“Fluxhouse.”
At the same time, the interdisciplinary hub of 112 Greene Street was fertile soil for SoHo’s budding art colony. Pioneering visual artists and performance artists like Gordon Matta-Clark, Vito Acconci, Richard Serra, Laurie Anderson, Alan Saret, and Richard Nonas added to the rich cross-disciplinary ferment, as did composers Philip Glass, Richard Landry, and Ornette Coleman. Venues in SoHo that presented dance and performance included The Kitchen, founded by video artists, and galleries run by Paula Cooper and Holly Solomon. It wasn’t much of a stretch for Laurie Anderson to call SoHo of that period the center of the art world.1
∎
In 1967 the artists who had been involved with Judson started hearing that George Maciunas was buying loft buildings in SoHo and selling them cheap to artists. Small manufacturers of clothing, corrugated boxes, candy, or dolls were fleeing New York, leaving behind a landscape of empty warehouses. Maciunas, later known as the “father of SoHo,” had a vision of cooperative loft living for artists. In exchange for taking on the risks of illegal occupancy, artists paid a low price for gobs of space. Maciunas was charging only two dollars a square foot, and word spread like wildfire.2 According to performer and movement therapist Joseph Schlichter, Trisha Brown’s husband at the time, “Everyone in Judson Theater was rumbling about it. There were 150 or 160 people who were interested. We had to roll dice to determine who got in.”3
Maciunas, who came to these shores in 1948, had studied architecture at Cooper Union and Carnegie Institute of Technology. He had also studied with Richard Maxfield, a student in John Cage’s famous course in experimental composition at the New School, instilling in him an interest in artists who were mixing genres. As the leading member of Fluxus, he gave the group its name and organized events in both Europe and New York.
Maciunas fought for what he believed—in eccentric ways. Charles Ross recalled him chasing away a city building inspector with a samurai sword. Maciunas once bought two huge batter mixers from a baker and installed one as his bathtub.4 He aligned himself with the Soviet ideal of workers sharing in ownership. According to Sally Banes, he even called his cooperatives kolkhoz, the Russian word for collective farm.5 He not only organized housing for artists but also got them work. He hired musicians as plumbers, including Philip Glass, Rhys Chatham, and Yoshi Wada, who used giant plumbing pipes to make new sounds.6
The first artist to go in with Maciunas, in 1967, was filmmaker Jonas Mekas, a fellow Lithuanian immigrant. Mekas and Maciunas transformed the ground floor of 80 Wooster Street into Fluxhouse Cooperative II. (Fluxhouse I, on Greene Street, was eventually repurposed.)7 It became the new home for the roving Filmmaker’s Cinematheque, which showed films by avant-garde filmmakers like Stan Brakhage, Michael Snow, and Andy Warhol, as well as Mekas.8 Others who performed there included poet Allen Ginsberg and video pioneer Nam June Paik.9 Because Yoko Ono was an active Fluxus artist, sometimes she would drop by with John Lennon.10 It was there that Philip Glass presented the first concert of his own work in 1968.11 But because of lack of proper licensing, the Fluxhouse only lasted until July 1968. Budding theater director Richard Foreman, who had helped to build the theater, then produced four of his early plays there.12
Trisha Brown and Joseph Schlichter moved into the top floor of 80 Wooster with their two-year-old son, Adam. In the beginning, the building’s only bathroom was in the basement. Running water did not reach the seventh floor, so Trisha would bring a bucket to a lower floor and fill it from a spigot every day.13 Schlichter grew marijuana and tomatoes on the roof and used the water tower as a swimming pool for children—to the dismay of other parents.14
Sculptor Charles Ross, the mastermind behind the collaborative Concert #13 at Judson, moved into the fourth floor.15 Conceptual artist Robert Watts, who was involved in happenings along with Allan Kaprow, moved into the fifth floor.
Brown found the raw space to be fertile ground for her choreographic—and architectural—imagination. In a way, she was collaborating with the space around her rather than with other artists. In workshops, she gave students the instruction to “read the wall.” The idea was simply to let one’s body respond to the markings on the well-worn wall. In 1967 she drove foot holes into her wall “in order to reach the ceiling but also to move on a vertical plane.”16 This was undoubtedly in preparation for her 1968 equipment piece Planes. She started off her 1970 concert “Dances In and Around 80 Wooster Street,” with her iconic daredevil work Man Walking Down the Side of a Building. A tiny audience clustered below in the courtyard, looking up in awe. The film of this event17 shows a man at the top of 80 Wooster, facing downward, body horizontal, walking so slowly and deliberately that he could just as well be taking the first steps on the moon. (This was only a year after the Apollo moon landing was seen on television.) SoHo artists Richard Nonas, Jared Bark, and David Bradshaw stood on the roof and let the cord out safely.18 Then the audience went inside the building to see Floor of the Forest, in which Brown and Carmen Beuchat crawled on an eye-level grid of horizontal ropes that were strung with garments. The two slithered into and out of the shirts, pants, and dresses. With this work, Brown brought the domestic mess of family life to the pristine grid of minimalism. At the same time, the piece referred to the uneven terrain of the forest, which Brown had called her “first art lesson.”19 Audience members had to create their own uneven terrain, squatting down or rising up to get a glimpse of the performers.
Last, the audience went outside onto Wooster Street to see Brown’s Leaning Duets I. This was a partnering task dance related to what she had been exposed to on Anna Halprin’s deck as well as to Forti’s Slant Board (1961) and her own Planes. Five pairs of people had to keep their feet in contact with their partner’s feet while leaning away from each other and trying to take steps without falling. The two would talk to each other (“Give me more of your weight” or “I need to twist to my left”) to keep in balance and go forward. This kind of discuss-what-you-are-doing banter became rife in Grand Union.
Man Walking Down the Side of a Building (1970), by Trisha Brown. Joseph Schlichter, 80 Wooster Street. Photo: Carol Goodden.
When Brown moved into SoHo, huge trucks were moving through the streets to deliver rags or other cargo to manufacturers. She picked up the lingo of the driver teams and brought those commands into Grand Union. In the last performance at LoGiudice Gallery,20 during an ultra-slow, ultra-gentle duet between Gordon and Paxton, she carried on with a gruff, street voice: “Easy now, easy now, easy now. C’mon now. Move it along, move it along. Over we go, now. C’mon, easy does it. Let’s go, move it, keep it going. Keep it movin’, keep it movin’. Up and over, watch out now. Move it along. [Th]at’s it, easy does it.”
Brown wasn’t dreaming of dancing in a theater. Learning her Bauhaus lessons well, she made her art in the place where she lived. “All of the pieces I performed at 80 Wooster had rambled in my head for a long time. My rule was, if an idea doesn’t disappear by natural cause, then it has to be done. I wanted to work with the wall but not by building one. I looked at walls in warehouses and as I moved around the streets … I chose this exterior wall and then thought—why not use mountain climbing equipment?”21
Brown also made short works at other sites in SoHo. Her Roof Piece premiered with audiences viewing from 53 Wooster Street in 1971; Woman Walking Down a Ladder (1973) took place on the rooftop of 130 Greene Street; Group Primary Accumulation premiered at Sonnabend Gallery the same year (later to be performed in Central Park and other outdoor areas); and Spiral (1974) was inspired by the columns at 383 West Broadway (later Ivan Karp’s OK Harris Gallery), where she also premiered Pamplona Stones.22 When she reprised Roof Piece in 1973, retitling it Roof and Fire Piece, the number of
