ABC TV.

As neither thoroughbred boomers nor gen-xers, the members of the demi-generation born in the late '50s and early '60s - my own - have always felt like history's mutts. Proximity to, and thus osmotic knowledge of, the utopian '60s fantasies entertained by older siblings wasn't the same as participation in them: We were too young. Too young as well, though only just, to claim as our own the funny, sour, dystopian response to the failed premises of the Revolution - punk (which response, of course, had also "failed"). Fittingly - and comically - the period of our own delivery into maturity coincided with a slippery transitional passage in the wider culture. We hit adulthood just as the quasi-socialist welfare model of American society, put in place by FDR, suffered eviction and replacement by the Reagan era's roaringly vigorous model of Darwinian competitiveness and self-interest uber alles. Whereupon another irony: My peers, forever "too young," were now too old to claim as their own the clear-eyed gaze of the Reaganite hatchlings then flocking to Wall Street and flooding the nightclubs. Much as some among us might have wished it, the ruthless cultivation of self-interest so natural to Reagan Youth was not to be our birthright. Although only a few years our junior, those kids were unblemished by memories of the Vietnam era, much less the Weathermen, and thus enjoyed - and I mean enjoyed - a very different relation to government and especially to capitalism.

As for a transitional generation, so for its artists. Of course, good artists will play whatever hand they're dealt, and even win chips with it. The Conceptual artists of my generation, who exhibited during the '80s East Village fever at the storefront galleries Nature Morte, International With Monument, Cash/Newhouse, and, a little later, at 303 and American Fine Arts, did just that, spinning significance out of our odd, unstable inheritance and advancing our impure status with inventiveness.

These artists - among them Peter Nagy, Alan Belcher, Oliver Wasow, Karen Sylvester, Jennifer Bolande, Gretchen Bender, Robin Weglinski, Steven Parrino, Cady Noland, Richard Milani, Peter Halley, Kevin Larmon, Haim Steinbach, Julie Wachtel, Jessica Diamond, Joel Otterson, Tom Brazelton, Meyer Vaisman, and myself - were primarily white, college-educated suburbanites who, mostly from instinct but at least partially in reaction to the existentially overwrought art hyped in the press, offered objects and images that were intended to appeal to the emotions by way of the brain. Whatever envy we might have felt toward the oft-photographed neo-expressionists was directed at their wardrobes, not at their art. Our aesthetic sympathies lay with the mass-media/institutional-critique artists headquartered at Metro Pictures. We were on friendly terms with Cindy and Robert, Sherrie and Louise, Laurie and Richard. When we needed to publish writing or images we offered them to Tom Lawson and Susan Morgan's REAL LIFE magazine or to Arts, at the time under Richard Martin's editorship and startlingly open to artists' ideas for articles and "pieces."

I was part of the Nature Morte crowd (the in-house writer, as it were), so this essay is necessarily skewed toward that gallery's aesthetic. A travelogue narrated by a representative of another gallery might point out different flora and fauna, but describe another planet entirely? - I doubt it; all of us were part of the same solar system. An additional note: While chartered as a gallery, Nature Morte also functioned as something of a think tank. There was a back room, tiny and, toward evening, smoky; in it, lively, intelligent people regularly hung around for hours, watching the action and sharing ideas and analyzing stuff and making each other laugh. A generous spirit was loose in that place; if you're rich with ideas, you feel comfortable giving some away. So, when in this essay I write "we," please imagine a point somewhere on a continuum between an improv comedy troupe and a board of directors.

We who comprised the Nature Morte/International/Cash, et al. set were basically nth-generation Pop artists. As had been true of the legions of Pop artists before us, ours was fundamentally an art concerned with the vast synthetic world established by the camera - in television and movies, in advertisements and magazines, in photographs - and, more abstractly, with the conditions of visual experience to which the camera has accustomed the eye. (Even a painter's painter such as Kevin Larmon, in his handmade, Morandi-esque repetition of an imaginary still life, engaged the camera's capacity for mechanical reproduction, if perversely.)

