Martin Beck … for hours, days, weeks, or weeks at a time (26 June 2025)
timlawrenceinfo.com

 Almost two years ago to the day I purchased an album titled environments 3, the third release in Irv Teibel’s environments series, released on Irv Teibel’s custom label, Syntonic Research, Inc. An artist based in New York and Vienna, Martin introduced me to the recordings, which formed one of the key elements of a new exhibition he was developing on the capturing, preserving and interpreting of environments. As soon as I eyed the album cover while listening for the first time I thought, “Martin is onto something here.”

Little did I know how far Martin would take it. The first iteration of the exhibition appeared as in place (environments) (2020), a 121-minute high-definition video that featured environmental shots taken in a shared home in Joshua Tree while selections from Teibel’s environments recordings played on a home stereo. Further elements appeared in a show that took place in Salzburger-Kunstverein in 2024, echo*, a collaboration between Martin and artist Sung Tieu, most notably a selection of Martin’s epic pencil drawings of ferns. Then came … for hours, days, or weeks at a time, the new, most developed articulation of the idea to date, which opened at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Connecticut on 30 March and runs through to 5 October.¹

As I leafed through the … for hours… catalogue I immediately grasped that Martin had come up with something every bit as compelling as Last Night, his previous artwork series that appeared in multiple exhibitions.² It had been easy for me to become absorbed with Last Night. After all, the works revolved around a symbolic party hosted by David Mancuso at the Loft, a figure, party and in effect set of practices that I’ve devoted a significant portion of the last 28 years to narrating and supporting. Much more significantly, the cutting edge of the artistic journalistic ecosystem lauded the work. Artforum included an extended review of Last Night and the show in which it first appeared in full, rumours and murmurs, in its “best of” review of 2017.³ In 2022 MoMA bought the most developed piece in the series and in 2024 arranged a wildly successful exhibition of Last Night. I wondered: how can Martin possibly follow this up? The … for hours… catalogue answered the question.

However it was only when I started to write this essay that I grasped that Last Night anticipated everything. One of its themes, after all, is that endings don’t amount to endings.

* * * * * * *

Last Night draws heavily on a rare, thirteen-and-a-half-hour recording of a Loft party, hosted by David Mancuso at the Loft on 99 Prince Street on 2 June 1984, the penultimate party he held at that location, half way through its 15th year. It’s the only such recording of its type because David didn’t like the idea of recording parties, or trying to capture them, and only a handful more would follow in the 2000s, none of them as expansive as by then the Loft had become a more circumscribed entity.

What would become a series of works first appeared as an art book published by White Columns in 2013.⁴ After that Last Night manifested as a significantly more ambitious installation that featured a thirteen-and-a-half-hour film comprised of ten different close-up camera angles that captured the records playing in the same sequence as they’d appeared during the 1984 party. Martin teamed up with the independent filmmaker James Benning to carry out the filming. The video appears on a large screen and synched soundtrack that plays through an analogue stereo system that captures aspects of David’s own set-up. It generates a world that’s profoundly linked to the Loft but isn’t the Loft. Call it a Loft extension.

The last night video installation exhibited for the first time at the Kitchen, New York, in 2017. Dancers and art-gallery aficionados along with a relatively small intersection of visitors who were both entered the space, absorbed and experienced its information, and reminisced or asked questions or moved a little to the music. The book (along with errata) and the video installation then appeared alongside a Last Night picture/poem and vinyl installation at a major retrospective of Martin’s work held at Mumok, Austria’s largest modern art museum, in 2017. I travelled over to host a public conversation with Martin at the museum on Thursday 8 June.

Taking the opportunity to receive a guided tour of the exhibition from Martin before the evening talk, I was amazed. Up until now I’d only got to hold Last Night in my hands. Here I got to properly appreciate the depth and intentionality of his interest in and exploration of countercultural ideas and practices as well as similarly-minded articulations of alternative ways of living, even perception. Strikingly substantial, wide-ranging, sustained, precise and original, the exhibition presented an impressive body of rigorously conceptual work that combined a devotion to curation and exploration across a wide range of multimedia forms, often through surviving remnants of the culture or attempts to frame and even capture it. The collection expressed devotion and restraint, with Martin peering in, trying to observe or even somehow access the precipice of conjuncture as well as offer a roadmap for viewer-listeners to do the same.

