Saou Chater, z= sreciat section: srt Hexic DECADES. ‘sw YORK INTHE 18808 AND 1980 (sees 2110) cov TUSTITUED (EAST VILLAGE ‘Saris, 0. keh a) Lynn sroNe ewal ak Dy Toa Coes aueica’s aueat 1 to Mapes Foster ‘SHERMAN DREXLER Wp chard Mart Myr Oa Holand Cote ‘OF THE EIGHTIES, tao sy Grace HaRTIGAN ‘ART OF THE 150. ty Nea Parvin by masa Rat by Rober Pinan ‘aris poston. tien Cok RECENT SCULPTURE by water Day Dave "Tn PORTRATT by bor Aaa102 THE NEW IRASCIBLES PORTFOLIO OF SIX PORTRAITS BY TIMOTHY GREENFIELD-SANDERS ENTRIES BY ROBERT PINCUS-WITTEN DRAWINGS BY MARK KOSTABI retrospective viewing of the East Vilage Bubble can hardly be AXtceme an rial Inspiration, The phenomenon has been re peatedly examined, both superficially and in depth, as it will continue to be with surveys proposed for cities as distant from us as Tokyo. At firs, the appellation East Village Arthad the effect of demarcating geos- raphy and mode, both vague as to actual limits and tothe specifies of style though the East Village green, Tompkins Square Park, has evolved in tree years from junkie, bongo, and barrio blaster heaven to a quasi Regeney Pare Monceau and by now is far safer by night than the abandoned ranges and rambles of Central Park. Sill the vague sense of East Village ghetto, promoted, forthe nonce, sense of confinement, of stylistic consistency and reification, East Vil: lage became tag, handle, and lever—a tag of easy appeal; a cognomen akin to the heroic self invention, the names ofthe graffi writers; har dle tha allowed for local, national, and ulimately international trans- posablity, in short, for commodification, a lever whereby a broad, wildly disparate set of options could be pried free from other contem Dorancous avantgarde episodes, be they ongoing or incipiently moribund: ‘But first there had been a depressed area, albeit in Manhattan, popu lated by generation upon generation of solid ethnic blue collar workers, as wellas of late, a sprinkling of artists in need ofthe cheap living space ‘that once i offered though hardly the large working space of the Soho loft For several years too, It served as liter ground ofthe wrappings of| the Great Society Candy Bar—the sociopathic detritus of urban society, the street corner drug dealer as purveyor to the cour ofthe disaffected junkie. Here was the burned-out, cold water tenement, its ironstone ‘Sinkbathoub as the main feature of the makeshift living room; here, where greenhorns once extended meager incomes through the preps: ration of piecework for the neighborhood sweatshop, the ambulant psychotic (abandoned by public institution and welfare survelllance) ow roamed; here was human grafiti—the wino, the junkie, the bag- Jady, and 2 growing numberof young artists, realy ther clubby hangers- ‘on, who took syste clues (quite as they tied on the old clothes ofthe Retro boutiques) from this farago, heartlessly seeing it as all 00 pank- ishly glamorous for words. ‘Then came the club-cur-gallery, and a constellation of mutually in terdependent elements—arist, dealer, alternative space, collector (up- ‘ow, out of town, erie, hanger-on, ete—a scene that finally im ploded into some vast culture, a mushroom bomb, ‘Alert young dealers West of Broadway in Soho extended antennae Ingo this nutrient mass, absorbing back Into their more conventional venue the talisman of this yeastiness, further legitimizing it as art— ‘as if it ever needed legitimacy. This percipience was alo shown by ‘young European dealers, especially in Germany, who saw in the East Vilage counter-culture a parallel to their own fragmented cty-agains- city-competition, class against clas, their Stilkrieg, ‘There had been immediately preceding @ migration, not westward across Broadway into Soho, but northward up across Houston Street— from the old Lower East Side to the new Lower East Side—from teeming tenement streets of ironically cruel bucolic and anglophilie ames to the numbered streets and alphabet soup avenues of New Yorkin its post Civil War expansionist boom, —Y_ SN _——§_, ‘This den, for Bast Village Art, registred shifts in class character, from the Liimpenprot to that of proletarian consciousness and, a8 itshuted back and forth between the Eas Village and Soho, brandish sng