An Anarchitectural Body of Work by De Gruyter Arts

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION, OR BREAKING NEW GROUND(S)

HARRIS’S SPATIAL PRACTICES: BETWEEN ANARCHITECTURE AND SPACE‑TIME

53 67

The Materialities and the Materialism of Space Walls: Defining Space

Volume and Gravity: Measuring and Sensing Space

The Lot: Dealing with Abstract Space

105

Anarchitecture as Paradigm

109 113

SoHo: The Making of New Space(s) and Places Lofts: Illegal Living

122

Alternative Spaces: 112 Greene Street as Place and Prototype

130

FOOD: Space for Eating, Working, and Making a Living

133

Claiming Space(s)—Producing Places

139

SPACES IN MOTION: HARRIS’S “DIALECTIC WITH SPACE”

148 154

Bodies in Motion: Dance in Relation to Sculpture Walking, Dancing, and Choreographing Bodies

160

Improvisation: NO to Choreography, NO to Organization, NO to Hierarchies

167

From a Broken Body to a Dancing Body

170

Sensory Awareness: The Program

177

The Natural History of the American Dancer

186

Dancing in the Space-Time Continuum

194

“Form as a Relative Movement through Time and Space”

198 200

Motion as Object: Sculpture in Relation to Dance Moving through the Field of Sculpture

206

The Human Figure vs. the Sensing Body in/as Sculpture

214

Figures and Bodies, Materials and Matter, or Elements of Science

225

Turning Sculpture Inside Out

236

The Body as Battleground

240 248

In Motion: Ephemeral Installations Lived (Bodily) Experience and Phenomenology

259

Sensory Awareness: A Philosophy Based on Motion

263

Harris and the Dance of Dialectic

273

Cyclic Processes: The Absent Bodies of Harris’s Body of Work

291

LOCUS: THE MAKING OF A PLACE IN FLUX

298

LOCUS and the Archaeology of a New Site

304

LOCUS and the Notion of Site

309

LOCUS and Urban Politics

314

LOCUS and the Production of Space

321

LOCUS and Public Art

341

BY WAY OF CONCLUSION: UNFINISHED BUSINESS, OR SPACES IN ETERNAL FLUX

357

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

359

BIBLIOGRAPHY

359

Note on the Estate of Suzanne Harris

359

Consulted Archives

360

Selected Literature

368

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

371

INDEX

INTRODUCTION, OR BREAKING NEW GROUND(S)

I am fascinated by a view of a vast universe, expanding, contracting, stopping momentarily to take form as a crystal, a sphere, a snowflake, a stone. We humans, too, are a temporary form, cursed with a veil between us and the secrets. I speak in relativity, hear in harmony, and see in rhythm. Stay still, let the cycle speak through you, try hard to remember what we have always known. The biggest obsession, the simplest causality, the measurement of time. Axis, diameter, rotate, return. Big time, small time, stop time, make visible the rhythm.1

