[Naijanet] HARLEM BECOMES DOWNTOWN

[duodu]

AUG 19, 2001
The Downtowning of Harlem
By DEBORAH SOLOMON
As it so happens, Harlem has been undergoing an art-world invasion in the
past few years. The arrival of artists and their ilk might seem to be a
purely positive development, although Hammons, who moved here in the 70's,
sees it like this: ''Harlem is under attack. White folks want it back.'' At
58, he himself is an art-world figure, an acclaimed sculptor who has created
strange and lyrical works from plastic milk crates, barbershop hair, greasy
paper bags, chicken bones and other detritus he considers emblematic of the
American ghetto. During a blizzard, he once stood on a corner selling
snowballs. They sold out.

Hammons is famously elusive, so I was surprised when one day I picked up my
phone and heard a voice whisper, ''Do you know whose birthday it is?''

A two-beat pause. ''It's Che's birthday. Let's go out and smoke some Cuban
cigars.''

Some Communist. In May, a sculpture by Hammons -- a wry, jarring piece in
which a basketball hoop hangs from an ornate, Rococo-style backboard as if
to suggest the unreachable goals of the urban black male -- brought $409,500
at auction.

Hammons is a slight, sardonic man with perfect posture and the wayward charm
of a contrarian. As he sits on the bench on this summer night, he instructs
me in the fine art of observing pedestrians, or what he calls ''reading the
signs and symbols of the street.'' He insists there is more vitality on
125th Street than in any American art museum, where, he says, ''there's
nothing to look at. It's all dead. It's the grateful dead.''

A teenage girl saunters by holding a big python. ''When you carry anything
exotic, people will look at you,'' Hammons says. ''These people are dying
for attention.''

A young man appears with an African drum. ''That's the first fax machine,''
Hammons says.

A white jogger dressed in white whizzes by at a fast clip.

''He's probably an artist who heard about a place for rent,'' Hammons says,
laughing ruefully.

The fashion forecasters in the art world are already posing the inevitable
question: Will Harlem be the next SoHo or Chelsea? Money that migrated out
of Harlem when the middle class departed to the suburbs in the 40's is
beginning to migrate back, and cultural momentum has never felt as
concentrated as it does right now. Artists of various races are staking out
studio space, and there are enough hip galleries to attract visits from Park
Avenue collectors in chauffeured cars. Bill Clinton, perhaps the most
popular tenant on 125th Street, will borrow pictures for his office from the
Studio Museum, which just came under the leadership of Lowery Stokes Sims
and Thelma Golden, the two best-known black curators in the country.

Much else is in the works. Ask around, and you learn of ambitious projects
that have yet to be publicly announced. Columbia University is drafting
plans for an off-campus, open-to-the-public arts complex on 125th Street,
west of Broadway. And the Museum for African Art, now in SoHo, expects to
break ground next year on a blocklong building at 110th Street and Fifth
Avenue, otherwise known as Duke Ellington Circle. Its planners speak of
projected budgets -- of a ''$40 million building'' or a ''$50 million
building'' -- as if a high price tag were roughly tantamount to the
Palladian style or the Classical style as a mark of architectural
distinction.

The art boom in Harlem is, of course, part of something larger. A general
revival of housing stock is leading middle-class settlers to buy up
19th-century brownstones and restore them to Old World splendor. On 125th
Street, the chief artery of black Harlem, the recent arrival of a Starbucks,
a Disney store and the Harlem U.S.A. mall, a frosty glass box, represents
what the marketing people like to call a business ''flowering.'' Yet, in
some ways, the art settlers may be more socially significant than the chain
stores: art is the gilded arrow of capitalism, promising to turn vacant lots
into gold.

The truth is that a few good galleries can help a neighborhood in ways that
40 years' worth of poverty programs cannot. The middle class wants to live
near art, open stores near art. The search for affordable studio space by
American artists that began a century ago in Greenwich Village has proved
that where art goes, money follows, and the ending is always the same: the
neighborhood booms and the artists go bust, driven out by skyrocketing rents
and their own restlessness, their desire for Something New.

