Transcript of AS-AP Panel at CAA Conference, February 2005

Transcript of AS-AP Panel

"Art Spaces Archives Project : Buried Treasure"

Presented At

College Art Association Annual Conference

Atlanta, February 17, 2005

Panelists:
David Platzker [moderator]
Irving Sandler
Marella Consolini
Julie Ault
Yasmin Ramirez
Marvin Taylor


David Platzker: Good afternoon. I want to thank you for coming to attend this panel: Buried Treasure, Art Spaces Archive Project. I'm David Platzker, the project director of AS-AP. On behalf of AS-AP I'd like to thank the College Art Association for making it possible to present this discussion this afternoon.

AS-AP is a new "organization" conceived about two years ago and begun in earnest this past August, with support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Our steering committee includes Rebecca Cederholm from the College Art Association, Linda Earle from Skowhegan, Elizabeth Merena from the New York State Council on the Arts, Betsy Sussler from Bomb Magazine, Marvin Taylor from the Fales Library at New York University, and Martha Wilson.

AS-AP in its initial stages has a mandate to accomplish two national initiatives. First the creation of a location database, a finding guide to the places, spaces, and other centers of avant-garde arts activity, or alternative arts activity, in the United States from the 1950s to the present. Surprisingly, no such index has ever been compiled, and the one we're developing will be inclusive of nonprofit spaces, nightspots, periodicals, and any other locus of activity, including for-profit, quasi-nonprofit ventures, or any other hubs of activity. We've documented over one thousand of these artistic entities, I and expect that we've ferreted out about less than half of the existing spaces. We're also interested in those spaces that are both living and defunct, which is to say that we're interested in any form of space that existed now or has existed for the last fifty plus years.

Secondly, we're interested in the fiscal state of the archives of these artistic focal points. As most all contemporary alternative or avant-garde arts organizations are by definition interested in embracing the new, not obsessing over the past, AS-AP wants to determine the condition of the historic documents, such as announcement cards, board minutes, correspondence, ephemeral material, fiscal documents, and any other flotsam and jetsam that provides concrete documentation to the artistic residue, as well as more immediate materials such as audio tapes, artistic debris and other artistic residue, if not the artwork itself. These materials, if recognized, have great value, both fiscal and historic. Most venues of artistic avant-garde activity, simply have not had the time, money or desire to do more than throw these materials in boxes and send them into deep storage. AS-AP wants to quantify the extent of the material, ascertain condition, and then, with future financial assistance, be able to provide standards, know-how and funds to help preserve this vital heritage for study by historians.

AS-AP's website, which is www.as-ap.org, and there's a very helpful card that you can grab from me, to help you remember that, is the beginning or our reaching out to identify this vital data. I want to encourage you to browse the site, where you'll find more information about AS- AP, and the beginning of our index of the avant-garde or alternative movement, as well as other resources. If you're from one of these places or spaces, and you have an archive, we hope that you'll go to the site and check out whether or not you're already indexed, and if you're not, we can have you instantly online. If you're a scholar or other interested party our database is fully searchable, for your own use in discovering the wealth of activity that's incurred in the United States.

In past conferences, I've given a fairly standardized monologue entitled "Your Trash is my Treasure." Prior to giving the lecture I visited a museum curator in New York, and with her permission poked through the contents of her trash can. The things that I find within an institutional trash is breathtaking. Announcement cards from hundreds of institutions, press releases, correspondence, and other items that my friend doesn't think twice about recycling, could be pilfered. It's literally a time capsule of the contemporary art world world-wide. And personally as a dealer of this sort of material, a speculator in trash, I associate value with this material both fiscal and historic. I'd like to impress upon you that there's no substitute for viewing a work of art in person in order to properly study it, but without the supporting material dredged from archives, oral or written history, as well as a circular file, the artwork itself is often unsupportable. With these primary documents becoming endangered by neglect, lack of funds or otherwise, our contemporary history will be a much more difficult story to relate to new generations and scholars. By preserving the history now, AS-AP hopes to ensure the avant-garde history of today will be seen in full in the future.

With that in mind I want to introduce our panel, and lay out our agenda for this afternoon's discussion:

Irving Sandler will speak about artistic venues, beginning in the 1950s with the Arts Club, which was founded in 1949 by pioneering abstract expressionists, and whose panels he arranged from 1956 to 1962, at the infamous Cedar Tavern in New York City. Additionally Irving's presentation will provide a history of alternative spaces founded in New York City in the late seventies, such as Artists Space, which he co-founded in 1972 and on whose board he still serves.

Marella Consolini of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture will discuss practical legal and ethical issues surrounding a seven year initiative to digitize and transcribe Skowhegan's archive of over four hundred lectures, given by its faculty from 1952 to the present.

Julie Ault, whose book, Alternative Art in New York, 1965-1985, which was published in 2002, will outline the conditions, growth and decline of the alternative arts network in New York. Her book is an inspiration to me as it highlights the need to consider alternative movements as broadly as possible.

Yasmin Ramirez will present "Mi Casa Es Tu Casa: Identifying the Spaces and Places of Latino Art Archives," in which she will provide an overview of recent initiatives to catalogue an archive of Latino art spaces, in New York and California, which are often forgotten by the mainstream alternative movement.

Finally, based on ten years' experience documenting the downtown scene in New York, Marvin Taylor will give an overview of the issues alternative spaces and academic institutions need to consider when discussing acquisitions of archives.

Irving Sandler: Thank you. I started by writing a paper that would take an hour and ten minutes to read. I whittled it down to fifteen minutes. Part of the reason was because we're fairly short on time here, and part of the reason was because out there are people like Christian, a curator at Artists Space, and Missy Joyce Robinson, who founded single-handedly the Sharp Foundation that has done fabulous things and indeed functions as an alternative space. There's Jackie Apple and Martha Wilson and I think we ought to provide as much time as we can for these people. I didn't really want to talk too much about the Abstract Expressionist Club, the Club, as it was called in the 8th Street Club --I thought that I'd focus really on the Tanager Gallery, the leading artists' cooperative on 10th street, and also on Artists' Space, and how these organizations functioned.

But, I think before I do, I would like to say that I will be reading a little bit just to save time and not to ramble too much, that it's important to understand that artists' spaces not only provide venues for artists to show, but they also provide spaces for artists to meet, and to share ideas. This discourse is vital, creating art that is not just a matter of doing one's own thing. It also means drawing from and contributing to the vital art of one's time, that is, using the visual and verbal information provided by the art world to shape one's perceptions and ideas, and adding one's perceptions to the art world's aesthetic and intellectual stew. Otherwise, one's art ends up being naïve and irrelevant. As David began to think or define alternative spaces I also did a little bit of that and wondered ... as far as I'm concerned, pretty much any place that an artist--artists-- meet, whether it be the Sharp Center in Tribeca or the Cedar Street Tavern, back in the 1950s, they for me constitute an artists' space, an alternative space, but as I said, I want to limit myself this afternoon to the Tanager Gallery and Artists' Space.

I'll briefly outline their histories, but underlying my talk is a message that I hope will be of value to some of you, namely, that if any of you identify the need in your art world, whether it be a need for a gallery, a publication, or a place to meet, or whatever, then, do it yourself. Call together a few artists and art-conscious people, to find the need, and meet it. All it takes is vision and energy. Don't wait until you've raised money. We'll have some idea, later on, I hope, from Jackie Apple and Martha Wilson about how much money it took to raise their spaces, in one case, zip.

Begin it on scratch, and move on from there, but begin it. It's not hard to raise money once you've identified a need, developed a good idea and how to meet it, and are underway. Then, just swallow hard and ask rich people for money. And you're going to get it. Major institutions in my city, New York City, were founded by individuals in this manner. Franklin Furnace by Martha Wilson and Jackie Apple, the New Museum by Marcia Tucker, P.S. 1 by Alana Heiss, the Sharp Foundation by Joyce Robinson.

I contributed in small measure to the founding of the New Museum. Marsha Tucker met with me and outlined her project for a new museum. I told her that she would fail. And for an hour or more I detailed every reason why she would fail. Did I discourage her? Not at all. She later told me that our talk was useful because she learned about the problems that she would face.

Why did artists organize cooperative galleries on 10th street in the 1950s? Simply because there were too few commercial galleries that would show their work. There was also, as I said, the need to talk, to me, to avoid the loneliness after long hours in the studio, to socialize with kindred spirits, and to receive the assurance of fellow avant-garde artists that their moves into the unknown were not insane. But there was more. What if DeKooning had not met Gorky or Pollock? What if Clifford Still, Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhard had not become friends? Would Abstract Expressionism have come into being? Or how would it have been different? I wonder.

There were eight cooperative galleries founded, underwritten and operated by artists on and around East 10th street between third and fourth avenues. Artists believed it was important to exhibit on 10th street, to show other artists what they had created. Near the middle of the block was the Tanager Gallery. Founded in 1952, it was first of the cooperatives. Its members hoped to determine art world opinion. I echoed this attitude in a statement I wrote in 1959 on the mission of the Tanager Gallery. I called it "the public extension of the artists' studios. Its shows have reflected the intimate artistic problems that painters and sculptors face, and have proven a means of defining, clarifying and evaluating them." I concluded by dubbing the Tanager "the barometer of the New York art scene" and in retrospect I think for the younger generation, the second generation of abstract expressionists, it did, in large measure, serve that purpose.

