Artists Serenade — RICHARD SCHULMAN

The Avenues: A B C

The streets dreamingly adorned with patterns of arabesque reimagined the paltry kiosks from Bangladesh and other third world fringe environments. But inside New Yorks’ 1980s East Village gallery world, was an explosion of art that were akin to millions of pomegranate seeds fired from a thousand kilns.

From where I was seated in the outdoor cafe “7A”; Seventh Street and Avenue A I imagined all of the struggling adventurers posing ala arabesque: “Basketball Diaries”, Jim Carroll, Henry Miller’s “Quiet Days in Clichy”, Orwells’ “Down and Out in Paris and London” and of course Thomas De Quincey’s “Confessions of an Opium Eater”. Years later I remember seeing the broken but proud Zampanò from Fellini’s La Strada. The ABC’s art world pulsed in ways the city had not seen. It was as if from the rooftops of tenement buildings a chorus of Miles Davis trumpeters played through the day and night “Elevator to the Gallows”. Everyone noticed. Nobody noticed. Alphabet City did not die, but changed.

I was always and forever going to make my life about photographing the artists of past and future art worlds. What an amazing visual expression could be had. My outdoor seat at the corner cafe 7A was not the epicenter of the East Village. Though It was the one that most reminded me of Paris’s Montparnasse. A feeling of being uncomfortably in the middle of something, but equally comfortably apart. The days always seemed like misty afternoons where one could imagine a smattering of artists skimming the sidewalks.

I had already photographed the names that sat on pedestals in Soho, 57th street and the Upper East Side: Dekooning, Warhol, Johns and Rauschenberg and hundreds more rested in my archives.

To the denizens of the ABCs I was already an aged photographer. I felt distanced like Eugene Atget must have standing in his damp Parisian studio away from the world he once paced proudly across.

I have seen where artists live and how they have lived

Some artists were without heat. Most studios seemed to have white Pressed Tin collapsing. The East Village looked a bit like an Escher world. I was there to let my camera go snippety snap snap.

This new more youthful generation of artists wanted to be photographed by their own. I mentioned my days with famed artists. The community only cared about Warhols’ name. They wanted stories about Basquiat and Haring. I prevailed. I corralled Rodney Allen Greenblatt, Stephen Lack, Philip Taffe, Thomas Lanigan Schmidt, Keiko Bonk, Troy Brauntuch, Basquiat, Haring, Kiki Smith and dozens more. Their dealers like Pat Hearn, Gracie Mansion, PPOW we’re spreading the word. My camera didn’t flinch.

For me, the photographs were an adventure; I wanted to see the new before they were defeated. I wanted to see the new youth oriented army of artists as they aimed their sights on the successes of their Soho superiors. At one point many unique personalities were vanquished by the life they intended to be part of. Most artists I have met who succeeded against all odds remember fondly the experiences they lived in “Alphabet City”. It was walking a tightrope.

Still, I could feel so many lives soon to be extinguished from their dreams. In a way it was a wild Hieryonmus Bosch world. Against all odds so many artists prevailed. My camera saw a world that was breathing fire and excitement.

Excitement filled the streets, galleries and studios. The ABCs were the beginning and the end of community.