New York, When It Sizzled

If the purpose of art is to reflect and illuminate the spirit of its age, then New York City's avant-garde scene in the '60s and early '70s was a worthy expression of a tumultuous time. Huddled together in a few low-rent blocks of lower Manhattan, a remarkable band of visual artists, theatrical innovators, dancers and composers, loosely allied in their rejection of both traditionalism and a previous generation's idea of radicalism, supported and inspired one another in what was then a lonely pursuit. "The collaborative element of those years was crucial," remembers Composer Philip Glass. "I mean, you'd walk down the street and run into Lucinda Childs or Bob Wilson, Laurie Anderson, Merce Cunningham or John Cage. It was like people say Paris was in the '20s."

Adventuresome audiences that had made the pilgrimage downtown to Leo Castelli's influential art gallery on West Broadway in SoHo, for example, might encounter minimalist sculpture by Don Judd and Richard Serra or hear Glass's new sounds in concert. Near by, Performance Artist Anderson was playing her violin on a street corner while wearing ice skates atop a melting block of ice. Composer Steve Reich had already experimented with out-of-sync tape loops in pieces like Come Out; Choreographer Childs had created her early works, like Street Dance. "No one organized an official group or issued a manifesto, as would have occurred in Europe," says John Howell, a New York % journalist who was part of the scene. "Instead, it was just wham."

The key to the era's ferment was the notion that an artist need not be confined to a single area of specialization. Instead, eclecticism ruled. Glass's early minimalist pieces relied heavily on unvarnished scale passages, enraging some listeners who thought his music sounded more like etudes than formal compositions. Anderson tried her hand at sculpture before evolving her distinctive combination of music, narrative, films and slides. In The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin, which received its U.S. premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1973, Wilson welded elements of painting, set design, music, ballet and pantomime into a single twelve-hour work. Many found it initially difficult to come to terms with the avant-garde's startling modernist images, such as Stalin's dance for 19 ostriches or its chorus line of caricatured black mammies swaying to the strains of On the Beautiful Blue Danube. But those who did, witnessed the foundation of much of the art of the '80s.

Eventually the downtown scene burnt itself out in a blaze of success. Rampant gentrification has made SoHo's once funky lofts affordable only to the moneyed, and its former have-not inhabitants have also become chic. Anderson has forsaken the streets for major concert halls like the Brooklyn Academy, where in 1983 she performed her six-hour multimedia epic, United States, Parts I-IV. Wilson directed Marc-Antoine Charpentier's baroque opera Medee last fall in France; Reich's music has been performed by major orchestras from San Francisco to Cologne. The next extraordinary concentration of creative artists is now probably taking shape. Wherever it turns out to be, it should be compared not with Paris in the '20s but to New York City just a decade ago.