Artist Stefan Eins's Alternative Art Space in the Bronx, Fashion Moda
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Artist Stefan Eins’s alternative art space in the Bronx, Fashion Moda, laid the foundation for the ’80s downtown art scene. After starting out in the early ’70s in Soho in Manhattan, Eins relocated to the Bronx by the end of the decade to create a more democratized art experience by and for the people. Playing host to the first graffiti art show, Fashion Moda worked at the intersection of high and low with a global, multicultural perspective. By the early ’80s, as downtown was blossoming, Eins quietly shuttered Moda’s doors. Upon the thirtieth anniversary of its closing, amid an ever-disappearing New York, Fashion Moda still serves as a pivotal touchstone in the development of the city’s cultural landscape. by Francesco Spampinato 88 89 3 MERCER STORE Stefan Eins, who moved to the U.S. from Vienna in 1967, belongs to that generation of post-conceptual artists who, in the early ’70s, chose downtown New York as the ideal place to observe folk and street culture. Like site-specific installation artists Gordon Matta-Clark and Paul Thek, Eins transitioned from traditional sculpture: “I made sculptures that consisted of individual parts and pieces. The viewer was invited to change their positioning,” he recalled. “Subsequently, I began to focus on multiples and correlations to science.”1 In 1973, he transformed his storefront studio at Three Mercer Street, Soho, had their first solo exhibitions here as That bad reputation attracted Eins into a hybrid space, between science well. Willoughby Sharp, artist and theorist and artists like John Fekner and Charlie lab, avant-garde art gallery, and bric-a- behind the “performance art” journal and John Ahearn. Fekner impressed marks brac shop such as those of the nearby Avalanche, was involved as curator. of shame on disused services, dilapidated bustling Canal Street. But his “commercial Three Mercer Store is part of a long, buildings, and abandoned factories with intentions were utopian,” asserted Alan articulated movement of resistance to the huge stencil graffiti: “Broken Promises,” Moore, militant scholar of New York institutional system of art, born downtown “Save Our School,” and “Industrial Fossil.” underground art.2 Eins didn’t want in the late ’60s and grown around art For a campaign speech, Ronald Reagan to sell out, only propose a different collectives (from Art Workers Coalition to chose some ruins on which Fekner had way of making and distributing ideas. Group Material) and so-called alternative painted “DECAY” as the background. Three Mercer Store, as Eins baptized art spaces (from Artists Space to ABC The Ahearn twins also used the South it, was active until 1978 and hosted No Rio). As Brian Wallis suggested, Bronx as studio, subject, and support of exhibitions, performances, and film these activities allowed artists to “discuss their works. Charlie filmed Wild Style screenings, involving appropriationist and understand their role as workers (1983), soon to become the documentary artists such as Sherrie Levine and Susan within an economically and politically manifesto of hip-hop. “He was close to Hiller. Charlie Ahearn and Tom Otterness regulated system.”3 [Eins], the artist behind Fashion Moda, so as we were putting Wild Style together and SOUTH BRONX HALL OF FAME researching in the Bronx, we would visit Eins, however, didn’t just reposition often,” remembers Fab 5 Freddy. himself within the art system, he decided John Ahearn, instead, made casts of to create his own. In 1978, he moved to locals with the help of Rigoberto Torres. He 2803 Third Avenue, South Bronx, at 147th showed them in South Bronx Hall of Fame, Street, a storefront he called Fashion 1979, at Fashion Moda, after a yearlong Moda—“museum of science, invention, residency. “I went there to cast Stefan. We technology, art, and fantasy.”4 “The New did it in the front window and a crowd York art system was too exclusive,” says gathered from the street,” John remembered. Eins, “Fashion Moda changed that. It was “There was a place called Narco Freedom the end of Modern Art.” directly across the street, which was a very With Joe Lewis, currently Dean of busy methadone rehabilitation clinic, so we the Claire Trevor School of the Arts at the had a regular group of friends that we got University of California, Irvine, and William to know there.”6 Scott, a neighborhood kid, as codirectors, John then installed them on public Fashion Moda became an extension of walls and was even commissioned for some the East Village art community, an engine sculptures for the local police district. His for the emerging hip-hop culture, and, naïve attempt to celebrate the “South as Lewis wrote, a “sensitive nexus and Bronx attitude,” however, was not always polylogue between the multifarious appreciated by the residents, tired of ethnocentric groups that live in and/or pass negative stereotypes. “In their eyes,” noted through the stressopolis, New York City, art historian Miwon Kwon, “Ahearn had via the South Bronx, an area all to often literally elevated the derelict, criminal, and mistitled ‘Criminals Paradise Regained.’ ”5 delinquent elements of the community.”7 (previous spread) Fashion Moda poster by Stefan Eins, 1980. (above) William Scott, Junior Director, and Joe Lewis, Director. Photographed by Lisa Kahane at Fashion Moda, 1981, during Animals Living in Cities, curated by Christie Rupp. (left) Stefan Eins, 1985. Photo by Peter Bellamy. (right top) John Fekner’s Decay, Charlotte Street Stencils, Bronx, 1980; Fashion Moda xerox flyer, 90 courtesy J. Fekner Research Archive. (right bottom) The closing party for John Ahearn’s South Bronx Hall of Fame exhibition. 91 THE FIRST GRAFFITI SHOW EVER the market and the cultural hegemony of Fashion Moda, a pedagogical project that Fashion Moda had a major role in the museums and academies. “We’d like to involved pupils from a local school. Holzer birth of graffiti art withGAS (Graffiti challenge the prejudice that art should carpeted the facade with posters for one Art Success for America), the first legendary be for an élite and that only someone of her first public interventions, Sentence show in the history of graffiti, curated by who’s been to school can understand,” Philosophy. In 1980’s Changing Displays, a nineteen-year-old John “Crash” Matos in declared Eins.11 Haim Steinbach assembled objects collected October 1980. Among the artists featured The first of Colab’s attempt to evade from the streets. Other artists linked to were Fab 5 Freddy, Futura 2000, Lady the art system was 1980’s The Real Estate Fashion Moda are David Wojnarowicz, Pink, Lee Quinones, Fekner, Zephyr, Disco Show, an illegal exhibition in an abandoned Richard Hambleton, Justen Ladda, David 107.5, Kel 139th, Mitch 77, Nac 143, Noc building on Delancey Street, which used Finn, Christy Rupp, Peggy Cyphers, David 167, and Stan 153. “From that first show, “gentrification” as its medium and message. Wells, and Rebecca Howland. everything started,” recalled Futura.8 That same year, Colab and Fashion Moda “Fashion Moda people say they want Before becoming stars of downtown joined forces in the Times Square Show, in nothing to do with concepts, labels, or galleries and before the international a former NYC massage parlor—“a month- schools,” wrote the East Village Eye.14 success, Bronx-based graffiti artists had long party, business enterprise and loosely So, in 1980, when invited to show at the been recognized in their neighborhood, curated exhibition of art, film, fashion, and New Museum, Fashion Moda insisted on in a space they must have looked at exotica,” wrote Jeffrey Deitch.12 presenting as a group, “creating its own as an offshoot of the “true” art world. Both shows were simulations: they used context, where the installation dominated “Fashion Moda’s premise was that art/ a language similar to the official one but over the individual works.”15 creativity can happen anywhere and that through chaotic installations, mock stores, Even for its official presentation to the art can be appreciated and made by people and the confusion between avant-garde art world, in the January 1981 edition of who are known and unknown, trained and folk, high, and street culture. It is this Artforum magazine, it maintained a strong and untrained, rich and poor,” wrote balance between art and non-art to attract anti-authoritarian identity by offering Eins recently.9 downtown artists to the South Bronx, not a brief manifesto in English, Chinese, Graffiti artists from other boroughs— the desire to foster a cultural renaissance Spanish, and Russian—which was an Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and of the neighborhood (as Longwood Art extension of its logo, Fashion 時裝 MODA Kenny Scharf—found legitimacy through Gallery and the Bronx Museum of the Arts МОДА—accompanied by posters by Fashion Moda, because of its position were already doing). Eins, Ahearn, Fekner, and Rupp. As Lewis at the epicenter of where hip-hop was Theirs was a tactic of disappearance explained recently, “Ideologically, Fashion flourishing. “They understood and agreed from the traditional art world. “We were Moda was quadra-lingual with a global to the whole approach,” says Eins, who saw part of a movement that was interested philosophical perspective that talked about graffiti as an instrument of institutional in moving art out of the white cube and multiculturalism before it was part of a critique, shifting the axis of art from the the small world that served and talked to the larger conversation in the art world.”16 center to the periphery, in a material but itself all the time,” stated Colab artist Jane also figurative sense. His following quote Dickson, who also exhibited at Fashion says a lot: “Creative expressions that address Moda.13 And Lisa Kahane, who more than We’d like to the public directly, as in Subway Graffiti, others documented the activities of the do so without the Involvement of the gallery and its unusual setting, tells me: “The challenge collector, the gallery owner, the critic, and Soho art scene seemed tightly scripted.