REPORT FROM NEWYORK IITales of Bohemian Glory

The tumultuous, i,nflumtial EastVillage art scme of the 1980s was the subject ofa recmt erhi,bition at the Nqw Mussum of Contemporary Art.

BY SARAH VALDEZefore it was gentrified and ovemrn by yuppiesand trust-funded NYI.J students, New York's

East Village-so the legend goes-wils a culturallythriving neighborhood of punks, bohemians, junkies,queers and artists. Through the 1970s and '80s, allmanner of eccentric, idealistic, rebel exhibitionistsand their misfit admirers could afford to dwell along-side the multiethnic communities alreadyensconced in the area's low-rent tenements. "EastVillage USA," a recent exhibition curated by DanCameron for the New Museum of Contemporary Art,catalogued, if not quite celebrated, art made by thedenizens ofthe area in its heyday, between 1977 and1987. The show historicized this recent era in apeculiar way, not only because many artists who gottheir start in the Ea.st Village are still at work now,but also because so many died too young and oughtto be working now Despite the fact that downtownManhattan has morphed into quite a different placeinjust 20 years, a good number of the scene's partici-pants remain here to arg;ue about whether all theright people got included in the exhibition-promi-nent among the excluded were Rick Prol, RhondaZwillinger and Mark Kostabi. (Which brings up oneof the Ea.st Village's charming;ly inational personali-W paradoxes: despite being a society of outcasts, itremained tenaciously elite, renowned for its night-clubs under the governance of a door policy.) Buteven given debatable omissions, with 167 works onview, the show did an excellent job of fleshing out aheady, bygone decade that might not be s0 "over" a.sa retrospective such as this suggests.

Since video perhaps best captures personalities,seveml of whom exemphfr the East Village's culhreeven better than its object-oriented art, the shodsmost compelling component lay in footage, mostly ofpedormances. A youthful lbren Finley plasters hernaked body with hdney beans, beets and ice+ream

Charlie Ahearn: Wild Style, 1 98 I, 85mm film tmnsferred to DW, 82 minutes,showing image oJ I'ee Quinonet's gralfiti.

sandwiches in characteristic fullabandon, while delivering a mono-logue that calls attention to rape andthe sociopaths who commit it. Theandmgmous, iiber-coiffed new-wavelegend Klaus Nomi-a Germansoprano who frequently got awaywith telling people he was an alien,who ranked among the first to fallprey to the "gay cancer" and whorecently tumed up as the subject of adocumentary by Andrew Horn, TltcNomi Song--sings his undergroundsmash "After the Fall": 'The fteaksshall inherit the earth now, no mat-ter how welldone or rare. Hold on,hold on, tomorrow will be there."Charlie Ahearn's unscripted l/ildStUIe (1981) documents the pre-scient, explosive collision of thrill-seeking downtown Manhattan artpeople with outer-borough b-boys,break dancers and gafrti writers. Inanother video, a bewigged AnnMagnuson consecutivef inhabits, ata rate faster than a.ny charurel surfercould keep up with, an outlandish,uproariously unfortunate range offemale stereotypes. These dap, suchis the stuff of college textbooks. Atthe time, they were actions of peopletrying to understand who they were,and how---or, even better, if-theyfit into the world

Some of the artists in the show went on to mqjorart careers; others, for a variety of reasons, more 0rless dropped off the map, which brings up anotherweird aspect ofthis exhibition. In his two catalogue

essays, Cameron admits notonly that he wasn't especial-ly fond of East Village artwhen he was a young criticliving in the neighborhood,but that the l i t t le ar t heactually l iked then he'scome to appreciate less now.So it 's not surprising thatthe enterprise reads as moreof a detached sociologicalendeavor than an affection-ate or esthetic one.

