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New Museum EV CATALOGUE TEXT INTRO 7 04

'Buried in Plain Sight: Contemporary Responses to Writers and Writings of the East Village Alan W. Moore

I. A Bitter Pill � United on the margins, like dirt scraped off a shoe ... a wedge or just a shape?

The recent cultural history of the Lower East Side-aka the East Village-has yet to be written. This artists' district has been of perpetual, even central, importance to American art throughout the past century. Besides having a reputation as a base for free-thinking, free-living people, the place was a slum and housing was cheap. The Lower East Side, like other neighborhoods in big cities around the developed world, was home to the vast army of laborers in manufacturing. Artists, many of whom made a living in artisanal trades, lived in these districts and pursued their vocations in the ample free time cheap rent provided. With the late twentieth-century turn to an information-based economy, manufacturing jobs melted away. Laborers-and their neighborhoods-became surplus to the city's needs ("redundant," as the British more honestly call the unemployed). Such neighborhoods were cleared through a long arduous process of "spatial deconcentration" and gentrification-a process that has brutalized many neighborhoods. First jobs disappeared. Then mortgage banks "redlined" working-class districts. An epidemic of arson assaults hit the devalued tenements, even as city services-fire, police, and medical-were withdrawn. Plagues of drugs and AIDS killed many Lower East Siders directly. Finally, in the period of this exhibition, the empty buildings and vacant lots began to be redeveloped. The district, depleted of its original population and glamorized by an art and nightclub scene, became a playground for young middle-class information workers and college students. Of course the Lower East Side did not go without a fight: squatters, anarchists, and homeless people staged a spectacular resistance in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a struggle that lies outside the scope of this exhibition.

Given the nationwide scope of civil injustices perpetrated mostly on the lower classes and people of color by capital and government, the tough breaks of middle-class artists seem negligible by comparison. The subject of how artists live, survive, and work has received scant scholarly attention. Almost no regular provision has been made for artists' continued access to housing, studio space, and the time they need to develop work. In the United States, art is a commodity in a free market-you sink or swim. (A trust fund helps.) In contrast to this neglect of their needs, artists have been routinely used to "gentrify" neighborhoods in New York City and other American cities. The presence of young, mostly white, middle-class faces with their make-do personalities lends a sense of character to neighborhoods that had previously just seemed dangerous. As the bourgeoisie moves in, the artists are priced out, herded off to another part of town to repeat the process. This has been going on for forty years. It is a system, there are blueprints for how to do it and real estate `industry' specialists in this line of work. The classic bohemian mix of artists and working class living together is history.

Of course artists get by; they deal with the rules of the game, whatever they may be. Cultural life persists and thrives, on the new terms. Artists today are already constructing the art worlds of the future in the crevices of the new world order. Right now in the East Village, this looks like a kind of internationalized caf� culture, akin perhaps to Balzac's Paris, where a young artist might have only a closet to keep a single suit of clothes presentable in a bourgeois salon. Privileged methods and concepts now include nomadology, crypto-communalism, and e-networked thrifty living. Artists live among the intellectual proletariat of the information age, like the college-educated record store clerks living in group houses of whom Ann Powers writes in Weird Like Us. The bitter pill is starting to taste like a double latte�

II. The Old Bohemian [drawing TK - small black and white of Edouard Manet, Le Bon Bock]

Histories have different functions, and are written for different reasons. A popular history is intended to succeed as a book, and weaves a close convincing story full of drama and incident (this includes media documentary work). Academic historians of culture address the concerns of their clan, with viable generalizations, formal problems, new lines of interpretation. These works intend to affect understanding, and the study of culture. Finally, a humanist sociology or geography describes the unfolding of structures over time with the frequent intention of motivating change. Literature lies outside of these motives. Its aims may be higher or meaner, or simply unconscious. It shares with the other genres of history, those songs written to different tunes, the pleasure of the text, the register of engagement with the past by a person living with the challenges of a present.

