3.27.24 — Past the Gates
SculptureCenter misses the old neighborhood, and it should know. It has made its home in Long Island City long enough to have seen everything change.
Founded in 1928, it moved to a dead end just off the main drag in 2001, early enough to have driven change itself. Can it, though, truly miss the days of empty storefronts, abandoned buildings, and nowhere to live or to eat? R. I. P. Germain shares the ambivalence, even as he brings his own graffiti and shuttered gates, as Avangarda. It may have been be a bit corporate for street smarts or an avant-garde, but he and Claudia Pagès in the back room found an antidote to dryness in something very much like SculptureCenter all the same, through March 25.
It took a long time for gentrification to reach the neighborhood. You can now find a decent bookstore and a noodle joint right across Jackson Avenue from SculptureCenter, although real growth lies closer to the East River, amid artist studios, craft breweries, and a waterfront park with a gorgeous public library. Still, change in New York comes with conflicting claims and a welter of graffiti. Developers demolished a building across from MoMA PS1, just a short walk from SculptureCenter, angering those who miss its paint job as a genuine expression of neighborhood spirit. The developers, in turn, tried to cash in on its street name by adopting it for apartments. Are Germain and SculptureCenter already late for the party?
The Berlin artist may not know his way around the hood, but he does mourn a loss of community. As his name has it, R.I.P. He describes storefronts everywhere as places to go and to meet. At the same time, he sees them and the gates that cover them as obstacles, designed to keep people out. And Germain sets out four gated storefronts, one after another, like a series of obstacles. You can walk past the first, but will you pass them all?
Not that they go all that far toward filling the impressive main hall at SculptureCenter. That can only reinforced the impression of abandonment. It can also restore faith in the trolley repair shop that Maya Lin left largely intact while putting it to the use of art. Each of Germain’s gates has its own graffiti, but not with the naiveté and egotism of tags. They come teasingly close to text but impossible to read. All that you may remember is the image of a silvery robot, on a rampage or on guard.
Their backs offer a slightly different picture. One has a glass door. A small assemblage on the floor behind each one includes a pot, a potted plant, and a magazine with its own dark stories to tell. Germain may be leaving open the possibility of life or closing it off for good. The entirety looks confused and slightly pathetic, not to mention out of touch with Long Island City today. But then welcome to the search for affordable housing and community in New York.
Pagès payed a different kind of tribute to SculptureCenter and its basement tunnels, through February 19. Not that she would admit it, but her video could well be exploring them. Downstairs, the institution displays “world cinema” from a recent biannual in Taipei. Together, their fifteen works take a serious commitment, but dipping in may be enough. It accords with the themes of incompleteness back upstairs. I caught some shifting patterns, disaster areas, and zombie creatures, but nothing like the basement’s own layered history.
Pagès can match that history and then some. Her explorations take her to a cistern in Spain, where her camera’s restless motion may remind you of your own. Moorish invaders remade the ancient roman caverns as their own, before Christians used the structure for a church and moderns for a fancy hotel. If her wanderings seem to lack direction, the video does not—abruptly flooding the tunnels and leaving her waist deep. Did you think that an institution called SculptureCenter would be showing sculpture? Gentrification itself may leave you high and dry.
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