Nada Lives
“But then they danced down the streets like dingledodies,
and I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after
people who interest me because the only people for me are
the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk,
mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time,
the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but
burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles
exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle
you see the blue center light pop and everybody just goes
‘Awww!’” from On
the Road by Jack
Kerouac, 1955.
Nada, nothing. In the beginning there was the void. The
infinite chasm of nothingness. From this void all things,
all of creation was sprung. Or so it is written. “The Tao
that can be told is not the eternal Tao.”
Nada. Street of lost souls. Shades half living, half dead.
The inebriation of the senses, rush of ghosts, invisible
made visible. Slouching down to the Lower East Side.
Looking for freedom where no one can touch you. Where they
cannot find you. Cannot see you. Cannot control you. Land
of neglect. The wasteland.
Nada. Abandoned storefront. Rivington Street. Sign on the
door. Condemned. Landlord: the Lower East Side Renaissance
Corporation. A punk kid slaps down his $1300 unemployment
check. This space is the place. Casa Nada. The house of
nothing. Out of nothing, the universe at his feet. House of
no return. No turning back now. Enter the void.
Delusional. Grandiose. Catastrophic. Heroes are either
courageous or they are fools. He was tending toward the
latter. The hero. To stand apart. Like Ivan the Terrible’s
Oprichnina, the “men apart.” The task, the challenge: to
create something new, “cutting edge,” excellent. Ah, but
it’s all been done before! But here… an alchemy of art.
Pure gold from pure dung.
And lost to the dung-heap of history was a flourishing of
creativity. Difficult to discern, especially for the
uninitiated. A “scene,” a living scene that could have been
a movie set. Not a mis en scene (scene within a scene), but
more like Antonin Artaud’s mis en abyme (scene within the
abyss). There was no script. Unscripted drama. Artists in
the city. New York City. What was and possibly still is the
creative center of our small corner of the known universe.
Seething with discontent.
A constant struggle for survival itself. An empty beer
can was worth a nickel. Twenty of them would buy another
beer and a couple of bags of chips. We lived like this for
years. No heat during winter in this cold Renaissance. No
running water. Yet, we were in a constant state of
celebration. Celebrating what? Celebrating the act of
celebration itself. And occasionally, a rare moment, we’d
even sell our art.
This was the action we made against the action that was
made in another district, a mere two blocks north of us.
The “East Village,” as it had come to be known, through the
subtle manipulations of real estate dealers, had become, in
our eyes, a haven for phonies, to quote the late and great
poet and painter Yuri Kapralov, the “bullshit artists.” Of
course, some would feel the same way about us, with all of
our posturing and pretense. But, in a kind of “fuck you”
act of nihilism, we did not “give a shit” about the East
Village or even the New York art world.
We knew that the Oprichnina, the “men apart,” stood on
their own terms and must be recognized on their own terms.
For, even while the angry and disenfranchised artists
rejected the mainstream, they yearned to be seen, to be
recognized in their own right.
Dredging
up the memories of a time nearly forgotten, amidst the
pounding drums and thrash of guitars. A droning chant of
punk rock music obliterates the senses, drowning the
cavities of the mind where sinuous vestiges of the past
reside. Wading through the detritus of age, ephemeral highs
and lows of experience are the first to emerge. Stories of
lovers enthralled, entwined in the heat of entangled
longing, later wrecked and scattered , beached for
eternity. These stories could be told from many a tangled
angle. But, for truth to be told (whatever “truth” means)
and for that truth to be told from the heart, these tales
of fleeting romance must be heard. For the story of one’s
life may be the story of one’s loves, ecstasy and the pain
indelibly wrapped -up as one.
And wasn’t it for love that they beat
upon their precious metal? Lashed out a frenzy of color
onto bare canvas? Pounding their sheet metal noise and
dubbing the cacophony “music?” Speaking, screaming,
foaming at the mouth an unending tirade to the gods of
delerium? Three
women, three sirens, beckoning the drunken sailor to his
fate, dashed on the rocks of a forgotten time. Three
phases, three fates. The brief scene, etched into
memory.
