ABSTRACT
T he Alternative Space, by contrast, was a nonprofitinstitution formed to serve groups of artists or genres of art that were not adequately included in the commercial galleries. The pioneer for SoHo was the 112 Workshop, commonly called 112 Greene Street after its street address. Founded by Jeffrey Lew, who had purchased the building previously housing a rag-salvaging business, the 112 Workshop was a ground floor 33 feet wide, 110 feet long, and 16 feet high, with several Corinthian columns within the space and large windows in both the front and the back. Lew simply made it available, initially to his friend Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-1978), the American son of the Chilean-Parisian painter Roberto Matta, who stayed here during World War II. As Robyn Brentano remembered, “Matta-Clark used 112 as a laboratory, activating the structure on every level. He uncovered its subterranean recesses, grew things in impossible places, and brought sunlight downward through a matrix of glass bottles. His love of cooking found strange permutations in the agar brew he concocted from molds and the furnace he built to melt down the glass he had
collected. Once, with the classic humor of a court jester, MattaClark dragged a baby carriage full of junk off the street and installed it in a group show, signing the piece George Smudge. He papered walls with the images of the walls in gutted buildings and plastered an enormous photograph of a subway train across the airshaft wall facing the rear windows of 112, forcing the viewer to traverse the rear of the space as if in a subway station. The impression one has of him is that of a magician who performed with the matter-of-fact manner of a day laborer.” In addition, he put on the street an industrial dumpster into which artists were invited to put things as well as take. Aside from his own activities, Matta-Clark established an ambience for 112 that informed subsequent activities that were documented in a rich eponymous book appearing in 1981, soon after his premature passing. More artists subsequently important worked here than anywhere else in SoHo, including the composers Phillip Glass and Jon Gibson, the dancers associated with the Grand Union, even the Hollywood filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow, among others. Once Jeffrey Lew took back his space in 1976, the nonprofit entity moved to the
storefront of a truck terminal way west on Spring Street and was renamed White Columns, which still exists at yet another Manhattan address.
