Art Trash Institutionalized for Lots of Cash
Valery Oisteanu
#146;s downtown has been a nursery for experimental arts and bohemian characters for more than 100 years. One decade, from 1974 to 1984, is the subject of a not-so-subtle revisionist exhibition at two New York University institutions: the Grey Art Gallery and the Fales Library.
"The Downtown Show: The New York Art Scene, 1974—1984" is one of a number of recent retrospectives to reinvent and reposition the rich cross-section of artists whose work coexisted and often overlapped during a heady time in Lower Manhattan. The show features some 375 paintings, sculptures, drawings, videos and photographs by the likes of Vito Acconci, Mark Kostabi, Martin Wong, Kenny Scharf, Cindy Sherman, Julian Schnabel, David Wojnarowicz, Kathy Acker, Kiki Smith, Eric Bogosian, Spalding Gray, Jeff Koons, Jenny Holzer, Ethyl Eichelberger, Nan Goldin and others, as well as more than 70 pieces of memorabilia, much of it from the archives of Hell–Richard Hell, that is.
Unfortunately, curator Carlo McCormick seems bent on creating a sort of virtual art reality populated by blue-chip and commercial artists in one giant sanitized art-scrapbook. He has revised the downtown scene both geographically and metaphorically, grossly distorting by omission how this ten year period really altered the face of American art and culture. The radicalism of the era as rendered here is here neutered, esthetically manicured and politically ambiguous. Only "Death to disco!" survives as a paltry plank in the punk platform.
You’ll have to take my word for it that the period spawned leftist politics enlivened by a heavy drug subculture (LSD, cocaine, heroin) in which artists and poets created radical and subversive works that were sexually experimental, neo-dada, sado-masochistic, surreal, provocative and angry. The Fluxus movement coexisted with Mail Art, graffiti intermingled with Sandro Dernini/Plexus human rights performances, Gomelsky’s Zoo-Fest married rock with punk, John Wilcox and Paul Tschinkel led the way into cable TV. It was a time of Poets in the Park, when the Tompkins Square Arts Festival and Lower East Side formed the true vortex of the avant-garde in a mad multiple expression of the need for change.
Many of the artists did not have or seek "representation," agents or the blessing of established galleries. And many of these forgotten ones, alas, are no longer with us, whether due to age, suicide, overdose or AIDS. The honor roll includes: Ray Johnson, Julian Beck, May Wilson, Nam June Paik, Charlotte Moorman, Carlo Pittore (of the Galleria del Ochio), A.M. Fine, Sari Dienes (founder of AIR gallery) Lil Picard, Brian Buzak, Yuri Kapralov, Ken Burges, Vali Meyers, Ahmed Yacoubi, Michael Savage (Man Ray’s nephew), Angelo Boreiro, Andreas Senser, Bill Rice, Mary Beach, Boris Lurie and poets Jim Brodey, David Rattray, Will Bennett (editor of Assassin), Herbert Hunke and Marty Metz. These artists and writers were recognized abroad, and then sometimes also by the local art markets, and they were talked about and attracted hundreds of acolytes. But ultimately they were considered too radical and "commercially challenged" to break into the big time, and they do not exist in the history of the glamorous and fashionable "galleristas."
"The vernacular of Downtown," muses McCormick (curator in training with "attitude") in an accompanying text, was "a disjunctive language of profound ambivalence, broken narratives, subversive signs, ironic inversions, proliferate amusements, criminal interventions, material surrogates, improvised impersonations and immersive experientiality." Who talks like that? Not the Carlo I knew! He is probably jockeying for a teaching position at NYU for remedial classes in the 3 R’s: Reinventing, Repositioning and Revisionism, where instead of Julian Beck (The Living Theater), Helen Stewart (La Mama), John Vaccaro (The Playhouse of the Ridiculous), Jackie Curtis, George Bartenieff (TNC), Tally Brown or Howard Margo, the performance pantheon is limited to Madonna, the New York Dolls, Television, the Ramones and the Voidoids.
By this show’s reckoning, Mark Kostabi "artwork" on Bloomingdale’s shopping bags represents the apotheosis of that era. "All’s well when it ends in a sale," went the slogan above the Kostabi studio doors. There are less mercantile survivors of the demise of the East Village and SoHo, such as painter/collagist John Evans (Ave. B School of Art), Ira Cohen (selected for the Whitney Biennial 2006), painter Kes Zapkus (once represented by Paula Cooper), Valeriy and Rima Gerlovin, Anton van Dalen, Christie Rupp, Philip van Aver, Jim Radakovich, Philis Bulkin-Lehrer, Reno, Arleen Schloss and others, all still creating despite years of severe critical or commercial neglect.
