ReActor is part of the 2016-17 Architecture Omi exhibitionWOOD: From Structure to Enclosure
1405 County Route 22
Ghent, New York, artomi.org

Atop a grassy hill, a typical Modernist slab house is hoisted aloft by a slender concrete pillar. Visitors to Architecture Omi in rural Columbia County, New York are struck by this magical, topsy-turvy vision as they emerge from the woods at the foot of a large open field. As they climb through mown grass toward the apparition, it becomes clear that the pillar is highway-overpass grade, and that the house is fully habitable, complete with plumbing and cooking systems neatly diagrammed in primary colors visible through transparent walls. This impressive engineering feat is ReActor, the fifth collaboration of artist Ward Shelley and architect Alex Schweder. All their joint projects have involved physically occupying, or as they put it “performing,” their deviant architectural inventions. ReActor is the least demanding so far in terms of performance, and the most ambitious structurally and aesthetically. It is also the first to directly address architectural genre, with the legacy of the high Modernist glass house placed onto a figurative, no less than literal, pedestal.

In my first visit to ReActor, under baking August sun, the sculpture was unoccupied. As I was trying to decipher how the weight of the house and its contents was secured to the cylindrical pillar, a welcome breeze began to spin and tip the house with the sluggish, machined majesty of a George Rickey kinetic sculpture. The structure, rather than being solidly attached, was simply resting the transverse beam of its roof –– a very Mies van der Rohe beam –– on a swivel point on the pillar, thrust through its interior.

My second visit took place on a dramatically overcast October afternoon, with the artists in residence (as they periodically will be during the two year installation). Their weight, as well as a gusty wind, made for far more spinning and tipping than before, although they took it in stride like veteran sailors. The house’s symmetry is rigorous, with dual balconies at the ends, dual beds and desks (lamps, chairs and personal items may be akimbo), and a central core of bathroom and kitchen, exposed like the HVAC systems of the Centre Pompidou. There is a theatrics of quarantine in the performances of Shelley and Schweder. As in an ocean crossing or space travel, all food and water must be cached in advance, five days for the performance I saw. Cooking and dining elements can be assembled when needed; stowed, they make a witty, De Stijl-style grid of primary colors, a detente between Rietveldt and Ikea. Closer in one notices a delightful detail that recalls the decorative survivalism of Andrea Zittel: two ready-to-use place settings made from colored boards hung sideways on the kitchen wall, each with magnetized cup, plate and silverware stuck in place.

The artists’ fourth collaboration, In Orbit (2014), was an immense mill wheel of bolted plywood built into The Boiler, Pierogi’s cavernous Brooklyn project space. It could be rotated freely on a sewer pipe rigged from the ceiling. For 11 days within the five week run of the show, Shelley lived perilously on the outer, upper slope, some 30 feet above the concrete floor, while Schweder occupied the lower, inner edge. Reciprocal furniture, kitchens and chemical toilets were distributed around the wheel, and the artists, walking in lock step, oppositely, could spin the required sector, hamster-like, to vertical. Every mood and whim of hygiene was thus a gravely serious comedy of negotiation. If Shelley and Schweder performed the architecture, it performed them, too.

Unlike the forced cooperation of In Orbit, however, ReActor’s architectural script allows for Shelley and Schweder to wander freely about their own wings, or to congregate in the middle. A rough reciprocity is observed, nevertheless, as eccentric distribution causes some tipping. (Joining one another for a drink on either’s balcony is out of the question.) Still, ReActor is neither perilous nor claustrophobic compared to In Orbit, or to Shelley’s other occupied sculptures (in collaboration with Schweder or otherwise), which include tunnels, elevated platforms, flattened ant-farm colonies, and secret mouse-like quarters inside a gallery’s walls. ReActor, by contrast, is a bucolic retreat. Even Shelley’s usual drama of endurance was deemed superfluous here, the artists only sporadically taking up residence. And fair enough: uninhabited, ReActor’s bold structure and setting strike the iconic, coffee-table-book pose of a Modernist masterpiece all the more –– without humans, that is, to mess up the architecture.

