Away from the Mainstream: Three Alternative Spaces in New York and the Expansion of Art in the 1970s

Radical practices that emerged in the sixties complicated the political and aesthetic possibilities of art in the seventies. Medium specificity, so closely identified with the modernist criticism of Clement Greenberg, was challenged in the sixties and seventies by new media and site-specific, performance-related art as well as by institutional critique and socially-engaged practices. As artists worked in the expanded context, the notion of medium opened to other media and to politico-economic and socio-cultural logic. These circumstances expanded the boundaries of art, and led the contemporary art world to directly intervene in sociopolitical, economic, and cultural domains. My study addresses the relationship between the emergence of alternative spaces and the expanded notion of medium in the 1970s. I argue that the alternative spaces provided a new field of discourse to encourage artistic experiments and to produce new ideas of art. My dissertation centers on three case studies of key alternative spaces founded in New York City in the early 1970s: 112 Greene Street, The Kitchen, and Artists Space. I also interpret significant changes in MoMA as the counterpart of alternative spaces in relation to the protests mounted by the Art Workers' Coalition and its limits as an 9 incubator of new art. Through a methodical analysis of artistic practices at these spaces, I attempt to provide a detailed picture of the alternative art scene in downtown New York, from which the notion of medium expanded into context-related and community-related levels. First, to address how the early alternative spaces expanded the artistic context, I focus on artistic practices at 112 Greene Street. Next, I examine the role of the early alternative spaces in understanding electronic media as an art medium by addressing the practices at The Kitchen. Thirdly, I investigate Artists Space in terms of production of the postmodern aesthetic, and demonstrate its transformation to a postmodern art institution.