Ken Butler Is in the House!

We count ourselves lucky among New York City galleries now to be representing an iconoclast of two major currents of activity across the turn of the century. Ken Butler is outsized both in Williamsburg and in the downtown school of Zorn. He is probably also the only artist in the world who can claim the distinction of having had simultaneous shows at the Metropolitan Museum of Fine Art and the Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum.

Ken Butler's work has also been featured at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and at Exit Art, Thread Waxing Space, The Kitchen, The Brooklyn Museum, and Lincoln Center. His work has toured South America, Thailand, and Japan. Butler has been reviewed in the New York Times, The Village Voice, Artforum, and Smithsonian magazine. He has been featured on MTV, PBS, CNN, and NBC. Ken recorded his 1997 Voices of Anxious Objects on John Zorn’s Tzadik Records. And he has a dozen other releases out on various labels.

Ken Butler, Sled Cello, 1998, Mixed media. Collection of the Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Willamette, Oregon, Gift of the artist

I am most pleased that Ken has joined us. I welcome and thank him. In our upcoming group show opening September 7 (still TBA) you'll see some of Ken Butler’s famous hybrid instruments.

Ken Butler, Torso Cello, 1994, Mixed media. 51 x 14 x 12

Visit Ken Butler's Website.

First Sale!

Mari Oshima, Metro Card, paper, glue, metro card. 5 x 7 in. 2011

We are pleased to announce that the gallery made its first sale this afternoon. Although some sales of artists' works occurred before we opened, this is our first sale since the gallery officially opened on June 1st. It is, therefore, our first sale out of the gallery as such.

Mari Oshima created "Metro Card" for a show called "Single Fare 2", a large group show of small works on used metro cards. Single Fare took place last year at Sloan Fine Art in the Lower East Side. This was a very popular event that many may remember. Congratulations, Mari!

Single Fare, a show of small works on used metro cards
Sloan Fine Art press release
Single Fare Opening Day
Mari Oshima's website
Mari Oshima's page on this website

Immersionism and Relational Aesthetics

I don't see any difference between relational aesthetics and the phenomenologies that were established by minimalism in the 1960s. They are both concerned with the "condition" that establishes "the work."

To say, as Bourriaud does, that relational art works "take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space," is just an extension of the in-your-face environmentalism of Donald Judd or Richard Serra. Throw a Jenny Holzer slogan in there and you've got postmodernism. Rehash it as a "relationship" between viewer and art condition, and you're just restating the obvious.

Relational aesthetics are a way of defining an art condition, with special emphasis on its relation to social and physical space. It is a field that was well-tilled by the minimalists. Immersionism is also a development of the early 90s, and it is also involves interactive and relational aesthetic experience. However, these are not necessary conditions for the immersive event. One has found in immersive events quite conventional, stand-alone art works, as well as interactive works. There are large communal spaces, and frequently as well cloister-like private spaces.

This is because in Immersionism the "theoretical point of departure" does not reside in the question of "human relations and their social context," a piece of jargon borrowed from the social sciences by art criticism. Hardly the first time this has been done.

Immersionism leaves human relations alone, does not try to inscribe "human relations" into aesthetics. One notices in the immersive aesthetics, just to cite two examples, of Nerve Circle and the Federation of Ongolia, that the aesthetic condition is already resolved. It does not hang self-consciously upon the entrance of a "viewer" to complete its condition. The world is already made, and the viewer is immersed in it. In what aspect the viewer or the participant stands in relation to the immersive condition is not really a concern of Immersionist theory.

Relational aesthetics advance a pedagogy of participation in which the participant completes the event. This is barely any different from the essentialism explored nearly half a century ago in, for example, a row of bricks on the floor by Carl Andre. Immersionism advances a world without these self-conscious comforts. The participant has to sink or swim, both as a "subject" and as a "communal" member.

Immersionism starts with systems that engage loops and spheres of information and sensory feedback. And these systems lie beyond just the sphere of "human relations." If Immersionism has a godfather from the 1960s, it would probably be Buckminster Fuller, rather than the minimalist and conceptualist art world.

Relational aesthetics entail a program about the use of gallery space and the "art condition." Immersionism addresses aesthetic experience as a general matter, and immersive practice has rarely taken place in galleries or theaters.

General Introduction to Immersionism

Compilation of links to Facebook albums on Immersionism and North Brooklyn art history

Facebook album on Immersionism in Williamsburg

The Bohemian League

We shall seize twenty blocks of obsolete industry in Brooklyn, connect them to a hundred non-profit organizations the world over, and bring ten thousand resident artists into the borough every year, not one of them male, fat, or over 30. We shall incur the wrath of every man in the Republic of Slovakia.

We are the Hanseatic League of urbanism. In that wonderful old German city in Poland called Gdansk, surely they talk about us, and about what happened when we moved into that wonderful old Polish city in Greenpoint. The artists are a distinct class of journeymen innovators. And I mean “artist” in a colloquial sense; it is not an exclusive claim for this group to Art with a capital ‘A’. Art happens in every group. “artist” with a small ‘a’ is the designation of a class, a certain population that embodies a set of values and functions in society. We are called artists because we as a group value the arts and aspire to them frequently. But not all artists are artists; some are entrepreneurs, engineers, teachers, tradesmen, or journalists such as myself.

