“The Rivington School” Curated by Adriaan van der Plas at FUSION ARTS

James Kalm ponders the question, IS THERE PROGRESS IN ART? Your correspondent has heard responses from certain quarters repeating a proposition regarding where painting or art is today? Saying “that’s hopelessly twentieth century thinking”, Kalm reflects on Arnold Hauser writing in “The Philosophy of Art History” that (paraphrasing) “art history doesn’t move in a predetermined way…that progress in art isn’t always a move forward…many times, progress is only in the way artists reassess and reinterpret the past…” The East Village could be a prime example of this happening right here, right now. So much has changed since the scene burned out around 1987-89. AIDS, the art market crash, gentrification, the collapse of SoHo and the ascendancy of Chelsea and Brooklyn, to mention just a few. If you wanted to be taken seriously in the late nineties, it was almost required that you purge your resume of any mentions of the EV. Beginning with Dan Cameron’s exhibition at the New Museum “East Village U.S.A.” in 2004 there’s been an ongoing rediscovery/reevaluation of the whole scene and its effects on the art world at large. There’s an ongoing series of recent shows featuring various EV people and venues. Each of these re-dos has its own slant, its own flavor and its own relationship to how contemporary people and artists perceive the legends and myths that were created in the East Village. Nostalgia may be deadly, but without a past, there is no present from which to perish… Your reporter popped in to record the opening of “The Rivington School” Curated by Adriaan van der Plas at FUSION ARTS last Thursday night. Artists included: Scot Borofsky, Jim C. (James Cornwell), Michael Carter, Christopher Hart Chambers, Linus Corragio, Angel Eyedealism, Richard Hambleton, E.F. Higgins III, Ken Hiratsuka, Istvan Kantor, Julius Klein, Shalom Neuman, Robert Parker, Therese Rodrigues, Susan Strande, Toyo Tsuchiya, Kevin Wendall (aka FA-Q), NIna Sobell, Krzysztof Zarebski This program was recorded April 18, 2018. http://www.fusionartsmuseum.org/ https://archive.newmuseum.org/exhibit... https://brooklynrail.org/2005/02/art/...