How to Catalyze Change

Or, at least move an idea into the culture

The original Upstairs Artspace: second floor of 204 Markham Road, Tryon, NC

Maybe I was unwilling to push myself out there as an artist because I didn’t believe in the viability of the art I was making in a culture like ours. Quirky, experimental, contemplative, it was the opposite of the kind of object a collector might want to buy. The art critic and activist Lucy Lippard had written a book that named this attitude “the dematerialization of the art object.” In the early seventies art had shifted into areas of performance, conceptualism, impermanence, and social responsibility. I had recently written Lucy a letter in response to her new project I had heard about–– something called PAD––Political Art Documentation, a collective dedicated to artistic activism. I was on board with that, but her single-minded focus on New York irritated me, so I wrote her a letter telling her that art cloistered in New York was just preaching to the choir, it would never effect any social change. She must have gotten other similar letters because within a few weeks the organization had been re-named PAD/D: Political Art Documentation/Distribution.

In the meantime, though, I chose to do the very things I considered suspect, but rather than selling myself and my own work, I began selling a much larger and more ambitious idea: an artists’ space. I saw The Upstairs Artspace as a way for me to fulfill the early ambition of changing hearts and minds while keeping my own art production away from the dirty work of self-promotion. Despite the fact that I promoted the work of other artists, we never sold an artwork, nor did we ever try. When the newspaper interviewed me, I referred to the gallery as “a clearinghouse for ideas, where nothing is bought or sold, only given away,” but I ended up sending press releases, calling newspapers, even buying ads, but to call attention to The Upstairs. By showing artists who believed as I did, I asserted that art’s purpose was not as baubles for the rich but as experiences for the masses, that art should exist as social glue and social grease, that artists were supposed to speak truth to power and that all people needed the opportunity to hear that truth. Idealistic? Yes. Naïve? Probably so. Sacrificial? To a degree. What inspired that young man to live like that, what inspired his wife to affirm the hardship and become a fellow-traveler? I am very grateful to those young people. Too bad they left us without a pension.

We moved into the loft in downtown Tryon and began renovating it with the help of a few local artists. Here is what that space looked like when we got it. Sheila, Sam McMillan, me and Kathryn Graves. Photos are by Chuck Hearon, who rented the loft to us for twenty-five dollars a month.

I considered The Upstairs, itself, as an ongoing artwork and an ambitious project of social transformation, but as collaborative social endeavors often go, I was not able to make it into something that exactly fit my own aesthetic. In fact, rather quickly there was pressure to present work I considered not up to the esoteric level I wanted to put forward. My first step off of the path of pure advanced art was a small step, but a step that saved the artspace from going down the tube of “things that are too cool for their own good.” The state library of North Carolina had a wonderful collection of sixteen-millimeter films I could request through the Polk County Public Library. I borrowed a projector from the local community college and brought in artists like Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin to entice folks who might be intimidated by “modern art” up the stairs. But I also pulled people along by screening the canon of experimental films from Maya Deren forward. I soon realized that folks just love sitting in a darkened room with other humans to watch flickering images, even if those images are scratched directly onto the filmstock by radicals like Norman McLaren or Stan Brakhage.

We sent press releases to local papers and projected the films onto the back wall under the skylight. People actually came. They came in numbers that forced me to find places for them to sit. I cut a deal with the local funeral home and each Thursday I drove my VW beetle over and borrowed four or five canvas bags of wooden folding chairs. Beat up green canvas bags, squarish and big enough to hold six chairs, each bag weighing forty pounds. I would drive to the edge of town, tilt the Volkswagen seats forward and fill the back seats, then boost the rest up on the luggage rack, drive two miles back and lug them all up the long flight of stairs, returning them the next day.

As the films gained us an audience, we began scheduling music at the encouragement of Claude Graves, the local potter, who had formed an old-time band. He envisioned a “Pickin’ Parlor” at The Upstairs and soon musicians became part of our tribe and music events another draw. An artist we presented frequently was Isidore Langlois. We called him “Lang,” as did everyone else in town. He lived down Markham Road from Sheila and me in the same African American neighborhood that gave the world the young Eunice Waymon, who later changed her name to Nina Simone. Lang had played jazz and Gypsy guitar with Django Reinhardt, Duke Ellington, Eddie South and other jazz greats all over Europe in the forties and had returned to Tryon to retire. The community adored him.

I had been moved to establish The Upstairs by discovering other artist-run places during an early trip to New York. I discovered that artists all over the country were experiencing the same things I was experiencing and trying to do the same thing I was trying to do: democratize the art experience; bring art to those not initiated into the high-flown rhetoric of the art world; seize control of the system of presentation run by the self-appointed gatekeepers tied to the commercial system. Soon I found more of these artists by applying for grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, which had created a category of grants for artist-run art spaces.

In 1981 I caught wind of a meeting to be held at Washington Project for the Arts in D.C. WPA had a prime location a few blocks up from the National Mall and there was plenty of room for meetings and gatherings and information-exchange. I went to this meeting and met some of the artists running similar organizations: LACE in L.A, The Painted Bride in Philly, N.A.M.E. in Chicago, Nexus in Atlanta, and from New York, a cohort folks that seemed to be either leading the charge or throwing up road blocks to organizing: Linda Goode Bryant from Just Above Midtown (JAM), Stephan Eins and Joe Lewis at Fashion-Moda in the Bronx, Matthew Geller at Colab, Josh Baer at White Columns, Martha Wilson at Franklin Furnace and maybe someone from ABC No Rio on the Lower East Side. I would see them again two years later at the Contemporary Art Center in New Orleans at a conference called Beyond Survival, where we founded the National Association of Artists Organizations. All of the organizations were non-profits and all of them were trying to resist the corrosive influence of the commercial gallery system by presenting performance art, mail art, installations, video. I suspect that like me, many of them naively ignored the paradox that nearly all the art objects sold from their walls would go into private homes never to be seen again, and that without the subsidy of the NEA, most of those artists who made the kind of art that left no sellable objects would simply disappear from view.

Nevertheless, we persevered. NAAO was a transformational influence on the art world for many years. I ran The Upstairs for six years, never managing to be paid more than $350 a month, mostly from grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the North Carolina Arts Council, but what an extraordinary education it was. I’ll tell you more next week, including a couple of do-it-yourselves artworks–instructions from artists for how to make one of their works.