No Rest for the Weary

Bushwick Open Studios and Sarah Baley

Some people think that art should offer all the comforts of home. Take Rirkrit Tiravanija, for one. Since 1992, he has converted some of the classiest galleries into versions of his home, serving curry and rest to the weary. He has even offered free espresso at the Guggenheim.

Tiravanija wants to make art a communal experience. Other artists may have their doubts. When, they might think, will I have a space like this? And when can I afford that imported espresso machine? The exercise highlights something else as well: in New York, an artist's or dealer's real apartment is still off-limits.

People in the arts have plenty of reasons to move to the city. Space is not one of them. Back home, perhaps, they could have opened their garage as a studio or alternative space. Even here, they can drool over stories of older artists in their Soho lofts. Frank Stella's former studio in the East Village, only a few blocks from Willem de Kooning's last digs, has become a spacious private gallery.

In New York, though, the rules have changed forever, and a glorious June day in Brooklyn is a great way to check out the new rule book. Meanwhile still other artists are renting space in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and Sarah Baley takes it as haunting ground for an evocative community.

A whole other New York

The first weekend in June, more than one Brooklyn neighborhood holds a "self-organized, collaboratively produced arts festival." For a first timer, Bushwick Open Studios has surprises in store, not all of them on the walls. This is not the compact community of Soho long ago, the East Village around Tomkins Square Park back in the 1980s, a "Chelsea Arts Walk" of the 1990s, a simulated "Studio Visit" at Exit Art, or even Williamsburg, before gentrification pushed artists further east and further from Manhattan. Some of my favorite memories are of Dumbo's open studios, near the Brooklyn Bridge. Each year, I marched diligently down narrow industrial stairwells that now are turning to luxury co-ops. How could I not have written down more of those artist names, for work I may never see again?

Bushwick is a whole other New York. Studios scatter across three square miles, and one can walk four miles from Maria Hernandez Park to McCarren Park past Williamsburg without a trace of greenery. Nothing rises above a few floors, in an industrial landscape that even most Brooklynites may not know. Sheetrock walls show every sign of planned real-estate development—and not by the artists themselves. For more of a challenge, the L train was out of service, reducing visitors to packed shuttle buses and a long march in the heat. And yet they do come, with an audience for art inconceivable ten years ago.

Naturally they come to see artists' aspirations, along with word of mouth on restaurants. One finds more impulsive painting and small-scale sculpture than in the galleries. One sees that old battle between abstraction and realism that conceptual art and installation have largely pushed aside—but not only that. Oh, yes, I know that painter of twilight Brooklyn rooftops from an Upper East Side gallery. Could those fantasy kitchen parts have shown last summer in Dumbo's waterfront park? They did, and they look curiously less fantastic indoors rather than consigned to the scrap heap.

One finds something else as well, besides the dispersal of artists further into Brooklyn. It is most obvious in the newest factory conversions, near the Morgan Avenue subway stop. The lofts look big, but artists are doubling, tripling, or even quadrupling up. While Chelsea galleries almost demand big work, to make an impression, these artists can hardly help working small. The handful of Bushwick dealers is smaller still. As for living in one's studio or exhibiting out of a live-in loft, forget about it.

Those beyond New York might not understand. How did this city get so distinct in its notion of an alternative space? The short answer is cost. People do not work from their garage or apartment because they do not have a garage and cannot afford a larger apartment. Art costs more, too, and so competitive a market brings constraints of its own. As Williamsburg has gentrified, say, many dealers no longer save enough to do without the walk-in traffic, the respectability, and the reviews—and many have given up or moved to Chelsea.

Conversely, artists and dealers cannot squat in their work space, because of the law. As New York lost more and more of its retail and industrial space, it cracked down, with harsher zoning and harsher enforcement. Soho lofts were "grandfathered in"—as was a close friend, in the loft we converted together overlooking a topless bar in 1977, in what was then a bleak area north of Chelsea. As for Dumbo, it took a developer more than a decade after buying up most of it, before he could get zoning rights to have people live there. Of course, he immediately chased out the remaining artists. Oh, and my friend in Chelsea needed the space to raise a family, and he now rents a studio elsewhere.

The good, the bad, and the outer boroughs

I would love a day exploring Brooklyn anyway. While it seems criminal to single out any of two-hundred fifty artists by name, I liked especially a landscape by Lisa Kirkbride of what looked like red Ping-Pong balls on Popsicle sticks, Eileen Weitzman's fabric fantasy creatures between plants and animals, and several instances of painstaking drawing. Most of all, I enjoyed the few Bushwick galleries. One collaborative space, Norte Maar, was showing classy drawings, including Jack Tworkov. A half-hidden gallery, Privateer, had an international cast but Brooklyn themes. Ward Shelley continues his family trees of cultural history, and Joerg Lohse photographs precisely the vacant lots that galleries and studios could easily expel.

