Friday, March 16, 2012
Shades of gray
On Monday, we pointed out the new buildings that arose from the grave of 326-328 E. Fourth St. ... At the time, the building were gray. But! EV Grieve reader Steven notes that perhaps the gray was just a primer... or some kind of undercoating ... Workers yesterday were putting on a coat of white...
This is what 17 Avenue A looked like on March 4, 2012
This year, we'll post photos like this of various buildings, streetscenes, etc., to capture them as they looked at this time and place... The photos may not be the most telling now, but they likely will be one day...
Thursday, March 15, 2012
The Pies of March
Members of Time's Up today at Astor Place... Per the description:
Feeling a little betrayed by your bank lately? Feel like banks got bailed out and you go sold out Don't want to associate your money with dirty coal and oil? Get on your bike and join us as we ride and take the banks to task. It's time to Occu-Pie the Banks! Ride will end at 4th Annual Unforgettable Pie Fight!
The art evolution of Ulli Rimkus and Max Fish
By Joann Jovinelly
To some, this year is symbolic of a potential global crisis that threatens civilization, but for a few New Yorkers that death knell rings much closer to home — on the Lower East Side. This year marks the threat of a different kind of death — the potential closure of a beloved bar known as Max Fish that has for more than 20 years been the life blood of New York’s downtown arts community.
Fortunately, when we finally caught up with owner Ulli Rimkus, we found her firmly rooted.
“We have no immediate plans to leave, and in fact, we’re good for now,” she explained joyfully last week.
If you recall, in December 2010, reports surfaced that the demand of rising rent costs might lead to the removal of yet another New York mainstay. However, by January 2011, Rimkus had received a one-year lease extension. Now she's here indefinitely.
While business has been up and down of late, Max Fish remains populated by regulars as well as newcomers hoping to mix it up at this storied art spot. For now at least, the hysteria of a forced move remains distant.
Hang the Art; the Beer Will Follow
Rimkus opened Max Fish on Ludlow Street in 1989, first as an art gallery, but her artistic past goes much deeper. More than a decade earlier she had arrived to the United States from Düsseldorf, then a part of West Germany.
In her twenties and eager to lay claim to New York’s thriving arts scene, Rimkus and her then boyfriend, artist Christof Kohlhofer, moved to the Lower East Side in 1977. They soon became members of the collective Collaborative Projects, Inc., or Colab, a loose confederation of artists that courted the likes of filmmakers Charlie Ahearn and Jim Jarmusch, painter Jane Dickson, sculptor Tom Otterness, and printmakers Kiki Smith and Jenny Holzer, and as many as 50 more.
By working together and establishing a nonprofit status the following year, Colab quickly evolved into a positive force in New York’s contemporary art scene. Besides being in control of its own exhibition spaces (which typically meant temporarily taking over abandoned spaces) Colab produced arts shows for Manhattan’s public access cable TV network, helped champion the nonprofit arts space ABC No Rio, opened a screening room for Super 8 films on St. Mark’s Place, and encouraged the intermingling and strengthening of the arts community at large.
Rimkus was at the center of that thriving push for unity and she even co-authored one of Colab’s first National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) grant applications, which later became a mission statement for the fledgling group.
No Gallery? No Problem
Within two years of its formation Colab began hosting radical group shows, first with The Manifesto Show in 1979, which broke new ground and caught critics’ eyes. The Real Estate Show followed in 1980, but none were as memorable as The Times Square Show. Held during the summer of 1980 in an abandoned four-story massage parlor on 41st Street and Seventh Avenue, critics hailed the exhibit as the arrival of New York’s “punk rock” artists. Nude models milled about and mock peep shows were staged. In one room, an orange punching bag hung from the ceiling.
According to its press release, the month-long exhibit took on “the complexities of the human condition, theatres of love and death, invention and phenomena…daring performance, comic relief, arcades of fiction and halls of art from the future — all beyond the horizon of your imagination.”
The Times Square Show had legs. Uptown gallery owners jockeyed for the opportunity to buy the work, and Jeffrey Deitch, Director of the Los Angeles Art Museum but then a young art critic, wrote that the art was “raw, raucous, [and] trashy, but exciting.”
