Upscaling Downtown: Interpersonal Dynamics of Nightlife Revelers in Geneva, New York

Bars have long been recognized as the intersection of a city’s culture and commerce. They provide opportunities for social interaction, contain a multitude of local memories, and serve as sources of identity. The American Revolution, the Whiskey Rebellion, and the Stonewall riots all developed out of local bars. So, what does it mean when the character of bars in a neighborhood begins to change? How do these changes to commercial spaces affect the social fabric of a city? Using a combination of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews, I explore the upscaling of the downtown bar scene in Geneva, New York to unpack what these commercial changes mean for the disparate groups that frequent the downtown space. I argue that instead of simply diversifying the types of businesses available to consumers in Geneva, this development has altered the very character and social fabric of downtown. Rather than creating an integrated and cohesive nightlife scene in which disparate groups come together in shared space and time, this development manifests in the fragmentation of the downtown scene in new ways that increase the segregation of people in social space.

Stepping into the Picture: Bild und Performance in Joan Jonas’ The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things (2005-12)

Die Studie eröffnet einen neuen kunstwissenschaftlichen Zugang zum Werk der amerikanischen Video- und Performance Künstlerin Joan Jonas, indem sie das Bildpotential ihres Schlüsselwerks The Shape the Scent, the Feel of Things (2005-12) erforscht. Gleichzeitig schärft sie methodisch den Blick für eine medienkritisch operierende ästhetische Praxis, die sich über eine raumzeitlich und intermedial erweiterte Bildperformanz paradigmatisch als eigene künstlerische Denkform entwerfen lässt; dazu eröffnet die Untersuchung ebenfalls wesentliche bildungstheoretische Anschlüsse. Die Konzentration auf (in einem weiten Sinne) Bildhaftes wird zunächst historisch hergeleitet, wobei das Gesamtwerk der Künstlerin eine neue kunstgeschichtliche Einordnung und Relevanz über die Relektüre der zeitgenössischen Downtown Scene der 1970er in New York erfährt. Nachgezeichnet wird Jonas‘ künstlerische Entwicklung hin zu repräsentationskritisch operierenden Bildimmersionen, für die sie immer raffiniertere Techniken der Multiperspektivität und des Multilayering entwickelt. Komplex verdichtete, umfassend recherchierte Bild- und Textmaterialien, deren Narrative sich zwischen aktueller Gesellschaftskritik und einer mythologisch-anthropologischen Anrufung einer conditio humana bewegt, oszillieren heute im ständigen Wechsel zwischen vorproduzierten Elementen (insbesondere Videomaterial) mit Liveaktionen und Livezeichnungen und werden als performative Kunstform zur Denkform. Dieses Vorgehen charakterisiert auch ihr Schlüsselwerk The Shape the Scent, the Feel of Things (2005-12), das im Zentrum dieser Arbeit steht. Es legt den methodischen Angang, sich auf Bildhaftes zu konzentrieren, auch inhaltlich nahe, da Jonas mit Aby Warburg als Reflektorfigur der Performance und mit dessen Methode des Bilderatlasses auch ihre eigenen performativen Bildstrategien reflektiert. Die Untersuchung charakterisiert die Performance als beständige, unabschließbare Bildwerdungen und Bildgenesen on stage, als Performanz eines eigenen Mnemosyne Atlas. Die vorliegende Studie schärft daher strukturell sowie konzeptuell den Blick auf die Rolle der bildgebenden Potentiale der Performance. Dies geschieht insbesondere aus einer bildtheoretischen Perspektive mit phänomenologischer und psychoanalytisch-repräsentationskritischer Akzentsetzung (u.a. Douglas Crimp, Gottfried Boehm, Hans Belting, Horst Bredekamp, Sigrid Weigel). Die Schriften von Didi-Huberman erlauben zudem, über den Begriff des ‚Symptoms‘ Aby Warburgs Studien rezeptionsästhetisch fortzuschreiben. In Mikroanalysen werden Strategien des Performativen im Kontext von Affektdramaturgien und Subjektübergängen vor allem anhand von sog. ‚Aspektwechseln‘ herausgearbeitet, die im extrem verdichteten Umgang mit dem Bildhaften zwischen Medialisierung und Materialisierung operieren und zugleich das Sehen der Performance als dessen Inhalt konzeptualisieren. Jonas‘ Werk steht für eine professionalisierte Form der ‚Deixis‘. Diese medienkritische Perspektive der ‚Zerzeigung‘ (Dieter Mersch) verschiebt grundlegend den Schwerpunkt bisheriger Forschungsansätze zu Joan Jonas. Zudem eröffnet die interdisziplinär angelegte Studie ein besonders reizvolles Potential für die Arbeit an der Schnittstelle zwischen Kunstgeschichte und Kunstpädagogik.