There has always been a respectful kinship between Modernist architecture and abstract art — whether geometric or biomorphic — since their mutual origins in the post-World War I European avant-garde. The relationship still thrives, though a sidelong critique began to hit “home” with Richard Hamilton’s interiors, along with Roy Lichtenstein’s better behaved ones. A bit later, Richard Artschwager’s textured paintings and flattened furniture and David Hockney’s cliffside L.A pools, among other projects, widened the ambiguous Pop embrace. And recently, Modernist architecture, in all its daring glamor, totalitarian hubris, and trickle down banality, has been gathering momentum as a subject, per se, of contemporary art practice. Across a broad spectrum, from the contemptuous to the fondly nostalgic, even perhaps to the credulous, Günther Förg, Enoc Perez, R.H. Quaytman, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Amie Siegel, Thomas Ruff, Marsha Cottrell, Jorge Pardo, Mike Kelley, Jeremy Blake, Matthew Barney and numerous others have addressed their work to the legacy, direct or indirect, of Modernist masters.

And it is surely a mixed legacy. Ruskin, some fifty years in advance of Mies’ defining less-is-more dictum, defended fertile Gothic inventiveness from Renaissance symmetry with a prophecy: “No architecture is so haughty as that which is simple.” The haughtiness, as much as the simplicity, seems to be just what interests many contemporary artists about modernism. In any case, despite the utopian ideals of the Bauhaus, its invocation of Medieval brotherhoods and democratic transparency, a dark side inheres in the corporate accommodations of Gropius and Mies in the new world, and generally to the International Style as it came to be cluelessly and expediently practiced in America: not only numberless crass glass towers, including a certain orange pustule on Fifth Avenue, but bland suburban high schools, like the ghostly one modeled in Kelly’s Educational Complex. Worst of all is the legacy of so-called urban renewal, symbolized by the failure of mass housing projects such as the imploded Pruitt-Igoe, which was inescapably, if clumsily, derived from Le Corbusier’s Vichy-commissioned studies in urban planning. If ReActor’s concrete piloti reminds us of the rigor of the Villa Savoye, it also beckons to Léon Krier’s observation that Corbu’s later, highly expressive innovations in concrete were inspired by Albert Speer’s Atlantic Wall defense bunkers. And speaking of opportunistic fascist sympathizers, Philip Johnson’s baronially sited Glass House in nearby Connecticut may be ReActor’s most immediate paradigm.

Part of what makes the legacy of Mies and Corbu, Walter Gropius and Frank Lloyd Wright, Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler, et al. such compelling subject matter for contempoary art may be that the dark side of Modernism was subliminally reinforced by Hollywood. In Thom Anderson’s brilliant documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself, we learn how Modernist trophy houses, perched on cliffs above the city, came to be the default mise-en-scène for evil foreigners, insinuating perverts, drug lords, and corrupt politicians by an accident of convenience. Over a location shot from L.A. Confidential, a 1997 throwback to classic noir, in which Richard Neutra’s seminal 1929 Lovell House plays the airy, cantilevered home of a murdered pornographer, Anderson’s narrator sums it up: “The movies have shown these pure modern machines for better living are dens of vice.” Anderson’s film also examines the numerous roles played by Jack Lautner’s1960 Chemosphere house, a hexagonal flying saucer that, not unlike ReActor, is perched atop a slender concrete pole. Cast as “the bachelor pad of a lunatic driller killer” in Brian De Palma’s Hitchcock homage, Body Double, Lautner’s structural audacity, influenced by a long mentorship with Wright, went down as camp.

 There is a touch of camp, actually, in the “body double” jump suits, one orange, the other red, worn by Shelley and Schweder as they go about their roughly symmetrical business. Suggesting both maximum security prisoners and operators of heavy machinery, the costumes function most of all to diagram the architectural narrative through ReActor’s transparent walls, the bright colors drawing the eye as in an Oskar Schlemmer dance-lecture at the Bauhaus. Diagramming narrative is, of course, Shelley’s artistic obsession. Aside from sculpture, he draws and paints intricate timelines of untold histories, including avant-garde art scenes and movements, television shows, car stylistics, and intimate autobiography. The shape of time, in his deeply opinionated, visually inventive telling, is a spaghetti of interweaving plots. Shelley’s intestinal timelines have been getting richer and more encrusted, with illustrational content now punctuating the flow, and the whole scheme often assuming punning outlines in the infographics tradition of gnarly “trees” of life –– or, in Shelley’s case, a “giant squid” of science fiction. To a conference of data visualization professionals, no less, he has spoken of how a map or data spread is merely informational, until a line is plotted across the data, connecting the dots. The line narrates, it interprets. It turns information into explanation.

