Defying Gravity

Picture it: It’s the summer of 1976, and you’re walking into a mound of sand on the southwestern edge of Manhattan Island. The World Trade Center, completed just three years earlier and currently the tallest structure in the world, looms above; the sand is actually the top layer of a ninety-three-acre landfill containing refuse from the construction of the Twin Towers and other urban development projects. What was supposed to already be where you stand now—the mixed use chimera of Battery Park City—won’t be complete until the end of the century. Instead, you are confronted with Suzanne Harris’s site-specific architectural earthwork LOCUS/UP↓〉ONE, which will be gone by summer’s end. Entering the void and moving through a short tunnel, you perambulate around the four roughly eleven-foot sides of a stucco-covered plywood cube inscribed within a circular crater twenty-one feet in diameter. Instead of being up in the air, where the money is, you are in the ground, with the trash. And yet, the experience is transcendent, because its creator designed it that way, aligning the points of the square with the cardinal directions like the pyramids at Giza. At dusk, the sun appears to drop down into the structure’s central void. At this moment, New York feels not ultramodern but ancient.

Friederike Schäfer’s An Anarchitectural Body of Work: Suzanne Harris and the Downtown New York Artists’ Community in the 1970s began from its author’s understandable fascination with LOCUS/UP↓〉ONE, grew into a German doctoral dissertation, and in 2023 became the first monograph published on its titular artist. The central challenge of her book is the gaping hole left by Harris’s sudden and mysterious death in 1979 and the subsequent dissolution of her oeuvre, much of which was purposefully transient in the first place. To try to get her hands around this lacuna, Schäfer draws on the artist’s archive, Henri Lefebvre’s spatial sociology, Rosalyn Deutsche’s Lefebvrian art history, Sally Banes’s postmodern dance history, Edward Soja’s postmodern political geography, Lucy Lippard’s feminist art criticism, Bertell Ollman’s Marxology, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, J. L. Austin’s ordinary language philosophy, Mabel E. Todd’s studies of posture and balance, Sharon Zukin’s study of SoHo, and Ann L. Buttenweiser’s chronicle of the Manhattan waterfront since the seventeenth century, as well as old squabbles over the ephemerality and ontology of the live arts, the reception of the historical avant-gardes by their “neo-” inheritors, and the vexed genealogy of installation art—not to mention Harris’s personal miscellany of sources (Einstein’s theory of relativity, Pythagorean geometry, the mathy mysticism of Johannes Kepler, “the priests of ancient Egypt,” and other period-appropriate New Age wellsprings).

While Harris’s multifarious career is in many ways suited to such a heterogenous treatment—she became an artist at twenty-nine, after stints in medical school and the music business, and over the next ten years worked in dance, sculpture, and installation; collaborated with Gordon Matta-Clark and others on the restaurant-cum-participatory artwork FOOD and the prototypical alternative art space 112 Greene Street; was part of the feminist editorial collective Heresies; and traveled to the newly opened China with a group of art workers—the effect is disorienting, not least because of Schäfer’s stated intention to “start in the middle,” a positionality Harris herself extolled. Reading An Anarchitectural Body of Work at times feels like riding Wheels (or Cyclic Process and the Human Dilemma) (1973), a kinetic sculpture Harris built and installed at 112 Greene Street that took the form of four oversized and interlocking gears. As performers draped themselves over and moved between the axles, the weight of their bodies caused the piece’s namesake wheels to spin and catch each other. A filmed performance of this participatory artwork demonstrates that it created motion but also stasis; one needs balance to not fall off the machine and out of the process.

Schäfer is far from the first person, as she admits, to write a history of a body of work that no longer exists. The question isn’t if it’s possible to do so but how one goes about doing it. Insofar as its form mirrors Harris’s own desire to think dialectically, “between the objective and the abstract,” Schäfer’s book is a qualified success. Unfortunately, it is also smitten by the academic tics (bodies are “of/at work,” archives are “(im)material,” the “embodied viewer” becomes the “embodied visitor,” and so on) over nearly four hundred half-excruciating, half-fascinating pages. Clunky assemblages of seminar-room jargon—as when Schäfer informs her reader that “In fact, the paradigm of spatial dialectics comprises that all theoretical considerations are grounded in a materialist approach, and the unraveling of the spatial dimensions considered in/as Anarchitecture demonstrated that the artists based their mental reflections on a corporeal approach to the material dimensions of space in terms of the space-time continuum”—try my patience and push her writing toward extremities of abstraction that feel indifferent if not hostile to the “history” part of art history, even as all elements of a compelling narrative are there on the page.

