1980s: AIDS and its related stigmatized groups were political ball and cultural transgressors, during the post disco times; attracting diverse gravities to their “macro atmosphere”: new wave music and leftover punk rock, with its coterie of middle class anarchists hanging out in Tompkins Square; graffiti’s center stage role in the art world’s narratives and postures; drag queens reverting their recreations by bringing a new kind of persona, named after buildings, Alice Tully Hall, Miss Gracie Mansion; airlines, Miss Pan Anne; streets, Rue Paul; street language, Miss Mira Mira. Highly acclaimed photographs by a white man, Mapplethorpe, of hot looking black guys were “a must to talk about” in the kultur circles below 23rd. Keith Haring got a chappel in a cathedral. At Avenue C, Cafe Life used to serve breakfast until 5:00 p.m. “De rigor”, black t’shirts and pants were to be worn downtown.
Breathless by Godard was the aleph bringing all of us and them together. Shown at the Film Forum, it was a hit with the new generations; and, as if touched by a collective miracle, downtown, a la Seberg, went black. The previous after the war periods of romantic tales, inner searches, dogma driven discussions, soft colors and sensual forms exploring the inner self of the abstract expressionist could not tell the stories evolving in the cities. The 80s, expressionistic they were, but of a different kind. It was the starting point of a period, darker than how is usually described, that reached its peak or plateau 30 years later with a different pandemic and no Jean Seberg as model to imitate or symbol to internalize. Yet the need to relate with images, statues included, grant them -consciously or not- power, how one responds to them seem to continue driving the macro/meta/overpowering symbolic culture. By the way, I nerve wore solely black in one given outfit.
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