Similarly, Shelley has sought to draw a human line through architectural data. With Schweder and his other collaborators, he has explored how the constraints of buildings and enclosures imply narrative, which his social-sculptural performances elicit. International Style architecture as a subject for contemporary art has become so fashionable that it now verges on cliché. But Shelley and Schweder invert the cliché, rebuilding Modernist architecture from the ground up –– or rather, from the sky down ––reclaiming something of its visionary purity in the process, and adding an all-American, can-do spirit. Despite the ambitious engineering of ReActor, the narrative here –– with sheeting standing in for glass, Home Depot for Knoll, and MDF for black steel –– is not so much nostalgia for Modernism’s sheen of perfection, as it is the contrarian, DIY spirit of “doing a dumb thing in a difficult way,” Shelley’s motto since the late 1990s. Floating above the trees, tilting ingeniously and absurdly in the wind, the artists have invented their own machine for living. It is a raft drifting between the Catskills and the Taconics as truantly as Huck Finn wending his way down the Mississipi.

The post A Machine For Living In: ReActor at Architecture Omi appeared first on artcritical.

April 3 to May 8, 2016
155 Suffolk Street (between Houston and Stanton streets)
New York, 646 429 9073

Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, in his 1942 essay “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins,” referred to a zoological taxonomy translated from a Chinese encyclopedia. The citation was in fact invented but reportedly, this system divided the animal kingdom into 14 categories, including “Those that belong to the Emperor,” “those drawn with a very fine camel hair brush,” and “those that, at a distance, resemble flies.” Borges parodies the irrationalities of classification systems, which govern biological science. In his current shows at Pierogi, “The Felicific Calculus and “The Last Library” (a collaboration with Douglas Paulson), Ward Shelley presents two bodies of work — a series of acrylic paintings on Mylar and an installation, respectively — that draw on the absurd beauty that can be found in the visualization and classification of knowledge by presenting different views of its organization.

The term “Felicific Calculus” emerged as part of Jeremy Bentham’s philosophy of Utilitarianism: it was a pre-digital algorithm for determining the degree of pleasure, or greater good, a given action would cause, providing an illusion of rigor in judging the ethics of any action. This method of turning something abstract, like pleasure, into a quantifiable value predates today’s mania for “the quantified self” by about two centuries. Today, similar processes are used for “sentiment analysis,” a method of analyzing speech to get a quantifiable value of the feelings expressed in a corpus of text, albeit for marketing purposes rather than for Bentham’s “greater good.” Shelley’s “Felicific Calculus” paintings are similarly intertwined with the material history of consumerism. Work, Spend, Forget (Dissected Frog Polemic), v.1 (2013) renders a timeline of the 20th century as a dissected frog, its guts and limbs spread horizontally and labeled with political, social, and technological developments; the mass media forms its nervous system, its arteries are labeled as “mass production.” At the far right of the chart — the present day — the organs merge together to form a incomprehensible pink soup devoid of any obvious organization.

The chaos of the current moment is a recurring theme in these paintings, such as Extended Narrative (2014) — a painting that expands on and re-imagines Alfred Barr’s canonical schematic of Cubism and abstract art as a weather chart, with the ominous thunderhead of “Postmodernism” looming over the present day. Most of the charts are organized as timelines, with events illustrated in a linear fashion with historical time as its X-axis. Events are shown merging together or branching off into further nodes, but all of them are constantly moving forward. This merges the imagery of these paintings with their subject matter, a consumer culture that values such “progress,” and the profit it brings, over life itself.

The body of work that accompanies the paintings, The Last Library, takes a Borges-like view of time. Interspersed with the paintings, the walls of the gallery are lined with shelves, each filled with “books that should have been written, but have not,” according to the press release. The spines of these books all recall mid-20th century graphic design tropes, featuring muted colors, black text, and conservative typefaces. Their titles are variously absurd (I Sniffed Your Wife), anachronistic (Puppies, Kittens, and the Internet), and self-referential (The Felicitous Calculus). This body of work recalls a similar project by Agnieszka Kurant, Phantom Library (2011-12), in which non-existent books that had been mentioned in other literary works (such as a volume by Pierre Menard, described by Borges) were written, printed, bound, assigned ISBN numbers, and put on display. Unlike Kurant’s piece, The Last Library doesn’t feature actual books: any illusion is destroyed by a simple shift of the viewer’s perspective, revealing the thin strips of paper-covered wood that constitute each “book.”

Like most libraries, The Last Library is organized and categorized, but rather than using the Dewey decimal system, Shelley has opted for a scheme that recalls Borges’s Chinese taxonomy of animals. The various classifications are written on bookplates placed on the shelves: “Pointing Towards a Singular Truth,” “No Missing Pages,” “Books With 12 Chapters,” and “With Teeth Marks” are some of the categories by which the library is supposedly organized. The Last Library presents a different view of space and time than the paintings do: Shelley’s charts are representations of systems that can be drawn in two dimensions, while the Library’s idiosyncratic organization pokes fun at these methods of visualization. Each body of work provides a perspective through which the other, and the world at large, could potentially be seen.

