Speaking of Archivists...

[Gooch]

God! I would love to be the archivist on this project...


The Chronicle of Higher Education
May 13, 2005, Friday

SECTION: RESEARCH; Pg. 12
LENGTH: 2240 words

HEADLINE: Filling in the 'Blank Generation'

BYLINE: RICHARD BYRNE

DATELINE: New York

BODY:

In the near silence of the Fales Library and Special Collections at New York
University, senior archivist Ann Butler guides writer and punk-rock icon Richard
Hell through the procedures for working with his own papers.

Mr. Hell wants photographs to illustrate a forthcoming compilation of songs
that he performed with a string of now-legendary bands including Television, the
Heartbreakers, and the Voidoids. Ms. Butler gives him Post-it notes to mark the
spots of the borrowed items. She is nearly finished cataloging the 30 linear
feet of material that Mr. Hell sold to Fales Library in late 2003, and she urges
him to take entire files, rather than plucking out individual items.

On his visit, Mr. Hell also brings new material for the archive, including
drafts and notes for his novel, Godlike, which will be published by Akashic
Books' Little House on the Bowery imprint in July. Reflecting his activities in
underground publishing during and after punk's heyday, Mr. Hell's archive also
documents a slice of the city's boisterous literary scene.

Mr. Hell's multiple careers as a writer, musician, and fashion icon -- he is
widely credited with engineering the spiky, slovenly look favored by punk's
adherents to this day -- are precisely why Fales director Marvin J. Taylor
secured his papers for the library's Downtown Collection.

For nearly a decade, Mr. Taylor has been assembling the collection to
document the activities of avant-garde artists in lower Manhattan in the 1970s
and 1980s. In addition to Mr. Hell's papers, the Downtown Collection -- which is
housed in the Fales's rooms on the third floor of the larger Elmer Holmes Bobst
Library on Washington Square -- includes the archives of artistic luminaries
such as photographer David Wojnarowicz (1954-92), and influential organizations,
including the Judson Memorial Church (a key performance space for postmodern
dance) and the Mabou Mines theater company, a collective that emphasized script
development and interdisciplinary collaboration with composers, musicians, and
visual artists.

The Downtown Collection's materials are as challenging as the artists whose
work it contains. For example, the Wojnarowicz collection boasts voice-mail
messages and artwork as well as the photographer's journals and correspondence.

Last fall the New York Archivists Round Table presented the library with an
award for the innovative use of archives. The award language highlighted the
Downtown Collection's pioneering spirit, noting that with "its broad collection
of textual documents, audio recordings, artist assemblages, and unclassifiable
artifacts ... the Fales Library and Special Collections expands the very
definition of what constitutes an archive."

Mr. Taylor agrees that he and his staff are "trying to push the limits of
special collections. But you necessarily have to these days if you want to
collect contemporary materials. Because it doesn't fall into neat little
categories of manuscripts, correspondence, and journals."

A 'Shattered' World

New York City radiated a dark energy in the years covered by the Downtown
Collection. It was an era marked by the Son of Sam killings, John Lennon's
murder, the looming specter of AIDS, and a collision of bankruptcy and national
hostility that led the New York Daily News to run its famous October 30, 1975,
headline on President Gerald R. Ford's vow to veto an federal bailout of the
city: "Ford to City: Drop Dead."

That chaos and corrosion fueled the city's art scene. New York's creative
culture in that era was the juicy but maggot-ridden Big Apple of the Rolling
Stones' classic 1978 song "Shattered" -- an oversexed and drugged-out metropolis
where "people dressed in plastic bags directing traffic" constituted "some kind
of fashion."

The New York City promiscuity captured by "Shattered" was artistic as well as
sexual. Avant-garde composers shared performance spaces with poets and dancers.
Writer William S. Burroughs hobnobbed with poet and musician Patti Smith, who
shared an apartment with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. In its dank
nightclubs, Mr. Hell could stand (or slouch) and move the fashion world simply
by designing a T-shirt with the words "Please Kill Me" stenciled on it.

