Alone At Last: Pat Ivers and Emily Armstrong

Alone At Last: An Interactive Installation Exploring Gender, Sexuality, and Desire Before the AIDS Crisis. By Artists Pat Ivers and Emily Armstrong

Howl! Happening

An Arturo Vega Project

Howl! A/P/E

Published on the occasion of the exhibition November 13, 2015–December 6, 2015 at Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project Howl! A/P/E Volume 1, No. 6

Howl! Happening takes its name from the unpredictable, free-form happenings of the ’60s and ’70s, where active participation of the audience blurred the boundary between the art and the viewer. More to be experienced than described, Happening will curate exhibitions and stage live events that combine elements of art, poetry, music, dance, vaudeville, and theater—a cultural stew that defies easy definition.

For more than a decade, Howl! Festival has been an annual community event—a free summer happening in and around Tompkins Square Park, dedicated to celebrating the past and future of contemporary culture in the East Village and on the Lower East Side.

The history and contemporary culture of the East Village are still being written.

The mix of rock and roll, social justice, art and performance, community activism, gay rights and culture, immigrants, fashion, and nightlife are even more relevant now. While gentrification continues apace and money is king, Howl! Happening declares itself a spontaneous autonomous zone: a place where people simultaneously experience and become the work of art. As Alan Kaprow, the “father” of the happening, said: “The line between art and life should be kept as fluid and indistinct as possible.” n

Alone At Last: An Interactive Installation Exploring Gender, Sexuality, and Desire Before the AIDS Crisis. By Artists Pat Ivers and Emily Armstrong

SEX IN THE SEVENTIES, OR EVERYONE WANTS TO BE DIANA ROSS / Marvin J. Taylor Sex in the seventies was nothing like what so-called sex is today. We were feral cats, perpetually in heat, rubbing our cocks and pussies and asses on anything, anyone, anywhere in any way that would get us off. Our bodies were young and hairy and lean. No gym boys or aerobicized girls or preppies or yuppies or legwarmers or tattoos or beards or dreaded topknots. We had drugs and sex and rock and roll and had to make up in one decade for the past two centuries of sexual abstemiousness. We hurt to fuck and to fuck often. Fuck as much as possible until our dicks and asses and tits were sore and chafed and we still had to go on fucking because that meant we were alive. Alone at Last takes us back to that golden moment when there was birth control. When women for the first time could use their bodies as men always had. Gays, fags, dykes, homos, pansies, queers, whores, pimps, dominatrixes, leather daddies, bottoms, tops, slaves, masters—we could be and strove to be all these at once.

We were the Village People. Our duty was to have as much sex as possible. And we did. And then came AIDS and the “big fear.” We all knew someone. And then came “safe sex.”

Sex wasn’t supposed to be safe. It was rebellion. We were the new generation. We had everything. We had to rethink everything. Overnight. Bodies became buff and waxed. We suffered Reagan and Bush and denial about a virus that was killing us off. We became so afraid of sex that our kids can’t even believe that the sex in the seventies existed. Alone at Last should be required viewing for everyone under forty. I’d love to watch them squirm with embarrassment and arousal at how we lived in our bodies. About how fluid our sex was.

How dirty, and dangerous, and honest. Maybe, just maybe, Alone at Last can help us remember the time before the virus.

Maybe, just maybe, Alone at Last can help us un-remember the “big fear.” n

THE LOOK OF LOVE / Carlo McCormick Best known as the videographers whose dedication to and documentation of the New York music scene produced an epic catalog of rare live concert footage, Emily Armstrong and Pat Ivers brought their prescient understanding of the emergent media of video and broadcasting (via local cable television) to the similarly and simultaneously emergent cultural forms of the city at that time. It’s easy to recognize this in the extensive catalogue of concerts they captured as hosts of their own Nightclubbing show on Public Access TV and as the first VJs at the first Danceteria, where they would record the bands playing in the club downstairs for patrons in the video lounge.

And yes, of course we like that in NYC, where sometimes it’s just not enough to lurk towards the very back of the concert with our arms crossed and a slightly bored expression on our faces, we might actually prefer to distractedly watch the whole thing from a couple of floors away on a television monitor. This potent confluence of a culture and its mediation however hit a sublime note of personality and provocation in Armstrong and Ivers lesser-known triumph, Alone at Last, a document of something even more outrageous and outré than the punk scene of their music videos.