The post Library of Babel: Ward Shelley’s Complex Taxonomies at Pierogi appeared first on artcritical.

Stamina. It’s a good quality for an artist to have in any economy, let alone a Recession. And Ward Shelley’s had it all along. In 1998 he teamed up with 2 other artists to live on a moving ‘Voyage Platform’, exposed to the elements in Socrates Sculpture Park. Their mission: to get from one end of the 4-1/2  acre park to the other, deconstructing, and reconstructing the Platform itself as they went. In 2007, Shelley slept, ate, showered and otherwise inhabited “Flatland,” a four-floor, two-foot-wide structure covered with “walls” of clear plastic that allowed viewers to see his (as well as the five other participating artists’) every move. The latter was housed, in Long Island City’s Sculpture Center, within the context of a larger high-concept group show (“The Happiness of Objects”). Years from now, few will remember the premise of that show. However, chances are they’ll remember Shelley. Pitted against hifalutin’ curatorial theory, ‘Flatland’ just had more staying power.

These days, however, if you are looking for Ward Shelley, you will probably find him asleep, inside a large cardboard box of his own construction, sited inside the back room of his one-person show at Pierogi gallery. (It should be noted that the larger box is also sited inside a hoard of smaller boxes—the latter part of an unrelated “Archive” installation that Shelley has co-created with artist Douglas Paulson).

If his ostensible state-of-hibernation may seem a little anti-climactic, it’s a rest he’s earned. The front room of the gallery is filled with 12 impressive, labor-intensive “Timeline” drawings, each of which takes the artist at least two months to research and complete. Shelley’s gone through three versions, for instance, of his graphic rendering of the state and evolution of art’s Avant Garde (“Who Invented the Avant Garde”); Media Role Models (2009) is a funny, and honest (not to mention chromatically interesting) mapping, in tree form, of the various role-model influences on Shelly’s life (everyone from Pink Floyd to Leave It to Beaver).

The drawings are funny, fascinating; they succeed both as artwork and visual document. That said, seen in concert with the Sleeper the show as a whole comes off as a bit disconnected. Viewers sense they’re looking at two very different manifestations of Shelley’s approach to processing information (almost like right- and left- hemispheres of the same brain) and turning it into art.  Still, they don’t quite jibe.

An important point is that Shelley isn’t simply sleeping in the gallery; in fact, Shelley, ever geared for stamina, isn’t getting much rest at all. He’s only sleeping during the day, while visitors roam the gallery. At night, he’s up and about having the gallery to himself, and making drawings (as per the gallery’s press release, he’s exhibiting and adding these new artworks to the show over time). Holes have been cut inside the walls of his cardboard-box bed to admit a pair of speakers, so that while Shelley’s sleeping (and while we’re watching), he can listen to computerized versions of texts submitted by visitors to the show (one can write to sleeperexperiment@gmail.com; or visit www.wardhshelley.com to participate). And, then, it’s on these texts that he’ll base his drawings. An accomplished draftsman, Shelley’s able to work pretty well under the constraints of his performative programme. That said, the day I visited, Shelley had let two whole days pass without completing a drawing. Even stamina has its limits.

Should we just let Shelley transition into being solely an artist who makes finite works on paper (albeit ones that describe infinitely interpretable data)–and let that be all? Or should we hold his feet to the fire, and assume he must constantly be taking on impossible tasks–and figuring out how to turn them into experiences we can share?

For the time being, we must simply stand in the gallery, thinking up what to say to Shelley through those speakers; while Shelley, the artist, is sleeping and dreaming up what to make. And ne’er the twain shall meet. Except, of course, in his future art.

The post Ward Shelley: Who Invented the Avant Garde (and other half-truths) and The Sleeper Experiment at Pierogi appeared first on artcritical.

In Julian Schnabel’s film Basquiat, the title character, exemplar of the flameout credo of the East Village, is assisting an artist-installer at the Mary Boone Gallery.  This mediocrity, played by Willem Da Foe, attempts to counsel the hero about the benefits of a reliable day job.  Basquiat replies that someday he would show on those very walls.  He quits on the spot and never looks back.  Likely Schnabel was not intending that the viewer inquire further into the Da Foe character’s pitiable existence, but let me suggest that he took the L train home to his Williamsburg sweatshop loft, stoked the woodstove with 2×4 scraps, and painted obsessively into the night, biding his time.

