Writer, cartoonist, and now curator Anthony Haden-Guest has organized a new show at White Box gallery (through August 23) that looks at New York City club culture, spanning the mid-1970s to the early ’90s. It is a milieu that Haden-Guest knows intimately — both from living it and writing about it in his 1997 book, “The Last Party: Studio 54, Disco and the Culture of the Night.” In addition to ephemera (like an invitation to a Doomsday party), the exhibition includes grainy photos of rockers, experimental videos, graffiti, and edgy, unfussy paintings. Artists like Lorna Simpson and Karen Finley and photographers Andres Serrano and Mick Rock are among more than 50 artists featured in the show.Haden-Guest noted that he will be adding more artists to the roster and rehanging the show over the course of its summer run, explaining that it’s about “discovering more material as it moves along.”“I want it to be not the traditional art show at all,” he said. “I want it to be people like experiencing what it was like living then.”ARTINFO spoke to the party expert about Studio 54, nostalgia for a lost bohemian life, and what New York’s art world is missing today. So, to begin, what is club art, how is it different from what’s being made today? I have never in my life lived through a period like today in which there is so much derivative art, and in good galleries — I am not talking about dumb galleries. That’s why I have a particular interest in the art and photography that came out of that whole life of clubs. Because mostly the artists and photographers there were just people. With a few exceptions, they were mostly making what they were doing with absolutely no eye on what was going on in the gallery world. It was an interesting culture of its own. What they were doing was not part of the gallery economy — they were very much in opposition.Do you think there is nostalgia for that outsider spirit today? One thing I’ve noticed is that the past used to come back pretty slowly. People started getting nostalgic about the 1920s about 30 years later, in the 1960s. People got nostalgic about the 1960s in the 1980s. And now people are already nostalgic about for the period of Studio 54. And there is a particular nostalgia here in New York as it goes through a devastating change of the growing wealth gap. The kind of edgy bohemian life is becoming harder and harder to live here. So that time seems like a very tainted golden age.How did this club life feed the art?Andy Warhol described the success of Studio 54 as: “Dictatorship at the door, democracy on the floor.” And there was that extraordinary populism. When I came, it was a time of New Journalism, and one of the things about New Journalism was this intense curiosity about other people. The mix at the door was deliberate — Steve Rubell described it as a “salad.” He tried to get Eurotrash, rich people, guys from the docks, and nerds, whatever — he wanted an interesting mix. But, well, those times have passed. It is not a huge popular movement anymore. Back then, everybody wanted to get involved. When people were not trained artists and were performers and rockers, making art was huge cultural meld.And it all began with Studio 54?It is all equated with Studio 54, but that is a bit unfair. Because there were other places back then like the Mudd Club, and so forth. But in a way, it is accurate, because during that whole Vietnam period the majority did not go to clubs. They went to sit-ins, they went to run-ins, they went to marches. Clubs were what their moms and dads went to. Certainly everybody wanted to party. But you had the women’s movements, you had the gay movement, you had every type of liberation movement explored at the same time in glorious abandon. There is a particular emphasis on photography in the show from work by Bob Gruen to Roberta Bayley. Why? This whole thing began as a New York phenomenon and it went totally worldwide. Newspapers, particularly in England and France, would not be putting paintings on the front page; they were putting photographs of naked people painted silver — that’s what spread the phenomenon.How did the clubs transform New York? The New York to which I came in the mid-70s was still a city of neighborhoods. People in Brooklyn, for instance, had funny accents, accents you don’t hear anymore. But, ironically, Studio 54, disco, Eurotrash turned New York into an international city that it remains today. It is no longer a city of neighborhoods in that old sense.Why did the party end?It died down for a number of reasons. You have to consider Mayor Giuliani as one of the reasons. Also, you have the rise of community boards, the incredible difficulty getting liquor licenses, things of that nature. Club life was kind of shut down. Like I say, with the rents, and a huge mass of people moving out to Brooklyn, obviously, that is going to have an effect. I don’t think we should get nostalgic for squalor and poverty, but on the other hand but it is better than the 99.9 percent to .1 percent situation these days.
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