{"id":5570,"title":"Not on the Shelf: Accounting for New York City Artists\u0027 Organizations\u0027","kind":"biblio","url":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/not-shelf-accounting-new-york-city-artists-organizations","version":"446b310e4f017e64bb2e421488c610b2ec33c03151932d19d54f65d361902f9c","modified":"2026-09-13T21:52:04.4390802+00:00","credits":[{"role":"Author","name":"Alan Moore"}],"authorKeys":["Moore, Alan"],"subjects":["Texts by Author"],"metadata":[{"label":"Publisher","value":"unpublished manuscript","url":null},{"label":"ETC archive","value":"ETC0658","url":null}],"citations":{"page":"\u0022Not on the Shelf: Accounting for New York City Artists\u0027 Organizations\u0027.\u0022 Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2026. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/not-shelf-accounting-new-york-city-artists-organizations.","publication":"Alan Moore. Not on the Shelf: Accounting for New York City Artists\u0027 Organizations\u0027. unpublished manuscript. .","risUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/citation/5570.ris"},"links":[{"label":"Scanned document","url":"https://archive.org/details/ETC0658","relationship":"linked document; contents not retrieved","contentType":"application/pdf"}],"sections":[{"name":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"characters":14048},{"name":"abstract","source":"recorded publication abstract","generated":false,"characters":90},{"name":"summary","source":"existing VHP generated summary","generated":true,"characters":729},{"name":"archive_summary","source":"existing ETC archive summaries: ETC0658","generated":false,"characters":90}],"content":{"section":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"text":"My perspective on archives arises out of biographical circumstances. An ex-artist seeking reinvention as a scholar, I work in archives and I have one. So does every artist, and every scholar. It almost defines an artist to have an archive, or a private museum. Before I entered school in art history, most of my artwork was destroyed in a legal disaster that may have been fortuitous. Much of my archive, however, remains. The bulkiest part of that is a video distribution business, a fitfully viable revenue-generating business. As an apprentice historian and a former artist with an archive, it is hard for me to speak of archives and what evades their grasp. This subject is twice bound up with me, and there is too much to say. [ill: MARCEL DUCHAMP Boite en valise... \u0022archive in a state of reproduction\u0022] My dissertation recounts a trajectory of politicized artists\u0027 organizations from the formation of the Art Workers Coalition through Art \u0026 Language, Artists Meeting for Cultural Change, Collaborative Projects, Political Art Documentation (PADD) and Group Material. These groups spanned some 15 years from 1969 to 1984. Most of what there is in public archives and libraries in New York City is general. All of it seems vaguely pertinent, but it\u0027s not really what I needed to construct an empirical history. Whether out of training, habit, convenience or sheer momentum, I worked almost entirely from textual sources. Given the skimpy material in most archives, my project would have made more sense as an oral history; that is to say, I should have created my own archive. Some remarks on failure In writing histories of the under-reported, and the commercially unsupported, I have come to realize the obvious: political opposition often entails failure and obscurity. I write of collective ventures that petered out, and artists who have been largely forgotten. Failure to achieve broad public notice or to sustain a group effort often results in amnesia, both personal and collective. Few art markets and institutions are interested in political work, so there is no history, only some stories and a feeling, the song of la boheme. The history of creative effort may be described as in large measure the history of a continuous even preordained failure of hopeful people to change a world built by the word of those who own it, and structured according to principles of material self-interest. A history that does not support saleable art, or a history long-ignored, is one that even its participants may turn away from. The parents\u0027 unsold art, their failures to turn dreams, experiences and ideas into wealth, when it passes into the hands of the sons and daughters looks like trash to them. This kind of sour attitude rather runs against the long-running American cultural romance of the margins. It sometimes seems as if marginality, that continent of universal suffering and insufficient means from which the beneficiaries of civilization are barred by their very comforts and institutional commitments, serves as a kind of 20th century Arcadia, a land where hobo shepherds write mystic runes and the police are all on strike... [WALKER EVANS photo of hobo scrawl] \u00B4\u00B4Why bother?\u0027 Always an important question to ask. Who cares what these artists\u0027 organizations were about? They were fleeting and contingent, fun while they lasted, and merely aspects of an overall armature of support, perhaps the first limb of support for the artist in the city who was not well connected. As artists rise in stature, they drop their organizational memberships -- or acquire new ones, moving from bohemia to the academy. These groups are to art as scaffolds are to architecture. The historian who understands art as an elite activity is unconcerned with popular acceptances or resistances. The real stake is the utility of past cultural production for the present. These uses include the taking up of artistic strategies by culture industry and publicity business. The toehold of regard that contemporary art has in the culture is, after all, very slim, and it should be occupied solely by the best and the brightest. And those are, on the populist side, artists whose works indubitably influence the commercial world, the \u00B4\u00B4consciousness industry,\u0027 which manages consensus (using of course innovative forms developed by resistant subcultures). Argued from the point of view of the elite, or vanguard, those artists must be advanced whose work can best refract philosophical and critical thought, ideas which are difficult to understand unless tied to objects of art which may be seen to exemplify or embody them. I take the foregoing as the usually unspoken rationalization for the way it goes, the way it shakes out, so everyone can feel good about what they\u0027re doing. Good cheer lies in acceptance, in an embrace of the inevitable, in somehow playing along with the cultural order. It\u0027s Darwinism.... just some kind of Gravity... or Capital\u0027s marching orders. But then again, who knows? Losing tendencies may inspire significant subsequent art. In a history of cultural production, what may finally matter is not so much the facts of reception, or the competing tendencies in play at a moment of triumph (however that may be managed, either popularly or privately), but