After the crash of ’87 (a laughable blip, in retrospect) the briefly pumped-up East Village galleries either closed or moved up the ladder to Soho.  Artists who didn’t get mowed down by hard drugs or AIDS got decadently rich and left yuppies in their wake – the price of a vacant Alphabet City “studio,” not to say an actual studio, moving out of reach of Midwest college kids.  A bridge and tunnel away, however, a scattered army of Da Foes popped their heads out their windows and noticed each other.

Marcin Ramocki’s new documentary Brooklyn DIY, which premiered at MoMA on February 25th, is subtitled The History of the Williamsburg Art Scene 1987-2007. The video is the first straightforward, Sundance Channel-style attempt, and one hopes not the last, to document the brief, happy life of the Williamsburg Scene – begging the question, in the process, as to the degree to which Williamsburg really was, or perhaps even still is, a coherent scene; a dissident view advanced in the video is that it’s just a bit of geography where numerous artists happened to find a place to live and work, an insignificant smattering rising to wider prominence.

One must be grateful that Ramocki, rather than some slick cultural tourist, has been the first to tackle this contested history.  He knows firsthand the experimental tradition ably evoked by the 75-minute video, having founded, in 2003, the Williamsburg gallery vertexList in the vacated address of the relocated 4 Walls, the most venerable of Williamsburg artist-run clubhouses.  Ramocki knows enough of the right people to interview, he covers the best of the early venues and events, and he was given access to crucial archives (in particular that of dedicated video chronicler Carleton Bright, credited as Associate Producer.)

Insider Ramocki’s do-it-yourself, laptop-edited history is thus in some sense an extension of its subject.  But he has chosen to play it close to the vest, adopting a familiar format of talking heads and supplemental footage.  He pretends to no innovation as a videomaker, strenuously avoiding not only the Williamsburg ethos of oddball, low-key subversion but, for that matter, vertexList’s more aggressive program of digital intervention.  Brooklyn DIY is content to showcase more imaginative acts of wry self-conscience, such as Ward Shelley’sWilliamsburg Timeline, a 2004 print in which the artist has ventured a disarmingly earnest, intestinal diagram of the comings and goings of Williamsburg’s significant people, places, and events, and Matt Freedman’s live drawing lecture, in which, accompanied by Tim Spelios’s percussion, he cartoons with deadpan erudition the convergence of economic conditions which emptied acres of cheap loft space just a stop away from the burnt-out, priced-out East Village.  Freedman’s performance puts us in mind that if Williamsburg is only geography, well, so was St. Louis in 1800, sited at the confluence of two mighty rivers teeming with beaver pelts.

Had Brooklyn DIY trusted its subjects more in the manner of its unhurried perusal of Freedman’s lecture, or its occasional returns to Shelley’s Timeline for close-ups of the particular node of activity under discussion, the video might have been both more entertaining and informative.  That said, when the interviewees are on the ball, Freedman and Shelley among them, and we are treated to priceless, thoughtfully correlated Hi-8 tape and photos of the ancestral events in play, the formula works breezily well.  Alas, Ramocki has a weakness for chopped up, artificially manipulated exchanges, which, while sometimes lively, tend to simulate debate in an all too familiar sound bite vacuum, as with the following sequence in which the much admired painter Amy Sillman, an acerb skeptic about the Williamsburg Scene, and Ebon Fisher, who was among the dedicated instigators of mass warehouse events, seem to be at odds:

Fisher:  “We began to figure out what makes a warehouse party work.”

Sillman:  “…and they were run by people with a sense they were doing something very important for everybody.”

Fisher:  “Of course we all assumed it would be revolutionary.”

Sillman:  “If you came here in 84, you didn’t necessarily party with people who came in 89.”

Fisher:  “Manhattan was learning from Brookyln, an entire community and its surrounding ecosystem…”

Sillman:  “East Village Two, why do we need it again?”