Intended to engage viewers with a kind of then unheardof interactivity, which of course proved far more costly and involved than technology could allow in that era, Alone at Last was never properly presented to the public and has languished lost and forgotten for more than a third of a century since. This too, like so much else about this work, seems emblematic of that era, where creative riches met fiscal impoverishment and artistic ambitions struggled constantly against budgetary restrictions. Time has served this undue absence well, for what would surely have been defining of its era and somehow iconic is now more a relic of curious heritage and obscure function—a talismanic invocation to a distant past and nearextinct society. What was meant to be some sort of Rorschach test to measure desire and locate identity in an age when these things were considered a bit more fluid if not outright migratory, exists now like some antiquated medical instrument of dubious purpose—something less useful for our own selfexamination than revelatory of the way we used to be.

If the early 80s were still in continuance with a sexual revolution that had already been waged by a few generations at that point.

People (especially in a city like New York) were working with a slightly better map but still finding cause for experimentation and exploration to more fully fathom the dimensions of human sexuality. This frisson between knowledge and mystery is something that seems kind of quaint and even cute now in

what is otherwise a very adult, even confrontational project.

Decades later our level of understanding then seems clumsy and incomplete, built off of polar dichotomies like gay/straight, boy/girl, top/bottom that fail the more complicated and nuanced models we require these days. There should be no cause for nostalgia in this, but surely we can appreciate the kind of underground subcultural currency that difference once represented before society allowed the issues of gay marriage and LGBT rights to normalize this formerly fraught field of diversity. Perhaps we may applaud ourselves for a far more sensitive, aware and tolerant perspective and toolkit to parse out the variables of personal proclivity, biological hardwiring and social membership that come to define us, but let us still appreciate that time and space where all this diversity could come together and celebrate difference, find pride in what others shamed, and even embrace these old stigmatizing notions of deviance as their own aesthetic paradigm.

Alone at Last is a fifty-plus person portrait of desire as we understood and acted it out in those very last days of America’s great sexual awakening before AIDS wiped out the most adventurous and permanently changed the attitudes and behavior of most everyone else since. But it is also something wholly more. Cast directly out of the community, Alone at Last features the artists, musicians and nightlife personalities that constituted the heart and soul of the New York scene then.

These were the friends of Pat and Emily, and just as crucially though perhaps harder to remember now, the friends of friends, because such was the integrity and intimacy of Downtown New York—just being there was the terms of participation.

And though this work does not speak to it directly, it manifests the discrete libertine currency of sexuality and youth where a large portion of us worked in one form or another for New York’s booming adult entertainment industries. If at times it feels a bit like a peep show or exaggerates and exacerbates the unhealthy symbiosis between exhibitionism and voyeurism that has always motored our televisual experience, well, this was very much the vernacular of the time. Emily Armstrong and Pat Ivers were artists and media radicals who knew how to seize the tools of mainstream representation and use them to portray and promote the underground. Here then are the come-ons that media always uses to sell something let loose as its own poetic language of lust, a kind of post-modern Dating Game redirected from the prudish and prurient gaze of Middle America to the perversities at the fringe, a way to resist the homogeneity of our ongoing bedroom farce with a brutal cut-up of our backroom fantasies. n

SEDUCED AND CAPTURED, IN THE BOOTH WITH EMILY ARMSTRONG AND PAT IVERS / Carole Ann Klonarides For a generation of women born in the middle of the 20th Century, the end of the 70s and beginning of the 80s was definitely a time to reinvent oneself. Like other women who chose video as their creative medium, there was slim chance of entering the mainstream establishment either through the television and film industry, or through galleries and museums. As one of a new wave of artists drawn to alternative methods of expression such as photography, performance, video art, experimental film, and music, I turned increasingly to finding or creating new contexts in which to explore and share ideas. We frequented The Lower Manhattan Ocean Club and Tier 3. Video art and experimental film were shown at places like The Kitchen, Anthology Film Archives, MOMA and the Donnell Library Center across the street. Occasionally video art was shown in commercial galleries, but video was generally exhibited as a sidebar to the artists’ other works, not the main event. As these venues and platforms became more commercial, artists increasingly turned to the downtown club scene. At this time, the New York club scene contained the crosscurrents of art and culture—a commingling of high and low in a unique interplay of mainstream pop, art and film history, performance, no wave music, and television.

