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'Alternative spaces is a general term referring to the various ways in which artists show their work outside commercial galleries and formally constituted museums. It includes the use of studios as exhibition space, the temporary use of buildings for work done on site, and co-operatives of artists, whether for the purpose of putting on one exhibition or for running a gallery on a long-term basis.'[[footnote 1]] This description by Lawrence Alloway gives us an adequate starting-point for the assessment of a major new art phenomenon of the last decade.

The vigorous growth of alternative spaces in recent years across the United States tends to favour big-city habitats. Their identities reflect the cities and communities they serve: New York, capital of the corporate art world, a very Europe-oriented and tradition-conscious city, possesses the greatest number of alternative spaces; Los Angeles, the megalopolis which seems to lie somewhere between a Brave New World and the Land of Oz, has fewer, but more radically experimental ones.

In New York assessments of alternative spaces range from the fulsome to the dismissive. One New York artist likens the phenomenon to a power-house generating most of the new ideas found in art today in the United States. Another painter, also in New York, views the same phenomenon as nothing more than a bourgeois art reform movement, implying thereby that it poses no real alternative to the capitalist network of commercial galleries, art museums and institutions.

Alternative spaces began in New York about ten years ago. Frustrated by the corporate art world's reluctance to take risks, non-established artists, among whom were many feminists, and a few established artists who wanted to show their experimental works, began creating their own exhibition areas in store-fronts, lofts and studios in downtown Manhattan. [[footnote 2]]

10 Downtown was one of the first. In the spring of 1968 ten artists (five painters, five sculptors) living in lower Manhattan opened their studios to the public. It became and remains an annual event run entirely by artists; the ten who exhibit each year are chosen by the previous year's ten. Many of the artists, who belong to the Post-Minimal school, and who range in age from their late sixties down to their early twenties, have been described by Lawrence Alloway as 'artists with a solid record of work, but without a matching history of exhibitions.' [[footnote 3]] For some this has changed; since 10 Downtown began several artists who have shown there have become well-known figures in the New York art world, who exhibit in commercial as well as non-commercial galleries.

Without a curator to purify the environment for art (some painters and sculptors do not clean their studios but just open up the doors) work in 10 Downtown is very accessible. And not only to other artists; the general public may also benefit; the open-studio event shows that art does not originate on Mount Olympus.

In January 1970, an artists' cooperative gallery appeared, 55 Mercer (so called from its address). This was one of the first alternative spaces with a fixed address in SoHo. [[footnote 4]] (SoHo was formerly an area of small industries, businesses and wholesale operations. In 1966 an amendment to a zoning law permitted artists to make their studios in the loft spaces left behind by vacating businesses. In the beginning rents were cheap and this opened the area up to colonization by artists. Subsequently the corporate art world moved in.)[[footnote 5]] 55 Mercer is a non-profit artists' members cooperative gallery which grew, in part, out of the Art Workers' Coalition, an early artists' rights organization founded to protest against the policies of the Museum of Modern Art in the late 60s. Seeking self-determination, 55 Mercer's founding members (fifteen, now stabilized at twenty members) wanted to establish a non-commercial showplace for art and ideas which would also sell their works. To do this they dug into their own pockets. And they still do; their dues, $354.00 per year if they are going to have a show, cover the basic operating expenses. The New York State Council on the Arts has, for the past three years, paid for invitational shows, leaving the invited artists to pay only the publicity costs. Guest artists, a third category, meet publicity expenses, and also pay a fee of
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$354.00 to cover the rent and electricity for the exhibition period of two to three weeks.

The artist and friends are solely responsible for the publicity, hanging and guarding of the works and even, when everyone has gone home after the preview, such a chore as bagging the garbage. The hard economics of most alternative spaces prevent that system of coddling (or traditional division of labour) typical of conventional galleries which deprive the artists of control over or participation in the art at the point where it reaches the public.

Artists may well benefit from being spared this kind of management. But at the same time the artist without a gallery has to face a host of problems, other than those connected with organizing an exhibition, which commercial and institutional art organizations have traditionally handled. Since 1971 there has existed an organization where artists can go for advice on all kinds of practical problems. Known as the Foundation for the Community of Artists (280 Broadway), it was founded by artists - it also grew out of the Art Workers' Coalition - and continues to be the run by people in the arts (among its fifteen directors are painters, sculptors, writers and film-makers as well as an architect). The Federation gives advice, and publishes and distributes information on such problems relating to the law in general, copyright, pricing, housing, jobs, grants and health hazards. The Federation concentrates its energies with some success; it has made gains on the bureaucratic frontlines in the fight for artists' self-determination.

The Kitchen, founded the same year, 1971 (and now located, since 1973, at 484 Broome) has become a landmark centre for video, music, intermedia and dance. [[footnote 6]] In recent years it has also expanded onto the wavebands of mainstream communications in New York, seeking to discharge its responsibility toward the wider (non-artist) public. In 1968 some of its video programmes reached, via Manhattan Cable Television, a potential audience of over some 80,000 subscribers in that district. More recently Kitchen concerts have been beamed over several radio stations, including WBAI-FM, New York. Also, plans are afoot to telecast material live from The Kitchen and to use tapes from its video archives over SoHo television, established in spring 1978.

The Kitchen's activities and plans to reach the mainstream American audience are exciting and ambitious; perhaps over-ambitious. The maws of the mass-communications industry, like those of the corporate art world, are always ready to gobble up new reputations and their vehicles. The Kitchen congratulates itself that 'many of the artists first presented at The Kitchen are now shown in major museums and galleries. The perimeters of the art world have widened to include them.' [[footnote 7]]

Sometimes only a solid commitment to the experimental prevents an alternative space from becoming a launching-pad into the corporate art world. Helene Winer, the director of Artists Space (105 Hudson), the exhibition gallery for the Committee for the Visual Arts, established in 1972, seems to have this kind of dedication and is reputed to be willing to 'go out on a limb.' The Committee's gallery, programmes and funds sponsor forms of art too controversial and incomprehensible for commercial galleries for museums to show.

Alanna Heiss, founder of P.S.1. (Project Studios 1 which opened in 1976) and other well-known alternative spaces, the Clocktower, the Idea Warehouse and the Sculpture Factory in downtown Manhattan, also goes out on a limb. Obtaining P.S.1, a former public school, now equipped with large exhibition areas and 35 low-cost studios, slightly adapted from former classrooms, at a rent of $1,000 a year for twenty years from New York City, was a coup for the Institute of Art and Urban Resources (108 Leonard).

The Institute, the parent organization of the four alternative spaces founded by Alanna Heiss in 1970, functions as a launching-pad for the non-established and an arena for the established. [[footnote 8]] The priorities of the Institute are, as Alanna Heiss stated recently, the promoting of artists first, their art second, and good relations with their audiences third. [[footnote 9]] To this end the Institute keeps cosy with the corporate art world;

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