Yet gentrification can strip a neighborhood of its character. And in Harlem
that prospect is unsettling. For Harlem is not just another cool art enclave
but also the most extreme and allegorical of American neighborhoods, the
''race capital'' of the world, as the writer Alain Locke once put it. Over
the years, it has spawned its own aesthetic, one epitomized by the
junk-into-art sculptures of David Hammons. He represents the populist
street-based notions of art that have flourished in Harlem for decades --
and that are now clashing with museum notions of art.

To be sure, you can't pretend that a vast divide separates museum art from
street art. Hammons, for one, is a well-schooled artist who owes his street
aestheticism to the assemblage tradition founded by Picasso in the early
1900's. Even his snowballs-for-sale are inconceivable without the precedent
of Marcel Duchamp's ''readymades.'' Nonetheless, in an age of numbing
standardization, Harlem is one of the last places in the country that can
still claim a local art culture, a culture caught up in the values of
community as opposed to postmodern irony. In other words, the Harlem art
boom is good for Harlem, but is it good for Harlem's art?

Among art-worldings, it is impossible to talk about Harlem without talking
about Chelsea, the Manhattan neighborhood in the West 20's that in the past
few years has become clotted with galleries. Chelsea is commonly criticized
as homogeneous, the avant-garde version of the suburban mall. Harlem, by
contrast, offers the romance of the frontier, the mythic American grit and
struggle in which art neighborhoods tend to specialize before the inevitable
arrival of clothing boutiques and desserts drizzled with raspberry coulis.

''Harlem is alive,'' says Jeffrey Deitch, a leading Manhattan art dealer
interested in opening up shop in Harlem. ''It's not fake. It's real. Chelsea
was built out of nothing, and that's a defect -- it's too exclusively
commercial. It's effective as a marketplace, but not much else.''

Harlem, of course, also offers the lure of cut-rate rents. Ellen Gallagher,
a 35-year-old painter who shows at the tony Gagosian Gallery, first became
known for pristine, quietly funky paintings that look abstract but on close
inspection yield up rows of minute black lips repeated like so many musical
notes. ''The reason I'm here is that I'm cheap,'' she says of her Harlem
studio, adding that her monthly rent is $1,000 for as many square feet.

Other prominent black artists still on the young side speak about Harlem
with a similar lack of nostalgia. ''I feel no obligation to the community,''
says Gary Simmons, 37, who is having a survey show at the Studio Museum next
year. ''I'm not about Save the Whales. There's this romantic idea about the
Harlem Renaissance, and that's pure garbage to me. I can't live in the past
like that.''

Lately, the lofty and evocative phrase ''Harlem Renaissance'' has been
bandied about as if it were newly relevant. But what, exactly, does it mean?
The original Harlem Renaissance, which flourished in the antic 1920's, was
not a renaissance at all. ''It wasn't a rebirth of anything,'' says the
cultural critic Stanley Crouch, ''unless you count slave narratives, most of
which were probably written by white people anyway.''

The Harlem Renaissance was mainly a literary movement, the first
self-conscious band of black writers in America. It produced a handful of
minor poets (like Countee Cullen and Claude McKay) and one major one
(Langston Hughes). But fewer Americans read poetry than dance, drink Scotch
or make love, and in the popular imagination, the Harlem Renaissance is
still defined -- affectionately if incompletely -- as a golden age of jazz,
clubs and sex.

If Harlem had a moment in the visual arts, it arrived a generation later. In
1941, Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden had studios at 33 West 125th Street,
a ramshackle tenement with no heat and no locks on the doors. (It is
adjacent to Clinton's current office.) Here, Lawrence produced his epic
''Migration of the Negro'' series, and Bearden also devoted himself to
social realism. But the two artists remained tokens in an age when racism
disfigured the art world, and it wasn't until the 80's in the East Village,
when Jean-Michel Basquiat became an international sensation, that everything
changed. His graffiti-laden paintings made the black street aesthetic
attractive to white art collectors. As David Hammons says, ''Basquiat was
the one who crashed through the gate.''

