Linus Coraggio Ramifications Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project
COVER: THE GAS STATION, 1995, Nick Kuskin. NIGHT SCULPTING AT THE RIVINGTON GARDEN, 1986, Toyo Tsuchiya.
RIV PHOTO 1, 1985 Photographic print 29 x 42 inches
LINUS CORAGGIO RAMIFICATIONS Published on the occasion of the exhibition September 12–October 10, 2019 Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project Howl! A/P/E Volume 1, No. 33
Linus with his father in front of MANDELLA at the Rotterdam Arts Festival in 1986.
LINUS CORAGGIO—THE EXISTENTIAL WELD Brad Melamed Apocalyptic Now. On the last day of July 2019, a thunderstorm plays soundtrack to the works that line the walls of Linus Coraggio’s studio. It is an immersive environment, a portal into the apocalyptic subversion that is the “now” of Coraggio’s work. Ranging in scale from tabletop size to monumental, his art is one steady and defiant stream of counterconsumption that includes sculptures of discarded metal, abstract canvases, and stacks of woodblock prints that are like giant pages from underground comic books. In this space, dystopian/utopian dreams are quantum entangled: street aesthetics meet hip-hop graffiti meet 50s abstract expressionism and beatnik nonconformity. Standing in his workroom, jam-packed with tools, machinery, and drawers of supplies, Linus says with a sly grin, “I’m not a hoarder; I’m a saver. These things are calling to me ‘Use me, use me.’ ” His job, his labor, is to heed that call. Are We Not Men? Coraggio’s sculptures are made from his ongoing ‘get what you need’ collection of worn, used, beat-up, and disassembled wrenches, pliers, clamps, chains, hub caps, street signs, doorknobs, horseshoes, tin snips, scissors, forks, spoons, knives, etc. His detritus is the gold vein of his anti-gravitational welded constructions. One can readily imagine Coraggio’s keen sense of play. As a testament to Chaos Theory—one piece is actually titled 3D Fractal (2009)—the artist intuits each next puzzle piece as he constructs a totality. He shares David Smith’s affinity with drawing (think of Smith’s iconic Hudson River Landscape), Judy Pfaff’s understanding of volume and composition, and Miró’s sense of space. A work called Mirror (2002) incorporates a circular mirror in a swirl of metal, drawing with a rectangular counterpoint served as a tray. There is a cascading flow in Coraggio’s metal works that pulls the viewer inside the ‘body’ of the sculpture. There we find the recognizable. The result is an organic structure far removed from any Cartesian or Newtonian rationale. Defying gravity, denying weight, he creates multidimensional interstices of real depth. New York City encodes Coraggio’s DNA. I’m reminded of the Mohawk construction workers of the 30s, reaching skyscraping heights. He envisions a soaring WTC (2012)—much like Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International— to replace the soulless behemoth he believes will eventually come down. “Are we not men?” the sculptures ask. Yes, they answer; we are of human, no longer of the corporate cookie-cutter machine. The Wild Ones. Looking at parts. Understanding function. That’s what mechanics do. Coraggio has a natural talent for doing just that...only the function is of his own intention. He seeks the remnants of destruction in order to create his very own dream machine. Evident in his motorcycle series (1986–present) he evokes mobility; the open road; the unburdened, uncomplicated, unobligated life; Brando’s bad-boy sexuality; and Fonda and Hopper’s not-so-easy ride. In several of these works he builds the wheels from scratch, from scrap—rim, hub and spoke—literally
ALL STUDIO, APARTMENT, AND INSTALLATION PHOTOGRAPHS by Jason Wyche unless otherwise noted.
