Librería Samer Atenea
Kálamo Books
Librería Elías (Asturias)
Librería Kolima (Madrid)
Librería Proteo (Málaga)
In the early 1980s, a few blocks of Manhattan’s East Village became the most creative square mile on earth. A generation of artists, musicians, performers and misfits turned cheap storefronts, basement clubs and abandoned walls into stages and galleries. They forged a cultural synthesis of punk rock and hip hop that went on to conquer the world. Steven Hager was there with a tape recorder.Hager wrote Art After Midnight, the first book on Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf. This volume collects the full interviews he recorded for it. Most were done between 1981 and 1985, while the scene was still exploding. Instead of looking back with hindsight, the people who made it happen talk in the present tense: about their art, their rivalries, their parties, their money troubles and their dreams. Hager lets them talk, and the secrets come out.Here are Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf before the fame took over. Here are Fab 5 Freddy, Futura 2000, Lee Quiñones, Phase 2 and Al Diaz, who carried graffiti from the subway yards into the galleries. Dealers and curators Mary Boone, Tony Shafrazi, Annina Nosei, Diego Cortez, Bill Stelling, Richard Marshall and P.P.O.W. explain how the art market discovered downtown. And here are the stars of Club 57, the Mudd Club and the Fun Gallery: Ann Magnuson, John Sex, Joey Arias, Patti Astor, Katy K, April Palmieri, Tish and Snooky, Wendy Wild, Steve Mass, Mickey Ruskin, Anita Sarko and many more. Also included are Julian Schnabel, David Wojnarowicz, Tseng Kwong Chi, Glenn O’Brien, Lenny Kaye, Hilly Kristal of CBGB and Fred Schneider of the B-52’s.Sixty-one interviews in all, alphabetically from Animal X to David Wojnarowicz. They’re illustrated with photographs, gallery invitations, club flyers and artwork from the author’s collection, many never published before.These conversations record a moment that can’t happen again. In a few short years, heroin, AIDS and rising rents killed the scene and forced most of its people out of Manhattan. Hager argues it took fewer than thirty artists, banded together and ignoring the market, to change the direction of culture. Their own words show how they did it.Art After Midnight: Conversations with Steven Hager is the companion to Art After Midnight: The East Village Scene. It’s an essential first-hand history of the downtown New York art world that produced Basquiat, Haring and the art of the 1980s.
