Hanging Out at No Rio @ No Rio

hanging Out at No Rio @ No RioHanging Out at No Rio @ No Rio
On view: September 24 – October 15, 2009
Reception: Vegetarian **Potluck** Valentine's Day BBQ
September 25, 7-9 PM

Gallery Hours:
Sundays noon to 3:00pm
Tues, Wed & Thrs 4:00 – 7:00pm

Artists:
Brendan Carroll
Margarida Correia
Takashi Horisaki
Gisela Insuaste
Darren Jones
Sarah Julig
SECRET SCHOOL AND THE K.I.D.S.
Bryan Zanisnik

Curated by Erin Sickler

Hanging Out at No Rio
September 24-October 15, 2009

Curated by Erin Sickler

In the wake of this most current economic downturn, politicians and pundits have looked to the 1930’s as a model that could teach us about the present. For New Yorkers, the current moment also speaks to a different era—the 1980’s—when the city was broke, the buildings were abandoned, and the parties were raucous. During the 80’s, New York was divided into distinct art scenes. In the Lower East Side, this meant makeshift exhibition spaces in apartments and storefronts, a scene that embraced the city’s subcultures and fringe neighborhoods as fodder for experimental art. By the late 80’s, real estate developers found a way to capitalize on the aesthetics of dereliction, AIDS had taken its toll and the party came to a bitter end.

Even prior to this latest financial crisis, New York institutions had begun their love affair with the 80’s, particularly the 80’s of the Lower East Side. In 2005, curator Dan Cameron organized East Village, USA for the New Museum. Lauded by some as an important recovery of an overlooked age, excoriated by others as biased or incomplete, Cameron’s show was one person’s remembering, that of a former East Village denizen attempting to tease out the exchanges, assimilations, and reciprocities that turned some artists into stars and caused others to fade away. Later, at NYU, another East Village regular, Carlo McCormick, utilized the East Village ephemera of the Fales Library’s Downtown Collection to provide the context lacking in Cameron’s show. Although ABC No Rio was not showcased within these exhibitions, its presence was felt—in zines, posters, recollections, and artist biographies. Prior to that, in the 1990’s, Julie Ault’s Cultural Economies at The Drawing Center and Gregory Sholette’s Urban Encounters at the New Museum made No Rio’s role in bridging political activism and artistic production more explicit.

In all these shows, artists were recovered, work was contextualized, and scenes were placed within their proper social context. There was fetishization in retrospect, of course. Now ensconced in the a staid and corpulent art world, the curators of these shows made all that political fervor and glittering trifle seem glamorous. But a certain wistfulness also prevailed. In part, the mourning for this period was more than symbolic, stemming from the staggering loss of life inflicted by the AIDS epidemic. That melancholy loss stretched the intervening years into decades and thrust the 80’s backwards into the annals of historical time.

When asked to do a show at No Rio, in the lead up to its 30th anniversary and the impending promise of a new building (or perhaps, more importantly, the demolition of the old one), it seemed pertinent to acknowledge No Rio’s history. The story of No Rio’s founding is a hero’s tale of a rag-tag group of artists who illegally occupied a building, fought the powers that be, and won. But rather than look too longingly at the past, however, I felt a strong imperative to be planted in the present, to take stock of the past without neglecting the future. As the economy faltered, artists were once again overtaking abandoned spaces—this time in outlying areas of Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens – in order to make exhibitions. Dredged out of that same pool of glitzy nostalgia that had spawned the East Village USA and Downtown shows, the impulse for this recuperation also made reference to the past with no clear understanding of how it was tied to the present.

Rather than tackling No Rio through a historical or thematic lens, or starting out with a predetermined idea and shoehorning artists into it, my role as curator would be to create situations, opportunities or platforms for exchange. Instead of a show about ABC No Rio, it could be a show for ABC No Rio. Hanging Out at No Rio was envisioned not only as a unique experience for the invited artists, who were at once fearful and animated by the possibility of economic fallout, but also to No Rio’s community itself—current members, past volunteers, founders, fans and hangers-on alike.

