Who Was the Connector Between the Uptown and Downtown Art Scenes in the Late 1970s and Early 1980s?
How the Re-create Auto Gave Ascension to New York's Downtown Arts Scene
Xerography was non only central to the production and dissemination of fine art and community, merely changed who could be an agile participant in the making of culture.
In the early 1970s, as New York Urban center was in an economic and social downturn, a vibrant arts scene emerged in downtown Manhattan s of 14th Street. From its onset, it was fully enlightened of its condition as a bona fide scene. Over the next two and a half decades, the scene gave rise to a generation of innovative artists, writers, and musicians. All the same, even though the downtown scene generated its share of art world celebrities, it was always defined by a distinctly DIY aesthetic and ethic. Equally Brandon Stosuy emphasizes in "Up Is Up, But So Is Down," a compendium of texts and images documenting downtown'south literary scene, writers and other cultural producers hither "took an agile function in the production process, starting magazines, small-scale and occasional presses, galleries, activist organizations, theaters and clubs," and this was every bit truthful for the scene's celebrity artists every bit information technology was for its cultural producers working in relative obscurity.
Like most scenes, this one was the result of a convergence of historic, economic, and technological factors. As emerging artists actively sought out spaces to occupy rather than negotiate entry to, cheap hire emerged as a central factor in the scene's evolution (and at the fourth dimension, inexpensive rent was non hard to find). Simply cheap rent was not the only factor driving the downtown arts scene; information technology was too contingent on the growing availability of a new medium: the copy automobile.
Emerging in the early 1970s just as copy machines started to move out of offices and libraries and into bodegas and re-create shops, New York's downtown scene benefited from this new form of inexpensive impress production from the outset: Musicians without agents lined up at re-create machines to turn out homemade posters advertising upcoming gigs; downtown artists embraced copy machines as a way to motility their art out of the gallery and museum and into the street; and writers seized re-create machines as a style to cocky-publish zines, broadsides, and even books. As Marvin Taylor, manager of the Fales Library and Special Collections at New York University, observes in "The Downtown Book," "Downtown piece of work exploded traditional art forms, exposing them as zero more than cultural constructs. Verbo-visual work, installation art, operation art, cribbing art, graffiti painting, Xerox art, zines, small magazines, self-publishing, outsider galleries, mail service art, and a host of other transgressions abounded." Significantly, most of the art forms listed by Taylor depended on xerography either directly or indirectly: It was either the medium these artists were working with or in, the means by which they were publicizing their work, or the medium of product and broadcasting.
Xerography'due south platform, in a sense, was the city itself, and anyone strolling by was a potential subscriber.
Non surprisingly, the Downtown Collection, which Taylor founded at Fales in the early 1990s and continues to develop, is a veritable storehouse of xeroxed ephemera. Among the dozens of collections — some donated by private artist and many others past creative person collectives and other downtown organizations and galleries — are countless examples of artworks, posters, flyers, and printed materials turned out on copy machines. Yet, in my diverse trips to Fales to conduct out research, I institute it difficult to find a definitive case or set of examples that might help me illustrate merely how important xerography was to the development of the downtown scene in the 1970s and 1980s. The collections that comprise the Downtown Collection incorporate examples of all the types of art mentioned by Taylor — xerox art, zines, small magazines, and mail art alongside thousands of photocopied flyers, ticket stubs, and posters. In some collections, receipts and cheque stubs reveal just how much money some of the individuals and collectives represented in the collection were spending on xerography at the time. More than or less absent-minded, however, are whatever self-witting references to xerography. Ane is left with the impression that, like talking or breathing, xerography was only something people were doing all the time, out of necessity and convenience. For this reason, it wasn't something anyone spent much time thinking or writing nigh or documenting in any formal manner.
Photographs of artists hanging out around Xerox machines at all-night re-create shops in the East Village may be elusive (which is not to say that such photographs are non in the drove, merely that I never institute them), just at that place is no way to visit the Downtown Collection and not get out with a stiff impression that in the 1970s to 1980s, xerography was fundamental to the production and broadcasting of art and community building in the downtown scene. In some cases, it was how emerging artists established international reputations while conveniently bypassing gatekeepers at established galleries and art museums.
Downtown artists like Jenny Holzer and Keith Haring, for instance, experimented with xerography in the late 1970s and 1980s before settling on other media. With few exceptions, however, works turned out on copy machines were rarely labeled or categorized as such. The medium, in most cases, was and then taken for granted that it was not always identified as a distinct form of image reproduction, fifty-fifty when being used to produce artworks.
This is precisely why, on one of my trips to Fales, I asked to look at 1 of the most iconic works to come up out of New York'southward downtown art scene in the 1980s. David Wojnarowicz'south "Arthur Rimbaud in New York" features a photocopied (yes, I confirmed) cutout of Rimbaud'southward face up cast confronting various iconic locations around New York Urban center. In its acid-free folder at Fales, the mask (probable just 1 of the many versions used by Wojnarowicz in the serial) looks like zero more or less than a hastily produced, photocopied paper mask. In the series, the flimsy paper mask is repeated again and once again, and in each photo the mask is attached to some other trunk in another space — a gesture that not only underscores the ephemerality and mobility of the xerographic medium merely also the power of the multiple as a means to quite literally occupy the city.
