Boy in the Hood

A DECADE HAS ELAPSED SINCE THE GALLERY GUIDE DROPPED THE EAST VILLAGE - MAP AND ALL - FROM ITS MONTHLY LISTINGS OF NEW YORK ART DESTINATIONS. WHILE THE '80S SAW THE OPENING (AND CLOSING) OF SOME 170 NEIGHBORHOOD GALLERIES, IT IS THIS SOBERING DEMISE, AS MUCH AS THE MAGNITUDE AND NOTORIETY OF THE "THIRD ART DISTRICT," THAT SEEMS REMARKABLE FROM THE VANTAGE OF TEN-PLUS YEARS. FOR CHIEF SCENE SPOKESMAN CARLO MCCORMICK, WHOSE REFLECTION ON HIS COMING OF AGE, "BOY IN THE HOOD," OPENS THE FOLLOWING SPECIAL SECTION, THE EAST VILLAGE OF THE '80S FEELS LIKE "A LIFETIME AGO" - BUT ALSO LIKE YESTERDAY. IN THE PAGES THAT FOLLOW, TWELVE OTHER WRITERS AND ARTISTS JOIN MCCORMICK IN REVISITING THE MOMENT.

Gather round, y'all, and I'll tell you about the little village I grew up in seemingly a lifetime ago. It's long gone now, its flavor left in traces less comforting than haunting. Sometimes in the early spring when the shit begins to thaw, or perhaps in the fall when the air gives out an unnatural early chill, memories drift into focus - the forgotten face, the bodega that turned into a gallery, then a boutique. Suddenly I'm back. A crummy day, a slight drizzle drawing out the aroma of last night's arson, junkies lined up in the open drug markets spread out over a labyrinth of derelict tenements and vacant lots, and that daily midafternoon parade of artists, musicians, drag queens, filmmakers, writers, and like-minded souls simply too lazy or fucked up to get around to cultural production just yet, waking up to a zone of immense possibility. A small community, intimate to the point of incest, the tiny East Village I grew up in is a far remove from the neighborhood where my wife and I will begin to raise our newborn this summer. The funny thing about it is that we live only a few short blocks from the apartment we first shared some fifteen years ago.

To be honest, I don't really remember all that much. Most of the files that might prove useful to history have been damaged in the flood of events. It is as if our insistence on living in and for the moment - a product of the romanticism of bohemia and the nihilism of late-'70s punk - had nullified all critical distance. Here's what I do remember: the growing shadow of history; the fluid way in which rage and pleasure were continuously exchanged; the easy artistic appropriation of any and all available media and material; a tacit understanding of how identity and community were constructed out of marginality; the doubts and desires that accompanied our uneasy relationships to youth culture as well as to the poverty that surrounded us and from which many of us were scarcely removed; a pervasive, collective unwillingness to adopt a dogmatic ideology and the degree to which this compromised our ability to articulate our intentions.

Whenever I look back at what has been generalized as "East Village Art," the best way to sort out what was particular to the moment, as opposed to all the other comic-styled, Pop, lowbrow, urban romantic, and appropriative forms art has taken then and since, is to realize the convergent and contradictory extremes of love and loathing by which this generation first came to deal with the baggage of twentieth-century America. To us, nostalgia was a tormented act of necrophilia, infantilism a perverse manifestation of no-future escapism. There was only one healthy response to our condition: transgression. Nothing epitomizes the convoluted relation between past and present that haunted and inspired those times like the dangerously overcrowded performance/party Not Andy Warhol's Factory, presented by Mike Bidlo at P.S. 1 in the spring of '84. A costume ball in honor of the decadence and transience of New York's underground youth culture, it featured many of the key East Village figures transformed mockingly and lovingly into the cliched icons of yore. With the free sense of parodic tribute that had emerged out of the drag vanguard at the seminal club Pyramid (itself part of a larger nightclub performance scene whose legacy extends to John Kelly, RuPaul, Ethyl Eichelberger, Karen Finley, and Lady Bunny), this carnivalesque farce included David Wojnarowicz playing the role of Lou Reed, Keiko Bonk as Nico, both Luis Frangella and Ena Swansea as Viva, Paul Benney as Maureen Tucker, Colin de Land as Joe Dallesandro, Dean Savard as Edie Sedgwick, Yasmin Ramirez-Harwood as Bianca Jagger, and Peter Hujar and Jimmy DeSana as Billy Name. With thousands of revelers closed to the gills with LSD (an important factor I saw to personally) and crammed into the attic of a condemnably derelict old schoolhouse, all seeing how deeply they could make the nearly collapsing floor buckle in time to the music of a hilariously arty Velvet Underground cover band, it was an afternoon to remember (which few, no doubt, are able to). It was not simply a wake for an idealized past we already understood would never be repeated, for the past would soon almost completely blanket the art world in the chilly shadow cast by postmodernism. In many ways it was a closing party for the moment at hand, a present that was painfully slipping through our fingers as we danced to chase away the future. By the fall, with Reagan's reelection hammering home the certainty that the AIDS crisis would remain undealt with, the party was over. In a painfully short time half of that evening's campy superstars would be dead, leaving the rest of us as mediocre reminders of what once had been.