This is a copy of Roberta Smiths' article on Brooklyn art galleries. Click here to read the review of "OFFBEAT", the current eyewash show.
November 6, 1998
Brooklyn Haven for Art Heats Up
By ROBERTA SMITH
NEW YORK -- The struggling gallery scene in the Williamsburg-Greenpoint section of Brooklyn is either reaching critical mass or is about to contract a serious case of "the good old days." Maybe both.
The neighborhood has long been known in the art world as a place where artists take things into their own hands, opening galleries and running them on shoestrings until energy, money or interest run out, or their own work becomes more consuming.
They have orchestrated elaborate performance events in abandoned buildings and even established shaky but persistent alternatives to alternative spaces. The most venerable of these, Four Walls, is still in business (sort of) after eight years, without a single outside grant.
Lately, more and more gallery announcements are being sent out bearing Williamsburg's palindrome zip-code -- 11211. This weekend there are at least a dozen art shows to be seen in this sprawling neighborhood's artistic heart -- the portion bounded by the Williamsburg Bridge on the south and McCarren Park on the north, and by the East River and, roughly, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway on the west.
And that number, probably a record, doesn't include a few galleries that are presently closed for installation, like Jessica Murray's Salon 300 on Graham Avenue.
Time never stands still in the New York real estate market, of course, and the chief harbingers of the next hot neighborhood have often been artists, propelled by a need for cheap studio space and aided by an innate sense of the architectural potential of neglected buildings.
In general, crime is down and so are the number of vacant apartments and lofts in the neighborhood ; so real estate prices and rents are up. One artist pointed to a brick garage and said, with some astonishment, that it had just sold for $1 million; another reported that $450,000 had been paid for a building so decrepit that the price was "mainly for the land."
It remains to be seen exactly how big the boom will be here, given a sizable indigenous population and a building stock that runs to tenements and small rowhouses punctuated by garages and squat commercial loft buildings. In contrast, the area Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass, known as Dumbo, seems like another universe: a land of majestic commercial edifices actively under development, where the sky may be the limit.
In low-lying Williamsburg, where the sky itself seems limitless, it is hard not to feel change in the air. Some are attempting to stave it off: partly because of unmanageable crowds at its film and video evenings, Four Walls recently dispensed with its mailing list, reverting to word of mouth.
At the same time, the independent, inclusive spirit that has always characterized the perennially nascent gallery scene here is visible as never before. In this neighborhood, which feels a bit like a spread-out East Village crossed with patch of big-sky Chelsea, galleries come in all shapes, sizes and degrees of finish, as well as in all kinds of architectural containers -- walk-up tenement apartments, street-level garages and lofts, both live-in and not.
The art is equally varied, and not necessarily made only by Williamsburg artists anymore. The play between the artworks and the spaces in which they are encountered is remarkably rich. Here is a tour of some of Williamsburg's current exhibitions, moving from solo to group shows.
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One of the quirkiest spaces in Williamsburg is Holland Tunnel, on South 3rd Street, a front-runner for first place as the tiniest gallery in the metropolitan area. Opened last spring by Pauline Lethen, an energetic Dutch woman who sees it partly as a conduit for Dutch art (hence the title), it occupies a small pre-fab gardener's shed set in a pretty little yard behind an old apartment building.
Usually Ms. Lethen can be found sitting just outside at a table, a position she claims to occupy regardless of temperature. She did allow, however, that coming exhibitions -- the next will be a display of contemporary Dutch photography -- may have to accommodate a number of plants that are stored in the shed during the winter.
The current exhibitor, Brendan Ballengee, has the space to himself for "Acme Labs Variation," a little black-light installation whose anti-pollution message is softened by its modest beauty. The walls are densely hung with thrift-shop landscape paintings that Ballengee has touched up with iridescent paint.
They glow in the dark, as does the "Fermi Worm," an oozing slug-like mass of (one assumes ) atomic waste surrounded by water and wafting curls of smoke, which is named after the father of the atomic bomb.
As with many Williamsburg shows, music is an important component here, specifically the eerie electronic sounds of "Radioactivity," a 1978 album by Kraftwork.
