Inaugural Group Show

DAVID BRADSHAW and JAMES BROWN exhibited photos of a black man and a white man hunting.

RAPHAEL FERRER’s work was described by Peter Schjeldahl as a dark canvas canopy dramatically shading a heavy framework of boards mounted on galvanized pails.”

LEE JAFFE wrapped two pillars in the basement with heavy rubber tubing which held a piece of broken mirror in place agains one of the pillars. Taped to the mirror was a newspaper clipping picturing someone with a double-identity (who may have been a South American revolutionary, according to Jaffee). Later in the season, the artist made another piece by removing the small thick pieces of glass which were imbedded in the sidewalk grating in front of 112 and replacing them with mirrors.

BARRY LE VA exhibited Cleaved Wall (Bending) (1969), an evenly-spaced row of ten meat cleavers which he banged into the wainscotting in the basement.

JEFFERY LEW used pieces of steel from the floor of 112 Greene to make a large tank, which he filled with water. He made another rectilinear form of polyester resin and stone material on plywood, filled it with water to a certain point, and allowed it to float free in the tank. “It looked like ice floating around, and it dealt with certain forces… If you press down on the polyester form, instead of popping back up, it went down even further.” (J.L.) Later, he showed plastic boxes, suspended on cables, inclining at an angle to the wall.

GORDON MATTA-CLARK’s work was changing daily and much of what he did then was never documented.

At the bottom of the steps to the basement is an old sidewalk elevator shaft. Matta built a bin in the shaft where he placed old bottles of every sort that he had collected and had his friends bring to him from all over New York. He also grew mushrooms in the bin, and called it Winter Garden; mushroom and waistbottle the bin, and recycloning cellar. “In the sunlight, with all that green glass, it was very beautiful,” Caroline Godden recalls. Later, the artist built a furnace in which he melted the glass bottles and made “commemorative ingots” (according to Richard Haynes). During this period, Matta “was involved with taking garbage, discarded items, and abandoned or dead spaces and making them come to life again. He saw life in everything.” (C.G.) Since 1969, he had been making pieces using agar, a gelatinous substance from the sea, which he poured into enormous flat trays. ‘The agar acted as a virulent host for micro-organisms in the air and eventually dried out into beautiful, leathery fabrics of dormant life.” One of the trays reportedly blew up on New Year’s Day, 1971, so the other was taken out to the street for detonation. The pieces were called Incendiary Wafers. In other works (at 112 Greene or elsewhere), Matta used the agar as a matrix for binding together objects such as empty milk cartons and cut-up comic books to make large rectilinear conglomerate sculptures. Matta also applied gold leaf to the capital of one of the columns in the space upstairs. After Christmas, Matta dug a hole in the basement floor and planted a Cherry tree in it and grass seeds on the mound of earth beside the hole. There were no lights in the basement at the time, so he hung an infrared lamp nearby. “Later on, after the tree died, perhaps because it didn’t take root, Gordon made a memory… a grave for the tree with a silver line dug out of the cement in the shape of the tree. lt must still be there under the (Big Apple) recording studio. That piece was very powerful. ” (C.G.)

BRENDA MILLER made Ceiling Piece “out of sisal, measuring 18′ across by25′ in length and hanging down 6’; At 5′ intervals there were rows of 6′ lengths of sisal attached to the ceiling at one-inch intervals for a total of 18′, which equals one-half of the width of 112. The 6′ lengths were one-third the distance from floor to ceiling. The 25′ space was approximately one-half the working space (depth) available to me.”

LARRY MILLER showed a bunch of fresh carrots which he wired together to form the shape of an enormous carrot. He installed it on the basement floor. Jeffrey Lew said, “lt was like a giant piece of jewelry.”

