IA
What about Vito Acconci?

CM
I think everyone in the show can remember the first time they met Vito. When I did, and I told him what an important artist I thought he was, he said, “Well, if I’m so great and important, then how come I’m starving? I’ve been sleeping on friends’ couches and I buy one jar of peanut butter every week so I can keep living.”

JS
What about Andy Warhol? He’s a figure who is not necessarily well-represented in the show …

CM
But he is! He sneaks into the show in a couple of very funny ways.

JS
Perhaps it’s not so much representing Warhol through a work of art but in spirit—a kind of elephant in the room.

CM
Yeah, he’s the elephant in the room. I think Duchamp is another. Most of the people in the show went to art school in the 1960s when Duchamp re-entered the discourse.
I also think John Cage held sway throughout. Luis Frangella, an artist in the show who was a good friend of Cage’s, had a great story about him. Cage wanted to do this piece about random chance and everyone was supposed to bring something that made a sound and “perform” it when they felt like it. So Luis showed up with a huge tuba and drowned everyone out. It made John Cage furious. And Luis said, “Well that’s the sort of chance you took!”

JS
This brings up the performative aspect, something that appears both in the artwork and in how people spent their nights at the clubs.

CM
Art as life was being explored at that time—Tehching Hsieh’s Year Long Performances are a great example.

Performance art was certainly going on in the 1960s, but I think it was a very self-referential, hermetic practice. What we see in this show is that performance art starts engaging the public in more entertaining ways. Underground video and film of the ’60s can be sort of like watching the grass grow or watching paint dry. Then, all of a sudden, it moves beyond that Warholian real time. What did survive from the Beats, the Pop artists, and the ’60s is the notion that you are your own star. And literally, people were famous whom no one had heard of.

Teri Toye, Joey Arias, and Klaus Nomi, for example, were spectacular presences—they were truly stars. I would like to have included even more of the beautiful freaks like them. But along with the DIY aesthetic was a self-sustaining, self-supporting, self-delusional mass hysteria by which we all ultimately believed that what we were doing was the center of the universe. New York has always had that myopia about it. It’s the most international city in America, but ultimately, it’s also the most provincial. We     actually believed that if it wasn’t happening in New York, it didn’t matter.

At the end of this period, this notion of centrality starts to dissolve. By the mid-’80s scenes were emerging in Germany, and the Italian Transavanguardia starts getting market recognition. We also went from this provincialism to multiculturalism and from multiculturalism to globalism. It is, in a way, the end of a particularly New York kind of thing.

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Tseng Kwong Chi, Puck Ball (The Gang’s All Here), 1983. Vintage gelatin silver print, 36 x 36 in. Courtesy Muna Tseng Dance Projects, Inc.
                                                           
In Puck Ball, Tseng Kwong Chi captured the flamboyance and raucous fun permeating the Downtown club scene. Here friends gather for a group portrait in his studio before heading out for the evening. The cast of characters includes (left to right, top to bottom): Katy K,  Keith Haring, Carmel Johnson, John Sex, Bruno Schmidt, Samantha McEwen, Juan Dubose, Dan Friedman, Kenny Scharf, Tereza Goncalves, Min Thomez, and Tseng Kwong Chi.

IA
In keeping with that, why does the show end in 1984?

CM
In 1984 Ronald Reagan was re-elected—this is the president who, in 1984, still had not even said the word “AIDS.” We were all going to three memorial services a week, and everyone was getting really pissed off. Some people weren’t getting invited to certain parties anymore because no one was entirely sure how this thing was spread. Very sadly, by then, to a large extent, we’re not all in the same room and we’re certainly not all at the same table.

IA
Are there other ways that the art scene in New York has changed?

CM
So many people had already died—between drugs and AIDS—that by the end of it we lost at least a third of our creative community, if not more. A lot     of the younger artists I’ve met who arrived in New York in the early 1990s have told me that they felt they came into a vacuum.

Also, New York used to be so open. You could come and  conquer it in a week. If you were a freak you had immediate access. Now, some thirty years later, there’s one place where all the fashion people hang out, another where all the art people hang out, still another where all the music people hang out, etc. Back then, we were all in the same space.

I think this exhibition is wrong in enough substantial ways that people may focus primarily on what doesn’t work. But I think that the way it’s wrong is very consistent with that time. One of the great things then was the incredible possibility of failure. Everyone was allowed to fail. You would hang a show and people knew not to get too close to the paintings, not because you don’t touch “art,” but because you would get paint on your clothes! And performance art would be put together at the last minute. People existed without a safety net, since the safety net was your peers. There wasn’t any other audience. You didn’t deliberately try to fail, but you had to allow for the possibility that you could fall flat on your face.

My point of view is that of someone who came of age at this time. I’m also a critic. Critics are great that way—they’re not historians nor are they academics; they’re total failures at both. They’re bad poets and terrible artists. I’m following in that great tradition!

 

Carlo McCormick is Guest Curator of The Downtown Show and Senior Editor at Paper Magazine. Ian Alteveer is a graduate student at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts and Curatorial Assistant for The Downtown Show. He also served as the Grey Art Gallery’s Graduate Assistant in 2004–5. Jennifer Sudul is a Ph.D. Candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts and 2005–6 Graduate Assistant at  the Grey.