Now, a little of this can be funny and to the point, as here perhaps, with Fisher’s utopian spin cut down to size – so the editing disposes – by Sillman’s curmudgeonly charm.  But pitting isolated interview subjects against one another by proxy, intercutting words from different contexts and temperaments as if they were on the same page, is mildly sensationalistic.  In fairness, we are shown glimpses during the “exchange” above of menacing, funky installations, whacked-out nudists, S&M stilt walkers and lab-coated pranksters from Organism, a 24-hour “webjam” in a disused mustard factory.  In venerable documentary tradition the viewer will judge whether such events deserve their own Ward Shelleyan nodule along the spaghetti which connects the Human Be-In and the Happening to the Rave on the master timeline of American counterculture.  But if Ramocki’s habit of interruption and juxtaposition can work well enough on occasion, it tends to get diminishing returns, as later when he elicits a montage of disagreements on the definition of “hipster” – an excruciating sequence with little redeeming schadenfreude.  Yes, hipsters are the new yuppies, as one youngish fashion photographer has it, and he ought to know.

The “hipster” episode is part of an attempt to tie Brooklyn DIY’s historical survey of the art scene to reflections about gentrification, an important topic to be sure, but one that deserves more than lip service to “the notion of [white artists’] privilege from the very moment they moved into this neighborhood,” as artist Freedman puts it.  This Solomonic admonition is unkindly dropped like a sandbag amid the usual war stories of the old days –shots  in the night, muggings, stripped cars set alight – stories that pioneers like to tell with a certain pride and glamour, despite being perfectly well aware that they were in far less danger of being shot than the 14 year old Dominican kid down the block.  If a documentary were serious about exploring the impact of artists on real estate values, we’d need to see interviews with artist-renovator winners and evicted loft dweller losers, as well as with Polish, Latino and Hassidic natives; statistics on development, rents, and incomes; and a wider survey of the mercantile hipster culture that came to fill every nook and cranny with professionally distressed lounges and pre-packaged trends.  The video goes into needless depth about one such latter-day party scene, shot gunned into brief vogue as “Electroclash” by a DJ named Larry T.  Mr. T’s mercenary, take-no-prisoners self-promotion does make for an amusing interview, and perhaps Ramocki means to illuminate, by contrast, the self-effacing sincerity of proprietors of projects like 4 Walls and Pierogi, which Joe Amrhein describes as “more like a social construct for an artwork” than a gallery.  If irony is meant, a little goes a long way.  But one has the feeling, instead, that Ramocki really means to suggest a continuum from the loosely anarchic DIY scene of clubs and events like El Sensorium, Keep Refrigerated, Cat’s Head and Organism to a more recent vintage of bridge and tunnel cattle pens where, as Larry T declares, “Everybody got laid!”  Let’s set the record straight, then: good times Electroclash stands in relation to the more diffident Williamsburg Scene as Studio 54 does to the Pyramid Club; the antagonism is stylistic and fundamental.

Not to say that self-promotion and battles over ownership were ever entirely absent from what Shelley denotes on his timeline as the Creative Golden Age.  Still, it’s substantially true that, in his words, “it was art for art’s sake, the artists were all pitching in, and they weren’t worried about the borders of what their work was.”  In Shelley’s mordant analysis, this foul-weather utopianism was inextricable from the fact that no one could get a show in Manhattan.  Things began to change as the art market expanded again, with opportunities for local artists to disentangle themselves not only across the river but also in their own backyard.  By then there were perhaps thousands of artists living and working in close proximity in Williamsburg, Greenpoint and environs, and a parallel world of galleries emerged to show them.  In an omniscient statistic Brooklyn DIY claims that 145 galleries have come and gone, but that number is generously inclusive.  Only a few have had true grit, laid-back but competent DIY style, and/or staying power.  And of these, a 75-minute survey can only cover a sampling, with significant players relegated to passing mention or, in some cases, insufficiently identified footage.  (A Roxy Paine periscope installation at Momenta, for example, in which the artist’s upstairs studio was surveiled goes uncredited.)  Seminal spaces like Brand Name Damages and Test Site get welcome remembrance (though oddly, the film never mentions that Test Site’s Annie Herron, Williamsburg’s matron saint, died tragically young in 2004) but when it comes to choosing gallerists to interview,Brooklyn DIY must resort to an attempt at cross-section: the old-time guerrilla (Aaron Namenwirth of Art Moving), the clubhouse impresario (Mike Ballou of 4 Walls), the for profit pioneer (Amrhein of Pierogi), the ambitious ship-jumper (Becky Smith of Bellwether), the bad boy Chelsea reject (Don Carroll of Jack The Pelican), and the persistent, if pragmatic idealist (Daniel Aycock of Front Room).  If a few of DIY’s choices seem marginal compared to other spaces that go unmentioned despite being on the leading edge or right at the center of the alternative gallery scene – such as, for the record, Flipside, Momenta, Arcadia, Sauce, Roebling Hall, Eyewash, Parker’s Box, and maybe also Sideshow, Plus Ultra and im n Il – one can forgive Ramocki his personal skew; at least he has troubled to get the bulk of it right, and we are amply referred to Shelley’s conscientious Timeline if we want to fill in some of the blanks.