He missed the oeuvre, the first scene, the 99 nights on
Rivington Street, 1983, act one. He was not there. Instead
he had been alone, solitary. Simultaneous with the
Rivington experiment at the No Se No social club was the
initial outpouring of the burgeoning East Village art
scene. Jim C.’s first show was on 10th
street
in a dark storefront called the Limbo Lounge, adjacent to
the quintessential East Village gallery, Gracie Mansion.
The East Village in 1983, alongside the No Se No 99 nights,
was a brief, exciting period where artists of all modes and
mediums were able to emerge. This was the non-exclusive act
one, the opening of the play.
The
mise
en scene was the
East Village, the Lower East Side, after a decade of
abandonment and decay. It was said that the police stopped
short of First Avenue, leaving the reckless “wild east” to
relative anarchy and lawlessness. This was a place where
“anything could happen.” This was the place where the
outlaw after hours clubs like the Limbo and the No Se No
could flourish. Where “do it yourself” (DIY) was the word
of the day. Where, if you wanted to be “in it” you simply
did it, no holds barred.
He had
met a woman, who was like a sorceress, whose ancient,
though modern day frescoes were marked with inscriptions
which spoke like the fates. They had met once more the
night of Metta Madsen’s opening at Piezo Electric Gallery,
then located on Clinton Street, just south of Avenue B.
Suzie Strande had somehow wandered into his experimental
performance and gallery space The Magic Gallery (the
painter Edward Brezinski’s fifth floor walk-up tenement at
Third Street and Bowery), during a poetry reading by Miguel
Pinero a few weeks earlier. Sleeping on the floor of a
friend’s studio, he was lost. Susan was his refuge.
Rounding the corner by Life Café, he ran into D.D. Chapin.
Chapin knew that he was looking for a space where he could
live, work and show the work of others. A storefront. This
was the time of the East Village storefront gallery
explosion. Run by, and largely for,
artists. The
first wave, 1982-1983. Now it was August of 1984.
The
“first generation” artist run galleries of the East Village
had been usurped by the influx of the more commercial and
entrepreneurial second and third wave galleries. The
atmosphere in the East Village had become less fluid, more
business-like. The original verve of the scene was lost.
This “new” East Village was a moribund simulacrum of the
real East Village, of the art world insurrection, which
gave it its birth. The rediscovery of Rivington Street,
removed from the East Village by a mere two blocks, yet
light years away from that village in its atmosphere and
ambience, provided fertile ground for a re-enlivened
artistic renaissance. Rivington was a place that was just
enough off the map to again enable artists to thrive in
relatively unfettered, unrestricted modes that were being
lost in the “uptown” sector of the Lower East Side, the
East Village.
The place was at 40 and 42 Rivington
Street. Three storefronts in a row. The first was No Se
No, the second, Freddie the Dreamer, the third, Casa
Nada, later abbreviated , simply, to Nada.
When
Jim C. first opened the Nada, an artist named Buster
Cleveland was living at No Se No, at 42 Rivington
(figure 1).
1.
Buster Cleveland at No Se No circa 1984 by Jim C.
Buster
had been an instigation to Gracie Mansion during the
pre-East Village days when East Village and Rivington
artists like Ray Kelly, Arleen Schloss, Ed Higgins and
others were more focused on the scene in Soho. In an
interview Gracie Mansion and Sur Rodney Sur, directors of
the Gracie Mansion gallery, vividly recollect their
experiences with Buster Cleveland:
Sur: The
gallery next door was Lisa Meyer. It was on the corner of
West Broadway and Spring. That corner became a hangout for
people like Buster Cleveland and Ed Higgins. They called it
"the office." Réné ("I am the best artist") decided to do a
magazine called The
Office. He
photographed us all on that corner called "the office."
Gracie:
And then Buster had the idea of selling artwork out of the
back of a limousine. We used to do these shows. Before then
we would take over collectors' houses, bringing the
artwork. Buster saw me as a dealer, that I was sort-of
running this gallery. He pushed me into doing the gallery.
Sur was doing shows at an animal hospital. This was in
1981. Buster said, "Let's do a limo show! Let's rent a
limousine, park it on the corner of Spring and West
Broadway, right by the 'office,' and sell for a couple of
hours." So that was like a first gallery (Cornwell:
Appendix, p. 252).