Located on the vacant landfill for the urban development project Battery Park City, at the Western waterfront of the tip of Manhattan Island, LOCUS/UP↓〉ONE was reminiscent of an archaeological excavation of an ancient ground (fig. 1).2 U. S.-American artist Suzanne Harris had conceived the large-scale work specifically for this site, and between May 8 and July 15, 1976, it constituted the only built structure on the reclamation ground encompassing a total of 92 acres (372,311 m2). The flat, sandy ground stretched between the Hudson River and the skyline of turn‑of-the-century landmark buildings—the newly erected World Trade Center (WTC) among them—all the way up to Chambers Street. Here, Harris—often called Suzie or Suzy among friends—was living and working in a former industrial loft at the time. Since work had begun on the Battery Park City landfill in 1966, the outer edge of the island was displaced by an average of 700 feet (213.36 m); nevertheless, this newly claimed space remained inaccessible to the public for an entire decade. For those living and working in the vicinity, this site constituted a void rather than a new piece of land (fig. 2).3 For a duration of 10 weeks in the summer of 1976, a gate in the construction fence across from Morris Street now granted visitors access to the site of LOCUS/UP↓〉ONE, comprising 4 acres (16,187 m2) of the landfill. The site of the work of art was partitioned off from the remaining, otherwise completely vacant lot by yet another fence. With the New York skyline in the background and the silhouette of New Jersey’s industrial shoreline on the horizon, the visitors entered a vast open field of sand. Behind the entrance, a path led through the sand directly to LOCUS/ UP↓〉ONE, which, from this perspective, appeared as a gateway into a sand mound (fig. 3). Starting 1 Suzanne Harris, Dalet Series, typewritten text (reproduction), ca. 1976; Folder no. 3/The Dalet Series; SHP; MSS.547; NYUFL. For an explanation on the situation of the remaining archival material from the estate of Suzanne Harris that is now housed as the “Suzanne Harris Papers” at the New York University Fales Library and Special Collections see my note in the bibliography. 2 A detailed analysis of this land reclamation project, which did not use waste but the debris from urban renewal projects, will follow in chapter “LOCUS: THE MAKING OF A PLACE IN FLUX,” 291. 3 On December 23, 1966, the New York Times announced that the Port Authority awarded a contract for the Battery Park City (BPC) landfill. The actual work, however, only began in 1970.

INTRODUC TION, OR BREAKING NEW GROUND(S)

LOCUS/UP↓〉ONE evidently compelled critics to rethink the relations between the work and the site itself, as it elicited an aesthetic experience based on physical involvement, not only transcending the objecthood of the artwork but also activating the corporeality of what had formerly been known as the “viewer,” namely by engaging the entire body rather than primarily the sense of sight. One of the critics, John Perreault, aware that Harris had a background in dance, arrives at the conclusion that “the piece makes the viewer into a dancer.” He describes the effect as a corporeal one as it forces the dancer’s self-perception of himself or herself as an entity in space. The physicality of the piece is the choreography. You do not look at it: you move within it. You move through the passageway: you circle the square within the circle.8

For Perreault, it is not the built parameters that define the artwork, but its embodied choreography that is at once enacted and experienced by the visitors, thus turning them into dancers. The term “choreography” derives from the Greek words choreia “χορεία” (a circle dance) and graphein “γραφή” (writing), but since the beginning of the 20th century it has acquired the double meaning of a dance notation and the overall creation of a dance work. This led German dance historian Gabriele Brandstetter to consequently define choreography more generally as “a system of rules for organizing (body‑)movements in time and space.”9 Perreault’s interpretation of a sand mound containing a concrete cube within a circle as choreography thus raises further questions: Firstly, in what way does “the physicality” represent a choreography? Secondly, how do a static structure and an ephemeral event merge conceptually? And thirdly, what transformation is taking place for the visitors of the artwork when their ascribed role as viewers become that of dancers, while moving through this in‑between space of circle and square, earth and sky, sculpture and dance?10 While the conflation of sculpture and dance represents only one of several paradoxes inherent to Harris’s practice, this converging polarity defines it in terms of a specific relation among work, site, and body; here “body” refers to both her body of work as matter and the body of the subject who moves within “the physicality of the piece,” as Perreault put it. Sculpture and dance

