Down and Then Out: 18 Murals on the Gates of the Bowery

Lawrence Weiner's painting at 134 Bowery, New York, for "After Hours: Murals on the Bowery," organized by the Art Production Fund. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

In December 2009, the New York City Council voted to require business owners to replace garage-style security gates with ones that allow views into the stores behind them by July 2026. "Roll-down gates are essentially large metal canvases," the New York Times' James Barron wrote in a report on artists who criticized the ban on the metal walls (which can no longer be installed after July 1 of this year). Barron noted that some painters have made their names on those gates, like octogenarian Franco Gaskin (also known as Franco the Great or the Harlem Picasso), who has painted scores of them around the world and more than a dozen along 125th Street in Manhattan. In other cases, a street-level mural may be one of the highlights of an artist's career. The city is filled with them.

All of which is to say that the Art Production Fund's latest project, which involved commissioning contemporary artists to design murals for 18 security gates along the Bowery, between Houston and Grand Streets, has an elegiac element alongside its more celebratory aspects. The works, which officially debuted on the evening of May 7 (they're only visible when the stores are closed: at night and on Sunday, in most cases), are on view for only two months, after which they'll be painted over, embodying the upcoming legislated disappearance of the gates across the city. A medium is slowly being ushered offstage.


Mary Heilmann's work at 220 Bowery, just feet from Prince Street

At a time when street art by its most famous practitioners is sometimes sliced off of buildings and sold, I'm a little surprised that no one has proposed auctioning off the soon-to-be-defunct gates to raise money for the APF or the nearby New Museum, especially since some of the works are really wonderful. Three of the most interesting are the abstract works by Mary Heilmann and Jacqueline Humphries and a characteristically manic, brushy text piece by Judith Bernstein, which could all be mistaken for the graffiti that appears on almost every other gate in the neighborhood. They appear to have been quickly and roughly painted, like many of the tags on the surrounding gates, and their work slips easily into the visual landscape of that stretch of blocks. Of course, the murals were in fact meticulously executed by teams of artists working from blueprints. They possess what art historian Rosalind Krauss, discussing Impressionist painting, calls the "codified sign or seme of spontaneity." They look easy, but they're hard-won: painting with the speed of a graffiti artist is difficult work.


A tricolor triptych! Jacqueline Humphries at 153 Bowery, inches from Broome Street.


Two people walking by the Judith Bernstein mural at 272 Bowery


The Kool-Aid man emerges: artists at work on Richard Prince's mural at 265 Bowery.

In other cases, the translation from contemporary painting to street mural is more awkward, as in Richard Prince's enormous Kool-Aid Man or Lawrence Weiner's gorgeous blue text piece. They're both stunning, particularly the Weiner, but they feel slightly out of place along the Bowery. This refusal of site specificity and the unique context and history of the street is a missed opportunity: these murals could be anywhere.


Ne travaillez jamais: Rirkrit Tiravanija's diptych at 180 Bowery

That can't be said of Rirkrit Tiravanija's piece, with its awkwardly shaped letters and occasional patches of sloppy painting, recalling the hand-painted "no parking" signs that adorn the storefront gates of many businesses around the city. It reads, "STOP WORK / NEVER WORK," a slogan plucked from the graffiti of Paris's 1968 revolts ("ne travaillez jamais") and sometimes attributed to Situationist International founder Guy Debord. That phrase also happens to be the text I had printed on the Tiravanija T-shirt that I picked up recently at the artist's "FEAR EATS THE SOUL" show at Gavin Brown's enterprise. Painted on the Bowery, on gates just a few blocks away from the Bowery Mission homeless shelter, it becomes far less easy to consume.


The Bowery Mission at 227 Bowery


Adam McEwen at 212 Bowery


The Danish duo Elmgreen & Dragset's piece at 213 Bowery, right next to Rivington Street


214 Bowery: Deborah Kass and Pulp, Ink have painted the gate of The Chair Factory.

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge Can Kill at a Distance of One Mile

New Museum senior curator Laura Hoptman and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, at the New Museum, New York, July 15, 2010. Photo 16 Miles

At the New Museum last night, senior curator Laura Hoptman introduced Genesis Breyer P-Orridge to a crowd in the museum's theater by listing P-Orridge’s myriad accomplishments. She was a founder of British performance-art group COUM Transmissions, which evolved into the legendary industrial band Throbbing Gristle, Hoptman explained, and she has served as an unrelenting provocateur for almost four decades. But P-Orridge, sporting a black shirt emblazoned with the word “Womanizer” in white block letters, was having none of it. “I didn’t do anything!” she protested to Hoptman. “Nothing!”

This was more than false modesty. As P-Orridge’s career has progressed, she has increasingly refused to distinguish between her art and her life, undergoing surgical operations with her second wife, Lady Jaye Breyer, in pursuit of what the two termed pandrogyny, a genderless state. Breyer died in 2007, but P-Orridge has forged on. In order to match Breyer’s appearance, P-Orridge has undergone additional operations and had cosmetic tattoos added to her face to match Breyer's eyebrows and beauty marks. She has announced that she and Breyer have become a single physical being. (P-Orridge refers to herself in the plural. For clarity, I am using singular feminine pronouns, as Hoptman did.)

