These radical pictures show NYC’s most dangerous 1980s art garden
The Rivington School’s lesson in junk
Turning garbage into art may not seem so revolutionary in an age when Burning Man culture has gone mainstream and recycling is for moms and squares. But in 1985, when a group of renegade artists began filling a vacant lot in New York with trash and calling it sculpture, it was still a novel concept. In name and action, the Rivington School embodied a “fuck off” ethos closely tied to the previous decade’s punk rock maelstrom, reflecting the attitude of artists entrenched in a lower Manhattan on the cusp of gentrification. At the time there was plenty of empty space on the Lower East Side. And a hell of a lot of garbage to spare.
Anti-commercial and anarchist by design, the Rivington School was a tongue-in-cheek response to the prominent art movements, or “schools,” of the time. Its members—a loose band of aesthetic misanthropes with influences ranging from performance art to graffiti to Neoism—concentrated their iconoclastic assault on the establishment from an underground bar at 42 Rivington Street. Dubbed the No Se No Social Club, it was positioned across the street from a shuttered public school—the “Rivington School”—from which the artists appropriated their name.
A new exhibition highlights the work of Toyo Tsuchiya, No Se No’s resident photographer and an active participant in the Rivington Sculpture Garden, a twisted, junkyard vision that would become the group’s most enduring legacy. In his images, and others by artist Linus Coraggio, the garden’s ad hoc salvaging and construction process emerges as an extended party predicated on the young artists’ belief that no one gave a shit what they were doing. And mostly they didn’t. But as the threatening thicket of gnarled fencing, car parts, and abandoned electronics continued to grow and densify, the owners of the lot took notice. In late 1987, a particularly tall portion of the sculpture collapsed, nearly killing a group of people, and the city dismantled the piece in November of that year. Though the garden was resurrected twice again at different locations, it, along with the rest of the East Village’s vibrant arts scene, was under persistent threat from the shifting demographics—and real-estate values—of the neighborhood. Today, the Rivington School is remembered as a little-known chapter in New York’s art history, and one of the most authentic moments for outsider postmodernism at the end of the 20th century.
Photos courtesy Gallery 98 from the online exhibition Linus Coraggio, Toyo Tsuchiya, and the Rivington School, 1983–95.
