An Other Worldly Production

Photo by Daniel Belli, credit 1 below

Last year, I spent a lot of time wondering what to make of an otherworldly performance that’s hit all three of Bridgeport’s art centers -- scenes from a non-conventional opera called Thunder, Perfect Mind staged by NON:Op Open Opera Works.

I first saw a scene from it at the Zhou B. Arts Center performed by 6 young women, all delicate in white.  Three of them were seated on chairs mounted high on the walls, playing stringed instruments.  Underneath, on the floor, the other 3 women seemed to play another set of strings, strung from the ground to the ceiling like a great terrestrial harp.

The performance was beautiful, but hard to grasp, like something spoken in a language being invented while you watched, just past the limits of your intuition.

Photo by Ron Wachholz, credit 2 below

Which is why I’d come to see it, really, at the suggestion of Deirdre Harrison, who’s had a long career in musical theater.  She’d just stepped in to help the composer, Christopher Preissing, orchestrate the players, to help them spin a way to think their performance.  For the scene at the Zhou B., she knew the young instrumentalists perched on the walls would need some point of mental reference, so she’d given each of them a scrap of paper with a line from the text on it to repeat to themselves during the silences.

For I am the first and the last…

the whore and the holy one…

Photo by Brittany Tepper, credit 3 below

Thunder, Perfect Mind is titled from an ancient Gnostic text that had been dug up from the Egyptian desert in the 1940s.  It was part of a whole lost library that had been buried in giant clay jars for some 1,800 years.  Even after the jars were found, the Nag Hammadi texts were jammed up in intrigues over ownership for decades before they started to filter out into the world.  They were just becoming available to Coptic language scholars in the 1970s, and then to the public in English translation in the 1980s. That’s when Christopher Preissing first read some of them, when he was still in school.

Preissing was a graduate music composition student, writing a dissertation on the history of opera.  He was studying its conventions so he could test them later.  He would step outside the traditions of composition, explore expressive notations, subvert the way social hierarchies had been worked into the seating arrangements and the theater itself.

The Gnostic scriptures also held a counter cultural appeal.  For almost 2 thousand years, the Gnostics were known mostly from the wild accounts early Christian Church Fathers gave of their beliefs.  

Those accounts were always suspect, the Fathers were using them to establish an orthodox church by defining it against degenerate heresies.  Though as the Nag Hammadi texts became available, some of the Fathers’ most outrageous accounts, of Bible stories turned on their heads, of the Biblical God willfully blasphemed, turned out to be pretty accurate.

The library is also diverse, it presents a whole range of lost possibilities, of paths not taken, rediscovered in an age when people are suspicious orthodox authorities and how they assert the truth.  Preissing found himself drawn to the hymn called Thunder, Perfect Mind in particular because it evoked a feminine voice, and it read like a riddle.  The divine speaker describes herself in impossibilities and paradox.

I am the mother of my father and the sister of my husband -- he is my offspring.

Photo by Scott Johnson, credit 4 below

In 1992, he got a grant to make an opera from it.  Even after the first performances, he has never entirely stopped working on it.  It has continued to grow in scope and dimension as scenes are elaborated in public practice sessions around town.  Today, Thunder, Perfect Mind, the opera, is a site specific immersive performance for a 12 member chorus, percussionists, street performers, orchestral musicians and 2 sopranos, one of whom is an aerialist who will descend through the heavenly spheres to earth, and re-ascend into the divine fullness in the end.

In the shock of more recent history, ancient squabbles over divine metaphysics and the esoterica of avant-garde opera may sound beside the point.

1800 years ago, a Gnostic would say that is the point: that the so called real world isn’t actually real.  That the powers of this world aren’t just ignorant of reality, they’re constitutionally incapable of understanding it, they sense it vaguely when they spot a true spirit in other people, then they’re jealous of it, they persecute it.  But those rare souls who have that spark of the divine spirit can be restored to the divine wholeness by remembering where they came from.

Modern people are less interested in escape to transcendence in general, and the Gnostic answer in particular is elitist and radically anti-cosmic, dismissing the material world we live in as a disastrous mistake.

But Gnosticism arose in a world that had compelling parallels to the world we live in now.  The latter centuries of the Hellenistic-Roman era are sometimes called an age of anxiety, menaced by threats of barbarian invasions, plagues, even financial catastrophes.  But they were also an era of unprecedented cultural ferment and change.  Like in our own era, change was disorienting to navigate for the individual person, and the Gnostics expressed the crisis of dislocation in a startling way.  But they also show that human instinct for hope.

Photo from Hubble Space Telescope, credit 5 below

Gnosticism was a trend of thinking, not a church with clear boundaries, and the so called Gnostics were enthusiastic speculators about the origins of the world and the human condition in it.  Some of their accounts focus on the story of Sophia, or Divine Wisdom.

They start with the perfect divine Wholeness, or indescribable Depths, whose qualities begin to emanate outward in pairs, male and female.  Sophia is part of the last pair. She sins, she falls from grace, she launches a whole chain of catastrophe.

The exact nature of her sin is some form of willfulness.  She wants to create on her own, without her consort, or else she wants to contemplate the original Depths without permission.  She becomes pregnant, like the emanations before her, except she gives birth to a monstrosity, an abortion.  A divine Limit gets summoned up, and Sophia’s abortion is cast out to the other side of it.

Photo from Hubble Space Telescope, credit 6 below

It has various names, Sophia’s abortion, sometimes it’s just called the Demiurge.  But outside, in the dark, it’s scared, it’s alone, it doesn’t know where it came from.  It creates the material world to comfort itself.  It creates a whole host of celestial powers, to serve as its minions – they rule the spheres of the planets and stars, they make mischief in the sphere below the moon.  The Demiurge declares itself God and feels powerful.  But it’s never really confident in that feeling.

The Demiurge creates mankind out of filth, and breathes life into it, gives it a Soul.  But our souls are just an animating principle, our appetites, our lower passions, our perceptions of the material world.  We’d have no access to the divine realm at all except that Sophia, from some divine purgatory where she waits for her own redemption, scatters some of her light into humanity.

The human Spirit is a divine shard that’s embedded in us, it’s alien to our world, and we’re born in a condition of flesh-bound forgetfulness.  But when we hear the truth about where we really came from, our spirit responds, it remembers.  It knows.

The Gnostics didn’t believe that all people have that divine shard.  Or else we don’t have it in equal quantities. In some people, the spiritual principle is so weak or absent they are essentially just animate creatures, slaves to their material natures.  Some are in an intermediate condition, they’ve got enough spirit to be reasonable, to exert their will, they’re soulful creatures, but not truly spiritual.  The Gnostics are an elect minority of truly Spiritual beings.

These Gnostics were a great irritant to those Orthodox Fathers who were trying to build a church where everybody could participate just by faith in something they didn’t understand.  And that Gnostic Spirit is a strong rhetorical device.  Because if you don’t recognize the truth when you hear it, it’s probably not your fault, and you won’t be convinced by arguments, you’re just not equipped to know.