With the demise of our bohemia, it is time to write its histories, to describe, analyze, and retell the stories of this past. How shall these histories be? Dan Franck's recently translated Bohemian Paris is yet another popular history of the artists' district of Montmartre. Frank clues us in on the dire poverty endured and the clever schemes enacted by the modernists. It's a district history, a kind of cultural geography. Such books are also pulp. They valorize tourist traps and delude the young. Along these byways of story, however, we will not find the kinds of papers which cultural analysts hope will affect government policies and capitalist practice. These are recruiting documents, just like the penny dreadfuls, westerns, and captivity narratives that convinced nineteenth-century easterners that they could, or could not, take the rigors of the western frontier. These works are both propaganda and manuals of instruction. For its part, the Lower East Side's mountain of stories, like all literature, is a call to the life of imagination, creativity, courage, and glamorous poverty.

In conventional practice, journalism precedes and informs history. But itest texts do not reliably capture the dynamics, mechanics, and affect of cultural life in this district. Such texts have already largely been written, in the various realms of art. They are in literature-novels, poems, screenplays, and plays. They are in memoirs and documentaries, and in a few histories. They are in paintings, drawings, and comics. The mythos of late American bohemia has already been well described.

The scope of this production is prodigious. Dip into the novels and stories of Steve Cannon, Herbert Huncke, Ron Kolm, Cookie Mueller, Sarah Schulman, and Lynne Tillman; the plays of Miguel Pi�ero, Charles Busch, and Ronald Tavel; the films of Jacob Burckhardt, Jim Jarmusch, Eric Mitchell, Amos Poe, Susan Seidelman, and Nick Zedd; the poetry of the galaxy of Beats-Ginsberg, Corso, Waldman, Giorno-and that read at St. Marks and the Nuyorican Caf� by the crowd hosted by Bob Holman and Miguel Algarin. The roster includes the theory of Peter Lamborn Wilson, and Valerie Solanas, who asks the echt-bohemian question in her SCUM Manifesto: "Why should the fates of the groovy and the creepy be intertwined?"

Some of this synoptic literary historical vision may already be glimpsed in the many biographies of the Beats-an industry of interpretation, exegesis, and historicization that has already written an early postmodern cultural history of the Lower East Side. More of it is present in band biographies-the stories of jazz and rock 'n' roll. The East Village chapter of this long unwritten history concerns, as always, what Nicolas Moufarrege called "a neighborhood that encourages one to be the person he is with greater ease than other parts of the city."

Authentic identity is about style, and the East Village in the early 1980s was an extraordinary fountain of style. Just as most of the period's music was entrained to the pop dream, so was art largely entrained to fashion. It was about letting it all hang out, making declarations of being. The East Village movement set out to sell it all. These artists reworked Pop modalities in multiple media to contain new identities-new wave gay and feminist, punk girl and boy, b-boy, rock artist, anarchist revolutionary, and more. This was in part a contest between urban fantasy and contemporary reality, as a side-by-side comparison of two key history books of the period will reveal: Steven Hager's Art after Midnight and my anthology, with Marc Miller, ABC No Rio Dinero. Just look at the pictures. One is real, the other is really surreal.

I spent time in the nationwide cultural and political resistance to Reagan's governance. This history-which includes movements such as Rock Against Racism, anti-apartheid, and the Artists' Call (against U.S. intervention in Latin America)-remains unwritten (no surprise). Reflecting on this period, when capital and state blindly ruined fragile unvalued social and cultural ecologies, is like massaging an aching wound. Considering the history and literature, the written register of the affect of the times, is to feel the wound's infliction. This history is political.

III. [perhaps another break here?] A pr�cis of all these novels, films, and poems would communicate the story we need to hear-how artists' lives were lived during that high season of American art. The following texts give a very rich and particular view on how literature is and isn't history, and how in themselves works of literary and filmic art make their own track through a creative community. The readers writing here are engaged participants. They are players in various scenes responding to accounts of others' scenes in a spate of contagious recollection. The stories they are reading here are their own, tales of relations once removed. This is a short piquant sampling of the kind of commentary that makes a collective historical consciousness, beyond the tactics of in- and exclusion. These texts are evidence of a collective cultural life and its consequences.