Talk:GAle GAtes et al.

Proposed New Draft

Responding to Justlettersandnumbers's message strongly discouraging paid advocates to write Wikipedia pages after my edits were blocked.

I am actually not being paid for the edits I am proposing here in the talk. In 2017, I was paid a modest sum by founder Michael Counts to create his page; I worked for him and the company from 1997 to 2003 as a grantwriter (for a similarly modest sum throughout) and it was a natural continuation of my relationship with him post-closure. I acknowledged the 2017 payment on my Userpage as required.

Michael asked me also to create a page for GAle GAtes et al., which I did in March 2019. Technically, at that point I finished the job I was paid for.

When the GAle GAtes et al. page was nominated for deletion in July 2020, I felt it was my responsibility as a former member with extensive firsthand knowledge of the company (and who has volunteered to write unpaid about the company following its closure before, for example for the final report of The Greenwall Foundation's Arts and Humanities Program pp 59-64) to establish the notability that was being challenged. I made extensive revisions to the text I myself had written a year and four months ago.

While I am not being paid to be an advocate for the company now, I am respecting the reasons Justlettersandnumbers blocked my editing and am now adding my proposed edits, additions and citations in the talk as instructed.

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GAle GAtes et al. was a visual art and performance company active in New York City from 1995 to 2003. The company was co-founded by director, designer and visual artist Michael Counts, performer and producer Michelle Stern and scholar and Butoh performer John Oglevee. The company is widely regarded as a pioneer of immersive theater.

GAle GAtes et al. was notable for the epic quality and visual sophistication of its productions, all of which were directed and designed by Counts. The sets were constructed by resident artists and through-composed scores created by resident composer Joe Diebes.

In the first two years, GAle GAtes et al. productions were mounted in multiple indoor and outdoor locations in New York, Thailand and Japan ranging from the vacant floors of skyscrapers to the side of a mountain at Min Tanaka's Body Weather Farm. In 1997, the company took up residence in a 40,000 sq ft warehouse space at 37 Main Street in Dumbo, Brooklyn for which owner David Walentas offered an affordable lease in return for the company attracting visitors to what was then a forbidding neighborhood.

At the warehouse, the company produced five large scale performance installations and presented numerous gallery exhibitions and performances by guest artists and curators. In 2002, the company once again began to present works further afield, including a video installation in the DUMBO Clocktower with a radio simulcast, a performance installation in the Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria's Performance on 42nd series, and live performance installations in the windows and parking lot of a restaurant in The Hamptons.

GAle GAtes et al. fortified the careers of numerous emerging artists and curators and was an important launching pad for the careers of core members and collaborators who have gone on to gain national and international notability. Cynthia Hopkins was a featured performer in multiple productions and collaborated with resident artists Tom Fruin and Jeff Sugg on several independent projects. Kate Moran was also a featured performer in multiple productions before building a successful film career in France. Sam Gold was an assistant director, and Adrienne Campbell Holt a performer who also directed and produced events in DUMBO while in residence for a company she founded, NEST. Museum Director Anne Ellegood collaborated with GAle GAtes et al. to organize the Emerging Curator Series at the space while she herself was an emerging curator at the New Museum, including one exhibition curated by soon-to-be Director of The Kitchen Debra Singer. Visual artists featured in the Series included Candice Breitz, Patty Chang and future Turner Prize nominee Jim Lambie.

The company closed in 2003 due to a combination of the economic fallout of 9/11 and the resident artists pursuing an increasing number of independent projects.

