East Village Art Hijacked West
By Valery Oisteanu
Nan Goldin, Trixie on the Cot, NYC, 1979. Courtesy of the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, NY. Copyright Nan Goldin. New Museum of Contemporary Art, East Village USA, December 9, 2004 – March 19, 2005
The New Museum of Contemporary Art’s show "East Village USA" (200 works by 75 artists) is on view through March 19 in a space rented from the Chelsea Museum (the New Museum’s temporary home until the new location on the Bowery is completed in 2006). In ithe show?s press release, curator Dan Cameron suggests the subtitle "reviving the scene that shaped the art world in the early ’80s." For the sake of accuracy, however, the statement should probably read: "revising the scene that did not change anything, but did introduce art resembling comic books, graffiti and advertising as an affordable commodity."
I cannot qualify this show as "historical nostalgia," nor an "80’s club-reunion," not only because of the crass revisionism in the critical and memorabilia-driven display but also in its sanitized, neutralized, presentation of "bad-art." Vintage "bad-art of the East Village" is still lame. And nailed on the walls of the Chelsea/New Museum, with provenance listed, it becomes neutered.
I suppose even such unpleasant markers are needed to measure some of the redeemable art of the same short-lived period against the great spectrum of New York art history. The East Village Art Scene (1981-87) was a period of the faux-primitive, "unapologetically-infantile-happy-art," that arose in a neighborhood that Italian surrealist Enrico Baj called "Manhattan’s Montmartre" (Mark Kostabi by Baird Jones, Matteo, 2002).
I have to commend Alan W. Moore for a well-written essay in the exhibit’s catalog, called "Buried in Plain Sight". He writes, "The East Village chapter of this long unwritten history concerns, as always, what Nicolas Moufarrege called ‘a neighborhood that encourages one to be the person he is with greater ease than other parts of the city’ (reprinted from "Another Wave," Arts Magazine 57, 1982). The East Village in the early 80s was an extraordinary fountain of style–it was about letting it all hang out, making declarations of being, the East Village movement set out to sell it all." Some succeeded, some sold out, most remain invisible.
Dan Cameron?s, with his "art-challenged" taste, has assembled his long time favorites, including Jeff Koons’ objects, Tom Otterness’ sculpture, and Rodney Alan Greenblat’s furniture from the kitsch department. Kiely Jenkins’ Chipmunk, Cat and Rat of 1984, taxidermist-animal heads are a kind of "Americana." Lady Pink’s inclusion, Death of Graffiti, 1982, is a work she said she doesn’t even remember painting!
More appropriate inclusions in the show (all by artists now dead, museums’ favorite kind of artists) are Jack Smith’s film, Flaming Creatures, the daddy of camp who was shocking the East Village way before the ’80s; Keith Haring’s Untitled 1982 work; Jean-Michel Basquiat’s faux-primitive portrait titled Famous Negro Athlete #4 from 1981; a poster of John Sex; David Wojnarowicz’s Collage NYC, 1982; and a photograph and video of Klaus Nomi, a "polymorphous-self expressionist" performer.
Most of the serious, non-commercial, local artists, even if they were shown at East Village galleries, were soon forgotten. Among them I would like to mention the late Andreas Senser, the late Ken Burgess, Carlo Pittore (who showed at Galleria del Ochio on 10th street), John Evans (of the Avenue B School of Art) and others mentioned in my monthly column "Wall Patrol" of Cover Arts magazine (April 1986 through 1988). I photographed and reviewed many openings of the East Village Renaissance in such publications as East Village Eye, SoHo Arts Weekly; Cover Arts, The Portable Lower East Side, and New Observation. My photos of that era often accompanied my writings in Cover Arts, Panorama (Italy), Ignite and were included in a documentary about 7th Street produced by the Sundance channel.
My reviews covered, for example, a gallery called Sensory Perception run by Stephen Style and the artists he represented such as Kenny Hiratsuka, Nicola Naimeo, Phyllis Bulkin-Lehrer and Leslie Lew-Burns among others. None of these people are presented in "East Village USA". I also reviewed an exhibition where "Aimee Rankin presented bizarre assemblages" at Postmasters; Frank Palaia’s Great Wall-billboards at Bridgewater gallery; and the quickly changing exhibitions at Sragow Gallery, Helio Gallery, Ave. B Gallery, Todd Capp Gallery, Limner Gallery, Henry Harvey Aftermath Gallery, and the Timothy Greathouse Photo-Gallery just to name a few. With many other artists, critics and poets who were "in and of East Village-cool-post beat counterculture," of the period 1981-1987, I also have remained invisible.
I have lived in the East Village for over thirty years and learned from the late East Village poet David Rattray (author of the seminal text How I Became One of the Invisible) how to maintain my Zen-invisibility. I wrote my reviews in "Wall Patrol" under the pen name Valery Gallery. I used my apartment under the same name as a studio/exhibition space. Several collage exhibits were held in my space in 1982-83 and were documented in my guest-books with drawings by guest-artists. I curated the introduction of the "Ray Johnson’s Fan Club" at Club 57 in 1981, introducing the "mail art community" of the East Village. Although the correspondents numbered in the hundreds, including international participation from Achille Cavellini, Valerii and Rima Gerlovin (dissidents from the USSR), Christians from Outer Space, Kato Tenakimura and many others this community also remains invisible and untapped. Against invisibility, my fellow mail-artist John Digby published "The Handbook of Collage" (Thames and Hudson, 1985) which includes many of my friends and the book has gone some distance in inspiring curators and gallery owners to reevaluate collage as a legitimate art medium.