Bobby Bucker, one of the first artists to move to Soho and open an artist-run gallery (Bucker and Harpsichords), calls the show "frivolous and kitsch" and says NYU is on the path of esthetical, not to mention architectural, gentrification, lowering artistic standards to a level of "awful fashion" and "ugly buildings." Even the art critic of the New York Sun, Lance Esplund, ruminated that an "account of that era is at best incomplete" and concludes: "Yet even as history, the ‘Downtown’ project is a revisionist history."
Essentially, McCormick has "organized" a quasi-chronological "personal preferences sideshow," representing approximately 175 artists, writers, performers and musicians, all shoehorned into eight themes. That the works are "salon-style installed" (read: "boring and didactic") is supposed to invoke the dissonances of the Downtown scene as the curator’s "faltered memory" and "dubious taste" allows.
The eight sections are: 1) Interventions–led by a preface and introduction that posits a connection between the proliferation of not-for-profit exhibition venues and artworks engaging Downtown urban settings; 2) Broken Stories–a look at the innovative narrative techniques developed during the decade not only by writers, but also filmmakers and visual artists; 3) De-Signs–an investigation of the artistic use of advertising’s shorthand signs and strategies; 4) Salon de Refuse–a section that brings together works that harnessed the surrounding detritus to create a "trash culture" of their own that challenged traditional hierarchical distinctions; 5) Body Politics–a presentation of art concerned with sexuality; 6) Sublime Time–an exploration focusing on the period’s search for the sublime in the wake of minimalism’s reductive and formal concept of beauty; 7) The Portrait Gallery (i.e., crass self promotion)–a space featuring photographic, sculptural and painted images of key Downtown denizens, which creates a distorted "portrait" of this dynamic community; and 8) The Mock Shop–a recreation of the stores, selling low-cost multiples and other artworks that mocked America’s consumer culture.
As Marvin J. Taylor, editor of The Downtown Book and director of the Fales Library, rightly adds: "Downtown artists adopted an anarchic attitude that violated the gap between high art and mass culture, removed the production and reception of avant-garde art from its isolation within elite circles, and directly addressed social and political concerns. They also irreverently pushed the limits of traditional artistic categories–visual artists were also writers, writers developed performance pieces, performers incorporated videos into their works, and everyone was in a band." And evidence of such appears at the Fales’ third-floor media section of the show, which displays a rich array of archival material–artists’ journals as well as exhibition announcements, posters and other ephemera. In the words of McCormick, "The Downtown scene is all about collision–don’t follow the footsteps. Instead, track the skid marks."
I also enjoyed the nostalgia of opening night (oh! the good old times!), bumping in to the famous and infamous of the underground, individuals such as Willoughby Sharp, Collete, Martha Wilson, Joel Lewis, Vera Veronica and Walter Robinson. And I appreciated anew the work of Carolee Schneemann, Charles Getwood, Peter Hujar, Jack Smith, Annie Sprinkle and others.
The Downtown Book: The New York Art Scene, 1974—1984 (Princeton University Press) provides also the "faux-overview" of this important period. "By 1974 something has changed in American culture. The "hippie-euphoria" of the 60s, with its optimism, free love and paeans to personal fulfillment, had evaporated," states the curator. (Yet Edward Field, author of The Last Bohemians, contradicts that assumption by noting that in 1974, "Sexual freedom had already spread around the country, even gay liberation. The only one thing that didn’t spread was political radicalism.") The Downtown Book also presents a disjointed look at trends that arose in the 70s and early 80s, and introduces New York’s reputation as arbiter of the postmodern American art. Its seven essays are intercut with 12 self-serving reminiscences from practitioners and exploiters of the downtown artists "povera" scene, and much posed photography in glamorous self-congratulation, illustrations, posters and recycled bad art that seems so tame and toothless, just like some of the artists that fabricated it.
Gentrification and institutionalization marches on, with the help of bureaucrats from the New York State Council on the Arts, the NYU Humanities Council and NYU Graduate School of Arts, the Fales Library and Grey Art Gallery, among many other cultural foundations supporting this dubious endeavor.
Companion exhibitions are:
1. "Anarchy to Affluence: Design in New York 1974-1984" at Parsons, The New School for Design, through April 2.
2. Kim Levin, "Notes and Itineraries, 1976-2004" at Ronald Feldman Fine arts, through Feb. 4
The "Downtown show" also will travel to:
Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh May 20-Sept. 3
Austin Museum of Art, Austin Nov. 11-Jan. 28 2007
