excellent interview with Alana Heiss (who started PS 1 in the mid 70s, effectively inaugurating the last several decades of the myth of the alternative art space.) What I like is how she reminds us (interview with Joachim Pissarro; its cute and charming that he be the grandson of the first and original Pissarro who wrote the Impressionist mandate using Proudhons mutual aid ideas as a template) how those early spaces were squats (she calls them hippie/anarchist; so cute) without electricity or plumbing. The Soho loft. And now they are just tax shelters for guilty police state liberals. So when I first came to New York, I was taken to the loft and met the opera diva and Serge, and all these diggers—which was a culture shock. Serge and his friends were discussing the potential bill for this illegal heat, and they were going to owe maybe $300,000 in 1968 for gas running this unofficial “chicken rotisserie.” The plumbing? I’ve never been involved with legal plumbing even, perhaps, to this day. [All laugh.] The problem with lofts was that in addition to plumbing you needed electricity, and every artist I knew was afraid of electricity. So you didn’t know how to electrify your loft, because you couldn’t go to a union electrician. That would cost a huge amount of money. Though, people did do that, in the end, because most artists couldn’t face dealing with electricity themselves. There were artists who would say to themselves, “Do I have to work 12 hours a day as a waiter, then work as a plumber, or could I just go to school and figure out electricity?” I always wondered why girls didn’t do that, because electricity is not so terribly hard, but no one wanted to learn it. (the century of art begins with Duchamp and ends with Claire Fontaine, because its ALL ABOUT PLUMBING) brooklynrail.org/2014/12/art/alanna-heiss
Posted on: Mon, 22 Dec 2014 18:58:36 +0000
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