An Exhibition With No Gallery

In June 1980 about a hundred artists opened a show in a vacant building on West 41st Street, a block off Times Square, in a part of Manhattan that the city had effectively written off. There was no gallery, no curator in the usual sense, no insurance, and no selection committee worth the name. The organising body was Colab, an artists' collective that made decisions by meeting.

Jean-Michel Basquiat showed there. So did Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, Jenny Holzer, Kiki Smith and Tom Otterness. Jeffrey Deitch reviewed it in Art in America and called it the first radical art show of the eighties.

I want to put that next to a show from 1863, because the structure is identical and the outcome was not.

Édouard Manet, Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, 1863. Oil on canvas, 208 × 264.5 cm. Musée d'Orsay, Paris. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Five shows that happened outside the room

1. The Salon des Refusés, 1863

The Paris Salon of 1863 rejected roughly three-fifths of what was submitted. The scale of the rejection produced enough public complaint that Napoleon III intervened and ordered the rejected works shown separately, in an annexe of the Palais de l'Industrie, so that the public could judge the jury.

Read that again, because it is the part that gets lost. The alternative exhibition was not organised by the rejected artists. It was decreed by the head of state, to settle an argument about a committee.

The picture everyone went to laugh at was Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe. Two clothed men and a naked woman on the grass, another woman bathing behind them, a still life of discarded clothes and fruit in the lower left corner. The woman looks straight out of the canvas at the viewer.

The scandal was not nudity. Salons were full of nudes. The scandal was that the men were in contemporary clothing, which turns a mythological convention into a specific afternoon, and that the woman was not looking at them.

2. Where Manet got it

Le Concert champêtre, about 1509, Musée du Louvre. Long given to Giorgione, now generally to Titian. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The composition is not invented. The grouping of the three foreground figures comes from Marcantonio Raimondi's engraving after Raphael, The Judgment of Paris — specifically the river gods in the lower right corner. The subject, clothed men and naked women in a landscape with music and no narrative, is the Louvre's Concert champêtre, which hung in the Louvre where Manet could look at it whenever he wanted.

So the most notorious picture of 1863 is a quotation of a picture from about 1509, restaged with the clothes changed. What made it unacceptable was not the borrowing. It was the updating.

3. The Times Square Show, 1980

Table 1. Two shows outside the official room, a hundred and seventeen years apart. One was granted the space; one took it.

The interesting wrinkle in the 1980 column is the funding line. Colab's money came substantially from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts. The show that is remembered as the eighties' anti-institutional moment was in part paid for by two institutions, which is not a contradiction so much as a description of how American art funding worked before 1989.

4. Fashion Moda, and the other end of the subway

Two years before Times Square, in 1978, Stefan Eins opened Fashion Moda on Third Avenue in the South Bronx. It was a storefront, it described itself as a museum of science, art, invention, technology and fantasy, and it operated in a neighbourhood that the New York art world did not visit.

Fashion Moda supplied a room at the Times Square Show. That is the link most accounts skip, and it is the one that matters: the downtown show that gets the credit was fed by an uptown space that had already been doing it for two years, in a poorer borough, with less attention.

5. What happens to a format like this

The Salon des Refusés ran again in 1864 and 1873 and then stopped being necessary, because in 1884 the Société des Artistes Indépendants was founded on the principle of no jury and no prizes, and the alternative became a permanent institution of its own.

The Times Square Show did not recur. Its participants were absorbed individually. Within a year Basquiat was in New York/New Wave at P.S.1; within four he was at Mary Boone.

Both formats worked. They just worked in opposite directions. One turned into a standing institution that outlived everyone involved. The other turned into a set of individual careers and then stopped existing.

What I take from it

If you are organising something outside the usual room, the question is not whether it will be good. Both of these were good. The question is which of the two outcomes you are building toward, because the choice gets made early and mostly by the structure rather than by anyone's intention.

A show with no jury, run by a body that persists, becomes the Indépendants. A show with no jury, run by a collective that dissolves, becomes a line in five people's biographies. The art can be identical.

And on the borrowing: Manet's picture was attacked in 1863 for being modern, not for being a copy. Nobody in that room thought quoting Raphael and Titian was a problem. That question only became a legal one much later, and when it did, the court that answered it reached for exactly this chain of pictures. That is the subject of another piece in this series.