1980s an Internet Conference

The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center presents

Introduction October 31-1 November Maurice Berger I would like to welcome everyone to "The 1980s: An Internet Conference."

The conference will be organized into two-day sessions, each of these devoted to a particular topic. I would like to dedicate the first session to the general question of the "legacy" of the "The 1980s"--the issues and events that matter most about it, then and now.

As Fredric Jameson reminds us in his essay, "Periodizing the 1960s," decades are never neat, clearly defined episodes. Their boundaries are porous, their roots long, their implications farreaching, their stories, a jumble of events that historical orthodoxy all too easily erases, overestimate, or devalue. For the purposes of this conference, then, "The 1980s," serves as an historical hook--a convenient means for focusing on a constellation of events, sensibilities, cultural objects, methodologies, and social movements that took form in the United States in the era roughly between the late-1970s and early-1990s.

When I use the term "The 1980s," I do so with a number of events and developments in mind.

Preeminently, the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 solidified the gains of a powerful neoconservative backlash to the progressivism of the preceding thirty years. Reagan's ascendancy brought about profound changes in Federal policies and in society and the culture at large. In response, a range of political and cultural groups--crossing all ideologies-emerged as a powerful force in the nation.

The "pluralism" of the '70s gave way to "multiculturalism" in the '80s, the freer and broader expressions of various ethnic, racial, and sexual groups often excluded from the mainstream.

During this period, the so-called "culture wars" came to full fruition. The first AIDS cases were reported, reaching epidemic levels by the end of the decade. And not since the Depression, had

homelessness and poverty become such a vexing national issue.

These social shifts, in turn, influenced changes in the arts: methodologies in criticism, art history, and cultural writing--including structuralism, post-structuralism, neo-Marxism, feminism, and subalternist and gay and lesbian studies--revised the nature and style of arts writing. The rise of "alternative" and community-based institutions and activist art groups (such as the Guerilla Girls and Gran Fury) redefined traditional cultural venues and discourse. Personal computers and other advanced technologies--from VCRs to telephone answering machines--altered the way we communicate, work, and think. Independent film projects challenged the studio system and broadcast television gave way to cable.

The focus of the American visual art scene shifted from SoHo to the East Village (and back again), and eventually became interested in work from other American cities, such as Los Angles, Boston, and Philadelphia and international cities, like London and Johannesburg. Collectors, dealers, and even corporations began to eclipse critics and curators as the principal arbiters of art world taste and value. And a heated theoretical battle ensued, waged by artists and critics alike, between painting--a medium believed by some to have exhausted its possibilities--and photography and other means of mechanical reproduction.

In the course of this conference, we should feel free to examine these issues not only as critics, artists, and historians but also as participants. After all, for most of us, the subject of "The 1980s" is intensely personal: no panelist, no matter how young, can claim not to have lived through it. In taking Jameson's lead, however, I am interested less in "defining" the '80s as an historical entity and more in an honest appraisal of the meaning of its disparate events and their legacy for the present day. Twenty-five years after Ronald Reagan announced his candidacy for President--not uncoincidentally in Philadelphia, Mississippi, a former segregationist hamlet made famous by the murder of three civil rights workers in 1963--the nation appears to be even more divided and polarized.

As a means of introduction, I would like each of you to speak to the issue of legacy: What issues or events of the period matter most to you now? What of that time--whether in the context of art and culture or of society in general--have the greatest implications for the present day? Feel free to select a single issue, problem, or event or several. Be as general or specific as you like; we will have time to explore these issues over the next two weeks.

Visitors wishing to ask a question or send a comment to conference participants or moderator may do so through a special e-mail address (see link on the main page for E-mail form). Due to the large volume of E-mail, I will not be able to respond to every inquiry or to post all of them to the symposium.

Linda Yablonsky What happened in the 80s? Money Talked! During the Reagan era, money became more important than anything - ideas, government, art, AIDS, you name it. The answer to everything was money, making money, spending money. The result is that now our only real culture is corporate and the business of art is money.

This has led to the development of a professional class of artists with degrees, prizes and big mortgages, and an underclass moving much more slowly and making work mostly for, and about, themselves. As you say:CEOs are now our arbiters of taste and value. In the 80s AIDS was the daily concern. Now it's money.

The great thing that happened in the 80s? Women. In the 80s, women artists began to be taken seriously, many of them through photography, or some aspect of photography, where they didn't have to compete with so many men (who were mostly painting). What's more, their subject matter was identifiably concerned with being female. They may not have made the big bucks but they

did make the big difference, enriching subject matter, adding perspective and sharpening critical faculties. Maybe they made art sexier?

Strangely, respect did not lead to power. I don't know who's moving forward now. I wonder why artists of color aren't making a bigger splash? Why white artists don't address the racial divide more directly? I think this is a big problem.

What especially concerns me: a clinging to the acceptable and especially the marketable. It's not that I suspect no one has any ideas or that there aren't great thinkers out there and interesting practitioners in all the arts but I don't think they are taken very seriously, and therefore their ideas are not shared, unless they are obsessed with becoming "successful." And critics are simply laughed out of the room.

For me, the poison in our culture starts with the White House - any White House. Like it or lump it, the president sets the tone and the rest of us have to deal with it. Imagine having a president who talked about art, who read books, who couldn't wait to tell us which opera he was going to see next? When was the last time we heard ANY politician make a public remark that valued, rather than denigrated, creative thinking and made it sound essential to our collective health? Give that person a Kennedy Center honor!

Wendy Perron There are four issues that come to mind: The first is a personal take on the relation of 70s feminism to 80s AIDS. The others are violence and war, breaking out of the mold, and black choreographers in postmodernism.

First. A few years ago a group of women choreographers got together to make known their issue about how badly women are treated in the dance field (and how men get preferential treatment).

Not as ballsy as The Guerilla Girls, they called themselves the Gender Project and tried to expose the sexism of presenters by way of statistics. I had had a similar burning desire when I co-wrote an article in the Village Voice in 1976 on the same subject—statistics and all. My old article was used as a resource by this group of women, many of them much younger than myself.

I recognized their (justified) anger as similar to my own 25 years before. (Although there are perhaps 100 girls to every boy who studies dance, when it comes to who gets presented and who gets to be an artistic director of a company, it’s usually a male.) But somehow I couldn’t get as worked up about this injustice as I used to. I wondered why, until I realized that I just couldn’t get angry at the men because so many of them were dying in the 80s. AIDS took a huge toll in the dance field, so it became an individual triumph for each male dancer or choreographer who was left standing—or hopefully dancing. I couldn’t be angry at an endangered species. The sadness I felt at seeing close friends die, and the loss I felt at the death of major figures like Robert Joffrey and Alvin Ailey eclipsed my anger. I was happy that some of the men in our field who might be at risk for AIDS, like Bill T. Jones and Neil Greenberg, were still going strong.

Second. The American embrace of violence and war. The readiness of the U.S. to go kill people in other countries always astounds and depresses me. The Reagan era, with its build up of Star Wars (a fantasy hawked by Edward Teller) has its legacy today in the billions of dollars that still goes toward these weapons even though they antagonize the rest of the world (and they don’t work). Many social programs could be helped with just a fraction of the amount that gets poured into military weapons. And I think that our readiness to use violence is related to the violence that is pushed in the media, from TV to movies to gangsta rap. I wonder whether any of the people in power—either in charge of the military budget or in charge of the media—ever think about the consequences of what they are doing.

Third. Breaking out of the mold. It seems to me that artists became influenced by all kind of things other than the proper domain of art or choreography. So Merle Ukeles (sp?) made art out of

garbage, and Anna Halprin making art our of community rituals. One could find art sprawling all over, not just in museums and theaters. And it changed how we thought about performance onstage too. For a piece I choreographed in 1986-7, I asked Komar & Melamid to create the visual element, and they said, ”We don’t want to put art on the stage, we want to put animals on the stage.” (They suggested an elephant but we settled for 22 fan-tailed pigeons.) The legacy now is more public art and in lots of different ways. We have Dancing in the Streets, which has produced Eiko & Koma in their caravan and Joanna Haigood flying off of the old grain silo at the Brooklyn Waterfront. And of course, there was Christo’s orange flags. There’s an effort to bring art to people and subvert the steep price of museum or theatre tickets.

Fourth. In the early 80s, young black choreographers came into the fold of postmodern dance.

From the 60s to the 80s, the only black choreographer to be working within the white world of “pure dance” was Gus Solomons jr. (Gus danced with Merce Cunningham and was decidedly not working in the aesthetic of Alvin Ailey or Rod Rodgers.) Now there’s Ishmael Houston-Jones, Bebe Miller, Bill T. Jones, and Ralph Lemon. And this happened, at the time, only in NYC. I’ve heard Ishmael say that he felt he didn’t fit in in the dance scene in Philadelphia (because he wasn’t a tap dancer or an Ailey-type dancer). When he came to NYC and performed at St. Mark’s Church (in 1982 or 83), and Ralph and Bebe were on the same program, he felt he had found a home. It seems to me that the black choreographers are the ones who have led the way to incorporating narrative elements into postmodern dance, e.g., Ralph Lemon’s haunting and beautiful Geography Trilogy, which he did at BAM over ten years. These four choreographers are now regarded as masters and have been a major influence on the next generation.

Maurice Berger Welcome to the conference, Linda & Wendy. And thank you for being the intrepid first posters.

Both posts reveal, I think, an inexorable relationship between the politics of the time and the culture. In our next session, we will take up the issues of the relationship between the politics of the Reagan revolution, the "Culture Wars," and the effect of both on art and culture in general.

Great posts.

Looking forward to other responses to the introductory topic, re: the legacy of the 1980s, the important issues then & now.

Barbara Buhler Lynes I wanted to take a moment to welcome all of you to the to the online symposium, "The 1980s," which is the third in our series of symposia hosted by the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Research Center and moderated by Maurice Berger.

We are delighted to sponsor this exciting event and look forward to a lively and provocative discussion.

David A Ross This is an interesting moment to reconsider the legacy of the 1980's.

I write this first post to the conference from Europe where there has been widespread mourning of Rosa Parks' passing --far more than I expected-- much heated discussion (and premature celebration) of the meltdown of the Bush administration, and after a week spent off the grid, deep in the western desert of Egypt where Ilya and Emilia Kabakov installed a remarkable work in the ancient salt lake in Siwa.

Why does the confluence of these events and this conference seem uncanny to me? Because it underscores the ways in which things seem to change, but remain very much the same.

Because it reminds me that the racism that Parks fought still exists, though it now apparently takes a hurricane or the death of a hero to remind the world of its powerful ugliness.

Because we still find ourselves mired in the horrors of a Bush administration committed to war, to lying, to the continuing attack on women's right to control their own bodies, to the misuse of religion in the pursuit and maintenance of power, and to willful and pernicious ignorance of the way we as Americans are perceived around the world.

And because the Kabakov's, in their Siwa work, revealed to me once again, how art helps people engage the power of their individual and collective imagination.

We can and should reconsider the 80's, but let's not wax nostalgic. We can party-on in the art world of 2005, but the social evils of the 80's are still very much with us, as are those of the 60's, 70's, and 90's. We may have newly evolved remarkable understanding the human genome, yet AIDS is still the killing thousands and thousands-- though mainly in the less developed nations.

We may be able to carry around our music libraries in our shirt pockets, yet the American death toll in Iraq passed 2000 this weekend, and there is no end in sight. We can SMS day and night, and email ourselves into a stupor, but we can't seem to communicate any better than in the dark ages before the Internet. Obesity is on the rise in the U.S. while hundreds of thousands of people still face widespread starvation and forced migration, and unthinkable numbers still live in actual slavery in Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

When people wondered why the 1993 Whitney Biennial was so filled with anger, I reminded them that we had just lived through 12 years of Reagen and Bush, and that there was an awful lot of pent-up rage exploding in the work of American artists. I am struck that there seems to be so much less anger in the art I see today.

So I wonder, as we sit smack in the middle of the second term of the second Bush, did we as a nation, as a principled society, learn anything at all from the 80's? Can we say that the world of artists, collectors, dealers and museums has evolved in any meaningful way? Or are we just too busy making money and having fun?

Maurice Berger Welcome Barbara & David.

David, your beautifully written post actually parallels my own thinking on the need for this discussion on the 1980s. The word "legacy" is both central to my introductory statement and the abiding and driving force behind this conference. We are now living through--each day, and in so many ways--the legacy of the past thirty years. With each step in our dialog, I hope we can begin to see history as a complex interconnection of events--a past, a present, and a future, all in conversation with each other.

Keep posting.

Wayne Koestenbaum I'm with you, Linda! Ignorance still dominates, incarnated in the White House. Imagine a leadership that reads, looks, thinks. Imagine any U.S. politician maybe behaving responsibly and feelingly toward a U.S. intellectual or artist the way that French politicians recently elegized Derrida. And, while we're at it, three cheers for the usually demonized (including by me) "French" theorists who gave the 1980s, at least in the arts and letters, some fuel.

Wayne Koestenbaum hi Maurice. Hi all. Glad to be aboard.

Reviewing the 1980s is a melancholy experience. One word for the room tone of my reminiscence: AIDS. Looking back, I see 1980, 1981, as a moment when possibilities came crashing down. (Perhaps this is a reductive compartmentalization. I agree that history doesn't neatly divide into decades.)

At the beginning of the 1980s, I thought, "This [everything for which "Reagan" is shorthand] is a disaster, but maybe the disaster will soon end. Maybe, soon, things will improve. Horror will abate." Now, witnessing Iraq, and a thousand other mistakes and miscalculations, including the current absence of any sane or ethical policy on health or education, I see the 1980s as a nightmare that was allowed to remain "business as usual," that was not perceived as a wake-up call, that set the tone for ongoing catatonic non-response (on the part of government) to ecological and human catastrophes. I don't need to reiterate melodramatically any of these issues, not at least to this gathering: no one needs to hear again the truth that the 1980s (politically) was a time when incompetence and immorality (under Reagan et al.) got normalized, once again, and when unintelligence, sleepwalking-as-leadership, callous disregard, and onwardrushing imperialism plundered the emotional reserves of, well, a few countries, including ours.

The refusal to think ethically about ecologies of all kinds, including the land and the sky and the water, and the brain cells of schoolchildren, not to mention their bloodstreams--the refusal to take health seriously, the refusal to take learning and safety seriously, or the preservation of natural resources, or the nonproliferation of ecocidal substances--these refusals-to-care killed off a certain capacity for feeling, for serious planning, for moral articulation. And we're living now in the continuing wake of those failures, those willed or imposed incapacities: a huge deadening of human possibility.

Carol Squiers Hi everyone.

I can't think about the 80s without thinking about today. Everything that has been enumerated about the 80s is the same now, only worse. Take the environment. Reagan staged an "antienvironmental revolution" in the words of one historian. But his administration, surprisingly, kept supporting the "polluter-pays" taxes in which corporations were taxed to fund the cleanup of the Superfund sites--the most toxic sites in the US. Each administration has supported these taxes, until the present administration. The fund is now bankrupt and the few cleanups that are taking place are being funded by taxpayers, not industry. We all know this is typical of the smallgovernment, no-taxes conservatives. But it is symptomatic of something else, which others have mentioned, whether as violence or war. I think of it as a culture of death, which seems to have existed in this country since its colonization by Europeans (Yes, I know that Native Americans were not uniformly peaceful people, but they were being invaded, for pete's sake). During the 80s that death culture was embraced and nourished at the highest levels of government. A fascination with extinguishing life and life-affirming change began in earnest in the 80s, and is being played out with even greater vengeance today.

Maurice Berger Thank you Wayne & Carol for your eloquent posts.

Carol, you write: "I think of it as a culture of death, which seems to have existed in this country since its colonization by Europeans (Yes, I know that Native Americans were not uniformly peaceful people, but they were being invaded, for Pete's sake). During the 80s that death culture was embraced and nourished at the highest levels of government. A fascination with extinguishing life and life-affirming change began in earnest in the 80s, and is being played out with even greater vengeance today."

I would add that the culture of death is driven by the innate fear of death. The right has become increasingly adept at manipulating the public by playing into its basest fears--of otherness, of

terrorism, of invasion, of sharing power and resources, of difference, of disease and death.

Reagan and his brilliant handlers worked hard--building on the longstanding Republican talent for torturing the public with vague but scary warnings of the "others" in our midst, from AfricanAmericans, to Jews, to Communists--to induce fear and thus manipulate the public. Death and fear now work hand-in-hand as cyphers of a future that only gun-toting, god-fearing Republicans can protect us from.

Catherine Lord It’s bleak, really bleak, even though there are occasional glimmers that the whole rotten empire might implode under the leaden weight of its own evil, a concept I take to include willful ignorance. Western culture has been about death and greed and poison from way back. It didn’t all start in the eighties with that puppet B-movie actor. Here’s a proposition…. The “eighties” were invented to forget certain aspects of the seventies. The “seventies” were invented to forget certain aspects of the sixties, and so on back. When Maurice asks about the legacy of the “eighties,” I scratch around in earlier dirt to figure out what I’m being encouraged to forget. I think the “eighties” were a way to erase the energy and optimism and brilliance and rage of the various liberation movements of the sixties and seventies. The “eighties” were a campaign strategy to disguise the force of capital by suggesting that the worship of money was realism, and that realism behooved us all (remember all that rhetoric about earned income and new audiences?).

The “eighties” were a way to give permission for alienation from politics and culture under the guise of irony. I think there was another eighties, an eighties that continued the legacy of early anti-colonial movements fuelled by gender, racial, national, and sexual oppressions). That eighties—and perhaps this is what I want to remember, or to project back into the eighties—were maybe not so much a time as a place, a territory in which some smart steps were taken to rethink power. The eighties saw the commodification of “multiculturalism” along with the promotion of identity politics. However, ways to refuse the essentializing surveillance of identity politics were also articulated in the 1980s-- most eloquently around issues of sexuality and skin—in a way that allows for curious affinities and unexpected alliances. That’s the legacy of unsettling that I would want to carry over—indeed, I think some of that eighties thinking about alliances and affinities informs the way that we now think about the net and its uses.

Karen Mary Davalos As I prepared to reply to Maurice's Introduction, I was thinking along the same lines as Catherine Lord: the 80s was a cooptation of the 1970s claims for inclusion, particularly the Chicana/o, Asian American, Native American, and African American social movements in the arts (I would also call these anti-colonial movements, as she does) and elsewhere. If we were charging that institutions were systematic in their exclusionary practices in the 1970s, by the 1980s the same institutions had appropriated the call for self-determination, first-voice, the unveiling of the myth of neutrality, and so on with an apolitical gesture toward "contributions approach" to multiculturalism.

The multiculturalism and its focus on contributions did not and still does not (yes I agree with several participants that not much has changed except to get worse in the 21st century) allow us to offer a critique of the society we are now said to have developed. Multiculturalism undercut the discourse of power, inequality, and social justice.

At the same time, the 1980s saw an increased production in scholarship by Chicana/o, US third world feminist, Asian American and other writers of color. It was the moment when the important anthologies such as This Bridge Called My Back, (editors Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua) were published, and the moment when single-author books by scholars of color in history, literature, social analysis, and critical studies began to take up space in our university libraries.

For scholars in Chicana/o studies and US third world feminist studies, the intellectual developments of the 1980s are still driving methodological, epistemological, and theoretical developments in many fields, including border studies.

It is regularly reported in Chicana/o studies that the theoretical developments of Gloria Anzaldua have been coopted and unacknowledged in post-colonial, cultural studies. And this could be the flip side of multiculturalism and the postmodern moment of the 1980s: fragmentation and deconstruction allows for sloppy intellectual work and accommodation without a material anchor.

Dorit Cypis Hello all. I remember the 80’s in many ways, private and public. I cannot comment on the 80’s without rethinking myself. I was a young, wide eyed artist through the 70’s, fresh from Canada and an amazing education at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design followed by the buzz of USA and California Institute of the Arts. The “80”s” were a time of tremendous regrouping for me...from the political, philosophical and aesthetic idealisms I had been primed into...to the entrenched and survivalist modes I carved out to get a grip on it all.

At first, I acted boldly and very publicly, buffered by the power invested in me by feminism, Foucault, Barthes. film theory and the “rights” to being an artist. I saw no distinction between performing my art work and sponsoring others to presenting theirs. I was supported as an artist and as a producer and never even thought of “having” a gallery. I worked with musicians, theater artists, writers filmmakers, dancers and visual artists.

In the early 80’s I helped spawn a more discursive relationship between the LA and NY arts communities by producing talks at the Pacific Design Center through FAR (Foundation for Art Resources). Over 3 years we invited Douglas Crimp (End of Painting), Craig Owens, Ingrid Sichy, Benjamin Buchloh, Ann Rorimer...etc. to a sleepy LA scene. I was harshly awakened to the realities of commerce and the aestheticization /fetishization of art practices when Craig Owens introduced me to Helene Weiner of Metro Pictures to interest her in my practices of producing my performances as well as those of others. I remember her asking me if the talks were art? I said I didn’t know what she meant but that no, I did not want to appropriate the speakers as my work.

She was not interested.

In 1983 I grew very disillusioned with the America reflected in the culture of Los Angeles....endless billboards, cars, shopping malls, Hollywood films deflecting us from experiencing any intimacy with ourselves, let alone with others. In LA multi-culturalism was barely a buzz. I left for Minneapolis in 1984 realizing that I needed to move “inland” to explore something of interiority, subjectivity...in order to better recognize the “otherness” within myself...and therefore my relationship to others.

From then on, the 80’s looked very different to me...looking from the inside out.

In Mpls., I was surrounded by very white Scandinavians. My “darkness” was not reflected but my shifting heritage was never reflected anyway (my mother has 6 passports, I have 3). Cross, multi was my norm. I just couldn’t understand the huge gap between theories of “difference” and actual lived experience of separation. We called it multi-culti. Talk it but never walk it. This drove me deeper into my work of struggling to uncover the complexities of my interiorized differences. I wanted to explode the surface of “representation”. I was not interested in the discussion of painting or not painting. That was a deflection from the harder work of deconstructing one’s complicity with the social forces of separation, greed and corruption. I understood that I was terrified of death so took an 8 week seminar with hospice workers to hypothetically take on a pathology and live it out to my “death”. I taught knowledge through the body. I was obsessed to “get bare”.

Maurice Berger Welcome Catherine, Karen & Dorit. GREAT posts.

Karen, you write: "The multiculturalism and its focus on contributions did not and still does not (yes I agree with several participants that not much has changed except to get worse in the 21st century) allow us to offer a critique of the society we are now said to have developed."

I completely agree.

Prevailing concepts like "multicultural," "inclusiveness," "the Other" (remember that one), or the earlier "pluralism" never advocated or demanded a self-conscious examination of the forces that make such terms necessary in the first place. The mere act of including the disenfranchised, most often a token gesture at best, precluded the need to examine the prejudices that impel individuals and institutions to belittle, ignore, or exclude. Thus, white liberalism, and the institutions that serve its interests, rarely acknowledge, let alone examine, their own racism, a denial that continues, to one extent or another, to the present day.

Later in the conference, I will devote a two-day session to the "ideals" of "multiculturalism" and "difference" and they ways they operated in the 1980s.

Jonathan Weinberg First, let me thank Maurice Berger and Barbara Buhler Lynes and all the people involved in making this happen. It is already off to a great start.

Since the 1980s was the golden moment of my twenties when I lived in the East Village feelings of nostalgia for my youth compete with a sense that the 1980s was a time of survival for me. For me the central fact of the 1980s was the AIDS epidemic and the loss of so many friends and colleagues including my closest friend in the world, the artist Marc Lida. When we think of the period which was only a mere two decades ago it is incredible how many of the key artists and art professionals from the period are now dead: a very incomplete list would include: Keith Haring, David Wojnarowicz, John Bernd, Marc Lida, Robert Vitale, Martin Wong, Frank Moore, Mark Morrisroe, Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Hujar, Arnold Fern, Cookie Mueller, Ethyl Eichelberger, Tseng Kwong Chi, Klaus Nomi, William Olander, Craig Owens...the list goes on and on (keeping in mind that many who lived with HIV in the 1980s actually died in the early 90s). (It might be useful for this conference if we all took time just to make our own lists drawing on our own fields of interests and communities--music, dance, theater, performance etc. Surely such a list would number in the hundreds) Many of these people would be around my age now (48) and more capable of speaking about the culture of 1980s than I am. Indeed, as a gay man who came out in the late-70s and frequented bathhouses and sex clubs it is nothing but pure luck that I am alive today.

And yet the other legacy of AIDS and the 1980s is the extraordinary response of the queer community and its supporters to the crisis. I think of the formation of AIDS service organizations like GMHC across the country and of ACT UP and of the NAMES Project Quilt. Indeed, part of my nostalgia for the 80s has to do with my admiration for the constructive militancy of the response to AIDS. Why are we on the left seemingly so passive today in the face of a political regime that is worse than Reagan's?

Barbara Buhler Lynes Maurice asks “What of that time [1980s]--whether in the context of art and culture or of society in general--have the greatest implications for the present day?

What comes to mind? Among so many things: Then from my home in rural New Hampshire, I connected what was called the “terminal” on my desk to the “IBM mainframe” of the Ivy-League college, where I was teaching art history, via a modem that accepted the receiver of my dial telephone, so I could use the primitive word processor available then to prepare lectures – perhaps called “Easy Writer” (can’t remember) one by which, for example, you could underline a word or series of words by typing in dollar signs before the first word and after the last.

No WordPerfect, Word, Access, Microsoft, Adobe Acrobat or Adobe Photoshop, e-mail, internet, Google or Mozilla Firefox – mechanisms now second nature as we make the shift from slide to Power Point lectures, read and send hundreds of e-mails daily, surf the net, whose search engines are research tools – with access through our laptops to the endless images, headlines, and editorials of any newspaper in the world (albeit for access to some you now have to pay).

Then and in that place, interest in technology made you suspect with colleagues whose aversion to it translated into your not really being a scholar if you didn’t depend on that IBM Selectric, working from reams of 3 x 5 cards onto which you had jotted down notes, quotes, and various thoughts organized by subject, date, whatever, to be culled up when you came to whatever point in your argument, slogging your way through the publish or perish mentality of the academy.

On the cusp – then – of the technological revolution of the last twenty-five years that has so dramatically altered and expanded mechanisms of communications, and that continues to flood our sensibilities with endless images and words, bringing along so many options. Those of the 80s, despite politics that envisioned the “Evil Empire,” loudly articulated inclusion, pluralism, and new strategies, such as those of deconstruction, appropriation, forcing new confrontations with the limitations and exclusiveness of earlier decades.

Now - mired in the skillfully-honed politics of deception that may be in the process of a melt down – we fervently hope – the challenge seems to be that of finding a voice.

Maurice Berger Welcome Jonathan and thank you Barbara.

Jonathan, you write: "When we think of the period which was only a mere two decades ago it is incredible how many of the key artists and art professionals from the period are now dead . . .

(Surely such a list would number in the hundreds) Many of these people would be around my age now (48) and more capable of speaking about the culture of 1980s than I am."

Indeed. I think of my friend and colleague Craig Owens. He was not just a brilliant writer and scholar but a very generous editor and mentor. I think of what would have been--the extraordinary texts to come, the young critics inspired by Craig's words and sponsorship. We lost so many great people. A living nightmare in retrospect.

Public Comments We are receiving a steady stream of comments from visitors to the conference. >From time to time, I will post these to the board.

Here is a text sent by Andras Szanto, a writer, scholar, and former director of the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University. Andras writes: "It is impossible to see the eighties in the art world without looking through the lens of money.

Yes, women. Yes, culture wars. Yes, "Reaganism." Yes, end of the cold war. Yes, media, and Pomo, and Pictures art. Yes, tragically, AIDS. Yes, convergence of uptown and downtown, and sex, and drugs, and rock'n'roll. But for the art world, this was a transformative period sociologically and economically. It is doubtful that the artistic achievements of the eighties will ever rank higher in art historical estimation than what emerged during the preceding three decades (much of the discourse at the time was worried about moving backwards, not forwards.)

The decade's main legacy for the art world lies above all in the institutional changes it bought about. It represents the first salvo in the art world's maturation from a relatively intimate and informal community of sorts into a full-blown, international, commercial industry, guided by money as much as by aesthetics. Many saw this as decline.

From that perspective, the symbolic beginning and end dates are fairly clear, and they correspond with remarkable crispness with the decade’s start and endpoints. The 1980 purchase

by Si Newhouse of John’s Three Flags for $1 million – the first painting by a living artist to reach that milestone – is an appropriate starting point; it would take a few years before a self-aware boom mentality suffused the art world, but this was the starting bell. The end date would be May 15, 1990, when Ryoiei Saito purchased Van Gogh’s Dr. Gachet at Christie’s in New York for $82.5 million. The bust didn’t come about until the following winter and spring, but this was the culmination of the art-market’s exuberance and the peak of the period’s “exaggerated esteem for money,” as the writer James Buchanan put it. In retrospect, the eighties on the whole were an opening chapter in a “long boom” that has lasted, with a brief pause in the early nineties, until today. It is only now, with the rise of giant art fairs and biennials and internationally diversified mega-dealers that we see the seeds that were put into the ground in the 80s spout into full bloom."

Simon Leung Hi everyone.

Maurice, when you asked us to comment on the “legacy” of the 80s, I understand legacies in the realm of “doing.” That is, I think of legacies not as the inheritance of a set of conditions, but rather, as the active continuation of labor, will, and ideological projects to challenge or sustain and maintain a power relationship that defines the limits of our identifications and struggles.

I feel compelled to open with a small anecdote because general pronouncements about decades give me anxiety and I am trying to figure out why. About 4 years ago, I went to a panel discussion on the art and the 80s at PS1 in New York. There were about 6-8 speakers, some of them among the most prominent people in the art world. As the panel was unfolding, I began to anxiously realize that the word AIDS was not once pronounced. Some of you might have been there as well, so should you remember the AIDS being mentioned, please correct me. If the word was said, it was not noticed by me—I know at any rate that the topic was not discussed.

Yet I wonder if only one other person had been on the panel at PS1, couldn't it have been a whole other discussion? More like this one perhaps. For if one person on the panel, like I, remembered AIDS to be an ubiquitous concern in all aspects of our interiors lives, of art and intellectual debates, of “real life” by the middle of the decade, that other forum would also have discussed the initial national bursts of the religious right backlash in the form of “the moral majority,” the systematic governmental inaction that became murderous, the corporate greed that put profit before lives, etc, etc. In other words, all the stuff we lived with that we lived with. I cannot explain that repression, but here, we are obviously "doing" the 80s differently.

So when you ask what legacy has the greatest implications for the present day, I try to think of how things feel different now based on what the “doing” part of the 80s and today are, and I cannot help but think that whether we are talking about art or the university or politics, it is the 80s style of the “corporate” has become normalized—that the corporate, geared toward a façade of power, toward selling and making the receiver consume, has appropriated oppositional attitudes and affects of all strips and repackaged them to keep the machine rolling.

One of the things I learned in the 1980s (and I like Wayne thank those theorists) was a resistance to and continual persistent critique of totality and singular origins. Yet almost all the major political issues I can think of revolve around totality and idealized origins: the globalization of profit, exploitation and terror; the interpretation of the Constitution; Creationism; the foundational violence of fundamentalisms (Christian, Muslim, National and otherwise)... No, they didn’t “originate” in the 80s, but the 80s was the studio time put in by the neo-conservatives, the so called Federalists Society, the cultural right, and a go-go style art market to give us the New Normal. I’m reverting to thinking about the 80s as affect, as armor, as style—because I think the superficial is exactly where power locates and orients itself now—it’s how things are “done” today.

Oliver Wasow It's hard in these dark days to reflect on the legacy of the 80's without seeing the entire period as a dress rehearsal for the fools running the show today. So often over the past two decades I've wanted to believe that deep down people are good, that we're heading in the right direction, that things are slowly getting better.... and then there was last November, the last straw, I gave up, pulled in, pulled away from the rest of the country. I'm blue, you're red, fuck off, don't talk to me, I won't talk to you.

Yea, Bleak indeed.

So how to go on? What's good? So many of you have posted so eloquently on what went wrong, what's bad, what's rotten, I'm going to try (not that the devils need advocates these days) to locate -on a personal level at least- a silver lining...

Despite the gentrification that has occurred throughout NYC over the past quarter century, it still is, as it was when I moved here in 1979 at the age of 19, an incredibly diverse place. And, despite the massive gender and racial inequities that still exist in the art world, I suspect there are more woman and artists of color showing today than there was 25 years ago. Is this a legacy of the 80's (or the 60's or the 20's or...) I don’t know? Progress, by no means perfection.

During the mid-80's I was an artist/dealer in the East Village. Among the thousand and one reasons I closed up shop, despite running a profitable business, was my inability to wake up every day knowing I was going to have to hear yet another young commodities broker explain to me why it was imperative that they be allowed to purchase (as an investment, of course) the latest work by the latest artist. It was essential, they explained, that they be allowed to move up the waiting list- on the very same artist they didn't give a nod to a month earlier. What an irony, Reagan's trickle down was working. For young, hip artists in NYC anyway. This was, and continues to be, an irony that many people don't want to acknowledge. So, where was that silver lining again? Oh yea, well, there are today an incredible number of galleries showing an incredible number of artists and, IMHO anyway, an awful lot of it is good. I know that a market driven art world is fraught with problems, and I know that the puppet theater in Oklahoma isn’t part of the game (if that sounds condescending, I suppose it is, I’m still pissed off, remember?), but there are more artists, making more work and making more money than when I moved to NYC and that can’t be a bad thing. Even if it’s not as good a thing, by any stretch of the imagination, as it could be.

Finally, someone mentioned in an earlier post that we should be grateful for the French philosophers and I too, despite the problems I have with opaque critical theory, am grateful for the diversity of critical thought that has developed over the past 25 years (even if it doesn’t drive the market). As a young student in 1979 I had a lot of trouble understanding just why it was that puncturing the picture plane was an imperialistic act of objectification that was going to add to the enslavement of oppressed people through out the world (there’s that condescension again, sorry). What a relief when I saw that a Jack Goldstein, for instance, could not only puncture it, but explode it and seduce me at the same time, guilt free. It’s hard these days to find a young artist interested in working in just one medium, let alone one worrying about the morality of the picture plane. I may not know much about cultural pluralism but I know it when I see it and I’m grateful that there’s more of it now than there was in 1980.

It’s hard to imagine that anything has improved while we live in times darker than the darkest of Reagan’s reign but, for me anyway, at least some things have.

A last word…The name of Bill Olander, I'd forgotten him and was chilled to remember. It’s sad to suppose I’ve forgotten the names of so many others, so thank you for the lists, for the memories, for the real cultural legacy, the artists and writers.

Alexander Alberro

Thank you Maurice, and to those who have contributed such interesting and poignant posts thus far. I’m in agreement with many of the crucial issues that have been raised in the past twenty-four hours, and with the points of view expressed. But as much as I disdain the legacy of Reagan, I think it’s important to bear in mind the significant transformation that took place during his predecessor’s term. In my opinion, Jimmy Carter’s introduction of religion into the White House ushered in a new age (no pun intended) of religious fervor and zeal that has left few aspects of our lives--private and public--untouched.

One aspect of Reagan’s reign that has not yet been summoned is the acceptance of the public lie. Everybody knew that Oliver North and many of the President’s men were lying about IranContra, but it was somehow seen by many to be okay. The White House was no longer held accountable for the truth, but rather for the way in which things were “spun” (the very term, “spin control,” was coined in the 80s). George I learned that lesson well, as did the regime in power today.

Money, greed, the Bonfire of the Vanities..., yes. But at the same time, I think we would do well to consider that the “80s” also signaled the crystallization a number of progressive counter-culture movements (e.g., Act-Up, which several posts have mentioned, but also British cultural studies and postcolonial discourse). For me, this played out in the form of the music of the Gang of Four, the Clash, LKJ and so many others. The 80s begin there, somewhere in the late 70s, when Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols at once rejected the legacies of the 60s and scowled: “Your future dream is a shopping spree!” That such phrases hit raw nerves is indicated by the fact that the songs were censored. That they were necessary is indicated by the fact that they succeeded in finding publics nonetheless. That they were full of contradictions is indicated by the fact that the insight that the unconscious had been colonized was at once the direct culmination of critical legacies such as the Situationist International and the announcement of things to come (they were, as McLaren said, “only in it for the money”). In art, this undercurrent of the eighties culminates in the extremely important (for my generation at least) 1993 Whitney Biennial. Neatly marking the end of the 80s, this exhibition also provided a clear transition into the next decade.

Yet, certainly the most momentous legacy of the eighties was what can now be summed up as “1989.” As the social historian Michael Denning has recently emphasized (see his important book _Culture in the Age of Three Worlds_, 2004), the way we understand culture changed fundamentally following the collapse of what for a short half-century (1945-89) had been known as the "Second World." With no geopolitical counterweight, global capitalism subsequently extended in unprecedented ways and the leverage the Soviet empire once provided to Third World nations seeking to develop their national cultures faded into the horizon. (In important ways, the rise of religious fundamentalism abroad could also be located there--i.e. in the absence of a rational alternative in terms of real politic.) Suddenly, following the events of 1989 and the emergence of what George “Papa Doc” Bush pronounced as the "New World Order," culture both consolidated and expanded at the same time. No longer the property of nations or smaller identity-political forms and now long removed from the domain of art and artists, everything became culture. How these dramatically new conditions have affected the production, exhibition and distribution of art continues to be as pressing a question as that of how artists, critics, curators and historians have responded to the unprecedented leveling of culture.

Maurice Berger Welcome Simon, Oliver & Alex. Extraordinary posts.

Alex, you write: "Money, greed, the Bonfire of the Vanities..., yes. But at the same time, I think we would do well to consider that the “80s” also signaled the crystallization a number of progressive counter-culture movements (e.g., Act-Up, which several posts have mentioned, but also British cultural studies and postcolonial discourse). For me, this played out in the form of the music of the Gang of Four, the Clash, LKJ and so many others. The 80s begin there, somewhere in the late 70s, when Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols at once rejected the legacies of the 60s and scowled: “Your future dream is a shopping spree!” That such phrases hit raw nerves is indicated

by the fact that the songs were censored. That they were necessary is indicated by the fact that they succeeded in finding publics nonetheless."

Just as the '60s counterculture rose out of the obdurate forces of reaction--the racism of Jim Crow America, the red-baiting of McCarthyism, the sexism and repression of 50s style family values, the tragedy of Vietnam--the 80s, too, witnessed an effluence of oppositional culture.

Indeed, it's hard not to become nostalgic thinking of the first ACT UP meeting I attended, or of the Guerrilla Girls' brilliant interventions, my first introduction to the films of my friend, Marlon Riggs or the writings of bell hooks and Michele Wallace, and the dance or performance pieces of Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane, Wendy Perron, Robert Longo, Izhar Patkin, and Ann Magnuson, and, oh yes, the activist installations of the late Bill Olander (also a friend).

Later in the conference, we'll take up the issue of these brave challenges to the forces of reaction and to the status quo.

Andrea Robbins Like some of you I want to first explain the context of where I was in the 1980s. I was a student at the Cooper Union from 1983-87. I viewed the art world as a small cloister with an enormous sphere of influence, which I still believe to be the case.

The word postmodern has come up only once so far in this discussion but postmodernism and semiotics were nearly in the common vernacular at that time. The concept of postmodernism would seem at first not to have benefited the male neoexpressionist painters of the time because they were not an intellectual group by a long shot. But because they were deemed (or self deemed) the heirs to the modern art-painting continuum, installing their names within the modern art legacy benefited them, as a fissure between the modern and postmodern would do equally well. Either the modern or postmodern legacy promised a hermetically sealed art object that avoided the social and political. Ironically it was within this opening (or the discussion of an opening) that an entry point was created for so much more diverse work, subjects, treatments as well as a more diverse group of artists and venues. As so as many panelists have pointed out this is the real legacy of the 1980s and not the work that occupied public attention and spectacle of the time.

Now on a seemingly different sort of legacy . . . .I remember seeing Larry Clark speak at St. Marks Church in 1985 and being completely horrified by the work, but touched deeply by the naivete of his subjects and the acts they were engaged in; their naturalness and their right to presence within the art object. I think this work must have been read as documentary to the rest of the world. To me in terms of subject it seemed like such a unique cultural offering and contribution as an American product in the most optimistic way. Of course one could also say it would later influence and exaggerate youth culture, "other directedness" and verite life, or life scripted in anticipation of being pictured or filmed.

I now it's not entirely fair but maybe we need to look at work in terms of it's effect is in the world, but of course I know this does not allow for dualities or coexisting ironies.

Lowery Stokes Sims This will be a very self-reflective posting because I've been thinking about how memory is an integral part of any process of evaluating the legacy of a time, a moment, a person. Today I viewed a video by Kevin Tribe in which Peter Wollens was interviewing his ten-year-old daughter.

When asked how she remembered, Wollen's daughter--and I am wildly paraphrasing here-replied that she was only able to remember that which she felt, touched or tasted. For her the 1970s would be a long time ago. So I ask myself what did I feel, touch or taste? What was I doing in the 1980s? I was in my 30s and at that prime moment when you really begin to establish yourself as a real entity, the ultimate adult. Being a child of the 60s I had to deal with the amazing

fact that I had turned 30 but had not turned into my parents. That was our paranoia in the 1960s.

In evaluating my personal take on the legacy of that moment for me, it turns out that I feel it as deeply as I feel the defining moments I witnessed in the 1950s and 60s as a young African American female: police hosing and beating demonstrating black people is still palpable for me; the aftermaths of the assassinations--Jack, Malcolm and Martin, the Vietnam war....Back then I never thought that I would live through anything as horrible and destabilizing. But here we are....

My memories of the 80s are caught up in images of big hair, shoulder pads, and a new economic reality. New fears as the Reagan administration deliberately baited the Soviet Union to the point that the reality of a nuclear conflict was more real than it felt in the 1950s as the arms race heated up. I remember a late night show in which they discussed the plan to evacuate New York City in case of a nuclear hit. We were to get on the subway, get off at the last stops in the Bronx and be bused to Westchester. Never mind that we all knew that the average range of a direct nit was at least 250 miles. It was at that moment I decided that I would prefer to stay put and go with the first strike.

And the messages were so seductive. Reagan in a cardigan with men, women and children looking up at his beatific presence. Ladies in white collars and cuffs and Laura Ashley prints posing counterpoints to earnest, rumpled abortion rights activists. My dear, late friend Daisy Voigt and I would watch the burgeoning landscape of punditry together on the phone late at night--she in Washington and me in New York, and despair at the visual messages that we knew would triumph over the content of what was said. Today that verbal sparing and manipulation combined with image has been fine tuned. We live now with Ann Coulter, and Greta Van Sustern and her face-lift--just to name a few examples. What had happened to feminism?

For me in the art world I had great expectations as the world ultimately opened to diversity in the 1980s--coming out of the pluralism of the 1970s. After almost 12 years in the art world, 12 years of remedial black art shows and women's exhibitions, I began to see tangible evidence of opportunity, acceptance, even lionization of the work and contributions of arts of all hues--African, Latino, Asian and Native American, all genders and all preferences. Content was admitted in again after the long-drought of formalism--which didn't dry it up--but certainly left it parched out on a limb.

Working at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, I had finally devised an entirely outside life for myself where I could pursue the agenda of inclusion and diversity to which I had committed my principles and career, all the while proving myself within the institutional context of that great museum--so inherently multi-culti in its collections, but so Euro-centric and colonial in its interpretations of that collection. It was therefore a period of great personal growth. I was really fortunate that the friendships and alliances that I had begun to build up when I first went to work at the MMA provided me with lots of opportunities to act on my interests in artists of color and women. I worked with the Caribbean Cultural Center, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Pratt, and many institutions out of town, curating exhibitions and writing for catalogues and art magazines.

These occasions allowed me to exercise my critical faculties and find my voice in the art world.

Friends like Leslie King Hammond, June Kelly, Maurice Berger, Marta Moreno Vega, to name a few, were those with whom I could ally myself in this dialogue about multiculturalism and its discontents. I was in graduate school which gave me a ready forum for the more heady theoretical and critical work that I wanted to do, and as I spent years researching and reconfiguring the career of the Afro-Cuban Surrealist-associated artist Wifredo Lam, the complexities of the intersections of race and class and gender around issues of modernism, primitivism, appropriation and creative progenitors became clear and defined my intellectual approaches.

As we punted around the language of deconstruction, it looked for a moment like the power structure would disintegrate, despite the diligent opposition of those who would be our opponents in the culture wars. To be female, assertive, black, and straight or gay was to be particularly

transgressive in the scheme of things. I carried that transgression into my support of the work of Bob Colescott, and black women artists who were doing performance and installation and video work--against the conventional attitudes of the black art community-- of "overlooked" white men, and still ferocious women artists and today I rejoice in the re-emergence of resilient souls like Sengue Nengudi and Maren Hassinger who are still making their mark in the art world despite decades of being over looked and under recognized.

But ultimately I left the 1980s rather jaded and disillusioned. I am currently teaching a theory and criticism class for graduate students at Hunter College. I decided that we would look at the 1990s.

We started out the class reading the catalogue for the DECADE SHOW that ground-breaking collaboration among the now defunct Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art, the New Museum, and The Studio Museum in Harlem. Uptown met downtown in a very intense and honest way in 1989-90. The first thing that you notice is how the exhibition was organized into themes and that artists working across themes were featured in each institution so that it was not only those individuals who fit in to the niche missions of the institutions who were shown there. They were distributed throughout all the participating museums. But in reading the prefaces by the directors-Nilda Peraza, Marsha Tucker and Kinshasha Conwill--you realize that themes like sexuality and spirituality would find resistance at the SMH and the NM respectively, and within the niche audiences of each institutions there would be resistance to certain ideas.

In an essay that I wrote for the catalogue on cultural pluralism nd the American canon, I am clearly impatient with the failed promise of the 1980s and attempt to grapple with the already skillful rhetoric of cultural conservatives that are common "spin" today in the halls of journalism, the media and the Internet. I wrote that "there has to be a reevaluation of our sense of who or what is "American" and it would have to go way beyond tokenistic programming in academic and cultural institutions to a full recognition of the integral part that Africans, Natives, Asians and Latin Americans play in American culture. Rather than promoting the white-washed, sanitized versions of culture of colors, this society would recognize them as the progenitors of their own culture."

Today I would say that the situation is better but there is still alot to do. I will have more comments on this as we continue this dialogue, but in the final analysis I think the legacy of the 1980s was to finally open the flood gates of diversity that continue to challenge and test what we say are our core values as Americans.

Maurice Berger Welcome Andrea and Lowery. Beautiful posts.

Lowery, you write: "But ultimately I left the 1980s rather jaded and disillusioned."

Yes, I feel the same way. Indeed, I've heard these words--or variations thereof--many times over the past few days, as friends and colleagues have written or called me about the conference and its subject.

I think, for me, it was the frustration of living through the ENTIRE decade under right-wing Republican presidents. Their presence felt like a low-lying lead ceiling, dampening our hope and denying and disempowering us at every turn.

I remember the exact moment when this feeling of disillusionment and frustration lifted: the moment Bill Clinton took the oath of office in 1993 (though with his administration came a host of other problems). Even now, thinking back to the '80s, I get the queasy feeling that the opposition was asleep at the wheel as neoconservatism honed its formidable skill at reaching, moving, and manipulating the American public. The brilliance of Reagan's agenda was that it really was a revolution, and what changed most was the way politics itself operated. Michael Deaver and Peggy Noonan were brilliant imagemakers and wordsmiths, and Ronald Reagan a far more gifted politician and actor than many of us realized at the time. Together, they gave us the greatest, ongoing performance piece of the past fifty years.

No wonder art and culture moved so definitively towards performance in the 1980s and beyond.

Karen Mary Davalos Earlier today Alexander Alberro wrote: “The 80s begin there, somewhere in the late 70s, when Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols at once rejected the legacies of the 60s and scowled: “Your future dream is a shopping spree!” That such phrases hit raw nerves is indicated by the fact that the songs were censored. That they were necessary is indicated by the fact that they succeeded in finding publics nonetheless.”

Thank you for reminding us about the punk scene, which can be said to have rejected the restrictive gender codes, notions of social decorum, and other codes of the establishment. (How is it that all of this is happening in the 1980s with some much social control coming from the Right? I am grateful for the post-modern argument about the death of ideology/hegemony, and long live the new hegemony because counter-hegemonic moments inspire me to believe that we can topple the Bush regime.) In its anti-establishment position, punk musicians and their fans threw out the 1950s of image of the family (Ozy and Harriet) as well as the corporate appropriation of rock n’ roll. They took on both the 1950s and the 1960s: charging that the accomplishments of both decades were a lie. But as you indicate, this happened in the late 1970s on the East Coast. And I would agree, but on the West Coast, the punk scene does not arrive, so to speak, until the 1980s with bands like Black Flag, The Dead Kennedy’s and The Germs.

I am not trying to insert a strict periodization, since Maurice has drawn our attention to the insight of Fredric Jameson. On the contrary, I am following one of Maurice’s questions about the shifting of the Center (i.e. NYC) to other sites of artistic and popular culture. In this case, punk truly became a “scene” not just musical style. As the following grows, even getting air -time in Los Angeles, the position of punk is both developed and co-opted. In Los Angeles, the land of body adornment and adoration, punk fashion was developed into a marketable convention.

I was growing-up in this scene and worn only black, a style long-dead in NYC (or so my bi-coastal friends told me). I was excited about the possibility of new genders. The punk scene matched my image of feminist action: I did not have to be a girl in a dress, I did not have to wait for men to invite me to the conversation, I did not have to control my emotions to protect others’ feelings, I did not have to act like a lady—all of the proto-feminist desires of the twenty-something set in the 1980s. But for all of my adolescent ideas, the punk scene liberated me.

Well, now that I have transitioned into the autobiographical (again, at Maurice’s suggestion), I find I cannot thread this conversation back to Alexander’s argument. Let me end with this: green-hair, pierced lips, gender-bending clothing, tattoos—all of these aspects of punk style have remained with us. The accommodation is not a simple as we might want to imagine. You still cannot get a job in corporate America with a tattoo on your forehead, or any other patch of flesh that shows through when dressed in the corporate suit. In Los Angeles, only the hardcore members of the local-to-international drug cartel have tattoos on their faces, so not all has been co-opted. Yes, we can buy grunge clothing at Macy’s and “men’s wear” is a phrase of the past, but several boundaries remain in the world of style. I would like us to hold on to some of those less visible parts of the 1980s and their legacies.

George Baker “A huge deadening of human possibility.” I haven’t known what to post, as the question of these first two days seems both beyond my ken—I was only 20 when the decade ended—and just too large, too all-encompassing, as all-encompassing as my own formation as a human being, since I became an adult during the years in question, and everything I have done intellectually as an adult seems to refer back to this past that I lived through but also, being a child precisely then,

missed. But I have been struck above all else by Wayne Koestenbaum’s post, by his final words, and his other ones, with all of which I agree. This “deadening” made me think of the music I spent most of my time in the 80s listening to, like Morrissey and The Smiths, which turned the apathy of the times into both a marketing tool and an aesthetic stance, something which—almost hysterically—made being “deadened” the universal condition of life. I remember wallowing in this hysteria, making it my own, or wanting it to be my own, as if only if I could be truly miserable and truly dead would the tenor of the times find its proper response in me. Maybe this is my own pathology, my own adolescent embarrassment, and maybe I should keep it all to myself and save myself the embarrassment, but I think it might be shared, perhaps a key to the moment more generally. I think this hysteria or this mimetic acting out of the cultural limitations and conditions of the decade remains one of the important legacies of the decade. I think this “acting out” has everything to do with how politicized art practice and art criticism became at the moment of the emergence of postmodernism in the visual arts, something I am nostalgic for but which I realize now has an inverse relation to the political limitations which the 80s brought down on the culture and on culture. Nostalgic, but also aware that this might be what connects us again to the 80s: for things are really bad again in many of the same ways and I’ve been feeling melancholic and deadened all over again. I can’t say that I’ve been listening to the Smiths again though…

Kathy O’Dell The posts to date have been so rich and provide so many points of entry that it is hard to decide just what path to pursue. I feel compelled, however, to stick with my first response to Maurice’s superb opening question: What matters most to us now about the period of the 1980s? My answer fittingly, perhaps, relates to Maurice himself.

Maurice and I first met as graduate students in the 1980s at the CUNY Graduate Center. Those were heady days, in which so many of us were immersing ourselves in the theory and criticism of modern and contemporary art under the rubric of postmodernism. As Andrea Robbins pointed out earlier, there’s been little discussion of postmodernism in the posts so far. This does not surprise me. There is much about my (our?) engagement in those heady days that is somewhat embarrassing, that begs to be forgotten, for it was so largely an engagement in, well, the head.

There was such an ironic drive in graduate school to master the discourse of the very individuals who led the charge to deconstruct the discourse of the masters and/or the master discourses themselves. And round and round we went, even when writing at such length about the body!

It was not lost on us ultimately (fortunately) that this tendency toward mastery was suspect, that postmodern critiques of originality and authenticity were coinciding in time with considerably more important—and, yes, “authentic”—voices of and from other cultures and societies. It would be these voices that would force us to question who we were in our own minds, bodies, and souls.

There is another twist: Postmodern discourse was far from being as negative and head-centric as I’m making it sound, of course. Many of its threads, especially having to do with practices of deconstruction, allowed us to “question authority,” long before that admonition was bumperstickered into oblivion and too many people lost hope in it. This act of questioning is precisely the “continuation of labor” that Simon Leung nailed in his post in his inimitable way, a continuation we cannot afford not to pursue.

I look forward to the days ahead, discussing the 1980s. Thanks, Maurice and Barbara, for launching this conference, and thanks to all those who have posted such profoundly moving and stimulating comments.

Maurice Berger Welcome George and Kathy. And thank you, Karen, for your wonderful post.

George, you write: "I haven’t known what to post, as the question of these first two days seems both beyond my ken—I was only 20 when the decade ended—and just too large, too all-

encompassing, as all-encompassing as my own formation as a human being, since I became an adult during the years in question, and everything I have done intellectually as an adult seems to refer back to this past that I lived through but also, being a child precisely then, missed."

At first reading, this line brought to mind a review of my first book on Robert Morris, Minimalism, and the New Left. The critic complained that I was too young to remember the sixties, and thus unqualified to write about it. Of course, the comment is specious, even comical. I am, like George, an art HISTORIAN: would an historian of Renaissance art be too young to write about 16th Century culture?

But I also know what George means. My 1960s is George's 1980s. I had just turned twelve in May 1968; yet I managed to protest the War and speak out against it in school. Still, I was too young to get the deeper implications of the moment. Reading George's post brings to mind the proximity of the 1980s to the present--and the political and cultural events of an era that have now come to full fruition. Even for those of us who are older, there is still something unsettling and confusing about that time. I still see it as a hazy blur. It's difficult to understand how we got from there to here and how we let it happen.

Maurice Berger Kathy, you write: "As Andrea Robbins pointed out earlier, there’s been little discussion of postmodernism in the posts so far. This does not surprise me."

We will have ample time to discuss this later in the conference; I will devote a two-day session to the ways academic and public discourses changed in the 1980s--including the blurring of disciplinary boundaries, the introduction of new methodologies, and the autobiographical imperatives that swept through art, writing, and academia later in the decade.

Franklin Sirmans So many incredible posts. Thank you all. Unlike George, I have been listening to the Smiths again... Like George I was 20 at the end of the decade. The nostalgic apathy feels appropriate for me, though it also makes me wonder. To return to that time... I can not help but think about the resistance in hip hop in the face of the hypercapitalism to which so many have pointed out: no money for the electricity for the party, steal it from the streeetlamps; no money for instruments to make the band, remix any sound you want with two turntables or a synthesizer; no need for oils, use spray; and no money for canvas, paint the city; no labels want to produce your music, make it anyway and sell it on cassette. Yes, this might be nostalgia, but it reminds me of a time, say just after the Civil War when Buy Black wasn't a slogan but the only way of life. DIY in all its glory. At a time, when the lines were drawn and you knew no one cared about your cultural output (except Michael Jackson) you were free to be you and me.

As academics were making strides, the cultural output seemed to suggest the same sort of commingling. Where Punk met Disco always meant hip hop was sure to follow. To me, no other concert tour sums this up better than the Beastie Boys with Public Enemy, where high school antics and hardcore political texts pushed the boundaries in terms of music and formal composition with love in both directions.

