Throughout Summer, 2020, ISSUE and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council presented The Steve Circuit, an episodic series of videos and digital artwork dedicated to the late beloved poet Steve Dalachinsky developed by his wife, painter and poet Yuko Otomo, and interdisciplinary artist Matt Mottel. Born in Brooklyn in 1946, Dalachinsky was an unforgettable fixture within particular strains of experimental music, poetry, and art—and at cultural happenings and gatherings of all kinds in Lower Manhattan and beyond. Dalachinsky was an important figure to many. He passed away September 16th, 2019.
Throughout these episodes, Steve Dalachinsky’s text, collage, and voice was a cultural prescription, in Mottel’s words, a “weekly dose of much needed ‘VITAMIN NYC’—a poet-biotic formula that celebrated the art and life of Steve Dalachinsky.”
On September 16th, 2020, The Steve Circuit concludes with Walking The Steve Circuit, a video essay by Yuko Otomo and Matt Mottel. They will share their own insight, stories and “astral logick” as they return to the sites featured in each of the six episodic broadcasts. The “subterranean spirit” is alive and in the street.
Steve’s art was created in tandem with the public life he lived. The places he inhabited—arts venues, community gardens, the New York Public Library neighborhood branch, his Spring Street sidewalk store—were all part of his daily routine. He was influenced by the culture he witnessed. He created his art both in public and at home. Late at night, in his apartment, after returning from film screenings, art openings, and multiple concerts, he returned to his collage artwork and to type up the poems he had written by hand during the day out in the world.
Throughout the six episodes of The Steve Circuit, these historical sites serve as meditations pairing Dalachinsky text, recordings, and artwork, with additional artistic collaborators who were part of the Dalachinsky orbit. The online cultural map and presentation provided a “virtual polaroid snapshot” of Downtown New York’s cultural history.
A note from Matt Mottel:
“In 1998, as a 17 year old Upper West Side teenager, I started my conscious absorption of downtown New York cultural history by meeting Steve Dalachinsky. He became my friend and collaborator for life. After the gigs were over and the hang ended, we walked—from Tonic to his stoop on Spring Street. We spoke the whole time with critique and his education about what we had just heard—nightly moonlight university. Once the sun rose, down the street from his beatific apartment, he peddled rare records and books; sidewalk hustle. I was there daily to learn / absorb with his chums from another planet: Rashied Ali, Tuli Kupferberg, his wife Yuko—equal as a poet and artist. Steve Dalachinsky—didn’t oxidize—he polished nyc street grit into a fine art. The world was his peer—he emasculated the gradation of hierarchy; the gravity of his orbit is eternal.”
Matthew Mottel
Summer 2020
This event will stream on The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Website
Yuko Otomo is a visual artist and a bilingual poet of Japanese origin. She also writes art criticism, essays, travelogues, translates and keeps her cultural journal. She showed her visual work at Tribes Gallery, Anthology Film Archives Courthouse Gallery, ABC No Rio, Brecht Forum, Gallery 128 and Vision Festival etc. She read at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s, Bowery Poetry Club, The Stone, ISSUE Project Room, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Cornelia St. Café, NYU, and NYPL in NYC and in France, Germany and Japan. Her publications include Garden: Selected Haiku (Beehive Press), Small Poems (Ugly Ducking Press), The Hand of the Poet (UDP), Cornell Box Poems (Sisyphus Press), PINK (Sisyphus Press), STUDY & Other Poems on Art (UDP), Elements (Feral Press), KOAN (New Feral Press), FROZEN HEATWAVE: a collaborative linked poem project with Steve Dalachinsky (Luna Bisonte Prods) and the most recent Anonymous Landscape (Lithic Press). She lives in New York City.
Matt Mottel enlivens primary source materials and creates collaborative artworks that amplify knowledge and provide access to subterranean culture. Social activism and cultural community are threads that run throughout Mottel’s extensive body of performances, videos, sculptures and music. Mottel’s comprehensive artistic foraging stems from his native New York upbringing. ‘Moonlight University’ was in session, with Steve Dalachinsky and Yuko Otomo, who he first encountered as a teenager on the downtown new york scene in the late 90’s. In 2010, Mottel was selected by the late ISSUE Project Room founder Suzanne Fiole as an Artist in Residence, and it was in this period that he developed an ongoing multimedia project that utilizes the cultural photography of his father, Syeus Mottel. He is currently researching the 18th century era of the keytar and is also inspired by the 24 hour format that was HnH Bagels…. ‘it's everything.’
