The Times Square Show, June 1980, is often referenced as a groundbreaking exhibition that inaugurated new trends in contemporary art. To date, the TSS's specifics are known almost exclusively through accounts from the established art press, either published during the show's run or its immediate aftermath. Times Square Show Revisited is the first exhibition to return to the original events of 1980 in an attempt to situate TSS within its proper historic context, to understand the origins of the TSS and to recover missing elements vital to comprehending the show's multidisciplinary program, which created an immersive experience of the downtown New York environment. At the time, the gestalt of the show was understandably overwhelming for many who viewed it, a quality unique to the original exhibition and impossible to replicate through any contemporary restaging. In this spirit, TSSR features works shown at the TSS, in addition to ephemera and documentation of the original exhibition. The varied character of the works presented in TSSR reflects the dissonances and synergies that coexisted within the downtown community of artists in 1980, when rents were cheap and local artist haunts such as the Mudd Club and Club 57 thrived on the dynamic social milieu. TSSR assembles work from approximately forty artists, only a fraction of those involved in the original exhibition, in an effort to offer an opportunity for dialogue and to promote further inquiry around this rich topic. To this end, TSSR presents a collection of thirty interviews that contribute to the historic record of this pivotal artistic moment in New York City. Read more...
Thirty-two years after being labeled the “first radical art show of the ’80s,” the Times Square Show, a raucous and revolutionary DIY art exhibition held in an abandoned massage parlor on 41st Street and Seventh Avenue in the old dirty and devastated Times Square, has been revived by the Hunter College Art Galleries in the exhibition Times Square Show Revisited. Read more...
t what date on the calendar, at what precise location, did counterculture become pop culture? And who do we mark down in the history books as the hero, or the villain, who masterminded the switch? There is an answer: “The Times Square Show.” In June of 1980, more than a hundred artists, under the auspice and directed by the vision of Colab (Collaborative Projects), took over a four-story building on Forty-first Street and Seventh Avenue and mounted a two-month exhibition. There were big names: Tom Otterness, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kiki Smith, Jenny Holzer, Kenny Scharf, Nan Goldin. But, already, this is a wrong turn; the notion of individual heroism, of the creative ego that strives for and achieves recognition—in other words, a modernist view of the artist—is an anachronistic way to view “The Times Square Show.” Read more...
The New Museum dedicated its Fifth Floor gallery space to “XFR STN” (Transfer Station), an open-door artist-centered media archiving project. “XFR STN” initially arose from the need to preserve the Monday/Wednesday/Friday Video Club distribution project. MWF was a co- op “store” of the artists ́ group Colab (Collaborative Projects, Inc.), directed by Alan Moore and Michael Carter from 1986–2000, which showed and sold artists’ and independent films and videos onVHS at consumer prices.
The “XFR STN” at the New Museum will also address the wider need in the community of artists for access to media capture and migration services as a means to preserve creative productions stored in aging and obsolete audiovisual and digital formats. In addition to digitizing a portion of MWF Video Club’s collection (currently housed in a storage unit in Staten Island), the “XFR STN” will be used to preserve various materials from the New Museum’s own rich archive (including video formats such as U-matic and VHS tapes). In keeping with the original policies of the MWF Video Club, “XFR STN” will be open to any artist-originated moving image or born-digital materials whose formats have become obsolete. The exhibition/lab will operate publically, informally exhibiting the material that is transferred, as well as rendering it available online through archive.org, an internet library whose mission includes offering permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format. Read more...
''Colab'' is the commonly used abbreviation of the New York City artists' group, ''Collaborative Projects, Inc.'' Colab was formed in 1978 after a series of open meetings to determine new venues for showing and creating work. Throughout its first ten years of activity, Colab was distinguished from other contemporary New York artists' groups by its regular open meetings and open membership and collaborative production of art shows, a magazine, media production, performance, theater and film shows. Early group media efforts included the weekly live cable shows All Color News (non-fiction), 1978, Potato Wolf (fiction),1979-86, Red Curtain (fiction & non-fiction) 1979-83. During this period from 1978 through 1986 over 100 video shows were generated by the Colab membership in these group productions.
Colab's numerous accomplishments include X Magazine 1978-79; the New Cinema screening room for punk and no wave films 1979; the Real Estate Show, December, 1979, which created the ABC No Rio cultural center, 1980-82 (ABC is ongoing); the Times Square Show, a large open exhibition of over 150 artists near the center of New York's entertainment district, June, 1980; MWF Video Club, est'd 1986. See below for a complete list of Colab projects and member related projects.
Members of the group are presently involved in individual pursuits as artists, musicians, filmmakers and writers. Colab membership is also currently assisting in creating the Colab archival project.
A simultaneous project is the evolving Wikipedia entry on Colab. Read more...