Ladies’ Auxiliary of the Lower East Side: Post-punk feminist art and New York’s Club 57

This article analyses the feminist art that emerged from New York City’s short-lived, post-punk venue Club 57 (1978–83), where music mixed with visual art, experimental film, performance and politics. A hub of New York’s ‘downtown scene’, Club 57 exemplified ways in which artists’ increasingly promiscuous experiments across media led them to abandon galleries and museums in favour of nightclubs, discos and bars. This tendency dovetailed with the practices of an emergent generation of feminist artists eager to both break out of the sexist art world and engage with popular culture and audiences. A look at the work of Club 57’s manager Ann Magnuson, the performances and collectives she organized there and at other downtown clubs and other significant women whose work Club 57 supported provides a snapshot of the feminist artists in post-punk New York City, many of whose art and activism continue into the present.

Denby, Edwin (1903–1983)

Edwin Denby is best remembered as one of the preeminent critics of dance modernism, yet he was also an accomplished poet and an experienced dancer, choreographer, and librettist. Both his poetic gifts and his practical experience in the theater informed his dance criticism, first collected in Looking at the Dance (1949) and amplified in Dancers, Buildingsand People in the Streets (1965). As the title of his 1965 volume suggests, Denby placed primacy on the pleasures of perception, recording what he saw rather than advocating for a distinct point of view, as did his contemporaries Lincoln Kirstein and John Martin. Denby’s sensibility was widely admired in New York’s postwar avant-garde milieus, and he became an important friend, muse, mentor, and tutelary spirit to visual artists—including Rudy Burckhardt, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, and Alex Katz—and to New York School poets—especially Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, John Ashbery, Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, and Anne Waldman. In the last several decades of his life, Denby continued to be a key figure in the downtown scene across several performance genres.

Giorno Poetry Systems

How did music – both in terms of its sound, its lyrics, and its associated recording technologies – encourage St. Mark’s affiliated poets to get their tracks on vinyl and ensure their poetry and poetics became ever more oriented towards a punk-inflected performance aesthetic? This chapter answers this question in part by turning to John Giorno. Giorno, a performance poet active in the St. Mark’s scene since the mid-1960s, who was in many ways downtown’s court jester. Star of Andy Warhol’s durational film Sleep, lover to Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, founder of a pirate radio station broadcast from the bell tower of St. Mark’s Church, organizer of L.S.D fueled poetry performance parties at the Poetry Project, Giorno was perhaps the preeminent figure in the downtown scene determined to refigure poetry as populist outlaw happening. This chapter moves further by exploring how Giorno made the move to vinyl and live performance not just because of earlier examples drawn from the broader history of performance poetry, but because he was determined to mark a break from the urbane literariness associated with the first generation New York School poets.

“I Just Got Different Theories” Patti Smith and the New York School of Poetry

This chapter analyzes how, from her time as a young performance poet in New York in the late 1960s to her current position as punk rock’s éminence grise, Patti Smith foregrounded the image of the poet as privileged seer. Simultaneously, Smith rejected stereotypically “feminine” personae emphatically both in terms of the content of her writing and in her very style when performing on stage. Much like Richard Hell’s response to the St. Mark’s scene, Smith developed vatic postures and made gender trouble within the context of her relationship to the Poetry Project. The Poetry Project proved a site in which Smith negotiated friendship literally and metaphorically as a way to establish herself in New York’s downtown scene, from which she launched herself into the world of corporate record labels and rock ‘n’ roll concert arenas. Smith’s friendship with Project-affiliated poets was equal parts target-based ingratiation and strategic distantiation verging at times into overt disrespect. This distantiation, performed fairly consistently in interviews during the early 1970s and re-invoked (if in a much-tempered version) in her memoir Just Kids (2010), successfully kept Smith from becoming fully absorbed into the Poetry Project scene.