Strolling through the immaculate grid of chain stores and frozen yogurt places that is SoHo, it’s difficult to imagine that —40 years ago — the neighborhood was a derelict, post-industrial artists’ playground, a wasteland of abandoned warehouses that — due to tax incentives and zoning laws — was inhabited only by artists. Curator and playwright Jessamyn Fiore’s new book, “112 Greene Street: The Early Years (1970-1974),” vividly portrays this fecund moment, focusing on the artist-run alternative space that was a hot house of site-specific, avant-garde art practice. The book arrives on the heels of last year's "112 Greene Street" exhibition at David Zwirner, which highlighted the work of several key players including Tina Girouard, Suzanne Harris, Richard Nonas, Alan Saret, the space’s founder Jeffrey Lew, as well as the late, great Gordon Matta-Clark.

While Matta-Clark is celebrated as a totemic figure of post-minimal art, 112 Greene Street, which served as his artistic laboratory, had slipped into the shadows of art history, as had many of Matta-Clark's friends and collaborators associated with the space. Fiore — the curator of the exhibition and the daughter of Jane Crawford, Matta-Clark's widow — collected interviews with many of the surviving members, compiling an oral history of the 122 Greene Street’s early years. The book, published by David Zwirner and Radius Books, officially launches today at David Zwirner’s pop-up bookstore at 533 West 19th Street.

Recently, Fiore spoke about the history of 112 Greene Street, it’s key players, and the spirit of experimentation and creative generosity that flourished in its early years. 

Was there a precedent for this kind of space?

There had been artist run spaces, but what made 112 Greene Street unique was that the work itself was site-specific and installation based. That really coincided with a moment of art history, from what was happening with post-minimalism to looking at process art to working with raw and industrial materials to that ethos — which I think 112 really captures — of interdisciplinary experimentation. It was the right space at the right time and that hadn’t happened before… [The artists] never referred to 112 as a gallery. They referred to it as a workshop. There was never an opening per se. It happened quite organically.

Did 112 serve as an incubator for Gordon Matta-Clark’s large-scale interventions in architecture?

Gordon was really inspired by the group of people he was working with…112 was almost his graduate school experience. His first solo show at 112 is where he presented his Bronx floors, which was his first cuttings piece, and also “Walls Paper,” which is one of my favorites. He took photographs of the walls of developments after they had been torn down and got them printed onto news sheet — very colorfully — and then pasted them on the wall as a kind of wallpaper. A wallpaper made of walls. And he also had a stack of them that people could take home, and put up their own "Walls Paper." It was a phenomenally beautiful, yet eloquent and simple way, to bring that experience into your own home... I think 112 was the first opportunity where Gordon really thought, “how do I address the problems with this architecture? With these urban development that are failing? How do I take what’s going on there and bring that into a gallery space. Is that even possible?”