reinventing the wheel. Regarded as a male fantasy (though of course there are woman bikers) Corraggio embraces the myth as part of his personal history (he owns two bikes), expressive of a desire to convert the machine into a means of liberation. In these works, as in all his conversions, a motorcycle is no longer a motorcycle—ceci n’est pas une moto. The artwork itself becomes the vehicle of travel and liberation. Born to be wild. Back to Yin. I’m drawn to a painting called Precrasher (2017). What does an artist do when he’s thrown off his bike and lands on his feet with a bruised psyche as collateral damage? He paints a joyous ride: out-oftime tracings of calligraphic highways in infinite space with strokes of matte and Day-Glo paint—like flashes of the world going by. His pictorial space is a mash-up of 50s existential abstraction expressed in nonrepresentational fields, and hip-hop subway cars created by artists like Fab 5 Freddy, Futura 2000, and Dr. Revolt. Coraggio carries the baton of abstract expressionism—think Bradley Walker Tomlin and Richard Pousette-Dart—upgraded with the knowledge of psychedelic drugs and street tags. A series of tondos, Color Hole (2019), Round Rain (2019), Tornado (2019), call on the circle to remind us the world is all curves, that the feminine aspect is the residence of all our creations. Coraggio may be the renegade bad boy—sometimes, to this day, calling women ‘chicks’—but he knows the subconscious, the unknown, the feminine aspect (the yin of the yang) is where the action is. He knows too that the role of the misfit resists patriarchy’s control. Like the Hindu goddess Kali, punk anarchist as destroyer. The Good Old End Days Today. Coraggio was admitted to the Whitney Independent Study Program in 1986. He’d already been in attendance at the Whitney earlier in the decade, selling his art along the building’s outside wall. In a series of paper-cast woodblocks, he tells his story of those first years out of art school. Captions read, “just buy it you rich shithead...inside bad and pretentious art.” He lasted about five months in the Whitney Program. His allegiance was clearly to the street rather than to academia. “Too much sitting around a table talking,” he says. Instead he went to his own school, which he named the Rivington School (19851997): the politically-incorrect, anti-commercial, anti-real-estate response to the East Village art scene. Their vision of end days feels prescient as the looming chaos of authoritarianism and climate change is ever more real. More recently, in collaboration with Anthony Haden-Guest, collages called Optimism, Corruption and Apocalypse (2019) pair text and pieces of metal objects, declaring, “I am extremely close to acquiring all the necessary bits and pieces to build a foolproof device...then too!!! I’ll destroy the planet.” Inside the apocalyptic mind he understands that everything, good or bad, is invention. Night Lights. Coraggio is keenly aware of the esoteric nature of welding. The work is demanding. Focus is essential. Methodical and fatiguing, the welder is in his own world behind the mask. Each weld must be strong enough to support the weight of the work’s existence. In the realm of
darkness and fire, Coraggio fine-tunes his vision. As the artist shaman, he knows that in the darkness there is light, that fear can serve as initiation. A series of Candlesticks (1986–present) stand along the studio shelves. Each its own character, they have a Charles Addams sardonic functionality—ingeniously, delightfully anticipating the next blackout. In Car Headlight Chandelier (2008), we look up to see a conglomeration of headlights that make a circle, a completion, a hole/whole, like a galactic center finally revealed to us from our collisions with the machine. In this piece, the spirit of John Chamberlain’s car sculptures and Ed & Nancy Kienholz’s tableaux levitate, elevating into an endless loop. Look up. Look inside. Embrace the darkness. If Coraggio’s vision is one long road trip into the dark, lonely American night, in resistance we can become fellow travelers on that road less traveled. Our lights will guide and lift us. We are cosmically wired. There is hope.
