Hey y’all—
I’ve planned to share writings and research that I did as part of my grad program, so the first in this series is a study of photography by artists involved with ABC No Rio in New York. This was written for my Histories and Aesthetics of Photography course and it builds on earlier research and collaboration with artists Jack Waters and Peter Cramer. It’s a rather long read, so grab some coffee and enjoy it one of these weekend mornings!
Stay tuned to see if Loisaida will become hope's graveyard, marked by the tombstones of progress—high art, high rise, high finance; or whether it will hold out for cultural, political and economic democracy—a magic pot that won't inch down.
– Lucy Lippard, Too Close to Home; Art Against Displacement, Village Voice, 1983
The East Village art scene of the 1980s prompted a flurry of institutional interest in and debate about the viability of subversive, underground art in New York. Situated in lower rank to the city's premiere gallery districts on 57th Street and later in SoHo, this bohemian enclave in the Lower East Side was composed of emerging artists and art dealers who were lured to the neighborhood by its affordable rents. Once home to an industrial working-class population, many of Puerto Rican descent, the area was in the midst of swift transition in the decades that preceded Y2K. Many commercial galleries sprung up at this time, and alongside them a related but rebellious smattering of marginalized identities—activists, performers, thinkers, and visual artists who rebuffed the gentrifying forces that were seeking to flip this corner of Manhattan. This community gathered at a number of clubs and social centers to organize protest events and radical art exhibitions, with one such venue arising directly from this resistance struggle. Documentary and performance images created during this period offer a visual record of artist groups who were leveraging their political will to stage interventions against real estate developers and their attendants within the arts and cultural institutions, a record that artists and art workers can look to in channeling our own collective power today.
Break-ins and Lock-outs
In late 1979, an artist collective known as Colab (short for Collaborative Projects, Inc.) began planning an exhibition to critique the intense real estate speculation happening throughout New York. The group had identified a building to enter illegally, which they did in the week between Christmas and New Years Eve in preparation for The Real Estate Show. The artist Becky Howland states that the action was dedicated to Elizabeth Mangum—a Black woman who had been murdered by police that August after she slashed an officer who was sent to evict her from her home in Flatbush, Brooklyn.1 The artists saw this injustice as a catalyst for demanding greater housing protections for the city’s marginalized residents, responding with collective action to bring attention to the damaging effects of displacement and gentrification.
Colab artists Peter Moennig, Ann Messner, and Gregory Lehmann each documented the break-ins at 123 Delancey Street. In one photograph, Messner is pictured in a cluttered room, standing between a wooden barstool and a splayed-open guitar case, cigarette in hand. Housed in the guitar case are an oversized set of bolt cutters that were used by the artists to gain entry to the front of the building.
In another image, Moennig is shown locking the gate with his own padlock, a replacement for the first which was meant to prevent trespassers like them from entering.
After only one day of activity, city officials returned and changed the locks again, barricading the storefront from the intruders. Howland reacted by creating posters that outlined the sequence of events in both Spanish and English, which Messner photographed as they were wheatpasted to the exterior of the building.
Coming together in response to the lockout of their art-squat-exhibition on Delancey Street, the Colab artists held a press conference and lobbied local officials to provide an alternative space in one of the city's many unused properties. With the support of German performance artist Joseph Beuys (who attended the press conference while staging a major retrospective at the Guggenheim), the city was under immense pressure to meet the artists’ demands—eventually granting them temporary use of a building at 156 Rivington Street.2 Writing in a later reflection of this success, Ann Messner noted that “the 123 Delancey Street action provides an interesting historical model to consider in moving forward—specifically because it involved the direct occupation of unused space to serve the needs of the community.”3
ABC No Rio’s Portrait Studio
On Rivington Street, the artists moved into a derelict tenement building that would come to house their community space and resource project. They called it ABC No Rio after the former notary public across the street, whose remaining painted letters were left to spell AB G NO RIO (previously “Abogado Notario”).4 The venue operated with a “do-it-yourself” ethos, producing an expansive array of events and performances while engaging directly with the residents of Loisaida (the accented nickname for the Lower East Side, given by New York's Puerto Ricans—the “Nyoricans”). In addition to demanding housing protections and other tangible goals, the artists were working to prevent cultural diffraction and further loss of the vibrant social fabric within this community.
The following year, photographer Tom Warren mounted an exhibition titled The Portrait Show that featured photographs he had created in collaboration with people in the neighborhood. Mixed in with Warren’s photos were also drawn portraits by Cara Perlman and Jane Dickson, as well as reclaimed images from Gus’ Photo Studio, a former portrait studio in the adjacent building that “had served the portrait needs of the local Jews and Hispanics since the early part of the century.”5 Seeking to sustain the long lineage of early portrait studios while also marking this particular juncture of life in and around Rivington Street, Warren invited anyone to come in and purchase a Polaroid print for one dollar.
Working with the leftover negatives, Warren assembled a large collection of these neighborhood faces for the exhibition. Pictured within the 10x10 grid are a diverse mix of families, children, and individuals from many age groups and demographic backgrounds. Many of them are wearing Halloween costumes while others are dressed in all sorts of stylish attire. Set against the same draped backdrop, the photographs appear quilted together, again emphasizing the notion of “social fabric” and embodying the very makeup of a community of marginalized people, many of them on the verge of being pushed out.
Photo documentation by Christy Rupp and Warren himself shows us what the interior and exterior of No Rio looked like while it operated as a portrait studio. The storefront facade of the building advertised the services inside, with mounted and framed portraits seen through the windows from Rivington Street. From the interior, we see a photo of Warren behind the 4x5 camera with a subject in a leather jacket and beret (you'll notice the same person in the grid of images above).
