The following mini-chat was initially to be the basis for an artforum.com piece (500 Words), but it never happened. Billy and I both felt that the format, which eliminates the voice of the interviewer/writer altogether made little sense.

A Warhol icon and a brilliant photographer/artist in his own right, Billy Name is synonymous with 60s-era art and culture. His witty, circumspect, and frank recollections peppering the PBS Master’s series on Andy is worth seeing the whole doc for (though I rather like it). And there’s many other gems to be found in other films and interviews about Warholism (anyone see that British street artist Simon Thompson’s poster “Warhol Is Over! (If You Want It),”?). So from the man who not only invented the Silver Factory’s tinfoil space-ship look, and was its most important in-house photographer, who I happen to think is the epitome of glamour, here’s a few more gems.

JH: Where did the idea (and name) of the “Billy Name Ante Art Superstars” come from?

BN: This is a concept that has been on my mind since the early days…I was a product of the avant garde. Dada, the Black Mountain College. My mentors were Merce Cunningham, John Cage, people who had their own ideas and did not work within the confines of the critics..they created art for art’s sake. Ante Art seemed to me to be the next natural progression. I had always wanted to recognize artists and musicians who I felt were a product of the same influences as me.

JH: How would you compare the New York art world of today to that of your Silver Factory days?

BN: Warhol was a neutral popular capper of the culture of the early sixties, which was avant garde, experimental, folkish, radical, and anarchistic.  Creators such as Cage, Cunningham, Oldenburg, and transitional artists such as Stella, Rauschenberg, Johns, La Monte Young/Marian Zazeela, etc., were all wrapped up and sent to the New York ‘art market’ scene by the Warhol ethic.  The popular idea of American artists being ‘front line’ art, succeeding Eurocentric art, won the day and American artists became popular by word-of-mouth as well as via art world literature.

Today the art world is living on the dangling threads of the early sixties rug, woven, but loosely, by the authentic artists of that era, whose little concern for the art market and finance showed through the avant garde weave of their work.  Today’s art is repetitive of that era, constantly recreating it as though it were ‘new’, but only recycling the work of that brilliant decade.  Every new artist is doing something old; it’s all been done. Today’s art does not have the excitement, joy, and culminating dynamic of sixties-era art, when these various artistic styles had a depth and symbolized creativity unhampered by market concerns.

signed: Billy Name, artist of yesterday and today.  There is no tomorrow; it never comes, it is ante art.

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Maybe it was the attempt to create a center that just didn’t hold – conceptually or literally for me – that doomed it. A gramophone set atop on a spot-lit table surrounded by a circle of chairs. People sitting in them and staring at the gramaphone or at their knees. It was akin to watching some gearhead-DJ putz around on-stage with his computer while everyone watches and doesn’t dance (white people: can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em).
 

 
I think had they set up smaller environments or free-form arrangements of chairs where listeners could move about and/or inhabit provisional niches – with friends or alone – a more shifting embodied relationship to the space and the narrative/score would have ensued.

I’m a fan of Cardiff and Miller’s work, but my attention was constantly distracted by the dense cavernous shadows surrounding me, and I wanted to explore them. The guards popping in and out of their recesses to tell people not to take pictures though kind of made it seem off-limits. An atmospheric prop.

I think the conception of the work as a “sound play” is part of the problem. It negates a more interactive engagement to fetishize the acoustics. 800 individual computer tracks, distributed among 98 speakers.

Don’t get me wrong, the latter produced many thrilling moments: the haunting orchestral arrangements, Cardiff’s enchanting recitation, the surround-sound crush of reeling crows and thunderous ocean. And there were many references in the text and music to war and Goya and all sorts of things inspired by the history of the Armory. In the end though, my friend and I waxed rhapsodic about how great Cardiff’s show at PS1/MoMA had been and puzzled over all the hype about this one.

Anyway, my intention here isn’t to write a review. These are just spontaneous thoughts in the wake of having just seen the piece. The real reason for this post was to share some of the work with you (along with some related pics) because its still worth experiencing. Maybe not for $12 at the Park Avenue Armory, but that’s your call. All rights belong to the artists, naturally. The sound is compromised a bit by compression but still magical.

Cardiff/Muller/Murder of Crows excerpt
 
The Armory’s renovation is just as dazzling. Palatial, really. And you’re paying for that, too.

Still, when you walk outside and see the homeless women waiting by the building’s basement shelter to be to let back in for the night – many mentally ill – that splendor kind of sours. At least for me. My friend, an artist who takes Beuys’ notion of social sculpture quite seriously (and I adore her for it!), wryly suggested we submit a proposal for a show that takes everything hidden away in the Armory like some dirty secret – shelter and all – and fill Drill Hall with that. I’m game.

“The Murder of Crows” continues through Sept. 9 at the Park Avenue Armory, 643 Park Avenue, at 67th Street; (212) 616-3930, armoryonpark.org.

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