Boundless Space, Vanishing Space

A new painting by Rafael Gomez Luna

Eagle Eye Rafael Gomez Luna 2016

The Children's School in Park Slope is one of the best grade schools in the city. It feels like a private school when you walk in. But this is PS 372, which just had its annual fundraising gala and art auction. "My daughter is in a class of twenty-five, and they have six teachers, for 25 children," Rafael Gomez Luna tells me. "We are really lucky to have her in this school, and I am grateful, really grateful. That's why I do so much for the school."

Ethan Pettit at TEDxBushwick

Art Causes Gentrification, 21 March 2015
at Livestream Public, 195 Morgan Avenue, East Williamsburg




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Why the TEDx–Livestream thing is the right thing for Bushwick

We should welcome any business that wants to do business in what we call our business zones. These will be our allies in preserving the industrial architecture of Bushwick. An "Industrial Business Zone" means just that. It does not mean "no gentrifying hipster videographers and web designers."

TEDxBushwick Coming to the Hood

Fundraiser - March 12 - order tickets for $25
Facebook Event
TEDxBushwick on March 21 at Lifestream Public

Burners

A certain well-known talkathon is running boot camp on an afternoon in the Flatiron district. I am one of two alternate speakers, along with eight or nine who are scheduled to deliver in March in a certain well-gentrified neighborhood in Brooklyn. We've got a drill sergeant in Utah who's skypin' our butts from a big screen, and it's feeling somewhere between Full Metal Jacket and Tony Robbins outside of his "zone."

Loft Dwellers Prevail, For Now

Jim Fleming of the book press Autonomedia, and a longtime resident on the storied South 11th Street in Williamsburg, testifies at last night's Loft Board hearing

At the conclusion of last night’s special hearing in Manhattan on a proposed amendment to the Loft Law that would make it more difficult for many loft dwelling artists to qualify for protection under the law, Loft Board member Chuck DeLaney thanked the people who packed the chamber, the great majority of whom were loft dwellers who’d come to testify against the proposed rule.

Spock’s New York

Star Fleet Federation Headquarters has moved to Chelsea, and it is called the High Line. This is a spectacular renovation of an old elevated freight railroad track in lower Manhattan that rides over what were once a meatpacking district and a notorious Romulan sex slave market. The Federation has recaptured the neighborhood and turned it into a nice place. No, the High Line actually does not suck. It was the no-brainer thing to do with these old elevated tracks, and the new promenade has been rightly advanced as a model for urban development in the 23rd century.

ZONE THIS!

On June 21 Governor Patterson signed the “New Loft Law” into law, and it is generally considered a victory and a testament to the tireless work of Assemblyman Vito Lopez, who sponsored the bill in what is now its third iteration in nearly 30 years. I commend the passage of this law most highly, and for reasons that go beyond the common sense fairness it extends to artists who live and work in industrial buildings.

Legitimation and Hipsterism

Could a universalistic linguistic ethics no longer connected to cognitive interpretations of nature and society a) adequately stabilize itself, and b) structurally secure the identities of individuals and collectives in the framework of a world society? Or is a universal morality without cognitive roots condemned to shrink to a grandiose tautology in which a claim to reason overtaken by evolution now merely opposes the empty affirmation of itself to the objectivistic self-understanding of men? Have changes in the mode of socialization that affect the socio-cultural form of life perhaps already come about under the rhetorical guise of a universalistic morality that has lost its force? Does the new universal language of systems theory indicate that the “avant garde” have already begun the retreat to particular identities, settling down in the unplanned, nature-like system of world society like the Indians on the reservations of contemporary America? Finally, would such a definitive withdrawal mean the renunciation of the immanent relation of motive-shaping norms to truth?

— Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, 1973

Williamsburg

You, gargantuan prow of insatiation

Slammed into the rectilinear sky,
On what dawn did your hollow fury
Turn to the inverted world.

What thou, behemoth! Plying maw,
The pinking rictus of a thug’s dusk
That teethed upon the Erie Canal
And whistled down the rails to war.

Long years came shank of beast,

Bolt of cloth and mustard seed
To thy clarion of tons and wheels.
And then came pay dirt you had never seen:

Th'ethereal phosphor Hubris
Pitched on the jut of your bow,
Burning the oil at ungodly hour,
Beatitude’s illumined cube.

Then maenads all dressed in white
Tore at the flesh of your fruit,
All in a row in the river’s reeds,
And slowly goes the night.

Rapture of thy keening toil,
Cant of the rooftop’s leaning sky,
Sweep down shaft to peeling depth,
The very echo of your belly sweats.

Bold city under siege, spare of line
That braced the mind and steeled the heart
To polygons of shifting art.
Yours is the song of the earth.

What heathen glow unearthly cast,
What Midas touch on river’s breeze,
What obscure torque of your concretion
Could cause such things to pass.

Thee, candescent juggernaut,
Infeudated brawn of faith,
By one confounded calculation
Transfigured in occulting light.

Once you were the wings of Gotham
And the pinion of her spine,
We anoint thee now a motherfucker,
And here is the fury this time.

Ethan Pettit, May 2010

The Silence and the Fury

As Brooklyn gentrifies, the role of the “artists” goes unexplained. And more, an explanation is stymied by a conflicted feeling about this population. We want to blame them for setting gentrification in motion. At the same time, we do not want to give them credit for it. We settle for the view that the artists are the tools of the developers. And yet the developers founder in the recession, while the artists and their culture and businesses have proliferated almost without a hitch through two recessions.

The Inflatable Man

Dennis Del Zotto and the Williamsburg Scene

Del Zotto in Organic TV: a New York Moment Galapagos, 1997

Screen grab from Japanese TV

Dennis Del Zotto is an artist of pitch-perfect economy and timing. He is one of the most well-liked and respected artists to come out of Williamsburg in the early 90’s, where his work was a fixture of the warehouse culture of new media and immersive art. Production outfits in the neighborhood at the time were Lalalandia, Keep Refrigerated, El Sensorium, Hit & Run Theater, The Lizard's Tail, Organism, and many more. Del Zotto collaborated with “illbient” electro-pioneers Gregor Asch (aka DJ Olive), Ignatio Platas, and Lloop Manalog (the three of whom comprise the band called We™. He has worked with Jeff Gompertz at fakeshop and Ongolia, and with Robert Elmes at the first incarnation of Galapagos, the iconic Williamsburg nightclub now located in Dumbo.