Avant-garde film scenes coalesced around charismatic figures running open crash-pad lofts

Evidence

Many people stayed with Jofen. Although steering clear of the loft’s labyrinthian sleeping quarters, Sitney noted that it was “always filled with people, more women than men. Most of them seemed dangerous or desperate in my nineteen-year-old eyes.” Sitney came to imagine the loft as a harem. The thirty-eight-year-old scion of what some thought, perhaps in exaggeration, a Hasidic dynasty—spirited out of Bialystok before the Germans arrived in 1941, arriving in the United States by way of China—Jofen was something of a cult leader. “Magnetic if you didn’t find him despicable,” Joan Adler recalled. “He really believed that he knew and could teach.” Because many of the loft’s inhabitants sat “gazing silently into the blank air for days at a time,” Adler considered the place a shooting gallery. It might also have been called a crash pad or a disreputable antecedent of the Warhol Factory. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 419

Categorization

• XREF: The crash-pad loft as incubator of an art scene directly parallels the ‘cheap rent + physical proximity’ conditions the reader is cataloguing for why avant-gardes happen.
• SHARE: Worth sending to anyone interested in pre-Factory Warhol antecedents — Jofen’s loft as a proto-Factory crash pad is a niche overlap.