At the same time, coming of age in the 80s as an adolescent, the world was cruel and you made do. There was no Bill Clinton factor to make you forget that the president doesn't care about you-we didn't need a multiplatinum artist (Kanye West) to remind us of that.

I guess what i would like to offer is the sense of possibility that hip hop offered within the context of the burgeoning multiculturalist writing. As has been pointed out, a generation of artists were crowned with no MFAs. Of course, a generation of artists were shown and marketed within the confines of the art world as graffitists and outsiders. The outsiders have stayed in the frame, the

graffitists were banished from the marketplace. I'm ranting now, excuse me, but the modus operandi seems to have also been changed by MTV and the continuing need for speed. I will never forget Andy Warhol's show so appropriately being on MTV. How long did we talk about graffiti? or neo-geo for that matter?

I wont bring it back to money here but...

Max Becher Hi all, first let me apologize for my delay. I'm in Florida living a country song the last two days: my car broke down, my child is sick, and I'm packing my bags (for Europe tomorrow). I'll spare you more details. First some coffee.

As a teenager in the late seventies I overheard a conversation among some art world adults complaining about the dreary atmosphere of the period and the imminent death of New York. If only there was a conservative president, however tragic, at least artists could have a target of opposition (the satirist's dilemma.) Well, some got what they wished for, but it was much more tragic than expected — covert action, military interventions, Aids, apartheid, homelessness, the arms race, etc — and the art world's response at times very disappointing. Instead of being uniformly opposed to the long term dismantling of the New Deal and the European social democracy model, the art world was tempted and torn, much co-opted, only partly reactive.

As a young person one doesn't always know how to distinguish between what is in the air and what is permanent. By the time the 70's had passed, I had formed a secure picture of what it meant to be an artist in the art world. The 80's shocked that picture out of me and created doubt about the art world as an environment.

I could understand the move rightward in society (what's the quote, persons are good, people are dangerous?) but I couldn't forgive it among artists. Not that artists really became conservatives, but many opted into the big cash art life with such enthusiasm that they functioned as conservatives, and functioned for certain systems. Slick spaces, deliberate primitivism (neoexpressionism), high-budget commissioned works.

One trauma of the 80's was when art world openings began to look like mobster limo drivers conventions. Every precious individualist artist in the room, as well as the collectors and gallerists, instead of wearing the jeans/long hair uniform, which at least had a certain variety to it, everyone wore a kind of all black corporate attire. This wasn't a superficial change. Art became again one of many indicators of moneyed taste along with designer furniture and clothing and AAArchitecture. I know that's trite, but artists in Armani? It was VERY disorienting.

It was groups like ACT UP and Guerrilla Girls and people like Hans Haacke, Martha Rosler, Douglas Crimp, Lucy Lippard among many others that gave us (Andrea Robbins and I) a lot of hope and road map for how to be part of the art world while remaining a human being, and showed it was still worthwhile. Without those individuals and organizations as guides, I might have headed elsewhere. It helped to realize that the art world shouldn't be hoped for as an environment but as a vehicle, if necessary.

The legacy of the 80's (besides the long arch of the corporate takeover, which included Carter functioning as a kind of calm before the storm and post-Nixon pacifier) is organization, as opposed to dis-organization, as opposed to group consciousness: organization not in the grassroots sense but in the office technology sense. There are now more political and cultural organizations than ever before (correct me if I'm wrong), and they compete like corporations.

Progressive action is now very well organized, but more so are the corporate and religious groups, and in the current climate of alienated but networked clusters, organization is the important activity. Every individual is now his/her own office manager. We all use corporate

methods now. And art doesn't feel like a reflection of society anymore, or like a fountain of culture. It feels like a specialization dispersed within a large field of organizations.

Elizabeth Alexander The eighties was the decade in which I was educated. In the academy, times were very exciting, as African (Afro-)-American Studies, Women’s Studies and other hyphenated studies seemed to be firming their toehold. The theoretical work in these fields was blazingly original and relevant. It moved through the culture hand in hand with the acclaim that some writers of color achieved, perhaps best exemplified by the glorious career of Toni Morrison.

AIDS and its devastation was certainly the shadow. The loss of writers like Joe Beam, Essex Hemphill, Melvin Dixon – as young men, just as they were establishing their brilliant careers! – was devastating. I was still studying and following modern dance in those years, and the losses of beloved teachers, dancers, and choreographers was shocking. Those magnificent moving bodies failed. Those deaths seemed to happen very quickly, and in quick succession.

The ‘eighties also felt very close to the ‘sixties. The ‘seventies were symbolically forgettable; the oft-cited lessons of the ‘’sixties were a guiding force in trying to think about how to make work that was, in Toni Morrison’s memorable words, “unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.” How could our work matter? It was now time to transform the academy, once and for all, to take real advantage of that proverbial foot in the door and make some real changes, material changes, changes that were not just about individual careers but about far-reaching reforms. It was time for cultural politics to flower, in response to all that was retrenching in the long Reagan era. Feminism was real and guiding, not suspect or discarded as would come down the road. It was o.k. to be a little essentialist” in order to get things done. Racial solidarity was hoped for; cross-cultural and cross class alliance and analysis was how we always tried to proceed, even when the struggle was wrenching. I still blush with embarrassment and shame to think of some of those struggles.

In the academy, also, the rise of “theory,” as we plainly called it then, sometimes offered a challenging way to think about opening texts, to bring them into the light with other than New Critical tools. But oh so quickly, it seemed, the dominion of theory became a way to obfuscate what actual women and actual people of color were writing and talking about. No accident, too, that at the same time that fluency in certain kinds of theoretical languages became necessary lingua franca if one was to be taken seriously academically, the brief, flush moments of hiring and promoting of faculty of color came to a grinding halt. We enjoyed just a few years of that hopeful time and then it was over. At my own university, until a few months ago, we have only ever had one tenured black woman on the faculty. As of September 2005, we have two. So much for the progress we all truly hoped for and worked toward.

I sometimes remember the eighties as one big academic conference, where a thrilling conversation floated from panel to panel, room to room, where you could pore over your conference catalogue and arrange to attend all the “multicultural” panels. You’d see the same folks moving between the same rooms as you, and it was wonderful to engage with that floating conversation, to carry it into the hallways and shared hotel rooms and sidewalks of the second cities where conferences are held: Miami, New Orleans, Chicago, Baltimore, San Diego. We were learning about each other’s cultures. We were learning about the cultures we were born into, knowing that being of a certain background didn’t give you any special purchase on the culture of that world. We knew how hard we had to work and we thought we knew what we were up against. We read everything and waited for books to come out that would change our lives: Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology; Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Culture; The Signifying Monkey; Zami: A New Spelling of My Name; Tight Spaces; Borderlands/La Frontera; The Alchemy of Race and Rights, and so on.

In the ‘eighties, the fierce and guiding lights of June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Barbara Christian, and

their like still illuminated paths of possibility and righteousness. It turns out those women were physically ailing then, and fighting.

Looking back now, there were not as many of us as it then seemed.

Lorraine O’Grady I've been having a hard time getting started. "Legacy" seems such a grand word for the vague memories I have, more a string of minute details, not necessarily sequential. I spent the first years of the 80s doing performances and shows railing against exclusion but the last years were spent hardly knowing who the President was (in a kind of sympathetic dementia with a mother in the last stages of Alzheimer's). Most of what I do remember about the art world in the '80s has to do with being an "insider-outsider" for the first time in my life---as opposed to the "outsiderinsider" I'd been before. I would still have an extreme case of "double-consciousness" (viz W.E.B. DuBois), but it was a huge relief that the terms were finally reversed. In June 1980, I arrived at the doorstep of the downtown black art world (how many people then or now know what that phrase means?). I'd spent my entire previous life in a succession of virtually all-white worlds: the all-white Ivy League world of the 50s; the all-white elite U.S. Government world of the early 60s; the all-white rock criticism and record company world of the 70s. Finding Just Above Midtown, the black avant-garde gallery that Linda Good-Bryant had just relocated from 57th Street to Franklin Street in Tribeca, felt like entering nirvana.

Drinking beer or chablis oudoors at Riverrun, the restaurant-bar next door, conversing about art with David Hammons, Fred Wilson, Dawoud Bey, Janet Henry, Sandra Payne, Senga Nengudi, among others, finding myself at home with people like myself, it was all I could hope for. For a couple of months. Then the old double-consciousness kicked in, the awareness that there was another world that this one was not and could not yet be part of. Certainly not routinely. And not without feeling that a rare and condescending exception was being made. I mean, Artists Space, the hot white alternative arts organization, was around the corner for Christ's sake, and we didn't get invited to show there. Mlle Bourgeoise Noire was born. After trying out her critique of "safe" black art at the opening of JAM, her next invasion was of an opening at the New Museum, shouting a poem with the punchline "Now is the time for an invasion!" Nobody listened to her, of course. She wondered if the time would ever come when black artists could act with agency, as originators, not recipients. By the end of the decade, when two black artists, David Hammons and Adrian Piper, were "approved for admission" and the mainstream art world entered a new phase of amnesiac self-congratulation, while yet another white feminist movement met with modest success, it all began to seem like the samo samo. Even the old gatekeeping system stretching back to Frederick Douglass whispering in Lincoln's ear seemed firmly in place.

But of course, nothing ever remains quite the same. Some things get worse. For a former government insider, watching a safety net built patiently over 50 years, telephone extension by telephone extension, desk by desk, hire by hire, being hacked at by those with a better idea, was a horror. I didn't think it could get any worse, but it did. Strange now to think of Reagan as benign because he was motivated by a philosophic ideal as opposed to self-righteous fundamentalism.

On the other hand, some things get better. The worst excesses of academic theory seem to be marginally dissipating. Mlle Bourgeoise Noire will never forgive all the talentless, apolitical epigones of socially committed theorists for making the world safe for reaction through the irresponsible promotion of irony. Good riddance. But she's thankful for what she thinks might remain of their legacy: the ability to think post-colonially in a world still ruled by colonialism.

Looking forward to learning more through this opportunity to listen and to force ideas into more coherent shape. Thanks, Maurice!

Maurice Berger Welcome Franklin, Max, Lorraine, and Elizabeth. Wonderful posts.

Elizabeth, you write: "In the academy, also, the rise of “theory,� as we plainly called it then, sometimes offered a challenging way to think about opening texts, to bring them into the light with other than New Critical tools. But oh so quickly, it seemed, the dominion of theory became a way to obfuscate what actual women and actual people of color were writing and talking about."

Perhaps this is why the "autobiographical" emerged as such an important strategy for writers and theorists in the late-1980s and early 1990s. I think of Patricia J. Williams' groundbreaking THE ALCHEMY OF RACE AND RIGHTS--a treatise on law, identity, and race that resonates with gorgeous writing and powerful stories that make theory come alive.

Increasingly, intellectuals seem to melding analytical rigor with writing that is fluid, engaging, and artful. To wit, Elizabeth Alexander's recent book, THE BLACK INTERIOR, a remarkable effort that rethinks the whole issue of critical theory and practice through writing that is, at once, trenchantly analytical, lucid, and poetic.

Michele Wallace I am sitting here at 10:30 p.m. of a rainy Tuesday of 2005 having come from a candlelight vigil and memorial for Rosa Parks at Cornell University's Sage Chapel. Certainly saying good bye to Mrs. Parks signals the passing of a major landmark of some sort.

I have just read all of the other posts and am still trying to figure out why there seems so little of the 80s I actually experienced in any of this but then I suppose I've been an odd bird all my life, albeit not deliberately.

For me the 80s, the entryway to the decade is dominated by a two- headed monster composed, on the one hand, of the spectre of a book which was very important to me just then and which would become more so: it was called THE CULTURE OF NARCISSISM and the author was Christopher Lasch, an intensely frenetic American intellectual, no longer among the living who, nonetheless, managed in this book to put his finger precisely on the pulse of what now seems the recurrent theme in American life and culture. I borrow from Lasch's entertaining speculations at the time the idea that an interminable American adolescence was increasingly reflected upon the unwilling canvas of the rest of the planet. The other head of the two-headed monster was formed by my own first book BLACK MACHO AND THE SUPERWOMAN published in 1979, the contents of which was to determine the quality and character of my life thereafter.

In the fall of that same year of 1979, I left New York for New Haven, Connecticut for two and a half years where I first encountered Derrida, Deconstruction, the life of the mind generally and the first really serious American Studies and Black Studies Department I had ever seen. These were all in residence at Yale University in 1980.

Circulating about in various orbits were Frederic Jameson, Michael Denning, Hazel Carby, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Ishmael Reed, Wole Soyinka, Sidney Ahstrom, Toni Morrison, Robert Steptoe, Leon Trachtenberg, John Blassingame, Roger Gouvenor Smith, Cornel West, Jerry Watts, Charles Davis, Stanley Aronowitz, Leslie Fieldler, Eugene Rivers, Judith Wilson, and probably at least another two dozen really important people who I may have met or noticed only in passing (among them were perhaps Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, Paul de Man). In other words, everybody was there, or about to arrive.

The 80s were for many reasons my lost decade, just because I had gotten off to a kind of false start in the 70s in a life that was largely overshadowed by the larger than life presence of a commanding figure, my Mom, Faith Ringgold the artist and art world activist. By 1979 and the writing of BLACK MACHO, I had not yet separated my own thoughts from hers and so it was a book written largely under the influence of her thinking but with my own thoughts mixed hither and yon, so the seams weren't showing. It was our baby, not mine, which would endlessly complicate my life. I spent the rest of the 80s running about the country trying to find myself, my voice, my

own political identity and Waterloo.

After the two years spent in New Haven where I briefly pursued a Ph.D. and thought better of it, I went home for awhile to defeat and to temping at various clerical agencies in lower Manhattan. I did some free lance writing for ESSENCE MAGAZINE, then teaching at UC San Diego, the University of Oklahoma and SUNY Buffalo.

I went into the decade trying to vanquish from my mind the personal disaster of having written BLACK MACHO, and thinking I was writing a novel which was never finished and never published. Prince and Purple Rain were really important to this process. I read THE COLOR PURPLE as soon as it was published and watched the movie on the big screen in Oklahoma City in a packed mega-theater. Not too long after that, it was time to begin thinking about the new black filmmakers led off by Spike Lee's SHE'S GOTTA HAVE IT and Julie Dash's DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST. The point was and is not that whatever happened to me in my life were the decisive events of the decade for the entire generation but rather that I can only see the decade through the prism of my own life. In particular the errors of the kind of narcissistic self-involvement which could ever lead me to think that how I handled or failed to handle Reagan could have changed anything that has happened globally since. Concerning all this talk about mega-bucks, I hardly know what to say since a mega-buck has never been my domain.

Linda Yablonsky Please forgive what is certain to be a staccato and abbreviated reply. This is due to unexpected minor surgery that has temporarily left me with the use of only one hand with which to type. I just wanted to add that the very first thing I think about when someone says "1980s" is AIDS, which decimated my generation and a large swath of my personal acquaintance in a few short years.

I actually started my first post with that thought but then just mentioned it because in a way it seemed too obvious to mention and then it seemed more on the back burner today, and then I realized that one of the legacies of 80s activism is that AIDS has become more manageable, though now it seems to be going out of control once again without raising any of the ruckus we had in the 80s.

Like David Ross, I too have been struck by an absence of anger today. Sometimes I wonder if everyone is on Prozac or some other leveling drug that keeps the emotions at bay. Then again I can't forget that I spent half the 80s addicted to hardcore drugs and I was hardly alone in that, Recreational drug use brought me into contact with many of the writers, artists, dancers, musicians, actors and filmmakers who formed the arts community that was so vibrant and engaged at that time.

Drugs ultimately got in the way of our creativity, contributing to some deaths or career stoppages and other life changes, but I can't say they didn't also cement a lot of important relationships. I don't know if prescribed drugs make a difference, but I can't understand the general failure of ire to inspire riskier approaches to art-making. Is it fear of personal failure? Of persecution? Or what?

So much of the time today I feel not just angry but disgusted by our government and stymied by the one-dimensionality of too much art I see, yet when I express it people just pooh-pooh me as a negative nabob.

Of course I don't want just to criticize but to make my own work better, that is more to the point, I sometimes think I hide too much of my true thoughts behind some mask or conceit but in the end I think that is not so engaging as laying it all out and making an utter fool of myself. People did that in the 80s and that was not a bad thing.

Dan Cameron Of the events and issues that seemed to matter the most in the 1980s, I would single out the morning in 1981 I first learned that the painter Bill Schwedler, a friend, had died of a mysterious new 'gay cancer' as being at the very top of the list, and staying there through the decade. For me it became one of those pivotal moments -- like one's first inkling of the immensity of 9/11 -- in light of which certain aspects of life and reality as they had been understood could no longer be sustained. For gay American men, especially during the critical early years of AIDS Panic, this meant coming to terms with a grim knowledge that many other disenfranchised group of Americans could have told them long ago: your government will always abandon you at your time of greatest need, your religious leaders will always blame you at your time of deepest suffering, and your fellow mortals will always shun you when you're at your weakest.

What extra energy that I had left to devote to indignation tended to be directed at US foreign policy in Central America. Pondering our bloody historical legacy of misdeeds in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, and -- most egregiously at that moment -- Nicaragua, would leave me in a state of slow-simmering fury, which on one occasion I directed at a group named Artists Call, who had staged a parade/protest against Central American intervention on West Broadway, the heart of Soho, on a busy Saturday, using artist-made floats and costumes to remind gallery-goers about the (then) semi-clandestine war being paid for with their tax dollars.

On the lighter side, the 1980s was the decade that all the '-isms' finally went away, and the harsh, pseudo-ideological struggles over topics such as whether or not appropriation trumped neoexpressionism would vanish with them. It was a time, as Jerry Saltz' immortal phrase has it, "when art and money had sex in public." It's funny how corrupted we were all worried about becoming back then, and how from a 2005 perspective that aspect of it now seems so quaint and homespun...

Maurice Berger Reagan and the Politics of Culture November 2-3 In the fall of 1986, the Whitney Museum of American Art sponsored a panel entitled “The Coming Fin-de Siecle.” Each panelist was asked to compare the pervasive disillusionment with in the modernist/industrialist ethos at the end of the nineteenth century with the cultural and social conditions at the end of the twentieth century. While challenging the his toricism of the question, I talked about homelessness and its representations in the culture at large--from Krzysztof Wodiczko's HOMELESS PROJECTION to reporter Bernard Goldberg's spectacular coverage of the looming crisis of poverty in America on the CBS EVENING NEWS. Several months later, Roger Kimball “reviewed” the panel for the neo-conservative journal, THE NEW CRITERION. Kimball felt compelled to single-out and attack my remarks, especially those in reference to homelessness: “Of course, [Berger] never specified just what the homeless might have to do with art,” Kimball concluded, “how could he have done so, since they have nothing at all to do with art.”

It would be easy, even justified from the stand point of good scholarship, to simply dismiss Kimball’s argument as unrigorous and naive, for if one were to accept his reasoning then Courbet’s STONE BREAKERS, Manet’s ABSINTHE DRINKER, or the displacement of poor people that was, in part, the result of the art-world gentrification of the East Village in the 1980s would “have nothing at all to do with art.” But as we see from looking back at the 1980s, so much about society eventually came to be reflected in the culture.

This relationship can be seen in the activist art of the time. It can be seen, in the extension of “trickle down economics” to the cultural sphere—to an art world, for example, that increasingly depended on collectors, dealers, and corporations to establish standards of taste and quality. It can be seen in the imperative to move beyond traditional institutions and discourses. It can be seen in the shot-gun marriage of politics and art that came to be known as the “Culture Wars.”

Indeed, culture was expressly targeted by religious conservatives and right-wing ideologues: Attorney General Edwin Meese’s war on sexuality (his strident campaign against “pornography,” for example), the “NEA Four,” the furor over Andres Serrano’s PISS CHRIST, and the cancellation of the Mapplethorpe exhibition at the Corcoran in Washington, D.C. This session, then, will deal with the relationship between the Reagan Revolution and the art and culture of the period: How did the social space of the “Age of Reagan” influence, transform, and impact the art and culture of the time? And what of the “Culture Wars,” what of its origins and meaning then and its continued implications for today?

Oliver Wasow I confess that at the time the "culture wars" were taking place I wasn’t a very good soldier. Aside from the fact that I wasn't much interested in the work at hand (Christ in urine?) I found it hard to see these attacks as anything more than obvious smokescreens, a way to cut funding for the arts in general and, more importantly, allow the right to paint an easy caricature of the left as advocates of the crazy and perverted. Impassioned defensive pleas for the right to display pictures of fist-fucking seemed to me then to be exactly what Meese and company wanted. We were playing right into their hands; look at the sick, queer NYers spending your hard earned money. This seemed to me, at the time, a battle that couldn't be won, an obfuscation and a waste of energy better spent elsewhere.

From where I sit now, with a president who proudly boasts not to read books, I'm not so sure I was right. This wasn't in the end a war about funding for the arts (remember the famous "NEA budget is less than the military's brass band budget" story? Was that true I wonder?), it was, in retrospect, the first salvo in the current fight over "values", a word that has more to do with fear than morality, and certainly has little to do with creativity.

My father used to tell me how sad he felt when Adlai Stevenson was criticized for being an intellectual. Good thing we decided to have Pa cremated, he'd be spinning right out of his casket these days.

Probably a lot of you saw the article in the NY Time a few days ago about Mayor Bloomberg's relationship to the arts. He’s not much of a fan it seems but does recognize its usefulness as a revenue generator for the city. So these are our choices; culture as a symbolic rallying point, something we hang our "values" on, or as a source of revenue, a way to appear "as if" we care about art. Not much of a choice really.

A last comment on Maurice's observation that the East Village art scene was a step towards the current gentrification of that neighborhood: As the owner of an art gallery on Avenue B in the mid 80's, it was always very difficult for me to reconcile my basic understanding of the role of culture in the process of gentrification, with what seemed to me at the time to be overwhelming support for our presence in the neighborhood by the community there. The locals seemed thrilled with the police protection that all this new money brought to the neighborhood and, with the exception of the resistance organized by people who didn't live in the neighborhood themselves, they were very welcoming. It seems too easy (not to mention a tad condescending) to suggest that this is all part of the process, that they didn't know what was happening to them, the galleries were a Trojan Horse. I guess that I'm not so much weighing in with an opinion here- the ice is too thin for my comfort- but I wanted to throw out this issue in the hopes that others might have something to say...

Olu Oguibe I am writing from Korea, so, my time is not in sync with US Eastern time, which is why I would like to add to the discussion on the legacy of the '80s before moving on to the Age of Reagan.

As Michelle Wallace has written, any report on the legacy of the '80s will ultimately reflect the

individual experience or understanding of the decade.

While a great deal of the recollection and narrative resides in the negative and depressing, the positive is also worth mention, and in that regard perhaps not only the merely fleeting such as the activism in the visual arts which was a broadening of the activism of the '70s, but the enduring legacies as well.

For me the most enduring, positive legacy of the '80s is perhaps the cross-over global culture that hip-hop became, not through the short-term, opportunistic involvement of mainstream investment capital, but through the uncompromising yet ruthlessly enterprising tenacity of black youth from California where Easy-E sold his first, self-sponsored records from his car boot in South Central Lost Angeles, to New York where a young man named Puffy became the Berry Gordy of his generation. Through the combined reality speak of gansta-rap and the ability of oft-dismissed black youth to show that all dissent is marketable, they transformed an inner-city aberration that rose out of monumental tragedy into the most important shaper of global culture in the late 20th century.

In a 1987 exhibition review, Arthur Danto predicted that hip-hop would pass rather quickly, indeed, that it was already largely passĂŠ, with nothing left but the remnants served up in New York galleries as a new form of outsider art. He proceeded to show draw a distinction between pop artists with their intellectual depth, their steeping in art history, and their irrefutable sophistication, and the clueless, illiterate, inner-city mimics that passed as hip-hop graffiti writers.

It was only a matter of time, he seemed to conclude, before the latter would relapse into primitive ignominy. Needless to say, neither he nor Donald Kuspit (in his book on the art in the '80s) nor indeed any of the establishment chroniclers of the decade acknowledged Jean-Michel Basquiat's monumental place in the history of late 20th century painting, let alone foresee how the seemingly dismissible events in the Bronx would ultimately emphatically define global popular culture for over a quarter century.

But black youth proved all that wrong and went on to create world culture. Karl Kani set black youth prison apparel as the defining form of global youth fashion for the end of the millennium before Hilfiger caught unto it, and rappers and hip-hop dancers created a legacy that is still with us. Today we speak of the State of the Nation, by which we do not mean the United States but the Hip-hop Nation, a global nation that transcends the consumer culture of spin-off fashion and soupy rap that globalization created, but also a global nation of creative dissent that stretches from Japan and Korea in the Far East through Vietnam and Taiwan to Pakistan and Afghanistan in the Middle East and Ethiopia and Senegal on both sides of the Sahara, back to New York and Houston and Detroit and Montreal. The seeds may have been sown in the '70s, but it was in the '80s that those seeds were reclaimed, revived, re-fed on the proper manure of unequivocal outrage, dissent, and entrepreneurial savvy and then, dispersed to all corners of the world where they took root. Hip-hop became a language, a style, the tenor of generations world-wide.

Reaganomics came and went. Thatcherism rose and fell. Artist activism gave way to timid, individualist struggle for meager survival, but hip-hop endured in almost all its forms, which is no mean accomplishment. Of all the legacies of the '80s none is more visible, more palpable, more positive, more promising, or more real. The stone that the builders rejected became the head cornerstone.

Reagan’s influence on the decade is complicated by the irony of the fact of his liberal past, his natural megalomania, and his devotion to the conservative core of American politics, all of which belong in a long tradition that begins with Theodore Roosevelt and continues in George Bush, but one comes to that presently.

Maurice Berger Welcome, Olu. Terrific post.

Oliver, you write: "From where I sit now, with a president who proudly boasts not to read books,

I'm not so sure I was right. This wasn't in the end a war about funding for the arts (remember the famous "NEA budget is less than the military's brass band budget" story? Was that true I wonder?), it was, in retrospect, the first salvo in the current fight over "values", a word that has more to do with fear than morality, and certainly has little to do with creativity. . . . My father used to tell me how sad he felt when Adlai Stevenson was criticized for being an intellectual."

This is the ingeniousness of the far right: their attack on art in the "culture wars" was really never about funding or even the art itself, per se; it was about manipulating people's sense of insecurity: first about "high culture," then about the media elite who condescends, then about "Hollywood," and finally--and this is where they really won big--about the opposition party, who they relentlessly argued was run by a bunch of elites. (Think of that picture of the tone-deaf, patrician John Kerry widesurfing.) Insecurity, after all, will provoke people to do really stupid or hurtful things, even things that are not in own their best interests.

As for your notion that it may well be condescending to imply that the former residents of the East Village were hurt and displaced by the gentrification that was the result of the art scene: I grew up in a predominantly black and Hispanic low-income housing project on the Lower East Side. (I lived there for twenty years.) I saw my childhood neighborhood change a great deal in the 1980s.

Some of it please and excited me. Some of it truly disturbed me, as I saw friends (and their families) priced out of the neighborhood. One evening, over dinner with the late, great Holy Solomon and a few friends, I brought my feelings up. Another guest, a prominent East Village art dealer turned to me and tersely replied, "What are you getting so upset about. These people are pigs. we really cleaned the place up."

No that's condescending!

Let's PLEASE hold off on the East Village debate. I'm devoting an entire session next week to the geographical shifts in culture in the -80s, with the East Village being a central topic of discussion.

Oliver Wasow Maurice, yes, I will hold off on further E. village discussion, but I did want to clarify: It wasn't my "notion that it may well be condescending to imply that the former residents of the East Village were hurt and displaced by the gentrification that was the result of the art scene". I was proposing that it was condescending to suggest that they didn't know better, that their happiness at the "cleaning up" of the neighborhood ( a slippery notion, yes) was mis-informed, that they were being duped by, to repeat, a Trojan Horse. This is of course a complicated and loaded issue and one that I definitely have very mixed and unclear feelings about. Looking forward to more later....

Maurice Berger I understand. Thank you for the clarification.

And, of course, the East Village art scene was an amazing moment. To be continued next week.

Now, onto Reagan, Politics, Art & the "Culture Wars."

Public Comments A visitor to the conference, Jack Waters, writes: "I am glad to know this discussion is happening, however it’s a shame that the discourse is limited to a selected group. I think public input would illuminate the discussion, especially if notices and invitations were made to those outside the fold. It would be interesting to hear from artists that lived and worked during the period, those whose

practice existed outside the margins of recognizable academic and critical circles of discourse.

One thing I find lacking here is any acknowledgment of the hierarchies of privilege that the ‘80s fostered, a smugness of attitude that ”trickled down” to the supposedly Alternative echelon of cultural institutions and its correlated structures in publication, media and academia. The divide and conquer strategy developed by the conservative right was implemented well before the recognition of a Culture War by the academic milieu, or the alternative space movement. This strategy of separation continues to be fostered by a social structure whereby conditions of race, gender and economic disparity are reinforced by a sense-driven value system that overrides rational analysis by virtue of the unchallenged givens that are reinforced by the failure to address unresolved issues like the institution of slavery that is the basis on which the interrelated imbalance of gender disparity, homophobia, misogyny, and racism are perpetuated. The following passage is my recollection of the beginning of the decimation of public arts funding that happened during our term as co-directors of ABC No Rio. It is a supplement to my 2000 presentation at the CAA panel The Archives Of The Avant Garde (Archiving The Unarchivable) chaired by Martha Wilson at Franklin Furnace.

”In the beginning (around 1980) Abc No Rio received funding annually from two main sources of public support: The New York State Council On The Arts and The National Endowment for The Arts. In both cases the principal contracted funds received were extremely modest organizational grants for No Rio’s Visual Arts programming, which included performance, media, and other forms that came within the range of No Rio’s experimental, interdisciplinary format. The first to go was the NEA. After having received funding on an annual basis for 4 years, in 1984, once the first Reagan administration had become well ensconced, No Rio received notice that although the peer panel had recommended funding, the chairman had requested that the panel reverse their recommendation on the basis that the application had demonstrated “a decrease in the quality of work submitted”. Chairman Hodsoll’s recommendation was for total cut—a drastic measure, since the NEA had (until that point ) well established the understanding that consistent prior year funding should be seen as an approval rating for an organization’s survival and development. A reduction in funding would communicate assessment endowment’s dissatisfaction with the direction programming an organization had taken whereas a sudden, drastic, and unprecedented cut could clearly jeopardize the very existence of such an organization. Despite emphatic requests, so that No Rio might make a more acceptable application in the future, the NEA would not provide more detailed explanation for this aesthetic determination. After research we discovered that organizations nationwide faced similarly sudden and severe cuts in funding to the extent that many of these organizations no longer exist. The profile of these organizations was similar to No Rio’s: Small, minority based, with strong social and/or political impact in programming style.

This covert tactic, a way of silencing organizations whose program

content was critical of government policy and the conservative constituency it represented predated the time when overt ideological arguments would be successful to support the withdraw of support.

Because the beginning of the erosion of public support for the arts affected only small minority organizations, based on the intangible basis of aesthetic opinion, the country’s more established arts organizations would not make a gesture of solidarity. Only when these organization’s budgets were affected was there a concerted effort to mobilize and by which time it may be too late.”

In this online conference there’s a lot written about the importance of AIDS and gender politics entering the public arena during the ‘80s. As I recall there was a lag in the time before institutions like PS 122, PS1, the New Museum, The Kitchen, and the like allowed these subjects enter into their programming. More marginal strategies mounted by ACT-UP, Queer Nation, and smaller organizations were the vanguard of these discourses before entering into the mainstream Alternative constructs - which lasted only briefly, weighted by the mandate that political discourse and sexual content would not be viewed favorably by publicly funded granting institutions. I will be curious to hear more on the ways in which the dynamics of power influence the intellectual discourse and the process of historicization."

Maurice Berger Thank you Jack Waters for your perceptive comments.

Jack, you write: "I am glad to know this discussion is happening, however it’s a shame that the discourse is limited to a selected group. I think public input would illuminate the discussion, especially if notices and invitations were made to those outside the fold. It would be interesting to hear from artists that lived and worked during the period, those whose practice existed outside the margins of recognizable academic and critical circles of discourse."

The public may send comments and questions via a special E-mail address on the conference home page. I welcome these texts and will post some of them up to the board.

Irving Sandler I agree that the political situation today is disastrous. The issue in art, as I see it, is how does the political situation affect what artists create and how should they respond. Since the 1980s, art has been in a situation of total pluralism. The question is: If everything goes, what counts? What is relevant in art today and why? I would prefer that we name names. As for myself, I follow all of art closely but I am most interested in painting and sculpture.

Linda Yablonsky Please correct me if I'm wrong -- my memory is a bit clouded --but it seems to me the so-called culture wars, or at least the acrimony generated by government policy or Congressional and rightwing religious conservatives, was more a phenomenon of the1990s. I recall the hue and cry that arose from a small government grant to Artists Space, for an AIDS-focused exhibition curated by Nan Goldin ("Witnesses Against Our Vanishing") was a kind of opening salvo in these wars, but that was in November of 1989.

To my mind, such as it is, for many reasons 1989 was not just the end of a decade but the end of the 20th century. So many things, beginning with the development of the Internet and the fall of the Berlin Wall and subsequent breakup of the Soviet Union (in addition to big changes in

leadership all over the world), were different after that.

In any case, I think the culture wars drew clear battle lines between artists or creative thinkers and fundamentalist hardliners, lines that were always there but perhaps in friendlier opposition.

These wars also arrived at a point when the borders of art were aggressively expanding and becoming more inclusive but also fuzzier - a process that had been going on at least since the advent of modernism - but I suspect contemporary art became very confusing and strange to the general public in the 80s, kind of crazy, and therefore also threatening.

Since the powers that be were discouraging the embrace of new or alternative ideas or perspectives in favor of escapist entertainment or simply rejection of intellectual life, much of what we consider to be art remained inaccessible to many and still is.

Part of the responsibility rests with the art world, particularly the commercial part. If information is privileged, art seems more rarefied. Sometimes that translates into big money; sometimes just the reward of knowing, as in being let in on a secret. A healthier culture would prize the seeking out of more wisdom and experience, but we seem to have lost touch with that sort of openmindedness, which requires some effort on everyone's part. Resistance is only human.

Today, oddly, the lines between the creative community and those who laugh them off are fuzzier than ever, as more artists seem to want very much to please and assimillate rather than involve themselves in any treacherous issue or activity. Perhaps such discussions are better left to us writers to explore and disseminate - if only more people felt as encouraged to read as they are to submit to signs and fashions and noise.

Maurice Berger Welcome Irving and thank you Linda.

Linda, you write: "Please correct me if I'm wrong -- my memory is a bit clouded --but it seems to me the so-called culture wars, or at least the acrimony generated by government policy or Congressional and right-wing religious conservatives, was more a phenomenon of the 1990s. I recall the hue and cry that arose from a small government grant to Artists Space, for an AIDSfocused exhibition curated by Nan Goldin ("Witnesses Against Our Vanishing") was a kind of opening salvo in these wars, but that was in November of 1989."

While the word itself may have gained popularity in the early 1990s, the war itself began much earlier. Many of these battles were quite public; some were decidedly less so and thus went unnoticed by most observers. I would argue that one of the earliest salvos in the "culture wars" came in 1982: the year that a cabal of neoconservative critics convinced the NEA to eliminate grants for critics: after all, the same forces that induced the public to fear Adlai Stevenson because he was an "intellectual," as Oliver pointed out in an earlier post, had a very easy time achieving this task. The right sent a clear, if totally unreported message: discourse is dangerous.

For the right, this was an early "test case," targeting a decidedly elitist practice to test the waters in its campaign to prove to the American people that Republicans could best speak to their "modest and everyday" needs. Their rhetoric certainly hit home with the so-called Reagan Democrats and indepedents, people who never quite realized they were being manipulated, their eyes obidiently cast up to god while the forces of greed and cynicism picked their pockets.

The 1980s were filled with many such episodes, from the controversy over Maya Lin's brilliant VIETNAM MEMORIAL to the burgeoning struggle over the appropriateness and depth of public support for the arts.

With the election of Reagan in 1980s, the reactionary forces of the then nascent "culture wars" truly consolidated and deepened their power. The games had begun, but--alas--have still not

ended.

David A Ross We all know the story.

The culture wars were brought about as part of the Reagan agenda to empower the religious conservative faction of the Republican party, and to complete the disaffection of culturally and socially conservative Democrats. These wars did not end with the 80's, or even during the Clinton administration. In fact, as we all know, they have become even more pronounced during the current Bush administration. The strategy worked very well.

Donald Wildman, Phyllis Shlaffley and their cohorts stepped up their organizing and fund-raising campaign under the cover of fighting for the moral health of some mythical American family, and that still functions at a frighteningly high level. The Alito nomination to the Supreme Court is the most obvious example.

One casualty of the war was serious federal funding for artists and critics, and the virtual neutering of the NEA. We still see a pathetic, underfunded, overly politicized NEA struggling to find its way to be able to play an appropriate role in support of American art and artists. (We should discuss the NEA at another time).

Another was that the arts became a virtual third rail in American politics. It would be no surprise that Bush never discussed art and culture during the campaign. More disturbing (and revealing) art was never even discussed during the Kerry campaign--though he is personally quite knowledgeable and supportive of contemporary art. In fact Kerry's former brother-in-law and closest adviser David Thorne (they formed VVAW together after returning from Navy service) was the president of the Boston ICA, and the current Mrs. Kerry (the former Mrs. Heinz) manages one of the most art-friendly charities in the United States. Not hard to figure. Support the arts = losing any hope of holding on to the middle of the American electorate.

(In his non-heroic, pre-9/11, slime bag persona, Mayor Giuliani attacked the Brooklyn Museum's showing of Chris Ofili work knowing he would only gain in support from those who remained convinced that the art community was the source of all evil in the world.)

And of course, now that misuse of religion has openly spread well outside of the arts, include the insane crusade against the teaching of evolutionary theory in the public schools without giving equal time to the consideration to biblically appropriate science.

The issue is really the rise of radical Christian fundamentalism, which is in many ways the most threatening development to emerge out of the Reagan-era culture wars. It helped propel us into the Iraq war, it hampers basic scientific research in cell biology, it promises to curtail the freedom of American women to control their own bodies, and will do everything in its power to hold on to the power it has attained. Make no mistake about it, the Christian fundamentalists own George W. Bush completely, and those who opposed their take-over of American domestic and foreign policy during the first administration, are being weeded out of the 2nd-term administration.

That is what came of the culture wars of Ronald Reagan, and we as a community have been unable to generate any effective opposition to this increasingly pervasive (and increasingly sophisticated) threat to the American democracy.

Reagan-era cultural politics has succeeded in marginalizing the place of the arts in American life.

Sure, strong voices and great art has resulted from these troubling times, and they serve as a powerful historical chronicle of the these complicated times. Yet it seems we were talking to ourselves, preaching to the converted, so to speak. And the irrefutable fact is that we lack effective political leadership committed to rescuing the arts from its side-show role as either an

economic miracle, or the knee-jerk response to complex city planning problems. (That is also for another conversation) Sadly, we are quickly sliding down that notorious slippery slope, and there does not seem to be a foothold in sight.

Dorit Cypis Memory is in the (one’s) present…it is impossible to “see” the 80’s otherwise. Of course (off course) our present political/social situation catalyzes how we remember. I may have learned this in the 80’s. When I squint I remember the (my) activism and the culture wars within the culture wars then. It is/was never black and white. 1982, an amazing symposium at USC, “Vietnam Remembered”…the likes of Dan Rather, Walter Cronkite and many others recalling their critical field reporting in the late 60’s and 70’s…and in the audience many veterans, passionately angry, demanding deeper, more searing criticality. For me, weaned on Apocalypse Now, witnessing this event inspired my passion to be involved in social critique first hand…not to leave aesthetic practice behind but to use it as fuel and mortar to get closer to life and the living.

I cannot forget seeing Michel Foucault at a symposium in LA named after him in 1982, showing up clad in black leather head to toe, and rather than siding with the historian (formalist) panelists, or the literary critics (romantic), each of whom were throwing daggers at the other over their interpretations of the ”real” Foucault, opened a scrapbook and ad libbed fragments of subjective thought, musings, critical essay writings, poetry and such, allowing the overlaps to fall into indeterminate patterns. Indeterminate patterns…the hardest space to keep open during “war”.

Winter 1984, my entrance to the Midwest was met by a demonstration of feminists across downtown Minneapolis, led by Andrea Dworkin and Katherine McKinnon, enraged over Passolini’s marvelous film Salo, itself a provocative critique of the “lust” of Fascism. How could one oppressed group not see the oppression of the other? But this had already become my question to follow, a legacy carried over from my childhood growing up in Tel-Aviv of the 1950’s, surrounded by survivors inhaling each other as their pain occluded one from seeing the other.

In the Midwest, then still a haven of co-op markets and the DFL, multi culturalism and public discourses of difference did get public support in spite of federal Reaganism, but what I grew to understand as support, in hindsight was but tolerance, permission to speak out but not get intimate. I learned that hearing was not enough…that listening is more subtle when it is active rather than passive, that friendship across difference was not that easy, that when I got too close, opportunities shut down. In 1988 I lost my 5-year position at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design for teaching exploratory seminars on corporeality, memory, desire and illusion. One of my classes was titled, “You’re Just a Split Second Away from Finding the Taste You’ve Been Looking For”. I should have just called it sculpture. Peer art faculty would pass me in the halls and whisper to me “going to sex class?” More tolerance (from the oppressed)!

A peak experience was turning on the McNeil Leher News hour one day and witnessing Act Up interrupt the live taping and all of a sudden appear on the air. Fabulous!

By the way Oliver, I think you are onto something in your earlier posting on the fine line between oppression and collusion. I would like to talk more on this. Thrashing an enemy is just too easy.

Judith Barry I think it is impossible to think about the notion of legacy without thinking about the present. While nearly 25 years have passed since the end of the ‘80’s, the social problems/issues that fueled ‘80’s activism are still with us (and in many ways, much worse) and yet this present moment seems unable to ignite a more galvanized form of social engagement capable of uniting people and sustaining the momentum required to effect change. How is it that social organizations (and

activisms) that should have benefited from the remarkable influx of empowering technologies and arguably a more nuanced and sophisticated understanding of how media cultures operate have not seemingly been able to use these advances to their advantage? Meanwhile, the Right has. I hope that in revisiting this period, it will be possible stimulate some discussion about potential strategies for empowerment now. My remembrances of the ‘80s are that despite the numerous and multiple catastrophes of that decade, that there was still a palpable sense that social change was possible.

To the changes in the art world that Maurice outlined in his introduction - multiculturalism, broader definitions of cultural writing – structuralism, feminisms, gay and lesbian studies and so on, I would also add that the ‘80’s opened up the category of art to include questions about its possible relations to/with more mainstream cultures – this included music culture as well as media-based cultures (film + television) and ultimately by the end of the ‘80’s, numerous other disciplines as well. While in many ways the art world has never been able to shed it elitist status, still there were a few moments in the ‘80’s when I could imagine that this opening up might lead to a smarter, more responsive popular culture. Instead, increasingly, the art world has succumbed to a corporate model.

Maurice Berger Welcome Judith and thank you David and Dorit for your insightful posts.

Judith, you write: "To the changes in the art world that Maurice outlined in his introduction multiculturalism, broader definitions of cultural writing – structuralism, feminisms, gay and lesbian studies and so on, I would also add that the ‘80’s opened up the category of art to include questions about its possible relations to/with more mainstream cultures – this included music culture as well as media-based cultures (film + television) and ultimately by the end of the ‘80’s, numerous other disciplines as well."

This relationship worked both ways, as TV also sometimes looked to artists for inspiration. The question of disciplinary boundaries--and how they were broken, expanded, blurred--is central to this conference and will, in fact, be the topic of our next two-day session.

Dorit: I love your appeal to memory and also admire the brave decisions you made, re: melding your work as an artist--learning from it and contributing to it--with the critical and vital social practice of mediation. I suspect that the urgency of the moment propels many of us to think of voice--of how to be heard and how to change the world around us in the tenuous, life-and-death moment we live in. Oddly, I can remember thinking the same way in the heat of the 1980s: faced with the prospect of seemingly unending right-wing rule, I contemplated seriously--and still do-making television: beautiful, skillfully written documentaries that could move and inspire people to think as well as to act.

Dan Cameron Hi everybody -- sorry I'm late.

Returning to Maurice's original question about the social space of the Age of Reagan, I'd like to add to the discussion the lingering sense that I had during the 1980s of culture becoming a kind of refuge.for the disenfranchised, the sensitve, and the passion-driven, in response to the rapid brutalization and desensitization of American society.

Among other things, the 1980s saw the rise of the Walkman, whose legacy has been to take what started as an enhanced way of listening to music, and transforming it into a technology (now we have iPods, cell phones, Blackberries) that, under the guise of keeping you in touch with the world, reduces the user's level of interaction with the real-time/real-space of life in the city.

I don't mention the Walkman to sound off on contemporary urban manners, but to try and connect with Olu's earlier statements about hip-hop and the art world. Especially in the first three years of the 1980s, I was witnessing a fusion taking place between the alternative-space/loft-movement ethos of the 1970s, and the punk/hip-hop/new wave club scene that was in full throtte by 1980.

Patti Astor getting down with Crazy Legs was the image that launched the movie Wild Style, which in turn launched the art world's brief love affair with graffiti, which led to FUN Gallery opening, which sparked the East Village. Even I knew that the Diego Cortez of Ramones/Mudd Club fame was the same Diego Cortez who put together the watershed New York New Wave exhibition at PS 1, and it was taken for granted that whatever else you did, you also had a band (I sure did).

This same volatile mix of art-world-meets-club-scene informed the early years of ABC No Rio as much as it did Club 57 and Charas/El Bohio north of Houston Street, which were followed by the Pyramid Lounge, Kamikazee, Limbo Lounge, 8 BC, Area, Palladium and a number of other spaces where art and nightlifecound not be pried apart.

Without exceptions, these were social spaces that the art world per se was lacking, and which artists and other boho types flocked to as a way of keeping their sensibilities fertizilied. I've often thought that a great deal of 1990s installation art seemed to be about recreating the milieu that artists lived within quite naturally during the 1980s, before the stock crash in '87 blew the tires out of that particular overheated market...

Jonathan Weinberg I am looking forward to a spirited debate about the East Village, until then, one thing I hope we can discuss in terms of Reagan and the period, was the tendency of certain critics trained in modernist critical practices to equate figurative tendencies in art with right wing politics. As a figurative painter working at that time, I found such wholesale equations of supposed formal conservatism with political conservatism troubling--even naive. Hal Foster at the time, for example dismissed certain neo-expressionist and realist modes as one with the rise of Reaganomics, however when Anna Chave equated qualities of minimalist sculpture of the 60s with the Vietnam war etc. this was denounced as reductive by the October circle. I raise this issue not to open up an argument about the merits of neo-expressionism etc. but to ask the conference participants to think with complexity and subtlety about the connections between art and politics.

Barbara Buhler Lynes In the Village Voice in 1981, Schjeldhal stated: “More is happening in American art right now than ever before. There is more of everything and everybody, including the critics.” And, in spite of Reaganomics – set on dismantling public support for the arts - and the increasingly horrifying statistics of AIDs - numerous and dramatically divergent voices increasingly emerged in the next ten years to express new, different, and imaginative points of view, approaches and positions, many of which have been mentioned or explored here.

But, by the end of the decade this plurality carried with it a certain cacophony soon co-opted by organizations such as the American Family Association, whose outrage in 1989 over NEA funding for an Andrea Serrano exhibition, which included Piss Christ, provided new ammunition for Senators, such as Armey, Helms and d’Amato in their on-going drive to fulfill the vision of Reaganomics – to abolish all government funding for the arts. The called attention, in particular, to what Armey called “the morally reprehensible trash” in the work of Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe. Within moments, it seemed, a leading component of the art establishment suddenly lost its footing to fuel the mechanics of repression: the Corcoran Gallery announced only later to apologize for its June 1989 decision to cancel the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition, “The Perfect Moment,” so as to not “adversely affect” the NEA’s congressional appropriations, and the show was immediately picked up by the Washington Arts Project, where attendance surged to 4,000 the first weekend.

In seeing the show then, and thinking about it now, I’m also reflecting on various responses to an exhibition of Mapplethorpe’s work I saw in Florence in 1984, in an elegant, stone palazzo dating from the sixteenth century, when I was leading a ten-week foreign study program sponsored by the college with which I was then affiliated. Course work involved acquainting sixteen students all between the ages of 18 and 22 – with the history of Italian Renaissance art by meeting every morning in one or more of the city’s outside and interior spaces – to discuss the city’s many, extraordinary exemplars of Renaissance art, a city in which images of nude bodies abound in both painting and sculpture– of Christ (often in the nude as a child in the arms of the Virgin) or and male and female nude bodies of biblical figures or those from Greek legends or history coexist in a seemingly easy harmony – depicting David, Bacchus, Hercules, Isaac, Menelaus, Neptune, Perseus, Venus, centaurs, angels, cupids, and prophets and saints by, among others, the sculptors Bandenelli, Cellini, Donatello, Giambologna, Michelangelo, Vincenzo di Rossi.

From the more diminutive, elegant, and decidedly provocative Donatello David in the city’s National Museum, to the life-size and larger-than-life sculptures in either white marble or bronze, the students confronted nude bodies on a daily basis - in the Uffizi, the Accademia, the Bargello, the Palazzo Publico, to name only a few, as well as in the city’s most public plaza, the Piazza della Signoria, and its adjacent Loggia della Signoria, through which thousands of Florentines pass on foot every day on their to and from wherever. Such imagery was an unspoken and completed accepted part of a civic consciousness, which was in fact in many ways global in a sense that millions of tourists from all over the world stream in and out of the city annually, never voicing any complaints.

Indeed, the Mapplethorpe show caused no more of a public stir in that city in 1984 than other exhibitions of his work that had taken place since the 1970s both in America and Europe – in New York, Los Angeles, Norfolk, Amsterdam, Paris, Berlin, Cologne, and Munich, to name only a few, although some of the earliest exhibitions were less provocative than those of the mid-to late 80s simply as a factor of the development of Mapplethorpe’s imagery and its increasingly provocativeness.

What better place than Florence to view the chisel-like, sculptural forms of Mapplethorpe highly classicized imagery – heads, torsos, legs, feet, sexual organs – juxtapositions and explorations of blacks and whites both in terms of medium and content that strangely paralleled the dark bronze and white marble sculptures the students had stood in awe of and openly admired throughout the ongoing weeks of the program.

We visited the exhibition as a group, and within minutes, I sensed division, which became increasingly palpable, as the women moved easily through the fairly confined spaces of the exhibition, confronting the large-format photographs without flutter or ado – perhaps because of the fact that the display of female bodies was so second nature to them – certainly the art history they knew then had been written in part across the nude bodies of women. In fact, as later discussions revealed, the women were fascinated by these overt, close-up depictions of male sexual anatomy, of homosexual identity, or eroticism and homoeroticism, which was startlingly new to them, in spite of their daily encounter the nude bodies of Florentine Renaissance art.

The men, however, were deeply troubled, averting their eyes from the most explicit images, and expressing embarrassment, especially, in response to seeing them in the company of women.

Although they didn’t use the exact words of those whose spoke out against the NEA in 1989 by calling these images “morally reprehensible trash” – their outrage was palpable, and they carried on loudly about them as pornography in the guise of than art, and to their having no place in an art exhibition.

The photographs had put these young men, in particular, I later realized in touch with their deepest fears, not only in terms of their own sexual identity, but with issues of homophobia, race, and death implicit in what they saw, and especially “the innate fear of death” that Maurice

mentioned earlier. The experience was prophetic of similar fears that underlie the actions and words of the white male advocates intent on eliminating the NEA in the 1980s, and especially of those of later decades espousing radical Christian fundamentalism in their exploitation of such fears “under the cover of fighting for the moral health of some mythical American family,” to quote David.

Karen Mary Davalos Posting late, so my dialogue is starting with Maurice's question about Culture Wars and its continued implications. Sorry if I do not engage a comment here or there by other panelists. I promise to return with other threads.

The culture wars have taken an expected development in the new millennium. The new battle is about the construction and learning of knowledge, what gets referred to as knowledge and what the Right masquerades as knowledge. It is not a question of quality, which guided some of the discourse in the culture wars: Socrates is better and ours, not the Popo Vuh, the Maya book of creation. In general, knowledge no longer has integrity or honesty, and I am not talking just about lies, as an earlier post correctly identified as standard practice in the current administration.

Fabrication functions all the most basic level. I offer four examples.

First, Section 215 of the Patriot Act that allows (allowed?) the FBI to conduct secret searches of business records, including libraries and bookstores, without probable cause. By compromising our freedom to learn, to acquire knowledge, the Patriot Act functions to not just limit knowledge but determine what is knowable. And I am not referring to epistemological processes. Our world and our connection to it shrinks when we no longer have the freedom to learn.

Second, in fall 2004 the Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) of the Department of the Treasury issued a new directive that requires publishers and authors to seek license from the government to perform routine activities, such as editing and marketing, in order to publish in the US foreign literature from embargoed countries, such as Iran, Cuba, and Sudan. In September 2004 a legal suit was brought against the OFAC and the plaintiffs included PEN America Center and the American Association of University Presses. I became aware of this new directive because I co-Edit Chicana/Latina Studies, an academic journal that published scholarly articles, creative writing, and commentary about the populations produced and dispersed as a result of Spanish colonization. As an academic journal of the Americas, we had planned to publish work, including visual art, by Cuban and other authors, but as a small press of a professional organization, Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social, that is still rasquache* [*making-do with what is at hand. Mea culpa for the definition, but practioners refuse to define this term and celebrate its ambiguity and flexibility], somewhat by choice, we could not move in that direction.

The classic example of the ramifications of this directive is more frightening. It goes like this: If a natural scientist in Cuba writes about bird migration in the Gulf and if a journal wanted to publish this work in the United States because it would help environmentalists chart policy, design habitats, or develop other research on bird migration, the press of the journal would be required to get a license in order to solicit, revise in any way, announce in any way, and circulate the article. In this case, knowledge is actually no longer valued as knowledge. It becomes regulated interaction and communication. The right to gather knowledge has been limited.

The ironic and chilling example, one that readers know, is the case of Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian human rights activist who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003. The OFAC rule prohibits the publication of her work. As an activist who has been jailed and clearly is a dissenting voice that has been censored in her own country, it is ironic that the OFAC would also create the same result –censorship—in the land of free speech. Readers in the United States will not have access to her work under the OFAC rule. For national security, knowledge is withheld and its for our own good.

And since I recently saw the indy movie, Good Night and Good Luck, I would suggest that we have entered a McCarthy-like era, but historical analysis would prove that we are in a much more drastic state.

The third example is speculative but it registers a new way of strategizing against knowledge. I say speculative because I could not trace the facts for this story. I have heard from university presses and administrators that the Right is developing a campaign in which state tuition is limited to expenses directly related to teaching and excluding research activities. In other words, if my memory is not a fantasy, the Right is planning to disconnect teaching and research, which would fundamentally change the way we conceptualize knowledge. The pitch or spin for parents is this: tuition should be spent on your child’s classroom encounters not that irrelevant stuff that faculty do outside of the classroom. Since we are talking about the 1980s I make the association with the Reagan administration’s bloody hands, to quote ACT UP, since it would not fund AIDS research. We might anticipate, again if my memory is accurate and I hope a reader chimes to correct any errors, that state tuition will eventually be funneled away from programs, departments, and academic units that do not support the Right’s vision of knowledge.

The fourth example is real and it is connected to the third. David Horowitz has crafted the Academic Bill of Rights and is pushing it in Ohio. First, we must acknowledge the Orwellian double-speak that has become common since the 1980s and the culture wars, the attack on affirmative action, and the destruction of welfare. The appropriation of civil rights discourse is part of the lie, effective marketing, and new notion of knowledge. This so-called bill of rights will limit what teachers discuss in the classroom and it requires universities to maintain political pluralism and diversity. In other words, faculty are no longer hired because of their knowledge but for their political perspective. Yes, we can guess as many have that Horowitz is responding to the survey that found that Democrats outnumber Republicans in faculty positions (hurrah for cultural anthropologists, we have the largest number of progressive Demos compared to other departments). But to allow the Red vs Blue dichotomy to frame this debate would miss its intensely destructive implications for what is called knowledge and how we consider knowledge and its role in the university. If the culture wars did anything, it strengthened the myth of neutrality and objectivity in a way that moved us away from quality. It created a path for undercutting critical thought, analysis, research, and problem-solving—the basic building blocks of knowledge.

