ARCHIVING THE CITY

for the city yet to come

Posts tagged “1980s

evidence

Posted on July 20, 2011

In January I went to White Columns to see, “Looking Back,” an exhibit surveying artwork shown in New York in 2010, curated by Bob Nickas. The work was a mix of mostly New York-based artists, young and old, living and dead. One piece that caught my attention was by Candy Jernigan: Candy Jernigan, Found Dope: Part II, 1986 (detail) Found objects on paper 28 in. x 39 in. Broken bits of used crack vials are pasted into into grid formation on a large poster, sealed behind glass, like the butterflies of a 19th century natural historian. Beneath each artifact in the grid is small even block handwriting, marking the date, time and location of its collection, e.g. June 11/Second Avenue at Third street/west side/10…

meeting place

Posted on January 13, 2011

We begin inside a small Baptist church at dusk, on the outskirts of a Lagos neighborhood in the mid 1980’s. We are here for a rare event, the screening of a film depicting the second coming of Christ. This Baptist church is not my church. In my house, going to church is a special event—the whole family piling into the station wagon wearing special shoes and hats, sitting still for what seem like hours—reserved for a few Sundays a year. We are not Baptist, and there are certainly never any films shown at our church. We come to this new lively church on a regular weeknight at the invitation of my friend, a neighbor. I am allowed to go because it is just a…

the DJ still runs this house

Posted on June 24, 2010

For a long time the word “house” referred not to a particular style of music so much as to an attitude. If a song was “house” it was music from a cool club, it was underground, it was something you’d never hear on the radio. In Chicago the right club would be “house,” and if you went there, you’d be house and so would your friends. Walking down Michigan Avenue, you would be able to tell who was house and who wasn’t by what they were wearing. If their tape player was rocking The Gap Band, they were definitely not house, but if it was playing Loleatta Holloway or (surprisingly enough) the Eurythmics, they were and you would probably go over and talk to…

Adrian Piper’s funk lessons

Posted on June 11, 2010

Consider the history and style of funk dancing, as a form of expression in urban black America, and then as a popular American dance form. Consider how this form has disappeared, in a sense, from our everyday physical vernacular. How are popular dances, ways of moving and self expression, archival practices? Notes on Funk I (excerpt) by Adrian Piper 1985 From 1982 to 1984, I staged collaborative performances with large or small groups of people, entitled Funk Lessons. The first word in the title refers to a certain branch of black popular music and dance known as “funk” (in contrast, for example, to “punk,” “rap,” or “rock”). Its recent ancestor is called “rhythm and blues” or “soul,” and it has been developing as a…

  

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