Mr. Hell was already performing his epochal punk anthem "Blank Generation" in
1974, the approximate starting date for the Downtown Collection. Mr. Taylor says
that the choice of year is rooted in that most valuable of Manhattan commodities
-- real estate.

"In 1974, the loft law changes," he observes. "And it allows artists to
actually inhabit the lofts in Soho legally. And that really opened up Soho for a
lot more people to move in. And then you see ... small artists' collectives,
small galleries, and alternative spaces."

Setting a terminus for the collection is slightly more complicated, but Mr.
Taylor has settled on 1992. "Gentrification is almost complete," he says. "And
the drug money dried up, which some people say ran the whole scene. And the
political scene had changed. It was a different city."

Over that 18-year span, and particularly in the first 10 years, many key
downtown arts groups and venues vanished, leaving little or no evidence of their
existence. Prominent people in the scene, such as members of the seminal punk
band the Ramones, left little or nothing that could be included in the
collection.

"When Joey Ramone passed away," says Mr. Taylor, "there was no archive. He
didn't keep anything. Which sort of makes sense. He always lived in one-room
apartments."

Fortunately some traces of the multifaceted scene did survive in the hands of
de facto archivists such as Ron Kolm, a writer and promoter who collected
numerous artifacts -- including the complete runs of now-extinct literary
magazines and hundreds of flyers for events that would otherwise have vanished
from history.

Mr. Kolm's papers, purchased by the library in 1996, are one of the main
building blocks of the Downtown Collection. Over the past few years, Mr. Taylor
has added numerous other collections that piece together fragments of that
vanished world. Mr. Hell's papers glue together the music and literary scenes.
The archives of the Fashion Moda gallery piece collect disparate elements of the
era's visual arts. The archives of the Mabou Mines theater company and the
Judson Memorial Church provide invaluable windows into connections between
performance art and poetry. (Playwrights such as Sam Shepard and Lanford Wilson
were involved in the Judson Poet's Theater.)

Mr. Taylor has a limited budget for acquisition -- and no dedicated fund for
the Downtown Collection. He paid Mr. Hell $50,000 for his papers, and has yet to
pay more than $150,000 for any collection. "I have to raise the funds every time
I purchase something," he says, "or ask the general library administration to
make special purchases for me. I have had the great good luck that my bosses
understand that this collection is important, and they have released funds from
time to time for strategic purchases."

Singing the Archive Electric

Part of the challenge for archivists in processing the Downtown Collection is
its sheer variety of formats. Among the material recently purchased by the Fales
from playwright and director Richard Foreman -- a MacArthur "genius"
award-winner whose Ontologic-Hysteric Theatre Company has spearheaded
experimental theater in New York -- are set designs and video and audio elements
of his work. One key item in the collection of David Wojnarowicz at Fales is the
"Magic Box" -- a crate found under the artist's bed and filled with various
religious icons (such as the Sacred Heart of Jesus) and kitsch objects (toy
bugs) that often recur in his work.

The Downtown Collection has stretched "the definition of an archive, and of
what constitutes an artifact, and how it can be accessed," says Kenneth
Schlesinger, director of media services at City University of New York's La
Guardia Community College. Mr. Schlesinger, who was chairman of the awards
committee that honored the Fales Library for its innovation, adds that "unique
objects" such as the box and its mysterious contents "present a real challenge
for archivists."

Mr. Hell's papers have provided another technical challenge. Among the many
manuscripts and drafts of novels and other literary works are numerous
photographs and even e-mail messages.

"Richard kept all his electronic files," says Mr. Taylor. "We were able to
compress all that data. Eventually we'll just have to print it out on acid-free
paper. At this point, it's the only solution."

