The Hylozoica Goes to London

This series of drawings from 2010 focuses on two sites in northern Brooklyn: The Domino Sugar Factory in Williamsburg, and an old industrial waterway called Newtown Creek in a part of East Williamsburg that is generally considered Bushwick. These drawings will be included in New Narratives, which takes a look at the empty and forgotten buildings of London, and imagines new uses for them. — Ethan Pettit 2.28.18

Opens Thursday March 8th, 2018, 6-9pm, at hARTslane gallery, 17 Harts Lane, London. Here's the facebook page.

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Ebon Fisher Interviewed on Yale Radio

Brainard Carey of Yale Radio talks with Immersive pioneer Ebon Fisher about Immersionist culture, memes, and media organisms, starting with Fisher's early work at the MIT Media Lab, and leading up to his role in Immersionism in Williamsburg in the 90s, and beyond. The discussion is about Fisher's work, but it loops around all kinds of interesting developments in Brooklyn back in the day.

Immersionism Book Underway

Ebon Fisher and Ilene Zori Magaras are the editors of an upcoming book about the Immersionist movement in Brooklyn in the 1990s, it's influences and outcomes. The book will be replete with photographs from the era, and writing by key Immersionists.

Robert Egert and Friends to Dec 19

Robert Egert: Beeding hearts and distraught souls cannot prevail against economic policies designed by non-human constructs.
oil on canvas 2015

morphopolis

ROBERT EGERT

New Paintings

with guest artists Chris Fiore and Tobias Tak

October 3 – December 19

BLASTA! - a thought about allegory in immersive art

Vlasta Volcano, Signs Along the Road, at Art in General, 1993

A good friend who is Serbian brought to my attention early this year, a piece made by Vlasta Volcano some 20 years ago for a show at Art in General about Yugoslav identity. I must say the "Yugoslav identity" dimension of the work was lost on me when I first encountered it in photos. Volcano was a member of the Immersive scene in Williamsburg, and so my initial response to this work of his was from that perspective. Here’s what I wrote about it almost a year ago:

They are figures, like Rodin or Giacometti, except they appear in abject material in a desolate place. From the bubbling coils of melting rubber, phantoms peel out and spring to life ... on a ghetto beach, oh brave new world. From an artist's hand, light of touch, comes a first-rate exposition in Vlasta's work of a certain ... insouciant minimalism of warehouse art of the time. A very simple process, burn rubber tires on the waterfront. A regular fine art foundry. And why not. If you can manufacture art in shops and factories, it stands to reason that you could make art at the ass end of industry as well, from the refuse. Off the schmelting rubber come leaping lords and hipstresses. Vlasta did not draw or paint, he lit a fire, and he caught our shadows all the same. 

— Ethan, January 6, 2014

1992 to 93 was a very dark time in Yugoslavia, and there were a number of Serbs and Croats in the local art scene. As it happened I fell in with that crowd for a while. My friend Jelena Tomic is Serbian by way of Paris, I introduced her to my old friend Ivan Kustura, who is Croatian and a painter whom I knew from a circle of Greenpoint artists in them mid-80s. And soon we were drinking at Teddy's with eight or nine other Yugoslavians.

Vlasta Volcano, from photos taken between 1990-93.

Volcano is Serbian, and I knew him the way people in close art communities know each other. That is to say, like family, even though we rarely ever spoke with one another. It might be like that in a Serbian village as well, with someone you've never spoken to, but have known for a thousand years. In a big-city avant-garde, you have people from all over the world, who know each other implicitly.

I do recall one funny exchange with Volcano at a subterranean club on the Southside of Williamsburg called El Sensorium, some 20 years ago. Sub-maritime as well, bulging with aquaria, waterfalls, unearthly lighting, dry-ice vapor, and Volcano was wearing a strip of duct tape over his mouth for most of that evening. At some point I caught him without the tape, and I asked him if he thought the phenomenon of fame and celebrity might be an evolutionary precursor to some form of social telepathy that might become highly articulated in another 40 thousand years or so.

“Could be” he said.


Volcano was, after all, an early proponent of transhumanism, in Brooklyn and Belgrade, which are both places where transhumanist aesthetics took shape in the early 90s, concurrently with the philosophical development of transhumanism in California. Volcano was a founder of the group Floating Point Unit, a major branch of Immersionism, and he always struck me as a most chill and immersive sort of dude. I called him “Blasta.” But I am only now decades later connecting with this artist’s work and its position in the Brooklyn movement.