The 10th Street galleries tried to be commercial but failed at it. There were very few sales, but that did not bother us then. In fact, I may, if there's time, have time to say a little about this later, the market for avant-garde art, did not really develop until 1958. So through most of the fifties there were very little sales. Well, I can't resist. In the three years that I ran the Tanager Gallery, I managed to sell just one work of art. A woman came in, wandered around, we had a huge Christmas show, over a hundred works. She sort of wandered around and came to the desk where I was writing a review or an article for Art News, and announced that she wanted to buy I work of art. Never happened before. We walked over to a little abstract sculpture of a bull, and she said "how much is it?" and I said, "it's $125." She paused. I paused ... thinking it's too much. I said. "but I know the artist needs the money, I'll let you have it for $80." She said, "if the artist needs the money, I'll pay the full amount," and then, "can we keep it for the duration of the show?"--"Of course."--"Would you leave a deposit?" -- "Of course."--"When the show is over, where should we deliver it?"--"The Museum of Modern Art." I said, "Oh, and, what's your name?" She said, "I'm Mrs. Mellon." And I said, "how do you spell that?" Well that was pure 50s, at least for younger artists.

In 1972 I was asked by Trudie Grace, the director of the Visual Arts Program of the New York State Council on the Arts, to administer a program that sent artist speakers to colleges, many of which were short of money for extracurricular activities. Working closely with Trudie Grace in the office of NYSCA, we were able to decipher its operations, and both of us became increasingly sensitive to an inadvertent inequity in the Council's funding policy, as mandated by State Legislation, namely that only not-for-profit institutions could receive grants. This met the needs of dancers, actors and other performers, who, because of the nature of their work, founded companies. It also suited film and video makers who banded together in order to share the high costs of their equipment. But visual artists rarely set up organizations--they work privately, in their own studios. The Council did provide funds for individual grants. But that was hardly enough. Painters and sculptors deserved more, since they had turned the city into the world capital of art.

Trudie Grace and I raised the issue within the Council, it's higher ups responded sympathetically and asked us to formulate projects that would be of general use to artists. We then invited small groups of artists of the diverse ages, aesthetics and positions within the art world to meet with us in order to identify the needs of artists and to designate programs to alleviate them, and it was at that point that I and Trudie figured out something that has really guided all of my art world activities, that if you want to know what the needs of artists are, talk to artists, they'll tell you. The artists we called together agreed that a distressing problem facing many excellent New York artists was the lack of venues in which to exhibit their art. Moreover there was a great deal of noncommercial art, much of it anti-commercial--that is conceptual, anti-form and so on, that private galleries did not show. We presented the plan for a new gallery and a half-dozen other projects, and assumed that our job was done. The heads of the Council accepted our proposal but informed us that its mandate was to fund arts groups, not to administer their programs. We were then asked to incorporate ourselves into a not-for-profit organization, and, with a grant from NYSCA, put into effect the projects we devised.

In the spring of 1973, Trudie Grace and I opened Artists Space. From the first we placed policy- making directly in the hands of artists. We decided that at least half of the board of Artists Space board members would be artists. That would make us different from typical arts organizations that are controlled by non-artist bureaucrats. We also recognized the need for tough-minded administration. Indeed Artists Space succeeded largely because it was able to couple the imagination of artists when they face the problems of their own community with the skill of a staff adept at Mickey Mouse bookkeeping and writing the elaborate and stringent grant proposals demanded by public and private funding organizations. We decided that each artist to be shown should be selected by a relatively well-known or established artist on a one-to-one basis. This procedure had the advantage of turning over decision powers to artists, of being public because the names of the selectors would be announced, and of avoiding the compromises and tedium of a committee process. We assume that the art-conscious public on the whole would, if only out of curiosity, wish to see what work a known artist believed to be significant, particularly if the venue was easy to reach. We also agreed that each selector would have only a single choice, and that an unaffiliated artist would be shown only once. Thus no person or group could dominate the gallery. We also decided that the gallery would pay for the costs of the exhibition--all the costs. If anything was sold, all the proceeds would go to the artist. We would fund our operations in ways other than collecting commissions from those we were meant to serve.

To make Artists Space more useful to the community, we made the space available after hours, to performing artists, poets, multi-media artists, film and video artists, and art advocacy groups from within the art world. We also arranged panel discussions and lectures on issues of interest to our constituency. Much as we tried we did not succeed in selling art. Since we exhibited artists only once we could not represent them as commercial galleries could. Dealers invited many of the artists we showed to join their galleries and the artists did. We became a feeder for those galleries, a kind of farm team for the majors. We did launch dozens of soon-to-be famous artists and a first show at Artists Space quickly became an important career move.

In 1976 Artists Space hired Helene Weiner as its Executive Director. She believed that our program of artists choose artists had ceased to be interesting to the art world. And she proposed that we maintain the practice of giving unaffiliated artists individual shows, and focusing on them, but that we also curate thematic shows of new art, not readily accommodated by commercial galleries, and that we support the work with adequate documentation, catalogues and the like. Weiner gave Artists Space a new life. As have the subsequent directors, who, in response to changing artists' needs, change the gallery's policies. This continues in Artists Space today, under the directorship of Barbara Hunt.

The problem that alternative spaces--I should say problems--face today, is to justify their existence. In a time of total pluralism, with a huge number of new commercial galleries, certainly in New York, what role can alternative spaces play? It is true that decisions in alternative spaces are made on the basis of criteria different from commercial galleries, and there is not the pressure of selling. Our problem becomes as it was in the past, what are the critical issues that artists face today, that commercial galleries don't or won't deal with?

Thank you.

[Applause]

Marella Consolini: It's really hard to follow Irving. It's a hard act to follow as the saying goes. My name is Marella Consolini, I'm one of two Executive Directors at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and we have a big audio archive that we have done something with. And to put it in sort of context, if you're not familiar with Skowhegan, I have a three-minute video that I'm going to show that includes excerpts from a couple of the lectures and it's kind of exciting to see, and, well, sorry, to hear, really, so let me just push the buttons.

Skowhegan is wonderful and magical, but, what I'm really bringing to the panel this afternoon is kind of a case study, everybody's going to be talking about alternative spaces and archives in lots of different ways, but, Skowhegan has taken an audio archive, and, over seven years and a lot of money, got it into some considerable shape and done some wonderful things with it. It's impossible, as Irving--you know, he took an hour and a quarter and put into fifteen minutes, I can't do seven years in fifteen minutes, so really, I thought the best thing that I could do is offer you kind of a time line, and, not an agenda exactly but a description of the steps that we went through in our archive, and I know that David is going to be, in his role as moderator, later, asking questions and you guys will be asking questions and that probably is the opportunity to go into any more detail.

But what we have, as you saw, I mean the David Smith lecture, you know, from the 50s, is fantastic, we also, I mean, Ad Reinhard spoke at Skowhegan six months before he died. The list is phenomenal, and really represents the crème de la crème of postwar primarily American artists, and it's not just painters, sculptors, etc, it's also we have a Mellon fellow (that's M-e-l-l- o-n!) who's a humanities speaker every summer, so in addition to the artists we have architects, poets, writers, philosophers, dancers, it really runs the gamut, so it's an incredible cultural resource. So we had like six hundred reel to reel tapes sitting in our office in New York, sitting in a room that occasionally had a leek in it, from the ceiling, and that's a reality, I think that a lot of people here are dealing with at the very beginning. What are you doing with your archives, where's the material being stored, what kind of archival consideration is being given to it?

So we had all these reel to reels and this actually started, I've been involved with it for the last four of its seven years, that this kind of has gone from start to finish. But the board finally said, OK, we're sitting on something important here we really have to do something. The lectures have been recorded at Skowhegan since 1952, and 99% of the time they're accompanied by slides, cause usually they're the artists talking about their own work. We do in fact have the majority of those slides, but when we decided to address the audio archive, the question of images, and protecting the artists rights and copyright was really big and scary. And so we decided to focus just on the audio, and as part of the package of the archive, when it goes to institutions who now are housing it all over the country, we're very clear that if a scholar, researcher or artist for whatever reason wants / needs access to those images, the chances are decent that we have them and we can on a one-to-one basis make them available to them. But the visual thing was very big.

So what we did first is, we had to determine the condition physically of the tape, the recording tape on these reel to reels, so we hired a consultant, he told us what he thought, what we needed to then do was tight-wind them, which is a process that is exactly what it sounds like and before you can do anything with audio tape, especially old audio tape, it needs to be unwound and rewound on the wheels, so we did that. Then, this is all, these things are happening, often, simultaneously, I mean I'm giving you a list like this, but often it was sort of a jumble and we had a committee made up of some of our artist board members, our governors and our trustees, who were kind of the steering committee for this. Next we had to decide what format we were going to transfer them to and something that I'm going to talk about in a minute is that, well, you probably can believe how dramatically quickly the technology was changing, is changing, will change. This is also a really big deal. And if you ask me a lot of technical questions I'm just going to blush and say I don't know. But at that time that we made this decision we ultimately decided to digitize them, and put them onto CDs. Our most basic thinking being, once they're in a digital format, whatever is coming in the future--and it's a whole other mindset to try to prepare yourself for things that you can't even conceive of, in terms of technology. And it's happened already in the four years that I've been working on this project.