There were just a handful of female video jocks back in the mid 70s to early 80s in New York, some came out of filmmaking, others the visual arts, but all were seeking new frontiers unencumbered by the biases of gender, class, or history. The year 1979 was a pivotal for clubs as venues for performance and visual artists and musicians. The Pyramid Club and Club 57 opened in the East Village and Danceteria on West 37th Street. In my mind, the most infamous female video jockeys were video artists Pat Ivers and Emily Armstrong, who designed the first Danceteria Video Lounge, and programmed an eclectic mix of found material, video art, and videos of downtown musicians they shot in the club, as well as artistproduced early music videos. They presented some of the best video programming I ever experienced. I felt part of a unique community that was on the cutting edge of something in the process of being defined. The Video Lounge became a place for VIPs in the downtown scene, and in many ways, was like the control booth of a broadcast newsroom—everything that was happening, happened there. It was very empowering for the programmers/VJs, especially if you were a woman for the first time in the power seat, controlling the crowd.

The clubs created this space of intimacy, exclusivity, and empowerment—this is where I imagine Armstrong and Ivers

conceived the Alone At Last project back in 1981. They invited artists, musicians, and locals to enact what desire, romance, and even manipulation meant to them, while imaging the seduction of an unknown voyeur, much like being in a now obsolete Times Square peep show or within any screen. Declaring themselves pro-sex feminists when pornography was, as they put it, “a hot-button issue in the women’s movement,” they saw the work as a video installation that explores issues of gender and fantasy, at a time when traditional views of sexuality were not just challenged but overturned. The final work has 52 seducers, who initially played it to Armstrong and Ivers behind the camera, and now as a multi-channel interactive installation, where the viewing public can chose—for pleasure (or pain)—their seducer/ seductress.

Alone At Last has its antecedents in The Love Tapes, a collection of over 800 videos shot by artist Wendy Clarke starting in 1972 of people speaking for three minutes about love in an effort to encourage and reveal “people’s need to communicate very personal feelings.” The artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman later explored the playful sense of intimacy between the viewer, the subject, and the artist in Deep Contact (1984) where a touch screen allowed the viewer to “touch” parts of a woman’s body, and Room of One’s Own (199093) in which a seductive protagonist and privatized viewing conditions mimic the scopic economy of the peep show. It also brings to mind Marcel Duchamp’s last work Étant donnés, a seminal artwork that functions as a peep show made in secret over a 20-year period (from 1946 to 1966), which the Philadelphia Museum of Art calls the very first example of installation art. Experts say it is a statement on voyeurism in art as well as a sexual metaphor. It may also be a homage to three women Duchamp loved. Perhaps towards the end of his life he reflected that he could only be a voyeur as an artist and a lover, and never physically be part of it again. In this final work, Duchamp forced viewers to become aware of the act of looking and their physical presence with the gallery space.

Interestingly, Alone At Last functions as another contained space of intimacy, now as a time capsule containing videos that, as stated by the artists, capture a time of wide-open freedom of expression and pursuit of pleasure that characterized Lower Manhattan before the AIDS epidemic changed things forever.

It also reveals how a generation yearned for connectivity to each other and beyond, decades before the Internet became a reality. n

ACID REFLUX / Max Blagg As a callow youth I made a kind of living by tending bar, dispensing vast quantities of alcohol to gatherings of drunkards not unlike myself.

After performing this circus act at various filling stations around Lower Manhattan I eventually found myself working in an abandoned garment factory on West 37th Street, the epic first incarnation of the nightclub Danceteria. Open on weekends from midnight to 7 a.m., the joint was packed during those hours with the curdled cream of downtown’s wildest and most creative denizens.

There were lots of drugs around, but my own preference was the ‘sweet machine,’ amphetamine, marketed as Desoxyn, which usually created the perfect blend of charm and hostility required to face the teeming hordes who swarmed round the club’s various bars. Some of the staff smoked reefer and some did cocaine, and some tripped the light fandango. I avoided psychedelics, having already done more than my share in London, ‘68 and ‘69. No balmy Woodstock vibes there—Altamonstrous years they were, burned down in Belsize Park, pulverized on Primrose Hill. The doors of my perception violently removed from their hinges.