Having been party to a number of community art projects, I was wary of dropping artists like paratroopers into some unfamiliar setting, asking them to report back from the ground, and demanding an immediate triage of the situtation. The goal for Hanging Out was not to remedy No Rio’s problems, but rather to strengthen and enhance its existing fabric. This was done in several ways, but primarily through the bi-weekly barbecues that took place in No Rio’s backyard throughout the duration of the project. Sharing food brings people together; when you add a theme, even more so. Through these shared meals and conversations, the social spheres of punks, photographers, printers, and performers were allowed to overlap. The experiment was a success. New friendships were formed, wisdom passed down, edibles consumed.

The first exhibition of the project at Cuchifritos gallery in the Essex Market drew on models such as Group Material’s Democracy project (1988-9) and Martha Rosler’s If You Lived Here (1989) to become a resource center for learning about ABC No Rio long-standing contributions to political art and creative activism. This second exhibition is different altogether. As the culmination of a 6-month project, the work presented here is the artist’s partial response to the experiences that emerged from this open-ended premise.

Attuning their respective social practices to the growing trend towards urban agriculture, SECRET SCHOOL AND THE K.I.D.S. (The Kindness and Imagination Development Society) began their collaborative efforts to exchange seeds, build a mobile greenhouse, and create a network of secret gardens throughout in the Spring of 2009. Their Secret Garden Tours have taken them into clandestine gardens throughout the city. Their poster, B-Line Superhighway Map for Birds, Bees, and other Bugs, re-images the New York City Subway map as a network of green spaces that provide a thoroughfare for urban wildlife. In addition to making books, zines, and posters, they have taken part in exhibitions, fostered seed exchanges, and organized harvest potlucks. At a workshop held at the Cuchifritos gallery in the Essex Market, they invited friends and market-goers to join in making hanging planters for No Rio’s backyard. For the show at No Rio, they repurposed a found kitchen sink to fashion The Everything Garden, a readymade garden for the front side of the No Rio building. Expanding the art of social practice to include practical solutions for sustainability and survival, the Secret Gardens share an affinity with Mary Mattingly’s Waterpod project (2009) and PS1’s Urban Farm (2008), the work of Future Farmers, Free Soil, Rebar, Nils Norman, and countless others who are expanding the boundaries of art, architecture, ecology and design to imagine new living systems for an increasingly fragile planet.

In order to better connect the various constituencies of No Rio, SECRET SCHOOL AND THE K.I.D.S. suggested adding wacky holiday themes to Hanging Out’s BBQ’s. Other Hanging Out artists joined in by producing silk screened and digital print posters to announce the bi-weekly events. Still others contributed by decorating the backyard, wearing costumes, or preparing holiday-themed dishes. At the final Hanging Out BBQ, SECRET SCHOOL AND THE K.I.D.S. initiated a Valentine’s Day Card station so people could express their love across No Rio’s collectives by leaving heartfelt messages inside a tilting tower of colorful mailboxes.

In the fall of 2006, Takashi Horisaki returned to New Orleans where he had received his undergraduate degree from Loyola University to initiate his project Social Dress New Orleans (2007), a cast sculpture of an abandoned shotgun house in the Lower Ninth Ward created in response to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Along with a small army of volunteers, Horisaki applied latex and cheesecloth in order to create a soft cast of the structure. Creating a physical impression of the hurricane’s destruction, Horisaki’s sculpture recorded everything on the house’s surface including the fish carcasses wedged inside. The writer Milan Kundera has famously said, “The struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” Beyond a mere physical impression, Social Dress is also an imprint of the struggle of New Orleans’ residents against a government and a nation all too quick to forget this tragic event. Each time the sculpture travels to a new city, the artist hopes to remind viewers of the economic, political, and social failures that contributed to the disaster’s immediate environmental impacts as well as its ongoing social devastation.