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Ranking high among the solo gallery shows is Katie Merz's installation at Velocity Gallery, which Sarah Rossiter, an artist, opened last spring in a high-ceilinged garage space on North 7th Street. Previously known for bright spirited paintings whose cartoon style exuded an anarchic feminism, Ms. Merz, who lives on Manhattan's Lower East Side, is having her first gallery show in five years.
She appears to have jumped ship for other media, specifically an energetic combination of photography, drawing and sculpture. These all figure in an installation whose componentes are suspended on string running from wall to wall, creating a first impression of unusually colorful laundry hung out to dry.
There are lush photographs of small set-up sculptures, which the artist makes from found objects, Playdo, food, hair gel and fragments of other photographs. (One is on the floor; at least two more float overhead on glass shelves.) There are delicate little drawings, often populated by tiny figures and their exclamations, which recall the artist's cartoon paintings. And there are curling coils of clear plastic painted with these earlier cartoon characters and literally cut to ribbons.
There are also boxes of additional photographs, which one can thumb through. The ensemble effect is playful yet oddly controlled, a kind of vertical scatter piece in which nearly each part stands on its own merits while also contributing to the larger, radiant bombardment.
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Pierogi 2000, one of the area's most active art galleries, is the brainchild of Joe Amrhein, who decided, in 1994, to promote the work of Williamsburg artists by filling a flat file with their drawing portfolios, creating a remarkably efficient way to enable interested parties to see a lot of art.
And remarkably mobile: the flat files, which now number three and contain the work of 350 artists, have traveled to exhibitions in London, Vienna and SoHo, as well as the Brooklyn Museum of Art.
Amrhein, who is about to move to a larger space next door to this current also mounts rather ambitious exhibitions in the space that started out as his studio, including a recreation of "Dead Tree," an early installation work by the Earth artist Robert Smithson.
The current show features the wry Late Conceptualism and art-about-art of an English artist who has called himself Bob and Roberta Smith since the early 90s.. The match with this writer's name is pure coincidence, but the double name takes strategic advantage of the fact that artists' teams and female artists are both very much in the foreground these days.
The Smith work is of the slapstick variety. On video, Smith harangues young artists to "make your mark" or recalls his humiliating attempts to get art dealers to look at his slides (names are named). Viewers are invited to participate in "The Meat Game," a variant on horseshoe-tossing that involves tossing artificial cold cuts and steaks into matching holes cut in wood.
The gallery walls are painted or hung with bright signs announcing "statements for the millennium." ( Amrhein's expertise as a professional sign painter came in handy here.) These include "hills are the new holes," "cats are the new dogs" and, best of all, "the late 90s are the new mid-80s."
When the laughs run out, which they rather quickly do, the flat files await, and reward, attention. Amrhein will soon move to a larger space next door to his current one, where he will have expanded viewing surfaces for the files' portfolios.
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Art Moving is the accidental gallery of the artist Aaron Namenwirth, who in 192 moved into a storefront on South First Street that had previously been occupied by one of Williamsburg's first galleries, Brand Name Damages. Passersby regularly inquired about the next show; and the previous tenant's mail, which included a fair amount of artists' slides, continued unabated.
Finally Namenwirth, who supports himself with an art moving business, caved. In 1994, he began holding sporadic shows of neighborhood artists.
When he was suddenly evicted from the space a year later, he organized a few "parasitic" shows in the art moving truck, by parking outside Four Walls in one case and the Postmasters Gallery, then in SoHo, in another.
In 1997, he bought a two-story building, a former chicken-feather cleaning factory, on North 12th Street, and, working with his wife, Nancy Horowitz, has resumed his sporadic exhibition program.
The first show, reached by walking through an extremely raw space, is a highly finished installation by Natalie Moore, who was one of the instigators of Sauce, another short-lived artist-run Williamsburg space.
Embedding strands and unraveled tufts of copper and aluminum wire in blazing white plaster walls that she built herself, Ms. Moore has created a wall drawing at once subtle and animated. The wires seem to tunnel through the plaster, pop up suddenly and then resubmerge; little tufts of wire erupt here and there.
