JS
There is intermingling of political affiliations as well. Some of the artists in the show seem to wear their ideals on their sleeves, but then there are others who appear very apolitical …

CM
By the mid-1970s some leftist artists and critics’ notion of being political was going down to Nicaragua. They would “flee” American materialism for two weeks and work for the Sandinistas or something and come back to talk about it—a kind of   “radical tourism.” They’d share their stories about grape-pickers or some other cause at someone’s loft, and, in the meantime, the city was going to fucking hell right outside their front door. There was this real schizophrenia in terms of our politics at the time.

Similarly, another thing that happens in the 1970s with the advent of Punk is nihilism. Punk turns away from radicalism’s failure, ultimately creating this template of apathy by which the “me” generation, which comes right after, is born and by which they are so misguided. We’re still kicking ourselves!

JS
Do you feel that the categories you devised accurately sum up the themes that run through the period?

CM
We knew it would be impossible to capture ten of the most productive years anywhere, a period when the artists’ population density is just so extreme, and there is so much happening in so many different ways. It was obvious that we were bound to fail. But it’s the type of no-win situation where you also can’t lose, because there was so much great work then!   We all have different lists of what’s fantastic from that time, but if you put enough of those lists    together, you can’t lose either.

At the time, most everyone realized that they didn’t have to write the great American novel or make a Hollywood movie anymore. Artists were taking a more handmade, do-it-yourself approach. In the “Broken Stories” section, for example, we see the return of the figure and the return of the story, but   it had been so neglected as an avant-garde practice for so long that it comes back broken—fractured, cut-up, distorted, in some way damaged.

This is also the first TV generation—not the first generation to have a television set, but the first generation to grow up really watching TV. Everyone in the first half of the show can remember Kennedy’s assassination and the artists from the second half know every episode of Scooby Doo by heart. That’s one of the origins of the postmodern: artists began to address media directly. We also have Kenny Scharf, the Club 57 kids, Keith Haring—all of them were  ’fessing up to the fact that our parents were right—they told us that TV would rot our brains and it did. “Look, look at how rotten my brain is.” Its like, we’ve been eating candy and here are our rotten teeth.


Tim Miller, Postwar, 1981. Photograph by Paula Court. Photodocumentation of performance at the Kitchen (gelatin silver print, 8 x 10 in.). Courtesy the artist and Paula Court

This photograph records Miller performing the first half of Postwar at the Kitchen as a work in progress. The following year he premiered the entire piece at Dance Theater Workshop, the choreographers’ collective and performance space in Chelsea.

IA
Tell us about how you chose the key intergenerational figures who are in the show.

CM
Well, I went to a lot of younger artists of the time and asked something like, “When you did that show at the Kitchen, who was there that you couldn’t believe was sitting in the audience?”

One of the things that has changed so radically—and there are many things that have—is that New York then was a really multigenerational scene. You had these incredible layers of generations—Herbert Hunke, Gregory Corso, Taylor Mead, Quentin Crisp, Allen Ginsberg, to name just a few. People could tell you about suffragettes leading marches in Union Square, Bruce Davidson could tell you about Weegee. There were living links of memory that extended back to New York at its most bohemian.

I remember one night when I put together a show at this hardcore Punk club called A7. It was a group called The Young and the Useless, whose Adam Horovitz became one of the Beastie Boys. We didn’t have any money to pay the band because everyone who wanted to come in was so poor—the admission was supposed to be five bucks, but all anyone had was 35 cents. Then Larry Rivers shows up with eight friends and lays a fifty on me and says “keep the change.” Larry Rivers is a great example of this kind of intergenerational connection. He’s not in the show, though, because I’m not showing artists from the 1950s and ’60s.

Hannah Wilke was great, too, and incredibly influential. She totally got what the kids were doing, and she also told down and nasty stories about our heroes. She humanized the pantheon in incredible ways.

< previous -- continue >