While Social Dress New Orleans is formally reminiscent of Rachel Whiteread’s architectural castings, Gordon Matta Clark’s cut pieces, and Do-Ho Suh’s Korean home project, Horisaki considers the participatory nature of the piece - the relationships he formed with volunteers and local residents during the 3-month long making - to be essential to the project’s success. Similarly, his contributions to Hanging Out include this interactive element. In addition to casting particular segments of the building - the front door, a window, and the frontispiece - Horisaki attempted to displace the graffiti adorning the building’s entrance. Doing so required a near daily application of colored latex. All the meanwhile, he became a fixture of the building’s entrance, engaging volunteers, visitors, and curious passersby alike in conversation about the project, his work and ABC No Rio. Peeled from the building and hung in the gallery, Horisaki’s graffiti casts become graceful gestures, their words no longer legible nor readily indexical to their source outside the gallery door. While the circumstances surrounding the eminent demolition of the No Rio building are more fortunate than that of the New Orleans house, Horisaki’s preservations provoke a parallel effect. Just as the body absorbs memories through the skin, Horisaki’s cast-latex membranes imbibe the emotional resonance of their sources.

Text art is most commonly deployed in the service of conceptual practices, as in the graphic design-cum-semiotic theory of Lawrence Weiner or self-reflexive institutional critique in the work of Barbara Bloom. Darren Jones instead mines words for their expressive content as much as their institutional function. The art world has a fundamental distrust of sentiment and the spirituality, but Jones is drawn to such taboo subjects. In 2008, Jones became involved with the first Artist in Residence at St George's Episcopal Church in Flushing, Queens. Throughout the residency, Jones’s inserted personal stories and questions into the Church’s official text. For his series, Revelations (2008), he rearranged the letters of the outdoor sign, usually reserved for Mass hours or Psalms, to question the certainty of Church doctrine. In Poolpit (2008), he inserted his mother’s account of her own baptism into the congregations’ official bible. Rather than a dismissal of the congregations’ beliefs, Jones interventions courted a deep engagement with his own struggles over faith and religion.

For Hanging Out, Jones created two posters. For The Demise of the Anarchist Powder Room (2009), he overlaid an irreverent rhyme atop a red-tinted image of the building’s sticker and graffiti filled bathroom. In Feel No Fear, he took an image of No Rio’s cracked and crumbling ceiling, placing within its dark recesses the following text:

Only when you really look
Will you ever see
Only when the cracks appear
Will you know the real and hidden me
So when the time for truth is close
When that time is near
Look deep into the darkness
And you will feel no fear

A common sentiment expressed by No Rio’s extended community was that the essence of ABC No Rio was somehow embedded in its very dereliction, that its magic lay within its ceilings cracks and uneven floorboards. Here, rather than dismissing this sentiment as quixotic or impractical, Jones delves into the fear of change and embraces the beauty of the building’s decay.

In addition to creating posters for BBQ’s and other Hanging Out events, Brendan Carroll intervened in Cuchifritos gallery by placing evil eyes on the doors to ward off bad omens. As a member of the Agitators Collective, a Jersey City-based group of artists who come together to engage non-art communities, Carroll’s work often takes the form of irreverent or humorous interventions into public situations.

Sarah Julig has been a volunteer in ABC No Rio’s printshop for several years. As such, she is the only member of the Hanging Out crew that had been involved with ABC No Rio before the project. As an insider, her unique perspective allowed her to notice that while ABC No Rio boasts some of the most committed volunteers of any organization, oftentimes the members of the various collectives do not know each other. To mend this tear in No Rio’s social fabric, she sent polls to all the volunteers asking them to check off the people they knew and identify their favorite and least favorite things about the organization. Graphing the responses, she created a chart that documents No Rio’s internal social connections. In a zine, she gathered the responses to her survey along with photographs of the various respondents. Abstracting her findings, Julig continued her use of recycled materials by creating a colorful constellation of found and modified objects. Each node in the constellation represents a No Rio volunteer and the links between them stand in for the various social connections. For Architecture of Resistance (2009), the clustering of these celestial fragments becomes an apt metaphor for the way individuals organize into a collective whole.