Meanwhile, down here in the cosmos, the Demiurge and his demons do have some vague perception of that spiritual element.  They recognize it in Eve and her daughters.  They know they don’t have it, and they’re jealous, they chase her, they rape her trying to get it, they persecute her wherever they catch a glimpse of it.

Preissing’s opera tells the story of Sophia and Eve like a double answer to the identity riddle posed by the hymn, Thunder, Perfect Mind.  The production starts with Sophia, setting out for redemption. She descends to earth, through the spheres of the planets, accumulating worldly qualities like heavy clothing.

Preissing’s Eve has wandered from the countryside into a big city, looking for adventure, but she’s quickly lost.  She wanders disoriented, she’s abused and assaulted, she sinks deeper and deeper into confusion, shame and fear.  When they meet, Sophia will relay her message, she’ll tell Eve of her true nature, remind her who she really is.  Sophia will re-ascend into heaven, restored.   Eve will stay behind.

In the opera, the results of their encounter, the nature of any transformation is left open ended, which is fitting for a terrestrial production.  So is the urban setting of Eve’s travails.  The urban condition has been one of the great themes of modern life; it is also a link into that ancient world where Gnosticism emerged.

Photo by Takashi Hososhima, credit 7 below

When Alexander the Great conquered the Persians in 331 BC, he said he was after more than glory, he wanted to integrate the known world – East and West – into a single cosmopolitan culture.  And he achieved that, he laid the ground for a new kind of empire, one built from a network of cities whose residents would be citizens of the world.  That condition exerted a dramatic psychic change.

The world had seen big empires before.  The great empires of the Near East, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians all helped lay the ground for imperial rule that wouldn’t just exploit conquered territories, siphoning off tribute and slaves.  Over centuries, they’d begun to build the bonds of trade, establish roads and postal systems.

In the west, Greek traders had been settling in foreign ports for centuries.  After Alexander’s conquests, they emigrated in much larger numbers, forming a leadership class in cities across the empire.  The Greek language became a lingua franca spoken across the realm. The Greeks also brought a common currency and cultural institutions like the gymnasia, which acted as secondary schools, teaching Greek literature and philosophy.

Some speculate that the alphabet the Greeks had adapted from the Pheonecians was a more versatile way of writing that helped them to develop new ways of thinking, especially abstract thinking, that they now brought with them across the empire.  Others have ventured that it was the dislocations of conquest itself that nudged ancient peoples to develop a capacity for thinking in universal terms.

Traditional cults had worked to guarantee the safety and integrity of small societies.  But once the town walls were razed, the local king deposed, the people sent into exile, their gods were either discredited, or else they were set loose from their parochial roles.  Exiles, soldiers and traders brought their gods along on their travels, and picked up new ones along the way.  People from all walks of life, cut adrift from all variety of old traditions, would appeal to universal gods as personal saviors.

A host of religious philosophies pushed abstract thinking to its limits, imagining a sphere of divine perfection so entirely transcendent from the earthly realm it was virtually indescribable.  The rational man might perceive it through the logos (“the Word” in the Gospel of John), a rational principle that mediates between the two realms, penetrating the cosmos, giving it shape and coherence, and resonating through the human mind.

At any rate, travel, trade and communication were all a lot easier in the new era.  The results were stimulating, but profoundly disorienting.  Geo-political boundaries were opening up, the population was more mobile, ideas that had been floated among philosophers a few centuries earlier seemed to penetrate further and more deeply into the populace, including a whole new concept of the universe.

It’s said that ancient peoples saw Heaven fitting over the earthly plain like a dome, regal but not all that distant, and there were clear axes for communication with the gods who dwelled in it.  The Ptolemaic universe exploded the dome, replacing it with a much vaster construction of planetary spheres and a realm of stars much further away.  The divine powers they expressed seemed indifferent to the passion and strife of the terrestrial sphere, maybe even hostile.

In the 1950s, the historian Eric Dodds evoked the anxiety of the age in a record of questions posed to an oracle – he says oracles had surged as the world became more changeable.  “Am I to become a beggar?” one record reads.  “Will I be sold as a slave?”  “Am I under a spell?”  “Are you God?  Or is someone else God?”

  

Gustav Caillebot, Paris Street, Rainy Day

The great scholar Hans Jonas thought Gnosticism expressed a spiritual condition of profound pessimism.  It reminded him of the existential alienation current in his own era. In fact, here in Chicago while Jonas was studying the Gnostics, a whole school of sociology was writing lyrically about the experience of urban life, and the psychic changes it affects on modern people.

The Chicago scholars would observe that in the modern city, life takes on a certain superficial quality, as people brush shoulders with uncountable numbers of strangers on the street each day, they each size each other up, read each other in an instant based on hints of dress and demeanor.   That pageant itself becomes fascinating and invigorating, there are whole genres of painting and literature spent observing it.

Each person traveling it can realize potentials that would be suppressed or ignored in small town life, because tradition and social conventions are much weaker in the big city than they are in the small town.  Those potentials express in good ways and bad ones: there are more artists, realizing their creative potential, and more juvenile delinquents, unrestrained by disapproving elders.

“In a small community it is the normal man, the man without eccentricity or genius, who seems most likely to succeed,” Robert Parks wrote in the 1920s. “The small community often tolerates eccentricity.  The city, on the contrary, rewards it.”

So the urban world is larger, in a wonderful sense, but more dangerous.  It is much harder to pick a course through the infinite variety and find meaning in it, much easier to skate through life on that distracting surface, oblivious to things that really matter.  It is easier to get lost.  This is the landscape Eve wanders in the scenes from Thunder, Perfect Mind -- a maze of urban streets, flickering with images and false idols -- sinking deeper into distraction and despair.

Photo by Scott Johnson, credit 9 below

Jonas links Gnosticism to a crisis of purpose in the ancient world.  He says that in the classical polis, the independent city-state, the citizen knew he was an essential part of a larger social whole.  He might be bound by its limits, he might be just a small part.  But his being helped to constitute and maintain a whole that was greater than the sum of its parts.

As cities were overtaken by empire, the citizen becomes a cosmopolitan, a citizen of the world.  He is still part of the whole, but as it becomes more vast, he is reduced to insignificance.  He can still participate in it, sync up his rational capacities with that principle evident in the cosmic order.  But his actions matter only to himself, he is like an actor playing a part on a stage.  “A role played is substituted for a function performed,” Jonas writes.  He may play it well, or play it badly.  Either way, it makes no impact on the stars.

For Parks, the sociologist in Chicago, the modern city is also a whole, more than the sum of its parts, more than a meeting place of individuals.  It is a state of mind, he writes, a body of customs and traditions, and the sentiments that inhere in them.  Where Jonas ties the psychic change of the ancient city to the dislocations of empire, Parks attributes the effect of the modern one to the mechanisms of urban life itself.

He believes those mechanisms are organic, tied to “the vital processes of the people who compose it.”  But since the city is also a center of trade and industry, they include the rationalizing tendencies of industrial society, especially the division of labor, the tendency to specialize.  They make the urban person more dependent on other people in a sense – where he performs one part of a process, he relies on others to complete most things.

