(It is now housed in a large, pristine space in Chelsea).
But on a recent afternoon before Poets House had officially opened, the pristine space was missing something.
"I had hit a brick wall," he recalls, "so I decided I would just take everything out of my studio and work on creating this absolutely pristine space.
We were sitting at the table in her Tribeca studio, a pristine space whose wall of white cabinets and shelves holds a forty-year accumulation of props, archives, working prints, and related materials.
He works every night with about five employees who squeeze into the tiny, pristine space, clowns-in-a-car style, grilling meats and whipping up sauces for the crowds who wait, sometimes as long as two hours, for their tacos.
This is heightened by Caty Olive's sensual but alienating lighting, which plays up the white-cube elements of Mr. Rizzo's set design, a three-sided chamber whose pristine space is disrupted by globular black shapes hanging from hooks and wires.
Once inside the vast, pristine space, all futuristic glass walls and veneer angles, you can't really see the grass or the pool, but there are views of the rear draperies of Avery Fisher Hall, the traffic on Sixty-fifth Street, or the kitchen.
I would roll my eyes over stories about mothers who couldn't wait to clean out their kids' rooms, and no sooner were they done than they would sit in the newly pristine space, mourning the very mess and disorder they had just cleared out.
When I first walked into Starting Out: 9 Abstract Painters 1958-1971, I didn't immediately remember that the pristine space on Fifth Avenue was the site of an raucous opening I had attended decades ago for a 40th Anniversary Exhibition -- where Larry Rivers was present.
