Art Worker: Doing Time in the New York Artworld
by Alan W. Moore
Written in an accessible style, this subaltern memoir casts a raking light on a classic period in cultural history — the ’70s and ’80s in downtown Manhattan. From art critic, to video artist, to radical organizer and then academic, the author played several roles in the seething scene of art galleries, nightclubs, and small publications.
“Art Worker” is in three parts, with characters, anecdotes, footnotes and extensive bibliography. It’s a book by a scholar written for a general audience.
Alan W. Moore wrote for Artforum and Art-Rite in the mid-1970s, then joined the artists’ group Colab early on. He organized the Real Estate Show and ABC No Rio, and participated in the Times Square Show in 1980. Writing and typing for the East Village Eye, Moore had a ringside seat at the downtown New York art show.
As a video artist during the No Wave era and after, he produced numerous shows for Colab’s artists’ TV series, then launched the MWF Video Club artists’ distribution project which persisted until 2002.
In the ‘90s he took a PhD in art history, and published Art Gangs in 2011, a history of NYC artists’ collectives from 1969 to 1984.
From a wet-behind-the-ears critic in 1974 to a precarious academic 25 years later, this memoir charts some 30 years in New York City’s art world. For the author, this gradually became a political world as first Reagan and then the Bushes took over the country’s government and wrought their dire mischiefs.
Since 2006, he has been researching squatting in Europe, and lives in Madrid. He published Occupation Culture, detailing these researches, in 2015. Now he is back in the States to face up to the past…
Description:
The book is in three parts:
One – the author’s life as a critic, then as an artist with Collaborative Projects, up to the Times Square Show of 1980.
Two – the author’s film and video productions with Colab’s Potato Wolf cable TV series, then the foray into artists video distribution with the MWF Video Club
Three – Colab after the Times Square Show, the East Village art gallery movement, related artists organizations like the Rivington School; 21st century coda
General description of the A.W. Moore papers
Alan Willard Moore (born 1951) is a writer and editor who also worked as an artist, organizer and professor of art history. His collection of papers consists of writings, clippings, ephemera, books and magazines. Works of art are described and listed separately.
Moore studied art history and journalism in California, from 1969-1974. He moved to New York City in 1974 as an intern for Artforum magazine, and also worked with Art-Rite. He joined the artists’ group Colab (Collaborative Projects) in 1977, and worked with them continuously as an organizer and video artist. (Although the group formally ended in 1989, members continue to be active informally.) He ran the MWF Video Club distribution project for artists’ work on video from 1986 to 2002. Papers relating to the MWF project have been deposited (Spring, 2019) in the Film and Theater Collection at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Moore was a co-founder of the cultural center ABC No Rio in 1980, and a writer and art editor at the East Village Eye news magazine. In 1991 he returned to school for a PhD in art history (City University of New York, 2000). His dissertation research was on artists’ collectives, published in 2011 as Art Gangs: Protest and Counterculture in New York City. In 2009 he embarked on a research project to explore squatting in Europe, publishing House Magic, an annual review on the culture of political squatting. He relocated to Madrid, Spain. In 2015 he wrote Occupation Culture: Art and Squatting in the City from Below, and edited Cultural Production in Occupied Spaces.
Moore’s papers are most numerous in the 1980s, ’90s, ’00s and ’10s. In addition to records of his and his artist comrades’ principle activities, the papers include an extensive collection of small publications, and ephemera around art, politics and academia. The MWF Video Club papers form a separate series, as does ABC No Rio, the Colab group, Lower East Side artists, and the House Magic research project on European squatting.
Moore’s library consists of books directly relevant to his research projects and his art collection. (This is aside from the many catalogues, gallery handouts, journals and ‘zines.) Most of the books are produced by independent presses. All materials are currently in storage in Milwaukee.
At a guess, there are in toto 200-odd boxes, partially listed and culled. Box descriptions available upon request.
Notes:
As noted, 20-odd boxes of material related to video distribution, i.e. the MWF Video Club and Colab TV, have already found a home at the Film and Theater Collection at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. (They have not yet been processed.) Materials relating to film and television production, both of Moore and other Colab artists, were not included in that.
Much of the material related to squatting research – books, posters, and ephemera – was deposited with the Interference Archive in Brooklyn between 2009 and 2015, when that project began, and events were held in NYC in 2012 and 2015.