Appropriation artists like Prince or Kruger investigated
the contradictory messages hidden behind mass media imagery and questioned
the gender roles and stereotypes of consumerist society. The booming
Hip-Hop movement introduced protagonists who came from the graffiti scene,
among them Keith Haring, Jean-Michel
Basquiat, and Futura 2000. Nan
Goldin photographed the underground scene on the Lower East Side. To
this day, the era of Studio 54, the Mudd
Club, Danceteria,
and performance venues like The
Kitchen remains a model for a club culture in which Hollywood
stars, politicians, and media people can mingle with artists, celebrities
of the scene, and suburban kids eager to party.
Singers Boy George (left) and Marilyn with
Andy Warhhol, 1985
Photo: Dave
Hogan/Hulton Archive/Getty Images, © Getty Images
Fans
became stars; stars became fans. It seemed as though Warhol's
legendary prognosis that in the future anyone could become famous for
fifteen minutes had become reality: Jenny Holzer's Truisms ran
along the electric news ticker display above Times Square; the Young
Wild Ones, the artists of the Transavanguardia, and painters like Julian
Schnabel were featured in lifestyle magazines and associated with the
young European aristocracy that bought their art and went out to clubs
with them. And with Jeff Koons' arrival on the scene, a new prototype of
the media art star was born, a successor to Dalí
and Warhol who was as slick as the shiny surfaces of his stainless-steel
bunnies.
Futura
2000, Untitled, 1984,
Deutsche
Bank Collection
In retrospect, the
pictures from this time seem like the relics of a romantic and somewhat
naïve age in which the world was both easier to understand and "weirder,"
in which boundaries could still be transgressed. In reality, however, the
early eighties heralded the end of the subculture. As the squatters,
musicians, and artists moved into problem areas and inner-city ghettos,
the process of gentrification was set into motion. Real estate agents
followed in the footsteps of the creative avant-garde. And while discos
like the legendary Area were transformed into exhibition spaces and
graffiti artists and punk musicians were shown in museums, artists and
scene celebrities increasingly metamorphosed into managers and PR wiz
kids. The commercialization of the underground was greatly accelerated by
MTV, which supplied viewers in the suburbs with images and trends that had
previously only been accessible to the initiated. Celebrities like Princess
Gloria von Thurn und Taxis appeared as self-styled Society
Punks—true-blue examples of the post-modernist individual who appropriated
formerly subcultural codes as a fashion accessory destined to soon be
replaced by the next hip look.
Nan
Goldin, Kee in bed, E. Hampton, N.Y., 1988
Deutsche
Bank Collection
Signs and roles
increasingly lost their meaning; it became difficult to obtain an overview
of any kind. Post-feminist theories questioned seemingly unassailable
categories such as male and female and pegged them as social and cultural
constructs generated through media portrayal. Not least, AIDS radically
altered social notions of sexuality and gender. The vast numbers of
deaths, thousands of which occurred in the art and culture scene alone,
led to vociferous debates. A flood of reports on HIV-infected stars like Rock
Hudson and Freddy
Mercury as well as the coming-out of prominent figures who had
previously concealed their sexual orientation behind a heterosexual façade
forced a wider public to confront the subject of homosexuality head on.
|
Robert Mapplethorpe, Cross,
from
"Für Joseph Beuys", 1986,
Deutsche
Bank Collection
The AIDS debacle also led to
an increased politicizing of art. A cultural war raged in the United
States. Just as the Reagan Administration cut funds on health, tens of
thousands of the afflicted could no longer afford the expensive HIV drugs.
The conservative right preached ultra-religious family values, curtailed
women's rights, and discriminated against homosexuals. In 1986, a group of
activists founded ACT UP in order to
put pressure on idle state and federal officials and the pharmaceutical
industry. Other groups masterminding public actions were the Guerilla
Girls and Gran
Fury, who operated with strategies similar to Barbara Kruger's. In the
financial district of downtown Manhattan, for instance, they handed out
money that resembled dollar bills on one side, but on the other were
printed with aggressive slogans like "White Heterosexual Men Can't Get
AIDS ... DON'T BANK ON IT."
Keith
Haring, Untitled, 1983, © The Estate of Keith Haring,
Deutsche
Bank Collection
For David
Wojnarowicz, the struggle with AIDS and the situation of sexual
minorities also played a dominant role. His work combines poetry with
polemics and a demand to be heard, to have a voice. In 2006, Wolfgang
Tillmans opened his art space Between
Bridges with a Wojnarowicz exhibition because the approach of the
artist, who died of AIDS in 1992, is still crucial to him: "I've had a
feeling for a long time that an apolitical attitude prevails in the art
world, although political involvement is acutely necessary. We're in
exactly the same situation now as we were then. But maybe the wealth of
the art world led to this odd separation from the world of politics."
Richard
Prince , Gwen Stefani,
from "all
the best", 2000
Deutsche
Bank Collection
©Richard Prince
But
perhaps it was easier to take on a position during the eighties than in
the globalized and confusing world of the present day. Now, the decade
seems like a schizophrenic era that oscillated between activism and cool
apathy, painting and appropriation, punk and disco, shoulder pads and thin
ties, hedonism and death. At the time, the departure from the modernist
project also meant the end of the grand narratives that explained the
world to us. Anything goes, the leitmotif of contemporary culture, is
based on phenomena that in the eighties became a part of mass culture — a
coexistence of styles and the appropriation and recombination of a wide
array of signs and sources. Since that time, the Internet has opened the
door to an inexhaustible reservoir of images and sounds that can be
sampled and remixed. And while Photoshop has long since replaced the Xerox
machine, the principle has remained the same since the eighties: copy &
paste.
Translation: Andrea Scrima
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