Poem for Linus: Linus was an aspiring poet Before he came to welding metal Poets use identifiable words To create newly formed expressions Linus uses identifiable objects As material realized in a new form. One informs the other in his poetic imaginings Taking his pleasure handling hard metal Compliment a tactile interest with 2-dimensional surfaces With paints, markers, or printer’s ink He revels in naming his achievements His artworks never left untitled. —Sur Rodney (Sur)
LINUS CORAGGIO: ONTO THE STREETS Anthony Haden-Guest When the street art phenom broke big in the early 80s, art worldlings got a grip soon enough and Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, and Jean-Michel Basquiat became the anointed ones. But in 2017, Richard Hambleton, the creator of that street presence, Shadowman, OD’d. And blew up. That, and last year’s strong Rammellzee retrospective, made it clear that the narrative of street art is in melt. So it’s good timing for a show of Linus Coraggio, who brought sculpture to the streets with 3-D graffiti and has spent nearly four decades making a remarkable— and remarkably diverse—body of work. Linus—it’s always just Linus—grew up in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, his father a musician, his mother a writer, who bought him lino-cutting tools when he was seven. He has meticulous memories of making his first sculpture aged 9, a pyramid glued together from 3,000 toothpicks. A decade later he was at Purchase, the State University of New York, and settled on an art-making future but quickly dropped the idea of looking for a gallery. “My teachers would say things like ‘one in 3,000 of you might make it as artist,’ ” he says. “They were so dismal that I started to look for other ways to get my work out.” Linus had friends making graffiti, and accompanied them from time to time, so after he graduated in ’84 and moved to the city, his plan was to wheat-paste abstractions downtown. The crew he approached though were looking for a gallery show, not a newbie. “That got me thinking what kind of street art can I do on my own?” he says. “I was already doing metalwork. So one night I was having trouble going to sleep and I flashed on these No-Parking signs I climbed as a kid. You could jam your feet into them. And I started welding the next day.” Installing a street sculpture is more time consuming than work with a spray can. “I had a Volkswagen bug,” Linus says. “So I drove around the East Village and SoHo putting them up. I had been hanging around the Life Café so put up a few ‘round there. And by the Hell’s Angels on Third Street.” Installation, being more time consuming, it’s also that much riskier. Which can help. “The edginess in the art comes from the roughness of the way I put it together and the chances you have to take to put it up,” Linus says. “And that energy creates a tension as an artist that goes into your work…the rough edges and the gestures…and that stays with you when you do your studio work.” Linus had been the first to make 3-D graffiti but soon others were at it too. Were they competitive? Well, it was the streets. He spotted a piece by a rival in Tompkins Square Park while drinking a beer at 5 o’clock one afternoon. “So I climbed up and crushed the beer can onto one of the sculptures,” he says. Later though he hung his competitor in a street art show he curated. “So I guess we buried the hatchet.” He followed up the sign welding with more complex assemblages,
LINUS OUTSTALLING 3-D GRAFFITI ON ST. MARKS AND 2ND AVENUE 1984. Daniel Falgerho. (Inset) GAS STATION YARD, 1995.
LINUS WITH 3,000 TOOTHPICK SCULPTURE, 1970. Patricia Brant.
some including figurative elements and text. You could say the toothpick pyramid was a precursor because multiplicity is key, and the signature style of Linus has become an inventive array of signatures. One piece will pack the raw minimal punch of scrap metal, but alongside there’ll be a motorbike piece, an unnerving Barbie-doll assemblage, and a piece bristling with knives and/or gunnery. “Minimalism is too quick. And too planned,” he says. “There’s a subconscious level to what ends up getting finished, based on the material I’m thinking of using.” The coming of the Internet largely transformed the world of street art, which has become a worldwide phenomenon, intimately—too intimately often—involved with promotion and sponsorship. Street sculpture has been largely immune from this. “The great graffiti artists, like Futura, their work was easy to photograph,” Linus says. “But a piece of 3-D street art on a No-Parking sign, perched on the edge of a sidewalk, with cars and trucks passing near it, a building 25 feet away, and patches of sky with sunlight, that’s difficult to document with a strong picture.” It’s a position Linus accepts, rather than embracing. “I always saw myself as the underground in the underground,” he says. “Like I was subverting the art that was supposed to be subverting the level above it.” It’s a thoroughly ornery attitude, a good attitude for an artist, and one that suits his uncompromising art.
