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Tales of bohemian glory: the tumultuous, influential East Village art scene of the 1980s was the subject of a recent exhibition at the New Museum of Contemporary Art
Art in America, June-July, 2005 by Sarah Valdez
Before it was gentrified and overrun by yuppies and trust-funded NYU students, New York's East Village--so the legend goes--was a culturally thriving neighborhood of punks, bohemians, junkies, queers and artists. Through the 1970s and '80s, all manner of eccentric, idealistic, rebel exhibitionists and their misfit admirers could afford to dwell alongside the multiethnic communities already ensconced in the area's low-rent tenements. "East Village USA," a recent exhibition curated by Dan Cameron for the New Museum of Contemporary Art, catalogued, if not quite celebrated, art made by the denizens of the area in its heyday, between 1977 and 1987. The show historicized this recent era in a peculiar way, not only because many artists who got their start in the East Village are still at work now, but also because so many died too young and ought to be working now. Despite the fact that downtown Manhattan has morphed into quite a different place in just 20 years, a good number of the scene's participants remain here to argue about whether all the right people got included in the exhibition--prominent among the excluded were Rick Prol, Rhonda Zwillinger and Mark Kostabi. (Which brings up one of the East Village's charmingly irrational personality paradoxes: despite being a society of outcasts, it remained tenaciously elite, renowned for its nightclubs under the governance of a door policy.) But even given debatable omissions, with 167 works on view, the show did an excellent job of fleshing out a heady, bygone decade that might not be so "over" as a retrospective such as this suggests.
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Since video perhaps best captures personalities, several of whom exemplify the East Village's culture even better than its object-oriented art, the show's most compelling component lay in footage, mostly of performances. A youthful Karen Finley plasters her naked body with kidney beans, beets and ice-cream sandwiches in characteristic full abandon, while delivering a monologue that calls attention to rape and the sociopaths who commit it. The androgynous, uber-coiffed new-wave legend Klaus Nomi--a German soprano who frequently got away with telling people he was an alien, who ranked among the first to fall prey to the "gay cancer" and who recently turned up as the subject of a documentary by Andrew Horn, The Nomi Song--sings his underground smash "After the Fall": "The freaks shall inherit the earth now, no matter how well-done or rare. Hold on, hold on, tomorrow will be there." Charlie Ahearn's unscripted Wild Style (1981) documents the prescient, explosive collision of thrillseeking downtown Manhattan art people with outer-borough b-boys, break dancers and graffiti writers. In another video, a bewigged Ann Magnuson consecutively inhabits, at a rate faster than any channel suffer could keep up with, an outlandish, uproariously unfortunate range of female stereotypes. These days, such is the stuff of college textbooks. At the time, they were actions of people trying to understand who they were, and how--or, even better, if--they fit into the world.
Some of the artists in the show went on to major art careers; others, for a variety of reasons, more or less dropped off the map, which brings up another weird aspect of this exhibition. In his two catalogue essays, Cameron admits not only that he wasn't especially fond of East Village art when he was a young critic living in the neighborhood, but that the little art he actually liked then he's come to appreciate less now. So it's not surprising that the enterprise reads as more of a detached sociological endeavor than an affectionate or esthetic one.
A few viewers may have been surprised to find some of today's art stars represented by less-than-sensational, early specimens of work. In one such example, made between 1983 and 1985, Jenny Holzer contributed pretty, calligraphic text ("When you expect fair play you create an infectious bubble of madness around you") to a colorful, spray-painted spotted flower on canvas by graffiti artist Lady Pink. Also on view was a simple, black-and-white printed list of Holzer's "Truisms." These days, Holzer's words appear in museums on LED screens or chiseled into marble, but originally the "Truisms" were pasted up for free on city walls. We also got a few okay, but far from outstanding, examples of work by Jean-Michel Basquiat. One of these, a rough sketch of an apartment building accompanied by the word "Aaron," appears to have been made on a paper bag in less than 30 seconds.
As a consequence, some of the show's less effective works didn't seem terribly out of place. Stephen Lack was represented by a 1985 painting of what seems to be a gay bashing about to take place--the semi-nude victim and the cops apparently about to clobber him with a stick have no facial features; a plain, decorative field of yellow takes up all but a sliver of the background. Most of the art on view, especially the earlier examples, seemed made in the service of urgent self-expression, rather than out of a desire to appeal to wealthy collectors, impress professors or fit into a dialogue with art history.
