{"id":4760,"title":"The Kitchen - Histories","kind":"biblio","url":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/kitchen-histories","version":"33af4d74e66c774ac66d0eb742f4ca31d6924802d3196f56e382ecd51e9b6fc8","modified":"2026-09-13T21:52:08.198369+00:00","credits":[],"authorKeys":[],"subjects":["Groups"],"metadata":[{"label":"Group dates","value":"1971 - present","url":null},{"label":"Group location","value":"New York City","url":null},{"label":"Group","value":"The Kitchen","url":null}],"citations":{"page":"\u0022The Kitchen - Histories.\u0022 Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2026. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/kitchen-histories.","publication":"The Kitchen - Histories. .","risUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/citation/4760.ris"},"links":[{"label":"History of The Kitchen","url":"#History_of_The_Kitchen","relationship":"record body link","contentType":null},{"label":"The Kitchen","url":"https://www.thekitchen.org/","relationship":"record body link","contentType":null},{"label":"The Opening of The Kitchen","url":"#The_Opening_of_The_Kitchen","relationship":"record body link","contentType":null},{"label":"Vasulka Archives","url":"https://www.vasulka.org","relationship":"record body link","contentType":null},{"label":"Essay on The Kitchen","url":"#Essay_on_The_Kitchen","relationship":"record body link","contentType":null}],"sections":[{"name":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"characters":22288},{"name":"summary","source":"existing VHP generated summary","generated":true,"characters":747}],"content":{"section":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"text":"History of The Kitchen \uFF96 from The Kitchen website The Opening of The Kitchen - June 15, 1971 - from the Vasulka Archives Essay on The Kitchen - by Ben Portis, January 1992 from the Vasulka Archives History of The Kitchen The Kitchen literally began in a kitchen. On July 5, 1971, in the unused kitchen of the Mercer Arts Center, housed in the Broadway Central Hotel in Greenwich Village, two video makers and performers invited friends to see the results of a collaborative project. Within this atmosphere of adversity and excitement, The Kitchen grew. It grew along with the new art form it presented and gradually embraced music as part of its presentations. In 1974, it incorporated as the not-for-profit Haleakala, Inc. and moved to 59 Wooster Street in SoHo, rapidly establishing itself as the center of the downtown art world. For the ten year period that followed, The Kitchen became a sort of hotbed of artistic activity. By this point in time, The Kitchen was also presenting performance and dance as part of its season, as well as film. Within the confines of a beautiful, columned, gallery-style loft space, this new Kitchen presented work that was both daring, non-traditional, and cutting edge. Artists would often informally gather at The Kitchen. They talked, questioned, and argued. Ideas happened. Artistic forms would merge and tradition would frequently be broken. Inevitably, through such passionate and ambitious work, many Kitchen artists broke through and achieved national prominence. Over the years, The Kitchen helped foster the careers of many innovative artists. People as diverse as Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane, Eric Bogosian, David Byrne with The Talking Heads, Robert Longo, Peter Greenaway, Dana Reitz, Meredith Monk, Brian Eno, John Lurie, Elizabeth Streb, Robert Mapplethorpe, Cindy Sherman, Vernon Reid, Jenny Holzer, and others. It soon became apparent that with more presentations of work, wider audience interest in The Kitchen, and heavy critical attention, The Kitchen needed to expand its physical space. And so, in 1985, The Kitchen came of age. Through the hard work of many people, great generosity and drive, The Kitchen moved into its new and permanent home at 512 West 19th Street. The 16,500 square foot building, an old ice house built in the late 1880\u0027s, housing two of the largest black box theaters in the country. Also made possible as a result of the building\u0027s spaciousness are a Media Services department and a large administrative space which itself often serves as the backdrop for The Kitchen\u0027s role as artistic meeting place. The Opening of The Kitchen This place was selected by Media God to perform an experiment on you, to challenge your brain and its perception. We will present you sounds and images, which we call Electronic Image and Sound Compositions. They can resemble something you remember from dreams or pieces of organic nature, but they never were real objects. They