Connecting with the Cosmic: Arthur Russell, Rhizomatic Musicianship, and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-92

Abstract

During the 1970s and early 1980s, a diverse group of artists,\nmusicians, sculptors, video filmmakers and writers congregated in\ndowntown New York and forged a radical creative network.\nDistinguished by its level of interactivity, the network discarded\nestablished practices in order to generate new, often-interdisciplinary\nforms of art that melded aesthetics and community. “All these artists\nwere living and working in an urban geographical space that was not\nmore than twenty-by-twenty square blocks,” notes Marvin J. Taylor,\neditor of The Downtown Book. “Rarely has there been such a\ncondensed and diverse group of artists in one place at one time, all\nsharing many of the same assumptions about how to make new art.” It was, in short, a remarkable period in the history of\norchestral and popular music in terms of aesthetic innovation and\nsocial relations as well as the way in which creativity and sociality are\nbound together. Arthur Russell, I argue in this essay, was not only a\nrepresentative product of the downtown music scene, but also that\nhis interactions with a range of musicians, scenes, spaces and\ntechnologies marked out the network’s radical potential.

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