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

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

Citation:
Lawrence, T. (2007) ‘Connecting with the Cosmic: Arthur Russell, Rhizomatic Musicianship, and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-92’ Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies 3 (3).