With a lively exhibition scene, then, centered first and foremost around Pierogi since 1995, it’s inevitable that the completely fatuous question is going to be asked, is there a Williamsburg “look?”  Perhaps this sort of thing is an inherent folly of mental anatomy, like the tendency to map parents’ faces onto an adopted child’s.  The East Village or Downtown “look” is a historical grain of sand around which layer upon layer of commentary has accrued, a pearl of conventional wisdom.  But in fact, no obvious common factor denominates between Basquiat and Koons, Wojnarowicz and Holzer, Coe and Scharf, et al.  Without the fiction of revolutionary alignment, a fiction that was artificially inseminated into the media slipstream by narcissistic gallerists, artists, and writers with a chip on the shoulder (and two in the pot), the East Village would have been just a loose, vibrant locus of activity.  Against this Machiavellian fait accompli, poor, innocent Williamsburg is forever held to a double standard in which it fails to achieve EV-level scenedom because its “paradigm” – to borrow from the title of a prescient 1993 show in far-off Illinois curated by trend-spotter Jonathan Fineberg – is either too predictable or else not predictable enough.  BrooklynDIYperks up when, in its patchwork fashion, talking heads weigh in on the question of aesthetic alignment, yes or no, good or bad.

Mike Ballou: “One of the dangers is that it becomes a little incestuous.  It does become a clique and a club.”

Amy Sillman: “[…] If you said something bad about someone’s art, they’d hear about it and it would be awful and so you’d refrain. […]  The Williamsburg thing, at least its deep roots, I think it does not have any particular aesthetic position, nor was anyone going to really argue about it, and without that you can’t have any kind of strong aesthetic platform.”

Joe Amrhein:  “I don’t think Williamsburg has that regional look [as with Bay Area or Liepzig School art] and I like it that way.”

Becky Smith:  “My friend calls it the International Williamsburg Style, a certain kind of painting it looks like Joe would show, out of this certain time.”

Sillman:  “I don’t think my work has any kind of aesthetic relationship to Williamsburg at all.  It wasn’t really an aesthetic community, it was really a geographic community.”

I’ve heard Pierogi criticized for favoring dense, handmade, graphic imagism (disclosure: the present writer has shown there), but gallerist Smith’s cavil, given Bellweather’s heavy rotation of off-kilter academic realism, is a stone cast from a glass McMansion.  If ever there was a Williamsburg aesthetic it probably had more to do with the sort of electro-mechanical “bricolage” shown in footage from 1991’s multi-space show, Tweaking The Human and exemplified by hybrid instrument sculptor/musician Ken Butler, whose opinions and AK47-cello riffs are agreeably laced throughout Brooklyn DIY.  Pierogi, for that matter, has often showcased absurdist sci-fi spectacle, and has now rededicated its program to large constructions with its cavernous new Boiler space (an act of typical Williamsburg optimism so out of step with reality that it might single-handedly turn the economy around).

Where Smith sees tired parochialism, Sillman sees the opposite, the blobby incoherence that arises in a vacuum.  Can there be an aesthetics, she asks, without a bit of tough-minded dialectics?  Sillman picks at the wound of the larger question about Williamsburg: Was low-key, inclusive niceness a deliberate and characteristic virtue, or was it a symptom of artistic mediocrity?  If the former, street events, clubs, anonymous and borderless artworks should be taken seriously in appraising Williamsburg’s historical importance, andBrooklyn DIY makes a down payment on video-logging the wealth of crazy stuff that went on, from Gene Pool’s unicycling Can Man, to a panel at 4 Walls on jokes, to barely contained pyromania in the cavernous Mustard club.

But in Sillman’s terms Williamsburg would only matter if its islands of individual artistic achievement were connected underwater, as it were, by an “ecosystem.”  Critic Sarah Schmerler further articulates this rather pitiless view, asserting that Williamsburg art won’t make it into books aside from a few success stories – and here she names Sillman, Bruce Pearson, Fred Tomaselli, and Roxy Paine.  (Interviews with the last three, by the way, would be essential to any comprehensive reckoning.)  “How many hands do we need?” Schmerler asks dismissively.