have all been made artificially from various frequencies, from sounds, from inaudible pitches and their beats. Accordingly, most of the sounds you will hear are products of images, processed through sound synthesizer. Furthermore, there is time, time to sit down and just surrender. There is no reason to entertain minds anymore, because that has been done and did not help. It just does not help and there is no help anyway. There is just surrender, the way you surrender to the Atlantic Ocean, the way you listen to the wind, or the way you watch the sunset. And that is the time you don\u0027t regret that you had nothing else to do. - June 15, 1971 Essay on The Kitchen \u0022There is time, time to sit down and just surrender. There is no reason to entertain minds anymore, because that has been done and did not help, it just does not help and there is no help anyway, there is just surrender the way you surrender to the Atlantic Ocean, the way you listen to the wind, or the way you watch the sunset and that is the time you don\u0027t regret that you had nothing else to do\u0022 The Vasulkas, \u0022Welcome to The Kitchen\u0022 (June 15, 1971) In early summer, 1971, Dimitri Devyatkin, a fresh convert to the Porta-pak subculture, approached Nam June Paik following the artist\u0027s talk at UC, Santa Barbara to express his admiration and ask advice. Devyatkin was about to return to his native New York \uFF96 how could he get involved with the video scene that was bursting open there? Paik told him a very exciting space had opened just days earlier in Noho. He should go there. Devyatkin rode a Greyhound bus to New York and on his second night back found his way to The Kitchen, at 240 Mercer Street. He brought a tape with him and joined the Wednesday Open Video Screening, one of the first in a long-running weekly series begun by Shirley Clarke. Other artists showing work that night included Bill Etra, Andy Mann, Jackie Cassen, Richard Lowenberg and Clarke. In the audience were Paik, Jonas Mekas and The Kitchen\u0027s proprietors, Woody and Steina Vasulka. After the screening, most of the group went out for dinner and drinks into the early morning. Within hours of turning up, Devyatkin had been welcomed and furthermore entrusted with the keys to The Kitchen (as well as those to the Vasulkas\u0027 14th Street studio). They were headed to Iceland for the summer. The 21-year-old newcomer was left in charge until they returned.. This story reflects an article of faith among the original generation of video artists \uFF96 value and accommodate anyone who arrives demonstrating enthusiasm, intelligence and commitment. Media arts curator and historian Robert Riley noted that \u0022the opening of The Kitchen ... was an outgrowth of the Vasulkas\u0027 interest in collaborative exchange, and their desire that community resources be shared by artists.\u0022 (1) Among the earliest video theaters in New York, The Kitchen alone survived the makeshift times from whence it emerged. In February 1971, the Woody and Steina Vasulka first presented programs of their tapes at Max\u0027s Kansas City \uFF96 three nights dedicated respectively to electronics, gay cabaret, and rock concerts, approximating the three broad themes with which The Kitchen would be identified: video-image processing, social-issue documentary and avant-garde music. They showed again at Global Village and then in March at the WBAI Free Music Store, multi-monitor environments of video and audio. Inspired by the possibilities of electronic theater, the Vasulkas pursued an initiative taken by their carpenter friend Andreas Mannik, (a.k.a. artist Andy Mann). They leased a modest space he located in the Mercer Arts Center, an aggregation of off-Broadway stages, independent drama groups and cabarets occupying two floors of the storied Broadway Central Hotel, a grand hotel of the 19th century which had declined into a welfare residence. (2) On June 15, 1971 they unveiled their renovation of the former hotel kitchen, from which the organization derived its name. (3) Mannik fitted the room with utilitarian elegance \uFF96 brick exposed on the exterior wall, ceiling-to-floor curtains over the windows facing the street, sound-proof baffles on the inner walls and an open floor upon which equipment and seats could be arranged as required. Although The Kitchen was never a production space per se, a lab aspect acquired from a related group, known as Perception (comprised originally of Eric Siegel and Vasulkas), played a crucial role in its financial footing. (4) Perception carried out its explorations in electronic image generation in their respective studios, but for business purposes its address was 240 Mercer. Through Siegel, a participant in the seminal \u0022TV as a Creative Medium\u0022 exhibition at Howard Wise Gallery in 1969 who continued to work very closely with Wise in the patents of his video synthesizers and colorizer, Perception became the first group taken in by Electronic Arts Intermix, which was also founded in 1971 by Wise shortly after he closed his gallery. EAI\u0027s mission, as stated to the New York State Council on the Arts, was \u0022to assist projects undertaken by groups and not-for-profit enterprises working to explore the potentials of the electronic media as a means of expression and non-commercial communication.