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Document 48 of 48.

Newsweek

March 19, 1984, UNITED STATES EDITION

SECTION: DISPATCHES; Pg. 18

LENGTH: 968 words

HEADLINE: New Art and Mean Streets

BYLINE: MARK STEVENS in New York

BODY:

There is a stylish pleasure, best appreciated by a young artist, in walking down mean streets. A person with this taste lives in a neighborhood, overlooked for years, whose charm he has rediscovered. Each evening, after a day's work, he leaves his garret and walks toward his favorite bar, dressed in fabulous clothes found in junk shops. He notices the drug addicts, hears the shouts of ragtag children, smells the greasy food in tiny restaurants. He blames the squalor on conventional society, which he despises. He spends the night analyzing art with friends, who might be geniuses. Later, he makes love to someone marvelous on the mattress on the floor.

This bohemian vision enhanced the appeal of Montmartre in the 1890s, Greenwich Village in the 1920s and Soho in the early 1970s. Each neighborhood once offered cheap space to young writers and artists, who brought with them whatever was new and outrageous in the culture of their time. Each eventually became chic, as hangers-on with money followed artists onto the scene. Today, something similar may be happening to the East Village in New York, an area that, while long a home to poor artists and writers, has so far been a little too gritty and dangerous to become fashionable.

Gamy: It's still rough -- yet swarms of young artists who want to live near the action in Soho have moved there. Young dealers, in turn, have started tiny storefront galleries, with names like the Fun Gallery or Gracie Mansion, along tenement-lined East 10th, 11th and 12th Streets. Stores catering to the tastes of the young, the fashionable and the penniless have opened next to the delicatessens. Gamy coffeehouses and rock clubs, which display indestructible examples of new art, have become hangouts.

Despite its growing similarity to other artsy neighborhoods, the East Village has a distinctive flavor. It is home not only to artists, for example, but also to descendants of the immigrants who once made the area a famous melting pot. You can still eat at the Odessa Cafe, which serves Ukrainian food, or visit the countless churches, some serving sects from Eastern Europe. You can buy kosher corned beef and Polish sausage. There is a strong Spanish note, which emanates from the large and poor Puerto Rican neighborhood on the area's eastern edge, where there is also a conspicuous drug problem A wealthy collector on his way to a gallery, may step over ajunkie with a needle in his arm.

This overlay of cultures, of intense sophistication and severe poverty, of punky discos and old-world values, gives the East Village the surreal surprise and scruffy charm that artists love. Among the area's most beguiling attributes, for example, are its many bizarre glass storefronts. Some front junk shops, some galleries; others front apartments, and people just hang a drape in front of the glass. Through those windows can be seen many strange, haunted set pieces -- often a kind of funky folk art. Placed together will be a stuffed squirrel, Christmas tree ornament, a Barbie doll with one arm and a yellowing travel poster. Why?

Down the street a rock club feature. Urban Blight. Nearby is an old churc with a few gravestones from the 1830s. Beside a rubble-strewn lot is a building painted in the hippie spirit of the 1960s. One particular hangout, the Life Cafe, is especially eccentric; it is papered with pages from Life magazines of the 1950s and decorated with kitschy bric-a-brac -- a small reproduction of Michelangelo's "David," a few old toys. On a typical afternoon one intellectual is reading a book on violence; a young woman wearing chartreuse socks plays chess with herself; a couple dances slowly to fast music. The place has the slightly seedy atmosphere that traditionally attracts pale young artists who are in love with the idea of the avant-garde.

Innocence: Using old magazines, though, brilliantly evokes the spirit at large in the East Village. There is something exactly contemporary in smiling -- wryly -- at the wide-eyed innocence of the old Life, as it celebrated a busty, now forgotten starlet or preached the values of small-town life. You smile -- while savoring the nostalgia of the '50s' view of the world. You smile, too, at the presumption of calling a magazine Life, when its presentation of life now seems so trapped in a period style. Anyway, isn't life all style? That question haunts much art and contemporary thought. And the youthful art made in the East Village -- which often portrays cartoonish figures, brightly colored and roughly drawn -- raises the question again and again.

This art is imbued with camp, nostalgia and a love of style for style's sake. Sometimes it is clumsy and awkward, like a child who dresses up in a parent's clothes. Sometimes it has a sly wink -- as in the barbaric names (Nude Ants, Young Dumb and Numb) of the rock groups. Sometimes it draws from the edgy energy of the street: the neon buzz and brassy vulgarity of an aging city. Many painters, in particular, have borrowed from the graffiti artists, whose style derives in turn from the kids who spray-paint the New York subways.

Artists in the East Village share potluck dinners. Some even like their dealers. "It's romantic to be poor and suffering together," says one. "You can still be nice." Few would resist the chance to move to Soho, however, or to show in a fancy gallery. As always, the first interest of most artists is to become a star, and this is only enhanced by the current preoccupation with fashion and style. One day the East Village itself may become as fashionable as Soho, though it's too soon to say. Already there are plenty of hangers-on. Apartment rents are going up. Artists may soon be looking elsewhere, in short, for a special bar, a cheap studio and those nice, mean streets.

GRAPHIC: Picture, The Life Cafe: Savoring the nostalgia of the '50s' view of the world, Bernard Gotfryd -- NEWSWEEK

Document 47 of 48.

The New York Times

January 13, 1985, Sunday, Late City Final Edition

SECTION: Section 2; Page 29, Column 1; Arts and Leisure Desk

LENGTH: 1725 words

HEADLINE: GALLERY VIEW;

EAST VILLAGE GETS ON THE FAST TRACK

BYLINE: By Grace Glueck

BODY:

No doubt about it, the East Village scene is a howling success. In the three years since the first gallery, the Fun, opened up there, the tough turf of drugs, punk rock and prostitution that characterizes the blocks from Houston to 14th Streets, from Second Avenue to the East River, has posed a challenge to mighty So Ho ? as a breeding-testing ground for young art. Now, with its mean streets and dingy clubs still providing a sense of adventure, it's the place to show, go and be seen. So hot, in fact, is this artists' milieu, many of whose more-or-less improvisatory galleries are themselves artist-run, that it's taken on the dimensions of a Movement.

The work produced and exhibited in the East Village - coming from wildly different directions - has no special identity, though it tends to be smaller in scale (because of the reduced gallery size), and more involved with humor, satire and politics. Besides the showcase virtue of exposing new art faster and more cheaply than is possible in So Ho ? or Uptown, what this cluster of informal, sometimes down-at-heel exhibition spaces offers is a more intimate setting for the kind of work not considered high taste in the slicker, more establishment precincts. While it reflects the multiplicity of the general art market, the scene is marked by energy and profusion, and touched with the bloom of struggling youth. It not only has appeal for artists, but for art searchers, particularly those from Europe. Some 60 galleries and clubs now inhabit the area, purveying to eager acquisitors creations that range from graffiti to New Surrealism, from cartoon to message art, from Minimal to Neo-Pop and New Wave, from pure kitsch to solid substance.

Unlike East 10th Street of 30 years ago, however, where artists' co-ops struggled without a nod from the larger art world, the East Village has quickly become a brand name that gets attention in art circles everywhere. Two exhibitions of East Village art have already taken place outside New York: in California last November and December there was Neo York, at the University Art Museum, Santa Barbara; while in Philadelphia, The East Village Scene appeared around the same time at the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania. So portable, in fact, is the scene that in our own Manhattan, it's not enough that we have the live East Village itself. A package version has now been brought uptown, in a new show called 57th Between A and D: Se lected Artists From the East Village, at the Holly Solomon Gallery, 724 Fifth Avenue at 57th Street (through Jan. 26). That means we don't even have to make the hairy trip to, say, East 11th Street, one of the city's main drug drags, to visit the work in situ. It's as if 19th- century Montmartre, during its own time, was excerpted for exhibition in a Paris Right Bank gallery under the title of, maybe, The Montmartre Experience. Once upon a time, an artist's milieu was simply a quarter whose inhabitants could live on the cheap and carry on as they pleased. Nowadays, the milieu itself makes a movement of the art produced there. The show at Holly Solomon presents work by artists from some of the leading East Village galleries, including Fun, Gracie Mansion, Patrick Fox, Pat Hearn, Cash Newhouse ?, Wolff, Piezo Electric, Debra Sharpe, Virtual/ Garrison, Nature Morte, Dana Garet, PPOW and Civilian Warfare. Many of these small places have tidied up since their grubby early days, so the elegant space of the uptown gallery no longer seems de luxe as a background for their transported art. Nor does the art itself seem ill at ease in its new surroundings; though to be sure, it is probably closer to the spirit of this, shall we say lighthearted, establishment than to most others on 57th Street. But why the show at all? They want recognition, says Holly Solomon, who plans in the future to do dual exhibitions of certain artists with East Village galleries. They do a show, then other galleries raid them and take their artists away. Also, many of the East Village art ists have been influenced by those in our stable, some of whom have even been their teachers in art school. It's a natural connection.

The obligatory pieces by Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf, two East Village alumni who have moved on to So Ho ?, greet us in the elevator hall: a panel of Haring's Magic Marker glyphs in black on brown metal; a worked- over cigarette machine by Scharf with kitsch appliques. Graffiti paintings by Futura and Fred Brathwaite also make ritual appearances; after all, where but in the East Village did graffiti first make it onto canvas? The best stuff here is in the front rooms, which contain some of the liveliest, most characteristically looney East Village works, among them a piece by Kiely Jenkins, Home of the Brave. It's a gutted TV set through whose screen we see a built-in blue-collar living room, occupied by a miniature couple. He, ensconced in a Barcalounger with a can of beer, stares out at us through the screen; she, turned away from the viewer, watches television. Outside their window looms Mac Donald ?'s. Rodney Alan Greenblat's furniture installation is adjacent, a captivating takeoff on your mother's front hall, with a wildly painted and embellished table bearing a decorative plate, and a serious painting hung behind it called A Balanced Universe, in which one of two merry fools reads a book on logic, the other a book on ethics. Nearby, Rhonda Zwillinger, another East Village name, has contributed one of her decorator mirrors, broken shards of gold-tinted glass glitzed up with gold sequins and blue plastic flowers.

Furniture, too, is the province of the Sanchez brothers, A. and P.O., whose mini-installation comprises another sendup of middle-class decor - a wooden wall cutout of a leering horse, and a painted chair rendered unsittable by a big, free-form drip painting in black and white whose bent form turns out to be an Australian boomerang board. Dan Friedman's Green Screen of painted wood is a folding screen that hilariously blends a Cubistic and a comic-strip vocabulary. Each of its partitions is an abstract body totem, with appropriate apertures, topped by a zany head, including that of a Smurf. Another comic touch is Nicholas Moufarrege's Edward Brad Munch, in which the poignant Munch painting, The Cry, is juxtaposed on a panel with a vintage Roy Lichtenstein cartoon, I Know How You Must Feel, Brad - all done in glittery Lurex thread. A strong painting in the Rauschenberg-John s mode, but politically tinged, is Just a Little Bit of the Tin Drum Mentality, in which a globe hangs in front of a plane whose seething white surface of broken canvas pieces is embellished with United States greenbacks, a burning baby, a blue bird with a drum and other ironic motifs. It's the work of David Wojnarowicz, another East Village name now being seen in larger spaces.

The rest of the exhibition is the rather predictable mix of any group show bent on giving pluralism a whirl. Neo-Surrealism rears its head in Cheryl Laemmle's canvas, Confined, a fallen tree trunk metmorphosing into a horse in a landscape of stark white rocks, and in Will Mentor's Angel, a big, white, prosthetic-looking structure with two white wings thrusting toward it, set in a rich swirl of Tiepolo-colored clouds. Sue Coe gives us a generalized political message in the form of Riot, a Brecht-inspired scene of mayhem in the streets, and Rick Prol inveighs against urban rot in Slowly, a marionette-like figure in camouflage dress holding a Tommy gun as he garrotes himself before a stark tenement background. Among the more interesting sculptures - most of them small - are Walter Martin's Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz, a tiny but romantic bust of a man in burnt plaster perched atop a polished, crooked stick and Ted Rosenthal's mock Coat of Arms, a wall piece of painted steel whose key elements are an erratic fork and spoon. Not to be scanted on the sculptural side is Kathleen Thomas's GR 84 (Gravity's Rainbow), a very scientific-looking space object that hangs in midair. On the other hand, it should also be said that a fair percentage of the work here is unimaginatively awful, especially - to single out some - the paintings of Stephen Lack, Rich Colicchio and Louis Renzoni. Well, more than any other, the East Village is a place to be bad in, too.

Meanwhile, back on the scene itself, where new galleries still seem to open every 10 minutes, there is Ground Zero, which occupies the old Civilian Warfare space at 526 East 11th Street. (Civilian Warfare has moved to larger quarters on gentrifying Avenue B.) It's run by James Romberger and Marguerite Van Cook, young artists who have named the gallery for the cartoon strip they once did for the East Village Eye. We're not serious art dealers, says Van Cook, in the old East Village spirit. We do and show what we like. It gives us a lot of freedom. When we can't do that any more, we'll go on to something else. Right now, they've turned the gallery over to Robert Costa, a downtown writer and exhibition organizer, who has produced his own East Village show, Start Again. Among the uneven mix in this tiny space, there are some standouts, including a black-and-white drawing by Calvin Reid titled God Forbid This Should Happen to You that wittily hints at an artist's travails; Husband, Father, Drunk, a cartoony painting by a team that calls itself Cockrill/Judge Hughes that gives a scurrilous account of the nuclear family, and The Golden Egg, a cleverly wrought sendup of baby clothes and baubles by Bonnie Lucas.

Jokingly warning that the East Village bubble may be about to burst, Costa fantasies that his show is already part of a post-East Village revival, rising on the ashes of a burnt- out scene. At this point, that's still a joke. But it's noteworthy that what started out as a casual community of young artist-dealers alienated from Establishment marketing methods is - inevitably - being subsumed in that very structure.

Christian Science Monitor (Boston, MA)

April 8, 1985, Monday

SECTION: Arts and Leisure; Art; Art in N.Y.'s East Village; Pg. 23

LENGTH: 1044 words

HEADLINE: Art forms in the East Village

BYLINE: By Theodore F. Wolff

DATELINE: New York

BODY:

Thirty years spent in New York has taught me two things: Central Park blooms again every spring, and a fresh crop of young artists from all over the United States sets out to conquer the art world here every fall.