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Martin’s journey into counterculture might have began when he and his brother started to listen to 1960s rock music in the Austrian Alps in the mid-1970s. “Music has often been an entry point into the cultures that generated those sounds,” Martin noted in an interview with November conducted in July 2023. “Musical cultures frequently envision different worlds and ways of being; they imagine futures that challenge whatever the mainstream is at a particular time. Maybe that’s what triggered my interest.”⁵ In the early 1990s Martin started to become “fascinated and bewildered by how countercultural moments and movements I was invested in started to get repackaged due to the availability of new technologies,” he added in one of several emails we exchanged while I was writing this piece.⁶

Martin suggests the example of DIY and punk’s cut-and-paste aesthetics. “They started to be digitally mimicked in slickly-produced, mass market magazines and typography, targeted at specific audiences,” he continued. “At the same time I also became fascinated with 1960s musical cultures being museum-ified, as when the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame opened in Cleveland, and the Hard Rock Cafe expanded and started to introduce displays of ephemera, especially in their Las Vegas venue.” In investigating these histories Martin is, he explained, “usually drawn to turning-point moments, to the paradoxes therein, where a single event, an artefact or a suite of artefacts, or a publishing trail open up possibilities for alternative futures but simultaneously haunt those possibilities.” He wants to explore how these historical moments are inevitably lost in time and can’t be recreated, yet certain artefacts carry traces of residual meaning that can help as we attempt to form our own imaginary relationship to the thing itself—a thing that was definitionally ephemeral. “I look for the paradoxes, openings that are closings that are openings,” he notes.

Martin explores the single event of the 1970 International Design Conference in Aspen, Colorado, in The Environmental Witch-Hunt (2008), a 10-minute film that features six people walking through a forest in Aspen, Colorado, before they sit to stage a panel discussion. The exchange quotes from an essay French theorist Jean Baudrillard delivered to the conference that attacks its theme and the environmental movement’s complicity with state-generated environmental catastrophe. The film accompanies Panel 2—“Nothing better than a touch of ecology and catastrophe to unite the social classes . . .” (2008), an installation that combines original pieces with archival material plus a film that documents the conference. Martin explored the publishing trail of self-published newsletters and books about utopian rural communes of the 1960s in series of works titled Directions, Headlines, and Irritating Behaviors (2010),” examining how “a (non-photographic) image of a new social body was displayed in ephemeral manifestations and instructions.”⁷ Martin’s 2012 book The Aspen Complex further explores what Artforumdescribes as “the intersection of culture and the ecological-industrial complex.”⁸

Martin found himself becoming particularly interested in the commodification of counterculture. “I often focused on the multiple meanings these processes generated,” he added. “On the one hand they gave access to important histories, on the other they obscured their formative contexts, which were often political and liberatory. I wanted to understand the contexts out of which these possible futures were created and learn from them, to learn how they came about and what of their constitutive forces still shape our present.”

In a 2015 interview Martin elaborated why the “somewhat paradoxical” character of the historical moments he turns to is significant. “Paradoxes point to possibilities and impossibilities,” he explained to with curator and writer Christina von Rotenhan. “The paradox is a figure capable of imaging multiple and complex ways of understanding history’s relation to the present; it can give form to the convergence of contradictory futures and multiple pasts embedded therein.”⁹ Martin’s intent is to present the paradox, not to project his own interpretation of it or solve it on anyone’s behalf.

My contact with Martin began on 23 September 2014 via social media. What follows is a fairly detailed account of the ensuing exchange that followed, which centres around Martin’s first iteration of Last Night, an art book. While this material isn’t specific to … for hours… for me it was a formative conversation about an important contribution. I decided to indulge because I have a particular history with David and the Loft and can imagine that some readers will find the material interesting. Anyone who wants to read specifically about Martin’s new exhibition rather than this particular aspect of its background and the friendship that Martin and I began through the exchange around Last Night is encouraged to skip to the next section.

