Archive Fever
Originally published in The Architect’s Newspaper, February 3, 2010
Since 1982, Storefront for Art and Architecture has been a bright spot in downtown Manhattan: both a social hub and an arbiter of some of the most distinctive, energetic, and interdisciplinary cultural programming in New York City. Now, the famously pizza slice-shaped space looks back into its archive with Storefront Newsprints 1982–2009, a collection of the gallery’s titular communiqués, “large sheets of double-sided monochrome newsprint folded down to the size of a postcard and distributed by mail or handed out for free in the gallery.” Gathered together in two handsome red volumes within a black sleeve, and printed — fittingly — on newsprint, this project is the first attempt to comprehensively visualize Storefront’s wild and storied history.
Not an easy task, for certain, but the newsprint allows an easy entryway into the archive without falling into a pitfall of rewriting or revising the Storefront story. Instead, the book foregoes commentary or art-historical positioning for clear, choronological presentation of the documents, leaving the rest to us. (Clear, that is, when they are legible. Storefront has archived high res scans of all newsprints online, to address the smudges and creases on some of the newsprints.)
Commenced at the time of Storefront’s early move from Prince to its current Kenmare Street location, the “newsprint project” continues to this day. These inexpensive and easily distributable publications serve a three-fold purpose. Each one is simultaneously an invitation to an exhibition opening, a guide to the material on display once you get there, and crucially for this book, a historical record. In fact, historicity (alongside a renewed interest in micropublishing in architecture and design circles) may be what makes Storefront diehards go over the moon for this book. In an introductory interview with outgoing director Joseph Grima, Kyung Park notes that he and cofounder Shirin Neshat “genuine liked the fact that [the newsprints] decayed and disappeared,” just like that crumpled Page Six on a subway bench. Even today, the only complete set of newsprints exists in the Storefront archive.
Readers will find a lot of bygone New York embedded within the newsprints. In one, the Twin Towers peek above a doomed-for-development community garden on the Lower East Side. Others find sporadic advertisements for likeminded but long-gone Soho operations, like Café Architecture at 25 Cleveland Place, where Storefront-related public conversations were regularly held. And in a 1990 newsprint for Three Projects 1985–1900 by Barcelona-based architects Enric Miralles and Carme Pinós, an advertisement for Perimeter Architectural Bookshop on Sullivan Street pops up — before vanishing alongside many other mainstay specialist and independent bookstores to the rising tide of corporate bookselling franchises and the massive media conglomeration of the 1990s. But as much as this book chronicles a changing New York, it is not nostalgic. In fact, Storefront’s previous self-examination, the exhibition Retrospective of Storefront in 1986, which covered highlights of its early years such as the collaborative and socially engaged Homelessness at Home project, was paired with the optimistic twin exhibition, Future of Storefront.
Self-referential even in its format (the front and back jackets of each volume double as tables of content for the material held within), Storefront Newsprints 1982–2009 successfully shows that a big part of the perceptual reinvention and forward motion of the space lies in looking back. For example, Performance A–Z, the 26-day-long foundational 1982 event that set a precedent for all future, spilling-onto-the-street Storefront extravaganzas was remembered in Performance Z–A in 2007, another 26-day marathon of outdoor performances — this time held underneath Korean architect Minsuk Cho’s dazzling Ringdome in Storefront’s neighboring Petrosino Park — organized to mark Storefront’s 25th anniversary. Likewise, 2008’s White House Redux — in its call for ideas to redesign the White House on the eve of the national election — paid homage to Liberty, a 1983 competition to create a new “symbol of collective freedom that would resonate more distinctly with contemporary culture” on the occasion of the centennial of the Statue of Liberty.
“There are endless ways to transform that space,” says Sarah Herda, the gallery’s director from 1999 to 2006, in a concluding chapter to Storefront Newsprints 1982–2009. Rather than overdetermine or codify Storefront’s identity, she (and this book) reminds us that at the brink of a new decade of programming and sociopolitical engagement on Kenmare Street, “the potential never diminishes.”