by Ian Alteveer and Jennifer Sudul

 

Ian Alteveer
Carlo, when and why did you end up in the East Village—or the Lower East Side, as the whole neighborhood was called then?

Carlo McCormick
Or Downtown—the idea that there was no reason to go above Fourteenth Street! I probably came Downtown for the same reason everyone else did: because we were too different to be anywhere else. I started living here full time at the end of 1979, but I was hanging around in the ’70s, more as an observer than a participant. I was a kid who picked up the SoHo Weekly News and checked out stuff. I’d end up at the Mudd Club, Tin Pan Alley, ABC No Rio, the Times Square Show, just because it all seemed so much more interesting than official culture.

Jennifer Sudul
How did you make a living when you first moved Downtown?

CM
I worked at a lot of clubs—Club 57, Pyramid, 8BC. By that time, I was part of the scene. I started writing for the East Village Eye around 1980.

IA
So, what was the scene like then? Do you feel it comes across in the show?

CM
Well, we’re not trying to recreate a big mise-en-scène of all the urban detritus and rubble of Downtown. Once something is presented in an institution, it takes on a certain preciousness. From the first time we met to talk about the show, I remember someone saying that drugs were such a common language and if you didn’t talk about how everyone was on them all the time, you’d missed it. And someone else saying if you don’t put up the work—no matter its value—with a staple gun and gaffer tape, you’ve again missed the point. Unfortunately, neither history nor the simple passage of time allows that.

Robert Longo, Untitled, from the series Men in the City, 1981. Charcoal and graphite on paper, 96 x 60 in.
Holzer Family Collection

 

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JS
Aren’t there other ways in which you’ve tried to avoid preciousness in the exhibition, or at least more standard views of this era? Is this why you organized the show thematically?

CM
I knew from the outset that the show couldn’t be chronological. I wasn’t going to present postminimalism, then Pattern and Decoration, then Punk, then the Pictures group, then the East Village, or whatever. I also wasn’t going to organize it by medium. Instead, I came up with these rather vague and totally problematic constructs by which we  could put different people of different scenes and from different moments of this arc in the same room and in conversation with each other. It’s not what was done in 1974 that’s important for this   show, it’s what was being done in 1974 that is still important for people in 1984, and vice versa.

1979 is the axis upon which this show pivots. Colab is coming together, Punk is exploding, the club scene is taking on a life of its own, and the alternative spaces are at their apogee. We could have done  a show just based on that moment from 1978 to 1980, but we wanted to get a little broader and talk about the links.

This show represents the cul-de-sac of a lot of ideas. How they wind down, implode, or explode. By starting it in the mid-1970s, we begin with a moment when radicalism had in many ways failed. It lost some of its impetus because, for one, the Vietnam War was over. Or feminism had all of a sudden changed or bifurcated, and that’s why many women in the show talk about “feminisms”…

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