No doubt about it, the East Village scene is a howling success. In the three years since the first gallery, the Fun, opened up there, the tough turf of drugs, punk rock and prostitution that characterizes the blocks from Houston to 14th Streets, from Second Avenue to the East River, has posed a challenge to mighty SoHo as a breeding-testing ground for young art. Now, with its mean streets and dingy clubs still providing a sense of adventure, it's the place to show, go and be seen. So hot, in fact, is this artists' milieu, many of whose more-or-less improvisatory galleries are themselves artist-run, that it's taken on the dimensions of a Movement.
The work produced and exhibited in the East Village - coming from wildly different directions - has no special identity, though it tends to be smaller in scale (because of the reduced gallery size), and more involved with humor, satire and politics. Besides the showcase virtue of exposing new art faster and more cheaply than is possible in SoHo or Uptown, what this cluster of informal, sometimes down-at-heel exhibition spaces offers is a more intimate setting for the kind of work not considered high taste in the slicker, more establishment precincts. While it reflects the multiplicity of the general art market, the scene is marked by energy and profusion, and touched with the bloom of struggling youth. It not only has appeal for artists, but for art searchers, particularly those from Europe. Some 60 galleries and clubs now inhabit the area, purveying to eager acquisitors creations that range from graffiti to New Surrealism, from cartoon to message art, from Minimal to Neo-Pop and New Wave, from pure kitsch to solid substance.
Unlike East 10th Street of 30 years ago, however, where artists' co-ops struggled without a nod from the larger art world, the East Village has quickly become a brand name that gets attention in art circles everywhere. Two exhibitions of East Village art have already taken place outside New York: in California last November and December there was ''Neo York,'' at the University Art Museum, Santa Barbara; while in Philadelphia, ''The East Village Scene'' appeared around the same time at the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania. So portable, in fact, is the scene that in our own Manhattan, it's not enough that we have the ''live'' East Village itself. A package version has now been brought uptown, in a new show called ''57th Between A and D: Se lected Artists From the East Village,'' at the Holly Solomon Gallery, 724 Fifth Avenue at 57th Street (through Jan. 26). That means we don't even have to make the hairy trip to, say, East 11th Street, one of the city's main drug drags, to visit the work in situ. It's as if 19th- century Montmartre, during its own time, was excerpted for exhibition in a Paris Right Bank gallery under the title of, maybe, ''The Montmartre Experience.'' Once upon a time, an artist's milieu was simply a quarter whose inhabitants could live on the cheap and carry on as they pleased. Nowadays, the milieu itself makes a movement of the art produced there. The show at Holly Solomon presents work by artists from some of the ''leading'' East Village galleries, including Fun, Gracie Mansion, Patrick Fox, Pat Hearn, CashNewhouse, Wolff, Piezo Electric, Debra Sharpe, Virtual/ Garrison, Nature Morte, Dana Garet, PPOW and Civilian Warfare. Many of these small places have tidied up since their grubby early days, so the elegant space of the uptown gallery no longer seems de luxe as a background for their transported art. Nor does the art itself seem ill at ease in its new surroundings; though to be sure, it is probably closer to the spirit of this, shall we say lighthearted, establishment than to most others on 57th Street. But why the show at all? ''They want recognition,'' says Holly Solomon, who plans in the future to do ''dual exhibitions'' of certain artists with East Village galleries. ''They do a show, then other galleries raid them and take their artists away. Also, many of the East Village art ists have been influenced by those in our stable, some of whom have even been their teachers in art school. It's a natural connection.''
The obligatory pieces by Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf, two East Village alumni who have moved on to SoHo, greet us in the elevator hall: a panel of Haring's Magic Marker glyphs in black on brown metal; a worked- over cigarette machine by Scharf with kitsch appliques. Graffiti ''paintings'' by Futura and Fred Brathwaite also make ritual appearances; after all, where but in the East Village did graffiti first make it onto canvas? The best stuff here is in the front rooms, which contain some of the liveliest, most characteristically looney East Village works, among them a piece by Kiely Jenkins, ''Home of the Brave.'' It's a gutted TV set through whose screen we see a built-in blue-collar living room, occupied by a miniature couple. He, ensconced in a Barcalounger with a can of beer, stares out at us through the screen; she, turned away from the viewer, watches television. Outside their window looms MacDonald's. Rodney Alan Greenblat's ''furniture'' installation is adjacent, a captivating takeoff on your mother's front hall, with a wildly painted and embellished table bearing a decorative plate, and a ''serious'' painting hung behind it called ''A Balanced Universe,'' in which one of two merry fools reads a book on logic, the other a book on ethics. Nearby, Rhonda Zwillinger, another East Village name, has contributed one of her ''decorator'' mirrors, broken shards of gold-tinted glass glitzed up with gold sequins and blue plastic flowers.