(L) LINUS OUTSTALLING 3-D GRAFFITI ON AVENUE B AND 10TH ST., 1983. Daniel Falgerho. (Inset) THE GAS STATION, 1994. (R) LINUS IN FRONT OF HIS BROOME STREET STUDIO, 2000. Michael Levine.
THE THIRD POSITION: SCULPTURE AT THE EXTREMES Carlo McCormick For all that we spend countless lives and generations just trying to figure things out—as if the folly of understanding the world and universe around us were endemic to the human condition—there is a place where logic ends, and that too constitutes a fundamental place in our comprehension. Let us not besmirch the legacy of rationalism and enlightenment, or even the manifest destiny of science, but neither can we ignore the power of the anti-rational that persists amongst us like a mutant outsider philosophy. From a philosophical perspective anti-rationalism does not contest logic, in fact it accepts it as an essential necessity to the workings of the hand and heart. Rather, it reckons that there is so much more to understanding, a phenomenology that embraces another kind of truth latent in madness and irrationality. Linus Coraggio does not make art based off of any belief system, but he does work towards a system of profound disbelief. As an artist Coraggio has an uncanny facility for adopting impossible contradictions, to wield them in just such a way that the implausible attains a balance, in concept and composition, a dance of irascible attachments where the off-kilter oddity reveals its own discrete symmetry. He says it’s a lot like jazz, a resemblance you can see in his paintings but is made manifest in the sculptures where materiality suggests form with an improvisatory vigor. He makes it up as he goes along, without preconceptions of form or content, no map nor compass to guide him, but like a great chef he begins with an abundance of ingredients, a spice chest of misfit metallurgical matter, for he knows that good taste is not a test of purity so much as an alchemical art of daring combinations. A toolshed tinkerer, Linus isn’t trying to fix things but make them better through an audacious DIY invention. Even when he ventures into the functional, as he did for many years when his eccentric objects found popularity in the realm of hip urban interior design, purpose remains incidental, hybridity everything. Linus Coraggio definitely does not like it when people point to a certain degree of whimsy in his art. He’s much too serious, even angry, for that. He’s not out for laughs or amusement, and even now that he grinds down the somewhat lethal edges of his assemblages to a more benign brutalism, there is a seething sort of barely contained violence within their anarchic anatomy. There is a psychological sense of horror at work here, and that’s part of this art’s curious fascination, like the way no one really looks away from the mangled metal gore of a car wreck, but—and don’t tell Linus I told you this—there’s something in the quirkiness of his forms that seems, well, kind of cute. Rife with the kinetic volatility of Jean Tinguely’s manic modernity, Coraggio’s mechanical language suggests a kindred manner of industrialist animation, as if the frolicking playfulness of Miró’s anthropomorphism was put to the engineering rigor of Legér’s machine age. In this way he is an unabashed modernist, reinventing the primitivism of all those artists colonizing the masks and fetish objects of tribal culture, or riffing on the legacy of David Smith and all those big-boy welders who once dominat-
ed but soon disappeared from the art world, leaving a public clutter of hulking abstract steel monsters in their wake. Like the orphaned offspring of Duchamp’s readymades and Schwitters’ Merzbau, Coraggio’s art offers its own awkward yet graceful impersonation of absurdity with the same lingering anxiety and trauma as Dada found in the wake of the First World War. Built from useless scraps like the homemade skateboards of his youth, and echoing the wild style of the subway-train art movement of that era, almost literally in his “3-D graffiti” work, this is unmistakably an urban art form. However, it is not of the shiny new city that beckons homogeneity and comfortable entitlements, it is rather of that decaying and abandoned Gotham metropolis from which Coraggio, like his art, emerged like thorny weeds in the rubble. It’s tough and grim, determined and abject, self-reliant and self-invented, like the people it serves. Old world and terminally anachronistic to all that is so white and polite about today’s city, it’s about the radical invention of style that happens when people start to make things when they have nothing else and nobody gives a shit. Born of that great glut of refuse and refusal that spilled like a cargo-cult dialect from a broken and bankrupt city, it’s now a memento mori for a society that cannot imagine sustainability and continues to consume anew rather that consider recycling what it already has. And this too goes to the genesis of modernism in the gothic obsessions of romanticism at the dawn of the industrial revolution—a post-modern Prometheus to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Postscript There’s a crazy lady running for president, no need to mention her name since she sells enough books already, who offers a kind of irrational logic befitting a Scientologist or a Christian Scientist to contest the use of pharmaceuticals to combat depression. But she’s got a great term for this vague spectrum of pain that is ultimately healthy, calling it “normal human despair.” Damn that would be a good name for a band, but let’s leave it as a doubtful descriptor for the place where Coraggio’s art is coming from. It is the pathos that rescues this art from its violence and its humor, as it does its creator from his irony, the cruel laughter of a besieged humanism reimagining horror in a show called Ramifications. Maybe the real diagnosis is that despair is now normal. The Third Position is a term used by the intelligence community to describe outliers who do not ascribe to any political ideology but will adopt incompatible and fundamentally contradictory extremes. It may apply to a new kind of aesthetics.