But that's what we decided to do, was go with a digital-based medium, and we bought at the time, the most archival CDs that we could get, which are gold backed. It's all going to change before those CDs wear out. Then of course we had to start raising money. We raised a little bit of seed money from a foundation that one of our trustees is a part of, we got a small NEA grant, and then ultimately, the Luce Foundation gave us $150,000, which was fabulous and took care of everything we needed to do including transcribing the majority of the archive, which is sort of a separate issue.

One of the kind of philosophical things that we had to address Sandler: was there an aspect of this archive that could be or would be commercial and money producing for us? And we ultimately decided no. I mean we certainly could have gone that way, but we're talking in our case about four hundred artists who have given lectures, some of them more than once, so, the archive at this point is actually closer to five hundred lectures, but approximately four hundred lecturers, which, in case you're interested, is eight hundred CDs, because often they run longer than one CD's worth of time. So we made a decision, no, whatever we were going to do with the archive, we weren't going to sell it, we weren't going to publish it, and, as part of that same discussion, well, I'm getting ahead of myself a little bit, but, then we had to start talking to lawyers, because we had to start determining where really copyright and intellectual property rights centered with all of these artists, because technically they had been in Skowhegan's employ when they gave these lectures, it's part of all of our faculty . . . all of our faculty give a lecture as part of their being a faculty member at Skowhegan.

So technically, really, probably, the copyright belonged to us, but we felt that the right thing to do was to get the permission from each and every artist, estate, or artist representative, to do something with this archive. At this point we knew what we wanted to do, we wanted to give away a certain amount of them, as complete entities, to institutions, research institutions, libraries, museums, across the country, and because of the Luce Foundation grant, we were able to give away five sets. After those five were given away, we now have a materials and administration fee, per set, which is $9500, but that really just covers our cost to dupe a set, and the time and energy that goes into labeling them, organizing them, etc, etc.

So we talked to lawyers and we decided that, yes, we wanted to ask every artist for permission. It took us over a year just to get the language comfortable for the letters that were going to the artists, and then ultimately the letters that were going to the institutions that were going to be receiving them as gifts, because there are certain conditions, just a few, actually, but, for example, it is a non-circulating archive, it's research only, that was really important to us, again as a step to protect the artists. But the language, you know, lawyers being lawyers, the first versions of what they wrote would have sent the artists screaming into the night. It's very scary what those things say, you know, I sign away, unequivocally, my right to blah blah blah, and, I keep going back to these guys and saying, you don't understand, you know, the delicate nature of this, and we finally did it, but, as I say the legal work alone, just to get the letters written right probably took a year.

What happened next was we had to locate all the artists. Right. That was, that was time consuming. And, but we did. We located actually out of four hundred and change lecturers, we ultimately only could not find thirty-two, which I thought was pretty good. But I have great staff, and they really got very very good at searching the internet and phonebooks, and tracking down cold leads, you know, like on TV. So we send them the letters, now do you think that they wrote us back right away and said, sure you can have permission!? I don't think so. It took another year, basically, to follow up, and to get them, and calling pretty much every one of them. We sent them each a copy of the CD, at this point we had digitized the archive, and we sent them their own lecture or lectures, so that they could hear it, and really be fully informed. Only ten people said no, and mostly their reasons were that they felt in their case the visuals were such a key component of the lecture that they just didn't feel right having the audio out there without the visual. It's a fair comment. But I thought that was a pretty, pretty strong response, that we only got ten no's.

We started to transcribe them. That took about three years. I had at any one time between five and seven people all over the country, transcribing them. I'd send them the CD, or, in some cases the cassette tape because a lot of them didn't have the equipment to transcribe from CDs. And we just kept this process going, and they would refer friends, or they'd have to, you know, go back to school, and, that was quite a networking opportunity. And then, really, I guess once we selected the institutions, which was based on a geographical spread, as well as the facilities they were able to offer.

The five initial institutions who received the archive were the Getty, the Archives of American Art, in Washington at the Smithsonian, Museum of Modern Art in New York, Art Institute of Chicago, and Colby College in Maine, because we have a longstanding very close relationship with Colby.

And Colby, interestingly, so there are five fantastic institutions, Colby has dedicated a fulltime person to create, they're the ones who have done all the cataloguing, to go up on the big, it's called OCLC [Online Computer Library Center], some of you will know what that is, it's a, an internet library, cataloguing, reference system, and feel free to correct me if I've butchered that. So Colby, and they're doing a gateway website, so if you type in Skowhegan lecture archive, it takes you to Colby's gateway website and has links to all the institutions and a little history, and a listing of the lectures, and a listing of which ones are transcribed, it's really fabulous. The transcriptions got a little sticky, because suddenly, some of the institutions were talking about putting them online. And, I just hadn't really thought about it, and had to ultimately say no, and write more letters and explain why. It's a fair enough request, but for us we couldn't do it because it was the equivalent of publishing them, and also sort of, a question of, well then why are we selecting so carefully the institutions that get to house this wonderful archive, if you're going to put the material online, it doesn't really make sense.

So, that's kind of a snapshot of what the process was like for us. So again that was seven years and 150, 160, 170 . . . about $180,000 to do the whole thing, and I actually think that we were able to do that very economically. $180,000, to digitize and transcribe let's say five hundred lectures from six hundred reels. I would say to people who are facing something like this and obviously there are so many different media, visual, audio, combination, everything in between. What I said before, keep an open mind to try to prepare for what you don't know is really hard. But you can do the best you can, and you're just going to need to keep, sort of revising what you think you're doing, and other people will help you, I mean there are a lot of people out there, I learned so much from the institutions that are housing the archive, because they're working with the stuff, these materials and these issues all the time whereas I'm just this tiny little isolated person in New York who kind of inherited this big project. But the librarians and the archivists are phenomenally knowledgeable and very generous about sharing that information, and very supportive, I mean those people are just wonderful. My husband is a magazine editor and he just told me the other day, we were talking about this, and he said in the magazine world, when the contracts go out to writers, it says that the magazine has control over their material in all media, currently existing and in the future--that's broad, that covers a lot, you know and that's kind of how you need to think.

I think that's pretty much all I have to say, aside from what important work this is and everybody that's here participating and listening, you know, has a different level of involvement or interest in this, but it's really worth all the time and energy and money because this is our history. And especially in the arts and especially coming out of alternative spaces, and I'm not going to take it personally that Irving didn't list Skowhegan as an alternative space, cause he told me before he started that he was going to, so I know it just slipped his mind. But, you know, the spaces and the material that comes out of them occupies just, like I said, a huge range of ways, and it's so, so important, so, yeah, good luck.

[Applause]

Julie Ault: You know I'm actually from Maine but I never saw it look so lovely as in that film. So in my fifteen minutes I'm going to go back to New York and complement some of the histories that Irving started to raise and talk about, and I'm going to outline the conditions, and the growth and decline of the alternative arts network of the 70s and 80s, in New York City specifically, which is the subject of the book that I edited. As well, in this discussion I want to raise some issues that have to do with the politics of archiving and historicizing that were highlighted for me as I was researching the field of alternative spaces and group structures, many of which are ad hoc to some degree, and difficult to apprehend information on. This is clearly going to be a very short, short version of events geared toward the format of this panel, but my comments derive from the introduction to the book and then extend a little bit out of that, into some contemporary thoughts on the subject of historiography.

The traditional methodologies and institutional structures of the art world have been fundamentally challenged in recent decades. During the 1970s and early 1980s, many artist initiated spaces, and group structures were established as responses to the explicit and implied limitations of the commerce-oriented art world. Critical efforts to theorize representation as a contested arena, and to create venues for self-representation and distribution were generated by and accommodated in these sites.

Relations between changing conceptions and forms of art practice, and the kinds of places and spaces that art circulated in, as well as the desire to battle constructively the disillusionment engendered by the established art system, led to the creation of New York's alternative sector in the 1970s. Alternative strategies for artmaking and venues for new forms of art emerged with a degree of simultaneity.