Buster
was living in the storefront of No Se No, which had been
shut down by the city after the 99 nights performance
series of the summer of 1983. Buster’s incarnation of No Se
no was the “Club Dada,” which he ran with Diane Siprelle.
The opening Club Dada show was by invitation and Buster had
invited Susan Strande. Jim C. did not know Buster until he
had appeared on the Rivngton scene. Jim had been immersed
in Latin American literature, and had also run a “Club
Dada” himself, so he dubbed his new storefront at 40
Rivington the Casa Nada, Nada a conglomeration of No Se No
and Dada. Permeated with the sensibilities, or more aptly,
unsensibilities, of the Dada movement, the first choice for
an art show at what some called “New Say Nada” was an
experiment in chaos, dubbed the Anarchy Open Art Show. He
posted a call to show art on the street, on crumbling
buildings and even on derelict abandoned cars. The posters
showed an image garnered from a book called the
Secret
Museum of Mankind, an
early anthropological work that showed depictions of tribal
people. He chose a picture that featured tribal hairstyles,
with a caption to the effect that everyone was invited to
bring their work, sight unseen, to the Casa Nada, where it
would be hung on the wall and shown immediately. The inside
joke was, “we don’t look at slides.”
Buster’s Club Dada show, while well intentioned, had no
follow up to it. Meanwhile, Nada’s Anarchy Open Art Show
succeeded in attracting literally hundreds of artists and
viewers to the Rivington scene. Fred Bertucci had just
opened a storefront at 40 Rivington, as well, and “Freddie
and Jimmy,” as they were sometimes called, began a series
of art events that re-awoke the vibrancy of the earlier
1983 scene of the legendary 99 nights. The Nada gallery and
the Freddie the Dreamer gallery soon held openings on a
nearly week-by-week basis.
The
concept of Nada grew out of a preoccupation, an obsession,
with the imminent prospect of total annihilation. Having
come of age in the midst of cold war fear, tangled with the
1960s, the Viet Nam war, widespread urban unrest, the
rioting and looting which accompanied the civil rights
movement, the decade of assassinations, political and
otherwise. John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King,
Malcolm X. The rupture and disjuncture of a society in the
throws of chaos permeated my own consciousness and scores
of others.
An artist friend named Dan Peterson gave Jim C. a book in
1979 – The
Marines Handbook. Jim C.
stared with wonderment and disbelief at a chapter on
conducting a nuclear war, that described it as though it
was not only inevitable, but also winnable. All of the
petty feuding and disagreements between peoples,
nationalities, philosophers, races and religions seemed
trite and meaningless, to pale in comparison with the
deafening wail of sirens, the blinding light of the sun –
our nuclear reality. This was the age of Reagan's, “We will
begin bombing in five minutes.”
Nada was
a place that was no place. A land of scattered souls, lost
angels flying upward with the wind. An image from
The
Marine’s Handbook of the
blast at Bikini Island became the symbol for Nada. Etched
over the mushroom blast, Jim C. drew radiating symbolic “X”
marks, crosses and the dripping text - “Nada” – spattered
beneath it. A
photograph from Hiroshima also inspired the Nada. The Casa
Nada storefront itself was an isolated architectural
afterthought, as it partially jutted out in physical space
from the building, a left over artifact resulting from the
thoughtless demolition of the adjacent building which once
stood on the vacant lot that was to become the Rivington
sculpture garden. Andy Castrucci’s brother, Paul, was an
architect. Andy inscribed on Nada’s wall facing the
sculpture garden, “The architects did not care.”
The photograph of Hiroshima after the bomb blast showed one
remaining, lone brick building left standing in the midst
of the utter devastation. This was “Nada.” The atmosphere
with which all of this brutal and edgy nihilism flourished
was “tongue in check.” All of these notions of imminent
devastation and annihilation, it must be noted, were made
while the Nada artists were studiously annihilating their
own senses. Insane laughter accompanied the ritual smashing
of beer bottles, spreading the litter of our age over a
collective mindscape. They became one with a spiraling and
disintegrating landscape. Sex, drugs and alcohol were
consumed to the deafening drone of a catastrophic noise
that they called music.