I'm grateful for both. Without Central Park's greenery and these artists' talent, enthusiasm, and imagination, New York would be a much less pleasant place to live, and its gallery world would very shortly shrivel up and die.

Unfortunately, very few of these artists succeed in any sense of the word, and most return to their home communities by the end of the first or second year. The rest, however, dig in, adapt, and do whatever is necessary to survive and to produce art. They learn to confront the real issues of creativity, to see art in its most basic and far-reaching terms, and to bring together what they feel, see, imagine, and think about into images that gradually deserve to be called art.

Even then, there's the problem of recognition in a city that even with roughly 500 galleries cannot possibly exhibit the work of more than a fraction of those who are ready. New areas open up, however, to fulfill the demand for new galleries, and before anyone knows what has happened, a new art community and gallery complex has sprung up.

The latest and most in of these is the East Village. It achieved its current status in not much more than a year, serving not only as the home base for many of the younger artists described above, but as a place where a number of them receive their first professional exposure.

An art critic ignores the East Village at his peril, a fact underscored by a two-part, four-gallery exhibition now taking place there and a few blocks to the west of it. Three East Village galleries, Sixth Sense, Dramatis Personae, and E. M. Donahue Ltd., are jointly showing Illuminations, while New York University's Grey Art Gallery is exhibiting Precious. Combined, these shows represent the work of roughly 100 artists, ranging from the modestly talented to the brilliant, the completely unknown to the well established.

What they all have in common, however, is a free-spirited approach to the creation of art that rejects the tyranny of formalist dogma, the sanctity of tradition, the belief that certain materials are not good enough for art, and any predetermined limitations as to what art is or can do.

Illuminations was curated by Joel Handorff and Susan Berko. Their selection of 100 works by 51 artists was made from about 300 sets of slides - a clear indication of the community's interest in this project. Its objectives were articulated by Alisa Kline, who also provided the text for its catalog:

'Illuminations' seeks work that is genuinely motivated by a search for meaning - art that starts with the impulse, the content, and finds a style that will contain it. . . . We have gotten so good at knowing the world and how it works, that we have lost sight of what it means. We live in a dark age, and we celebrate it as enlightenment. 'Illuminations' hopes to cast just enough genuine light to make apparent how dense is the surrounding darkness.

Reasonable words and a worthwhile objective? Perhaps, but not in the eyes of most formalists, traditional modernists, and those who believe we have just entered a Golden Age. For them, these words represent a frontal assault on much of what they hold dear, most particularly the dogma of formal purity, and the belief that the 20th century is the beginning of an age of enlightenment.

The question, of course, is how all this translates into the exhibition itself, and to what extent the works on view fulfill or illuminate Ms. Kline's written objectives and cultural interpretations.

My first impression was of great diversity. Since the shared perceptions and beliefs that animate this show discourage stylistic conformity, there are almost as many styles represented in it as there are painters, sculptors, and photographers. In addition, the level of creative commitment on the part of its artists is remarkably high. Although some of the works on view are of less substance than others, and a very small number must be described as trivial, I found none of the intentional frivolity and self-serving attitudinizing that have marred several other recent group exhibitions of younger and emerging artists.

I was particularly impressed by the seriousness of what I saw, even when the subjects were delightfully eccentric or extravagantly lighthearted, and the styles in which they were fashioned seemed more in keepind with the manufacture of toys than with the creation of works of art. Expressionism, iconoclasm, satire, narrative painting, decoration, modified surrealism, visual puns, were all there - as well as many other modes of expression. But in almost every case, the styles chosen by the artists were put to good personal and expressive use, and the work that resulted did, at least in a general sense, reflect the show's overall intentions.

Precious, curated by the Grey Art Gallery's new director, Thomas Sokolowski, consists of 100 works that comment on the meaning of the word precious as used in the mid-1980s. Although its theme is more specific than that of Illuminations, it also addresses itself to the search for meaning that underlies the other show. In fact, both overlap to a degree, with some of the artists included in one also appearing in the other.

Not only does Precious consist of intriguing and highly unusual pieces in styles and techniques that would have driven the art establishment into a rage only a decade ago, it is also assembled as shrewdly and sensitively as any of the individual works on view. I found it thoroughly enchanting - if occasionally somewhat startling - and recommend it as an excellent introduction to some of today's newer and more delightfully idiosyncratic trends in art.

Precious will remain open to the public at the Grey Art Gallery, 33 Washington Place, through May 4.

Illuminations can be seen at Dramatis Personae Gallery, 25 East Fourth Street, though April 19 and at E. M. Donahue Ltd., 28 East 10th Street, sixth floor, through April 14. Sixth Sense Gallery's portion of the show, unfortunately, closed yesterday.

The New York Times

April 19, 1985, Friday, Late City Final Edition

SECTION: Section C; Page 22, Column 5; Weekend Desk

LENGTH: 1428 words

HEADLINE: EAST VILLAGE GALLERIES;

ART OF PROTEST ATTEMPTS TO SHOCK AND MOBILIZE

BYLINE: By MICHAEL BRENSON

BODY:

SUE COE'S work is about anger, about making art that cannot be absorbed into a system she abhors and about art with the power to provoke political action. In her graphic images, the narrative and expressive currents of contemporary art, as well as the present widespread identification with animals and nature, are channeled into political statements.

Using collage and the vocabulary of outrage developed by Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, Goya, George Grosz, K"athe Kollwitz and the Mexican muralists, Coe pieces together images that are direct and unequivocal. Her mixed-media works on paper and canvas are filled with black-and- white contrasts, abruptly shifting perspectives and human and spatial dislocations. The nearly naturalistic is juxtaposed with the satirical. Most of the images contain words, sometimes written in blood red, which make the content unmistakable.

The more than 40 works in the show at the P.P.O.W. Gallery, 216 East 10th Street, through May 12, give the impression of a cruel, claustrophobic, nightmarish world divided between ruthless oppressors and helpless victims. The sense of black and white, good and evil, blessed and damned is as emphatic as it is in doctrinaire and religious art. The bad - Ronald Reagan, the State, Capitalism - are grotesquely evil. Their victims are martyred and angelic.

Coe was born in London. She moved to the United States in 1972. By immersing us in a tide of local and international issues, she intends to make it as difficult as possible to see any issue as an isolated problem or an aberration. Coe's subjects include police brutality, exploitation by landlords, teen-age prostitution, capital punishment, vivisection, violence in Northern Ireland, apartheid, the Central Intelligency Agency and the nuclear arms industry. Some of the bitterest anger is directed toward the control and exploitation of women. Coe illustrated the cover for Germaine Greer's 1984 book, Sex and Destiny. The Politics of Human Fertility.

The distinguishing characteristic of Coe's work may be its absoluteness. There are no questions asked; there is no curiosity about the other side or doubt that everyone is either part of the solution or part of the problem. The specificity of her work serves a number of purposes. For one thing, it obliges us to consider exactly where we stand. For another, it presents issues in a way that is intended to mobilize us. By making her position so unequivocal and her rejection of the existing power system so categorical, Coe also intends to make it extremely hard for that system to assimilate her.

This is not work that is going to speak to anyone who does not share its point of view. Coe is not an artist who will reassure anyone who is troubled not only by the complacency and exploitation of the right but also by the inflexibility and exclusiveness of the left. But she has produced a passionate, uncompromising body of work through which it is possible to approach many issues engaging political art now. And Coe's images will reinforce anger about some or all of the issues with which she is concerned.

Also of interest this week:

Richard Hambleton (Piezo Electric Gallery, 437 East Sixth Street): At first glance, the seascapes in Richard Hambleton's new show seem to be a radical departure from the black, shadowy figures on the walls of New York City buildings for which the artist may still be best known. There is black in each of these paintings, but now it is largely confined to vertical stripes that divide the canvases like oversized Barnett Newman zips.

The largest painting is an almost Oriental seascape in which we find ourselves in the trough of a huge white wave. Treason, the title of the painting, is one clue that all is not as romantic as it seems. The mushroom cloud in the left background is another. The paint itself seems to have a torrential, independent life.

In short, the looming violence in Hambleton's earlier work is still present, but now it has taken almost an apocalyptic form. There are paintings of Marlboro men who look as if they have begun to dissolve. There are three paintings called Rainstorm, in which raging water seems to be rushing toward us from within the canvas. In each of these paintings, sea and sky rage a bit more, until they seem on the point of swallowing everything.

In the end, the black stripes are less formal devices than magnets of death. Hambleton is another contemporary artist whose work seems intent on changing the way we look at the heroic abstract paintings of the 1950's and 60's. In his waterscapes, it is as if the color zones of Newman had suddenly opened up to show us not the harmony and infinity of nature but a world on the verge of chaos and destruction. (Through May 5.)

David Sandlin and Guy Augeri (Gracie Mansion Gallery, 167 Avenue A, at 10th Street): David Sandlin is another East Village artist whose work sets out to satirize suburban life. The works in his present show, Religious, Mythological and Historic Art for the New Right?!, are painted in a a relaxed style that is apparently intended to make it harder for the people who are the objects of his satire to realize that he does not like them. Sandlin takes aspects of Americana - beer, the mall, the beauty queen - and aggrandizes them by dressing them up in iconography identified with high-minded artistic conventions and themes. Conceivably, the subject of the painting, President Ronald Reagan as Charles III in Hunting Dress After Goya, could view the work as a tribute, or as good clean fun.

The wax and oil paintings of Guy Augeri are a different story. Augeri starts from dream, moves toward myth, and often winds up with art historical quotations that in this show range from Dura Europas to Jan M"uller and Susan Rothenberg. Augeri paints, scrapes, scratches and then paints some more in an attempt to make the meaning of the original inspiration reveal itself. In a painting like Singing Bone (P-11), in which a white minotaurlike figure floats on a white ground, surrounded by obscure faces, the exploration of painting and the exploration of emotional states go together. (Through Sunday.)

The Chi-Chi Show (Massimo Audiello Gallery, 436 East 11th Street): Inspired by his affection for Chi-Chi, the pet Chihuahua of the East Village art dealer Pat Hearn, Massimo Audiello asked artists he knew to create works based on the dog. The resulting show of works by 13 artists may not be the cat's meow, but almost everything in it has some bite.

One reason the show is successful is that the subject led the artists to the popular campy border between the sublime and the ridiculous. In Ross Bleckner's small, glazed painting, a little white dog propels itself upward through a narrow passageway flooded with visionary light. In Michele Zalopany's Chi-Chi, the head of a Chihuahua is the subject of a four-foot-tall charcoal portrait in which the rodent-sized dog is transformed into something dangerous and absurd.

No work has more of an edge than the large work on paper by Philip Taaffe. Six identical images of a white dog on the left side of the work face six identical but deathly images of the same white dog on the right. The dogs are only a nose apart at the top of the work, but the distance between them widens as the pairs descend. These animal icons of middle class life are set into a red grid derived from a painting by one of the most absolute abstract artists, Ad Reinhardt. One of the goals of the work seems to be a greater awareness of the places in which once radical artistic statements now reside. (Through Sunday.)

21 Women (Phenix City Gallery, 184 East Seventh Street): The 21 women brought together by Eve Zimmerman share neither an approach, nor a point of view. Mimi Gross, Eva Hesse, Judy Rifka, Nancy Spero and Hannah Wilke are widely known; Carolyn Jennings, Margery Mellman and Megan Flores Piran are not. For all the differences, however, the show has a sense of community.

One reason is that there are a number of works with a feminist orientation. Keiko Bonk's painting is an angry statement about marriage. Kathryn Halbower begins with the kind of family snapshots we are all familiar with and makes them into paintings in which the images seem closer to Francis Bacon than to family idylls. In Gilda Pervin's work, there is a biting contrast between saccharine prototypes of domesticity and female beauty and an experience of anger and violation. (Through April 28.)

The New York Times

May 24, 1985, Friday, Late City Final Edition

SECTION: Section B; Page 6, Column 2; Style Desk

LENGTH: 1007 words

HEADLINE: EAST VILLAGE DINING LURES THE ART CROWD

BYLINE: By SUZANNE SLESIN

BODY:

There is no need to dress up or make reservations weeks in advance. The prices are not outrageous and diners don't have to fight their way through masses of people. At least not yet.

One of the newest and most vital Manhattan restaurant scenes is in the East Village, in the area between Tompkins Square Park, St. Marks Place, Second Avenue and East Fourth Street. Members of the art, fashion and photography world are filling the tables nightly at a number of small restaurants there. They're working restaurants, said Massimo Audiello, who opened a gallery on East 11th Street in February. You can be relaxed, but still meet everybody and keep on working when you go out to eat.

Hawaii 5-0, at 121 Avenue A, between Seventh Street and St. Mark's Place, is the most stylish of these. Such well-known artists as Alex Katz, Marc Lancaster, Jennifer Bartlett, Julian Schnabel, Billy Sullivan and Francesco Clemente are such regular patrons that Jane Kaplowitz, a painter, remarked: One could feel funny about coming here unless one had a show on West Broadway.

Many of them have also invested in the restaurant, along with Richard and Robert Rathe, who also own part of the Gotham Grill, and Jim and Beth De Woody ?. He's a sculptor and she has the real-estate connection, said Tony Tarango, one of the owners of Hawaii 5-0. Mrs. De Woody ? is the daughter of Lewis Rudin, the real-estate executive.

Named After the Show

The 16-table Hawaii 5-0 opened in April, after Mr. Tarango and a friend, Hank Tomashevski, a former architecture student, decided to name their venture after the old television show. We spent next to nothing, under $80,000, Mr. Tomashevski said. That's what it would have cost 10 years ago to open a restaurant.

Knoll secretarial chairs on casters, sparkling table tops lacquered with automotive paint, a stack of bananas and a static-filled black-and-white television screen on the two Saarinen tables that serve as a bar - the restaurant does not yet have a liquor license - are all part of the understated interior.

It's fun because you can roll around on the chairs, said Marc Jacobs, a fashion designer who was having dinner with Robert Boykin, a film producer, and Nick Egan, a graphic artist. We're from the Upper West Side, said Mr. Egan. There's a nice loose feeling here, like eating in an art school canteen.

But unlike in most cafeterias, the menu, which changes weekly, includes appetizers such as coconut beer shrimp ($6) and main courses such as Texas-style barbecued steak ($15). The Blue Angel, a huge chunk of angel's-food cake with a big blob of blue-hued whipped cream, is $3.50, and the tropical fruit drinks are $2.50 each.

