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MUSIC MAKES YOU FEEL LIKE DANCING Blake Oetting on Martin Beck at 47 Canal, New York

“Martin Beck: Last Night,” 47 Canal, New York, 2022, installation view

“Martin Beck: Last Night,” 47 Canal, New York, 2022, installation view

Manhattan’s thriving club scene during the 1970s and early 1980s was not only a catalyst for downtown’s burgeoning art scene but also a space that allowed for countercultural world-making. In his recent exhibition “Last Night,” Martin Beck actualizes the disco of bygone days through a video installation based on the songs played on the last night at the fabled SoHo party space The Loft in 1984. Contrary to the presumably sensual bustle at that historical event, its resurrection at 47 Canal constitutes, for the art historian Blake Oetting, rather a negentropy, because defining moments of downtown’s history are torn away from the literal movement of club culture to suit the controlled conditions of the gallery space, becoming stripped of their spontaneous, intoxicating, kinesthetic prospects – and not least from the (potentially) stripped bodies themselves.

The last party at David Mancuso’s mythic club, The Loft, was held on June 2, 1984. Located at 99 Prince Street in SoHo, The Loft was one of the buzzier spots within New York City’s downtown geography, well known for its extraordinary sound system – including Klipschorn speakers and custom-built turntables – as well as its exclusivity. Entrance to The Loft was on an invite-only basis, its dance floor playing host to a network of disco devotees, Timothy Leary acolytes, artists, and their contiguous social milieus. Mancuso, who began throwing parties in 1970, contributed to the flowering of a broader disco scene that sprung up around his spot on Prince Street: in 1971, the Gay Activists Alliance took over an abandoned firehouse on 99 Wooster Street, where it hosted Saturday-night dances; Michael Fesco opened the gay club Flamingo at the corner of Broadway and Houston Street in 1974; 12 West started hosting parties the following year near the cruising spots on the West Side piers; in 1977, the famed Paradise Garage opened its doors on King Street. If, as Douglas Crimp writes of the period, Mancuso was “at the center of New York nightlife throughout the seventies,” his prominence, and the prominence of the disco universe he helped catalyze, would soon succumb to the tripartite devastation and displacement spurred by the AIDS epidemic, the gentrification of SoHo, and Rudy Giuliani’s “quality of life” campaign in the mid-1990s. [1] These were the last days of disco.

Martin Beck’s video installation Last Night offers a chronicle of the music played by ­Mancuso at The Loft’s final party. More than 13 hours in length and featuring 119 songs played one after another and in full (following the style of Mancuso’s DJ sets), the video focuses on a spinning turntable, perched atop a wooden desk set in front of a cherry-red curtain. To a certain extent, the installation mirrors the casual, comfortable but otherwise nondescript nature of the space onscreen, offering visitors a black rug, a couch, and lounge pillows. Rather than the usual bench, the available seating suggests, as a pretext, our transportation into an intimate environment: a friend’s house, a back room, or a private theater made for casual listening. What Last Night ultimately problematizes, however, is precisely this presumed proximity between the audience and the music on offer – the space of the installation and its nested history.

Pierre Nora, in his exploration of les lieux de mémoire, discusses the transformation of historical recollection from organically reproduced and passed-down traditions to an age of museums, archives, and other venues offering forms of “prosthesis-memory.” He describes the type of remembrance offered by these lieux de mémoire as “moments of history torn away from the movement of history, then returned; no longer quite life, not yet death, like shells on the shore when the sea of living memory has receded.” [2] Nora’s writing opens up an important set of questions related to art’s capacity to reawaken and productively represent the past. Do the research-based practices that currently flood contemporary art galleries effectively reanimate their subjects or merely foreground their fossilization? Are artifacts and archives used by artists in ways that, à la Walter Benjamin, syntactically articulate historical montages – indexing our active reconstruction of the past – or do they operate as synecdoches, portals that condense the messy and discontinuous events and peoples of years past into easily consumable chunks of organized information? Do historically attuned artworks function as analogs or allegories?

