From Jim Fouratt, an incredible resource of NYC history: A number of people have written to me asking if I was involved in the reconstruction of the video lounge at Danceteria. The simple answer is no, I was not asked. But if you are interested in FACTS --- (not a very postmodern idea) --- no, I was never consulted by NYUs minions. This is an all-too-common occurrence with young art-world curators -- they just do not do the work of fact-checking. Back in 1980, I conceived the idea of a video lounge based on what I had learned from the misuse of video at Hurrah, where I had been previously involved. Rudolf and I designed the Danceteria video lounge, as we did the entire interior of the the three-level space, incorporating suggestions from artist friends and employees (e.g., Keith Haring). I hired Emily and Pat to shoot the bands and feed live video upstairs. I also asked them to program archival clips from their Nightclubbing shoots as content in the lounge. (By the way, Rudolf did not want to hire them. He did not like the way they looked [imagine]! they were female -- most videographers were men. I likd that ! When we built the video lounge at Danceteria 2 on 21st Street, I brought in Kit Fitzgerald and John Sanborn, who were involved in the emerging downtown video-art scene. I dubbed them the Danceteria Video Lounge Art Curators. Thanks to them, many of todays best-known video artists premiered their work at Danceteria. The video lounge at 21st was an attempt to present high and low art in a pop-culture nightlife setting. Pat was outraged and has carried a grudge since then. But the NYU Fales people should have done their own research and presented the truth. I had and continue to have enormous respect for the archival work and cultural legacy of Emily and Pat, but at that time, I simply wanted to present a new, more art-driven direction for the Danceteria video lounge. Have you seen the tapes from the Andy Warhol cable show that were shot there? The one of me and Marc Almond (Soft Cell) is hilarious. They are in the collection of the Andy Warhol Museum, the Paley Center for Media, and I think online. But getting back to the NYU installation: do go see it; I certainly look forward to it. Pat and Emilys archival tapes are something special, not least because they were there as fans as well as videographers. I think of them as the essential archivists of the downtown NYC music scene, 1977-1984, and I was thrilled when I learned that NYU had purchased their archives. Fales must be faulted for presenting false history, but I am sure the work of NIGHTCLUBBING will rise above it all. One more parenthetical: Emily and Pat were employees-for-hire, the tapes were never their property, and they never asked permission to show them or otherwise publish them -- not that i would have objected, provided the bands agreed nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2014/02/18/gonightclubbing-installation-at-nyu-s-fales-library-opens-march-.advancedsearch.html?tags=fales
Posted on: Fri, 07 Mar 2014 19:51:24 +0000
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