Willy-nilly, this is the group that not only catalyzes the chemical reaction called gentrification, but is also its ongoing reference. We provide the ideology, the style, and the cultural framework in which the real estate and commerce of gentrification unfold. The fact that these business developments may not square with what we had in mind “back in the day” is trivial. The point is that gentrification is the muscular outcome of the cells we implanted in the community. And urban life from here on out will always refer to us, just as in Norway, Poland, Russia, Italy, and England, there are cities that refer to the German traders called the Hansa who built those cities or changed them forever.

Gentrification can happen with our without artists. Luxury housing was being contemplated for the Williamsburg waterfront in the mid-1980s; and there is an argument to be made that without an artist and proto-yuppie constituency in place by then, and the political voices this added to the community, there would have been more towers along the waterfront than there are today. In an alternate universe where all the artists moved to Staten Island, there is no saying the towers of Guttenberg, New Jersey, would not have appeared in Williamsburg.

But it is not a matter of who started gentrification, but of whose version of it has prevailed, and will prevail. In Brooklyn we have a form of gentrification that is deeply inflected by the arts, and by ideological forms in society that correspond to the arts. Therefore, we identify the artists as a social and political force in the formation of Brooklyn at the outset of the 21st century. The more we acknowledge ourselves and our role in the world, the more we articulate ourselves as a class, the more power we can seize from the bums in city hall — to realize what we had in mind back in the day.

The Knitting Factory in Williamsburg

Peg Simone

Jonathan Kane's February played the "Brooklyn Knit" in October

Once an eccentric backwater of the downtown music scene, Williamsburg receives the movement's first mothership. Here's an article about the Knitting Factory moving to Brooklyn. Read it in WG Magazine. Or right here:

The Knitting Factory has been at its new location on Metropolitan Avenue and Havemeyer Street for all of three months. And this indeed is a nice little bow tie on the loopy tale of two of the city’s most enigmatic art scenes of the past twenty years—downtown music and Williamsburg.

The “warehouse movement” that started in Williamsburg in 1990 was a network of unlicensed clubs, lounges, events, and environments that bore not the slightest resemblance to either the galleries or the nightclubs of Manhattan at the time. It was a cultural movement really, which amounted to a kind of alternate universe of aesthetic experience. But what the warehouse artists did take from lower Manhattan was the legacy of that genre-busting, iconoclastic music and performance juggernaut that has been known for nearly half a century simply as “downtown.” And it was the Knitting Factory that in 1987 provided the downtown scene with its first permanent venue, first on Houston Street and later in Tribeca.

What places like the Kitchen, the Knitting Factory, and other venues in Manhattan did between 1971 and the beginning of the 90s was to ensure that music and sound would become more a part of the daily life of conceptual art, installation art, and the business of aesthetic hubris in general. And this development reached a peak in Williamsburg in the first half of the 90s.

For the Knitting Factory today, the picture is bigger than Williamsburg or downtown or conceptual art. The variety of programming has increased over the years, and so has the reach. “The Knit” has venues in Hollywood, Boise, Spokane, and Reno. They run several record labels, an artist management division, and they recently signed an exclusive concert promotion agreement with the Warsaw Theater in Greenpoint. This will allow the Knit to put some of its artists before much bigger audiences than the Metropolitan Avenue location can accommodate.

“A primary focus of ours is to grow artists from a grass-roots level to a 1,000-capacity venue and beyond,” says Chris Moore, senior VP of Knit Touring. “Adding the Warsaw to our repertoire of venues continues with that mission.”

The Knitting Factory today appears to be putting an interesting business model in place: a national organization that can manage a great number and variety of underground acts and subgenres, and get them to the mainstream or to new markets with a certain efficiency heretofore only dreamed of in this industry. I asked senior East Coast talent buyer Chris White if this is the case. He replied by email:
 “I’m not sure our goal is to propel anything into the mainstream as much as to have a long-term and sustainable business built on presenting and promoting quality events and artists. The Knit has a long history of producing events outside of its owned and operated venues. The Warsaw relationship is an extension of that, the same way any ‘Knitting Factory Presents’ shows we do will be.”

Staff at the Brooklyn Knit are circumspect about the new reach of the organization. “This is still the hub,” says Zach Jeager, a manager at the Brooklyn venue. “We still do everything we’ve always done, and more. We’ll always have the John Zorns, the Gary Lucas’s. But we still have a lot of variety. And the programming is completely different at each Knit location.”

