‘The Downtown Show: The New York Art Scene, 1974-1984’

"The Downtown Show: The New York Art Scene, 1974-1984"

Austin Museum of Art, through Jan. 28

"The Downtown Show" formally begins in 1974 with the passing of the Loft Law, which enabled artists to lawfully live in the city lofts of SoHo, and ends in 1984 with the re-election of President Reagan. Within these bookends arose a culture of difference – of radical challenge, performance, found art, identity politics – whose experimentation still surprises, shocks, and stimulates. In this exhibition, what the Austin Museum of Art, in partnership with the Grey Art Gallery of New York University, presents is not only a rich and wild retrospective on the time that put New York art on the map; it also serves a young city like Austin as a bit of a how-to guide for raising the stakes and standards on our own artistic creativity.

Not that what happened in New York then could ever be reproduced: Compared to the raw, first-run rebellion of artists like Robert Mapplethorpe, Keith Haring, and Gordon Matta-Clark, attempts at imitation would only look like failed sequels. As "The Downtown Show" curatorial setup illustrates with section titles like Interventions, Salon de Refuse, the Mock Shop, and Body Politics, myriad factors in place at the time helped create and grow New York's crowning artistic movements. Reaching from the photography of Tseng Kwong Chi to the artist publication Top Stories to public-access television and the possibilities opened up by its arrival, this show homes in on the ways in which the artists of the burgeoning downtown scene continually sought to appropriate and mix up perceived splits between established artistic genres. Anything and everything was up for new scrutiny, from the formerly private categorization of gender roles to the increasingly public New World. Therefore, while early feminist pieces by Hannah Wilke, including performance pieces and photography, began to set the stage for post-feminist art, performance art by Matt Mullican, represented here by photos from Under Hypnosis taken during a performance at New York's Kitchen, illustrated the nation's search for experiences of the sublime, no doubt inspired by the nuclear threat of the Cold War.

As the work of these artists conveys part of the "what" that the downtown scene artists were expressing, and the entire exhibit sets the scene and establishes a sense of "where," so the more intimate and at times bizarre portraits and photos within the Portrait Gallery section remind us candidly of the "who" – the personalities that still come to mind as some of New York's most edgy artists and art supporters. For American art enthusiasts and collectors, being in this room is like looking through a lost photo album from your childhood and finding that your favorite figures and characters were there all along.

In a way that elicits both nostalgia and awe, the overall effect of the show is almost patriotic: It is a look at what was startling about America in the 1970s and early Eighties, as it was created by artists from around the world who flocked to the blooming magnet of the Big Apple. It is an appreciation of the radical thought and freedom of action that made the U.S. the young revolutionary that it was to so many people in that time – in all its rebellion, in its critiques, in its amazing creative production, and in its clever talents for bringing something new and radical to debates of all kinds, which reached into all places.