I can get a lot of art business done table-rolling, said Richard Marshall, associate curator of exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, who has dinner at Hawaii 5-0 at least twice a week. Do you think this will start a trend? asked Robert Rosenblum, a professor of fine arts at New York University, looking at the blank brick walls.

I like the fact that there's no art around, Mr. Marshall said. Having art on the walls is so political, you'd have problems with certain people.

It was a first visit for Kenneth Tepper, who manages a hair salon, and Lorina Quigley, a hair stylist and makeup artist. Both were sipping tropical concoctions with Hawaii 5-0's signature two-foot-long straws. Not bad so far, Mr. Tepper said. But next time, I'll bring my haircutting scissors and trim the straws.

Friends From Paris

Around the corner, at Spaghetteria, 126 East Seventh Street, Jean-Paul Beaujard, an antiques dealer and interior decorator, was having dinner with two friends who had just arrived from Paris. I like to bring uptown establishment and European people here and introduce them to the well-mannered side of the punk and artist scene, he said.

The restaurant, which has a small garden, is shaped like a railroad flat and seats about 35. It is unpretentiously furnished with folding wooden chairs and banquettes set against natural brick walls.

Stephen Shanaghan and Arnoldo Caballero opened Spaghetteria a year ago. We had traveled all over Italy and wanted to do an inexpensive Italian diversified restaurant, Mr. Caballero said. Appetizer portions of pasta are $3.95; main courses are $6 to $8.

Close to midnight, people were crowded around the bar at Evelyne's, 87 East Fourth Street, a larger and more dramatically decorated establishment.

David Mc Dermott ? and Peter Mc Gough ?, two painters who work together and co-sign their paintings Mc Gough ?, were just finishing dinner. Suddenly, Mr. Mc Gough ? rushed to the telephone by the maitre d'hotel's table. I found an 18th-century corner cupboard, he shouted above the general din. It's on the street. I have to find a way to pick it up right away. Evelyne's seats about 100 people in the restaurant and garden and serves French nouvelle cuisine, with entrees costing between $13 and $20.

Jacques Halbert and Mireille Brame opened the Art Cafe, a wine bar and restaurant, at 151 Second Avenue, between Ninth and 10th Streets, last New Year's Eve. We wanted something easy, a place where people who like to sit could come and do nothing, said Mr. Halbert, whose establishment is frequented by neighborhood artists as well as local gallery owners and art critics.

A Sidewalk Terrace

Glass doors open onto a sidewalk terrace and Mr. Halbert's own art works decorate the walls. The restaurauteur had also applied his artistic skills to his and Miss Brame's jackets. Both had been painted in a realistic pattern of red cherries.

I'm a painter and I also like to show different artists' work, he said. But I don't sell the works. I do it just for pleasure.

Even the wine lists got an artistic treatment. They are hand-drawn on empty wine bottles that have been painted. Four of them get stolen every night, Mr. Halbert said. I guess that one day, I'll stop making them.

GRAPHIC: photos of patrons at the Art Cafe (NYT/Bill Cunningham)

The New York Times

May 31, 1985, Friday, Late City Final Edition

SECTION: Section C; Page 23, Column 1; Weekend Desk

LENGTH: 1358 words

HEADLINE: ART: 'GATHERING OF THE AVANT-GARDE'

BYLINE: By VIVIEN RAYNOR

BODY:

THE way things are going, Manhattan may soon be coast-to-coast condos, co-ops, office buildings, centers and plazas, with the labor force needed to keep it all going transported in daily - the subways permitting. This isn't the theme of The Gathering of the Avant-Garde, but the show's very existence implies concern over the impact of the real-estate boom on daily life and, hence, on the making of art.

It's a huge exhibition, split among three locations - the Kankeleba Gallery, 214 East Second Street, the Henry Street Settlement, 466 Grand Street, and the Community Documentation Workshop, in St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery, at 10th Street and Second Avenue, through June 30. Each section has its own character, but the overall message is that there was, too, art on the Lower East Side before it became its present trendy self - even before it became the East Village, in the 1960's.

There was no visible scene then, as there is now, no amusing dens of iniquity and, except for dairy restaurants, delicatessens and cafeterias, not much in the way of eating places. Parents and tourists alike stayed away. The galleries didn't arrive until the 50's and then beyond the western edge of the neighborhood, which is Third Avenue. However, these 10th Street galleries are counted as a Lower East Side manifestation; so is Willem de Kooning's former studio, at Fourth Avenue and 12th Street, which is the subject of Rudy Burckhardt's photograph on the show's announcement.

What this dingy and sad neighborhood was rich in, however, was low-rent crannies built for the immigrant hordes, in which artists could live and work. And between 1948 and 1970, the period covered by the exhibition, there were nearly 350 of them doing so. More remarkable is the fact that some 30 percent of these aspirants went on to become stars. In addition to de Kooning, these include Hans Hofmann, Alex Katz, William King, Franz Kline, Robert Rauschenberg, Larry Rivers and Tom Wesselmann (Jasper Johns and Claes Oldenburg are two unavoidable omissions). For each major reputation in the show, there must be a dozen that are only slightly less well known.

A year and a half in the making, the roundup was organized by the co-directors of Kankeleba, Corrine Jennings and the painter-sculptor Joe Overstreet, working in collaboration with Susan Fleminger and Arthur Tobier, who head the settlement and the workshop, respectively. But the size of the event - many of the participants contributed more than one work - is partly attributable to the fact that most of the artists who were approached remembered others who had been forgotten.

All of which may sound like the makings of a gigantic mess, but, in fact, the results are amazingly good. This is not just because of the names, since they don't always appear at their best. Kline, for instance, is represented by two ball-point drawings of Aristodemos Kaldis on Cedar Bar menus. It is, rather, that the general level is high, with many of the most eye-catching works coming from the lesser known and even the obscure. A list of exceptional pieces would occupy the rest of this review, but some names to look out for are Tom Boutis, Knox Martin, John Button, John Hultberg, James Snodgrass, Leo Schulemowitz, Alvin Hollingsworth, Selena Trieff, Tom Kendall, Esther Gentle, Howard Kanovitz and Nicholas Krushenick. All of them are at Kankeleba, though some also appear at Henry Street.

The much smaller settlement show emphasizes abstraction of the late 50's and early 60's, but, like Kankeleba, it includes many small works and photographs of artists that Robert Rauschenberg took during the 50's.

If nothing else, the exhibition suggests that seedy neighborhoods are necessary for the germination of cultural life and perhaps should be left alone, which is why it is best approached by way of the St. Mark's display. Consisting of photographs (note the street scenes by Robert Frank and a lot of text, this traces the Lower East Side's cultural history from the early days of the Educational Alliance (where Jo Davidson and Jacob Epstein studied art) through the W.P.A. and Beat eras to Hippie Heaven, when jazz flourished at the Five Spot and poetry readings at St. Mark's. It takes close scrutiny, but the pithy quotes from the artists and writers alone are worth it. Also of interest this week: Walter Gaudnek (Grey Art Gallery and Study Center, 33 Washington Place): Walter Gaudnek first appeared in New York in the early 1960's, when he showed briefly with the seminal Pop artists. But his own work was - and still is - far from Pop, being rooted in a fascination with the signs and symbols of ancient cultures, particularly labyrinths. These, as Thomas Sokolowski, director of the gallery, explains in a brief introduction, are considered to be more benign than mazes. Gaudnek's show is mainly a large installation that he titles Nomaze and describes as a labyrinth of labyrinths.

Easily penetrated, it consists of very large canvas panels decorated on both sides with figures that seem part robot, part Mayan inventions, together with masks and other motifs, including, of course, labyrinths. All these geometricized shapes are drawn in a fine black line and patterned in prime colors. Every so often, the visitor runs into freestanding sculptures of the figures that are made of plywood sheets bolted to wood beams and decorated in the same way. At the center of the labyrinth is a truncated version of the 40-foot-high tower that dominated the work when it was first erected last year, at the Haus der Kunst in Munich, and it contains a swing.

A pleasant spectacle that arouses associations with Leger and Art Deco as well as with Keith Haring, the installation comes with some large unstretched canvases of an earlier date. These are pretty well covered with grotesque faces, mysterious hairy-looking shapes and, again, labyrinths. Painted mainly in black on raw canvas, they look rather tribalistic. A Czechoslovak-born painter who studied at the University of California at Los Angeles, Gaudnek now teaches at the University of Central Florida, in Orlando. (Through June 21.) Lester Johnson (Zabriskie Gallery, 724 Fifth Avenue, at 57th Street): Lester Johnson's new canvases are almost all the color of a ripe mango. Prancing across them are the artist's familiar belles with skins of such a similar hue that it is only touches of vestigially lighter modeling, the subjects' unfocused but lustrous dark eyes, tawny or blond hair and beautifully patterned clothes that separates them from their backgrounds. Sometimes a young man, cigarette on lip, slinks along with them, but mainly the ladies stride alone, usually from left to right and on long, tubular legs not unlike those the sculptor Reuben Nakian is currently putting on his nudes. Although a look-alike was recently spotted on a beach, the Lester Johnson women are a 1940's fantasy repeated over and over. The drawing of these unearthly creatures is a little odd at times, but the painting is quite beautiful. (Through next Friday.) Charles Boone (Christminster Gallery, 336 East Fifth Street): Each of Charles Boone's paintings consists of two distinct but related images: for example, a head of a periwigged man in profile, and the same head full face; three chimneys and a tree, and a stovepipe hat acting as a chimney on a thatched roof. Sometimes, the color and lighting of the images change too melodramatically and, indeed, the show as a whole tends at first to bear down on the spectator, although this could probably be corrected by deeper and more generous frames. Also, the artist can get perilously close to Donald Roller Wilson-style weirdness, as in the dog in a dunce's cap that is combined with a tabby cat dressed in Jacobean costume. For all that, the peculiar juxtapositions set in motion rhythms that have an almost physiological effect on the beholder. Moreover, there are a few passages of fine painting -specifically in the study of a black satin witch's hat with a cup of coffee alongside - that bring to mind the art of Edwin Dickinson. A promising first solo. (Through June 9.)

The New York Times

September 29, 1985, Sunday, Late City Final Edition

SECTION: Section 2; Page 33, Column 1; Arts and Leisure Desk

LENGTH: 1684 words

HEADLINE: GALLERY VIEW;

FROM YOUNG ARTISTS, DEFIANCE BEHIND A SMILING FACADE

BYLINE: By Michael Brenson

BODY:

Anyone making the rounds of New York galleries in the last two years is likely to have noticed the emergence of something that can be loosely described as a mid-1980's style. It is identified with the East Village. The subject matter it serves is drawn from middle-class life and popular culture. It is characterized by lush, thickly encrusted surfaces and smiling, youthful faces, many of them as sweet and mindless as the faces in soap operas and comic strips. The style is accessible, seductive and hedonistic. Its appearance has generated considerable confusion. Pleasure and fun have never before been an integral part of American art. While American modernists made art that barely even paid lip service to the great American need to be liked, a young East Village artist like Rodney Alan Greenblat not only wants his work to be liked but is brazenly undefensive about it. While modernism remained generally uneasy about relations with commerce and power, for many younger artists in the East Village and So Ho ? the taboo against careerism has all but disappeared.

The changes suggested by the art of the mid-1980's may be even more consequential. Since Pop Art, there has been an ongoing effort to bridge the gap between high and low culture. When the Whitney Biennial turns loose in one of its corridors and two of its bathrooms a gifted but infantile artist like Kenny Scharf, and when a fashionable discotheque like the Palladium seems to have become for contemporary artists what the Cedar Bar was for the Abstract Expressionists, there is a question whether popular culture may, in fact, have replaced high culture as the guiding light of American art.

The new art season is a good time to try to respond to some of the questions the art of the mid-1980's raises. Does the appearance of accessibility and materialistic excess mean that growing numbers of artists have indeed sold out to the American gods of money, celebrity, novelty and youth, which the entire history of modernism until Andy Warhol had taken as its responsibility to resist? Have growing numbers of artists been so seduced by the prospect of properity that they can only reflect rather than confront the troubles and contradictions around them?

When all the lush surfaces and sweet faces are looked at closely, it is clear that the smiling, prosperous face of contemporary art is basically a facade. In the paper and tinsel icons and treasuries of Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, which were recently on display at the Holly Solomon Gallery, gaudy surfaces and kitsch subjects conceal bitterness about the hollowness of cultural promises. The almost irresistible bronze figures of Tom Otterness, on view at the Brooke Alexander Gallery through Saturday, are filled with defiance and ambition. In the sculptures of David Finn, some of which will be nestling in the trees of the traffic triangle just below City Hall Park from Oct. 20 to Dec. 10, goony, grinning faces set in motion a process of political provocation.

This has been a year of retrospectives of artists concerned with the esthetics of fun. The Red Grooms fun house closes today at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, after which it travels to Denver, Los Angeles and Nashville. A retrospective of the sculptor Mark di Suvero, another artist marked by the populist desire to make work that can say something to everyone, continues at the Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, N.Y., through Oct. 31.

This was also the year in which Jonathan Borofsky brought his troupe of nodding, dancing, quacking figures to the Whitney. Borofksy is an example of how difficult it is to judge a book by its flashy cover. There is a lot of laughter emanating from his work, but in his noisy, cluttered, playful installations, there is also a horror of a vacuum that is a sign not only of boundless invention but of panic. There may be a lot of smiling visitors pouring in and out of a Borofsky show, but his work is a powerful artistic reminder of the inspiring and crushing challenge of creating individual meaning in an American society where collective meaning is largely absent.

Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt is one of the key precursors of the mid-1980's style. Like the lavishly ornate art in East Village galleries as a whole, his work gives an immediate impression of materialism that has run amok. More important, years before the current style emerged, Lanigan-Schmidt was creating work that existed on a strange edge between sweetness and bitterness. Although he is not an East Village artist, he is one of the artists whose work best embodies the East Village combination of romanticism and cynicism. It is this combination that explains why the East Village has become an art center. This tension defines the current art world, not only in the United States, but also in Europe.

Lanigan-Schmidt's recent show was called The Venetian Glass Series. It was inspired by a recent trip to Venice - that city where the grandeur and sentimentality of religion, where the vision of former glory and present decay, run together. The main part of the show consisted of Plexiglas cases filled with Christmas-treelike constructions built from Saran Wrap and aluminum foil. The cases suggested objects from the Treasury of San Marco, which were recently shown at the Metropolitan Museum in an installation so spectacularly pretentious that it wound up letting everyone know that the objects it set out to venerate no longer had a chance of retaining their sacred aura without the help of theatrical lighting and decor.