* * * * * * *

In that first message Martin wondered if I’d heard about his artist book, Last Night. He said there’d be a launch event at PS1 on the 27th where he and Matthew Higgs, the director of White Columns and publisher of the book, would select the full thirteen-and-a-half hours of music in the same sequence as that night at the Prince Street Loft on 2 June 1984. He offered to send me a book and hoped that we might meet. I thanked Martin but wasn’t quite sure what to make of it all, having become quite closely tied with David and his legacy during the course of 17 years.

My first interview with David in the spring of 1997 was sufficiently revelatory for me to go on to write Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970–1979, which positioned David as the era’s pioneering, visionary prophet.¹⁰ During the course of the next 20 interviews conducted for that book David suggested I use the “Love Saves the Day” slogan associated with his inaugural Loft party in the title, which felt significant. Just before the book went into production, David also proposed that we co-host parties in London, which introduced a new dimension to our intertwinement.

A wider team gathered to stage the first event in June 2003, after which David started to travel to London four times a year, staying five days at a time. Within two years he’d persuaded us to take out a massive loan to purchase a sound system that resembled his set-up in New York. Ultimately David decided he only wanted to work with us in London plus Satoru Ogawa, the owner of Precious Hall in Sapporo and a born again David discipline, in Japan. This continued until a doctor advised him to stop travelling in late 2011. Along the way David sometimes asked me to help with aspects of his affairs as well as the safeguarding of his legacy.

So when Martin reached out I was mildly surprised that I hadn’t heard of his book and wondered how he’d worked things out with David, especially in terms of the launch event, which was marketed as being “part listening-session, part epic dance party”.¹¹ While David was dedicated to sharing good practice, he was also protective of the Loft, having long considered himself to be not the owner but the caretaker of the party. When folks hovered close, wanting to emulate his practice, his standard reply was: be original. I’m not suggesting for one moment that Last Night and the launch event weren’t original, just that Martin had entered a sphere where certain ways of being were unusually well established. Martin’s report that the PS1 event had gone “way beyond expectations” didn’t straightforwardly answer anything. But I’d soon grow to understand that Martin’s artistic practice is remarkably thoughtful, careful, intelligent, respectful and anti-egotistical. He is devoted to the prompt. I’d also go on to learn much from his prompting.

Martin’s book, I soon discovered, is entirely different, even the inverse, of Love Saves the Day. Instead of 500 pages of semi-novelistic drama combined with as much analysis as I could introduce within the narrative flow, Last Night listed all of the records selected at the penultimate Loft party at 99 Prince Street in 1984. Coincidentally, the list emerged in the first place through the broadcast of the tapes of the 2 June 1984 party in 2008 by Guillaume Chottin and Simon Halpin, two devotees of the London party, which, initially nameless, by assumed the name Lucky Cloud Sound System in 2005. David along with remixer and DJ François Kevorkian, who had organised the original recording, had wondered what to do with the tapes, if anything, for 24 years before David decided it would be appropriate to make them available to Guillaume Chottin and Simon Halpin to broadcast on their internet radio station, deepfrequency.com.

Incomplete annotations of the recording circulated before Martin created a thoroughly detailed, almost entirely accurate list that contained only one or two question marks against unknown selections plus full discographical information provided for each title. With one track listed per page, the typography was clean black and white. The narrative is the order of the titles. The analysis is intentionally minimalistic and rests on a handful of suggestive David quotes introduced at the front and back.

Martin’s point was to develop a laser focus on a rare relic of the culture, one that happened to fall four-and-a-half years after the closing point of Love Saves the Day. A complete statement in and of itself, there was nothing to add or subtract. In a way I was happy that it was so completely different to Love Saves the Day that there was, at least superficially, little if any overlap between the two books. I appreciated its elegance, its solidity, its attention to detail and its archiving of information related to a historic party.

Last Night was also intentionally an artwork and I can’t say I initially understood or particularly appreciated how it operated. Staying in the comfort zone of my existing Love Saves the Day/Lucky Cloud Sound System/David knowledge, engagement and advocacy, I sent Martin a thank you email that outlined aspects of the book that left me unsure, and preferring to be direct rather than revert to pure congratulations, I put some questions to him.