Pocket Utopia keeps to neighborhood artists, featuring assemblages of old vinyl and CDs by Maggie Michael. English Kills gets raunchier, including paintings of a girl with a gun by Tessia Seufferlein and of fornication by Jim Herbert, like the world's largest Dana Schutz. Holly Faurot and Sara H. Paulson stage something between dancing, mud wrestling, and painting. Andrew Ohanesian builds and destroys walls. Placed at a corner of the L-shaped space, they create structures within the gallery structure laden with an imagined history. Besides, the dealer was personally serving hot dogs.

NURTUREart has in no time become the area's oldest nonprofit. In fact, everything on view for the day echoes a changing, dreamlike landscape. The dream starts out on the street, where Kim Holleman has parked a trailer. Within it, she has set curving brick walls, around a pond and garden—as the punning title has it, a Trailer Park. In the gallery stairwell, Chris Hagerty projects a rotating escalator, like a moving fantasy from Piranesi. The light itself seems to climb.

The theme of model housing continues inside. James Reeder constructs a cross between lampshades and modernist housing projects. Holleman has another ecosystem, a "sand collection" under glass. Out back, Audrey Hasen Russell has a larger version, with a tower and pink grass made of foam insulation. On the fantasy side, Meg Hitchcock spins fluid curves of cut-and-paste text, like two-dimensional poetry. Rahul Alexander has psychedelic Color Bars, and Mike Estabrook animates The Good, the Bad, and the Remix, with what looks like the cast of South Park in place of Eli Wallach and Clint Eastwood.

Some show a Brooklyn more literally in transition. Jason Falchook's painterly photographs capture it at night, glowing and empty. Deborah Brown does something of the same in her painting of Summer in Stanhope Street. Scrapworm's cluttered images still look like real places, but solarized. A broken bicycle of fiberboard, by Jonathan Brand, might have fallen there. Josey Hale's tapestry boat might have rowed there.

The whole show gets a little too polite, almost like Rirkrit Tiravanija and his "relational esthetics" after all. An hour later, after a long walk in the sun, I could barely picture utopias like these, even comic or busted ones. Brooklyn looks messier all over again on the way to a microbrew and a working subway. Can it still hold true alternative spaces—and can New York? I had seen enough nonprofit activity and enough creativity. I am less sure who can afford either one.

Blade runners

Sarah Baley's stylish photos of a seriously unstylish community have appeared in The New York Times Style magazine. And that raises more nasty questions, but stylish they are just the same. A young woman, head bowed, stands before the Brooklyn Bridge and a panorama of Lower Manhattan. Darkness drowns all of another woman but her face and the feathers around her neck. They share the vulnerability and glamour of the spotlight. They share, too, the warm red glow of the city at night.

Could those feathers belong to a live bird? Cindy Sherman might appreciate the echoes of Hitchcock in two blurred, wheeling swarms of them. Like a young couple clinging to each other for comfort, they punctuate the mostly color photographs with black and white. As with Sherman, too, the pageant has a running character hard not to mistake for the artist. She greets one by the door, in the same short blond hair and hunting cap as by the bridge, but clean, collected, and in a well-ordered interior. This, she seems to say, is the real me.

That frankness also serves as a warning. Before I go looking too hard for old stories, I should pay attention to a single new one. The same woman rests again against a night sky, but with a black eye and no one to explain it. Even the skyline forces one to fill in the blanks, in the present tense. Vans stop at a gas station and pack a parking lot. This is not On the Waterfront, but the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

It is also a community. Baley calls it "Bois." From the dark, treeless forests of Brooklyn, I want to pronounce it like the Bois de Boulogne. From the hints of the "Pictures" generation, I want to think of Yve-Alain Bois, the editor at October. A saner head, I bet, would pronounce it boys. This community goes for the hydrogenous look.

Like the waterfront, it also lives on the edge. Catherine Opie would understand its codes. The heroine wears nothing like a shirt or bra beneath her Rollerblades, hunting cap, and flak jacket. She has little though, of Opie's deadpan defiance. That couple clings beneath the scrawled word Peace, as if afraid to believe it. The blader has a black eye.

Can a community like this last, as art invades the Navy Yard? Does it even exist, outside the photographer's imagination? It makes a good antidote to the trust in youth of "The Generational," at the New Museum. Still, like New York, it has all the advantages of a young imagination. Churn out portraits of a neighborhood, and no one might recognize them. Recycle images from the movies, and one may finally see Brooklyn.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Bushwick Open Studios, or at least my second visit to it, ran the weekend of June 6, 2009. Artists that same weekend welcomed visitors to Red Hook, a good seven miles to the south. NURTUREart held its "Bushwick Biennial through July 19, and Sarah Baley ran at Collette Blanchard through June 17. Portions of this article's basic history came at the request of a west-coast magazine and may thus sound simplistic to local artists and real-estate mavens.