Lanigan-Schmidt begins with the conviction that the objects people worship, whether in religion, film or popular culture, are empty. His work contains plastic rosaries, fake flowers and stills from movie romances. His images are illuminated by magic markers. In his variations on devotional images from working-class environments, the Virgin Mary and saints are transported in waxed paper clouds. With the tackiness of the images, sometimes intertwined with bleak emblems of tenement life, the artist does not allow us to believe his subject matter for a second.

Yet Lanigan-Schmidt also stubbornly, even desperately, refuses to make art that does not come out of the sentimental landmarks of the working-class Roman Catholic environment in which he was raised. He diligently bends, folds and twists papers into ephemeral shrinesand trees of life. His best works turn our attention away from the trappings of worship onto the religious impulse itself. There is seductiveness and bad taste in his work, but they are the artist's way of guiding us toward a purity and sweetness that he believes are genuine and essential.

The work of David Finn is extremely good-natured. Finn lives on the Lower East Side, where he scours the streets gathering the debris from which he assembles his multiplying band of life-size figures. All of them have painted cardboard box heads that resemble the heads of friendly animals. But they also resemble the hoods terrorists place over the heads of victims.

Indeed, the heads and bodies have no relation to each other. While the heads are often smiling, the bodies -made up of sacks and chunks of wood and garbage - are tattered, stained, disintegrating. Finn's installations lead us to anticipate a playful encounter with the Big Bird of Sesame Street. They end up directing us to the mean streets from which the figures were formed and encouraging us to look closer at the prisoners of those streets and to see appearances as masks.

Athough the sculpture of Tom Otterness reflects the style and concerns of the 1980's, he, too, is an independent artist. He has a feeling for sculptural form and a paradoxical, contrary way of thinking that is as close to Lewis Carroll as it is to James Thurber. He has lived in the Far East and in Europe and has a curiosity about foreign cultures and distant times that has become rare among younger artists in New York. The wit and appeal of his cherubic figures grow out of a desire to create work in which the whole world will be welcome. But there has also been a streak of violence, if not savagery, in Otterness's work. It is more internalized than it was several years ago, but it remains a force.

Otterness's present show is filled with riddles. There are waist-high robots of Adam and Eve and of Jack and Jill, who do not carry a pail of water, but a pail with a globe in it - a clue to the internationalism the artist is after. There are reliefs of an almost slapstick bestiality. A frog princess plays erotically with a smaller robot male. The feet of a Chinese idol are on backward. There is a snake with a head at each end, both with a forked tongue and a hat like a vaudeville performer. Almost everyone and everything in the show seems in the process of performing.

Behind the farcical and seductive facade, however, there is something enigmatic and even disturbing. The elusiveness results in part from Otterness's search for a universal and all-inclusive language. His men and women look very much the same. Both are active and passive; mothers may have the traditional role of fathers and fathers the traditional role of mothers. Figures are upright, but they are also upside down. They are on the floor and walls, but they are also on the doors and ceiling. While the artist's ample volumes recall Elie Nadelman and other 20th-century sculptors, they also bring to mind Indian and Chinese sculpture.

Within Otterness's simple forms and basic gestures, opposing emotions collide. Grins become grimaces. Ecstasy becomes pain. A smiling face resembles the head of a gorgon. Fairy tales, pornography, mythology and the Bible all run together. Otterness uses simplicity to undermine simplicity and to provoke a meditation on a culture in which so much information from so many contexts is constantly slamming together. His work is proof that responding to popular culture and reflecting the prosperous veneer of this uneasy time are by no means incompatible with a search for the depth and meaning that the best art has always had.

GRAPHIC: Photo of Tom Otterness's Snake With Feet sculpture

The New York Times

December 22, 1985, Sunday, Late City Final Edition

SECTION: Section 4; Page 8, Column 1; Week in Review Desk

LENGTH: 977 words

HEADLINE: FOR ARTS GROUPS IN MANHATTAN, THE LEASE IS THE THING

BYLINE: By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN

BODY:

When Joseph Papp founded the New York Shakespeare Festival 30 years ago, he paid no rent for its home, a church cellar on the Lower East Side. Twelve years later, when he moved the organization to new quarters in the East Village, the cost of the space was not much higher. But if the festival were looking for a home today, he maintains, he could not afford to open, at least not in Manhattan.

That the Shakespeare Festival grew from its basement beginnings to become one of the most important theater organizations in the United States suggests how much is at stake in the rent squeeze on nonprofit arts groups. Critical and severe were among the adjectives used earlier this month in a report from two city agencies, the Department of Cultural Affairs and the Office of Business Development, to describe the situation. A conference sponsored by Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts to discuss the space chase drew representatives from 151 groups.

In Manhattan, the chase has never been more desperate. For the first time in our history, said Bess Myerson, the Cultural Affairs Commissioner, there are no unexplored frontiers in Manhattan for arts groups and artists to pioneer.

Such institutions as the Twyla Tharp dance company and the Manhattan Punch Line Theater have no performance spaces. Many of the dance studios on the Upper West Side, including the New York School of Ballet, have closed as rents have escalated and alternative spaces have evaporated. Rent increases of as much as 300 percent have hit the Dance Theater Workshop and Theater for the New City. Art galleries have begun to emigrate from Manhattan to Long Island City.

What is endangered is not only the network of arts groups that forms a $5.6 billion-a-year industry but also something less easily quantified - the creative climate of artistic neighborhoods. Movements such as Abstract Expressionist painting, Beat poetry and Off Broadway theater developed in part because artists could work and live near each other. But with a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan commanding an average of $1,000 a month, artists have dispersed as far afield as Astoria, Flatbush, Hoboken and Newark.

To a great extent, artists and arts groups have become victims of the neighborhood improvements they set in motion. From So Ho ? and Tri Be Ca ? in the 1970's to Clinton and Alphabetville in the 1980's, artists have followed cheap rents into unsavory or undiscovered neighborhoods and helped make them safe, chic and, ultimately, too pricey for artists. We dig our own graves, said Mr. Papp. We get punished for the good we do.

The city has contributed to the rental crunch with contradictory policies. The Koch Administration has stimulated construction to generate property tax revenue and revive neighborhoods. At the same time, the Cultural Affairs Department has been warning that development threatens to drive arts groups out of Manhattan. In Clinton, the neighborhood west of Ninth Avenue in the 40's and 50's, which is undergoing wholesale rehabilitation, the city's development plan would give it the right to raze buildings housing such performing arts groups as the Ensemble Studio Theater, Women's Interart, INTAR Stage Two and Soundscape.

It's a constant struggle to balance priorities, said Randall Bourscheidt, the deputy commissioner of cultural affairs. You have to balance urban renewal with preserving the arts groups. In the past, the groups have moved rather than stood and fought.

The choice now is not moving to a new building or neighborhood, but moving out of Manhattan altogether. That means leaving behind the biggest audience and the greatest visibility - but not necessarily escaping real-estate woes.

Moving may no longer be a solution, according to a report released earlier this month by Artists-in-Action, a group of artists in the Clinton neighborhood. Arts groups who serve as pioneers for future real estate development in the outer boroughs are not exempt from the development goals that have altered Manhattan.

The recent city report suggests several remedies, including the creation of a fund to provide seed money to help groups buy their quarters. In addition, the Cultural Affairs Department has compiled a list of vacant spaces and has put $25,000 into a Technical Assistance Fund to hire real-estate and financial experts to aid arts groups.

But Artists-in-Action calls such steps inadequate because they validate the status quo without recognizing that it is the city's own real-estate policies which have helped to create the current space chase. Mr. Papp has suggested that the city require developers to set aside space for arts organizations in new building projects.

There is a precedent for such a proposal. Under the Lindsay Administration, developers in midtown were permitted to construct larger buildings if their structures included theaters. The Minskoff, American Place and Marquis theaters all came about as a result of the Lindsay program.

The city's role so far has been limited to enacting limited zoning preferences for artists in So Ho ? and encouraging the construction of federally subsidized housing for artists in Manhattan. Last week, after three years of study, the Board of Estimate decided to force more than 100 artists out of manufacturing lofts in Brooklyn that they had leased and occupied in violation of building and fire codes. Next year, however, the city expects to complete work on 150 apartments in the outer boroughs to be leased to artists.

In the meantime, arts groups continue to chase the remaining space, despite ever- higher prices. We should all be thankful the Statue of Liberty is not on the Upper West Side, Richard Thomas said shortly before his dance school in the neighborhood closed. She wouldn't have stood a chance. No one would have saved her.

GRAPHIC: map of Manhattan

The New York Times

November 17, 1985, Sunday, Late City Final Edition

SECTION: Section 6; Page 26, Column 1; Magazine Desk

LENGTH: 6223 words

HEADLINE: YOUTH - ART - HYPE: A DIFFERENT BOHEMIA

BYLINE: By Maureen Dowd; Maureen Dowd is a reported for The New York Times.

BODY:

ANN MAGNUSON SITS ON a worn couch in her East Village apartment, rummaging in the junkyard of American culture. She talks, with affectionate mockery, about icons and totems and slogans, past and present. Her allusions spill out like the contents of some crazed time capsule - Steve and Eydie, The Beverly Hillbillies, Patty Hearst, Gidget, Wonder bread, Amway, TV evangelists, Lawrence Welk, Jim Morrison and the Doors, Chicken Mc Nuggets ?, high-fiber diets, midstate pork princesses, Mantovani, Mr. Spock and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.

Recently christened the Funny Girl of the avant-garde by People magazine, the 28-year-old conjures up these spirits in her satirical skits for downtown clubs such as Area, Danceteria and the Pyramid. Her characters include Mrs. Rambo, who shoots her way through Bloomingdale's to save Nancy Reagan from getting a New Wave makeup job at the Yves St. Laurent counter, and Fallopia, Prince's new protege, who is really Delores Jean Humpshnoodleburger, a graduate of the Rose-Marie School of Baton and Tap in Duluth.

In the past, Ann Magnuson, who had a bit part in the movie Desperately Seeking Susan, would have been described as an aspiring actress and her territory would have been called the bohemian part of town. Now she is a performance artist with a cult following and the area where she lives and works is simply called downtown.

She is at the center of the vivid New York arts community that has captured international attention spinning what has come to be known as the downtown style. The artists cannibalize high art and the mass culture of the last three decades - television, suburbia, pornography, Saturday morning cartoons, comic books, Hollywood gossip magazines, spirituality, science fiction, horror movies, grocery lists and top-40 lists.

It's everything turned inside of itself, it's sensory overload, Ann Magnuson says. It's a postmodern conglomeration of all styles. You steal everything.

Although there are one or two outposts above 14th Street, the community begins there and moves fitfully down Manhattan, through the East Village, the Lower East Side and, on the West Side, down through Tri Be Ca ? to the Battery. It tends to hug the edges of the island and carefully avoids that older artists' haunt, Greenwich Village.

Just as irony is the hallmark of the downtown style, the word bohemia takes on an ironic twist when used to describe this arts community. For this is a bohemia, to use Ann Magnuson's phrase, that is turned inside of itself, different from any that have preceded it. While past bohemians were rebels with contempt for the middle class and the mercantile culture, many of the current breed share the same values as the yuppies uptown.

This is a blue-chip bohemia where artists talk tax shelters more than politics, and where American Express Gold Cards are more emblematic than garrets. In this Day-Glo Disneyland, the esthetic embrace of poverty has given way to a bourgeois longing for fame and money. It is a world where nightclubs have art curators and public-relations directors are considered artists.

Bohemia used to be a place to hide, says John Russell, the chief art critic of The New York Times. Now it's a place to hustle.

It's not chic to be a starving artist any more, agreed Joe Dolce, a writer and publicist for the downtown nightclub Area. It's more chic to be making millions. Bohemia meets David Stockman.

DESPITE ITS OLD-FASHIONED aroma, the word bohemia offers a valuable context in considering New York's art scene. Historic comparisons with other fabled countercultures can help make sense of downtown's heady, kaleidoscopic imagery and values.

A lot can be learned about any society by looking closely at the kind of art it makes and the kind of artistic communities it calls into being. For about a century and a half, most of the artistic capitals of Europe and America have nurtured communities of artists and esthetes known as bohemias, enclaves that have never ceased to exert a powerful force on artists and youthful romantics. Existence in these places was (and still is) dedicated to living freely, to working at one's art the way one pleased, and to pursuing pleasure before, during and after hours. Bohemians delighted in throwing pepper in the eyes of the bourgeoisie. Their behavior, sexual and otherwise, always ran counter to middle-class standards.

The word bohemian slowly began to be associated with art and loose living in Paris during the 1830's and 1840's. Originally the word signified gypsies, vagabond beggars and tricksters who were thought to have come from the central European region of Bohemia. The first chronicler of the bohemian life of Paris was Henri Murger, who wrote short stories, and then, in 1849, a very successful play about the lives of poets, painters, philosophers and their mistresses in the cold and dismal garrets of Paris. (The word, in its present sense, was first used in English in Vanity Fair by William Thackeray in 1848.) Probably the most memorable picture of the bohemian way of life is Puccini's La Boheme, his opera of 1896 based on Murger's characters.

Among the most famous bohemias of the past century have been Montmartre, Montparnasse and, more recently, St. Germain-des-Pres in Paris; the area north of the Chelsea Embankment in London; Schwabing in Munich; North Beach in San Francisco, and Greenwich Village in New York. All these areas were havens where artists and their hangers-on lived, worked and gave each other support -artists contra mondo. Murger's poet, Rodolphe, who had a casual relationship with the seamstress Mimi, shocked bourgeois Paris. But, shocked or not, from the very beginning outsiders came to these neighborhoods to gawk and often to misbehave. According to Albert Parry, the historian of American bohemianism, uptown New Yorkers came to Greenwich Village in the early 1920's in the hope of seeing nude artist's models.

The real passion of many of the bohemians, though, was for ideas. There was always much argument in these places about esthetics, much talk of politics and social change. This was to be expected, because the cherished freedom celebrated by the earliest Parisian bohemians was the result of ideas unleashed by the French Revolution. Accordingly, the political bias of most of the artists -then and until recently - was to the left and away from the establishment. It seemed to follow, most early bohemians argued, that art itself was the result of the feelings that arose naturally in common folk. That idea, however, like many that surfaced in bohemia, was challenged almost from the beginning. The poet Baudelaire, a bohemian who hated bohemia, argued that art was artifice, that it did not arise from life but that the proper life should be art. Across the English Channel, Oscar Wilde, some years later, concurred.