Could the minimalistic text capture the vibrant energy of the Loft? What were the implications of attributing the musical selections of 2 June 1984 to David when David rejected the individual model of creativity, believing that the dancing crowd co-authored any musical journey, plus David went to extensive length to remain anonymous at the parties? Didn’t the book itself also replicate a version of artistic authorship that David rejected, which included his belief that the party was collectively owned? Was the Last Night title appropriate given that David had refused to reference the 2 June 1984 party—which turned out to be the penultimate party at the Prince Street Loft—as being the “last”, preferring to see it as the precursor to a rebirth that would soon materialise at his Third Street location?

Martin replied:

I am a visual artist, often working with historical subject matter and with a keen interest in the tension between representability of histories within the languages of art. That is to say that my work’s ambition goes toward imaging through working with structures.

Of course, one could narrate that particular night in very different ways, from oral histories to narrative descriptions, to more academic approaches; or even with the few photos that exist. But from my artistic perspective it seemed more pertinent to let the songs’s rhetoric and the information about them tell the spirit of the event. I believe the titles alone, their production information, and their sequences speak very strongly (try reading just the titles in sequence and see what unfolds); they are a story but they are not the party and they do not represent the party—how could they? It would be presumptuous to think they could.

I’ve sometimes thought of the book as an epic poem; one that is typeset at a certain scale on document-sized pages with plenty of blank space to project into, with typographic restraint to let the language come forward. To me these and other small decisions are important visual tools. I recognize that not everyone shares them. There are many visual worlds, desires, and preferences; I see that and can respect it.

For me, it is exactly the ‘minimalism’ of the book that resists that presumption, the dry typography, the scale of the book as it creates space to project into. This restraint is an important visual and methodical device; the production details of the music’s selection and their sequence in their most stripped down form is, to me, a way to point to the poetry that I understand David’s music playing as being.

I believe strongly that there is a strength in abstraction, a tension that arises between restraint and the emotional power and exuberance of the songs’ rhetoric. That tension, or maybe better: that paradox, to me, is one of the forces that makes for a successful artwork; especially when engaging with historical subject matter. I see it as a methodological foundation of generating expression within a certain kind of art practice. Maybe it’s not everyone’s cup of the tea, but art practice and discourse operate within and use different logics than historiography, ethnography, sociology, documentarism, etc.

I understand that, from the background of all your work on dance culture and specifically on the Loft, my book might seem inadequate but I nevertheless feel strongly about it being a positive contribution. Not an academic one, but an artistic one. To me, the book and the list, as I wrote in a lecture a while ago, “builds a paradoxical bridge between structure and desire, between abstraction and affect, between form and the social. The list is ... an unstable diagram that points to an image between images. A document as an absence.”

Maybe these thoughts help understand where I am coming from. Despite our different take on these and other things I do believe we share a lot in our passion for the music and the contexts that bring it forward. And I look forward to experience that shared passion in a person-to-person conversation.

I admired Martin ability to explain and stand by his intentions in a non-defensive way while holding out the hand of friendship. I acknowledged that in many respects I was ventriloquising a series of ideas David had put to me over time. David was extremely particular about language and framing, especially when it came to the Loft. This had extended to London, where, I wrote, he “wouldn’t let us describe the parties we put on with him in London as the Loft or the Loft in London, even though we modelled the party on just about everything that took place in New York.” I’d learned a great deal from David and had become an advocate, yet I’d already learned a great deal from Martin.

The exchange with Martin encouraged me to reflect on how I’d been quick to step into the role of gatekeeper. David had expressed appreciation of my writing and my contribution to Lucky Cloud Sound System, and on occasion had even asked me to intervene in matters that revolved around turf or maybe understanding. I also didn’t exactly need to be persuaded to repeat “what David thought” about a whole range of matters. Yet David and I didn’t always agree, i.e. we could tussle, often energetically, and I’d also become aware how other gatekeepers could leverage their position in ways that could be consciously or unconsciously self-interested. Who was to say I wasn’t doing the same? Ultimately there was and never could be a singular knowledge or truth about the Loft, which shifted over time and was always communal and therefore pluralistic.