THE LIGHTER SIDE OF HEAVY METAL: THE WELDED STEEL AND SCRAP METAL WORKS OF LINUS CORAGGIO Michael Carter I first encountered the work of Linus Coraggio in the summer of 1984 at Avenue B Gallery in the East Village. With his scrap-metal “3-D graffiti” and cartoony welded-steel constructions, the young artist’s work built upon the first wave of E.V. street art, with a heavy metal twist. His tumbling tenement buildings echoed Looney Tunes caricatures and Gaudi’s undulating architecture; his steel-and-barbwire Berlin Wall parody was fraught with political angst and was also an innovative wall-work. Irreverent as they were, I was most struck by the thought and skill of their fabrication. The artist found larger inspiration and notoriety as a founding member of the Rivington School. Coraggio and sculptors Ray Kelly and Robert Parker were most responsible for creating the bulwark of the sprawling steel-and-debris phoenix that arose from the rubble of a vacant lot on Rivington Street, later added to by dozens of known and unknown artists—including Jean-Michel Basquiat—demarcating a kind of “temporary autonomous zone” that became the locus of an alternative Lower East Side culture which thrived into the mid-90s. (The “sculpture garden” itself would go through three different dislocations and reconstructions, and Linus was instrumental in all of them.) Coraggio also exhibited frequently at the three small storefront art spaces on Rivington: Freddy the Dreamer, Nada, and No Se No. Following the “style wars” of the graffiti writers, the Rivington School artists became as notorious for their “trash or be trashed” ethic as for their kitchen-sink trash aesthetic, but the scrap-metal style which was their hallmark quickly attracted international attention (and imitators), especially in Japan, Finland, Italy, and Germany. In 1986, Coraggio and other Rivington artists opened Space 2B at an abandoned gas station in the East Village, hosting hundreds of performances and doubling as Coraggio’s showroom. Its vast scrap-and-steel “fence” also elicited international celebrity. In 1991, PS1 invited Coraggio and the others to construct a miniature Rivington sculpture garden. At 2B, Coraggio began to create his signature welded steel-and-scrap furniture, particularly the unique, oddly shaped chairs that exuded East Village edge and formal virtuosity. Novelist Joyce Carol Oates called one of his chairs “witty, weighty, and almost comfortable; [it] exerts an iron will and dares you to be equal to it,” noting “it descends from Duchamp and the assemblage sculptors of the early 20th century.” At 2B, he also started a series of trademark “chopper” sculptures, letting the materials and his imagination run wild. Coraggio has recently created one-of-a-kind chess sets with imaginatively welded pieces. (I daresay Duchamp would have approved.) Though he adamantly walks the line between utilitarian, decorative, and the deliberately provocative, Coraggio’s more abstract welded collage works are his most aesthetically engaging, and spotlight the artist’s full
powers. Away from the impersonal junk beacon on Rivington, Coraggio began to hone his individual sculptural chops, executing smaller, unified abstract constructions, always centering on an armload of well-chosen found artifacts. Coraggio’s approach to scrap metal is almost mystical: “I think to a minor degree that certain metal junk has a soul or at least some kind of quirky historical continuum...that inspires me and motivates me to use it as my main medium.” Years of studio- and scrap-metal experience have sharpened his welder’s touch and finder’s eye—and Coraggio’s most recent abstractions bend space and perspective in sometimes startling ways—yet their object choices continue to evince his wry humor and irreverence (which may have lightened somewhat, along with his touch). At his best these constructions recall the found-metal alchemy of Picasso’s sculpture (such as