Lightning: Hello. Thanks for taking the time to talk with us. Over here at Lightning we are trying to experiment with some ideas that seem both fresh in your mind and also deeply interwoven with some of the things you have dedicated your life to.
We were talking with Slim Moon, the founder of Kill Rockstars, and he was reminiscing about a time when he and his friends were just trying to make great music - there wasn’t any possi- bility of making money or making anything out of it - and that romantic notion of creating art in this local context seemed very valuable. Similarly, in David Byrne’s book “How Music Works”, he talks about how CBGBs was, through a somewhat random series of conditions, rules, i.e. Hilly would let the bands drink for free on nights where they weren’t playing, and events, such a perfect breeding ground for the experimentation that would become punk rock. From our vantage point this story seems very similar to what you created at Alleged. We were curious if you could talk more in depth about that time, and that condition?
Aaron Rose: First off, I can certainly say that I identify with both examples you’ve mentioned. Like Slim and Hilly, I had absolutely no idea that the scene we were creating in New York in the early 1990s, had any historical value, and I certainly didn’t purpose- fully act in any way that would support that idea. We were barely getting by, and the only personal motivation I really had at the time was keeping the gallery lights on...which I should add didn’t always work. There were a couple of openings at Alleged that we had by candle light because I couldn’t pay the bill. It really wasn’t until about ten years later that I started to understand that what we had done would have some sort of historical significance. At the time it didn’t feel special. It was just a bunch of friends and friends of friends getting together to drink beer and make things. It was very unromantic.
L: What were your intentions when you first opened your doors?
A: There weren’t really any specific intentions beyond having a cheap place to sleep. The idea to actually open the space to the public came only after some time living in the storefront. I had been making paintings, mostly works on paper and doodles on skateboards. I decided to throw a birthday party for myself and show all of my art in the front space. That became the first show. After that I started asking friends that lived and worked in the neighborhood to put things up as well. We would have these monthly parties. The gallery was just next store to a bar called Max Fish, and most of the bartenders there were artists so they would show stuff, then skateboarder friends of mine who were touring through New York would put stuff up...it was a free for all at the beginning. There was definitely no business model.
L: Would you mind talking about some of the seeming chaos and experimentation at that time?
A: One of the most interesting things I’ve noticed, and again this is only in retrospect, was how much everybody was influencing each other sub-consciously. At the time there was sometimes heat between artists about one artist “copy-ing” another’s style, but I realized later that that influencing became central to a certain aesthetic that grew really organically from that gallery. Also, after learning more about cultural and art history, I came to understand that this process has been integral to every significant creative movement. Abstract Expression- ism, Pop, even Punk and Grunge, all came out of a small insular scene of artists whose work was informing each other. Call it chaos or experi- mentation, but it was really a bunch of artists working together, without realizing it, to find their unique vision on the world, both as individuals and as a group.
L: From our viewpoint it seems like you and Hilly and Slim share some- thing in common - helping to be the creator of a subculture. Can you talk about the art of creating subculture?
A: I don’t believe a single person can create a subculture. Many peo-
ple lay claim to have invented one subculture or another, but I have my doubts about that. I truly believe that cultural shifts are in the collective consciousness...and they might have originated from one place or anoth- er, but they probably would have happened anyway because the collec- tive culture needed this certain aesthetic or expression. When I think of myself and my part in helping to create a certain scene I tend to think of myself as a medium. The culture just happened to run through me. I was in the right place at the right time, but I truly believe that if it wasn’t me it would have been someone else.
“I truly believe that cultural shifts are in the collective consciousness”
L: A sculptor friend of ours Ted Springer, started a sort of wilderness sculpture park for homeless sculptures - thinking about how sculptors are always paying expensive storage rents for storage space. He ex- pressed that sometimes it’s difficult to get people out into the wilds, but the people who show up are the more adventurous. In these current times I think that one can take the angle that you must highly curate par- ticipants to be specific and stand out, but there is another idea that you can start something and the wild spirits that show up can work together to make it into something great. Would you say Alleged was a collection of spirits that showed up, or more a controlled group of artists in a certain style?
A: One of the funniest things about my years at Alleged, and something that rarely gets talked about was just how many “dud” shows we had! I mean that gallery ran in one way or another for over ten years!! People look back at it as though it was this amazing series of cultural successes, but they don’t remember the scores of exhibitions and artist’s careers that showed at the gallery that just went nowhere! That doesn’t mean that I didn’t believe in the work, I really did, just for some reason, be it that maybe it didn’t strike a chord with people or the artist changed priorities, some work just died on the vine. In retrospect, people seem to only remember the successes. That’s a sad thing about society sometimes. Our theory back then was throw enough shit at the wall and hope that some of it sticks. Lucky for us, some of it did.
