In the mid-1970s a distinctively new attitude toward artistic production surfaced in downtown New York. It was not a new aesthetic, not a new style, and not a unified movement, but rather an attitude toward the possibility of art and the production of art that, while for the most part unspoken, was shared by a wide range of writers, artists, performers, musicians, filmmakers, and video artists who moved to the relatively inexpensive lofts and tenements of Soho and the Lower East Side. Influenced by the Beats, the New York School, Dada, Pop Art, Hippies, Marxists, and Anarchists, downtown New York artists began to push the limits of traditional categories of art, believing these categories confine artistic expression. Artists were also writers, writers were developing performance pieces, performers were incorporating videos in their work, and every one was in a band. Along with the profound disruption of artistic specialization, downtown works themselves undermined the traditions of art, music, performance, and writing at the most basic structural levels. Rather than attempting a revolution to overthrow traditional forms and establish a new movement, downtown work sought to undermine the traditional structures of artistic media and the culture that had grown up around those structures from within. Without assimilating into the traditional art scene, downtown artists mounted a guerilla assault on the structures of society that led to grinding poverty, homelessness, the Vietnam war, nuclear power, misogyny, racism, homophobia, sexphobia, the gallery system of art, the credentialling of writers, and a host of other issues. Developing concurrently with post-structuralism and post-modernism, downtown artists were profoundly aware of the failure of modernist revolutions, but not willing to abandon the possibility of a better world. They began to explore the cracks and fissures where human experience--the actual events of everyday life--undermine the oppressive, prescriptive structures of society. Hoping to kick culture both in the sense of forcing it to change and, possibly, in the sense of giving up the stifling, prescriptive, and addictive structures, downtown art exploded traditional forms of art, showing them to be nothing more than cultural constructs. Verbo-visual writing, appropriation art, performance art, graffiti painting, xerox art, 'zines, small magazines, self-publishing, outsider galleries, mail art, and a host of other transgressions of tradition abounded downtown and dramatically changed how we think about the production of artistic work. "Kicking Culture: Fragments of the Downtown Scene 1975-Present" presents materials from the Downtown Writers Collection in the Fales Library at New York University. The items on display represent only a small, and not necessarily representative selection of downtown work. The Downtown Collection contains over 5000 books and magazines, 6000 gallery announcements and invitations to readings, poster, letters, manuscripts, ephemera, and other materials relating to the downtown scene. The archival holdings include the personal papers of David Wojnarowicz, Dennis Cooper, Ron Kolm, Tim Dlugos, William Anthony, and Bob Witz. The archives of the magazines and publishers like Between C&D, one of the important literary magazines of the East Village during the 1980s; Redtape Magazine, Appearances Magazine and High Risk Books Archive document the publishing venues for downtown work. Other members of the scene have generously donated copies of books and magazines to help us fill in gaps in the archive, making it the largest collection of downtown material anywhere. The Fales Library is committed to documenting the downtown scene and to preserving the history of the downtown artists and their community. As the collection continues to grow and as we acquire, catalogue, preserve, and make available downtown works to a wide audience, we will update this site. Our goal is to preserve the important history of downtown work and to make it accessible to anybody who is interested.