The intensity of the bohemian spirit in Greenwich Village soon after World War I is often evoked by images of Edna St. Vincent Millay writing her verses during the day (in a cold and uncomfortable apartment, of course) and acting in the evenings with the Provincetown Players, a company that was producing the early work of Eugene O'Neill. Around the corner, the radical John Reed talked at most important gatherings, and in every flat and on every cafe table lay a copy of the Masses, the influential Village magazine of social comment that the Government tried to censor.

Even in Chicago, bohemians gathered at the Dill Pickle Club in Tooker Place, an alley in the Near North Side, to talk, as a poem described it, about ideas of Polarity and other allied isms.

But whatever the intellectual ferment inside any of these communities, there was always a jauntiness, a panache that belied the poverty all around. Puccini summed this up in the pandemonium of the Act II Cafe Momus scene of La Boheme. Robert Motherwell, one of the founders of the Abstract Expressionist movement, recalls that, when he was a young artist living in Greenwich Village in the 1940's, art was regarded as a spiritual quest. The material options for Modernist artists in the 1940's were much more limited than they are for artists today, he said. Due to the low standing then of American Modernist artists, rarely did such artists expect to make money at all. I naively used to think it was immoral to know a critic or a museum director.

Then, too, bohemia acted as a precursor of taste and change in standards in art and behavior. It usually took at least a generation for such change to be discovered and accepted by the society at large.

NEW YORK'S DOWNTOWN ART COMMUNITY, viewed in the context of bohemias of the past, certainly displays aspects similar to most of them. Like the artistic and nightclub society of Berlin during the years of the Weimar Republic in the 1920's, downtown believes in freedom of expression and pleasure. The place looks and sounds like Swinging London of the 1960's, when young people up and down the King's Road in Chelsea lived for rock music and dressed up in the outlandish costumes first marketed on Carnaby Street. However, New York's current bohemia differs from its predecessors, because its attitude toward money and politics has changed drastically. The idea of the poor, struggling artist has been rejected and so has the idea of the affinity between art and the common man. Moreover, the attitude of the rest of society toward bohemia has changed, as well. People are no longer shocked by it; they're often titillated and desperately seeking its style.

Just as bohemians have grown more like yuppies, so a credit-card culture dizzy with consumption has grown instantly eager for the product of bohemia. What is very far out in September is totally embraced by the following spring, says Hilton Kramer, the editor of The New Criterion.

Partly, this is because art is now a good investment, and partly it is because the imagery of this arts scene is easier for the average person to understand - paintings of Fred Flintstone, silk-screens of Kraft grape-jelly jars, poems about Ozzie Nelson, performance art featuring live versions of The Dating Game, and, in a recent Ann Magnuson skit staged in an elevator with champagne, A Celebration of Muzak. In any case, there is, suddenly, a great appetite for downtown New York's style, in humor, fashion, film, writing, art and music.

Amos Poe, a New York film maker, recalls that several years ago he had talked about making a movie of downtown vignettes and received little response. Now a lot of producers are calling up and saying, 'When are you going to do that downtown thing?' he said. Downtown has become a myth, something exotic. The sensibility is what people want, kind of like going to Africa and getting a drum.

Pilar Limosner, a 30-year-old fashion designer with a shop on gritty Avenue A in the East Village, says that she has barely hung up one of her new creations, such as her Mrs. Rambo camouflage cocktail outfit (inspired by her friend, Ann Magnuson) or her gold lame Liberace meets Mr. Spock in Mexico line, before the buyers from Macy's are down here scrounging for it. The fascination has been fanned by the success of three movies set downtown and made by directors who live there: Susan Seidelman's Desperately Seeking Susan, Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise and Martin Scorsese's After Hours; by the popularity of the Jay Mc Inerney ? novel that is set amid chic downtown clubs and restaurants, Bright Lights, Big City; by the influence in rock of Talking Heads and in the music and fashion of Madonna and Cyndi Lauper, all of whom got their start downtown, and by the art explosion in the East Village that has given young artists who were unknown a few years ago the sort of celebrity and wealth previously reserved for rock stars.

The satire of icons and cliches that defines the downtown style has been called nihilistic nostalgia and apres-garde. The classic and the kitschy, the serious and the shallow are yoked, provoking greater confusion than ever about the distinctions between art and decoration, between art and entertainment. Walt Disney to Dada. Eva Gabor to Bertolt Brecht. James Brown to John Donne. T-shirts with holes to Tiffany's diamonds. The chief characteristics are camp, glitz and a sort of impudent rudeness, with a favorite target the American Dream. The style is controversial, called a renaissance by some and garbage by others.

I used to wonder what young artists would turn out like who grew up with Andy Warhol's pictures on the wall as acceptable art and thousands and thousands of television images stored in their minds, said Henry Geldzahler, a critic and former curator of 20th-century art at the Metropolitan Museum. The result is the East Village. Their art is not just precious things that change hands at high prices. It's more art as blood that courses through our veins. It's a way of living, a way of being. That's why it walks off the wall more easily to become fashion. These artists fight the idea of art as merely valuable objects by saying, 'We have to make glitter. We have to make things that are evanescent.'

What looks to us to be glitzy and vulgar is to them, I'm afraid, quite natural, he said. It's what clothes looked like when they were kids, what comics looked like, what MTV looks like. The materials that made up their world were not wood and oil and paint and all those wonderful cranky things we used to like.

Geldzahler says that the downtown group was also shaped by the post-Warhol idea that it's possible for anybody to be a star. So they do forceful things that attract attention.

The artists both mock and embrace materialism and glamour. Having grown up with art that looks serious, they want to make art that looks frivolous. Artists now can use materialism and enjoy it at the same time, the way movies now parody old movies, says the movie director Susan Seidelman.

Two of Ann Magnuson's closest friends are Kenny Scharf and Keith Haring, who have become two of the hottest art stars downtown, with waiting lists for their work and annual salaries easily in the six-figure range. Scharf, 27, draws colorful landscapes, many inspired by the 1960's television cartoons The Jetsons and The Flintstones. Haring, 27, who first became known for his subway art, does graffiti-esque drawings featuring his trademark doodles of a crawling baby and a barking dog.

Haring is opening his own boutique in So Ho ? in January, the Pop Shop, to sell his art on shoelaces, wallpaper, T-shirts, radios and patches. A sort of Laura Ashley of the Neo. It's being aware of what the times are and aggressively using it, says Haring, a thin, soft-spoken man in jeans and wire-rimmed glasses who says his idols are Andy Warhol and Walt Disney. Some of us have finally gotten to the point where we don't feel we have to suffer what Rene Ricard called 'the Van Gogh syndrome,' where, if you're an artist, people don't like you to make money until you're dead, he says, sitting at a desk in his studio with a Mickey Mouse telephone at his elbow.

ANOTHER MEMBER of the crowd is Gracie Mansion, an engaging 38-year-old who legally changed her name from Joanne Mayhew Young to that of the residence of the Mayor of New York just for the heck of it. Her trend-setting gallery on Avenue A in the East Village looks more like a fun house than a lucrative dealership.

There is 25-year-old Rodney Alan Greenblat's Wishing Well, a seven-foot high, zanily painted wooden well decorated with little plastic figures - a flying cow, a guitar, an Eskimo Pie, boy and girl astronauts, the tree of life and two men holding golf tees. On top of the well is a large house with eyes that light up from inside, and on top of that is a whirligig that twirls hanging birds and satellites. The whole thing is festooned with plastic flowers, flags, Christmas lights and tinsel.

Nearby is a Rhonda Zwillinger painting called The Promise. On one side of this diptych, Spencer Tracy spanks Elizabeth Taylor, a scene taken from an old publicity still from the 1950 movie Father of the Bride; on the other is Cinderella's castle.

In Gracie Mansion's museum store, there are other examples of downtown chic. A David Wojnarowicz silk-screen of a 99-cent Kraft grape-jelly jar sells for $150. Karon Bihari's martini glasses, at $125 apiece, have small plastic objects glued to the bases - a Daisy Duck in curlers, a James Bond with weapons and die and a Miss Moneypenny with colored glass gems.

Down the street, the Batislavia boutique, owned by the designers Pilar Limosner and Carmel Johnson, features a vest covered with National Football League labels and a skirt covered with the Budweiser logo. (Not a matching outfit.) This art of appropriation is everywhere. Kathy Acker, a writer who lives downtown, has written a novel called Great Expectations. It begins with a section called Plagiarism, a playful perversion of Dickens - My father's name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Peter. So I called myself Peter, and came to be called Peter. Peter plunders world literature, conjuring up Henry Miller, Melville, Keats, Woolf, Djuna Barnes and Propertius.

Downtown clubs and restaurants echo this style of familiar and fantastical imagery. El Internacional, a popular eatery in Tri Be Ca ?, has a replica of the Statue of Liberty crown on the roof. On the sidewalk, there is a mosaic of crushed cans of Coca-Cola, Sprite and Schlitz beer laminated into the concrete.

BECAUSE IT OFTEN appears that downtown, to paraphrase the singer Cyndi Lauper, just wants to have fun, the young artists are often called on to explain why a product that looks like fun, and bohemians who have fun, should be taken seriously.

The painter Kenny Scharf addressed the sensitive issue of fun recently in Art News magazine. The whole thing about fun - I like to have fun, he said. I think everyone wants to have fun. I think that having fun is being happy. I know it's not all fun, but maybe fun helps with the bad. I mean, you definitely cannot have too much fun. O.K., it's like I want to have fun when I'm painting. And I want people to have fun looking at the paintings. When I think, what should I do next? I think: more, newer, better, nower, funner.

Denizens of downtown subscribe to the Oscar Wilde premise that one should either be a work of art or wear a work of art. Known in fashion circles as the Wild Style, the downtown look is a sort of postpunk, neo-New Wave jumble in cascading decades - ranging from Victorian morning coats to Marilyn Monroe sundresses to bikers' outfits. A man in pink hip-huggers and Sammy Davis Jr.-style medallions walks with a woman in a tailored designer silk suit who has perfectly manicured nails and a fuchsia streak in her hair. Just as Madonna's black lace bras and Boy Toy belt buckle scoffs at the conventional notion of the female sex object, men strolling through the East Village in long flowing skirts scoff at assumptions about masculinity. One couple entered the Pyramid Club on Avenue A with chains of naked baby dolls dangling from the belts of their jeans. Another man showed up at Area wearing a dinner jacket he had made from gluing fashion magazine covers over every inch of material.

There's a lot of mockery and confusion in their choices, said Wickham Boyle, the executive director of the La Mama theater in the East Village. People learned that they had to make money to be happy yet they didn't want to become their fathers so they put on a T-shirt underneath their expensive Italian suit to look different.

WHERE THERE have been artists' colonies there have been fabled watering holes. In the 1850's, Baudelaire, Dumas fils and Henri Murger gathered at the Brasserie des Martyrs, a cafe on the edge of Montmartre that reeked of beer and tobacco. In an unfashionable slum south of Washington Square before the First World War, Eugene O'Neill, John Reed and others sat around a seedy saloon called the Golden Swan, which they rechristened the Hell Hole and which became the main source of material for O'Neill's play, The Iceman Cometh. The grubby Cedar Street Tavern on University Place in Greenwich Village became the hangout for Abstractionists such as Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning in the 1950's, and later drew the beat poets Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and Gregory Corso.

Now, the top artists gather at the elegant and expensive Mr. Chow, one of the few uptown hangouts for today's bohemians, or the glittering downtown nightclubs. The nature of bars suits the increased collaboration among artists in the 1980's. We're not looking any more at this is theater, this is dance, this is video, said Wickham Boyle. It's a time to let each artist excite and confuse the other with their different mediums. Flowing from this, clubs have become more than places to take a break from work, have a drink and talk. They are art galleries and experimental theaters and fashion runways. They host book parties, photo exhibits and jazz concerts. Clubs are a place to do business, to make contacts.

These people are ambitious and goal-oriented and they want to make money and be successful, said Steve Rubell, who runs the successful nightclub the Palladium. They're not content to sit around and talk about politics. Nicaragua doesn't raise their interest. They talk about themselves.

In the back room of the Pyramid Club, John Jesurun, a 33-year-old playwright, had the premiere of his 42-episode serial play, Chang in a Void Moon, featuring some of the Pyramid's regulars as actors. The play became so popular it enhanced the reputation of the bar, and even established performers became eager to appear there.

When Rubell and Ian Schrager, the former owners of the discotheque Studio 54, wanted to open another club, they chose an old theater on East 14th Street for the site of the Palladium over one on the Upper West Side. A club is about being on the edge of the new, the innovative, Rubell said. People from uptown will travel downtown, but the downtown people wouldn't bother coming in the other direction.

Nearly every club downtown has art shows and permanent collections of paintings and sculptures. Area is a disco-cum-art gallery, redecorated with a whole new theme and artworks every six weeks. But the Palladium took this style to the limit, hiring the critic Henry Geldzahler as its art curator. The club commissioned top young artists to help decorate: Scharf designed a black-lit corridor with floors covered in a rainbow of shag carpet and walls swaddled in Day-Glo fake fur. He plastered the pay phone booths with fun-house mirrors, bubbles of liquid foam and plastic toys -dinosaurs, airplanes and soldiers. Haring painted a backdrop for the dance floor, Jean-Michel Basquiat did a mural over one of the bars, Francesco Clemente did a fresco at the top of stairs, and David Salle and Eric Fischl designed video art.

The upper-class tastes and aspirations of this bohemia are chronicled by Stephen Saban, a gossip columnist for Details, a thick downtown monthly magazine. Saban has been dubbed the Boswell of the Night and his reports rival Suzy's in their breathy attention to champagne and limousines and designer clothes and chic restaurants and madcap behavior. Here are Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf and Andy Warhol, Le Roy ? Neiman and Bianca Jagger at a champagne dinner at Mr. Chow hosted by the owners of Area. Basquiat, Saban says, is wearing a straw bird's nest on his head, and Haring is playing with an Etch-A-Sketch.

