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Time capsules: 1980-1985 - Calendar
ArtForum, March, 2003 by David Rimanelli
1980
JANUARY
ABC No Rio's inaugural event, "The Real Estate Show," takes place in an abandoned Delancey St. tenement. Organized by Collaborative Projects--aka Colab--the exhibition addresses the machinations of the Lower East Side real estate market. The show only gains in notoriety when the city repossesses the building during the show's run.
Benjamin Buchloh's "Beuys: The Twilight of the Idol," appears in Artforum. Coming in the wake of the artist's Guggenheim retrospective, the essay seriously undermines Beuys's felt-and-fat-in-the-Caucasus self-mythology. Strategically, Buchloh's demystification of Beuys serves as a historical correlative for his disenchantment with the revival of expressionist tendencies toward artist-heroes and private agons.
ZG, the London-based arts-and-attitude periodical, launches. Fifteen-issue run, edited by Rosetta Brooks, provides eclectic coverage of the latest downtown Manhattan trends. Very pretentious and way cool.
FEBRUARY
Ingrid Sischy's debut issue as editor of Artforum: "Allegiance to one kind of art or to one kind of thinking about art is inappropriate, at this time, for a serious art magazine.... Blinders would be fatal now." Her first issue, dominated by artists' projects, is nothing if not inclusive: Art & Language, Dan Graham, Kim MacConnel, Just Another Asshole, and, memorably, Heresies Collective's "Artrace: An Heretical Bored Game." Among the rules: "Subscribe to Artforum; read only your own reviews. Don't join a Marxist or feminist study group; you won't get points."
MARCH
Craig Owens, "The Allegorical Impulse," part 1, October 12: Leaning on Walter Benjamin, Owens maintains that allegory persists as a crucial element in contemporary art. Citing Cindy Sherman, Troy Brauntuch, Robert Longo, and Sherrie Levine, he attributes allegorical tendencies particularly to appropriation artists. The critic concludes with an excursus on the inevitable complicity between this "deconstructive" art practice and the objects of its critique.
Roland Barthes dies in Paris. His book on photography, Camera Lucida, had appeared the month before.
Studio 54 shuttered after owners' tax evasion charges.
APRIL
Ross Bleckner, Julian Schnabel, and David Salle open at Mary Boone. In his Arts Magazine diary Robert Pincus-Witten calls the dealer's three darlings "Boonies."
MAY
"Pablo Picasso: A Retrospective" opens at the Museum of Modern Art. Auspicious timing for this compendious exhibition, given the fashion for Picassoid wannabes with gargantuan ambitions.
3 Teens Kill 4, an East Village band including David Wojnarowicz, pours blood and bones down the stairwell of 420 W. Broadway, SoHo's most important gallery address, as commentary on US policy toward Central America. Drummer Julie Hair: "We went to 14th St., absconded some bones, and sealed them in plastic. Those bones were not well cleaned off. Lots of dead animal bits intact. Still quite bloody."
"Seven Young Artists from Italy," curated by Jean-Christoph Ammann, opens at the Kunsthalle Basel. Arguably the first Transavanguardia exhibition with international impact, the show includes Sandro Chia, Enzo Cucchi, Francesco Clemente, Mimmo Paladino, Nicola de Maria, Luigi Ontani, and Ernesto Tatafiore.
JUNE
Douglas Crimp, "On the Museum's Ruins," October 13: Taking his cues from Rauschenberg, Foucault, Benjamin, Bouvard et Pecuchet, and Malraux, Crimp identifies the museum as an inevitably incoherent archive. Couched in the neutralizing language of academe, Crimp's essay has an inescapable ideological thrust: He is gunning for the institution before setting his sights on painting in the following year's "The End of Painting."
Venice Biennale: Georg Baselitz and Anselm Kiefer share the German pavilion. Some infer that the former's Model for a Sculpture depicts Hitler giving the Nazi salute; the latter's works refer to the Nibelungenlied, militarism, Wagner, Heidegger. Vituperative reaction--fascistic," "teutonic," "bombastic--aggrandizes the hitherto relatively obscure artists. The international pavilion, curated by Achilie Bonito Oliva and Harald Szeemann, includes Chia, Cucchi, Clemente, and Paladino, as well as Americans Susan Rothenberg, Julian Schnabel, and David Salle: the first important attempt at integrating recent European and American painting. Pictured: Georg Baselitz, Modell fur elne Skulptur (Model for a sculpture), 1978-80, tempera and wood, 70 x 58 x 96".
CNN launched.
JULY
Colab's "Times Square Show" opens in a decrepit former massage parlor on 41st St. and 7th Ave. A hundred-odd artists and performers, many from the nascent East Village art scene and including soon-to-be-notables Jenny Holzer and David Hammons. Violence and sex overriding themes, in keeping with the "outsider" locale.
SEPTEMBER
Jurgen Habermas's watershed lecture "Modernity: An Incomplete Project" sharply rebukes the theoretical critical mass increasingly subsumed under the rubric of postmodernism--Foucault, Derrida, et al.
Three Cs--viz., Clemente, Chia, and Cucchi--open at Sperone Westwater Fischer, a group show that decisively puts the central figures of the Transavanguardia on the New York map. Kay Larson (Village Voice) describes the look as either "Late Late Mannerism" or, quoting Chia, "The Last Baroque." Pictured: Sandro Chia, Genova, 1980, oil on canvas, 7'6" x 13'.