A few viewers may havebeen surprised to find someof today's art stars repre-sented by less-than-sensa-tional, early specimens ofwork, In one such example,made between 1983 anc1985, Jenny Holzer con-

One oJsb imagesftom Ttmothy Creenfield.Sanders's The NewIrascibles, 1985-86, black-and,-white fiber prints, each 18% by1 8 inches tramed. Front row seated, lefi to right, Rick Prol, KeikoBonlc, Jim Radakoaich, Peter Schuyf,J Middlc rou, lefr to right,Cheryl La.emmele, Martin Wong, Louis Renzoni, Ronnie Cutrone,Philip Pocock, Petcr Drake, Phikp Taofie. Back ro.D standing,Iefi to right, Thierry Cheoemey, Colin I'ee, Kiell Eria Killi Olsen,Bobby G, Kiki Smith,

tr ibuted pretty, call igraphic text ("When youexpect fair play you create an infectious bubble ofmadness around you") to a colorfrrl, spray-paintedspotted flower on canvas by graffiti artist LadyPink. AIso on view was a simple, black-and-whiteprinted l ist of Holzer's "Truisms." These days,Holzer's words appear in museums on LED screensor chiseled into marble, but originally the'ulluisms" were pasted up for free on city walls. Wealso got a few okay, but far from outstanding, exam-ples of work by Jean-Michel Basquiat. One of these,a rough sketch of an apartment building accompa-nied by the word "Aaron," appears to have beenmade on a paper bag in less than 30 seconds.

As a consequence, some of the shods less effec-tive works didn't seem terribly out of place.Stephen Lack was represented by a 1986 paintingof what seems to be a gay bashing about to takeplace-the semi-nude victim and the cops appar-ently about to clobber hin with a stick have nofacial features; a plain, decorative field of yellowtakes up all but a sliver of the background. Most ofthe art on view, especially the earlier examples,seemed made in the service of urgent self-expres-sion, rather than out of a desire to appeal to

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Daaid.Wojnaroul'cz: NYC, 1982, collage and' spray painton U.8' map,33 by 49'l inches. JPMorgan Chase Art Collection. Irnages this articlecourtes| the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York,

Near right, lValterRobinson: TheAmboy Dukes,1983, acrylicon masonite,24 bA l7 inches.Collection HangDruzd,, New York,

Midd,le, Sue Coe:The Money Temple,1985, mixed.med,iums andcollage, 53 by 98'/'inches. ColkctionJohn Carlin andRenee Dossick,Edgewater, N.J.

Far right,Jimmg d,e Sana:Cardboard, 1985,Cibachrome,20 by 16 inches.

Stephen Lack: Strip Search, 1985, acrylic on cantas, 48 by 64 inches.Collection Mr, and Mrs. Asher B, Ed'elman, Neu York'

92 June/Jul:11 2005

Martin Wong: Attorn€y Street (Handball Court with AutobiogtaphicalPoem by Piiero), 1982-84, oil on canaas, 35 by 48 inches. MetropolitanMuseum ofArt, New York.

Frank Moore and Jim SeIf: Beehive, 1985,approx. 15% minutes,

16mm Jilm lransfened to DW.

Even given its debatableomissions, the show didan excellent iob offleshing out a heady,bygone decade thatmight not be so ttoverttas a retrospectivesuch as this suggests.

wealthy collectors, impress professors or fit into adialogue with art history.

lrhe Reaganite '80s were painful years for eachI and every person in this exhibition. Many East

Village artists, especially the ones who died ofAIDSand had plenty of time to contemplate their ownmortality and the government that proclaimed thatthey deserved their deaths, couldn't help but bleedpolitics into their art. David Wojnarowicz, who diedin 1992, channeled his rage into some of thedecade's most compelling work. He was representedhere by two pieces: a collage in which flgures in afreefall verge on crashing onto a map of the United

Jelf Koons: Lifeboa! I I 85, bronze, 20 % by 62 % by 87 U inches.Musewn of Conternporary Art, Chi,cago.

