Introduction

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Top: Joe Lewis performing at the Manifesto Show. Photo: Coleen Fitzgibbon Above: Tactics of Survival in the New Culture, G.H. Hovagimyan, 1979 Right: Postcard for reading at 112 WorkshopGoff

Excerpts from a Novel, 112 Workshop, Apr. 24, 1980

In 1979, the cast-iron loft building at 112 Greene Street converted to a cooperative apartment building, renting out the commercial storefront to offset the costs of improvements required to get a Certificate of Occupancy from the city.50 The gallery moved to 325 Spring Street in West SoHo, reopening in February as White Columns.

In April 1980, Hovagimyan read from a work-in-progress, a novel based on remembered dialog from the 1962 film Two for the Seesaw, set in a New York City apartment and starring Robert Mitchum as a lawyer from Nebraska and Shirley MacLaine as a struggling dancer. Hovagimyan had seen the film as a child and reconstructed the movie from memory without looking at the script, interspersing it with street scenes from his life as an artist and things going on with him at the time. Later he got the script and compared it to his memory.

I was trying to get to something. The movie must have made an impression on me. How a movie would influence what I was projecting about life when I was young, being an artist in New York, and the reality of being an artist in New York. Then Bright Lights Big City came out, and it was so similar that I gave up on it.51

Hovagimyan had a literary agent encouraging him to pursue the project, but as he recounted in a conversation, they were doing lots of cocaine together, and the agent’s wife eventually objected to him coming over. That was the end of his short literary career.

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Above: Pseudo postcard, c. 1995–1997 Opposite: Art Dirt ad on Pseudo networkGoff

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