Quite a few, actually.  Here’s a very short additional list of internationally respected artists who can be said to have more than passed through – who lived, worked, curated, showed, partied and did it themselves in Williamsburg:  interviewees Amrhein, Ballou, and Shelley; Michael Ashkin, Francis Cape, Diana Cooper, Charles Currier, James Esber, Jane Fine, Su Friederich, Joe Fyfe, Rachel Harrison, Perry Hoberman, Byron Kim, Mark Lombardi, Chris Martin, David Opdike, Joyce Pensato, David Scher, James Siena, Mike Smith, Eve Sussman, Dan Zeller, and Brenda Zlamany.  Among these, a number have been in Biennials, had solo museum shows and, pace Schmerler, made it into art history books.  Dozens of impressive artists might be added to that list.  The real question is, how densely interwoven is the network that connects them?  Is it like loose seaweed floating among the waves, or more like a coral reef, anchored in place and bristling with exotic life?

Schmerler, to her credit, was the first mainstream critic to novelty-shop in the neighborhood, covering the Crest Hardware Show, a stealth art extravaganza, for Time Out as a harbinger of new energy.  And in Brooklyn DIY she extols the value of having artists still congregate within the precincts of New York, “like gold backing the dollar,” though this hardheaded choice of simile comes off as grudging.  She’s right that a sea of artists, writers, and musicians are required to buoy up the few celebrities, and maybe a materialistic headcount of the famous is the only objective way to judge the vitality of a scene, in toto.  Schmerler, however, draws the waterline so high as to make her verdict seem truculent, as if wishing to repudiate her early association with Williamsburg amateurism in order to avoid being tarred by the same brush.  But given the recent mid-career emergence of formidable forces such as Martin, Pensato, and Sussman I would suggest that it’s still too early for a final assessment, in any case, of what may turn out to have been a singularly slow-ripening phenomenon.  (Full disclosure: the present writer would like to think there is still room for a generation of under-known mid-career artists to emerge from local notoriety into the light of wider recognition.)

For all the hand wringing about gentrification (and the dark jokes about artists mixing paint on the marble countertops of abandoned luxury condos), what if, instead, the most salient characteristic of Williamsburg was its longevity?  Yes, things change fast in New York, but maybe a little more slowly in Brooklyn, and that opulence of time in many cases allowed for a different studio approach.  Could Martin, Pensato, and Sussman have matured in the pressure cooker of Avenue C in the ‘80s?  Maybe there’s a particular flavor to the Williamsburg Scene, a rare terroir that connects the DIY attitude to a kind of work that takes years to ferment.

In the end, what Brooklyn DIY does best is to resuscitate the energy of a time of underground events and wacky street theater that may have begun as a footnote to the East Village Scene but flourished on its own gleeful terms, innocent of the sort of fashion despotism and lust for fame and fortune that came to rule the EV.  Of that earlier scene Gary Indiana has written, “Many artists made no objects but did things that were art, like keeping dull people out of the Mudd Club.”  To be sure, Williamsburg was duller, partly because the scene was too small to afford to be exclusive, but also by design, in reaction to the psychic price of snobbery.  No guardians kept clueless artists from bringing their work to Crest or hanging it at the Salon of Mating Spiders.  Anyone was welcome to cobble together a pile of junk at Cat’s Head or read bad poetry at The Ship’s Mast or pontificate at 4 Walls, if they were thick skinned and shameless.  The only gatekeeping mechanism against dolts and poseurs, effective enough at low densities, was negative word-of-mouth.

Scenes come and go according to cyclic factors as dry as real estate values, as mysterious as the wheel of kharma.  A notable few persist in memory.  You have the feeling of needing to be alone, so as to give yourself over in deeper peace of mind to this ambiguous wink from nirvana; and at the same time, you need the presence of others, like gently-shifting relief figures on the plinth of your own throne.  Walter Benjamin was writing about hashish intoxication, but the sentiments might equally apply to the condition of making art within a community.  Time has begun to tell, and the Williamsburg paradigm, in which artists might explore the nirvana of solitude without loneliness, may someday turn out to have produced as much lasting art-market value as certain louder, more spectacular, and shorter-lived bubbles.  With a new age of stagnation upon us, such a combination of amateurism, communalism, and elbow room will take root again, whether in the looming forest of bankrupt waterfront condos planted in the asbestos of warehouse parties past; in Bushwick or Bed Stuy; or someplace neither yuppies nor hipsters nor Barbara Corcoran have yet heard of – someplace plain wrong, and thus exactly right.

The post Brooklyn DIY: A Story of Williamsburg Art Scene 1987-2007 directed by Martin Ramocki appeared first on artcritical.