More later:) Ondine Chavoya Hello to all and thank you for this lively and necessary dialogue. I have been reading the responses with great interest and enthusiasm from Los Angeles en route back to Santa Fe. Thanks especially to Jack Waters for bringing attention to the conservative strategies to “divide and conquer” that set the stage for and fostered what came to be known as the Culture Wars. It seems clear to me at least that what played out as the Culture Wars at the national level in the 1980s had its precedent with the earlier weakening of state funding agencies and the abolishment of CETA (Comprehensive Employment and Training Act).

By 1979 the California Arts Council budget was slashed in half and California ranked 49th in state per capita funding for the arts. Without question, the passage of the California ballot initiative Proposition 13 (which capped property taxes in the state) in 1978, had a huge impact in these drastic cuts, fueled the conservative movement of the 1980s forward, and catalyzed the so-called “taxpayer revolt” that contributed to the election of former California Governor Ronald Reagan to the presidency. But the weakening of the California Arts Council was also accomplished by manufacturing conflicts between established arts organizations (at the time, identified as the symphony, opera, and ballet, and large public museums) with grassroots arts organizations and culturally-specific alternative art spaces. If during the 1980s the ostensible subjects of contention in the Culture Wars were related to religious iconography, gender, and sexuality - as witnessed with the NEA Four and the Robert Mapplethorpe Perfect Moment exhibition controversies, in

California at the close of the 1970s it was a fear of “ethnic gangsterism.” This was one of the conservative fighting terms that circulated in the California press and among elected officials to manufacture division and animosity between the “deserving” arts organizations and artist-run spaces such as the Centro de Artistas Chicanos and the Royal Chicano Airforce (both in Sacramento) and Galería de la Raza in San Francisco. By the late 1970s conservative legislators and journalists were calling for the complete abolishment of the CAC, and hostility towards and scrutiny of state funding for the arts was galvanized by this supposed form of institutionalized and government-supported “ethnic gangsterism” (viz., culturally-specific and/or community-oriented arts organizations. As Waters identifies in his commentary such strategies functioned to silence organizations that were critical in their content and programming while simultaneously lambasting the funding sources that supported them.

As many of you will recall, CETA was a federal program designed to provide employment opportunities and training to economically disadvantaged individuals. CETA provided block grants to local and state governments to support private and public job training programs. Within the context of arts organizations, CETA essentially awarded government contracts to arts organizations to employ artists, offer additional training to artists, and often involved developing further community-oriented training programs in the arts. By 1978, CETA was funding 6,500 artists across the country with 451 in the Los Angeles area alone. The legacy of CETA is still palpable - although largely unacknowledged - among the surviving institutions that were able to reorganize following the suspension of CETA funding in 1982. For example, one of Southern California’s most influential cultural institutions throughout the 1980s, LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) was founded as a CETA program when a group of ten artists comprised of local Chicano artists and Otis Art Institute graduates - were hired to teach mural painting to high school students in El Monte in 1976; LACE incorporated as a non-profit in 1979 shortly after moving to downtown LA. LACE was the first downtown artist organization committed to local, emergent, and experimental artforms and dedicated (in its early days) to multiculturalism – an institutional mission directly related to the CETA programs that started it. It was also one of the very few institutions in Southern California dedicated to all media including performance, film, video, dance, sound, and spoken word. In the course of LACE’s multiple expansions in the 1980s and its growing national and international profile for cutting edge work, the institution metamorphosed from a grass roots alternative space to a steeping stone into the “mainstream” art world. By 1988 its trailblazing support for Chicano art in particular had waned dramatically and then director Joy Silverman admitted with regret that the original goals and commitments of the institution had not been met and that women and artists of color had been and continued to be “short changed.”

Max Becher I experienced the 80's as a very primal shift that permeated everything, including, as I mentioned in my first post, the art world in very disappointing ways. I will totally oversimpify for the sake of brevity: convex shifted to concave, bell bottoms to shoulder pads, lean to muscle, sensitive to type-A-personality, intellectual conceptual to meaty expressionist or slick consumerist, modest to ostentatious, nuanced to binary, inclusive to excluse, small cars to big cars, environmental to domestic, community to "family", egalitarian to hierarchical, Carter's casual white house dress code to Reagan's tuxedos and limos, internationalist to patrotic, pluralist to corporatist (one of fascism's official definitions).

Of course it is a meaningless coincidence that two of the major figures bringing 30's Europe to fascism were Austrian (Hitler) and Italian (Mussolini), and in the 80's two (in my opinion) key cultural figures bringing America closer to fascism were also: Schwarzenegger and Stallone. It was the return of Schläger Chic (Schläger = German for ruffian).

It felt as if society had been on a moral health kick in the seventies and Reagan gave everyone permission to binge on personal and national selfishness. The leader that shouts 'let's pillage' is rarely criticized because the followers are immediately complicit.

But I'm still unresolved on these questions: to what extent did he "follow from the front" like most

mediocre leaders, i.e. give society what it secretly yearned for. Was this anti-intellectual push strategic, or was it just a part of the conservative cultural package?

Maurice Berger Welcome, Ondine & thank you all for your incredibly insightful and erudite texts.

Jonathan, you write: "one thing I hope we can discuss in terms of Reagan and the period, was the tendency of certain critics trained in modernist critical practices to equate figurative tendencies in art with right wing politics. . . . I raise this issue not to open up an argument about the merits of neo-expressionism etc. but to ask the conference participants to think with complexity and subtlety about the connections between art and politics."

Two things: [1] I think we need more from you on this subject. We would all benefit from a fuller explanation of how this connection was made in the 1980s. [2] I don't believe anyone in the conference has actually made an analogy between painterly figuration and neoconservativism.

So I'm a bit unclear, re: the second sentence I quote from your post. Do you think members of the conference are taking an unnuanced approach to the subject of art & politics?

I would very much appreciate hearing more from you on this.

Alexander Alberro Jonathan, do you mean the return of figurative tendencies in art in a manner that wished what were arguably the most ambitious developments of twentieth century art away--or that tried to pretend they hadn't happened at all? I too am confused about the point you're trying to make.

Irving Sandler From my vantage point, the 1980s was a great time for what artists created in their studios, despite the fact that it was the age of Reagan with its burgeoning art market. The 1980s saw a renewal of painting and the emergence of photo-based art. Newly emerged art theoreticians claimed that painting was dead. The idea that one artistic medium was more relevant than another struck me as ridiculous. I personally did not feel I had to choose. I found the claim that painting was dead unbelievable at a time when painting seemed more alive and kicking than ever. Off the top of my head, for openers, among the newcomers there was Schnabel, Salle, Fischl, Murray, Rothenberg, Scully, Applebroog, Morley, Colescott, etc. etc. Then there was the Italian Transavantgardia and the German Neo-Expressionists. And sculptors Serra, Graves, Shapiro, Rydingsvard, Puryear, And older painters Golub, Spero, Ryman. Also Nauman, Acconci, Burden, Paik, Pfaff, the Christos, Irwin, Turrell, Lucier, Boltansky, Kabakov, Hammons. And later, Basquiat, Koons, Kelly, Taffe. But I admired much of photo-based art, for example, that of Sherman, Haacke, Holzer, Levine, Kruger, and Coplans.

Looking back still makes my head spin.

How did the age of Reagan affect these artists? A number made political art in opposition to reactionary politics. Others confronted the AIDS crisis. We showed several in the Witnesses show at Artists Space. Many more were apolitical, at least on the surface. What does that say about their art? I would like to second Jonathan Weinberg’s request that we "think with complexity."

Karen Mary Davalos In response to Jack Waters observation: “This covert tactic, a way of silencing organizations whose program content was critical of

government policy and the conservative constituency it represented predated the time when overt ideological arguments would be successful to support the withdraw of support. Because the beginning of the erosion of public support for the arts affected only small minority organizations, based on the intangible basis of aesthetic opinion, the country’s more established arts organizations would not make a gesture of solidarity. Only when these organization’s budgets were affected was there a concerted effort to mobilize and by which time it may be too late.”

Jack is articulating what I am trying to communicate in my earlier post for this second session.

The battle in Ohio, the new directives of the OFAC, or the proposals to limit state tuition revenue to teaching are a new development in this conservative “divide and conquer” strategy. Ondine Chavoya suggests that the legacy is much longer, and I would agree with him. My framing of the issue as an attack on knowledge is one strategy to get our so-called liberal university colleagues to see that this is also about all of us. It is not just a matter for those ethnic/race-acknowledged* departments and programs, gender and feminist studies, or queer theorists. [* allow me to offer a more accurate term for institutions like the Mexican Museum in San Francisco, or those mentioned by Ondine, such as the Royal Chicano Air Force. The only difference between the Met and these institutions, as Michelle Wallace, Carol Duncan, and others have pointed out, is that race is named and identified. Nearly all institutions that present art are “ethnic-specific” some just acknowledge that race, and others call it “universal”].

Of course, I am also thinking of the positions that challenge the nation-state or offer criticism of domestic or foreign policy. In the post-9/11 era, the critics of the occupation of Iraq have been viciously attacked, such as Ward Churchill and Nicolas De Genova, both of whom received real death threats and went into a period of police protection/hiding. The mobilizing Right has also systematically attacked student groups such as Moviemento Estudiantil Chicana/o de Aztlan, or MEChA, and politicians who had an affiliation with them (Cruz Bustamonte in California was vilified during his run for governor). MEChA has been portrayed as “racist,” violent, and seditious.

It is actually a student group devoted to improving the number of Mexican-origin youth who get a college diploma and it designs programs to encourage others to apply and get admitted to colleges.

Even art for art’s sake—a position that I do not support—will not survive the new attack on knowledge because the value of knowing has been undercut. Knowledge for the sake of knowledge has little meaning in the call for national security in the post-9/11 era.

So even if the university, museum, or arts organizations believe that “those people” [AKA the queer, the racialized, the womyn, the disabled, etc.] are making waves, pressuring for new programs that would take away dollars from the “core” of the institution and are therefore, separate and distinct; the new attack on knowledge requires solidarity, as Jack points out.

It might be convenient now to stand back, as one panelist admitted to have done in the earlier period, and think that this battle is not for us/you, but we would only harm our chances of stopping this new affront to knowledge and liberty.

Wow! That sounded polemical. I surprise myself.

Maurice Berger Karen, you write: "In the post-9/11 era, the critics of the occupation of Iraq have been viciously attacked, such as Ward Churchill and Nicolas De Genova, both of whom received real death threats and went into a period of police protection/hiding."

The insidious of this kind of attack touches more than just famous anti-war types. Just as the United was about to go to war in Iraq, I was having an argument with my dentist, a kind and talented person of whom I am very fond. "You don't believe, do you, that there are no weapons of

mass destruction?" I heard this line not as a question but more as an accusation: "you would not be so foolishly radical, so unpatriotic in this frightening time, to imply that Saddam wasn't swimming in nuclear devices and slithering germs meant to murder and terrorize innocent American men, women, and children" Maybe I was being a bit too sensitive, but this is what I read between the lines of her words. I heard the same logic on TV, in the tortured rhetoric of sloppy and incurious journalists and politicians fearful that their constituents would think they're soft on terrorism.

My reply to my dentist: "I have no idea, really. Why are you so sure?"

Her expression was at once upsetting and sobering; a sadness touched by cognitive dissonance, fear, and even anger at my honesty (and, perhaps, at what she perceived was my foolishness).

Catherine Lord Thanks for the observations that the evaporation of CETA and the dismantling of NEA critics’ grants were early steps toward making the mess we now find ourselves in, where art and culture are the third rail, as David put it, and where, as Maurice reminded us, it’s not safe for presidential candidates to speak about art. I think Karen is spot on about the shift in terms from state restriction of cultural production due, supposedly, to “quality,” to restrictions on the production and circulation of knowledge due, supposedly, to security. To me, the issues we face involve reframing what we’re doing to envision ourselves within systems of information technology enabled and manipulated by capital. Academia has already been sold, cheap. The biennialization of the planet is about a global relay of art-as-commodity. Gosh, that sounds like latter day Marxist crap, but I think we’re speaking, or rather typing, inside the belly of the beast. Empire has already swallowed us whole. Backing up a bit, even, say, to the 1950s, the discourse supporting the production of objects (performances, texts, etc.) has been framed along either human rights lines (the “right” to creativity, to the memory of one’s own group, to the pains and pleasures of invention, to unfettered free speech) or a kind of pragmatic capitalism (artists are brats but if tolerated, quirks and all, as long term investments, some will make a lot of profit and others will make some). Is there a way to understand the limits of a discourse of “rights” while reframing such a discourse, reworking our understandings of bodies and citizenships and information, in order to move forward in an era where nation states are superseded by global empire?

To reiterate what Ondine and Karen have been saying, we’re using the 80s to understand where it all began to unravel, but I can’t credit Reagan with being the beginning of the end. He was a cipher. America has always been at war with culture—and this makes periodization more risky than usual. To remain within our memories of the 1980s is to distract ourselves from the length of the war. I read remarks about what lay outside of “culture” in the United States of America in the 1980s as a way to expand a rare intergenerational conversations. I’m hoping that on top of every other impossibility we’re chasing we might productively theorize the ways that remembering, or excavating, or inventing, any one thing means forgetting, or burying, or erasing, other things.

AIDS, for example. Let me add to yesterday’s lists Ray Navarro, Essex Hemphill, Vito Russo, Mark Niblock, Tony Green, Stuart Marshall, and Felix Gonzalez Torres. (Felix stuck it out until the middle of the 90s but I wake some mornings with a devastation where Felix and his politics used to be and after all we don’t believe in decades plus the guy fought it for a long time.) But let us honor those who didn’t make it out of other epidemics: Audre Lorde, Charlotte Moorman, Kathy Acker, Susan Sontag, Margaret Kilgallen, Hollis Sigler, Christyne Tamblyn, and Hannah Wilke.

And let the inner historian in each of us remember that the women’s health movement of the 1970s developed the chutzpah and the tactics that were immensely useful, but not widely credited, in the AIDS activism of the 1980s and 1990s. (David Wojnarowicz wanted his corpse tossed on the White House lawn. I fantasize tossing a titless dead woman after him.)

Olu Oguibe

My immediate, personal experience of the Reagan epoch was in the realm of its global manifestation, and the most poignant moment in that experience, perhaps, was after Mr. Reagan ordered the bombing of not only Tripoli but Mu’amar Khaddafi's desert hide-away, also, in which Khaddafi's adopted daughter was killed. Back where I was at the time as a student leader in Nigeria, to say that the mood that this act generated was one of outrage is to acknowledge the frustrating limitations of language. We were quite familiar with narratives of leaders sending their children into battle and losing them, but we were certainly not prepared for the idea of the leader of an independent nation having his little, four-year old adopted daughter killed at home in an undeclared war. In the larger scheme of great world events it was probably no more than an inconsequential incident that hardly merited mention in the press, but that act woke us up and reminded us that we had come of age in a new world where the rules were different than anything we'd read or heard and we had better get ready to contend with that new world. Ours would be a ruthless era, it seemed to say, where the civilized pretenses of the past would give way to rabid savagery and the mighty would have no qualms ramming every morsel of its power down the throat of the weak. Perhaps that was always the way of the world, but we didn't know it yet. The death of a little, adopted girl in the desert sands brought things home to us.

The triumphal march of philistinism that sparked the culture wars in America was not unrelated to that return of the Theodore Roosevelt ethos in American foreign policy which marked the Reagan years. And the irony of it, especially with regard to the cultural sphere, was as I indicated in an earlier post most conspicuously embed in Reagan’s own personality. Here was a former Democrat who would come to symbolize the triumph of Republican conservative fundamentalism, a Wild West genre actor who would rest his dispensation on the bedrock of Christian family values, a double-speak genius who would pride himself on promoting Democracy abroad but dedicate himself to repressing it at home, a people’s man under whom the people took their fiercest beating in a generation, a culture man whose base seemed to suggest that sticking it to culture was The American Way. The assault of the neo-Philistines under Reagan was not limited to so-called high culture and the white-washed halls of blue-chip galleries; it extended to popular culture, also. Provocateur artists were challenged, but so vigorously also was the fledgling revivalist edge in rap which came out of Texas and the West Coast. The trend of assault that would culminate in the denouncement of gangsta rap on the floor of the US Congress in the early ‘90s began under the rule of a former gun-wielding, Wild West screen hero. And all that was done in the name of—you guessed it—a higher culture, the culture of Decency. The way to restore this mythical culture of Decency, it seems, was to destroy culture itself.

That said, it ought to be noted that one process that was not encouraged in the visual art world following this face-off between culture and the culture of Decency, one that ironically did in fact take place in rap, Hip-hop, and the world of black popular culture, was the process of a genuine self-reflectivity. While rappers and their communities reeled back to ask themselves whether the genre of Macabre Fiction that they were exploring in rap was getting across as intended or instead misleading the larger public to mistake gory fiction for philosophy, most people in the art world bristled instead as indeed they continue to, to this day. In the wake of extremist conservative attack, the Hip-hop community turned in and asked itself: does violent imagery and language, no matter its sources in American culture and the American psyche, truly represent the generation’s understanding of its mission? Does macabre juvenile fiction underpin Hip-hop’s highest goals and its place in history and society? Is the espousal of male chauvinism synonymous with Keeping it Real? Is there, perhaps another way? Out of this exercise in selfreflection, several different streams of practice gained validity in rap and Hip-hop that did not follow in the footsteps of gangsta machismo.

The visual art world, however, spared itself this kind of indulgence, at least to the very best of my knowledge. Instead, the vocal minority in that world, just like the vocal minority on the Right, made it palpably uncool to question the ‘Divine’ right to liberty and artistic license. Seldom was it permitted to ask; Who are we speaking to when we make art, who are we making the art for, what

is it we are trying to say with some of the art that provoked conservative assault and how effectively or not do we manage to get those points across, how well were those points being understood? No one seriously asked: When we step out of the protected territory of the artist’s studio and step into the world, what are the ramifications and what must we expect? When we enter the realm of public patronage, what can we insist on and what can we expect to get away with? When we accept municipal and state funding, does that make us perhaps accountable to much more than the sacred muse of individual genius? When clamber up the high-ground of artistic license, on what parameters do we do so and within what perimeters? In the course of the culture wars and their aftermath, the visual art community shied away from one crucial issue, the issue of Responsibility.

And, because many pertinent questions were drowned in the deluge of art world outrage and selfpity, many equally pertinent lessons were not learned. Instead, it seemed that the only lesson learned, at least certainly by artists, was that controversy pays. Because the pertinent lessons were apparently not learned, the art world continues to be harassed and terrorized at will not by the majority of society, but by the vocal minority of conservative fundamentalism. Hence, the repeat scenario of the Brooklyn Museum vs. Mayor Giuliani and the City of New York at the turn of the century, on which occasion the response of the visual art community was anything if not predictable: the chorus repeating the age-old line, “Damn Censorship!” Hardly anyone asked: how do we get across to the silent majority to whom the rabid Right always appeals when it mounts its assaults on cultural expression, and get that majority used to the idea that we are all tax-payers, after all, and have equal rights to the cultural largess of public funds? No one broached the notion that perhaps it is time to engage in a deeper, wider, more serious discussion on the nature and politics of individual cultural expression and representation especially in the public space. And of course, no one was allowed to acknowledge that all dissent has a right to representation, including the protests of the real and supposed philistine minority, that in the case of Mr. Ofili’s use of animal dung to represent a major Christian icon, believers in that Faith had a right to hurt, shock, and outrage; in other words, that outrage is not the exclusive right of the allknowing, supposedly more cultured, art community. The universal cry of “Damn Censorship!” occluded, as it continues to, the fact that the gains of other critical struggles are being gradually and incrementally eroded every day by artists under the guise of free individual expression, which for instance is why, again in the case of Mr. Ofili’s controversial work, no one paid heed to the fact the use of animal dung to represent a woman’s breasts may indicate a little more than artistic license and freedom of expression, that indeed, it may also serve as a fine example of the return of male license to the image and representation of the female in art.

When the visual art world replicates the intolerant myopia of the philistine, fundamentalist minority as it did during the culture wars by getting caught in the motions of the moment and fighting shy of broad and deep self-reflection, it not only leaves itself open to attack without devising a strategy of effective response, it also allows related and no less important questions to go under the sludge. When we fail to take advantage of certain moments in history to redefine the liberties that we call on society to uphold, we lose sense of the meaning of those liberties and why they matter, why it is important to defend and uphold them. In my thinking, the Era of Reagan and the immediate aftermath was one such lost moment.

We may not need to justify our liberties to anyone, but surely, in order to defend and protect them effectively, we must certainly justify them to ourselves. Then we can go out enamored to fight for them, to strategize for them. And if there is another lesson that still ought to be learned from the Reagan years, the culture wars, and the aftermath, it is that freedom is a Sisyphean boulder; we must lean our shoulders to it at all times and never relent or take it for granted, else it rolls most certainly all the way down to the bottom of the hill from whence it is much more difficult to retrieve.

Elizabeth Alexander In light of all that has been said about the Reagan era, I am sure I was not alone in watching

astonished (but why be astonished?) at the rehabiliatating television coverage of Reagan when he died. His actual policies, Iran-contra, racism, etcetera etecetera, were supplanted by, in the end, his alleged "niceness:" a nice man, a civil man, a spectral Cheshire cat smile that blotted out actual history.

Maurice Berger Olu, you write: "That said, it ought to be noted that one process that was not encouraged in the visual art world following this face-off between culture and the culture of Decency, one that ironically did in fact take place in rap, Hip-hop, and the world of black popular culture, was the process of a genuine self-reflectivity. While rappers and their communities reeled back to ask themselves whether the genre of Macabre Fiction that they were exploring in rap was getting across as intended or instead misleading the larger public to mistake gory fiction for philosophy, most people in the art world bristled instead as indeed they continue to, to this day."

In this sense, the world of visual art is little different from the world of whiteness: honest selfinquiry is rarely ever a part of the white man's discussion or understanding of race. It is this lack of self-awareness that makes racism so intractable.

Self-awareness and self-inquiry--second nature to people of diaspora, to those whose very survival depends on understanding one's place in and relationship to the world--does not come naturally to ANY dominant culture.

In this regard, it was ONLY Kanye who spoke out on NBC's telethon for the survivors of hurricane Katrina: as a plethora of entertainers keep their mouths shut, he spoke the truth about Bush and the racial hatred that infests and permeates his base.

Lorraine O’Grady Another day of not knowing quite what to say. I'm really feeling out of synch here. I just did a page-search of the posts to date and couldn't find Richard Nixon's name anywhere. Tricky Dick is the reason I can't see Reagan as a beginning, only as a culmination.

I loved Catherine's remark: "Išm hoping that on top of every other impossibility wešre chasing we might productively theorize the ways that remembering, or excavating, or inventing, any one thing means forgetting, or burying, or erasing, other things."

But before I get to theory (and I might never get to it), I have to begin with the anecdotal. My art resume starts in 1980, but my full CV stretches back to the late 50s, to my first job after graduation---as a low-level research economist at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. When I was leaving, my professors said: "You're lucky, Lorraine. the BLS is one of the best-regarded institutions in government!" For those who may not know, the BLS collects the data on which almost every economic decision of the government, including the COLA, is based. It's as politicsfree as government ever gets. And it was as boring as it sounds. One of my office mates would end every paragraph with an undigested quote from Nietszche, while another was a "Baconian" and spent his spare time trying to convince us that Bacon had written all of Shakespeare. We would argue for hours over the meaning of figures to the third decimal point---to get it right, to defend ourselves to the Assistant Commissioner. I couldn't wait to get out of there.

Fast-forward a decade, to 1971. A hangover from the 60s, I am deep into my rock-and-roll life when the phone rings. A voice from the mist, but I know it's Nietszche. "Turn on the TV! You won't believe this!" When the image comes up on the black and white TV, I squint. He's older, but eventually I recognize Mr. Invisible. Mr. Incorruptible. Back on the phone, I ask why the Assistant Commissioner is having a press conference. Nietzsche is unexpectedly subdued. "These people

stop at nothing. They told him to lie, to change his interpretation of the unemployment figure. He's refused." A few months later, the AC was gone, and the world had turned permanently for those who believed the employment stats were too sacred to mess with.

Luckily, Tricky Dick had five-o'clock shadow. That made him arouse suspicion. But it was aweinspiring to watch Reagan lie on TV, his makeup was perfect. The show he put on was so good even the "spin control" Alexander Alberro referred to seemed superfluous. I certainly agree with Maurice that Reagan's was "the greatest, ongoing performance piece of the past fifty years." But the script was not a revolution.

Maurice Berger Lorraine, you write: "Tricky Dick is the reason I can't possibly see Reagan as a beginning, only as a culmination."

This is very true. Ironic, too, that Nixon learned from another master at media manipulation: Jack Kennedy. Important, too, to realize that Nixon was the first politician to use television EFFECTIVELY as part of a wide-scale effort to move the American public: remember the infamous, "Checkers Speech." (Technically, Eisenhower was the first US president to hold a televised news conference.)

Thank you for the provocative post.

Judith Barry The notion that Maurice mentions in his opening remarks to this session ”… so much about society eventually came to be reflected in the culture.” reminds me of something that Herman Melville remarked upon after the failure of his book PIERRE, OR THE AMBIGUITIES. He said that an artist can only be as good as the culture in which he lives…. While I don’t subscribe to this point of view, I do think that art, however it is defined, --- and the definition of what is art (or not) was one of the many ways in which art and politics became increasingly intertwined during the ‘80’s --- can not escape the social conditions under which it was produced.

These conditions often provide a palimpsest which imbue the work with a repressed power. A fairly clear example might be the gender relations expressed in Jugenstil painting, for instance, Gustav Klint’s ‘The Kiss’, the way the body disappears under the weight of the decoration; and how this dissolution of the body is echoed in the architecture of that period, Art Nouveau, which (I have argued elsewhere) owes a stylistic (at the very least) debt to the more than 2000 artifacts collected in the late 1880’s from Leopold II’s minions from what was soon to become the Belgian Congo.

Additionally, the way art and politics were related in the ‘80’s had to do with the contested nature of various types of subject matters --- in which discourses should they be located, exhumed or interrogated? Of course, this also betrays where I was in my own thinking about the questions of subject matter or content in relation to art.

When I think of the Reagan Years in relation to the Culture Wars of the ‘80’s, I am reminded of Michael Rogin’s book RONALD REAGAN, THE MOVIE-– which was a proto-cultural studies mapping of Reagan, the actor-president, in relation to subversive tendencies in US politics. For me this figure of Reagan underscored how the anxiety surrounding the legitimacy of the image effected the problematic question of ‘truths’ as they were understood through the over – valuation of the image. We certainly had all the tools at our disposal to ‘read’ and ‘deconstruct’ the images of Reagan, the man, the politician, the actor, but not the foresight to realize where this would lead…..straight to spin. Obviously, I think they lead elsewhere, too, however as textual analysis is potentially endless, so is spin…

The efficacy of images, their ability to say something, to be controlled as to what they say and

might say, the impetus behind the desire to make images at all --- these were (and are) important questions that I think many artists were actively addressing in the ‘80’s and ‘90’s. And while I recall that this also sometimes accompanied censorship, self and otherwise, as well as a kind of ersatz political correctness, none-the-less image production and reception were understood to be fundamentally analytical processes. Today, this approach is not so much in evidence despite the fact that ‘reading’ the image has become part of mainstream culture.

Jonathan Weinberg What I wrote was not in response to the remarks of individuals in the conference because at the time there were not that many postings. It was something of a preemptive strike, because I felt that some of the broad generalizations about economic and political forces seemed to me to be leading in the direction of making broad characterizations about the relationship of style and/or medium to politics. However, I suppose the remark by Alexander Alberro “do you mean the return of figurative tendencies in art in a manner that wished what were arguably the most ambitious developments of twentieth century art away--or that tried to pretend they hadn't happened at all?” is a bit of what I mean. This is probably not the place or the time to rehash questions of the role of figuration in 20th century art, but Picasso, Matisse, De Kooning and even Pollock were figurative painters. To make a painting that is figurative, or even harkens back to older styles is not to wish away other kinds of developments. Hopper is not a negation of Ab. Ex.—in deed, I believe he was admired by certain modernists painters. As we know in the queer sphere, the frank depiction of the male body, as in Harold Stevenson enormous nude of 1963 which was just acquired by the Guggenheim, may be more disturbing to the status quo of its contemporary moment than a work

by Frank Stella or Andy Warhol.

Rather than make broad generalizations about the connections between certain styles/mediums to politics, I think we need to do careful historical work that pays attention to the specificity of content and context and the way form and subject matter shifts with time. I personally hate works

by Schnabel etc. for various reasons. I am also willing to accept that the in some cases the return to painting played into right wing tendencies among the public. However, it is also true that conservative collectors like corporations etc. embraced abstraction and even certain modes of conceptualism because of their lack of obvious political content. Major wealthy collectors with ties to the so-called industrial military complex have bought conceptual art etc, and have even created institutions that foster the latest trends in contemporary art—I am thinking of Philip Morris etc., the Dia. In making these remarks I am not targeting the remarks of anyone in the conference as yet, rather I am reflecting my own annoyance with so much of the writing on the 1980s and the East Village art scene which castigates certain art as affirming conservative tendencies because of its supposed popularity and supposed reactionary form regardless of its content (artists like Haring and Basquiat).

Maurice Berger Disciplines, Borders, and Boundaries November 4-5 At the turn of the new decade, in 1980, Lorraine O'Grady, performs MLLe BOURGEOIS NOIRE and boldly introduces issues of race, class, and gender into an indifferent and naive art world.

Ann Magnuson, the actress and comedian, plays "Miss Packman" in an hilarious send up of the rampant consumerism of the day in a performance piece at the Kitchen. Art students host a rollicking "Salute to Nancy Sinatra Night" at the Pyramid Club on the Lower East Side, replete with male dancers, clad only in G-strings and white go-go boots. Lucinda Childs, Phillip Glass, and Sol Lewitt collaborate on a spare yet magisterial dance piece at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, an institution that nurtured a new wave of collaborative dance and performance pieces.

The Israeli-American artist Izhar Patkin stages a lush theatrical event at the Holly Solomon

Gallery, an Easter Sunday wedding that parodies WASP propriety and the conventions of heterosexual marriage. And Jack Goldstein, Reginald Hudlin, Todd Haynes, and Marlon Riggs make amazing movies.

The photo-conceptual works and videos of Martha Rosler, Ana Mendieta, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Barbara Kruger, Hans Haacke, Carolee Schneemann, Howardena Pindell, Adrian Piper, David Wojnarowicz , and Cindy Sherman navigate the aesthetic and social space of human identity.

Sherrie Levine signs her name to meticulous recreations of the art of others, and in the process, challenges us to rethink the sexism and limitations of the modernist canon. Krzysztof Wodiczko projects enormous images onto the facades of buildings, eloquent meditations on a harsh reality haunting the country: the pervasive homelessness wrought by the economic train wreck that is “Reaganomics.” The artist Edgar Heap of Birds, a member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Nation, produces IN OUR LANGUAGE, a video presentation in New York’s Times Square. And the artists Oliver Wasow and Tom Brazelton open an important art gallery in the East Village.

Welcome to the 1980s: Painting is dead. Formalism is out. Performance, film, video, and photography are in. Disciplinary boundaries are disappearing. Collaboration rules the day. Is this the 1980s, or our view of it in hindsight? Was it necessary to kill traditional disciplines and art forms in order for art to live? Or was Michael Fried right in his critique of the inherently “theatrical” nature of minimalism: was performance destroying the visual arts? Or was it their salvation, a way of growing in a new social and technological era?

I would like to devote this session to the issue of disciplines, borders, and boundaries. Why was the blurring of disciplinary boundaries so important in the 1980s? How did this sensibility manifest itself in art or in other disciplines, like dance, film, literature, and music? What cultural or ideological shifts did it signify? To what extent were traditional art forms--like painting and sculpture--being challenged? Why had art become so performative?

Please be as general or specific as you like. And for the artists and performers in this conference: please feel free to talk about your own work and its relationship to this topic.

Wendy Perron I think crossing disciplines and borders has not destroyed art (my vote is that it has revitalized it), but sometimes I think it has destroyed the way we talk about art. At the NYU Department of Performance Studies they are so intoxicated by the intellectual properties of crossing boundaries that they have lost the ability to respond to art as art. They look at art only in an analytical way, losing sight of the fact that art is something mysterious that comes from someone’s brain, heart, and experience.

As for the historical influences for the 80s crossovers: There were bursts of crossing disciplines in the late 50s and early 60s, first with Happenings, and then with Judson Dance Theater. Artists like Red Grooms, Klaus Oldenburg and Lucas Samaras (and of course Allan Kaprow) felt limited by the 2 or 3 dimensions and decided to take their work into time and space. Visual artists and composers were making dances as part of Judson Dance Theater in the 1960s. Rauschenberg, Bob Morris and Alex Hay, caught the bug from Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs and Yvonne Rainer.

Rauschenberg has said that he likes to perform because it makes him nervous. I think that putting your whole body out there is a more vulnerable stance, and I think Cindy Sherman and Adrian Piper wanted to go for that kind of personal exposure. It’s like Dorit was saying about wanting to break through the representation. Using your real body makes the art more real. It was a way of forcing yourself to be honest (with the occasional side effect of merely being narcissistic). I also think that for women artists, redefining where and when you do your art can (seem to) give you more autonomy. John Cage was an influence too, as he wanted his music to be “theater,” meaning he wanted to take it into space. Not only dancers and musicians, but also visual artists who were pioneers in this area like Nam June Paik were influenced by Cage’s blurring of the boundaries and disciplines.

Grooms and Oldenburg et al soon returned to painting and sculpture; my guess is that some of the vitality of their work comes from the days when they got nervous before a performance.

Meredith Monk (now concluding her 40th anniversary season) brought music, set design and dance together in a way that was absolutely haunting. I think with her it was not only a matter of experimentation, but a matter of creating a whole psychic environment. Her works were often a powerful theatrical experience—sort of trippy, and maybe that’s part of the cultural context.

I think the artists who crossed disciplines in the 80s had way more irony than they had at Judson in the 1960s. Yvonne Rainer was dead serious about everything she did—every dance, performance, and film was completely devoid of cuteness—but it harked back to Dadaism in its grave absurdity.

In the 70s many of us tried to break time boundaries. I co-choreographed a dusk-to-dawn piece on a Winter Solstice (guests could bring sleeping bags). Robb Baker, who had initiated a page called “Concepts in Performance” at the Soho Weekly News, saw it, and invited the three of us who made the piece to write for his page. He wanted the page to cover all the performances that were starting to happen then that couldn’t be categorized or named. (This was before the terms “performance art” or “performative” came into use.) I eventually became the editor of that page, and we wrote about Laurie Anderson, Meredith Monk, and Robert Kushner (who, in addition to painting, was doing things like hat shows), as well as sometimes non-art events like auctions or gospel Sundays. It was a great exercise in expanding the definition of reviewable art. I guess we were also influenced by Jill Johnston, who, in her columns in the Village Voice, got to aim her artseeing eyes at anything.

Max Becher I experienced the 80's as a very primal shift that permeated everything, including, as I mentioned in my first post, the art world in very disappointing ways. I will totally oversimpify for the sake of brevity: convex shifted to concave, bell bottoms to shoulder pads, lean to muscle, sensitive to type-A-personality, intellectual conceptual to meaty expressionist or slick consumerist, modest to ostentatious, nuanced to binary, inclusive to excluse, small cars to big cars, environmental to domestic, community to "family", egalitarian to hierarchical, Carter's casual white house dress code to Reagan's tuxedos and limos, internationalist to patrotic, pluralist to corporatist (one of fascism's official definitions).

Of course it is a meaningless coincidence that two of the major figures bringing 30's Europe to fascism were Austrian (Hitler) and Italian (Mussolini), and in the 80's two (in my opinion) key cultural figures bringing America closer to fascism were also: Schwarzenegger and Stallone. It was the return of Schläger Chic (Schläger = German for ruffian).

It felt as if society had been on a moral health kick in the seventies and Reagan gave everyone permission to binge on personal and national selfishness. The leader that shouts 'let's pillage' is rarely criticized because the followers are immediately complicit.

But I'm still unresolved on these questions: to what extent did he "follow from the front" like most mediocre leaders, i.e. give society what it secretly yearned for. Was this anti-intellectual push strategic, or was it just a part of the conservative cultural package?

Maurice Berger Welcome, Ondine & thank you all for your incredibly insightful and erudite texts.

Jonathan, you write: "one thing I hope we can discuss in terms of Reagan and the period, was the tendency of certain critics trained in modernist critical practices to equate figurative tendencies in art with right wing politics. . . . I raise this issue not to open up an argument about the merits of neo-expressionism etc. but to ask the conference participants to think with complexity and subtlety about the connections between art and politics."

Two things: [1] I think we need more from you on this subject. We would all benefit from a fuller explanation of how this connection was made in the 1980s. [2] I don't believe anyone in the conference has actually made an analogy between painterly figuration and neoconservativism.

So I'm a bit unclear, re: the second sentence I quote from your post. Do you think members of the conference are taking an unnuanced approach to the subject of art & politics?

I would very much appreciate hearing more from you on this.

Alexander Alberro Jonathan, do you mean the return of figurative tendencies in art in a manner that wished what were arguably the most ambitious developments of twentieth century art away--or that tried to pretend they hadn't happened at all? I too am confused about the point you're trying to make.

Irving Sandler From my vantage point, the 1980s was a great time for what artists created in their studios, despite the fact that it was the age of Reagan with its burgeoning art market. The 1980s saw a renewal of painting and the emergence of photo-based art. Newly emerged art theoreticians claimed that painting was dead. The idea that one artistic medium was more relevant than another struck me as ridiculous. I personally did not feel I had to choose. I found the claim that painting was dead unbelievable at a time when painting seemed more alive and kicking than ever. Off the top of my head, for openers, among the newcomers there was Schnabel, Salle, Fischl, Murray, Rothenberg, Scully, Applebroog, Morley, Colescott, etc. etc. Then there was the Italian Transavantgardia and the German Neo-Expressionists. And sculptors Serra, Graves, Shapiro, Rydingsvard, Puryear, And older painters Golub, Spero, Ryman. Also Nauman, Acconci, Burden, Paik, Pfaff, the Christos, Irwin, Turrell, Lucier, Boltansky, Kabakov, Hammons. And later, Basquiat, Koons, Kelly, Taffe. But I admired much of photo-based art, for example, that of Sherman, Haacke, Holzer, Levine, Kruger, and Coplans.

Looking back still makes my head spin.

How did the age of Reagan affect these artists? A number made political art in opposition to reactionary politics. Others confronted the AIDS crisis. We showed several in the Witnesses show at Artists Space. Many more were apolitical, at least on the surface. What does that say about their art? I would like to second Jonathan Weinberg’s request that we "think with complexity."

Karen Mary Davalos In response to Jack Waters observation: “This covert tactic, a way of silencing organizations whose program content was critical of government policy and the conservative constituency it represented predated the time when overt ideological arguments would be successful to support the withdraw of support. Because the beginning of the erosion of public support for the arts affected only small minority organizations, based on the intangible basis of aesthetic opinion, the country’s more established arts organizations would not make a gesture of solidarity. Only when these organization’s budgets were affected was there a concerted effort to mobilize and by which time it may be too late.”

Jack is articulating what I am trying to communicate in my earlier post for this second session.

The battle in Ohio, the new directives of the OFAC, or the proposals to limit state tuition revenue to teaching are a new development in this conservative “divide and conquer” strategy. Ondine Chavoya suggests that the legacy is much longer, and I would agree with him. My framing of the issue as an attack on knowledge is one strategy to get our so-called liberal university colleagues

to see that this is also about all of us. It is not just a matter for those ethnic/race-acknowledged* departments and programs, gender and feminist studies, or queer theorists. [* allow me to offer a more accurate term for institutions like the Mexican Museum in San Francisco, or those mentioned by Ondine, such as the Royal Chicano Air Force. The only difference between the Met and these institutions, as Michelle Wallace, Carol Duncan, and others have pointed out, is that race is named and identified. Nearly all institutions that present art are “ethnic-specific” some just acknowledge that race, and others call it “universal”].

Of course, I am also thinking of the positions that challenge the nation-state or offer criticism of domestic or foreign policy. In the post-9/11 era, the critics of the occupation of Iraq have been viciously attacked, such as Ward Churchill and Nicolas De Genova, both of whom received real death threats and went into a period of police protection/hiding. The mobilizing Right has also systematically attacked student groups such as Moviemento Estudiantil Chicana/o de Aztlan, or MEChA, and politicians who had an affiliation with them (Cruz Bustamonte in California was vilified during his run for governor). MEChA has been portrayed as “racist,” violent, and seditious.

It is actually a student group devoted to improving the number of Mexican-origin youth who get a college diploma and it designs programs to encourage others to apply and get admitted to colleges.

Even art for art’s sake—a position that I do not support—will not survive the new attack on knowledge because the value of knowing has been undercut. Knowledge for the sake of knowledge has little meaning in the call for national security in the post-9/11 era.

So even if the university, museum, or arts organizations believe that “those people” [AKA the queer, the racialized, the womyn, the disabled, etc.] are making waves, pressuring for new programs that would take away dollars from the “core” of the institution and are therefore, separate and distinct; the new attack on knowledge requires solidarity, as Jack points out.

It might be convenient now to stand back, as one panelist admitted to have done in the earlier period, and think that this battle is not for us/you, but we would only harm our chances of stopping this new affront to knowledge and liberty.

Wow! That sounded polemical. I surprise myself.

Maurice Berger Karen, you write: "In the post-9/11 era, the critics of the occupation of Iraq have been viciously attacked, such as Ward Churchill and Nicolas De Genova, both of whom received real death threats and went into a period of police protection/hiding."

The insidious of this kind of attack touches more than just famous anti-war types. Just as the United was about to go to war in Iraq, I was having an argument with my dentist, a kind and talented person of whom I am very fond. "You don't believe, do you, that there are no weapons of mass destruction?" I heard this line not as a question but more as an accusation: "you would not be so foolishly radical, so unpatriotic in this frightening time, to imply that Saddam wasn't swimming in nuclear devices and slithering germs meant to murder and terrorize innocent American men, women, and children" Maybe I was being a bit too sensitive, but this is what I read between the lines of her words. I heard the same logic on TV, in the tortured rhetoric of sloppy and incurious journalists and politicians fearful that their constituents would think they're soft on terrorism.

My reply to my dentist: "I have no idea, really. Why are you so sure?"

Her expression was at once upsetting and sobering; a sadness touched by cognitive dissonance, fear, and even anger at my honesty (and, perhaps, at what she perceived was my foolishness).

Catherine Lord Thanks for the observations that the evaporation of CETA and the dismantling of NEA critics’ grants were early steps toward making the mess we now find ourselves in, where art and culture are the third rail, as David put it, and where, as Maurice reminded us, it’s not safe for presidential candidates to speak about art. I think Karen is spot on about the shift in terms from state restriction of cultural production due, supposedly, to “quality,” to restrictions on the production and circulation of knowledge due, supposedly, to security. To me, the issues we face involve reframing what we’re doing to envision ourselves within systems of information technology enabled and manipulated by capital. Academia has already been sold, cheap. The biennialization of the planet is about a global relay of art-as-commodity. Gosh, that sounds like latter day Marxist crap, but I think we’re speaking, or rather typing, inside the belly of the beast. Empire has already swallowed us whole. Backing up a bit, even, say, to the 1950s, the discourse supporting the production of objects (performances, texts, etc.) has been framed along either human rights lines (the “right” to creativity, to the memory of one’s own group, to the pains and pleasures of invention, to unfettered free speech) or a kind of pragmatic capitalism (artists are brats but if tolerated, quirks and all, as long term investments, some will make a lot of profit and others will make some). Is there a way to understand the limits of a discourse of “rights” while reframing such a discourse, reworking our understandings of bodies and citizenships and information, in order to move forward in an era where nation states are superseded by global empire?

To reiterate what Ondine and Karen have been saying, we’re using the 80s to understand where it all began to unravel, but I can’t credit Reagan with being the beginning of the end. He was a cipher. America has always been at war with culture—and this makes periodization more risky than usual. To remain within our memories of the 1980s is to distract ourselves from the length of the war. I read remarks about what lay outside of “culture” in the United States of America in the 1980s as a way to expand a rare intergenerational conversations. I’m hoping that on top of every other impossibility we’re chasing we might productively theorize the ways that remembering, or excavating, or inventing, any one thing means forgetting, or burying, or erasing, other things.

AIDS, for example. Let me add to yesterday’s lists Ray Navarro, Essex Hemphill, Vito Russo, Mark Niblock, Tony Green, Stuart Marshall, and Felix Gonzalez Torres. (Felix stuck it out until the middle of the 90s but I wake some mornings with a devastation where Felix and his politics used to be and after all we don’t believe in decades plus the guy fought it for a long time.) But let us honor those who didn’t make it out of other epidemics: Audre Lorde, Charlotte Moorman, Kathy Acker, Susan Sontag, Margaret Kilgallen, Hollis Sigler, Christyne Tamblyn, and Hannah Wilke.

And let the inner historian in each of us remember that the women’s health movement of the 1970s developed the chutzpah and the tactics that were immensely useful, but not widely credited, in the AIDS activism of the 1980s and 1990s. (David Wojnarowicz wanted his corpse tossed on the White House lawn. I fantasize tossing a titless dead woman after him.)

Olu Oguibe My immediate, personal experience of the Reagan epoch was in the realm of its global manifestation, and the most poignant moment in that experience, perhaps, was after Mr. Reagan ordered the bombing of not only Tripoli but Mu’amar Khaddafi's desert hide-away, also, in which Khaddafi's adopted daughter was killed. Back where I was at the time as a student leader in Nigeria, to say that the mood that this act generated was one of outrage is to acknowledge the frustrating limitations of language. We were quite familiar with narratives of leaders sending their children into battle and losing them, but we were certainly not prepared for the idea of the leader of an independent nation having his little, four-year old adopted daughter killed at home in an undeclared war. In the larger scheme of great world events it was probably no more than an inconsequential incident that hardly merited mention in the press, but that act woke us up and reminded us that we had come of age in a new world where the rules were different than anything we'd read or heard and we had better get ready to contend with that new world. Ours would be a

ruthless era, it seemed to say, where the civilized pretenses of the past would give way to rabid savagery and the mighty would have no qualms ramming every morsel of its power down the throat of the weak. Perhaps that was always the way of the world, but we didn't know it yet. The death of a little, adopted girl in the desert sands brought things home to us.

The triumphal march of philistinism that sparked the culture wars in America was not unrelated to that return of the Theodore Roosevelt ethos in American foreign policy which marked the Reagan years. And the irony of it, especially with regard to the cultural sphere, was as I indicated in an earlier post most conspicuously embed in Reagan’s own personality. Here was a former Democrat who would come to symbolize the triumph of Republican conservative fundamentalism, a Wild West genre actor who would rest his dispensation on the bedrock of Christian family values, a double-speak genius who would pride himself on promoting Democracy abroad but dedicate himself to repressing it at home, a people’s man under whom the people took their fiercest beating in a generation, a culture man whose base seemed to suggest that sticking it to culture was The American Way. The assault of the neo-Philistines under Reagan was not limited to so-called high culture and the white-washed halls of blue-chip galleries; it extended to popular culture, also. Provocateur artists were challenged, but so vigorously also was the fledgling revivalist edge in rap which came out of Texas and the West Coast. The trend of assault that would culminate in the denouncement of gangsta rap on the floor of the US Congress in the early ‘90s began under the rule of a former gun-wielding, Wild West screen hero. And all that was done in the name of—you guessed it—a higher culture, the culture of Decency. The way to restore this mythical culture of Decency, it seems, was to destroy culture itself.

That said, it ought to be noted that one process that was not encouraged in the visual art world following this face-off between culture and the culture of Decency, one that ironically did in fact take place in rap, Hip-hop, and the world of black popular culture, was the process of a genuine self-reflectivity. While rappers and their communities reeled back to ask themselves whether the genre of Macabre Fiction that they were exploring in rap was getting across as intended or instead misleading the larger public to mistake gory fiction for philosophy, most people in the art world bristled instead as indeed they continue to, to this day. In the wake of extremist conservative attack, the Hip-hop community turned in and asked itself: does violent imagery and language, no matter its sources in American culture and the American psyche, truly represent the generation’s understanding of its mission? Does macabre juvenile fiction underpin Hip-hop’s highest goals and its place in history and society? Is the espousal of male chauvinism synonymous with Keeping it Real? Is there, perhaps another way? Out of this exercise in selfreflection, several different streams of practice gained validity in rap and Hip-hop that did not follow in the footsteps of gangsta machismo.

The visual art world, however, spared itself this kind of indulgence, at least to the very best of my knowledge. Instead, the vocal minority in that world, just like the vocal minority on the Right, made it palpably uncool to question the ‘Divine’ right to liberty and artistic license. Seldom was it permitted to ask; Who are we speaking to when we make art, who are we making the art for, what is it we are trying to say with some of the art that provoked conservative assault and how effectively or not do we manage to get those points across, how well were those points being understood? No one seriously asked: When we step out of the protected territory of the artist’s studio and step into the world, what are the ramifications and what must we expect? When we enter the realm of public patronage, what can we insist on and what can we expect to get away with? When we accept municipal and state funding, does that make us perhaps accountable to much more than the sacred muse of individual genius? When clamber up the high-ground of artistic license, on what parameters do we do so and within what perimeters? In the course of the culture wars and their aftermath, the visual art community shied away from one crucial issue, the issue of Responsibility.

And, because many pertinent questions were drowned in the deluge of art world outrage and self-

pity, many equally pertinent lessons were not learned. Instead, it seemed that the only lesson learned, at least certainly by artists, was that controversy pays. Because the pertinent lessons were apparently not learned, the art world continues to be harassed and terrorized at will not by the majority of society, but by the vocal minority of conservative fundamentalism. Hence, the repeat scenario of the Brooklyn Museum vs. Mayor Giuliani and the City of New York at the turn of the century, on which occasion the response of the visual art community was anything if not predictable: the chorus repeating the age-old line, “Damn Censorship!” Hardly anyone asked: how do we get across to the silent majority to whom the rabid Right always appeals when it mounts its assaults on cultural expression, and get that majority used to the idea that we are all tax-payers, after all, and have equal rights to the cultural largess of public funds? No one broached the notion that perhaps it is time to engage in a deeper, wider, more serious discussion on the nature and politics of individual cultural expression and representation especially in the public space. And of course, no one was allowed to acknowledge that all dissent has a right to representation, including the protests of the real and supposed philistine minority, that in the case of Mr. Ofili’s use of animal dung to represent a major Christian icon, believers in that Faith had a right to hurt, shock, and outrage; in other words, that outrage is not the exclusive right of the allknowing, supposedly more cultured, art community. The universal cry of “Damn Censorship!” occluded, as it continues to, the fact that the gains of other critical struggles are being gradually and incrementally eroded every day by artists under the guise of free individual expression, which for instance is why, again in the case of Mr. Ofili’s controversial work, no one paid heed to the fact the use of animal dung to represent a woman’s breasts may indicate a little more than artistic license and freedom of expression, that indeed, it may also serve as a fine example of the return of male license to the image and representation of the female in art.

When the visual art world replicates the intolerant myopia of the philistine, fundamentalist minority as it did during the culture wars by getting caught in the motions of the moment and fighting shy of broad and deep self-reflection, it not only leaves itself open to attack without devising a strategy of effective response, it also allows related and no less important questions to go under the sludge. When we fail to take advantage of certain moments in history to redefine the liberties that we call on society to uphold, we lose sense of the meaning of those liberties and why they matter, why it is important to defend and uphold them. In my thinking, the Era of Reagan and the immediate aftermath was one such lost moment.

We may not need to justify our liberties to anyone, but surely, in order to defend and protect them effectively, we must certainly justify them to ourselves. Then we can go out enamored to fight for them, to strategize for them. And if there is another lesson that still ought to be learned from the Reagan years, the culture wars, and the aftermath, it is that freedom is a Sisyphean boulder; we must lean our shoulders to it at all times and never relent or take it for granted, else it rolls most certainly all the way down to the bottom of the hill from whence it is much more difficult to retrieve.

Elizabeth Alexander In light of all that has been said about the Reagan era, I am sure I was not alone in watching astonished (but why be astonished?) at the rehabiliatating television coverage of Reagan when he died. His actual policies, Iran-contra, racism, etcetera etecetera, were supplanted by, in the end, his alleged "niceness:" a nice man, a civil man, a spectral Cheshire cat smile that blotted out actual history.

Maurice Berger Olu, you write: "That said, it ought to be noted that one process that was not encouraged in the visual art world following this face-off between culture and the culture of Decency, one that ironically did in fact take place in rap, Hip-hop, and the world of black popular culture, was the process of a genuine self-reflectivity. While rappers and their communities reeled back to ask themselves whether the genre of Macabre Fiction that they were exploring in rap was getting

across as intended or instead misleading the larger public to mistake gory fiction for philosophy, most people in the art world bristled instead as indeed they continue to, to this day."

In this sense, the world of visual art is little different from the world of whiteness: honest selfinquiry is rarely ever a part of the white man's discussion or understanding of race. It is this lack of self-awareness that makes racism so intractable.

Self-awareness and self-inquiry--second nature to people of diaspora, to those whose very survival depends on understanding one's place in and relationship to the world--does not come naturally to ANY dominant culture.

In this regard, it was ONLY Kanye who spoke out on NBC's telethon for the survivors of hurricane Katrina: as a plethora of entertainers keep their mouths shut, he spoke the truth about Bush and the racial hatred that infests and permeates his base.

Lorraine O’Grady Another day of not knowing quite what to say. I'm really feeling out of synch here. I just did a page-search of the posts to date and couldn't find Richard Nixon's name anywhere. Tricky Dick is the reason I can't see Reagan as a beginning, only as a culmination.

I loved Catherine's remark: "I¹m hoping that on top of every other impossibility we¹re chasing we might productively theorize the ways that remembering, or excavating, or inventing, any one thing means forgetting, or burying, or erasing, other things."

But before I get to theory (and I might never get to it), I have to begin with the anecdotal. My art resume starts in 1980, but my full CV stretches back to the late 50s, to my first job after graduation---as a low-level research economist at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. When I was leaving, my professors said: "You're lucky, Lorraine. the BLS is one of the best-regarded institutions in government!" For those who may not know, the BLS collects the data on which almost every economic decision of the government, including the COLA, is based. It's as politicsfree as government ever gets. And it was as boring as it sounds. One of my office mates would end every paragraph with an undigested quote from Nietszche, while another was a "Baconian" and spent his spare time trying to convince us that Bacon had written all of Shakespeare. We would argue for hours over the meaning of figures to the third decimal point---to get it right, to defend ourselves to the Assistant Commissioner. I couldn't wait to get out of there.

Fast-forward a decade, to 1971. A hangover from the 60s, I am deep into my rock-and-roll life when the phone rings. A voice from the mist, but I know it's Nietszche. "Turn on the TV! You won't believe this!" When the image comes up on the black and white TV, I squint. He's older, but eventually I recognize Mr. Invisible. Mr. Incorruptible. Back on the phone, I ask why the Assistant Commissioner is having a press conference. Nietzsche is unexpectedly subdued. "These people stop at nothing. They told him to lie, to change his interpretation of the unemployment figure. He's refused." A few months later, the AC was gone, and the world had turned permanently for those who believed the employment stats were too sacred to mess with.

Luckily, Tricky Dick had five-o'clock shadow. That made him arouse suspicion. But it was aweinspiring to watch Reagan lie on TV, his makeup was perfect. The show he put on was so good even the "spin control" Alexander Alberro referred to seemed superfluous. I certainly agree with Maurice that Reagan's was "the greatest, ongoing performance piece of the past fifty years." But the script was not a revolution.

Maurice Berger Lorraine, you write: "Tricky Dick is the reason I can't possibly see Reagan as a beginning, only as

a culmination."