8 John Perreault, “Three Times Pi,” SoHo Weekly News, July 1, 1976, n. p. 9 Gabriele Brandstetter, “Choreographie,” in Metzler Lexikon Theatertheorie, eds. Erika Fischer-Lichte, Doris Kolesch and Matthias Warstat (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler Verlagsbuchhandlung & Carl Ernst Poeschel GmbH, 2014), 52. English translation by the author. 10 In her seminal book Passages in Modern Sculpture, first published in 1977, art theorist Rosalind Krauss identifies the relationship between space and time as conditioning the experience of (modern) sculpture, and states that it is crucial to consider movement in its analysis. To Krauss, “sculpture is a medium peculiarly located at the juncture between stillness and motion.” She further notes that it is the tension between space and time that “defines the very condition of sculpture.” Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture, 8th ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 5. By drawing on Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s aesthetic treatise on Laocoön (Laokoon oder über die Grenzen der Mahlerey und Poesie) from 1766, Krauss argues that the very nature of sculpture is to be determined by the category of experience, which she connects to phenomenology and structural linguistics. However, I will argue that because of its position in between stillness and motion, ephemeral installation art provides a synthetical sublation of this tension, and that this new art form in the end inverts Krauss’s title, from a progression of “passages in” modern sculpture to the experience of installation itself as a “passage.”

INTRODUC TION, OR BREAKING NEW GROUND(S)

Figure 5 | Close‑up of LOCUS/UP↓〉ONE, taken from the open passage with the World Trade Center t owering above. Diapositive.

are thereby rendered fields of the arts that are not to be regarded as discrete but rather as traversing sets of practices. Within the scope of this book, sculpture and dance thus provide two access points for unraveling Harris’s practice—or practices for that matter—as a process that results in a conversion within the concept of installation art. Yet, this process will not be outlined as an abstract analytical model (as in Rosalind Krauss’s renowned conception of the expanded field of

INTRODUC TION, OR BREAKING NEW GROUND(S)

sculpture);11 just as critics located the reader as “one,” “you,” “we,” or “I” in order to convey the paradoxical and disorienting experience of LOCUS/UP↓〉ONE, this new role of the body-subject will be “located” within the two fields as well as conceptually framed by drawing on phenomeno logical theory to address the embodied experience. By discussing Harris’s practice with regard to contemporaneous developments in sculpture and dance—that is, from within each of their disciplinary conventions—I will trace the convergence of the unique parameters of these fields in terms of a change of perspective from the viewing to the “performing” body. As for LOCUS/UP↓〉ONE, Perreault concludes that the experience is specific to the site as a changing situation: due to the way the structure elicits physical movement in accordance with the cardinal points, “the piece is also about a sense of direction.”12 After immersing oneself in the tunnel and the subterranean pathway, there were in fact two main parameters that influenced this sense of direction. The first is the alignment of the corners of the cube with the cardinal points, as the the summer sun cast ever-changing, angled shadows on the curved wall. The other factor, by contrast, was solid and concrete: when moving along the passage, the two shiny slabs of the WTC came into view over the rim of the wall (fig. 5). Herrera describes this effect, noting that “the towers of the WTC seem to float aloft.”13 When moving into and through the passage, one left behind the land-/cityscape of the site, only to see it slowly reappear from an entirely new perspective. Evident here, even without considering the imagery in terms of symbolism, is that Harris palpably relates her work to both the specific cosmic constellation (between the location on earth, the sun, and the individual space-time of the visitor) and the concrete, built environment of the site by way of a corporeal (kinesthetic) experience. The in dividual is confronted with the realization of the immediate and immanent relations among body, work, site, and the spatiotemporal circumstances of downtown New York in the 1970s. Suspended between the two material realities of a void landfill and two aloft towers, LOCUS/ UP↓〉ONE thus located a gap that had opened up in the city, which, at the time, was on the verge of bankruptcy. Accordingly, in Harris’s practice the act of locating a body not only takes place as an immersive experience but also situates the visitor as a subject in relation to the urban reality of the site. Suzanne Harris’s body of work thus allows me to revisit, half a century later, downtown New York in the 1970s and to look at the emergence of new practices as acts of transition, conversion, or dissolution, to capture that which is not manifest or even visible: the underlying processes. While Harris herself pushed boldly beyond familiar terrain with her work, this was also true for her everyday life; indeed, she ended up transgressing the limits of her life (at least as bound to this

11 Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” October 8 (Spring 1979), 30–44. The text is an analysis of the discourse on sculpture as a historic category and how historization is applied as a strategy to incorporate artistic practices that were pushing its boundaries. It pinpoints the very moment at the end of the 1970s when “sculpture” as category no longer held the “spatial” practices that were ascribed to it, but installation art had not yet become recognized as an additional category. 12 Perreault, “Three Times Pi,” n. p. 13 Herrera, “City Earthwork,” 100. Until the destruction of the WTC by the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001, the iconic towers helped many New Yorkers find their bearings, for example, when emerging from the subway station.