The surging popularity of the artists, many who lived on the Lower East Side, paved the way for the first wave of gentrification in the East Village. Before long, galleries popped up on every other corner that would eventually create art stars out of Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, David Wojnarowicz, and many others. Within five years, the East Village surpassed SoHo as New York’s art mecca with more than 78 galleries lining its streets by 1985.
In the late 1970s, however, the city’s contemporary art scene thrived for established artists, but not for newcomers. Colab was significant because it pushed the boundaries of what struggling artists could control, especially when they banded together.
Samuel M. Anderson, Ph.D., who has written extensively about the groundbreaking show, noted the power that was yielded by Colab and the significance of the artist alliance.
“Just as distinctions between the specific art works on display and the genres they represent begin to evaporate, distinctions between basic ontological concepts dissolve in the chaotic play of objects housed in a four-story massage parlor,” he wrote. “This was the particular, disorienting contamination of power wielded within the bounds of The Times Square Show: Not only materials, but genres, categories, sensibilities, even whole realities met, merged, and infected each other with the tumultuous interplay of their qualities, their meanings, and their histories.”
Street Artist to Art Star
Charlie Ahearn, director of the widely respected 1980s film "Wild Style," which told the story of New York’s earliest graffiti writers, remembers The Times Square Show well.
“Jane Dickson painted a portrait of Ulli on a black plastic bag and hung it in the second-floor stairwell,” Ahearn recalled. “Ulli was there often, hanging up work, helping out in the ‘gift shop’ on the ground floor, or up on the second floor ‘fashion room’ where Sophie VDT [another Colab artist] had hung work and Jean-Michel Basquiat painted a red abstraction directly on the wall. Basquiat also painted the words ‘Free Sex’ over the main entrance doorway, but someone else painted it out.” [The Times Square Show was Basquiat’s first entry into showing work professionally.]
“Ulli was an amazing supporter of artists,” Ahearn continued, “especially of Kristof Kohlhofer, who not only painted his stencil art on canvas, but was a forerunner to [today’s] street art scene, painting his stencils up and down Ludlow Street.”
Basquiat was also better known as a graffiti writer. His street tag, SAMO (an acronym meaning SAMe Old shit) was once found all over downtown Manhattan. He had become loosely affiliated with Colab through Diego Cortez, a filmmaker he’d meet at the Mudd Club, but he quickly left the graffiti world when his popularity exploded, just a few years after his associations with Colab.
But the collective was not without its problems. Just two months prior to The Times Square Show, the group was in danger of losing its NEA funding due to the work of one of its members, Tom Otterness, whose controversial project Shot Dog Film turned the stomachs of anyone who watched it. (Otterness, who fatally shot a dog in the video has since apologized, but continues to face opposition from some New Yorkers based on that 30-year-old work.)
Tomorrow: From Tin Pan Alley to Max Fish.
--------------------------------------------------
Joann Jovinelly is a freelance writer and photographer who still calls the East Village home. When she's lucky, she sells her work and pays the rent. She knows about the Times Square Show because she lived and worked with Charlie Ahearn and Jane Dickson in the late 1980s and they told her all about it, among other things.
[Photo of Ulli Rimkus via New York Art Department]
More details emerge about the CBGB music festival this summer
Gothamist first pointed out that the CBGB brand was eyeing opening a club somewhere in the city ... Then, BoweryBoogie heard about a CBGB music festival happening this summer... Now our friends at This Ain't the Summer of Love found some more details on the event (sort of buried) at CBGB.com.
In part:
The CBGB Festival is a five day celebratory showcase of music, film, distilled spirits and learning. From The Bowery and the Lower East Side to the streets of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, join them as they turn it up as loud as it will go this year during the 4th of July holiday week. July 4-8, 2012: Named for the greatest rock-n-roll venue in the world; they proudly introduce the first Annual CBGB Festival. Experience four energy-fueled days & nights of music, rock-n-roll films, insider-industry workshops, and intimate storytelling; all LIVE, all in New York City. CBGB has defined music and culture for generations of people around the world. Universally recognized as the birthplace of punk, CBGB continues to define new music and popular culture by fostering live performances & personal expression from artists around the city and across the globe.
You can read the rest of it at This Ain't the Summer of Love.
Interesting... even if it does sound like a treatment for an energy drink commercial...
