Dennis Hollingsworth

THAT EIGHTIES SHOW

Peter Schjeldahl sums up the decade of my formal education in art in his New Yorker column, a review of East Village USA,? at the New Museum:

The contemporary art world of the early eighties blew apart into four main fragments, of which the East Village was one. The others were a defensive establishment of older artists, a fashionable confederacy of neo-expressionists, and a gang of theory-mongering Duchampians. All surfed waves of new money. Eventually, even the fragments disintegrated, becoming the sluggish mishmash that has prevailed in art ever since. The East Village contributed the novelty of a New York avant-garde that forsook global perspectives to party locally. (As such, it was a franchise of similar slum Babylons in European cities.) It was directly opposed by a craze in academe for moralizing discourses?deconstructionist, Marxist, Freudian, feminist. Delectable tensions surfaced between these sensibilities. A leading exegete of theory on the scene, Craig Owens, hatched the keenest critique of East Village art, in one word: ?Puerilism.? (Why the slur?s victims didn?t promptly embrace it, on the model of ?Fauvism,? I don?t know; maybe they lacked ready access to a dictionary.) Such starchy acuity from one who was himself young points to the split personality of a generation: part hellbent on polymorphous perversity, part hankering for the majesty of erudite age.

In the beginning of that decade, I was in architecture school. I remember going to ACE Gallery's "Art and Architecture in the 20th Century" book store on Melrose and buying KunstForum magazine, checking out the NeoEx in Europe.

When we arrived in LA after undergraduate school, the whole NeoEx thing was done and even though it was worldwide phenom, it had only lightly toasted the West Coast, unlike the burnt toast of the East Village. MOCA LA was being born and as I was apprenticing in architecture offices, the counter movement of moralizing discourses that Schjeldahl referred to were surging forward.

By the time I had won my license, I was in grad school and critical theory had run it's course... except few around me seemed to understand that the party was over. Or maybe few cared and went about their own business. I've always maintained that the fall of the Berlin wall was a watershed event for our world of art too.

Critical theory had run out of gas, but this is different from the discourse at large. It sought to define criticality absolutely and it failed.

(That's good!)

And things did change, but not in the way I had anticipated. Instead of a rigorous critical assessment not only of the 80's but of the entire PostModern era, what happened was that young artists declined to speak of the recent past at all. The 80's was then, this is now. Using the term "PostModern" was verboten, a silent proscription. Artists instead focused on their enthusiasms, to hell with technical talk. The preferred discourse at the studio level among artists was childlike. Theory became tighter, more select and a ratcheted up demmand for rigor selected only the strong who floated above the fray, close to the institutions.

That was fine and good... but it seemed as if we were tiptoeing past the kings we should have instead killed. People went on and painted again... not unlike the way NeoEx burst forth, an efflorescence of painting. Perhaps these kings, now professors and chairs of university departments, critics and curators... the elders, were too strong for us then. Maybe it was smart to change the subject, to focus on your hands as babies do when gaze at their hands when they are overwhelmed (these were the days of Adult Babies, remember them?).

It was a bluff, perhaps an unconscious generational strategem. But now the ante is very high. And I am seeing signs of this overdue critical project, in art blogs no less. More of this in a later blogpost.