I gather this work is made from burnt or unraveled automobile tires. And it is Rodin-like, in is morphogenic release of energy and material. It is exemplary immersive sculpture. A calculated manipulation of the concrete random. No arty trappings or skills known to the genres. A process shall be deployed, upon such material as is readily available. No rules of the minimalists are broken, and an appreciably different world from theirs is revealed.

In 1998 Craig Owens located the “allegorical impulse” within minimalism and material art, and extended that impulse to the postmodern art that followed. The immersive artists are also allegorical, but they absorbed this irritating chestnut from the history of art in a different way. Brooklyn artists generally turned away form the analytic approach of the 80s, and discovered the synthetic approach. And so, where the allegory of Robert Smithson or Robert Morris is astringent and literate, the immersive sculpture of the 90s can be saturated with allegory and downright baroque. It must be noted, many thousands of people experienced immersive art first as entertainment.

Lauren Szold was making her seminal immersive work in Williamsburg in 1990 and 91. When I interviewed her at that time, she spoke about meaning embedded in raw material. She said she tried to avoid obvious cultural references; loaded objects and symbols plucked wholesale from the culture. It is characteristic of a lot of immersive work that narrative is ingrained in the material and the process, but not forced through symbolism. Dennis Del Zotto's polystyrene structures come to mind, as does the “plastic fog” of Frank Shifreen at the Flytrap in 1991. And of course many of the schemes of Lalalandia are exemplary in this regard.

The catch here with using the word “allegory” in this connection, is that this word has a precise meaning in literature and art. It means to tell one story by means of another. Usually, this means to recover some aspect of the past, of history usually, and pitch it as a new “story” that can be comprehended by a present-day audience. Napoleon as Caesar for example. But when we get into modern uses of “allegory,” the concept has been harnessed to other similes. Allegory is a resilient and flexible attribute of aesthetic experience; it may not always appear in a sharp “this-for-that” formulation. Allegory may be mixed in with the aggregate, so to speak, of a morphogenic and immersive art.

Volcano's work here is an example of allegory in immersive sculpture. It clearly suggests a lively narrative space, but it just as easily can stand for nothing but process and material.

Volcano, early- to mid-90s, with friends. Brooklyn or lower Manhattan. Photo by Megan Raddant

See my Facebook album on Immersionism

Post by Vlasta Volcano.

Eva Schicker at Valentine Tonight!

Eva Schicker, Across the Mountainscape, ink on paper, 22x30, detail, 2012

Eva Schicker, who is represented at our gallery, will be showing at VALENTINE tonight in a group exhibit

RECENT DRAWINGS

James Siena, David Humphrey, Loie Hollowell, Eva Schicker

Opening tonight, 6PM - 9PM at Valentine

464 Seneca Ave • Ridgewood • Queens 11385 • 718 381-2962

DeKalb Avenue L station map

The exhibit runs through December 23rd.

Gallery hours are Friday - Sunday from 1PM - 6PM and by appointment.

When We Were Ancient

Teddy's Bar and Grill celebrates 25 years of solidarity
with the avant garde!

As part of the celebrations of their 25th anniversary, and also of 125 years since Peter Doelger opened a tavern at this location, Teddy’s Bar and Grill is proud to present

WHEN WE WERE ANCIENT

a history of the Williamsburg scene

Opening Reception: Saturday, October 20, 9pm to Midnight

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••

Teddy's Back Room

Teddy's Bar and Grill

96 Berry Street, at the corner of North 8^th Street

Williamsburg, Brooklyn

(L Train to Bedford Avenue)

718.384.9787

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••

a project of ethan pettit gallery

347.578.3041

An exhibit of archives from the artist and bohemian migration to Williamsburg and Greenpoint in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s. Zines, posters, photos, weeklies, artist literature of all kinds from 3 decades.

And featuring Ward Shelley’s "Williamsburg Timeline"

Loren Munk’s "Williamsburg Strip" and photography by Mara Catalan.

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••

Minor Injury • The Nose • Flytrap • Cat's Head • Lizard's Tail • Keep Refrigerated • Lalalandia • El Sensorium • Organism • They Might Be Giants • The L Cafe • Mustard • Brand Name Damages • Waterfront Week • Worm • Tony Millionaire • Medea's Weekend • The Curse • The Can Man • The Ten Dollar Man • Test-Site • Open Window Theater • The Pedestrian Project • Nerve Circle • The Astro Zombies • Colored Greens • Hit & Run Theater • Wild Child Productions • Lex Grey • The Ship's Mast • and piles of other ephemera and detritus from the days of $300 apartments in the heart of the Northside