Sifting through the spoofable pedantry of An Anarchitectural Body of Work reveals Harris, intrepid multipotentialite. Born Susan Campbell in 1940 and known as “Suzie,” Harris initially trained to be a doctor before falling into the folk scene, where she would help manage Phil Ochs and hang out with the likes of Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. Her friend Ted Castle, an art critic and novelist, described her as “possibly the most highly conscious person in a generation of New York artists in which there are many highly conscious people,” with the caveat that she “was not systematically intellectual”; perhaps it was this freewheeling curiosity that allowed her to traverse so many fields. Her husband, Paul Harris, was a session keyboardist who kept five grand pianos in their apartment, much to Harris’s chagrin. In 1969, two years before loft living was legalized for city-certified artists, the Harrises moved into a raw space above the gallery at 112 Greene Street. The bare-bones condition of the couple’s new digs obliged her to strap on a tool belt and get to work. Her realization that she could construct something like a designed space in a manner we would now call DIY led to a parallel revelation: She could be, and wanted to be, an artist. In short order, she divorced Paul and escaped those pesky pianos.

In a very real sense, Harris as an artist and SoHo as a neighborhood came into being at the same time. By making its light-industrial spaces habitable, Harris and the nascent community of artists working and showing downstairs would unwittingly inaugurate the processes that transformed the deserted manufacturing zone into one of the most expensive enclaves in the world. Schäfer cites the rapid reversal of opinion on the area as indexed in New York Magazine—what they condemned as a “wasteland” in 1962 rose in their estimation over the next twelve years to become “The Most Exciting Place to Live in the City.” Municipal bureaucrats had other plans for the neighborhood. Way back in 1929, Robert Moses first proposed the Lower Manhattan Expressway, an eight-lane elevated highway that would have necessitated the destruction of fourteen blocks of Broome Street. Three decades later, the power broker was primed to make his vision of unimpeded car travel a reality. His thwarting by Jane Jacobs and legions of concerned residents over the course of the ’60s is the stuff of New York legend and an enduring part of the neighborhood’s self-image. (Today, there’s a contemporary art gallery on the border between SoHo and TriBeCa named LOMEX.)

The communitarian ethos demanded by the area’s dearth of services—for more than a century, Fanelli Café was the only place to eat dinner—begat a multitude of collectives, Anarchitecture among them. Anarchitecture is easier to type than LOCUS/UP↓〉ONE but, remarkably, harder to explain. Semantically, Anarchitecture is both not-architecture and anarchic-tecture; art historically, it was a loose affiliation of SoHo artists whose interest was, according to member (if such a thing could be said to exist) Richard Nonas, “the failure of architecture, not the promise of architecture.” Matta-Clark, a disillusioned architecture student who put his training to use making surgical “cuts” through condemned structures, understood Anarchitecture’s mission to be “making space without building it.” Schäfer’s reading of Anarchitecture attempts to loosen its longstanding identification with the canonized Matta-Clark and emphasize what was vitally a “group effort. … based on a model of conceiving space beyond the built environment and as in flux.” As part of this circle, which also included Laurie Anderson, Tina Girouard, Jene Highstein, Bernard Kirschenbaum, and Richard Landry, Harris participated in Anarchitecture’s sole exhibition, in March of 1974 at 112 Greene Street, which consisted primarily of collectively attributed “photographic notes.” No documentation of the show survives (the production of enduring, immaculately crafted art objects was clearly not at the forefront of their minds), but a two-page photo spread dedicated to the group, published that summer in the Italian magazine Flash Art, provides a sense of its anaesthetic vocabulary: a vacant lot, a hole in the ground, an old Carpenter Gothic house transported on a barge, dentures floating in a wineglass, this last image annotated “George Washington Slept Here.”

