AWAY FROM THE MAINSTREAM: THREE ALTERNATIVE SPACES IN NEW YORK AND THE EXPANSION OF ART IN THE 1970s By IM SUE LEE A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2013 1 © 2013 Im Sue Lee 2 To mom 3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am deeply grateful to my committee, Joyce Tsai, Melissa Hyde, Guolong Lai, and Phillip Wegner, for their constant, generous, and inspiring support. Joyce Tsai encouraged me to keep working on my dissertation project and guided me in the right direction. Mellissa Hyde and Guolong Lai gave me administrative support as well as intellectual guidance throughout the coursework and the research phase. Phillip Wegner inspired me with his deep understanding of critical theories. I also want to thank Alexander Alberro and Shepherd Steiner, who gave their precious advice when this project began. My thanks also go to Maureen Turim for her inspiring advice and intellectual stimuli. Thanks are also due to the librarians and archivists of art resources I consulted for this project: Jennifer Tobias at the Museum Library of MoMA, Michelle Harvey at the Museum Archive of MoMA, Marisa Bourgoin at Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art, Elizabeth Hirsch at Artists Space, John Migliore at The Kitchen, Holly Stanton at Electronic Arts Intermix, and Amie Scally and Sean Keenan at White Columns. They helped me to access the resources and to publish the archival materials in my dissertation. I also wish to thank Lucy Lippard for her response to my questions. I am fortunate to study and work with the most congenial and inspiring colleagues. I would like to thank in particular Jong Chul Choi, Ellie Laughlin, and Maura Gleeson in School of Art and Art History for sharing and discussing my idea and for reading drafts. Finally, I am grateful to my family. My mother has sustained me with spiritual support throughout the duration of my doctorial program. My sister, Youn Sue, and brothers, Jae Sung and Jae Jin, supported and cheered me on to keep things going. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .................................................................................................. 4 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ............................................................................................. 7 ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................... 8 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................... 10 2 THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART: THE MAINSTREAM ASSIMILATING NEW ART......................................................................................................................... 24 Spaces: “Actual Space” within the Museum ............................................................ 30 Information: Communicating Changes .................................................................... 50 Projects: Institutional Condition of MoMA ............................................................... 73 3 112 GREENE STREET: AN EXPANDED CONTEXT OF ART ............................... 87 Beyond the Museum-Gallery System ..................................................................... 93 A Continuous Inaugural Exhibition: The Building and Artworks ............................ 103 Installations and Performances: On the Borders of Space and Body ................... 115 Food: Art in the Communal Context ...................................................................... 135 Anarchitecture: Rejoice in Architectural Problems ................................................ 146 Avalanche and Video Performance Show: Expansion of Artistic Network and Emergence of New Media ................................................................................. 156 4 THE KITCHEN: EXPLORING THE VIDEO MEDIUM ........................................... 166 Technology, Television, and Video Art ................................................................. 170 The Kitchen as a Live Audience Testing Laboratory ............................................. 180 The Intermedial Kitchen for Music, Video, and Collaboration ............................... 188 Image-Processed Video........................................................................................ 201 Kitchen Video Festivals: Video Expanding the Boundaries ................................... 206 The Kitchen Moves to SoHo: Video in the Alternative Space ............................... 220 Conceptualizing the Medium of Video .................................................................. 231 The Kitchen, a Community and Institution ............................................................ 240 5 ARTISTS SPACE: CANONIZING POSTMODERN AESTHETIC ......................... 247 Governmental Funding and A New Mature Alternative Space .............................. 250 The Diverse1970s at Artists Space ....................................................................... 258 3 Shows Series: Toward the Theatrical Condition ................................................ 268 5 PersonA Performance Series: Theater and Language ......................................... 278 Artists Film Series and Performance Series: A New Syntax of Temporality ......... 287 Pictures: Formalization of Postmodern Aesthetic ................................................. 296 6 CONCLUSION ...................................................................................................... 311 APPENDIX: LIST OF FIGURES .................................................................................. 322 LIST OF REFERENCES ............................................................................................. 329 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .......................................................................................... 347 6 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS AAA Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C AWC Art Workers’ Coalition EAI Electronic Arts Intermix, New York E.A.T. Experiments in Art and Technology EGMC Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal MoMA Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum Archive, Museum of Modern Art, New York NEA National Endowment for the Arts NYSCA New York State Council on the Arts PAD/D Political Art Documentation and Distribution; PAD/D Archive, MoMA Queens Library, New York 7 Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy AWAY FROM THE MAINSTREAM: THREE ALTERNATIVE SPACES IN NEW YORK AND THE EXPANSION OF ART IN THE 1970s By Im Sue Lee August 2013 Chair: Joyce Tsai Major: Art History Radical practices that emerged in the sixties complicated the political and aesthetic possibilities of art in the seventies. Medium specificity, so closely identified with the modernist criticism of Clement Greenberg, was challenged in the sixties and seventies by new media and site-specific, performance-related art as well as by institutional critique and socially-engaged practices. As artists worked in the expanded context, the notion of medium opened to other media and to politico-economic and socio-cultural logic. These circumstances expanded the boundaries of art, and led the contemporary art world to directly intervene in sociopolitical, economic, and cultural domains. My study addresses the relationship between the emergence of alternative spaces and the expanded notion of medium in the 1970s. I argue that the alternative spaces provided a new field of discourse to encourage artistic experiments and to produce new ideas of art. My dissertation centers on three case studies of key alternative spaces founded in New York City in the early 1970s: 112 Greene Street, The Kitchen, and Artists Space. I also interpret significant changes in MoMA as the counterpart of alternative spaces in relation to the protests mounted by the Art Workers’ Coalition and its limits as an 8 incubator of new art. Through a methodical analysis of artistic practices at these spaces, I attempt to provide a detailed picture of the alternative art scene in downtown New York, from which the notion of medium expanded into context-related and community-related levels. First, to address how the early alternative spaces expanded the artistic context, I focus on artistic practices at 112 Greene Street. Next, I examine the role of the early alternative spaces in understanding electronic media as an art medium by addressing the practices at The Kitchen. Thirdly, I investigate Artists Space in terms of production of the postmodern aesthetic, and demonstrate its transformation to a postmodern art institution. 9 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION The issues of “intent and context” and “art and life”—phrases that were so much a part of the vocabulary of that time—exemplify the direct relationship between the emergence of the artist-generated alternative spaces and the form and content of the work that took place in those spaces.1— Jacki Apple We frequently encounter artwork that blurs the borders between art and life or between aesthetic and discursive production in contemporary art exhibitions. This common experience raises a question: what enabled art to expand its boundaries from object-oriented production to context-oriented practice and to sociopolitical intervention? As many have argued, the range of media, contexts, and practices evident in contemporary art is indebted