FRED HERKO: A COURSE PACKET
Edited by Joshua Lubin-Levy, Kelly O’Grady, and Nova Benway Design by Alan Ruiz
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Produced on the occasion of:
FRED HERKO: A CRASH COURSE Saturday October 25, 2014
Co-presented by The Department of Performance Studies, NYU Goethe-Institut New York The Tisch Institute for Creative Research (TCR) Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory New York Performance Artists Collective Co-sponsored by The Department of Art & Public Policy, NYU The Department of Art History, NYU With associated works by Movement Research Journal
Deborah Hay, All Day Dance, Judson Dance Thaeter Concert of Dance #7, 24 June 1963 4
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Gerard Forde (Independent Scholar) Marc Siegel (Goethe University, Frankfurt) Danielle Goldman (The New School) Heather Love (University Of Pennsylvania) Richard Move (Queens College, CUNY) Ara Osterweil (McGill University) Julia Robinson (New York University) Organized by JOSHUA LUBIN-LEVY
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Faculty Sponsor ANDRE LEPECKI
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ABSTRACTS “A Concert of Dance #16,” program for A Concert of Dance #16, 29 April 1964. Reproduced from Box 3, Folder 56, Judson Memorial Church Archive, Fales Library & Special Collections, New York University. 9
Send Three And Fourpence, We’re Going To Dance - Misreading Fred Herko Gerard Forde (Independent Scholar) Judson Dance Theater choreographer and Warhol superstar Fred Herko died fifty years ago, on October 27th, 1964, when he jumped from a fifth-story window of the apartment at 5 Cornelia Street in Greenwich Village that was home to his ex-lover and Caffe Cino lighting designer, Johnny Dodd. The New York Times reported his death the following day, authoritatively informing its readers that he was 29 years old. He was 28. Thus began a succession of misapprehensions, half-truths, projections, fictions, embroiderings, romanticizations and outright lies that leave us, fifty years later, further from the truth of Herko’s life than we have ever been. Six years into researching Herko’s biography, Gerard Forde provides a much-needed corrective to the mythology that has grown up around one of the most fascinating figures of New York’s early-1960s avant-garde. Good Bananas, Bad Bananas And Gossip Marc Siegel (Goethe University, Frankfurt) In the New York underground theater and film scene in mid-1960s, there was a veritable cult of interest in the off-screen scandals of depression-era Hollywood actress Jean Harlow. Warhol’s first sound film, Harlot (1964), starring drag Superstar Mario Montez as the seductive Harlowesque blonde bombshell, is a “travesty” on this cult, according to writer Ronald Tavel, the main force behind the film’s improvised soundtrack. Despite its satiric aspects, this static and mesmerizing film manages to turn “mass media into human meaningfulness” (Tavel). My lecture will argue that this underground production of “meaningfulness” depends equally on the structure of gossip, as it does on the aesthetic, formal and performance aspects of the film. Moreover, I will offer an expanded notion of gossip to account for the compelling interest of Warhol’s films and the affective charge of his fabulous Superstars. 10
Reading Herko’s Archive: A Crash Course Roundtable
Danielle Goldman (The New School) Heather Love (University Of Pennsylvania) Richard Move (Queens College, CUNY) Ara Osterweil (Mcgill University) Julia Robinson (New York University) While Herko remains a prominent figure in the history of the 1960s New York avant-garde, the body of literature on Herko’s performance work is slim and scattered at best. In part this is due to the lack of any core set of documents or recordings that might give us the illusion of access to Herko’s performance events. With this in mind, five interdisciplinary thinkers have been invited to engage with this absent history, using a small array of photographs of Herko in performance as points of departure. Encouraged to bring in their own interests and lines of inquiry, as well as to think broadly about the legacy of this queer dance and performance artist, each panelist has prepared a short response which will be followed by a roundtable discussion. We have not asked our panelists to masquerade as Herko experts, nor even to speak directy to Herko’s life or work, but rather to use this opportunity to experiment and explore with how we read, write and produce knowledge around queer performing art histories.
