With Downtown/Uptown: New York in the Eighties, gallery Lévy Gorvy Dayan aims to make the case for the 1980s as a vital – and currently relevant – decade of artistic output. The blockbuster show has brought together a who’s who of 80s art, with major pieces from Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente, Jeff Koons, Keith Haring, Cindy Sherman, and many others.
The goal for Downtown/Uptown is quite simple: to showcase the decade’s best art for new generations. “I was thinking about what art was pivotal to the moment,” said Brett Gorvy, show co-curator. “And also what over time has become pivotal. We’ve been lucky to be able to access the greatest paintings of so many of these artists.”
According to Gorvy, the 80s were typified by the central role of celebrity in the art world, as well as being a decade marked by the Aids epidemic and the ascendancy of a hyper-capitalistic mentality. Gordon Gekko’s refrain “greed is good” rang out everywhere, especially the art world, as artists’ journeys from rags to riches were frequently marked by frenzy and extravagance.
“Artists are literally taking things out of dumpsters and creating art, so it seemed like the opposite of Wall Street,” said Gorvy. “But what happens to many of these artists is that money came very quickly. Ultimately there were drugs and excess.”
The show taps legendary art dealer Mary Boone, herself a major figure in the 80s art world, to co-curate, offering an unparalleled expertise into the minds of the artists – one piece by Basquiat demonstrates Boone’s intimate role, a punching bag onto which he has written her name in block letters below his iconic crown. “It’s been amazing working with Mary Boone, who was the queen of Soho,” Gorvy said. “She has been this incredible collaborator – ultimately her connections with the artists allowed me to piggyback onto that and have a show that is both historical and that feels very relevant.”
Downtown/Uptown opens with a showcase of Warhol’s silkscreen portraits, including ones of show luminaries Clemente, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Basquiat, as well as a very fitting one of dollar signs. “Warhol is a very important figure in the show, because he’s the lynchpin for all this activity,” Gorvy said. “He was a mentor, and his Factory was a place where you could congregate as an artist. There’s the notion that these are young kids basically being presented by Warhol as the superstars. He essentially created the celebrity aspect.”
Beyond the all-encompassing effects of money and celebrity, the Aids epidemic also permeated the 80s art world – this aspect of Downtown/Uptown comes into focus in Ross Bleckner’s 27764, which represents a tally of those lost to the disease at the time the work was created in 1987. Done in a muddy off-white and consisting of innumerable strokes, the work is somber and deeply affecting – it’s a jumping off point for the deeper, mournful looks into HIV that Bleckner would make throughout the 90s. “It looks almost like legions of wounds on the canvas,” said Gorvy. “And then, right in the middle, is this number, in this like gothic script.”
In addition to being ravaged by Aids, the art world of the ‘80s was also ravaged by the plague of sexism, a fact that anonymous art collective the Guerrilla Girls managed to declare with an inventiveness and sarcasm that turned heads. Downtown/Uptown pays the collective due respect by showing some of their wittiest posters One such poster notes how the Guggenheim, Met, MoMA, and Whitney collectively featured just a single female artist in a one-person exhibition in 1984. Another wryly collects the “advantages of being a woman artist”, which include “not being stuck in a tenured teaching position” and “having the opportunity to choose between career and motherhood”.
Gorvy acknowledged that Downtown/Uptown is very unbalanced when it comes to representing female artists, noting that this fact is sadly reflective of the realities of the ‘80s art world. “What’s striking about this show is the very strong male voice,” Gorvy said. “That notion of female artists finding their own sort of room to grow was not something that existed in the painting world of the 80s. The galleries of the time were not necessarily choosing female artists to promote. I think we have seven female artists in the show, which proportionately is probably pretty accurate.”
According to Gorvy, the part of 80s artistry that most permeates the art world of today is the focus on figuration, which originally came back into style after a 70s dominated by a harsh and chilly minimalism. “The primacy of figuration today is something where the birth of that was in the 80s,” Gorvy said. “It was very much a reaction against minimalism and the cold mentality of artists not having a hand.”
Downtown/Uptown also offers a fascinating opportunity to see how the major works of the 80s have sorted out. It would seem almost impossible to do an 80s show without paying due respect to Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ – which almost singlehandedly launched the culture wars over the arts that would last well into the 90s – yet when Gorvy namechecks those artists who have truly endured, the figure who tops his list is Basquiat.
“With an artist like Basquiat, the authenticity of his work is of bringing the history of the street, of graffiti into the gallery,” Gorvy said. “It has a vitality that just touches you. There’s a reason why Basquiat is one of the top artist today commercially. He’s, well beyond anyone else in the show, the most expensive artist who we have in the exhibition, and he has a relevancy both in terms of younger artists and of the collectors.”
Gorvy shared that while working on Downtown/Updown he frequently thought of his 20-year-old daughter, musing on what someone of her generation would want to know about the world of 80s art. “I was thinking of why the 80s should speak to this generation,” he said. He sees relevancy in the fashion and music of Gen Z, an opening that will hopefully make for curiosity. “We’re hopefully introducing these artists to a new audience, showing a full spectrum of artists so that young people can understand it in a very holistic way. In my mind it goes back to the notion of my daughter and asking, ‘How do you pass the baton of something that’s very special?’”