While some alternative groups created spaces that proposed a counter- aesthetic to the white walls and track lighting of the generic gallery, others emulated that formulaic environment in order to legitimate their endeavors. Some groups functioned on an ad hoc basis with loose membership, and others operated with a tightly defined mission and a fixed structure. Organizations founded in the initial period of New York's alternative arts movement fit into several classifications. Many fit into more than one category. For instance, and these are just a couple of examples that could call up to mind each category ... For instance, experimental exhibition spaces such as 112 Workshop and Fashion Moda were established. Venues for exhibiting the work of unaffiliated artists, such as Artists Space, were set up. Some exhibition spaces originated in response to needs of a particular group of people, for example A.I.R. Gallery, and Just Above Midtown. Medium-based venues, such as the Drawing Center, Printed Matter, and The Kitchen were started. Artist-run or artist-centered spaces, including ABC No Rio, and The Alternative Museum were founded, as were cooperative galleries, including 55 Mercer, and SoHo 20. Many neighborhood and alternative museums, which articulate identity for groups of people, or kinds of art not usually represented in the existing museums were conceived. These included the Studio Museum in Harlem, El Museo del Barrio, and The New Museum. Organizations which facilitate art in public and in previously underutilized places, for instance, Creative Time, The Public Art Fund, and P.S. 1, form another category. The Black Emergency Cultural Coalition, Political Art Documentation and Distribution, known as PAD / D, Art Workers' Coalition, COLAB, and Group Material, the collaborative I was a part of for sixteen years, were collectives with socio-political cultural agendas.

The establishment of these kinds of organizations resulted in a not- for-profit alternative arts network. Their diverse goals ranging from "wanting a slice of the pie," to "wanting nothing less than a revolution," embodied a cultural, political and artistic movement.

The proliferation of such alternative spaces and groups was time-and context-based. A convergence of socio-economic factors led to the flourishing of cultural production in New York City. During the alternative network's growth period, New York was composed of a culturally, racially, and ethnically diverse population in flux. There was an abundance of artists in the city. Cultural and political activism of the late 1960s and early 1970s-- civil rights, the anti-Vietnam War movement, and feminism-- affected many people's consciousness and activities. Affordable residential and commercial rents were available. A plethora of neglected urban sites, spaces and places in transition, as well as a less restricted public sphere than the present, supported efforts to extend art beyond the studio and gallery circuit. The city was then a powerful art center. Finally, the growth of public subsidy for culture coincided with all these factors.

State and Federal Funding for the arts was critical to the emergence and development of alternative art structures. The National Endowment for the Arts had been founded in 1965, and by 1972, had established a Visual Arts funding category called "Workshops" to support newly founded artist-centered organizations. By 1982, that category had become "Visual Artists' Organizations." Funding allocated to the sector increased throughout the 1980s, until 1989, when Congress began to hack away at the NEA's legitimacy, as well as its budget, eventually dismantling its efficacy. By 1995 the category of support for Visual Artists' Organizations no longer existed.

Although public funding was essential to the growth of the field, a dilemma alternative spaces and structures faced was the onset of bureaucracy and hierarchy that accompanied it. Openness and commitment to flexibility in programming as well as in daily operations were frequently sacrificed to the demands of funding constancy, which mandated conventional, static administrative processes and structures. Over time, as the organizations that composed an alternative sector adopted business models of order, and became entrenched in routines resulting from funding guidelines, new disillusionment occurred among artists, this time with the alternatives themselves.

On another track, the art market expanded tremendously in the 1980s. Mainstream media glamorizations which rendered art profitable and superficial in the mid-80s were quickly followed by the Christian Right's demonization of artists and portrayal of art as a moral threat to American society. Against this backdrop, congressional forces effectively initiated their agenda to "get the government out of culture," leaving artists to fend for themselves economically and philosophically, and leaving art to prove itself, or not, in the marketplace of ideas. The alternative and nonprofit arts network, the environment that fostered critical, experimental and controversial art, was a primary casualty of the so-called culture wars.

In the early 1990s, the dismantling of the city's residential rent control and stabilization system was overseen by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. A series of subsequent real estate booms linked to art districts contributed to making space a tremendously precious commodity in New York. Commercial rents were traditionally subject to unregulated increases, but they have virtually skyrocketed in areas such as the East Village, SoHo and Chelsea, as art districts formed.

Growth, competition, skyrocketing rents, and eventual exodus are factors built into the creation and demise of commercial art districts in New York City. Once, alternatives and nonprofits could fit in here and there, nestled in an existing art area or functioning as their own outposts. Now, however, affordable physical space has virtually disappeared in the face of the current real- estate-based-economy.

As they struggled to sustain financial solvency for their spaces and organizations, people got worn out. Missions and methods became outmoded. Although some alternative arts organizations struggled unsuccessfully to survive, many that are now defunct, were strategic and time-based by definition. Other endeavors have retooled their missions and become institutionalized, despite their alternative or experimental origins. Some continue their activities with their original mission more or less intact. Still others have been incorporated into larger structures. The list of alternative spaces, groups and organizations once constituted a vibrant cultural network, but have closed their doors, or dissolved, in recent years, signals the disintegration of an alternative art sphere as once known. There is only a vestige of that particular network remaining, whereas previously, there was an alternative art world made up of venues and voices, practices and projects, agendas and events, embedded in New York City's art system.

So several questions emerge at this juncture. Where have alternatives and challenges to the status quo of the art industry since located? What forms have they taken? What happened with the political, cultural and social agendas and practices that catalyzed the field initially? Some argue that structural changes have occurred within the institutions and system which were critiqued and challenged by alternative initiatives. Some say that the notion of center and alternative was always problematic, both in theory and practice. (I'm hearing yes, next to me. Yeah. [Laughter]) Some say, now, everything is possible within the mainstream art world, that an alternative network is no longer necessary. Having worked in this field for over twenty years, I can attest to many welcome changes within it, to widened institutional doors, to dislodged hierarchies and boundaries between mediums, and to new degrees of cultural democratization. I can also attest to enduring opposition to the overhaul of the art industry posited by many individuals and groups through analysis, protest, dialogue and example. Despite that, I would like to believe that critical alternative activities have permanently altered accepted notions and possible definitions and functions of art.

For many group structures and alternative spaces, archiving is beyond the means of time and money available to them. It is important to register into history these activities, particularly activities which don't circulate with objects, or circulate commercially, or get easily historicized. Specific narratives about people, society and history take shape from using archives, depending on what is contained therein. Interpretation is influenced by what is looked at or studied, and with what filters and expectations. Because they are repositories of documents or "facts," archives seem to tell the truth, and they do so with a degree of authority. Archives tell truths, but they can also "lie" through omission, or mislead. Connecting the dots between discrete documents, and discovering relations between information, in other words producing meaning, is what is at the heart of research and historical inquiry. But the "facts" housed within a particular archive are not necessarily systematic. They are often fragmentary, disconnected from context, and sometimes even random. Crucial pieces of information, which might answer questions, to suggest particular narratives, or unlock mysteries, are not necessarily archived or available.

Historiography, whether done traditionally, or with alternative methods and tools, is a creative practice, and a form of production, which ultimately embodies the process of uncovering, discovering and recovering. What is at stake in the discussion of how archives function is access to experience--our own and others--articulations of history, specific conditions, as well as more abstract conceptions of events in time, are produced through such engagements. Cultural formations, especially those that spring from alternative philosophies, and act as counter-models to dominant cultures seem to contradict and evade principles of containment and preservation. The dangers of losing access to our own histories and depriving people in the future of valuable information and models are clearly signposted in this realm, and the necessity for creative and conscious archiving is highlighted.

I apologize that my comments are a bit more about the decline than anything else of that period, I suspect that Yasmin and Marvin's presentations are both going to offer insights into current archiving initiatives, and that'll end us on a more positive note. Thank you.

[Applause]

Yasmin Ramirez: By the way, I just wanted to make clear when you talked about the alternative versus the mainstream model being problematic that Hal Foster was one of my professors at Columbia and we would often clash in our perspectives. His whole thing was: "There is no outside, Yasmin, there is no alternative. There is only the margin and, even that's elastic."

[Laughter]

I always disagreed and I went my own way [Laughter] In any case here is my talk called "Mi Casa es Tu Casa: Documenting Latino and Latin American Artist Spaces."

Latino artists, specifically Puerto Ricans, in New York, a.k.a. Nuyoricans, and Mexican Americans / Chicanos in California in the Southwest, were at the forefront of establishing not- for-profit artist-run galleries in the 1970s. But despite our best efforts to rid ourselves and the academy of institutional prejudices involving race, class and language, these biases are insidious, and continue to structure our idea of " American art". Having just completed my dissertation on Puerto Rican artists in New York, I've concluded that the invisibility of Nuyorican artists in mainstream art history surveys is the result of a constellation of forces that include, A) A backlash against pluralism and multiculturalism, launched by conservative critics on the grounds that heterogeneity in the arts reflects a decline in aesthetic and moral standards. B) The promotion of abstract expressionism, pop minimalism and conceptual art as the definitive vanguard movements in postwar America, that subsequently reduces other forms of expression to secondary or rear-guard status. C) Lingering resistance towards incorporating Puerto Ricans and other artists of Latin American descent into the annals of American art, because of cultural and linguistic differences.

Of course, I am hardly a lone or original voice in the Academy that has taken issue with institutional prejudices. Among the most vocal and influential critics concerning the representation of Latin American and Latino art in the United States are Shifra Goldman, Tomas Ybarras-Frausto, Edward Sullivan, Chon Noriega, Rita Gonzalez, Arlene Davila, Karen Mary Davalos, Alicia Gaspar De Alba, and Mari-Carmen Ramirez, whose groundbreaking essay, "Beyond the Fantastic," criticized curatorial paradigms that fetishize Latin American artists as other-worldly or outside the western cannon.