the famous bicycle-seat-and-handlebar Bull’s Head), Picabia, and the spatial wizardry of such modernist masters of welded metal sculpture, like Julio González and especially David Smith. His frequent incorporation of utilitarian objects evokes Pop sculptors such as Oldenberg or Dine. His eye for metal collage puts him in the company of Rauschenberg’s steel assemblages, some of Chamberlain’s sculpture —most notably in this exhibition, the car-headlights chandelier—and contemporaries like Robert Parker. Although visual art—specifically painting (or whatever that means), especially street or graffiti-inspired art—has always been a focus of his work, in the last decade Linus has created a plethora of graf-based, abstract, yet quite painterly canvases and tondos, which blend elements of psychedelia and ab-ex artists such as de Kooning and Still. While he has long collaborated with other artists, especially the stone sculptor Ken Hiratsuka (a fellow Rivington School artist), Kevin Wendall (aka FA-Q), DJ Spooky (aka Paul Miller), Richard Hambleton (who also lived on Rivington), and Arturo Vega, recently he has worked with many others of the street-art scene including Al Díaz (the partner in Samo® with Basquiat), Alfredo Martínez, Stefan Eins of Fashion Moda, and Chris Chambers of the street-art collective Avant; the noted wag Anthony Haden-Guest; artist-photographers such as Curt Hoppe and M. Henry Jones; and performers like Kembra Pfahler. Regardless whether he puts his torch to abstraction or figuration, Coraggio’s output has established him as one of the premier scrap-metal sculptors in New York, if not the world. (In the realm of scrap metal he has few peers.) His metal-collaged objects evidence the transmutation of dross materials into sculpture of serious beauty (and sometimes functionality), while retaining a strong whiff of the youthful artist’s smirking humor. Coraggio’s redeployment of found objects connects him with two of the richest veins of 20th century art, which continue to pulse into the 21st: assemblage and welded steel sculpture. Impressive as they are, these objects evidence the development of an artist whose vision will widen as the scope of his projects becomes more challenging, whose touch will continue to lighten and transfigure the heaviest of metals into works of rare wonder.
ABOUT LINUS Christopher Hart Chambers Linus and I have lead parallel lives. We grew up in the same neighborhood, both attended the High School for Music & Art in Harlem and attended SUNY Purchase. In those days the concept of making a living as an artist was a pariah subject. Kids we knew from growing up in New York City were earning more selling their graffiti paintings than our teachers. Out of frustration and poverty I started pasting up my paintings in the streets all over town. Linus started bolting small metal sculptures to signposts. But, it was only a few years before the graff and street-art scenes came crashing down, as the art-world turnstiles rotated to other trends. I opened an arts venue on the Bowery with a musician friend, and Linus got entrenched in an indoor/outdoor arts space in a disused gas station in the East Village. We participated in exhibitions in each other’s “galleries.” Linus and his crew constructed a massive, landmark sculpture of welded scrap metals that loomed over the area like an anarchistic Tower of Babel. Attracting huge crowds, it became a fixture on the downtown map which is remembered today as an icon of the rebellious “you can’t stop me” punk-rock aesthetic of the era. We both exhibited with a strip of underground galleries on Rivington Street, and Linus soon became known as one of the leaders of the “Rivington School,” leading to numerous exhibitions locally and worldwide. Now, some 35 years later, Linus and his art remain true to that youthful exuberance. It is hard to tell the recent works from those of his early years. He has an intuitive talent