Dual Nature

ArtForum, Oct, 1999 by Peter Nagy

Even in the midst of the thrill of it all, it was apparent that two contingencies - one demographic, the other economic - laid the groundwork for the making of the "East Village Art Scene." First, the postwar baby boom, which peaked in 1959, led to an outpouring of art-school grads in the early '80s. Sometimes it seems as though a majority of my generation, having grown up in the fertile '60s, pursued careers in the creative arts, and the New York art world simply couldn't accommodate this glut of brash, snot-nosed artists eager to exhibit their goods, and consequently burst at the seams. Second, the boom market enabled a generation of artist-entrepreneurs not only to start their own galleries but to keep their doors open and flourish.

I graduated from Parsons School of Design in 1981, having majored in communication design and feasted on art-history and critical-theory courses in general. At the time, I was working as a typesetter in a small ad and magazine shop on West Fifty-seventh Street and one day Alan Belcher walked in to do pasteups and mechanicals. We bonded almost immediately over Malcolm McLaren's latest project, Bow Wow Wow, and soon started going to galleries together on our lunch hour. Our favorite artists at the time - Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni, Yves Klein - were still underdogs, and we were both excited by obscure foreign Pop, such as Eduardo Paolozzi, Richard Hamilton, and the French Nouveaux Realistes. Our tastes were remarkably similar.

At home, I was sharing an East Village basement with Doug Bressler, a friend from Parsons who was in the band 3 Teens Kill 4 alongside David Wojnarowicz, and our landlord was Bill Stelling, cofounder of the Fun Gallery. I had started making art, and prowled the galleries of SoHo and uptown incessantly. One day, Bill invited me to an opening at the storefront space he had recently started with Patti Astor. I was completely alienated by both the hip-hop crowd and the graffiti art, but appreciated the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "let's put on a show" attitude of it all. Belcher and I started to talk, spotted an East Village storefront only to lose it and find a better one, and, with the help of some cohorts from Parsons and about $500, opened Nature Morte on May 15, 1982. We chose the name because we liked its postpunk feel (something akin to the name Joy Division) and figured that all art was really just a still life anyway. Gracie Mansion was mounting shows in her bathroom, Civilian Warfare opened on the very same day we did, and, as much to our astonishment as everyone else's, the galleries started popping up around us like mold spores.

Think back and you realize that this was a pivotal moment for the art world in general. The first waves of European neoexpressionism had arisen just a few seasons earlier, Mary Boone and Julian Schnabel were electrifying the scene, and established galleries were opening huge new spaces. I had been influenced by the Joseph Beuys retrospective at the Guggenheim in 1979-80. It brought a physical type of Conceptual art to the forefront and gave contemporary art its blockbuster potential. At the time, I associated Beuys's social sculpture with Michael Asher's experiments in institutional critique in Los Angeles in the '70s. With my education in advertising, publication design, and packaging I was gravitating toward museum work, so it seemed natural to fuse my interests into an art gallery. At that point, the commercial gallery seemed to be a direct route to action, a way to forgo the hassles and dependencies associated with alternative spaces, and the nonprofit foundations with all their paperwork and advisory boards. I had been impressed with Colab's "Times square Show," ABC No Rio, and Fashion Moda, especially with their do-it-yourself spontaneity and their success at drumming up attention in the mainstream press.

My generation came of age in the early '70s. We had been aware of the '60s - the hippies, the acid, the antiwar movement - but we were too young to join in. We watched it all on TV, saw the era unfold on the pages of Life. But by the time we could participate (i.e., when we finally had the part-time jobs that let us buy our own clothes and records), times had changed. Glitter and glam were the rage, and a new rebellion based on style and a much more personal set of issues (sexual, psychological) was at hand. Fashion was important - really important - and by the time we arrived at the East Village scene (by way of disco and punk, let's not forget), seasonal innovation and parricide were the established cultural norms. I make this point to get at the mind-set of my generation at the beginning of the '80s. We were accustomed to the comfort food of novelty, nonthreatening and perfectly in line with the paradigm of change for change's sake that was symptomatic of all areas of cultural production (not just the garment industry). No wonder the art and fashion worlds continued to schmooze along until they became virtually indistinguishable. Change was necessary, fun, and good, but it didn't mean that the basic structure of things was likely to topple. The punks unfortunately had to learn the same lesson the Surrealists had learned forty years earlier: You could change your own life and your aesthetics, but that would have little effect on society as a whole.