Night Breaker Auto Body and Fender Shop operates out of a one‐story cinderblock shell on East 9th Street between Avenues C and D. Two mangy mutts guard the entrance, which is next door to Pat Hearn’s new gallery, the biggest in the East Village with 3,600 square feet. The Night Breaker space is up for sale; $550,000 is the asking price this week.
Rampant real estate speculation fueled by the non‐stop media blitz about the East Village art scene made the ludicrous asking price for Night Breaker possible. In barely four years, rental costs for prime space in the area bounded by 14th Street on the north, Houston on the south, Avenue D on the east, and Second Avenue on the west have hit $20 per square foot, making it as expensive as some spaces in SoHo. The tiny storefronts, crammed baseboard to ceiling with small works, have given way to spaces as sleek as those in SoHo or on 57th Street. The days of the Fun Gallery, the first to open in the East Village and the first to hit the pages of People magazine, are over.
The funny thing is, the East Village has been around for a long time and this is not the first real estate boom for the area. Twenty years ago the Lower East Side got promoted and renamed the East Village when prices in Greenwich Village got too high and people started moving east. John Gruen wrote a book on the phenomenon, calling it The New Bohemia. “In less than two years,” wrote Gruen back in 1965, “New York has given birth to a new and radically different Bohemia. As such, it is symptomatic of an international movement in the arts. Its protagonists and practitioners may well have become known as the Combine Generation. Its center is known as the East Village…” Gruen focused on the youth cult, the drug scene, the underground film, experimental theater, the jazz and folk, the poetry readings, happenings, and even the area’s own newspaper, the East Village Other. The 10th Street cooperative galleries that lionized Abstract Expressionism during the 1950s had already faded from view and, as Gruen rightly observed, painters sought large loft spaces in other districts.
Gruen’s Bohemia had more of a literary bent. That tradition goes back all the way to the 1830s, when James Fenimore Cooper lived at 6 St. Mark’s Place, now the site of the closed St. Mark’s Baths. Emma Goldman edited her journal, Mother Earth, in her apartment at 210 East 13th Street. Jack Kerouac wrote about the Bacchanalian gargoyles in the courtyard of an East 11th Street building in The Subterraneans. The Lower East Side/East Village literary thread weaves back to Stephen Crane: “…It was on the Bowery that I got my artistic education.”
While Gruen’s “Combine Generation” got detoured by the psychedelic counterculture and the East Village fell into the dark ages of the Nixon years, hard drugs, and rampant crime, “Operation Pressure Point”―the highly publicized police campaign that began in 1984 to rid the East Village of the hard drug trade―saved or ruined the day (depending on whom you talk to). The area now boasts a policeman on practically every corner, giving the impression that it’s safe to go slumming and view the galleries on otherwise dangerous streets.
The cosmetic success of Operation Pressure Point enabled the gallery trade to move east. Deborah Sharpe of Sharpe Gallery “never dreamed” she would open a gallery space on Avenue B in what had been a “shooting gallery” for junkies. It has also contributed to what is commonly called gentrification. New restaurants, bars, cafes, and Korean green markets open while bodegas and other “Mom and Pop” operations close. It was the initial atmosphere of “who would want to open a gallery here?” that got the East Village on the gallery guide maps and gossip columns. It was fun like it used to be when the night club scene flourished in Harlem. With all the current talk about the East Village coming of age, it helps to realize the same concerns were voiced in the early 1970s when SoHo began to take on 57th Street luster. In those days, decals sprung up on loft building doorways proclaiming “SoHo sucks, bring back the trucks.” Now the signs tacked on boarded‐up buildings say, “Speculators Keep Out. The Lower East Side is not for Sale. This land is ours.”
