Art Worker is a book in three parts, with characters, anecdotes, footnotes and extensive bibliography. It's a book by a scholar written for a general audience.

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

236 pages

With 10 full page photo spreads, index, footnotes & bibliography

book designed by Lamm & Kirsch 

2022 

$30.00
(purchase below)

Art Worker: Doing Time in the New York Artworld 

The long rolling crescendo of Art Worker comes in Alan W. Moore’s discussion of the expansive art scene around Collaborative Projects (Colab) that had its heyday from 1977 to the mid-1980s. Colab, situated in New York’s downtown art scene, was a collective that engaged in provocative anti-curation and television production in efforts to bridge boundaries between art and the wider world. Moore’s accounting makes this a very personal story. He allows us alongside him and his friends and comrades as they make things that will eventually be called “historical” – the Real Estate Show, the Times Square Show – exhibitions Colab produced that were key events for some art history. Moore entangles them within an expansive linear narrative that starts with summers of love spent tramping in Europe and days of wonder doing radical cultural programming for the University of California.

About Alan W. Moore

Alan W. Moore was a critic, an organizer, a video artist and a typist in the subaltern NYC artworld during the last years of the 20th century. He organized the Real Estate Show and ABC No Rio for Colab, and participated in the Times Square Show in 1980. Working for the East Village Eye, Moore had a ringside seat at the downtown New York art show. In 2000 he took a PhD in art history, and published articles and a book on artists’ collectives. In colorful accessible language, this memoir runs over those years, with fully-sourced reflections on the epochal changes they wrought.

From the Intro...

"Moore’s downtown is one of strivers and radicals, organic geniuses and peddlers, activists and freaks in the guise of artists. So, with all these layers coming together, Moore narrates a story where this reader ends up saying, “Of course the birth of HipHop, contemporary DIY anarchist practice, and MTV have common roots. Sure. That makes perfect sense.” (read the rest here)