If any one place symbolizes the Harlem establishment, surely it is the
Studio Museum. Dedicated to African-American artists since its founding in
1968, it has lately shed its genteel image. Lowery Stokes Sims, its
director, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum before joining the Studio
Museum last year. One recent afternoon, we headed to lunch on Lenox Avenue,
passing Sylvia's, the landmark soul food restaurant, ''in search of the
elusive salad,'' as Sims put it.

Sims is an understated presence beside Thelma Golden, the museum's chief
curator, a petite, talkative woman of 34 who lives for contemporary art.
Last spring, she organized ''Freestyle,'' a survey of young artists that was
feted by the media as a national event. (It opens at the Santa Monica Museum
of Art on Sept. 28.) The exhibition came with a thesis. It introduced a
generation of African-American artists whose sensibility is ''post-black,''
as Golden says, a shorthand way of distancing the museum from the shrill
racial politics of art in the 90's.

What, exactly, is post-black art? In principle, it is an appealing idea. At
a time when racism in America is said to be abating, post-black art assumes
that it is obsolete to whine about a sense of victimhood. Nadine Robinson,
one of the standouts in ''Freestyle,'' is a prime example. She now has a
self-portrait at the museum, a big, all-black, humorously sensual canvas
that looks like a shiny shag rug. She made it from hair extensions, long
strands of Chinese hair purchased by the bag. No one could mistake it for
victim art; if it is pro anything, it is pro-beauty parlor. ''I find it
liberating to admit that I love straight hair,'' says Robinson, who is 32.
''That's not the way of righteous blacks, who have dreadlocks and braids and
don't imitate the dominant beauty aesthetic.''

In some ways, the Studio Museum is much like the rest of the art world in
its vulnerability to fashion and youth. Its critics accuse it of promoting
''emerging artists'' -- a hopeful phrase for recent art-school graduates --
at the expense of a lost generation of older black artists. They see the
museum as a flashy symbol of Harlem's revitalization, offering more to
outsiders than to longtime Harlemites.

Lloyd Toone, a 61-year-old artist and retired art teacher, lives in an
immaculately restored brownstone on West 121st Street. In his living room, I
notice a few sculptures, free-standing heads with the blunt angularity of
African wood carvings. Like so much art in Harlem, they are made from
orphaned objects, in this case, old shoes gathered from local shoe-repair
shops.

Toone runs a gallery out of his home, exhibiting his own work and outsider
art from the South. When the subject of the Studio Museum comes up, he rolls
his eyes and says, ''I can't wait for Thelma to come knocking on my door and
say, 'I discovered you.'''

His wife, Peggy Dillard, adds: ''The Studio Museum has to embrace us as a
community or they shouldn't be in Harlem. They should be on Fifth Avenue.''

''It's the Studio Museum of Harlem,'' he says, as if to reiterate the
museum's obligations to local artists.

''It's the Studio Museum in Harlem,'' politely corrects his wife. Different
preposition, same point.

Cynics might say that Toone's opinion is just sour grapes, the obstinate
plaint of an artist who has worked in relative obscurity for decades. Yet
that would not be fair, for his grievance is essentially aesthetic. While
the Studio Museum may speak of a vogue for artists who are ''post-black,''
the onerous issues of race cannot be brushed aside so summarily. Racism is
real, and many artists who have endured its effects feel the museum is
promoting a kind of art -- trendy, postmodern, blandly international -- that
has turned the institution into a ''boutique'' or ''country club,'' as David
Hammons puts it.

Informed of such criticism, Thelma Golden says: ''I don't have a response to
that. I could give you a quote that could start a war, but that wouldn't be
effective.''

This is not to suggest that most Harlem artists voice a litany of
complaints, a sense of disenfranchisement and fatigue. To the contrary, I
was surprised by the number of artists I met who don't need the art world
because they have their own art world. They specialize in community-based
art, and they are less likely to exhibit in a museum than in their own
homes, in tenements or even in the streets.

Michael Bramwell is a 47-year-old artist who at times dons the uniform of a
maintenance worker. For two years, he worked on a performance piece called
''Building Sweeps -- Harlem,'' which required that he spend his Sunday
mornings diligently sweeping the stoops and mopping the hallways of local
tenements. He used a pine-based cleanser ''to give the hallways that forest
smell,'' as he says.

