Masao Gozu Time Frame October 13–November 5, 2017 Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project
Published on the occasion of the exhibition October 13–November 5, 2017 Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project Howl! A/P/E Volume 1, No. 20
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.”
Masao Gozu Time Frame
Masao Gozu and His Windows Kotaro Iizawa
In 1986, I stayed in New York for two weeks between the end of October and November. Time passes so fast. It has already been over 30 years. Memories of my first stay in New York are deeply connected with Masao Gozu’s windows because I had stayed at Gozu’s former East Village basement studio. In the studio, there were large exhibits of reconstructed window frames and bricks, which Gozu had carried in from demolished buildings. At first, I could not get used to the rawness of the materials; however, as I continued to gaze upon the exhibits for days, I began to understand why Gozu’s heart was drawn to the windows and why he created exhibits. Gozu came to New York from Tokyo, Japan, in 1971 and began his journey towards becoming an artist. He studied at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. He felt lonely and alienated in an environment where he could not communicate. One day on Mott Street in Chinatown, he came across an elderly woman gazing out of her window, whom he unwittingly photographed. This photograph taken on May 18, 1972 officially marked the beginning of the Windows series. The series has many distinctive features. Other than the windows themselves, one element is the people photographed are gazing at something. These people are usually immigrants of African American, Asian, Puerto Rican, or Italian descent. Living in a conflicting environment, it was rare for them to show their true selves. Their “windows” were persistently closed. However, when peering at a parade or an event on the streets of the city, their closed “windows” were reluctantly opened during those short moments of freedom. Gozu was likely clicking his shutter as he empathized with them. Windows separate the inside and the outside, but they are also fixtures that blend both sides. Gozu’s Windows teaches us this. The object and the observer become reversed. The people gazing out of their windows become the object of Gozu’s pictures, and we by extension also become
observers as we gaze upon each of their photographs. The time and place of each photograph in the Windows series is noted; however, rather than emphasizing the uniqueness of each window, Windows can also be seen as universal openings. Gozu continued his work as a photographer but also began sculpting and engraving windows, gaining worldwide recognition. These windows, originally set in East Village and Brooklyn buildings, were rebuilt by Gozu not only for the residents of these buildings but as “windows” for everyone. That being said, the photographs of his Windows series, which inspired the artist in him, have not lost appeal. They have the power to move the emotions and memories of all observers. Translated by Miyako Fukuda
Previous Page Mott Street, Chinatown 4 p.m. May 18, 1972 Archival print 16 x 20 in.
Opposite Foster Street, Manhattan 3 p.m. October 15, 1972 Digital print 16 x 20 in.
Foster Street, Manhattan 3 p.m. October 15, 1972 Digital print 16 x 20 in.
Mott Street, Chinatown 3 p.m. February 10, 1973 Digital print 16 x 20 in.
Thompson Street, Manhattan 3 p.m. September 27, 1973 Digital print 16 x 20 in.
Harlem, Manhattan 2 p.m. August 20, 1974 Digital print 16 x 20 in.
Pell Street, Chinatown 4 p.m. January 10, 1975 Digital print 16 x 20 in.
Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn 4 p.m. September 1, 1975 Digital print 16 x 20 in.
Mulberry Street, Little Italy 11 a.m. September 28, 1975 Digital print 16 x 20 in.
Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn 2 p.m. September 30, 1975 Digital print 16 x 20 in.
Pell Street, Chinatown 3 p.m. January 20, 1976 Digital print 16 x 20 in.
Pell Street, Chinatown 3 p.m. January 20, 1976 Digital print 16 x 20 in.
9th Avenue, Manhattan 4 p.m. May 26, 1976 Digital print 16 x 20 in.
Williamsburg, Brooklyn 4 p.m. July 20, 1976 Digital print 16 x 20 in.
Mulberry Street, Little Italy 5 p.m. August 21,1978 Digital print 16 x 20 in.
Mott Street, Little Italy 11 a.m. May 10, 1979 Digital print 16 x 20 in.
Mott Street, Chinatown 2 p.m. October 13, 1979 Digital print 16 x 20 in.