L: Anyone who’s tried to do anything in this world knows pulling off any- thing can be a lot of work. Can you talk about your intention and role in those early times. And what kept you going?
A: As some of the artists started to experience success, I felt a real responsibility to continue to engage. I had to make some hard decisions in order to do it. Not many people know this, but the reason I closed the gallery on Ludlow Street and moved to a larger space on Prince Street and Mott Street in Little Italy, was that I didn’t think the artists could grow where we were. The place was too much of a party scene. Every night was a whole gang of people getting messed up until all hours of the night. Don’t get me wrong, that was super fun for a while, but I had
to come to the hard decision that if I wanted this thing to grow we had
to leave the nest. That caused some really bad blood between me and my roommates at the time. Some of those rifts have never been healed. They thought I was giving up, when all I was really trying to do was grow... for both myself and the artists. The artists were ready to play on a bigger stage and I wanted to build it for them. People sometimes can’t deal with it when you grow. They find it challenging. There’s this thing called “tall poppy syndrome”, you should look it up. I was definitely a victim of that when I closed the Ludlow St. gallery.
L: A theme that is shaping up for our first journal is about exploring sub- culture ...In your essay “The Death of Subculture”, you discuss a problem you’ve seen occurring, that art is becoming so referential it is losing
it’s important center of originality of ideas and ideals, that “ we have a creative culture based on a hybridization of styles” and you also present some possibilities out of this as well. How does one, so influenced by available mythology flip from being influenced and copying a sub culture, to being influenced to embody the spirit and move things forward?
A: I really don’t think that it can be a conscious decision. We live as a generation that has come into cultural awareness at the dawn of the internet age. We cannot ignore that Google Image exists. It’s right there! Every time we open the computer the whole history of the world is at our fingertips. An idealistic approach would be that one could try to cut one- self off completely from technology in order to find a more “pure” place from which to create, but that wouldn’t really be authentic with our times would it? If the artists’ role is to tell the story of our times, the narrative one is telling from a cabin on the woods, completely shut off, is far from authentic in the mass sense. My opinion, if I could hypothesize, is that the work that is produced in the first two decades of the 21st Century will probably be remembered as “Retrospectivist”. Meaning that because of the sudden influx of historical visual information that has happened during this time, the only logical reaction that creative people could have is to be influenced by that and to make work relating to it. We probably won’t see a truly original 21st Century art movement until around 2050. That’s based on the amount of time historical movements have needed to fully blossom in the past of course.
L: Douglas Rushkoff brought up the idea that the role of the artist has changed, post what he calls the cultural narrative collapse, and that the new narrative is to bring people into the sacred circle. The 20th century story of subculture seems to be told around the hero, the author or paint- er or poet...I’m wondering if in the years since you wrote this essay you have run into anything that feels like it points in this new direction?
A: It’s an interesting theory. Personally I don’t have as much faith in humanity as Rushkoff does. If anything, in the 21st Century, I see our culture moving more and more toward singular hero worship. We are completely detached from community. I watch the world flash by on my phone in 30 seconds. I know what my friends are up to in London, Beijing,
Berlin, New York, Marfa, wherever and all at the same time. It seems like I’m connected to them because of this, but am I really? Are followers friends? Sometimes yes, but most of the time it falls very much into the category of hero worship. I don’t consider that a sacred circle. It’s a very loose web where it’s quite easy to slip through the cracks.
L: A big aspect of what Lightning is circling around is the centrality of experience - whether it was the first shows you went to as a kid, or going off road on a dirt bike, or carrying some too heavy sculpture into the des- ert with your friends, all of it revolving around experience. You mention in your essay that even more than the access to all information, the loss of experience is “perhaps...where the real death of subculture takes place
“ - can you talk about this a bit, what was different in the scene you came from, and where things could potentially go?
A: In my essay I was referring to the fact that we each experience so much of our lives through virtual experience that we are forgetting what authentic human communication consists of. If I take photography as an example, we now look at the world through what I call “Information Photography.” This is an entirely new way of unitizing pictures. They have no more art. They are just throw away images and it’s really interesting to me! When I first learned about photography the image was everything! The composition, the exposure, the subtleties in the printing process... these things were at the heart of the photo process. The subtleties in the way one person made an image versus another was where individuality lived. This is not so much the case anymore. There is a new aesthetic growing from information photography. I couldn’t begin to predict how this will mature and take shape, but I just know it is important. I would say that is quite possibly the most important aesthetic shift of the next fifty years, and I’m really happy that I will be alive to witness it.