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PARTICIPANT BIOS “James Waring and Dance Company,� announcement for James Waring Dance Company, no date. Reproduced from Box 3, Folder 58, Judson Memorial Church Archive, Fales Library & Special Collections, New York University. 13
Gerard Forde (b. 1968, London) is an independent scholar. His research over the past six years has focused on the interconnections between avant-garde visual art, theatre, dance and poetry in New York in the 1950s and 1960s. He is writing a biography of Fred Herko and a history of the New York Poets Theatre. Recent essays include: “Plus or Minus 1961 – A Chronology 1959-1963” in Julia Robinson and Christian Xatrec (eds.), ± 1961: Founding the Expanded Arts, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, 2013; “Poet’s Vaudeville – The Collages of James Waring,” in James Waring, Galerie 1900-2000, Paris, 2013; “Dramatis Personæ: The Theatrical Collaborations of Kenneth Koch, Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely,” presented at the Métamatic Reloaded symposium at Museum Tinguely in Basel in March 2013, will be published in the summer of 2015. Marc Siegel is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theater, Film and Media Studies at the Goethe University in Frankfurt. His research focuses on avant-garde film and queer studies. He recently edited “Jack Smith: Beyond the Rented World,” a special issue of the journal Criticism (56.2, Spring 2014). He’s currently completing two book projects: one, a monograph on gossip and queer film culture; the other, an edited collection of essays by German film scholar Gertrud Koch. Siegel’s projects as a freelance curator include the festivals “Camp/Anti-Camp: A Queer Guide to Everyday Life” (with Susanne Sachsse, HAU/ Berlin, 2012), and “LIVE FILM! JACK SMITH! Five Flaming Days in a Rented World “ (with Susanne Sachsse and Stefanie Schulte Strathaus, 2009), and the exhibition “George Kuchar” (Berlin Biennial, 2010). He is on the advisory board of the Forum Expanded section of the Berlinale and one of the co-founders of the Berlin-based artists’ collective CHEAP.
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Danielle Goldman: In my research, I analyze the social, cultural, and historical conditions that affect how people move. I’m fascinated by critical theories of the body, and I tend to think about dance as an arena for experimental relations between self and other. These interests are informed by my experience as a dancer – taking class, rehearsing, and performing (most recently for the choreographers DD Dorvillier and Beth Gill). Persistent shuttling between dance practice and academic work – two worlds that I’ve been trying to bridge for as long as I can remember – has shown me that dance and critical theory inform each other in significant ways, revealing much about embodiment, subjectivity, and notions of identity. I hope to make these relations apparent in my classes.
Heather Love received her A.B. from Harvard and her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. Her research interests include gender studies and queer theory, the literature and culture of modernity, affect studies, film and visual culture, psychoanalysis, race and ethnicity, sociology and literature, disability studies, and critical theory. She is the author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Harvard 2007), the editor of a special issue of GLQ on the scholarship and legacy of Gayle Rubin (“Rethinking Sex”), and the co-editor of a special issue of New Literary History (“Is There Life after Identity Politics?”). A book of her essays and lectures (Queer Affect Politics: Selected Essays by Heather Love, ShenLou Press 2012) was published recently in Taiwan. She is spending 2014-2015 as the Stanley Kelley, Jr., Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching in Gender and Sexuality Studies at Princeton.
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Richard Move is Artistic Director of MoveOpolis! a TED Fellow, Ph.D. Candidate (ABD) in Performance Studies at NYU, Assistant Professor of Dance in the Department of Drama, Theatre & Dance at Queens College, CUNY and Lecturer in Design at Yale School of Drama. His commissions include multidisciplinary works for Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project, Martha Graham Dance Company, American Festival of Paris, Florence Opera Ballet, European Cultural Capitol, Guggenheim Museum, Deborah Harry, Dame Shirley Bassey, Isaac Mizrahi and New York City Ballet Principal, Helene Alexopolous. His films include: Bardo, Jury Prize nominee at Lincoln Center’s Dance on Camera Festival, BloodWork-The Ana Mendieta Story, National Board of Review Award at CityVisions/Directors Guild of America, GhostLight, Tribeca Film Festival premiere and GIMP-The Documentary, Lincoln Center’s 2014 Dance on Camera Festival premiere. Martha@ ..., Move’s performances Martha Graham, received two New York Dance and Performance Awards (“Bessies”) and tours globally.
Ara Osterweil is an Assistant Professor of Film and Cultural Studies at McGill University, as well as a painter. She has written extensively on cinema in journals such as Film Quarterly, Camera Obscura, Millennium Film Journal, and Framework. Her book Flesh Cinema: The Corporeal Turn in American Avant-Garde Film (Manchester University Press) was released this year.
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Julia Robinson, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History at New York University, is currently at work on a booklength study of the American artist George Brecht. Her essays and criticism have appeared in Grey Room, October, Artforum, Mousse, Performance Research, and Art Journal. She is the editor of the John Cage October Files (October/MIT Press, 2011). Her curatorial activities include: ¹I96I: Founding the Expanded Arts (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, 2013), New Realisms (1957-63): Object Strategies Between Readymade & Spectacle (Reina Sofia, 2010), John Cage & Experimental Art: The Anarchy of Silence (Museu d’Art Contemporani [MACBA] Barcelona, 2009-10), and George Brecht Events: Eine Heterospektive (Museum Ludwig, Cologne, 2005-6).
