The New York Art Scene, 1974-84 at The Warhol

["Dennis Moore" <clayboy56>]

When art met punk / The Warhol takes us back to the messy creativity
of New York in the '70s

Thursday, May 25, 2006
By Mary Thomas, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06145/692910-42.stm

It's uncanny how quickly a visitor drops back three decades once
inside "The Downtown Show: The New York Scene, 1974-84," which rolls
open its doors at The Andy Warhol Museum Saturday.

Part artwork, part archive, part titillation, part nostalgia, this is
as close a visit to the era as you can get, or maybe would want. It
will speak directly to those who lived it as well as to the younger
generations that have granted the period mythological status.

The cast is star-studded, including Patti Smith, Keith Haring, Nam
June Paik, Jenny Holzer, Richard Hell, Carolee Schneemann, David
Wojnarowicz, Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass, Vito Acconci, Karen
Finley, Robert Mapplethorpe, Cindy Sherman. You get the idea.

Artists represented are a checklist of the seminal and/or the famed,
the living and the missing.

"AIDS is the spectre that kind of hangs over this show," says John
Smith, Warhol assistant director for collections and research, who
will leave the museum next month to become director of the Smithsonian
Institution's Archives of American Art. "It hit a lot of these artists
either during their prime or before they were able to achieve it."

The decade was bracketed politically, Smith says, by Watergate and the
end of the Summer of Love, and the identification and naming of the
AIDS crisis.

The exhibition was organized by the Grey Art Gallery and Fales Library
and Special Collections at New York University.

It was curated by the perennially hip and knowing Carlo McCormick,
Paper magazine senior editor and popular culture critic, who'll
conduct a tour of the exhibition at noon Sunday.

With approximately 175 artists represented through more than 375
paintings, sculptures, drawings, videos and photographs, the show's
more a celebration of the concentrated dynamic than of any individual.
Also displayed are more than 70 items from the Fales Library rare book
and manuscript collection, including posters, artists' journals and
exhibition announcements.

The exhibition seemed a good match for The Warhol, Smith says. It has
a preponderance of archival materials, it has a great mix of film and
video material, and it offers many programming possibilities. "It's a
great collective look at that period -- what we like to do," he says.

There's also a connection with Andy Warhol.

The way the artists were moving back and forth among disciplines -- a
painter is also in a rock band is also doing performance -- is a sort
of Warholian idea, Smith says. "There's a fluidity in how one was
defining oneself in that period that continues to be an interest of
young artists [today]."

SoHo and the Lower East Side were then affordable for young and/or
experimental artists. "There were amazing spaces in which to live for
very little money. That kind of creative activity is now being forced
out of Manhattan to different parts of New York."

Interestingly, although Warhol influenced young artists in a
significant way during those years, his own reputation as an artist
was such that he was hard pressed to get an exhibition in New York,
Smith says. Artists trying to emulate Warhol were creating their own
"Silver Factories, if you will." But Warhol was in crisis at that
time.

In the mid- and late 1970s Warhol was not taken seriously, Smith says.
It was his work with Jean-Michel Basquiat in the early 1980s that
returned him to the spotlight.

"I think [the mid-1970s] were really conflicted years for Warhol,"
Smith says. "The art world had changed. It was the height of
Minimalism, Conceptual Art. Warhol wasn't the name on the tip of
everyone's tongue."

The later artists in the "Downtown Show," Smith says, were not only
acting on the influences of Warhol, but they were also acting against
the formality of Minimalism. They were saying "art can be messy and
art doesn't have to have so many rules."

The range of the exhibition is reflected in the eight sections it's
divided into: "Interventions," exploring the connection between the
proliferation of nonprofit exhibition sites and artworks engaging
Downtown settings (which may have particular relevance to contemporary
Pittsburgh, where storefront art is spreading and the monthlong
live-in performance "Looking In, Looking Out," currently at 922 Penn
Ave., addresses living and the cultural scene Downtown -- Pittsburgh,
that is); "Broken Stories," new structuring of narrative by visual
artists, filmmakers and writers; "De-Signs," investigating advertising
strategies; "Salon de Refuse," the "trash culture" that challenged
hierarchies; "Body Politics," sexuality and identity politics;
"Sublime Time," the new sublime post-Minimalism; "The Portrait
Gallery," images of key figures; and "The Mock Shop," re-creating the
stores that critiqued consumer culture by offering the likes of
low-cost multiples.

"The importance of this show is not so much that it's a collection of
masterpieces," Smith says. "It's to give one a sense of what a vibrant
and exciting period this was and also how we're still feeling the
legacy of that period, that time.

"Also the way the work of artists finds its way into popular culture
-- using popular culture, but also having a dramatic effect on popular
culture."

Schedule of events:

The Downtown Show: The New York Art Scene, 1974-84
'The "F" Word'
Where: The Andy Warhol Museum, North Shore.
When: Saturday through Sept. 3.
Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays and until 10 p.m. Fridays.
Admission: $10, seniors $7, students/children $6, after 5 p.m. Fridays
half-price, members free.
Information: 412-237-8300 or www.warhol.org.