The transition from curb‐side views of PADD’s (Political Art Documentation and Distribution) sloganeering efforts to gallery interiors is breathtaking. There are easily a dozen East Village galleries that buck the popular media’s notion of what the art is about here. “A.C.I.”, a term coined by Jay Gorney of Modern Art Gallery on East 10th Street for “apocalyptic cartoon imagery,” is still a force, but it is no longer the dominant chord. Rick Prol’s by‐now classic image of the skinny guy in a motorcycle jacket with a trio of knives sticking through his neck while he sits on a toilet and strangles a black cat is still sought after by serious collectors. But at the same time as Prol’s violent and funky imagery is being admired in Hal Bromm’s brand new space on Avenue A, a platoon of collectors, critics, and curator types are taking in the mannerist and swirly figures in the landscape by the Italian Lorenzo Bonechi at Sharpe. This is the kind of painting you’d expect to see at Sperone‐Westwater in SoHo.
The platoon keeps moving east for the huge and shaped canvases of Philip Taaffe at Pat Hearn’s, which oscillate with Op art lines and post‐Vasarely dizziness. An oversized $25 catalogue (you’d pay the same for Schnabel’s at Pace) with an essay by Ross Bleckner (who recently showed at Nature Morte while on loan from Mary Boone) tells you why Taaffe is the latest gift to the art world. As an antidote to “cool op” or “hot sloppy heads,” a connoisseur’s show of early Robert Smithson drawings and collages at International With Monument on East 7th Street exudes a classic snob appeal. Just as this observer was about to editorialize on the increasing snootiness of the East Village, a press release announcing a show at Zeus‐Trabia crossed his desk. “In Homage to Ana Mendieta” (the late wife of sculptor Carl Andre) with relevant works by 30 women artists momentarily made me feel there was still hope for the unexpected in the East Village.
On some blocks, galleries look more like Metro Pictures (where the art of appropriation found its first commercial roost) than Metro Pictures. Conceptual and hard edge, photographic and appropriated‐simulated works make as much noise (and money) as the A.C.I. group. “It’s a genuine counterpoint,” says Lisa Phillips, a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, “to the heat of the East Village painting.”
Two important artists closely identified with the East Village have recently dropped out. One left her gallery while the other chose to step back from the scene, stop painting, and collect his thoughts. Sue Coe’s ferocious images of Reagan’s America and Botha’s South Africa have appeared widely in magazines and books. Her work spits venom in the eyes of the ruling class. As she writes in her just‐published book by Scarecrow Press, “If I get safe contraceptives I can paint romance not abortion. If you create jobs, I won’t paint poverty. If you remove prisons, I won’t paint the incarcerated.” Coe has left her gallery, P.P.O.W., and the only public plans for exhibiting new work will be a show of her new Malcolm X drawings (also the subject of a book) at the Phyllis Kind Gallery in Chicago this May. Coe—through a spokesperson—declined to talk, so one can speculate as to why she’s left: like all successful artists she might want a change and a move to a different part of town, or perhaps the concerns that she paints with such sledgehammer force are too visible on the streets of the East Village. Perhaps all the hype that surrounds her work is too disturbing. David Wojnarowicz, an artist of similar caliber, talked about his concerns that kept him from painting for close to a year.
“The attention and money for me,” said Wojnarowicz, “was getting in the way of any kind of clarity and I needed to pull away. All of this media stuff, you get lost in it. You can take it too seriously and become self‐conscious. It seemed like a joke at a certain point. People just come into the gallery and take what you put out and they don’t even look at it. You just become a workhorse filling a list. You self‐imitate to meet demand. It becomes overwhelming when 20 people pick up one gesture and the energy dissipates like crazy.”
The estrangement of two committed artists like Coe and Wojnarowicz from the East Village gallery network—even temporarily—spells trouble for emotional, social content‐packed work. It also signifies a boost for cooler conceptual visions that already have been trotted out by the SoHo stables of Metro Pictures and Baskerville + Watson. As the East Village becomes more cosmeticized, an apolitical aesthetic makes sense. Wojnarowicz will show again at Gracie Mansion in a few months, but his comment that “untampered‐with energy” was no longer in the galleries but in places outside the spotlight like music, performance, and film indicates a shift away from the object that can be purchased or manipulated. He joked that no one could buy his cinderblock‐sound installation at Ground Zero (a collaboration with Richard Kerns) with no signs explaining the pitch‐darkness or blood‐spattered “corpses” around a dinner table: “I felt pleased. It was the least saleable thing we could have done.” Wojnarowicz may be in a tiny minority that pulls back on the reins of exposure. I wonder how a 26‐year‐old artist such as Will Mentor can handle the daily pressure of having a buyer for every one of his paintings since he first started showing at the Wolfe Gallery just a season ago.
“A couple of years ago, the East Village was all equalized,” says Jeffrey Deitch, who started out as a secretary to the art dealer John Weber and is now a vice president at Citibank’s Art Advisory Services. “It was fine to show in a storefront. It was a democratic place where pure capitalism flourished. But a hierarchy is developing. It has changed from pure democracy to oligarchy.”
Pat Hearn has already been tagged the Mary Boone of the East Village and is on everyone’s oligarchy list. “I’m not interested in showing any historical works or resale, as it’s called, but I am interested in young emerging artists, working with them and helping people recognize what I see in the work. I want people to look at their work in the future and not just today. I want the gallery to grow and develop more contacts with Europe and increase my relationships with American museums. Time will prove what’s going on here. I’m in no hurry… It’s not understood yet.”
Hearn’s yearning for European attention (and boy, does she have it!) and general networking on the continent make sense, especially if you look at Leo Castelli’s history, or Mary Boone’s recent merger with the German dealer Michael Werner, or Gracie Mansion’s 1986 European itinerary of a half‐dozen of her gallery artists. These “ambitions” away from “let’s show our friends and their friends and party!”—that, at least, is one view of the camaraderie of the early days versus the cut‐throat competition of today. As Jay Gorney says, “I’m not about scene‐making. I’m about art dealing.”
It was scene‐making that everyone talks about which made it possible for Mike Osterhout to open M. David Gallery on East 9th Street in 1984 as a two‐year conceptual performance that began in his garage in San Francisco. Since a number of artist‐dealers (there are quite a number in the East Village) feel it is unethical to show their own work in their own gallery, Osterhout went one step further and created an artist, Kristan Kohl, and made up a batch of paintings for her to show in his gallery. He also invented a résumé and a certain all‐over but murky monochromatic style. Kristan survived for a year before Osterhout killed her off with an “en memoria” card sent around and a collaborative obituary written with critic Carlo McCormick for the East Village Eye.
Osterhout closed his gallery last month (“we didn’t sell enough paintings and our rent was doubled”) but Kristan Kohl lives on with an exhibition at the New Museum of Contemporary Art (with proper billing). Last June he organized the “Payola Show,” where he sold space in the gallery at $20 a square foot and filled it with art right off the street. “It looked like any other East Village carefully curated group show,” says Osterhout. In September, a few of his Kristan paintings were shown in a group show, “Conscious Objections,” at the Ted Greenwald Gallery and Vivien Raynor of the New York Times wrote: “Kohl’s abstractions seem no more than comments on modes that already have been commented on to death.”
Although Raynor was hoodwinked by Osterhout’s Duchampian deception, she accidentally raised a big issue about the many forms of “neo‐modes” that are endemic to the East Village. Thomas McEvilley, writing in Artforum, questioned why quotational painting was the dominant mode in the East Village. “An obviously quotational style is easier to develop than an original style, which mandates that the artist transform and alter—hide, in a sense—influences and models.” And critic Carlo McCormick told me that “the art schools are producing insipid Postmodernists and of course only a few will be good.” But it’s too easy to blame youth for the allegiance to imitation, whether it be a Hallmark card or a Magritte painting. Lichtenstein started the appropriation beach ball rolling long ago.
What is the East Village after? Does it have a collective lust? The dealers want to grow and do more business. The artists want their work shown to the most influential audiences. The East Village has managed to carve out a new art district. “It was an assault on the institutionalized SoHo art world,” says the painter‐pundit Walter Robinson. “It exploded like an embolism. With the success of the community’s assault, the market forces entered and divided it.” The East Village is on the circuit. It’s a madhouse on Sunday when SoHo and uptown galleries are shuttered. Everybody dresses up to stroll the seedy avenues. Now that an established dealer from Tribeca (Hal Bromm) and one from SoHo (Barry Blinderman of Semaphore) have opened up satellite spaces in the East Village, and SoHo artists show up there, and 57th Street dealers book “East Village shows,” and independent curators flock to Gracie Mansion’s to scout “Brave New World” extravaganzas, there is not much left to say about what the East Village has left to accomplish. It is not a casual or funky place anymore. There are, of course, holdouts, and small storefronts/low budget spaces survive till lease renewal time.
After looking around and talking to artists and writers and dealers, I must say that the East Village is a complex place and a state of mind that won’t be pigeon‐holed. There is “great‐art” here and also some of the lousiest examples that make you want to shout “I can’t take it anymore.” The mechanism that allowed fourth‐rate, barely student work in also managed—miraculously so—to introduce work that is strong and gritty and makes you want to know more about it. The East Village is livelier than SoHo. The storefront‐street level view is earthier than the hair‐salon‐scented elevators of 57th Street or the beehive cluster of galleries packed in the huge loft buildings across the street from the New Museum of Contemporary Art on Lower Broadway (Lo Bro). Everybody—from uptown collectors to SoHo real estate agents—wants a piece of the East Village.
I worry the most about the young artists who are taking their first steps in the art world and have role models like Keith Haring, Jean Michel Basquiat, and Rhonda Zwillinger. It is not easy anymore to show your stuff in the East Village. Deborah Sharpe says she gets 500 sets of slides every month from eager artists. It has gone right back—well almost—to the days of alternative space, when SoHo was locked up tight as a drum, and then the alternatives got their funding cut and became conservative and the new decade of the ’80s brought us the Times Square Show in a former massage parlor and a front cover on the Village Voice proclaiming it was “the first radical art show of the ’80s.” And from the sweet success of Times Square the action moved downtown to Rivington Street and ABC No Rio, where the original East Village fever incubated. Operation Pressure Point never made a dent on the still‐hard‐core Rivington Street. The action drifted to places like Club 57 in the basement of a Catholic church on St. Mark’s. The scene kept shifting and then Patti Astor and Bill Stelling opened Fun Gallery. I hear Patti has gone to Hollywood and Stelling got serious and moved to SoHo and a new partnership, Totah‐Stelling, where I just saw a stunning Matta show. Since events have moved so fast and the media is still chasing a dead horse, many young artists wind up in the same boat that got their elders so grumpy to begin with. Walter Robinson reminded me that two irascibles (not the cloned variety you saw on the cover of Arts magazine), Willem de Kooning and Ad Reinhardt—among others—picketed the Metropolitan Museum in 1951 for not showing abstract art.
Like a satellite dish picking up thousands of broadcasts, the East Village has become a fickle video screen programmed by the media and the market. In a much simpler way, the stereotype of the young artist hitting the jackpot came alive for me two years ago when I saw a famous Chicago collector in a black cashmere overcoat clapping Rick Prol on the back in a tiny gallery on East 6th Street, telling him how easy it would be to arrange a museum show. During the exchange the collector’s frail wife stood in the doorway, swathed in mink, surveying the street in nervous disbelief. That vignette of a “star is born” is hopelessly out of date now. But I believe the greenhorn painters and assemblers still cling to it. It is a romantic notion. It has taken just four years to grow from Fun and graffiti to at least 60 galleries that can all tell an invoice from an eviction notice. After The New Bohemia, John Gruen went on to write The Party’s Over Now, and I’m beginning to believe him.
Judd Tully is a New York editor of the NAE and a long‐time resident of the Lower East Side.