Of course, every generation since the Second World War having offered up its own, there's nothing intrinsically distinctive about being the latest group of camera-centric Pop artists. That America is Pop, now and forever, is just a fact of life. We gosling East Village Popsters were (to borrow a line from George Trow) only telling the truth about our imprinting. But no truth is arbitrary. Exact will be the coordinates of that experiential matrix which to any given generation signals Pop Truth Now. And since no artist ever again need dedicate energy to making the essential Warhol discovery - that of America's modern incarnation in its mass culture - each subsequent report is obliged to transmit news of some evolution. That obligation we fulfilled. Warhol had concentrated on the idea of Pop. Essentially a recognition of the way a new cultural infrastructure had impacted identity, the tone of his work had been impersonal, objective, speechless - stunned. Fifteen years later, the Metro Pictures artists figured out how to get emotion into Pop. What was the emotion? For some reason, anxiety. Longo's melodrama, Sherman's nausee struck not always the same note, perhaps, but a consistent chord, yes - a chord composed by Bernard Hermann. The horror, the horror. We East Village Conceptualists, on the other hand, made Pop personal, playful, everyday. Logically so: With Pop become as nature, its coldness will seem like warmth.

Mind you, there were limits to exactly how cold things could get: We worked in the precyber age. Just prior - the personal computer had been invented, but most people still tapped away at electric typewriters. So, we weren't computer kids. The glow we sported came from prolonged exposure to another screen.

In an essay entitled "The Guiding Light" (written in 1985 to accompany "Infotainment," the first substantial touring exhibition of works by Nature Morte's artists, plus fellow travelers Peter Halley, Laurie Simmons, and Sarah Charlesworth), I remarked that "my generation is defined by its experience of peacetime (lacerated occasionally by terrorism), the atomization of history's authority, and perhaps most singularly, the cold glue of television." We were TV kids. Sure, references to film-induced sensation showed up in the work of some - in Jennifer Bolande's sculptures, in Gretchen Bender's movie-title pieces - but the motion picture didn't stand as our core experiential model. We deemed the movies' investment in illusionism too steep; it amounted to an investment in dishonesty. Too, their presumption of their own importance - and thus their importance to the audience - struck us as arrogant. Everything about the scale of movies felt wrong.

Television had our vote. Still, we were more than just American kids who had grown up with TV and had gone on to become artists. We were conscious of being the first generation of American artists not to regard TV as an enemy. We were the first generation of American artists for whom it was authentic to feel that TV wasn't the demise of civilization but instead the linchpin of a contemporary informational infrastructure, unnamed and still forming, perhaps, but by which we did not feel at all intimidated, from which we derived joy, and in which we even took pride. This stance was a contribution, because it advanced a reality of the culture. It recognized that a strange new world had done in the old - and that however strange, this new world had not managed to prevent the young from liking life.

Within the more parochial confines of the art world, our pro-TV attitude signaled an important power shift. The traditional eastern-seaboard intellectual had resisted and at every opportunity denigrated the tube. For a new generation of educated, Manhattan-based culture critters to consciously accept TV as (at least) a pleasurable condition of life meant that the hierarchical, Euro-inflected concerns of the postwar New York School had lost serious ground to a more indigenous value system, the frank embrace of which was fast becoming a hallmark of artists working in that risen capital, Los Angeles. Even the Metro artists, much as we admired them, were still dealing with film, essentially, and still accessing, however subliminally, the respect accorded cinema. Our group, having been born a little later and thus a little farther away from where American culture had been - Europe - acted as a bridge leading into where the culture was heading: TV Land. Outside the confines of the art world, construction of said bridge was already well advanced, of course; the attitude held by the East Village Conceptualists just forced the art world to adjust to the realities of the day.

Did we all make videos nonstop, then? No. The East Village galleries saw very little video, actually; the camcorder technology available produced too crude a look. Of the group considered here, only Gretchen Bender worked seriously with the medium, fashioning exhilarating multimonitor video symphonies such as Dumping Core, 1984.