The “downtown” or “experimental” music with which the Knitting Factory first made its name is usually defined as music that is unfettered by genres or preconceptions, and which might roam freely between jazz, rock, pop, classical, folk, muzak, spoken word, and poetry, and even raw sound or what is sometimes called “concrete” music. In its first decade the scene was a renegade contingent, awkwardly negotiating fixed-genre rock and jazz venues like CBGBs and The Blue Note; until Michael Dorf and Louis Spitzer opened the Knitting Factory in 1987. Dorf moved the club to Tribeca in 1994, and with the recent move to Brooklyn there is no longer a Knit presence in Manhattan.

In 1998 the gravitational center of the downtown scene shifted to a new club on Norfolk Street called Tonic. When the beloved Tonic closed in April 2007, twenty years on the money after the Knit had opened, it felt as if downtown music had lost its base in its ancestral homeland of downtown Manhattan. There has since been a downtown Diaspora to places like Zebulon, Glasslands Gallery, and Death by Audio in Williamsburg, the Tea Lounge in Park Slope, Issue Project Room, Galapagos, and to John Zorn’s space The Stone on Avenue C in the city.

John Zorn, Thurston Moore, Kim Gordon, Shelley Hirsch, Alan Vega, Elliot Sharp, William Hooker, Yuka Honda, David Moss, Zeena Parkins, Ikue Mori, Michael Formanek, Raz Mesinai, Toshio Kajiwara, Tom Surgal, Drew Gress, Toshinori Kondo, Uri Caine, Ralph Alessi.

That’s a short list of avant-garde artists from among the many who have played at the Knitting Factory over the years. It’s also a short list of artists who have worked with dj Olive.

Gregor Asch (dj Olive) was a co-founder of the Lalalandia Entertainment Research Corporation, which was a mainstay of the warehouse scene in Williamsburg. Asch coined the word “illbient” to mean a darker, “sicker” permutation of ambient music. He is a member of the group We™, with Ignacio Platas (Once 11) and Rich Panciera (Lloop). Their CD releases are classics of the 90s after-hours culture — startling, delicately funky works of modernity that satisfy the downtown canon as well as any definition of the warehouse movement.

Apart from being the best endorsement for duct tape the city has ever seen, the warehouse movement raised the bar on after-hours culture. Consider the fact that in the mid-80s a derivative theme club called Area was the hottest ticket in town. A decade later a wholly original and much more unearthly environment had overtaken after-hours scenes across Brooklyn and Manhattan, with tags like “Omnisensorial Sweepout,” “Webjam,” “Zion Bubble Party.” This was thanks to technology and a booming economy, but it was also thanks to Williamsburg and the rise of audio culture within downtown music.

In 1989 the Lizard’s Tail opened at 99 South 6th Street, fast by the Williamsburg Bridge. The following year they started producing enormous one-off blowouts in the warehouses along the waterfront. In 1991, another group of artists started Keep Refrigerated at 90 North 11th Street. Out of “the Fridge” came Lalalandia and later fakeshop. These spawned more than a dozen environments around Williamsburg in the space of five years, including clubs, lounges, a restaurant, and even a school bus “shuttle” to get around to them all. There were performance and theater companies that provided spectacle, rappelling down the sides of grain silos, and even providing some buoyancy now and then in the East River.

As much as possible, music and performance were required to support the whole environment, blend with it, become a concrete part of its idea. The conceptualist Ken Butler took ideas about concrete music and prepared instruments, and extended them to fully-realized “hybrid instruments”—a cello made from a rifle, for example. Butler of course has recorded on the Knitting Factory label.

At the Knitting Factory on October 30 was Jonathan Kane’s February, a blistering avant-blues quintet. The set was awesome and rather cinematic. The only catch was that one of the band’s guitarists, Peg Simone, is really hot and I couldn’t take my eyes off her. But this band is smokin’. I got a quick word backstage with the virtuoso drummer himself, and it turns out Kane was in the Sirens with Dina Emerson, the diva of Williamsburg in the early 90s. Dina also collaborated often with Ken Butler. Brian DeWann, Billy Basinksi, and the award-winning Jamie Mereness are other names to check from the early audio-frontier of Williamsburg and downtown.

Williamsburg has generally not been known for movements. It is a pluralistic culture, and the rise of the neighborhood as an art center corresponds with the end of an era that required neatly packaged movements. Yet the warehouse scene was a strikingly collaborative and stylistically consistent enterprise. Writing in 1998 in Domus magazine, the architect Suzan Wines perhaps best summed it up as “immersive culture.”

The movement has fanned out into the world and inflected the culture. One of its descendents is Galapagos, which was on North 6th Street between Wythe and Kent avenues, until it moved to Dumbo for twice the space at half the rent.

So how difficult is it to get a gig at the Knitting Factory. And also, do they allow bestiaries, or is it primarily just for bands.

“It’s not that hard to get a gig,” says Zach Jeager, the manager at the Brooklyn Knit. “On the other hand, we’re not Bowery priests. We are curators, we work off our taste, and we’re into growing and developing acts. We’re not going to be that venue that’s trying to make revenue by booking five bands a night, with each band bringing in 20 people.”

Any plans for amphibious life?


“Yes. We are definitely open to burlesque.”