Time capsules: 1980-1985 - Calendar

Time magazine Man of the Year: the computer

FEBRUARY

Robert Longo's double show at Metro Pictures and Castelli Greene opens, featuring very large, multimedia works--cast aluminum bas-reliefs, paintings, and drawings in various combinations. Iconic works, e.g., Corporate Wars: Walls of Influence, shown.

MARCH

Ronald Reagan dubs the Soviet Union the Evil Empire.

Compact discs introduced.

APRIL

Curators Tricia Collins and Richard Milazzo launch Effects magazine in their East Village apartment. "The whole idea behind Effects was that it was an extension of our living room, which was a regular hangout at the time," Collins recalls. Great visuals, e.g., Richard Prince's "The Entertainers"; often gelatinous, comedy-theory prose ("Jim Welling sets his obscurities in iceberg pronged pedantic Russian. Is there a poetry of loss?"). Folds after three issues.

MAY

Semiotext(e)-- a journal that began publication in 1974--issues first two volumes of its Foreign Agents series, Jean Baudrillard's Simulations and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's On the Line (1983). The series comprises nonpareil critical-theory must-haves for the smart-art crowd.

Julian Schnabel's painting Notre Dame sells at Sotheby's for $93,500--$40,000 over initial estimate.

JUNE

Cindy Sherman's first "fashion" photographs commissioned by Dianne Benson, proprietor of the trendy SoHo boutique Dianne B., for Interview.

AUGUST

Just Another Asshole #6 appears: prose writings by 61 artists and others, including Kathy Acker, Eric Bogosian, Jenny Holzer, Cookie Mueller, Richard Prince, David Rattray, Kiki Smith, and Lynne Tillman.

SEPTEMBER

Thierry de Duve, "Who's Afraid of Red Yellow and Blue?," Artforum: Another art-history heavyweight enters the death/rebirth of painting argument, concluding "that both alternatives, unless rejudged and reinterpreted, are bound to remain equally disquieting."

"Science Fiction," curated by Peter Halley and including work by Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, Ross Bleckner, Donald Judd, Robert Smithson, R.M. Fischer, Taro Suzuki, David Deutsch, and Jim Biederman, opens at John Weber, New York. Proto neogeo, before there was a name or market for it. Halley: "You couldn't give it away until '85." Pictured: R.M. Fischer, Max, 1983, steel, brass, limestone, and lights, 86 x 33 x 31".

Unofficial opening of Philip Johnson's AT&T Building, hailed as a "harbinger of a new era" by Paul Goldberger in the New York Times. An overnight icon of postmodern architecture (and symbol of that style's acceptance by corporate America).

Area opens in TriBeCa. As the Mudd Club era ends, a new velvet rope dispensation begins.

Richard Prince's "Spiritual America" opens in a Lower East Side storefront tricked up for the occasion. The exhibition consists of a single, notorious image: Prince's rephotographed picture (after an original by Garry Gross) depicting a prepubescent Brooke Shields emerging from a steamy bathtub. The brazen image of little-girl sexuality arouses hostile reactions from former (often feminist) critical supporters.