RICHARD NONAS exhibited Blocks of Wood in the basement. The installation consisted of a single row, about 30′ in length, of short, standing plank ends, roughly sawed off at slightly varying angles and heights and placed parallel to each other. Another work was constructed of a long beam which rested at an angle to the floor in the arms of a crossmember section. He also tied a bunch of wood pieces, about 4′ in length, together and hung them with a rope about 5′ long at an angle to a basement wall which had a cross-hatched cement surface. Upstairs, on the street level, he exhibited another floor piece made from 12 large blocks of wood, rough-hewn, and carefully, yet casually, fitted together (January, 1971). Later, he hung a very large drawing which said, “‘Pay me what you owe me or vomit what you ate.”

DOUG SANDERSON created three or four sculpture/ drawings both upstairs and downstairs. He poured plaster of Paris with sand and glass in it directly on the floor and did “”hand drawings” in the mixture.

ALAN SARET had been working on a series of sculptures which were made from sheet metal cornices salvaged from an old cast-iron building on the corner of Canal and Greene streets. He brought one of these pieces into the space and hung it from the ceiling. In his own  studio at 119 Spring Street, Saret had been making enormous bamboo sculptures, which he placed in bundles through a hole that he cut in the floor at the back of his space. He placed some of these bamboo pieces in 112 as well. He installed another work in the basement, a special form of Rubber, Raffia, Cloth, Tube and Wire-weights draped over an old rag-picker’s scale. Hexagonal bars of brass and aluminum were added to the network, so that the wire supported the rubber and cloth which in turn held the weights.

MARJORIE STRIDER had been looking around for a place to experiment with her brightly-colored plastic foam, when Lew, who was living upstairs at 112 Greene Street at the time, arranged for her to use the front windows of the building. A photo of Building Work #1 was featured in an article in which appeared Die Welt.

GEORGE TRAKAS didn’t know Jeffrey Lew when he happened to look in on the activities at 112 in September, 1970. “I was very excited about the space. The minute I saw it, I knew that that was where I wanted to install this piece I had been working on.” Trakas had not exhibited his work in New York City before that because, in one sense, he had been waiting for the perfect place. He approached Jeffrey Lew (who was then in the process of welding his own sculpture together), who turned him down because it seemed that there were already too many artists using the space. A few days later when the group show was “opening,” Trakas arrived with the sculpture in the rear of his truck. He insisted on showing it. Lew relented and the work was installed at the very rear of the basement space. ⇄ was a structure composed of wood and wire supporting a large standing piece of glass, which had a pile of sawdust resting against it at the base. The entire structure (56x201x64″) was carefully balanced by a taut rope which ran out the window and was attached to the outer wall of the airshaft. A few days later a torrential downpour caused the rope to tighten and pull the entire piece down. Trakas had taken this into consideration while making the piece and was pleased with the elegant and perfectly symmetrical way in which it collapsed. The special glass shattered, resembling cracked ice. Lew apparently like the installation too, because he invited Trakas back to make another piece. 

The next time, Trakas arrived very early in the morning, counting on Lew’s late-night habits to keep him away until later in the day. He and a friend began cutting a large hole in the floor, going through an old trap which had been used by a reg-picker. Midway in the process, Lew arrived to see the gaping hole; Trakas managed to calm him and promised to restore the floor to its original condition if Lew didn’t like the piece. The work was finished by Thanksgiving and was removed in late January, 1971. Trakas referred to it as the “demolition piece.” He used steel, glass, and wood, and the piece measured 108x60x222″. [from a conversation with the artist]

RICHARD VAN BUREN: “For the opening at 112 Greene, I decided that I did not want to bring objects into the space. The gallery seemed alive to me without latex-white-skin walls and sanded varnished floors. It was a chance to use the space before it became another Art Gallery. The network of cracks between the boards was the space that I chose. I thought of the cracks as molds. I cast into the the molds with polyester resin until they were filled. The piece could be experienced in the gallery, on the ceiling of the basement, and on the floor of the basement. I was interested in building a situation that would point out to other artists what existed at 112 in terms of architecture and attitude.”

Excerpted from Brentano, R., & Savitt, M. (1981). 112 Workshop, 112 Greene Street: History, artists & artworks. New York: New York University Press.