FOOD, another cooperative venture in which Harris and Matta-Clark overlapped, applied the lessons of loft living and Anarchitecture to the notoriously cutthroat world of New York restaurants. Schäfer, paraphrasing Matta-Clark, characterizes SoHo as “a space that was made without having been built”; the description applies well to FOOD, which took over the lease from a failed Puerto Rican luncheonette on the corner of Prince and Wooster. Curator Alanna Heiss remembered it as a “kind of clubhouse” where artists both ate and worked; Schäfer suggests it was a “counter-space” in both the literal and Lefebvrian sense. Allegedly the first dining establishment with a poured concrete floor, the artist-run cantina’s open plan united the kitchen and dining area, breaking down the barrier between production and consumption in a manner now familiar to rabid reservation-chasers the world around. The menu, too, was a forecast of future dining trends: veg-forward (Harris was the de facto entremetier), seasonal, and health-conscious. Critic Robert Pincus-Witten later recalled the scene at FOOD as a subcultural milieu where art bled into lifestyle and artists of various persuasions broke bread: “Here, over yogurt and wheat germ, Anarchitecture blended with Sensibility Minimalism.”

“Sensibility Minimalism” has a Marie Kondo–like appeal, but Pincus-Witten became famous for a different coinage: postminimalism. Appearing in his 1971 Artforum essay on the late sculptor Eva Hesse, the term encompassed a range of artistic production, “from process-oriented experience to an art of purely intellective activity,” that both followed and differed from the high minimalism enshrined in Primary Structures, Kynaston McShine’s definitive 1966 exhibition at the Jewish Museum. Schäfer is keen to apply the description (which, she notes, appeared sporadically in art criticism before Pincus-Witten’s Hesse essay) to Harris. Her classification proceeds from the artist’s 1979 claim that, unlike that minimalism, with its focus on closed, gestalt forms (see 1960s Donald Judd, Robert Grosvenor, and the Robert Morris of the L-Beams), the production of the Anarchitecture group was “more about a dialectical relationship between the whole and its parts and the fact that forms come from a set of relationships.” Though Schäfer’s contention that Anarchitecture is postminimalist (italics hers) is chronologically unassailable, the distinction she cribs from Harris to define the genre doesn’t hold water—it would be absurd to say that Judd’s wall-mounted stacks of floating boxes were not about the relationship between a whole and its parts, even if he rhetorically elevated the former over the latter. Schäfer’s desire to order cultural production into successive, discrete, differentially defined groups—in other words, her desire to do an Art History—smooths over the ways in which earlier minimalist works anticipated many of the qualities deemed postminimalist in the following decade. For instance, she cites Highstein’s 1971 Human Scale Container as an “early example of [the postminimalist] break from the art object as enclosed object and a self-referential gestalt” but ignores Morris’s Untitled (Box for Standing) from exactly a decade earlier: an open wooden crate with its height calibrated for the artist to stand in with no space left over above his head. Periodization is dicey, all the more so when motivated by a desire to confer the ever-elusive and always-vaunted status of the avant-garde; there’s a reason that so many art historians working today are wary of such linear thinking.

More persuasive is Schäfer’s account of how installation art emerged from the related fields of sculpture and dance. (Here she does duly credit Morris, who danced and choreographed alongside his partner Simone Forti as early as 1959, as a significant figure in this history.) When Harris first landed in SoHo, she was known in the community as someone who performed in so-called dance concerts by Judson Dance Theater alums Trisha Brown and Steve Paxton. She had no formal dance training, making her a perfect vehicle for the kind of choreography engaged in quotidian motion that would later be called “postmodern.” By 1972, she was performing as part of an all-female collective called The New History of the American Dancer and teaching sensory awareness to Pratt undergrads. Her 1973 solo exhibition at 112 Greene Street announced her arrival as a sculptor. Still, given the way Harris understood “form as a relative movement through time and space”—as elucidated by Albert Einstein, whose name appears all over her notes of the period—dance remained critical to her art. The show included the kinetic sculptures Wheels and Flying Machine (1973), the latter a harness-like device that suspends performers in midair and is, to the best of anyone’s knowledge, Harris’s sole surviving large-scale work. Stored in Richard Nonas’s basement after her death, Flying Machine was an apparatus for an aerial pas de deux, perfect for making untrained bodies dance; Harris described it as “an attempt for two to defy gravity with minimum aid,” and it’s lovely to imagine this tangle of ropes activated by performers in motion, the provisional transcendence afforded by its primitive machinery. Alas, when Schäfer announces her intention to “contribute to the ongoing project of suturing art history and performing bodies by considering the ephemeral materialities of absent bodies as performative evidence of vanished practices,” my blood runs cold.