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EDITORS' NOTE By Joshua Lubin-Levy
he following course packet presents an incomplete array of archival materials related to the life and work of dancer and performer Fred Herko. A number of factors contribute to its incompleteness - the least of which is the editors’ lack of time and resources to adequately access the totality of archival materials available. Like many who performed in the experimental arts of the early 1960s, Herko's life and work remains scattered across various North American archives – the distributed traces of his legacy mediated by that of more clearly recognizable “authors,” such as the choreographer James Waring, the poet Diane di Prima and the artist Andy Warhol. In a sense, histories like Herko’s will always be incomplete. Not only because of this dispersal, nor simply because his medium was live performance (that elusive and ephemeral practice haunted by the challenges of documentation and preservation), but also because of Herko’s rather untimely aesthetic. Hardly a critic favorite, the documents that remain attest to the kind of queer work that appeared illegible, inaccessible and even out of place during the time in which he lived.
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Embracing this obstacle as an opportunity, we decided to develop a packet that makes use of the multiple points of access that incompleteness allows. Compiled here is a handful of the immediately available materials collected in the archives at the Fales Library Downtown Collection and other local repositories that have helped to preserve the legacy of the 1960s Greenwich Village art scene. In that sense, this packet reflects the traces that remain in the vicinity of where Herko conducted so much of his work, an echo of the things one might discover while attempting to retrace his steps.
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FRED HERKO: A COURSE PACKET presents the possibility that even when we are present with a performance it may not be present to us. It is not always so readily available nor so easily watched. Most of the material collected here shuttles between before and after the moment of Herko performing. Programs, press releases and performance scores for a number of the Judson Dance Theater concerts testify to Herko’s place among this groundbreaking group of artists. Reviews, reflections and other writings speak to the reception and experience of these performances after the fact. Together, they articulate the discursive sphere within and against which Herko’s seemingly too-campy and tooqueer work often struggled to leave its mark. Hardly limited to Fred Herko, the quest to access the works of others, especially after they are gone, is always a complicated affair. It is our hope that in making these materials available for use, this course and course packet will encourage us to develop new tools for engagement, new pathways for moving past what we already know about the life and work of someone like Fred Herko. In charting a new course together, how might we come to know him differently? FRED HERKO: A CRASH COURSE is made possible by the generous support from a team of co-presenting organizations whose investment in public events and experimental pedagogy make events like this possible. We would like to extend our gratitude to the many individuals and participants who have shared with us their time, knowledge and curiosity. We would like to thank Professor André Lepecki, whose is not only the faculty sponsor for this event but whose sponsorship extends to the ways in which his teaching and mentorship has been nothing short of groundbreaking for countless students. Professor Lepecki’s teaching has a tidal quality, an ebb and flow in the way he presents bodies of knowledge as always pushing and pulling at their own limitations, between dance, art, performance and academia. It is this kind of profound pedagogical sponsorship that makes this event on Fred Herko possible. 20
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archival images Fred Herko resume, no date. Reproduced from Box 4, Folder 68, Judson Memorial Church Archive, Fales Library & Special Collections, New York University. 23
Diane Di Prima, “FORMAL BIRTHDAY POEM: February 23, 1964” published in Freddie Poems by Diane Di Prima, Eidolon Editions, 1974. 24
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Fred Herko, “Paul Taylor – A History” published in The Floating Bear, edited by Diane Di Prima & LeRoi Jones, Number 17, January 1962. Reproduced from The Floating Bear: A Newsletter, edited by Diane Di Prima & LeRoi Jones, (Laurence McGilvery: La Jolla, California, 1973), page 192. 26
Edwin Denby, “Dear Floating Bear…” published in The Floating Bear, edited by Diane Di Prima & LeRoi Jones, Number 19, March 1962. Reproduced from The Floating Bear: A Newsletter, edited by Diane Di Prima & LeRoi Jones, (Laurence McGilvery: La Jolla, California, 1973), page 216. 27