This is very true. Ironic, too, that Nixon learned from another master at media manipulation: Jack Kennedy. Important, too, to realize that Nixon was the first politician to use television EFFECTIVELY as part of a wide-scale effort to move the American public: remember the infamous, "Checkers Speech." (Technically, Eisenhower was the first US president to hold a televised news conference.)

Thank you for the provocative post.

Judith Barry The notion that Maurice mentions in his opening remarks to this session ”… so much about society eventually came to be reflected in the culture.” reminds me of something that Herman Melville remarked upon after the failure of his book PIERRE, OR THE AMBIGUITIES. He said that an artist can only be as good as the culture in which he lives…. While I don’t subscribe to this point of view, I do think that art, however it is defined, --- and the definition of what is art (or not) was one of the many ways in which art and politics became increasingly intertwined during the ‘80’s --- can not escape the social conditions under which it was produced.

These conditions often provide a palimpsest which imbue the work with a repressed power. A fairly clear example might be the gender relations expressed in Jugenstil painting, for instance, Gustav Klint’s ‘The Kiss’, the way the body disappears under the weight of the decoration; and how this dissolution of the body is echoed in the architecture of that period, Art Nouveau, which (I have argued elsewhere) owes a stylistic (at the very least) debt to the more than 2000 artifacts collected in the late 1880’s from Leopold II’s minions from what was soon to become the Belgian Congo.

Additionally, the way art and politics were related in the ‘80’s had to do with the contested nature of various types of subject matters --- in which discourses should they be located, exhumed or interrogated? Of course, this also betrays where I was in my own thinking about the questions of subject matter or content in relation to art.

When I think of the Reagan Years in relation to the Culture Wars of the ‘80’s, I am reminded of Michael Rogin’s book RONALD REAGAN, THE MOVIE-– which was a proto-cultural studies mapping of Reagan, the actor-president, in relation to subversive tendencies in US politics. For me this figure of Reagan underscored how the anxiety surrounding the legitimacy of the image effected the problematic question of ‘truths’ as they were understood through the over – valuation of the image. We certainly had all the tools at our disposal to ‘read’ and ‘deconstruct’ the images of Reagan, the man, the politician, the actor, but not the foresight to realize where this would lead…..straight to spin. Obviously, I think they lead elsewhere, too, however as textual analysis is potentially endless, so is spin…

The efficacy of images, their ability to say something, to be controlled as to what they say and might say, the impetus behind the desire to make images at all --- these were (and are) important questions that I think many artists were actively addressing in the ‘80’s and ‘90’s. And while I recall that this also sometimes accompanied censorship, self and otherwise, as well as a kind of ersatz political correctness, none-the-less image production and reception were understood to be fundamentally analytical processes. Today, this approach is not so much in evidence despite the fact that ‘reading’ the image has become part of mainstream culture.

Jonathan Weinberg What I wrote was not in response to the remarks of individuals in the conference because at the time there were not that many postings. It was something of a preemptive strike, because I felt that some of the broad generalizations about economic and political forces seemed to me to be

leading in the direction of making broad characterizations about the relationship of style and/or medium to politics. However, I suppose the remark by Alexander Alberro “do you mean the return of figurative tendencies in art in a manner that wished what were arguably the most ambitious developments of twentieth century art away--or that tried to pretend they hadn't happened at all?” is a bit of what I mean. This is probably not the place or the time to rehash questions of the role of figuration in 20th century art, but Picasso, Matisse, De Kooning and even Pollock were figurative painters. To make a painting that is figurative, or even harkens back to older styles is not to wish away other kinds of developments. Hopper is not a negation of Ab. Ex.—in deed, I believe he was admired by certain modernists painters. As we know in the queer sphere, the frank depiction of the male body, as in Harold Stevenson enormous nude of 1963 which was just acquired by the Guggenheim, may be more disturbing to the status quo of its contemporary moment than a work

by Frank Stella or Andy Warhol.

Rather than make broad generalizations about the connections between certain styles/mediums to politics, I think we need to do careful historical work that pays attention to the specificity of content and context and the way form and subject matter shifts with time. I personally hate works

by Schnabel etc. for various reasons. I am also willing to accept that the in some cases the return to painting played into right wing tendencies among the public. However, it is also true that conservative collectors like corporations etc. embraced abstraction and even certain modes of conceptualism because of their lack of obvious political content. Major wealthy collectors with ties to the so-called industrial military complex have bought conceptual art etc, and have even created institutions that foster the latest trends in contemporary art—I am thinking of Philip Morris etc., the Dia. In making these remarks I am not targeting the remarks of anyone in the conference as yet, rather I am reflecting my own annoyance with so much of the writing on the 1980s and the East Village art scene which castigates certain art as affirming conservative tendencies because of its supposed popularity and supposed reactionary form regardless of its content (artists like Haring and Basquiat).

Disciplines, Borders, and Boundaries November 4-5 Maurice Berger At the turn of the new decade, in 1980, Lorraine O'Grady, performs MLLe BOURGEOIS NOIRE and boldly introduces issues of race, class, and gender into an indifferent and naive art world.

Ann Magnuson, the actress and comedian, plays "Miss Packman" in an hilarious send up of the rampant consumerism of the day in a performance piece at the Kitchen. Art students host a rollicking "Salute to Nancy Sinatra Night" at the Pyramid Club on the Lower East Side, replete with male dancers, clad only in G-strings and white go-go boots. Lucinda Childs, Phillip Glass, and Sol Lewitt collaborate on a spare yet magisterial dance piece at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, an institution that nurtured a new wave of collaborative dance and performance pieces.

The Israeli-American artist Izhar Patkin stages a lush theatrical event at the Holly Solomon Gallery, an Easter Sunday wedding that parodies WASP propriety and the conventions of heterosexual marriage. And Jack Goldstein, Reginald Hudlin, Todd Haynes, and Marlon Riggs make amazing movies.

The photo-conceptual works and videos of Martha Rosler, Ana Mendieta, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Barbara Kruger, Hans Haacke, Carolee Schneemann, Howardena Pindell, Adrian Piper, David Wojnarowicz , and Cindy Sherman navigate the aesthetic and social space of human identity.

Sherrie Levine signs her name to meticulous recreations of the art of others, and in the process, challenges us to rethink the sexism and limitations of the modernist canon. Krzysztof Wodiczko projects enormous images onto the facades of buildings, eloquent meditations on a harsh reality haunting the country: the pervasive homelessness wrought by the economic train wreck that is “Reaganomics.” The artist Edgar Heap of Birds, a member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Nation, produces IN OUR LANGUAGE, a video presentation in New York’s Times Square. And the artists Oliver Wasow and Tom Brazelton open an important art gallery in the East Village.

Welcome to the 1980s: Painting is dead. Formalism is out. Performance, film, video, and photography are in. Disciplinary boundaries are disappearing. Collaboration rules the day. Is this the 1980s, or our view of it in hindsight? Was it necessary to kill traditional disciplines and art forms in order for art to live? Or was Michael Fried right in his critique of the inherently “theatrical” nature of minimalism: was performance destroying the visual arts? Or was it their salvation, a way of growing in a new social and technological era?

I would like to devote this session to the issue of disciplines, borders, and boundaries. Why was the blurring of disciplinary boundaries so important in the 1980s? How did this sensibility manifest itself in art or in other disciplines, like dance, film, literature, and music? What cultural or ideological shifts did it signify? To what extent were traditional art forms--like painting and sculpture--being challenged? Why had art become so performative?

Please be as general or specific as you like. And for the artists and performers in this conference: please feel free to talk about your own work and its relationship to this topic.

Wendy Perron I think crossing disciplines and borders has not destroyed art (my vote is that it has revitalized it), but sometimes I think it has destroyed the way we talk about art. At the NYU Department of Performance Studies they are so intoxicated by the intellectual properties of crossing boundaries that they have lost the ability to respond to art as art. They look at art only in an analytical way, losing sight of the fact that art is something mysterious that comes from someone’s brain, heart, and experience.

As for the historical influences for the 80s crossovers: There were bursts of crossing disciplines in the late 50s and early 60s, first with Happenings, and then with Judson Dance Theater. Artists like Red Grooms, Klaus Oldenburg and Lucas Samaras (and of course Allan Kaprow) felt limited by the 2 or 3 dimensions and decided to take their work into time and space. Visual artists and composers were making dances as part of Judson Dance Theater in the 1960s. Rauschenberg, Bob Morris and Alex Hay, caught the bug from Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs and Yvonne Rainer.

Rauschenberg has said that he likes to perform because it makes him nervous. I think that putting your whole body out there is a more vulnerable stance, and I think Cindy Sherman and Adrian Piper wanted to go for that kind of personal exposure. It’s like Dorit was saying about wanting to break through the representation. Using your real body makes the art more real. It was a way of forcing yourself to be honest (with the occasional side effect of merely being narcissistic). I also think that for women artists, redefining where and when you do your art can (seem to) give you more autonomy. John Cage was an influence too, as he wanted his music to be “theater,” meaning he wanted to take it into space. Not only dancers and musicians, but also visual artists who were pioneers in this area like Nam June Paik were influenced by Cage’s blurring of the boundaries and disciplines.

Grooms and Oldenburg et al soon returned to painting and sculpture; my guess is that some of the vitality of their work comes from the days when they got nervous before a performance.

Meredith Monk (now concluding her 40th anniversary season) brought music, set design and dance together in a way that was absolutely haunting. I think with her it was not only a matter of experimentation, but a matter of creating a whole psychic environment. Her works were often a powerful theatrical experience—sort of trippy, and maybe that’s part of the cultural context.

I think the artists who crossed disciplines in the 80s had way more irony than they had at Judson in the 1960s. Yvonne Rainer was dead serious about everything she did—every dance, performance, and film was completely devoid of cuteness—but it harked back to Dadaism in its grave absurdity.

In the 70s many of us tried to break time boundaries. I co-choreographed a dusk-to-dawn piece on a Winter Solstice (guests could bring sleeping bags). Robb Baker, who had initiated a page

called “Concepts in Performance” at the Soho Weekly News, saw it, and invited the three of us who made the piece to write for his page. He wanted the page to cover all the performances that were starting to happen then that couldn’t be categorized or named. (This was before the terms “performance art” or “performative” came into use.) I eventually became the editor of that page, and we wrote about Laurie Anderson, Meredith Monk, and Robert Kushner (who, in addition to painting, was doing things like hat shows), as well as sometimes non-art events like auctions or gospel Sundays. It was a great exercise in expanding the definition of reviewable art. I guess we were also influenced by Jill Johnston, who, in her columns in the Village Voice, got to aim her artseeing eyes at anything.

Maurice Berger Wendy, you wrote: "It’s like Dorit was saying about wanting to break through the representation.

Using your real body makes the art more real."

I was going to discuss Dorit's work later in the session, perhaps after she posted-in, but your remarks have given me an opening. In a number of ways, Dorit's work in the 1980s--resolutely performative, theoretically, humanistically, and socially engaged, body-driven--speaks directly to the issues of this session. Her work always seemed to me to be both a part of the rarefied space of theoretical feminist art of the period, but also always closer to the grain of everyday life. Thus, it does not surprise me that Dorit now sees as coextensive her practice as a visual artist AND her work as a mediator. The connection inspires a metaphor for art itself as a mediator of ideas, hopes, aspirations, activism, beauty. I look forward to Dorit's comments.

Also, I look forward to the observations of other artists and performers in this conference (as well as everyone else).

Ondine Chavoya In this my preliminary response to the question concerning disciplines, borders, and boundaries, I thought it perhaps appropriate to try to describe how I found inspiration and relevance in the dynamic synergy and active disciplinary cross-pollination, particularly between art and music, that took place during the era – while perhaps also touching on points introduced by Alexander, Karen Mary, and Dan. Although this particular path may seem rather circuitous…

Like a handful of other panelists, I grew up in the 1980s; I was 9 years old in 1980. My introduction to contemporary art and “the art world” came through popular music in the 1980s, largely of the post-punk, new wave variety. I was turned on, so to speak, to 20th century art by bands with names like Bauhaus, Cabaret Voltaire, and the Cocteau Twins.

My earliest art education was gleaned through magazines such as Andy Warhol’s Interview, Wet, The Face, and LA Style and was occasionally augmented with visits to the Los Angles County Museum of Art and the newly established LA MoCA and its Temporary Contemporary. In the early 1980s, I was enthralled by the ideas of cultural piracy that infused the look, performances, and lyrics of bands like Adam and the Ants and Bow Wow Wow. It wasn’t until 1988 in art history courses at UC Santa Cruz that I began to recognize the connections between these strategies and those used by visual artists such as John Baldessari, Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, and Victor Burgin (one of my professors at the time).

I was first introduced to the ideas and writings of Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, and Jean Beaudrillard not in a college seminar or in the pages of Artforum or Art in America, but through the lyrics and liner notes of the German synth-pop band Propaganda’s album, “A Secret Wish” (1985). When I first purchased the debut Smiths’ LP (yes, The Smiths, again), sometime in late 1984, I had no idea that the beautiful male chest on the cover was that of Warhol Superstar Joe Dallesandro (a detail taken from a Flesh film still) who would become a major obsession of my adult life. A lecture by punk impresario Malcolm McLaren at California State University Fullerton sometime around 1987 on “The Future of Popular Culture” changed my life. For this barrio high

school kid in the audience, it instilled the desire to take popular culture and visual culture (although I didn’t yet know the term “visual culture”) seriously and that somehow or another I would find a way to pursue this seriousness in college.

During my recent trip to Los Angeles, I spent a lot of time in the car listening to the radio, which I rarely do now. This experience reminded me how the Reagonomics that fueled the shoulderpadded corporate fantasies of “Dynasty” and “Dallas” also prompted powerful critiques of the Reagan-Thatcher-Bush Empire in the form of popular, commercial culture that were often broadcast on the LA radio station I grew up with, KROQ. Here, I am thinking of songs by the Specials such as “Ghost Town” and “Free Nelson Mandella,” Fun Boy Three’s “The Lunatics have Taken Over the Asylum” (with the lyric “Go nuclear the cowboy told us,” the lunatics are clearly the conservative world leaders), and Heaven 17’s “(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thing”(a straight forward condemnation of the right wing politics of Reagan and Thatcher set to a funky electronic rhythm and banned by the BBC). And let us not forget the Afrika Bambaataa and John(ny) Lydon collaboration “World Destruction” as Times Zone. It seems that during this repressive regime there was a wider aperture for critique and resistance on the airwaves than in our current era of increasing globalization and multinational media conglomerates such as Clear Channel. And, I also want to believe that the DIY ethos of punk and the critical commitment resonant in some of the post-punk/new wave bands, spurred the collaborative ethos of artists groups such as The Border Arts Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo and reenergized the Asco collective – while such groups also harnessed the spirit of art collectives and activism from the previous two decades.

If I may, I would like to offer a correction to the suggestion in an earlier post that punk did not arrive in Los Angeles until the 1980s. This oversight seemingly stems from an unfortunate, but pervasive, myth that punk arrived late to its third capital, Los Angeles, or was simply derivative of British punk. The punk scene emerged in California in the late 1970s, and 1977 is recognized as the critical year for its development in Los Angeles. The Germs formed in 1977, released “Germicide” in 1979, and by December 1980 Darby Crash had overdosed on heroin at 21 years old; X formed in 1977 and released their classic album “Los Angeles” in 1980; Dead Kennedys frontman Jello Biafra ran for mayor of San Francisco in 1979 and came in forth out of ten candidates. Lo-fi syth-punk performance art pioneers The Screamers had already broken up by 1981. Screamer’s lead singer, the incomparable Tomata du Plenty – who had formerly been associated with the queer radical theater troupe The Cockettes in 1968 – continued to be involved in the downtown LA arts scene throughout the 1980s and along with Gronk organized art exhibitions at The Score Bar, which up until very recently was the oldest functioning gay bar in town. (Much of this is all well documented in the Track 16 exhibition catalogue “Forming: The Early Days of L.A. Punk” and in the dynamic oral history collection “We Got the Neutron Bomb,” named after the second Weirdos single.)

It was in the early-1980s when LA punk was popularized, through films such as Penelope Spheeris’ documentary “The Decline of Western Civilization” (1981) which featured X, The Germs, Black Flag, Alice Bag Band, and Fear among others. It was also in the 1980s when LA punk was popularly pathologized in prime-time television such as the Emmy-award winning drama, “Quincy M.E.” I remember the Quincy “punk rock” episode (“Next Stop, Nowhere,” 1982) vividly. A young man dies while slamdancing in a dingy punk club and Quincy’s investigation determines that the music he listened to about desperation, deviance, and violence ultimately contributed to his death (well that and the ice pick that he was stabbed with).

At some point before tomorrow I will prep a post on the important intersections between the East LA punk and art scenes that might more directly respond to the questions.

Karen Mary Davalos I echo Wendy Perron’s statement: “I think crossing disciplines and borders has not destroyed art (my vote is that it has revitalized it), but sometimes I think it has destroyed the way we talk about

art.” Not just sometimes, but nearly all the time how we talk about art.

And not only did scholars and critics have a difficult time catching-up to the transformed art world, the museums, galleries, and arts organizations were challenged by the technological media and the ephemeral nature of performance, installation, and multi-media projects. Even those institutions that support innovation or crossing boundaries, such as the Mexican Museum and Galeria de la Raza, both of San Francisco, were challenged in the 1980s (and beyond) by artists who required use of a continuous loop video or audio player, the automatic slide projector, or the use of food and other biological matter in the gallery. What to do with all the bugs? Or the machine would break down, and the museum did not have the funds to keep replacing the light bulb, the rubber gasket, or the audio head.

I will also chime in with the assessment that the crossing had some important beginnings in the 1970s. The example that comes to mind first is from the West Coast, and we can recognize the conference’s historiography have a gap for that region, so it is important to mention the work of Asco, the Chicano collaborative performance arts group from East Los Angeles. But since C. Ondine Chavoya, one of our panelists, has written eloquently about Asco, I will only introduce them as one bit of evidence from the 1970s.

Asco can serve as a spring-board for my post. This was a group that made use of the public ritual known as the procession, although they used it with ironic and sardonic flavor. They also were innovators of site specific installation art, like the No Murals which did not call for paint but a bit of masking tape to attach performers, such as Patssi Valdez, to the wall. Harry Gamboa, Jr., another member, has served as the groups critical historian, documenting and analyzing the group's work.

The timing of this conference—currently, in Los Angeles we are celebrating the Days of the Dead, a particularly Chicana/o (regional?) version of this Latin American commemoration for the dead— narrows my examples but if I could raise my mind/body from the corporeal events on the streets, in the cemeteries, and at the galleries, I am confident I could think of other examples. But allow me to focus on the 1980s artistic expressions for El dia de los muertos.

As a cultural anthropologist (yes, yes, that’s a confession to this group), I am most interested in the “why?” artists blurred the boundaries. For Chicana/o artists working in the 1980s, I think the general dissatisfaction with art historiography, which they began to articulate in the late 1960s, found tremendous public support by the 1980s. The messages of the Chicano Movement and other civil rights movements that called for and affirmed identities beyond whiteness, resisted assimilation, and demanded equality were received by a range of people within Chicano communities. The middle class professionals, the working-class 5th generation Chicanos of Boyle Heights,* the monolingual Spanish-speaking new arrivals, the migrant workers, the poor, and the college students—all of them were participants and supporters of Day of the Dead exhibitions and processions that ethnic-acknowledged institutions organized in the 1980s. I confine my remarks to this decade, but the Day of the Dead exhibitions and processions/performances can be traced to the prior decade at East Los Angeles’s Self-Help Graphics and Arts and San Francisco’s Galería de la Raza. [*probably an expression lost to those readers of the other coast, and so I translate: Boyle Heights is a center of Chicano political and social activism and it has a large number of homeowners].

Site specific installations about death or a specific person(s) who had passed away transformed the museums and galleries brave enough to allow artists inside for multi-disciplinary, multi-media, and nearly always ephemeral creations for the Day of the Dead. The artists and the Chicana/o communities changed the museum and gallery into a sacred space, a place of homage and pilgrimage. The installations are typically called by their religious signifier: los altars (the alters) or las ofrendas (the offerings). But this is not the Museum as Temple, an image promoted by

scholars such as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Rick E. Robinson, a place in which the aesthetic encounter elevates the viewer to a higher existence and enlightenment and which assumes a universal standard.

Installations/ofrendas are sites that link earthly experience to the spiritual world. They are grounded specifically, historically, and experientially in the moment and the bodies of the viewers; they do not exist as altars or ofrendas for the dead without this connection. That is, the installations/ofrendas are art with context.

For example, each year in November, the attendance records at the Mexican Museum in San Francisco or the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum in Chicago shot way up, and galleries were filled with hundreds of school groups that had booked their tours months in advance. One the weekends, the attendance was also dramatically elevated. In some years, the November revenue from admissions fees or purchases at the museum shop exceeded the revenue of all the other months combined. Or several thousand people attended the processions—site specific performances in which participants and artists dressed as death with painted faces, costumes, and props and paraded through the streets with candles and song— that kicked off an exhibition opening for the Days of the Dead.

The installations/altars resonated with the lived experiences of Chicana/os who do not compartmentalize how they engage art and spirituality. In other words, the classificatory scheme of art history or the museum did not resonate with lived realities, and its lack of meaning contributed to the creation of new models and categories. The cultural and ideological shifts of the Chicano Movement opened up the reception of performances and installations for the dead.

Wayne Koestenbaum So many complex and stirring recollections, elegies, prognostications, imaginative reconstructions of the 1980s I've been reading--with admiration--in everybody's posts! Lots of punctums for me: Elizabeth Alexander's reference to Reagan's posthumous rehabilitation an especially chilling one.

"The 1980s" is proving difficult for me to achieve analytic distance on--partly, I'm guessing, because that decade was for me a time of unconsciousness, of narrowed vision: in my case, a constriction due to the conflation of sex and death that the discourse around AIDS, and often the experience of it, made vivid and visceral. (How could I not have responded, at least initially, to the lash of that conflation, with a phobic shutdown of consciousness, a numbing?) As I look back at those times, and look back at my foreshortened, hunkered-down mood, I want to pay my melancholy respects--pay reluctant homage--to a strange hybrid of a deadening of affect, and a heightening of excitement: it seemed possible, then, to be profoundly excited (am I remembering drugs?) but also shut-off, slowed down by inertia, by a sense of death's imminence and ubiquity.

The 1980s was, maybe for some, a time of boundaries being shattered: I envy that shattering. I shattered a few sexual taboos, in the 1980s, but those were relatively small-scale shatterings, hardly perceptible. Otherwise I lay sunk in my word-obsessed ontology. My task in that decade was becoming a writer and becoming a serious reader: which meant (or so I insisted) solitude, and shutting out the world, even as I pretended to drink it in. I'm not proud of that narrowness, but I need to mention it here, as we're discussing bold leaps and brave acts. I can't look back at my 1980s as being especially filled with bravery. And perhaps the relentless interiority of my 1980s had some link, without my knowledge, to the temper of those times.

Two events of the written word, in the 1980s, call now for me to mark them. In 1980, James Schuyler published his great long poem, THE MORNING OF THE POEM, a tremendous ode to possibility, even as it was also a confession of psychological limitation, of shut-in status, of remoteness from the world. (Thus he demonstrated that it was possible to have a utopic flooding of consciousness--a sense of vibrating possibility--at the same time as that consciousness was truncated and limited by solitude and illness.) And in 1986, Jean Genet died, after not having

written novels for years; he completed his last work, PRISONER OF LOVE, right before his death, and it was published, in France, that same year. That book, as I see it, represented as much a flight from writing as an embrace of it; and it seems to me a monumental testimony to how a writer--or artist--must flee his or her medium (or traditional preoccupations) in order to keep working.

Warhol died in 1987. I wasn't conscious of Warhol, or contemporary art in general, in the 1980s.

That unconsciousness was part of the lamentable texture of my 1980s.

Am I speaking in the too-easy register of disavowal? As if now I were super-conscious, superomniscient, super-involved-in-the-world, as opposed to my benighted 1985 self? A certain mood of somberness (crossed with fitful ebullience) stays with me from that time. I guess that's one legacy of the 1980s.

Apologies for the inwardness of this posting! I can't revisit the 1980s without stepping back into that inwardness, an introspection that sometimes prohibits thought. It's safe to say I'm haunted.

Maurice Berger Wayne, you write: "Am I speaking in the too-easy register of disavowal? As if now I were superconscious, super-omniscient, super-involved-in-the-world, as opposed to my benighted 1985 self? A certain mood of somberness (crossed with fitful ebullience) stays with me from that time. I guess that's one legacy of the 1980s.

Apologies for the inwardness of this posting! I can't revisit the 1980s without stepping back into that inwardness, an introspection that sometimes prohibits thought. It's safe to say I'm haunted."

Firstly, I want to say that your words are both insightful and eloquent. I think introspection is very necessary in this conference, both because we all lived through the '80s and because it was, itself, a decade haunted by very powerful forces of reaction. I would stay out all night--reveling in the amazing club scene of the East Village in the early 1980s--only to return home to a NEW YORK TIMES filled with the startling reality of the day. The 1960s, despite its tragedies and wars, returns to me, to my memory, as a refreshing, even bracing moment. "The 1980s" really does seem haunted, for within it, perhaps, are sown the seeds of our present day nightmares (as David observed yesterday).

Thanks, also to Wendy, Ondine, and Karen for your insightful, well-written thoughts. It's great to read writing like yours, especially in the context of the art world.

Irving Sandler What one thinks is important in the 1980s (or any time) depends on one's vantage point. There is no question that performance, film, video, and photography were significant, but they only ruled the day for those who were committed to them. But for others, myself included, there was a renaissance in painting, think Schnabel, Murray, Salle, Rothenberg, Fischl, Scully, Applebroog, et., etc. The Russian Constructivists first killed painting, or so they hoped, but ilike Joe Hill or the cat with 9 lives, it never died. Artists such as Oldenburg, Dine, Raushenberg, Grooms, and Morris did performances. I loved many of them, and invited Rauschenberg to do one at N.Y.U. But that did not stop these artists from making art objects. I think that the alleged war between objectmaking and photo- and media-based-art was waged by art theoreticians.

Olu Oguibe I'm glad that Karen and Ondine are broadening the geographic breadth of our discussions which in some sense has been running the risk of becoming irretrievably Nuyocentric. Reports and

reflections on the rest of the American '80s beyond Manhattan would do a great deal to correct the myth that New York was all there was and will ever be.

Thanks, Maurice, for mentioning Marlon Riggs's absolutely critical interventions that stirred the waters of American public television and challenged several decades of stereotypic cultural narrative and their hold on the American imagination. It ought to be remembered that Marlon's "Tongues Untied" was one of the most controversial cannon shots in the culture wars at the end of the decade when it extended those wars beyond the visual arts and publicly funded art institutions by dragging in public television and equally challenging it to stand up and defend its mission rather than surrender to the far Right. Marlon's previous work of course prepared the way for that final shot as a new decade crept in, and by then, it was too late for the door to be shut in his face. Sadly, that epic incident marked another moment of glory for conservative fundamentalism as public television eventually betrayed its mission and hence quietly submitted itself to self-censorship.

Marlon Riggs's work was a great discovery for me and an indispensable fixture of my curricula from the moment I moved to America from the UK. That work was also made possible by the spirit of the '80s and the fact that the '80s, as many have pointed out, were in several respects an extension of the '70s and the late '60s as well as a response to those decades. Video had matured which made it possible for such work to be produced on relatively low budget. There was an established track record of African American film-making boosted especially by the seminal works of the late '60s and the popular appeal of the work from the '70s, and this also made it easier to sell projects such as Riggs's. And public television seemed ready to admit wellconstructed critical narratives in the mainstream except perhaps that it hadn't quite correctly gauged its strengths against the onslaught of the philistine minority. Unfortunately, when that strength was tested, public television caved in and withdrew to redraw the parameters of its engagement with truth.

Regarding the erasure of boundaries in artistic practice and the rise of new genre and media, it is important to note that although painting breathed its last at the end of the '80s, it nevertheless did rule. Painting did not go out with a whimper; it remained dominant in the market to the end. In Europe painting continued to command the respect of the establishment even as it gave room to other media in the gallery space, and until very recently the winners of Britain's highest artistic honor, the Turner, remained almost exclusively painters.

The emergence and success of alternative media has not happened outside the dictates of the market, and Cindy Sherman and the rest would not be successful if their work had not stayed close to painting by retaining wall-bound interpretations. In other words, it is impossible to discuss the triumph of new media in the '80s without acknowledging the role of the market as both inhibitor and arbiter, constantly mediating the will to explore and experiment, constantly summoning artists to a reality check. Hopefully we will at some point take a look at the market and its role in defining the work of the '80s.

For me the heydays of performance art were not the '80s but the late '60s and the '70s. In fact, I think that performance art lost its way in the '80s and is only now beginning to recover and redefine itself. Adrian Piper's seminal performance work, Marina and Ulay's seminal work, Yoko Ono's seminal work, did not happen in the '80s but prior, and nothing out of that decade, in my thinking, compares with the daring challenge to tradition that those artists posed in the '70s. I would like to be corrected, but perhaps we run the risk of over-romanticizing the achievement of the '80s in certain areas. In fact, in my thinking, what the '80s did most emphatically was reassert the dominance of the market on creative strategy. Perhaps this was good since, as pointed out earlier, it challenged artists to device strategies to market their work. The other side of the coin is that something was lost of the will to take art outside and beyond the reaches of the market, to defy the hegemony of collectors and the dictates of the gallery space, to create art outside of the market economy. Sure enough, a great deal was done outside the gallery space but much of that was done within the gallery system, nonetheless, with the market constantly hovering in the

background. Artists may have kept their eyes on the prize of experiment and autonomy in the '80s but their minds were firmly set on the money, too.

Jonathan Weinberg I have been spending a lot of time reading and looking at ephemera from Club 57 which of course was run by Ann Magnuson, and which artists like Kenny Scharf, Keith Haring, Klaus Nomi, Tseng; Kowng Chi, John Sex hung out. Many things seem remarkable about it. Here are a few that come to mind in relationship to Maurice's intro. 1) The "pose" that the participents were could not care less about what the academy and other art institutions were saying about art. 2) The extraordinary mix of kinds of art--music, theater, poetry, film--and, I might add in a big way, painting. 3) Maurice is right--there was a requirement, that whatever you do, even if it was in a traditional medium, be performative, i.e. Haring found a way to make his drawings highly theatrical by doing them in the subways in the middle of the day so that he would be caught (Haring was actually quite sophisticated about conceptualism, Burroughs etc.) 4) A lot of it was very silly, which at the time was liberating.

Weirdly, I went to Studio 57 a few times to see campy movies but only realized it was _the_ Studio 57 years later. At the time it never occurred to me that this crazy place was some kind of laboratory for art making. The lack of pretense was definitely real--it seemed like a rec room in which a lot of young people were doing fun things. A had a similar feeling when I first saw Nan Goldin's Ballad in a loft. It seemed like she was just showing a bunch of slides of her friends.

Again, she turned traditional documentary "street-style" photography into a performance.

And yet we can also feel in this theatricality, perhaps the possible loss of a certain kind of serious contemplation. Or perhaps that comes later when we re-digest what was done.

Maurice Berger Olu, you write: "Hopefully we will at some point take a look at the market and its role in defining the work of the '80s."

Yes, indeed. Our next session will deal with the art market and the geographical and institutional shifts that took place in the 1980s.

Jonathan: a question. You refer to "Studio 57" in the second paragraph of your last post. Do you mean "Studio 54"? Or am I missing something? STUDIO 57 was a short-lived TV program on the Dumont Network in the US in the 1950s and, I think, a London Club.

In NY, Studio 54 was a sex-and-drug infused disco . . . until the late-1980s, when it WAS rented out to artists, choreographers, and performers. Are you referring to the London Club or "Studio 54."

Simon Leung I’m so impressed with everyone’s passion and reminiscence—this really leaves me sort of speechless, since I remember a lot of what’s said about the art world, about punk, about activism, about the simultaneous breakdown of disciplinary knowledge and re-entrenchment of the art market, etc, but I feel a bit disconnected from the discursive side of these re-stagings, maybe it’s because I saw many of the same things from different angles, but also perhaps because I think feeling un-timely with the 80s means/meant that one does/did not connect the experience of “being there” with the discourse around it, however counter-hegemonic the discourse.

Here are some scattered thoughts on a few topics raised by others.

Punk: I was not punk, but in the early early 80s punk was the most rigorous self-administered political consciousness raising/self-awareness/aesthetic revolution program I knew. Punk was, for me, in a word, Nietzschean. I know this wasn’t everybody’s punk, but it was mine: a transvaluation of all values. It was a fuck you to both complacent hippies AND fascist Reagan because punk meant an aesthetic destruction of the world as you inherited its hypocrisies. Punk meant everything you thought were the correct values, say musical skills, was wrong. It was mostly anarchist in tone, its take on politics was not always consistent, but more or less always ironic—if it made political references, it exposed both the violence and glamour of political allegiance and idolatry (three bands names from the 80s: the Dead Kennedys, Reagan Youth, Jodie Foster’s Army). Punk meant radical alienation without apologies—beginning with yourself (“Please Kill me”). As the great East Village performance artist Penny Arcade, channeling Jack Smith, likes to quip about contemporary post Queer Nation queers (probably someone not unlike a few of us here), “you’re not queer, queer means you don’t have any friends!” That’s what punk was like for me—a continual project of the self where you gave yourself impossible tests at which you mostly failed. It was the kind of thing you couldn’t keep up forever, because on some level it demanded continual impossible rage; and an aesthetic aporia where you had to both appear authentic/real and committed to tearing down all the tropes of appearing. When you’re young and trying to be a person, it was a pretty effective way to tear down boundaries—in yourself.

Art: In the late 1970s when I was starting high school, I discovered performance art and punk simultaneously. In 1979 I wrote my 9th grade English on Chris Burden, in part because it looked like punk rock, even if I hadn’t been to anything and didn’t have punk (or practically any) friends; but also more pointedly, I think it was because I discovered a place called contemporary art where conventional believes about propriety or normal values were suspended. By 1982 I was at UCLA where Burden was a professor. But the thing is, by that time, as lots of students were doing performances, the people whom we thought of as “real” performance artists—like Burden or two of my teachers Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy, were making things and no longer making performances. One can perhaps argue that that part of the reason Kelley and McCarthy became such big stars beginning in the late 80s and early 90s was because they more or less stopped doing performances. I cannot tell you how many times I would be in a “new forms and concepts” (performance) class and the professor or an older graduate student would say, “when I used to do performances…”

Dance: Wendy was locating a shift in aesthetic focus when she described the seriousness of an Yvonne Rainer work, however humorous, with the sensibility of the 80s, let’s say a Michael Clark or better yet, Karole Armitage. But what are the implications of these shifts if we consider Maurice’s question about the performative in all its different implications? (Let’s say, the differences between representational performativity and simulational performativity.) One way to characterize this was, as Wendy did, via the a trajectory from avant-garde “seriousness” to postmodern “irony,” but I wonder if we can’t also venture a theory of the shifts in attitudes via an etiology of, to use a very 80s word, “the gaze” of the dancer—and by this I mean both the look of the dancer and, in more Lacanian vein, the way the dancer becomes an articulated picture for the other—the way the dancer DOES performativity. If the heroic Martha Graham dancer always looked up toward the transcendental heavens, to the Greeks and their Gods, and Merce Cunningham took the gaze down a notch towards the straight ahead, and “human,” quotidian eye-level of the dancer, by the time of the radical experimentation of Rainer’s 60s, and I am thinking specifically about “Trio A,” the gaze of the dancer took an even more rigorous desublimation when it doesn’t even stay at any ONE level. The dancer avoids eye contact with either the heroic gods or the immediate, present audience. One can see this gaze as one that is inward, as a living, imminent gaze within a body that doesn’t pretend that there is an idealized symbolic illusionistic space beyond. The affect of this gaze connoted the imminent process of the dance being done by a dancer who is neither mythic character (Clytemnestra) nor abstract shapes (Summerspace), but one whose function as a body (say a lived body), is not divorced from all that can happen to a body (say a woman). If in the 1970s Deborah Hay famously did not dance, but instead talked to the audience AS a dance, it was in part because that dealt with the phenomenological here and now (there an then) of a lived moment where the argument of

authenticity still held sway. But by the age of the actor as president Reagan 80s, and I’m thinking of the looks of Armitage’s go-go ballerinas, I see, in a sense, the loss of faith in a discourse of the authentic in the gaze of her dancers, their gazed fracturing into an endless series of quotational looks OF women—not unlike a television… screen.

Simon Leung There’s a lot more I am beginning to think about. I need to check out now because there are some pressing real life things I am dealing with, but at some point, I think it might be worthy to examine the fact that much of the challenges waged against disciplinary knowledge or hegemonic modernism in intellectual life or art practice was in fact directed toward something we thought was going to be around, but are now seriously under threat. Much of the post-structural philosophy and political theory of import, and much of the post-modern art we value as emblematic of the age, were ANTI-humanist; critical of the transcendental/universal enlightenment autonomous subject, etc, but what we are being faced with, as Karen points out, is a threat to the autonomous subject—however fictional—as such.

The political/cultural backlash of the 1980s was in fact mirroring the critiques and projects—they were each other’s symptoms and subjects. Roger Ailes and Cindy Sherman were both masters of simulation in the 80s, but it was Ailes who got us 12 years of Reagan/Reagan/Bush.

I’m still a little stuck on what I said in my first post-that I am interested in how we now DO the 1980s; in affect; in surface. I am interested in a “READ” of the past where we maintain the tension between situating the past with our presently situated gaze. For example, Jeff Koons was much debated in the 80s in terms of how much he actually WAS that ever superficial sunny, “morning in America” Reaganesque guy, but I think it would be interesting to think through his “affect” as just that—a sheddable depth-less skin, an inoculation—and what does inoculation tell us as a strategy? Compare that with Tehching Hsieh, whose performances in the 80s were what many considered the epitome of 70s hardcore commitment, but thought of by others as a coda to an age that had moved on and became how we are now talking about the 1980s. Writing in 2005, I somehow think that Tehching Hsieh’s work has a lot to teach us about this moment, but also the 1980s.

Dorit Cypis Thank you Maurice.

“We may not need to justify our liberties to anyone, but surely, in order to defend and protect them effectively, we must certainly justify them to ourselves…. freedom is a Sisyphean boulder; we must lean our shoulders to it at all times and never relent or take it for granted, else it rolls most certainly all the way down to the bottom of the hill from whence it is much more difficult to retrieve.” Olu “Self-awareness and self-inquiry--second nature to people of diaspora, to those whose very survival depends on understanding one's place in and relationship to the world--does not come naturally to ANY dominant culture.” Maurice Last night 15 folks of cross generational backgrounds, teachers, artists and lawyers sat around a table at my studio reflecting on the late 80’s and how artists lost so deafeningly to congressional and public opinion. We simply did not know “where” we were then. In our reflections last night we echo your sentiments above. When did it get fixed in stone that the arts had only to be true to itself? We fell right onto the blades of those waving the “bread before roses” banners. It drove me nuts…and continues to…that there has to be a choice between the two. There are many days today I spend with lawyers, trying to mediate between their adversarial positions, none of which present the possibility of self-reflection or of empathy for the other. I love mediation because I can never lose sight that the bars are bars because of the spaces between them.

The “spaces between” was my exploratory work of the 80’s…supported by the personal and textual meetings I had in the 70’s…Simone Forti, Robert Filliou, David Askevold, Vito Acconci, Rebecca Horne, Dan Graham, Yvonne Rainer, Lori Anderson, Marguerite Duras, Werner Hertzog, Jean Luc Godard, Maya Deren, Tadeuz Kantor, Doug Huebler, and no less, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Courbet…but it was my “second nature”, in your words Maurice, that drove me relentlessly to observe introspectively and socially “where” I was, as if not looking might mean a death sentence. These artists modeled fabulous forms, but the drive came from within, propelled always by selves and histories inter-reflecting to find meaning, again. I smashed images, sounds, and narratives together not only because I could, but also because I had too. Feminism was a rubric, which spelled permission for much of my work, but few then understood that it was the “beingness” within the (my) gendered form, which was crying louder, the 1980's not withstanding.

In 1982, during the national Nuclear Freeze Campaign, I was just as committed to producing the symposium “Unforgettable Fire”(the bombs that fell on Hiroshima/Nagasaki, fell on America too), as I was in creating the performative work “The Artist and Her Model (after Egon Schiele)” in Holland, 1986, or the multi image work “X-Rayed”, at the Whitney, 1988. Each work attempted to excavate the body from external social oppressions and too from internalized obsessions. And too, ironically (although I never intended any) I did not escape the social pitfalls of inevitable power relations inherent in “looking”, as the subject/object of my gaze in “X-Rayed” threatened me with litigation over the images I displayed of her. My art, inevitably, always fell back into life and it was there that the harder work was to be done. In hindsight, back then, I saw art as a lab for life. I loved playing with the forms but I loved even more the human movement, philosophically, physically, psychically, and socially. When we lose sight of these, in any era, we fall back to the bars.

Andrea Robbins I have to smile a little because a few weeks ago in class a student half jokingly referenced his perceived failure as a teenager in the 80's, compared with the "brat pack" John Hughes films, Tom Cruise in Risky Business, Fast Times at Ridgemont High etc. of the same time.

"No parties with pizza spinning on the record player, no prom for him" he complained.

I have often wondered the same thing about the photographs of Nan Goldin; whether her work created a sort of fiction that has come to stand for that time and the East Village, or provided a script for it's players and followers (sort of hen or egg?). I went to school in the same neighborhood and I worked for a lower east side gallery but Golden's work seemd like a construct to me even at the time. I went to performances at Limelight, CBGBs and to the way passe Studio 54 but only as sort of field trips, those places held no currency for me or my friends, except as landmarks (but hip ones). By the way an interesting aside CBGB's will move from the Bowery to an "East Village Themed Mall" in Las Vegas that just broke ground just last month by the airport.

I agree with Olu Oguibe that performance lost it's way in the 80's. The NEA was under attack, Richard Serra's Tilted Arc went first. Public Television also took so many hits under Reagan (the period before had been so rich with documentaries by established and emerging film makers backed by PBS monies). Now we are subjected to the miserable big budget productions by the likes of Ken Burns that pass for documentary; The Civil War, Baseball,and later his public self education on the subject of jazz.

I guess PBS at times does take the path of self sensorship, or just plain blather under the banner of "centrality", but there's POV as a platform for some independent documentary and of course Bill Moyers and a few other gems.

"Putting ones body out there" as Wendy Perron writes would seem to imply a more vulnerable stance, but we are not just talking about the incredible "Vital Statistics of a Citizen" by Martha Rosler(1976) but Karen Finley shoving yams up her ass.

Maurice you are right about collaboration being central to the 80's art world. I always had the feeling that many artists collaborated in earlier days but often without formal credit being assigned especially to female partners and collaborators. Perhaps that is one good thing that the corporate model supplied to the art world.

Crossing disciplines and borders has revitalized the artworld. I think crossing into the social, political, local and the area beyond the frame is what art and artists do even when they try as they might not to. I don't see it so a blurring of borders in terms of production, but certainly one of reception and the new openness of the art audience and collectors in the 80s. I didin't perceive a war being waged between object making and photo-and media-based-art (Irving Sandler), just a widening of reception and more unconventional and new platforms to view new art like performance spaces, and east village galleries.

Maurice Berger Simon, you write: "The political/cultural backlash of the 1980s was in fact mirroring the critiques and projects—they were each other’s symptoms and subjects. Roger Ailes and Cindy Sherman were both masters of simulation in the 80s, but it was Ailes who got us 12 years of Reagan/Reagan/Bush."

I wonder why this is so. The troika of '80s Republican image-makers--Roger Ailes, Michael Deaver and Peggy Noonan--had an extraordinary grasp of the ways images could manipulate and persuade. I think of the amazing story about a speech Reagan gave around the time of the Bittberg disaster, a misstep that lead to accusations by some Democrats that he was a warmonger (an accusation that had also begun to register in his polling numbers). Deaver set up an ingenious photo-op, a speech design to imbue the saber-rattling Reagan with the aura of peacemaker. Above Reagan's head, he placed a banner with three words--something like "stability," "strength," and "peace." Then he limited the print and TV camera pool to a tiny area below the stage. Thus Reagan could be photographed delivering the speech from only one angle-a shot from below that revealed a gesticulating Reagan below the world "peace." Such strategies of subliminal message delivery--then rather novel--are now commonplace in American political campaigns.

But strategies like these require a considerable degree of sophistication, re: the way images work. When AD executives were asked to analyze the Bush II and Kerry campaigns last year, they concluded that Kerry's visual campaign--from its graphics to its language--was both tired and ineffective, far less up-to-date and snappy than that of the Bush campaign.

Barbara Buhler Lynes I remember the exhilaration of seeing the innovative work of Kruger, Levine, Sherman, Lawler, Holtzer, Mendieta, Piper, Pindell, and Simmons, to name some of the women who gained visibility and authority in some cases in the early 1980s. Indeed, collectively, they achieved a higher profile for women than ever before, which gave such new hope, but as we celebrated, it also became clear that in spite of the new perspective 70s feminism had provided, no woman artist could have achieved the prominence or authority these women enjoyed had they been painting, which was then being declared dead. Its death had been announced shortly after the invention of photography in the mid-nineteenth century and had since been repeated frequently.

Yet, as others here have pointed out, painting was very much alive, such as in work of, among others, Schnabel, Salle, Bleckner, Basquiat, Dunham, and although its doors were open to women, and there have since been many major women painters, painting was then and has always been a male domain that has effectively barred women from attaining an authority equal to that of male painters (seems like not much has changed). Yet, by inserting themselves as something other than painters into the dialogue about painting, these women artists consciously or unconsciously defined a new point of intersection between painting and other mediums, especially photography, as in Sherman’s photographs of herself that call to mind archetypally

famous paintings, that prepared the way and energized a new space in which the dialogue between painting and photography, film, and video could expand into its present richness and subtle complexity.

Elizabeth Alexander Adrian Piper's "Pretend Not To Know What You Know" was a very important piece of boundarybreaking work for me to see and meditate on in the 'eighties. She used photographs in the public domain (such as the famous picture of Nancy Reagan sitting on Mr. T's lap -- thinking back from now I ask myself, was that really as I remember it? Did Nancy Reagan actually sit on Mr. T's lap or did someone somehow doctor the image?) and superimposed several refrains, the most resonant of which was "pretend not to know what you know." This way of calling up all that was unspoken in images we see all the time, in "the news," offered me a powerful way to think about what we might call the American Sub-Rosa. Barbara Kruger, Lorna Simpson, and Carrie Mae Weems also opened great possibility with their use of texts with photographs. Further, Piper's very existence as someone working in more than one area, areas that are sometimes contradictory -- working artist, philosophy professor -- gave me another way to think about what my life might look like.

I took a master class some time in the mid-'eighties with Garth Fagan and experienced the challenges his technique posed to anyone whose body was educated in a unilateral fashion in dance. Was it Limon? Was it ballet? Was it jazz? Was it Horton? Was it folk? Was it bootyshaking? Was it sport? What was this thing he was doing, he had visioned? It took what it needed to be what it had to be, and that was what was liberating for me as I tried to be a poet and scholar in the '80s.

Oliver Wasow I’m feeling a tad scattered at the moment but wanted to register in with some thoughts before the “lock-down”….

First off, I suspect Jonathan was referring to Club 57, not Studio 57 (or 54). If I remember right, Club 57 was at 57 St. Marks Place and had a number of theme nights, most of them a lot of fun, very camp, and very much the first flowering, in my life anyway, of the media-referential, ironic, pomo strategies that would come to dominate so much of the art of the last two decades. Club 57, The Mudd Club, The Pyramid, etc., were all filled with young people, like myself, who had come to NYC to recreate Warhol’s factory for our selves. We’d listened to the Velvets, felt like we knew Andy and Lou personally, and when we got through the Mudd Club’s ropes we were Superstars. The creative energy in these places was very media-centric, full of pop culture homage, nostalgia, kitsch and lots and lots and lots of IRONY. I t was also, for lack of a better word, very multi-disciplinary, multi-media, boundary-crossing stuff. We were artists first, and painters or photographers or video artists or performers second. And, of course, many were also “in a band”.

Some, perhaps related, words about the connecting of neo-expressionism with neo-conservatism: It seems to me that one of the greatest ironies to come out of all the irony floating around at that time was the failure by so many of us to recognize that much of what we objected to-- the tortured, heroic, posturing, macho, mythologizing, market savvy of the neo-expressionists--was in fact every bit as much in the tradition of Duchamp and Warhol as Van Gogh and Pollock. Well, ok, maybe not the macho part. In retrospect, it may have been, at least in part, the underdog market status of the more theoretically driven work that legitimized its claim to radicalism, not the work itself. This is not of course to suggest that a lot of this work wasn’t good, only that there was an unnecessary “us vs them” construct set up, perhaps the last gasps of an art world accustomed to having one dominant movement in place at a time.

As Wendy said earlier, it seems obvious to me that crossing disciplines is a very healthy thing,

and so many artists working today with so many different tools and so many different styles can only be seen as a positive development. Even healthier still would be if new technologies, and the re-mix culture they help facilitate, decreased our focus on the individual artist and weakened our desire to “name names”.

That being said, Maurice, in your otherwise pefect and eloquent intro to this section, you misspelled my name. Wasow, only one S. Ondine Chavoya As a way to expand my discussion on the vibrant exchanges between Chicano punk and art in LA in the 1980s, I want to introduce a very specific event, LA’s Punk Prom, and build from there. I will try to be as specific as possible, since I imagine this is not a particularly well-known story. But I think it is evocative of the types of “resolutely performative, theoretically… and socially engaged, and body-driven” forums Maurice mentions.

The Punk Prom was held at the Vex club in East L.A. on Sunday, May 11, 1980, as an anti-gala for Dadafest L.A., a month-long city-wide arts program. X, one of LA’s most celebrated punk bands, headlined the event, which also included a “vicious dance contest” and the random selection and crowning of the punk prom king and queen. The Vex originated to give punk an East LA venue and at the same time link it with East LA’s copious history of Chicano public arts activism by associating it with the physical space and programming of Self-Help Graphics, a Chicano community arts organization. Self-Help Graphics was founded in East Los Angeles in 1972 by Sister Karen Boccalero, a Franciscan nun, as a printmaking atelier, exhibition space, and education center. Self-Help Graphics is currently embroiled in a controversial reorganization and closure which has generated a lot of press in LA, but as Karen Mary movingly introduced yesterday, the center’s activities and community outreach programs were (will be again?) as innovative as they were far-ranging, particularly around Days of the Dead.

The Vex was established as a bimonthly nightclub in 1979 by Joe Suquett and Willie Herrón, wellknown muralist, founding member of the Chicano art group Asco, and lead vocalist and keyboardist for the band Los Illegals, with the full support of Sister Karen. Opening night of the Vex featured performances by The Plugz, The Brat, and Los Illegals, and was hosted by Asco artist Gronk and Jerry Dreva, a South Milwaukee and LA based performance artist, who had been a driving force in the 1970s queer conceptual-performance art group Les Petits Bon Bons and an extraordinarily active member of the mail art networks. By having Gronk and Dreva co-host the inaugural Friday night affair, the organizers self-consciously aligned the Vex with the infamous “Dreva/Gronk 68-78: A Decade of Life/Art” exhibition opening - publicized as “Art Meets Punk” in the pages of Slash magazine - that put LACE on the map. The Vex soon became a popular and unparalleled intersection for punk and new wave enthusiasts from both the East and West sides of Los Angeles, wherein live music was combined with theater, poetry, and a variety of visual arts forms. In addition to a host of striking Xeroxed flyers, local artists like Richard Duardo of Aztlán Multiples were often commissioned to create silkscreen posters to promote Vex events. (The “Just Another Poster?: Chicano Graphic Art in California” catalogue includes a number of these Duardo prints – including his Punk Prom print - in the “Punks and Pachucos” section I helped develop for the exhibition.)

In essence, the Vex was a locus for all kinds of cultural and aesthetic activities… “a new platform for new art” (Andrea Robbins). As Willie Herrón remembers it, the Vex was “an alternative to the alternative” (the West Side music scene) and represents the “do it yourself” ethos of collaboration that often made the production of Chicano art and punk recordings possible at the time. Thus, the Vex points to another moment when East LA artists developed alternative means of access and support in the face of legacies of exclusion. In this regard, Herrón’s involvement with the Vex and his band Los Illegals channels and extends his earlier work with Harry Gamboa, Jr., Gronk, and Patssi Valdez as Asco.

Fueled by the Chicano civil rights movement - but often at odds with the restrictive definitions of

cultural and aesthetic “authenticity” posited by the Chicano Arts Movement – the multimedia conceptual art group Asco specialized in guerrilla public performances and their signature invented medium, “The No-Movie” (a simulation of film stills). Throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, Asco developed a sophisticated body of work attentive to the specific geographies of Los Angeles and, in particular, the urban Chicano barrios. The frequent object of Asco’s critical actions and investigations was the normative landscape and official culture of Los Angeles.

Through the performance of body, action, and tableau, the artists brought attention to the spectacles of violence, police brutality, exploitation, and discrimination that played out in the urban barrios and coupled these recurrent scenarios with forms of representational violence carried out in mass media.

Willie Herrón sought to cultivate the spirit of Asco’s visual and corporeal subversions into musical performances and ideally expand the audience in the process by forming a band and starting a club. Los Illegals’ first single “el-lay,” co-written by Herrón and Gronk, was released in 1981 by A&M Records. The crux of the song is a bilingual pun: the common abbreviation of Los Angeles, L.A., sounds like “el ley,” the law, in Spanish. (The song was recorded on one side in English and Spanish on the other side of the 7” single, but the bilingual play on words functions in both versions). The lyrics represent the spatial economy of L.A. as a racialized law of limits and containment, while also making reference to earlier Asco art projects, “didn’t Gronk erase the border yesterday?” In 1983, Los Illegals released their full-length LP “Internal Exile,” also on A&M Records. (Although Los Illegals were promoted as “punk” – perhaps because of the critical urgency of their lyrics and their expression – today, it sounds more like “new wave.”) Like the earlier single, the album directly addressed immigration and racism in its lyrics all the while denouncing the repressive mechanisms of landscape, law, and media in Los Angeles. Other songs criticized the “urban renewal” projects that had historically destroyed or displaced barrio communities, gang violence, and police abuse. The title of the album provocatively suggests that regardless of national origins or citizenship, all Latinos are “internal exiles” within dominant U.S. cultural, representational, and state apparatuses. In this way, Los Illegals aimed to identify and denounce the increasing xenophobia directed against both immigrants and U.S.-born Latinos fueled by the impending terror over “loosing control” of international borders that circulated in the mass media (a scenario that has only intensified in subsequent years and has now been transformed into national policy).

In the case of Willie Herrón, an artist already involved in collaborative performance art in the early 1970s, it’s in the 1980s when additional performative forms are explored, namely music, that could hypothetically reach - and create - even broader audiences than the public and performance art projects he had also engaged in. At the same time, however, Willie Herrón never abandoned more traditional mediums, including painting, printmaking, and muralism. AgnPs Varda’s 1980 documentary “Murs, Murs,” produced for French Public Television and later shown at the Cannes Film Festival, aptly demonstrates Herrón’s movement between these multiple forums.

The histories of Chicano participation in punk, like the histories of Chicano art more generally, are only now being written and interpreted. In addition to some of the bands already mentioned, such as The Brat, Plugz, Los Illegals, two other popular Chicano punk bands of the time were The Odd Squad and Thee Undertakers, while countless others featured prominent Chicano bandmembers such as Alice and the Bags, Black Flag, Gears, Germs, Nervous Gender, Plimsouls, Screamers, Weirdos, Zeros, etc. (In fact, Robert Lopez, lead singer of The Zeros, is perhaps best known today as the artist and icon, El Vez.) Over the years, I have had numerous conversations with scholars committed to Chicano and Latino cultural studies who had some involvement in the LA punk and new wave youth cultures, namely Michelle Habell-Pallán, Raúl Villa, Josh Kun, and Rita Gonzalez, and there seems to be some consensus that Chicano youth who experienced alienation from both the dominant and Chicano culture may have been drawn to the punk and new wave scenes in California because it offered a site where identities outside of both ethnic stereotypes and narrow cultural nationalism could be embodied and performed. Simon, I absolutely agree with (and love) your concept of punk as “a fuck you to both complacent hippies

AND fascist Reagan because punk meant an aesthetic destruction of the world as you inherited its hypocrisies.” At the same time, if the above scenario is at all plausible, then it might offer an important, however subtle, nuance to your compelling perspective. At the very least, why and how certain Chicano youth may have been attracted to punk and new wave suggests the potential that it may have also been enacted differently or a least with a varying intonation and accent. And maybe it is because of this different intonation and accent that its specific sonic texture and enactments have been effaced.

