The Mercer Arts Center’s many rooms provided a home for underground rock, contemporary dance, Off-Off-Broadway, and even Shirley Clarke’s video experiments. The former filmmaker embraced the egalitarian potential of video as an alternative to broadcast television, a mass medium that encouraged passive media consumption. “It was very important for her that it should go back and forth in a two-way type of communication,” recalled Andrew Gurian, her longtime assistant. “She was very democratic and ahead of her time in that way. And I think she really was excited by the fact that all this equipment was getting smaller and smaller and more accessible to everyone.” Clarke also found creative ways to subvert the masculine-coded domain of electronics. “One day Shirley just painted all the equipment pink,” Gurian said. “You associate it with six-year-old girls and their dolls, which I think was the point. She constantly would refer to what we did as being ‘playful.’ We were adults playing around. So if you wound up with a pink screwdriver, there was something lighthearted about that. It desterilized the equipment so it became an extension of your eye and your hand.” Clarke’s aim was to make the hardware feel more user-friendly, so that no one felt excluded. The Kitchen, cofounded by Steina and Woody Vasulka, provided a testing ground for Clarke and others to imagine these new modes of electronic communication. “Shirley’s idea was to have video always going, constantly there,” Steina said. “So the first programming we had was video on Wednesdays, an open house where anybody could come in and show stuff.”

From Chapter 28 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore