THE EAST VILLAGE AND THE FANTASY OF THE SUBLIME SPECTACLE
East
Village Art, a vague, somewhat random term that is applied to the
i,finite numbers of artists who have either shown or lived in the East
Village, is fast becoming America's premier cultural export. Fueled by
the attention of the market and the press, the East Village is the most
visible, heatedly debated representation of contemporary emerging art.
Yet, while most geographic creative collectives are bound by a certain
regionalistic character, the East Village has no such effects and could
arguably be found to have no one stylistic constant. In fact, there
isn't even that much about it that can be called particularly American.
This exhibition's small East Village selection includes artists from
England (Sue Coe), France (Thierry Cheverney), Germany (Christof
Kohlhofer), and Canada (Richard Hambleton) and others from across the
United States.
In reaction to the plethora of hyped-up and generalized misinformation
that has termed the East Village some cohesive movement, it is an easy
trap to worry so much about what the East Village isn't that it is
forgotten what it really is. To talk first in terms of a general
description, that is, what must be understood about the East Village
regardless of the particular curatorial specificity of this or any
other show, is inescapably a matter of geographical and sociological
analysis. As this exhibition has more soul, and in a positive sense,
more opinion than the broader spectrum of East Village survey shows, we
must subsequently examine this subject for its aesthetic content.
Before the East Village is completely transformed into a region of posh
consumerism and complacent bourgeois residents, the vibrant unique
character that is has had, and the effects of this particular
environment on generations of artists, will be entered somewhere in our
history books. It is indeed a remarkable history to trace, from the
,Yiddish Theater, to the New York School of Expressionists like Pollock
and De Kooning, to the beat poetry of Ginsberg and Burroughs, to the
hippified plastic explosion of the Fugs and Warhol's Velvet
Underground. The neighborhood which spawned the East
Village art scene was not just the composite of the many creative
residents who were moving into it for cheap rents, but was also the
fertile sediment of a dynamic past. Not only would these young artists
be influenced by the youth culture bohemian tradition of their
forefathers - specially the continual artistic and social interchange
and an indulgent counter - culture pride of living on the edge - but
would also come to bear the imprint of the Lower East Side's rich
ethnic texture.
It is becoming progressively more difficult, amidst the hoards of
tourists and shoppers, the new boutiques, restaurants and the
rows of recently renovated apartment buildings, to remember the surreal
wasteland of burnt-out abandoned tenements, junkies and urban warriors
that was the East Village until quite recently. The violence, poverty,
nihilism and fear that the white middle class youths who first began to
settle the area (a fair generalization of East Village artists) where
exposed to , became a constant renewing source of creative material for
many and still persists in the imagery and personality of much of their
work today.
Another, although less dramatic trait of the neighborhood is its
multi-ethnic flavor. As a region of cheap housing built for wave after
wave of arriving immigrants, the East Village retained an intense
collage of different nationalities. The limitless array of small old
world shops and aging inhabitants from all parts of Europe, as well as
the busy ghetto life of the large Puerto Rican population, is a sensory
onslaught that is gradually ebbing the new tide of homogenization
that gentrification entails. The diverse ethnocentricity on a nearly
block-by-block basis and the scars of urban decay are ultimately what
is meant when the art world goes back again and to the significance of
East Village geography.
Much of what we have discussed as the geographic personality of the
East Village is more accurately the domain of sociological study. What
needs to be stressed beyond all this is the active climate of the areas
social scene. The intermingling of artists in a busy schedule of
crowded gallery openings and performance and music events at local
clubs has helped form the tight knit fabric of creative community that
is pathologically incestuous and communal on a scale probably larger
than any other artistic eruption. The energy invested into this
systematized togetherness has not only been the fuel of artistic
inspiration, but the driving force of competitive careerism.
As residents of New York, the current world capital of contemporary art,
and as a result of their overcrowded proximity, East Village artist
have access to the full range of styles and ideas that float around in
contemporary art and are always aware of each others development. They
are denizens of a three-ring circus and as such can willingly,
collectively embrace the eclecticism of our age as no others can. Such an
immense conflux of ideas, styles and personalities have lead many to
worry as some of careerism, superficiality and overexposure.
We have, in our rough picture of the dense network of physical and
psychological stimuli effecting the East Village art community, the
basic framework in which we may place the individual talents of this
show. But we have here more than a simple graph to locate
the various psyches and aesthetic at hand. The relative atmospheric
conditions that surround the artists in this show are the medium in
which we may draw the patterns of convergence and divergence of the
individual visions within the grandness of their meta-spectacle.
The turmoil that is implied in the eclecticism of artistic production and
the grim spectre of slum survival may be issues to East Village art at
this time, but this edgy personality portrait we are using is quite
aptly the general account of what a great many of young artists around
the world are experiencing. In style and content as well, the reactions
of artists internationally are following similar paths. The extremity of
the East Village art milieu has forced into it more sharply articulate
differences in the ways of confronting or avoiding reality, but
essentially people everywhere are exposed to the same kings of sensory
overload (media, the accelerated pace of life) and hysterical fear
(cold war paranoia, the vast array of media-generated crisis involving
crime, health, politics, and an infinite steam of disasters). Yet
despite the consistency of these pressures, the artistic responses
range from horror to humour to absolute escapism itself. As the East
Village constructs its fantasy of the sublime, the flashing media
spectacle it explodes is privately the cryptic languages of its own
greatest hopes and fears.
The intermittent role of the artist as conscience for a society that
rarely subjects its behavior to the scrutiny of ethics is one which
takes on different degrees of humour and didacticism.
Sue Coe , an English political graphic artist, believes in art
carrying the full weight of a heavy message. Her strong illustrative
style emphasizing a moral narrative is an entirely propagandistic
device.Aesthetics remain secondary to the content which itself is but a
means to an end. Ultimately for Coe,the responsibility is for art to
force social change and her targets are often racism, sexism, violence
and oppression.
Mark Kostabi's elegantly rendered paintings and drawings are not guides
by any of Coe's imperative justice. Kostabi rather enjoys a conceited
immorality as the joke of this aggressively capitalistic goals. His
emphasis on the selfishness of human nature, especially his own, is of
a dark cynicism which, for all of its bravado, strikes one as
hopelessly acquiescent to the system of shallowness that he cannot even
see the reflection of how pathetic its philosophy makes him look. From
the same hometown as crooked Richard Nixon and the same home state as
egocentric E.S.T., if Kostabi were as convincing as he is funny,
he might be a dangerous man. But, as is, his ability is more visual
than intellectual.
The absurdity Kostabi plays within his sardonic tributes to the art
world is made more explicit in the collaborative paintings of Christof
Kohlhofer and Marilyn Minter, Kohlhofer, a German who has been leaving
in New-York for many years, and Minter, who has developed her style
from a more literal realism to match his elaborate image overlay and
compositional deconstruction, together produce lyrical overloads of
incongruously matched comic book style images. A mass of images lifted
from the media assaults the viewer in baroque fantasies of the modern
world which is left void of any perceptible tragedy.
The deliberate dadaist image shuffling of Kohlhofer and Minter projects
a pictorial mannerism through hallucinatory screen of unexpected
juxtapositions which has found another voice in the current resurgence
of the surrealistic fantastic, such as in the work of Thierry Cheverney
and others. Cheverney's paintings construct whole surreal dream worlds
which flee the confines of ordinary experience and hide in a
mock-mystical bizarre universe of make-believe. The subconscious
becomes mined by the efficient machinery of a very literal imagination
in work that is attributable more to the successive commercialization
of Surrealists art in design than it is to the original concepts behind
the movement.
Will Mentor's academizing of surrealist motifs is much more formulatic
than Cheverney's art. Content is completely absent in Mentor's work.
Surrealism's infatuation with creating from the realm of the irrational
was set to produce art whose execution was purely automatic and whose
inception was ideologically rooted in theory. With Mentor, the
preconcieved abstract painting functions as decoration whose only
theory is in design and whose execution invests a carefully crafted
sense of painterly emotionalism. The artist's self expression, however,
measures itself as effect. On these terms his paintings are successful;
sparking jems of style which are satisfyingly pretty. The spectacle is
transcendant through the picturesque.
Jonathan Ellis, like Will Mentor's subtle trompe l'oeil
apparitions, creates sculptures that is redolent of altered states, and
may even include them, but decidedly made with full capable rationality
of his craft. Ellis' creatures are caught in a time warp of evolution,
questionably of our forgotten past or of our distant future. Grey and
lifeless, they are like static guards to a dead land. They do not think
or breathe, but they appear to watch us.They exist in one long
illustrative fantasy of gnarled beings which seem like black holes of
emotion, vessels one might transport one's imagination into but are
somehow empty in their own right. It is this masterful effects that can
make such forbbiding forms so likably unthreatening, so untroubedly
meaningless.
While Ellis' monsters are enigmatically hardly there? the goofy paper
mache monsters of Daryl Trivieri are huggably cute. They are lovable in
that E.T. way - for their ugliness and helplessness. Trivieri's innate
sense of caricature makes each one look like someone you know but can't
remember who. In the paintings too, they are animated and silly.
Airbrushed and happy, these paintings could be reduced and turned into
zany greeting cards. But what ultimately saves these creatures from
just being clever wave dolls is that they are imbued with a somewhat
sickly fetishism. The recurring subject matter of masturbation, as it
adds to the humor also adds the pederastic perversion to the boyish
charm.
The obsessive artistic attachment with which Trivieri childishly
fantasizes his goonish ghouls to life is a point where pure absurdity,
escapist fantasy, and the psyche of Romanticism are tenuously
coexistent. Like the mocking of life or the fantastic distortion and re
assemblage of it, romanticism in contemporary art distills reality
through extremely narrow filters of perception. In an artist such as
Peter Drake, the resounding emotions of melancholia effectively distort
depiction to the point of superseding all elements of style and
content. At work in Drake's paintings and drawings is the
distinguishable hand of a draftsman. Linearity, as it defines light and
shape, takes form as the living textured of the work itself. These
dark, usually black and white, paintings lack more than color. In
each there is haunting sense of absence, of a longing that is the
shadows and highlights of an unspoken tenderness.
The moodiness of Drake's work is long steeped in its own brooding, yet
with Keiko Bonk it erupts so uncontrollably that it engulfs the art
like tears which cannot be held back, like love which will heed
nothing. The spontaneity, the fire, the omnipresent totality of
affection guides over the tragic and the content narratives and pumps
blood from its bleeding heart to every bit of failing flesh. It is the
erratic pulse which must guide the long sinuous brush strokes which
ripple to the flexing muscles of lust and flow with the endless streams
of teary loneliness and flay with the despairing flames of rejection.
As true to life as adolescent fantasies, these are the episodes of life
which only our dreams make true.
There is a distance between the psyche of an artwork and that of its
creator which Bonk violates in her passionate indulgence. Conversely,
the gap is deliberately widened by Richard Hambleton. Hambleton has
transferred the conceptualism of his early work into the execution of
sublimely romantic paintings.Grand churning sea scapes dramatically lit
by rich overcast skies, spewing froth in gobs of expressionistic paint.
Macho cowboys jerking in their saddles as bucking broncos flail to be
free, turf thick as mud stuck to the picture plane, hurled by the sheer
force of the fight. These are the imposing scenarios which Hambleton
has so dispassionately and expertly produced that he is reworking
kitsch by the methodized means of expression itself. The picturesque
becomes the hollow metaphore for the psychological potency of
reproduction.
Jimmy De Sana, by means of photography, is, like Hambleton,
articulating the emotive impact of artifice. His carefully staged
studio work, greatly aided by dramatic brilliantly colored lighting,
often implies states of psychological and physical being that are not
in fact present. It is an important distinction since the real scene
could easily be available but is rejected in favor of the dramatic
effects of false staging. The work pulls at the seams of presentation,
and the fabric of photographic verité misses realism but still elicits the appropriate emotional responses.
While De Sana's recent series of self portraits involved making himself
obscenely obese by means of clothing props, Lynn Augeri's photographic
self portraits are manipulated to emphasize an erotic sensation.
Augeri's black and white prints create an antiquated and sculptural
quality that suggest herself as living Venus statues. She becomes an
icon, a frozen object of adoration which implies a classical ideal that
has become largely disconnected with contemporary life.
Carlo Mac Cormick