Between 1974 and 1984, many Downtown artists fervently embraced figuration, breaking away from the stark formality of  minimalism and the mathematical rigor of dematerialized conceptual art. Writers like Kathy Acker and Lynne Tillman devised innovative narrative techniques that radically departed from mainstream American fiction. In painting, sculpture, and filmmaking, too, stories were often disjunctive, circular, and fragmented. The videos of both Michel Auder and Michael Smith slip fantasy into biography, while Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills document movies that were never made. Sherrie Levine’s appropriated images double their originals, deliberately plagiarizing modernist “classics.” In their non-directional repetitiveness, Ida Applebroog’s cartoon-like vellum storyboards seem to tell no story at all, while Laurie Anderson’s woven newspapers are nearly illegible. Challenging linearity and creating self-referential authorial voices, these experimental artists and writers devised strategies that would later become codified as central tenets of postmodernism.