INTRODUC TION, OR BREAKING NEW GROUND(S)

world) at the age of 39.14 The objective of this book is to fill the void that has resulted from Harris’s untimely death in 1979, to grasp her body of work both by locating its present-day whereabouts and its sociohistorical context. Yet, as LOCUS/UP↓〉ONE has exemplarily shown, this “corpus” cannot be considered in terms of the artwork as a fixed entity; rather, it must be experienced as changing and relational. This act of locating Harris’s body of work as material remains thus is only the first step of what is best described as a sweeping journey along her burgeoning work.15 Embedded in the pioneering SoHo artists’ community and its avant-garde practices, she also drew on contemporaneous postmodernist philosophical thought, scientific research, and ancient concepts. The book positions her idiosyncratic artistic practice, through which she conceived an all-encompassing “philosophy of space,” as based on her experience of this specific situation in terms of contradictions of everyday reality, and her quest to “dissolve” them.16 It is this processual approach—spanning the ephemeral work and its remains, objecthood and practice, past and present; and on a larger scale, space and time, the everyday and the cosmos—that poses a challenge in defining the status quo of her body of work. Taking Inventory, or From a Void to Real Space The experience described by Perreault, Herrera, and Glueck could not be any more different from how the viewer encounters Harris’s disembodied work today. When I first obtained access to the material remains in 2014, the Suzanne Harris Estate consisted of two large storage boxes with hanging folders, three boxes of color slides, a pile of films and video cassettes in different obsolete formats, as well as various ephemera and a small collection of works on paper, such as drawings and some collages (fig. 6). In addition, the remnants of her body of work (primarily works on paper and small-scale castings, along with some recent reproductions) had not been systematically catalogued and were dispersed, mostly in private collections.17 My initial encounter 14 Harris studied various religious and philosophical traditions, such as the Kabbalah and Buddhism, which include the theory of reincarnation or soul migration, that is to say rebirth and cyclicality of all life. 15 I adopt the term “remains” from archeology, for both its reference to material artefacts as well as its corporeal reference to mortal remains. In this regard I build on Rebecca Schneider’s conceptualization of the term in her analysis of cultural practices of reenactments. She shifts from looking at performance through its disappearance to looking at what remains of an event. This can take on various forms, such as the dead-butalive bodies of Civil War reenactors or photographic documents. Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (New York: Routledge, 2011). 16 Suzanne Harris, handwritten note; Folder no. 10; SHP; MSS.547; NYUFL. 17 After discovering a screening of a video documentation of Flying Machine at the Rhona Hofmann Gallery in Chicago (June 14–August 9, 2013), I tracked down the estate of Suzanne Harris. At the time, the main part of what would become the Suzanne Harris Papers in the Fales Library and Special Collections at New York University Libraries (NYUFL) in 2018 was stored by the co‑director of the Gordon Matta-Clark Estate, Jessamyn Fiore, in Brooklyn, New York. Fiore had taken over as guardian of the collection after Jene Highstein died in 2013. However, it was Glenda F. Hydler, who originally started the archiving process after Harris’s sudden death in 1979. Hydler both arranged for Harris’s original writings to be consigned to Franklin Furnace Archive Inc. (FFA) in 1988, and, through the connection of FFA founding director Martha Wilson, that the remaining Suzanne Harris Papers are now available for further research at NYUFL. Before the collection was transferred in 2018, Hydler continued the archiving of the Suzanne Harris collection. She preprocessed and augmented it with her own photographic documentation, and works and material that had previously not been ar-

INTRODUC TION, OR BREAKING NEW GROUND(S)

Figure 6 | Boxes with the remaining archival material of the estate of Suzanne Harris in 2013. The holdings are now housed under Suzanne Harris Papers; MSS.547; NYUFL.

