Photo: © Toyo Tsuchiya. From the series No Se No 99 Nights, 1983.
Picture It: New York City, summer of 1983. For 99 nights in a row, at a little spot called No Se No (Spanish for “I don’t know nothing”) down on the Lower East Side hosted a cabaret unlike anything that would ever see the light of day. It was strictly underground, for those in the know, a raw artistic explosion of anything goes.
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On any given night, you could have wandered in only to discover Warhol Superstar Jackie Curtis performing Ripping Off Layers to Find Roots, the one-act play James Dean wrote for his audition at The Actors Studio. Another night you stumble upon Yugoslavian artist Dragan Ilic with power tools duct-taped to his biceps and back, furiously hammering pencils into the bar. Still another night could see girls from around the way jump on the bar and dance to Michael Jackson ‘cause Thriller was everything back in the days.
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99 Nights, as the performance art festival was known, was a pure, unbridled New York phenomenon featuring a melange of song and dance, poetry and beyond. It was unlike anything the city had ever seen before—or since—and were it not for the photographs of Japanese artist Toyo Tsuchiya, most of us would have missed it entirely. Tsuchiya was there nearly every night, camera in hand, documenting the scene with casual insouciance. His photographs are simple straightforward affairs that embrace the edge wholeheartedly, never gawking or gaping but rather making the extraordinary and amazing a regular part of life.
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Photo: © Toyo Tsuchiya. From the series No Se No 99 Nights, 1983.