Maurice Berger Oliver, you write: "That being said, Maurice, in your otherwise perfect and eloquent intro to this section, you mis-spelled my name. Wasow, only one S." This being written, I and the introductory text now stand corrected. Sorry for the mistake.

Kathy O’Dell Did performance art “lose its way” in the 1980s? Olu’s and Andrea’s assertion, albeit compelling, begs an additional question: What precisely was/is “the way” of performance? I think Dorit provided a wonderful answer: It is what lies between the bars.

To my mind, the “way” of performance—its mission, its destiny, its contribution to artists and viewers—is all about what happens between the performer and the audience. So what’s the big deal? The same can be said of any experience of art, be it a conventional painting or an interactive digital artwork, right? Yes, but the thing that continues to amaze me about performance is that it drives that point home. Performance brings attention to the relationship between, the space between, and especially, the unspoken agreement between the viewer and the performer (or any work of art, no matter how active or static). Enter the performance space, enter into a contract, and enter into an exploration of what a contract even means. Exit with a little more understanding of what negotiation and mediation (thanks, Dorit) mean. The value in this understanding, of course, lies in what these practices CAN mean.

This one paragraph condenses what I spent almost all of the 1980s thinking about vis-B-vis performance, so it threatens not to make any sense whatsoever, I realize! But I needed to attempt a condensation to get to what I really want to say in response to Maurice’s question of why art had become so performative by the 1980s, as well as in response to some of the profoundly moving words that others have written.

I am not so sure that art had become more (per Maurice’s suggestion) or less (per Olu’s and Andrea’s shared suggestion) performative in the 1980s. What I think may have happened by the 1980s, however, is that there was a need to discover art’s already existing performativity and, more specifically, to discover the dynamics of negotiation that is performance art’s pulse.

Of all the posts, it is Wayne’s I cannot shake. The “word-obsessed ontology” in which he says he stayed sunk was shared by many a performance artist I saw (and reviewed, whenever I could) in the 1980s. I think of Frank Maya’s and David Wojnarowicz’s monologues packed with sometimes hilarious, but always rage-filled, action-provoking words about being gay and sick, Diamanda Galas’s screeching cascades of words memorializing those dead and dying of AIDS, Robbie McCauley’s eyes staring into the audiences’ as her endless-seeming words spoke of the endlessseeming pains of racism, Karen Finley’s words, words, words about sexism, homophobia, and more (yes, yams were involved). These are only a few of the examples of ever-increasing reliance on “the word” in 1980s performances, especially toward the late 1980s. I, for one, needed those words. These artists “did my anger for me,” all the while prodding me to find my own and take action in whatever small ways I could to “negotiate” a better set of circumstances.

I apologize for being so New York-centric in my post. I have shed proper art historian garb and focused on personal experiences of performance in the 1980s, most of which happened to be in

New York. The proper art historian in me would look to other parts of the globe. I echo Olu’s appreciation of Karen’s and Ondine’s “broadening the geographic breadth of our discussions.”

We need more of this broadening, to include more places around the world. We are still being very America-centric, if not US-centric, in our discussions. Perhaps there is someone out there among the panelists or the public who could bring to the table examples of 1980s performances in, say, China in the years leading up to Tiananmen Square in April 1989, or in Germany leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, or in Brazil, or in Australia, or anywhere other than the US? Kathy O’Dell I meant to close my post by pointing out that RoseLee Goldberg's PERFORMA 05—“the first biennial of new visual art performance,” according to the New York Times—is transpiring in New York right now, as we all discuss performance and its valence in the 1980s. A close look at this event, especially at its global representation of artists, as well as the meaning of the “re-make” (Marina Abramović begins her re-staging of past works by the likes of Gina Pane, Valie Export, Vito Acconci, and others on Wednesday), could bring a great deal of what we have discussed about performance in the 1980s into sharper focus. Of course, that discussion must be deferred to a future date.

Wendy Perron After trying to follow this discussion, I have a few isolated thoughts.

• The idea of collaboration has also been forming within progressive education. My son went to Bank Street School for Children, where they emphasize learning through working together and thru asking questions. It’s a bit like Paulo Freire: you ask questions rather than swallow the knowledge they feed you whole. And you learn from each other.

• I want to add a bit more on John Cage, who was a grandfather of a lot of the ideas of the 80s.

Deborah Hay has said that he was a big influence on her in his encouraging her to play. His spirit of experimentation was an inspiration to her. As it was to Yvonne Rainer, who did do silly things (in a serious way) like the chair-pillow dance that she recycled recently for Baryshnikov. But the other part of Cage was his insistence that art and life are inseparable. Dorit’s comment brought this to mind. I think in the 80s (and before) we were all examining how art could be closer to life rather than an escape from it. And that art-and-life credo yielded later work like Anna Deaveare Smith’s and Suzanne Lacy’s that combines art and life, or present art in the guise of life (or vice versa) in a way that is accessible to a wider swath of people than usual.

• Karole Armitage, the “punk ballerina” of the 80s is now still/again going strong. It was a kick to see her dance with a tutu on her head in the 80s, and using pointe shoes as stiletto heals (or maybe they were heels). It shook things up in exactly the way that Simon has described. All us of self-righteous feminists had to admit that it was fun. Karole’s latest work is shorn of all that 80s punk décor and, but there is a still a feistiness at its core. The dancers gaze (she no longer performs) into each other’s eyes while pulling and pushing each other in astounding ways.

(Armitage, by the way, toured with Merce Cunningham when Cage was still alive.)

• In around 1982 I co-sponsored a program of reconstructions of Judson Dance Theatre. Yvonne Rainer, at the age of 47, performed “Trio A.” She wrote a program note saying that she was menopausal and hadn’t danced in years. On the dance floor at St. Marks’ Church she wobbled quite a bit. I feel that this rendition, plus her “Convalescence Dance” she had done in the 60s, foreshadowed Bill T. Jones’ “Still Here,” the dance (or rather the idea of including terminally ill people) that was attacked by Arlene Croce in 1994. If the dancer is not at peak shape, how can the critic review it? Plunging us into the question of why people want performers to be perfect and healthy, and into the question of just how human we are allowed to be in our art.

• Another “Trio A” story: A few years ago, for an anniversary at Judson Memorial Church, I

produced a revival of Yvonne Rainer’s “Flag Dance,” which was basically several young dancers performing “Trio A” nude except for a flag tied like a bib around their necks and hanging down. In preparation I watch the video of the “People’s Flag Show” at Judson in 1970, which was the occasion for that dance (and lots of other things). The dancers who originally performed it, including Yvonne, Steve Paxton, Barbara Dilley, and David Gordon, were natural, engaged, with a direct gaze (looking fearlessly at everything in the room except the audience), with a singleness of purpose that seemed somehow spiritual. Nothing today can compare. They had an intuitive understanding of what she was doing; they were of that time. That fuzzy old video was more compelling to watch than the live dancers reconstructing it in 1997 (or maybe it was 1999). That is only to say, it’s hard to go back. And it’s hard to capture the 80s here. It’s all so elusive...and personal.

• I agree with Oliver that the difference between what we thought we were doing and what we thought we were resisting gets smaller. In looking back, the differences shrink. But I guess every era has to make its own statement in its own style.

• I want to thank Ondine and Karen Mary for telling us about the 1980s Chicano scene in L.A. It’s a reminder of how many rich pockets of activity there were and how it’s impossible to be aware of all of them.

Linda Yablonsky I must confess that I am having a hard time assimilating all of these reminiscences and reflections, mostly because it's too much too fast, and because my own experience was somewhat different and in no way academic.

First, for me punk, the Mudd Club, Club 57, the Pyramid Studio 54 and many more (Max's, One University Place, etc) were all born in the 70s and were all pretty much over by 1983, when the contemporary art market exploded and SoHo filled up with galleries and art that people had been making for themselves began to find a market - not a bad thing at the time. Meanwhile, artists who had begun teaching in both L.A. and New York began making a big difference to artists who came of age throughout the 80s and beyond.

However, what I most remember about the early 80s, in regard to the art world (leaving aside for a moment its heavy involvement in sex and drugs), was the wonderful, everything-goes energy, and this was fueled, as others here have said, by a collaborative impulse that shaped the whole community, one that got a very good look at itself during the 1980 Times Square Show. Often the moment took its most tangible form in performance and often enough the performances were the result of collaborations between artists who could not get many people to take them seriously as individuals, pretty much the genesis of the alternative space movement in the 70s.

The drugs, shared in groups, became a kind of social glue that brought people together, leading to ever widening circles of acquaintance, black and white and across all media. In collaborative performances, artists, musicians, dancers, filmmakers and writers could really see one another's minds at work. Dance, film, music, spoken word and a visual kind of burlesque theater became sympathetic, not competing, elements. That makes quite a contrast to the media-segregated, competitive culture we have now - not sure there's much of the 80s spirit in it. (One reason the art world has no political power is because the community seems to have no common goal of benefit to all.)

These days, it seems to me, it is the individual artist who performs in several areas at once, playing music, acting, painting, making videos or especially making multimedia installations. I see very little that isn't a hybrid of several forms at once. Perhaps this is a legacy of the 80s, I don't know.

I do think that by becoming performers artists can connect directly to an audience. No other medium offers the same immediacy, except books, but they connect to readers one-to-one, not collectively. (Public readings perform that service - group access to the writer's inner voice.) Back in the day, when a performance - or more likely a club evening - included film, painting, sculpture and spoken word, it could draw a broader, more mixed audience, giving the work more resonance and power.

Most of all, performances made artists into personalities and they could then become known to an increasingly larger public, which makes larger demands on the artists, who then start to add entertainment value to the mix. Now, today, I think few performance artists can afford not to be entertaining. (Joan Jonas and Marina Abramovic may be exceptions; they don't have to entertain. But it seems to me the one-time-only "experience" shared by audience and performer around a central idea is rare.

What I also remember about the 80s are all the art shows and performances that were not in galleries but in restaurants, nightclubs, discos and after-hours bars. At One U, there was the big annual art show in which everyone reveled - in the 80s in fact it joined SoHo to the East Village - leading to quite a few sponteaneous "performances" on the floor. Every night at Area was a performance, God knows, not just by the hired performers but by nearly everyone there - a legacy of both Studio 54 and the Mudd Club. Most people dressed in some sort of costume, copped an attitude, moved around as if on stage and withdrew into corners for "serious" conversations about art or artists.

Actually, the first time I saw paintings by several artists - Donald Baecheler is one example that I remember - was in one of these bars whose names I no longer remember, curated by my friend Cookie Mueller.

I remember John Kelly performing at the Anvil (or was that the 70s?). I remember doing a reading one night in the basement of the Pyramid, around 1984 or 85, with David Wojnarowicz and Lydia Lunch and that it was really crowded and that the audience was magnificently supportive.

And if someone as retiring as I was then was out there doing performances, then everyone must have been doing it. And I think everyone was - but I consider this a legacy of the Mudd Club and CBGBs, of the glitter rock years and the off-off Broadway theater of the late 60s and early 70s, of the Judson Church scene and yadda-yadda everything comes out of something.

Nevertheless, by the mid-80s hardly a weekend could without some reading in some bar somewhere, and then everyone would go to hear some band or to a party after an opening. I remember nightlife being a big part of the art experience then - it doesn't seem so now. That is, art doesn't seem so mixed up in it. I remember Nan Goldin showing what was then a fifteen- or twenty-minute slide show in lofts and how these evenings grew in length and the audience in size, mostly by word of

mouth (same as the loft-music scene had in the 70s), but also because the pictures were of all the people in the audience and narcissism ruled the day among us then the way it does in the Bush White House now.

Perhaps it's true that the art world does everything first and after a while everyone else starts to get it?

Mary Kelly When I moved back to New York in 1989, after twenty-five years in Europe and the Middle East, my sense of national boundaries and “American” identity was decidedly blurred. So, at first, I felt somewhat marginalized by the discursive boundary of the conference, which takes as its object the cultural and political legacy of the 1980s specifically in the United States. But, on second take, I might say this experience of displacement, could be seen as symptomatic of the desire for tangible borders, and, perhaps, considered in the wider context of economic globalization and Diaspora, what falls outside the regional paradigm is, in fact central to its formation.

I am thinking of certain forms of cultural migration, translation, iteration, that transformed (or eroded as some have suggested) the disciplinary boundaries of both art and criticism in the United States in the 1980s. It can be traced back to the social movements of the 60s (as Olu Oguibe and others have already pointed out), in which the demands of national liberation struggles were repeated by activists in the so-called first world. Take, for example, one of the emblematic slogans of Paris ’68, attributed originally to Mao: “no right to speak without les enquetes”. The idea that there could be no entitlement to political authority, or, closer to our agenda, artistic authenticity without continual interrogation was reiterated throughout the next two decades, but around 1977, I think there was a significant shift in the form of its appearance, I mean, from the manifesto style of an emergent organization or communal action to the editorial function of the magazine or journal.

In England, for instance, from 1969, local women’s groups met annually at the National Conference where we would give our collectively written papers, insisting that everyone had a voice and agreeing to disagree because we were part of “something bigger”, until the Conference dissolved in 1978. Then, the various tendencies in the movement started journals (Feminist Review, m/f, among others) as a means of continuing their political legacies and this was the beginning of “feminism”, contested or consolidated, as discursive site. Of course, there were magazines that functioned in this way much earlier, Tel Quel, New Left Review, Screen, and the traffic in theory (Marxist, structuralist, semiotic) was well established in the “developing world” (I was introduced to it in Beirut in the 60s), but it was not until the late 70s that the proliferation and distribution of these kinds of publications, including translations of key texts, mainly from French, had an impact on cultural theory in the United States (Yale French Studies, October, Critical Inquiry). I realize that the trajectory I am following is a narrow one, but what I want to focus on is the intersection of postmodernism and feminism in the 1980s, not because it is the most important thing that happened then, or simply, because it

informs my view of that moment, but mostly, because it seems to have been absent (except for comments by Andrea Robbins and Wendy Pierson) from this discussion so far.

In 1983, Post-Partum Document (1973-79) was published in book form, translated, you could say, from the materially heterogeneous and phenomenally contingent shape of an exhibition as event into something altogether different, more homogenous, but also more accessible because it is reproducible and enters easily into the commerce of ideas which is not the same thing as the discursive site. The discursive site as I see it, is the embodied exchange that takes place around the text/event among those with a stake in its decipherment. The intense pleasure and excitement, even the conflict, this generated could be considered one of the “upsides” of the 80s. I have in mind what became known as the social construction versus essentialism debate. Although this was never a formulation I used, PPD was associated with it. With regard to feminism, what I did describe in the introduction was a theoretical transition: from the personal is political to the subjective moment of women’s oppression and then to the question of sexual difference. And there were important iterations of this argument in relation to race, i.e., positive images versus representation (Stuart Hall) and later, in queer theory, performitivity versus determinism (Judith Butler).

This was also a period that accelerated the movement of people and ideas (“jet setting” originated in the 80s): the ubiquitous biennale, (Catherine Lord), theme shows, international symposia and conferences, artists’ talks and unofficial visits. My vivid recollections include Craig Owens in London, our conversation (with Laura Mulvey and Mandy Merck) about Blue Velvet pushing the interpretive limits of psychoanalysis in the field of vision; my visits to New York, meeting Craig (and Jane Weinstock, Lynne Tillman, Barbara Kruger), the publication of his article on postmodernism and feminism; 1984, a talk at Yale, graduate students say they have never heard of Jacques Lacan, the questions go on for three hours. The same year, Kate Linker writes on sexuality and representation for Art Forum, comes to London with Silvia Kolbowski, we discuss the Difference exhibition for the New Museum; it will include European and American artists, men as well as women, work in all media. Cutting across national, gender and disciplinary boundaries, it will be one of the first exhibitions to emphasize thematic rather than formal unity.

At the New School, a conference was held in conjunction with the show in which the significance of theory in relation to sexual politics was ferociously debated, confirming both the transformative and debilitating consequences of cultural migration. Judging from the posts for this conference, I imagine many would say we have gone beyond the polarizing discourse of that moment. Just the same, it is worth remembering why psychoanalysis, in particular, was necessary then. If it could make sexuality pass into discourse, then feminism too, could enter the grand narrative of social change. Hopefully, in periodizing the 80s, the ”new subjects of history” will no longer be relegated as they were in Jameson’s otherwise brilliant periodization of the 60s, to the parenthetical, that is, as he puts it, (…women and the others).

“Geography, Institutions, and Markets”

November 6-7 Maurice Berger There is, in any cultural sphere, an implicit inter-relationship between places, markets, and institutions. The 1980s saw a number of shifts in the geography of art and performance. At the dawn of the new decade, SoHO was the center of the American art world, the result of a twentyyear transformation from an urban space of factories and deteriorating loft buildings to a vital and lucrative art center. Within a few years, the center had shifted a half-mile north and east to the East Village on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The area—home to successive waves of immigrants—was economically poor, a neighborhood of tenement buildings surrounded by mammoth low-incoming public housing projects. Galleries opened everywhere; clubs and performance spaces soon followed. And so did gentrification and the exodus of many of the area’s poorest residents.

The East Village art scene was, without argument, ebullient and energetic. But it disappeared almost as soon as it arrived. By mid-decade, many of its galleries and performance spaces returned to a revitalized SoHO, with its escalating rents and influx of high-end boutiques, designer stores, and expensive hotels.

The 1980s was marked by other shifts, as well. The New York-centric art press began to acknowledge the presence of art in other parts of the country as well as in other countries.

Institutes of Contemporary Art in Boston and Philadelphia, as well as other regional and university institutions, introduced new theories and sensibilities into museum practice, and, in the process, served as important alternatives to the increasingly conservative mainstream museum.

Traditional cultural institutions were joined by a range of “regional" and "alternative" spaces.

Organizations were founded to advocate for and support the culture of those left out of the mainstream. Artists confronted the status quo by making art that defied the hierarchies, economic interests, and biases of traditional cultural institutions. Art magazines, by decade's end, began to publish essays about “globalism” and the need to acknowledge and reach out to the rest of the world.

In this session, I would like us to examine the issues of “Geography, Institutions, and Markets.”

To what extent where these geographical and institutional shifts market driven? How and why did former industrial or residential areas, like SoHO and the East Village, emerge as art centers?

What impact on art did these geographical shifts have and vice versa? What did the East Village scene mean for American art and culture in the 1980s? To what extent did collectors, dealers, and even corporations began to eclipse critics and curators as the principal arbiters of art world taste and value? And what of the issues of gentrification, “alternative spaces,” and globalism: what cultural forces and changes did they represent in the 1980s and what is their legacy today?

Once again, please be as general or specific as you like. Tackle one question or a few Jonathan Weinberg As I have been conducting my research into the East Village Art Scene I am struck by how much of the serious writing about it focuses on questions of the market and gentrifrication. Key narratives seem to get repeated. For example the rise and fall of the galleries. Certainly the displacement of the poor, and eventually many artists themselves because of rising real estate markets is tragic, particularly since the East Village collectives like COBRA were so attuned to the ways in which the city was ignoring problems of housing and the urban poor. It all raises larger issues of capitalism--the way groups that should share the same goals for affordable house and social justice, compete for artificially limited resources. I initially lived in the East Village partially because as a young artist without parents it was what I could afford.

Another familiar narrative that actually occurred at the time is a kind of "death watch" over the scene. Trend setters were on the lookout for the moment when the East Village was over. There was an obsessive discussion of what event signaled its "end." (Gary Indiana recently in New York

Magazine said the end of the scene happened in 1981 when the restaurant 103 opened) Other key participants at the time said it was dead in 1984 at the very moment in which Art in America ran its issue celebrating the arrival of a new art neighborhood. It is typical of the market that anything that is celebrated for its youthfulness and newness becomes old and obsolete--this logic dominated the responses to the East Village. But we should be careful about all of this. East Village Artists continued to live in the neighborhood and create amazing art after 1987 after the galleries closed much of it in response to to the AIDS crisis and to gentrification.

Such issues of the market and of planned obsolescence seem to me to be crucial to an understanding of the period, but it troubles me that art historians and curators so far have focused on the market as the dominate way of thinking about the art of the East Village. The recent show at the New Museum seemed to me to be largely organized around what art was shown in the galleries--and artists were grouped according to those galleries. Significantly the New Museum reprised the silly New Irrascibles photograph by Timothy Greenfield Sanders in which the gallery dealers and critics were given more space than the artists. By this logic the opening and closing of galleries is more important than questions of form and content. I cannot think of another contemporary art scene that is discussed quite in this way. Would surveys of AbEx or Pop Art put such emphasis on the gallery spaces in which that work was shown? Even the rather haphazard way in which works of art were presented at the New Museum was justified because supposedly it gave a flavor of how art was originally shown in the small galleries.

Don't get me wrong. I am not saying we should not investigate these market forces. And yet it is odd to me that the first serious dissertation on the scene by Liza Kirwin was about the market to the absolute exclusion of a discussion of the art (It is a great dissertation, but Liza begins by saying that she is not interesting in discussing works of art).

Next week I am going to Pittsburgh to meet with the parents of Greer Lankton, the extraordinary artist of fantastic transgendered dolls and see some of her work at the Mattress Factory. She was a close friend of Nan Goldin, and her work got some attention in the 80s. She died in 1996.

However, there is almost no information on her work and life beyond a few interviews. Much of the work is in storage. I have just taken over the care of the work of Marc Lida, who spent the 80s filling sketchbooks with images of the clubs, gay bars and backrooms--places where you often cannot bring a camera. His art is uncatalogued--many pictures have no dates or titles. Another artist whose work has all but disappeared, is Arnold Fern, who owned a tiny restaurant called Everybodies and did extraordinary icons. Like Marc, he died of AIDS. To put it another way, the "market" is also acting to eradicate the memory of certain artists because they don't fit into prevailing trends, or they failed to get the widespread attention they deserved at the time. Those of us who are art historians have an enormous task to shine attention on the art that was made in the East Village and which is not adequately documented.

At the same time not enough attention has been paid to thinking about the links between certain artists and groups. My own project is to look at the creation of various queer identities in the scene. Indeed, one of the interesting aspects of the East Village was the rejection of older gay identities (I am thinking of the "clones" go home campaign, which had a geographical component: East vs. West Village style). There were also extraordinary lesbian collectives and performance spaces (WOW cafe for example) that are almost never mentioned in discussions of the East Village (Good dissertation by Uzi Parnes that discusses the Split Britches Company in this regard, as well as other performance artists like Ethyl Echelberger and Jack Smith).

Maurice Berger I want to thank Jonathan for your thorough and provocative post. I'm sure it will stimulate much dialog in this conference.

Kathy O’Dell

I couldn’t agree with Jonathan more. We as art historians DO have an obligation to “shine attention on the art” of any given era or place. Fortunately, artists themselves lead the way for us.

I feel I work in humble service to artists. Let’s face it, it’s more fun to deal with the art and the artists who made/make it! Those of us who deal with contemporary art history, criticism, and theory have far more fun, in fact, because we stand a better chance of meeting and conversing with artists and/or those who knew/know them (this conference is a good example of such an opportunity). Dealing on the meta-level of how memory works can never be left behind, of course, but it is the knotty question of the mechanics of memory and the overall complexity of being a custodian of contemporary art that keeps me, at least, going.

All this said, there is a way in which all aspects of art production (or as many as possible) can and should be attended to, no? I think Maurice’s question regarding the institutional forces playing upon art production of the 1980s is an important one and needs to be folded into the robust mix of things upon which historians must reflect in order for history to impart its fullest lessons.

This is a very general post (and one mostly focused on methodology), inasmuch as I do not have the level of expertise that others do on the East Village scene specifically, just a lot of mixed memories of hanging out there, ranging from exceedingly pleasant ones to downright surreal. The first mink coat I saw step out of a limo and enter International With Monument thrust me into a Bunuel film. I bow to the level of research that you are doing, Jonathan. Your contribution is immense, and I cannot wait to hear more.

What prompted me to post right away this morning (Jonathan’s post furthered my desire) is the New York Times article on Marina Abramovic’s series of re-makes of “self-mutilatory” performances from 1965-1975 at the Guggenheim starting on Wednesday (I addressed this series in my last post, just before lock-down, last night). While the dates of these performances throw them outside our discussion of the 1980s, there is much about their re-makes that links directly to Maurice’s question to us for this two-day session. The institutional context in which these performances were first executed was key to their meaning. Valie Export’s Genital Panic was performed in a porn film house. She walked up and down the aisles in her crotch-less leather pants brandishing a rifle as glassy-eyed men were left to choose between watching women’s crotches on the screen or watching Valie Export’s crotch in real life (or did they keep their eyes trained on what they rightly wondered might be a loaded gun?). Marina will brandish a fake gun in a high-art institution. Surely, curators Nancy Spector and Jennifer Blessing will address the profound difference the shift in institutional framework will make on the meaning of Valie’s performance and Marina’s remake.

Jonathan draws our attention to the peculiar twist in our perception of East Village 1980s art when it’s shown at the New Museum today. The geographical, institutional, and market forces that play into the meaning of art are unavoidable ones to address. That said, Jonathan’s admonition that we train our attention on the art itself and not lose the forest for the trees is spoton. In Marina’s case, the intellectual work entailed in addressing institutional issues need not overshadow what will undoubtedly be a visceral response to her re-makes. We need not be single-track beholders of art. Our bodies and brains can handle quite a lot. And if we allow them to, history keeps teaching us great lessons … especially if we listen to the artists whose work comprises that history.

Maurice Berger Jonathan, you write: "As I have been conducting my research into the East Village Art Scene I am struck by how much of the serious writing about it focuses on questions of the market and gentrification. Key narratives seem to get repeated. For example the rise and fall of the galleries.

Certainly the displacement of the poor, and eventually many artists themselves because of rising real estate markets is tragic, particularly since the East Village collectives like COBRA were so attuned to the ways in which the city was ignoring problems of housing and the urban poor."

FULL DISCLOSURE: I believe this is true of much writing on the East Village, but not all. My

relationship to the scene, however, was LITERALLY tied to the notion of institutions: I grew up there. As I mentioned in the first session, most of my childhood and young adult life was spent living in a low-income housing project at the East Village's southern border. My elementary and junior high schools were a few blocks away; my Yeshiva in the middle of what was to become the "scene," at 8th Street and Avenue B. My relationship to the arrival of the "scene" was complicated. I had just moved into my first apartment (on the Upper West Side)and away from my father, sister, and the Baruch Houses. I couldn't wait to leave the Lower East Side: the projects were dilapidated, crime-ridden, and depressing. The elevators smelled of urine. The grounds were unkempt. The hallways filthy. By the late-1960s, white residents had, more or less, abandoned the projects. With this abandonment came the City's racist retreat from the cause of public housing: government stopped caring about the projects, mine and virtually all others in the City.

The arrival of the scene--no less a scene resplendent with contemporary ART, the subject I was studying at the time in graduate school--filled me with a contradictory sense of delight and dread.

Twenty years later, these feelings remain. I had friends from school whose families were forced out of the neighborhood. But I also saw cleaner streets. And some amazing art, dance, and performance pieces.

I very much welcome discussion about the art of the East Village, though I believe that questions about the market, galleries, and gentrification are deeply relevant to this discussion.

As for the gallery-centric discussion of the East Village: I have personally never seen a time when gallerists acted and thought more like artists. And, of course, many were artists. But make no mistake: they were business people, too. And an excedingly lucrative market emerged from their efforts.

Oliver Wasow Before addressing the issue of why so much attention has been paid to the East Village art market while relatively little is said about the art, I’d like to describe my experience of the time, an admittedly biased perspective but one that covers a wide gamut.

When Tom Brazelton and I opened Cash Gallery (later Cash/Newhouse) in 1982 in a small storefront on e.6th st. there was a very active SCENE in the EV but only a couple of galleries; FUN, Gracie Mansion and Nature Morte. I was 22 years old, had absolutely no idea what an art gallery was and no idea what I was doing. All I knew was that I was making art and, along with most of my friends, had no audience and no real hope for an audience. More importantly, I needed a place to live and a $500 a month storefront on E.6th seemed as good as any. Our first shows were, in the tradition of the clubs we frequented at the time, messy affairs, though in our case at least, they had a decidedly conceptual slant. We were enamored of Metro Pictures and felt fairly certain that something new was coming out of the Pictures scene, something that was not, for the most part getting a lot of financial or critical attention. Over the next couple of years a lot of galleries opened in the EV and, like any sub-culture that finds itself undergoing the process of reification, the scene began to factionalize. On one hand you had the first wave of galleries resentful that their trail-blazing wasn’t retaining its bohemian edge (or just disappointed that the party had become less exclusive), on the other there were newer, more commercial galleries , showing a wide range of work, much of it indistinguishable from your standard Soho/57th St. fare.

Within these groups you had smaller groups wanting to either distinguish themselves from what the press was already defining as “EV art” – graffiti, neo-expressionism, cartooning,-- or to capitalize on it’s marginal success in the market.

As I write this I realize the story has been told ad nauseam so I think instead of continuing the time-line I’ll try to add a few things that from my perspective have been omitted or distorted…

The role that the writer/curator team of Collins and Milazzo played in growth of our gallery, as well as the other more theoretically oriented galleries Nature Morte and International with Monument, has been under valued in my opinion. Regardless of what one might have thought about their writing (fairly indefensible if taken too seriously I suppose, but not bad free-form poetry, and down-right funny if read with tongue in cheek) the frequent salon-like get-togethers they held in their small apartment were instrumental in introducing us to a whole slew of artists , many without any steady representation at the time. Artists like Jim Welling, Allan Mcollum, Sherrie Levine, Michael Zwack, Sarah Charlesworth, Al Ruppersberg, Jack Goldstein, and many others.

A word also about the idea of the EV as a hot-bed of youthful creativity that was extinguished by media attention and a corrupt market. I remember in those days listening to older artists talk nostalgically about the EV of the 60’s and while I don’t doubt it was an exciting time, I suspect that every generation has its corrupted Eden. I’m sure some day in the not too distant future there will be artists lamenting the passing of the pure artistic energy found in Williamsburg ,and a hundred other small communities of artists in a hundred other cities, all reacting against the entrenched, closed system of the time.

Gary Indiana might choose to mark the end of the EV in 1981 but this strikes me as territorial nostalgia…no one goes there anymore on account of it’s too crowded.

I’ve already posted some thoughts on the issue of EV gentrification in an earlier topic thread so I won’t repeat but I would like to offer my perspective on the markets role in the creation and demise of the EV. When the center of musical activity shifts from London to NY, to Detroit, to Athens, Ga, to Brooklyn, to Compton, to Ireland, to Seattle, to Atlanta, to Miami, to Houston, to Scotland, to…no one suggests that it was killed by an over-heated market or accuses the scene of sucking the life blood out of its artists. It’s generally accepted that music follows the trends and paths of fashion and, like the fashion world, needs new blood to feed it’s audience. Why anyone should expect different from an art world that clearly follows the seasonal rhythms of the fashion world is beyond me.

Like any sub-culture, it had its moment, was embraced, reified, and discarded.

The EV never posed any real threat to the Soho establishment. When it appeared that it might, the big money swept in and bought us out.

As Maurice pointed out, many of the dealer’s in the EV were artists and for most of us the process of sublimating our own egos to the artists we suddenly “worked for” was just too depressing and disruptive. Most of us were all too happy to pack it in when the rules of the game changed.

Finally, if more attention is given to the market than the art in the EV perhaps this is because, in the end, much of the art was really not that good. As a microcosmic case study of the process of evolving form sub-culture to media phenomena, the EV was archetypical and ideal. But on the whole much of the work that could be defined as having the “EV aesthetic” was not very memorable. Greer Lankton, btw, was in my opinion one of the exceptions to this rule, David Wojnarowic another.

George Baker A few disconnected thoughts, since I have not been able to post regularly: Why does everyone who discusses the 1980s recently, and not just in this conference--why do we always speak of "my" 1980s? I'm thinking of Gregg Bordowitz's essay by the title, and the recurrence of it here as a trope. Even in my own posting. It seems to replicate the possessiveness and hyper-individuality of the decade.

On boundaries (I know, I'm late but so will be my point): I'll take Irving Sandler's bait, although it seems an awful lot like red-baiting to me, and accept the moniker of "art theoretician," although I prefer "critic." (That for some there is a difference—that's another discussion I would suppose,

and one crucial to the 1980s.) Whenever I think of the issue of crossing boundaries, of interdisciplinarity as it arises in the production of the 1980s moment, I think of a very special "art theoretician" of that moment no longer with us, namely Craig Owens. I feel very strongly that I once read in something by Owens the following basic premise, although I've never been able to re-find this passage, it always puzzles me and I hope I haven't invented it: Owens speaks somewhere of the hope that crossing disciplinary boundaries, this inversion of modernist logic, was a challenging of what a Marxist would call the "division of labor" in the cultural field. Crucial to Owens' vision of this scrambling—where the roles of artist, critic, curator, historian come unfixed, and are hardly erased but begin to work in concert with one another—was a perceived relation to radical cultural practices of the 1960s and 1970s. And yet it seems to me of course that the 1980s was the moment when this project of hybridization first became possible—and it was also at this moment that it was simultaneously closed down as a possibility. What I also mean is that seeing the model in the past already, in the work of the 1960s/70s, in the moment of its true emergence immediately cast the project in a melancholic mode, as if an opening up had been immediately closed down while of course critics and theorists, for one, were only grasping the possibilities at the moment of the 80s. More recently, in dialog with Benjamin Buchloh, I have been told that the "collaborative" model of practice—between artists and critics for example—is hopelessly naive and falsely utopic in a market-driven art world where the possibility of transformation, or of real challenges to divisions of labor that rattle the market's need for such divisions, has been driven from the horizon. Again the past weighs heavy on a present where the possibilities of crossing disciplinary boundaries were first realized in a new way—today I feel like we need to re-connect to this desire in 1980s criticism and practice, because the possibilities are only just beginning, not ending.

On geography: Here is an answer to Jonathan's key observation about the strange prominence of gallerists/galleries to histories of the 80s. The East Village was the first example of a new market logic that the 1980s put in place and is still with us today: First the Village, then Soho, then Chelsea, then Williamsburg, from New York, to London (YBAs as the new East Village), then Los Angeles, or Berlin, or Oslo, or Mexico City, or Rio, or Lagos....There must be a positive side to the sheer materialism of the market narrative, but what is it? It does start with the East Village phenomenon however, it seems to me.

Maurice Berger George, you write: "I think of a very special "art theoretician" of that moment no longer with us, namely Craig Owens. I feel very strongly that I once read in something by Owens the following basic premise, although I've never been able to re-find this passage, it always puzzles me and I hope I haven't invented it: Owens speaks somewhere of the hope that crossing disciplinary boundaries, this inversion of modernist logic, was a challenging of what a Marxist would call the "division of labor" in the cultural field. Crucial to Owens' vision of this scrambling—where the roles of artist, critic, curator, historian come unfixed, and are hardly erased but begin to work in concert with one another—was a perceived relation to radical cultural practices of the 1960s and 1970s."

I believe Craig wrote this in a catalog essay, though I am not sure it appears in the posthumously published anthology of his writings, BEYOND RECOGNITION. Alas, the reference is lost to me, as well. But I believe he DID say this. Does anyone else remember?

Irving Sandler Young artists move into low rent neighborhoods because rents are low and they are poor. They have no intention of displacing other poor people. But the very presence of artists gives rise to gentrificantion and rising rents. Consequently, poor people, including poor artists, are forces to move out. Any solutions? Perhaps the development of viable regional art centers is one solution. I fought for this cause when I chaired the Visual Artists Overview Committee at the NEA.

Dan Cameron I'd like to take the opportunity to respond to Jonathan's remarks about the East Village exhibition at the New Museum, and how it reveals what he interprets as a non-historical reading of the period. What I gather from his post is that, to the degree that the East Village exhibition was organized by galleries and not artists, it did not satisfy his understanding of what art history should be.

First, I think that this characterization of my exhibition is fundamentally inaccurate -- with a single exception, the groupings were entirely by stylistic affinity between artists, not galleries. The curatorial and historical reality, however, is that these galleries were dramatically polarized by style, and the graffiti camp didn't mix with the neo-geo camp, period. Jonathan might believe, for example, that all the graffiti artists were presented together at the New Museum because they showed together at Fun and Fashion Moda, but that's not true, nor did I claim it was. As for his observation that there was a self-consciously haphazard installation style intended to reflect the typical East Village look, I guess my only defense is that one man's painstakingly crafted design will always be another man's haphazard mess.

And yet, having said that, I also believe it is pointless to try and discuss the art of that period here without also delving deeply into the context in which it was presented: galleries. Maybe the main point to make here about the East Village art scene, vis-a-vis art history which is devoted solely to artists and their creations, is that the galleries of that milieu had absolutely nothing to do with any preexisiting model of art gallery, nor have they noticeably influenced any galleries that came afterward. This history supports a possibility that Jonathan seems to discount: the East Village was an intentionally short-lived experiment in artist-run spaces that fused the Soho model with the Fashion Moda model, came up with a weird but dynamic mutation that thrived a few seasons, then died. To refer to them, as Jonathan seems to, as if they were galleries in the sense that we had galleries then in Soho, or the way we have them today in Chelsea, is fundamentally missing the point.

A bit less subjectively, I also take exception to his interpretation of the media-created death knell hovering over the East Village. For me anyway, this always seemed to be pretty transparent case of the mainstream art world wish-projecting onto the scruffy upstart that was busy stealing its thunder. Of course there was never any question that the East Village would disappear, and the familiar pose of world-weary jadedness that typified many of the scene's stars was really just that -- a pose. On the other hand, to review back issues of the East Village Eye from that period is to re-experience an unusually breathless journalistic excitement fueling the reviews of emerging artists -- up to a dozen at a time -- that appeared in each issue. These writers (usually artists as well) didn't seem to care how many seasons the East Village scene lasted, as long as it kept coming up with new art, music and film for them to write about.

Linda Yablonsky I'm glad to hear from Dan about his East Village show at the New Museum and appreciate his perspective (and also Irving Sandler's throughout this conference). Just a few observations about the questions Maurice has proposed.

First, SoHo, at least in the early 80s, was not the center of the art world, because the art world is far bigger than the contemporary market. Nor was it ever my impression that the East Village gallery scene was ever anything more than a fringe movement, a center perhaps for the artists who were involved in it and who hadn't yet exhibited in other galleries, cities or countries. I lived in SoHo throughout the 80s and it didn't seem to me it lost any thunder to the East Village whatsoever, except perhaps on nights there were openings at FUN. Still, it wasn't that long a walk from one neighborhood to the other and it seems to me everyone went back and forth.

These neighborhoods became art centers because that's where the artists were and artists are a very clannish bunch. They hang out together, share work spaces, organize shows together. (I'm

not sure but I think Paula Cooper, who opened SoHo's first commercial gallery, lived there too.)

They also know how to make things, including homes, and as Irving Sandler has said, to get cheap, big spaces and relative peace, they have always had the willingness and know-how to build from scratch in order to make a place for their often very absorbing. beautiful, stimulating, provocative work. It's an admirable quality and small wonder it's attractive to others.

One thing that struck me when I saw Dan's show at the New Museum was that the galleries who showed the artists whose work came to be most meaningful were run by other artists International with Monument, Nature Morte, Pat Hearn, Colin de Land and others already mentioned. Other galleries were opened by people who may have had artist friends or liked art but who were more or less sales people whose roots didn't run as deep.

If we look back, we will find a long history of artists organizing shows for each other, important shows. Even van Gogh did it, his own little Salon Refuses in his favorite Paris cafe, with many more to follow, from Tenth Street to Greene Street and on to the East Village and Damien Hirst's "Freeze." Perhaps this is vanity, but I think they all needed writers to make sense of them and often had terrific ones.

I look around today and see a rampaging market driven by gallerists who are glorified sales clerks intent on selling, selling, selling and who have little historical knowledge or interest in cultural import or developing an artist's career with an eye toward history, just the secondary market, and they are enabled by the cottage industry in art "advisors" who help determine value by creating demand. For me it's a weird way to think about art, simply as "merch" I mean. No one needs a degree or any training whatsoever to hang out a shingle as an art dealer or an advisor and the atmosphere has become increasingly shallow and uninformed as the money has grown more plentiful. Well, I guess we can't take it personally. It's just business.

Maurice Berger Linda, you write: "One thing that struck me when I saw Dan's show at the New Museum was that the galleries who showed the artists whose work came to be most meaningful were run by other artists - International with Monument, Nature Morte, Pat Hearn, Colin de Land and others already mentioned. Other galleries were opened by people who may have had artist friends or liked art but who were more or less sales people whose roots didn't run as deep."

This is a very important point, one that speaks directly to Jonathan's question, re: the gallerycentric writing on the East Village.

In Dan's defense, I found his show at the New Museum essentially ARTIST driven, both in its content and its uncanny design (far from the mess that Jonathan suggests). I know from experience that a survey of any period or movement involves editing--a process that is implicitly about subjectivity, intellectual priorities, and taste. Even from this perspective, I found Dan's effort refreshingly open. Were some important artists left out and other aspects of East Village culture ignored? Yes, but it's hard to fault Dan on an exhibition that was, after all, a major survey in a relatively small temporary space.

Dan Cameron I'm interested in returning to Maurice's initial question about the types of alternative spaces available to artists during the 1980s, and how this affected the work being made, beyond the immediate gallery framework of the East Village. I recall talking to Gracie Mansion while I was doing my research, and being struck by how her vivid her memory was of the day she and Sur Rodney Sur decided they weren't going to do performances in her gallery anymore. Because for Gracie this meant that other kinds of creative activity would be deliberately excluded, (including non-studio activities by her own artists), and she knew this was going against the grain of how they had all envisioned themselves at the start, it was a tough call.

Julie Ault, speaking to me a few years back about Group Material in its East 10th Street incarnation, also surprised me by emphasizing her relationship to the punk ethos, which had more to do (for her) with a DIY approach to everything, including the way one thought about making and presenting art. When one stops to consider that the biggest thing in Soho in 1982 was Julian Schnabel, it's not difficult to imagine how disgruntled younger artists figured they had nothing to lose by launching a jerry-rigged, cardboard version of the grownup art world in Soho (which, barely ten years earlier, had begun as a correction to 57th Street's small spaces and conservative instincts).

In this connection, the kinds of spaces and programs that I took pains to highlight at the New Museum were those unfolding at Club 57, Limbo, Palladium, Darinka, Pyramid, 8 BC, PS 122 and La Mama. Because by the early 1980s interdisciplinary practice was, as Maurice observed, already part of the DNA for making art, from a community perspective, these club spaces were significant because they provided venues for those visual artists who worked in performing arts as well, as well as thgose who wanted to be part of its audience. Maybe I was more in a minority than I thought, but it certainly seemed that back then, being an artist (or curator/critic) really meant also paying close attention to what Lypsinka, 3 Teens Kill 4, Ann Magnuson, Richard Kern or Ethyl Eichelberger were doing. Today we have at best a faint glimmer of that, largely because the only working model for artistic success is one that involves a freshly minted MFA and a gallery in Chelsea.

Whenever I think about the 1980s East Village in these terms, something that never fails to strike me as lopsided in comparison with our current situation was the real abundance of interdisciplinary spaces proliferating back then, in which experimental, cross-media work was being nurtured in very modest venues that were equal parts club, gallery, and performance showcase. The closest equivalent to that today would probably be new media networks and spaces (or something like Participant), but because these do not tend to integrate easily with the gallery framework, I'm not sure what kind of impact they have on the art world at large.

Simon Leung I think there is a reason why Maurice bracketed the 80s as beginning in the late 70s, why Mary Kelly mentioned the sift in tone from the manifesto to the editorial in 1977, why we have been evoking punk as the 70s form that gained wider social political currency in the early 80s (as Ondine so wonderfully outlined for us in its dissemination in LA). I think it’s because the 60s sense of revolution hit its limits in the 70s, and the lag time between its disillusionment and something else was played out then. East Village was for me like a parallel proposition to Soho.

There were lots of artists, musicians, writers, bands, clubs, drugs sex, etc, but although these things have been associated with the art world in the past, the East Village intermixing relied more on Warhol’s factory than other “art historical” paradigms.

This is not a flip association, because like other aesthetically and/or politically committed artists of earlier and later times, an identification with the East Village was contingent on reinventing yourself in some way. In some ways, the East Village was the part of New York that still identified with the 60s (however partial or romantic or idealized) in the 80s.

A comment about the discussion around artists/dealers /East Village/Soho, etc. “Geography, Institutions, and Markets” are words that I think should be examined for their functional definitions, connotative value, and slippages. Let’s take the two people I actually knew well from the list of names already mentioned, two East Village “dealers” who moved to Soho who were in the New Irascibles photograph by Timothy Greenfield Sanders—Pat Hearn and Colin de Land (whom I continue to miss all the time, not only because they were my friends and I showed with them as an artist, but also because they transcended geography, institutions and markets).

When I saw them in the “dealer” photo in the East Village show Dan curated, I had a reaction which bridged what Jonathan, Dan, Linda, and Oliver all commented on. I was struck by how

young everyone was, how they were “posing.” How they, like all the dealers, artists, critics (was there a photo of collectors?) who posed as “New Irascibles” were fulfilling a role based on a historical photographic model, but the photograph was campy, ironic—an early 80s return to the futuristic 50s the way New Wave bands like the B-52s returned to the Jetsons. In other words, the East Village “scene” was, as Linda evocatively captured, fluid and always already ironic. I remember Pat’s hairstyle and dress in that picture as being a sort of a post-punk/new wave reappropriation of a 60s girl—Cindy was not alone. When I compared Roger Ailes to Cindy Sherman earlier, I didn’t develop the point that they were both re-writers. If in 1977 Sherman’s office girl of B-movie actress was quoting what was by then seemingly impossible anachronisms, but the same things we took to be ironic (say pre-Kennedy assassination, pre-Vietnam America) was sold to and more importantly bought by 80s America.

Much of the art that was first shown in the East Village was about the commodification of the past as it intersects Reaganite politics, the art market, the no longer viable Modernist projects, etc.

Oliver, am I right in remembering a show at Cash/Newhouse in 1985 where there was an Allan MacCollum piece and a photograph by Louise Lawler with a pack of burning cigarettes? When I think back to those kinds of shows, I remember how the sensibility of the work, as contextualized in a storefront gallery in a tenement building in a poor neighborhood, was in fact meaningful in relationship to its site. In one way or another, SITE was always a part of the meaning of the work that was showned there—whether this was in relationship to a “scene” or “style” or via allegories of power, privilege, and history (I think the writings of Craig Owens, once again, is important); or gentrification and real estate (Martha Rosler, Douglas Crimp, and Rosalyn Deutsche have all contributed significant writing on this). This was not always explicit, but social and economical antagonism was played out in a very self-conscious way in the East Village—race, class, money, education, gender, housing, you name it. The East Village was unlike Soho in this sense: I associate the transformation of the blankness of Soho from industrial "Hell's Hundred Acres" to a gallery district in the late 70s and 80s with the last moment of Modernist sensibility (for example Gordon Matta-Clark or Trisha Brown) where Modernism could still be faced head-on, if only to be torn apart. No one ever mistook the East Village as Modern—regardless of ideological affinity or academic or theoretical sophistication/privilege.

I guess this is also a way of saying that “the institution” is not a discreet edifice, not an exterior site or collection of power, but that it is in oneself and must be performed. I think of museums as institutions, but I also think of Art History as an institution. I think of religion as an institution; marriage as an institution; and I think of one’s “self” (e.g. any number of rights-bearing identity we apply to ourselves—the citizen, the racial body, the artist, the patient…) as an institution. Thus if we can apply the critique of institution already so familiar in art and philosophy to the EV, it seemed to me that in the case of someone like Colin de Land, at the very least, the Market was taken up as an impossible matrix in his work as a dealer, but in his work as a dealer, he was a brilliant, idealistic, passionate, committed artist who somehow kept going despite the most impossible pressures. He used the institution of the market (the role of the dealer) as the medium of his work, and it moved beyond the specificity of geographical sites.

I wasn’t much part of any scene in the art world, except I was and am friends with a few artists who showed with Pat and Colin. A lot of us, among ourselves, always talked about how we worked with Pat and Colin because they weren’t like most other dealers, by that we meant they were like us, like artists. I guess that’s one thing the legacy of the East Village gave me--that ethos is something I feel is totally lost. In regards to this group of artists, I have also been thinking a bit about how we went to the Whitney program in the 80s, but did not go to graduate school (Andrea Fraser, Mark Dion, Gregg Bordowitz, Renee Green, Tom Burr); and we all, in our ways, do work associated with critiques of institutions and markets.

Two points of reference which may be interesting to Jonathan and others here working on the 80s/90s: Silvia Kolbowski, whose work first gained wide attention in the mid-80s in the Difference show at The New Museum and Postmasters in the East Village made projects about the transition of galleries from East Village back to Soho, and then from Soho to Chelsea. Silvia’s last two solo shows in New York (in Soho and then in Chelsea) were at Colin de Land’s American

Fine Arts. My knowledge of Ailes came from Lincoln Tobier’s extraordinary but too little known installation made on the eve of the 1992 presidential elections, “Roger Ailes: A retrospective in context,” in which he proposed that Ailes (who in fact produced Broadway shows and the Mike Douglas show and a documentary on Fellini) was the Gesamtkunstwerker of our time. Lincoln is another artist who showed with both Pat and Colin.

Public Comments Gregg Smith, a visitor to the conference, writes the following: As one who has spent the past twenty-something years putting together a collection of East Village Art of the 80s (81-87-now at more than 90 artists/300 pieces), along with almost everything that’s been written on the subject, as well as the music, videos and artifacts associated with that extraordinary time and place, I have found your on line symposium a revelation. As an outsider and non-professional, I would like to make a few observations.

On Reagan and the Politics of Culture: Is it possible that much of the excitement surrounding the 80s is the simple result of more artists having an opportunity to participate in the conversation? Could this extraordinary moment have ever occurred if so many artists who were shut out of the traditional art system (either Soho/57th St. galleries/publicly funded initiatives) didn’t take the initiative to creative an alternative art universe in the East Village? Is this the reason that so much attention has been given to the galleries/gallerists of the East Village, Mr. Weinberg? Without the venue, would the art ever have been seen?

Certainly most East Village galleries were opened on a shoestring, but for more than a few, that shoestring was a few hundred dollars from a tax return.

Although it’s undoubtedly heresy in academia, is it possible that this cultural phenomena occurred during Reagan and not Carter because taxes were lowered (there’s that tax return money) and the emphasis was placed on private initiative? Would we really have preferred to see Gracie Mansion filling out grant requests or audaciously introducing work from the trunk of a limo or in her bathroom (the Loo Division). Would it have been better if an arts bureaucrat determined the “importance” of the work of a David Wojnarowicz or Martin Wong rather than an involved, interested and committed public?

On the subject of the viewing/buying public, Oliver Wasow (whose early photo construction work I greatly admire) took aim at the obvious 80s target of the young, aggressive stock broker looking to purchase art as an investment. I missed the class where Mr. Wasow explained why in the 80s it was acceptable for the burgeoning secondary dealer population to receive preference for purchase art with investment/profit purposes over the individual collector. I also missed the class where it was explained why it was preferable to sell art in the 80s to women of a certain age using their frail husband’s money to turn art collecting into an Ubber-Shopping contact sport rather than to a kid in Doc Martens and jeans with a pocket full of cash. The 80s created all sorts of new paradigms, including collecting.

When Mr. Berger asks “What did the East Village scene mean for American art and culture in the 1980s....” the obvious answer is possibility. For that brief instant, almost anything was possible (as Mr. Cameron pointed out in his introduction to the East Village USA show). There was hope for all, a time when all that mattered was talent...not education. (see artist bios of the time), not ability (from Koons to Halley to Futura...could anyone draw without a

projector?), not connections (everyone was an outsider), not even being a white male (the diversity in gender, race, nationality and sexual orientation couldn’t be more pronounced), but the aching desire to be a part of the what was happening. It was from this moment of possibility that so much interesting art emerged. For many context was critical. Without the positioning of ”Post-Modernism” (see Oliver Wasow’s acknowledgment of Collins & Milazzo in this forum or Dan Cameron’s “Art And It’s Double”) for whatever that meant, would Vaisman, Bickerton, Halley, Koons, Charlesworth, Bender, etc. have emerged? Without critical writing style of Nicholas Moufarrege would the East Village have been viewed in the context of a non-stop party that just happened to be showing art that was vibrant, energetic and challenging? The fact that so many galleries had a definitive position (context) to place their artists is still another factor in the importance of the gallery at this time.

Could Jonathan Weinberg be more wrong about almost everything he has written about the art of the East Village of the 80s?

His claim that the closing of EV galleries was “... in response to the AIDS crisis and gentrification” is inaccurate. A number of galleries moved to Soho (the Broadway building became the new East Village) for greater market viability. Another group of galleries closed so their artist/owners could pursue their artistic careers. Still other galleries closed because their artists left for galleries with higher profiles. What was left by late 1987 the drek and everyone knew it. Time to move on. Nothing to do with AIDS or gentrification.

His claim that “the New Museum seemed to me to be largely organized around what art was shown in the galleries-and artist were grouped according to those galleries.” See the above comments on the importance of the gallery in the East Village. But also recognize that Cameron acknowledged the importance of the gallery aesthetic by showing the affinities of the artist concerns to those of their representation. What Mr. Weinberg saw as gallery affiliation in the New Museum show was actually artist affiliation. Keily Jenkins and Arch Connelly WERE affiliated with the grafitti crowd, it made sense. The Nature Morte artists needed to be seen again within their context. Cameron got it right.

Weinberg got it wrong.

On the Greenfield Sanders “New Irrascibles” that Mr. Weinberg referred to as ”silly.” The intent, as I understand it, was to document the entire scene, not just the artists. In fact, the Greenfield-Sanders also photographed a group of East Village collectors as part of the document. The appropriation of the famous AbX photo alludes, I believe, to the breakthrough concept of East Village artist to employ historic styles as vocabulary for new sets of ideas. As Cindy Sherman famously observed, what you’re looking at isn’t what it’s about. Along with a very few other documented pieces, (Plous’ Neo York, Robinson/McCormick’s “Slouching Towards Ave B,” Holy Solomon’s 57th Between A&D) the Greenfield Sanders effort is an invaluable document for anyone interested in who was who.

As Mr. Cameron has already pointed out, the “haphazard way in which works of art were presented at the New Museum” reflects the way the works were often hung. I wonder if Mr. Weinberg was ever in an East Village gallery in the 80s.

And finally, the fact that Lisa Kirwin is not interested in the art of the time hardly means that the market was more important than the art. If anything, I would think that the market told us very little about the work and much more about the time. The courage of Jeff Koons to produce works that were far

more expensive than he could ever hope to recoup during this period is only one example.

As a final thought, I believe it necessary to address Mr. Wasow’s contention that “if more attention is given to the market than the art in the EV this is because, in the end, much of the art was really not that good..” It would seem to me a time and a place that introduced us to the amazing diversity of work of such artists as Kiki Smith, Basquiat, Bidlo, Koons, Halley, Haring, Scharf, Vaisman, Taaffe, Simmons, Charlesworth, Parrino, Dickson, Wojnarowicz, Wong, Frangella, Lack, and many, many more is something far more than “not that good.” It has also been thoroughly and repeatedly refuted that there was, as many have tried to claim, an “East Village” aesthetic. I’ve seen more attempts than I can count , generally claiming Kostabi, Prol, Coe, Lee, etc..as representative of the “EV easetetic.” Wherever paint was being plashed about, that was supposedly East Village art. Like the generation that made the work, my generation, no one walked in lock step. For every idea there was a “well... not really” response. Mr Wasow should know. He was there.