Lillian Moore, “Rainder-Herko Dance Recital,� New York Herald Tribune, 6 March 1962, page 12. Reproduced from the microfilm collection at New York University. 28
Marcia Marks, “Dance Works by Yvonne Rainer and Fred Herko, Maidman Playhouse, March 5, 1962,” Dance Magazine (36), April 1962, pages 54 & 57 – 58. Reproduced from the microfilm collection at The New School. 29
Jill Johnston, “Fresh Winds,� The Village Voice, 15 March 1962. Reproduced from the microfilm collection at New York University. 30
Jill Johnston, “Judson Speedlimits,� The Village Voice, 25 July 1963. Reproduced from Box 3, Folder 37, Judson Memorial Church Archive, Fales Library & Special Collections, New York University. 31
“A Concert of Dance,� program for Judson Dance Theater concert, 6 July 1962, 2 pages. Reproduced from Box 3, Folder 30, Judson Memorial Church Archive, Fales Library & Special Collections, New York University. 32
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For Immediate Release,� press release for A Concert of Dance #3 & #4, 29 & 30 January 1963. Reproduced from Box 3, Folder 32, Judson Memorial Church Archive, Fales Library & Special Collections, New York University. 34
Maxine Munt, “For Dancers Only,� Show Business, 9 February 1963. Reproduced from Box 3, Folder 32, Judson Memorial Church Archive, Fales Library & Special Collections, New York University. 35
“A Concert of Dance #3,� program for A Concert of Dance #3, 29 January 1963, 2 pages. Reproduced from Box 3, Folder 32, Judson Memorial Church Archive, Fales Library & Special Collections, New York University. 36
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Allen Hughes, “Judson Dance Theater Seeks New Paths: Avant-Gardists Give First Programs in Church,� The New York Times, 26 June 1963. Reproduced from Box 3, Folder 37, Judson Memorial Church Archive, Fales Library & Special Collections, New York University. 38
“A Concert of Dance #6,� program for A Concert of Dance #6, 23 June 1963, page 1 of 2. Reproduced from Box 3, Folder 37, Judson Memorial Church Archive, Fales Library & Special Collections, New York University. 39
George Brecht, “Comb Music,” score for Comb Music performed by Fred Herko, 19 August 1963. Reproduced from “Judson Dance Theater: 19621966, Organized by the Bennington College Judson Project,” held in Box 73, Folder 6, Judson Memorial Church Archive, Fales Library & Special Collections, New York University.
A Concert of Dance #12,� program for A Concert of Dance #12, 8 August 1963. Reproduced from Box 3, Folder 43, Judson Memorial Church Archive, Fales Library & Special Collections, New York University. 41
Ray Johnson, “Review by Ray Johnston (In The Style of Floating Bear),” published in The Floating Bear, edited by Diane Di Prima & LeRoi Jones, Number 27, November 1963. Reproduced from The Floating Bear: A Newsletter, edited by Diane Di Prima & LeRoi Jones, (Laurence McGilvery: La Jolla, California, 1973), page 316 - 317. 42
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John Daley, “Billy Linich’s Party,” published in The Floating Bear, edited by Diane Di Prima & LeRoi Jones, Number 27, November 1963. Reproduced from The Floating Bear: A Newsletter, edited by Diane Di Prima & LeRoi Jones, (Laurence McGilvery: La Jolla, California, 1973), page 322 - 324. 44
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John Daley, “Billy Linich’s Party,” published in The Floating Bear, edited by Diane Di Prima & LeRoi Jones, Number 27, November 1963. (cont.) 46
Allen Hughes, “At Home Anywhere: Avant-Gardists Adjust to Anything,� The New York Times, 9 February 1964. Reproduced from Box 3, Folder 49, Judson Memorial Church Archive, Fales Library & Special Collections, New York University. 47
Gerard Malanga, “Rollerskate,� published in The Floating Bear, edited by Diane Di Prima & LeRoi Jones, Number 29, March 1964. Reproduced from The Floating Bear: A Newsletter, edited by Diane Di Prima & LeRoi Jones, (Laurence McGilvery: La Jolla, California, 1973), page 358 - 359. 48
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“The Palace of the Dragon Prince,� announcement for The Palace of the Dragon Prince, choreographed by Fred Herko, 1964. Reproduced from Box 3, Folder 57, Judson Memorial Church Archive, Fales Library & Special Collections, New York University. 50
Elaine Summers, “Fantastic Gardens,� description of performance Fantastic Gardens (from 2 February 1964), 16 November 1981. Source unknown. 51
special thanks
Dana Whitco Karen Shimakawa André Lepecki Noel Rodriguez Jr. Laura Fortes Jessica Holmes, Samuel Draxler David Everett Howe Will Rawls Kyle Bukhari Yve Laris Cohen Adrienne Edwards Claudia La Rocco Raja Feather Kelly Tavia Nyong’o Jillian Peña Jen Rosenblit Aliza Shvarts Alan Ruiz