Nada was informed by Dada. As Hans Richter described the
early Dadists in his book Dada:
Art and Anti-Art, “Our
provocations, demonstrations and defiances were only a
means of arousing the bourgeoisie to rage and through this
rage to shame faced self-awareness. Our real motive force
was not rowdiness for its own sake, or contradiction and
revolt in themselves, but the question (basic then as it is
now), ‘where next?’” (Richter, p.9). For, out of Nada, out
of nothing, springs all of creation. “Todos y Nada” was
their battle cry.
Nada was intent upon disturbing and disrupting a status quo
that would result, finally, in an absurd and total
annihilation. The Rivington artists gained a reputation,
which inspired fear among the mainstream of the art world.
They were the punks of the art scene. “Outside of society,”
as Patti Smith would describe it in “Rock ‘n Roll Nigger,”
where she wails, “Jackson Pollock was a nigger!” A
neanderthal, primate, grunge existence was revealed in the
murky and dusty detritus of the scene and of the age.
The Anarchy
Art Show flooded
the Lower East Side with posters depicting the image of the
nuclear explosion with the dripping word
Nada above.
The invitation was to any and all artists willing to bring
their work to la nueva Casa Nada on Rivington Street.
Artists ask, “Is there a size limitation?” “No, if you got
it, I’ll hang it.” Large paintings are hung over the small
ones. As people stream into the gallery, Jim C. removes the
large paintings from the walls, revealing the hidden show
of smaller paintings. Everything is in an anarchic state of
flux. Critics spewed venom. “Overly democratic,” sneered
Carlo McCormick in the East
Village Eye. The
implication was that, without proper curatorial judgment,
this experiment, the Anarchy Art Show, would be a show of
pure schlock. Yet, the Anarchy Art Show was more about
flying in the face of a society that says that art is
something only produced and judged by a special, critically
sanctioned, elite class of people. The Anarchy Art Show was
about elevating the status of the struggling artist more
than of declaring that one had discovered and was showing
“great art.” Nada quickly became known as the “cutting
edge.” Ironically, Carlo’s was one of the few mentions Nada
ever got in the art rags of the day (the exception being
David Herskowitz’s Paper
Magazine). The
Anarchy Open Art Show helped to open the floodgates for a
resurgence of the Rivington scene.
Jim C.’s video camera captured the moments as they flew by.
Time, like the black hole remnant of a supernova, expanded
then collapsed. Days stretched into weeks, weeks into
years, years into decades. So much happened in such a short
amount of time that the decade of the eighties felt like a
century.
A vacant lot was adjacent to Nada. A mirror of “nothing,”
the lot was strewn with garbage and litter. This lot was
home to Geronimo, who lived there during the warmer months
of the year. Jim C. and Strande were drifting apart. Jim
asked her to do a kind of surrealistic collaboration. She
trucked a pile of painted cow bones from Wisconsin to the
site of the vacant lot. There he dug at the barren earth,
scratching its hard, unrelenting surface. He planted these
bones into the earth. The lot became transformed into a
weird, unsettling apocalyptic image. This was in the fall
of 1984: the first incarnation of Geronimo’s abandoned lot,
what was to later become known as “the Rivington sculpture
garden.” Soon after, artists such as Strande, the late
Geoff Gilmore nicknamed Gizmo(figure 2), the artist group
called Babalu (John Waldo and Pat -----), and Andrew
Castrucci would paint a set of murals on the walls of the
lot, with Babalu creating a sculptural relief of an ear
protruding from the bricks on the wall of Nada facing the
once empty space, as if the walls actually
did
have
ears.
2.
Geoff Gilmore, otherwise known as
“Gizmo” at Nada,
circa 1984 by Jim C.
There is little doubt
today, for those who were
there, as to how this empty lot
first began to be a place where artists worked. Out of
the bones of the dead the Rivington Sculpture Garden was
born.
Jim C.
had fled the East Village for new turf. The East Village
had proven to be a place where up and coming, emerging
artists and entrepreneurs vied for attention in an
atmosphere of heated competition. He had thought that the
move to Rivington Street and Nada would free him from the
constraints of others trying to exert their power over him.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Enter “Cowboy” Ray
Kelly. He had first seen Ray earlier, before Nada, at ABC
No Rio, an artist’s cooperative at 156 Rivington Street.