Masao Gozu’s Windows: Looking Out and Seeing In Carlo McCormick
If eyes are proverbially the windows of the soul, then perhaps too we might say that windows themselves are something like the eyes of our city. Once upon a time, when Masao Gozu made these photographs, windows were the locus and lens of our gaze. In a way, they were our most immediate connection between the domestic and the outside world. You would look out of them to know the weather, and in those hot months before the age of perpetual climate control when something like an air conditioner was a real luxury, you might live right by the window for its meager dose of breeze. And they were something of our telephones too, for we were just as likely to call up to someone’s window from the street or across the way than on the phone. Before intercoms, this was how we’d actually visit one another, calling to a window for the front door key to be thrown down in a rolled-up sock. Adorned with blinds, shades, curtains, gates, flower boxes, mementos, flags, and on occasion their inhabitants, in the casual scrutiny of their idylls before computers commanded our attention, windows are not simply our eyes on the world—they are the face we show the world, at once uniform and idiosyncratic. What has been lost in the cityscape since Masao first took these pictures, why do they seem now so suddenly antique in the classic sense of time gone by? What is missing now from the human architecture of Gozu’s cityscape is the street level view, that engagement between the buildings we live in and the sidewalks we traverse. Today, as residential buildings compete with office buildings in their hubris to scrape the skies, we’ve lost that precious interaction between home and street. Sure, New Yorkers always defined themselves apart from their tourists by keeping their
heads down—for surely you were an out-of-towner if you walked about bewildered by the sheer monumental mass of the city—but we did look. We looked up just as we looked out, and this basic mode of connection was what made any block a neighborhood rather than some anonymous real estate zone. Perhaps we were voyeurs all, but in this looking was a commonality that defied the urban alienation, a keeping an eye on our neighbors even if that meant seeing them potbellied and sweating in their underwear. We see nothing of lives in the high rises now, just an abstraction bordering on invisibility, and from up there what do they see? Surely nothing of the life below, just their pricey piece of the skyline forever contested by the advent of new, taller buildings obliterating their view. Even in their isolation as solitary figures framed by their windows, Masao’s actors play in the theater that was tenement life, in that most sacred covenant of what it meant to be the one and the many. What is nuanced and poetic in Masao Gozu’s street eye view of the city—what distinguishes it from all the great street photographers who captured the everyday life of this town as the decisive moments in the multitude made unique and personal—is his uncanny understanding and sympathy for the architecture that contains these lives. In sculptural terms his facades are imposing, but in the scale of the city they are unmistakably human. Here before us, we feel the quotidian vitality of the storefront from the era when they were dearly mom-and-pop family establishments, inheritors of the old pushcart commerce, and in retrospect the far more distant ancestors of the oft-sterilized and homogenized houses of commerce that sell us what we do not need. Was life that much less busy then, or has it simply become a bad look to
appear as a bored shopkeeper with not enough business to gaze outward and dream of the streets? Life was surely less secret then, it went on in public. If you drank in those last Bowery bar dives in the daytime, there was no hiding your transgression, but perhaps too in this visibility we all shared there was less shame. Masao Gozu’s photography is utterly classic and perfectly suited to its time and place. Seeing it today, like a specter still whispering the past, calls forth not simply the curiosity and empathy of photographers like Abbot, Atget, CartierBresson and Frank, but the beauty of the architectural frame itself. He seems then apart from the very lineage he suggests, correspondent in the downtown demimonde with a painter like Martin Wong (particularly his riotous array of people hanging out by their windows in “La Vida”, from 1988), spirited as Ormond Gigli’s famous 1960 fashion photograph “Girls in the Windows”, and so utterly New York as Peter Corriston’s 1975 album cover for Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti—a structure of companionship contained and broadened by the window-frame as intimate and universal as that image of Lucy and Ethel leaning out a window, dreaming and scheming, at home but yet part of the world. Buildings now block the view I once enjoyed, the sun but a suggestion in the shadows; the architecture has changed along with the sense of place that made it a neighborhood bound together for generations…but the gaze by which we register our world and one another is not extinct, we just need to look.
9th Avenue, Manhattan 5 p.m. June 20, 1980 Digital print 16 x 20 in.
Henry Street, Chinatown 1 p.m. August 30,1980 Digital print 16 x 20 in.
Williamsburg, Brooklyn 4 p.m. October 16, 1980 Digital print 16 x 20 in.
Orchard Street, Lower Manhattan 2 p.m. February 5, 1982 Digital print 16 x 20 in.
Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn 4 p.m. September 10, 1982 Digital print 16 x 20 in.
Bay Ridge, Brooklyn 1 p.m. June 20,1983 Digital print 16 x 20 in.
Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn 3 p.m. September 15, 1984 Digital print 16 x 20 in.
Bay Ridge, Brooklyn 2 p.m. October 5, 1984 Digital print 16 x 20 in.
Studio, East Village 3 p.m. July 7, 1985 Digital print 16 x 20 in.
Bay Ridge, Brooklyn 2 p.m. November 4, 1986 Digital print 16 x 20 in.
Mott Street, Chinatown 3 p.m. February 5, 1987 Digital print 16 x 20 in.