Figure 7 | Folder from the estate of Suzanne Harris containing photographs of LOCUS/UP↓〉ONE.

with LOCUS/UP↓〉ONE was thus reduced to that of a flat, paper photograph found in one of the many folders (fig. 7). The first image in a stack of printed, black-and-white photographs shows the piece opposite the two towers of the WTC. From the perspective of a person standing on top of the mound, the structure simply appears as an immersed cube placed inside a circular opening amid a rugged landscape, with the skyline rising behind it. Only slowly, after viewing all available photographic material, do the multiple perspectives coalesce, and a multifarious “image” of LOCUS/UP↓〉ONE begins to emerge. Removed from its original situation in space and time, this process primarily takes place as a cognitive act. This fundamentally different experience of the work, while sitting still and flipping through the stack of photographs, not only renders ephemeral the act of perception but also the work itself.18 The documentary photographs (comprising photo prints in black-and-white and color, negatives, contact sheets, and color slides), as well as some filmic documentation and several folders with notes, sketches, and papers, including ephemera and legal documents, today provide the basis for what can be described as a performative reconstruction of the piece in writing. The material reveals that Harris’s body of work largely no longer exists as works in their original chived. Both Hydler and Fiore generously provided me access to review and digitize the material in their homes. Also see note 439, 284). 18 In regard to installation art, the term “ephemeral” has increased in discourse, as compared to “temporary” or “transient.” See, for example, Barbara Ferriani and Marina Pugliese, eds., Ephemeral Monuments: History and Conservation of Installation Art (Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, 2013), or Zoe Tillotson, “Ephemeral Art: A Philosophical Proposition about the Nature of Time,” in Philosophy of Art, ed. Richard Osborne (London: Zidane Press, 2008).

INTRODUC TION, OR BREAKING NEW GROUND(S)

versions.19 The limited prospect provided by the documentary photographs introduces LOCUS/ UP↓〉ONE to a disembodied viewer as a built sculpture, though admittedly a somewhat confusing, sunken‑in structure. It is empirical accounts of the work, such as Perreault’s description in terms of choreography, that allow for a shift in perspective away from its formal properties and toward its spatiotemporal situation and corporeal effects. If the experience of LOCUS/UP↓〉ONE was transitory and ephemeral for each visitor to the landfill that summer (dependent on the time of day, length of stay, and overall conditions of their visit), the state of affairs regarding Harris’s estate suggests that the experience of transition itself is one of the defining characteristics of her overall work. This points toward a reconceptualization of “work” as such in her artistic practice, as it spans two seemingly opposed processes taking place at the time; that is, the turn to the very matter of the site in the late 1960s and early 1970s and the dematerialization of the artwork since the 1960s.20 In her official proposal, submitted to the proprietor of the landfill, Harris defines the specific relation of the work to its site as marking a moment of change: New York City is changing its face again. […] We have all grown so out of touch with the physical realities of our surroundings that these moments of change pass unnoticed and unexperienced by the majority of the city’s inhabitants. I would like to produce an experience for this moment of change, an experience of space and motion in this newly created piece of the city. I should like to propose a project that would provide an opportunity to bring New Yorkers closer to their city […], a sculpture about the land, not just on it.21