The East Village-art scene started as an extension of the Beat generations’ local presence. In the fifties Jack Kerouac wrote "Paradise Alley" in the East Village, Larry Rivers lived and played his saxophone in a 13th Street loft, Frank O’Hara wrote his best poetry on Second Avenue, Robert Mapplethorpe was here, and even W. H. Auden lived on St. Marks Place at the corner of First Avenue. In the sixties The Fugs (Tuli Kupferberg and Ed Sanders) were playing at the Poetry Project, and the whole group of Allen Ginsberg’s friends congregated in a building on 12th Street and First Ave: Gregory Corso, Peter Orlovskii, Ted Joans, Herbert Hanke and Marty Metz.
The Living Theater (Julian Beck and Judith Malina) performed in Tompkins Square at the TNC. Ted Berrigan held court at St. Marks Church (St. Marks by the way has long been the protector of artists, poets and winos!). The East Village Scene became a mix of hippies, artists, poets, anarchists and ultimately punks such as Von LMO, Richard Hell, and Joey Ramone. It was a magic-cauldron, without publicity or trust-fund-artists, that lasted throughout the rebellious seventies.
The New Museum’s ""East Village USA"" institutionalizes an art movement that was trying in every way possible to avoid such institutionalization.. East Village exhibits of the ’80s were held in the dark spaces of nightclubs, such as Club 57, with glow-in-the-dark graffiti by Keith Haring covering all the walls and performances bent on traumatizing the audience by Karen Finley. Galleries such as the Emerging Collector on 2nd Avenue sold paintings for under fifty dollars. These were the renegades?not the commercially successful Nan Goldin, Jimmy de Sana, Kiki Smith or Peter Hujar. The art of the East Village was not apart from the large picture of art in New York, and still is an integral part of it. Some artists showed in both the "legitimate" SoHo galleries and in nightclubs such as Zippers, Underground, Berlin, and Mudd.
Many of the sensitive artists were consumed and destroyed by the very subculture that they represented. Among the victims of junk and AIDS were Angelo Boreiro, Jackie Curtis, Ethyl Eichelberger, Margo-Margo, John Sex, Klaus Naomi, Jean-Michel Basquiat and others. But many of the "famous-dead-artists club" of the ’80s East Village are mysteriously absent from the "East Village USA" roster: May Wilson, Al Hansen, Buster Cleveland, Andreas Senser all were shown at Gracie Mansion gallery, but have been past over by Dan Cameron. He prefers instead Steve Lack’s painting Strip Search, 1985 and Mike Bidlo’s Not Pollock, 1983– appropriation which in retrospect seems tame and didactic.
Rhonda Zwillinger’s objects and Marcia Reznick’s edgy photographs of that colorful period also have gone unnoticed by Cameron. Instead he chose docu-photos by photographer Dona Ann McAdams (PS 122) and gave a whole second floor to Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’ black and white group-shots of artists sitting stiff and visibly uncomfortable in "Vanity Fair-like poses."
Among the invisible, my real name is mentioned in the catalogue in the essay signed by Sur Rodney (Sur), ex-co-director of Gracie Mansion, called "On Ed Sanders’ Tales of Beatnik Glory" (1975) where he acknowledges, "So many stories untold, retold, wanted, or lost." He then lists poets and artists including Taylor Meade, Ruth Kligman, Emilio Cubeiro, Ira Cohen, others and me.
Despite the vitality of the performance scene in the East Village and the thousands of events that took place in the ’80s, the performance exhibit of "East Village USA" is an overdone "multi-media flash in a pan" and looks almost like an MTV display at an Adult video convention. It has as much to do with the East Village, as Reality-TV has to do with reality. Let’s face it, The New Museum has cultural amnesia about most of the over 100 galleries that were in the East Village art-explosion, many of them are not even mentioned. The New Museum’s Senior Curator also has a mental blockage about the "poetry-performance" experimentation of that time which included "spoken word" poetry accompanied by jazz and punk music (Sergio Gomelsky’s ZU-festival-1981), The New Romantic group, The Nuyorican slams, The La Mama la Galleria poetry series and The Art-Cafe group-shows on Second Avenue (Jacques Halbert was the artist-owner) and Rene Ricard readings on the street. Also forgotten are the many other performance venues presenting women poets-voices (Jeanine Pomy Vega, Heidi Jones, Eileen Miles, Cathy Acker, Reno, Cookie Mueller, etc) and including WOW Cafe, Limbo Lounge, The Gas Station, Cafe Nico, King Tut, Danceteria, the Pyramid lounge, 8BC and the Kamikaze club.
Lance Esplund qualifies "East Village USA" in his review (The New York Sun, December 10, 2004) as "some of the worst art ever exhibited in New York City–art that does not necessarily get any better the second time around." I really don’t want to join the chorus of "sour-grapes" critics, some of them begrudging the exhibition even preceding its opening (Gary Indiana, New York Magazine-Dec 6), but I had to address the skewed sampling of artists, the campy look of the entire show and Cameron’s perpetuating the mistakes that eager curators of the 80’s made in the first place by promoting "bad-art" as "cheap-art." Cameron fails to consider that some artist were opportunistically "in the East Village" and some were artists "of the East Village," creative pioneers that truly represented a radical sensibility and style, fomented social and political dissent and had a spiritual component to boot. So hurray for the survivors of the great exodus of 1987. Against all odds, East Village Art and Poetry Lives!