Presently the curator of Latin American Art at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Mari Carmen Ramirez's essays on curatorial praxis, and exhibitions on Latin American modern and contemporary art, such as "Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde in the Americas," have made definitive changes in the manner that Latin American artists are represented / exhibited in the United States. Through Ramirez's efforts and those of other curators, and scholars such as Luis Camnitzer, Monica Amor, Geraldo Mosquera, and George Yudice, there is a greater interest among art historians to recover the history of avant-gardism in Latin America, and exhibit the full range of activity in the 20th century such as the development of abstraction, conceptualism, minimalism, and post-minimalism in Latin American countries.

A cursory look at the Latin American sessions I saw here at CAA demonstrates that scholarship on Latin American vanguardism and modernism is increasing. In terms of archival research, Mari Carmen Ramirez is spearheading a project that promises to make a significant contribution to the field of Latin American and Latino art. Ramirez has founded a new institution called "The International Center for Arts of the Americas." The ICAA operates like a semi-independent research institute within the Houston Museum of Fine Arts and its first objective is to create a digital archive of primary Documents such as manifestos, letters and writings by artists who participated in the formation of vanguard art movements in Latin America, the United States, and the Caribbean.

Chon Noriega, Director of the Chicano Studies Research Center at UCLA has initiated two groundbreaking research projects that concentrate on Latino artists in the United States. The first is "A Ver: Revisioning Art History" which involves commissioning scholars and critics to complete monographs on Latino artists. The books will be published by Minnesota University Press.

I am on A Ver's national advisory which includes the following scholars and curators: Alejandro Anreus, Gilberto Cardenas, Karen Mary Davalos, Henry Estrada, Jennifer Gonzalez, Kellie Jones, Mari Carmen Ramirez and Teresa Romo. We aim to select 10 artists for monographs per year for the next ten years. We expect that by the year 2020 we will have helped publish one hundred monographs on Latino artists.

Secondly, because so many Latino artists have been undocumented, the Chicano Studies Research Center is also commissioning oral histories on artists and encouraging artists to donate their papers to UCLA and the other research centers we are Partnering with such as Cuban Research Institute, The Institute for Latino Studies at Notre Dame, The Mexican Museum, El Museo del Barrio and the Center for Puerto Rican Studies in New York. The CRCS is sharing the information collected on Latino artists with the ICAA archival project so one project feeds into the other.

Henry Estrada, a project director with the Smithsonian Center for Latino Initiatives is on the A Ver advisory board and his presence serves to remind us that the Smithsonian has been a lynchpin for the above mentioned projects because it is helping to train future generations of Latino scholars and archivists.

Among the projects that the Center for Latino Initiatives sponsors is a summer research seminar for fifteen graduate students called the Smithsonian Institute for Interpretation and Representation of Latino Cultures. Participation in the seminar is open to Latino graduate students in the humanities, and the interdisciplinary scope of the program exposes students from a variety of fields to career opportunities related to the visual arts. The program began around 1998 and over the years the Smithsonian has helped create a network of graduate students and scholars who are interested in archival research and have since become associated with ICAA and A Ver. Additionally, the Smithson sponsors two year long graduate research fellowships, and two post-doctoral research fellowships Latino and Latin American art.

In comparison to the archival projects that are being organized in Texas, California and Washington D.C., New York, arguably the center of the international art world, appears a little behind the curve. At present, the Museum of Modern Art been given a very modest grant of $50,000 to survey Latino art spaces through the New York State Archives Documentary Heritage Program. The archives project is being directed by Taina Caragol who, along with the help of one intern, has managed to survey about fifteen Latino art spaces in the last two years, as well as add about 1,000 new books to MoMA's online bibliography of Latin American art. Her survey on the collections of the Center for Puerto Rican Art, Taller Boricua, The Bronx Museum and The Americas Society, are available on the MoMA website.

In a recent interview I conducted with Taina Caragol, she noted that several of the institutions she surveyed did not want to be publicized on the MoMA website, because they did not have enough staff to attend to scholars who want to see their materials. While cutbacks in the arts have affected all alternative spaces, Latino art spaces in New York have historically suffered from under-funding, and the lack of staff has contributed to the loss, damage and neglect of their collections. On a more positive note, the MoMA survey, as well as A Ver has made Latino artists aware that there is an interest in their materials. To that end, the Center for Puerto Rican studies has given me a modest grant, i.e. $5,000, to begin artist files for the A Ver project--yeah, it's a great post-doctoral grant I got here!

[Laughter]

No, they're good people and I love them. I mean come on, I know they're doing the best they can.

I would like to leave you with the following thoughts. In "An Undocumented History, a Survey of Index Citations for Latino and Latina artists," Rita Gonzalez, observes that Latino artists tend to be written about in discussions of otherness, folk, outsider art, or as exemplars of static minority culture within the United States. I would add that the same can be said about the artists spaces that Latino artists founded. For example, with the exception of Julie Ault's book, Alternative New York, institution building by Puerto Rican artists in New York has gone unnoticed in scholarly writing despite the fact that Puerto Rican artists founded over twenty-five alternative spaces in New York.

I'm not going to name all of them but we've got Taller Boricua, El Museo Del Barrio, The Nuyorican Poets Café, En Foco, The Alternative Museum, Exit Art, the Caribbean Culture Center, Charas El Bohio. In my dissertation I also argued that the Casitas, which are these little multipurpose houses set in community gardens that people decorate and make culture happen in- -I argued that Casitas are alternative space too, so the number of Puerto Rican alternative centers in New York is more like seventy-five. [Laughter] Hey why not make that case? Anyway, the omission of these spaces from the historical record is too often based on the assumption that community-based or Latino-identified galleries catered to a limited, or perhaps lowbrow audience, or that the work exhibited in these spaces is folkloric or marginal to the mainstream. Yet anyone familiar with the inner workings of the contemporary New York art world knows that Puerto Rican identified alternative spaces served diverse constituencies in the 1970s and continue to do so today. The local community is the primary audience, but these galleries also serve the mainstream art world by providing places for emerging artists of color and otherwise to exhibit in New York, and emerging curators to organize exhibitions. We're like one of these "underground" resources in New York.

The Longwood Art Center, in the South Bronx, is a case in point, founded in 1984 by the Bronx Council on the Arts, an agency that Bill Aguado, a Nuyorican artist activist has directed for over twenty-five years. The Longwood Art Center can boast of nurturing two artists who won the Macarthur award, Pepon Osorio and Fred Wilson. Whereas mainstream dealers curators and critics are now much more inclined to visit shows of emerging artists like The S Files at El Museo del Barrio, and Artists in the Marketplace at the Bronx Museum, Puerto Rican identified art spaces rarely received exhibition reviews in the1970s, a fact that suggests New York art critics foreclosed a possibility that vanguard work could be found in galleries that identified themselves as Puerto Rican or community based.

In sum, A familiar trope that's used to define and sometimes dismiss Latino alternative spaces is the idea that they are casitas of art, little houses of art for a minority population who couldn't get to the big house of the mainstream museum. But the historical record proves that Latino artists' spaces are generous. That they may appear little because there's a lot crammed inside them. Our casas de arte can be your casas de arte too, and they have been. You just have to be willing to walk in with no preconceptions, to speak a little Spanish and to be willing to contribute to their upkeep. Thank you.

[Applause]

One of the things that I wanted to add is that we're really optimistic about these archival research projects and about using the internet to our advantage. Many of us are working with living artists, and we're hoping that we can finesse this whole copyright issue, because, you know, we're familia and expect things are going to be cool. And also, this issue of archiving alternative spaces versus artists, well in the case of Puerto Rican artists in New York you have so many artists who founded alternative spaces that you get two for one. It's all in the way you think about it, so it seems doable to all of us at A Ver and the ICAA, we all think we can do it, we all have this belief that it's going to make a big difference. Of course, I also know that this idea that we can create these amazing digital image banks that are accessible to everyone is not going to be easy. We're just going to try and struggle through it and I hope you can support us, and you look out for all these sites. Thank you.

[Applause]


Marvin Taylor: Thank you. I know we're running a little behind so I'll try to make this brief. I've entitled my remarks "In the Belly of the Beast," because when one thinks about alternative art spaces, one doesn't necessarily think about massive libraries and institutions like New York University. I sometimes think that in building the downtown collection, which is where the archives that we have of alternative spaces reside, that my major job, and the major job of any of us who care very much about this material, is to mediate between creative people and the larger structures of culture to make sure that these larger structures --such as the way libraries processing books--don't undermine the tenets that were set out by these alternative spaces. I'd like your to keep that overarching statement in mind as I proceed with what I'm going to say today.

There are three areas that I'd like to discuss: first, what can an institution like a library or an archive bring to the archives of an alternative space-- I suspect that's why I'm on the AS-AP board; I hope I can provide some insight into that. Second, what are the major issues involved in acquisition, (by acquisition I mean the process of acquiring these archives, bringing them in, and then managing them, because it's not a one-time event--, in fact, I think this issue is the meat of what I have to say today. And finally, what are the processing concerns, and how--this is internal to the library--how can we make sure that we process materials in a way that enlightens the content and doesn't fall into the pitfalls that Julie spoke about. We must remember that archives are fickle, that people don't keep everything, and that you need to support any archive with oral histories as Yasmin just said.