While Wojnarowicz forth with Holzer and Haring eventually received attending in New York and well beyond, for near artists in the downtown scene the copy machine was less a medium of art than a means of advice and publicity. Later all, prior to the development of digital social media platforms in the late 1990s, xeroxed posters and flyers were the principal means past which artists and performers took publicity into their own hands. Unlike more recent forms of social media, which are typically only or primarily visible to people who are already members or subscribers, xerography's platform, in a sense, was the metropolis itself, and anyone strolling past was a potential subscriber.
It'due south precisely this democratizing effect that David A. Ensminger celebrates in "Visual Vitriol." While recognizing that well-nigh copy machines were produced by the very sorts of large corporations that no cocky-respecting punk would e'er dream of endorsing, Ensminger concludes, "Xerox and others produced machines that freed punk graphic artists from the demands of money, time, and free energy by handing them a machine that could act as a Trojan horse." The Trojan equus caballus in question enabled punk and its signature aesthetic to carve out visible spaces non but in New York simply in cities across North America and well beyond, at a time when many downtowns were more synonymous with abandonment and crime than cultural production. While not everyone viewed punk every bit distinct from the social problems plaguing inner cities in the 1970s and 1980s (in many respects, punk was where it was precisely because loftier crime rates and the divestment of properties had left a convenient space for information technology to fill), at least in New York the punk scene was, from the beginning, deeply entangled with the urban center'due south downtown art scene. Punk'southward visible presence there in the 1970s and 1980s — the walls of posters and flyers for upcoming shows and events of all kinds that appeared as a effect — was a sign of life, of a constantly shifting life force in New York'southward downtown mural. This aesthetic and energy were in plough recirculated in much of the work produced by artists who were part of downtown scene at the fourth dimension.
Punk'south visible presence was a sign of life, of a constantly shifting life force in New York'southward downtown landscape
Xerography, in this sense, offered more than a means of production and distribution that bypassed the expectations and censorship of promoters, curators, and publishers. In the 1970s and 1980s, walls of xeroxed posters and street art distinguished downtown scenes from other neighborhoods by creating constantly irresolute and highly textured facades. Xerography also effectively blurred the boundary between art making, its context, and its publicity. Equally a issue, as artists, musicians, poets, and performers of all kinds publicized their work and events, the urban center in plow was transformed. These posters changed what sure neighborhoods looked like and changed the part of these neighborhoods along the way.
In an interview for the Deed UP Oral History Project, Avram Finkelstein, artist and cofounder of Gran Fury, recalls, "Eighth Street was literally papered with posters, manifestos and posters and diatribes. It was literally like a billboard, the entire corridor between the East and Westward Village, and I recall that every bit a very vital fashion that people communicated in the street. It was gratuitous. Everyone did it. I remember it as a function of my boyhood." Artist and activist Carrie Yamaoka, reflecting on the downtown scene in the aforementioned period, remembers that "back then, you lot could look at a wall and see a poster and you knew that so and and then is playing at the Pyramid on Saturday. … That is really the style you would discover out that something was going on. It was a bulletin lath, only the bulletin board was everywhere."
One might debate that at that place accept always been posters in downtown cores of cities, making what happened as a issue of xerography only an extension of previous forms of urban advertisement. This analogy rapidly breaks downwardly, withal, since with xerography there was a drastic shift in who was producing the posters and how posters were being produced. Every bit Ensminger emphasizes, the postering and flyering that were synonymous with the punk scene and more broadly with artistic production during the punk era were not simply about advertising events. Sometimes, after a bear witness was announced, iii or four different posters would appear ad the gig — some made past members of the band and others by fans (something that xerography made possible past drastically reducing both the cost and time of production). Re-create machines not only helped to forge social bonds merely also arguably changed who could be an active participant in the making of civilisation.
After all, as long as the urban center was a message lath and the bulletin board was everywhere, in a sense we were all living in our communication platform. We walked through it, were influenced by its aesthetic, and of course, as my own archival inquiry for this affiliate reminded me, we took it mostly for granted as well — that is, until downtowns regained their status equally sites of economic involvement and the aesthetics and content of xeroxed posters began to come up under assail.
Every bit downtowns regained their mainstream entreatment in the late 1980s and 1990s (both as sites of commerce and as preferred places to live), public postering — with its strong links to art, activism, and the punk scene — was targeted every bit one of the things to exist contained or eliminated (along with other forms of street fine art). If borrowed time on copy machines and borrowed space on city walls one time offered artists and activists a way to carve out a space for themselves in downtowns and actively participate in defining cities, by the belatedly 1990s these practices were increasingly existence constructed equally antithetical to efforts to make clean up, gentrify, and privatize the aforementioned public spaces.
Kate Eichhorn is Chair and Associate Professor of Culture and Media at the New School. She is the author of several books, including "The End of Forgetting" and "Adapted Margin," from which this article is excerpted.
Source: https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/how-the-copy-machine-gave-rise-to-new-yorks-downtown-arts-scene/
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