NYU’s Downtown Collection Becoming a Safe Home for Punks and Other Artists
A few months ago, Marvin Taylor took a short walk from his third-floor office in Bobst Library over to Richard Hell’s apartment, located in the same East Village building that the late Allen Ginsberg called home. Taylor, head of NYU’s Fales Collection, was on his way to evaluate Hell’s archives and to determine if the University would purchase them.
Past the apartment’s narrow entrance, past the kitchen bathtub, Taylor found more than 30 linear feet of journals, posters, photographs, manuscripts, correspondence, song sheets, and set lists, all belonging to the man many consider one of the godfathers of punk rock. The collection, Taylor notes, was kept meticulously, the work of “a great bibliophile.” Hundreds of items were packed carefully and symmetrically in boxes, as if awaiting a safe place to travel to.
Taylor acquired Hell’s materials for $50,000, and they are now officially part of NYU’s Downtown Collection, a unique archive within Fales that documents the New York art, music, and literary scene of the 1970s, 80s, and early 90s, mostly occurring throughout SoHo, the Lower East Side, and parts of Greenwich Village. The papers will take about a year to catalogue.
Hell’s penchant for order might surprise some of his fans who remember him best flailing around the stage of CBGB’s wearing ripped pants, several inches of spiked hair, and t-shirts that read, “Please Kill Me!” But Taylor insists that’s only part of the picture.
“Richard Hell is most often thought of only as the first punk rock star, but that’s too simplistic,” says Taylor. “Richard is an author who links the European avant-garde tradition of France at the end of the nineteenth century to New York at the end of the twentieth. His papers show a deep knowledge of this tradition and how he became a touchstone for so many contemporary artists who were trying to express similar ideas.”
Like many punks and other downtown artists, Hell destroys the conventional concept of a single-medium artist. One of the founding members of the band Television, Hell would go on to release Blank Generation in 1977 (with his group Richard Hell and the Voidoids), which the New York Times called one of the 10 best albums of the decade. He is the co-author of a book of poetry called Wanna Go Out?, a short novel, The Voidoid, and, most recently, a full-length novel, Go Now. Hell has also appeared in numerous New York City-based independent films and had his first showing of drawings at the Rupert Goldsworthy Gallery in 1998.
Taylor says that Hell contacted him about selling his collection on the recommendation of former Spring Street Books employee Ron Kolm, whose archive came to Fales in 1993 and helped found the Downtown Collection. Hell was afraid that a fire might wipe out his treasured possessions and upon hearing about the Downtown Collection, decided it would be a logical home for the material. As Taylor says of Hell, “He understands he’s part of a legacy of experimentation and knows it needs to be preserved.”
“In a strange way you only exist in the works you do,” Hell said in a January 1, 2004 New York Times article. “If you don’t keep them, then you don’t exist.”
The evolution of downtown art, says Taylor, is best attributed to the works of artist/filmmaker Andy Warhol, poet Frank O’Hara, and composer John Cage. These three provided the theoretical backdrop to which punks would add irony, anger, and dissatisfaction and forge a punk style. Downtown audiences preferred the jagged, literary edge of punk’s messages over the sweet packaging of the hippie movement.
“Punk was a rejection of symphonic rock, a rejection of where the Beatles had gone,” says Taylor. “It was an effort at making the ugly beautiful. Nothing was off limits for expression. I’d like to think that punk wiped the slate clean in the same way Baudelaire did a century before.”
Taylor should know. He was one of only a handful of punks who followed the New York scene from the campus of Indiana University in Bloomington. Even from a distance, says Tayor, punk reinvented perceptions of gender, sexuality, and the illusion of identity. However, the art form always struggled to define itself clearly, often exhibiting contrary strains.
“Was punk actually the greatest act of performantivity or was it a desperate search for authenticity?” asks Taylor. “How you answer that question depends on which side of the great postmodern divide you stand.”
Today NYU students can confront those questions themselves. The scene at CBGB’s isn’t as cutting-edge as it used to be and most of the artist lofts of SoHo have become pricey condominiums, but there is still much to be learned from the ideas of the era.
In the quiet, refined rooms of Fales, students—most of whom were born after punk’s heyday had passed—can research the scene in the Downtown Collection, which includes the archives of novelist and poet Dennis Cooper and painter, writer, photographer, filmmaker, and performance artist David Wojnarowicz, among others.
Students and scholars are proving that the material is as relevant as ever. In fact, over half of the research done in Fales last year involved the Downtown Collection. In all, Downtown comprises some 4,000 linear feet of archives and more than 10,000 printed items. Fales itself comprises over 200,000 volumes, including collections of rare books and manuscripts in English and American literature.
Encouraged by the recent acquisition of Hell’s materials, Taylor aspires to expand the Downtown Collection to include as many punks and downtown artists as his small budget will allow. The way he sees it, NYU is the best destination for the works of so many artists who honed their craft only a few steps from campus. And as New York’s downtown university, NYU is easily in the best physical location to seek out these archives.
As Taylor says, “We couldn’t put together a collection like this if we were at any other school in the country.”
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June 2004