for design and composition as well as an artisan’s tactile sense for material, applied with abstract expressionist fluidity. His style, sometimes referential, at times wholly abstract, is Coraggio’s own thing. Like punk rock, it’s junk art. Among his signature pieces are dangerous looking motorcycle sculptures ranging from 14 inches long to about 3 feet, and towers of tangled found-metal parts that assume a Mad Max sensibility. Furniture assembled from whatever can be welded together with aplomb can be shockingly appealing. His “screens” (hinged partitions), along with the totemic towers, are some of the most intriguing to this fan; they are a stylistic admix of art nouveau, steampunk, and Viennese secessionism. He mashes together wrenches, scissors, swirling rods, saw blades...did we see a kitchen sink? Coraggio’s aggressive, burnt, and rusted steel modus operandi belies his acutely graceful, even surprisingly contemplative tenacity. Linus Coraggio transforms quotidian drollery into extraordinary beauty when a drill bit or a vice grip become constituents of an altogether different gestalt. An ice skate, a boat propeller, spoons, knives, architectural ornaments, bicycle parts, horseshoes, and more, are repurposed into art for their formalistic qualities alone, not for their functions at all unless irony (intentional pun) is their wont—so form follows? I have seen rifles with all sorts of threatening doodads welded on, and a chair (think: restful + communism?) with a back literally made from a hammer and sickle. Figger that?!
In situ photograph of 3-D Graffiti, 1983. Daniel Falgerho.
RIV PHOTO 2, 1985
Photographic print with welded steel frame 27 x 40 x 3 inches
TURQUEL, 2019
Welded steel 10 x 5 x 13 inches
2 WAY PLUS, 2010 Woodcut print on paper 20â…› x 26 inches
ROUNDY PROFOUNDY, 2014
Welded steel 19 x 11½ x 10 inches
SAWHORSE, 2010 Woodcut print on paper 20â…› x 26 inches
(L to R)
SHIMONOE DROP, 2018 Welded steel 96 x 20 x 20 inches
LEAVING BUSHWICK, 2010 (Also detail) Welded steel 96 x 24 x 16 inches
EVILLE TOTEMIC, 2017 Welded steel 150 x 16 x 16 inches
WATTS TOWER, 1984 Woodcut print on paper 11 x 14 inches
CURLY CUBE, 2010 Woodcut print on paper 20â…› x 26 inches
FIRE, 2010
Woodcut print on paper 20â…› x 26 inches
KI-OM-FI, 2019 Welded steel 10 x 5 x 5 inches
NO-PARKING SIGNPOST WITH 3-D GRAFFITI, 2019 Welded steel 96 x 15 x 15 inches
MATT KNIFE BLADE STILLETTO, 2017
Welded stainless steel and steel 6 x 4½ x 9 inches
OFF CENTER YEAR KNIFE, 2015 Welded steel 13 x 6 x 6 inches
WHITE TOWER, 2015
Welded steel, plastic, and marble 15 x 5½ x 5½ inches
SMOKE, 2016 Welded steel 13 x 6 x 6 inches
PINSTRIPE INTERSECTIONS, 2017
Acrylic, enamel, latex, gouache, permanent marker, and paint markers on canvas 70 x 64 x 1½ inches
SMAP, 2015
Welded steel 11 x 5 x 10 inches
CIRCLE CYCLE, 2018 Welded steel 60 x 25 x 25 inches
CONEY, 2019
Acrylic, enamel, latex, gouache, permanent marker, and paint markers on canvas 46 x 58 x 1½ inches
TONDO 2 (ROUND RAIN), 2019
Acrylic, enamel, latex, gouache, permanent marker, and paint markers on canvas 38 x 38 x 1½ inches
SPANDEX FLAG, 2017
Acrylic, enamel, latex, gouache, permanent marker, and paint markers on canvas 70 x 66 x 1½ inches
TONDO 1 (TORNADO), 2019
Acrylic, enamel, latex, gouache, permanent marker, and paint markers on canvas 55 x 55 x 1½ inches
PRECRASHER, 2017
Acrylic, enamel, latex, gouache, permanent marker, and paint markers on canvas 50¼ x 50⅛ x 1½ inches
BLACKDROP, 2017
Acrylic, enamel, latex, gouache, permanent marker, and paint markers on velvet 49 x 31 x 1½ inches FOLLOWING PAGE:
3 FIRENADOS, 2018
Acrylic, enamel, latex, gouache, permanent marker, and paint markers on canvas 66½ x 33 x 1½ inches
HOME OF THE MOBILE WELDER, 2010-2019 Welded steel, plastic, cast iron, and paint 204 x 192 x 48 inches
(L) GAS STATION STUDIO, 1987, Earl Kimmich, (R) LINUS CORAGGIO, 2019, Curt Hoppe. (FOLLOWING PAGE): RIVINGTON AND FORSYTH, 1986, Linus Coraggio.
