A Room Full of Televisions: The Kitchen Opens on Mercer Street, 1971
In 1971 Steina and Woody Vasulka carried their monitors into a disused hotel kitchen in Greenwich Village and opened a room where video was performed live.
In 1971 Steina and Woody Vasulka, artists and musicians who had been showing video to friends in their own loft, moved the gatherings into a former kitchen at the Mercer Arts Center, a cluster of theatres carved out of the catering rooms and ballrooms of the Broadway Central Hotel in Greenwich Village. "Friends, and friends of friends would come almost daily," they later wrote. "The transition became inevitable." They called it The Kitchen. Its monitors were wired through a matrix so images could travel around the room, and the space was laid out with dance in mind.
An early invitation promised "sounds and images" made "artificially from various frequencies." The programming was open. Wednesday screenings needed no invitation, and the Vasulkas said their idea "was not to select or curate, but to mediate and accommodate." There was no office, only a pay phone by the door, and at the end of the night the audience helped stack the chairs and sweep the floor. The young directors who ran it, among them Rhys Chatham, Shridhar Bapat and Dimitri Devyatkin, were artists themselves.
The music series opened on October 4, 1971, with Laurie Spiegel playing Harmonic Rhythms on a Buchla synthesizer. Video artists jammed live with whoever played, the video synthesizer builders Bill Etra and Eric Siegel were part of the circle, and festivals of video, of computer art and of women's video followed. Electronic Arts Intermix, the nonprofit founded by the gallerist Howard Wise, gave The Kitchen its administrative umbrella until it became its own nonprofit in 1973. Steina's Violin Power, in which her violin shakes the video image of her own playing, grew partly out of the research she did there.
By the time the Broadway Central Hotel collapsed on August 3, 1973, The Kitchen had already moved out. That November it reopened in a loft at 484 Broome Street in SoHo under its first executive director, Robert Stearns, and the Vasulkas left for Buffalo. Looking back in 1977, they described a room that "was only as successful as the artist of that particular day. It was reborn every 24 hours."
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