There are also two installation shots, taken a few weeks later, of what the exhibition looked like on the walls of the gallery. Some of the photos are placed in decorative frames while others remain fixed directly to the wall along with the drawn portraits and other ephemera from the show.
That this collection of images came together through sustained engagement with residents in the neighborhood speaks to how radically different this artist space operated in comparison to the commercial galleries that would flood into the neighborhood in the years to come. After The Portrait Show, photography would continue to play an instrumental role in this neighborhood arts venue through continued documentation of performances and exhibitions as well as the on-site establishment of a community darkroom.
Photography and Performance
The documentarians of this time saw themselves as fully immersed in the scenes that they portrayed, dissolving the distinctions between artist and historian. The last set of images, taken by the artist Toyo, straddles the line between documentary and performance work. All of them are extremely high-contrast, suggesting a Xerox photocopy that results in a flattened, two-dimensional image space. Whether due to a rudimentary understanding of darkroom tools, or a deliberate aesthetic choice to mimic photocopy culture, Toyo saw himself as both photographer and participant, extending the role of documentarian to actively intervene in the production of this performance culture and its visual expression. He wrote of this period:
I spent my nights making performance photographs. In 1983, I met Ray Kelly (Founder of No Se No and The Rivington School) at the No Se No 99 Nites Summer Fun Club. My connection with performance photography crystallized. I shot my photographs from within the subject, not as an outsider.6
Toyo photographed the artist Jack Waters on stage at No Se No, another performance-centered club that was just down Rivington street from ABC No Rio. The image is busy with photographs in the background (many of them taken by Toyo throughout the 99 Nites events in a performance-installation of his own), as well as spiky orbs and woven mobiles suspended from the ceiling above. Waters is most clearly visible, standing at the center-right of the frame with his arm extended out toward the crowd below, making an offering of an unidentifiable nature. As if to repeat the high-contrast images pasted to the walls of the venue, he is pictured wearing a suit of white folded paper that is adorned with words written in permanent marker, each of them evoking the language of linguistics and philosophical inquiry – syntax, dialectic, analyze, text – the most prominent of them stretching from shoulder to shoulder to spell out the word ontological.
Later that year, the artists at ABC No Rio began staging subsequent rounds of performance marathons that consisted of non-stop actions and events. The first of these marathons, Seven Days of Creation, was put on by a group known as POOL (whose members included Carl George, Brad Taylor, Peter Cramer, and Jack Waters), followed by The Extremist Show, organized by artist Kembra Pfahler to take place for nine days.7 Pfahler is pictured in another photograph by Toyo, sleeping in No Rio's storefront window as part of her performance titled The New York Experience. Bearing some resemblance to Martha Rosler's The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems, this work and its documentation highlights the checkered mix of transient and houseless individuals with the bohemian artist lofts and other real estate development taking place on the streets of downtown New York. Unlike Rosler, who actively avoided human subjects in her frame, Pfahler's visibly sleeping body provided the subversive counterpoint to the language used by market speculators, which the artist aptly mocked in the title of her work.
At The Extremist Show, Toyo also photographed a performance by Jack Waters and Peter Cramer, longtime partners and artistic collaborators who became co-directors of No Rio in the summer of 1983. Their performance-action took place at dawn while participants witnessed them rolling around with mirrors, broken glass, copy fluids, and other detritus found in the backyard of the venue. Appearing naked (or almost naked), the couple’s action teetered on the brink of injury and bodily harm, as if to suggest a physical resonance with the exhibition’s concept, printed boldly on the show’s poster: LEGS, ARMS, AND EYES–WITH IDEAS.
As members of Colab began stepping away from the ABC No Rio project in 1983, the space was closing out the first of many cycles of stewardship. Waters and Cramer (and other artists involved with their non-profit Allied Productions) would take on operations for the next decade, before handing it on to a group known as Rehab Video, who introduced weekly hardcore matinee shows that brought No Rio to prominence with punks and squatters around the world.8 The continued development of the venue’s darkroom, zine library, print shop, and gallery space would draw members of the community to utilize these affordable resources while sustaining ABC No Rio’s reputation as a long-standing site of neighborhood solidarity. In 2016, the building was demolished in preparation for construction of a new, safe and secure home. While the project remains in yet another state of transition, its successes linger in our consciousness as a model for community power and collective resistance within the arts.
Howland, Becky. “Real Estate Show” in A Book About Colab (and Related Activities), 108-109. (New York: Printed Matter, Inc.), 2015.
Messner, Ann. “Real Estate Show” in A Book About Colab (and Related Activities), 105. (New York: Printed Matter, Inc.), 2015.
See Messner (no. 2), 105-106.
Goldstein, Richard. Quote from Becky Howland in “Enter the Anti-Space” in the Village Voice (1980), reprinted in ABC No Rio Dinero: The Story of a Lower East Side Art Gallery, 64. (New York: ABC No Rio with Collaborative Projects), 1985.
Moore, Alan and Miller, Marc. “Portrait Show: October-November 1981” in ABC No Rio Dinero: The Story of a Lower East Side Art Gallery, 98. (New York: ABC No Rio with Collaborative Projects), 1985.
Tsuchiya, Toyo. Artist Statement, June 1992.
See Moore and Miller (no. 5), 144.
Kimball, Whitney. “The ABC No Rio Interviews: Peter Cramer and Jack Waters” in ARTFCITY (2012). Retrieved from http://artfcity.com/2012/08/01/the-abc-no-rio-interviews-peter-cramer-and-jack-waters/