Arturo Vega Foundation Lalo Quiñones Jane Friedman Donovan Welsh BG Hacker Board of Advisors Dan Cameron Curt Hoppe Carlo McCormick Marc H Miller Maynard Monrow Lisa Brownlee James Rubio Debora Tripodi Howl! Board of Directors Bob Perl, President Bob Holman, Vice President BG Hacker, Treasurer Nathaniel Siegel, Secretary Riki Colon Jane Friedman Chi Chi Valenti Marguerite Van Cook, President Emeritus In Memoriam of our Beloved Board Member, Brian (Hattie Hathaway) Butterick Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project Founder and Director: Jane Friedman Gallery Director: Ted Riederer Assistant Director: Josh Nierodzinski Director of Education: Katherine Cheairs Program Coordinator: Daniel Wallace Collection Manager: Corinne Gatesmith Registrar/Archive: Daniel A. Silva Production: Ramsey Chahine Marketing and Public Relations: Susan Martin Gallery design: Space ODT/Teddy Kofman Creative Consultant: Some Serious Business/Susan Martin Gallery Photographer: Jason Wyche
Linus Coraggio Ramifications Published on the occasion of the exhibition September 12–October 10, 2019 Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project © 2019 Howl Arts, Inc. Howl! Archive Publishing Editions (Howl! A/P/E) Volume 1, No. 33 ISBN: 978-1-7338785-3-1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of Howl! A/P/E. © 2019 Carlo McCormick © 2019 Anthony Haden-Guest © 2019 Michael Carter © 2019 Sur Rodney (Sur) © 2019 Christopher Hart Chambers © 2019 Brad Melamed Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project 6 East 1st St. NY, NY 10003 www.HowlArts.org 917 475 1294 Editor: Ted Riederer Copy Editor: Jorge Clar Design: Jeff Streeper
The Arturo Vega Project: Jane Friedman
Howl! Happening takes its name from the unpredictable, free-form happenings of the 60s and 70s, where active participation of the audience blurred the boundary between the art and the viewer. More to be experienced than described, Howl! Happening will curate exhibitions and stage live events that combine elements of art, poetry, music, dance, vaudeville, and theater—a cultural stew that defies easy definition. For more than a decade, Howl! Festival has been an annual community event—a free summer happening in and around Tompkins Square Park, dedicated to celebrating the past and future of contemporary culture in the East Village and the Lower East Side. The history and contemporary culture of the East Village are still being written. The mix of rock and roll, social justice, art and performance, community activism, gay rights and culture, immigrants, fashion, and nightlife are even more relevant now. While gentrification continues apace and money is king, Howl! Happening declares itself a spontaneous autonomous zone: a place where people simultaneously experience and become the work of art. As Alan Kaprow, the “father” of the happening, said: “The line between art and life should be kept as fluid and indistinct as possible.”
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