537 Broadway - Am MIT spezialisierte KI-Forschung

537 Broadway
Performance and Buildings

Agustin Schang

ICH

Seit 1974, like many other spaces in downtown Manhattan, Die 537-541

Broadway cast-iron building became the headquarters of an artists’ commu-
nity that worked outside the conventional borders of the art system. Moved
by the co-operative housing spirit that took roots in SoHo during the late 1960s
and early 1970s, Fluxus leader George Maciunas helped to buy and refurbish
many commercial lofts formerly used by marginal business in the neighborhood.1
In 1967, he organized the acquisition of the first building on 80 Wooster Street,
which he named FluxHouse II, after a first attempt on Spring Street. He kept
the basement as his personal operation base, and from there, he ran the entire
Fluxhouse project: the first artists’ co-op initiative in SoHo. Beyond residences
and studios, Maciunas hoped to establish collective workshops, food-buying co-
operatives, and theatres to link the strengths of various media and bridge the
gap between the artists and the neighborhood.

He materialized his utopian planning impulses through detailed projections of
construction costs and the benefits of wholesale purchases. He was convinced
that legal prohibitions could be overcome, despite the fact that SoHo was not
zoned for residential use. He established himself as the president of Fluxhouse
Co-operatives, Inc., performing all the organizational work involved in the
planning. He was in charge of creating the collectives, purchasing buildings,
obtaining mortgages, securing legal and architectural services, and conducting
work as a general contractor for all renovations. He also offered to handle the
future management, if so desired by the members. It was through this planning
that Maciunas helped to purchase sixteen buildings that he later remodeled and
sold to artists, making very little profit.2

SEITE 117 (2017), S. 53–64. 
doi:10.1162/PAJJ _a_00381

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Five thirty-seven and five forty-one Broadway—later separated in two artists’
co-ops—was the last building developed through this plan. In 1868, the five-story
cast-iron building was erected by Irish architect Charles Mettam after a spectacular
fire on the former site of P. T. Barnum’s Chinese Museum Collection (1853–1863)
Und, später, P. T. Barnum’s second American Museum (1865–1868). Five thirty-seven
and five forty-one Broadway was designed shortly after the Civil War for joint
owners Benjamin Franklin Beekman, who had his office there, and Peter Gilsey,
the strong advocate of cast-iron who was soon to build the Gilsey Hotel, welche
is still standing on Broadway at Twenty-Ninth Street. The Broadway building
was later extended two hundred feet through the block to Mercer Street, Wo
it currently appears under the numbers 108-112 Mercer Street.3

For this last FluxHouse, Maciunas assembled a group of multi-disciplinary artists
who subsequently split the 537-541 building into two co-operatives. Trisha Brown,
Lucinda Childs, David Gordon, Valda Settefield, and Joan Jonas bought lofts at
541 Broadway. The building was shortly going to become the so-called “Dancers’
Building.” Their spaces were wider than the standard twenty-five-foot-long lofts
without columns, and the floors were entirely made of wood; these factors quali-
fied as an ideal combination for performance practices.4 For the 537 Broadway
section, Maciunas brought together Nam June Paik and Shigeko Kubota, Ay-O,
Yoshi Wada, Simone Forti, Peter Van Riper, Frances Alenikoff, Mary Beth Edel-
Sohn, Davidson Gigliotti, Elaine Summers, and Maciunas himself. They decided
to name their co-op The Cast-Iron Court Corporation after the internal courtyard
separating them from their symmetrical artists twin-co-op at 541 Broadway. Mit
this newly established artistic community, the whole building became a labora-
tory accommodating the emerging fields of video, Leistung, and visionary
new works in disciplines such as poetry, Musik, and dance.

