Those who consider themselves to be among New York's downtown creative ranks can be roughly divided into two groups: those who lived through the East Village scene of the 1980s, and those who, in one way or another, wish they had.
Depending on which group you're in, East Village USA, currently on view at the New Museum's temporary quarters at the Chelsea Art Museum, will either be a bittersweet trip down memory lane or a glimpse into one of the most dynamic, storied and infamous episodes in the city's recent cultural history, defined as much by its decadent narcissism and self-destructive tendencies as its boundless energy and creativity. The exhibition includes over 180 works by 75 artists, from taggers like Crash and Futura 2000 and performance artists Karen Finley and Ann Magnuson to, of course, the likes of Keith Haring and Jean Michel Basquiat. If much of emerging art these days can be characterized by its messy youth cultural commotion, then East Village USA shows where the party started.
By now, the set up is almost mythic. In the early eighties, the scruffy enclave of battered hovels, house fires and strung-out prostitutes that was the East Village proved fertile ground for a generation of angst-ridden, media-savvy artists. Fueled by punk and early hip-hop, nights at the Pyramid Lounge and Paradise Garage, as well as the new money being made on Wall Street, these artists and the grassroots storefront galleries that sprang up around them unleashed a diverse body of work charged with do-it-yourself defiance, political fervor and self-conscious facetiousness. While many of its members, like Nan Goldin and Jeff Koons, have proven their staying power, the scene itself unraveled as quickly as it jelled, a victim not only of its own overhyped success, but also the 1987 stock market crash, gentrification and AIDS.
In videos, paintings, photographs and sculptures, East Village USA presents the free-for-all of neo-expressionist, Neo-Geo, appropriative and other experiments of the period's familiar and lesser-known artists. It is here that the handiwork of graffiti artists like Crash, Lady Pink and Lee Quinones went from subway cars to the gallery wall; that Koons and Peter Halley brought Pop and minimalism together to expose modern systems of commodification and organization; and Goldin, David Wojnarowicz and Peter Hujar documented the demimonde and its lives gone wrong with profound impact.
At the same time, the East Village was more of a milieu than a movement, and the exhibition portrays this in other relics, from Glenn O'Brien's cable show TV Party and Nelson Sullivan's videos of the Pyramid Lounge to Patrick McMullan's snapshots of club kids. A room is devoted to those, including Haring, Hujar, Wojnarowicz, Jack Smith, and Martin Wong, who died of AIDS. However, while the tragedy of the East Village scene often overshadows its exuberance—in fact, the two are inextricably linked—you can't deny its significance, as some do. It may have produced some truly bad art. Its antics may have been infantile, and its convictions occasionally shallow and self-serving. But, if street culture and counterculture have found a home in high culture, and such art has found ways to consume the commercialization and hype that inevitably try to consume it, then the East Village's spirit truly lives on, for worse and for better.
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Perry Rubenstein's 23rd Street gallery has become an altar to Leigh Bowery. And that's just how the inimitable performer, drag diva and Lucian Freud muse would have wanted it. Bowery, a Divine-like creature who died in 1994 after having checked himself into the hospital using John Waters's name, was an Australian-born underground art and nightclub fixture in 1980's London. His over-the-top transformations of his own corpulent body practically created its own genre of shock performance art, subverting conventional mores through campy artifice and grotesque shenanigans. The exhibition includes about twenty photographs by Fergus Greer, as well as two films by Charles Atlas, that portray the provocateur in his famously outrageous—and surprisingly well-done—self-made costumes that could pass for a (plus-size) Vogue Italia spread.
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The hyper-trendy London architect David Adjaye is almost as famous for being famous as he is for his work. Caught in the limelight, and snarled in a media frenzy, Adjaye has come up with an installation at the Bohen Foundation that takes a more introverted route. Asymmetric Chamber is a long, rectilinear structure of rough plywood, cut in profile and sandwiched together, that leads one on a zigzagging path down a side corridor and through a central room where uplit fiberglass perimeter strips and ambient music by Adjaye's brother, Peter, have a meditative effect. Another corridor, the mirror image of the first, leads one out. Accordingly, Adjaye has created a sensorial journey that slows you down in stages before speeding you up, a momentary respite that verges on hallucination.
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Shoptart
01, 22, 16. Nope, it’s not bingo night; it's the numerical filing system at Maison Martin Margiela. Adding to the mathematical fun is a new line of fine jewelry in absurdist proportions and scale. Also this month: Comme de Garçons for H&M, Louis Vuitton and more. By Franklin Melendez  Hint Shop
If Rad Hourani were writing this blurb, it would be over already. That's because, for the soon-to-explode French-Canadian designer, it's all about extreme minimalism. Thus, the concept behind this one-size-fits-all, unisex, sleeveless T-shirt—printed with the dates and times of a calendar—is that it can be worn by anyone, anytime. Message Boards
"Madonna starves herself on a raw macrobiotic kosher vegan kaballah diet and works out three hours a day to maintain the physique of a 12-year-old gymnast boy, and then has the cheeks of a 300-pound woman implanted into her face. And her forehead is like a plastic baby's bottom. It's like Nicole Kidman's forehead at the height of her botox addiction, and we all remember how unfortunate that era was." |
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