An Anti-Capitalist Art History?

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 anticuration and television production in efforts tobridge 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.

Although this book’s index might suggest the reader could browse this book as an art world gossip tell-all, that is not this kind of rag. This is a social history, and the magic of this social history is that Moore’s attentions focus on political histories and social economies besides small and pleasant reflections about his art loves, political interests, and lovers.

Moore’s downtown New York scene mattered not because it was where the bedrooms were, but rather because it was where its bars were. It was where ambition met revolution with cheap rents, and the possibility to actually do something that mattered in any which way. It was also, importantly, where so many small journals were headquartered. Though an early editorial intern for Artforum and a certifiable junior member of the L.A. art mafia, Moore ends up identifying as an art worker, a writer-producer and a typesetter, for Art-Rite and the East Village Eye, but also for among many other magazines High Times, the socialist Guardian, and what he calls a “short-lived egghead tabloid called University Review.”

History is written after the fact. While things are happening,you have a limited understanding of how the events will lead to others, and even less sense of how things will be seen in the future.

Despite the success of many of its members, Moore says, “I don’t think Collaborative Projects was just a sort of postgraduate training ground, a kind of incubator, for gallery / museum art careers.” This statement seems to me the ethicotheoretical heart of this book. Not the “theoretical” heart because this is not a theory book, but “ethico-theoretical”
because in his writing and telling, Moore demonstrates a way of thinking / doing history. The mainstream of capitalist cultural history packages collective efforts and intentions either as springboards for, or as now clearly necessary pathways of unique genius. Moore’s writing does otherwise demonstrating how he and his friend’s actions were guided
by much more than just careerism, more than just an idea of what art could be, or even a clear idea of what a public might want (because they were interested in engaging the public). 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.”

It makes sense because Moore paints the naturally complex ambition contingent to how he and his friends were in this world and how they wanted to be, individually and together. It makes sense because some young adults in the late 1960s and the early 1970s saw the world rapidly changing around them and wanted to meaningfully help in ways that conformed to what they understood about Italy’s Red Brigades, the classical avant garde, Dada, Hollywood, good sex, good highs, cheap meals, art’s meaning and hard work.

As the bums and junkies on the streets of this book likely knew, life throws you curve balls. So too do historical
narratives and the interests of the art market. Yet individual and collective developments continue as they can in some relation, different but not unmoored, to this market’s twists of fate. Art market interests say that Colab was only significant in relation to the stars that partook in it, and that collective efforts are actually only meaningful insofar as they
serve individuals. The poetry of this radical art historian is to talk about how his life and plans continue through these economic, libidinal and political twists. Moore and his interests just keep on going through his and his peers’ successes and failings.

This story simply implies that others also continue to organize themselves and their politics despite the market’s vagaries. Capitalist cultural histories can demonstrate to us how Keith Haring made the big money while obscuring surprising cultural connections that are simply the result of living in a complex and exciting city. I think we are richer for the complex city, not for the cost of a painting.