The Face of Downtown: Strokes for a Portrait
Berman, Paul
Every place and time has a representative personality. For downtown New York in the period just ending—the New York of Soho and the East Village, middle 1980s—the representative personality is a...
...So there is a conflict...
...Strong emotion can be seen only in the lens of an absurd telescope...
...True reality can only be found by seeing through the deception, by unmasking the culture that surrounds us...
...Nonetheless there are portraits...
...If it first seems to be non-sense, wait: roots will reveal themselves...
...Roland Barthes applied a parallel notion to the study of popular culture...
...For downtown New York in the period just ending—the New York of Soho and the East Village, middle 1980s—the representative personality is a certain type of bohemian, similar to other bohemians we have known, but with distinctive traits...
...but to drive people out the door is nearly impossible today, given ticket prices...
...Being off balance makes the true downtowner feel more at ease, because off balance is how he feels inside...
...The idea left no room for common sense, since common sense presupposes that reality is obvious...
...At its worst this produces the numerous pretentious passages in Foreman or Acker...
...David Salle attaches a Santa Clause sticker to one of his canvases, covers another painting with cartoon alligators, and there's no way to know what he means by this...
...De-hypnotize the brain...
...It puts you off balance...
...The smallest-seeming fact reeks with meanings that someone has created in order to manipulate you...
...I point to one called The Birth of the Poet...
...the obsessed brain is otherwise occupied...
...He wants to smash the golden calf...
...The attitude is visible in David Lynch's Blue Velvet, which shows passionate love, but only by first establishing an absurd environment and absurd sexual obsession, so that any time you think the film is taking the sexual passion seriously, you are made to recall that all is in fact a straight-faced send-up...
...The downtown personality is dominated by ironic bemusement and obsession, and of all mental states, bemusement and obsession least allow for intelligence...
...The composite drawing is a little cartoonish, too crudely penciled, and like all composites looks stiff and FALL • 1987 569 THE CULTURE OF THE CITY unlifelike...
...Acker's Quixote is a woman in love with a female dog who looks like a boy and was in love with a feminine man who was able to respond because the female dog is boyish...
...Life is reduced to a cultural reference...
...Even without a sexual quirk, the quality of obsession is central to the downtown personality...
...Likewise in the streets of downtown...
...Is it about God...
...A fantasy about New York after the Bomb, another revery about sex—all with Foreman's characteristic crowds and giant human props thundering across the stage, and wispy sounds wafting from the musicians, and enormous dogs painted by Salle gazing stupidly from the backdrop...
...You can see this in a poker-faced, witty film like Jim Jarmusch's Down by Law, where the characters stumble around a bayou swamp in which every leaf and vine evokes the movies...
...The sense of being removed from real life, combined with self-absorption, mixed resentment and sentimentality for the dominant culture, a flip anti-intellectualism that turns into grandiosity at the drop of a hat, all this combined with the hokum that in every era accompanies the avant garde—these traits aren't necessarily perfect for producing great works...
...572 • DISSENT THE CULTURE OF THE CITY An example, if I can reach back to the last decade and a slightly different era, is the avantgarde masterpiece by Robert Wilson and Philip Glass, Einstein on the Beach, another opera, in which events on stage and in the orchestra pit are so cool, monotonous, obsessive, and original, that your mind goes into idle, and like all idle things, gets into trouble...
...Plays by Caryll Churchill, the English playwright, offer something similar...
...A fantasy about ancient Rome, a revery about sex...
...This isn't for real, folks...
...Now, the political consequences of perceiving the world as a vast deception manipulated by elites turned out to be unfortunate for the movements that relied on this branch of radical thought...
...Anyone with a love for theater could have appreciated Charles Ludlam, but I dread what most readers will think when they pick up Don Quixote...
...Thus the style that Acker calls "plagiaristic," but which could better be called "vandalistic," along the lines of improving Mona Lisa...
...In the real Don Quixote, the mad knight comes across a crowd of people on the road including two Benedictine friars, whom he mistakes for evil enchanters and attacks with his lance...
...4. The downtowner is also amused by his own predicament as a prisoner of culture...
...It is not an aimless resentment, nor an inward-turning one...
...The downtown personality is a thwarted personality, and the more thwart, the more wry...
...New Music may be said to offer the higher-consciousness version of same, where obsessive droning is the main idea...
...The berserker sexual aspect of the downtown personality dates, of course, from the preAIDS period...
...The late Charles Ludlam was a genius at this sort of thing...
...The downtown sensibility requires exactly that ambiguity...
...And with this background in mind, the downtown resentment can be specified...
...And though today is, as should have been noticed, the Age of S/M (go to the movies and you come home black and blue), the tendency of this woman's sex fantasies to involve her getting knocked around outraged the audience, which fled up the aisles and out to the grimy streets, on the grounds of, Better the outside of Brooklyn than the inside of Kathy Acker's head...
