THAT EIGHTIES SHOW.(East Village USA, theater review)(Theater Review)

"East Village USA," at the New Museum, explores a do-it-yourself art scene that took form suddenly in 1981 and flourished until its equally abrupt end, in 1987. Bold youths stormed an impoverished neighborhood that had been devastated, in the previous decade, by fire and crime. They promulgated nihilistic punk and nascent hip-hop, the rogue glamour of graffiti, haphazard variants of neo-expressionist painting, gamey performance art, drag-queen cheek, anarchist political deliriums, and bustling entrepreneurship. Limousines purring outside storefront galleries on grubby blocks symbolized a romance of the rich with the nether classes which gentrified the latter out of house and home, and betrayed their artistic progeny, as one season's cosseted graffiti master became the next's snubbed has-been. aids, fashion fatigue, real-estate speculation, and the lure of a booming SoHo for the more nimble dealers and artists, (who were fed up with tenements that afforded few spaces suitable for exhibiting or even making art) withered the scene's shallow roots. There was something toxically facetious about the East Village versions of avant-gardism and la vie boheme which heralded a shift to arch self-consciousness in American culture. (Writing in this show's catalogue, Liza Kirwin notes the nearly simultaneous debuts, in 1982, of a trailblazing gallery in the artist Gracie Mansion's bathroom and "Late Night with David Letterman.") But the half-cooked epoch was significant in ways that merit closer consideration than it has received.

The best art in the show, which manages to be both comprehensive and concise, tends to be the least reflective of the street-level East Village experience, with one exception. Nan Goldin's color photographs of determinedly broken youth--from her great, baggy suite "The Ballad of Sexual Dependency"--preserve the desperate, at times literally deathly, ardors of a generation that stayed up late to fit into each day its maximum quotient of mistakes. Her work's formal beauty and aching intimacy transformed a genre of kids-on-the-skids verite that had previously been identified with grainy black-and-white and churlish defiance. (Think of Larry Clark's winsome, strung-out oafs.) In "The Hug" (1980), a bare, muscular, strangely disembodied male arm clasps a frizzy-haired girl in a thrift-shop blue dress. Her face is unseen, but she feels known: daughter, sister, confidante. Flash-lit, with inky shadows, in a corner of a white-walled apartment, the picture is a baroque icon, becoming classical as its period qualities recede in time. Thanks to Goldin, the East Village moment lingers as a fable of tear-stained vitality that, thwarted by limitations both personal and cultural, stupidly but somehow magnificently threw itself away in drugs, drink, violence, and spasmodic erotic splendor. A suggested title for a musical version that would be truer than the formulaic "Rent": "What I Undid for Love."

In general, what survives as estimable East Village art is somehow atypical of East Village art, whose echt keynote was punkish amateurism, and whose strongest mode was ephemeral performance. (Projected videos of Karen Finley, Ethyl Eichelberger, Ann Magnuson, and other galvanic spirits in action are informative, at times hilarious and even moving, tribulations.) Most of the paintings in the show are terrible, ranging from the truculent clutter of David Wojnarowicz, an inchoate poete maudit, to the hysterical giggles of Kenny Scharf, whose maladroit cartooning no longer surprises. Marginally better, because they are firmly styled, are a shadowy woman at a window on Times Square by Jane Dickson and a painterly pastiche of a pulp paperback cover by Walter Robinson; they channel raw melancholy and righteous wit in properly low-down veins. Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring are important special cases, alike in being middle-class sophisticates who mythologized themselves as wild-child graffitists and became international stars. (Both died young, Basquiat of an overdose and Haring of aids.) Haring functioned as a one-lad advertising firm for sex and fun; his forte was less art ...