From the archives of ethan pettit contemporary and Eyewash gallery

Special thanks to Larry Walczak

Curated by Ethan Pettit

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••

If you know who you are ... you will not want to miss this

Exhibit runs through November 15, daily

Photo: the Northside waterfront, circa 1990. © Eva Schicker 2012

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

Song of Fuaa a production by multipolyomni
early 1990s. From an album by DJ Olive

Immersionism is a cultural movement that took shape in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in the early 1990s. It bears some affinity to the ideas of Buckminster Fuller, to Relational Aesthetics, paganism, and multi-media art. Here are a few articles and albums that I and some others have assembled on Immersionism:

Articles

Immersionism: Manifesto and Introduction with further links, February 13, 2011

Bernard Carey of Yale Radio talks with Immersionist pioneer Ebon Fisher, July 2016

The Omnisensorialists 1991-1999, by V Owen Bush, January 19, 2012

Immersionism and Relational Aesthetics, March 19, 2012

Go with the Flow (pdf download), Domus, February 1998. Suzan Wines coins the term "immersive environments" in this article.

The Cat's Head, Constructing Utopia in Brooklyn and Dublin (pdf download), TDR, Fall 1993. Melanie Hahn investigates early appearances of immersive culture.

The Inflatable Man – Dennis Del Zotto and the Williamsburg Scene, June 7, 2006

Discourse sur la Moutarde: the evolution of warehouse events in Williamsburg (pdf download 622 KB), Breukelen Magazine, Winter 1993

Williamsburg's Arcadian Past, NY Observer, Zachary Woolfe on Billy Basinsky, November 2011

David Brody's 4-part series, From Biofreak to Organism, 2001 (pdf download)

Facebook albums of key immersive laboratories

Immersionism: Warehouse Events in Williamsburg, 1989-98

The Lizard's Tail

Lalalandia 

Nerve Circle

Mustard

The Federation of Ongolia

The Inflatable Man, immersive pioneer Dennis Del Zotto

Multipolyomni

The Sayanayas

Google spreadsheet on immersive events and players

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.

City Council Land Use Subcommittee Hears Testimony on Domino Sugar Factory

The City Council “land use subcommittee on zoning and franchises” heard testimony yesterday at a daylong hearing on the proposed development of the Domino Sugar Factory site on Kent Avenue in Williamsburg. The developers have been putting this idea together for five years, and it showed. An impressive array of community and church leaders, architects, real estate people, and assorted beneficiaries of the largesse of CPCR (the developers) came out to support the plan. So too did a representative for Congresswoman Nydia Velasquez; and executives from the two key Latino community organizations in Williamsburg, Los Sures and El Puente. And filing into the chamber were scores of people in bright yellow t-shirts emblazoned with “Domi-YES!”

Opponents of the “New Domino” plan held a rally on the steps of City Hall just before the hearing, and assemblyman Vito Lopez fumed against the “paid t-shirts.”

“It’s outrageous," said Lopez. "No one I know here has any paid t-shirts, and no one I know here stands to make 400 million dollars on this project.”

The costume party did seem to disrespect the hearing and therefore to work against CPCR, exposing a hint of cynicism. As the hearing got underway, you could almost see the gates slamming down over the eyes of the council members seated along the dais. It was no fashion show.

What is was, and what it is shaping up to be, is a face-off between Vito Lopez and his protégé councilman Stephen Levin on the one side, and Velasquez and councilwoman Diana Reyna on the other. Reyna and Levin both represent Williamsburg, although the Domino site is in Levin’s district. Reyna supports it, Levin wants to send it back for revision.

The developers want to build 2,200 units in a complex of towers rising as high as 40-storeys on both sides of the old Domino refinery, with 30% of those units being low-income. A key point of contention is that the developers are claiming the site is exempt from restrictions imposed by the 2005 waterfront rezoning; because the Domino factory was still in operation at that time and had not been rezoned. One opposition group holds that the “New Domino” plan exceeds by 21% those restrictions on size.

Councilman Levin says the site should comply with the limitations imposed by the 2005 rezoning, and he is clearly aiming for a scale-down of the project. He does not, at this point anyway, seem to be considering any kind of a “new vision” for the site. However, in view of what the councilman is up against, I commend him for standing his ground yesterday against “business as usual.”

Levin grilled CPCR executives on the density and size of the project, and he snagged one proponent after another on a simple question — “Would you support this plan if it could be scaled down, but still retain its 660 low-income units and the other community benefits promised in the plan?”