Jim C. was videotaping the art and performances there when
he noticed someone staring, emotionless. Jim C. gave a nod
and a smile, but this man gave no reaction at all, but a
grim, stolid, steady stare that cut right through you. He
did not crack a smile. His unflinching demeanor was
unsettling. This was Cowboy Ray. Later, Fred Bertucci would
introduce Ray to Jim C. as the owner of No Se No, or “Club
Dada,” as Buster had envisioned it. Jim C. could sense what
he felt was a simmering resentment from Cowboy. Jim C., a
young upstart neophyte was edging in on Cowboy’s territory.
Jim C. ignored these feelings, intent upon diving head on
into a wild creative process where he would try to rival
the Dadaists, in this new and lost place. The Anarchy Art
Show and the bone sculpture had brought literally hundreds
of people to Nada. Susan had left. Cowboy curtly told Jim
C., “She doesn’t like you.” Upon entering No Se No, Jim is
greeted by a “Hello, asshole.” It appeared that everyone
was referred to as “asshole.” “Just one of those things,”
he guessed, “Maybe we are
all just
assholes. Live with it.” One time, entering No Se No, Ray
yelled, “Hey, faggot!” Jim said, “I’m not gay, asshole.”
Ray came to Nada to check out the scene. Upon seeing a
painting with sculptural clay molded onto it, Cowboy took
his thumb and squashed it out, saying, “weak
materials.” The artist, Geoff Gilmore, or
“Gizmo," had
no problem with this. He said, “Yeah, Ray’s right – weak
materials.” Ray’s power over others was strong. People
tended to bend easily to his will. Jim C. was not one of
those people.
The No Se No had ceased to do performance because the city
had shut that activity down. Ray and Fred had an idea to
open the basement of 40 Rivington to create a new “basement
No Se No.” Jim C. was “down with that,” so they all got
together to work at clearing the basement. One night Ray
videotaped Fred and Jim shoveling piles of garbage from the
basement. At six o’clock in the morning they all left to
“crash.” Around 10 a.m. Jim C. went outside and discovered
the bone sculptures had all been toppled, crushed and
destroyed. This was the abrupt end of the first phase of
his experience on Rivington Street.
Cowboy Ray had a girlfriend named Rachelle Garniez.
Rachelle and Ray had shaved their heads, a noticeable pair.
Rachelle was young, around 18 years old, easily 15 years
younger than he. She was also quite attractive, with an
angular face and bright darting eyes and a smile to match.
Jim C. discovered that he had unknowingly videotaped her
previously at a club called Danceteria, where he had
documented painter David West’s Sex
Questionnaire interviews
that were later aired on cable TV’s Midnight
Blue. At an
art show, the Gorilla Art Show on Avenue B and
10th
Street,
curated by the late Red Spot (Alan Dougherty) Jim saw Ray
and Rachelle, where he was able to document the two on
videotape for the first time. The show featured Kwok, a
Chinese calligrapher that had been featured at the No Se No
Button Show. Kwok would translate anything you want onto a
button using Chinese calligraphy. Ray had Kwok write
No
Se No in
Chinese calligraphy.
Like an angel
from space, a
lost planetella
who was
out of orbit, in search of her home planet, Rachelle spun
with a wild, creative force, a crazy maelstrom that meshed
together with Jim C’s chaotic visions. Rachelle called
Nada New
Say Nada,
combining No Se No with Nada, indicating that something
very new was happening on Rivington Street. The Nada was
deeply engaged in the anarchy show. For a period of around
10 months, from fall 1984 to fall of 1985, Rachelle played
co-director of Nada. Jim C. and Rachelle’s portraits were
featured in a show of art dealers at Colin Deland’s Vox
Populi gallery on East Sixth Street between Avenue A and
Avenue B. The photographer Tom Warren photographed the two
for Roland Hagenberg’s East
Village Book. Her
friend, the painter Geoff Gilmore, better known
as “Gizmo,” pleaded
with Jim C. for a solo exhibition of his paintings. This
ended the Anarchy Open Show and began a period of solo
artist installations at Nada. Geoff was the first artist
to solo at Nada. Jim C. began an experiment in
cross-hybridization, combining Rivington and East
Village artists in an ongoing series of installation
exhibitions. Jim typed up a schedule of shows, which
change on a weekly basis. This list was mailed to
the New
York Times gallery
listings where a woman named Jane English, friendly to
the downtown scene, made sure that Nada was included.