Noble idea, but how is it any different from what a janitor does? ''I am an
artist,'' Bramwell replies soberly. ''I wanted to challenge the myth that to
live in Harlem means to expect crack addicts in the hallways.''

You might see Bramwell as a Minimalist of the tenements, clearing away the
gunk of real life to reveal a shining ideal. On the other hand, making art
for the community does not necessarily make a work of art distinguished.
Leonardo's ''Last Supper'' also qualifies as community-based art; it was
made for the folks of Milan. It is just aesthetic common sense that the best
way an artist can serve the community is to create world-class art, art that
will endure and enlighten over the centuries.

Yet this view tends to get shouted down in Harlem, where other priorities
prevail. ''I don't want to be Matisse,'' says Brett Cook-Dizney, a painter
with a sense of high social purpose. ''My heroes are Thoreau and Gandhi and
James Baldwin.''

Cook-Dizney, 33, paints jumbo-size portraits of local residents -- teachers,
preachers, the unemployed -- and nails them up to abandoned buildings around
Harlem. He doesn't sign his portraits, insisting they are about something
besides himself. They are eminently likable, big, jazzy pictures that appear
to be teeming with brush strokes but in fact are done with cans of spray
paint, the favored medium of graffiti artists. They are the street version
of Chuck Close's giant heads.

''Part of my critique of Chuck's work is this: he's not kicking it in a
democratic world,'' Cook-Dizney says one day over lunch at Strictly Roots, a
storefront vegetarian joint where men sit playing checkers. ''I wonder what
the reaction to his work would be if he painted Asian maids instead of art
stars.''

It is impossible to know how much the Harlem gallery scene will expand in
coming years. SoHo took 20 years to reach critical mass. But Chelsea became
the world center of gallery mania in just two years -- it seemed to leap
from one person to two people to six people to 6,000. Significantly and
bizarrely, it began to flourish as an art scene before the area had any
artists or even major art, just sumptuously renovated galleries in search of
masterworks to hang on the walls.

Harlem, by contrast, is full of artists but fairly devoid of galleries.
There is no central gallery district. The most interesting of the
contemporary-art galleries, the Project, is hard to find; it is tucked away
in a modest building at 427 West 126th Street. No sign announces its
presence. The place is run by Christian Haye, a tall, stylish man of 31 who
began his career as a poet and art critic. Asked why he opened his gallery
in Harlem, he says -- simply, brusquely, disparagingly -- Chelsea.''

In the back room, you can get an advance peek at new pieces by Paul
Pfeiffer. He and the gallery have made each other famous. At 35, Pfeiffer,
who was born in Hawaii, has been acclaimed for his videos, which are shown
on miniature screens and mingle such disparate subjects as basketball and
the Bible. Last year he won the Whitney Museum's first $100,000 Bucksbaum
Award, the largest prize anywhere for a visual artist, and he is having a
show at the Whitney in December. Asked what he's up to these days, Pfeiffer
says, as if on cue, ''I've been looking for a studio in Harlem.''

Pfeiffer, who is not black, has no relation to Harlem's past, but he can no
doubt benefit its future. The mutually nurturing relationship between art
and capitalism has often translated into real gains for a neighborhood;
curiously enough, young artists intent on challenging society can wind up
strengthening it simply by virtue of their presence. Granted, gentrification
has its down side, pointing toward the Disneyfication of the universe. Yet
only an alarmist could pretend that the art boom in Harlem will erase the
neighborhood's fabled past. After all, neighborhoods can be gentrified, but
people cannot. No one can gentrify David Hammons.

We wound up lingering on the bench that night for three hours. It was light
when we sat down and dark when we stood up. He sat through the sunset. He
sat through dinner. He sat even when silences began seeping into our
conversation, as if sitting itself were somehow the point, as if sitting
were some kind of protest. A sit-down, perhaps.

Indeed, Hammons suggested as much. ''I want to sit across from the museum to
show that I am not on their side,'' he said solemnly. ''I am an artist, but
I am not on the side of the art world.''

Deborah Solomon, a 2001 Guggenheim fellow, is working on a biography of
Norman Rockwell.

Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company | Privacy Information

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