the revolutionary SoHo arts scene to Europe.24
∎
Roof Piece (1971), by Trisha Brown. Foreground: Sylvia Palacios Whitman; at upper left, Douglas Dunn. Photo: Babette Mangolte, 1973.
Although Maciunas was creating a cooperative artist colony with what he considered a “selfless spirit of collectivism,”25 he was an autocrat. With an architect’s training, he was very sure of what he wanted. As Richard Foreman recalled, “He saw things in his own way and if you didn’t accept the way he saw things happening, he would get very mad.”26 Foreman described working with Maciunas as “a kind of a perverse spiritual test.”27
Maciunas, however, cared about the artists he knew and alerted them if a good deal came up. When he discovered 541 Broadway, with its good proportions (wider than the usual twenty-five feet), no interior columns, and floors made of wood—not just wood over concrete—he knew it would be perfect for dancing. He contacted Trisha Brown, who relocated there in 1974 or 1975, soon to be followed by David Gordon and Valda Setterfield.28 Douglas Dunn moved there, from a block away, in 1982.29 Lucinda Childs of the Judson days also lived in the building, and on the Mercer Street side lived—and still live—hybrid artists Joan Jonas and Jackie Winsor. Simone Forti, along with dance artist Frances Alenikoff, musician Yoshi Wada, and artist Emily Harvey, lived in the next building at 537 Broadway.
Maciunas felt that his artists’ colony, which grew to sixteen buildings over ten years, was in line with the ideals of Bauhaus and Black Mountain.30 In the Cagean and Fluxus spirit of making art out of everyday life, he was creating spaces where artists lived, made work, and gathered. Trisha Brown, with her uncanny ability to nestle the human body into, or use the body to extend, existing architecture, was in line with Maciunas’s vision. Brown helped shape the values of SoHo and vice versa. During this period, she was working with Grand Union as well as making her equipment pieces and accumulation pieces.
Like Brown, both Marilyn Wood and Mary Overlie devised ways to embed the moving body into the SoHo landscape. A former Cunningham dancer, Wood devoted herself to site-specific dance, performing internationally with her Celebration Group as well as on the fire escapes on Prince Street. In 1976 and 1977 Overlie, who had performed a speaking role in Rainer’s piece at Oberlin in 1972 and had been a guest of Grand Union at 112 Greene Street in 1972, performed with her dancers in the windows of Holly Solomon Gallery, creating a stir of enchantment on West Broadway.31
∎
Another hotspot in SoHo made possible by low cost was 112 Greene Street. A cluster of artists, including married couple Jeffrey Lew, a self-styled anarchist, and Rachel Wood, a dancer, inhabited the building. They had bought the building—Wood had family money—directly from a rag factory in 1970.32 The pioneering site artist Gordon Matta-Clark, who briefly lived in the basement, was constantly altering the space with his outrageously deconstructionist actions. In an episode of “guerrilla gardening,” he piled soil into a small hill in the basement and planted a cherry tree in it. In order to give the tree space to grow, he cut a big hole in the ground floor of the building, which became his signature mode—literally deconstructing buildings. Though he died in 1978, he is known as one of the great instigators of large-scale, space-altering work, addressing the deterioration of New York City buildings with his manic imagination. Matta-Clark, whose godfather was Marcel Duchamp,33 was a forbear of later huge projects by the likes of site artists James Turrell, Michael Heizer, and Christo.34
Glass Imagination II (1977), by Mary Overlie. Photo: Theo Robinson.
The glory of the lone artist, however, was losing its luster. In his book Another Little Piece of My Heart: My Life of Rock and Revolution in the ’60s, cultural critic Richard Goldstein wrote this in reaction to Norman Mailer’s novel Armies of the Night: “[I]t seemed like a violation of the countercultural ethos that I’d come to share. We kids saw politics as a collective activity, something we did together. Radicals in Mailer’s generation had struggled to maintain their individuality, but we fought to maintain community.”35
During this period, 112 Greene became a hangout for all kinds of artists and dancers, including Barbara Dilley, Douglas Dunn, Nancy Lewis, and Steve Paxton. Rachel Wood was a member of Dilley’s group, the Natural History of the American Dancer. This all-woman group also included Carmen Beuchat (who was also dancing with Brown), Cynthia Hedstrom, Mary Overlie, Suzanne Harris, and Judy Padow.
GU at 112 Greene Street, 1972. From left: Paxton, Lewis, Overlie (as guest), Rainer (face hidden), Scott in chair. Photo: Babette Mangolte.
The works that took up space at 112 Greene broke all existing conventions of art-making etiquette. Louise Sørensen, in the introduction to 112 Greene Street: The Early Years, wrote that “112 Greene Street was synonymous with a remarkably concentrated period of the New York art world where creativity and idealism went hand in hand—a product, no doubt, of the 1960s counter-culture.”36 It was a non-gallery gallery. As conceptual artist Bill Beckley recalled, it “was a raunchy kind of place where you sometimes couldn’t tell the mess from the art or vice versa.”37
SoHo was a counterculture in both art and leisure. Its artists were decidedly uncommercial, not looking to make money from their art. Beckley felt they were “redefining” art. “It was the cusp of modernism and postmodernism.”38 Some called them “post-minimalist.”39 The social life mingled with the art life. According to Rachel Wood, “[W]e had incredible parties: rock ’n’ roll music, dope and alcohol, and dancing like mad for hours.”40
Padow, who also lived at 112 Greene, described how the group named the Natural History of the American Dancer emerged from those parties: “It’s a party but everyone’s dancing and improvising. It got formed almost like an outgrowth of the lifestyle at 112 Greene Street. There was not a fine line between having dinner and performing eating dinner. Someone sitting on a sofa would rise up and suddenly you’d notice that someone else has risen. The cues … the picking up of someone else’s gestures would happen at a spontaneous level.”41
Paxton, however, doesn’t feel that 112 Greene held a corner on this kind of social life. Asked, via email, if he felt 112 provided the soil for endeavors like Grand Union, he replied: “The times were that soil, I believe. The transition of SoHo into artists’ spaces rendered it especially fertile; a failing industrial area was transformed into a colony of activist artists, musicians, poets, dancers [having] huge parties, pranks, hijinks, performances and a confluence of a new generation of artists.”42
Douglas Dunn often went to the dancing parties at the Byrd Hoffman School for Birds on Spring Street, the studio of experimental theater director Robert Wilson. Daily improvisation sessions there also bled into social parties. “These places were so cheap and it was so much fun and so interactive. Grand Union was sort of an extension of this kind of familiarity and intimacy of artists at that time.”43 The sexual revolution was still young, and the calamity of AIDS hadn’t hit yet. “There was plenty of erotic energy in the mix and sometimes it ended up being physical connections and sometimes it didn’t,” Dunn said. “It was one of the driving forces, not just in Grand Union but in SoHo in that era. Sometimes these relationships fed the work and sometimes they distracted from it.”44 A graphic that reflects that randiness, with a certain elusive humor, is the flyer that Paxton designed for the February 1971 performances at Bob Fiore’s loft on