Until this one particular night. Moonshine, an older guy whose job it was to make sure the bartenders did not steal—as if!—handed a pill across the bar with a knowing smile. I took it from him, washed it down with a Bud, then asked what it was. “‘White lightnin’!” he growled with a swampy Louisiana cackle, and indeed just as the rush for the bars started around two minutes after midnight, my own rush started. A human zoo was stampeding toward my tiny basement bar, every cracketeer, dope diddler, clitlicker, bum bandit, every downtown dandy, dave dee dozy beaky mick and titchy itchy booze puppet came thundering my way as the lightning snapped and crackled in my brain. They were shouting and breaking glasses, claiming to be personally acquainted with the owners, cawing ‘Max! Max! Max!’ like crows in a rookery, banging on my glockenspiel. My bonce was on fire, a roaming candle, and yet I clacked the flywheel, took their money, two for the house and one for me, shredding my fingers with Budweiser screwcaps that would not unscrew, as the befuddled masses buzzed around my honeybar.

By break time the initial panic had passed. I was larfing and lollygagging, feeding free drinks to a gorgeously tan girl, clocking her balustrade as she wrapped herself around the barstool like a snake.

My busboy, whom I had warned of a possible mental crackup, was a lanky street kid named David. He kept it all flowing, dunking cases of warm Budweiser into the melting ice. Who could have known 30 years later he would be having a retrospective at the new downtown Whitney, a famous artist, but alas he would also be dead. David Wojnarowicz, one of many talented kids who worked there—a list as long as it is glorious; Keith Haring, Peter McGough, Chuck Nanney, Zoe Leonard, Iolo Carew, Aleph and Taylor, Haoui Montaug, Anita

Sarko, Alexa Hunter, Barbara Porter, all of them so very fuckable. I sent David’s first brilliant manuscript ‘Sounds in the Distance” to my old friend Jim Pennington at Aloes Books in London, who printed it in 1982. That original version is now as rare as hens’ teeth, and far more expensive.

Where was I? I was peaking on MDA or PCP or whatever Moonshine had slipped me and now I was going to cool my paws for 20 minutes.

The python girl slithered after me into a back room office, where a cruddy sofa morphed into a four poster bed. Sweat was cascading off me like Niagara but she slid around in it like a worker from Soap World, slippery as a golden eel, and golden-eyed she was and dark below, fur below yes pure cashmere soft as very heaven’s clouds and the slit sunlit, emanating a certain slant of sunlight, my brutish brain comprehending Emily Dickinson while simultaneously slamming someone who looked more like Angie Dickinson. The basement tapes were playing somewhere, Tiny Montgomery says hello, beauty was everywhere, squeezing my inflamed and purple heart. I came, she went, break was over, the rush of the drug had evolved into a delightfully tender descent, the cabin crew so solicitous of my safe return, congratulating me on a dry landing as I wandered back around the other floors. The Nightclubbing team, Pat and Emily, were showing a Cramps clip in the video lounge, Pat told me to ignore the alligator people in the basement, so I did. Keith Haring’s drawings adorned the walls, radiant babies, barking dogs and flying saucers.

Mobs of attractive people swayed back and forth, up and down the stairs, frantic music packing the dance floor, Madonna dancing her brains out, already clawing her way upward, she would be banging the DJ later. Golden years, who knew?

This kind of hothouse behavior went on all over the club on a regular basis, so it was no surprise when Pat and Emily asked me and about 45 other miscreants, drawn from the staff and the other artistic riffraff who frequented the joint, to participate in their latest art piece, a video installation entitled Alone at Last. The two videographers wanted to capture a sense, a whiff, a taste of the sweaty, druggy, sensual world in which we nightly immersed ourselves. And so they filmed these little ‘capsules,’ ‘come-ons,’ verbal video seductions in which each of us attempted to explain in grimy detail what we wanted or in some cases what we didn’t know that we wanted. It stands now as a vivid document of an extraordinary time, when ‘love could be found anywhere,’ and nobody dreamed that having wild sex with a beautiful stranger might kill you way before your time.