But the nature of the connection has changed.  In a village, people are bound together by complex emotional connections – ‘bonds of sympathy’ is Parks’ term.  In the city, these are replaced by simpler, rationalized relations based on common interest.  Bonds of interest are more volatile than the other, more complicated kind.  They can be adjusted more easily as situations change, but they also leave individuals more vulnerable to being dismissed if they are not particularly useful, or at all annoying.

Every small town has its oddballs, Parks observes.  The peculiar character, who might not command the highest respect, but who is tolerated, looked after, maybe even with some affection.  He’s an oddball, but he’s our oddball.  In the city he might find his way into the right circles and become an exceptional artist, or a billionaire entrepreneur.  Or he might just never find his function at all, and drop out from the bottom of the machine.

George Bellows, The Cliff Dwellers

Jonas believed that the material world the Gnostics wanted to escape was rational, in a demonic way.  It was a world defined by law and order, but it was “rigid and inimical order, tyrannical and evil law.”  It was “devoid of meaning and goodness,” it was “alien to the purposes of man and to his inner essence.”  Like existentialists in his own era, the Gnostics wanted to defy this tyranny, to be true to their inner essence, to live authentically.

Modern people seem to have more or less continued on the trajectory that extends the logical principle to further and further ends.  The rational, instrumental pursuit of interests reigns supreme.  It’s helped us accomplish amazing things.  It’s made our horizons much larger, but it’s made individuals smaller, it’s made the powers of this world, in government and in business, powerful to the extreme.

We still have a sense, like the Gnostics, that their powers don’t rule the whole of reality.  We know that there is some inner voice that we have, maybe not expressed in all people in the same way, but it is the link to some more authentic existence.  And when we hear it in music, for instance, or see it in art, we recognize it – or we hope we will.

I don’t think it’s accidental that when we’re talking about “authentic” experience we’re less likely to call on the spirit, we’re more likely to say something’s got soul.  We really mean that lower element.  Not the airy, the distant, the detached, but the embodied person, connected to passions, deeply embedded in the material world and its sympathies.

It’s as if that logical principle has become too ascendant.  We’ve pursued the good things it has to offer, we’ve learned to detach ourselves, to be objective, so we can see a bigger picture than what’s visible from where we stand embedded in our parochial lives.  We’ve learned to recognize that the kind of social judgment and outright bigotry that thrive in small societies ruled by sympathies are corruptions to root out.

But pursued to its ends, rational detachment becomes dangerous and proud, ignorant of that field of goods outside its reach.

I think that authentic reality is something we make up amongst ourselves.  It’s a kind of music, or a subtle language that is constantly being invented and elaborated among the people speaking it.  The process of making up the language is most obvious in art.  I think that’s what Preissing, and Deirdre Harrison and the young musicians in white were all doing that night at the Zhou B. Center.

But it is something that goes on all the time, whether we’re conversing easily with people who seem most like us, or whether we’ve got to stretch to understand how they can be so backward, or annoying, to recognize them as being essentially like us.  We have that capacity to know.

For more information about NON:op Open Opera Works visit www.nonopera.org. For more information about Thunder, Perfect Mind visit http://www.nonopera.org/WP2/thunder

Photo from Hubble Space Telescope, credit 11 below

Photo Credits:

1.  By Daniel Delli (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

2. By Ron Wachholz, performance from Thunder, Perfect Mind at the Ear Taxi Festival, Harold Washington Library, 2016

3. By Brittany Tepper, performance from Thunder, Perfect Mind at the Chicago Loop Alliance

4. By Scott Johnson, performance from Thunder, Perfect Mind at Feed Salon, 2016

5. By NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration, and A. Evans (University of Virginia, Charlottesville/NRAO/Stony Brook University) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

6. ESA/Hubble [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

7. By Takashi Hososhima from Tokyo, Japan (Day 4: Stars #1) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

9. By Scott Johnson, performance from Thunder, Perfect Mind at Feed Salon

11. By NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

4Art Gallery Starts an Art Scene

Robin Monique Rios first became a gallery owner in 2003, when she and Jerod Schmidt opened the 4Art Gallery in Pilsen within 6 months of finishing art school.

If this sounds bold, Robin makes it sound like a pragmatic move.  She says she was raised by tough Southern women, having a job was always a priority. She started working for hotels while she was still in high school, later she’d switch to the telecom industry.  She worked on business and corporate accounts at MCI, which came in handy when she went to write the gallery’s business plan.

Meanwhile, she did well in corporate and male dominated environments.  She says she got every job she applied for, and she advanced at every job she got.  She says she has a learning disability so she always struggled in school, but in the workplace she compensated, she never let anyone see her struggle to learn.  She always had money to spend, but she wasn’t a shopper, so she spent it going to nightclubs and looking out for her friends.

That part is important, that she felt successful in the corporate world, or at least valued and well paid, with an active social life on the side, because after about 10 years of it, she fell into a depression anyway, and she says it was because “I wasn’t living my life.”

It is true that the year was 1999, MCI/WorldCom was poised for some problems.  There was lots of shifting around within the organization, though Robin says her employer would accommodate her if she refused a particular job.

Today Robin puts great importance in spiritual expression, and back then, she wasn’t doing that.  She says she was having thoughts of suicide, she was functioning on the outside, but in secret, she was thinking about how she might end it all.

Then one night she switched on the television, and she saw a commercial for the Illinois Institute of Art.  “It was as if the t.v. illuminated,” she says. “It was as if God himself was talking to me.” 

The Illinois Institute of Art was founded in 1916 as the Commercial Arts School; in 1999 it was promoting a new campus embedded in the Merchandise Mart, which was still dominated by showrooms for furniture and interior design.  Today the school promotes its Chicago context, with its advertising agencies, world class restaurants, high fashion and design.  In the commercial Robin saw “they were describing all the things they were going to offer, and I wanted to learn all those things.” 

She had some trepidation about going back to school.  She doesn’t test well. “I don’t comprehend what the questions are asking of me.”  But she put that aside and asked the admissions counselor to just pitch the program.  The campus was small, a class might have only 5 or 6 students. “The instructors will work with you to make sure you have what you need to learn,” he assured her, and that turned out to be the case.  “It was the best thing I ever did,” she says now, “I didn’t miss a single day of class.”

She met Jerod Schmidt at school.  Their personalities were so sympathetic she says their reactions to life were often in sync, and after graduation they were both a little depressed by the job prospects they saw at other people’s businesses.  They started talking about opening their own business - a fine art gallery that would also offer framing and graphic services.  So they wrote the business plan and got a $20,000 small business loan from Accion Chicago.  That seemed to be the easy part.

The hard part seemed to be finding a good space.  They started looking in Wicker Park first, because they thought they needed an arts scene to bring in customers.  This was back in 2003, the Around the Coyote art fair still drew tens of thousands of people through the Wicker Park galleries, and the Flat Iron building had been buzzing with artists for over a decade, but Wicker Park rents were so high she figured they’d have to bring in $10,000 a month just to meet expenses.

