MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

In the decade between 1978 and 1988, over ten new nightclub-performance venues opened in the twelve square blocks comprising the East Village and the Lower East Side, providing nightly entertainment for and by a community of young artists. Attempting to convey the flurry of artistic activity, critics mythologized downtown as the “Elysian fields,” the scene as “phenomenal,” spoke of its “aura” and “mystical vitality,” but neglected any nuanced understanding of the political, economic, and social forces at play in its construction. Indeed, performance was the connective glue of the downtown community. Nightclub performances, in particular, were crucial in the construction of this community, creating a marketplace for the production and consumption of new cultural content. Entertainment—pleasurable symbolic and economic exchanges between performance and audience—emerged as a means to build and cater to new audiences, best seen in the vaudeville performances of DANCENOISE and Ann Magnuson, the stand-up comedy of Tom Murrin (The Alien Comic), the drag performances of Ethyl Eichelberger, and the music of David Wojnarowicz’s band Three Teens Kill Four. This paper argues that between the waning of punk and the art market boom of the 1980s, performance art found a way to create and profit from a market economy, despite the medium’s ephemerality. I contend that the growth of performance in the 1980s owes its success to neither ‘selling out’ nor subversion—as is typically argued—but rather to the entrepreneurial creation of what I call a ‘market-community,’ a community constituted by practices of production and consumption, and emblematic of the larger economic shift towards affective and immaterial labor in our post-Fordist ‘service economy.’