References

Resident Artists

Michael Counts, director, designer and writer

Michelle Stern, performer and producer

Michael Anderson, collage artist

Joe Diebes, composer

Tom Fruin, sculptor and installation artist

Jeff Sugg, Technical Artist

References

Critical Reception

Peter Marks of the New York Times called GAle GAtes et al. "an adventurous troupe with one foot in the world of post-modern art and the other in downtown performance" and Counts a "mad genius"." Douglas Davis of Art in America described The Field of Mars as "a sprawling work so brilliantly imploded, at once by its acting and its technology" and the audience as “dazzled witnesses to a cosmic event." He went on to describe GAle GAtes et al.'s performance format as echoing that of the early Happenings of the Living Theatre, Judson Dance Theater and the Squat Theatre, "but The Field of Mars was more sophisticated, complex and controlled than these predecessors... In the end, GAle GAtes is entirely suited to the information age. The era of an extended artist's theater is upon us." In his book Theatre, Robert Cohen described Counts as "not only the heir of Robert Wilson's achievement but also a current leader of a vigorous new performance and theater art" and commented "Artist Michael Counts' astonishing, if short-lived, Brooklyn performance art/theatre troupe, GAle GAtes et al., received national acclaim for 1839, as seemingly free association of the complex relationships between narrative, images, and human memory, employing both Greek tragedy and high-tech sound and videography and creating intriguingly beautiful stage pictures." In a review of Tilly Losch in PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, Michael Rush commented "Given the deteriorating state of late twentieth-century performance art (identity monologues, new vaudeville comedy routines), aficionados of the form may well find solace that someone as energetic as Counts still feels strong affinity for the artful abstractions with which theatre artists like Liz LeCompte, Robert Wilson, George Coates, Richard Foreman and John Jesurun nourished us. This is not to suggest that Counts is an 80s clone: he isn't... Like several visual artists of the moment (video/film appropriationist Douglas Gordon, Duchamp progeny Mike Bidlo, and Cindy Sherman come to mind) Counts has learned how to mine art-historical sources, combine them with postmodern literary and theatrical techniques, and emerge with his own brand of an exquisitely executed theater of images."

References

Funding

GAle GAtes et al. received grant support from the National Endowment for the Arts, Howard Gilman Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, Heathcote Art Foundation, The Greenwall Foundation, Andy Warhol Foundation, Jerome Foundation, Lily Auchincloss Foundation, and the New York State Council on the Arts.

References

Archive

The Exit Art Archives at Fales Library and Special Collections at New York University has extensive holdings of GAle GAtes et al. archival materials.

References

Productions, Presentations and Exhibitions

• 1995 The Making of a Mountain
• 1995 90 Degrees from an Equinox? Where are We? And Where are We Going?
• 1996 To SEA: Another Mountain
• 1996 Departure
• 1996 Ark
• 1997 Oh… A Fifty-Year Dart
• 1997 wine-blue-open-water
• 1997 I Dug a Pit a Meter Six in Either Direction and Filled it Full of Sake. I Mixed in Honey and Milk and Poured It Over Barley and Pine Nuts and Rice and Onion and Fruit and Blood and Stopped
• 1997 To SEA: Another Ocean
• 1997 The Field of Mars(text by Ruth Margraff)
• 1997-9 Sonic Adventure Series (curated by Joe Diebes)
• 1998 Tilly Losch
• 1999 1839
• 1999 Size Matters (curated by Mike Weiss)
• 2001 So Long Ago I Can’t Remember (text by Kevin Oakes)
• 2001 Strange Birds (opera by Joe Diebes)
• 2001 Still Life With Microphone (conceived and performed by Todd Reynolds with Evan Ziporyn, Theo Bleckmann, and David Cossin, designed by Michael Counts)
• 2001 Return (choreographed and designed by Julia Mandle)
• 2002 Looking Forward
• 2002 Avalanche Thoughts (directed and designed by Julia Bardsley, music by Andrew Poppy, Tania Chen, piano)
• 2002 Transparent Architecture (curated by Anne Ellegood)
• 2002 superlounge (curated by Andréa Salerno and Mari Spirito)
• 2002 Mimic (curated by Robert Boyd)
• 2002 The Three Birds
• 2002 The World: An Immersive Installation Performance
• 2003 Radiohole's Wurst

Kbaker121 (talk) 21:02, 2 August 2020 (UTC)

References