Just a bit of background on the downtown collection: It began ten years ago; it currently contains about 12,000 printed books and some 7500 linear feet of archives documenting the Lower East Side and SoHo arts scene from 1974 to the present. So it's roughly, contiguous with the work that Julie had done on artists' spaces downtown. While our focus is very much on downtown, it's not just art though; it's also about the literature and music scene (both the punk scene and the minimalist scene) and a variety of other cultures downtown. In addition to alternative space papers we have the papers of individual artists like David Wojnarowicz and Martin Wong. we have recently received the archives of Richard Hell and Richard Foreman. We're actually branching out into experimental theatre as well, so we're trying to look at downtown as a whole community of creative people working in the avant-garde.

So, what can an institution provide for an alternative space? Probably number one it may seem rather silly, is climate control for your archive so that there isn’t a broken pipe, so that there is some air conditioning, and that there’s protection from fire. I worry about all the materials that have been lost already and all those materials that are in danger of loss because they’re sitting in spaces with very poor environmental conditions. Poor housing and storage are the single worst threats to these archives. Another issue is access. As someone mentioned earlier, a lot of the archives don’t even want to be opened because they don’t have staff to allow researchers to use the material. Unmonitored access leads to theft and destruction of collections. Institutional repositories can provide safe environmental control and monitored access for collection. An often overlooked service institutions can provide is the administration of a collection, including exhibition loans, registrar functions, etc. When we began to think of taking on these kinds of collections and we had to realize that we’re no longer going to be a very straightforward archive; we’re taking on some museum and gallery functions and—but more on that later, because it’s one of my whipping horses, as it were.

The other thing we can provide is security, not only from fire and water, but also security of use of materials in our reading rooms etc. (As an aside let me say that the Downtown Collection is open not just to scholars and students, although they’re our primary user base, but also to members of the community and artists to come in and view material. You have to make an appointment, but, we feel that it’s very important that we reach out to the community. It’s funny, at NYU you have more access to the rare book library than you do to the general stacks).

The other thing that we’re set up to do is provide preservation including the latest in preservation techniques for a variety of media, not just paper-based materials. In fact, in the past few years we’ve spent a lot of time raising funds and trying to raise awareness of the importance of preserving video, which is even at greater risk than sound recordings. We stand to lose a huge amount of video that was created before 1980, within the next five to ten years. Especially if any of you have one inch or half -inch open reel –this format is very volatile and we’re lucky if we have anything left on those tapes. It is essential to remember that some of the earliest performance work was actually taped on half-inch open reel video.

Finally, the one thing that is peculiar to the very nature of an institution and different from alternative spaces: larger institutions have a certain amount of stability because we tend to have larger endowments. While and NYU’s not among the most wealthy of institutions—despite public opinion—we have certain funds and an ability to get more funding to care for archives—it is our mission to do so. As we move into digitization there may be more opportunities for funding for archives. That said, we’ve discussed digitization a lot today, but we have not discussed the costs, which are astronomical .

So what is the process by which archives find their way into institutions? For me it’s been a long process –more than ten years—of trying to document the downtown scene in all its aspects. The work of AS-AP is a boo to any of us who are interested in documenting artistic material. What I keep hoping, and I’ve not quite seen it happen yet, is that other universities in other parts of the country will start to document this material in the way that we have begun to document the downtown scene in New York. We’re still the only collection documenting the downtown scene, and as all of us know, the more places that we collect things, the better the chance that things will be preserved. We can’t do it all. AS-AP is helping locate the important artist’s spaces archive and I hope my colleagues will begin to acquire and preserve the papers AS-AP unearths.

As for procedure, I seek people out, people come to me, word has gotten out through our programming that we’re very interested in helping these archives be preserved, and making them accessible for scholarship. Beyond the first contacts a series of questions always come up, and the first one Sandler: who owns the archive? This is especially important with alternative spaces, because, chances are, there is no documentation about who really owns the archive. It’s a collaborative proposition by three or four, ten people—there could be ten different archives, and more often than not there’s a web of people who were involved. So to actually begin to document a specific archive you need to contact all of them, and each of their personal papers may contain a bit of the history of their organization. Sometimes there is actually one person who may be a secretary who kept the bulk of the papers, but you never know what political biases, and you never know what kind of in-fighting led to the demise of defunct organizations. Quite seriously, so you’re never quite sure what you’re getting, and you have to be careful to try to preserve as accurate a picture as possible, to negotiate all of the different points of view and to locate all individuals who you might have to work with to put the archive together. I’ve learned this from experience.

Another question that often arise is whether an organization is ongoing or defunct. If an organization is ongoing, and they’re in New York, chances are they have a records management problem, which means that they have a portion of the archive which is no longer active, that is sitting in bad storage conditions—probably on the west side of Manhattan in Manhattan Mini Storage—I’ve spent countless hours there pawing over dirty boxes of fabulous stuff, it’s amazing what’s sitting in storage units all over Manhattan. (Sometimes we can help with that, too.) We can organize the papers of a space based on the way they’re keeping them now, and then, we can help them with their back files.

One question that sometimes comes up : is there an archive at all? People may have small bits and pieces of ephemera, but does it constitute an archive? In the worst-case situation all you might have is a list of flyers from a particular venue. But even that is something. We collect flyers and have over ten thousand of them from the period. Sometimes there may be only one postcard for a space and that may be all we’ll have as a historical record, even if the space that was very vibrant. So I second the notion of going through the trash and don’t throw anything out as David said.

Another major issue, and one we’ve touched on several times here, already is copyright. Who owns the copyright? Is there any copyright? How do you get clearances for copyright? Many institutions will want to have the copyright turned over to them. This is ludicrous! It’s simply ludicrous. It just doesn’t make sense for artists’ spaces and artists’ papers, so don’t give up your copyright. Retain it. There’s no reason why an institution should take it. This is a not very popular statement among my library colleagues, but I’m going to make it anyway. And it’s essential—this is the point I can’t stress enough— it is essential for those of us who are negotiating contracts between artists and alternative spaces, and institutions to realize that the contract has to be fair to the artists. It is especially important for in alternative spaces, many of which were founded on notions of ownership that were quite, quite different from how legal contracts work. Legal contracts are all based on your owning something individually. Legal language struggles to define collaboration and most lawyers don’t understand collaboration at all. It’s a constant struggle with the language to make sure that artists are fairly represented and that spaces are fairly represented in the contracts. I probably spend more time on this than any single thing in my job. Also any kind of acquisition process for this kind of material is just the beginning of a very long-term investment on the institution’s part. It’s not a dead collection. It’s not something you process, put on the shelf, and, it’s done. You get involved in the ongoing life of the artists who were a part of this scene, the ongoing research that goes into working with these materials. You have to be prepared for that. It differs from a lot of what many archives do—we’re mostly used to dealing with dead papers.

I do want to have one corrective statement, here about value, : they’re really two kinds of value inherent in archival material: one is research value. There’s no question that the papers and the archives of alternative spaces have incredible research value. With few exceptions do they have monetary value that is equivalent to the research value. It’s just simply how the marketplace operates with this material. I have been offered many collections which contained original works of art. And we love having original works of art in the collection, however people tend to think that the price of the archive is based on the art market prices for individual works of art, and that’s simply not the case. And it’s hard to explain because everyone thinks that, oh, you know, paintings are selling for $400,000, why couldn’t the archive be worth the aggregate of the twelve pieces by Keith Haring that happen to be in this archive plus $1000 per box? It doesn’t work that way. If artists are institutions really need money, then sell off the artwork for artworld prices, then let’s talk about the archive.

What we’re interested in is the contextualizing material. This is just a bit of a corrective information about value. You should also know that there are not many repositories that have funding to purchase material. I have to say that anything I purchase for Fales I have to raise the money for. There’s not a separate endowment, and you know, I would love to get Madonna to give me a million dollars to buy material, but she hasn’t been answering my phone calls. Probably that’s enough on contracts.

Finally: processing. Any archivist will tell you that the way a good archive should be processed is in the order it arrived to you; you always preserve the natural order that was put on it by the creators. I think this is especially important with alternative space archives, because that order reflects, more than anything, the structure of the organization itself and how the members thought about how they were organizing things. Sometimes this may look like sheer chaos, but we try very, very hard not to disturb original order. Although I have to say that sometimes we get collections in simply no order, they’re just thrown in boxes and then we hate to, but we have to impose some kind of order. But if you are negotiating with an organization and they don’t want to preserve that original order that you think is important, find somebody else. It’s very, very important to understand how these organizations work, how things are processed.

I’ve mentioned a variety of viewpoints already, I think that’s absolutely essential. I have part of the COLAB papers now, but it’s one person’s view, and that happens to be pretty extensive, but I know that there are many other people out here and Julie I want to talk with you about this—who have a lot of other materials that would be wonderful to add to that picture.

Finally I think the most important thing I’d like to say is that , we’re entering a new realm, at least I hope so and I keep screaming about it in the library world and the archive world; we need a fusion of libraries and archives and museums and galleries. This shift has been coming for a long time, and it’s the artists who’ve been pushing us there for the last fifty years of so. Neither libraries nor museums nor archives have figured out how to create this hybrid institution, and our federal government in its infinite wisdom created the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS), which only seems to hand out money for namby-pamby digitization projects instead of lik addressing the really serious issue that we need a new model for how these organizations should work together. Artists’ papers are not regularly collected—not nearly as regularly collected as they should be—by archives. Museums still focus on and fetishize the object as the "work" of the artists without any context. It’s heartening to see everyone here today discussing the fact that we absolutely must recontextualize these objects. I content that it’s in the archive that we can find the contextualizing materials, if archives start to collect artists spaces’ and artists’ papers.. It’s actually beyond just collecting: you can’t just collect papers and put them in boxes and stick them somewhere. You have to process them. You have to make Them accessible to people. You have to do all the other programming, whether it’s exhibition programming or publications, or creating scholarships that go along with building research on contemporary art.. We need to raise consciousness across the country of how important this material is for the art world, for research, and for our cultural heritage..

That’s a good place for me to shut up. Thanks.

[Applause.]

David Platzker: We have about fifteen minutes left, and I have all sorts of bombs I want to lob at my panel, but I don’t think we’re going to be able to do it all in fifteen minutes. So I’m going to open up the questions pretty quickly to the floor, I want to again thank the panel, for Irving and Marella in particular, as living organizations I’m really curious about the extent of your archives beyond what you’ve talked about, if you could say just a couple of minutes about how many linear feet you have and what the stage of it is and how much money you have to preserve these things that would be a thrill to find out.

Irving Sandler: I think one of the remarkable things about what you’re doing is that you’ve made me aware that you must have a huge archive somewhere where (thank you, Martha), and I now am going to look into it. I know we have, we have, incidentally published a large book on the history of Artists Space, which has a great deal of documentation in it, but what other documentation exists, give me a week or so and indeed I will tell you that—I’m sorry?

From audience: We have quite a bit!

Irving Sandler: Oh, Christian [Rattemeyer]! Oh, I’m sorry, I forgot for a moment you were there, would you answer that question?

Christian Rattemeyer, Curator, Artists Space: Yes, we do have one room that is boarded off [Laughter.] that contains part of our archive –

David Platzker: Is it humidity temperature controlled?

Christian Rattemeyer: Um, have you ever been to Artists’ Space? [Laughter.] We have fans . . . [Laughter.]

David Platzker: Right, and you have interns who are fanning...

Irving Sandler: But it’s certainly something that we would like to look into with you, because it’s indeed a very valuable archive that now goes back to 1972.

Marella Consolini: Yeah, we have a fabulous and extensive photo archive, that goes back to the beginning, to the founding of Skowhegan, for whatever reason, I mean, some people just are inclined to be sort of naturally archival, I mean some people collect material and Skowhegan is very fortunate that the founders as well as, it seems like the administration, going all the way back to the beginning, really was very collecting oriented, so, you know, the photos of the artists who have been at Skowhegan, artists working, artists talking, it’s, I’ve got drawers and drawers and drawers of them and I’d love to do something with them. That really is sort of, to me, material for a book, and what it would cost to properly archive it, and, and I don’t know.

Audience member 1: Photographs, are $67.50 per image.

Audience member 2: Really, $67.50?

Audience member 1: I’m sorry, per hour, and it probably would take, let me get it right, $67.50 per hour, and, a linear foot would probably take you 45 hours.

Marella Consolini: Oh my God! $67.50 per hour and one linear foot equals forty-five hours?

Audience member 1: Photographs are one of the most expensive things to preserve.

Marella Consolini: So that answers your question.

David Platzker: You need a lot of money.

Marella Consolini: That’s another project for me. But you know, and, Marvin talked a little bit about it, and I was actually also going to say it, even from the time that I began working on Skowhegan’s archive, to now, I know that there is much more openness, willingness and resources available for archiving projects of all different kinds. When I first started, you know, poking around to see who might give us the big chunk of money to do our digitization, there weren’t that many options, and I know that it’s multiplied many times just in the last four years, so I think that’s really hopeful and positive.

Irving Sandler: Just one word in thinking about the book that Artists Space put out book [5000 Artists Return to Artists Space: 25 Years, by Claudia Gould (Editor), Valerie Smith, 1998], that may be another way of treating an archive, in other words, having the archive itself lead to publication.

David Platzker: I both agree and disagree, I love the fact that the Artists Space book exists, I think it’s an amazing document and a great tool, but it isn’t the archive itself.

Irving Sandler: No it’s not.

David Platzker: And to a degree it’s a tempered view of an organization as opposed to something that gets back to the organic history and the original materials. Questions? Yes.

Jackie Apple: Myself and a lot of my colleagues that I’ve been talking to recently—we’ve been making art for thirty or more years, and we’ve been involved with various spaces and, well, I’ve got boxes and boxes, you know, of files, and we’re thinking about what are we going to do with all this stuff, and how do we go about planning for our demise, right? In terms of, how do we approach it to plan it as an estate donation and, because, we don’t want to leave all this behind, just, for somebody else to be stuck with, to sort through, and, there’s a process that you want to set in motion, and there’s a point where you reach, where you just look at it all and you go, I can’t stand it I just want to throw it all out, and so I’d love to know about—I have a lot of stuff I’d like to turn over to all of you.

[Laughter.]

Marvin Taylor: I think I can answer this one. Any institution should have a planned giving process, that’s what —

Jackie Apple: But not as an institution, when it’s individual.

Marvin Taylor: No, that’s what I mean. I mean any institution that you were to approach with your archive, like me, for instance, would be able to tell you how to go about planned giving, which is what it sounds like you want: to make plans for the disposition of your archive at some point in the future. There are a variety of ways to do that. We like collections to stay together as your papers, because together they preserve the integrity of your work. Even though certain sections of your papers might fit in several different repositories, responsible repositories will advise you to keep you papers together and, in fact, will sometimes tell you that your papers may not be appropriate for them, because the papers would be more appropriate somewhere else. I have had to do this from time to time, sometimes with collections that I really, really want, but, that would be better elsewhere. I referred a collection to Duke recently that was more appropriate there, given the profile of our collection. So, but yes, any institution you approach should be able to help you with planning giving. I do it all the time with folks.

Jackie Apple: And how do you know who to approach?

Marvin Taylor: Well..

Jackie Apple: You sound interested . . .

David Platzker: There you go, good place to start, thank you, OK, thanks Marvin. Susan [Cahan]?

Susan Cahan, Associate Professor of Contemporary Art, University of Missouri-St. Louis: I actually have a question and a comment, and, my question dovetails with what Jackie just said about how we know where to go. I just did some research that involved using several archives: a personal archive that had been given to the Studio Museum; a personal archive that had been given to the Schomburg Library; Henry Hampton the filmmaker’s archive, which had been given to Washington University at St. Louis (because he was an alumnus of that school); and personal archives that reside in people’s homes. So, my question is, and then I have a comment, is there such a thing as a directory of archives?

David Platzker: Yes.

Ferris Olin, Director, Margery Somers Foster Center, Mabel Smith Douglass Library, Rutgers University: Can I answer that?

David Platzker: Please.

Ferris Olin: My name is Ferris Olin, I’m at Rutgers University where I Head the Margery Somers Foster Center. We’re developing WAAND—The Women Artists Archives National Directory—a new initiative that aims to identify and locate in archival repositories the papers by and about women artists (art organizations, artists communities, publications, etc.) active in the US since 1945. We also want to learn whether these records are accessible or not. This information will become available on the Internet in a directory we are creating. Women artists aren’t part of national directories and we see this as a major informational need. We just got a Getty grant in January, and I’d be glad to share this information with you about our project and encourage you to participate or get back to me with information. In addition, the Foster Center, which is a research center and archive using digital technology as well, focuses on women’s scholarship and leadership. We have already collected the records of several women’s art organizations, such as, the Women’s Caucus for Art, New York Feminist Art Institute, and the Heresies Collective, as well as the Mary H. Dana Women Artists Series. The Foster Center is also collecting papers of women artists and making them readily accessible. Please talk with me after the session if you have any ideas or information.

David Platzker: Marvin?

Marvin Taylor: And there is also an online database which is a part of the RLIN [Research Libraries Information Network] network for autographs and manuscripts, which will give you information about and institution’s holdings. Most major institutions are contributing records there, and that’s a good place to start, though these days the truth is more and more people are putting things up on the web and so actually a good Google search is, I hate to admit it, sometimes better.

Irving Sandler: EAD [Electronic Archival Description] has done that.

Marvin Taylor: Yeah, they’ve done some as well, and a lot of us are involved in it, it’s actually radically changed archive in the past ten years.

David Platzker: The AS-AP website also has good links on it, and we’re adding more constantly.

Marvin Taylor: Stanford was the leader, actually, in that project.

Susan Cahan: Can I make another comment?

David Platzker: Yes, Susan.