States, and a painting on plywood illustrating noth-ing less lhan The Death of Amnri,can Spi,rituality(1987), a gruesome image including billowing pollu-tion, a cowboy, a kachina doll, newspaper clippings,red paint dripping like blood and a green head ofChrist with glowing yellow eyes. Peter Hujar, onceWojnarowicz's partner, romanticized urban squalorin black-and-white photographs. He also shotJa,cldnCurtis Dead, (1985), a riveting, tragic image of thefrequently cross-dressing transgendered Warholsuperstar. In contrast to his flamboyant living per-sona, Curtis in his coffur is dressed in a black tuxedo,sports a large white mum in his lapel and has beenmade up to look like a regular dead man.

Looking away from harsh realities never rankedamong the East Village's faults, insofar as anything

Greer Innktnn: Untitled (Acrobat), I98{,mixed-medium sculpture, 17 by 12 by I inches.Collactian Nan Goldin, New York.

can be said of an entire neighborhood's point ofview. The area attracted refugees from the grotesquebanality of the American Dream who were steepedin the belief that the world. if not doomed. had atthe very least gone to hell in a handbasket. Not sur-

prisingly, toxic urban wastelands capturedthe imaginations of many artists in theshow, including Anton Van Dalen, DavidSandlin, Lee Quinones, Martin Wong and,most impressively, Sue Coe, whose mixed-medium collage The Moneg Temple(1985) casts shade on geedy, bloodshot,bug-eyed old men in a casino. Wong'spantlng AttornsU Street (1982-84) depictsan urban handball court with graffiti-covered walls, beautifully detailed in amiumer reminiscent of a medieval manu-script; a Miguel Pifrero poem describing aworld and a city'\vhere even God was cor-rupt" runs across the top.

Jeff Koons's tongue-in-cheek, life-sizebronze Li,feboa, (1985) can be read as ametaphor for art as an unreliable meansof rescue, The sculpture also speaks to theinoeasingly sophisticated production val-ues of art in East Village galleries, as theart market boomed and real-estate valuesskyrocketed. By the late 1980s, most ofthe galleries in the area had closed ormoved to SoHo. Today, orily a few are still

in business: P.P.O.W. and Postmasters, which areboth now in Chelsea, and Nature Morte, which relo-cated all the way to New Delhi. The artists whoswam on to fame in the '80s, like Koons and PeterHalley-the latter represented here by a big, slickorange painting with a pink square-tended to bethose who steered clear of raw emotionalism.

It's true that the East Village was proudly, evennarcissistically, aware of its own importance(Cameron aptly refers to the "East Village's self-rythologizing antics" in one of his catalogue essays).But even at the scene's apex, its atmosphere wastinged with nostalgia for Warhol's New York of the'60s-and this yearning was only exacerbated by theEast Village's precocious, innate instinct to memori-alize itself-the desire for fame and the desire for

immortality possibly being not-distant cousins.Photographic portraits of "everyone," in fact, consti-tuted by far the most popula"r genre of work in theshow, with contributions from Nan Goldin, AndeWhyland, Charlie Ahearn, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, Tom Warren, Martha Cooper, PatrickMcMullen and David Robbins. AII these photogra-phers demonstrate that, despite how awtrl thingsoften really were, their subjects, there and then,clearly felt they inhabited what Truman Capote oncedesignated as "that place called fabulous." n

"East Viilnge USA" appeared at thz Nau Museum of Cun-temporary Art in Neut Yorlt, Dec. 9, 2004Mar. 19, 2a05. Anaccom.panging 159-page catalogue contains essags bycurator Dan Cotnerary Liza Kintin and Aktn W. Mome,akrng with cuntributionsfrorn Penny Arcad,e, Patli Astor,Julin Ault, Mitnh Corber, Lgdin Lunch, Carl,o Mc0ormhhCaluin ReiQ Mark Rwsellund Sur Rodney (Sur).

Neus York.

Peter Eqjar: Jackie Curtis Dead,1985, gelatin silaer print,1!% inches square.

Photo of lllaus Nomi trom a performance at thedisco Xenon, 1980, @ George-duBose.com,

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