Product Description

Downtown is more than just a location, it's an attitude--and in the 1970s and '80s, that attitude forever changed the face of America. This book charts the intricate web of influences that shaped the generation of experimental and outsider artists working in Downtown New York during the crucial decade from 1974 to 1984. Published in conjunction with the first major exhibition of downtown art (organized by New York University's Grey Art Gallery and Fales Library), The Downtown Book brings the Downtown art scene to life, exploring everything from Punk rock to performance art.

The book probes trends that arose in the 1970s and solidified New York's reputation as arbiter of the postmodern American avant-garde. By 1974, the hippie euphoria of the previous decade, with its optimism, free love, and paeans to personal fulfillment, was over. In its place emerged a new kind of experimentation--in art, sex, drugs, and rock and roll. The seven essays featured here examine from different perspectives how Downtown artists constantly pushed the limits of both traditional media and the art world. Art critic Carlo McCormick addresses the energy, power, drugs, and nonstop erotic motion that propelled the scene. Music historian Bernard Gendron explores how minimalism, loft jazz, and Punk all occupied the same Downtown spaces. RoseLee Goldberg, the noted scholar and critic of performance art, looks back at ten years of its ascendancy Downtown. English professor Robert Siegle casts a critical eye on the literature of the Downtown scene. Librarian and archivist Marvin J. Taylor surveys Downtown as both geography and metaphor, and grapples with the question of how best to organize and preserve materials that often challenge the very notion of the archive. The book also includes seminal essays on the critical theories underlying Downtown art, by Brian Wallis; and on Downtown film, by Matthew Yokobosky.

The essays are intercut with personal reminiscences by such renowned pioneers of the Downtown scene as Eric Bogosian, Richard Hell, Lydia Lunch, Ann Magnuson, Michael Musto, and Martha Wilson. More than 150 striking photographs feature Downtown denizens and galleries; works by Cindy Sherman, Keith Haring, and many other artists; and hotspots such as CBGBs and Club 57. Hip and provocative, The Downtown Book provides a rare glimpse into the cauldron of the New York artistic counterculture--and the colorful characters who inhabited it.

EXHIBITION SCHEDULE

Grey Art Gallery and the Fales Library
New York University
January 10 - April 1, 2006

The Andy Warhol Museum
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Mid-May to September 4, 2006

Austin Museum of Art
Austin, Texas
November 11, 2006 - January 28, 2007 (tentative dates)

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #707231 in Books
• Published on: 2005-10-17
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

Kenneth Baker, San Francisco Chronicle
"Lower Manhattan at the turn of the 1980s has become in legend one of those crossroads of music and art".

Review
The Downtown Book: The New York Art Scene 1974-1984 celebrates the era's creative commotion, much of it scattershot and under the mainstream radar.
(New York Times Style Magazine )

For readers with an interest in New York's art history, the detailed chronology alone makes the book essential source material.
(Kenneth Baker San Francisco Chronicle )

Review
This is a terrific and important book. It brings an interdisciplinary view to one of the most fecund decades in the history of avant-garde art.
(Peggy Phelan, Stanford University )

Customer Reviews

Uneven
I agree with the previous reviewer: why no Basquiat? Yet that brings me to my major issue with the book, which is the uneven quality of the included essays. Berbard Gendron's essay on downtown music and Matthew Yokobosky's essay on no wave cinema are useful and interesting, yet the reader is punished with Robert Siegle's vague essay on downtown writing, an absurd essay about modernism vs postmodernism, and an absolutely awful essay by Carlo McCormick. Here's a sentence by McCormick:

"Between the communality of the great psychedelic orgy and the mortal dread of viral transmission, the concupiscence of youth proliferated a polymorphous perversity that explored the politics of desire, the social ideals of attraction, and the aesthetics of fetish in a carnal celebration of ideogrammatic Sexpressionism."

Someone get him a copy of _The Elements of Style_.

In any case, the book is filled with some really interesting photos and reproductions, so I'd say it's worth a look. I just wouldn't pay full price.

A great cross-section, but where's Basquiat???
This book indeed contains a good cross-section of the artists, writers & performers navigating around the downtown NY art scene between 74 & 84. Great photographs & an excellent Chronology feature at the end of the book. BUT: How do you get by sub-titling a book The New York Art Scene 1974-1984 without showing one photo of or one piece of work by Jean-Michel Basquiat, or writing one full paragraph concerning him? There are only scattered mentions of him here & there & the only photo we get are a couple of stills from Downtown 81. It's true that I didn't buy this book expecting in-depth Basquiat coverage, but still, there could have been at least a bit more on him. I'm only knocking off one rating star for that since besides the lack of Basquiat pictures, this book is an excellent summary/chronology of an increasingly important & often overlooked period of American art.