As Maciunas did with many of the buildings he helped to purchase and renovate,
he kept a spot in the building for himself: the second-floor loft on 537 Broad-
way would become the base of his renewal operations until 1976, when he was
forced to leave New York after suffering a violent assault by the construction
mafia, causing the end of his ambitions housing program. He then sold the loft
to the French artist Jean Dupuy, who moved in with Olga Adorno and dubbed
the space Grommet Studio. For the next three years, and engaging over two
hundred artists, Dupuy presented a series of Collective Performance Concerts,
in which he participated as both an organizer and an artist.5 In 1982, Dupuy
and Adorno rented the front half of the loft to Emily Harvey—a corporate art
consultant—and the Grommet Gallery opened under Harvey’s direction, An
Januar 15, 1982, with Adorno’s first solo exhibition. It was after a couple of
years that Dupuy and Adorno decided to move to France and sold the loft to

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Harvey and her then husband Christian Xatrec who, In 1983, renamed the space
the Emily Harvey Gallery. It is well-known that the space was not only an art
gallery, but also a gathering place for the Fluxus diaspora at large, einschließlich der
artists Dick Higgins, John Cage, Henry Flynt, Alison Knowles, Jackson Mac Low,
Paik, Charlotte Moorman, Carolee Schneemann, Marian Zazeela, and La Monte
Jung. The Emily Harvey Gallery would continue to exist until Harvey’s untimely
death in 2004. After that, and for administrative reasons, the gallery reached a
new legal status, becoming the Emily Harvey Foundation (EHF), and developing
a comprehensive art-event program drawn from its rich history, art collection,
and archival materials on Fluxus, Concept Art, Performance Art, and Mail Art.

In August 2013, I moved into the second-floor loft of this building, after an
agreement with the present owners of the space: I would coordinate the activities
taking place in the art foundation in exchange for housing.

Ever since I moved in, intrigued by the history of the site, I started conducting
research in the institution’s archive. It was obvious to me that the archival proce-
dures within the institution had been unclear and fragmented. There had never
been a proper, complete cataloguing process of the objects, artworks, zeigt an,
and transactions that had taken place at 537 Broadway Co-op, ranging from its
origins as a FluxHouse to its later transition into a foundation. Although the
EHF—due to the legal requirements as part of its status evolution—had to create
an inventory of its inherited estate, many of the items skipped the cataloguing
Verfahren, which mainly consisted of registering and appraising its art collection.
Therefore—and as it would continue to occur in the case of odd findings—what
objects could tell about themselves was all held in their own materiality: no reg-
ister, no inscription, no album, or index was to be found anywhere, preventing
me from identifying any footnote on when the object in question had entered
the space at 537 Broadway.

During one of the frequent opening of drawers and boxes, I came across a series
of aerial photographs that could have been taken from the spiral staircase that
leads to the upper bedroom in the gallery room. The photographs captured a
table centered in the space, surrounded by chairs and people sharing a dinner.
Most likely, the event had taken place at night because the light in the picture
was clearly artificial. I found out later that those snapshots were from approxi-
mately April 2002, preceding the opening of poet Emmett Williams’s Story Lines
exhibition, which was to be re-staged as part of my project in the space: the EHF
Dinner Series.

SCHANG / 537 Broadway  55

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The EHF Dinner Series was conceived with writer Valeria Meiller as a site-specific
event that would replicate the setting and atmosphere around those photographs.
In five private intimate gatherings, we would place a table in the same way as
that found in the photographs and invite a group of artists and friends to dine,
showing or performing a work of their choice. In these action-dinners, we were
certain that by focusing our curiosity on the re-enactment of archival images, Wir
could better understand the connections interrelating the elements in the loft.
By activating works, Gesten, and archival findings in the present, and using the
residual index of actions that were once alive in the space, we found a way to
imbue past and present time within the nature of our project.

In the EHF Dinner Series #4, the attendees were invited to show or share something
on the figure of George Maciunas and the EHF loft. We invited people who had
been close to Maciunas to participate and talk about his architectural and plan-
ning practice, as well as the trajectory of the loft’s history from its original concep-
tion, aus 1974 up to today. We invited filmmaker Jonas Mekas, who had been
Maciunas’s closest friend, and Kevin Harrison, who had worked with Maciunas
refurbishing buildings, becoming the superintendent of 537 Broadway in 1988.
Mekas and Harrison, along with their active collaboration with Maciunas, war
also very interested in archives. Mekas had inherited part of Maciunas’s personal
archive in 1978; in fact, he brought a copy of Maciunas’s architecture diploma
from the Carnegie Institute of Technology (1954) to the dinner. Zusätzlich,
Mekas is founder of the Anthology Film Archives, a New York–based institution
devoted to independent, experimental, and avant-garde cinema.6 Harrison, on the
andererseits, was building his own personal archive on the urban nature of SoHo
and the cast-iron buildings by buying drawings, pictures, and stamps featuring
the neighborhood’s evolutions over time. Almost all the images Harrison showed
during the event were dated from 1856, the moment when SoHo developed into
an upscale commercial district populated by department stores, hotels, musical
Hallen, and new cast-iron facades. This newly prefabricated technology incorpo-
rated the large open spaces known as lofts, which later would shape SoHo’s rise
as an artists’ colony.7