She was driving home from a particularly discouraging day scouting overpriced spaces in questionable proximity to the heart of the scene, when she passed the Podmajersky buildings on Halsted and saw a “For Rent” sign in one of the windows.  On a whim, she stopped the car and called the number.  John Podmajersky III answered the phone and offered to show her some spaces on the spot.

Deanna Isaacs would write about the John III and his plans for the family business in the Chicago Reader later that year.  It was his father, John Podmajersky Jr, who had bought the properties, starting in the late 1950s.  Over 40 years he accumulated more than 100 of them and renovated them as shabby-chic live-work spaces for artists. The designs were playful, he opened floor plans, added spiral staircases, clerestory windows, made covered passageways outside.  The backyards were joined into shared private gardens furnished with architectural curiosities salvaged from other buildings.  But the fronts were left relatively nondescript – they had a uniform look, just slightly off-beat in their paint jobs, the artistry went on behind the fronts.

His son wanted to bring more energy to the front.  He saw the renovations around the UIC campus approaching down Halsted Street.  He didn’t want artist’s studios with their back to the street, he told Isaacs he wanted “artist entrepreneurs” who would open commercial businesses in the storefronts.  Isaacs interviewed 2 of Podmajersky’s new tenants for the article – one was an art consultant for corporate buyers, the other was Robin Rios.  She and Jerod had opened the 4Art Gallery in a 2,800 sf space at 1932 S. Halsted earlier that year.

The space had a great accessible floor plan, storefront windows and reasonable rent, the only thing it didn’t have was a scene.  So she and Jerod set out to generate one.  The Podmarjersky’s already organized an Open Studios night each year.  The galleries in River North drew crowds by marketing 1^st Fridays, open gallery nights when the public was encouraged to wander through on the same day every month.  Robin and Jerod began to market 2nd Fridays in Pilsen.

What was trickier about Pilsen was that most of the studios were part of that hidden trail of spaces the older Podmajersky built.  So Jerod made maps of where all the artist studios were – they printed fliers and gave copies to the other artists to promote themselves, they spent hours handing them out downtown, and at other arts events. Robin still remembers approaching an established gallerist to ask her for advice.  The woman was incredulous.  “Why would I tell you how to start a gallery?” she wanted to know.  Robin and Jerod had the opposite instinct – they believed they’d be more successful if their neighbors were too.

In the end, they were successful at bringing crowds to Pilsen, and even at helping Podmajersky fill his storefronts, but it wasn’t clear it all worked to sell a lot of art.  A few years later the storefronts were emptying out again, 4Art had paid off its loan but Robin still wasn’t drawing a reliable salary. One departing gallerist told the Reader she thought 2nd Fridays were mostly a party where people came to drink wine, eat the cheese and crackers, and watch each other look at art.

Yet on any given 2^nd Friday the crowds still come to Pilsen.  They wander the artists’ studios, they rub shoulders with each other, and they look at art with the person who made it right there to chat with them about it.  And the party and the art may be sympathetic in non-commercial ways.

They’re both expressive activities, for instance. As a place where people come to show themselves and to check each other out, a social scene is a sort of theater for mutual display. People hone their personal style, stimulated by people they see around them.  And to the extent their tastes evolve together as they participate in the pageant, the scene is also a sort of collective activity for spinning webs of meaning, for creating a context where each individual’s small acts of expression take their significance.

The curator Claire Molek says when she set out to revive a curated version of open gallery night in River North, her goal was to make the art scene more “transparent” -- more accessible to the public who might not feel conversant in art, but also more open to participants in the gallery system itself, who might be tempted to stay in their own box and protect it from poaching without a nudge to step out for a collective project.

That kind of transparency and context might be more important for an art world now, in a postmodern landscape, where critics have less authority to define direction and meaning for whole schools of people than they did even a few decades ago. Selling art could be an after effect.

As an exercise, Robin recently sat with an intern at the 4Art Gallery and did a Google search for images of abstract painting. Scrolling through, they saw a lot of repetition, treatments and effects they’d seen before in other people’s art, repeating again and again through the Google scroll.  It’s as if they’ve been mutually informed, communicating by invisible threads.  Robin tells her intern that what will be new about her work as a fine artist isn’t necessarily her style, or her technique. “What’s new is your connection to the world.”

Robin does take pride in her technique.  She describes herself as a digital painter, and she considers digital art the most recent art movement to point a whole new direction in the field, the way Impressionism did.  She recalls being amazed at the possibilities opened up by tools like Photoshop. “It blew my mind,” she says.  But in the mid 2000s, critics and artists weren’t sure using digital tools made real art.  And Robin herself is a little critical of artists who are too free with Photoshop filters and effects.  She uses her own photographs, makes her own effects with the camera, she’s proud that photographers who looked at her work couldn’t believe it was digital because they couldn’t see pixels, even with a glass.

At first she was making photographs of fairly traditional genres – landscapes and buildings in picturesque decompose.  But her signature, her “brand” she even calls it, her particular connection to a subject matter, began take shape when a friend gave her an X-Ray and asked her to make it into a piece for a 2004 exhibit called The Devil Show.

 “It spoke to me on so many levels,” she says.  She’d been sick a lot as a kid, and always with exotic illnesses, including a bone disease that fused her hip and put an end to her skateboarding days.  As an artist she came to believe her physical ailments were an expression of soul sickness, the unhealthy spirit she’d got by suppressing her true self, by not living her life.

She’d been so nervous about showing that first piece she didn’t want to attend the opening.  But when she arrived there were people waiting to talk to her about it.  Some of them wanted to give her X-Rays and MRIs of their own for her to make into art.   Eleven years later, she has made more than 40 pictures in a series she calls Observation.  She says the Observation series is about stripping away layers of social and personal constraints in order to reconnect with the world as our true selves.

As a gallery owner, Robin emphasizes that she represents artists who make fine art, as opposed to what she calls “decorative art.” The distinction must hinge on that goal – making art that expresses a real connection to the world – but since the goal is ephemeral, the distinction is also a moving line.

Robin says she’s known too many older artists who’ve had some success, but have become embittered misanthropes in the process.  They got sucked into a cycle where appreciation of their work seems to wax and wane, and they find themselves making the same kind of thing over and over again.  Either they’re trying to fill a large order for a hotel buyer with lots of rooms to fill, or they’re trying to recapture that landscape that sold, to hit the stylistic notes that brought some recognition before.

She says the critics, who could theoretically give artists feedback and push them to re-approach the world anew, aren’t much use anymore.  When Dan Davidson was in art school [profiled on The Hardscrabbler in April 2015], there was a so-called Artforum Mafia, a clique of critics whose essays defined the terms artists could use to make sense of their own careers, whether they followed their guidance or rebelled against it.  It doesn’t sound like today’s critics carry that kind of authority – or necessarily even seek it.  “No one’s writing long articles anymore,” Robin says.  “It’s all just Q and A.”

If the critics have stepped back, it sounds like gallery owners have stepped up to guide the show: they scout out what’s important, and neglect what’s not; they cultivate artists and educate buyers to appreciate them.  In fact, that’s pretty much what the old ArtForum Mafia was afraid would happen – it’s the kind of art market feedback loop they pictured when they argued about the commoditization of art.