subsequent interpretations by other producers. Things and practices may need to be lost, so they can be found again. [ILL... Mike Kelley, college posters piece; R. Pettibone? Geo. Herriman\u0027s Krazy Kat?] Towards a \u00B4\u00B4visible history\u0027 If artists\u0027 organizations and alternative exhibiting institutions are the scaffolds of art, archives are the compost of historical construction. The organisms at work in them are time, mortality, and decay. This stink and rot is covered over in a conventional historical style of writing.... History should smell. Its construction should be self-evident. Students -- in both history and studio -- should be brought into the confidence of the archival so that history is more visible to them, clearer in the lineaments of its archival construction. Rather than simply the mastery of texts and their construction, immersion in the archive itself should be required in historical study. To trouble the dominion of historical narrative, to set aside the authority of the text from within it, what is required? Perhaps it is through anecdote, dimly recalled, or colorfully enhanced by retellings, unverifiable, self-serving, drunken. Now I am romancing the oral history I did not do. Yet even there, as oral history is verified by being recorded, transcribed, and passed into the form of text, it loses the contingency of the scene. We don\u0027t see the rich surroundings of the hearty, or the stinking lair of the bitter. Mortality of the record Both art and information are mortal. Most is lost. Despite the diversity of our cultural life, our historical culture is in many ways impoverished. The hand of the market regularly determines archival value and settles questions of survival. The most desirable is agented into collections. Absent obvious commercial or historical value, -- (and the two seem increasingly to be conflated) -- the position of magnetic materials like video and computer information which require high maintenance is especially precarious. [ILL -- Dziga Vertov, \u0022Man with a Movie Camera\u0022 still] [question of the anarchival... cf. Derrida] Destruction has always been the fate of most art, of course. This emerged anecdotally through a string on the College Art Association list initiated by Dario Gamboni as he prepared his book Destruction of Art. This is so for most records. The U.S. government has a \u00B4\u00B4retention cycle\u0027 for each class of records. Minutes of panel meetings at the National Endowment for the Arts are destroyed within so many years, then supporting materials, and so forth. The mortality of the record is plotted and charted, just as prisoners are incarcerated for specific terms. Then the information that had once been a record is freed into living memory, the aether of mortality. [ILL -- Baldessari, \u0022Burned my Paintings\u0022 piece] Digital media, the cyborg incarnation of the archive as prosthetic memory, promises a kind of solution for this mortality. How real is that promise? Is there \u00B4\u00B4eternal life\u0027? Like my new career, this paper was begun on the ruins of another -- an inquiry into the question of obsolete technology in art initiated by Ardele Lister at a conference for video history in upstate New York. The question of obsolete technology has been imbedded in the contemporary archive, and in the sudden sharp challenges that the rising storm of an information-based economy poses, the changes which are reshaping the global commercial landscape and academia. I met Ardele, after an interval of many years, at a conference on the history of experimental video in Syracuse, New York, last year. Half the conference was given over to the preservation of magnetic media, an urgent question for video, since over time the content-bearing iron oxide tends to separate from its plastic backing. At the conference, Ralph Hocking, a founder of the Experimental TV Center, brought up the \u00B4\u00B4why bother\u0027 question when he suggested that, since no exhibiting institution had ever really regularly supported this art anyhow, we should all agree to let it rot. This advice came from an artist who has methodically filled several garages on his farm with antiquated video devices, monitors, synthesizers, and computers -- a veritable warehouse of obsolete technology. In her studio teaching at Rutgers University, Ardele Lister became concerned that her students, trained in digital video production, did not understand the conditions of production that generated so much of the canonical video work of the 1960s and \u002770s. Ardele\u0027s practical \u00B4\u00B4studio\u0027 concern with the terms of production of historical media art is akin to the question of performance and of the political in the art of the recent past. All are contingent, unfolding within the terms of their time, that is, given certain transient material and historical conditions. It\u0027s curious, and seems like a kind of fetishism of the tool, to think that the art is incomprehensible without knowing how it was made. This may be a formalist technological determinism, but this relation of the tool to the image is somewhat like that between a history and the archive which verifies it. Considered independent of its \u00B4\u00B4proofs,\u0027 any history is a work of fiction; it is the archive behind it which gives it authenticity. An antiquarian of vanishing social forms: not failure, but obsolescence As a former participant in the events I narrate as history, I execute a brand of nostalgia. \u00B4\u00B4Ah,\u0027 Betti-Sue Hertz said to me, \u00B4\u00B4you\u0027re writing your memoirs.\u0027 A nostalgic participant aspiring to write an empirical history can become an antiquarian. And in a sense I have been that, driven by the classic antiquarian motive of the urban dweller, scribbler and flaneur, who finds the city he or she knew vanished from sight. For me it is not architectural but social forms that have vanished. My impulse is all the more impossible, that is, to save not only the work of these artists\u0027 collectives, but the memory of their ambiences, their enveloping socius. [Atget... street or shop window; Brassai, caf\u00E9 scene...] In preparing his collaborative installation \u00B4\u00B4Open House\u0027 for the New Museum this year, Michael Smith asked to look at videotapes from my archive. The show Michael Smith and Josh White produced was a brilliant evocation of 20 years of a video artist\u0027s life through the fictive pretense that he was getting out of the art biz and selling his now-valuable loft in Soho. \u0022Open House\u0027 is the second installation this team has done which points to obsolete technologies and vanished cultural practices. Smith and White\u0027s gallery construction of a bankrupt company called MUSCO which had produced light shows evoked an era of populist 1960s technology art. Both these installations, to which I can no more than","offset":0,"nextOffset":12000,"totalCharacters":14048,"complete":false},"rightsUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/terms-service"}