In what, then, did our endorsement of television consist? Here I am again, in "The Guiding Light": "To the children of Barthes and Coca-Cola, television affords the opportunity to monitor consumer civilization from our bedrooms." (Fancy talk, for a thief; the reference rips off and riffs on Godard's characterization - remember Godard? - of his films of the '60s as portraying "the children of Marx and Coca-Cola," My mid-'80s update surfed the cresting influence of semioticians - remember semioticians? - and of Roland Barthes, the most widely known of the tribe.) We, the children of Barthes and Coca-Cola, anointed TV to he our core experiential model of camera-centric Pop because television provided a window onto late capitalism's vast social and cultural infrastructure. If this attitude marked us as unromantic and worldly and dry-eyed, well, we meant it to. There'd been quite enough melodrama already, thank you. We had no use for either '60s naivete or '70s embitterment. Cynicism springs from disappointment, disappointment from naivete; obvious, it seemed to us, that to ward off cynicism's black flowers, naivete had to be nipped in the bud. We wielded the shears cheerfully.

"[My] generation loves t.v. because it frankly admits with every absurd inch of videotape that it exists solely to commodify everything it touches, and this transformation of the imagination and spirit into Product is the heart of the American story in the 20th century." As a medium that honestly interrupted itself every fifteen minutes to tell us just who brought it to us and, more important, why, TV effected the most radical reconciliation of contrasting and complementary realities extant. Television integrated commerce and entertainment, journalism and show biz, war and froth, sound and image, and did so with an attitude of fairly naked honesty about its intentions. That honesty accounted for much of its attractiveness. TV's habitual bean-spilling prevented viewers from sinking into illusionistic/narrative depths, mindless addiction to which had made movies so tiresome. The tube seemed to us the right kind of shallow. As we watched, we knew perfectly well that the camera was capable of lying, or at least that it believed whatever it was told, and so, making the best of an imperfect world, we opted to believe in disbelief. On that surface which TV kept us close to, we frolicked.

In a way, of course, the surface was mighty thin ice; television, the perfect medium for a generation accustomed to occupying the sidelines of history, was about to encounter in another piece of technology, the PC, a profound challenge to its authority - indeed, the only real challenge it had ever had to face. Within the art context, the confrontation between the two screen systems was staged - and, to some degree, resolved - in the work of the East Village Conceptualists. h was in their art that the dominant Pop mode, reinforced most powerfully and insistently by TV, began to dovetail with visual strategies distinctly of the Digital Age. Television, supreme repository of the signage of capitalism, and the computer, audience enabler par excellence, began to overlap and to merge.

The moment manifested itself as an obsession with visual strategies of integration (particularly at Nature Morte, where a focus on the question of how to organize visual information reflected the graphic-art backgrounds of gallery founders Alan Belcher and Peter Nagy). While David Salle painted triple-exposed images in a manner originated by Picabia, while Robert Longo rendered anxious 3-D versions of Rosenquist's billboard-collage, the younger infotainers, influenced by TV's radical synthesis of complement and contrast and, perhaps just as essentially, by the neither/nor, both/and condition of their native suburban landscape, pursued a radical synthesis of elements aptly described as postcollage. In Nagy's paintings, Ashley Bickerton's in-your-face combines, and the sculpture of Belcher, Joel Otterson, or Jennifer Bolande, discrete informational entities, whether material or imagistic, relinquished part or all of their identities toward the creation of a hybridized whole. (About the same time, as if on cue, science confirmed the postcollage strategy with a model of its own: the gene splice.) The evolution of computer technology may have perched these artists on the cusp of the predigital era, but the more precocious among them had by instinct already converted to the gospel of seamlessness that the cyberworld would soon preach. That effortless erasure of seams that Photoshop accomplishes with a click of the mouse these artists already carried out, albeit in more laborious fashion, with Xerox machine and paint or with stone, wood, and metal.