Wayne Koestenbaum It’s a wild and pleasant experience, to witness (or overhear, or eavesdrop on) this ardent discussion of 1980s art practices. I have nothing to add except to say: I WASN'T THERE. I was in New York from 1984-1988, but I simply wasn’t on the planet that the other panelists are passionately revisiting. Does saying I WASN'T THERE matter? Perhaps only to signal that any city—or any historical moment—is MANY moments packed together, contiguous, competing, mismatching. It is always possible to NOT coincide with one’s time—to be within history but nonetheless operating at a slant to that history, especially as it gets re-told, re-packaged. That’s why, despite George Baker’s arresting comment about our tendency sometimes to say “MY 1980s,” I persist in using the possessive first-person pronoun—mostly to mark (and honor, and regret) the necessary partiality and bias of my, or anyone’s, account of a historical period. THE 1980s has no conceptual coherence. Nor does "MY 1980s"--as if conceptual coherence were what we sought!--but at least "MY 1980s," the phrase, makes clear its nonsensicalness, its smallness, its negligible claim on the generalizable. The 1980s, in the New York art world, may have resembled what the other panelists are eloquently describing; MY 1980s, in New York, benefited, perhaps, from the oxygen that the East Village artists and dealers were releasing (bless them!) into the atmosphere, but I didn’t consciously acknowledge their scene as my respiration’s origin.

I’ve always believed in belated coincidence, posthumous reclamation (hence, my hunger for archives, my dependence on the unread, the unseen, the ignored); I think it’s possible to arrive at a historical moment AFTER that moment is over. I’m moved to think that the 1980s, or at least this particular NYC-art-world 1980s that’s being revived in this conversation, hasn’t entirely happened yet, hasn’t yet (fully) released its revolutionary potential, its constructive (and, happily, destructive) force.

Catherine Lord And let us not forget that the 1980s were the beginning of frequent flyer miles. This is becoming SO New York that I have been hesitating to post observations about the 1980s that are SO un New York, but presumably there were other 1980s, occurring in other cities and other countries, as Ondine and Olu have been reminding us. In the spirit of Mary’s remarks, I write to get rid of certain parentheses. My experience of most of the 1980s was as dean of the art school of CalArts. When I arrived, the faculty were all male and all white. My commitments were to make interdisciplinary links, to hire women and artists of color, and to embed an acknowledgment that art exists in a political and social context. This agenda, which now sounds like a snooze, was seen to pose a threat beyond all reason or proportion. In my 1980s, I was reminded on more a

less a daily basis about the extraordinary conservatism of the avant garde establishment, that is to say, the systems of privilege based on class, color and gender that replicate themselves. I was seen to pose a threat because in a tuition driven institution, progressive ideas were seen as a threat to retaining faculty and to recruiting students, because those sublimely quirky but fragile creative types would flee at the prospect of mediocre theory spouting scary activist OTHERS forcing all them into a politically correct mold. This, of course, is drivel, but the point is that progressive ideas were explicitly seen to threaten market success or market realism. CalArts was, during a lot of the 1980s, judged by how many faculty came from, or how many graduates went to, New York. To shift this, to attempt to make the school responsive to local communities and to open the discourse beyond the not-so-avant-garde was to feel, viscerally, exactly how resistant institutions are to change.

Another note about the 1980s. Silvia’s late 1984 “Difference: On Representation and Sexuality,” as I remember, included no gay or lesbian artists and one non-white artist. In other words, halfway into the decade, it was possible to mount a high profile show on “difference” that ignored differences. Then Silence = Death became a slogan in 1986, Gran Fury formed in 1988, and “Witnesses” was attacked in 1990. As I’ve suggested earlier, part of the ACT UP response was informed by the women’s health movement of the 1970s. ACT UP enabled the Guerilla Girls and WAC, taking that history forward into the 1990s. This eruption of a queer presence in the art world in the last half of the decade required tactics that went outside markets and institutions and disciplinary boundaries. Judith Butler’s contributions to theories of performativity, through which it now seems easy to read much of the activity in the 1980s—and, indeed, Marina Abramowicz’s current replays of her canon--came late in the decade via a thoroughly queer critique of gender, as well as ideas of origins and of repetition. I could go listing, but my point is that while one way of historicizing the 1980s represents a set of particular tactics about visibility (e.g., the East Village and the art market), other critiques continue to unsettle the center in ways that are more difficult to nail down.

Andrea Robbins Here in Europe where I am writing from, I sometimes find myself in the position of having to explain the lack of culture, or "taste" in the United States. I feel a little bit like Woody Allen after being awakened from suspended animation in the movie "Sleeper". When scientists presented him with the bra and photograph of Richard Nixon among other things, and asked him to explain them (he did in an erroneous and absurd fashion (but not altogether wrong for the viewer who knew what they actually were).

Defining a lack of formal coherence in the United States assumes a moral and cultural superiority within hermetic Europe. As we have seen in France this week, Europe is engaged in it's own culture war and it is bloody (in Paris last night 1,400 cars were set on fire, and at least one man was beaten to death).

I am an unwilling ambassador for the US,for one thing I agree it is ugly, but unlike Europe it has been up for grabs culturally since it's inception.This is a progressive idea for the individual, but one that has gone haywire.

I like the unsnobby way so many panelists have defined the 80's through memories or personal anecdote based on their own consumption of cultural products (music, clubs, performance), vs. a more distanced analysis of trends in consumerism. Consumption takes place in the present and it is something we are all complicit in.

In the first session of this online conference Ondine Chavoya wrote about his intro to Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes and Jean Beaudrillard not in an art journal or college seminar but from the liner notes of Propaganda's album, "A Secret Wish". How ironic, for Benjamin who defined the "aura" (mass products were "aura" free as per Benjamin's definition) to be introduced in this way.

Roland Barthe would later address the compelling entry point of mass produced photographs as punctum, but most of us and the young people I know have a relationship to mass produced

objects and experiences (even simulated ones) that even punctum can not begin to address (feels like "aura" to me) and can not be reduced to consumerism.

Linda Yablonsky wrote about how the EV and Soho galleries existed simultaneously, with interested viewers going back and forth between both. Maybe the EV was a little bit like art fairs are today for collectors, sort of in vogue places to visit, see and be seen. I think EV artist/dealers for the most part wanted to create a place where they could show their work and address an audience of peers. Once the fashionable moved to the EV many honest people felt they could subvert the system from the inside without being absorbed into it (as opposed to overt (not complacent!)"hippie" strategies), but they got bought out.

The displacement of people on the lower east side was not altogether innocent; the lessons of Soho were still fresh and offered a floorplan to developers. It had a wild west feel, I think the final prolonged battle was waged over Tompkins Park but not between the artists and locals, but the homeless and the police on behalf of the new residents of the apartment buildings surrounding the park. As Maurice has mentioned Krysztof Wodiczko's projections on the subject were very important at the time, in both form and content.

Andrea Robbins Yes, sorry to be so NY centric. I'm glad others have been able to add so much more.

Maurice Berger Andrea, you write: "Yes, sorry to be so NY centric. . . ."

It's perfectly OK to speak from the vantage point you know best. MY 1980s (to quote Wayne) was a decidedly New York '80s. I'd be interested in hearing from other panelists about regions and cultural issues outside of New York.

Simon Leung Regarding some points raised by Catherine Lord: I agree with the limits of the Differences show.

In addition to Catherine's reminder here, I believe this was addressed by in a published conference at Dia in 87 or 88, and the first project I know of by Gran Fury (before it was Gran Fury), was "Let the Record show" at the New Museum in 1987. It's not quite true that there was no gay or lesbian artists-weren't Max Almay and Stuart Marshall were in the show? So although gay and lesbian representation was not great, it was not invisible. Also, the exhibition was curated

by Kate Linker and Jane Weinstock; Kolbowski was one of the artists. Although I didn't see it, and Dan perhaps you should address this, wasn't your show "Extended Sensibilities: Homosexual Presence in Contemporary Art" also at the New Museum, but BEFORE the Differences show?

None the less, the point is well taken--that by the mid-80s, at the institutional "discursive" level (here I am putting into practice what I meant earlier about the word institution), at least in terms of curatorial efforts at the New Museum, exhibitions meant to address diffence met their own conceptual limits.

Now, in terms of how "ACT UP enabled the Guerilla Girls and WAC, taking that history forward into the 1990s," I teach the Guerilla Girls in class all the time, but I always locate their origin in 1985, two years before ACT UP was founded in 1987. (In fact, one of the Guerilla Girls’ first gallery exclusion posters listed galleries which showed very few women and people of color at the beginning but later became, if anything, exemplary in their feminist inclusions—like Pat Hearn.) I am sure that most of the original group in ACT UP was very much aware of the Guerilla Girls, if not directly influenced by them, so if anything I think it was the other way around.

Simon Leung

By the way, sorry, but I'm a terrible typist and I write too fast, but I just wanted to correct one of my many typos because it's a proper name: its Max Almy, not Almay. As a teacher, Almy introduced me to a lot of the video art I learned about in the 80s--Bruce and Norman Yonemoto, Barbara Hammer, etc.

Ondine Chavoya I do not wish to sideline the focus on the East Village as I believe the topic and the discussion is vitally important, rich, and fascinating. But in response to the question(s) concerning, places, markets, and institutions, I would like to offer a perspective on what artists and institutions made possible in the absence of a viable art market in one specific geographic location: San Diego. To my mind, some of the most important work being created on the west coast during the mid-tolate-1980s was in San Diego, where there has never been a particularly well-developed art market or gallery scene.

In lieu of a sustainable market for contemporary art, there was a lively constellation of institutions and collaborative activities: a number of colleges and universities, including the stellar visual arts faculty at UC San Diego; a variety of galleries affiliated with the region’s multiple educational institutions; museums, such as, La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art (now, San Diego MOCA) and Museum of Photographic Arts (MoPA); public supported institutions, such as the Centro Cultural de la Raza in Balboa Park, and alternative, non-profit art and performance spaces, such as Sushi and Installation Gallery. By the 1980s, all of these institutions to varying degrees began to respond to their specific geographic location at the U.S.-Mexico border and the social and economic crossings and dependencies that transpire there. Moreover, this specific location became a site and subject for artistic production, exchange, and collaboration. Just as the international U.S.-Mexico border is equally a political and cultural issue, here, “the local” was necessarily global(ized) or, at the very least, transnational.

The Border Arts Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo (BAW/TAF) was one of the most remarkable aesthetic and intellectual forces to develop out of this matrix. Formed in 1984, and sponsored by El Centro Cultural de la Raza, BAW/TAF was truly interdisciplinary in media and in the background of participants; in addition to visual and performing artists from a variety of disciplines, BAW/TAF also included social scientists, filmmakers, writers, and community organizers from both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. BAW/TAF generated an array of artistic strategies and theoretical tools wherein process and communication, negotiation and exchange were fundamentally central to its practice that consistently responded to transnationalism and brought attention to the effects of globalization in provocative ways. This work was often discussed as an “art of place” at the time, but I think it’s also important to recognize the placemaking functions of these activities waged in the name of art that activated as they engaged the hybridities, mobility, and spaces of possibility that were at once opening up - and being suppressed - by the globalizing forces at work. Here too, “SITE was always a part of the meanings of the work,” as Simon Leung fittingly proposes.

From this particular context, the public art project “Welcome to America’s Finest Tourist Plantation” (1988) by Elizabeth Sisco, Louis Hock, and David Avalos materialized, which for me represents a paradigmatic example of the most effective, aesthetically complex, and sociallyengaged art produced in the 1980s. The “…Tourist Plantation” poster appeared on the back of one hundred city buses and presented a parody of San Diego’s slogan “America’s Finest City” that visually evoked the region’s dependency on and exploitation of undocumented labor.

Necessarily mobile, traversing the county via public transportation, the public art project was mobilized further by the mass media where it precipitated an intense debate over public funding for the arts (including NEA support). The poster became the catalyst for a civic debate, lasting well beyond its month-long public staging in January 1988, regarding the intersection of pressing social issues with a complex aesthetic one – the form and content of art for public spaces. This project by Sisco, Hock, and Avalos, as well as subsequent art projects that they and many others produced in San Diego and Tijuana during the late 1980s and 1990s, innovatively brought

attention to a major oversight of national immigration reform and NAFTA negotiations – immigrant rights. Many of these projects powerfully revealed that while capital may seem to have become deterritorialized, denationalized, or otherwise unhampered as a result of globalization, equivalence cannot be assumed for its human correspondent, migration, which has become increasingly subject to transnational surveillance and prohibition.

For the sake of brevity, I will forgo a history of the organizational transformations over time or detail the various rifts - and claims of institutionalized co-optation - that transpired during and since this period. (I think sometimes the rifts are better known than the art due to the prolific publishing enterprise of one former BAW/TAF member.) But moving forward to 2005, it is important to point out that key elements of this aesthetic synergy and social engagement remain active today in InSITE, the binational collaborative arts partnership initiated in 1992 that commissions art in the public domain in the cities of San Diego and Tijuana.

Oliver Wasow A few, brief, responses to some earlier comments ….

In response to Linda’s assertion that; “Other galleries were opened by people who may have had artist friends or liked art but who were more or less sales people whose roots didn't run as deep…. I look around today and see a rampaging market driven by gallerists who are glorified sales clerks intent on selling, selling, selling and who have little historical knowledge or interest in cultural import …”

This characterization seems a little one dimensional to me. People who run art galleries sell art.

It’s very hard, certainly within the construct of the contemporary art market, to be both an artist and a dealer. I wasn’t able to sustain it. Even the most brilliant and creative individuals, Colin and Pat certainly fit that bill, have to choose to prioritize one aspect of their practice over the other.

However, to prioritize does not mean to rule out one entirely in favor of the other. Many of the dealers in the EV, and many of the dealers working today, are highly intelligent individuals who not only like art but know an awful lot about it. I’ve had many long fascinating conversations with any number dealers. People like Helene Winer Of Metro, Lisa Spellman of 303, Friedrich Petzel, Hudson from Feature, and so on. They are salespeople, true, and there are definitely some ethically corrupt dealers in the world, but many of them also are not.

In response to Simon’s question: “Oliver, am I right in remembering a show at Cash/Newhouse in 1985 where there was an Allan MacCollum piece and a photograph by Louise Lawler with a pack of burning cigarettes? When I think back to those kinds of shows, I remember how the sensibility of the work, as contextualized in a storefront gallery in a tenement building in a poor neighborhood, was in fact meaningful in relationship to its site.”

I think it wasn’t a pack of burning cigarettes but was instead two Styrofoam cups, one slightly larger than the other.

As for the neighborhood context: There was definitely an active effort on our part to distance ourselves from what we felt was the romanticizing and mythologizing of urban decay and ghetto chic inherent to a lot of the work being shown in the EV. This was however primarily a reactive impulse on our part, there was never really a consideration of the specific content of the work in context of the socio-economic conditions of the neighborhood. It was in truth, as many have pointed out, just cheap rent.

And finally, a few comments about Gregg Smith’s contribution…

He suggests that “Certainly most East Village galleries were opened on a shoestring, but for more than a few, that shoestring was a few hundred dollars from a tax return. Although it’s undoubtedly heresy in academia, is it possible that this cultural phenomena occurred during Reagan and not Carter because taxes were lowered (there’s that tax return money) and the emphasis was placed on private initiative?”

I’ve already commented on what I perceive to be the role of Reagan’s trickle-down in the art market at that time, so in that sense I agree with part of what you are saying. But to suggest that a few hundred dollar tax return or that the emphasis on “private initiative” had anything at all to do with our or any other persons decision to open an art gallery seems a stretch, to say the least. As I said earlier, I was motivated by a cheap storefront to live in and an opportunity to hang some friends work on the wall. It never occurred to us that we would actually sell any work. Many of the dealers who came later to the scene had more than a shoestring, usually substantial financial banking and/or trust funds.

As for his take on the differing paradigms of art collecting: “I missed the class where Mr. Wasow explained why in the 80s it was acceptable for the burgeoning secondary dealer population to receive preference for purchase art with investment/profit purposes over the individual collector. I also missed the class where it was explained why it was preferable to sell art in the 80s to women of a certain age using their frail husband’s money to turn art collecting into an Ubber-Shopping contact sport rather than to a kid in Doc Martens and jeans with a pocket full of cash. The 80s created all sorts of new paradigms, including collecting.”

My only point was that the huge space between my rather naive ideas about the role of art in the world and the crash course I received in the realities of speculative-investment collecting was a depressing shock and proved extremely incompatible to my practice as an artist. Many of the collectors I dealt with were intelligent, dedicated, nice people. Many more of them were not.

Finally, as to the quality of the work that came out of the EV. Most of the artists Greg Smith cites, “Kiki Smith, Basquiat, Bidlo, Koons, Halley, Haring, Scharf, Vaisman, Taaffe, Simmons, Charlesworth, Parrino, Dickson, Wojnarowicz, Wong, Frangella, Lack” had either established a reputation of some sort before showing in the EV, jumped at the first opportunity to dis-associate themselves from the EV (most artists do not want their work transcended by the context it’s shown in. They also, for better or for worse, go where the money is), or were, I would stand by my original statement, not that good.

Franklin Sirmans Searching for an entrance into this thread, I go back to Linda's note of the space being created in "my 80s" as one in which, " ever widening circles of acquaintance, black and white and across all media" were an experience... As a high school student in the 80s, my experience was limited to long nights at The World, Area or Danceteria, not the galleries. The little I remember is wrapped in this space that Adrian Piper's Funk Lessons perhaps speaks to: the social space as the space of dialogue and transformative experience... It feels like an outgrowth of the EV's DIY aesthetic and the promise of disco was a coded space in which we all had a secret handshake. As I imagine earlier happenings and performance based art events, the intertwining of the bizness space of art with the social space of public art (club performance; graffiti, bands, etc...) that was

opened to a more than rarefied public had a significant impact on the market for artists.

Galleries founded on similar theories of inclusivity engendered a radically different space to confront the Reagan year's delineations of difference.

Just Above Midtown, Fun, and Gracie Mansion have all been mentioned. I'd be hardpressed to name more than one (market significant) gallery in the last fifteen years that has founded itself with such a mission and they too embrace a name (a calling) that is more pointed towards a collective concept than the person who pays the bills and sells the art: The Project (aka Projectile).

Unfortunately now, (maybe it's age) but it often feels as if the club's presence and priority within the art of the 80s has been replaced by the art fair, and needless to say it doesnt seem to carry the same sense of promise for dialogue.

Dan Cameron I'm also writing in the comment-on-other-participants'-posts mode...

Catherine brings up the extremely important point of the ways in which difference was perceived by the participants in the East Village art scene of the 1980s. Many participants in that scene continue to insist that the seeds for today's multi-racial, interfaith art world were sown in those days, and I think there is some truth to that observation.

Something that many members of the art community continue to downplay about the graffiti movement (I suspect because it too easily explains why the artists themselves were so rapidly seduced and abandoned by the establishment) is that it was by far the most racially integrated art movement New York has ever seen, and the fleeting experience of young African-American and Hispanic artists being toasted by the mainstream art world was, as it happens, far too good to be true. At another level, I often got the sense in hanging out with people like Luis Frangella or Meyer Vaisman (from Argentina and Venezuela, respectively), or Haim Steinbach (Israel), or even Keiko Bonk or Martin Wong, that I was experiencing the Lower East Side immigrant dream being replayed as a kind of cartoon version of Breakfast at Tiffany's. These weren't success stories as such, but strangely imploded, even tragic narratives of the self-created American legend.

In saying this, I should also emphasize that my experience of a pre-global was almost certainly not a universal one, and that many East Village galleries had a more buttoned-up, pedigreed idea of what being a professional artist meant. But if you were as interested as I was back then in experiencing as many different facets of the East Village as possible, it was easy to have access to a more international and less class-stratified art than was available elsewhere in the art world.

Also, in answer to Simon's query, my 'Extended Sensibilities' exhibition at the New Museum, which was entirely of lesbian and gay artists, was in 1982, two or three years before Kate Linker's 'Differences' show. For the record, though, 'Differences's first manifestation was as an exhibition proposal in 1983 to the Grey Art Gallery while I was working there as Assistant Director, and Kate and I had a few substantive conversations at the time in my office about the points of similarity and difference between my project (which had just finished) and hers (which was still in formation). I mention this only to emphasize that these exhibitions were not happening in a vaccuum, even when we seemed to coming at our respective subjects from totally different points of view.

Simon Leung Thanks Dan for the info on Extended Sensibilities. Frankin, in reply to your post, I am not sure about "market significant" galleries per se, but in New York there are currently in the Fall of 2005 at least three new(ish) spaces on the lower east side that I think fit your description in terms of

ethos: Participant on Rivington; Reena Spaulding on Grand; and on Orchard Street, Orchard, which is run as a collective by among many others Rebecca Quaytman, Christian Philip-Muller and Moyra Davey (they just did a show on September 11, 1973, the day of the Pinochet coup in Chile). There are many more spaces in other parts of the the city, the country, the world; in other times... but in my experience, until last year, Colin's American Fine Arts really DID functioned in the way you described.

Dorit Cypis Reading today’s posts, feels like chasing the tails of speeding marble balls...all these divergent subjectivities writing about an era where the notion of “subjectivity” was just rearing its head! It was becoming more diverse, questioning, inclusive and also, more perverse, oxymoronic, financially lucrative.

At the NAAO (National Association of Artists Organizations) conference in New Orleans in the early 80’s, Fashion Moda was highlighted with one of the Graffiti artists they “discovered”, Lady Pink. That year Pink, a very young Latina artist from Queens (maybe Bronx), transitioned from street graffiti artist to a very collectible, financially successful artist. At NAAO, Fashion Moda was hard pressed to identify with the other socially issue driven artist run organizations.

I would like to introduce yet another character into these fictions of Geographies, Institutions and Markets.....the MFA. We did not know it yet, but the 1980’s cemented the notion of “artist via MFA.” I myself graduated from Cal Arts in 1977 and by then many of us were already questioning the relationship between these 2 rubrics, particularly in Southern California were there were/are umpteen MFA programs to choose from. Howard Singerman’s book “The Artist as Subject” well documents this era and its evolution to today’s factory production of ready made artists, ready that is for the marketplace. We know the rest.

This trend was incubating in other art centers as well, i.e. London, as was to be revealed by the exhibition “Brilliant”, Walker Art Center, 1995, epitomized by the wall labels which read the artist name, birthplace and year /school where he/she had received an MFA. I remain with many questions...i.e. what has the impact of artists, often with few skills of critiquing their own pedagogy, been on teaching want-to-be artists; how have artists teaching artists colluded with the run away commodification of art; how many generations of interpretations of art histories, cultural theories etc. does it take to change a light bulb....I mean, have we flogged “art” to death yet? Did we forget to breath? Last year I heard a talk given in LA by Sylvere Lotringer, who via his journal Semiotext introduced many of us in the USA to French Theory in the later 70’s and into the 80’s...lamenting the fact that academia (MFA programs) had flattened Deleuze, etc. into a pulp of de-contextualized meanings. He exhorted us not to forget that theory too comes from lived experience in lived space and time and that perhaps we had forgotten what cannot be represented by theory alone. Has the MFA institutionalized and territorialized art production?

These roots too lie in the 80’s.

On the other hand, there were many other "Geographies", collectives, journals, events, individuals who did not fit into these canons.

Franklin Sirmans Hey Simon, I'm not sure about Reena Spaulding but the others all work from the old paradigm of "alternative" spaces. The idea of an alternative space is something that i think is very much about the 1980s... but to have long lasting "market significance" the alternative space seems to be more or less a stepping stone. My memory is clouded but the thing i remember about the aformentioned spaces is their ability to take the market head on and say its not about good work that we can demonstrate with art funding, but to take the bull by the horns, and function in the marketplace...beyond ideas but in the place where history is going to be written outside of the confines of art historical criticism. But, how much are these artists going to get for their work...

Multiculturalism November 8-9 Maurice Berger In 1989, in an essay published, ironically, in the pages of ARTFORUM magazine, the writer and scholar bell hooks wondered if the concept of “multiculturalism” was as formative and useful as it seemed at the time. She concluded that the concept itself was both too amorphous and simplistic: the act of mere inclusion of the formerly ignored or excluded seemed insufficient to her. She called for a broad-based “critical intervention,”a process in which individuals—as well as institutions—collectively and honestly self-examined attitudes, beliefs, and behavior. Only then, she believed, could the promise of “multiculturalism,” and its dream of equality social justice and come to fruition.

From the start, the notion of “multiculturalism” was fraught. To some it suggested hope for equality and justice in a culture infiltrated by racism, sexism, and homophobia.; for others, it was an epithet that signified a brazen attempt to undermine "standards" and rob straight, white men of a power so jealously guarded (and yet so extraordinarily disproportionate) . Its very meaning seemed unclear: was it—like the “pluralism” that preceded it in the 1970s—about inclusion? Was it about consciousness raising or sensitivity? Did it advocate affirmative action or quotas? Who would be included in the multicultural ethos? (Would Jews, for example, a people who, only forty years earlier, were being gassed and tossed into ovens by the Nazi’s and their European allies?)

What of the competing interests within the multicultural rainbow, the racial and sexual groups that would inevitably compete with each other for power and attention? What was multiculturalism's relationship to "Identity Politics, another '80s catchphrase? How did AIDS become implicated in the struggle for racial and sexual rights?

There is no question that “multiculturalism” is a child of the 1980s—a key ideology and sensibility of the time. I would like to devote this session to its meaning and import, both then and now.

What were the origins of the “multicultural” ethos? What were its causes and effects in the period? And what of its aspirations and long-term implications: how far and in what ways has “multiculturalism” impacted American society and culture?

Mary Kelly Maurice, you say multiculturalism is a child of the 1980s. Umm, perhaps “unwanted” by some who were afraid it would grow up and marry the free enterprise ideology of globalization and live unhappily ever after as the justification for outsourcing. Not enough has been said about the reluctant parents—representation and sexuality and the extended family—“identity politics” which, as I remember it, was the most prominent catchword in the 80s and addresses your question about the origins of the multicultural ethos. Here are a couple late night thoughts.

First of all, Catherine, before you reminded me that most institutions were still very conservative in the 80s when it came to diversity, I was beginning to think, reading many of the posts, that all that was over and done with in the 70s and I was just hallucinating. Thanks. It reminded me of something Gayatri Spivak said about a “lag-effect”, in terms of cultural representation, we’re always trying to undo it.

Your comment about there not being enough difference in the “Difference” show, for example, seems to suggest that the difference between men and women, their equality in number, is not enough …something’s lagging behind. Even though the show included a very q influential gay artist, Stuart Marshall, mentioned by Simon, and Yve Lomax, a lesbian, overlooked by everyone, this is not the point. When

q sexuality was posed as a matter of difference, not gender, it immediately begged the question of object choice. Though, I think the intense debate was generated not just by the way the question was framed, but how it converged with the lived experience of an emerging crisis to produce a palpable lag. Eventually this persistent attack on the lag made the bottom fall out of the whole binary scheme which is where one tendency in queer theory ends up in the 90s (e.g., Inside /Out, (Fuss, 1991; Bodies that Matter, Butler,1994), I mean, the one that’s suspicious of fixed identities and probably multiculturalism, too. Simon, I’m thinking of the importance of your work here. And Maurice, your exhibition, “Ciphers of Identity”.

Secondly, if you follow the other thread of Difference through the issue of representation it comes out on the side of postcolonial theory, not multiculturalism. In the early 80s, we were preoccupied with the question of images and how to change them. Posts have mentioned Crimp’s exhibition Pictures, (but not Solomon Godeau’s, The Stolen Image). And then, there were publications like Postmodern Culture (ed. Foster) 1983 and Art after Modernism (ed. Wallis) 1984.

For the most part then, sex, race and class were filtered through various systems of meaning which meant they were infinitely more negotiable than the 70s search for “positive images’. But when race was posed as a question of difference, it didn’t produce a lag-effect, it was something more like a blind spot. Looking back at it, I’m shocked and at the same time I can see how that interrogation was headed on a crash course with sexuality and the unconscious and just how long it would take to put the pieces together again with ethnicity and nation via Fanon and Stuart Hall and finally Homi Bhabha (Nation and Narration,1991, The Location of Culture,1994), to come up with the kind of complex identity politics that Renee Green addresses in her work—not claiming any specific way of being, and most likely, at odds with the multicultural paradigm.

Maurice Berger Mary, you write: "For the most part then, sex, race and class were filtered through various systems of meaning which meant they were infinitely more negotiable than the 70s search for 'positive images.'"

One thing that greatly altered (and strengthened)the discourses of race, class, sexuality, and gender in the 1980s--something often absent from cultural writing and scholarship in the 1970s-was the increasingly sophisticated understanding of representation itself, and how words and images are inexorably tied to cultural and social biases, presumptions, and hierarchies. I think of Craig Owens' contention that earlier incarnations of Marxism had been, inevitably, somewhat "vulgar," "unfocused," and "ineffectual"; the introduction of theories of representation into "neoMarxism," to his mind, resulted in a far more incisive and critical discourse, one that more persuasively linked words and images to the vicissitudes of class.

Such interplay (and codependency) between theoretical models was pervasive in the 1980s.

There is no question, for example, that post-structuralist, psychoanalytical, neo-Marxist, and feminist practices--from Gayatri Spivak's deconstruction of the racism of traditional histories of colonialism to Mary Kelly's adoption of Lacanian principles to examine the hierarchies of masculinity--helped introduce into the culture at large a far more sophisticated and critical understanding of representation (even if by a kind of intellectual "trickle-down effect," to cite

another '80s expression). This form of critical "seeing" and "reading" was a significant legacy of the 1980s, one we can discuss at length in our next session on "Methodologies and Writing."

Karen Mary Davalos In nearly all areas of my experience, I am an optimist, except on the topic of multiculturalism, the “key ideology and sensibility” of the 1980s that created a dangerous and impossibly limiting path for an inclusive society. In short, I have almost nothing positive to say about multiculturalism and its legacy.

On better days, I like to imagine that multiculturalism was created through a cooptation of the Left, civil rights, or calls for social justice. In the late 1960s and 1970s, scholars and activists of color, queer theorists and feminists called for a university that would serve the local community, create curricula and research that would address social problems, demanded a restructuring of disciplines to acknowledge histories and experiences hidden by conventional methods and ways of knowing—and the list goes on for an inclusive society. These types of demands were made on other institutions, particularly the museum. They resulted in major and minor transformations and re-visions in education and other institutions. The re-vision of higher education by scholars and activists of color, queer theorists and feminists resulted in the formation of new disciplines, methods, epistemologies, media, and forms of community.

Here I borrow from Adrienne Rich’s notion of “re-vision” as “an act of survival.” Affirmative action was one method or tool that helped universities create inclusive and demographically proportionate faculty and students. Ethnic studies, women’s students, and later LGBT studies were major interventions in the university.

As I say, one my better days, I pretend it was simply a matter of accommodating the demand for space in the curriculum, the galleries, the board room-yes, we wanted equal representation and this was a major activity in the late 1960s and 1970s. We also called for new categories, new methods—new notions of knowledge, beauty, art. We pointed out structural inequalities and injustices.

But aspects of the civil rights discourse supported the ethos of multiculturalism, particularly the contributions approach. Let us inside the BLANK (museum, gallery, university, dictionary, index, journal, etc.) so we can show the public that we too have art, we too have beauty, we too aspire to truth, we too produce knowledge. People of color, queers, women, the East, etc. are all contributors to this BLANK (great nation, world of art, knowledge, civilization, humanity, etc.).

YIKES! I wrote myself into a corner and can't get out!

A few days ago, Maurice asked me to hold off on my discussion of multiculturalism, and now I have taken a path into flippant cynicism.

But this distaste emerges from the realities around me. Allow me to list them: 1) Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), established in 1964, during the opening of the Chicana/o art and social movement, has organized 3 or 4 exhibitions of Chicana/o art, and two were in a “basement” gallery, or at least a space that was not typically used for exhibitions. We had more Chicana/o art exhibitions at LACMA in the 1970s than the 1980s and 1990s combined.

[Your own geographic location can probably produce a similar tail].

2) LACMA’s collection can claim that it owns perhaps dozens of works by Carlos Almaraz, a Chicano painter and muralist who was a member of Los Four, a collective that exhibited at LACMA in 1974. But this acquisition was not intentional. No committee, curator, or trustee thought it would be a good idea to collect the work of Almaraz, after he died from AIDS

complications in 1989. His partner, Elsa Flores must be credited with the foresight or economic necessity to get the work into a public museum.

[To address the staff might make us feel safer, since LACMA recently hired Rita Gonzalez as assistant curator, and perhaps she will be able to do great things, but I already suspect that this hire is not a signal of great instiutional change. Gonzalez is qualitied, but the terms of her success are beyond her control].

3) In the new millennium, some Mexican-origin artists in Los Angeles are claiming that they want to be known as “artists” and not as “Chicana/o artists.” Why is it that we can still hear echo of Langston Hughes’ observations made during the Harlem Renaissance?

If the benefits of being Chicana/o are not as clear or real as the benefits of being “white” or “just an artist”, then multiculturalism and its reinforcement of the neo-liberal agenda are to blame. That is, multiculturalism only reinforces racial privilege, it cannot be used to dismantle it.

4) this town, to paraphrase Gloria Anzaldúa, was Mexican. If we look at the state, 35% of the residents are Latino, and over 70% of these are Mexican-origin.

5) Under the multicultural ethos, my list will be read an ethnocentric politics, balkanization, ethnic chauvinism, cultural nationalism, etc. It cannot function as a challenge to inequity, historical amnesia, or racial or gender privilege—the very ideologies and discourses that led to the social inequity in the first place.

Maurice Berger Karen, I share you impatience with "multiculturalism," mainly because it rarely demands an a honest assessment of one's private attitudes, complicity, or behavior. Two years ago, in the last O'Keeffe Museum online conference, "Museums of Tomorrow," I wrote the following: "The other day, I found myself 'defending' Toni Morrison to a young writer friend of mine. What an absurd situation--one of our nation's greatest writers and critical thinkers, a Nobel laureate no less. After a while, I realized that it was not the question of Morrison's "artistic" merit, per se that was driving our argument. (Though it WAS the subject of our debate.) Race, or rather the irrelevancy of the complex of cultural and intellectual idioms inherent to Morrison's writings to a guy interested only in Michael Cunningham and Dale Peck, was at the root of our disagreement.

The young man was white and middle-class. When I asked him to name his favorite writers, not a single one deviated from the tribe (with respect to gender AND race, I might add).

Yet, in some sense, this tribalism embarrasses and troubles many of us--especially in an art world that thrives on tweaking the norm, pushing the envelop, and blurring boundaries. To some extent, the art world has opened up to such cross-cultural possibilities, but these gestures still feel to me like multiculturalism without teeth. Crumbs thrown by the guilty to the formerly insulted and ignored. One more Kara Walker exhibition is not going to convince me that things have changed on a deeper, more formative level.

I think we need to get over our embarrassment, if simply to free ourselves from the straitjacket of bigotry, complacency, and smugness. Maybe then, we'll find out just how much we can learn from each other."

My comments elicited an angry response from several panelists who felt I wasn't fully appreciating the efforts of museum directors and curators to confront institutional racism, sexism, homophobia, and classism. Two years later, I stick by my observation.

I wonder, after the spectacle of Hurricane Katrina, if my words will once again elicit anger or surprise.

Karen Mary Davalos Mary Kelly's post has me wanting to clarify my argument by way of a document.

Her assessment of Renee Green as “not claiming any specific way of being” causes me to pause, because under multiculturalism’s rejection of identity politics, claiming a specific way of being could be misperceived.

I do not pretend to know what Green or Kelly are arguing, but this comment just got me thinking about Gloria Anzaldua, the author of Borderlands/La Frontera: a new mestiza (1987) in which she argues for a porous, flexible, multiple but always historically grounded way of being, or identity.

She asks us to recognize that rigid identities are dangerous, multiple one’s are creative, and crossed boundaries are more common than we acknowledge under the rubric of multiculturalism, and its bed-fellows of cultural nationalism prior to the expansion by queer and feminist theorists such as Anzaldua.

Multiculti mutated, as one queer scholar Alicia Gaspar de Alba notes, our alternative vision of ourselves. It made it appear as if any claim to identity was suspect, even though we can still trace systematically the inequalities in education, political representation, health, health care, or the environment.

And for Maurice, the untenable claim that our BLANK is getting better and has made changes: Can any body tell about a new discourse or policy that unhinges the diffensiveness of those with privilege?

When we have this discourse, we will have arrived --- not at middle class success, the site of future and near utopias under neo-liberalism--but a place of equity.

Wendy Perron I have heard bell hooks say a similar thing about integrated education. When she was a child, she thrived at an all black school, but then was dismal at an integrated school. I understood a lot about the limits of multiculturalism when I heard that. But I don’t think any of us would want to abolish integration in schools.

At my son’s school, which actively recruited kids of color, the parents of color were angry because the school didn’t do much to make them feel comfortable once they were here. The school leaders couldn’t make a dent in the ingrained attitudes of some of the teachers. Maybe there should be a major re-training program for the teachers at schools that have ambitions to be more diverse.

I think of multiculturalism as a beginning. In the civil rights movement, making the seats in the front of the bus available for everybody was just a beginning. That alone will not solve the deeply embedded racism of our culture. Multiculturalism is a step toward an equal society. I can understand that Karen Mary finds it frustrating—and its alarming to hear that Latino inclusion has gone backward in L.A.—and I can understand Maurice’s frustration with the museums giving only a nod to multiculturalism. But it’s a start in a direction that has potential. So I want to ask you, what would you suggest for those museums to do in order go further toward a more equal and fair inclusion? Personally, I would love to see students required to read Maurice’s book “White Lies” in the 8th grade, and then again in the 10th grade. That would help people start to get over their embarrassment (as Maurice just said) and examine their own prejudices.

What I find frustrating is when people think that multiculturalism is a passing fad, and then when it’s over we can all go back to reading only white male authors etc. I think its’ here to stay, meaning that there are going to keep being people of all kinds of colors in this country, and even

those people who don’t absolutely revel in diversity will have to get used to it.

I think the dance field may be slightly more open to other races than other fields. Working in the studio, physically touching and sweating together, is a leveling thing. (I think that leveling thing is something that Adrian Piper used in her performance work to break through the colonialism.) I’m not saying that people in the dance field don’t perceive inequities and hypocrasies. They do, all the time. But looking at the dance artists who get work and sponsorship, it’s pretty across-theboard in terms of race.

Dorit Cypis “Nepantla”, is an Aztec word taught to me by Carlos Ramirez with whom I am teaching a class at Metro Continuation High School in downtown Los Angeles. The students are of mixed racial and ethnic backgrounds, each one feeling caught between plural cultures and identities. Nepantla refers to a cultural identity, which is neither purely where one came from (pre colonization), nor merged with the colonizers’. It is a self-grounded in before, between and beyond. I approach this place as one of strength, expansion, self-recognition, generosity and empathy towards others.

Cixous writes of “equality with difference”. Not, I want what you have, but I want a reciprocity, which assumes a mutual recognition of each other and a distribution of the resources appropriate to our differences (of need).

To see an other, I need to also see myself. This is no easy task for it asks each of us to be diligently awake to our strengths and weakness, aspirations and illusions...to the patterns of our subjectivities. On the 21st, 15 Metro students will be walking a procession through the downtown LA Greyhound Bus Station next door, holding poster size picket signs representing answers to questions they have posed to themselves, i.e. “How do I focus my courage?” “How does my body remember?” “When am I in present time?” “What is a threshold?” etc. The difference between the youths’ engagement with this project today compared to when we started 2 months ago is palpable. They were uncomfortable with each other, with themselves, reactive and competitive.

The deeper we were able to engage the questions, the calmer, more inspired, more interested in each others’ differences they became. I have witnessed this scenario repeated from the time I first started teaching, 1983, whether it be art school BFA/MFA, bank employees, civil servants, or homeless youth. Difference needs to be engaged intimately.

There was much hope in the 1980’s that recognition of “difference” would open the doors much wider than doors were in fact opened. We did spend more time listening to each other.... we learned how to “represent” our differences, but there are myriad levels to active intentional listening and representation is not enough. I agree with the sentiments of bel hooks, that “critical intervention” demands honest self-critique of beliefs and behaviors which live cellularly within each of us...are socially framed by class, race, gender and sexuality and go so much deeper.

Alexander Alberro I find the discussion of multi-culturalism thus far, though in many ways interesting, very angloamerican centric. I understand that the exchange is focused on the condition of the eighties and its legacies (particularly in the US), but I think that the topic of multiculturalism in particular would benefit from a broader, more international perspective. I don't mean to be controversial, but I find that many of the cynical postings thus far with regard to multiculturalism come from positions of privilege and power--a comfort that has been afforded precisely because of the in-roads that the struggles for multiculturalism have cut. In my opinion, though there is still a lot more that can (and should) be done, the multiculturalism of the 70s and 80s has produced significant results (evidenced, for instance, in the fear and backlash of white middle class men and women against minority groups today). I was recently struck by just how important and progressive the debates on identity politics were for the political landscape of North America and Britain while spending a year abroad in European countries: Germany for the greatest period of time, and also Spain and France. Since I was most fully immersed in German culture, let me address that context in

particular. First, a debate of the sort that we're having here on art/culture/politics and multiculturalism would simply not take place in Germany today--neither at a university, nor a museum, nor within the context of an exhibition or "critical" journal. Don't get me wrong, artists and intellectuals in Germany are in many ways more progressive than we are when it comes to the issue of global politics, they're even more progressive in the defense of state sponsored social programs. But when it comes to the issue of identity politics they seem to have blinders in place. In Germany, for instance, it is simply not seen as relevant that only five percent of professors are female, or that it is almost impossible for members of the Turkish minority (many of whom were born in Germany) to enter the university and achieve class mobility. Class demarcations are in many ways as rigid as they ever were: children are tracked (based on family background) already in elementary school. Eighty-five percent of women who have professions do not have children, and within the university the statistic is even higher (approx. 98%).

Discrimination on the basis of gender, race, religion, ethnic background and age are prevalent. In the realm of art, progressive curators such as Uta Meta Bauer and Okwui Enwesor are vilified for their gender/race/age before their shows even open. Such ad hominem attacks do not occur as commonly in North American/British journalism (and when they do, they're for the most part not taken seriously). The Germans (French, Italian, Spanish--though this is changing with the fabulous government of Zapatero) ridicule the US for its "PCness," though I'm suggesting that we shouldn't lose sight of gains made by these very struggles in our context. As problematic as the current US government (if one can call it that) is, public officials (with perhaps the exception of the President's mother) did not go as far as to refer to fed up constituencies in New Orleans as "scum" or "louts" or "freeloaders" (the way that, for instance, Sarkozy is doing in France today to minority populations there, or Stoiber in Germany to citizens of the ex-DDR).

Maurice Berger Alex, you write: "I don't mean to be controversial, but I find that many of the cynical postings thus far with regard to multiculturalism come from positions of privilege and power--a comfort that has been afforded precisely because of the in-roads that the struggles for multiculturalism have cut."

I frankly do not understand what you are trying to say. One of the innate problems with multiculturalism, and with identity politics in general, is the implication that the critique, commentary and analysis must come from only those who are disenfranchised or disempowered.

The "cynicism" that you suggests rides through the above posts strikes me neither as cynical nor anglo-US centric. What you read as "cynicism" seems to me to be an appropriately critical analysis of an ongoing and problematic situation. People with privilege and power, it seems to me, should be at the forefront of this criticism, since it is within privilege and power (and the unwillingness to share it) that bigotry (and the fears and anxieties that fuel it) are often bred.

I might also add the being female, or of color, or gay has a way of mollifying one's power within the culture: so I'm not quite sure how you understand the position of "power and privilege" that fuels the "cynicism" of the thread above. To live with sexism, racism, and homophobia is to live, everyday, with a sense of how tenuous your power really is. Just look at yesterday's election and the two-thirds of Texas voters who decided that state laws barring gay marriage were not enough; only a deeply religious (and grotesquely homophobic) declaration of the people's disdain of homosexuality--in the form of a far more durable and symbolic "constitutional amendment--would suffice.

If some of us seem focused on the United States, well, it's hard to take our eyes off our own country when we must vigilantly watch for the attacks, slights, insults, and bigotry that can turn an ordinary day into a nightmare.

Oliver Wasow This particular topic, multi-culturalism, scares me, it causes me to start to say things and then stop for fear of saying the “wrong thing�. I had decided to skip the topic and wait for the next but

changed my mind, figuring if it scared me that much perhaps I was meant to address it.

I was at best a spectator to the issues of multi-culturalism, identity politics, whatever you want to call it, in the 1980’s. I’m a straight white male artist and while I applauded the efforts of those around me in the battle for diversity in representation, I never felt overtly the sting of exclusion (well, growing up a Jew in Wisconsin had its downside I suppose, but it was after all a college town…)

There was however a part of me, and I suppose there still is, that felt that it was unreasonable to expect what is basically a luxury item, “high” culture, to give a voice to a populace that does not constitute its market base. What the answer to this problem is I’m not sure but it does seem that in order, for instance, for LA to have a cultural outlet for it’s economically deprived, but majority population, a (genuinely) government funded alternative is the only solution. It’s hard to imagine galleries, collectors or even museums being open to work that doesn’t appeal to their financial base.

Of course this is a gross over-simplification and addresses only one small, but powerful, portion of the art world, and it also assumes that the disenfranchised speak in a language that holds no appeal to the dominant class, but it’s my impression and I thought I’d take a (small) risk and throw it out there.

Dorit Cypis Oliver, I applaud your honesty, which allows for discourse, but to imply that only art with a market base has an impact is somewhat narrow and naive. Do you really believe that?

Maurice Berger Oliver, you write: "This particular topic, multi-culturalism, scares me, it causes me to start to say things and then stop for fear of saying the “wrong thing”."

In the context of this conversation, you need not have this fear. This is precisely what I meant when I said that we need to get past our "embarrassment." The refreshing honesty of your post is important. If you say something "controversial," to quote Alex, you may indeed elicit a response.

Not because you are "wrong," but rather, because what you said has moved your colleagues to correct, inform, persuade, reject, or add to your remarks. When Wendy asks me what I think museums (and other institutions) need to do better, re: multiculturalism, I can think of a number of things. But nothing is more important than honest and open discourse. It's far better to admit our racism, homophobia, or misogyny--and ultimately to deal with it--than take a defensive posture that will get us nowhere.

Oliver Wasow Dorit in response to your comment/question: “to imply that only art with a market base has an impact is somewhat narrow and naive. Do you really believe that?”

No, sorry to be unclear. Of course all art has an impact of some sort.

What I meant to suggest was that to fight for inclusion into those institutions that are so tied to a market that is unavailable and unfriendly to the disenfranchised, seems like the old, proverbial, going to the hardware store for oranges. The notion of “subverting from within”, central, as long as we’re talking about the 80’s, to much of that decades deconstructive strategies, is perhaps too easily co-opted and neutralized. Rather than try to change those institutions, an impossibility it seems to me in a market-driven economy, I think political energy should be directed towards

more classic, old school, new-deal, socialist, government funded solutions. Which, I realize, brings us back to the culture wars. So, I don’t know.

Oliver Wasow Re-reading my posts was too depressing and left me feeling the need to find some light.

I do think that one possible, small, "solution" to the problem of inclusion may involve transcending the entire institutional framework itself and utilizing other avenues of exposure and distribution, particularly ones offered by new technologies; the internet, self-publishing, etc.. For the time being anyway, these are relatively free and democratic channels.

And, finally, I’m everyday encouraged by the color-blindness of my 1 year old daughter and 3 year old son. May they stay this way.

Andrea Robbins The term "multi-cultural" was incredibly productive in allowing for more layered cultural and racial identities for people who were the products of cultural dislocations; including colonialism, Diaspora, emigration...

At the time I think it was meant to address the limitations of the "melting pot" idea.

Multiculturalism also became a model for the acknowledgment of more nuanced applied personal and sexual identities as opposed to one word stereo-types; labels in polite circles.

A failure of multiculturalism was that it became a catch all for the disenfranchised, who could not or would not view themselves as partners, because they came with differing status, histories (which could at times be in conflict), not to mention privilege which they were not necessarily willing to share.

Today, November 9th is the anniversary of Kristalnacht; which many consider to be the beginning of the Holocaust so your question Maurice (esp. about the ovens) resonates from where I am sitting (Dusseldorf). Max and I spent a great deal of time photographing the "museumification" of Dachau Concentration Camp in the 80's (the first ("model") concentration camp). There as everyone knows, inmates were labeled and divided by identity. Groups with more social "status" were pitted against, dominated, and at times brutalized those with less.

All victims and unequal.

Back to the 80's; 1989, ironically today is also the anniversary of travel restrictions being lifted between East and West Germany, the day the wall came down and (West) Germany theoretically doubled it's white German speaking population. I do not mean to suggest that this is multiculturalism quite the opposite. In a 'culture of complaint' like Germany, I guess this is their version. And it goes in the face of the Turkish and other "guest workers" some of whom have been here for two and three generations but may not acquire German citizenship.

Simon Leung I barely know where to begin. Maybe with the voice, maybe with the problems in speaking I remember encountering throughout the 80s. We’ve brought up how post-colonialism and queer theory modified the terrain “multiculturalism” once treaded. I am thinking about when Gayatri Spivak’s inestimably important work (e.g. “Can the Subaltern Speak?”) where her persistent and nuanced critiques described differences and forms of violence missed by the multiculti’s (e.g. the post colonial translator/native informant class speaking for the subaltern); I am thinking about Trinh Minh-ha’s writings and films, where images and words and sounds undo each other’s authority and the masculinist Master-narrative; I am thinking about how when Judith Butler was introduced to a wide audience for the first time in Diana Fuss’ “Inside/Out” (the avant la letter queer theory anthology), she wrote about the essentialist demands that bracket the term “lesbian;” I am thinking about Avital Ronell singular form of Nietzschean scholarship (“The

Telephone Book”); and I am thinking about Wayne’s work on opera and desire.

Wayne, I apologize if I am I remembering this incorrectly, but if I do it’s because I’ve transposed it to a mental register I can more easily retrace. There is a passage in your book “The Queen’s Throat” that has instructed me on the price of self representation—it’s where you ask the (presumably male?) reader to stand in a room alone and to first sing aloud in a high falsetto, and then to sing in a “natural” voice, from the chest. Which voice, you asked, would you rather your neighbor to overhear?

There is a sense of being found out that I think a lot of people feel when speaking about the kind of things “multiculturalism,” in the American context, implies. A sense that however one enunciates oneself, the performance will be found wanting because the speaking subject is always implicated in a field of power nexus, an already charted diagram of privilege, myth, and sadomasochism. To borrow Mary’s family metaphor (which I have to say was laugh out loud funny), speaking from a multicultural script feels a lot like having to “do it” (and you can decide on what that “it” is you’re “doing”) in front of the parents and all the relatives: representation, sexuality, and identity politics (or, in the spirit of Cixous’ phrase “equality with difference” Dorit invoked, “the politics of difference”).

Why does one voice sound “more natural” than the other?

I am putting most of this in the past tense (the 80s) but by no means do I think this moment is past. How many times have we been in the presence of those who use alibis of authenticity to naturalize identity, but in doing so, either intentionally or unwittingly maintain the existing power relations in a binary of rights? One doesn’t hear this as much today, but I remember time and again “speaking as” qualifications that would set up, “Speaking as a woman of color, I feel…” or “Speaking as a white man, I cannot talk about…” or “why don’t you speak as an Asian/Black/Chicano artist?”

I’m not saying that this is “wrong” or that it is necessarily essentialist (there are plenty of people who identify as anti-essentialist who are in fact blindingly essentialist in deed). I really respect the sincerity and yes, “truth” in how we take risks in speaking. So like Dorit, I too, want to thank Oliver for how he was going to wait but decided to take the risk of speaking—I think it’s a gesture of good faith, and I take it in the generous gesture in which it was meant. There is nothing more ethically repellent than when holders of privilege accuse others of political correctness because those with less privilege put themselves at risk by “speaking as,” but in some PC circles I’ve also seen people closing down discussion by insisting that men (whatever the hell that is) or white people (how do you know for sure?) cannot speak; or worse, when I am provisionally ALLOWED to be a part of a discussion BECAUSE I am “queer” and “non-white” EVEN THOUGH I am “a man.”

In other words, this restraint on speech we experienced throughout the 80s presupposed that there is a right to speech based on immutable, often biological difference, and this was assumed by essentialists on all sides of political divides. Some conservatives ridiculed these imagined rights and some “radicals” policed them. Yet rights are not natural—they are granted, fought over, seized. Rights are historical constructions. Yes, I agree with Maurice that sometimes “speaking as” did not assume ipso facto “natural” differences, but was done with all the passion and pain of those who were subjected to the violence of history. As we witness the 12th day of rioting in France I think it’s pretty clear that Le Citroyen has its limits and could use a little “multicultural” soul searching. But to go back to my point, one rarely witnessed the “speaking as” mode generated off a positivistic multicultural “power grid,” either in the 80s or today. Multiculturalism was often a mask that hid other forms of privilege. When did you last hear someone say “Speaking as a Ivy-league educated lesbian with a trust fund?” or “Speaking as a white rulingclass tenured professor who identifies with patriarchy?”

Multicultural “speaking as” allowed a lot of people to include words that signified social privilege

either from the perceived naturalized top (white) or bottom (lesbian)—and yes I know I’m enjoying the use of the top/bottom binary a bit too much here—while garnering legitimacy and shoring up their own power. This model of enunciation assumes and demands that speakers sound “natural,” chest voice and all, in their race, gender, ethnic identities. But shouldn’t countertenors speak as well? Or is that too embarrassing? Where is the break between falsetto and the natural under multiculturalism? It’s no wonder that Eve Sedgwick work on the affects of shame is important to so many. Perhaps I’m going back to surface and affect: the burning red face of not being able to feel as one “should” in one’s body modifies the shade of ones brown or yellow or white or black skin.

I remember being in Julia Kristeva’s Freud seminar in the 80s when she spoke of the voice of the mother as a semiotic space (chora), but that just as sound can be space, the mother is not always a woman. This does not close down the category of woman, or replace the biological woman (I am thinking of Judith Butler’s writing on “Paris is Burning,” and her theoretical extension of Kristeva) with a neo-colonization by men with Venus (Extravaganza) envy, but rather, opens up the vulnerability of all bodies in a critique of the uses essence, like masculinity, or whiteness.

Andrea Robbins There is something else I wanted to mention about Germany and that is that even though everyone knows it is a homogeneous culture, you would have no idea by looking at billboards and advertising which are filled with photographs of people of color. Am I being paranoid or is a multicultural group identity being fabricated for future cultural historians?

Simon Leung Hmmm... I wonder if Germany IS a homogeneous culture. I think Germany certainly has, well, a history of perceiving itself as homogeneous; and that it did a lot to try to, uh, "regulate" this perception...

I'm not just talking about "the elephant" here.

As recently as 1992-3, Germany DID forcibly repatriated 50,000 of its 60,000 Vietnamese guest workers, even though many of them spent an entire generation there--remember the neo-nazi riots and attack on immigrants after the wall came down? As you mentioned Andrea, there IS a rather significant Turkish population denied citizenship because they are not "racially" German. If there is anything being fabricated, I think one can begin with the German self-image as being homogeneous, or the rather active production/naturalization of the myth of nationality and race.

Karen Mary Davalos Such an encouraging dialogue! I am delighted we have found a space that allows for honesty, integrity, and clarity.

Simon’s post is a helpful direction for me to understand the limits of multiculturalism.

But it also suggested to me the discourse that has produced its own untenable position.

“Speaking as” as Simon notes is problematic, and I want to point to another of its problems.

To “speak as” a Chicana (fuller disclosure: occasional cross-dressing, born in Los Angeles County, from a grandmother who crossed the border several times at AZ, TX, and CA, pochaSpanish speaker, halfbreed, butch-aesthetic short woman) does not require me to question power and its unequal distribution. It gives me space to name and multiculti allowed that space to serve as the “authentic” site of the thing that I named.

But my naming and speaking as does not dismantle power, even though the position from which I

speak – as a Chicana – resists assimilation, erasure, and amnesia. I can, like my students at a mid-sized private Catholic institution, just speak from this position and forget about rearranging authority and power.

The signified space and name is sometimes meaningless to them in the multicultural ethos of "be yourself" and "tolerance for others" and "unity in diversity."