...As a cultural insight, however, the idea hasn't ceased to prosper, for instance in the field of literary theory, where the lack of common sense is generally regarded as no drawback...
...For there on stage was a certain kind of selfobsessed character, a modest personality in the grip of grandiose fantasies, a radical, a fraud (let's face it: the kind of person who doodles all over the page and calls it an opera), a bore, a person of fitful originality...
...That's how it is with the downtown personality...
...No single art work has managed to evoke this personality in all its characteristics...
...Fuck off...
...It was a collaboration by Richard Foreman (staging), Kathy Acker (book), David Salle (scenery), and Peter Gordon (music), which made it something of a World Series for at least one branch of the downtown avant garde...
...q FALL • 1987 • 573...
...But in the year since then, Acker has published Don Quixote, a novel, Foreman has won an Obie for Film is Evil, Radio is Good, Salle has exhibited his dogs and other works at the Whitney, sundry plays and films by other people sharing some of the same ideas have appeared...
...Here's an idea of my own invention," Foreman's character says while pulling a plug...
...So what...
...2. The downtown personality resents this situation...
...It isn't sullen, like the resentments of the 1950s...
...Humor makes the downtown personality looser and better-spirited than his grim cultural analysis might suggest...
...She was riding her horse along, in order to find sex that wouldn't hurt too much...
...Please beat us up...
...The downtowner wants to emancipate himself and everyone else from the deceptions of the imprisoning culture...
...It was, though, a scandal...
...And not only did The Birth of the Poet manage to shock, it also—so I thought—depicted...
...To begin with, the downtowner seems to love the popular culture that he resents...
...At this point she saw three to four hundred men...
...Political movements that lack common sense have short lives...
...It could hardly be otherwise...
...Let us say that the avant garde doesn't have to write the "news that stays news," that it's enough merely to write the news, if there is any...
...Who cares...
...Says who...
...Notes on the Process of Making It...
...but history has moved on...
...The collaborators described their work as an opera...
...7. The downtowner has an ambivalent relation to intellect...
...Why the umbrella...
...That doesn't leave much space...
...Modern culture—especially popular culture—is the cause...
...Salle is merely doing what art teachers do in art school, getting the students to paint a series of spheres, a series of cones, and so forth, with no value placed on one cone as opposed to another...
...I quote a description by Enrique Fernandez in the Village Voice of a recent Spanish film made by Pedro Almodovar: "In the film, Carmen Maura plays a man who's had a transsexual operation and, due to an unhappy love affair with his/her father, has given up men to have a lesbian (I guess) relationship with a woman, who is played by a famous Madrid transvestite...
...Take me out of myself...
...The news is that people are actually like that...
...I'm afraid that The Birth of the Poet, being a fiasco, didn't present this personality in a fully rounded way...
...Foreman frankly doesn't mind writing pretentious passages or even lapsing into nonsense...
...A modest-looking young woman stood on stage declaiming preposterous fantasies and reveries...
...It should be mentioned that the only kind of sexual excess not explored by the downtown scene is conventional male overenthusiasm...
...What difference does it make...
...8. Mostly the downtowner exists in a state of disorientation...
...Not like today...
...He feels that his own incapacities aren't the cause of his predicament...
...Of FALL • 1987 • 571 THE CULTURE OF THE CITY course this is an international and not merely a downtown New York trait...
...Looking at his paintings, you can't help posing Big Questions, to which come back dismissive answers in the vernacular...
...We do not have a Henry Murger, no Scenes de la vie de l'avenue A, not yet, anyway...
...My God," she said . . . "Here come the friars...
...Benedictine...
...That's because the downtowner is a prisoner of culture...
...but you are not, in fact, seeing anything Awesomely Grand, nor anything definable at all, and you suspect this, too...
...Noam Chomsky expressed it politically in his early essays on liberal ideology...
...That was impressive, Anyone can bore an audience, and The Birth of the Poet did its share of that...
...In those days of yore," writes Acker, "a man loved a woman who loved him...
...We belong to the order of St...
...Actual experience may exist and from time to time may get the upper hand...
...Mention Leave it to Beaver or early rock and roll, and the radical downtowner will weep real tears—or fake tears, who knows...
...And so forth, relentlessly...
...The downtowner suspects that passionate feelings and ways of living exist—but not in our time, in any case not for him, due to the false culture that he understands too well...
...The bemused brain is pretty much empty...
...are all the response I would anticipate to my questions and objections...
...In Acker's case, vandalism means doing Don Quixote without the mustache—as a woman out adventuring...
...The resentment felt by the downtown personality is a form of cerebral radicalism and it expresses itself as a program for liberation...
...In William Hoffman's play As Is, the characters remember how they used to be crazed sexual adventurers, and loved it...
...The Birth of the Poet was a spectacular theatrical failure of 1986 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music...
...Therefore his characteristic gesture is comedic, controlled, not hilarious...