those letters of patent, finally achieving the bourgeols commodity status of “real art.” But twas along Ridge and Rivington, Norfolk and Suffolk Streets, where the Eastern European pusheart gave way'to the Hispanic shaved ices vendor, tha the earliest generation of East Vilage art fist emerged from the primordial grange. Next came te astute curator who grasped that an historical overview ‘ofthe Bast Vilage would provide an occasion forte "scientie™ study ff'a closed model while it vouhsafed the host instistion all the {lanour accruing\o 0 novelan enthusiast Indeed, nthisrespect the Inuseological effort has been preeminent invalidating the East Vilage “The catalogues, ay, ofthe overview held atthe Insitute of Contempo: rary Arta the University of Pennsylvania (in 1964) or "Neo York" the ‘survey presented atthe Santa Barbara Museum the same year, ar cen tralreference works-all the dates are there, the firsts, the bios, the bib. lography Hardupon the maseum survey came the brief group exhibitions of tablished dealers who, sensing the displacement of excitement from Conventional spheres| of influence, reinvigorated their polite tt through the presentations of smaller versions of te miaseum survey. As icing came the commercial ip ook and hip guide-ready reference, fast info like the cakumns of East Vilage newspapers sich a New York Talk othe East Village Eye and the notion of the East Village a8 citadel of art was fyngly buttressed “Truth is, walls are crumbling and what we have now are mounds of fallen stones the orginal matrix has not held. Well that Is overstated Rather what we have now is another level another mesh, another scene built on the earlier foundation. Archavology. But the mastie whereby carly work was experienced a talisman of set of commonly held a- Piraions, that period is over. The sweet, the idealistic, the green are fone ‘Sheik all natural resource, gts used up, ges absorbed An obses: | sion with isis ets one know whether new artis good or bad surely | All artis good atthe begining, good, that if you are predisposed t | the new (however long the new may’ last and acknowledging all the ‘wile just how manipulated this predisposition is—but 0 ae ll pre Judices); bad, i you are for the od “Artists who male bad art know it and hope for an audience deaf to the mechanistic hut ofthe machinery of se. But, even bad artists in that sense, may have been good artists fora while they were partici ants in an adventure of the new. To have been a participant confers & momentary patent of excellence. Time wil tll if the warrant hols, ‘Wy then this album? Preciely because the East Village episode, ‘even if far fom over, has transformed radically. This was the last mo- sent whereby it was stil possible to assemble a photographic record ofthe early paricipants. As such the album is a valeditory efor, ‘marked bythe sense of nostalgia and rue occasioned such adeux 18 April 1985 Visit Timothy Greenfield Sanders yesterday. We worked through the frst iss of The New Iraseibles, a project addressing the artist (rst, second, and third generations), the art dealers (first and second gener. ‘ation, and the art enites (Sufficient for one generation)—granting, as ‘we now do, the notion of generation as encompassing September June, like an academic year, oF a Season inthe rag trade. ‘Greenfield Sanders wants to document the art world partiipants of ‘the changing neighborhood where he and his family have lived a decade now (in the rectory of Saint Nicholas, the old German Catholic Chureh now razed), through a reconstruction of ‘The Iracibles”the celebrated ‘hotograph taken of the Abstract Expressionist group by Nina Leen in 1951. (All of this, mind you, must be done with a minimum offs; no social secretary reschediling. One accepts; one doesn’; that's it) “The Iraselbles” stands behind much of Greentild-Sanders' efor ‘as a photographer, perhaps most—the series of portraits of the Abstract Expressionist painters Thity Years Later, for example, or the | ‘Art Criti Series, ete. "The Irascible” is both talisman and paradigm for ‘Greenfield Sanders, who is, after all, the son-in-law of Joop Sanders, 2 painter from the Leen years. ‘Understandably, Greenfield Sanders thought that Hans Narn had |