On December 7, 2014, we hosted our fifth and final dinner-action. We asked
Summers—a dancer, choreographer, and founder of the Experimental Intermedia
Foundation as well as an original member of the 537 Broadway Co-op—to screen
a video recording of her work Windows in the Kitchen (1976). The twelve-minute
film is made up of footage from 1976, shot by photographer Paula Court at The
Kitchen when the experimental art venue was located at Wooster and Broome
Streets. The clip features a bare setting for the dancer Matt Turney to perform
under the guidance of Summers. The Kitchen’s dance floor, where the original

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performance took place, was very similar to the current spatial arrangement of
the EHF gallery: the dancer moved along three large windows that very much
resemble those of the Broadway loft. After the screening, artists Yolanda Hawkins
and William Niederkorn, inspired by the history of modern dance, led the audi-
ence to think of the body as an archive of movements in which the embodi-
ment of history is reflected. Their performance was called Loft Dancing (Mit
Eye-Robotic Warmup) (2015). The scripted piece used movement and improvised
text conveyed in a fictitious structure of a class setting, which resembled the way
twentieth-century popular dances were taught. The piece was introduced by a
warm-up of eye movements, and the following scored actions were performed
on techno music.

The performative component of the actions from the fifth gathering placed the
gallery into a new and vibrant dimension. Architecture, narratives, and bod-
ies blurred time periods and categorizations. They revealed processes of time
recording operated by different media, articulated through photographs, films,
oral histories, and spatial excerpts. Hawkins and Niederkorn’s instructed dance,
driven by an archival impulse, captured bodily memories and movements, con-
necting past ideas of time and space to the present. Through actions in the space,
performers and participants were actualizing every element and object in the
gallery. The nature of an everyday item, such as a chair, could be transformed by
repositioning it in the site. The residue of a past performance became palpable
in the present through its reactivation. A similar transformative power affected
the works of art that had been resting in storage for the previous twenty years,
as well as the personal anecdotes from the participants of the dinner. The EHF
Dinner Series was marked by evident moments of recognition for the connections
between present and history, which were generated by the actions related to the
objects resurfaced from the archive. As echoed by Hawkins, the EHF Dinner Series
felt like “just another one of Emily’s dinners.”

III

In 1992, Harvey started the Venice gallery project while still running her estab-
lished New York space. In the same year, she also conceived The Cast-Iron Court
Corporation Group show, a curatorial project to be held in her own gallery.8 Diving
into the records of the EHF, I found correspondence between Harvey and Dupuy—
the previous owner of the loft still involved in the gallery’s activity—where she
described the exhibition plan: all the artist-members of the 537 building would
be represented through a selection of their works. In the letter, she listed all the
current and former shareowners, as well as suggestions for the display of some
artist-friends. Trotzdem, The Cast-Iron Court Corporation Group show was never

SCHANG / 537 Broadway  57

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Top: Emily Harvey Foundation Gallery space. Mitte: Emily Harvey Foundation Dinner Series #3, 2014. Bottom:

in Order to See Them, 2015. Photos: Paula Court.

Jonas Mekas and Kevin Harrison. EHF Dinner Series #4, 2014. Photos courtesy Emily Harvey Foundation.

58  BLUME 117

SCHANG / 537 Broadway  59

Top: Charlotte Moorman, Green Neon Cello: Shadow of my cello, 1989, 537 Broadway

Sub-basement. Emily Harvey Foundation Collection. Mitte: Francesca Rheannon

introducing the history of Eden’s Expressway at 537 Broadway, 4th floor. Bottom:

Cathy Weis performance at WeisAcres, 537 Broadway, 3rd Floor. Ways of Treating Buildings

realized. Later that year, Harvey decided to move to Venice, and slowly, most
of the original members started to move out of the building. Folglich, Die
proposal was put aside and forgotten as time went by. Once again, the act of
discovering through hidden or forgotten materials triggered questions on both
the loft’s and the building’s layered relationship to history. How were all these
pieces and settings housed in this building-container?

