Roberta Bayley, Richard Hell, Legs McNeil, Andy Warhol, 1976,
Gelatin silver print, Courtesy Barry Neuman / Modern Culture, New York
[source]
[see also our earlier post]
via NYTimes:
Art Review | 'The Downtown Show'
The Downtown Scene, When It Was Still Dirty
By GRACE GLUECK
Published: January 13, 2006
Remember Downtown? No, no, not the sanitized, respectable SoHo and Chelsea of today, but the real down-and-dirty Downtown, when the East Village was an art scene, punk and new wave rock assailed the ears, graffiti spread like kudzu, and heroin and extreme style were the rage. While Downtown lasted, the AIDS plague peaked, police raided illegal lofts, and artists attacked Establishment institutions. It was an explosive era of Super-8 films; "no wave" cinema; street art and performances; oral poetry; political engagement; feminist, gay and lesbian activism; clubs and alternative spaces.
Hot-to-trot Downtowners, both performers and audiences of their work, read the SoHo Weekly News and the East Village Eye, made the scene at Max's Kansas City and joined the doings at the Kitchen, the smoking griddle of the Downtown art world. Among the art spectacles were Joseph Beuys confined with a coyote behind a chain-link fence at the René Block Gallery; Gordon Matta-Clark carving up buildings with a chain saw; Andy Warhol making multiples and movies at his Factory; and the graffitist Keith Haring leaving his happy hieroglyphs everywhere.
Oh, the bubbling energy, the barrage of high-decibel sound, the wild and woolly frenzy, the sheer proliferation of it all! It's recaptured now - at least a generous slice of it - in "The Downtown Show: The New York Art Scene, 1974-1984," a humongous time warp of more than 450 paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, videos, books, journals, posters and ephemera by artists, writers, performers, musicians and maestros of mixed media, at New York University's Grey Art Gallery and its Fales Library. (The Fales, part of the larger Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, has the world's most extensive collection of materials relating to the Downtown art scene, from 1970 to now.)
The decade covered by the show runs from the enactment in 1974 of the Loft Law, which made it legal for artists to live in the sprawling factory spaces of SoHo, to the re-election of President Ronald Reagan in 1984, confirming the country's sweeping turn to the right. The show's organizers are Lynn Gumpert, the Grey's director, and Marvin Taylor, director of the Fales, with Carlo McCormick, a critic, writer, lecturer and teacher who specializes in pop culture, as guest curator.
Imposing an ingenious kind of order on the scene's inherent chaos, Mr. McCormick has arranged the show in eight sections, among them "Broken Stories," focusing on the imaginative narrative techniques hatched by writers, filmmakers and visual artists during the period; "Body Politics," work dealing with sexuality and identity politics; and "Sublime Time," chronicling breakaways from the reductive Minimalism that preceded the period.
"I knew from the outset that the show couldn't be chronological," Mr. McCormick says in an interview in a brochure accompanying the show. "Instead I came up with these rather vague and totally problematic constructs by which we could put different people of different scenes and from different moments of this arc in the same room and in conversation with each other."
Conversation! With so many clashing ideologies, points of view and attitudes toward art-making, the show generates the buzz and stridency of, say, Canal Street after payday. It's a no-holds-barred hodgepodge that still reflects the vitality of an off-the-wall culture at a time when New York City's fiscal viability was at an ebb, and the shadows of the cold war, Vietnam and Watergate hung over the country. [read on...]
