Mitch Corber is a New York City neo-Beat poet, an eccentric performance artist, and no wave videographer known for his rapid whimsically comical montage and collage style. He has been associated with Collaborative Projects, Inc. (aka Colab), participated in Public Arts International/Free Speech and The Times Square Show , [1] and is creator-director of cable TV long-running weekly series Poetry Thin Air in New York City [2] and its on-line poetry/video archive. He has worked closely with ABC No Rio, [3] Colab TV and the MWF Video Club [4] and his audio art (often musique concrète collages) have been published on Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine three times. He is a recipient of a NY Foundation for the Arts Fellowship grant (1987) in the field of emerging artforms.
Corber graduated from UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television in 1971 and shortly thereafter moved to New York City's Lower East Side, became influenced by the slide show performances and films of Jack Smith, and became an early member of Colab. Corber contributed to All Color News, Just Another Asshole and X Magazine. [5]
During this period he became known as a performance artist with his Corber/Jolson Goes to Harlem performance. [6] Riding the subway in blackface, Corber sang My Mammy crouched on one knee in true Al Jolson style. Lines include, "I'd walk a million miles For one of your smiles, My Mammy!"
He also appeared in James Nares's 1978 well-known no wave 82-minute color Super-8 film entitled Rome 78. The narrative is about the Roman emperor Caligula now set in a shabby 1978 downtown Manhattan apartment. As such, it proposes an analogy between ancient Rome and modern America as cultural empires. [7] Despite its large cast in period costumes, the work is never made out to be a serious undertaking, with actors who interject scenes with self-conscious laughter, and deliver seemingly improvised lines with over the top bravado. [8]
In 1988 Corber conducted a taped interview with Leonard Cohen that was purchased by the New York Public Library for its collection. He also produced a documentary on the New York Microtonal music group that was founded by Johnny Reinhard.
Corber is an awardee of a New York Foundation for the Arts grant as producer of Poetry Thin Air Cable Show and for founding the Thin Air Video Poetry DVD Archives: which includes material on Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, John Ashbery, Diane di Prima, and John Cage.
He has created a DVD called John Cage: Man and Myth (1990) with appearances by David Antin, Glenn Branca, Jackson Mac Low and others. On August 24, 2006, Corber presented Cage Live Mix: Four Hours and 33 Minutes at A Gathering of the Tribes, impresario Steve Cannon's legendary venue. It was a multi-screen, multi-speaker, multi-room, ambient music mix of John Cage: Man and Myth material, that included video, audio, interview, poetry and various inserts, some chance-oriented with some audience participation. The title Four Hours and 33 Minutes refers to Cage's notorious silent piano sonata 4′33″ . Spread through different areas of Tribes Gallery, it was, said the artist, "an opportunity for chance events and audience participation." [9] The program included interview sequences with Cage and the many avant-garde artists who contributed homage interviews, including David Antin, Philip Glass, Richard Kostelanetz, Jackson Mac Low, Alison Knowles, Allen Kaprow, pianist Grete Sultan, Marjorie Perloff, and microtonalist Johnny Reinhard. In 2015, Corber created a short documentary video called Ludlow Street with Clayton that features Clayton Patterson walking down the street, discussing its cultural demise due to gentrification. [10]
Corber is the author of the poetry collections Weather's Feather and Quinine. [11] Since the early 1980s Corber has read his poetry throughout New York City. His poems have appeared in Columbia Poetry Review, Vanitas, Nedge, Mirage, BlazeVOX, Blackbox Manifold 4, Listenlight, Polarity and tight.
He resides in East Village, Manhattan.
No wave was an avant-garde music genre and visual art scene that emerged in the late 1970s in Downtown New York City. The term was a pun based on the rejection of commercial new wave music. Reacting against punk rock's recycling of rock and roll clichés, no wave musicians instead experimented with noise, dissonance, and atonality, as well as non-rock genres like free jazz, funk, and disco. The scene often reflected an abrasive, confrontational, and nihilistic world view.
Ludlow Street runs between Houston and Division streets on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in New York City. Vehicular traffic runs south on this one-way street.
UbuWeb is a web-based educational resource for avant-garde material available on the internet, created by poet Kenneth Goldsmith and active from 1996 to 2023. It offered visual, concrete and sound poetry, expanding to include film and sound art mp3 archives.