While the social scene is lively, it is, in many ways, conventional. Reflecting the more conservative trend in the rest of society, many artists say they are cutting back on drugs, alcohol, cigarettes and sex. There's not much freedom of sex because of all the diseases, said Rubell. Everyone is always saying, 'Be careful, be careful!'

We're not as wild as we used to be, concurs Gracie Mansion. We're all on crazy yeast-free diets now.

The more conservative tenor also flows from the fact that there aren't many taboos around to break any more. Larry Rivers recalls that as a young artist he felt that he was shocking and original in my behavior and thoughts on sex and how men and women relate. Today, those ideas are a part of everyday life. What am I supposed to do now -think of another thing that's shocking?

THE CENTER OF raw energy downtown is the East Village and, south of it, below Houston Street, the Lower East Side. Just as the French bohemians moved from Montmartre to Montparnasse to get away from commercialism, New York artists gravitated to shadowy sections of Greenwich Village. In the 1960's and 1970's, they civilized So Ho ? and Tri Be Ca ?. A decade later, these areas grew smug, staid and expensive, and the new outer limit for bohemians became the Lower East Side.

Montmartre of the Neo, Robert Hughes, the art critic for Time magazine, acerbically calls the area and its crush of young painters.

Poetry and new writing are also blossoming here, breathing new life into the 20-year-old Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in the Bowery. The project offers a continuous round of readings and workshops. Allen Ginsberg, who lives nearby, comes to read, as do artists of the younger generation, including the poet Rene Ricard and the novelists Kathy Acker and David Leavitt.

The poverty of Loisaida, as it is known by its inhabitants, has not thrilled and inspired artists there in the same way poverty did the rebels of O'Neill's day, when Lola Ridge wrote The Ghetto and Other Poems and Hutchins Hapgood produced The Spirit of the Ghetto.

Now a poet named Joel Lewis, published in the East Village Eye newspaper, pens Homage to Ozzie Nelson.

never had a job still supported a family

The streets are still riddled with drugs and crime and rubble, but the area is well on its way to gentrification. Ann Magnuson characterizes the transformation of her neighborhood: The collision of sushi and souvlaki in the marketplace. The influx of white, middle-class art students into a poverty-stricken area. Rich art patrons traveling from uptown to downtown floating like spoors through the air, - her hands flutter above her head - looking for canvases and attaching themselves like fungus on a piece of soggy white Wonder bread.

Scores of small galleries are springing up in every abandoned building and storefront vacated by mom-and-pop businesses. Chic restaurants are opening, like Hawaii 5-O, with mesquite grills and blue drinks and table tops lacquered, like motorcycles, with metal-flake gloss. Decaying buildings that used to go begging for $15,000 are now selling for $250,000. Bohemia has been co-opted, co-oped and condoed, says Pilar Limosner, the fashion designer.

For the first time, however, many artists are forging a symbiotic relationship between the counterculture and the culture. Instead of fleeing the capitalist invaders, they are collaborating with them.

If the old image of bohemia was falling off the edge of the earth, now it's building a condo on the edge of the earth, says Wickham Boyle at La Mama theater. Somehow you feel that even if Hemingway had a broker he wouldn't have talked about it.

Just as Andy Warhol is an artistic father of this art scene, with his Pop Campbell's soup cans and Marilyn Monroe lithographs, he is also its spiritual father. Business art is the step that comes after art, the pale guru who presciently named his art studio the Factory once said. And good business is the best art.

By decorating the Palladium, the art stars helped to insure its success and encourage the swarm of pretties and poseurs into their bohemia. With the ubiquitous Warhol in their midst, groups of artists and downtown dealers also pose in publicity shots for the Palladium and Area. James Mathers, a young downtown artist, is featured in a studio in a glossy magazine advertisement for Rose's Lime Juice.

Perhaps the ultimate example of an artist marketing himself was the September exhibit at the Gracie Mansion gallery called Win a Trip to Paris Sweepstakes. It was art as lottery, the yuppie market's dream. Mike Howard painted 100 miniature landscapes, all depicting an airplane flying over the Eiffel Tower, and numbered them. For $108.25, a buyer got both the painting and a chance to win such prizes as a trip to Paris, a Honda motorcycle, a color television set, a Sony Walkman or tickets to a Mets game. The winning number was picked by spinning a carnival wheel.

There's so much materialism in the art world now and this idea is wild because it appropriates the imagery of marketing at the same time it is a personal advertisement for the artist, says Gracie Mansion, who is wearing one large, dangling earring shaped like a bent Eiffel Tower with her polka dot ski pants and pearls. It functions on several different levels.

Comparing his bohemia with this one, Robert Motherwell does not think it is fair to fault young artists for their talent for self-promotion. To pretend the 19th-century idea still exists of pure artists against a world of Philistines is naive, he says. The middle class is not monolithic any more; it's subdivided into a thousand different specialties. The contemporary world has become a place where most people are sort of entrepreneurs.

Larry Rivers, the painter who lived downtown in the 1950's, agrees. A lot of people thought in those days that art could give you a view of things that could tell you what was wrong with the world, he recalls. ''I thought even then that that was kind of dopey. There was also supposed to be a natural attraction between workers and artists. Well, that just turned out not to be true. Just as it turned out not to be true, which a lot of artists once thought, that the Russian Revolution could make a real change in the world. Russia turned out to be a big villain.

Kids now regard art as much more of a career. They're not identifying with the poor. They're identifying with making it. I'm not putting them down for that.

IF OLDER BOHEMIAS were leisurely, this one is fast-motion, with the artists producing more quickly, showing their work more often and getting famous sooner. Willem de Kooning did not have his first solo show until he was 42. Rodney Alan Greenblat had his first solo show in New York two years ago at age 23. By the time of his second one-person show here last March, Greenblat had already appeared in the Whitney Museum Biennial and had a waiting list for his work. Gracie Mansion, unable to break into the So Ho ? scene, held her first show in the bathroom of her East Village walk-up in 1982 and is now the top dealer in the area.

But as Hemingway once said of Paris in the 1920's and might have said of downtown in the 1980's: New York is a very old city and the artists are very young and nothing is simple here, not even poverty nor sudden money. The competitive atmosphere has led to tricky emotional eddies that did not exist in colonies where artists toiled in a friendly swamp of collective obscurity.

The nouveau riche, like Haring, are defensive. The paradox down here is, so many artists are overly competitive, putting you down and then wanting to be in your shoes, he says. The way people treat me in New York is worse than any other place. I get more respect in Tokyo and Europe.

Just as Mark Rothko was once tortured by the idea of making money, Ann Magnuson has been tortured by the idea of not making it. She watched some in her circle, Scharf and Haring, Madonna and Susan Seidelman, reach the top in a handful of years while she still lives in a frugal Avenue A walk-up, where a painting by Haring decorates the wall above an exposed radiator.

I agonized over it for awhile, but I've come to terms with it, she says. It hit me like Scarlett realizing she doesn't care about Ashley. Somehow it doesn't matter. What's better than having friends and enjoying life together? That's what's great, regardless of who becomes rich and famous out of it.

That noble speech delivered, she smiles mischievously. And yet, she says, don't we all want to live in creature comfort? Don't we all want to have a 25-inch Sony color console compact laser-disk home entertainment system?

She and many other artists worry about the merchandising of downtown, and some are disaffected. It puts the focus for artists on the wrong things, says the playwright John Jesurun. Next I expect to see somebody selling East Village dolls. Ann Magnuson suggests building a monorail through the area. The East Village as Epcot Center, she says wryly.

Sarah Charlesworth, an artist who makes photographic collages, lives downtown and is married to the film maker Amos Poe, criticizes the current scene as a corruption. Artists are creating increasingly for the media, she says. The art world cannot function independently. It discourages people from pursuing their own vision and idiosyncratic way of doing things.

It also causes everyone to glance nervously over their shoulder for the next shift in taste that is on the heels of the current rage. No matter how serious you are, or how much you think you have to say, if it comes on too quick, you're yesterday's news after 15 minutes, says Rockets Redglare, a comedian and actor. People start saying, 'Oh God, he's been around forever.' Redglare, who once worked as a bodyguard for the late rock guitarist Sid Vicious, has recently won attention in three vintage downtown roles, as a sushi-hating cabdriver in Desperately Seeking Susan, as a poker player in Stranger Than Paradise and as a vigilante in After Hours.

Some artists strenuously shun the downtown style as a passing fad. Claude Carone, 33, who works as a plasterer part-time to support his work in oils, vows he will not jump into something just because it's fashionable even if I have to break my back lifting bricks. Painting is something spiritual. You can't play with it. It's not easy. It's damned hard.

But the material mood is hard to resist, even for purists. John Alexander, a 40-year-old artist from Texas who has a studio on lower Broadway, recently caught himself talking tax shelters to a museum curator from Boston. I just wanted to kill myself, he said, wincing. Pilar Limosner worries that she will succumb, perhaps subliminally, and tailor her designs to suit the mass market. There's so much pressure to make money, she said. As the rent goes up, just to survive you can't take as many chances. Commercialization steps on the experimenters' toes and brings things to society at large before they're ready or fully grown.

THERE EXISTS A WIDE chasm of opinion on the subject of what the legacy of this bohemia will be, whether its style surpasses its substance. Will there be art to cherish after the artists have left the territory?

As far as the visual arts, Geldzahler says some is energetic and worth knowing about. Robert Hughes of Time magazine is less impressed. This gunk is not even kitsch, he deemed the East Village product. What finds favor here is young, loud and, except in its careerism, invincibly dumb with all the significance of a goat-cheese pizza.

John Alexander, praised by Hughes for his spiky, haunted style, deplores the lost camaraderie of bohemia and the modus vivendi of his younger colleagues: This concern about image has reached the point of malignancy. If you weigh the substance and the hype down here, the hype is the size of Mount Everest and the substance is the size of a coffee can. It's disgusting.

Gracie Mansion argues that there's deep meaning to the pieces. It hasn't been easy down here, she said. Art critics have said, 'Give me a break! Bright colors. Smiley faces. Is this serious art?' But these artists broke through the old feeling that for something to be serious it had to be negative, angst-ridden and black. The downtown style is a celebration of life.

Every counterculture has served, as the essayist Kenneth S. Lynn put it, as the research and development wing of American society. And that raises the question of whether a bohemia that is instantly co-opted and exploited for commercial purposes, both by the artists themselves and by others, has lost its function in society. What does it say about the times that the rewards of such glitz are often immediate and munificent? That there is desperate seeking all around?

Caught up in a downtown phenomenon spinning faster and faster, the artists do not have time to consider such questions. They are conscious, however, of the disposable nature of everything these days, and muse about where the next bohemia will be. Ann Magnuson has her money on Westchester, or maybe Hohokus. All the really exciting stuff, she says, is starting to happen in the suburbs.

GRAPHIC: Photo of poetry reading in Greenwich Village, 1959 (Burt Glinn/Magnum); Photo of muralists at work on Avenue C and 9th St. (Arlene Gottfired); Photos of downtown denizens (Arlene Gottfreid) (Pages 28-29,30-31,36); Map of Downtown scene

The New York Times

January 5, 1986, Sunday, Late City Final Edition

SECTION: Section 2; Page 1, Column 2; Arts and Leisure Desk

LENGTH: 2487 words

HEADLINE: ART VIEW;

IS NEO-EXPRESSIONISM AN IDEA WHOSE TIME HAS PASSED?

BYLINE: By Michael Brenson

BODY:

An artistic moment has passed. It is not that the phenomenon known as Neo-Expressionism is dead, or that the artists identified with it are no longer the subject of intense interest and debate. But the fire that was lighted by those European and American artists whose large-scale, usually painted work burst into prominence around 1980 with a flair and sweep that seemed to make everything possible, is now down to a glow. Together, it is unlikely that they will receive the same kind of attention again.

The passing of a moment can be felt in many ways. Although with the most widely respected of the artists there may be no tailing off in prices or gallery attendance, there is far less sense of expectation and excitement, and far less interest in the artists as a whole. Furthermore, a new arts scene encompassing many approaches and styles has emerged in the East Village, and become itself a complex, international phenomenon. There are also new generations of artists, particularly in Italy and Germany, that the art establishment is now eager to look at, exhibit, write about and sell.

Most of all, Neo-Expressionism has been milked and bled and fought over to such a degree that there is now a sense of saturation with many of the artists linked to it - the Americans Julian Schnabel, David Salle, Eric Fischl, Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman; the Germans Anselm Kiefer, Jorg Immendorff, Georg Baselitz, Markus Lupertz, A. R. Penck, and the Italians Sandro Chia, Enzo Cucchi and Francesco Clemente.

With prominent artists of all kinds having one and sometimes two shows a year, in one, two and even three galleries simultaneously; with museum shows for 30-year-old artists now commonplace; with ceaseless critical and curatorial attention; with the marketing methods of art dealers now material for television business programs; with artists puffed up like rock stars, courted like princes and displayed in the pages of trendy magazines like Hollywood prima donnas, there has been a widespread feeling of enough!

The past months have been quieter than at any point since before Neo-Expressionism arrived. There is little sense of waiting for the next hot artist or trend. In a 1983 article clarifying the importance of a number of artists who had recently stepped into the spotlight, the art critic Peter Schjeldahl perceptively wrote that Sculpture, the most significant mode of the '70s, plays no important role in the new art. It is a sign of the saturation that what has emerged this season is sculpture, and that unlike the paintings and pictures of Neo-Expressionism, much of it is small-scale, intimate in its contact with the viewer and without rhetoric.

What is reflected above all by the need for distance, the need to take a step back and sort things out, is a crisis of belief that now touches every aspect of the art world - artists, dealers, critics, collectors, art magazines and museums. One of the major achievements of Neo-Expressionism was that it brought art into the 1980's. In the process, however, it also brought the 1980's, in all its massive confusion, into art.

The more that artists created work with splashy surfaces and images, the more this art lent itself to hard sell. The more artists like Salle, Longo and Sherman concerned themselves with the media, the more the media seemed to concern itself with contemporary art. Although probably no significant shift in style or sensibility can enter the general cultural consciousness without hype, the amount of attention given to Neo-Expressionism has been hyper-intense, and at times almost hysterical. It couldn't last.

In addition, in the process of making art that could reach a broad audience and reflect their generation's relationship with pop culture and the art of the past, most of these artists made themselves into machines of production. Almost all of them have teams of assistants to help them to turn out work for the waiting lists of collectors eager to have a Salle or a Kiefer of their own.

