The 80s East Village was a neighborhood dotted with storefront galleries, rubble-strewn lots, shooting galleries, and artist-run clubs like 8BC, WOW, and The Pyramid. Cynthia Carr was one of the only writers covering the performances staged in those clubs, often well after midnight. There she discovered artists like Ann Magnuson, John Kelly, and Karen Finley. This intensely vivid club scene lasted just a few years and happened during an era when performance art was still uncodified and not taught in schools. Carr will also discuss the two major pieces of ordeal art that occurred in the 80s – Linda Montano and Tehching Hsieh’s year spent tied together with an eight-foot rope and Marina Abramovic and Ulay’s walk across the Great Wall of China. She spent three weeks with the artists in China.
About Cynthia Carr
Cynthia Carr is the author of three books, most recently Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz. She chronicled the work of contemporary artists as a Village Voice writer (with the byline C.Carr) in the 1980s and 1990s. Her work has also appeared in Artforum, The New York Times, Modern Painters, TDR: The Drama Review, and other publications. Her previous books are Our Town: A Heartland Lynching, a HauntedTown, and the Hidden History of White America and On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007.
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