Why Faye Dunaway could be your new neighbor
The Post notes today that Faye Dunaway looked at renting an apartment at 300 E. Fourth St. (She recently lost the sweet deal on her Upper East Side rental.)
Anyway, we took a look at the listing for 33o E. Fourth St. The one-bedroom unit between Avenue B and Avenue C is going for $2,800.
Per the listing:
This 1-Bedroom, 1-Bathroom with additional oversized sleeping / storage loft features soaring ceilings, exposed brick, hardwood floors, a king-sized bedroom and open kitchen. The sleeping / storage loft is large enough for a king-sized bed as well! 300 East 4th Street is an intimate co-op featuring a laundry room, elevator, and spectacular landscaped roof deck.
Plenty of room to showcase an Oscar!
Or whatever crap that you have. There's an open house Saturday from noon-1 p.m.
Reader report: Three apartment buildings sold on East Third Street
There's talk on East Third Street that Abart Holdings LLC has sold (or is selling) the buildings at 50, 54 and 58 on this block between First Avenue and Second Avenue.
Per a tipster: "Word on the street is people who have leases ending this summer have received letters informing them of the sale and that the new owner will NOT be renewing leases. I don't doubt the validity of the letters, although I would love to..."
The tipster says that the letters are from Abart Holdings. The letters do not name the new owner.
Have any tips about the situation here? Please send them our way via the EV Grieve email ...
Per the tipster, who lives in one of the buildings: "Better not be another set of fucking personal mansions..."
Might make for a mansion row to go with 47 E. Third St. across the way.
Calling all showoffs! Theatrical East Eighth Street apartment back on the market
This unit on Eighth Street and Avenue B is back on the market ... we last checked in here at 295 E. Eighth St. in February 2010...
And the two-year layoff hasn't made the listing any less corny... Seat belt fastened?
The most WOW loft you will ever see! Calling all artists, chefs, designers, showoffs and anyone with a flair for the spectacular, this is it! Crowning the living room, a STAGE - a ceremonial platform from the early 1900's, today an especially dramatic place for living\dining\display. One can only dream of finding a cavernous live-work space in such a prime location! Grand and certainly unique, 2,300 square feet directly facing Tompkins Square Park on Charlie Parker Place (Ave. B), your own iron balcony. 18' ceilings, 12' windows facing West onto the park and South onto 8th Street. ... This award-winning landmarked, restored building is an integral part of the history of the East Village and it only gets better with time. Live "outside the box" and be a part of NY history! The unit is on the 2nd floor in a walk-up building.
Uh-huh.
And it's $9,000 per month now. Was only going for $8,900 back in February 2010.
So 295 Avenue B was completed in 1887... It was known as Newsboys' and Bootblacks' Lodging House as well as Tompkins Square Lodging House for Boys and Industrial School, Children's Aid Society.
Il Bagato holding a fundraiser tonight for fallen ad star Phoebe
As you can see from the flyer, there's a fundraiser tonight for Phoebe at Il Bagato. Phoebe was a full-breed Papillion owned by Helen O'Neill, director of art production at ad agency Deutsch N.Y. According to an article in the trade publication Creativity, Phoebe starred in ads for Nissan and Milwaukee's Best, among others.
Phoebe died last Thursday "after eating something poisonous on the streets of the East Village," per an email from Il Bagato.
[Updated] Marshal seizes Sal's Pizza on Avenue A
Looks as if Sal's Pizza may be done here on Avenue A near Sixth Street... Dave on 7th notes the Marshal's Notice of Possession taped to the gate... the pizzeria had cut back on its hours in November... and the space has been for sale...
Updated 10:30 a.m.:
According to LoopNet, the business is for sale for $99,000. Here's part of the description:
Great opportunity to own beautiful small business, in the heart of the village where people never sleep. It's close to alot of bars and events, and using the same pizza recipe since 1967, makes it a very unique place. The business is owner absentee, which leaves alot of room for improvement and increased revenue.
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
Jupiter and Venus over the Lower East Side
Venus and Jupiter have come together in what astronomers call a planetary conjunction. (I had no idea — I just cut and paste that from MSNBC.) Anyway, Shawn Chittle passed along this shot. Enjoy while you can.
Won't be able to see a Venus transit like this until 2117, which will coincide with the opening of the Second Avenue subway line.
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