Art Worker: Doing Time in the New York Artworld

Written in an accessible style, this subaltern memoir casts a raking light on a classic period in cultural history — the ’70s and ’80s in downtown Manhattan. From art critic, to video artist, to radical organizer and then academic, the author played several roles in the seething scene of art galleries, nightclubs, and small publications. “Art Worker” is in three parts, with characters, anecdotes, footnotes and extensive bibliography. It’s a book by a scholar written for a general audience. Alan W. Moore wrote for Artforum and Art-Rite in the mid-1970s, then joined the artists’ group Colab early on. He organized the Real Estate Show and ABC No Rio, and participated in the Times Square Show in 1980. Writing and typing for the East Village Eye, Moore had a ringside seat at the downtown New York art show. As a video artist during the No Wave era and after, he produced numerous shows for Colab’s artists’ TV series, then launched the MWF Video Club artists’ distribution project which persisted until 2002. In the ‘90s he took a PhD in art history, and published Art Gangs in 2011, a history of NYC artists’ collectives from 1969 to 1984. From a wet-behind-the-ears critic in 1974 to a precarious academic 25 years later, this memoir charts some 30 years in New York City’s art world. For the author, this gradually became a political world as first Reagan and then the Bushes took over the country’s government and wrought their dire mischiefs. Since 2006, he has been researching squatting in Europe, and lives in Madrid. He published Occupation Culture, detailing these researches, in 2015. Now he is back in the States to face up to the past…