This conception of relating the work to its site is also captured in the title of LOCUS/UP↓〉ONE. The Latin term locus translates to “place,” which—in its most basic meaning, as distinct from spatium, meaning “space”—denotes a specific location within a greater whole. Yet, it is only since the late 1990s that the concept of site has been conceived of as a topos in art historical discourse. In her groundbreaking 2002 study, art historian Miwon Kwon outlines a detailed genealogy of site specificity in terms of a fundamental recalibration of the relationship between work and space in the arts. She arrives at the “provisional conclusion […] that in advanced art practices of the past thirty years the operative definition of the site has been transformed from a physical location—grounded, fixed, actual—to a discursive vector—ungrounded, fluid, virtual.” By delineating three consecutive spatial paradigms, namely “phenomenological or experiential; social/institutional; and discursive,” she outlines a discourse that encompasses not

19 The Suzanne Harris Estate does not contain a list of the whereabouts of her remaining works. During my research, I was able to locate some of her pieces in private and public collections. However, the only original works that remain are small-scale castings, drawings, and maquettes that relate to her large-scale ephemeral works. According to the currents state of research, it seems that all original installation pieces (except the Flying Machine, 1973) have been lost. Some of the glass pieces, as well as one of the cardboard sculptures, have been reconstructed based on her original drawings. (Won for the One at Lance Fung Gallery, Nov 6–Dec 6, 1997; Inhabitat for Decoys, Complexes, and Triggers: Feminism and Land Art in the 1970s for the Sculpture Center, New York, May 4–July 28, 2008; Glass Sculptures & Works on Paper for Salomon Contemporary, 14 September–6 October 2012). 20 For a genealogy of the dematerialization of the artwork, see Lippard, Dematerialization. 21 Suzanne Harris, typewritten letter to Avram Hyman (Battery Park City Authority), March 22, 1976; Folder no. 10; SHP; MSS.547; NYUFL.

INTRODUC TION, OR BREAKING NEW GROUND(S)

only art but also, as its reciprocal field, spatial politics.22 That is to say, whereas Kwon determines an understanding of “site” as “tangible reality” in the artistic practices of the late 1960s to have been a starting point for the emergence of site-specific art, in Harris’s practice, all three realms that Kwon traces conflate immediately.23 In her proposal, Harris also begins her exploration with the “groundedness” of the site, but only to point out that the aspect of time is a parameter integral to unraveling the relational complexity of the site, and thus arrives at a conception of space as in flux. With her approach to space in terms of change, Harris ultimately questions the notion of reality as grounded or fixed. Though the very notion of what constitutes reality underwent a categorical reconceptualization along these lines within the scope of postmodernism, the philosophical theories associated with it, such as poststructuralism, do not provide an adequate overall frame of reference for her ponderings. The reason is that although postmodernism in general is concerned with similar issues of fragmentation, diversification, subjectivism, and relativism, its basic premise is the rejection of metaphysics, which for Harris was essential: The constitution of the universe, among all things of Nature that fall within human comprehension, may, in my opinion, be set in first place as the proper object of philosophy.24

That is to say, while contemporaneous thinkers were abandoning notions of progress, grand narratives, and history itself, for Harris, the ultimate goal of her practice was nothing less than “trying to see the whole” by conceiving her own cosmological metaphysics in terms of the spacetime continuum from what she regards as “A Feminist perspective.”25 Modern man has lost his ability to relate to the objective world. He lives in a self created microcosm that shields him from his relativity. He has culturized himself into a corner. Even his science has minimalized + fragmented at the expense of the whole.26

For now, these issues spanning the corporeality of the human body, the physical reality of urban space, and metaphysical notions are only a starting point for unraveling how Harris’s practice is based on the very strategy of conflating perceived juxtapositions, such as circle and square; inside and outside; objecthood and ephemerality; the here and now and the eternal; the local and the global; the worldly and the cosmic; space and time; and more generally, the concrete and the abstract within a continuous movement. Within Harris’s thinking, all of these dimensions merge in her philosophy of space. Consequently, her notion of space cannot be classified within the canonized progression of site specificity; she instead renders space as ambiguous, due to