And the commercial results have been fabulous.  At least in the secondary market, after pieces leave the gallery and are sold again at auction, the market has moved from one record to another, shouted on by ever more astonishing prices for superstar art.  In 2014, worldwide sales for art sold at auction topped $15 billion, up 300% from 2004, according the ArtPrice annual market report.  In the 1980s, top prices for individual artworks had stagnated around $10 million in the western market; in the 2000s a market emerged for works priced $100 million or more.

But behind the shouting around the superstars, the auction market has grown broader too, as in more art, made by a larger field of artists, finding a larger audience.  Partly, there are just more fabulously rich buyers from more parts of the globe.  They’re trying to establish new museums, or they’re building their personal collections, diversifying their investments.  China’s auction market has surpassed New York’s every year since 2010.  It’s helped shift the whole balance of genres.  Europeans and Americans buy paintings above all else, but ArtPrice reports that sales of drawings have taken a new scale under the influence of the Chinese.

But maybe the most encouraging point is that even as the celebrity paintings get all the press, the vast majority of sales, 80% of them, are of pieces priced less than $5,000.  In 2013, that segment represented nearly 300,000 works of art sold, twice as many as 10 years before.  By 2014, sales of contemporary artists brought in $1.2 billion in revenue, which was $1 billion more than 2004.

Auction sales are where speculative buyers have access to bid up prices, but a vigorous secondary market is good for art sold in galleries too, especially if interest is growing in emerging contemporary work.  It may be that in fine art, as everywhere else, it’s harder to establish a canon of important work than it once was.  The conversation is ever more diffuse, it’s confusing, but there’s more opportunity to be part of it. Especially if it transacts at a local level, in your neighborhood, for instance, like it does in ours.

By 2009, the Pilsen art scene was wearing Robin out.  John Podmajersky had succeeded in filling his storefronts, but then his all efforts seemed to backfire.  Robin says she didn’t have a problem with John the way some people did – she never thought he was responsible for marketing the district, for instance, but she did think he went overboard on the rules.  He had rules about the hours his artist entrepreneurs should be open, and about the appearance of their window displays.  And then the rents kept going up, Jerod had moved to Portland, and Robin was tired of promoting the scene.  By 2009, she was ready to close the 4Art Gallery.

Then she got a call from Michael Zhou, son of ShanZou Zhou in Bridgeport.   Robin had seen the Zhou brothers at the occasional 2^nd Friday event in Pilsen before, Michael told her his father and uncle had respect for what she she’d accomplished, they wanted to create something similar in Bridgeport, and they wanted her to be part of it.  Robin says it was an emotional meeting – she was flattered, but she was also exhausted.  In the end, the vision Michael laid out for building an art mecca in Bridgeport won her over.

Robin says the space was very raw when she moved in, her own space it was smaller, but it was also more manageable, she represents about half the artists she once did, and she’s part of a vibrant art scene she isn’t responsible for generating herself.  Today, the Zhou B Center thrums on 3^rd Fridays – from the basement to the roof, and there are hosts of other shows throughout the month.

The 4Art Gallery is located on the 4^th floor of the Zhou B. Center at 1029 W. 35^th Street.  Robin displays works from her own Observation series at the back of the gallery.  This is my favorite one.  It’s an X-Ray of a human skull, painted in with more than 20 other images: there are train tracks burrowing into the depths, and gothic windows opening to the light.  There are the creaking gears of thought packed in a frontal lobe, and there are doves in flight just outside the skull walls – soaring on invisible currents.  It evokes all the limits and possibilities of the human mind.

On my most recent visit, I told Robin about the things I saw in it, and I was gratified when she told me it was very similar to what she saw.  It was only walking home afterwards that I remembered we had talked about that same picture before.  Did I see those things myself?  Or did she point them out to me and they took root in my mind somewhere, pushing to the surface as I looked at it again?  I don’t remember, but either way, as I start my collection of Bridgeport art, that will be the first picture I buy.

A Field Vision of Art

Malevich's Black Square

 A few weeks ago Daniel Davidson came into Bridgeport Coffee excited about a review he’d just read in Apollo, a British arts journal.  He didn’t agree with it – he was stimulated the way you are when you stumble across a clear articulation of something you know to be deeply wrong.  The essay described a new exhibition of Malevich’s Black Square, an avant-garde painting first shown in 1915.

The title is accurate: Black Square is the picture of a black square, painted inside a white one.  It is sometimes described the culmination of the European tradition that evolved from realistic pictures through ever more impressionistic depictions of light, geometric form and shifting perspective until it arrived at pure abstractions.  Malevich himself is said to have hoped that by breaking loose from representation of the material world, his painting pointed the way to a plane of ideals and utopian social possibilities.

In the century since then, the utopian social possibilities haven’t been realized, and some critics have wondered if abstract art hasn’t been less a culmination than a cul de sac, cluttered with empty shapes where anyone can project his own fantasies.  The review in Apollo was more optimistic; the author, Rye Dag Holmboe, describes some recent abstract art he believes show new directions for the genre.

Daniel is of the opinion that abstract art is really a dead end.  But it is a dead end he wrestled with himself for decades before he found a way out, and the review in Apollo has inspired him to describe it in his own essay.  Which he begins to compose at the coffee shop, in a journal with a black cloth binding and thick white pages, like Black Square with content.  It’s filled with carefully drawn text and illustrated with pictures cut from magazines and catalogs, some of them are from his own work; some of them have been cut apart and reassembled as inverted rectangles, a theme from his days as a systemic minimalist.

Davidson with his journal: Black Square inverted

Daniel was an art student in the 1960s.  Which has meant his career spanned the years when the modern world is sometimes said to have given way to a postmodern one.  In that formulation, the modern world was marked by progress and rational certainty, the people who lived in it were engaged in a common project to pull eternal truths out from the flux and chaos of everyday life. The postmodern one started as people lost confidence in the common project, settling into a world of relative truths.  They might still have the power to create significance, but they’d assemble it self-consciously, with doses of irony to show they knew they were making it up.  Daniel’s journals are a jumble of both.

On one page, he’s made a collage of events picked out from 1937, the year of his birth. The fascists bombed Guernica that year, Goering appeared on the cover of Look magazine, Stalin turned his paranoid gaze on his own inner circle. Howard Hughes flew across the continental United States in record time, Amelia Earhart was lost in the Pacific, Disney released Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, its first full length animation feature, where innocence triumphs.

On another page, he’s summed up his life in a brief outline ordered around a series of spontaneous acts.    He remembers them as a series of breakthroughs, abrupt intrusions of insight that rupture the patient practice of everyday life.  Like the moment riding the El home from school one day when he decided he would race sailboats – he’d had no prior experience with sailing, but it’s an enthusiasm that stuck with him through his life.  He does not count the moment in 1957, as a young philosophy student walking back to the dorms when he renounced the afterlife, even though it was abrupt, because he was considering the question.  But he does count the moment in the army in 1962, stepping off the landing from the mess hall, when he knew he would be a painter.

