For those who know The Kitchen in its current space, we would like
to add a few notes on its origin, location and operation from spring
1971 to fall 1973.The "Old Kitchen" was located at the Mercer street
entrance of the Broadway Central Hotel in the Mercer Art Center,
a conglomerate of theaters adapted from the catering rooms and ballrooms
of the hotel. Our space was a former kitchen. The termination of
the Mercer Art Center was the total collapse of the Broadway Central
Hotel in August of '73. Shortly before this catastrophe, the directorship
had been transferred to Bob Stearns, and the "New Kitchen" moved
to its current location on Wooster Street. The "Old Kitchen" was
formulated through contributions of many people, namely Andy Mannik,
Sia and Michael Tschudin, Rhys Chatham, Shridar Bapat, Dimitri Devyatkin
and later by Jim Burton and Bob Stearns, all of whom helped run
the daily operations and programming. A particular credit for the
three annual festivals: The Video Festival, The Computer Festival
and The Women's Video Festival, should be given to Shridhar, Dimitri
and Susan Milano respectively. Howard Wise, through "Electronic
Arts Intermix," provided for us the administrative umbrella, without
which we could not have existed. Eventually, the funding by the
State Council on the Arts helped to secure the rent and further
our continuation. Since we started working with video we knew we
had an audience. People would gather in our home. Friends, and friends
of friends would come almost daily. The transition became inevitable.
We had to go from a private place, our loft, to a public one. In
many ways, we liked the Mercer Arts Center. It was culturally and
artistically a polluted place. It could do high art and it could
produce average trash. We were interested in certain decadent aspects
of America, the phenomena of the time: underground rock and roll,
gay theater and the rest of that 'illegitimate' culture. In the
same way we were curious about more puritanical concepts of art
inspired by McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller. It seemed a strange
and united front - against the establishment. The music, in particular,
carried a similar kind of schism. On the one hand, it was technological,
represented by people working with synthesizers or certain structural
investigations of sound - on the other hand, it was an almost theatrical
rejection of established musical performing conventions. It was
difficult to separate these tendencies within new music. Our personal
interest was in performing video. Very soon we understood the generic
relationship of video to other electronic arts, and this realization
became our guiding policy. To us, it was difficult to become an
establishment. We did not want to administer, or have an office,
or even a phone. There was a pay phone by the door. Our idea of
programming was not to select or curate, but to mediate and accommodate
- no one was turned down and no one was served either, since there
was no staff. The people that were around were creative artists
and colleagues. The performers would bring their own crew, their
own equipment and their own audience. At the end of the evening
the audience would help stack chairs and sweep the floor. Some artists
insisted on showing for free, but if there was a donation, the artist
had a choice to collect it, split it or leave it to us. Almost everybody
let us keep the proceeds, which paid for the monthly calendar and
petty cash. It was this loose administrative arrangement that let
people participate spiritually in the directorship. If there was
any virtue in our arrangement, it was the participation. Once a
place is well administered, it becomes a victim of its own well-working.
It includes or excludes, seeks its hierarchy of qualities and eventually
becomes an established idea, not always able to permeate with the
needs of time. There is a self-preserving instinct within every
creative person; preferring the sense of creative freedom to being
bound to a successful model. Every instinct within the daily operation
is superbly important. The Kitchen was only as successful as the
artist of that particular day. It was reborn every 24 hours. Of
course, there were catastrophes only an environment creatively secure
can afford them. We would not have had a telepathic concert from
Boston if the event was being advertised months in advance and the
artist was getting a fee. The impulse to create a concept such as
The Kitchen should not be perceived as an administrative fundraising
initiative. Looking back, we lived in a unique situation when an
alternate cultural model had culminated into an ability to perform
its content - whatever that meant. Suddenly it was ready and eager
to express itself. We went into this venture with a simple and innocent
belief that this activity, so relevant to us, also was of interest
to others. As two newcomers, we were lucky to observe and participate
so intensely in the bizarre culture of that time.