I wrote another email and along the way mentioned:

I’m not for a moment suggesting anything about how David would respond to the book. We haven’t spoken for a few months now and for all I know David hasn’t tracked its journey. It’s possible he will find the book entirely positive and uplifting. Maybe this doesn’t even matter because as David himself acknowledges, the Loft is bigger than him.

I added:

I appreciate that my response has been somewhat knee-jerk inasmuch as I’ve thrown out immediate thoughts instead of sitting on the book for a few months and working out how it registers then. I might well grow to regret saying all of the above and take a completely different line.

I suggested Martin might try to speak with David about these matters and signed off saying that I looked forward to “meeting and sharing our mutual enthusiasm, hopefully on the dance floor as well as over coffee.”

The email tussle melted instantaneously when Martin and I met for the first time in London in January 2016. Five months later he returned for a Lucky Cloud Sound System party; we hung out and he also helped set up as well as dance the evening away. We continued to talk, especially in the run-up to the Mumok conversation of June 2017, even more during the two days I stayed in Vienna, and more and more when I went to stay with Martin in the “simple house” in Joshua Tree he shares with Julie Ault, with whom he has collaborated closely for decades, for 10 days that August, where we mixed hiking, reading, writing, listening to music and cooking with conversation. Each step of the way I learned more about Martin’s journey into Last Night.

* * * * * * *

Martin first came across the Loft in the second half of the nineties via the East Village record store Dance Tracks, which was selling 12”s from the Loft Classics bootleg releases. “I had no idea what the Loft was back then, I just liked the tunes,” he remembers. Coincidentally during the same period I was heading to the store every Friday night and have a hazy memory of David reprimanding me for purchasing from the series.

Martin bought Love Saves the Day soon after it came out, “started to understand what the Loft was/is” and began to collect Loft music, first in digital format, then on vinyl, especially after piecing together sections of the deepfrequency.com broadcast. For a period this amounted to “a private passion discrete from my art practice.”¹² Then, in late 2011, he combined the two after concluding that the records played at the Loft resembled the kind of “documentary remains” he liked to turn to in his practice.¹³ Martin explained:

For a while I was under the impression the Loft was all in past tense. I was trying to figure out how I could capture something from it. What is left that is tangible? What can it communicate? By playing the records in sequence I wanted to understand, what might have been this thing that people are talking about? There was this tension between something that was tangible and intangible.

Come the summer of 2013 Martin had purchased a copy of every record selected at the 2 June 1984 party save for two mystery songs. Many years later I got to see the spreadsheet Martin had created to chart all the purchases; the level of detail, ordering and annotation, the incredible amount of work and care he’d put into the activity, moved me to suggest it amounted to an artwork in itself! By the end of 2013 the book was ready and around the same time Martin met dancer, artist, art installer and music aficionado Gary Murphy while installing Macho Man: Tell It To My Heart, an exhibition at Artists Space in New York composed of artworks from the collection of Julie Ault.¹⁴ They talked about Love Saves the Day, Martin showed him a copy of Last Night on his laptop, Gary offered to take him to the next party as a guest; the Valentine’s Day gathering of February 2014.

By this point David had stopped attending the Loft, having pulled back from musical hosting around the same time he stopped travelling to Japan and London. Even before then, around 2008, David had started to ask long-time Loft devotee and stand-in musical host Douglas Sherman to put the records he selected onto the party’s turntables because the tone arms were equipped with highly sensitive Koetsu cartridges, because his sight was weakening and his hands were shaky. He also started to leave the party early, handing over to Douglas. Yet he never stopped hosting the parties. He just grew to prefer to carry out this role, his life mission, from his tiny, fifth floor walk-up apartment on Avenue C (part of a community housing initiative he’d landed via longstanding volunteer community work he was conducting for the association).

The inevitability that Martin didn’t get to witness David work as musical host did nothing to detract from the experience. Whatever had been coded into the 2 June 1984 playlist remained a vibrant, living, multidimensional entity that exceeded the sum of its parts as well as expectations and rationalisations. A series of ordered records collected via Discogs transmuted into an immersive, unfolding experience. The wonder and joy of the party even filled Martin with a new sense of purpose. “By going to the parties and getting to know people there, I became aware of a few misidentified versions of songs and started to publish errata documents to the book,” adds Martin.