He had studied commercial art at Lane Tech High School, but he describes his courses there as entirely separate from fine art; he says he learned to draw by cutting class, sketching from the street and wandering the galleries of the Chicago Art Institute. But then, when he decided to be a painter, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago was the natural place to start. 

from Davidson's journal: 1937

At the time, abstract art was enjoying a re-florescence in New York, egged on by a clique of quarrelsome editors at Artforum magazine.  The intellectual artist Ad Reinhardt was working on his own series of nearly identical Black Paintings in homage to Black Square -- they occupied him for 13 years from 1954.  Holmboe says Reinhardt embraced Malevich’s metaphysics, his appeal to “oneness” and “unity,” but the utopian social goals seemed beyond art’s reach in the years after the war.

In Chicago, a new school of students was beginning to define themselves against New York and its so-called Artforum Mafia.  They took stylistic cues from commercial art, and they made images of people and objects – they were cartoonish, carnivalesque, with a bawdy, political edge. Some would come to be known for an art show they titled “Hairy Who?” after a critic they found particularly pretentious (as in, “Who the hell is Harry B?”)

Daniel defined himself against the Chicago school.  “I didn’t want to be a Hairy Who.”  He wanted to be a New York artist. He made a study of Artforum.  His idol was Frank Stella, known for his flat geometric stripes in bold colors with sharp lines -- they didn’t represent other objects but were objects themselves.  Describing their appeal, Daniel says they were vibrant, muscular, but also systematic. “Every year or so he’d change something up,” introduce the next logical step. “Which eventually led him into utter nonsense,” as Daniel recalls, “but that’s another thing.”

Daniel developed his portfolio and “plotted and schemed” his way into Yale, because Yale fed directly into the New York arts scene.  After earning his MFA from Yale in 1968, he took a teaching job so he wouldn’t be beholden to the gallery system.  He taught printmaking, drawing and painting at Alfred University in Upstate New York from 1968 to 1982.

He began working on a series of inverted rectangles, working with 4 by 8 pieces of Masonite.  He painted them, cut them apart and turned them inside out. He showed them at New York’s OK Harris Gallery in 1975.  Though the whole time, he was working on another kind of project.

As a student at Yale he had taken a course in Chinese painting.  It was a tradition entirely outside the logical path he’d learned in European painting, it started from calligraphy, and elaborated on the quality of the brush stroke.  On the side, he started doing his own brush stroke paintings, working with a graphite powder so fine it would billow each time you dipped the brush in it.  He says the results were beautiful, but he wasn’t sure where to go with it. “It wouldn’t fly in New York.”

from Davidson's journal: a pictorial summary of his career

In an article for the New Yorker called “A Girl of the Zeitgeist,” Janet Malcolm would describe an about face at Artforum made with the arrival of Ingrid Sischy as editor on the eve of 1980.  The writers of the 1960s and 70s had faith in art as a coherent project that followed the history of western painting to its end.  Progress meant being pulled forward by a necessary pursuit of the next new thing – there was a logical path, a ladder, there was no looking back.  As Sischy described “that particular avant-garde” to Malcolm: “Its rule was that painting was dead, it was just decadent picture making, the regressive act, and all one could do was produce heroic works of abstraction, accompanied by a great deal of terminology.”

The old writers and editors shared a common education in art history, philosophy and aesthetics.  They defended art’s aloofness from the compromised values of the bourgeois world.  Art didn’t need a “social mission,” its mission was encompassed in the intense aesthetic encounter you’d either experienced, or had not.  Their resistance targeted the commoditization of art, by which they meant subservience to a gallery system that levered the artistic aura for outrageous profits.

The first thing Ingrid Sischy did on her arrival at Artforum was scrap the issue underway and pull out an issue of entirely new art in 2 weeks. From that first issue forward, the whole tone of the magazine changed.  The editorial content was less erudite and more irreverent, more inclusive, even socially conscious.  Malcolm’s article describes a terrific fight over an exhibit showing African Art alongside Modernist abstractions after one of Sischy’s writers criticized it for taking the African Art from out of its ritual context, and pressing it into the service of a Western project.

Under Sischy, Artforum covered European artists, and painters of figures and objects; painters who would treat art history less like a ladder, and more like a trunk of dress up clothes in the attic; painters whose pictures alluded to power dynamics very much of this world, and who also participated with relish in a gallery system that made them fabulously rich over night.

Barbara Rose was one of Artforum’s old avant-garde.  She had been married to Frank Stella in the 60s.  She told Malcolm about having everybody over for parties “and there would be raging arguments.”  But they were arguments among intellectuals who cared deeply about the same issues and who spoke the same language. “You had a sense of not being isolated. You were talking to other people.  It might be only 5 people, but you were talking to somebody, and you knew who you were talking to.”

The small group created a “consensus of educated people,” they gave a sense of coherence to the magazine, and to the culture.  “There wasn’t this horrible leveling where everything is as important as everything else.  There was a sense of hierarchy of values.”

Duchamp and Mondrian in one of Davidson's Meta-Paintings

The lost consensus of educated people sounds like a complaint that old elites have probably always made about the new generation that fails to recognize their own importance.  But in the 1980s and 90s it enjoyed a wider resonance.  In 1987, the year after Malcolm’s article appeared in The New Yorker, Allan Bloom would publish his book The Closing of the American Mind, detailing the decline of the classic liberal education, deeply experienced, that prepares a leadership class that knows how to think.  And his book was a bestseller.

Its popular appeal might be evidence less of the real value of high culture than of the particular dilemma of its time.  In 1990, David Harvey published The Condition of Postmodernity.  In it he argues that a new round of acceleration of the world economy has been accompanied by a new kind of cultural change.  The two spheres have long been linked by processes of creative destruction – with new business models, new products, new fashions, new developments in art, and new urban plans burning down the old ones and building on their ashes, over and over again.  That dynamic has been underway since the earliest days of capitalism; freedom from tradition and its superstitions has been one of the core values of modernity.

In the decades after the war, creative destruction only accelerated.  Information and transport kept moving faster, the world got smaller, and smaller.  And as those changes accelerated, the cultural landscape got noisier.  By the 1970s, it wasn’t just a matter of more change, faster.  The rate of acceleration was so dramatic that modernity surpassed itself, there was a qualitative break.  It ricocheted through the arts and popular culture; it ruined that project where creative destruction had a purpose, which was to keep the way clear for rational progress toward universal, or at least widely understood ideals.

The experience was profoundly disorienting.  Rose and Bloom, and all the people who might not be part of their circles, but who took a little comfort in knowing they were there, weren’t just practicing the usual complaint about an old elite’s loss of prestige.  They felt the loss of purpose.  They had no tools for navigating a culture where there is no center, no outer boundaries, and maybe no instruments for navigating a sure course, just a lot of individuals wandering around in the wilderness with lots of freedom on their hands. And a media machine for doling out distraction and fame in small doses.

At least that’s the idea of a “postmodern” condition.

from Davidson's journal: Nietsche and Kandinsky in a boat stuffed with fireworks

Before he studied art, Daniel studied philosophy.  As an abstract artist, he saw himself as an aesthetic engineer, he would take a simple thing and work his way through all the permutations of it.  “It was my way of being creative, of imagining stuff.”