Susan Cahan: I would just like to commend Martha for the donation of the Franklin Furnace Archives to the Museum of Modern Art, in order for them to become accessible, it’s extremely important, and I want to make a plea, probably to you Marvin. I worked at the New Museum of Contemporary Art for nine years, and all the files from the museum were stuck in the basement, kind of randomly, with the hope that eventually maybe someday somebody would get around to organizing them. And then, there was a big flood in the basement, and the major problem, which nobody wants to talk about is what happened to all that stuff. Maybe, there’s a way in which, you know, you could investigate, because it was a lot of really very important material.

Marvin Taylor: Very important!

David Platzker: Martha, correct me if I’m wrong, you sold that portion of your archive.

Martha Wilson, Executive Director, Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. : We sold the artists' book collection and retained our archives.

David Platzker: I want to emphasize that’s another reason why one wants to associate value into versions on these things is that they’re both intrinsically valuable fiscally as well as historically.

Marvin Taylor: I have one small statement about the New Museum, which is, we’re negotiating with them for their library right now, and so when I left New York I don’t know where we were but we were, it was very serious.

Audience member 3: So it would go to the Fales and not to the general library?

Marvin Taylor: It would be split.

Audience member 4: Oh no!

Marvin Taylor: This is very typical. There’s a lot there that everyone has, right, so every book that’s catalogued has to have a note in the record saying "From the New Museum Library," so you can recreate that.

Audience Member 5: This panel deals with existing archives, it seems like AS-AP also, has a concern with like the value of archives now and in the future and what do you do when most of your material now, issued to artists, are emails?

David Platzker: From my point of view it’s going to depend, institutionally from organization to organization on how they deal with this material. You know a lot of emails are going to sit on individual computers as opposed to a server and it’s going to be a real nightmare. Yes?

Marcia Reed, Head of Collection Development, Research Library at the Getty Research Institute: I actually thought that one of the things that you might have addressed is something that, at the Research Institute, we talk about all the time: This is how institutions or other kinds of archives collect. Because you can't collect everything, knowingly, and how you decide what in fact you do collect, because you want to be very careful. In your collecting, you're actually writing history, you are making some things accessible, and hence other collections not chosen will not be so accessible. So I'm really actually surprised that you didn't touch on that, it's something that we agonize about, continually, and try to give a lot of careful attention to because there's so much out there. Sometimes very important organizations, individuals, do not have archives, and so you're unable to collect something, other times, rather minor figures have been extraordinarily compulsive about saving everything, and so it's quite interesting to make decisions among the myriad choices.

Irving Sandler: That's one other reason that you have to have a great deal of networking between these organizations because my archive went to the Getty but much of that archive involves Artists Space, The Club, and artists' organizations which should be known about elsewhere.

David Platzker: Again, what AS-AP wants to do is we need to ascertain the need that's out there. We have about a twenty-page survey that we're going to start sending out in the next couple of months to over two thousand organizations nationally to get a sense of what their holdings are. And I think that, like Printed Matter, where I was formerly the director, we're going to find they have hundreds of linear feet of undocumented materials, and then we're going to have to figure out, with them, how to deal with that material.

Audience member 6: In Los Angeles, the Getty, a couple of years ago, did a survey on every arts organization, and listed whether they had archives.

Marcia Reed: A subject survey was performed, called "L.A. as Subject." It is going to be followed up by another survey, which is being completed, on the archives, both public and private, and what's there, and then those institutions will be able to apply for planning grants, and some preservations grants. This is called "On the Record: Art in L.A., 1945-1980."



Marvin Taylor: Well, you know, there were two things that were sort of bouncing around and that are sort of meta-theoretical ideas about archiving that are going around. One is the question about email. Well, the telephone didn’t destroy archives, and email’s a kind of funny thing, because it’s somewhere between the telephone and a letter, and it’s odd how more people are preserving email so that maybe it’s a little better than it was when we were just picking up the phone. And the truth is you know that archival documentation changes, we work on Homer but there are no Homer manuscripts. No real Homer manuscripts, you know, they’re all copies. So, we find different ways of interpreting things historically, but your question, it’s one of those things that just dropped out, I also felt like the things I wanted to talk about today were much more pragmatic, rather than getting to the theoretical aspects—it’s very, I worry very much about what’s not in my collection. I worry for instance right now that my collection is very very heavy on men and not women and the reason is because many of the people’s papers we have died of AIDS. And many of the women are still very actively working, and I’ve talked to people whose archives I want, but they aren’t ready yet, and they don’t want to think about it yet, so it worries me all the time that the archive be, that’s why I’ve adopted a documentary strategy instead of a connoisseurship model, which would make no sense whatsoever, I don’t think, for any archive, quite frankly, but certainly not with what I’m trying to do in the Downtown Collection.

Irving Sandler: You’re also compensating in part for those losses by doing oral history programs. They become very necessary.

Audience member 7: Could you clarify a few points about AS- AP? You talk about artists spaces but are you interested in what sociologists call emergent groups or organizations, in other words, that have no space where they meet? And secondly, you talk about, are you interested in actually collecting these archives, or merely indexing them?

David Platzker: The first part is, we’re interested in any venue, and venue is a word that can be used as broadly as you like, to include both temporal spaces that exist, physically as well as non- physical spaces. You know I want to emphasize that we’re interested in periodicals as well and anything that exists, in any format that is an artistic venue, be it ether or not. The second part of the question is, is AS-AP collecting, the answer is at this time no. Maybe someday. We have a broad vision that someday we might have a huge building someplace where people can send archives and they can be dealt with professionally, but I think that we’re many many years away from anything like that.

Audience member 8: I just had a couple points, one for the Skowhegan project, it would seem that audio work would be eminently suitable for the web, so I’m a little surprised that that wasn't considered, but secondly, I’m just a little unclear as to how this project relates, naturally, I’m looking at a larger context and how would you encourage other people, other cities to organize? I mean I spent a lot of time in San Francisco and that’s an eminently suitable place for documenting a whole wave, that hasn’t even been touched.

David Platzker: We most definitely need leadership outside of New York. There’s no question about that, that we are a New York centric group here, so, yes, we need to gather people who can build strength nationally for us.

Audience member 8: So how would you support an organization say in San Francisco?

David Platzker: Again, where AS-AP is at now is we’re trying to build an index, and anybody that can lend a hand in helping us build this index of where these focal points of activity are would be more than welcome. You want to answer the Skowhegan aspect?

Marella Consolini: We certainly did consider the internet, and we had taken just a more conservative stance about that from the very beginning because we have so many artists who are very very nervous and apprehensive about what might—how their words might be stolen, corrupted, whatever, and we felt, all along, our real priority has been to the artist and trying to just help them feel comfortable, getting the material out there but in such a way that they were comfortable with it, and it’s one of the reasons that it’s non- circulating, research only, and that the transcripts are read-only, at the institutions that have them. There’s a real argument to be made that we’ve been too conservative about it, however, you know, it’s a conversation, but that’s the route that we consciously chose to take.

Irving Sandler: This job is really enormous, I was just fascinated by Julie’s listing of what happened in New York in the late 1970s, we did a count there were 300 alternative spaces throughout America, and I don’t know whether that number—surely it’s fallen off, but at least there’s somehow 300 archives out there, and it’s just a huge job.

David Platzker: Marvin did you have follow-up?

Marvin Taylor: Yes, I just wanted to say about the Skowhegan project, I think seven years ago that’s where libraries were thinking was, I remember, were thinking of doing a CD-ROM project back then, and I’m glad we didn’t because now it seems anti-diluvian given what happened in web technology and digitization in the past three or four, maybe five years, but that’s where we were when they started the project, so I sort of understand historically where that came from. Boy it would be a great digital project, though, up on the web with the images and, but the copyrights are a nightmare. They drive you crazy.

Marella Consolini: Well, I’ll tell you, P.S. 1’s new streaming radio station [wps1.org] has, because the archive is with MoMA, P.S. 1 actually has the ability, the right, and they have contacted all of the artists in our archive to request permission to put it on the radio station, now, here’s a word of something or other, when I talked about the original letter that the lawyers came up with to the artists that would’ve sent them screaming into the night, P.S. 1, and if there’s anyone here in the room affiliated with them, I’d love to hear—P.S. 1 did a standard, kind of rights and reproduction letter to the artists and I got all the phone calls going "what do you mean, what do they want, I’m signing my life away!" you know, and I called the guy and said that there was really a better way to do this that would have been much more to your advantage, and I haven’t spoke to him since. But I would guess that he’s had a hell of a time getting any response, when, if approached a little more gently he could’ve made I think a lot more leeway and it would be fantastic to have those lectures on that website. A perfect venue for it.

David Platzker: The website is wps1.org and it’s streaming both live and on-demand audio arts and interviews. MoMA’s content is actually quite good. They have their own materials that’s online, it’s something really worth checking out.

Irving Sandler: I was going to say if there are people out there representing estates, the Judith Rothchild Foundation will provide monies for archiving and preservation and all sorts of other things but involving deceased artists.

David Platzker: I know we have to turn the room over to another panel, but before we do I want to thank our panel and thank you for attending.