Purple Magazine
— S/S 2014 issue 21

night pictures

AREA THE NIGHT CLUB AS ART by GLENN O’BRIEN
Night pictures by OLIVIER ZAHM
purple dinners by STÉPHANE FEUGÈRE

 

AREA. Even the name proclaimed the concept, intentions, and ambitions of the new nightclub: to be unlike anything that preceded it. Area? A prescribed-extent two-dimensional planar surface. It could have been called Space, but that would have been too 2001. Area had the perfectly circumscribed tone to describe an unprecedented project.

Area was named the way artists reckon a place. It had the deadpan formality of Artists Space (1972), The Performing Garage (1975), or Storefront for Art and Architecture (1982). And as Area revealed itself, it was essentially a space that was made to be completely built up and torn down repeatedly in a series of thematic identities. It was to be nightclub as art.

Nightlife had flirted with art before. In 1912 Frida Strindberg, the wife of the playwright, opened the Cave of the Golden Calf in a London basement. It was decorated by the painters Spencer Gore and Charles Ginner, the avant-garde sculptor Jacob Epstein, and Wyndham Lewis, the writer, painter, and founder of Vorticism. In 1916 Dadaists Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings created the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in association with other artists, including Tristan Tzara and Jean Arp.

In the 1960s, under the influence of the “happenings” movement, Andy Warhol created a multimedia show called The Exploding Plastic Inevitable featuring the Velvet Underground and Nico, with Edie Sedgwick, Gerard Malanga, and Ronnie Cutrone as dancers, accompanied by films and a light show. Originally housed in a Polish club, the Dom, it was more of a traveling happening than a nightclub, but it presented art in a club context.

In the ’60s and early ’70s Mickey Ruskin’s restaurant, Max’s Kansas City, was decorated with works by New York’s most prominent artists in exchange for food and drink (mostly drink), and later Ruskin establishments, including the Lower Manhattan Ocean Club and Chinese Chance, were similar artists’ dens.

[Table of contents]

S/S 2014 issue 21

Table of contents

purple NEWS

purple BEST OF THE SEASON

purple INTERVIEW

purple FASHION WOMEN

purple FASHION MEN

purple LOVE

purple DOCUMENTS

purple BEAUTY

purple TRAVEL

purple NAKED

purple NIGHT

purple STORY

purple VISUAL ESSAY

© Purple Institute

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