Michael Holman

In the last ten years more than a dozen exhibitions on the Downtown New York art scene of the 70s and 80s have been mounted, all making their point with varying degrees of success. The latest addition to this cottage industry is 'The Downtown Show, The New York Art Scene, 1974-1984', a collection of more than 450 works of art and other artefacts, presented by New York University's Grey Gallery and Fales Library.

The show does not claim to be the definitive record of the Downtown scene. But it doesn't explain its glaring omissions, and neither does it justify its problematical proposition, that the period (1974-84) was one in which art was politically defined. The exhibition lacks the truthfulness of critic Rene Ricard who, in his famous 1981 article 'Not About Julian Schnabel', declared 'What do you say in a radically apolitical time when nobody knows what politics are after the hyper-politique of the 60s? ... I don't have a clue as to this period, if this is a period at all, so it would be futile to project anything. I don't consider this a personal shortcoming.'

The show is organised into eight groups, titled: 'Interventions', 'Broken Stories', 'The Portrait Gallery', 'Sublime Time', 'Salon de Refuse', 'The Mock Shop', 'De-Signs' and 'Body Politics,' characterised by phrases like, 'how artists took their art to the Street'; 'fresh look at the innovative and disjunctive narrative techniques'; 'a collective communal portrait', and 'artworks concerned with sexuality and identity'. Say what!? Are we talking about the same scene? This all sounds to me like they're forcing the Downtown scene into pseudo-intellectual constructs, much easier to package then the truth. Frankly, all we cared about was looking good, making great art, dancing all night, getting high as often as possible, getting laid as much as possible and becoming famous as fast as possible. Many of the important artists, writers, bands and filmmakers who made the scene – like Basquiat, Schnabel, Talking Heads, Karen Finley, Patti Smith and Eric Mitchell – are included, but the exhibition is busy, over-thought and under-represented; hard to dismiss but even harder to like.

Don't get me wrong, this scene was crucial to art history, and there are a few good pieces in this show, but the way it's been put together is downright weird. Already NYU boasts that its Fales Library has 'the world's largest archive focusing on the scene'. For what purpose? Is it strictly academic? Or might we be seeing future books, tours, merchandising and intellectual property schemes that exploit its so-called 'Downtown Collection'?

The curators have chosen the enactment of the 1974 Loft Laws (which made it legal for artists to live and work in the factory lofts), and the 1984 re-election of Ronald Reagan (signalling America's steadfast march towards absolute conservatism), as the defining parameters of the exhibition. But why? New York artists have been wrestling with real estate issues, and reacting to (or ignoring) greater American politics for decades. And in view of the curators' general choice of artists, 1974-84 seems way too arbitrary, adding to the clutter and confusion. Better parameters might have been 1978 – the year that Julian Schnabel blasted onto the scene with his broken plate paintings – and 1988, the year Basquiat died, not long after the deaths of Keith Haring and Andy Warhol. The one Schnabel in the show isn't a broken plate painting, but rather a 1974 painting, titled Draw-A-Family, which out of context, could almost have been made by anybody, and by no means captures Schnabel's historic impact four years later; a curatorial decision that is symptomatic of much that is wrong with the show.

Most, but not all, of the remaining paintings, photographs, sculptures, written material, videos and artifacts – as they are presented here – aren't particularly engaging either, and they aren't even particularly emblematic of either the scene or the chosen artists' better works. The two Basquiats in the show, the Harings, Kenny Scharfs (some pictures, some painted found objects) and a David Salle drawing are all average, and on it goes.

Hip Hop culture and graffiti art are unaccountably, almost entirely, excluded from the show. There is one half-decent undated token graffiti drawing on paper by Rammellzee, and that's it. Hip Hop culture had an enormously significant role in the Downtown scene, especially after 1981, and I see no valid excuse for its near exclusion. In 1981 Ricard, who was pretty much the scene's major voice (also unrepresented in this show), had written that 'The most accessible and immediately contagious productions in these shows (the 'Times Square Show', exhibitions at the Mudd Club, the 'Monumental Show', the 'New York/New Wave' show at PS1) were those of the graffiti stylists. The graffiti style, so much a part of this town, New York, is in our blood now.' Indeed, the absences of Hip Hop culture in the exhibition is made all the more striking and obvious by the over-representation in the exhibition of punk rock music, film, flyers and artifacts. Similarly the exhibition all but ignores crucial venues like the Mudd Club, The Roxy or Danceteria. Could it be that our scene, as it really was, was too hedonistic and apolitical to be packaged for academic discourse? Hey, they didn't call it Fun Gallery for nothing.

I feel a perverse need to protect and defend our libertine, sybaritic, 'ignorant' behaviour from the maws of political correctness and revisionist sanitizers. When Reagan was voted into office, then re-elected four years later, we just shovelled on more makeup, and shovelled in more drugs. And sure the ape-masked Guerilla Girls' protests, over the near exclusion of female artists in New York galleries, were valid. But they, individually, would never have risked being labelled 'party killers' by exposing their faces?! People were dying of AIDS – we were dying of AIDS – but do you think we took to the streets with the West Village Act Up crowd? It's not that we were dumb, we were just too hip to be overtly political. Our politics was the politics of aesthetics. Sure there were a few souls who were engaged in local politics and community issues, but they were in the minority.

We weren't proud of it, but we kept on fucking and sucking until we were exhausted, sans prophylactics. If someone stopped the music, we'd find someplace else to dance. Death was just another step, paved with good intentions, along the road to fame and immortality. When we were careful, it was to make sure they spelled our names right. That's the problem with the show for me. They're trying to force our round peg of throbbing abandon into their square hole of hyper-political consciousness, and it just won't fit (not that we were beyond giving it a go back in the day!). Politics, schmolitics, where's the party?

The Downtown Show: The New York Art Scene, 1974-1984 tours to The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh from May 20 to September 3 and the Austin Museum of Art, Austin from November 11 to January 28 2007.

Michael Holman has been performing with his band Gray (founded with Jean Michel Basquiat) off and on since 1979. His club, Negril, was home to Hip Hop's DJ Afrika Bambaataa, Grand Wizard Theodore, DJ Kool Herc, and the RockSteady Crew. He currently works as a film scriptwriter.