At first, like a good modernist, he thought there was something behind the abstractions.  But even in art school he felt stirrings of doubt.  Even Frank Stella used to tell people that his paintings were just what they appeared to be.  The more you looked behind all the theorizing, Daniels says, “it all turned to dust.” He found an alternative in Chinese landscape painting early on, but that was just another tradition, it wasn’t a satisfying answer.  He would alternate back and forth between abstract geometries and calligraphic techniques, “from one visual idea to its opposite,” for 40 years.

In the late 1990s, he went back to get a second MFA at UIC’s Electronic Visualization Lab, where he practiced systemic minimalism in a new medium, but the new medium wore on him, he missed the painterly technique.   He says he left Chicago for awhile to get away from digital art.

He set up a studio in Silver City, New Mexico in 2003.  And it was there, in the desert state where he first decided to be a painter, that he launched a series of 60 paintings that he considers his third spontaneous action. It wasn’t instantaneous, like the others, it was spontaneous in the sense it was not planned, it seemed to come from some mysterious ground that he’d prepared without knowing how – it was the synthesis he’d been striving to realize his whole career.

The paintings were inspired by the I Ching, the Book of Change, an ancient Chinese divination text.  The I Ching composed of a series of trigrams and hexagrams – each one representing permutations of 3, or 6, solid and broken lines.  Each has accumulated layers of numeric and symbolic associations over the centuries.  Ancient commentaries describe the Book of Change as a microcosm, a sort of element table of a universe in flux.

Daniel had run across it in the 1970s, it had interested him as an ancient example of a binary logic system.  He painted out the hexagrams on 64 large sheets of paper, but he didn’t go deeper than that.  He brought the 64 sheets out in Silver City for a gallery exhibit.  He was disappointed in the gallery scene in Silver City, he says no one sold any paintings there, they just hung them on the wall and made money selling merchandise.  But it did get him started thinking about the I Ching. 

And he thought by painting, starting with abstract paintings of the hexagrams themselves, then adding his own layers of associations.  He painted the hexagrams for heaven and earth using birds of the sky, land and water; he depicted each of the hexagrams with the “mountain” trigram in them, using expressions in human hands.  He did more than a dozen paintings that worked his way through phases of art history, their accomplishments and limitations, all using correspondences with the 8 trigrams as a frame.

Daniel isn’t particularly impressed with the I Ching as a divination text – he doesn’t believe it will tell you the future.  But he does believe that if you go to it with a real question, something you want answered, you will find an answer.  He says it brought him back to representative art, in fact it brought him back to figure painting.  The experience was tremendously liberating.  It’s like, having found himself set loose in a trackless desert, he managed to map the world on a frame of trigrams, so he could navigate it.

Davidon's Birds of the Earth

What got Daniel going about that Apollo article was the idea that abstract art might still have further to go.  In his experience, it has been a dead end of what he calls “target vision” – the obsession with chasing the Next New Thing in art. He thinks artists would do better to try to achieve a “field vision” instead -- a wide angle view of the world.

In his essay, he proposes a schema for achieving a field vision that does not reference the I Ching.  He calls it the triangulation of art.  He says art history can be analyzed into 3 primary styles: the mimetic art of the western figure painting; the calligraphic art of the Chinese landscape, and pure abstractions of the Islamic tradition.  He says any painting can be placed somewhere within that triangle, either as a pure example of one of the primary styles or as some mixture of them.

Realizing that, understanding the map, makes all styles available, it frees the artist to paint poly-stylistically.  At least that’s what it did for him.  In his own art, he has become absorbed in “meta-painting” – painting about painting, often literally pictures placing famous artists together in an almost allegorical way.

After 7 years at New Mexico, Daniel returned to Chicago.  He moved to Bridgeport in 2012.  In Bridgeport, he lives in the middle of a burbling local art scene.  He inhabits a studio in one of the Zhou Brothers buildings on Morgan Street.  But he still describes his arrival here as almost accidental, he says he can’t remember how he found this particular place.  He doesn’t feel he can identify with what the artists around him are doing, or that they recognize the value of his work.  But that doesn’t particularly concern him either.  He says no one can help you make art.  It’s finding the field vision that’s vital.

notes from Davidson's journal

On the Industrial Frontier

Ten years ago the little strip of 37^th Street between Morgan and Racine was not broad and smooth and wide open like it is today.

There were more buildings on it -- the Joslyn plant sprawled the whole length of a city block -- and the street itself was narrower.  Its rolling pavement was a ruin of asphalt patches, all broken into potholes and crumbling to gravel, with stretches of the old paving stones showing underneath.  A set of rail tracks ran across it -- they were operational just up to the verge of the street, but the railcars that used it all stopped before crossing.  And somewhere underneath all that ran a very old water main -- it was broken, and it was also legally inaccessible, so it was going to stay broken for awhile.

But my friend John didn’t know that when he bought the three story warehouse at the middle of the street.  He saw industrial heritage and the opportunity to build something new.

  

I’ve told this story before.  At least the practical version, about the progress of a real estate project. About how John bought it, in 2002, with documents in hand from the city, promising to repair that water main, and from the railroad, detailing their plans for re-activating the track where it crossed the street and ran alongside the loading docks at the back of his building.  The rail siding was a feature central to the interest of the drywall distributor who was going to lease the whole first floor, and pay the rents that would help finance John’s plans to subdivide the other stories into small spaces for metal fabricators, makers and artists.

And how, after he bought it, the railroad’s lawyers squashed the idea of a grade level street crossing – too much liability risk (even though the same tracks run through the middle Racine a few blocks away).  And how the city’s plans to repair the water main were stalled by the significant detail that the city didn’t own the street.  The street was still owned by the company that originally developed the Central Manufacturing District, now a huge multinational, whose lawyers had other things to do than manage the sale of a scrap of street in Bridgeport – an inconvenient bit of industrial heritage.  It would take 3 years before they’d complete the sale and another year for the city to repair the main.

And how John still ploughed forward anyway, doing renovations himself like a really ambitious home improvement project, and attracting tenants, even before there was water, and about the cast of characters who passed through that place, from the outlaws who prowled it before he bought it, to the cast of bikers, missionaries, machinists and other curious parties, including myself, who were drawn in by John’s evolving vision for rebuilding something exciting from waste stream recycled materials, and by his skill for telling a really good story.

For a long time it wasn’t clear if he’d be successful.  He has been.  Though it took him 6 years to finish it, and start looking for the next project, which he found in the Stockyards.  He’s pursuing that one gradually too – time allows synergies to develop.

When I first tried to write about John and his building I had a hard time making a coherent story out of it, because by then I’d already spent 3 years down there, shoveling rocks and hauling debris into dumpsters, and listening to John and all the guys who came through to see what kind of progress he was making.  At night I’d pedal north, exhausted and filthy and weirdly satisfied, and the next morning I’d write down everything I could remember because every detail seemed really important.

Partly I liked it just because in my regular life, I worked at a desk and didn’t have a lot of opportunities to operate simple things like pallet jacks – I thought it was absolutely astounding that even a relatively small person could maneuver loads of material, even machine tools weighing thousands of pounds, across floors and around corners with a simple hand operated device.

