No Garlic Please points us to Spain's Marrs Bar and their "Beer Mat" festival. You might know them as coasters, and if you have a Danceteria coaster, please scan it and send it in! There may be some in the lower strata of the archives on Madison Ave., but we want a picture of yours before you sell it on eBay.
The Downtown Show now on view at the Grey Art Gallery at NYU presents an amazing and definitive collection of works and personalities that made up the New York art scene, 1974-1984.
“Lifestyle was as much a creative practice [then] as putting time in the studio,” says pop culture critic
and curator Carlo McCormick, the guest curator of the Downtown Show. Opening a café, playing in a band, scouring dumpsters for a flamboyant outfit to wear at Danceteria, all these creative acts weren’t “tangibly fine art practices, but they could bring together in one room a bunch of cool, creative people, and a certain amount of hybridity would come of that.” So writers hanging out with musicians started bands, or artists starred in movies or did performance art..." (The Villager).
From the show's site: "...the Downtown scene attracted painters, sculptors, photographers, musicians, performers, filmmakers, and writers who could afford the then-low rents of SoHo lofts and Lower East Side tenements. Downtown artists violated the gap between high art and mass culture, removed the production and reception of avant-garde art from isolation in elite circles, and directly confronted social and political concerns. Creating work that was both populist and subversive as well as utopian and raw, they irreverently pushed the limits of traditional artistic categories—visual artists were also writers, writers developed performance pieces, performers incorporated videos into their works, and everyone was in a band."
Don't miss the Sublime Time Playlist, and The Downtown Show's iMix on the iTunes Music Store!
Nam June Paik, the avant-garde artist credited with inventing video art in the 1960s by combining multiple TV screens with sculpture, music and live performers...died Sunday night of natural causes at his Miami apartment.
Steven Kolpan is a trailblazing video artist who architected Danceteria's groundbreaking 24/7 video production, exhibition installation, and video lounge, the first of its kind anywhere. In this 1982 article for a show he curated, Kolpan examines a Paik-infused piece by Kit Fitzgerald and John Sanborn, resident video artist/collaborators at Danceteria on 21st Street.
A TRIBUTE TO NAM JUNE PAIK: PORTRAIT OF A MAN WHO WON'T STAND STILL
by Kit Fitzgerald and John Sanborn (1980).
NAM JUNE PAIK is the seminal video artist in the world today, as his recent exciting retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art proved to those not familiar with his work, and re-emphasized this fact to those of us who have respected and revered his work as a video art pioneer for many years. Fitzgerald/Sanborn's tribute is Paik qua Paik. The form of their tape is pure Paik, using tools developed by Paik, examining the concerns of Paik as an artist, incorporating his major influences (especially John Cage) and his collaborators (especially Charlotte Moorman, the "Joan of Arc" of video art).
Fitzgerald/Sanborn's work gives us a close-up/collage view of the relationship of Nam June Paik to technology, to other people, and to his personal over-riding obsessions, which appear and re-appear in so many of his works - i.e.: sex, the development of new instruments exemplified by his altering and re-inventing the cello for Charlotte Moorman; "Devil With a Blue Dress On" by Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels (a song rescued from oblivion by Paik); the humor of the artist, which personalizes a medium that has for so many years been a monolith becoming a dinosaur; and the influence of John Cage on the "global village," or a universal culture/consciousness, among other obsessions.
Kit Fitzgerald and John Sanborn capture not only the Paik form, but the Paik substance. When during an interview Paik is asked about his development of the Paik/Abe video synthesizer he laughs it off as an insignificant contribution. Paik explains that this tool is an extension of the fingers (digits/digital), rather than the mouth. A Zen master once explained the difference between chopsticks and a spoon with the same words. Paik is the Master and Fitzgerald/Sanborn's tape is reminiscent of a Zen koan (a puzzling question of cosmic importance posed to the Zen master). Paik's answer is also a classic response - a "slap across the face" - providing instant, involuntary enlightenment.
In explaining his own work in this video tribute, Paik himself poses a Zen koan. He asks, "What is Buddha?" and rhetorically answers, "It is toilet paper already used and dried up." Kit Fitzgerald and John Sanborn have created a video work to make precious the conscepts, ideas, and mastery that we often take for granted or ignore, or consider used and dried up. Nam June Paik is the vehicle to jog our consciousness.
Steven Kolpan, Curator
"Radical Departures"
June, 1982