LOCUS/UP↓〉ONE provides the anchor for the final chapter in Schäfer’s long and winding monograph. Harris’s temporary intervention on the sand-covered landfill overlooking the Hudson and Jersey City’s blighted industrial waterfront, a forerunner of Agnes Denes’s much more famous and photogenic Wheatfield (1982), is the apogee of what the artist was able to accomplish in her short career. This 1976 installation was the second on the landfill; Mary Miss did it first in 1973. But unlike Miss, who arranged five freestanding perforated wooden walls, as Judd wrote of his own work, “one thing after another” in a coup of guerrilla art, Harris’s plans required her to enter a pact with city government and hawk-eyed developers to make LOCUS/UP↓〉ONE a reality. Because her site lay on the future ground of Battery Park City, Harris had to work with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Counsel to lobby the Battery Park City Authority (BPCA) for permission to build. When it was finally granted, in 1976, BPCA Chairman Charles J. Urstadt issued a statement revealing of art’s lubricatory role in urban redevelopment: “The residents who will one day reside in Battery Park City and the people who will work there will enhance their daily activities with a life style oriented to recreational and educational as well as cultural events. Support of LOCUS signals an early commitment by the Authority to this aspect of Battery Park City’s environment.”

We have Urstadt to thank for Battery Park City, whose simulacral historicism today seems fairly benign compared with the glass Gomorrah of Hudson Yards. We also have him to thank for the passage of a 1971 law, still known today as the Urstadt Law, that forbids New York City from enacting stricter rent controls than those imposed by Albany—a blow to municipal democracy and a gift to landlords that keeps on giving. Urstadt’s namesake legislation doesn’t figure in Schäfer’s telling, nor does his slashing, in 1972, of low- and moderate-income housing in Battery Park City by more than 50 percent. Overall, New York in the first half of the 1970s comes off as a city not easy to live in, but at least one in which more was possible. Harris was lucky to engage the BPCA at just the right moment: The oversupply of office space due to the erection of the World Trade Center in 1973, along with the city’s fiscal crisis of 1975, halted plans to develop the landfill further.

LOCUS/UP↓〉ONE was there for the summer of 1976, during the American bicentennial celebrations, and then, just as quickly as it appeared, was gone. In 1979, the year Harris died, the city transferred ownership of the landfill to the BPCA, and a new plan for the development of Battery Park City was in motion, this time with no low-income housing at all. As The New York Times would report in 1982, with apposite Reagan-era Pollyannaism, “What was imagined as a great housing resource for a lower-, middle-, and upper-income population working in the office buildings of lower Manhattan and Battery Park City itself is coming forth as a prestigious urban community of first-rate quality.” Did the dialectics of sensibility minimalism and lifestyle luxury, Anarchitecture and unaccountable state authority, “counter-space” and real estate, enter into Harris’s cosmology? Did the most highly conscious person in a generation of highly conscious people know which way the wind was blowing? The artist’s untimely death means we will never know for sure, though we can scratch our heads at a gnomic jotting, reproduced in Schäfer’s book, made while Harris was at work on LOCUS/UP↓〉ONE:

Schäfer’s conclusion looks back over An Anarchitectural Body of Work at a remove, recapitulating its methodological convolutions in an off-puttingly self-reflexive manner. Her argument that Harris’s “practice is guided by an epistemological interest in itself” applies just as well to Schäfer’s book, which suffers from the constant narrativization of its arguments. I imagine Harris up in the heavens, smiling at her oeuvre’s power over its historian, trapped in a dialectical dance that never ends.