But back to the occasion of the chat: Hoptman’s latest New Museum show, “Brion Gysin: Dream Machine,” has just opened, and P-Orridge happens to have been an old friend and admirer of Gysin. The crowd had gathered to hear P-Orridge talk about her late friend and, as the invitation promised, discuss “other matters.” She did not disappoint, providing a freewheeling series of anecdotes about Gysin, her life, and the art scene that once surrounded their mutual friend Williams S. Burroughs in downtown New York.

Here are some of the highlights from the talk:

• At public school in the U.K., a teacher nicknamed "Bob Brush" by the students — “As in toilet brush, for his mustache,” P-Orridge explained — told Porridge, “You obviously live in a completely different cultural universe than me,” and recommended she read Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. That experience led P-Orridge to the books of Burroughs (stolen from porn shops in London), and then Burroughs himself. Eventually, he met Gysin, who was a friend of Burroughs.

• P-Orridge attended a military school, she revealed, listing off to the audience a variety of the weaponry that was usually on hand: mortars, rifles, machine guns, artillery, and so forth. P-Orridge explained that she was trained as a first-class sniper while in school. “They taught me to kill at one mile!” she said, a glimmer in her eye. “Also, we began to start smoking hash at that time.”

• Many rare Gysin films exist today only because of P-Orridge. Burroughs apparently phoned P-Orridge frantically one day, telling him to call Gysin, who explained that a numbers of films kept in storage were going to be thrown in the garbage since the person paying the rent had died. P-Orridge explained that she cashed her welfare check, hopped in a taxi, and picked up the large, 35 mm reels just as workmen were carrying them to a Dumpster.

• “I realized that real lives were a lot more interesting than aesthetics,” P-Orridge said, describing what she learned early in her career by falling into the world of Burroughs and Gysin. Asked by Hoptman to describe pandrogyny, the state that P-Orridge is working to attain, the artist succinctly outlined her beliefs. Humans have transformed their world, she noted, but they have not changed themselves. They must rethink who they are as physical and spiritual things since they are currently out of touch with the world they have created, which has led to the tremendous destruction and violence that occurs today. (I’m describing this with considerably less eloquence than P-Orridge offered.) “We have to destroy all binary systems,” she said.

• Also, we have to colonize space. This would be easier if we could hibernate, like bears, P-Orridge noted. If we were cold-blooded, she continued, we wouldn’t even have to heat spaceships carrying space explorers. And, since there would be no gravity, we could even get rid of our legs. “Once you let go of the human body as a sacred thing, anything is possible,” she said.

• Describing a visit to Hoptman’s Gysin exhibition upstairs, P-Orridge mentioned standing in front of one of the artist's works, which was blue work and features a psychic cross. “He was going to give that to me, but we couldn’t take it because it was too precious,” she told Hoptman. “We regret that.”

Art Trend - Fire

Juan Zamora, Untitled, 2009, at A Coney Island State of Mind, Galería Moriarty in Madrid. Photo: 16 Miles.

In the past three days, in three cities, we have seen open flames in three different works of art. First we entered Galería Moriarty in Madrid to find a gentleman igniting the candle on the installation / drawing by Juan Zamora [above], who just had a solo show at the gallery that was reviewed in Artforum this month. It marks time - looking at the piece, wandering the gallery, running the space (the wax has accumulated on the floor) - and becomes the source of anxiety for the little man standing precariously on his plank.

Cildo Meireles, Volatile, 1980-1994, at Cildo Meireles, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA). Photo: 16 Miles

On to Barcelona, where Cildo Meireles's manic retrospective (which was just at the Tate Modern and also reviewed in Artforum) at MACBA featured his creepy Volatile (1980-1994) installation in a neighboring building. A dark room, anonymous powder lining the floors and floating in the air (which appeared to be flour but was later revealed to be talcum powder by a friendly guard), the faint smell of gasoline, and a single open flame. Suddenly we have become Zamora's terrified figure.

AIDS-3D, OMG Obelisk, 2007, at The Generational: Younger Than Jesus at the New Museum, New York. Photo: 16 Miles

Returning to New York and the New Museum's triennial, we saw that AIDS-3D had returned the open flame to its primordial associations, staking torches around their OMG Obelisk (2007) a site that appears destined for some sort of mysterious, prehistoric ceremony.

Though I am sure that I am missing dozens of examples, two precedents come to mind: Urs Fischer's Untitled (Branches) (1995) [below], which was featured prominently at the 2006 Whitney Biennial (and before that at the Palais de Tokyo) and Gina Pane's 1973 piece, in which she laid on above a bed of candles for thirty minutes (extended by Marina Abramović in 2005 to seven hours, broken into intervals, as part of her Seven Easy Pieces performance). Fischer's piece defines the ritualistic possibilities for the candle, while Pane's action more clearly hints of danger and violence - the startled surprise - that Meireles seems to covet.

Zamora's quirky drawing piece ends up standing out as the hardest to place and easily the funniest. After being activated by an observer, it runs a slow-motion play: the figure staring nervously at the candle until it completely burns down, uninterested in our presence.

Urs Fischer, Untitled (Branches), 2005, at Palais de Tokyo. Photo: suncana


Marina Abramović performing Gina Pane's 1973 piece,The Conditioning, 2005. Photo: The New York Times