Artists Space

The five-night music festival in May 1978 at the legendary gallery and performance venue Artists Space, at 105 Hudson Street in Tribeca, had no title. The flyers on the fences around vacant lots in Lower Manhattan said only “BANDS” with a lineup: Terminal, Gynecologists, Theoretical Girls, Daily Life, Tone Death, Contortions, DNA, Mars, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. In the audience were The Village Voice’s Robert Christgau, John Rockwell from The New York Times and Brian Eno, in town to produce the Talking Heads’ second album. The Contortions’ set on Friday night was halted when James Chance, the group’s singer, and Mr. Christgau got into a fistfight. Tickets cost $3.

The Artists Space festival was No Wave’s apogee. Theoretical Music: No Wave, New Music, and the New York Art Scene, 1978-1983, an awkwardly titled three-day event last week at Issue Project Room in Gowanus, organized by Branden Joseph and David Grubbs, was the latest in a series of critical reconsiderations of the movement. If punk was nihilism sprung from political and economic turmoil, No Wave rose from the ashes of such gloom, when even nihilism had expired. The style disregarded melody and tone in favor of rhythm and texture. Its influence remains in the sounds emanating from the ever healthy population of makeshift clubs in New York, but the movement was little more than a cultural blip in New York history: the brief harmony of music, visual art and film in downtown Manhattan, showcased nightly at New Cinema on Astor Place, at small venues like CBGB and quasi-legal spaces like the Mudd Club.

Photos: Julie Corton/No Wave Post-Punk Underground