As part of my residence in the loft, I decided to stage one last event. Based on Har-
vey’s exhibition proposal, I chose to bring back to life a list of artworks, Aktionen,
and relationships embedded within the architecture of the building. The event
was called Ways of Treating Buildings in Order to See Them, modeled on George
Brecht’s description of Ways of Treating Objects in Order to See Them (Notebook
#8–154, June 1961–September 1962), a set of notes in which he attempted to
explain the criteria of the “event score.” Brecht developed the event scores between
1959 Und 1961, which are linguistic propositions that mediate visible and invisible
everyday experiences between subjects and objects through a few lines of text
printed on a white card.9 In his description of how to act toward objects, Brecht
explains that they could become explicit by the act of “plac[ing] them in much
empty space . . . plac[ing] them near one or more other objects . . . mit welchem
they form a new whole, (A) complementing by difference (unrelatedness) oder (B)
complementing by having . . . common ground . . . ”10 With my project, I aimed
at investigating whether I could translate Brecht’s proposition for understanding
objects to the treatment of the building.

Designed to unveil the particular way that 537 Broadway recorded its own history,
Ways of Treating Buildings in Order to See Them included three forty-five-minute
guided tours, in which viewers were escorted through the private lofts and com-
mon spaces in the building. Based on archival research, oral history, Interviews,
legal transactions, and accidental findings, the exhibit registered twenty-seven
arrangements—works done by the artists who participated in the site’s life—
disseminated throughout the entire structure. The tour was led by Harrison,
the superintendent of the Cast-Iron Court Corporation, as well as myself. Ich würde
explain the chosen artworks at every stop while Harrison would add personal
and historical details to shed light on these arrangements in time and space.

The expedition began in the sub-basement of 537 Broadway—where the EHF
archives are located—with Moorman’s Green Neon Cello: Shadow of my Cello
(1989) displayed next to Xatrec’s Untitled (Man hole cover) (1980), an artwork
permanently installed in the floor of the archive when Xatrec used the space as
his studio in 1984. Further down the sub-basement hallway, Harrison explained
that a storage closet, now inaccessible by its closed door, had once been Ay-O’s

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Black Hole dedicated to George Maciunas (1992). This project was “a kind of tactile
black-hole, carpeted and totally black where the only light [War] the one of the
camera flash after the snapshot of each participant that Ay-O [took] as a record
that they came out alive.”11 The next arrangement included two speakers and the
vinyl recording of Off the Wall (1984) by Yoshi Wada, who used to live on the
third floor of the Mercer side of the building (110 Mercer Street). Wada used to
work with Harrison doing plumbing jobs for Maciunas in various established
co-ops, whose musical creations are written for instruments called “pipe horns.”
In the early 1970s, Wada began building homemade musical instruments from
plumbing pipes, writing compositions for them based on his personal, quotidian
musical exploration.

As the third stop in the tour, one floor above the archive, on the cellar level,
Paik was being portrayed on a TV while riding the Mercer freight elevator. Der
video Nam June Paik Freight Elevator (1979) was shot by video artist Joan Logue,
who used to share the fourth floor on Mercer Street with Ay-O. Logue’s video
was played on a small, old monitor on top of a wooden pedestal designed by
Dupuy in the early 1980s. In the proximity of the freight elevator, outside of
Harrison’s studio, a reproduction of a print from 1857 titled New York Scene in
Broadway documented a street scene on lower Broadway, between Spring Street and
Prince Street. The drawing featured the Chinese Museum building that preceded
the current 1868 cast-iron building. Adjacent to this, photographs arranged in
acrylic boxes documented the unmanageable drive of artist and collector Citizen
Kafka—pseudonym of Richard Schulman—a radio personality and folk musi-
cian who used to rent a space at 537 Broadway when one floor was converted
into art studios. The selected photographs showed an event hosted at the Emily
Harvey Gallery in 1987, when Kafka decided to sell all of his possessions as his
fortieth birthday celebration. The sellout packed the gallery space from floor to
ceiling with boxes; the number of goods that cluttered the loft made it almost
impossible to walk through.

