how to create a communal business: they opened the restaurant FOOD. In 1971 Carol Goodden, who was living with Matta-Clark and dancing with Trisha Brown, bought a small Puerto Rican food shop on the corner of Prince and Wooster Streets. With the help of other SoHo friends, they transformed it into a center run by and for artists. Philip Glass installed the radiators,58 and visual artist Jared Bark put up a new ceiling.59 Goodden was determined to pay artists well for their work and accommodate them with flexible hours.60 FOOD was the only restaurant in the neighborhood with healthy fare, a welcome warm spot on the otherwise empty streets. It specialized in fresh fish, soups, and salads, and the menu changed daily. Members of the theater group Mabou Mines, musicians from Philip Glass’s ensemble, and dancers of the Natural History of the American Dancer cooked, served, and stocked supplies. When it was her turn to cook, Barbara Dilley made food you ate with your hands: “Shells from mussels in broth become scoops for rice pilaf. There were artichokes to dip in melted lemon butter.”61 Nancy Lewis remembers making salads while her future husband, musician Richard Peck, washed dishes.62 Artist Robert Kushner was dessert chef. Everything about FOOD was cooperative. They took turns cooking, relying on family recipes and artistic flair for presentation. Rauschenberg, Don Judd, and Keith Sonnier all did stints as guest chefs.63
In one of his first acts of deconstruction, Matta-Clark tore down the walls separating the kitchen and dining area, putting the cooking in full view of patrons as though it were a performance. In fact, Goodden and Matta-Clark thought of FOOD as a long-term art piece.64 One example of Matta-Clark’s food art is described by Claire Barliant in Paris Review: “Gordon did a meal called Matta-Bones, where everything he served was on the bone and at the end he drilled holes through the bones to make necklaces.”65
Woman Walking Down a Ladder (1973), by Trisha Brown, 130 Greene Street. Photo: Babette Mangolte.
FOOD thrived as an artist-run restaurant from 1971 to 1974, when it changed hands. (The heyday of 112 Greene Street also ended in 1974; in the eighties it morphed into White Columns in the West Village.) Throwing themselves into the work at the restaurant exemplifies Marcuse’s concept of “erotic labor.” Richard Goldstein interprets that to mean the kind of work that “enlists your deepest passions…. Lots of people found the pleasures of erotic labor in political organizing. This was about work as an act of love. Marcuse made me see that when work is love it can be liberating.”66
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It’s often been said that SoHo in the seventies was ideal for artists. But the questions come up: For whom was it ideal, and who got left out? It’s no secret that the population in SoHo was largely white, young Americans.
It should be noted, however, that there was a parallel pocket of fervent dance activity for a more diverse group of dance artists about three miles north. Alvin Ailey had helped launch Clark Center for the Performing Arts as a midtown dance space. Affiliated with the Westside YWCA, Clark Center was a crucial hub of dance that was much more racially inclusive than SoHo. Some of the dance artists nurtured in this studio at Eighth Avenue at 50th Street were Rod Rodgers, Eleo Pomare, Donald McKayle, Mariko Sanjo, Brenda Dixon (later Brenda Dixon Gottschild), Dianne McIntyre, William Dunas, Elizabeth Keen, Chuck Davis (founder of DanceAfrica), and Tina Ramirez (founder of Ballet Hispanico).67 During the 1969–1970 season, I often rehearsed there with Rudy Perez, who had performed at Judson from the start and later became a pillar of postmodern dance in Los Angeles. Performances at Clark Center were more fully produced and more accepted by the modern dance establishment than the anything-goes escapades in downtown studios. The choreographers at Clark Center were clearly preparing for the stage rather than for a loft space or art gallery. Dancer/scholar Danielle Goldman points out that Ailey and his repertoire used “metaphors of uplift” that were aligned with historic modern dance.68
Banes has noted: “Postmodern dance was seen by many African American dancers as dry formalism, while African American dance was considered by some white postmodernists as too emotional and overexplicit politically.”69 But a handful of dancers—Gus Solomons jr, Laura Dean, Meredith Monk—shuttled between Clark Center and SoHo. They were accepted socially and aesthetically in both milieus. Solomons explains why most black dancers were not drawn to the aesthetic of Grand Union: “Black audiences and artists typically were interested in messages, be they of rebellion, oppression, or emotion. In general, they didn’t see the point in making work that was only about itself and not the human condition as they experienced it.”70 I might quibble with his depiction of downtown dance as not representing the human condition, but his point is well taken.
It wasn’t until 1982, when Ishmael Houston-Jones curated a slate of African American dance artists for a series called Parallels at Danspace Project, that many of us recognized that postmodern dance was attracting more black dancers than it had before. Danspace, a center of downtown (heretofore mostly white) dance, had been costarted by Dilley in 1974. When curating Parallels, Houston-Jones included not only Solomons and others who had crossed the black/white divide long before, like Harry Whittaker Sheppard and Blondell Cummings, but also younger dance artists like Ralph Lemon, Bebe Miller, and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar. This series created space for black dancers to feel welcomed in downtown dance houses. They were part of a vibrant postmodern dance as a new art form.
As author Richard Kostelanetz pointed out, SoHo in the seventies was particularly hospitable to new forms of art.71 While Clark Center nobly upheld the tradition of modern dance, experiments in holography, video art, and book art (and as we have seen, food art) were sprouting up in SoHo or nearby. The Kitchen Center opened in the Broadway Central Hotel in 1971, specifically to nurture the new art form of video.72 In 1973, when it moved to Broome and Wooster Streets, it welcomed music, soon to be followed by performance art and dance. (When the Grand Union performed there in 1974, Kathy Duncan’s review called the troupe a “utopian democracy.”)73 The Kitchen fostered the careers of dancers and other artists who brazenly crossed lines of genre and etiquette, for example Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane, Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, Karen Finley, Eric Bogosian, Molissa Fenley, Christian Marclay, Charles Atlas, and Robert Ashley. (My dance company too was presented there.) With a professional staff to generate publicity and raise funds, it was a more polished operation than either 80 Wooster or 112 Greene. The Kitchen could commission new works and could even send an interdisciplinary band of experimental artists to tour Europe.
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John Cage’s ideas pervaded SoHo like a mist. Visual artists like Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and Donald Judd were redefining American art, forming all kinds of hybrids and crossovers. Judd presented Philip Glass and his ensemble at his building on Spring Street, the first of a string of gigs for the Glass Ensemble in galleries and museums.74 Just outside the bounds of SoHo, places like Printed Matter (for artists’ books), La MaMa (for experimental theater), The Living Theatre, and The Clocktower (similar to The Kitchen but more site-specific) added to the mix.
The desire to bust out of cultural or genre straitjackets continued into the seventies, and SoHo provided spaces for that to happen. As sculptor Suzanne Harris said, “We didn’t need the rest of the world. Rather than attacking a system that was already there, we chose to build a world of our own.”75
That world was supported by Avalanche, a maverick art publication that considered itself a sibling to 112 Greene and FOOD, where it was available to peruse. Avalanche advocated new genres like earth art, body art, collaborations, video art, and installation. The cofounders, Liza Béar and Willoughby Sharp, were part of the art scene and presented text and images from the artists’ point of view. Grand Union members were