\u0022 (NYSCA, through Russell Connor and its new TV/Media section, had likewise earmarked funds for media arts around the same time.) By way of EAI , Perception received its first grant of $15,000 in autumn 1971, soon after the Vasulkas returned from Iceland. By mutual agreement, Wise and NYSCA included, $8000 was channeled into The Kitchen, allowing Woody and Steina to draw salaries as Director and Assistant Director, although Steina\u0027s pay ended up being put into a 50 per cent share of the rent to the Mercer Arts Center. (Presumably Wise made up the difference from his own pockets.) The balance of the grant was invested into equipment for Perception, from which the Vasulkas again re-directed their share towards additional monitors for The Kitchen. This attention to high-quality equipment distinguished The Kitchen from other artists\u0027 video collectives in New York, such as Global Village, Raindance Corporation, and the People\u0027s Video Theater. The Vasulkas, for instance, contributed some solid video hardware from their own studio, such as five 25\u0022 Setchell-Carlson monitors obtained in barter from Max\u0027s Kansas City impresario Mickey Ruskin. Such production-grade gear, to which artists rarely had access, presented one major incentive to show one\u0027s work at The Kitchen. The union of technology to performance followed organically from the personal histories and creative dispositions of the Vasulkas. Woody began as an industrial engineer. Steina was an accomplished violinist. The live interface of video technology to electronic music became a hallmark of The Kitchen, and an obvious one given the inextricable geneses of audio and video synthesizers. With an excellent sound system in place from the start, The Kitchen soon attracted composers in addition to artists. A music program had been intended from the beginning; La Monte Young, for instance, performed at the inaugural event. However, it was not until the arrival a young musician and composer, Rhys Chatham, in the fall of 1971, that someone took that aspect in hand. In October, Chatham launched the Monday night series of Electronic Music Concerts. Four of the first five concerts featured Chatham himself (one notable evening being an improvised electro-acoustic-video collaboration between he, Dimitri Devyatkin and Woody Vasulka) but soon many of New York\u0027s audacious new composers and performers were appearing, including Maryanne Amacher, Emmanuel Ghent, Frederick Rzewski, John Gibson, Henry Flynt, Tony Conrad, Phill Niblock, Gordon Mumma, Nam June Paik and Charlotte Moorman, to name but a few. A signal change which Chatham introduced to The Kitchen, indicating a rite of growth and a minor source of irritation, was a published schedule. A primary need of an artist-run center like The Kitchen was for its members to have time for their own work. With a number of coordinators, each tending his or her specialty on a regular rotation, a balance between programming and creative space was achieved. The Vasulkas were directors-at-large. Chatham organized weekly concerts. However, aside from Monday music, The Kitchen was almost exclusively dedicated to video in its first year. Dimitri Devyatkin was the original video coordinator. He brought a concern for social issues and documentary, which could not have been more different from the image-popping video sensibility of the Vasulkas. (Woody, a Czech emigr\u00E9, knew the failure of the Velvet Revolution and was famously skeptical of the liberal bias which ran through New York\u0027s art world.) Devyatkin, in solidarity with the leftist agendas of Raindance or Global Village, invited marginal community groups \uFF96 feminists; rent strikers from Harlem and Chinatown; gay and lesbian activists; prostitutes and transvestites \uFF96 to use vi","offset":0,"nextOffset":12000,"totalCharacters":22288,"complete":false},"rightsUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/terms-service"}