Martin Beck, “Last Night,” 2013

Martin Beck, “Last Night,” 2013

With Last Night, Beck strategically disarticulates the lieux de mémoire as described by Nora, foregrounding the inevitable mistranslations of Mancuso’s musical script by the gallery and its visitors. Most immediately, in watching Beck’s video, one becomes aware that the normative conventions of viewing art are woefully out of step with the material at hand, whose playlist asks for a type of spontaneous, libidinal, kinesthetic response rather than quiet observation. The light foot tapping or head nodding that I saw during my visits to 47 Canal only reinforced the awkward discomfort of The Loft’s aestheticization – strangely sexless adaptions of the gyrating bodies one imagines on Mancuso’s dance floor. Furthermore, when one focuses on the sonic element of Beck’s video, it becomes clear that this sterilized restaging of Mancuso’s DJ set – with the singing, shouting, gossip, and guttural eruptions of pleasure it likely inspired conspicuously cut out – similarly reads as an artificial conveyance, ultimately registering as The Loft’s relocation to the controlled conditions of historical conservation. Like Félix González-Torres’s Untitled (Go-Go Dancing Platform) (1991), in which scantily clad dancers jar with the detumescence of their cleaned-up, minimalist stage, Beck’s video and its installation point out these inorganic, negentropic conditions of The Loft’s restaging.

Adrian Piper’s Funk Lessons offers an instructive counterexample to Last Night because of its entirely different model of cultural transmission. Performed several times between 1982 and 1984 (and again, several years later, in what the artist described as a “meta-performance”), Funk Lessons was a collaborative performance piece advertised and directed by Piper, who broke down the history and movements associated with funk music and dance for a group of white volunteers. The artist described the piece as a process of intercultural communication and self-transcendence aimed at overcoming racial barriers, one in which audience members were directed to “GET DOWN AND PARTY. TOGETHER” using the lessons of Piper’s instruction. [3] In a video that documents an early iteration of the performance (filmed by Sam Samore), funk is showcased as a viral exchange that re-coordinates the movement of Piper’s participants, putting into relief the utterly disembodied experience of Beck’s musical exhumation, one that offers, in place of active and earnest transfer, a passive, nearly academic form of historical recitation.

This sense of historical and sensory distance that Beck encodes into his video is augmented by the location of 47 Canal in an ever-gentrifying Lower East Side, where the types of renegade or even extralegal spaces like Mancuso’s now exist merely as points of nostalgic cathexis. Here again, Nora’s writing is useful: “there are lieux de mémoire, sites of memory, because there are no longer milieux de mémoire, real environments of memory.” [4] The video’s current display offers a loosened version of site-specificity, forming its locational relationship with downtown New York at large rather than The Loft’s current tenant on Prince St. As a result, Beck taps into the former’s romanticized past, one that has long provided fodder for corporate branding schemes, real estate development, and other types of retro-speculative investment. The homogenizing logics of these predatory encroachments might reasonably register as an impetus to seek out the subcultural vitality of yesteryear. Indeed, as Craig Owens notes as early as 1984 – writing in response to the influx of yuppies into the East Village – this type of “searching for lost difference has become the primary activity of the contemporary avant-garde.” He goes on to warn, however, that “as it seeks out and develops more and more resistant areas of social life for mass-cultural consumption, the avant-garde only intensifies the condition it attempts to alleviate.” [5]

Rather than fuel this cycle of mythification and speculation that Owens describes, Last Night positions The Loft at the far end of a historical horizon that is marked, not transcended, by Mancuso’s playlist and its dysfunctional position within the gallery’s aesthetic format. In doing so, Beck’s video might be considered most successful for its methodological position, one that places limits on the possible extent, affirmative potential, and political efficacy of historical reconstruction. As its programmed discord makes clear, Last Night shows how the euphoric reverie induced by places like The Loft emerges outside the frame of art.

“Martin Beck: Last Night,” 47 Canal, New York, September ­8–October 1, 2022.

Blake Oetting is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. In addition to Texte zur Kunst, his writing can be found in Artforum, Flash Art, BOMB, November and The Brooklyn Rail.

Image credit: Courtesy of the artist and 47 Canal, photos Joerg Lohse

Notes

[1]Douglas Crimp, Before Pictures (Brooklyn, NY: Dancing Foxes Press, 2016), 154.
[2]Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” in “Memory and Counter-Memory,” eds. Natalie Zemon Davis and Randolph Starn, special issue, Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 12, 14.
[3]Adrian Piper, “Notes on Funk I,” in Out of Order, Out of Sight, ed. Adrian Piper, vol. 1, Selected Writings in Meta-Art, 1968–1992 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 195–98.
[4]Nora, “Between Memory and History,” 7.
[5]Craig Owens, “Commentary: The Problem with Puerilism,” Art in America 72, no. 6 (Summer 1984): 163.