Not all diversities are created equal. In addition, some folks insist(ed) we celebrate "whiteness" without determining what whiteness is/was. To paraphrase, George Lipsitz, whiteness has cash value, do not confuse a critique of whiteness with a criticism of white people, and finally, white is not a culture.

Therefore, in the Let's All Get Along multiculti model, we never deconstructed whiteness sufficiently. We mistook it as another space from which to speak. In short, we are still looking for the tools to dismantle power in all of its forms.

Ironically, the migrants/folks of color in France and beyond might have ignited one tool for challenging power! So no, they don't need our multiculturalism. They will hopefully come up with a better model.

So I am less concerned with so-called essentialism, since I also believe that it has its use, as Spivak argued. It is strategic to name and speak as a Chicana when that identity, history, and experience is disempowered, but it does not require – in an of itself – a redistribution of power, integrity, or change.

Wayne Koestenbaum All so interesting!

Quick response to Simon: thanks for remembering and internalizing my reference to falsetto and humiliation. I wish I’d been your classmate in Kristeva’s Freud seminar.

I’ve been thinking about the difficulties of speaking in an Internet conference—about the artificiality of “posted” speech. Its falseness. At once in private and in public. A voice without a larynx. Speech without organs.

Today I heard for the first time Antonin Artaud’s voice—a recording of a 1947 radio broadcast, “To Have Done with the Judgment of God.” He spoke in a sibillant, aspirating, theatrical voice— sometimes falsetto, always artificial. 1947 isn’t the 1980s, but I want to bring a few of Artaud’s words, from 1947, to bear on the question of 1980s-style multiculturalism (I hear his words as a call for the multiplication of masks, or a call for MULTIPLICATION, MULTIPLICITY of positions, of voices, of angles onto consciousness): in Clayton Eshelman’s and Bernard Bador’s translation: “For tie me down if you want to, but there is nothing more useless than an organ.

When you have given him a body without organs, then you will have delivered him from all his automatisms and restored him to his true liberty.

Then you will teach him again to dance inside out as in the delirium of dance halls and that inside out will be his true side out.”

Inside out. We need more and more multiculturalisms. (Who’s “we”?) Multi, without end. Of every

style. Multiply the organs, to obviate (and confuse) their false surety. Multiply the counterpoints.

Or, as Artaud says elsewhere, “I have never written except to fix and perpetuate the memory of these cuts, these scissions, these ruptures, these abrupt and bottomless falls which” ...

(His voice breaks off.)

I wish I could say I have never written or spoken except to multiply.

I take seriously what Alexander Alberro posted about the “anglo-american centric” nature of some multicultural discussions—not necessarily these; certainly my own thinking has been woefully and pathetically “anglo-american-centric” and I’ve been often ashamed of the limitations of my knowledge, sympathies, curiosities. The move toward the “multi,” in cultural and literary studies, has helped me, and others, over the past years, since the 1980s, to break out of unnecessary, cramping, ignorant cubbyholes.

I think Artaud would have had interesting things to say about what’s going on in France right now.

The "mad." The voiceless. The martyrized.

“And not like god, but like, being, me, this unique body, from where all, even god, came out, that I have been violated for life, insulted, offended, dirtied, polluted, muddied, smutted, day and night... that I have been a little bit everywhere martyrized...”

(Artaud, “Interjections,” 1946-7, trans. Eshelman/Bador) Apologies for being so “off-topic.” Consider me the madman in the corner.

Andrea Robbins Hi Simon: I began with the anniversary of Kristalnacht as well as the anniversary of reunification taking place ironically on the same day, and more ironically that being today when we are conducting a discussion of multiculturalism.

Germany is pretty homogeneous though has never has been "Aryan" as was the Nazi myth (I think maybe you mean Aryan?). The "guest workers" are not the people portrayed in the German advertisements I described, and "diversity" is in not in proportion to this phenomenon.

The post reunification population is around 83 million, with over ninety percent of this number being German citizens by birthright with all the privilege this entails.

Of the remaining population, 2/3rds is primarily from Eastern Europe and add to the homogeneity of appearance.

This creates an atmosphere where visual diversity is an exception that is tied to "otherness" as opposed to rule. The public events post reunification (1989) as well as from the time of the Holocaust spring from a historic lack of tolerance for groups the majority perceives as outsiders.

Irving Sandler

Concerning multiculturalism, I have a question. In 1961, the Club of the New York School had 200 members, none of which was African-American. I asked Hale Woodruff why. He replied.

Count them. I did: Bearden, Lewis, Alston, Thompson, Joans, and I stopped. That's it, he said.

Why so few? He said he had asked himself that and thought that maybe poor ghetto youths did not want to enter another life of poverty. In 1963, African-American artists met on the buses on the March to Washington on behalf of civil rights. Woodruff and Bearden then formed the Spiral Group of African American artists.

Within a few years there were dozens of African American artists. Today, they are among the most celebrated artists in America, many of whom have taken the African-American experience as their subjects, I think of (in no particular order) Julie Mehretu, Martin Puryear, Emma Amos, David Hammons, Mel Edwards, Adrian Piper, Robert Colescott, Kara Walker, Faith Ringgold, Ellen Gallagher, Renee Green, and Lorna Simpson, and Fred Wilson, and that's for openers.

These are not token artists. My question is: What happened?

Barbara Buhler Lynes With all apologies for the US-focus of this post -- other than living a few years in Europe, it's where I've been all my life -- in the mid-West, California, the South, New England, a mid-Atlantic state, and the Southwest.

The issue of multiculturalism – so difficult to address – I have found myself stumbling around all day trying to find a way of discussing its complexities in a way at least as meaningful as what has already been said about it here. Yes it brought new awarenesses of differing cultural systems, each to be taken seriously, understood and valued, and it has brought with it the complexities of finding ways of dealing with racism, sexism, and discrimination, placing them once again front and center. Multiculuralism – a promise of peaceful co-existences of differences within a single culture, each ethnicity, religion, class, race, and sexual and being seen as equal to one another and valued equally. Very different from the melting pot theory of the assimilation into the dominant culture.

I want to describe two very different experiences that I had in the 80s that seem to epitomize the complexities of the problems of multiculturalism. The first was a lecture I attended, where a wellknown black writer described what it had been like to make a family trip by car in the 1950s from the mid-Atlantic states into the South to spend Thanksgiving there with relatives. Packing enough food, water, gas, and oil to sustain the car and family for the entire trip was the only approach, because the family knew roadside restaurants were off limits to them, and they were afraid of driving into gas stations, unless God forbid, the car broke down, opting instead to pack gas and to use the fields and forests as bathrooms along the way and after dark.

I knew of course that things had changed and that car trips for black families could now more or less parallel those I remembered from my childhood – times of exploring new places, eating in roadside restaurants, spending nights in motels along the way and, of course, feeling free to stop anywhere to use the facilities. And although I knew that racism was (is) still very much embedded in our culture and that things were far from where they should be (and still are) with respect to recognizing and resolving inequality and discrimination, I felt that the 60s civil rights movements had achieved something in its insistence on integration, equal opportunity, and human freedom.

Sometime later, but still in the 80s, I attended the American Studies Association annual conference and at one session, whose title has since escaped me, was startled as I listened to one of the speakers--a black woman. With 20/20 hindsight on the limitations of the ways in which schools had been integrated in this country in the 70s, she argued that black identity could only be understood and preserved by sending black children to schools where all students and teachers were black.

Integration – segregation – surely we are capable of different and effective solutions?

Kathy O’Dell Barbara – I had just finished the following post when I logged in to find yours, which provides a fitting segue to my own. Here’s what I had written: … A sparkling and spirited dialogue here, one which I’m entering late in the game, with many bases covered, but I found myself wondering throughout about some very plain things: application and practice.

As an art historian and critic who has spent as much if not more time the last several years focused on education and policy issues, I have become (perhaps boringly) practical, but I find questions of application and practice important, for they go to the possibility (utopian dream?) of how to change things for the future by changing things for kids today.

How can concepts of multiculturalism be not only applied but practiced in such an arena as education? I see children of different skin colors, ethnic backgrounds, or family incomes sitting next to each other as they move through their teachers’ lesson plans, which are more multicultural than anything dreamed of in my own elementary school education in the 1950s, but still clustering with classmates with the same skin color, background, or income bracket at lunch or on the playground. How can the application of multiculturalism to the curriculum be extended to the practice of everyday life outside the classroom?

In 1983, the National Commission of Excellence in Education issued its “Nation at Risk” report and, no matter how flawed and odd its Reagan-spurred results might have been, a flood of school reforms followed, including a revamping of curriculum to include multicultural aims. Again, although many efforts to accomplish these goals might have limped along or been superficial, a debate ensued that needed to ensue, bringing us closer to what Lani Guinier in the 1990s called a necessary “national discourse on race” and on other cultural issues that can divide as much as bring people together. But here we are, two decades later with “No Child Left Behind” (or as one of the teachers I sat next to at a meeting recently called it, “No Child’s Behind Left Untested).

The challenges of applying and practicing multicultural aims are huge, but worth it, and it seems to me that art can and must play a role. Exactly what that role is I am uncertain, but all your posts give me hope of finding an answer.

Wendy Perron What Oliver said about his 3-year old son reminded me of when my son was young. When he was around 3 or 4, I too was happy that he was “color-blind.” He made friends with kids of all colors and didn’t seem aware of the socially perceived differences. I mentioned this to the mother of one of his black friends, at which point she told me how only white kids have the luxury to be “color blind,” that her son, at 15 months old, would try to rub the color off of his skin, that he insisted on wearing long sleeves even in summer to try to hide his brown arms, and that he wanted to grow up to be white. Her son had already ingested racism against himself. She wasn’t angry at me for my complacency, but she just wanted to let me know how it was for her son, and how sad it made her, and how hard she had to work to convince him that he was fine the way he was. That conversation made me I realize how insidious white privilege is. It’s not just economic; it’s psychological, deeply held from a very early age, permeating every thought and feeling.

Learning that, empathizing with that mother’s emotional pain, made me question all the sophistication I thought I had as an advocate of multiculturalism.

I want to quote Beverly Daniel Tatum, who wrote the book “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria.” She said that when it comes to race and racism, we are all works in progress. Meaning that, as Maurice said, there is no blueprint, no right and wrong in these discussions, but the goal is to get beyond our assumptions and be ready to listen and change.

I also want to say in response to Alex’s post, that I didn’t see any real cynicism in the prior posts, but I think maybe what you mean is that if the comments are coming from a place of privilege, we should be aware of that privilege.

Olu Oguibe The question that Irving Sandler raises is a very useful one that goes back to the old saying that unless a people know where they are coming from, they will have difficulty determining where they are going. When it comes to the subject of multiculturalism and its discontents, one very critical question is: what are the alternatives?

For one the safest way to arrive at an answer is not through theoretical speculation but through the prism of history. What was it like before now? As has been pointed out in our discussions here, many questions have also been raised regarding integration, and very rightly so, yet the most critical question remains; what was America like before integration? And, are we, in all truth, willing and quite happy to return to that Station of the Cross? We are all familiar with the forced segregation that white flight has produced in the inner cities. Can we in all honesty hold the results up as ideal and preferable? In what regards? Can we possibly underestimate the difference that better, closer knowledge of one another has made in this society, or indeed, how the residues of ignorance that still exist in nooks and crannies of this nation continue to constitute fertile ground for often disastrous misunderstanding?

I wonder how many on the forum watched the recent movie, Crash (written and directed by Paul Haggis), which I consider a very pertinent commentary on what happens to a society when there is little knowledge and understanding across its constituent communities. In the movie, a white gun seller subjects a Persian customer and his daughter to blatant verbal assault because he mistakes them for Arab. A middle-class white woman makes no bones about her distrust of a rather particularly honest and hard-working Latino man who comes to fix her door locks, certain as she insists to both the man and her

husband that he would return to rob the house.

Later on the same Latino young man is assaulted by the Persian fellow who not only refuses to pay him for work on his locks but follows him home after he is denied insurance cover for a robbery that the Latino fellow warned him about, and in the most hair-raising scene in the movie, fires his gun at the man and his little daughter, with near-fatal results. Meanwhile, a young white rookie cop who disapproves of his partner's racism again blacks and saves another near-disastrous situation, eventually mistakenly shoots and kills a young black youth he is giving a ride at night because the later fatally reaches into his pocket to fetch what turned out to be a mere statuette similar to one that the rookie had on display on his dashboard. The rookie cop kills the youth because in all his knowledge of American society, a young black male could only reach into his pocket for one thing; a gun. And so on.

Some might mistake Crash for a commentary on the failure of multiculturalism in America, but it is in fact the very opposite, a commentary on the dangers that lurk in the underbelly of a society that fails to acknowledge and illuminate its multiculturalism.

When communities grow apart from each other, and exist without knowledge of one another, ignorance festers like a wound and breeds multiple infestations, from benign nervousness to malignant distrust. The white fellow at a job says; well, I have no idea how to behave with blacks because I hardly know "their" culture. The black says the same about the Latino. The Latino says the same about the Jew. I don't know about others in this forum, but every now and then I spend an afternoon or so watching the crass, opportunistic talk shows that now populate all the free television channels. I find these shows very informative especially for an outsider, because, though the men and women who produce and host them are nothing but utterly diabolical, the shows nevertheless provide a little window into the heart of everyday America.

Watching these talk shows one begins to appreciate the gaping precipice that lack of education and opportunity to interact with and learn about each other has recreated in this country. On one such show not so long ago, a white lady declared that she was more comfortable with her daughter dating her physically abusive former white boyfriend rather than her going out with a black man because she was afraid for her daughter's life. Black men, she said, always beat their women since it is "their" culture. And this

may be a banal example, but such prejudices color relationships across location and class right through to the board rooms of America’s major corporations, but most conspicuously so when people have had no opportunity to observe and learn from and about each other.

If there are problems with multiculturalism in America, as indeed there are, they are problems of implementation; the problems of grandstanding, cynicism, under-funding, lip-service, lack of faith and commitment, sidelining and backsliding.

The problems are not with the idea but rather, errors in the rendering.

Irving (Sandler) asks; what happened to make it possible for a whole new generation of young black artists to emerge in the mainstream of the American art world at the turn of the century?

The answer is multiculturalism. In America's strictly segregated past, very few if any of these young artists would stand a chance, let alone find a place in the mainstream. Lest we forget: for every Jacob Lawrence that made it into the halls of the Museum of Modern Art, there were a Henry Ossawa Tanner, Augusta Savage, Charles H. Alston, William H. Johnson, Palmer Hayden, Eldzier Cortor and Beauford Delaney that died in ignominy. For every Kara Walker that exhibits at the Whitney today there are numerous Howardena Pindells that were barred from ever doing so.

What is changing--for the process of change has only just begun--is that today the mainstream American art world is considerably more comfortable with the idea of American artists existing together, alongside one another, American artists all, occasionally judged not by the color of their skin but by the quality of their work. And the mainstream American art world has become more comfortable with this idea not because segregation in the art world was outlawed (it is, in fact, very much alive still), but because the reins of that art world are beginning to pass on to a different generation, one that is less traumatized by the idea of co-existence because it had the opportunity in many instances to grow up together, school together, protest together, sit together on the train and on the city bus, and dine together at the eatery; a generation that had the opportunity to learn a little more about its multiple heritage, and about its Fate and America's, which is that we are all here to stay, and will swim or sink together.

What is changing is that many of the young artists in question have grown up under the protective if flailing wings of multiculturalism;

schooling together, attending art college together, learning the rules of the culture game together, emerging confident in their equal abilities alongside their colleagues and compatriots, no longer quite as doubtful today regarding their talents and opportunities as they might have been under segregation a generation ago.

What else is changing is that these artists are coming into their own at a moment in history when Africans incidentally far more than African Americans have risen to positions of redoubtable power and significance in a larger, multicultural art world, and have done so from backgrounds that are historically far more open to the multicultural essence and reality of the world than America is. In effect, their efforts and determination are further inspired and supported by a contingent from across the sea that is confident enough to take on the art world in a manner that is unprecedented in the history of modern or contemporary art because its vision is fundamentally multicultural. The gains of the past two decades were certainly not made in solitary.

There are problems with multiculturalism in the present, but can we afford to return to the past, to the Dark Ages of this nation’s history, to the unnameable terrors of a world that was pathologically in denial of its own very nature and therefore preferred ignorance to knowledge, no matter how infinitesimal? Can we afford a future in which our children have no opportunity to discover each other, learn about each other, feel comfortable with each other, and be at peace with the idea of a new world in which each and everyone of them is part of a great mosaic that spreads beyond the borders of this nation?

Elizabeth Alexander I do not aspire to color-blindness, and i don't want my children to be color-blind. I want to SEE. I want to learn about how others are like me and not like me, and I want to know how "it's not about me." Obviously, we don't want our kids to have stereotypical views according to race, class, and so forth. I certainly don't want my sons to see the world solely through the lens of race. But guess what? I am race-obsessed, by which I mean, the study of race, and my specific study of AfricanAmerican culture, and exploration of its complexities in my own artistic work, could keep me learning, thinking, challenged, and fascinated forever, and I still wouldn't be done. We can only begin to learn from each other when we assert that we must work to see each other, and hear each other. We should all be teaching our children that black is beautiful. "And ugly, too," to quote Langston Hughes. Because we shouldn't be afraid to say that we noticed it, and that it means something infinite.

On the subject of car trips: I grew up in Washington DC in the 60s and 70s. My parents had my brother and me go to the bathroom before long car trips and then hold it 'tail we got where we

were going. My mother packed our shoebox lunches and we hit the road. I literally do not think we ever stopped once on a road trip in my childhood, not even for gas. I didn't realize other people didn't necessarily travel this way until I took a road trip with a white girlfriend in graduate school, and it seemed like we were stopping every five minutes. I had come to think of my family's way of travel as being a manifestation of a somewhat obsessively efficient ethos. Now, we were invariably traveling NORTH, to family in New York or holidays in New England. But as I learn when I discussed it with my mother long after, my parents were raised not stopping because of the inconveniences and dangers of segregation, and so, without evaluating whether or not times had sufficiently changed to take that risk, they conducted travel in my childhood as it had been conducted in theirs.

I tell this story to illustrate how racial knowledge and behavior, for all of us, is not just about the moment we are living in but also about what has been brought forward from the past. Our stopping or not stopping didn't affect anyone but us. But what about the assumptions and patterns of thinking and behaviors that still produce a country full of universities with scarcely any tenured women of color? Who runs big companies? Who gets paid what? Who wins literary prizes? Who speaks authoritatively on television? Who is cited with only a last name because of course you know who they are and of course you know they are important (Mailer, Nabokov, Roth, Salinger) when we don't say "Hughes" without "Langston" or "Morrison" without "Toni"?

Who gets shows in museums? Who gets called a genius? Who gets to lie in state at the Lincoln Memorial? (You know what I'm talking about -- Rosa Parks was the first woman of any color to lie in state in Washington in the history of this country). And so on. Numbers don't lie too much, and we really do need to keep counting.

The poetry world is certainly more "multicultural" than it was in the 80s when you look at who gets published ad who gets published where, and that is progress. I am presently noting the stirrings of the backlash that comes when it's not just one token nominee for the prize or one person of color at the press. When writers of color really start to get the kind of attention we deserve -- and truly, we aren't even close -- then the echo of James Baldwin's eloquent words from his essay "Stranger in the Village" will seem as ominous to those who don't want to cede the illusion of their cultural superiority as it sounds like sweet music to those who know he was right: "The world is white no longer, and it will never be white again." That should make everyone happy, to see each other and learn from each other, through culture and in personal exchange.

Karen Mary Davalos I am inspired again, this time by the Def Poets who performed at the university tonight. Please allow this late night post which is driven

by Wayne Koestenbaum's observation about the falseness of the dialogue.

I want to mimic conversation here, and make a so-called reply to as many panelists as I can, and all of this might only be for my own soul, but please bare with me. I will sleep better.

Yes, yes, Wayne, let us multiply every style, and being. But we cannot forget history, because history tells us that some multiplication factors have more worth. At the same time, the effort to multiply cannot be determined by demography, because if we use numbers to validate who gets included, then Native Americans will not have a place at the table. So it is history and demography, and listening for other voices that we still have not heard.

Def Poets can raise middle-class aspiring Black and Latino students to their feet because they are (still) speaking truth to power. Our world continues to ignore Black-on-Black crime, under- and

mis-education of English-learners and African American youth, the cycles of poverty ... Given these conditions, it is still imperative to develop affirmative action programs, social welfare, etc. we cannot back away in the midst of the multiples that we wish to acknowledge.

And this, for me, is what Irving Sandler is asking? With all of our so-called advancements in the 1980s and 1990s, why is that nothing has changed? How can we support the confused ethos of multiculturalism if it has not made a difference?

And thus to Barbara Buhler Lynes I reply: In my view, things have not gotten better.

In the state of New Mexico, a community of approx. 400 households, all homeowners (the affordable type--the mobile home) with plots of land and property taxes, cannot get the county (they are living on unincorporated territory outside of the city of Albuquerque) to pave the roads, install sewer lines, pick up kids for school with a bus--wait it gets worse.

They have no electricity, no running water, and the police and emergency vehicles do not enter the community, named Parajito Mesa, because the streets are not mapped and therefore do not exist. Police get lost and the ambulance refuse to enter the community, forcing the residents to drive several minutes to the Circle-K convenience market on the outside of the community. It is the place from which they call 911 to get services. Of course, no map means no street address, and no street address means the census or post office does not recognize their existence. Tell me multiculturalism made a difference.

It is under these types of conditions, ones that I think this group (including me since I just learned today about Parajito Mesa) does not know enough about, require folks to call for safe spaces, the way the speaker did at the American Studied Association. We still need to "all sit together in the cafeteria" because we need our sanctuaries to survive.

Multiculturalism cannot allow for the sanctuary. It wants to infiltrate every space with inclusion.

Therefore, I disagree with the view, as Wendy Perron articulated, that multiculturalism was the beginning. It was the end because it striped the revolutionary methods from the movement. The movements prior to the 1980s demanded change, redistribution of power, and privilege and that message or strategy has been diluted.

The alternative to multiculturalism is not separatism and segregation. It is Critical Race Theory, the real and viable legacy of the civil rights movement. It calls for legal, structural change, and questions the parameters of the law as it demands a reformulation of society.

In the museum world, what I observe under multiculturalism is this: bring in one visiting scholar/curator/artist of color. Invitation

only. Please do not muddy the waters with competing voices. One or two consultations with local artists, advocates, and scholars. Select the visitor for short-term solutions re: audience outreach or education. Do no more homework. Do not change the ways in which we define art, scholarship, or the institution. Trust feel-good people.

Trust already-vetted authorities, the MacArthur grant winners or the Rockefeller appointees. Do the easy homework. Hire another visiting scholar.

Oliver Wasow raised the fear of saying the "wrong thing" and I believe that such a fear emerges from the discourse of political correctness that actually has no politics.

To confess, I never understood the phrase politically correct. I know what offensive speech is, I know what racist commentary is, and I know naivete when I hear it. And context is everything.

But the language of politically correctness still does not have meaning for me.

That is, if it were simply a matter of getting better pedagogy for African American and English language learning children, then we should have been able to solve school failure. But it is a matter of politics, that is, power. And until we look this one in the face, I do believe we will Leave Every Child Behind.

And so, finally, I address Kathy O’Dell's call for application.

The current system in the Los Angeles School District, based on the Leave Every Child Behind Act, uses a standard curriculum called Open Court, a phonics based language model that teaches awareness of the parts of a word. Technically called phonemic awareness--just think, the kids learn to sound out the words and decode the parts of a word.

Well, since 70% of the LAUSD kids are English-language learners, then they have little to no awareness of the words they learn to sound out. Therefore, they read but without comprehension and meaning. And yes, the standardized tests measure how many words the child can decode (I refuse to call it reading) in a minute.

Once again, it gets worse, the stories the kids read are all about your culture, my culture, every bodies culture. In the Barney the purple dinosaur model of multiculturalism -- no unhappy cultures, no problems, just the colorful array of faces. And at one moment, I am glad that my son does not have an awareness that he is reading about the little white kid who dresses up like an Aztec warrior and plays with costumes in the antic of his grandfather's house.

I too watch my children (at age 10 and 7) become aware that their skin color is not an option, that whiteness has privileges, and that how they are pressured to deny their Mexicanness.

So if we take art back into the schools, then please let the artists really speak, as Def Poets did tonight at LMU, with their uncensored speech about gang violence for the drug cartel, rape, sex with a condom or no sex, police brutality, and unrelenting calls for

accountability.

Peace and sleep well.

Lorraine O’Grady I'm feeling so frustrated. After my first two posts, I was unable to post for a week. I've been adding posts thanks to Maurice's willingness to post me into already closed threads. While I'm aware that my timing makes it impossible for me to really be part of the discussion, it's important to me to be part of this, if only in the archived afterlife of the conference. With this "multicultural" session, I've come up against a wall. I am hoping that I've said enough in my previous posts for panelists and others to understand why the term is a compromised one for me.

Given what I experienced as a period of almost total exclusion of black artists from the mainstream 80s art world, I can't help wonder why so many of the African Americans invited to take part in this discussion on the 80s have not had more to say. Is it because there is not much more to be said?

It's rather a truism that the art of "others" is most likely to break through to majority consciousness during times of economic recession. The recession of '87 combined with the discourses of multiculturalism to make continued exclusion untenable. This made possible the reception of Adrian Piper and David Hammons' shows in 1988. And a few squeezed through the door. But not so many as to cause a new kind of thought. Not so many that they couldn't be immediately converted to tools for self-congratulation. And not so many that it couldn't be business as usual at the next market upswing.

A black male friend described an opening he attended in Chelsea just last month of a show by a relatively highly-regarded black artist. For the space of an hour, he said, his white partner and a gallery worker were the only non-blacks in attendance. The gallery had acquired the reputation of being a "black" gallery and didn't attract those who wanted to socialize at openings. Yes, a few whites would show up at the dinner afterwards, where some business could be done, but that was it.

Some things have changed since the events of the 80s, but other than a few black artists who've slipped under the radar to earn a living from their art, and an even smaller number who have landed in isolated sections of certain textbooks, it's difficult to say with precision what those things are. More difficult still to be hopeful.

I've been struck by certain comments here. First, the distinction Mary Kelly drew between the lageffect in dealing with gender and what happened with race: "When race was posed as a question of difference, it didnšt produce a lag-effect, it was something more like a blind spot." I agree and would have to add: even among the "gendered." This came home to me most forcefully when, as one of less than a handful of non-white women active in WAC (Women's Action Coalition), the feminist organization that had a brief but fervid existence among New York women artists in 1992, and as one of two non-blacks in the group's 30-woman Committee on Diversity and Inclusion, I experienced a shock to my system on discovering that most of the other 28 had assumed that "diversity" meant lesbians.

When Maurice writes, "To some extent, the art world has opened up to such cross-cultural possibilities, but these gestures still feel to me like multiculturalism without teeth. Crumbs thrown by the guilty to the formerly insulted and ignored. One more Kara Walker exhibition is not going to convince me that things have changed on a deeper, more formative level," my heartfelt response is "Right on!" It's not very theoretical.

While I felt saddened by Oliver Wasow's hesitation to speak, for fear of speaking "politically incorrectly," and agree that it is a fear that comes from a place that is basically without politics, I still can't help at least partly agreeing with his analysis:

"What I meant to suggest was that to fight for inclusion into those institutions that are so tied to a market that is unavailable and unfriendly to the disenfranchised, seems like the old, proverbial, going to the hardware store for oranges. The notion of 'subverting from within', central, as long as we¹re talking about the 80¹s, to much of that decades deconstructive strategies, is perhaps too easily co-opted and neutralized. Rather than try to change those institutions, an impossibility it seems to me in a market-driven economy, I think political energy should be directed towards more classic, old school, new-deal, socialist, government funded solutions. Which, I realize, brings us back to the culture wars. So, I don¹t know."

If I'm honest, I have to admit that the death of the NEA, and Governor Cuomo's 1990 gutting of the New York State Council, totally compromised me as an art-maker. And I'm not as optimistic as Wasow is about the internet as a tool of inclusion, though it's better than nothing.

I am trying but can't muster wholehearted belief in Karen's proposal that "The alternative to multiculturalism is not separatism and segregation. It is Critical Race Theory, the real and viable legacy of the civil rights movement. It calls for legal, structural change, and questions the parameters of the law as it demands a reformulation of society." I was born and raised in Boston, where the laws of the 60s didn't manage to reformulate much of anything (we were always able to sit at a lunch counter). And I've just come back from a brief trip to Pittsburgh, where after a couple of days I had to ask, "Where are all the black people?" It's not very theoretical.

Moderator November 10-11 Writing Discourse and Methods Maurice Berger During the 1980s, many changes took place in the way scholars, historians, and critics wrote about culture. The preeminent methodologies of the preceding three decades, such as formalism and Marxism, gave way to new theories. History writing, for example, came under intense scrutiny, from French historian Michel Foucault's influential analysis of the relationship between knowledge, ideology, and power to the emergence of community or identity-based history projects.

During this period, new or newly popular methods in criticism, art history, and cultural writing emerged or reached new levels of acceptance, including structuralism, post-structuralism, neoMarxism and theories relating to sub-alternist, gay and lesbian, race, and feminist studies. Much like the culture of the period, the disciplinary boundaries of writing were blurred by scholars and writers as they combined or adapted methodologies. And a number of influential journals— OCTOBER, BLOCK, REPRESENTATIONS, and SCREEN—gave voice to an expanded field of theories that challenged the conception of cultural writing as ideologically neutral disciplines devoted solely to stylistic analysis or connoisseurship.

What of the vital changes in discourse that took place in the 1980s? To what extent did art, culture, and politics engender these shifts? How did "critical theory" impact the art and writing of the period? What was the role of academia, as well as, journals in encouraging or dissuading the application of new methodologies and theories to the study of culture? To what extent--as Homi Bhabha wondered at decade's end--was the "commitment to theory" antithetical to activism and social change? (Bhabha's answer was a qualified, no.) What is the legacy of these methods on contemporary writing on art and culture?

Alexander Alberro Maurice, I agree that the journals you mention were influential in giving “voice to an expanded field of theories” in the 1980s. But I would argue that the theoretical work carried out in much of the art of the previous two decades was as crucial in “encouraging the application of new methodologies and theories to the study of culture” as were the “new or newly popular methods in criticism, art history, and cultural writing.” In fact, in many cases the two were conflated--certainly by the 1980s. With art increasingly now defined as a practice (and the artwork as text), disciplinary boundaries became labile and every step in the chain of artistic production was “theoretical.” (And in many ways theoretically more advanced than much critical writing of the period, which struggled to keep up.) That’s why I find today’s calls to separate “art” from “theorists” so shortsighted and condescending towards artists. Is art and theory not the same thing in so many instances?

Maurice Berger Alex, you write: "That’s why I find today’s calls to separate “art” from “theorists” so shortsighted and condescending towards artists. Is art and theory not the same thing in so many instances?"

I ABSOLUTELY agree. Thus the second of my five topic questions: "To what extent did art, culture, and politics engender these shifts?" I have devoted sessions to the social space that defined art and culture, to art itself, to institutions and markets, and now "discourse" and "writing."

Thus, the emphasis on theory and criticism, an emphasis in no way way meant to dismiss the symbiotic relationship between art, culture, and theory.

Jonathan Weinberg The idea that theory can be separated from practice whether academic or artistic is surely wrong.

As someone who is both a painter and an art historian I have a strong investment in the idea that the study of the history of art and the use of critical theory informs and deepens the practice of art making. In a sense writers like Foucault and Benjamin and Adorno are as important to me for my painting in some deep way, as they are to me for my writing on art.

That said, over the years I have been disturbed by a tendency to bracket theory into a separate discipline, or to put down a particular art historian because he or she does not "do" theory.

Weirdly doing theory has a kind of macho connotation in the field, equivalent to the way in the old days connoisseurship was suppose to be a mark of mastery.

One of the things that is wonderful about this conference is the impetus it gives us to think about how many of our working tools in gender, feminism, multiculturalism etc. are themselves historically based. For example, I have recently become fascinated on the connections between Foucault's late writings and the world of sexual experimentation in New York and Paris in the late1970s and early 80s. When Foucault talks about the future in which an anonymous discourse will hold sway, it reverberates with the hope at the time that the kinds of anonymous encounters created in backrooms etc. pointed to the possibility of new kinds of human relationships (read Hocquenhghem on this as well). This is obviously an over simplification, but my main point is that we need to think about the ways are theoretical tools arose out of particular moments and circumstances.

To put it another way, there is a tendency in certain kinds of writing to use writers like Foucault, Lacan, Freud, Butler etc. as if they were master authorities. If the 80s produced anything it was a suspicion of such mastery.

Finally, I sense some pessimism (not cynicism) in the posts on multiculturalism and elsewhere in the conference. I think this is because many of us felt that if we remade art history and visual studies in the academic and cultural sphere we were somehow doing the work of remaking the political world. Last year, a week after the election, the queer art historian Jim Saslow brought me

to tears when he introduced the Intersexsion conference with the words: "I am old, I am tired and my heart is broken." Certainly those who say that theory is somehow antithetical to political work are wrong, but it does not replace old fashioned organizing on the left (Jim in fact is the kind of guy who has always licked envelopes and put up fliers). I remember at Yale how hard it was to get art history faculty to get involved in raising money for AIDS service organizations--I always had to turn to the art school and to artists, people like Shiela De Brettville. Few art history faculty supported the unions by meeting off campus during the strikes etc. I am not saying that I am some kind of political guy who is rushing to man the barricades, only I should not fool myself into thinking that writing about queer art is equivalent to organizing for the right to have gay marriages (actually I am very deeply ambivalent about gay marriage, but that is another story).

Once more it comes down to the relationship of theory to practice; neither is a substitute for the other, both must go on together. We all know this, but few, including myself act as if it were true.

Wayne Koestenbaum I agree with Alexander’s comment that “the theoretical work carried out in much of the art of the previous two decades was as crucial in ‘encouraging the application of new methodologies and theories to the study of culture’ as were the ‘new or newly popular methods in criticism, art history, and cultural writing.’”

Roland Barthes died in 1980. His pathbreaking work of the 1960s and (especially) the 1970s may have become more influential in the United States in the 1980s (I certainly didn’t read Barthes until 1984 or 1985), but by 1980 his work was completed—fatally endstopped.

Derrida’s GLAS, perhaps his most radically experimental text, was published originally in France in 1974, though not published in English translation until 1986. So there’s a lag, admittedly.

John Ashbery’s “Litany,” his poem in two parallel columns (influenced by Derrida?), was published in 1979. Actually, his most difficult and genre-breaking book, THREE POEMS (actually three prose meditations), was published in 1973.

It’s hard for me to overvalue the bold new advances of the 1980s, when placed against the backdrop of all the innovation and bravery of the century—or centuries—preceding. I’ve been harping on Artaud, whose influence still informs the contemporary; he died 4 March 1948. Walter Benjamin’s THE ARCADES PROJECT—admittedly, not seen in English translation until 1999— was written (compiled, imagined, collaged) in the 1930s. Gertrude Stein, artist/theorist, died in 1946 (though the 1980s—and the feminist literary-critical movement—saw her rehabilitation and rediscovery).

Andy Warhol’s "a: a novel" was published in 1968.

This is not to say that the 1980s wasn’t the scene of miraculous and energizing confluences, absorptions, and discoveries! But I don’t want to give one generation, one coterie, one city, one magazine, one decade, undue centrality.

L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry and its affiliates probably deserves mention here: that movement grew and spread and acquired adherents in the 1980s, I believe. (I’m not great with dates.)

Anne Carson published her first book, EROS THE BITTERSWEET, in 1989 (approximately).

Susan Howe’s MY EMILY DICKINSON was published in 1985.

(The texts I'm mentioning in this post are milestones for me. They needn't be everybody's milestones.)

As for the distinction between art and theory, or poetry and theory: thank God it’s meaningless.

Wayne Koestenbaum And to continue the list of milestones: Carolee Schneemann's "Interior Scroll," an emblematic blending of art and theory, of poetry and performance, was 1975.

1975.

Judith Barry I have been traveling non-stop since the conference began but I have been following it when I can. Many terrific threads that I would like to respond to, maybe still can…

I meant to post this for the ‘Crossing Disciplines, Boundaries, Borders’ but perhaps it is germane to ‘Writing/Discourse…’ in relation to what Alexander posted earlier on this thread – that there wasn’t such a separation between theory, art, ideas and during this period and that the disciplinarian boundaries for many artists between theory and art were in flux. At the time I thought of theory as a kind of raw material which I could make use of like any other material to animate/reshape/reform the questions I was asking of my work across different disciplines.

In thinking about ‘Crossing disciplines…: In addition to the importance of the ’fun ’factor, punk + bands, more mainstream audiences in clubs, DIY sensibilities and the legacy of ‘70’s alternative spaces in fostering this inter-disciplinarian permissiveness, I would add the ‘playfulness’ that characterized much of the use of language from the ‘60’s/ ‘70’s, and into the early – mid ‘80’s. I see this as coming from literary theory of various stripes (the Situationalists (sp?), Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, even Baudrillard), French Feminisms (Cixous, Irigary, even Duras), the French New Wave (Goddard, Truffaut, Renais, Duras, slightly later Ackerman), Film Theory (Metz, Bellour, Kuntzel) as well as from the ‘language poets’, particularly those around SF/Berkeley, where I was (Johanna Drucker, Ron Silliman). DIY in music also extended to other DIY forms of popular culture, and some of this theory found its way into the lyrics/ideas in punk music as Ondine mentioned, also in ‘playful’ way MTV begins around ’82 and initially as it didn’t know what it could be, it allowed for a bit of playfulness within popular culture, although this was very short – lived (corporate take-over). And yes, many producers were reading literary theory. Mastery wasn’t important, authenticity was and this authenticity also often included idealistic notions (such as I had at the time) about making a ‘better, smarter, funnier more inclusive popular and art culture’ reflective of the cross fertilization of these many heterogeneous discourses and the development of new forms. Additionally, the dismantling of the so-called ‘master narratives’ and the fact that nothing yet had quite taken their place seemed to demand (or so I thought) that we try anything/everything, imagine wildly - just to see what might happen… reality, for me, didn’t come crashing in until AIDS and the Culture Wars.

Looking back on this time, I see just how privileged (in so many ways – class, education, cultural access --- an accident of geography and chance meetings) I was, although I didn’t think I was; and not that the art world doesn’t still make a unique cultural place, from which to work and which I still value.

I also wanted to underscore, as so many have mentioned, that Feminism in its many guises was and remains important for me. It is where I began and actually my very first Feminist experiences came through the dance world, hence I have been especially interested to read Wendy’s posts.

Maurice Berger It is true that art, theory, and culture are inexorably interwoven. But I keep thinking of another "art" that seems to get lost in most conversations about criticism, critical theory, and art history: writing itself. In a "symposium" on feminism and theoretical practice, published in OCTOBER magazine a

decade ago, I wrote about the relationship between critical theory and writing: "There is no question that [structuralist] post-structuralist, psychoanalytical, and neo-Marxist feminist practices . . . have replaced unmediated reality with representational sophistication. But the increasing adeptness of the radical right at political debate and manipulation has called into question the elusiveness of theory and the insularity of the academy. It may very well be counterproductive, at this point, to disregard the reality that some of the most effective political methods in the ongoing struggle for equality and freedom are often won through the very strategies of coherence and consensus that earlier intellectuals, with all good intentions, strove to subvert."

Ten years later, this observation seems to me even more relevant. I am not arguing for a dumbing down of writing or its content, but rather a more incisive and insightful understanding of the power and richness of the text itself. If the late, great Roland Barthes taught us anything, it is the ideological and aesthetic richness of writing itself, its innate power to mediate, communicate, and inspire a range of meanings and emotions.

The art world, by its very definition, devotes itself to excellence in all things visual. Yet, rarely does it take full advantage of the power of good writing to enrich the experience of art. Words without style or eloquence, of course, can do little in this regard. Many critics and scholars are gifted writers; many more indulge in writing that is inelegant, clumsy, and riddled with jargon.

There is no question that critical theory has made writing about culture more rigorous. But literary rigor—the concern with craft that the best writers bring to their work—remains unfashionable within academia, the museum, and the art world in general.

It may be my imagination, but I've noticed that younger critical theorists--including those in this conference--seem to take writing more seriously. Increasingly, I'm noticing a refreshing communication of powerful (and empowering) critical methods through writing that is, itself, agile, eloquent, and persuasive. I hope this is a trend and not just in academia. Progressive culture, in general,needs to speak in voices that can inspire and move people. Our future--and the future of this country--will, in part, depend on just this kind of talent.

Barbara Buhler Lynes There is no question that the art community (and areas beyond) has (have) been greatly enriched by the wealth of, as Maurice puts it, “new or newly popular methods in criticism, art history, and cultural writing . . . including structuralism, post-structuralism, neo-Marxism and theories relating to sub-alternist, gay and lesbian, race, and feminist studies.”

And such new strategies to quote Jonathan: “gave voice to an expanded field of theories that challenged the conception of cultural writing as ideologically neutral disciplines devoted solely to stylistic analysis or connoisseurship.”

But, as theory increasingly gained prominence in the 80s, it displaced the importance of studying and valuing the object. The implications of this problem were raised with great poignancy at a session sponsored by the Catalogue Raisonné Scholars Association at the College Art Association some years ago (can’t remember the exact title or date) by Metropolitan Museum of Art curator, Gary Tinterow. (The Catalogue Raisonné Scholars Association is now one of the many affiliated societies of the CAA – interesting that the value of the tools scholars rely on to put a catalogue raisonné together, the study of the physical object and its history (when it was created, its dimensions and medium, its provenance and exhibition histories, etc.), which had played such a central role to the discipline of art history had shifted to the margin).

Gary pointed out how increasingly those who came to his department as interns, fresh from or still enrolled in some of the best art history programs available in this country, who were amazingly fluent in the latest theoretical arguments, had no idea about how to approach or look at a work of art or to acknowledge the relevance of either its formal or physical characteristics. He found himself having to teach them to look, to recognize formal qualities, to know whether the medium of a painting was oil or watercolor, whether its support was paper, wood, or canvas, and why

these characteristics of an object were important. And he was equally surprised by their lack of curiosity about the object in that it did not occur to them, until he made the suggestion, to turn the painting around to see whether it had inscriptions or signatures on its verso, stretcher, or backing, whether such markings were or were not in the hand of the artist, and that these components of a work carried meaning.

Although this imbalance seems is being gradually put right, the point is that we do ourselves a great disservice to tip the scales in one direction or the other. Theory versus object – object versus theory – how ridiculous to exclude either given that our subject: the work of art.

Olu Oguibe When it comes to writing, discourse, and methods, it is difficult to narrate the 1980s in any manner that particularly distinguishes the period from the previous two decades, but it is fair to say that certain practices that began in the late 1960s and flourished in the 1970s were sustained in the 1980s after which they almost virtually met their extinction. I began my graduate seminars this year by calling my students' attention to what I described as the death/dearth of intellect in contemporary art practice over the past decade. I particularly wanted them to take another look at practice from the 1930s especially, till the late 1950s, and then again in the late 1960s when art practice was synonymous with robust intellectual engagement as well as visual manifestation, and artists not only engaged in rigorous public discussion but wrote and published manifestos, studio notes, criticism, lists, and collective organs such as journals and magazines, also. Looking back on those periods and reading not only the Dada artists or the Situationists or the Still group or the Lettrists or Fluxus, but also Robert Smithson as well as the minimalists writing and discussing their practice and taking public social and aesthetic or philosophical positions, it suddenly struck the students how dry, mute, and retarded art practice has become since the 1990s. The figure of the practitioner/theorist, it appears, died after the 1980s, following which artists seem to have either bought into the anti-intellectual rhetoric of the rabid corporate age, or fallen short of the exuberant intellect that earlier generations of artists exhibited quite naturally. In a recent correspondence with a fellow in South Africa, I was informed that one of the country's most significant young artists had responded to a call to appear on a conference panel by indicating that she prefers to "speak through her work". You scout around for the Victor Burgins of my generation, and the effort is akin to Lot futilely scouting through Sodom and Gomorrah for those oh so few exonerable souls that might save the twin cities from the wrath of God. They are nowhere to be found. Since after the 1980s what the younger generation of artists seem to excel in is dismissible whimsy, the flaky dry effort at irony, the plain dud, the plea to be allowed to speak through the work, or not speak at all, rather than the ability to approach the multiple theaters of deep intellection through writing, discourse, and practice all considered as one seamless stage. In this regard the 1980s did live up.

But the period also witnessed the accretion of conservative, institutional tendencies in the academies and around collectives such as October where the Krausses and Fosters appeared infinitely stuck in a grove two steps behind the rest of the world, still regurgitating that pallid aestheticspeak of the old art criticism even as people like Owens and Burgin recognized the ascendancy of what Burgin referred to as "the discourse of others", and of the pluralisms of practice-as-discourse-as-text-as-performance that were taking place around them. By the end of the 1980s the old, delineating tendencies had reasserted themselves, and practice and practitioners yielded once more to the terrors of anal criticism on the pages of October, Art Forum, and Art in America. Even practitioner/theorists such as Adrian Piper seemed to re-divorce their practice into the neat drawers of making and theorizing. Good bye to the 1980s.

The 1980s witnessed both the consolidation and death of cultural theory. It became a useful tool, of course, but it was clear, also, that its seminal moment was back in the 1970s. In the 1980s post-colonial theory came of age; then expired. No sooner did Homi Bhabha publish The Location of Culture in 1994 than it became grossly questionable if not entirely untenable. In England, the young artist-writer-curators that emerged from the Midlands to headline a new Black art

movement suddenly found they had to make a choice: stick with the making and make a success of it, or resign themselves to the onerous task of curating and generating discourse around other artists.

Perhaps something about the 1980s made this return to the old ways inevitable in the 1990s, a backlash against intellection perhaps. Methinks it also had something to do with the reascendancy of the market by the late 1980s when, having failed to generate a sizable clientele outside traditional, institutional patronage, and institutional patrons having determined that it was safest to place their bet on proven forms of practice, the market began to lean on artists to reconsider the material merits of total art. By the end of the 1980s a new generation of artists had begun to emerge that would come to consider discourse-as-practice untenable in the marketplace, and keen to observe the rules of practice in the age of corporate triumph whereby specialization becomes imperative. The imperative of specialization in the corporate age required that the fields be re-sequestered into critics, theorists, artists, and curators, with dealers, publishers and patrons again seizing the ground to define the tenets of successful practice and either beating practitioners into line or beating them out into the cold. Out went play; in came pay.

Which is an epochal tragedy.

The 1980s carried on from the late 1960s and the 1970s with regard to blurring the borders between areas of practice, between the studio and the academy, between the gallery space and the public space, between art and play, but only so far before the torch was struck out. Enter the corporate '90s, the Saatchi '90s, the calculating '90s, the dumb '90s, and practice was never quite the same.

Mary Kelly If I rearrange the title of this session to read “methods of writing as discourse”, then I see it, not as a legacy of the 80s, so much as a lofty inheritance from the social and cultural movements of the 60s and 70s, and, in another way, an eerie premonition of the blogosphere (?) phenomenon of the 90s and after. First, the lofty intention, as I remember it, posed discourse against “history”, that is, a kind of writing that erased the traces of its making, no personal pronouns, no “shifters” as linguists say, as opposed to discourse which embraced the contingencies of “enunciation”…I mean, that define the speaking subject as a position in language inflected by real bodies and imaginary scenarios as well as symbolic constraints. Anyway, in the beginning of the feminist movement, this idea struck some of us like a lightning bolt! Our exclusion from history had everything to do with the fact that the subjective moment of women’s oppression had not been allowed to pass into discourse. I said something about this and the importance of psychoanalysis in my post on Crossing Disciplines etc. so I won’t go there again, but what I wanted to ask is if the power of the personal pronoun, the imperative of consciousness raising, which had such a transformative effect on art and writing including my own at that time, has morphed into something more ominous in the new century, casting the 80s as a moment of transition.

Now, there is an eerie aspect to the Internet that transcends both the message and the medium, a stream of instant access that resembles the process of the unconscious, taking the quickest route to wish fulfillment—hallucination. In a way the chatty, familiar, often confessional style of writing that prevails in this sphere, is uncanny, rather than just eerie, because it also seems so unfamiliar, I mean, things come to light (unexpected emails from ex wives, husbands,

lovers, for example, or disgruntled colleagues,) things that should have remained hidden (as Freud put it in the famous essay on this subject). And the vertiginous speed of exchanges, this conference, described so well by Dorit–all the subjectivities, histories, voices whizzing past. Maybe I’m the only one who feels exhausted, but for me, reading soon goes beyond the pleasure principle when I’m over stimulated. Writing is even more difficult, it’s not really like speaking, it has a materiality similar to visual images and realism is only one option among many. When I use words in my work they are “things” that invoke the voice, not only narratives. So I guess what I’m saying is that a little bit of writing goes a long way and with the profusion self expression in the virtual world, it might be necessary to critique the discourse of the hysteric rather than seeing it automatically as the corrective to mastery.

Dorit Cypis Sorry if I am sounding repetitive......There was a lot to be suspicious of in the life I experienced as a young person. I entered art school only when I recognized that I could also not trust myself.

Funny, I believed that I might gain my own trust not a psycho-sociologist I had intended to be, but as an artist invested in asking questions. English is my second language and I was not comfortable speaking, writing, reading it until my late 20's, late 70's. English "obliterated" my first language...never allowed for a reciprocity. It was Foucault and Barthes who first spoke with me.

Foucault, because he wrote eloquently about entering into a relationship with the cultures he was critiquing. He did not critique from a distance. I trusted my mind to him, trusted him to tell me his truth from experience, not from loftiness. And then came Barthes, someone I felt close to, as if I was in the same room as he was writing in. Again, his discourse revealed a humanity, heart and soul which I trusted. There were many other writers I flirted with in between, but next it was Duras and Cixous who carried me into their writing and did not separate me from that part of themselves that questioned what/how they were writing.

Yes, Maurice, I agree with you that the texts which for me rose above others were those which were themselves in discourse with the(ir) act of writing, witnessing inter-subjectivities in action.

Many artists and academics I was with in the 80's seemed to appropriate the meanings of theory but not put themselves, their experience, into it as well. When I moved to Minneapolis in 1984 it was dancers with whom I engaged with for the next decade. Dancers who left the stage to study somatic, kinesthetic awareness through exploring minutia of movements, following sensation cellularly. For me it was another form of post-structuralism...weaving, rather, through the body.

Remember Jane Gallop, "Thinking Through The Body"?

When I first started teaching in the early 80's, I brought in theory texts as tools for "looking" but also People Magazine, architects, ad men, doctors, dancers, psychics...guiding the students to deconstruct representation from their daily lives and also to give them agency to see anew. I took this role on passionately as extensions from the texts which had so generously nurtured me.

Andrea Robbins "Successful" writing on art can at times take the "joy" work in order to enter it into the art historical lexicon, or it can turn art into illustration for the text supplied by the critic. I loosely call this second one the "Charlotte's Web phenomenon", from the kid's book where the spider writes enthusiastic phrases within it's web above the pig, and then everyone loves the pig because of the text, but it's the spider pulling the strings (oh, excuse the banality of this example I have two boys (seven and eleven).

Serious subjects can be filled with humor and irony and of course beauty; the art objects initial entry point or source of engagement with the viewer. Deeper readings take time to unfold as well

as multiple viewings. The viewer needs to "own" the work through their own experience in order for the effect of the work to unfold regardless of how casual the process of seeing may seem. Of course for the work to be embedded in the mind of the viewer (along with who knows how many other visual cues and signs that pass before ones eyes each day) could simply result in name recognition for the artist, but more optimistically it can lead to the displacement or enlarging of conventional discourses (beyond the cliche or conventional). What the artist chooses to do with the attention and interaction with the viewer differs depending on the artist.

When recognition is tied into a signature, meaning becomes secondary to "trademarking", so the role of the critic was to reapply meaning so the two CAN co-exist. I think in the 1980's more artists tried to control the discourse surrounding their own work, as EV galleries did, another example might be the use of popular culture in form and content (influenced by Pop) but with a political social edge (so perhaps more influenced by Brittish Pop than American).

Much has been written about the shift in meaning that took place within the image when social documentary photography entered the museum, but the work of savvy 80's artists also lost meaning or context when it entered the museum system and became an emblem of signature (for the lucky few who this applied to, and who were not relegated to the "kiddie table" (ad hoc basement or unconventional museum spaces).

The other shift in meaning was when (again for the few who this applied to ) their art became an abstract place to hold enormous amounts of wealth. I do not mean by mentioning this to put the emphasis on the market place or begrudge the few people who this applies to, but two days ago I saw a photography show at the Tate Modern and it was hard to see the work beyond anything but abstract containers of wealth- 'cause I believe some of the same works in the last NY show were priced in Euros but were going for the equivalent of one million dollars each. Entering the system had it's price for art and not just for EV artists turned gallerists, but it did succeed in getting a plurality of works and artists into the museum context. The idealized space kills art and critical theory resurrects meaning for future generations. Perhaps I am using art historical writing vs. criticism interchangeably (like psychology vs. behavioral science) but I think this distinction is a legacy of the 1980's and the starting place of the last question of this symposium.

Dorit Cypis Sorry if I am sounding repetitive......There was a lot to be suspicious of in the life I experienced as a young person. I entered art school only when I recognized that I could also not trust myself.

Funny, I believed that I might gain my own trust not a psycho-sociologist I had intended to be, but as an artist invested in asking questions. English is my second language and I was not comfortable speaking, writing, reading it until my late 20's, late 70's. English "obliterated" my first language...never allowed for a reciprocity. It was Foucault and Barthes who first spoke with me.

Foucault, because he wrote eloquently about entering into a relationship with the cultures he was critiquing. He did not critique from a distance. I trusted my mind to him, trusted him to tell me his truth from experience, not from loftiness. And then came Barthes, someone I felt close to, as if I was in the same room as he was writing in. Again, his discourse revealed a humanity, heart and soul which I trusted. There were many other writers I flirted with in between, but next it was Duras and Cixous who carried me into their writing and did not separate me from that part of themselves that questioned what/how they were writing.

Yes, Maurice, I agree with you that the texts which for me rose above others were those which were themselves in discourse with the(ir) act of writing, witnessing inter-subjectivities in action.

Many artists and academics I was with in the 80's seemed to appropriate the meanings of theory but not put themselves, their experience, into it as well. When I moved to Minneapolis in 1984 it was dancers with whom I engaged with for the next decade. Dancers who left the stage to study somatic, kinesthetic awareness through exploring minutia of movements, following sensation cellularly. For me it was another form of post-structuralism...weaving, rather, through the body.

Remember Jane Gallop, "Thinking Through The Body"?

When I first started teaching in the early 80's, I brought in theory texts as tools for "looking" but also People Magazine, architects, ad men, doctors, dancers, psychics...guiding the students to deconstruct representation from their daily lives and also to give them agency to see anew. I took this role on passionately as extensions from the texts which had so generously nurtured me.

Andrea Robbins "Successful" writing on art can at times take the "joy" work in order to enter it into the art historical lexicon, or it can turn art into illustration for the text supplied by the critic. I loosely call this second one the "Charlotte's Web phenomenon", from the kid's book where the spider writes enthusiastic phrases within it's web above the pig, and then everyone loves the pig because of the text, but it's the spider pulling the strings (oh, excuse the banality of this example I have two boys (seven and eleven).

Serious subjects can be filled with humor and irony and of course beauty; the art objects initial entry point or source of engagement with the viewer. Deeper readings take time to unfold as well as multiple viewings. The viewer needs to "own" the work through their own experience in order for the effect of the work to unfold regardless of how casual the process of seeing may seem. Of course for the work to be embedded in the mind of the viewer (along with who knows how many other visual cues and signs that pass before ones eyes each day) could simply result in name recognition for the artist, but more optimistically it can lead to the displacement or enlarging of conventional discourses (beyond the cliche or conventional). What the artist chooses to do with the attention and interaction with the viewer differs depending on the artist.

When recognition is tied into a signature, meaning becomes secondary to "trademarking", so the role of the critic was to reapply meaning so the two CAN co-exist. I think in the 1980's more artists tried to control the discourse surrounding their own work, as EV galleries did, another example might be the use of popular culture in form and content (influenced by Pop) but with a political social edge (so perhaps more influenced by Brittish Pop than American).