In short, the public perception of Neo-Expressionism is now inseparable from its perception of the art world in general. Sorting out the relationship between business, fashion, entertainment and quality in Neo-Expressionism means sorting out the relationship between business, fashion, entertainment and quality in the system of which they are part.

Neo-Expressionism occupied center stage for about five years. Given the speed with which the art world moves now, that is a respectable period of time. Since Neo-Expressionism was never a movement or style, it probably could not have dominated public attention for much longer. There were always as many differences between the artists as there were similarities. Longo and Sherman, for example, who may or may not be identified with Neo-Expressionism, are not painters. Longo works with photographs and three-dimensional objects often based on film and television images. Sherman takes photographs of herself in an ever growing variety of guises in which her self remains absent.

Penck's stick figures, which walk the line between the artist's divided Germanies and between the prehistoric and modern worlds, have almost nothing in common with Clemente's almost diaristic drawings, which in turn have little in common with Fischl's psychodramas of suburban America, which have little to do with Chia's sometimes coy, always painterly excursions into and around his Italian past.

Because the term was always to some degree artificial, there is no single definition of Neo-Expressionism. Its importance can be suggested by what these artists have in common. Their works tend to be immediate, large scale, committed to subject matter and imagery we all share and shot through with ambivalence. This ambivalence, which in the best of these artists has had nothing to do with capitulation, helps explains their vitality and their limitations, and why their work has been so bitterly contested by both sides of the political spectrum.

The works communicate an awareness both of the power and necessity of myths - whether age old or generated by popular culture - and of their danger. There is a widespread fascination with sex, as well as a need to understand the stereotypes that help decide what sexuality is and why sex has become such a consuming part of contemporary life. Particularly in Italy and Germany, there is an obsession with the artistic past and a need to find a way to use it without getting stuck in it and without assuming those aspects of it that they find unacceptable.

The sparks that set off Neo-Expressionism included the multigallery exhibitions of contemporary Italian painting in New York in 1980 and of contemporary German painting in 1981. The key launching pad may have been the November 1979 exhibition of Schnabel's plate paintings at the Mary Boone Gallery. Schnabel's theatrical and sometimes inspired crockery, his gift for gesture and scale, the fearlessness with which he applied antlers, plates and paint to his wood and velvet surfaces and his attraction to the kind of mythical subject matter that had been explored by Joseph Beuys and Kiefer, helped break everything open.

The contribution Neo-Expressionism has made is substantial. While the art scene had become international and while the mass media had penetrated American cultural life -both educating the public and turning every authentic search and struggle into entertainment and promotion -the art of the 70's was inhibited by the dogmatism and anti-commercialism of the 1960's. There continued to be a way to make art and a way to think about it. As a result, although there was plenty of sound and fury and some fierce and eloquent sounds and gestures, mainstream art as a whole seems, in retrospect, to have been caged in. It did not have a great deal to say about what it meant to be alive at a particular moment in time.

With Schnabel, with Salle's cunning and elegant juxtapositions of a vast range of appropriated images and styles, with Longo's photopieces about the tyranny and potential of mass-media sentiment, with Kiefer's cultural meditations on what it means to be a German artist born at the end of the Holocaust, with Fischl's eager and anxious confrontations with American culture's hidden sexuality, modernist dogma was shattered. The shift from art that could only refer to itself to art that could refer to everything took place almost overnight.

Art now jumped back into the world with both feet. It was not obliged to wage an avant-garde struggle for ideological purity and strive towards a perfectible future. It could be conceptual, photographic, figurative or expressive. It could wear styles like clothes. It could mirror and engage the mass media, particularly the visual media like television and film. It could have mythical, personal, political and social subject matter. Neo-Expressionism would not have made such a big splash if it did not satisfy a hunger. It was something a broad public could relate to. It had something to say about the giddy excitement and awful conflicts of late 20th-century life.

It is important to recognize that whatever it may have seemed, this art has never been simple. Part of the content of Salle's work, and of the work of the influential German artist Sigmar Polke, is the edgy, perverse, almost diabolical self-consciousness behind it. Longo's visual statements about popular culture would not have so much appeal if the artist were not caught between a love of it and an awareness of its destructive power. Kiefer's work is a stage on which he directs and acts out his evolving relationship with his exalted and terrible past. In his lush, charred paintings, an exalted belief in creation and a terrible rage to destroy run together.

We are just beginning to give these artists the close attention they need. It has yet to be decided what Salle's willful resistance to interpretation means and whether it is ultimately acceptable. Schnabel has made himself a target for so much praise and abuse that there is little outside the hagiographic 1984 catalogue essay by the art historian Gert Schiff that provides a concrete way of evaluating his dramatic flair and craving for fame.

There are still questions about whether Kiefer has been too close to troublesome aspects of the German past. In Anselm Kiefer and the Exodus of the Jews, in the October-December issue of Art & Text, an Australian art journal, Peter Schjeldahl made one of the first attempts to deal systematically with the content of Kiefer's paintings.

Whether their work was understood or not, however, it is a fact of considerable importance to any analysis of the current feeling of saturation and cynicism that within five years all of these artists were absorbed into the art establishment. All are now represented in just about every important institution involved with contemporary art in the United States and Europe, and the number of those institutions is growing. In 1982 three years after he first showed his plate paintings, Schnabel, then 31 years old, had a show at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Sherman also had a show at the Stedelijk in 1982, when she was 28. Another museum exhibition of her work has been touring the United States since 1984.

A Clemente retrospective began touring the United States last fall. Kiefer has had a touring retrospective in Europe. He will have another museum show in the United States beginning in the fall of 1987; it will be at the Museum of Modern Art in the fall of 1988. A Fischl exhibition will open at the Whitney Museum of American Art next month. A Salle show opens at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia late this year and arrives at the Whitney next January. This fall also saw the publication of books on Longo and Clemente.

The sense that the moment has now passed depends not just on overexposure and establishment acceptance, but also on two recent events. Schnabel's move in 1984 from the Mary Boone Gallery in So Ho ? to the Pace Gallery on 57th Street was an unmistakable sign of the commercial viability of Neo-Expressionism. The willingness of Pace, which represents older artists of admirable integrity like Agnes Martin, Robert Irwin and Louise Nevelson, to physically restructure its space for a 33-year-old hotshot reinforced the climate of opportunism that surrounded Schnabel and Neo-Expressionism all along. But when Schnabel's first show at the Pace Gallery, last winter, seemed to be more hot air than substance, the wind went out of many of the Neo-Expressionist sails.

Last spring there was a Clemente show at the Sperone Westwater, Leo Castelli and Mary Boone/Michael Werner Galleries that also suggested opportunism. No artist had had a three-gallery show before. Clemente is one of the most articulate of all these artists. He is one of the most international in his references and one of the most deceptively simple in his technique. But the show was inflated. The sense of necessity that could have justified the scale was largely absent. Although Clemente, like the rest of these artists, seems to be highly conscious of the art world's capacity to devour its children, there has been little or no sign, on his or anyone else's part, of a desire to stand back. On the contrary, to many of these artists, not having gallery walls to fill up every few months seems tantamount to artistic suicide.

Just as serious as questions about dealers and artists involved with Neo-Expressionism are the questions about museums. These institutions have reached a point, at least in New York, where they are almost incapable of providing any guidance or direction. What does it mean when museums just about trample each other on the way to the same young artists studios and when they do not offer the public a perspective that could clarify what the rush is all about?

New York museums have an indispensable role to play in sorting out new work, and, on the whole, they are not playing it. With their passion for spectacle, with the way they allow corporations to serve business interests, particularly through advertising, museums are part of the problem. It is in the context of this general failure that the criticism heaped upon the 1985 Whitney Biennial for trying to reflect the moment rather than confront it, needs to be understood. The problem is not the Whitney's alone.

From the beginning it has been hard to respond to Neo-Expressionism apart from the art world with which it is connected. Now that its moment has passed, the process of clarification has begun. We are likely to find that these artists have made a big difference and that a handful of them have the seriousness and depth that is worthy of our continuing attention. No matter how saturated we are with them and how much the term Neo-Expressionism dissolves or disappears, it is not going to be easy to replace them.

GRAPHIC: Photo of paintings by Julian Schnabel, Eric Fishl, Robert Longo and Francesco Clemente

The New York Times

September 12, 1986, Friday, Late City Final Edition

SECTION: Section C; Page 21, Column 1; Weekend Desk

LENGTH: 1422 words

HEADLINE: ART: MARK KOSTABI SHOWS 20 WORKS

BYLINE: By VIVIEN RAYNOR

BODY:

THOUGH it was born in 1981, the East Village art scene has long since subsided into middle age. Real estate giveth and real estate taketh away - in this case, the inexpensive spaces that make possible new artists and their galleries.

It may be for the best - this senescence marked by high rents, high art prices, an excess of ice-cream parlors, antique-clothing stores and amusing bars, and, above all, a sense of street theater playing around the clock. The artists who made up the scene and were to some extent obscured by it must now stand on their own feet - something that Mark Kostabi is currently doing at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, 31 Mercer Street.

This is not the artist's maiden voyage: far from it. He has had shows annually since 1981, when he left California State University at Fullerton, and several have been in Manhattan galleries, as well as in Europe and the Far East. But the Feldman show is a major effort consisting of 17 sizable canvases - the largest is 17 feet across - and three small sculptures, all dated 1986.

Like many of his colleagues. Kostabi affects a disenchantment that, with but 26 years to his credit and only the last five lived in the real world, he seems hardly entitled to. And if his titles - Sadness Because the Video Rental Store Was Closed is one example - and his attempts at aphorisms, such as paintings are the doorways into collectors' homes, are any guide, he's not very good at it.

Still, it's not for verbal bluster that this artist has stood out in the East Village mayhem but rather for the precision and coldness of his paintings. Until now, the actors in Kostabi's scenes have been mostly male mannequins, with and without conical hats, but in the new work they are accompanied by equally anonymous females. This is partly because several of the compositions are based on Edward Hopper works involving women, such as Summer Evening, which features a young couple passing time on a porch. Kostabi renders this in mainly black and white but inserts a red sky behind the figures, a chair and a bottle flushed with red, and a blue cat, which is transfixed by the sight of a mysterious floating cube in black, white and red.

Recurrent emblems - the cube, towers like those of the World Trade Center and televisions - are Kostabi's way of updating the anomie in Hopper's art, and sometimes the effect is amusing. If there is anything missing from the master's visions of people with nothing left to say to each other, is it not television? Nevertheless, the version of Night Hawks -the 17-footer - remains Hopper's admirer's most impressive tribute. Meanwhile, the desolation of the video store picture alluded to earlier seems to be Kostabi's own. Another black-and-white image relieved by patches of bright color, it is of a store window with one man at loose ends sitting inside, at a table without legs, another walking on the sidewalk outside. Bleaker still are the pictures of three crouching figures with toilet bowls for heads who are armed with plungers and of a logjam on an assembly line producing humanoid heads.

Evidently, Kostabi has taken his cue from 1930's Social Surrealists such as Louis Guglielmi, but his misanthropy is flip, and he definitely overdoes it in a plaster parody of a crucifix. The cross is missing, but nails project from the figure's outstretched wrists and, for some reason, a baby's comforter encircles the neck like a noose.

The canvases with spattered backgrounds suggest that a change of direction is imminent. But as of now, the artist is holding his own with glistening, sometimes morbid, sometimes witty fantasies. (Through Oct. 11) Also of interest this week:

Beyond Stylish Considerations (Brooke Alexander Gallery, 59 Wooster Street): Here's a novel idea: 1984 has been and gone but the uniformity predicted by Orwell hasn't come to pass. On the contrary, variousness reigns and individualism knows no bounds. The idea is Rosetta Brooks's, proposed in an introduction to this show of eight works by six artists. Ms. Brooks goes on to say, in effect, that it isn't a matter of the cultural center not holding but of there being no center - and no limits either - and that their very absence has provoked a desperate need for them. The need, she observes, expresses itself in nostalgia: no matter what the field - politics, music, art or fashion - the past is the thing and since its substance is unrepeatable there is no recourse but to copy its styles. As a result, style has replaced innovation as a creative value and, in the visual arts especially, instantaneous recognition has become the be-all and end-all for the artist and the viewer alike.

Needless to say, help is at hand - or is it? It is debatable whether Lawrence Weiner's contribution that is nothing but a description of itself written on the wall is not also an example of stylishness; likewise, Ross Bleckner's vertically striped canvas that would be Minimal if it weren't blurred. Moreover, the spectator is none the wiser for knowing that Peter Nadin is using style as a site for misrecognition when he incises a field of dull green with his characteristic post-and-lintel shape and adds pink stripes to the top of the canvas, yellow to the bottom. No doubt the fault lies with the beholder, who has long since grown accustomed to art that, to quote Ms. Brooks again, construes the visual world as a computer does. Then again, it could be because problems are more easily identified than they are solved. The collaborative effort by Tim Rollins and his South Bronx workshop, Kids in Survival, would be the closest to Ms. Brooks's ideal work operating between the codes of recognition and beyond considerations of stylistic coherence except that it harks back to Baroque ornament. A canvas roughly 16 feet long, it consists of shapes evoking musical instruments, cornucopias, paddles, roots and bones painted in dull gold on a ground pasted with the pages of Franz Kafka's Amerika. The other artists trying to dodge the inevitable are Robin Winters and Annette Lemieux. (Through Sept. 27.) Stone Roberts (Robert Schoelkopf Gallery, 50 West 57th Street): This is an impressive debut by a 35-year-old painter born in North Carolina but trained at Yale and the Tyler School of Art. The geographical background is not unimportant because it may account for some of the mystery pervading these paintings. Like many contemporary realists, Roberts doesn't hesitate to apply lessons learned from the Renaissance and Baroque masters to modern subjects, as when, in the manner of Vermeer, he groups still lifes of fruit on tables covered with Oriental rugs. But he takes anachronism almost to the point of fantasy by introducing a sense of -for want of a less hackneyed term -Southern graciousness into scenes that are manifestly Northern. The setting of his magnum opus The Conversation could be the interior of a mansion, down to the classical columns and the uniformed maid who is clearing the coffee table center stage. And it's a mansion in which the shirtsleeved host and the elegant young women he is entertaining, as well as the small boy helping himself to a peach in the background, are all equally at home. Even the warm light slanting down from the left is relaxed and gracious. Meanwhile, the view through the window is not of hills and meadows but the skyline of New York City.