Furniture, too, is the province of the Sanchez brothers, A. and P.O., whose mini-installation comprises another sendup of middle-class decor - a wooden wall cutout of a leering horse, and a painted chair rendered unsittable by a big, free-form drip painting in black and white whose bent form turns out to be an Australian boomerang board. Dan Friedman's ''Green Screen'' of painted wood is a folding screen that hilariously blends a Cubistic and a comic-strip vocabulary. Each of its partitions is an abstract body totem, with appropriate apertures, topped by a zany head, including that of a Smurf. Another comic touch is Nicholas Moufarrege's ''Edward Brad Munch,'' in which the poignant Munch painting, ''The Cry,'' is juxtaposed on a panel with a vintage Roy Lichtenstein cartoon, ''I Know How You Must Feel, Brad'' - all done in glittery Lurex thread. A strong painting in the Rauschenberg-John s mode, but politically tinged, is ''Just a Little Bit of the Tin Drum Mentality,'' in which a globe hangs in front of a plane whose seething white surface of broken canvas pieces is embellished with United States greenbacks, a burning baby, a blue bird with a drum and other ironic motifs. It's the work of David Wojnarowicz, another East Village name now being seen in larger spaces.
The rest of the exhibition is the rather predictable mix of any group show bent on giving pluralism a whirl. Neo-Surrealism rears its head in Cheryl Laemmle's canvas, ''Confined,'' a fallen tree trunk metmorphosing into a horse in a landscape of stark white rocks, and in Will Mentor's ''Angel,'' a big, white, prosthetic-looking structure with two white wings thrusting toward it, set in a rich swirl of Tiepolo-colored clouds. Sue Coe gives us a generalized political message in the form of ''Riot,'' a Brecht-inspired scene of mayhem in the streets, and Rick Prol inveighs against urban rot in ''Slowly,'' a marionette-like figure in camouflage dress holding a Tommy gun as he garrotes himself before a stark tenement background. Among the more interesting sculptures - most of them small - are Walter Martin's ''Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz,'' a tiny but romantic bust of a man in burnt plaster perched atop a polished, crooked stick and Ted Rosenthal's mock ''Coat of Arms,'' a wall piece of painted steel whose key elements are an erratic fork and spoon. Not to be scanted on the sculptural side is Kathleen Thomas's ''GR 84 (Gravity's Rainbow),'' a very scientific-looking space object that hangs in midair. On the other hand, it should also be said that a fair percentage of the work here is unimaginatively awful, especially - to single out some - the paintings of Stephen Lack, Rich Colicchio and Louis Renzoni. Well, more than any other, the East Village is a place to be bad in, too.
Meanwhile, back on the scene itself, where new galleries still seem to open every 10 minutes, there is Ground Zero, which occupies the old Civilian Warfare space at 526 East 11th Street. (Civilian Warfare has moved to larger quarters on gentrifying Avenue B.) It's run by James Romberger and Marguerite Van Cook, young artists who have named the gallery for the cartoon strip they once did for the East Village Eye. ''We're not serious art dealers,'' says Van Cook, in the old East Village spirit. ''We do and show what we like. It gives us a lot of freedom. When we can't do that any more, we'll go on to something else.'' Right now, they've turned the gallery over to Robert Costa, a downtown writer and exhibition organizer, who has produced his own East Village show, ''Start Again.'' Among the uneven mix in this tiny space, there are some standouts, including a black-and-white drawing by Calvin Reid titled ''God Forbid This Should Happen to You'' that wittily hints at an artist's travails; ''Husband, Father, Drunk,'' a cartoony painting by a team that calls itself Cockrill/Judge Hughes that gives a scurrilous account of the nuclear family, and ''The Golden Egg,'' a cleverly wrought sendup of baby clothes and baubles by Bonnie Lucas.
Jokingly warning that the East Village bubble may be about to burst, Costa fantasies that his show is already part of a ''post-East Village revival,'' rising on the ashes of a burnt- out scene. At this point, that's still a joke. But it's noteworthy that what started out as a casual community of young artist-dealers alienated from Establishment marketing methods is - inevitably - being subsumed in that very structure.
A version of this article appears in print on Jan. 13, 1985, Section 2, Page 29 of the National edition with the headline: GALLERY VIEW; EAST VILLAGE GETS ON THE FAST TRACK.