Much has been written about the shift in meaning that took place within the image when social documentary photography entered the museum, but the work of savvy 80's artists also lost meaning or context when it entered the museum system and became an emblem of signature (for the lucky few who this applied to, and who were not relegated to the "kiddie table" (ad hoc basement or unconventional museum spaces).

The other shift in meaning was when (again for the few who this applied to ) their art became an abstract place to hold enormous amounts of wealth. I do not mean by mentioning this to put the emphasis on the market place or begrudge the few people who this applies to, but two days ago I saw a photography show at the Tate Modern and it was hard to see the work beyond anything but abstract containers of wealth- 'cause I believe some of the same works in the last NY show were priced in Euros but were going for the equivalent of one million dollars each. Entering the system had it's price for art and not just for EV artists turned gallerists, but it did succeed in getting a plurality of works and artists into the museum context. The idealized space kills art and critical theory resurrects meaning for future generations. Perhaps I am using art historical writing vs. criticism interchangeably (like psychology vs. behavioral science) but I think this distinction is a legacy of the 1980's and the starting place of the last question of this symposium.

Lorraine O’Grady Maurice, I'm not sure how to answer your questions with respect specifically to the 80s. They seem timeless to me. Except perhaps to say that the late 80s seemed a moment when writers and academics had finally caught up, when they could at last comfortably "talk the talk," or at least pretend. (I'll be addressing less the "theory" questions in your first post here, than the questions on "writing" in your second).

This may be speaking out of turn, but what the hell.... One of the funnier activities, beginning in the mid-60s in the U.S., was to see a seemingly endless krazy-komic procession of intellectuals trying to look cool as they were re-tooling. When I was studying at the Iowa Writers Workshop, a professor in the English Department wrote a book on structuralism for the main purpose of deciphering its vocabulary; it would be the first of many. For as soon as one syllabary was mastered, another had to be figured out. First structuralism, then post-structuralism, then deconstruction, then Foucault-ism, and then all the branches and offshoots: feminist theory, postcolonial theory, and queer theory (I hope I have the order right). Translation from French mindsets to what could be thought in English seemed the least of it. Added conversions had to be made across disciplines---from the structuralism based in anthropology and linguistics, to the post-structuralism based in literature, to the deconstruction based in philosophy.... By 1991, the College Art Association's Art Bulletin, ever foresighted, was featuring a book-length article by Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson to teach art historians how to apply semiotics to the field. No surprise that the art writing of the period was mind-numbingly turgid. Even reading Artforum in the 80s was a hoot, as writers struggled to string words together like foreign, sculptural objects, or at best, like expressionist brushstrokes.

I think you're right (at least I hope so) in saying that contemporary writing is getting better, especially among younger critical theorists. Let's not kid ourselves. Despite the awe they roused in poor Anglo-Saxons, those originating theorists were, almost to the one, writing in a "personal" voice. Levi-Strauss, Derrida, Foucault, the lives they lived were, to one degree or another, in their words. Even Stuart Hall's articles have the pleasures of the personal essay. (One wonders how much time a gifted essayist like James Baldwin, had he been born in the age of critical theory, would have spent writing novels.) Like you, I hope that younger theorists, like some of those here, can get us past the scratchy period of translators and epigones.

Adorno argued that "difficulty" was the price of thought, by which I think he meant sentences that begin with the end nowhere in view. But I don't agree. It's true that beautiful writing has to leave out a lot. But I would prefer to write "stupid" than to write ugly, because incompletion, even at times inaccuracy, seem small prices to pay for the possible ability to persuade and to move.

Perhaps the backward swing of writing in the 80s and 90s will prove worth it if it enables the vision you posit here, which I quote: "Increasingly, I'm noticing a refreshing communication of powerful (and empowering) critical methods through writing that is, itself, agile, eloquent, and persuasive. I hope this is a trend and not just in academia. Progressive culture, in general,needs to speak in voices that can inspire and move people. Our future--and the future of this country-will, in part, depend on just this kind of talent." Let the congregation say amen.

Maurice Berger November 12-13 Conclusion The past twelve days of conversation have been insightful, honest, surprisingly personal and emotional, and productive. We have looked at the 1980s not as an ossified historical period, but as a continuum of events, social and cultural shifts, stories, and issues. The result is a resonant and decidedly topical discussion.

We have also contributed to an unusual and exceedingly rare type of “interdisciplinary� and "intertextual" conversation: limited neither by the constraints of time nor geography, the online format allowed us to speak to each other, and to communicate with the conference's thousands of visitors, from many parts of the county and the world.

I would like to devote the next two-day session to concluding statements from conference panelists. I ask that you try to address the following question: What insights have you gained from the conference and how have they impacted on or altered your thinking? Please feel free to address any issue you feel is relevant to your concluding remarks, including the way in which the online environment itself shaped our discussion.

Linda Yablonsky Why don't we let the facts try to speak for themselves?

Take 1989. That was the year the Berlin Wall came down and the Communist tent collapsed in Eastern Europe, even as Communist forces in China doused a fire for democracy in Tiananmen Square. In Iran, the Islamic Ayatollah Khomeini kicked the bucket, but only after issuing a milliondollar death warrant for a British novelist from India who, the Ayatollah believed, had written a blasphemous book. Over in the free world, in the U.S., women with AIDS died in ever increasing numbers and the use of crack cocaine reached an all-time high, as did the number of airline accidents in the sky. In that same year, a dizzying plunge in the Dow Jones paved the way for two Japanese electronics giants to buy two hallowed symbols of American enterprise, the Columbia Pictures movie studio in Hollywood and the Rockefeller Center in New York; a Japanese-born novelist won the top literary award in England; a Chinese-born American architect erected a modern glass pyramid before the medieval Louvre in Paris; the Tibetan Dalai Lama won the Nobel Peace Prize in Sweden and Time, Inc. joined Warner Communications to form the largest media company in the world.

Did this extraordinary exchange of cultures create a new climate for world understanding? Just the opposite. Perhaps this was our last chance to mind our own business. No one yet had a cell phone or pager and any mention of a personal computer only brought an amused glint to the eye.

The Internet? Who knew? In 1989, many of us were only just getting used to the fax machine; some were still lost at an ATM. Still, we could see what was coming and it did not look as if anything was going to be the same as before.

The whole planet shifted. An earthquake split the San Francisco Bay Bridge, Hurricane Hugo stomped through the Carolinas, and the temperature around the globe turned its warmest on record. Life on earth was heating up and we had to say goodbye: goodbye to the Cold War, to paper and pen, to sex without condoms and mom-and-pop commerce, goodbye to information with an end. Goodbye, goodbye.

Other things happened too, in your lives and mine, which you know and I know, even if they did not make any news. Generally speaking, these things did not become part of the public record because they did not happen in the public eye and so were not considered to be in the public interest. Few of us have reason to remember them.

Nevertheless, such memories do not vanish without a trace, nor can they live on their own. They have to be shaped and polished, and assembled over time, made not of what we miss but what we find, not what we recall but what we carry. They're our baggage and our train, both together.

They're what we long for. They're all the information we have, outside the realm of the senses.

They're what came before and what's in store and here is what I came here to tell you, just so I don't forget: you can never put your past too far behind you; the harder you try, the closer it gets.

That will bring us to the year 1990.

Wayne Koestenbaum Today I reread Samuel R. Delaney’s magnificent TIMES SQUARE RED, TIMES SQUARE BLUE, in which he recounts his experiences in Times Square porn theaters, in the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s: he chronicles—celebrates—the richness of cross-class (often erotic) contacts that

those theaters permitted. Delaney’s Times Square is gone. Downtown’s Meat Market sexclubs have turned into homogeneous, overpriced restaurants. Today as I revisit the 1980s I mourn the erosion of “contact” (as opposed to “networking”—these are Delaney’s terms, inspired by Jane Jacobs’s THE DEATH AND LIFE OF GREAT AMERICAN CITIES); a loss of what Delaney calls “pleasantness” (or “the pleasant”—like Roland Barthes’s “the neutral”!) transpires when urban diversity—with its erotic promise, its random sexual occurrences, its browsing and loitering and cruising—makes way for what Delaney calls the “Brave New Mall.” I’ve experienced New York City, since the 1980s, lose “pleasantness”; l won't wax nostalgic about 1980s New York, but I must acknowledge the rightness of Delaney’s argument. The Adonis and the Eros, gone. In their place, THE LION KING. There are not insignificant losses.

Would Joseph Cornell, today, bother to leave Utopia Parkway? Would there be a reason to take a day-trip to Times Square? Bickford's, gone.

New sites of pleasure: the Internet? I’m not sanguine—though Dennis Cooper’s recent novel, THE SLUTS, illustrates how closely an Internet “thread” can resemble a back room straight out of 120 DAYS OF SODOM. I’ve never experienced anything exactly like this conference—a combination of a chat room and actual dialogue—like a heated seminar, but (as in a dream) I’m wrapped in Saran Wrap, and can’t quite move or speak. Everything gets muffled, muted, dispersed. Much is lost when face-to-face contact is replaced by computer exchange. In the 1980s, as Linda acknowledges, some of us were confused by ATMs. I didn’t own a word processor until 1988. The 1980s for me were still the era of the typewriter. I bought my typewriter ribbons at a now-defunct, eccentric, musty store on lower Fifth Avenue—across from what is now the Gap and Banana Republic. An answering machine was still a novelty for me.

Avoiding the Now, I still don’t own a cell-phone.

The Gaiety--gone.

To borrow Delaney’s language: am I, when “speaking” at an Internet conference, engaged in “networking” or “contact”? I want more “contact” in my life, quickly, before it’s too late.

Oliver Wasow I missed the “writing, discourse…” session and was going to have this posted in by Maurice after the fact but decided it would serve as a conclusion as well.

In the spirit of what follows, I’ll keep it simple…

The writers that moved, influenced, and engaged me the most in the 80’s were, for the most part, from the 70’s. The simple and anecdotal voices of Barthes and Sontag touched me in ways that the more opaque writers didn’t. I struggled through Derrida, Adorno, Jameson and Lacan, and while I was strongly influenced by Debord and Baudrillard, the experience of reading them wasn’t pleasant for me and I couldn’t shake the feeling, so eloquently expressed by Sontag in her “Regarding the Pain of Others”, that they were talking about a smaller world than most people lived in. It was my world too of course, and while it may have been rapidly becoming everyone’s, their voices still seemed needlessly distant, from “on-high”, dis-connected. Needless to say, the difficulties I had with their writing was in no small part a symptom of my not being “smart enough" and more than a little lazy. And I know that those twin towers of influence Marx and Freud aren’t an easy read either, but still…

In the end, like many artists I know, it was the fiction writers that influenced me most. As brilliant as Baudrillard might be, he could never describe the condition of simulation as well as a Philip K. Dick, a J.G. Ballard, or a William Gibson. Further more, it often seemed to me that artists who adhered too closely to the writings of theoreticians ended up making work that functioned as

mere illustrations for text, “proof” that they had read the authors.

As for my experience with this conference; What fascinates me most is the way in which our posts lies somewhere between the spoken and written word. I struggled myself with resisting the urge to edit, to try to retain something of what might occur in a face to face, while grappling also with the need to be “understood” without the inflection of voice, the raise of an eyebrow that signals suspicion or the smirk that betrays my cynicism. A couple of times I’ve found myself responding to someone who has clearly misunderstood my point, possibly because I was not articulate enough, but I think more because I wasn’t able to find my voice, to utilize this new medium in a way that mimics effectively my actual presence. It was fascinating too to try to “hear” the others. I suspect I was not alone in sensing in Irving Sandler’s posts a desire to “cut to the chase”, make our points, keep it simple. And for my part too I found that the more anecdotal and personal a post was, the better.

All in all this was a great experience for me, much better than I expected. Before this I hadn’t thought back much on the 80’s and when I had it was mostly with amazement that they had suddenly slipped so far behind me. It was good to reflect on such an important time in my life, to put it in perspective with the present, to see how far we’ve come and how little has changed. I learned things by listening to myself, and of course from listening to others. I had it pointed out that my assumptions about the virtues of my children’s social “color-blindness” might not be such a virtue after all and I was grateful for this insight (if not a little embarrassed that I couldn't see it myself, but that's the beautiful part).

In the end perhaps the greatest legacy of the 80’s were the developments in technologies that facilitated this conference, changing the ways we look at things, make things, and perhaps most importantly, talk about things.

Wendy Perron The first surprise to me was the topic of this conference: the 1980s. I always thought the 60s were THE decade, and I craved to know more about the consciousness of it (because as an adult I had just missed it). I did some research on the dance and art experiments at Judson Dance Theater (Dan Cameron joined me in that venture) and when we mounted our exhibit on Judson at Grey Art Gallery in 1981 or so, some of the artists said, This is not history; it was just a little while ago; why are we up on the walls? Likewise, this conference made me realize that the 80s have indeed passed, and its possible to look back and put a frame around them. Or is it?

I agree with whoever said it’s impossible to separate where we were in our personal lives with our insights about that or any decade. I think that being in ones 20s or 30s is an absorbent time. For me the 80s was the decade when I did the most choreography and felt like a working dance artist.

Part of the richness or fun of that was hobnobbing with others and being on a discovery ride individually and collectively. So I have little perspective about what actually happened in the 80s and whether we have lost something, because I know I lost something.

One of the things I enjoyed in this conversation was the slipperiness of when the 80s were and what happened and the confusion over places like Studio 57 or Studio 54. After all, this whole discussion is built on the shifting sands of fallible memories and subjective reactions.

What surprised me was the pessimism about multiculturalism. I have always thought of all multicultural efforts as a positive idea/possibility/ideal. In many cases it has not gone beyond tokenism, but at least now it’s desirable (economically? aesthetically? emotionally?) to include performers of color in a movie, a dance company, or on TV. I’ve tried to be part of the whole multicultural effort — after all it’s what makes things interesting — wherever I go. I feel that mostly, the consciousness has evolved. However, reading the posts of some of the panelists made me realize that in terms of museums and probably a lot else, we have much further to go.

As Mary and Dorit said, this conference had so many voices and thoughts whizzing by that it’s hard to hold on to anything. But one large theme was the blurring of theory and art as a good

thing. And all of us seem to be involved in both creative and communicative practices. So I see this shift in the definition of an artist from being the intuitive genius in the ivory tower (Joseph Cornell, George Balanchine) to someone who sees the world with her eyes wide open. Along those lines, I liked Dorit’s first post because I identify with the kind of doing/being/everything/everywhere thing she talks about, and not delineating between her art self and her curating or seeing or hearing self. I used to feel I wasn’t enough of an artist because I was so interested in other people’s work. (And in fact, I’m not an artist any more; I’m a journalist with a trail of dance inside my brain/body.)

I think theory & practice, like talking & doing, and thinking & feeling, inevitably go together. In dance people were thought of as having bodies and maybe an ear (to hear the music) but not necessarily minds. And dancers are just beginning to respect their own intelligence. However, I go along with Howard Gardner’s findings about different modes of intelligence, and I wouldn’t always expect an artist to be able to explain his work. (In fact sometimes I see a young painter’s work and I want to say to him: Now do a painting that you cannot explain.) And certainly Balanchine and Merce Cunningham distrusted any analysis of their work because theory can get unmoored from the work itself. And I think that theory can get so refined (and can assume familiarity with certain concepts) that it shuts out whole groups of people. During this conference there were times when I wanted to raise my hand and ask a question, like, What is essentialism anyway? But I decided to concentrate on the threads I could follow.

I think one of the positive accomplishments of this conference is a constructive use of the internet. Yes, it can seem artificial, disconnected. (I wish a thumbnail photo of each of you were posted along with the bios.) But we were all trusting enough (of what, not the internet, but maybe of Maurice’s sincerity) to dive in.

Like others, I think whatever happened in the 80s grew out of earlier movements like the civil rights movement and feminism. And all these things contributed to the awareness of postmodernism, which meant to me allowing different ideas to coexist at the same time, whether it’s Yvonne Rainer vacuuming the floor while projecting slides of her innermost written thoughts, or Bob Gober’s bathroom sinks pushing out of a mural of a forest. And these “radical juxtapositions” (to use Yvonne’s term) reflect life. I think multiple realities bear a relation to multiculturalism.

Although the 80s was when I was most active artistically and had the most affinity for the other arts I was seeing, I am determined to find meaning in the current decade. I don’t want to be one of those critics who cannot get past the time of their youth when everything was so momentous. I once heard an older dance critic say that when he first saw Maria Tallchief in Firebird, it was like a lightning bolt for him and nothing in the subsequent five decades ever struck him like that again.

I remember the first time I saw Meredith Monk, Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, and contact improvisation. I don’t know if anything will ever hit me again the way those things did. But still I try to be open to any new ride of discovery.

Catherine Lord Vertiginous. Mary’s word. I think of it more on the horizontal axis, perhaps because it’s Los Angeles and I’ve done a lot of surface roads in the last three days. Surface has been my last three days. So I’ve read but haven’t posted. Some of the driving involved driving to the white bastion of art history (oops, that’s ambiguous, but I’ll leave it) on the other side of town to attend a symposium in which art historians and art history students managed to discipline contemporary art so as to render the presence of living artists something of a disciplinary inconvenience, or redundancy, which I suppose, come to think of it, we are. We ‘re sprawling ourselves-- arguing, questioning, reaffirming, correcting--into an already institutionalized cyberspace, which is to say that the trees that will be cut to put our words on the printed page haven’t yet been pulped. It is exhausting. We’re posting our theory, our memory, our grief, our anger, our hope, our regrets, fixing a past we may not have lived, or remembered correctly if we did (glad to have served as an exemplar here) in order to survive the present and get on with the future. Would we write at such

length about the 1930s, or the 1950s? I doubt it. We’re close enough to the 1980s to have something direct to say about it, a collective of survivors, actors and archivists shooting off really long text messages each other, unsure about whether to leap on our mopeds and set something on fire, or whether we already did that and the fire didn’t take. Vertigo again. Working to remake a past that wasn’t there anyway. In technicolor.

Anecdote from late 1990s, I am being invited to the Midwest for studio visits with a group of emerging artists. My host to be is describing the group--.a lesbian, a Native American, a conceptual artist who’s probably gay, an African American man, and a Chicano filmmaker. I’m enthusiastic. GREAT lot of people, say I. Yes, replies the host-to-be, but we’ve also got a painter, a straight white man. Do you think you’ll be able to talk to him? Multiculturalism was at once ideal and instrument, the stick and the carrot. In my (cynical) institutional memory, it was a funding priority replaced by “new technologies.” Another conversation, early 21st century, monumentally well known curator to me: Why do a project about colonialism, Catherine? Multiculturalism is over.

Eighties “multiculturalism” got some work done, but the work is not over. It’s not so much, or only, a matter of inclusion, but of examining situations in which one’s own relative privilege is difficult to yield and understanding the structural tenacity of these situations.

The theory thing, in this connection. Thanks to Wayne saying there is no difference between poetry and theory, and for bringing in Sam Delaney whose ideas of urbanity and contact (not networking) have been revelatory to me. And to Olu for going back to the late 1960s. when art practice could mean “robust intellectual engagement.” And to Mary, looking back to the same people, for reminding us that a little good writing goes a long way. My sense of the 1980s here…… Theory was shorthand for what people wrote who had ideas about art practice that fell outside the art history academy or the art practice marketplace. Theory meant critical, in a liberatory sense. It allowed practicing artists to expand the scope of their materials (e.g., to include text as material) and the depth of their investments. It was a way to remind yourself-when you or your friends were accused of making “bad” art because what you did was “too” political or socially inflected or because art wasn’t “just” content or that after all the object had to be addressed, or speak for itself, or do the work, or be respected, or WHATever--that you had to fight for the sense of your own agency and that there were intellectual frameworks in which such language could be called out for being transparently a means of maintaining privilege and reinforcing systems of exclusion. This, to me, is the way in which “theory” (a rubric under which I admit just a wee bit of October, but definitely poetry, impassioned screeds, prose that disrespects distinctions between fiction and fact, a lot of good writing about sex, as well as key works of art) had a deep connection to a “multicultural” utopia in which people of all sorts could say, or make, or insist upon, or repeat, what they saw. To thieve Foucault, theory is the management of bodies and the management of meanings. People die for theory, which was not invented in the 1980s.

They come because of it. (I think of the title of Kiss & Tell’s book, Her Tongue on My Theory.)

They don’t get out of bed in the morning without it or drive to the photo lab or type on a key board…..

Alexander Alberro In rereading the postings and reflecting back on the past twelve or thirteen days of this conference on the 1980s, I am struck by just how PERSONAL this topic is for us. The majority of the postings (mine included) invoke particular memories, musings, recollections, and coming-ofage stories. The political, historical and cultural is more often than not deeply intertwined with personal memory. I believe that the tone of address would have been significantly different had we focused on, say, the 1930s--a decade to which (presumably) none of us had direct access.

But since most of us experienced the 1980s first-hand, our postings have often taken the form of bearing witness--of recording and documenting based on the privilege granted by access to memory from lived experience. Thus at the end of the conference, I can’t help but wonder what it would have been like to hear from younger artists or scholars who did not have directly lived

memories of the 1980s. What would they have said about our musings? Does not our obsessive return to the personal create a “club� where some are denied access due to their age? And what sort of dialogue are we engaging in with the present? What happens to the contemporary if our mindset is driven by our memories?

This is not to imply anything negative about the conference. In my view, Maurice convened it in a very productive manner, and I learned a great deal from (and about) my fellow interlocutors. I am pleased to have participated.

Max Becher I've recovered somewhat from travels and glad to have a chance to comment on a subject that is somewhat underrepresented in the posts: digital media (a.k.a new media, computer art, electronic media, etc.)

Does anyone disagree that digital media are the single most significant development in the arts (at least in terms of medium) in the last 25 years? The 90's saw the full expansion of computer based art, but it first blossomed in the 80's. Remember, the Macintosh was introduced in 1984, and its graphical interface was immediately welcomed in Art Schools and by Artists, some of whom were eager for such a device, having worked with less graphical ones. We saw the rapid trickling down of affordable technical solutions for print, film, video, music, performance and more.

There are two branches of this subject to consider: pre-existing media involving or converted into digital media and digital media as a new set of directions in art: a "mega-medium" with its own particular characteristics and possibilities.

For so many artists, including myself, it had long been a desire to be less specialized in a particular medium, to start with interests or ideas and realize them in a medium that best fits the idea. Computers put multi-media on the desktop, and that was EXTREMELY alluring. One could even say that the early imperfections of computer applications (such as the choppiness of video or the stiffness of computer renderings) created opportunity. One knew what innovations were coming and could attempt to experiment with them early, not knowing what lessons could be learned.

Hypercard, for example, was a an application, important as a prototype of the internet, that allowed text and visual "cards", essentially database pages to be linked as hypertext. The links were local (although computer professionals could use it as a front end for linking to the internet), but the idea of linking information and media content creatively was inspirational for artists. Many typical internet projects were already being developed with Hypercard and similar applications before the 90's began. It's a cliche now, that from the 80's on, organizing went from tabular and hierarchical to neural and decentralized.

Desktop publishing, an exciting idea not only for artists but for activists, was ushered in by the program "Pagemaker" and the Macintosh and laser printers. In the late 80's and early 90's I volunteered for various organizations including "Computers for Social Change" and "Playing to Win", a community based computing center in Harlem: both organizations were trying to battle the "digital divide" and desktop publishing was one of the main tools. The computer revolution threatened to increase various social and economic disparities (and it has), but also created many opportunities for educators, students and job seekers, including artists.

Many of the early, easily learned and visually oriented applications fostered a brainstorming on future possibilities, including randomized art, data-oriented art, political lobbying and organizing, and interactivity, and of course the very thing we're involved with now: online conferencing.

A notable downside of the Macintosh and PC was the linking of art practice to a particular company or industry (somewhat like early video was linked to the Sony Portapak). The syndrome of art being dependent on evolving technology is to be watched carefully. In my students I see an

increasing anti-tech reaction. Just as photo and film freed painting, computers with their high cost and complexity are freeing older media once again to be seen as fresh and direct alternatives.

One more comment, more of a conclusion: to put it cynically, yes the world is getting catastrophically worse with global warming, diseases, starvation, imperial wars and their blowback, insurmountable deliberate deficits, a retreat to religion, loss of liberties... But, have you seen the new IPod? Isn't that what it's like now? The promises of the future distract us temporarily from a prevailing pessimism. There is so much noticeable progress, not just in technology, but in the sciences, most amazingly I think in astronomy, and in many other areas as well. In students I find the spirit of the 60's still alive and maybe not so well, but sturdy. Yet, the mainstream is still regressing to the 50's and much of the future looks like a disaster movie. Will progress and regress cancel out, one overcome the other, intertwine unpredictably or create a high-tech dark ages?

It's getting overwhelming, but could it come to this: (from a recent New Yorker cartoon) "To hell with the past - I'd like to put the future behind us"?

RoseLee Goldberg Dear Maurice and colleagues: Hugely disappointed not to join this conversation until today; PERFORMA has taken up every moment, even as I have been thinking about the cross-fire in the ether of the internet, on the 1980s. A few words on this final day: For me, 'decades' begin and end on the 7s or 8s (the sixties with happenings in 1957, the seventies, with political unrest and student uprising in 1968). So too, the 1980s, began in 1977/8, with the arrival in New York of the "media generation" -- Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo, David Salle, Eric Fischl, Nancy Dwyer, Troy Brauntauch, Michael Zwack, Jack Goldstein, Sherri Levine, Thomas Lawson, Richard Prince, Sarah Charlesworth, Louise Lawler, Laurie Simmons from points afar (Cal Arts, Hallwalls, Nova Scotia). These artists were students of some of the most intellectually astute mentors -- John Baldessari, Vito Acconci, Dan Graham, Lawrence Weiner, Joseph Kosuth, Michael Snow, Mary Kelly, to name a few. They were the first entirely media- literate generation who grew up on rock and roll, 24 hour television, B Movies: The Gong Show, Andy Warhol, Twilight Zone, Blue Oyster Cult, Alan Suicide, Brother Theodore, Studio 54, Life Magazine, The Daily News, were source material as much as anything to do with art history.

It was a decade of excess, of yuppies, a rising class of collectors, of designer branding, and the beginning of the artist-as-celebrity movement that still trumps today. It was a decade symbolized in 1980 by a young curator, Jeffrey Deitch, announcing that he was going to Harvard Business School. It is also the decade that had more 'waves' than any other: the first included the artists in Douglas Crimp's "Pictures" group show at Arists Space in 1977 and in the one-person exhibitions at the Kitchen of Cindy, Robert, Jack, Troy, Sherri, Thomas. By '81 and 82' a second group, including Jeff Koons, Mayer Weisman, Haim Steinbach, quickly followed this first group who had 'made it ' critically and financially in record time, and soon a third wave, of new conceptualists with Yvette Lemeux, and a fourth followed.

Each group seemed to make way for the next, as an excited art market upped the ante, and a discussion about 'high and low', of new conceptualism, new popism, new painting and new image making held sway.

Added to these sequential histories are the critical ones of AIDS, which from 1981, viciously infected downtown in such severe numbers to force artists to become political in ways not seen since the early seventies; geographical and economic ones caused by the rolling of the real estate dice (SoHo too expensive, East Village suddenly an option); and cultural; a rising African American intelligencia demanding a full accounting two decades after the Civil Rights movement had roiled the country and promised more. Add Ronald Reagan, his own brand of economics and brilliant manipulation of the media, into the mix on the broad American front, and the importation of French intellectual theory into the narrow world of academia, on the other, and the high-low seesaw was set in motion. Performance perfectly settled in the no-man's land between disciplines, and held sway over the argument that suggested that art might indeed intrude into mass culture (as Punk Music had done) with good results, and that advertising should stay away from stealing artist's ideas (Cindy Sherman's images were quickly mimicked by Madison Avenue). Karen Finely, Spalding Gray, Laurie Anderson, Eric Bogosian, Bill T Jones, straddled art and pop culture worlds in ways that no others had done before, with material that was accessible and ascerbic in equal measure. By 1987, 88, when the crash came down, the wall came down, and Mandela walked out of prison, the 80s were over. On December 31, 1989, I wore a tee-shirt that said 1990, never having worn such a thing before. Little did I know that many of the values of the 80s would continue to drive art and culture for another decade or two.

Barbara Buhler Lynes Thank you once again, Maurice, for being the moderator extraordinaire – for the third time -- in the third of the series of online symposia that the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center sponsors. Your framing of the discussion with such engaging and provocative topics has indeed prompted a diverse and rich exchange of information and ideas that you have skillfully and brilliantly guided along – a mosaic of recollections and realities, a collective reconstruction of the people, images, and events through which we have given shape to the 80s, a process through which we sift out where and who we were then, and who and where we are now. Also, thanks to everyone who has contributed so graciously, incisively, thoughtfully, and frankly to this amazing discussion.

In closing, I also want to let everyone know that the Research Center will celebrate its five-year anniversary this summer with a symposium (July 6-8) in Santa Fe that will further explore one of the many issues this discussion raised – namely the increasingly significant role photography has played in shaping American art, and the ways in which photographers and painters have and continue to influence and provide ideas for one another: “Painting and Photography in American Art: Ideas, Sources, and Influences, the 1890s to the Present.” Please mark your calendars and join us if you can (speakers, schedule, and other details will be posted on our website).

Kathy O’Dell Oh my, oh my. It’s so difficult to wrap up, to conclude, to reflect on past posts, to capture new thoughts, to post again, summarily.

I have found this conference at once exhilarating and frustrating. I’ve been able to carry the posts around in the hip pocket of my brain as I went about my life, which is so much more emotionally rich than it was in the 1980s, and ponder how to respond, often ending up not saying much at all, because, like Mary, I feel like a few words go a long way, and so many participants, especially the younger ones among us (as Maurice pointed out) use words so elegantly. I just want to hold those words … everyone’s words, actually … and let them breathe life into history. (I don’t feel

that this conference has been about creating a “club,” by the way, but about making a small, humble attempt to create an oral history.)

Today, in my emotionally rich 2000s, I cook with my 8-year-old, go to her dance recitals, read to her at night, wonder a little why she’s so utterly captivated by cemeteries, and try to answer her tough questions … like the one she asked during the course of this conference: Mommy, what does “gay” mean? I reminded her that we’d talked many times before about how boys fall in love with boys and girls fall in love with girls, and all that matters is love, and I reminded her of the various friends we have who are gay. She seemed surprised by this review, because she knew all that, and she was just wondering, she said, why her friends use the term “gay” just like they use “retarded,” to describe something they think is “stupid.” Sexuality and disability, both subsumed in adolescent pejoratives, which are allowed to exist by loathsome tolerance of hate.

It’s at moments like this, in this first decade of my 21st century, which is arguably more emotionally rich than my intellectually rich 1980s, that I’m both happy that I am beyond that past decade and immensely grateful that I lived it … in all its wordiness. From the flood of words in which I was immersed (and felt like I was intermittently drowning … probably why I couldn’t bring myself to respond to the last two-day session, not having unpacked that near-drowning experience) in the 1980s, I learned so much about how to listen. I learned to listen by being forced (if anyone is really “forced” to do anything in graduate school) to read, and to do so in a focused, hyper-critical fashion. Remember the pleasurable tyranny of the “close read”? I was in that same room with Barthes that Dorit spoke of sharing.

This conference reminded me of the importance of the close read and the invaluable materiality of the words one reads and, as Maurice pointed out, the craft with which they are written. As much as the 1980s were awash in too many words for me in retrospect, those words (their content and craft) imparted to me some portion of the capacity, however inadequate it often seems as I drive my 8-year-old home, to answer tough questions.

I share Wayne’s metaphoric Saran Wrap. I haven’t seen those of you I know in so long, and those of you I don’t know, I long to see, to have contact with (to end in a preposition).

Elizabeth Alexander At the close of this two weeks of meditating on the '80s, I find myself thinking of a very important artist who began his work then: August Wilson. It is interesting to me that in the 80's when so much was new, when the shape of art and theory went in a million different directions, that Wilson began a project which on the surface was not so much of the times: un-trendy, seemingly disinterested in breaking old forms and making new ones. But the historical project was actually a radical one. It took great vision and audacity to recognize, as he did, that until we went through American history, we would not be able to look and move forward. He somehow intuited that the moment had come when the century could be surveyed, intimately and in the terms and language of black urban folk. So he set out to write a play for each decade of the century, all but one set in a single black neighborhood in Pittsburgh. When that work was complete he died. Wilson reminds me that in the end, the work is the work, and either we struggle through it or we don't. Process is all. In 25 short years he completely changed American theater, and he did it by writing profoundly in the languages and out of the histories and philosophies of black people. And he got rewarded over and over again, for work of integrity! And he was generous with his time and his money in supporting the work of others, individually and institutionally. So that body of work and that artistic life well-lived but cut too short is a strange but important legacy of the 'eighties. Thinking of Wilson as we conclude makes me realize that we've just begun to touch all there is to say about that bustling, contradictory, important decade.

Irving Sandler I found the conference very illuminating, with one qualification. I would have liked more critical

discourse on art, I mean works of art, the kind RoseLee Goldberg talked about. I liked the statements that digital media is "the single most significant development in art" and that mediainspired art is. I don't agree, but these assertions met my request that at this time of pluralism, the question is: What counts? I find developments in painting more relevant than digital or mediainspired art, notwithstanding that OCTOBER relegated painting to the dust-bin of history. One final comment. Art theory isn't art, and it certainly isn't poetry. It's art theory and all too often it is imposed on art and is too convoluted. I think that we ought to pay more attention again to what artists say about their work, untheoretical though this may be. Maurice, you are to be commended for carrying off this conference.

Maurice Berger PLEASE NOTE: The "Conclusion" session will remain open for posting.

ALL other sessions are now permanently locked. BUT please keep posting in your concluding statements.

Olu Oguibe It is perhaps apropos that the job of beginning to examine and narrate the 1980s should occasion a plurality of voices in conversation. It was in the 1980s, after all, that the new art history gained recognition, having shifted the ground from under previous dominant methods of critical articulation to make room for plural narratives across ideologies, struggles, histories, cultures, perspectives and visions. Feminism met the new psycho-analytic theory met what has been described here as critical race theory met post-colonial theory met queer theory met visual culture met whatever was left of Marxist theory as well as residues of the old art history. The seeds of polynunciation that were sown in the 1960s and nurtured through the 1970s finally took root in the 1980s. Out went the sole commanding voice, the so-called meta-narrative. In came conversation: the probing, insinuating, speculative, equivocal moment of multiple perspectives, and narratives.

The series of discussions and examinations of topical issues that Maurice Berger and the O’Keeffe Research Center have organized over the past few years, of which this re-examination of the 1980s is part, are a continuation of that tradition of conversation.

Also, it is the nature of good conversation that there are no final words. The task of revisiting, reexamining, investigating, interrogating, and reminiscing about the 1980s is an open-ended one that hopefully will deepen even as it draws a larger crowd of voices. In time certain strands of knowledge and reminiscence will begin to cohere, certain points of agreement will emerge, and histories will begin to intersect.

I did not experience the American 1980s. I left grammar school in 1980, in Nigeria, and having failed to make it to university that year, spent the time working on my father’s farm and listening to radical Third World music and the Jazz hour on the Voice of America. I finally entered university the following year aged 16, and spent the rest of the decade getting kicked out of college. In many ways, my 1980s were akin to the American 1960s without the drugs and free love. It was spent fighting authorities, battling with police, hauling back tear-gas canisters, laying down in front of armored vehicles, and demonstrating against dictatorships. In 1989 I was kicked out of graduate school for the last time.

However, my practice as a public intellectual also began in the 1980s, and whatever I could glean of the American experience before then had a significant influence on me and my generation. We read and performed and drank and dueled in cabaret joints, wrote manifestos, carried Fanon and Ezra Pound in the back pocket—a fascinating combination, I dare say—and organized for Mandela’s release. And we decidedly took a different position on the events in Tienanmen Square than the popular rhetoric in America, having compared those events to a certain incident that took place in Chicago on December 4, 1969. With the advantage of distance, we could already read the American century through the prism of history even as it happened.

As has been pointed out by others, these conversations have been particularly enriched by numerous accounts that bear the distinct mark of recollection and the authority of witnessing. It is impossible to articulate or narrate any epoch without the authoritative element of recollection.

What we did not experience enough in this seminal exercise, however, is the cold and distant subjectivity of the mere observer, the unsentimental insouciance or rigor of those who did not live the American 1980s or perhaps were too young to be fully immersed in its adult indulgences and wisdoms. Additionally, it can also be argued, as a manner of speaking, that certain critical veins of reminiscence did not come to light in these conversations. Hopefully, when those other voices emerge to contemplate and interrogate the 1980s, they will bring far more to it than inherited nostalgia or the corporate opportunism with which capital and its culture vultures have masticated and regurgitated the1950s and 1960s. History is an infinite process.

Dorit Cypis Infinite it is. I think about the distances through which we are "speaking" with each other about an era whose imprints are all over and around us and yet is long past. We are dispersed physically across cities, countries and time zones, several of us simultaneously traveling as well. We inhabit different genders, sexualities, ethnicities, races, aesthetic disciplines, and endless subjectivites.

We have woven a micro ecology in public. Perhaps it is in the minds and hearts of the younger visitor reader where the evolution of this discourse will be reshaped into new actions. To that young reader I want to say...Silence=Death, take theory into your daily lives, practice with integrity, engage with difference (your own included), create reciprocity, challenge fear, stay vulnerable.

Every participant taught me. Thank- you. Maurice, your vision to bring multiple voices together is so important, generous and inspiring. Thank-you.

Andrea Robbins Like Dorit Cypis I can't help but project onto the young reader; it is so important that students and/or young people take their work, their peers, and community to heart. There are many forces which try to marginalize or diminish the value of the experience of the inexperienced (I'm sure everyone can relate to being told that they will understand something in time etc.). I am not advocating for a glorification of youth culture (which does the opposite, and sort of steals the projection by basing so much emphasis on the present), but on creating a life and a work which raises the level of ones interactions with the world in the present. I think each of the panelists has addressed this through their writings and musings on this pivotal period (coincidentally a period of time which is often overlooked because it is considered a pivot and not a bridge in time).

I have a plane to catch in two hours so I am out the door but I have been walking around with this discourse and all of your voices in my head for the past two weeks on the road. It has been a pleasure being part of this dislogue and this community. Thank you all.

Lorraine O’Grady 202 posts and counting. Perhaps I read and think more slowly than others (and there was that week I was gone), but it's going to take me a long time to digest them.

I don't usually think about decades the way we have these past two weeks. Examining the 80s has made me think back to the 60s (like Wendy, I think it's a more natural candidate) and forward to the 00s (we KNOW it's a candidate, Twin Towers, Osama and George, etc.). But mostly it's whetted my appetite for the 70s and 90s, decades where nothing much happened.

My response to the conference-ing has been as much physical and emotional as intellectual. As some one who writes late at night, in the beginning I struggled with deadlines. Then after being away from the internet, I had to literally post ex post facto. It was hard not to feel I was in a 1930s

movie (Chaplin's Modern Times) shouting messages over the din to the 00s. Though I was reading and responding to everyone on a given thread, I couldn't expect anyone to respond to me. In a way, this virtuo-physicality was a sad but exact corollary to my emotional state. I was only too aware of having to witness, to give testimony that couldn't be heard/understood at the time. There wasn't enough space to work out the detached observer voice I might be capable of, to calibrate the back-and-forth segues between the insider-outsider and outsider-insider I had variously been. I had, after all, begun the decade in 1980 as Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, beating myself with a whip and shouting out guerrilla poems, and had ended it in 1990 by creating a translation business to convert those same ATM screens into a dozen languages, doing my bit for global capitalism.

On the other hand, I disagreed with those of my fellow panelists who seemed nostalgic for the outsider voice imagined as someone too young to have been there at all (someone born after 1980?). The outsider voices I longed to hear more from were the Irving Sandlers, but from differing points of view. It was an odd gift to get from the process, to realize that I love the sound of the cut-to-the-chase, no-time-for-bullshit voice of the wise but old.

I wish my participation had been more interactive, but I also wish there had been more time.

There were many questions I had. I wanted to ask Wendy Perron: Are black choreographers widely accepted as "originators" in dance? How do you account for that? I'd like to understand more how this can/can't be applied to other fields. To ask Mary Kelly: How do you parse the differences between race and gender? How do you theorize the differences you referred to between the "lag-effect" and the "blind spot?" Etc.. Etc..

It was an interesting experience, Maurice. I'll be working it out for a while.

Simon Leung Jackie 60s, a club in downtown Manhattan no longer with us, had themes for their parties like “Night of a thousand Stevies,” by which they meant Nicks. If memory serves, there was one that took place around 1996 called “The Golden Age of Drag,” by which they meant 1994. I may not be getting the details straight (pun intended) but you get the idea.

In the 80s, I used to talk about “the 80s” all the time. Nowadays, until this conference, I don’t so much. I am not sure why, except perhaps that the phenomena and feelings I associate with the decade (both joyous and sad, oppressive and liberating), as many have pointed out, never left.

Since 1989 or so, collective versions of categorized time (e.g. “the 90s,” “the new millennium,” “post 9-11”) have seemed to me to liken newer, but not necessarily more useful software on a computer that has seen better days. If you want the computer to open certain files, you have to download new versions of the same software you already have. I am that old computer. I try to update, back up, reboot… but my hard drive still crashes—sometimes it’s “the screen,” sometimes it’s “the mother board.” I’ve been wiped out a few times.

Temporal categories of the past come into existence because they help us define ourselves in a narrative of “the past” leading up to “the now.” If the retrospective 80s was a time when we still could and did do without some of the contemporary versions of ourselves, this gaze owed its focus (or is that anamorphosis), as the last time certain ways of seeing was possible, to the fact that certain lenses (and what is theory but another word for lens?) became aligned at certain angles and showed us certain pictures. Assuming we were standing in certain spots. Assuming, assuming.

I’m grateful that I got to learn from everyone here, to see things through their eyes. But what I think is truly fascinating about our exchanges here is that everyone is potentially talking about what everyone else has written, but due to the de-centered apparatus of the net, the time lag of reading and posting, the structure of the linear sequential page, etc, all encounters are a bit out of sync, many are missed, some are left hanging—all this while we try to meet ourselves with the 80s we “know/knew” (now/new? no/new?)

The fact that this conference is done with words only makes me think more about what Walter Benjamin, the deepest thinker of the shallow, has written on several “just past” residues of his 1930s, valued for the uncanny personal revolutionary potential based on their obsolescence.

There are too many examples, but our venture here reminds me most of the fragmentary, posthumously published “Arcades” project, which of course fittingly was not put together as a complete text. Like its “subject,” the Arcades Project mirrored the structure and architecture of the infinite reflections of glass surfaces, the chaotic shop signs, the logic of montage. Our posts remind me of the index cards on which Benjamin was said to have written the book. The web reminds me of the fragile, but spectacular edifice onto which he projected a world that once seemed so new. Benjamin hallucinated the Nineteenth Century. A quote: “We can speak of two directions in this work: one which goes from the past into the present and shows the arcades, and all the rest, as precursors, and one which goes from the present into the past so as to have the revolutionary potential of these ‘precursors’ explode in the present. And this direction comprehends as well the spellbound elegiac consideration of the recent past, in the form of its revolutionary explosion.”

Oh, a coda: “The Golden Age of Drag…”

I didn’t go.

But maybe you were there.

Jonathan Weinberg Thank you Maurice and Barbara for including me. I am thrilled that Wayne mentioned Samuel Delaney whose fantastic memoir The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village, 1957-1965, appeared in 1988 right in the middle of "our" period. Like us today, he was thinking retrospectively about twenty five years before. Delaney's book is an extraordinary "coming out" tale that makes sense of his experiences, including having sex along the docks of New York in the 1960s through the lens of writers like Foucault etc. Inevitably, we all are remembering the 80s in ways that are probably more about 2005 than they are about 1985.

Several times the question of witnessing as come up. I think of Nan Goldin's 1989 show, Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing. Many of us write about the 1980s from the vantage point of having lived through the period. It is important to acknowledge this. But just because some of us were "there" it does not give us some special privileged vantage point to talk about the art of that time. In fact it may get in the way. At the same time, if we were participants in the various scenes as artists and/or critics it is only proper to acknowledge that in our writing.

Many of the participants have commented on how new the online format is for a conference. As someone who spends a lot of time on the Internet in chat rooms etc. I have to say for me it already seems old fashioned--very 1990s. There is not enough give in take because the responses are written over such a long period. There are undoubtedly advantages to the format-the responses are far more considered then they would be off the cuff, and yet I think it would be far more exciting if at least some of the conference occurred in real time. With web cams and picture downloads you could even have visuals. I realize that this is complicated and perhaps more costly but I urge the O'Keeffe center to think about a more multi-media format in the future. I think this would help address Irving's astute comment that we have not spent enough time talking directly about the art. If we had actual images and clips to respond to this would not have happened. It would also make Maurice's job a bit more interesting because instead of asking a question he could post pictures and clips and we could respond to them. We could also field questions from the "audience" in real time (many Internet sessions are run this way on American

Online etc.)

I have enjoyed it and it has helped my own research on the period immeasurably! Thank you all...

Maurice Berger It is 15 November, 11:45, EST. This session will close at 12:00, noon, EST. I will post my final statement a few minutes before. Thanks.

Maurice Berger I want to thank all of the panelists and visitors to the symposium for their extraordinary contributions. The reality of our present, troubled time has lent a sense of gravity and urgency to our conversation. Our discourse--fragmented, passionate, spirited, emotional, and eloquent-created a powerful continuum of ideas. I have learned much from each of you and from the amazing "meta-text" that you have collectively created.

I would like to thank Barbara Lynes and George King of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum and Study Center for their unwavering support of this symposium. Molly McDow, our conference administrator, gave her unwavering and generous attention to EVERY detail of the symposium and its site. And Heather Hole of the O'Keeffe Museum followed through on the conference's myriad details, offering all manner of support along the way.

Most of all, I would like to express my gratitude to the thousands of visitors to the conference as well as the 30 colleagues who joined me in this important and generative dialog.

"THE 1980s: AN INTERNET CONFERENCE" IS NOW PERMANENTLY LOCKED & ARCHIVED. Karen Mary Davalos This conference has been a delight and a challenge because of its virtual nature. The method of talking is still my favorite but I confess to a fascination for the venue of on-line dialogue -- most of us will probably never meet at the conference that I normally attend, or even at the conferences to which I get invited on an irregular basis. And for this I am grateful to Maurice's desire to share and dialogue.

The interdisciplinary and inter-generational perspectives on the 1980s provided me with new insight about the decade that I have come to loath almost as much as the 1970s. For some readers, my tongue-and-cheek comment about the 1970s will clarify that I lived in the suburbs of Los Angeles County and did not see or hear punk music until the 1980s, and therefore, I was still wearing the awful fashion designs, including high heeled sneakers and horizontal striped t-shirts, in the 1970s.

I agree with Alexander Alberro's observation on the first day of the conference: "the 1980's signaled the crystallization of a number of progressive counter-culture movements." But the challenge for me has been how to reconcile (and this is not the best word) this process and development of the "progressive counter-culture movements" and the simultaneous rigidity of the Right and Center, the clap-down on expression, the attack on knowledge that challenged the status quo, the homophobia-and on and on.

Certainly, Gramsci and others have provided us with the tools to understand how hegemony works and how counter-hegemonies find cracks and fissures in the ideological walls of domination, but for me, and from my observation of the posts, it was difficult to hold in our view these simultaneous phenomena. In my posts, I directed readers to counter-culture or I directed readers to hegemony, but I could not explore them both at the same time, even though they exist

simultaneously.

And finally, I learned that I need to learn more about New York, if only to get the rest of y'all to think comparatively about Los Angeles, my own center of the universe.

Lowery Stokes Sims A Public Trust at Risk As I write this I am completing a Theory and Criticism course that I taught at Hunter College. I chose to focus on the1990s mainly because I felt that decade got away from me unlike the 1980s a decade in which I felt deeply involved and invested. In a way the 1990s were like the 1970s for me: a bit of a let down after all the heady, heated events of the 1960s During the 60s when I transitioned from high school to college, it was clear to me what was to be done: the violence and disruption of society had reached us on the bucolic campus of Queens College in Flushing, but so had the idealism, the notion of forging new pathways in life and society. We concluded the 60s filled with piss and vinegar and ready to commit to a new way of working this world. The reality, or course, was that there was a calming down. I was aware of the struggles of black artists and women artists for diversity and inclusion in art institutions, and all artists confronting institutions about their complicity in the war in Vietnam, their investments in the regimes of South Africa and other totalitarian, human-rights violating governments. The response of institutions in the 70s was pragmatic and accommodating without really changing the body politic. Corrine Robbins codified the ambiance in her book on pluralism, and the decade was marked by the obligatory black or feminist exhibitions, without there being any real recognition of the fact that these artists were the vanguard to the new figuration and identity politics of the 1980s, bringing womanist and cultural content to the language of minimalism and color field painting. (Who can forget Frank Bowling stenciling a map of South America on a Barnet Newman “zip” composition painted in red, yellow and green and entitling it Who’s Afraid of Barney Newman? Or Kay WalkingStick paying homage to her Cherokee father in minimalist composition on which flayed teepee forms intimated the same issues that Susan Rothenberg’s horses did in defining space on a flat surface and tweaking the sparseness of minimal vocabularies?)

Then the 80s dawned. For me the clear indication of a new day was the introduction of the new French structural theories in panels at the College Art Association. “Deconstruction,” “center/margin,” “periphery,” “identity,” “diversity”, multicultural”, neo-this and neo-that—all these terms entered the art lexicon. I felt another surge of energy and was convinced that somehow now form and content would be reunited to demonstrate the endless possibilities of that union. I remember the first big multicultural exhibition of prints at MOMA, and the excitement of the potential for cross-cultural dialogue that marked the decade and came to full fruition in the Decade Show in 1989. That vast collaboration among the New Museum of Contemporary Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem and the now defunct Museum of Contemporary Hispanic art, defied convention by organizing the artists into themes that would be placed in atypical contexts.

In their preface the three directors—Marsha Tucker, Kinshasha Conwill and Nilda Peraza admit that some themes would be out of place in their institutions demonstrating the constituencies were diverse but not across the board and not the same way. Spirituality would have a hard time playing out in Soho, and sexuality might come under fire in Harlem. Writing much later, Elaine Kim would complain that for all the diversity that the writing and theorizing around the Decade Show was still along ethnic lines after all that time: Asians wrote on Asians, African Americans on African Americas, gays on gays, whites on whites, etc., etc. Guillermo Gomez-Pena would encapsulate that in his summary of the failures of multiculturalism as he cast one of the required goals as affirmative employment of people of color in mainstream institutions.

Eventually I found myself confronting the limitations of the new jargon. While there were extensive analyses of “center” and “margin” it would seem that they would almost never intersect.

I drew a diagram for my class at Hunter—a smaller circle (representing the “center”) within a larger circle (representing “the margin”) and noted that this diagram could represent two

alternative actions: one in which the two entities were put in proximity to another and never really touching (nothing changed). To represent the other, I erased a sliver of the outer circle and compared it to the casing of a human ovum. If elements coming from the outside could really penetrate the center, then mitosis would occur and as in the union of sperm and egg a new hybrid of the two would occur. Even as I discussed this I noted the problematic aspects of that other 1980s term “hybridity.” So easy to problematize, yet so representative of the changing demographics in this country as we saw at last the full florescence of the aftermath of integration and the final downfall of miscegenation laws. “Mixed race” was the tem that permeated the 1990s, and we pondered the working out of this biological and cultural concept in the arts. But in the end the center would hold and the margin would exist as just that, only now in some privileged position as a bona fide theoretical construct. “Exclusion” was a state of being, as opposed to a social and political proactive attitude whose purpose was to maintain the status quo.

I recently participated in a conference on the state of Native American artists in the contemporary art scene. One of the high ticket issues was “appropriation.” In the 1980s this was the hall mark of that other trend of neo-primitivism, as the “center” once again looked to the “margin” or the “periphery” for authentic expression and co-opted the forms to greater recognition than that accorded their progenitors. I was just starting my long study of the work of Wifredo Lam, pondering his relationship to Picasso—both vaunted and actual—so that issue was one that also preoccupied my mind. I benefited from dialogues with John Yau who was unequivocal in his assertion that Lam rescued the appropriated (and decontextualized, ergo rendered impotent and ineffectual) forms of Africa and reinserted them back in the Cuba brush (the surrogate for the African rainforest, which Lam dubbed the “jungle”). But what could that mean in terms of the issues of authenticity that James Clifford raised in the Predicament of Culture? Were westernized “primitives” like Lam inauthentic representatives of their cultures because they could converse and dialogue with the West? Because they weren’t “anonymous” native artists whose names researchers and white hunters did bother to record? Whereas I could write for a project that Maurice Berger and I worked on involving the theme of Race and Representation that appropriation was tantamount to “slumming,” to preserving “colonial” privilege, and ponder the “peculiarities” of the interface between ethnicity and assimilation both for people of color and the mainstream, at this recent conference, any attempt to confront the power politics of appropriation were rebuffed as the practice was ascribed to all artists, even contemporary Native American artists. I left the conference realizing that after the 1980s and during the 1990s the solidification of control of the dialogue, nay the vocabulary presented the most daunting challenge today. Words that had specific social, political and economic impact now were neutralized trends.

The most daunting task facing us today is how to regain a sense that we can really make a difference in a media-saturated world that co-opts any cause and neutralizes its righteousness.

Recently a few days after Rosa Parks died, my students engaged me in a conversation about their frustration in figuring out how to make a difference. Ultimately Rosa marks the way. It is sometimes with the simplest action, not necessarily made out of a specific political motivation, but that reflects a genuine and immediate human feeling that ultimately allows us to make that difference. I guess that is what will help me to make sense of the legacies of the decades I’ve lived through and work my way through the present.

Dan Cameron CONCLUSION: EIGHTIES Reconsidering a historical period that one participated in is a bit like revisiting the scene of a crime. This is even more so with regard to the 1980s, an especially flamboyant moment in time when one’s guilt over indulging in intemperate desires played an integral role in a standard evening’s entertainment. Even in retrospect, it is difficult to even try and envision the 1980s through all the smoke and carnage -- not without feeling a bit like a voyeur in somebody else’s peep show.

In terms of a personal narrative, the trajectory of the 1980s followed the arc of a deep-seated urge to establish credibility by moving beyond the confines of my neighborhood, just as I had left my hometown to come to New York. I spent the first third of the decade longing to see Europe, and the next two-thirds doing everything in my power to return there. In 1984 I quit my day job and started a rock band called Infra-Dig, and two years later I was writing for several art magazines at once and organizing exhibitions abroad, while continuing to record and perform in clubs.

As someone too young to have gotten Vietnam until it was practically finished, I found myself involved in Central American politics, until, almost overnight, AIDS went from consuming the periphery of my thoughts to encroaching on them as the main event. One’s own health suddenly became an overlapping concern shared with the health of millions of others, and the hours of the day had to expand to accommodate the needs of friends and lovers who were sick - whether that meant demonstrating in the street or being a sick-bed buddy. Having also missed the euphoria of post-Stonewall New York, AIDS was not the way I’d expected to develop my sense of community, but it was what my generation inherited, and over time I have tried to make the most of my position as someone who can, indeed, look back.

This list of detours and aspirations is very much in keeping with my retroactive sense of anxiety, once the 1980s were clearly at an end, that I really hadn’t done enough. I feared I was becoming a dilettante, but one whose interest in parties was insufficient to keep me firmly in the loop. At essence I had been living the life of a postmodern intellectual drifter, moving back and forth from Avenue A to Madrid’s Gran Via, from band practice to critical theory seminar, pretending to the best of my abilities to believe that it all added up to pretty much the same thing.

I am grateful to Maurice for providing the opportunity to engage in some shared reflection on the period. It perplexes me that many people opt to discuss the 1980s as if they were a kind of closed book, when my own experience in researching the period has been one of constantly refreshing my own memory, filling in a few of my considerable gaps in firsthand knowledge, and trying to grasp associations which in the past had eluded me. Like any period in living memory, the 1980s are still very much a part of the people who actually lived them, but no less a part of the people who have delved into the matter long after the fact. Through our varied projections onto the 1980s, it’s apparent that we will never arrive at a set of shared conclusions, but we can certainly conclude that the need to creatively and responsibly live with this history is very much a theme of the present moment.