In the early ‘70s, before The Kitchen was founded, artists would come to Steina and Woody Vasulka’s SoHo loft to watch grainy black and white videos.
The Vasulkas had a synthesizer, three monitors, and a Sony Portapak: a new portable recorder called at the time “the most revolutionary breakthrough in media since Gutenberg.”
Steina was an Icelandic violinist; Woody, born in Brno, Czechoslovakia, edited industrial films. At the time equipment was expensive. “New York was a very friendly place in those years, and the idea of sharing and pooling and using instruments and hooking them together,” Steina remembered in an interview on the Experimental Television Center’s website, “it was completely spontaneous.” Artists would crowd into the loft until late at night, in a kind of ad hoc collaborative experimentation that eventually solidified into an institutional ethos.
In the 1970s, artist-run collectives—resisting traditional museums and commercial galleries—were burgeoning in the abandoned factories and warehouses in New York. And yet while many alternative art spaces from that era either flamed out or gradually calcified into the old guard, The Kitchen, for over 50 years, has been an unusually long-lasting experiment in adventurous art-making.
Tired of lugging huge video monitors in New York City checker cabs, the Vasulkas soon decamped to the Mercer Art Center, a collection of small theaters in an eight-story 19th-century hotel that staged everything from repertory theater to underground rock concerts in the nascent days of punk. Andres Mannik, a carpenter for choreographer Merce Cunningham, first discovered the space, and they were joined by a group of “directors” that included composer Rhys Chatham and media artists Dimitri Devykatkin and Shridhar Bapat.
The group was interested in video not as documentary but as a live art form, a series of moving images that could be combined with other mediums like music and dance in real time. The new electronic art space took up residence in the building’s kitchen—hence the name—and advertised itself as a place “selected by Media God to perform an experiment on you, to challenge your brain and its perception.”
Since its beginnings, The Kitchen has defied definition. It wasn’t exactly an art gallery, a theater, a nightclub, or a concert stage, but somehow managed to function as a combination of each. “It was reborn every 24 hours,” the Vasulkas wrote in 1977. The Kitchen was a place where you could see androgynous punk group the New York Dolls one night, and then experiments in computer art the next. Different mediums—visual art, film and television, literature, music, and dance—blurred together. “Monthly event calendars show the fluidity of programming that ranged from music concerts to dance performances to readings and more,” said Alison Burstein, a curator at The Kitchen. “In some ways, audiences of The Kitchen have always had to be as experimental as the artists because you really don’t know what to expect when you arrive.”
As an organization created for artists by artists, an anti-establishment establishment, a playful rebellion prevailed in its early years and persists to this day. While it had its origins in video art, it quickly expanded to become an epicenter of new music—debuting experimental works by composers like Philip Glass, Pauline Oliveros, Meredith Monk, and Julius Eastman, as well as work that crossed over into popular culture by the Talking Heads, Fab 5 Freddy, and Sonic Youth.
Other seminal artists like Robert Mapplethorpe, Sherrie Levine, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Anderson, Barbara Kruger, Nam June Paik, Bill T. Jones, Trisha Brown, Blondell Cummings, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Fred Holland, Kathy Acker, Constance DeJong, Carolee Schneemann, and Adrian Piper presented early or notable work there.
“The history of The Kitchen, in many ways, is a microcosm of the history of interdisciplinary art and performance across the past 50 years,” said Burstein.
Because the Vasulkas were video artists, the performances, in all their fledgling weirdness, were recorded. As early as 1975, in the days long before YouTube, visitors could watch videos of past events in what was called The Kitchen’s Video Viewing Room. It was part of the organization’s open-source ethos that information be shared. “Visitors could come in and say, ‘Can I please watch that recording of the performance from last month of the Talking Heads,’ for example, and you could sit down and use the tape deck that was available in that space and watch it,” said Burstein. “The ways that The Kitchen built an archive of performance recordings indicates that there was a sense that what they were doing was significant enough that audiences would want to see it, whether it would be two weeks later, or many years after the event happened.”
As a result, although performance art is fleeting, the history of The Kitchen is well-documented. In 2014, the Getty Research Institute acquired The Kitchen’s 20th century archive, adding to its collection of avant-garde art—including archival materials relating to the Fluxus movement and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe—that flourished in New York after the second World War.
Now The Kitchen is busy preserving its 21st archive, as well as finding new ways to share its history. In September, under the leadership of its new executive director and chief curator, Legacy Russell, The Kitchen created an installation at the Armory Show, showcasing audio recordings made between 1976 and 1986, and posters and ephemera spanning the full 50-plus years of its history. It also invites contemporary artists to explore and respond to the works in its archives, providing access to its historical materials for present-day inspiration.
“The organization's early and sustained efforts to preserve its history show the foresight of its staff in knowing that there was great cultural significance to what was happening,” Burstein said, “and that those records would allow for those works to go on being seen, experienced, and studied by later generations.”
Explore The Kitchen archive at the Getty Research Institute.