Colab is the commonly used abbreviation of the New York City artists' group Collaborative Projects, which was formed after a series of open meetings between artists of various disciplines.
Live Skull is a post-punk/experimental rock band from New York City, formed in 1982.
Radio art is an aural art form that uses radio technology to transmit sound.
Launched from the Lower East Side, Manhattan in 1983 as a subscription only bimonthly publication, the Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine utilized the audio cassette medium to distribute no wave downtown music and audio art and was in activity for the ten years of 1983–1993.
Carlo McCormick is an American culture critic and curator living in New York City. He is the author of numerous books, monographs and catalogues on contemporary art and artists.
Tier 3 was an influential but short-lived 300-capacity no wave art nightclub in New York. Founded by Hilary Jaeger in 1979, Tier 3 was a major venue in the city's underground music and counterculture post-punk art scene, along with the Mudd Club. Live performances showcased punk rock, no wave, ska, noise music, free jazz, new wave and experimental music. The club was located at 225 West Broadway in the TriBeCa neighborhood of lower Manhattan.
Disband was an all-female No Wave performance group in New York City from 1978–1982. Modeled after a rock band, the members were artists rather than musicians. The band's sound was a type of a cappella No Wave. Disband performed mostly at art venues like Public Arts International/Free Speech, Franklin Furnace, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center and Hallwalls. Disband was popular with the Feminist art audience due to songs like "Every Girl", "Hey Baby", and "Fashions".
Jamie Nares is a British transgender woman artist living and working in New York City since 1974. Nares makes paintings and films ; played guitar in the no wave groups James Chance and the Contortions and the Del-Byzanteens ; and was a founding member of Colab.
Scott B and Beth B were among the best-known New York No Wave underground film makers of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
James Allan Curtis, known professionally as Diego Cortez, was an American filmmaker and art curator closely associated with the no wave period in New York City. Cortez was the co-founder of the Mudd Club, and he curated the influential post-punk art show New York/New Wave, which brought the then aspiring artist Jean-Michel Basquiat to fame.
Alan W. Moore is an art historian and activist whose work addresses cultural economies and groups and the politics of collectivity. After a stint as an art critic, Moore made video art and installation art from the mid-1970s on and performed in the 1979 Public Arts International/Free Speech series. He has published several books and runs the House Magic information project on self-organized, occupied autonomous social centers. His partial autobiography was published in 2022 in The Journal of Aesthetics & Protest as Art Worker: Doing Time in the New York Artworld. Moore lives in Madrid.
Coleen Fitzgibbon is an American experimental film artist associated with Collaborative Projects, Inc.. She worked under the pseudonym Colen Fitzgibbon between the years 1973–1980.
Joe Lewis is a post-conceptual non-media specific American artist and educator. Lewis was co-founding director of Fashion Moda in New York, where he curated and mounted numerous exhibitions and performance events. He also early on has been associated with Colab and ABC No Rio
The Real Estate Show was a squatted exhibition by New York artists' group Colab, on the subject of landlord speculation in real estate held on New Year's Day in a vacant city-owned building at 123 Delancey Street in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, New York City.
Cave Girls is a 1984 New York No Wave underground film by Kiki Smith created on Super 8 between 1981 and 1984. that makes use of Stan Brakhage-like montage cutting.
The Times Square Show was an influential collaborative, self-curated, and self-generated art exhibition held by New York artists' group Colab in Times Square in a shuttered massage parlor at 201 W. 41st and 7th Avenue during the entire month of June in 1980. The Times Square Show was largely inspired by the more radical Colab show The Real Estate Show, but unlike it, was open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, in what was then a Times Square full of porno theaters, peep shows, and red light establishments. In addition to experimental painting and sculpture, the exhibition incorporated music, fashion, and an ambitious program of performance and video. For many artists the exhibition served as a forum for the exchange of ideas, a testing-ground for social-directed figurative work in progress, and a catalyst for exploring new political-artistic directions.
Bradley Eros is an experimental film director, actor, curator, poet, and performance artist who also makes Musique concrète sound collages, music videos, photographs, live projection performances, works on paper and art objects.