Bright light, big city: the '80s without walls

ArtForum, April, 2003 by Molly Nesbit

In Buffalo, in art school, Cindy Sherman sat down in a photo booth and gave the camera a look. She came up under Lucille Ball's face so successfully that her own face subsided. Most people her age were swimming in another direction, preferring the pond of their own nonconformity. Hers was a different, though still contrary position: The negative of your negative is my Lucy. This idea had led her first toward elaborately unpredictable appearances at parties. Her boyfriend, the artist Robert Longo, suggested she combine them with her work. Was he proposing an imitation of life? The two of them moved to New York together in the summer of 1977, the summer of the blackout and the string of murders by a man calling himself the Son of Sam.

That same year David Salle, who had come to New York from CalArts in 1975, took a job teaching drawing at the Hartford School of Art. He brought various friends along to help, among them Sherrie Levine. She herself had arrived in New York from Madison, via Berkeley, having had her own experience of work and play. She had made a series of short Super-8 movies. In one of them six cowgirl candles burned down to a puddle, weeping, she noted later, like a country-western song, but in silence.

Bruce Nauman, when he saw this, felt the result was boring. She took this as reason enough to destroy the whole series.

Permanent silence seemed not to be fatal. Levine taught a course in Hartford on the work of Douglas Sirk. She and Salle plunged into the aesthetics of melodrama. They fixed on Imitation of Life. Sirk's film had appeared in 1959, when they were children, at the end of the decade that had seen and loved six seasons of I Love Lucy. The movie showed the danger that lay in wait behind every success and star. Salle took Sirk's warning back to his studio and wrote a set of statements designed to set out the issues for his own work: "The pictures present an improvised view of life as normal. Life is shown as we think we see it but in fact never do. The pictures imitate life to find a way out." There was New York.

They had all come to a city fabled for its art. They settled downtown in the new center of activity, SoHo, and took stock. Around them the entire economy had fallen into the grip of a deep and slowly grinding recession. There were no galleries coming to call, no sense that a person wanting to perform great art experiments could expect to make a living from them, much Less obtain general recognition. Louise Lawler, who had come to the city earlier from Cornell, could have told them this. These conditions would require inventing the space for their art. They had come to a place without walls.

Spaces were being invented--spaces for living, spaces for eating, spaces for nightlife. Inside and outside were indistinguishable. If their day jobs were necessary and various, bottom-feeding along the commercial art hierarchies or teaching nursery school or cooking in restaurants or sitting fairly dutifully at a reception desk, their free time merged. Collective life led to collective art life. The place-names were generic but memorable: Artists Space, The Kitchen, Franklin Furnace, 112 Greene Street, Printed Matter, the Performing Garage. A Louise Lawler place-mat picture once had to be rescued from Food (the early-'70s restaurant-collective now best known as the brainchild of Gordon Matta-Clark) when the police temporarily padlocked it. With the accumulation of friendship, collaboration, and exchange, none of their work was completely individual. Call it instead independent.

What to put where? Sherrie Levine would put seventy-five pairs of small shoes, sized for a child but styled for a man, on sale at the Three Mercer Street Store. That she had found them at a California job-lot sale hardly mattered. Artists could work through any economy, the thrift economy too. The money economy proved more difficult. Levine made a series of silhouettes taken from the penny, the quarter, and the new half-dollar coins, painting the presidents so that they faced each other flatly fluorescent on small sheets of graph paper. Happily parodying D.H. Lawrence, she called them Sons and Lovers. Douglas Crimp included them in the group show he curated at Artists Space in the fall of 1977. He called it "Pictures." "Pictures" also announced a twenty-six-second film loop by Jack Goldstein called The Jump, in which he had altered some stock footage so that one saw only a human silhouette filled with a light effect repeatedly run, jump, and dive, piking stylishly off the end of an unseen board into perfect d arkness that, like a psychedelic reflex, swallowed it whole. Crimp highlighted it in his catalogue essay. In hindsight The Jump looks like a pure description of a professional situation.

Two years later Artforum sent out a questionnaire asking artists to address the change in the general professional situation, or as it diplomatically put it, the change in the audience. Assuming, Vito Acconci said, that the gallery could still be considered the space of operations, one had two options: either to use the gallery like language, as a sign, for all intents and purposes turning it into a book, or to use the gallery as the space where art itself occurred while someone else watched. In the '70s he had taken the second option, which meant that the gallery then became something else, "a community meeting-place, a place where a community could be formed, where a community could be called to order, called to a particular purpose." The community was understood to be an art community. "The art public was, in effect, a substitute for 'community,"' he noted, "but, at least, this was a way to work in a public rather than in front of a public." In 1976 in the pages of Arts Magazine, Salle had already paid Acc onci the supreme compliment of calling him the anthropologist of his own universe.