Or with a photograph and its support. Belcher and Bolande led the way in prying photography off the wall and out of the frame to let it stand upright on the floor, thrust forward into space, cascade from the ceiling. By emphasizing that photographs were physical things, the two artists extended the medium beyond both its pictorial hang-up and the more Conceptual practices of John Baldessari, John Knight, Richard Prince, et al., which, evolutionary intent aside, still worked a 2-D groove. In Bolande's work of the time, single photographs were incorporated into organic, determinedly tentative sculptures that flicker between abstraction and representation, landscape and body; in Belcher's, photos plural, referencing the synthetic/commercial realm, figured in playful volumetric constructions. The photo-object was flat-out invention - precedented perhaps in the display industry, but hardly at all in the biz of fine art. (Man Ray's oeuvre, Martial Raysse's, Marcel Broodthaers's - each of these might feature one or two examples, yes, but only incidentally, not as a focused pursuit.)

Once uncorked, the postcollage aesthetic expanded outward, engulfing, dissolving, "digitalizing" materials, images, styles, genres . . . (visual traditions, even. The monolithically integrationist, One World philosophy inherent to the Information Age disposed the East Village Conceptualists toward spotlighting aesthetic similarities rather than differences. From there it was just a gene splice away to combining, say, visual expressions of the ecstatic, exampled in Baroque and Rococo art, with their contemporary Pop manifestation in rock 'n' roll, a subculture equally dedicated to sensory overload. Whether the results - Nagy's paintings, Otterson's furniture sculptures - embodied a Pop rococo or a rococo Pop, none of us knew for sure, and the confusion felt appropriate and true). A flashy technique was no excuse for textual vacuity, however; the discrete, the intact, the separable may have become transmuted into the hybridized, the synthesized, and the temporary, but to the children of Barthes and Coca-Cola the result had still to deliver as signage, had still to reward our interpretive impulses at least as richly as had the source material prior to its transformation. Otherwise, why go to the trouble of making this stuff? By the same token, substantive intentions weren't enough, either - which meant that content alone wasn't enough. The presence of "critique" or "commentary," no matter how brilliant, didn't justify an experience of visual impoverishment. Integration, integration, integration! Content and lush physicality, mind and body, were meant to flirt, seduce, cohabit, rut, and finally settle down to a union happy with tension, A balance of qualities being the condition of life, we looked to include beauty, wit, sensuality, artifice, and rigor in every object, permitting no quality to become more dominant than balance.

The jacuzzi's motor was a little rusty, but once we'd gotten it started up, things got plenty sexy, Perhaps seduced by the bubbles, most of us opted to abandon any pretense of performing deconstructive surgery on society's ills. What, we wisely asked ourselves, was the sense of devoting our imaginations, our energies, our live, to making art about that version of the world that we didn't like? Whining about the demise of the classical world, carping about the world that capitalism had made - this was too easy. It was hypocritical, to boot: We'd seen artists get rich off their honed complaining, Moving decisively out of response mode, we jettisoned the discourse of unhappiness and voted instead to make art about all the thing, we liked - rock 'n' roll, fashion, TV, movies, architecture, sex, furniture, travel, humor, oh, abstract thinking - in order to build the world we preferred, We rejected the notion of justifying art by assigning it, a priori, some therapeutic function, and exposed it again to the risks of life.

We were right to do so, for our lives as well as our art. We shifted the young avant-garde's attitude from tragedy to comedy, from disintegration to integration, from deconstruction to construction. Truth's coordinate, keep shifting - the computer gradually supersedes TV as the core experiential model of media, and cloning has already replaced the gene splice as a metaphor (all those cast-resin bodies littering the galleries!), The most lasting contribution of the East Village Conceptualist, intangible, but appearing everywhere since, may turn out to have been our restoration of a discourse of happiness - affirmation of the present and receptivity to the future - as an option for ambitious, thinking artists. Before our loosely clustered group took up its meager winnings and dispersed - to India, Bali, Venezuela, Toronto, upstate New York, Kentucky, Chicago - we had carried out a generation's work.