What Is The Times Square Contagion

In early June 1980, the New York Times mourned Mayor Ed Koch's decision to reject the 42nd Street Redevelopment Corporation's designs to transform Times Square into a shopping complex and theme park. Yet, contrary to the administration's depiction, Times Square was one of the most heavily trafficked spaces in New York City at that time, with up to 8,000 pedestrians per hour walking its streets.
In a very real sense that transcended the attendant hyperbole, The Times Square Show transformed the New York art scene. It, as an event, made a crucial mark on the New York art scene. Yet It's singular impact, massive scale, and collective, anonymous marketing all overshadowed the nature of the individual elements that constituted the show. Viewing
It as an event only reveals part of the picture. It made an equally revolutionary mark as an archive a space and time in which a certain series of artifacts and their histories were, however briefly, collected and displayed. It worked to sustain the chaotic affective power of Times Square, a power threatened by the city's plans for redevelopment.
Rather than a methodology of regulation, it chose a methodology of contagion. While imaginary and conceptual objects are included in this equation, for art exhibitions, the objects in question are clearly primarily material; specifically physical artworks that produce affect. It subverted this model by privileging preservation of affect, by means of contagion, even if that resulted in risk to the object. Three specific examples serve to illustrate various modes of contagion it employed in reproducing the chaos of Times Square. Rupp's Rat Patrol was one example of how the New York City, and particularly Times Square, diffused its influence into it from every front, breaking down the boundaries between indoor and outdoor, private and public spaces. Yet, in the final throes of its voluptuary chaos, Times Square's particular blend of semiotic and transgressive excess was celebrated throughout, apparent in the title of one of the theme galleries, the "Money, Love, and Death Room," as well as in subject matter that ran throughout most of the work. More important than any rational representation of the themes or politics in
Times Square was the affective integration of the anarchy and overload of Times Square itself. It held a record of the particular events of the 1979 garbage strike, the broader dynamics of the urban ecosystem, and the disgust underpinning the urban project. Though Times Square itself provided the most dramatic context, it's important to note that it was just one of many converging behavioral vortices. Geographic space was contained within it as a site of intermingling territories. With the representatives of The South Bronx Hall of Fame, it contained the record of dozens of peoples, classes, and professions.
This was just one of a plethora of performances and screenings that took place within. The problem of the performance in the archive is one of the particular epistemological crises of the field of performance studies one that produces convincing assertions that performance itself, unlike the object, cannot be archived. This was the particular, disorienting contamination of power wielded within the bounds. Yet as it demonstrates, it is a contagion that is as creative as it is destructive. If the value of an object is dependent on affect, and affect is dependent on contact, it would appear that the isolationist practices of the conventional art economy severely curtail the value of archival or artistic objects. It in many ways represented the polar opposite of this "tournament of value" mentality. But it was as much a parody of the art world as a participant. Unlike the smooth machinery that props up exclusive auction houses like Christie's and Sotheby's, Colab was an unstable organization that as little as two months before the opening of it was in danger of imploding due to internal conflicts involving grant dispersals, the high cost of
video equipment for their public access cable programs, and a controversy surrounding Tom Otterness's "Shot Dog Film" that almost sank their NEA funding. Yet, the team managed to coalesce around It, and while the motivations for this disparate bunch of artists were by no means unified, It brought them into an intimate contact where their divergent artworks and philosophies lost individual distinction. And more than simply upending the dominant hierarchies of American art exchange, It initiated a culturally significant intervention on its own terms. But for one month, an abandoned four-story massage parlor briefly became an electrifying space of "human complexity, theatres of love and death, invention and phenomena, a gift shop of original objects, daring performance, comic relief, arcades of fiction, and halls of art from the future all beyond the horizon of your imagination"