The myth of
Manhattan is the sum of its tensions: dangerous/vibrant; cynical/romantic;
charming/raw; commercial/creative. Yet what animates Manhattan’s art world
today is less creative tension than banal contradiction. It is crowded but
feels disconnected. It is urban though strangely sanitised. While it
searches for newness, youth and cool, it is too expensive a location for
young artists to live and work. What used to be Manhattan’s fabled rough
edge has been replaced by a catty obsequiousness. The ‘art community’ is
really more an art scene.
Economics, politics and their aftermath have altered Manhattan’s art
culture. When rents raced upward, the atmosphere stiffened to meet massive
pressures on galleries to sell. The result is that voracious overheads
compel galleries to show work that is tried and tested and therefore often
shallow, scared and dull. Thankfully, the energy and accessibility that made
Manhattan a home and muse to generations of artists have moved to Brooklyn,
where DUMBO*, Williamsburg and Greenpoint now exemplify the promise of New
York’s art world.
Brooklyn’s sensibility arises from a sense of community largely absent from
Manhattan since the SoHo of the seventies. Historically, Brooklyn
neighbourhoods were ethnically defined by strong, creative diasporatic
cultures. Considered dangerous or unwelcoming for outsiders, they
nevertheless became home to artists unable to afford living and studio space
in Manhattan. Thus, communities developed in the eighties and nineties among
artists living and working in Brooklyn but showing in Manhattan. Today,
galleries have opened in Brooklyn with commitments to a respectful
relationship with those pre-existing artist communities and to creating a
dialogue between the local culture and its art.
One enabling factor is that Brooklyn’s lower rents allow galleries to
support artists’ visions and experiments with less apprehension. From that
environment emerges work with a fresh interest and broad conceptual focus
that is possible when art is freed from careerism. Critic Thomas McEvilley
has said ‘the problem is no longer that artworks will end up as commodities,
but that they will start out as such’. The difference between the nineties
commercial enclave in Chelsea on the one hand, and Brooklyn on the other, is
often not financial but why the art is being made or shown.
Perhaps the most potent merger of a director’s gallery and an artist’s
vision occurs in DUMBO’s Gale Gates et al. There, Executive Director Michael
Counts is an artist whose exquisite amalgams of theatre and installation
gained recognition long before he founded the 40,000 square foot gallery in
1997. Previously, the gallery had been located in Manhattan’s financial
district. In the enormous warehouse space in Brooklyn, Counts stages grand
and splendid installation performances and also offers opportunities for
large-scale exhibitions to independent curators as a part of his extensive
Emerging Curators Series. The shows display a rich academic focus while the
space supports unfettered artistic vision.
When Gale Gates moved to DUMBO, it was the first major gallery to develop
from the pre-existing artist community. According to Counts: ‘If you look at
any era’s next generation of artists, it is always about the level of risk.
Chelsea galleries are in less of a position to take risks. The galleries in
Brooklyn have the luxury of focusing on emerging artists. The next
generation needs its own community; it needs its own vibrancy. To some
extent, though not entirely, this is the area for our generation. DUMBO in
the last five years has been the frontier. There has been an artist
population out here for the last fifteen years. Dennis Oppenheim, Tom
Otterness, Vito Acconci, and a lot of others live and work here. Ten years
ago it was like the Wild West. You did not want to be out here at night at
all. Then the developers started making space available. Now, this area is
like SoHo was twenty, thirty years ago.’
A Brooklyn sensibility also flourishes in DUMBO’s Smack Mellon Studios,
which was developed in 1995 as a non-profit space. Smack Mellon consistently
shows provocative, layered and multi-media work. Recently, it hosted Mir2, a
large-scale complex ‘spacecraft’ installation where artists lived suspended
in the gallery’s two-storey warehouse space. As Kathleen Gilrain, Executive
Director of Smack Mellon, explains, the show was less about a curated,
formulated project than a concept which developed organically through the
artists’ open access to the space. Mir2 was neither a sensational press ploy
nor a staid saleable piece. Instead, what was most appealing about the
project were the playful risks involved as the artists took advantage of
their opportunity to engage the space without restraint – an opportunity
artists too rarely enjoy without massive grant funding or museum support.
Another significant element in Brooklyn’s sensibility is the number of
gallery directors who are artists themselves. Because they relate
empathetically with the process of making art, their focus can be more
centred, their understanding of the work they present extending beyond art
market tastes and academic preoccupations. For this reason, galleries like
Smack Mellon Studios have strong artist in residency programmes which allow
them to support local artists in more constructive and connected ways than
traditional artist/dealer relationships permit. Thus, Rebecca Smith,
director of Williamsburg’s Bellwether says: ‘The only reason I’m in Brooklyn
is because I am an artist, and being an artist, focusing on my career and
the community while having a gallery, is something I can do here. Here it is
affordable, whereas in Chelsea it would be impossible.’ Bellwether, an
artist-run store-front space, has shown a compelling range of emerging
artists, supporting various media and receiving strong critical attention as
a result of Smith’s skilled curatorial focus. Often called ‘cutting-edge’,
it displays a provocative mix of hipness and intelligence.
Plus Ultra, which opened in Williamsburg in May 2001 as a collaboration
between curator Ed Winkleman and artist Joshua Stern, also displays these
qualities. It has a smart comfortable feel – more café than shop. Far from
disdaining humour or intellectualism, both are highly encouraged. According
to Winkleman, Plus Ultra’s exhibition focus is on ‘some level of
irreverence, a conscious play with art history and the welcome aspect of not
taking itself too seriously’, while Stern adds, ‘We would like to somehow
think of ourselves as being didactic without being pedantic’. Plus Ultra’s
debut exhibition, entitled Skank, was a bawdy group show of thoughtful
sleaze. The work replicated the aesthetics of smut while it also usurped its
seriousness, presenting it as intellectually, more than sexually,
provocative.
A more assertive Brooklyn sensibility is summed up by Hugo Martinez,
director of the Martinez Gallery which is slated to open in Greenpoint this
summer. Previously, Martinez ran a gallery space specialising in graffiti in
Manhattan’s Chelsea district. For Martinez, the appeal of Brooklyn is
cultural drama as well as artistic possibility: ‘Chelsea never had an
artists’ community. Its growth was not organic, it was contrived by the
secondary art market in an effort to mask its mundane function as cutting
edge. The galleries in Manhattan who show emerging artists are making an
effort to capitalise on the allure of being trendy while really trading in
the less adventurous. Brooklyn has over 20,000 artist residents; their
presence requires a response to that community’s aesthetics and values. The
rich don’t/can’t dominate this world as easily as they do the fat cat
galleries. The wrong and right side of the tracks mix it up here … plus the
light is wonderful!’
* DUMBO is an acronym of Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass, an area of warehouse buildings lying between Manhattan and Brooklyn.
www.galegates.org, www.smackmellon.org, www.bellwethergallery.com, www.plusultragallery.com, www.martinezgallery.com
Ana Honigman is a freelance art critic based in New York