Although Ms. Moore joins a growing group of artists who work in rather than on walls -- among them Ricci Albenda and -- the work is also so familiarly Post-Minimalist that it could have been made 25 years ago. And while Namenwirth seems happy to have put down roots again, don't expect complete stasis. He said the exhibition space will probably move around within the building.
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Despite the many solo exhibitions currently on view in Williamsburg, shows of two or more artists are more the neighborhood norm. Momenta, a three-year-old gallery that the artists Laura Parnes and Eric Heist oversee in a former loading dock on Berry Street, favors the double bill. Its current show introduces the work of Liza Phillips and Pamela Lins, who share a futuristic sensibility.
Ms. Phillips makes blurry paintings based on satellite views of the earth that balance on the line between realism and abstraction. Ms. Lin, whose work shows a bit more promise, animates conventional pedestals by giving them metal vents and then appends them with odd little sculptural incidents and architectural models.
"Vented Jump," which features a ski-jump-like scaffolding, avoids conventional Surrealist oppositions most successfully.
In a sunny tenement walk-up, Everything Is Everything is the two-year-old project of the artists Michael Asente and Monique Luchetti, who have lived in Williamsburg since 1984. The shows here seldom match the charm and light of this pleasant apartment, and the current one is no exception.
Jack Bach's paintings, which feature rising suns in fields of dark, carefully textured blue or green, have a congealed, Esthetic Movement stiffness and pallor; they want to be visionary, but seem academic. There's more going on in Craig Drennen's paintings -- maybe too much.
Fragments of words (lazy, Baptist, dirty) and numbers (666, the sign of the devil); bits of labyrinthine patterns and excesses of pastel colors or piles of excremental browns. Sin and innocence are all implied and nicely pitted against each other, but the visual terms are familiar, uninventive and overly polished.
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Last year, Tim Spelios and Carolyn Cox opened Flipside in a small room and hallway at the front of their Withers Street loft, literally a stone's throw from the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. After several group shows, they have mounted their first two-person exhibition.
Ward Shelley shows a group of kinetic sculptures whose basic theme appears to be failure. In "Ambitious Toaster," the appliance in question repeatedly attempts to climb a soup ladle.
"Floor Standing Ashtray" consists of a pathetic, oddly appendaged cylindrical ashtray (the kind positioned in office hallways and doctors' waiting rooms in the days before No Smoking), which futilely attempts to rise from the floor, only to fall with a crash and a bounce, thanks to a red rubber ball affixed to its side. Its moves resemble those of a drunken clown.
In the gallery's drawer-lined hallway, Lynn Mullins, a Hoboken artist known for "Trouble," her weekly radio show on WFMU, has concocted a whimsical installation that involves a peculiar, not entirely convincing blend of the funky and the geometric.
At one extreme are hard-edge wall paintings; at the other, bright hand-knit covers for the drawer pulls and shower caps holding strands of crocheted filament. In between are drawings on teabags and drawings and paintings on vellum; the latter are full of lacy forms and patterns, which, while in wide use these days, are the best thing here. But even if the individual parts don't always hold up very well, the overall effect is rather lovely.
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This month's group shows have all been mounted by relatively young galleries. "Offbeat: Humor in Life and Art," is spread throughout a railroad tenement gallery called EYEWASH, which the artist Larray Walczak opened on North 7th Street six months ago.
This gathering of 16 artists maintains a reasonably high level of amusement and is notable for the drawings of Ward Shelley, the maker of the kinetic sculptures at Flipside. On paper, Shelley elaborately and wittily diagrams such subjects as the history of music in the universe, art world success (a drawing titled "What I Wanted/What I Got") and five decades of American car design, good and bad ("Cars R Us").
Also good here is a new project by Komar & Melamid that involves paintings made by self-taught artists in a nearby senior citizens center. And Lisa Hein and Bob Seng have rearranged and painted with bright colors the components of three old-fashioned built-in closets, creating what might be called site-specific abstract reliefs.
