商品簡介
The Rise and Fall of Artists' SoHo documents how a little-known industrial neighborhood in New York unintentionally became a nexus of creative activity for a brief but intensive period. Taking advantage of loft occupancy laws that allowed artists to live where they worked, a band of enterprising people began settling in New York's SoHo in the 1960s, renovating industrial spaces for personal use. With growth fueled by word-of-mouth, the area soon became a center for artistic creation. And New York's one-of-a-kind urban artists' colony was born.
Richard Kostelanetz not only discusses how the artists came and why, he also focuses on some of the most creative, describing both the lives and work of artists Nam June Paik, Robert Wilson, Meredith Monk, Richard Foreman, Hannah Wilke, Richard Schechner, George Macuinas, and Alan Suicide, among others.. The galleries followed the artists, and the artists utilized the places around them, fashioning themselves, their homes, their buildings, and even their streets into makeshift exhibition and performance spaces. Such an ideal situation totally unplanned could not last forever; the author shows how market forces squeezed out this art utopia, trading in on the allure of its unique character, to be replaced by a shadow of itself, "SoMall" with the coming of trendy stores and restaurants. The book provides an analysis of a remarkable neighborhood that transformed the art and culture of the past five decades and history of New York.
作者簡介
Richard Kostelanetz is a critic and literary artist who has been active on the New York scene for more than five decades. He moved to SoHo just as it was being developed by the underground arts community, and his home -aptly named Wordship- became one of the most famous loft/work spaces in the city. Now residing in Queens (the Rockaways), he is a rare living witness to the life and times of an artistic neighborhood.