Danceteria’s sparkling moments dim like bulbs on the midway as the carnival folds its tents…. Those of us still standing must continue hacking through the thickets, defusing the obstacles placed like improvised explosive devices beneath our path to the stars, where Anita and Haoui and the rest of the crew are rehearsing a celestial No Entiendes. n

Alone at Last was conceived in 1981 as a video installation that explores issues of gender and fantasy at a time when traditional views of sexuality were not just being challenged but overturned. Created by artists Pat Ivers and Emily Armstrong, both pro-sex feminists when pornography was a hot-button issue in the women’s movement, Alone at Last invites the viewer to initiate an encounter with a stranger in the dark and be seduced, in the process becoming part of the artwork.

Designed in the pre-AIDS era when bath houses and back rooms, no-strings sex and role playing were all part of life in downtown New York, Alone at Last invited artists, musicians, and locals with an offer of self-representation, a chance to enact what desire, romance, and even manipulation meant to them. Seizing on the trope of the Times Square peep show booth, Ivers and Armstrong redefine notions of sexuality, extending a come-on—not with the clichéd sentimentality of broadcast TV or the banality of hardcore porn, but consistent with the artists’ truth.

This is how it works: A participant (for she/he is no longer just a viewer) enters a darkened booth, and using a touch screen, answers a series of questions: Gay? Straight? Do you like boys who strip? Two girls? A foreign affair? Finally, a video screen brightens. On it, a potential lover—including well-known club goers, artists, and personalities of the time—appear and attempt to seduce the participant with a performance ranging from 30 seconds to seven minutes.

The 52 seducers represent a spectrum of gender and sexual choices, in a revealing portrait of the wide-open freedom of expression and pursuit of pleasure that characterized Lower Manhattan before the AIDS epidemic changed things forever. Alone at Last compels the viewer to participate through conscious choices and sudden decisions delving into private, perhaps hidden, sexual feelings. It also winks at the idea of television as the ultimate seducer—but, through interactivity, changing the dynamic and making it new.

When it was first imagined, technological and financial considerations proved to be insurmountable obstacles to the artists’ vision, and so the project languished for more than 30. Today, a partnership with Howl! Happening has made it a reality. So surrender your inhibitions, get into the booth and finally be Alone at Last.

Alone At Last: An Interactive Installation Exploring Gender, Sexuality, and Desire Before the AIDS Crisis.

By Artists Pat Ivers and Emily Armstrong Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega project November 13–December 6 HOWL! COMMUNITY Arturo Vega Foundation

Lalo QuiĂąones Jane Friedman Donovan Welsh BG Hacker Board of Advisors

Curt Hoppe Marc H. Miller Dan Cameron Carlo McCormick James Rubio Anthony Cardillo Debora Tripodi Lisa Brownlee Howl! Board of Directors

Bob Perl, President Bob Holman, Vice President BG Hacker, Treasurer Nathaniel Siegel, Secretary Brian (Hattie Hathaway) Butterick Riki Colon Jane Friedman Chi Chi Valenti Marguerite Van Cook, President Emeritus Gallery Director: Ted Riederer Program Director: Carter Edwards Creative Consultant: Susan Martin Archive Manager: Mikhail Torich Videographer: Darian Brenner

© 2015 Howl Arts, Inc. Howl! Archive Publishing Editions (Howl! A/P/E) Volume 1, No. 6 ISBN: 978-0-9961917-5-3 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, with prior written permission of Howl!

A/P/E. Alone At Last: Video, photos and installation by Pat Ivers and Emily Armstrong. Alone At Last is a feature of the GoNightclubbing Archive Programmer, Joshua Goldberg Video and Photo Editor, Kevin Gannon Video Archivist, Mercer Media Photo Archivist, DiJiPix Special thanks to Marvin Taylor and the NYU Fales Library and Special Collections www.gonightclubbing.com Essays © 2015 Marvin J. Taylor © 2015 Carlo McCormick © 2015 Carole Ann Klonarides © 2015 Max Blagg Editor: Ted Riederer Copy Editor: Jorge Clar Design: Jeff Streeper, Modern IDENTITY Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project 6 East 1st St. New York, New York 10003 www.HowlArts.org 917 475 1294

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