Oral History Interview with Alanna Heiss, 2010 June 15-October 28

Oral history interview with Alanna Heiss, 2010 June 15-October 28 This interview is part of the Elizabeth Murray Oral History of Women in the Visual Arts Project, funded by the A G Foundation. Contact Information Reference Department Archives of American Art Smithsonian Institution Washington. D.C. 20560 www.aaa.si.edu/askus Transcript Preface The following oral history transcript is the result of a digitally recorded interview with Alanna Heiss on 2010 June 15 and October 28. The interview took place at Art International Radio in New York, NY, and was conducted by James McElhinney for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. This interview is part of the Elizabeth Murray Oral History of Women in the Visual Arts Project, funded by the A G Foundation. Interview JAMES MCELHINNEY: This is James McElhinney speaking with Alanna Heiss for the Archives of American Art, at Art International Radio at 108 Leonard Street in New York, New York on Thursday the 15th of June, 2010. Thank you for agreeing to this conversation. ALANNA HEISS: Well, I certainly have been looking forward to it for a long time. And I think that it's symbolic that we're having the conversation at the old Clocktower. The AIR radio offices and broadcast officers are at the Clocktower, which has been a place that I have directed since 1972. When I left, a year ago, the position as director of PS1, my exit plan took me back into Manhattan and down to the Tribeca area and up the stairs, 12 flights, and up the extra walking stairs to the 13th floor and down the long corridor to the original place where I not just started out completely, because a couple years had gone by in the early '70s when I had other locations. But this was always a favorite location and it's one that I've kept now for all these years. And to be back here is a great, great pleasure. I've valued and laughed my way to work—I live not far from here—every single day since I've been coming back. It's been nothing but pure joy. MR. MCELHINNEY: It's a kind of homecoming. How has it changed in 38 years? MS. HEISS: Well, it is a homecoming when Aggie Gund, a great friend and a great patron of PS1 and of the Clocktower and the radio programs, did a farewell party for PS1 and a welcome home party the same time a year ago, June. And that was her way of suggesting that these two events dovetailed with each other. In fact, I set everything up in my office, which is my same office space that I had in '72 to '76, and I set it up as an idealized version of what my office was like then. It's actually much better now, but it's the way we remember things. When you're young and little, the ponies are always horses and your grade school is actually the size of a giant university and to me, my first activities in New York were mysterious, exciting and alluring. And the Clocktower was and is a gorgeous Stanford White tower, a beacon of sanity in an insane art world, and it remains that to this day—or, I should actually say a beacon of insanity in this too-sane world, which is the more important way to word it. MR. MCELHINNEY: But it's straining against the current in a healthy way. MS. HEISS: Well, yes. In the '70s, when I began working in what we now see as the art community or art world, it's usually called, it's not funny but it's a way of suggesting that our world is so unique and so compartmentalized that there is a whole world that goes on parallel—there's a parallel world like there is in science fiction, and I think a lot of critics and artists and art dealers and collectors do feel that way. They feel they're living in a parallel world. I certainly do. I use the expression as much as anyone else. But the art community and art world of the '70s was kind of a—I don't want to say sad because it was the time of my youth so for me it was terribly happy, but it was very much a depression in New York City. There were thousands and thousands of acres and acres of empty buildings, caused by a fairly significant depression in the real estate market. The one that we're looking at now doesn't even seem to compare with what was happening in the '70s. The New York City government was quite afraid of their upcoming bankruptcy. They were afraid that the city would be punished unnecessarily because of the proponents of Republican values from the rural areas in the Midwest—which is exactly where I come from so I understood how and why it would be punished to be in New York City instead of Des Moines, Iowa. And really, the situation other than the fancy, or to us very fancy, museums like the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney and the Guggenheim, those museums seemed fairly frisky. And the galleries that were around were very frisky. I mean, certainly Leo Castelli was—you can't get friskier than Castelli. But amongst the artists there was, you know, a certain compelling feeling that there was very little money and it had to be spread around and it was very hard to get studios. Compared to that, on the other hand, was a feeling of great interest in a new, a very new—it had only gone on for about 10 years—international companionship among the world of contemporary artists. The shows of the artists of the time were not done much in New York but they were being done a lot in Germany and they were being done in a very small way in France. Switzerland was extremely active in organizing artists of its time. By that I mean New York artists and all the artists from Germany and England. And England did put on a series of some significant shows. In fact, that's where the expression "pop art" came from was from a critic named Lawrence Alloway, who in the '60s organized a show I think at the ICA in London, which brought the expression "pop art" into usage. In any case, the New York artists I was with—my friends, my colleagues, my peers—were in a state of extraordinary excitement because foreign curators and collectors were coming every day from—mostly from Europe but some from the West Coast, looking at art, organizing shows and collections, and the feeling was you could really get in on this. It was a lot like perhaps—soccer was just being taken up in New York and people thought they could get on a soccer team really fast if they were— The enthusiasm was very high, the money was very low, and I walked into that magic situation with an idea that I would provide spaces for my own shows and I would organize, and I would organize them around a central administrative headquarters, which would have a pompous and pretentious name. I had Brendan Gill, the enormously—I guess the word is erudite. There's no number of words under a hundred that could describe Brendan, who was brilliant and a great writer and great speaker and a theater critic of the New Yorker and also a great architecture critic, writing books on Frank Lloyd Wright, and who also wrote books on Tallulah Bankhead and whose friends ranged from—Mrs. Astor was a very close friend of his, and Jackie Kennedy also, to really quite unacceptable people. Brendan liked the Times Square night life. He liked—he thought prostitution and cabaret were one and the same, and he liked to go to bars and watch standup comedy and all these sort of things that made him a unique person while he was tearing around New York going to black-tie dinners. He was afterwards going to very wild bars, and then in between he would be giving speeches at private clubs in New York, which were quite snooty. So he was the chairman of my board, and he advised me to name this new not-for-profit thing we were starting in a way that would allow it to be removed by the pomposity of the wording, which was we devised something called The Institute for Art and Urban Resources. And, now, we worked on this a long time. The institute was very legitimate. It was modeled after an institute for policy studies which had been started by some of my radical friends from the University of Chicago that had gone to Washington to start a think tank, and it meant you could bring to you people who would hold the position of fellow, which is borrowed from the Oxbridge world of participants who are not really working very hard but whose ideals were yours. And that was the fellow principle at the institute, and the other part was art. Well, that's pretty clear. And "urban resources," what that really meant was we were going to do a lot of work with things that were owned or existed in the urban environment rather than a rural environment, but also that the emphasis was going to be more on use of buildings than gathering of collection. There was no interest that I had then or now in collecting anything.

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