22 Miwon Kwon, “One Place after Another: Notes on Site Specificity,” October 80 (Spring 1997): 95. The 1997 article is an excerpt from her dissertation, which Kwon later turned into a chapter of her book, Miwon Kwon, One Place after Another: Site-specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). 23 Kwon, “Notes on Site Specificity,” 85. 24 Suzanne Harris, notebook reproduction, undated; Folder no. 11; SHP; MSS.547; NYUFL. 25 Suzanne Harris, handwritten text, attributed to by Harris, Nancy Holt, De Maria and Jackie; Folder no. 1; SHP; NYUF. 26 Suzanne Harris, notebook reproduction, undated; Folder no. 11; SHP; MSS.547; NYUFL.

INTRODUC TION, OR BREAKING NEW GROUND(S)

“the limited stance of an [sic] Euro-American history of the world.”27 The very question of how to conceive of this ambiguity of the spatio-temporality of real space—that is, reality in general— thus constituted the central quest of her practice. Real Spaces in the Arts Harris shared with a group of fellow artists this ontological concern with real space; indeed, space in general had been a “buzzword” since the 1960s.28 Within the downtown New York art scene, many practices that would soon enter the canon under the nomenclatures of site specificity and institutional critique were dealing with the literalness of a site or its institutional parameters. At the same time, discontented with the art system, artists had begun to “produce” new art spaces as alternative structures, one concrete case being the alternative space, which took the form of a built space but initially functioned in a mode categorically different from any other exhibition venue. In a retrospective interview, Harris recalls the overall reconception of space to have been a central, shared issue among artists engaged in the intitial phase of one of the first alternative spaces, 112 Greene Street, in the winter of 1970/71, in the sense that “there was a feeling about form and space and the indivisibleness of it that was common to us.” She goes on to specify that “[i]t’s very different from minimalism because our work was more about a dialectical relationship between the whole and its parts and the fact that forms come from a set of relationships.”29 Harris does not explicitly define an art form or category here; nonetheless she implicitly addresses a sculptural practice by way of dissociating their work from minimalist art. The work of the group of artists actively involved in 112 Greene Street unfolded in an experimental field spanning primarily sculpture, conceptual art, dance, music, and film and thus created various new intermediate pieces. These practices at large can be regarded as acts of dissolution of the boundaries among these media, which consequently (as according to the theory of dialectics) resulted in (or sublated into) new forms of art, such as what came to be known as performance art and installation art. Within the alternative space, the artists, performers, dancers, choregraphers, musicians, filmmakers, etc. were free to collaborate and to merge and conflate what had before mostly been regarded as incommensurable. Irrespective of these various collaborations, when Harris defines the “dialectical relationship” as the common denominator of “our work,” she means specifically the artists with whom she was discussing space as an issue: the Anarchitecture group. Together with Tina Girouard, Richard Nonas, and Gordon Matta-Clark, Harris was one of the founders of the group in 1973; by its final exhibition in March 1974, it also included the following artists: Laurie Anderson, Jene Highstein, Bernard Kirschenbaum, and Richard (Dickie) Landry.30 In the context of this new spatial framework around 112 Greene Street, this group of artists carried 27 Suzanne Harris, “The Tower of Power/The Pillar of Mercy. A Monument to Latter Day Ambiguity.” Artforum 18, no. 4 (December 1979): n. p. 28 See Martin Beck, “Alternative: Space,” in Alternative Art New York, 1965–1985: A Cultural Politics Book for the Social Text Collective, ed. Julie Ault, exh. cat. (New York: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 249–79. 29 Interview with Robyn Brentano, ca. 1979. Quoted in Robyn Brentano and Mark Savitt, eds., 112 Workshop / 112 Greene Street. History, Artists & Artworks (New York: New York University Press, 1981), ix. 30 The members listed here constitute the core Anarchitecture group. I will discuss the varying list of members in chapter 1.