After taking the Broadway elevator to the fifth floor, the expedition arrived at
Gigliotti’s—a member of the pioneer video collective Videofreex—and Summers’s
loft. They had moved to the space in 1974, and sold it by 1987, before moving to
Sarasota, Florida. Gigliotti assembled his studio and editing room over a mez-
zanine facing Elaine’s old dance studio and offices. Under the silhouette of an
arch that still marks the wall—a relic from what used to be the connection with
the adjoined building (541 Broadway)—a flat monitor showed Davidson’s video
recording of Brown’s Spanish Dance (1977). Brown had her dance studio behind
that arched wall, and the day they arranged to tape the piece, Gigliotti passed
the video cables through the front windows. In the back of the loft, Summers’s

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video Buttons and Buttonholes (1978) was placed on the kitchen counter. It was shot
in the very same kitchen space that we were visiting. This was a video dance in
four languages—an abstract comedic work about kitchens, cooking, and female
impressions on domesticity.12

One floor below, in Frances Alenikoff ’s space, her daughter Francesca Rheannon
explained the history of the dance studio’s wooden floor. Alenikoff was a dancer,
choreographer, and visual artist whose performances often combined movement
with photo slides, film, voice, tape recordings, and chants. She moved in the loft
In 1974, after signing Maciunas’s Co-op contract, and found the floor inadequate
to perform, due to the gaps and splinters. After fixing the floor in 1978, she began
to use the studio to develop her own performance work, while also renting it
under the name Eden’s Expressway. In 2000, Movement Research bought the loft
from Alenikoff and opened it to the public for classes and workshops.

On the third floor, Plumbing Music (1976) by musician Van Riper was playing,
while his Windows Shadows (1976–1977) registers where showed on an old TV.
In twenty-five minutes of footage, Van Riper delineates the contours of the sun-
cast shadows of the building’s decorative ironwork onto the Broadway windows,
creating an animate net of superimposed lines. While looking at the video, Die
audience became aware that dancer Cathy Weis was laying on the floor, in front
of their eyes. Weis purchased what used to be Simone Forti’s loft in 2005, Und
since then, the space has functioned as the base of the Cathy Weis Project, A
non-profit organization which explores dance, film screenings, Aufführungen,
and other modalities of artistic gatherings.13 Weis’s work intertwines video and
technology with performance. In the piece she improvised for the tour, Weis
placed two cameras on opposite walls. Her body moved while both live record-
ings slowly converged into one, as she reached the center of the studio.

At the end of the tour, the crowd returned to the EHF where the space had been
modified to follow the spatial arrangement that articulated the gallery. On one
of the walls, an extract from Jonas Mekas’s Zefiro Torna or Scenes From the Life of
George Maciunas (1992) was projected. The film was being screened in the exact
position where Maciunas and Billy Hutchins celebrated their Fluxwedding in 1978.
Dupuy’s Floor Mirror (1973)—two symmetrically opposite openings on the east
and west sides of the wooden floor—revealed the thin corridor underneath the
horizontal structure, recalling the model of an archeological excavation. Close
to the internal courtyard of the loft, the screening of Adorno’s performances
featured Sola (1977), a retro-projected invitation on the wall, and Horse Piece
(1978), a video of the artist’s feet and voice imitating a horse walk and recorded
by Gigliotti on his fifth-floor loft. On a table, a work by Flynt revealed a portrait
of Harvey from Flynt’s series Photos of Women (1989–1991). Next to it, a pipe horn

62  BLUME 117

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aus 1979, Untitled, by Yoshi Wada hung from a mezzanine structure. Endlich,
the exterior courtyard, previously mentioned as inspiration for the Co-op’s
name, was being animated by Anne Tardos’s recording of a dance exploration of
the building by Simone Forti. Statues (1977–1999) described the trajectories of
bodily movements, Raum, and objects from what used to be Forti’s loft on the
third-floor to the communal rooftop, once left open for artistic explorations, alas
now closed due to insurance policies.

