{"id":448856,"date":"2026-02-02T09:01:22","date_gmt":"2026-02-02T09:01:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/448856\/"},"modified":"2026-02-02T09:01:22","modified_gmt":"2026-02-02T09:01:22","slug":"the-times-square-show-grit-glamour-and-grotesquerie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/448856\/","title":{"rendered":"The Times Square Show: Grit, Glamour, and Grotesquerie"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"PhotoPhoto of the \u201cTimes Square Show\u201d by Terise Slotkin, June 1980.<\/p>\n

Artforum critic Richard Pincus-Witten visited the Times Square Show on June 25th, 1980. In his journal he described what he saw: \u201cFour floors of extravagant bad taste, which is of course, already codified and imitated \u2013 in short, its own good taste. Black artists \u2026 graffitists galore, neo-Feminists inquiring after bondage porn. Pleated fans depicting penetration, moving sex tales coupled with explicit anecdotes of all kinds; in short, the resolute antithesis of any high art notion associated with Formalism\u2026\u201d This was mess and madness, a phantasmagoria of art and \u201cart\u201d that stuck its middle finger up at art world institutions and those who more easily found passage into their exhibition spaces. This was creative expression forged in underground clubs and social activist spaces; this was about the collective, not the individual. While the show is now, rather ironically, ensconced in the art historical narrative, and many of its artists were eventually welcomed into the highest echelons of the art world, this wasn\u2019t the plan and it wasn\u2019t the point. Let\u2019s look back at this remarkable show with its \u201cunrepentant raunch\u201d (Pincus-Witten again) and see how it came to be, what it had to say, and what it all meant.<\/p>\n

The Planning<\/p>\n

\"ACharlie Ahearn<\/a> and Jane Dickson<\/a>, advertisement for the show, 1980.<\/p>\n

Organized by the artist-run group Collaborative Projects, or Colab, the Times Square Show was meant to bring together artists from all mediums, all backgrounds, all creative and philosophical persuasions. Colab had already successfully organized a group show that year with the Real Estate Show, but the scope of this new endeavor was much wider.<\/p>\n

Over one hundred artists (the official number still isn\u2019t known) agreed to show their work, many of them soon to be art world darlings \u2013 Jenny Holzer, Kenny Scharf, Nan Goldin, Jean-Michel Basquiat<\/a> (showing as SAMO), and Kiki Smith<\/a>, among others \u2013 but the individual was less important than the collective. Colab member John Ahearn<\/a> stated that people often thought \u201cthat art belongs to a certain class or intelligence [and] this show proves there are no classes in art, no differentiation.\u201d Coleen Fitzgerald agreed, remembering that \u201cBasically it was open to anyone. It was sort of like taking all your cards and throwing them up in the air to see where they would fall.\u201d<\/p>\n

Colab chose an abandoned four-story building on 41st and 7th Avenue, which was right at the crossroads of the city \u2013 Times Square. The neighborhood in the late 1970s was on the precipice of gentrification, its porn theaters, video stores, prostitutes, and drug users already starting to be pushed out by the Koch administration\u2019s redevelopment effort to \u201cclean up\u201d this part of the city and thus appeal to corporations and tourists. Tellingly, the building that housed the show had once been a massage parlor, a nod to the neighborhood\u2019s tawdry past. Organizer and artist Tom Otterness said they were trying to \u201cpull art out of the gallery and into the street,\u201d and that since they were \u201ctrying to communicate with the public,\u201d locating the show in Times Square was the best way to \u201ctalk about the underbelly of culture.\u201d Critic Lucy Lippard commented that while the show \u201cwas ostensibly about Times Square \u2013 that is about sex and money and violence and human degradation,\u201d it was also about \u201cartists banding together as pseudo-terrorists and identifying with the denizens of this chosen locale.\u201d<\/p>\n

SEE\u00a0ALL\u00a0ARTWORKS\u00a0FOR\u00a0SALE\u00a0BY\u00a0JEAN-MICHEL\u00a0BASQUIAT<\/a> <\/p>\n

The Show\u00a0<\/p>\n

It is impossible to analyze, or even list out, every work of art in the show, a show that billed itself not in conventional terms but as its press release claimed, a site of \u201chuman complexity, theatres of love and death, invention and phenomena, a gift shop of original objects, daring performance, comic relief, arcades of fiction, and halls of art from the future \u2013 all beyond the horizon of your imagination.\u201d Instead, we will look at a handful of works in detail in order to give a sense of what the art on display was concerned with.<\/p>\n

\"AChristy Rupp<\/a>, Rat poster 1979.<\/p>\n

Christy Rupp\u2019s Rat Patrol featured the rodent \u2013 then even more than now a scourge of the city, especially due to the 1979 garbage strike \u2013 screen-printed in a seemingly endless line on thin, horizontal bands of paper that in the show were affixed to stairwells and walls (prior to the show she had also posted some of these on walls and fences throughout the city). They were also accompanied occasionally by life-size concrete rat statues, connoting the \u201ccontamination\u201d of the indoor space by the denizens of the outdoors and asking viewers to ruminate on their own role in the ecosystem of the city.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Photo of the \u201cTimes Square Show\u201d by Terise Slotkin, June 1980. Artforum critic Richard Pincus-Witten visited the Times…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":448857,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[76,354,355,49,48,356,75],"class_list":["post-448856","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-design","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/448856","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=448856"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/448856\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/448857"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=448856"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=448856"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=448856"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}