What amounted to an epiphany was, I imagine, rooted in Martin experiencing for one of the very first times—even maybe the very first time—an expression of the thing that was fundamental to counterculture. Up to that point his experience of countercultural expression was rooted in objects and mediation. “In my larger practice I’m interested in what I call the structure of community, what can be understood as a structural force, what togetherness forms,” he told me. “Whether it’s a dance party like the Loft or a commune from the 1960s or 1970s, I ask: what are the rituals, what are the rules, how do you live, what do you do when you have a conflict, how are these things negotiated? I try to understand such things in a deeper sense, not simply as images of hippies in the pastures or people dancing. I’m interested in the structural underpinnings, the workings beyond the clichés, something more fundamental.” On the Loft floor he experienced the structural underpinnings firsthand.

During the period of making the book Martin reached out to David and they spoke on the phone a few times. They also arranged to meet on a couple of occasions but David didn’t show up. In the end Martin met David on the couple of occasions he sat at the front door of the Loft, having otherwise stopped going to the party altogether, “but David didn’t seem to be interested in talking about the book or the 2 June 1984 party,” recalls Martin.

A little later, Martin heard that David had described the book as a “sophisticated bootleg”, the memory of which prompted a warm, little laugh as Martin recounted the story to me. For me the laugh captured Martin’s admiration for David’s way with words, an appreciation of the value of David’s deep commitment to protecting the rights of an original artist (which had led him to refuse to play bootlegs), the understanding that in this case there was no artistic intellectual property to protect and a familiarity with having to deal with folks who didn’t quite get it. At least Last Night wasn’t a regular bootleg, it was a sophisticated one!

As it happens—and David had no particular reason to appreciate this—Last Night didn’t amount to a commercial art initiative, never mind a commercial “bootleg” (Martin being the creator of work that can be challenging for conventional art collectors). It was an unconventional work that was no less valid for its unorthodoxy. Instead of playing at full volume it quietly prompted subtle, perception-opening questions. In other words, Martin was doing what artists do: he looked around, sought out inspiration, considered aspects of experiencing and then created something. Rather than encroaching on something, Martin was moved by his fascination with the Loft to make an offering. Nor did David issue an instruction to cease and desist. That wasn’t David’s way and he lived a happier life for it.

Along the way I learned that the 2 June 1984 party at Prince Street was the penultimate party at the Loft, but this hardly mattered because Last Night was never meant to literally refer to the “last party” at that location. “The phrase contains a complex range of connotations,” he told Christina von Rotenhan in an interview published in 2015 in Martin Beck: summer winter east west. “It can refer to an emotionally coded moment in the immediate past or, simply, to the marking of time—or anything in between.” He noted that “its associations range from an ecstatic night of dancing to an end of an era: pleasure at a crossroads” before adding that the phrase can also “be read in a more abstract way: as a poetic device that connects structure, time, and affect; as a linguistic connector joint that unlocks new spaces in the midst of the paradoxes that often define the relationship between memory and historicity.” Rounding things off, Martin observed that “‘Last night’ stands for ending but also for beginning.”¹⁵ Drawn to the Derridean concept of “hauntology” as well as Mark Fisher’s more recent writings on the idea, Martin maintains that Last Night references possible alternative futures that are nevertheless haunted by the past, or that we are haunted by futures that failed to happen.¹⁶

Many within the wider Loft community would go on to embrace Last Nightwith huge enthusiasm—and as David believed it was the community that embodied the party, with the party a voluntary association that could never be owned. The first big hug unfolded in the form of a party that almost surprised itself at the PS1 book launch of September 2014. A second followed when Martin exhibited the video installation iteration of Last Night at the Kitchen in March 2016. Like a good party, the underlying idea for the artwork was worth returning to and doing again, only differently, it transpired. Also like a good party—and I’d be surprised if this didn’t apply to the Loft, as hallowed as the inaugural night of 14 February 1970 has become—its first articulation wasn’t necessarily its fullest, even if a semblance of its potential had been partly imagined from the get-go.