Another recent arrival is N3 PROJECT SPACE on North 3rd Street, which the artist James Biederman has just opened in the living room of his loft and plans to devote exclusively to painting. The first exhibition features the work of six artists, most impressively the little map paintings of Sharon Horvath, the loosely structured, beautifully colored geometries of Craig Buckbee and the small dream-like landscapes of Eric Holtzman.
ROEBLING HALL, occupying in a big groundfloor space on Roebling Street, is the latest gallery venture of Joel Beck a Williamsburg regular. "Utopia," the gallery's fourth exhibition, has been co-curated with Christian Vivero-Faune, a Chilean critic living in Williamsburg.
Centering on the fairly ubiquitous theme of architecture and its discontents, it is an impressively coherent effort. Lane Twitchell renders the entrances of ersatz tract houses in glowing pastels that do nothing to disguise their anonymity. Colin Keefe outlines elaborate cities on huge sheets of paper. Also included are works by Valorie Fisher, Soren Martinsen, K.K. Kozik and Fred Tomaselli.
The Brooklyn Art Gallery was recently carved out of the first floor of a commercial building on North 6th Street by Joe Caterinie, David Edgar and Michael Houston, artists and designers who live or work in Williamsburg. Their inaugural show features work by Hope Windle, Martin Mazorra and David Ellis, all of it enthusiastically derivative. Ellis, who creates big Surrealist-flavored, music-obsessed paintings, makes the most memorable impression.
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Finally, there's MWMWM, an "uncomfortable" gallery (as the latest generation of shoestring exhibition spaces are called in Chicago) that has recently relocated from the Windy City to Williamsburg. It is currently showing a videotape by Ulrich Heinke, a German artist, which rather obscurely tackles the idea of professionalism by showing the artist going through the motions of bar-tending for invisible customers.
Heinke has generously turned a second monitor over to several other artists whose video tapes treat the same subject -- with an equal lack of clarity, unfortunately. But his gesture suggests that the inclusive spirit so basic to the Williamsburg art scene easily rubs off on newcomers.
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Here is information about the places mentioned in the article about art galleries in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Many are open only on Saturdays and Sundays; the hours vary and should be checked by telephone.
ART MOVING, 166 North 12th St., between Berry Street and Bedford Avenue. (718) 302-9314. An installation by Natalie Moore. Through Dec. 6.
BROOKLYN ART GALLERY, 283 North 6th St., near Meeker Avenue (west of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway). (718) 486-0946. "Grab Bag," a three-artist show. Through Tuesday.
EVERYTHING IS EVERYTHING, 245 South 3rd St. (718) 388-3947. Paintings and drawings by Craig Drennen; paintings by Jack Bach. Through Sunday.
EYEWASH, 143 North 7th St. (718) 387-2714. "Offbeat," a group show. Through Nov. 22.
FLIPSIDE, 84 Withers St. at Meeker Avenue (east of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway). (718) 389-7108. Sculpture by Ward Shelley and a painting-video-sculpture installation by Lynn Mullins. Through Dec. 13.
HOLLAND TUNNEL, 61 South 3rd St., between Berry Street and Wythe Avenue. (718) 384-5738. "Acme Labs Variation," an installation by Brandon Ballengee. Through Sunday.
M W M W M, 65 Hope St., near Meeker Avenue (west of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway). (718) 599-9411. Video by Ulrich Heinke, through Nov. 15.
MOMENTA, 72 Berry St., near North 10th Street. (718) 218-8058. Paintings by Liza Phillips and sculpture by Pamela Lins. Through Nov. 30.
N3 PROJECT SPACE, 85 North 3rd St., at Wythe Avenue. (718) 599-9680. "Painting," a group show. Through Nov. 29.
PIEROGI 2000, 167 North 9th St., between Bedford and Driggs avenues. (718) 599-2144. Installation and videos by Bob and Roberta Smith. Through Nov. 16.
ROEBLING HALL, 65 Roebling St., between North 7th and 8th streets. (718) 599-5352. "Utopia," group show. Through Nov. 23.
VELOCITY GALLERY, 281 North 7th St. (718) 302-1709. An installation by Katie Merz. Through Nov. 15.
