Roland Hagenberg et al. — East Village ’85: A Guide. A Documentary., New York: Pelham Press, 1985

Roland Hagenberg et al.
East Village ’85: A Guide. A Documentary.
New York: Pelham Press, 1985
Softcover, illustrated wrappers
Approx. 20 × 26.5 cm
160 pp., black-and-white and colour illustrations

Condition: Very good overall for a heavily handled period softcover. Visible rubbing, edge wear, surface creasing, corner wear, age toning, and handling marks to covers and page edges. Interior remains clean and highly usable. The wear is consistent with an object that circulated as guide, document, address book, scene report, and commercial instrument.

Edited by Roland Hagenberg, with contributions by Alan Jones, Michael Kohn, Carlo McCormick, Nicolas Moufarrege and others. A dense guide/documentary of the mid-1980s East Village art scene, combining gallery profiles, essays, maps, portraits, listings, advertisements, and social documentation. Includes references and appearances connected to Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Jeff Koons, Madonna, Kenny Scharf, Walter Robinson, Gracie Mansion, Piezo Electric, Limbo, Civilian Warfare, Artmart, Nolo Contendere, Wolff, and many others.

A book that converts a neighbourhood into a printed system.
Map, gallery, portrait, advertisement, essay, directory, gossip structure.

East Village ’85 does not sit outside the scene it describes. It participates in it. The book has the form of a yearbook, a sales prospectus, a local index, and a documentary device. Artists, dealers, photographers, critics, performers, and galleries are arranged as entries within a short-lived cultural economy. The East Village appears here not as myth after the fact, but as a working surface: named, mapped, promoted, monetised, and already becoming historical.

The commercial language is part of the object. Hagenberg’s project understood the East Village as a place where documentation and promotion could not be separated. The guide records the scene while helping to produce its visibility. In that sense it belongs to the same economy as the gallery card, the downtown flyer, the paid page, the art-world directory, and the social photograph.

As shop/object, this copy functions as retained evidence from a moment when art, nightlife, real estate, youth culture, and market formation briefly occupied the same paper field. Not a neutral guide. A printed mechanism for placement.

Shipping and handling included in the listed price. Dispatched protected and tracked.