Mott Street, Manhattan 2 p.m. January 10, 1989 Digital print 16 x 20 in.
Bay Ridge, Brooklyn 2 p.m. April 13, 1989 Digital print 16 x 20 in.
Suzanne Kreps
Masao Gozu was one of the many artists and photographers who dropped by OK Harris Works of Art to show owner Ivan C. Karp slides of their work, and one of the few to procure a solo exhibition. Ivan had, since 1969, owned, operated, and exemplified the vision of OK Harris, the second gallery to open in SoHo during its golden age for artists. Ivan had a benevolent attitude in looking at artists’ slides without appointment and visiting their studios. He was a high-speed conversationalist and dynamic, animated New Yorker. Gozu, in contrast, conversed in halting, reticent English, having only moved to New York from Japan a few years earlier. His tranquil veneer hid an ironclad purposefulness to accomplish what needed to be done to achieve an exhibition. This was a meeting of two very diverse, strong-minded individuals. The slides Gozu showed Ivan that day in 1980 were of photographs of people—and sometimes their pets— looking out of New York City tenement windows in Little Italy (where Gozu lived for a time), Chinatown, the Lower East Side, and the East Village, where Gozu moved to in 1979 and still lives today. In retelling the events of that first meeting, Gozu remembers that OK Harris Gallery director Carlo Lamagna commented on the lack of professional quality of his photographs. Gozu admits they were blurry looking, and that Ivan responded, “not quality but quantity!” Ivan was actually very much interested in quality—it was one of the hallmarks of the work he exhibited at OK Harris—but what may have attracted him to Gozu’s early photographs was the tenacious documentation and lively
depiction of New York tenement life in the 70s and 80s, which eclipsed other more professionally-rendered photographic reproductions. Gozu’s next photography exhibition for OK Harris was a series of black and white images of the façade of Harry’s Bar on the Bowery. He took photographs of this establishment every night over four years, tracing the evolution and eventual decline of the seedy watering hole. These photographs depict the quintessential loneliness of city life and the bleak, down-at-the-heels existence on the Bowery at that time. Gozu’s photographs of windows led directly to a sculpture series: recreations of tenement windows perfectly scaled down in size to fit a large gallery space. This first sculpture exhibition contained seven windows from all over New York City—from the East Village to the Bronx. Trying to remove a fire escape from an abandoned building in the Bronx, Gozu was confronted by a man with a gun demanding to know what he was doing. They worked it out. New York City was a different place in the 70s and 80s. Abandoned buildings were everywhere and salvaged windows not difficult to come by. “Couldn’t do this work now,” Gozu comments. It took a five-person installation crew comprised of Japanese students and an entire week to help set up the huge, jigsaw-puzzle-like window sculptures. Other than his well-founded concern for damage to the gallery’s oak floors during the installation, Ivan wondered if the crew would have enough time to complete the set up for Saturday’s opening. Gozu’s color photographs from his 1988 exhibition were
distant scenes of the World Trade Center towers at sunset, as seen through his sculptures’ recreated windows. He used different window constructions, trucked to and set up in Dumbo and also parts of New Jersey, to make the photographs. These images are now imbued with a poignant historical significance, like 19th century sepia photographs of the pyramids. Gozu said he was lucky—Ivan let him do anything. He would build it and then show it to him, until Ivan finally said, “Show me before you build it!” For one exhibition, Gozu rebuilt a scaled-down façade larger than the gallery’s 16-foot ceiling—a four-story tall sculpture. He split the sculpture in half and put its first and second floors beside the third and fourth floors, and thus one sculpture became two. It may have been this several-ton sculpture that caused OK Harris’ gallery floor to need reinforcement from the basement. Between 1980 and 2013, Gozu had 10 exhibitions at OK Harris, but his photographs and sculptures were never exhibited simultaneously. The opportunity to now see examples of both of Gozu’s mediums together—one begetting a complementary other—is a satisfying culmination of a life’s work. Gozu’s photography and sculpture exhibitions all required laser-like focus, obsession, stamina, and single-minded discipline to document and preserve a fast-fading part of New York City in the last century. They are a love letter to New York and a testimony of the immigrant lives that built, lived, and looked out of the windows of Lower Manhattan’s tenements.
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Masao Gozu, Time Frame October 13–November 5 Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project © 2017 Howl Arts, Inc. Howl! Archive Publishing Editions (Howl! A/P/E) Volume 1, No. 20 ISBN: 978-0-9975565-9-9 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. © 2017 Carlo McCormick © 2017 Kotaro Iizawa translated by Miyako Fukida © 2017 Suzanne Kreps 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 for Modern IDENTITY
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