The Nada Gallery was listed under “other” galleries,
even though Rivington Street is only two blocks south of
the East Village. Rivington, located “on the Lower East
Side.”
It is
difficult to recall all of the shows at Nada.
Kevin Wendall, otherwise known as
Fa-Q, (figure 3), Scot
Borofsky, Ena Paul Kostabi, Ena’s brother Mark, Daze
(Chris Ellis), David West, Rick Prol, Peggy Cyphers,
Edward Brezinski, Brian Goodfellow, James Romberger,
Marguerite Van Cook, Michael Roman, the Cracked Mirror
Show, curated by Michael Carter, which featured David
Wojnarowicz, Richard Hambleton and
Joe Coleman, a show protesting police
brutality called “Brute Force,” curated by Robert Costa
(figure 4), Krzysztof
Zarebski, Diane Vierra, the Russian painter Victor
Skersis, Conrad Vogel and many others…. But the summer
of 1985 included one show that was to revive the damaged
bone-sculpture garden.
4.
Kevin Wendall (Fa-Q) 1985 By Jim C. 5. Robert Costa at Nada
circa 1985 by Jim C.
This was the Japanese-American sculptor Ken Hiratsuka’s
installation of stone sculpture. Ken had a concept of “one
line,” infinitely connecting, unifying the parts into an
all engulfing whole. He feverishly, obsessively etched this
jagged, sometimes spiraling line on stone fragments, blue
stone sidewalks in the East Village and Soho, even tracing
this line on the body of his girlfriend, Gloria MacLean, as
a performance during his show at Nada, all videotaped by
Jim C. This show attracted a large throng of people. A kind
of creative potential, a momentum, was gathering at the
Nada openings. At Ken’s show that momentum reached critical
mass. Hundreds of onlookers watched as Ken “planted the
seed.” The “Seed” was the name given to a large boulder
that Ken had etched with his one line. It was transplanted
from Central Park to a new kind of zone, what has been
called a “temporary autonomous zone” (see Michael Carter’s
article on Hackeym Bey’s concept of T.A.Z.). The fanfare
and excitement of Ken’s installation heralded a furry of
activity that culminated in the Rivington Street metal
sculpture garden (which is detailed in other chapters in
this book). Toyo, at one point, painted the sculpture
white, but Jim C. used the white paint as a gesso over
which he began, in a fit of alchemy, spray-painting the
sculpture gold. Shit turned to gold.
Colin Deland had asked Jim C. to
document the sculptor Robert Parker hacking up an old
checker cab with a circular saw. The cab had been
abandoned in a vacant lot on the north side of East
12th Street between Avenue B and C. The
components hewn from the rusty old cab were reformed
into cube structures for a show at Colin’s gallery.
Parker’s checker cab installation at Vox Populi was
later sold to a nightclub called The World, located on
East 2nd Street near Avenue C. Cowboy and
Parker hauled the rest of that cab down to the lot
adjacent to Nada Gallery. This was the beginning of the
metal sculpture that was to envelope the entire lot, the
Rivington Sculpture garden.
Jim C. had been working as a “VJ”
at a nightclub called Danceteria that was located on
21st street between
6th and 7th Avenues. Vjing is a form of video
art where the artist projects mixes of video live to an
audience. Combined with sound, this becomes audiovisual
art. Jim had been showing his video and audio
abstractions around the downtown scene.
At Nada, No Se No, ABC NO
RIO, Darinka, Limbo. Carlo invited him to show at 8BC
(East 8th Street between B and C and
the Chandelier on Avenue C and East
7th Street).
But,
even while the scene appeared to be catapulting and
frenzied, an article appeared in Leonard Abrams’
East
Village Eye that
effectively took the wind out of the sails of the East
Village movement. This was apiece written by Carlo
McCormick entitled East
Village R.I.P. Although
the Rivington scene was separate geographically and
aesthetically to the East Village scene, Rivington’s
identity lay in its opposition to the East Village.
To
Be Continued...