Ms. Butler, senior archivist at the Fales Library, says the blurring of the
line between manuscript and object in the Downtown Collection has forced the
library to borrow some techniques for managing and cataloging the material.

"We've adapted museum-registrar techniques to catalog and classify the
objects within the collection," she says, "because I felt that the descriptive
tools available within the archival community were not robust enough to
adequately describe and manage the materials."

Ms. Butler observes that in traditional archives, collections such as the
Wojnarowicz materials would have been split up, with "the objects going to a
museum, the media going to a film archive, books and printed materials going to
a library, and the manuscripts, journals, and letters going to a literary
archive. Rather than privileging one format over another, our goal is to fully
describe the totality of the archive because all of the materials are equally
significant and essential to understanding Wojnarowicz's entire creative output.
" Mr. Hell's materials, she adds, are being handled in the same manner.

Given that the Fales Library has adopted some museum-registration techniques
for the Downtown Collection, it is no surprise that the library has established
a close working relationship with New York University's fine-arts museum, the
Grey Art Gallery. The library and the gallery are planning an exhibit this fall
featuring materials from the Downtown Collection and coinciding with the
publication of a book about the exhibit by Princeton University Press.

Lynn Gumpert, director of the Grey Art Gallery, says that the works of
artists in the Downtown Collection are much in keeping with the general trend in
20th-century art of "a blurring of distinctions" between mediums. "The artists
themselves are breaking the boundaries," she says. "Institutions have to respond
to what they are doing."

School of Rock

That Mr. Taylor's project recognizes the shifting shapes that downtown art
and artists have assumed was a big selling point for Richard Hell. Though he has
been lionized for his role in giving birth to the punk movement, Mr. Hell has
spent much of his career as a writer and a publisher -- and his work as author
of books such as Go Now (Simon & Schuster) and editor of the literary magazine
CUZ is given a prominent place in his archive.

Mr. Taylor's "philosophy of collecting is radical and interesting," says Mr.
Hell. "Marvin doesn't impose his own structure. He wants every bit of it and he
wants to make every bit of it available. I'm really grateful for that."

Having his career placed in the context of his particular New York milieu --
and available to scholars of music and literature -- is also important to Mr.
Hell. More important, say, than having bits of it enshrined in the Rock and Roll
Hall of Fame, in Cleveland, Ohio.

"When the Cleveland rock museum was opening," he says, "they asked me for
anything I'd part with. And I didn't want to give them anything. It's the music
industry's advertisement for itself. And you're supposed to donate to them. The
people who'd been sucking your blood. Not to say there aren't a couple of people
I respect. But they are the sausage makers. I don't need to be part of the
museum of baloney."

Mr. Taylor argues that the "true story" of Mr. Hell and the other members of
the downtown scene "is much more interesting than the myths." His aim for the
Downtown Collection is to "actually provide the resources so people can go back
and authenticate what really went on."

NYU students are among those who use the collection most heavily. In the
2003-04 academic year, the library had 2000 visits to the Downtown Collection --
half of them from the university's undergraduates. Mr. Taylor says that the
statistics from the current academic year will show increased usage by students
and scholars.

And aside from receiving the award from the Archivists Round Table, the
Downtown Collection is gaining recognition from other sources. It has received
substantial grants to further its ability to process and catalog film and video,
including a total of $100,000 over the past three years from the National
Endowment for the Arts.

The NEA grants do present certain ironies, says Mr. Taylor. In April 2004,
the Fales Library hosted a "reunion" of the four artists -- Karen Finley, John
Fleck, Holly Hughes, and Tim Miller -- who had their NEA grants revoked in 1990
by NEA chairman John Frohnmayer. Mr. Frohnmayer's decision to enforce a law that
required the endowment to consider the "decency" of the works that received
federal monies was a major watershed in the culture wars of that era.

"Downtown work was the work over which the culture wars were fought," asserts
Mr. Taylor. "Now these grants are helping preserve the material that caused all
that trouble."