New York Annual Avant-Garde Festival (1963--1980).
In 1978 the Festival was held in Cambridge, Mass. There was no Avant-Garde Festival in 1979. The last Festival was held in 1980 at the Passenger Ship Terminal, pier 92. All the Festivals were staged and curated by Charlotte Moorman, sometimes with some help from NYSCA and usually with help from the renegade art dealer, Howard Wise. Dates and locations were always tentative, and often there was some suspense as the time drew near as to whether it would happen at all.
Charlotte Moorman (1933 - 1991) staged fifteen Annual New York Avant-Garde Festivals in diverse locations around the city. The first one, in 1963 at CAMI Hall on 57th Street, was intended as a showcase for avant-garde music (Charlotte was a cellist), and featured the work of John Cage, David Behrman, Edgar Varese, Earle Brown, Morton Feldman, and Frederic Rzewski.
The one-day Festivals grew, year by year, to include a diverse group of artists, as many as two or three hundred, and did as much as anything to create a sense of community among New York's avant-garde. Not that the Festival had a great deal of status � in fact, it had none. Charlotte was not selective - the main requirement for inclusion was a sincere desire to participate.
Its very egalitarian nature told against it within the context of New York's artworld, which tended to view the Festivals as a "fringe" event, and the participants as mainly poseurs, auto-didacts, and artists manqué. There may have been mentions of it in the major art publications of the day, but I cannot remember any that were respectful.
But the public and the non-art media came in numbers to the unusual locations that Charlotte chose � the 69th Regiment Armory, Shea Stadium, Grand Central Station, the Alexander Hamilton (an old excursion steamer) at the South Street Seaport Museum, the World Trade Center, Floyd Bennett Field - and the Festival experience was always chaotic.
Artists crammed their pieces into unlikely spaces. Video installations, marathon performance pieces, piles of soil, piles of leaves, piles of spaghetti, aromatic dead fish, miles and miles of black polyethylene (to create darkness for projections of every sort), food art, light art, noise art, all jammed cheek by jowl into spaces clearly not meant for the purpose - the Festivals were a great optimistic feat of cacophonous activity.
Although artists from many aesthetic persuasions and from all over the city participated, the event did have a certain Fluxus flavor about it. Many of the regular participants � Nam June, John Cage, Yoko Ono (and John Lennon, once or twice), the Hendricks brothers, Phil Corner, Yoshi Wada, etc, were identified with Fluxus, as was Charlotte herself to some extent.
Video was a part of the Festivals from 1967 on, and the culmination of the day's events was frequently a collaborative performance piece, often involving video, with Nam June Paik and Charlotte.
Like altogether too many events, the Festivals' importance is most clearly recognized after they are gone. The impact of this event, coming year after year, did, however, create a definite sense of community among the artists, and introduced an often bewildered public to avant-garde art. They were quite wonderful. Someone should write a book about them.
I participated in every New York Festival from 1971 (Armory) to 1980
(dock) and I have to say this: I would not trade the experience for
any other honor.
George Maciunas
It is certainly true that "cranky old fart" is not the only apt description of George Maciunas. George did many positive things, not the least of which was originate a number of artist's co-ops in SoHo, back at a time when SoHo bujildings were very cheap. I was a direct beneficiary of his activity in this area, being one of the early members of the co-op at 537 Broadway. It should also be noted that George did these co-ops at real risk of his personal liberty. The way he did it was strictly illegal for a number of reasons, and he was, when I knew him, hiding out in the basement of 80 Wooster Street from the Attorney General's investigators who had warrants, I believe, for his arrest. At least, they so indicated when they came around looking for him one day.
Also, he almost paid for his guerrilla real estate activities with his life. He was beaten nearly to death in the second floor front loft at 537 Broadway by a disgruntled sub-contractor in 1974. George lost an eye in that struggle, and it probably took years off his life. It was a terrible event.
Davidson