The question was intended to smoke out the fact that CPCR really has no interest in bargaining or compromising on the plan. It worked. Most people he asked were stumped. Only one person said “sure” without blinking. It looked as if the developer’s tactic had been simply to come heavily armed and make a forced march through the hearing.

To be sure, the proponents of the plan made some valid arguments, notably that the plan does address affordable housing, and that it does so forthrightly to the Latino community that has suffered most from displacement on account of gentrification. Diane Reyna cited a decline of more than 14,000 Latinos in Williamsburg in the past 20 years, from a Latino population of over 67,000 in 1990. This decline is a difficult figure to verify, but it is probably conservative.

Assemblyman Lopez underscored Reyna's point in impassioned language. “Six-hundred units! Are you kidding? We need three thousand. I get calls every day at my office from people who’ve been here all their lives and they are being forced out of their homes. We are creating a gold coast here.”

Finally, this reporter’s name was called, and I testified for the plan that Stephen Zacks has articulated on behalf of that loose consortium of urbanists who circulate around, well, Stephen Zacks. His letter and proposal on the Domino site is worth a read:

During the hearing, councilman Levin and many others repeatedly talked about density in the neighborhood, especially overcrowding on the L train in Williamsburg, a situation they say would be exacerbated by the proposed Domino development. I argued that the way to alleviate stress on the subway is to create jobs in Williamsburg so people don’t have to get on the subway. And the way to preserve communities is by creating high quality jobs and industries for those communities. And the way to create those jobs and industries is by starting a high-tech “green” industrial center and business incubator at the site in question … Domino University!

Public speaking is hard. Some people are too shy, some are too theatrical. As I came off the podium, Zacks said my delivery was suitably “dramatic.” But I knew it was a backhanded compliment. (Disclosure: Zacks and I were in vaudeville together years ago.)

It was the testimony of Stephen Zacks that got Levin’s attention and had the councilman pursuing him with questions. Zacks rather surprised the room by saying he has no problem with the height of the towers, no problem with the density, no real problem with the plan in general … except that it is “boring.” It is simply not visionary enough, it does not do justice to the legacy and the grandeur of the location.

This broke with the repetitive theme of real estate and housing that had dominated the hearing, and indeed which dominates most discussions of development in Williamsburg. To be sure, my own group at facebook Urbanum Tremendum has talked about education and business incubation. Another opposition group in Williamsburg has talked about museums and cultural tourism at the Domino site. But the urbanism of Stephen Zacks was a new voice, full of informed ideas.

Zacks talks about a “downtown Williamsburg” with a reconfigured transportation infrastructure, easing congestion on the existing system, flowing commerce and investment “to the east,” rescuing the “hapless” intersection of the BQE and the JMZ and "inclining" it all toward the new landscape design currently underway for the "BQE trench." Zacks dares even to look over the ancient wall of Flushing Avenue into “Brooklyn proper” of all places. All this in view of the potential economic reach of the Domino site, which he compares to the High Line in Chelsea.

And when it comes to leveraging the “creative economy” of Williamsburg, there’s no stopping Stephen Zacks:

“It is a community filled with entrepreneurs busy inventing software, designing spaces, opening shops, crafting objects, making clothing, producing magazines and newspapers and websites, working in and starting some of the best restaurants, fashion houses, and design firms in the city. They’re college graduates turning rooftops into farms, and kitchens into start-up companies selling organic food and creating beautiful and unheard of fusions of ethnic cuisines. They’re milling the interiors and industrial designed products and modeling the high-design spaces of Manhattan and the rest of the city and country. They’re teaching in the city’s expanding universities, creating new musical genres, writing movies, books, and dramas for television. They’re performing scientific and medical research, curing diseases, and transforming our ability to live healthy lives.”

Who, the hipsters? Precisely. But not only them:

“A part of the [Domino] facility would be specifically programmed by stakeholders from the Eastern European, Puerto Rican, Italian, and Jewish communities that have made the area their home, along with the West Indian communities to the southeast whose historical relationship to sugar plantations and Domino sugar is particularly important.”

Finally, the “Zacks Paper” was the only testimony at yesterday’s City Hall hearing that used positive language to address the matter of the Domino Sugar site:

“Don't just vote no. Let's start a process by which we can make this project great. Let's form a working group within the city's department of design and construction in cooperation with the NYC Economic Development Corporation that actively develops sites like these in neighborhoods everywhere around the city. Let's create special places that we LOVE and think of with affection.”

Let us hope our elected officials have that much love in their hearts for Williamsburg. See Zacks' paper — A Call for New Vision for Urban Development at the Domino Sugar Site.

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 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.”