* * * * * * *

Martin’s initial idea for Last Night was to create a video installation but it didn’t take him long to conclude that “nobody other than myself would be interested in looking at records spinning for thirteen hours.” So he ran with the book instead and then headed to Joshua Tree to spend the summer of 2014 with his good friend James Benning, a film maker and a legend in the field of experimental cinema. When Martin got around to explaining why he’d decided against making a film James told him he was “crazy” and offered to do the camera for him. Everything unfolded from there. As Martin told me:

Later that year I began putting together the record player using classic analogue stereo equipment that wasn’t as high-end as the Loft set-up but was rooted in similar era and intent. I purchased a Thorens 125 MK II turntable, an SME Series II tone arm and I also found this moving coil cartridge in mint condition from the early 1980s called Sleeping Beauty. It looks beautiful and sounds great. I went through the process of educating myself about the sound equipment as I put all these elements together, so it was like real time.

Filming happened in the summer of 2015. We filmed every day for 6-7 hours. Some records we had to shoot multiple times because something would go wrong. It took us three weeks. It was like this collaborative project and I even offered to credit James as a co-author. He didn't want that and said, “It’s your idea, I’ve been happy to help.”

It took about eight months to edit—not every day. It turned out that commercial editing software isn’t built to make a thirteen-hour film. I worked with an editor in New York and we ran into one technical problem after another. The editor built a computer just to render the film. The film was finished in early 2016 and premiered at the Kitchen.

At some point I asked Martin if he’d sat through the full thirteen-and-a-half hours in one go. “With bathroom breaks, yes,” he replied.

After screening in several cities, including an event Martin and I organised at the Red Gallery in London in June 2018, MoMA purchased Last Night in 2022 and on 2 June 2024 exhibited the work to mark the 40th anniversary of the party it references. That day the museum arranged for the opening hours to be specially extended from late morning to around 1:00am—at least in the exhibition room—so that it could run the full thirteen-and-a-half hours. The day and evening remains the most engaging and emotive art gallery experience I’ve ever had. I’ve been to a decent number of stunning shows. It’s just that 2 June reached an entirely different artistic and socially-expressive level. The polite yet hearty MoMA takeover also amounted to a moment of celebration for Martin, for David and also the historic and ongoing Loft community. The MoMA website even published an oral history of the party by curator May Makki that featured several longstanding contributor-protectors, Ernesto Green, Sandy Moon, Douglas Sherman, Edowa Shimizu, Luis Vargas.¹⁷

The one-day exhibition didn’t amount to a party as such; Martin was always careful to note that Last Night is an artwork, not a party. Nevertheless the organisation of the room—including the installation of a Loft-based sound system (by Douglas and co-Loft stalwarts Edowa Shimizu and Luis Vargas) featuring Mark Levinson amplifiers and four Klipschorn loudspeakers, a 20 feet wide x 11 feet tall screen.

The introduction of sofas and cushions, along with a generous supply of refreshments led the marathon exhibition-event to became a slowly-unfolding repository of memories and meetings, re-lived recordings and newly-absorbed moving images. Even James Benning, having travelled over from California, told Martin that thanks to the size of the screen he observed all manner of new micro-details in the film he hadn’t noticed before. Amidst all of the interactions, reunions and introductions that took place in that multigenerational, multi-experiential room, the emotional, conversational and physical exchanges almost imperceptibly led more and more attendees to begin to sway and then dance. I don’t think the MoMA team, whose commitment to hosting the day according to Martin’s wishes was unswerving, could believe the feeling that emerged in the room.

The euphoric applause that followed at the end of the film expressed shared appreciation of the epic journey of the screening while connecting everyone in the room to the culture of the Loft as expressed through a mediated exploration of a historic party that took place 40 years ago that day. That mediation had become a way for those who gathered, many of them Loft dancers to deepen their engagement with the Loft. As they did so they connected with previous generations, a significant number of whom showed up, and future ones, with recently-introduced enthusiasts a glowing presence. Martin drew inspiration from the Loft to create Last Night and through the screening gave back to the Loft. And now, remarkably, an articulation of the Loft, without question the longest-running community party in New York City’s history, had been welcomed into and given a home in New York’s most prestigious modern art museum.

Last Night at MoMA became the first of an infinite number of new nights.