If the EHF Dinner Series brought a whole group of artists, Objekte, and perfor-
mances back to life in the second-floor loft at 537 Broadway, the event Ways of
Treating Buildings in Order to See Them extended the action to the rest of the site.
Connecting the different stages of the tour, funktioniert, Objekte, and authors, Die
Co-op re-materialized under a new light. During the guided tour, viewers made
personal readings of the surroundings, coming into contact with the activated
space through the voices of the tour guides, the loft owners, and the help of a
newspaper that functioned as script throughout the walk.

Ephemeral, interactive, and sometimes disposable, many of the artistic practices
hosted in the 537 building challenge their own nature, while also becoming
supremely resistant to categorizations and cataloguing. The oscillation between
Kunst, authors, documents, and archival remains is crucial to understand the mul-
tifaceted art historical phenomenon that determines their meanings. My project,
Dann, essentially focused on experimenting with this history, asking: How can
individuals find their place within historical coordinates by experiencing build-
ings and dealing with altered temporal narratives?

I’ve come to realize that what is (and was) housed in the 537 section operates
in a complicated overlay of settings where biographical, archeological, vertraut,
öffentlich, and personal constantly encounter and regenerate within a multitude of
fluctuating historical links. By occupying the 537 Broadway loft, together with
the projects conceived there, I was not only able to discover the fascinating nature
of this space, but also experimented with the exercise of architecture. Treating
and seeing the ways this site was built enacted an archival attempt to preserve
constant processes of change. While permanent records can idealize and secure
historical narratives, mediating history through pieces “in flux” renders complexi-
ties of the social settings visceral.

It will probably not be long before—as has happened to many other sites in
New York—these objects, Menschen, and spaces will be gone, pushed aside by real
estate developers, excited shoppers, and trendy restaurants. Noch, I believe that an

SCHANG / 537 Broadway  63

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archival-driven obsession and an interest in listening to residents and spaces, stag-
ing events and tours, and registering experiences in cheap newspapers constitutes
a chance to rethink the ways of seeing layers of memories. Architecture can be
preserved within a particular moment in time, enclosed by its walls, a structural
ganz, as the temporal container of the event. In this way, 537 Broadway—
filled with its artifacts and objects—survived for at least a liminal interval of
forty-five minutes.

NOTES

1. Aaron Shkuda, The Lofts of SoHo: Gentrification, Kunst, and Industry in New York,

1950–1980 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 55.

2. Roslyn Bernstein and Shael Shapiro, Illegal Living: 80 Wooster Street and the Evolution

of SoHo (Vilnius: The Jonas Mekas Foundation, 2010), 45–54.

3. Margot Gayle and Edmund V. Gillon, Cast-Iron Architecture in New York: A Photographic

Survey (New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1974), 145.

4. Richard Kostelanetz, SoHo: The Rise and Fall of an Artist’s Colony (New York and

London: Routledge, 2003), 78–80.

5. Jean Dupuy, Collective Consciousness: Art Performances in the Seventies (New York: SEITE

Veröffentlichungen, 1980), 46–61.

6. Anthology Film Archives website: http://anthologyfilmarchives.org/about.

7. Shkuda, The Lofts of SoHo, 51–53.

8. Emily Harvey Gallery Archive, The Cast-Iron Court Corporation Group Show, corre-

spondence, 1992, n.p.

9. Julia Robinson, “In the Event of George Brecht” in George Brecht: Veranstaltungen, A Hetero-

spective, Hrsg. Alfred M. Fischer (Köln: Museum Ludwig, 2005), 18.

10. Ebenda., “Defining the Event,” 62.

11. Emily Harvey Gallery Archive, Black Hole Dedicated to George Maciunas, press release,

Oktober 23, 1991, n.p.

12. See Elaine Summers’s website: http://www.elainesummersdance.com.

13. See Cathy Weis’s website: http://www.cathyweis.org.

AGUSTIN SCHANG is curator-in-residence at the Emily Harvey Foun-
dation. He studied architecture at the University of Buenos Aires and
received a M.S. in Critical, Curatorial and Conceptual Practices at
Columbia University GSAPP. He has collaborated with artists such as
Jonas Mekas, Henry Flint, Elaine Summers, and Jean Dupuy developing
Aufführungen, zeigt an, and publications.