Gisela Insuaste channels abstracted visions into real and imagined landscapes. Responding to the environments they inhabit, but also culled from the places of her past, her installations play with form, scale, and color to interpret the language of place. On a smaller scale, her drawings act like personal topographies, mapping out the social, physical and emotional attributes of the spaces they channel. For Hanging Out, Insuaste’s response to the No Rio’s architecture and the interventions made by other artists was to construct a whirlwind in wood, much in the same color as the backyard graffiti. The apparent precariousness of the installation pays homage to the No Rio building, on the brink of collapse but still a pillar of both activist and alternative art circles. Striking out from the wall before dangling around a tree trunk and across an entranceway, Haciendo Marcas (2009) also surfaces in No Rio’s gallery, filling the holes and the ceiling with stripes of brilliant color. Tiempo 1 and Tiempo 2 (2009), two gouache drawings on wood panel, present whimsical visions of No Rio’s façade and backyard barbecues. Using a more delicate linear form than her sculpture, they express Insuaste’s intimate attachment to the building, its history, and inhabitants.

In her photographic portraiture, Margarida Correia uses her lens to open doors to the past. Depicting her subjects in intimate settings, surrounded by cherished objects, Correia creates narratives about people and the things they hold most dear. In her series, Things (2006), two series of chromogenic photographs were taken in the family homes of two of the artist’s friends, one in Rotterdam, the other in Lisbon. The two men are shot in and among all the possessions, decorations and trinkets that have accumulated in the houses where they were raised. Juxtaposed with this abundant domesticity are re-photographed images from family photo albums, in which the same objects from the present-day re-appear in the past. The artist’s position as a trusted observer allows the viewer, by proxy, to access these distinctly personal worlds.

For Hanging Out, Correia photographed several members of the No Rio community framed by the spaces in No Rio they inhabit regularly--darkroom, printshop, zine library, office. Although surrounded by things that are closely familiar, the subjects looms larger than life; like No Rio’s own quixotic quality, their presence assumes almost mythical proportions. Alongside these portraits are the black and white photographs taken in the mid-1990’s by Vikki Law, a founder of No Rio’s darkroom and one of its most active members. Placed next to the current photographs, these images provide a link between No Rio’s present and past.

In his carefully constructed photographs, performances, and videos, Bryan Zanisnik combines carefully constructed tableaus with outlandish humor to create spectacles of the banal. Often employing his family, his constructs straddle the boundary between meaning and nonsense. Part pagan, part punk rock, Hollow Man Levitate (2009) was Zanisnik’s first performance for Hanging Out. Carried into the room and placed on a pedestal by a group of robed envoys, Zanisnik recited The Hollow Man, a treatise on life’s impermanence and uncertainty by the poet T.S. Elliot. At the same time, the artist’s hooded minions turned him into a human peanut butter sandwich, slathering the gooey substance over his body and plastering it with white bread. In the background, the artist’s father floated on a video screen, eating a hamburger while wearing a chef’s hat, as atonal music plays in the background. Held aloft as he exits, Zanisnik’s body sways and surfs through the crowd in deference to the punk shows that take place at No Rio every Saturday. For one of Hanging Out’s final events, The Wake, Zanisnik pays tribute to the founding of ABC No Rio, as he recites a eulogy for the building.

Whatever form they take, the projects created for Hanging Out are attempts to pin down the intangible. They are not the sum total of the interactions that have taken place, but, nevertheless, they are traces—thoughtful, elegant, inquisitive, and poetic sketches of relationships, ideas, and exchanges. And while the gallery proves an inadequate container for conveying this experience, the works express it through a synergy all their own.

Hanging Out at No Rio made possible with support from the New York State
Council on the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and
the Dedalus Foundation.

Hanging Out at No Rio (installation shot)

Darren Jones, Feel No Fear, 2009. Darren Jones, The Demise of the Anarchist Powder Room, 2009.

Takashi Horisaki, Off The Wall - 156 Rivington, 2009.

Secret School and the K.I.D.S., Collective Love Boxes, 2009. Sarah Julig, Architecture of Resistance, 2009.

Margarida Correia, Vikki, 2009. Margarida Correia, Steven, 2009; Margarida Correia, Garry, 2009; Victoria Law, Selection of ABC No Rio photographs, 1995-1996.

Gisela Insuaste, Haciendo Marcas, 2009.

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