...6. Filled with these (pre-AIDS) sexual and other obsessions and confusions, ironic and disillusioned about the wall of culture that imprisons him, the downtowner can't help feeling frustrated, vulnerable, and disappointed...
...This particular resentment derives from the 1960s...
...relentless, not zany...
...The downtowner veers from absolute intellectual modesty and renunciation to the most grandiose intellectual posturing...
...5. The downtowner has dissolved into sexual confusion...
...But what do we want from an avant garde...
...You haven't the slightest idea what's going on, and you find yourself struck by your own confusion...
...Why the hip and thigh...
...He's not interested in searching out the "authentic," the way his predecessors of twenty-five years ago were...
...The back-and-forth between intellectual emptiness and the suspicion that something large and important is being said generates the interesting quality in David Salle...
...Since the sole reason she ever went out of her house was to fuck, she decided that to be happy's to fuck...
...but the downtown personality has trouble identifying this experience or knowing how to respond...
...Well, just picked through, in my opinion...
...He may be snickering at the popular culture, he may be snickering at high art...
...But the distinctions aren't meant to be taken too seriously...
...I detect eight traits: 1. The representative personality of downtown New York is someone who feels divorced from actual experience...
...The downtowner relishes making arcane distinctions between popular culture that is beneficent and popular culture that is not, e.g., Film is Evil, Radio is Good...
...He (or she) gazes in the direction of real life, and it is movies, plays, books, and pop music that gaze back...
...And vice versa...
...Yet a face emerges...
...The End of the World...
...Sometimes the roots never do reveal themselves, of course...
...He's painted these objects so flippantly, yet with so much air of importance, you can hardly believe your eyes...
...He prefers instead to laugh at himself in a self-ironic manner...
...Herbert Marcuse expressed the idea philosophically in One-Dimensional Man...
...In Don Quixote by Acker, Quixote the woman goes on the road reflecting on how much she likes sex...
...You begin to wonder, what is this strange monotony about...
...Hence your disorientation...
...That is the aimed-for result, not always achieved, of the ambivalent attitude toward intellect...
...But that's Salle's achievement...
...The gap between internal heat and external cold is another source of downtown irony and humor...
...There's no intellectual content at all...
...And drawing from these various productions a trait here, a feature there, it's possible to assemble a fuller portrait, the way that police artists piece together portraits of murderers from the memories of unreliable witnesses...
...But because he does have such an analysis, the humor necessarily takes the form of ridiculous or ironic commentaries on the culture...
...Nor was it exactly a drama, since the book served mainly as one more object for the actors and creators to get weird about...
...3. The resentment felt by the downtown personality is not, however, a straightforward feeling...
...Sense can't be avoided...
...You have to laugh...
...Arthur Danto, in explaining why he doesn't much care for Salle, says: "The work appears to situate itself beyond good and evil, hence outside the sphere of critical discourse altogether, so that such snarls as Oh yeah...
...With Acker I always feel I'm in a weird, witty revery, then have been rudely transported to a graduate student lounge where some pompous bore is expounding theories about postdeconstructionism...
...He is trapped in a windowless room of these things...
...In the streets of lower New York in the middle 1980s, there is, in fact, some news...
...Every era has its own taboos...
...The message was: What you see when you look at the world should enrage you, and the less obvious the reasons for rage, the angrier you should feel...
...Richard Foreman actually wheels a golden calf on stage in Film is Evil, Radio is Good, in case you 570 • DISSENT THE CULTURE OF TEE CITY don't get the point...
...He paints a gigantic woman's hip and thigh, and hangs a real-life umbrella in front, and the viewer is thrown into a tizzy of interpretation...
...It's impossible to say...
...Understand— it ALWAYS makes sense...
...Of course it wasn't an opera, since the music played a minor role...
...is the downtowner's cry...
...For the idea that visible reality is a deception, that culture is a tool of manipulation, that the obvious world is essentially delusion—this idea was the foundation stone of all the great original radical thinkers of the 1960s...
...On the other hand, the downtowner's impulse to unmask things and ridicule the dominant culture is largely an intellectual inspiration...
...Don Quixote decided that the only thing's to be happy...
...How to evaluate the art of downtown is, in the end, partly a matter of who you are...
...Therefore the downtowner — especially the downtown woman and the downtown homosexual— hides, but only halfway, a hot, romantic interior beneath a cool, critical, rueful exterior...
...The suspicion that you're seeing something Awesomely Grand accounts for the power of Einstein on the Beach...
...Is it meant to be read, they will ask...
...Very likely the downtowner has also become obsessed with some kind of sexual quirk, for instance getting slapped (the Benedictines), or tying up little boys (Albert Inauratto's last play, Coming of Age in Soho...
...The obvious truth is that Salle has painted a hip and thigh out of appreciation for female beauty, then has occupied himself with finding other objects that are visually related to produce a theme and variations...
Vol. 34 • September 1987 • No. 4
