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

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.

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.

The Reaganite '80s were painful years for each and every person in this exhibition. Many East Village artists, especially the ones who died of AIDS and had plenty of time to contemplate their own mortality and the government that proclaimed that they deserved their deaths, couldn't help but bleed politics into their art. David Wojnarowicz, who died in 1992, channeled his rage into some of the decade's most compelling work. He was represented here by two pieces: a collage in which figures in a freefall verge on crashing onto a map of the United States, and a painting on plywood illustrating nothing less than The Death of American Spirituality (1987), a gruesome image including billowing pollution, a cowboy, a kachina doll, newspaper clippings, red paint dripping like blood and a green head of Christ with glowing yellow eyes. Peter Hujar, once Wojnarowicz's partner, romanticized urban squalor in black-and-white photographs. He also shot Jackie Curtis Dead (1985), a riveting, tragic image of the frequently cross-dressing transgendered Warhol superstar. In contrast to his flamboyant living persona, Curtis in his coffin is dressed in a black tuxedo, sports a large white mum in his lapel and has been made up to look like a regular dead man.

Looking away from harsh realities never ranked among the East Village's faults, insofar as anything can be said of an entire neighborhood's point of view. The area attracted refugees from the grotesque banality of the American Dream who were steeped in the belief that the world, if not doomed, had at the very least gone to hell in a handbasket. Not surprisingly, toxic urban wastelands captured the imaginations of many artists in the show, including Anton Van Dalen, David Sandlin, Lee Quinones, Martin Wong and, most impressively, Sue Coe, whose mixed-medium collage The Money Temple (1985) casts shade on greedy, bloodshot, bug-eyed old men in a casino. Wong's painting Attorney Street (1982-84) depicts an urban handball court with graffiti-covered walls, beautifully detailed in a manner reminiscent of a medieval manuscript; a Miguel Pinero poem describing a world and a city "where even God was corrupt" runs across the top.

Jeff Koons's tongue-in-cheek, life-size bronze Lifeboat (1985) can be read as a metaphor for art as an unreliable means of rescue. The sculpture also speaks to the increasingly sophisticated production values of art in East Village galleries, as the art market boomed and real-estate values skyrocketed. By the late 1980s, most of the galleries in the area had closed or moved to SoHo. Today, only a few are still in business: P.P.O.W. and Postmasters, which are both now in Chelsea, and Nature Morte, which relocated all the way to New Delhi. The artists who swam on to fame in the '80s, like Koons and Peter Halley--the latter represented here by a big, slick orange painting with a pink square--tended to be those who steered clear of raw emotionalism.

It's true that the East Village was proudly, even narcissistically, aware of its own importance (Cameron aptly refers to the "East Village's self-mythologizing antics" in one of his catalogue essays). But even at the scene's apex, its atmosphere was tinged with nostalgia for Warhol's New York of the '60s--and this yearning was only exacerbated by the East Village's precocious, innate instinct to memorialize itself--the desire for fame and the desire for immortality possibly being not-distant cousins. Photographic portraits of "everyone," in fact, constituted by far the most popular genre of work in the show, with contributions from Nan Goldin, Ande Whyland, Charlie Ahearn, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, Tom Warren, Martha Cooper, Patrick McMullen and David Robbins. All these photographers demonstrate that, despite how awful things often really were, their subjects, there and then, clearly felt they inhabited what Truman Capote once designated as "that place called fabulous."

"East Village USA" appeared at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, Dec. 9, 2004-Mar. 19, 2005. An accompanying 159-page catalogue contains essays by curator Dan Cameron, Liza Kirwin and Alan W. Moore, along with contributions from Penny Arcade, Patti Astor, Julie Ault, Mitch Corber, Lydia Lunch, Carlo McCormick, Calvin Reid, Mark Russell and Sur Rodney (Sur).

Author: Sarah Valdez is a freelance writer living in New York.

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