Actually, subtle discrepancies may be the artist's specialty. Whereas Tom Wesselmann makes a jolly phallic monument out of a lipstick, Roberts, including it in pencil studies of cosmetics, lavishes dense hatching on it until it becomes a jewel. The artist's perfectionism sometimes leads him astray, as in the awkwardly posed figures in the canvas of a dressing room scene. But as a draftsman and a colorist, he promises, nonetheless, to be one of traditional painting's most gifted exponents. (Through Oct. 1.) Harold Bruder (Armstrong Gallery, 50 West 57th Street): A realist who has been on the scene for more than 20 years, Harold Bruder paints interiors and street scenes that are packed with incident. People meet each other, hug, dance, talk on the telephone or just hang out; they all seem to belong to the same family and it includes an engaging West Highland white terrier. Bruder has a very nice feeling for light and for bright color applied briskly in short strokes. Nevertheless, it is still lifes that bring out the best in him, particularly those involving iridescent white china. (Through Oct. 1)

GRAPHIC: photo of work by Mark Kostabi

Crain's New York Business

July 6, 1987

SECTION: REAL ESTATE; Artful Spaces; Pg. 13

LENGTH: 1598 words

HEADLINE: A city of galleries;

Galleries maintaining gloss amid the N.Y. rental crunch

BYLINE: By FRANK SOMMERFIELD, CRAIN'S NEW YORK BUSINESS

BODY:

Jose Freire opened his tiny East Village gallery, Fiction/Nonfiction, in February. Ironically, he paid a premium to be at a location -- Avenue B at East Ninth Street -- that, aside from being a high crime area is, in art circles, now considered "out."

"The art I show is tough. It takes as much out of the viewer as it took out of the artist. As a gallerist, I have to translate that idea into the language of the art consumer," says a slightly sallow Mr. Freire, chain-smoking in the back of his narrow gallery of abstract sculpture and paintings.

"One way I convey that is being here. By taking as big a risk as possible with my location, people think I'm a visionary. They think there's something behind it all."

Fiction/Nonfiction's rent is $1,625 a month, and it stands to increase significantly next year. It's possible that Mr. Freire could have gotten twice the space for that price on Broadway in So Ho ?. His decision to open on Avenue B, and buck the current trend, shows just how exuberant business is for art galleries in Manhattan.

While many retailers, particularly individually owned specialty stores, are buckling under the pressure of rising rents, art galleries are thriving and adapting amid Manhattan's real estate crunch. On expensive strips like 57th Street, galleries that serve a traditional clientele are finding they can do enough business to support rents of nearly $40 a square foot.

Meanwhile, more adventurous galleries that settle off the beaten path of escape high rents have discovered their patrons will follow them as they reshape the boundaries of the Manhattan art world.

"Real estate and space are very critical for art galleries, and many people moan and groan," says Patterson Sims, an associate curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, whose job includes being part of the gallery scene.

"But at the same time there are an astonishing number of galleries, and an incredible number of artists and gallerists are making good livings."

A conservative estimate numbers at least 200 pre-eminent art galleries in New York and scads of lesser ones. Most big cities don't have more than 10 important galleries.

Real estate trends have kicked art dealers all around the island, but they generally emerge unscathed. Madison Avenue was once Gallery Row. Then came the rush to 57th Street, still the home of some of the city's most famous galleries. In 1971, Leo Castelli led the move to West Broadway in So Ho ?.

A few years ago, when gallery space along West Broadway became precious, young, aspiring dealers went to the East Village, where they showed frantic, expressionistic paintings by a new generation of artists.

Now, the style of art has calmed down a bit, and the scene has moved to Broadway on the eastern edge of So Ho ?, where landlords, trying to cope with a glut of downtown loft space, are more than happy to give it to dealers for $10 to $15 a square foot. That's much more than the $2 a square foot that the old tenants, textile firms and light manufacturers, were paying.

"Real estate doesn't destroy the art world in New York. It just changes the configuration," says Jane Gekler, co-owner of the Wolff Gallery, which just left the bowels of the East Village for airy, white-pillared quarters in an industrial building at 560 Broadway.

In fact, art world insiders are already pointing to Chelsea, the Hudson Square area and the part of So Ho ? east of Broadway as Manhattan's gallery centers of the future.

Artist Gary Mc Kee ?, always on the lookout for a gallery to display his paintings, says, "Even though they're moving around like they always have, it seems like there are more galleries now than there have ever been."

The most expensive strip remains 57th Street, which still attracts galleries that want to project a dignified image to conservative customers. Dealers say they can succeed there because of the strength of the art business and low overhead -- galleries take artworks on consignment instead of purchasing them.

Garth Clark Gallery, which started in Los Angeles, deals in modern ceramics. Since some consider pottery to be more of a craft than an art, Garth Clark's owners decided that when they opened a New York outlet that a 57th street location would help legitimize their offerings.

"Since we always present what we have as art, we have to have our gallery in an area where there's no question about art. So Ho ? has an experimental reputation," says Mark Del Vecchio, Garth Clark's New York director, standing amid colorful, twisted pieces of ceramic sculpture in the low-ceilinged, charcoal-gray-and-white gallery.

The Garth Clark strategy is apparently paying off. "Our rent here is three times higher than it is in Los Angeles, and with the extra volume we're doing in New York, we're actually making it," Mr. Del Vecchio says.

Yet Garth probably could have been bolder and ventured farther south to So Ho ?. Many galleries, even those who are uneasy about how collectors accept their genre, have found that a move to So Ho ? doesn't mean a loss of clientele.

Since its founding in 1969 on East 60th Street, the Witkin Gallery had been selling photographs in midtown. But the gallery's lease in the Fuller Building ran out, and the rent would have jumped from $26 a square foot to $38 a square foot.

At first, Edmund Yankov, the assistant director, combed 57th Street and found no deals. Then, with some trepidation, he began looking downtown.

"We could have squeaked by with the new rent at the Fuller Building, but we decided we didn't want to be too threatened by our rent and wanted to put the money to other uses," Mr. Yankov says. At 415 W. Broadway, Mr. Yankov was offered a choice 10-year lease for about half of what the gallery was paying at the Fuller Building. It was an offer Mr. Yankov couldn't refuse.

"We were a bit worried about losing our clientele and having out-of-towners not being able to find us in So Ho ?. Our customers are rather conservative," says Mr. Yankov, sitting in a Breuer chair in the back of the gallery, which has the feel of a tidy library. "None of that happened, and we picked up some more customers."

By contrast, painting dealers are more comfortable with the medium they handle. Therefore, they aren't afraid to move to cheap, outlandish spots. In fact, an offbeat location could be an assertion of a gallery's individuality.

Even in 1985, So Ho ?'s West Broadway strip was too mainstream for Robert Monk. So he and his partner, Susan Lorence, and three other dealers got together to pioneer eastern So Ho ?'s Broadway strip.

"People thought we were nuts two years ago," says the bearded but preppy Mr. Monk, co-owner of Lorence Monk, which opened at 568 Broadway in an old loft building. "We didn't want to be rent-poor, and we weren't all that interested in street traffic. We wanted good programs, not our location, to draw people."

Two Jasper Johns shows put Lorence Monk on the map, and its reasonable $10 a square foot rent allows the gallery to experiment with lesser-known artists. Some West Broadway galleries pay more than $20 a square foot.

When Lorence Monk opened, only a few other galleries operated at the crossroads of Broadway and Prince Street. By fall there will be at least 40. That's why Jane Gekler chose to venture just south of Prince Street, where the invasion hasn't yet reached, for the new location of Wolff Gallery.

"People are calling 568 Broadway the mall now," says Ms. Gekler, whose uptown clothes belie the fact that her gallery started in the rough-and-tumble East Village. "We like being where we are, a bit away from 568. We feel a bit more anonymous. Some old loft buildings, even in eastern So Ho ?, are now overrun. We like being not with a bunch of other galleries but with different kinds of businesses."

Airy, white-pillared Wolff Gallery's neighbors at 560 Broadway include Steven Knitting Mills Inc. and a few other industrial firms.

Ms. Gekler's deal could be replicated -- many times over. There's an enormous amount of loft space between Astor Place and Chambers Street, both to the east and west of Broadway, that landlords would love to rent to galleries.

"On Broadway around Canal Street, there could be 300,000 square feet available. The average gallery takes 3,000 square feet," says Arnold Hauser, who owns three buildings along Broadway that are 60% leased to galleries.

Landlords like galleries as tenants. "They're not bothersome," says Paul Wigsten of Andover Realty, a brokerage in eastern So Ho ?. "Also, there's an underground rumor mill, so it's easy to rent to the good galleries."

Art dealers are barraged with calls from brokers. Five times a month, Mr. Del Vecchio from Garth Clark gets invitations to move downtown, and a building owner has tried to lure Mr. Yankov of the Witkin Gallery out of his West Broadway quarters into identical but far cheaper space next door.

It's unlikely that the Broadway corridor in eastern So Ho ? will suddenly become extremely expensive as the East Village did. The commercial zoning of loft buildings prevents their conversion into residences, an occurrence that would result in all-out gentrification.

Yet if eastern So Ho ? loses its appeal of price and taste, it may not matter. Other areas are already emerging as low-cost alternatives. Soon, say members of the art world, colorful paintings will be hanging in spaces along West 23rd Street; in the Great Jones Street/Bond Street area; along Lafayette Street, and on the western edge of Spring Street and in Tri Be Ca ?.

GRAPHIC: Pictures 1 through 3, Lorence Monk, 568 Broadway, is a bargain space; Edmund Yankov of Witkin Gallery, 415 W. Broadway, escaped midtown rents; Jamie Wolff and Jane Gekler of Wolff Gallery, 560 Broadway, wanted a gallery away from others. PHOTOS BY SHERRIE NICKOL; Picture 4, Better than So Ho ?: Mark Del Vecchio, New York director of Garth Clark, believes 57th Street lends his ceramics gallery more credibility. SHERRIE NICKOL

17. The New York Times, July 25, 1987, Saturday, Late City Final Edition

SECTION: Section 1; Page 13, Column 5; Cultural Desk

LENGTH: 880 words

HEADLINE: Art Boom Slows In the East Village

BYLINE: By DOUGLAS C. Mc GILL ?

BODY:

The East Village neighborhood in Manhattan, since the early 1980's a spawning ground for new artistic trends and the fastest-growing art district in New York City, has reached a plateau of growth, with fewer new galleries opening and some of its most successful ones moving to larger spaces in So Ho ?.

In its early years as an art center, dozens of new galleries opened in the East Village each fall. Artists flocked there to live in low-rent apartments and high-rolling collectors arrived in limousines at art openings in tiny storefront galleries.

Various gritty, kitschy styles of art known as graffiti art, fun art, even East Village art were the rage.

Today, however, a cooler, more abstract and often more sophisticated style of art has grabbed the attention of leading art collectors, and some of the galleries that have shown this new work, although they made their mark while in the East Village, are moving to So Ho ? or planning to.

Geographically, we were in the East Village, but our approach was always different from the East Village, said Jane Gekler, co-owner of the Wolff Gallery, a leading East Village gallery that moved last spring to 560 Broadway in So Ho ?.

Other Galleries Moving

Another gallery whose artists are now much sought after by leading collectors, the Jay Gorney Modern Art gallery, plans to move to 100 Greene Street in So Ho ? in the fall, and the International With Monument Gallery, also highly successful, is looking for larger quarters in So Ho ?. The M-13 Gallery moved from the East Village to 72 Greene Street last month and the Jack Shainman Gallery plans to move from East 11th Street to 560 Broadway in the fall.

Meantime, the Gracie Mansion Gallery, at 167 Avenue A, is the single gallery among the handful that first settled in the East Village to remain in business there. The Fun Gallery, which gave now-famous artists, including Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, some of their first shows, is closed, as are the Civilian Warfare and New Math galleries. Piezo Electric, which opened in March 1983, will close this summer, and its two directors plan to open two galleries under separate names in So Ho ? in the fall, also at 560 Broadway.

It's less of a happening and more of a business, said Doug Milford, explaining the shift in the East Village art scene. When we opened, we were just trying to start something for ourselves and our artist friends. When they started to achieve success, they needed professional representation, and that meant getting up a little earlier in the morning, being a little more serious.

Dramatically rising rents in the East Village, most dealers in the area say, have played a key role in forcing art dealers to leave the area.

The East Village landlords are putting rents at a level that's not competitive with So Ho ?, said Massimo Audiello, who runs a gallery bearing his name at 436 East 11th Street in the East Village. Rents of $10 to $12 per square foot a year for relatively large loft spaces are easily found in and around So Ho ?, dealers say, while $20 per square foot for smaller tenement storefronts is not uncommon in the East Village.

The Art Scene Survives

The six-story prewar building at 560 Broadway, which has high-ceilinged rooms and 20,000 square feet per floor, is drawing many East Village galleries to So Ho ?. The building's manager, the Newmark Realty Company, is seeking art galleries and art-related businesses as tenants, and the building seems destined to become a kind of vertical art-shopping mall, similar to 568-578 Broadway across the street. Its average rent of $12 per square foot and leases of 5 to 10 years are easily competitive with East Village spaces.

The exodus of galleries does not mean that the East Village art scene is dead. There are still more than 70 galleries in the area and many cafes, gift shops and boutiques have sprung up around the galleries since 1980.

Several major galleries have chosen to stay in the East Village, with some even moving to larger quarters there. The Massimo Audiello Gallery, for example, and the Pat Hearn Gallery, at 735 East Ninth Street, will both remain where they are.

People have gotten used to coming to this area, Ms. Hearn said. But I don't think good art has anything to do with geography. The art world is very small, and people who are interested in the art will come to the gallery.

Against the Trend

The P.P.O.W. Gallery, which has often shown art with a strong social message, such as the work of Sue Coe, has moved to more spacious quarters at 339 East Eighth Street. And a highly regarded gallery of contemporary art, Gallery 303, recently moved from Park Avenue to 513 East Sixth Street, the former home of the Wolff Gallery.

We liked the idea of moving into the East Village when other people were moving out, said Lisa Spellman, the director of Gallery 303. It's not about East Village art any more. It's about art galleries in the East Village.

Gracie Mansion, whose gallery is still thriving although not riding the crest of public interest as it did for several years, agrees.

There used to be a sense of community, she said. Now, it's just another art neighborhood. There's Madison Avenue, 57th Street, So Ho ? and the East Village.