But I thought it was a story about everything: the ups and downs of industry, the twists and turns of human ambition, man’s strange relationships with the stuff he manages to accumulate in this world.  There was one scene in particular that stands out in my memory -- it reminds me how the building was an opening, or a lens that made things visible that I couldn’t usually see.  It was a Sunday afternoon spent in the basement, it was cold, like it is now, and beautiful.

When John first bought the building, that basement was like a dungeon.  The windows were covered with plywood, its corners and concrete columns were clotted with cobwebs, the floor was covered with sediment that had been left after he’d pumped an inch of standing water off the floor.

Water would continue to seep back in from a phantom building next door.  When the other building was standing, it had shared drain pipes with the Lowe warehouse; after it was gone, water still entered its old pipes and backed up a drain at the bottom of the elevator shaft in John’s building. Eventually, he’d rent office space to the engineering firm that rebuilt the drainage system for the whole district.  In those early years, though, he was pumping the seepage through a hose that carried it up to a set of plastic drums on the first floor where he’d use it to operate a flush toilet.

Meanwhile, water had seeped into the tank of fluid that ran the hydraulic elevator, turning the oil into a greyish foam that spread through the lines and into the piston that raises and lowers the elevator cage.

On this particular afternoon, John was down there in the elevator pit – where everything was covered with a thick coat of slime that stank of mold and motor oil.  He had clamped a floodlight on the elevator door, which opened horizontally like 2 iron jaws, and the muck at the bottom glistened in the light.  He wasn’t intimidated by the fact he’d never fixed an elevator before – he’d basically do it by taking it apart to see what was inside, and he’d do most of it with nothing but a pipe wrench and a big allen key.

The plywood had been pried off the basement windows, and the sun was streaming in overhead.  I was sweeping sediment off the floor.  It filled the air in a sunlit haze, and the otherworldly chords of a Romanian women’s choir filtered through the space.  Every now and then, John’s voice would rise from out of the pit, exclaiming after he’d opened a line and found it was still in excellent condition inside.

And while we were down there, Santa stopped by.  Santa had been proprietor of Scooter World, a business selling used motor cycle parts that had once occupied at least 2 floors of the building, though he’d lost control of his inventory before John arrived on the scene.  He still came around to see what kind of progress John was making.  He knew a lot about the building – what had broken and how they’d fixed it before.  And if John had some scrap he wanted to get rid of, Santa would take it off his hands.

This afternoon, he fell to chatting about how he’d started Scooter World back in the 1960s, when motor scooters were very popular.  He’d started it as a repair shop, and neighborhood kids would hang around the shop and learn how to fix stuff by watching Santa do it.  He says scooters came out in a new model every year, and you could harvest parts from old bikes people would abandon in the alley when they got new ones.

As his inventory grew, he moved from one space to the next, before arriving at the old Lowe warehouse on 37^th Street, where he spread over several floors.  Now Santa looked back with nostalgia on the glory of his inventory, which had whole departments dedicated to seats, or gas tanks or carburetors.  Gesturing around, he described how the basement was filled with wheels from every kind of vehicle, from lawn-mowers to bikes.

Then the guy who owned the building died, and left it to his daughter, and his daughter let her boyfriend Cowboy move in.  Cowboy engaged in a lot of destructive pastimes before he finally went to prison.  Santa said it was for beating an old man to death for the money in his pocket, which turned out to be $37 and change.

But his real complaints about Cowboy came after Santa fell behind in his rent, and Cowboy started selling off his stuff. Because Cowboy didn’t know what anything was worth, or he didn’t care.  He’d sell parts worth hundreds of dollars for a fraction of their value in quick cash.  He’d squandered Santa’s glorious collection, accumulated over decades, it still rankled with Santa now.

After they were both gone, other guys, friends of John’s, would come through that warehouse with new collections.  Their skill sets reflected the era of industry where they’d pursued their careers; it was their collections that reflected what they’d been able to make of it all.  They weren’t accumulations of wealth, in fact they often turned out to be cumbersome objects hung round their owner’s necks, but they were fascinating to look at, to sort through, they seemed to be testament to something – to their owner’s ability to see possibility, though not necessarily their ability to grasp it.

So Santa and Cowboy both came through in the frontier days, the long interim between when the Central Manufacturing District was first built, at the cutting edge of modern industry, and when John arrived a century later to rebuild it for a new industry revival.  In that interim, Cowboy saw a vacuum for a chaotic career on the semi-legal fringe; Santa saw opportunity dealing in other people’s junk, sifting out gradations of value that could only be realized if you were willing to learn what it was all worth to the right buyer.

John’s friend Richard was a machinist.  His employer kept luring him back from retirement because his skill set can’t be hired anymore.  His collections included heaps of stuff you could buy at hardware stores, but also elegant wooden chests filled with antique instruments, sets of drill bits and dies that had been hand tooled, and a growing collection of machine tools he was buying up at fire sales and hauling to John’s building as more and more businesses shut down – some of them still had appendages from when they were hooked up to steam engines.

His friend Matt’s favorite job had been working for a company that made elaborate props – fiberglass trees that were really waitress stations, things like that.  He wanted John to fill the warehouse with craftsmen who could build objects in any material – wood, glass, metal, fiberglass – and he got him started, referring some of his earliest tenants.  Matt’s collections were accordingly eclectic: boxes of glass lenses the size of saucers, a long tray of beads and semi-precious stones, antique furniture he might someday repair and dozens of wood-framed windows he planned to someday build into a greenhouse.  His friendship with John nearly sank under that collection, he underestimated how much time we spent hauling it back and forth across the floors to get at windows John was replacing, or to core holes where he’d run new plumbing stacks through the floors.

John’s era was in high-tech end of industry.  He built virtual sets for industry trade videos using motion tracking technology originally developed for making smart bombs – it’s probably archaic now, it was a little tenuous back then.  You could build any fabulous set you could imagine, but if the tracking mechanisms lost their place the human talent could appear to go skidding across the virtual carpet, or the whole set would shiver behind their backs.  The industry turned out to be tenuous too – the company John worked for spent millions on bleeding-edge technology they were betting would become standard for the industry, and when it did, the price came down and they found themselves competing with guys working out of their basements.  Eventually, the founder would sell his business to a big media company.

But by then John’s building was up and running with water and utilities, and he’d sorted through a whole range of new age, low tech possibilities – the drywall distributor lost interest when the rail siding fell through, but then the Italian cookie company and the green architects considered moving in, and even though they never did, one by one the glass finisher, the metal workers and the artists started renting.  When the building was fully occupied, he moved on to the next one, which he bought a few blocks away.

That afternoon in the cold, in the basement, when John was banging around the elevator shaft, and the women’s voices filtered through the sun-lit haze, while Santa told wild stories of the frontier days, the whole place hummed with possibility.  It was more vivid because it was built from stuff that was workable with simple tools and human sweat, and because it resonated with the efforts and imaginings of all the guys who’d passed through there before, whether they’d been successful for a time or not.