Dive bars in NY circa 1996

I'm working on a big piece for a show I'm doing at La Mama Gallery in January (also showing Wil Ortega's work).  La Mama is located right off the Bowery, on 1st street, near the Liz Christy garden.  Also, I suppose I should mention its also nowadays sandwiched between one of the largest (luxury) housing developments built in recent times in the neighborhood, built by Avalon Bay, who previous to this complex on the Bowery had mostly build suburban apartment complexes in places like New Jersey. Anyway, if I can pull it off, my portion of the show will incorporate some of the last 20 years of history in terms of the Bowery - pretty much the time person when I would have traversed it as a Cooper Union student, then staff and faculty, and a general NYC downtown resident.

I have a lot of memories, but they tend to be a bit fuzzy.  Images are in my heads, but dates are uncertain.  I've started doing some research, mostly using the NY Times archive, which so far has been very helpful.  I typed in Bowery and Houston and a bunch of stuff popped up.  I was tryign to determine when the aforementioned housing development was proposed, because i remember seeing a rendering in a book in the Cooper Library circa 1999?  2000? and thinking "well, thats never going to happen".  And it didn't, at least as far as I can tell. Originally it was proposed as city housing.  Then it was sold to a private developer.  So, big difference there in terms of what it represents.  Still looking into finding that rendering. 

Anyway, from time to time I'm going to post some of the articles/images I find, and my thoughts here.  

Note the date.  This one is from 1996:

http://www.nytimes.com/1996/03/03/news/lives-bar-none.html?scp=98&sq=houston+and+bowery&st=nyt

enjoy.

concrete misplots

 concrete misplots - click for article + more pix

Race and ethnicity: New York City

Race and ethnicity: New York City, some fascinating maps originally uploaded by Eric Fischer.

The Homefront's website is up!

go to: here to read the press release for my upcoming show, and see a sketch of the collage! also read about other stuff going on at The Homefront (other art will be on display, including some of Simone Meltesen's wonderful houseboats) busy printing and working on some new images for the "stalled" series of photos (from williamsburg construction sites...)

Summer project in Long Island City

I wrote this last week in a stream of consciousness, its part of the process of working on an artist statement for the new collage. More thoughts and pix soon.....

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I've been very kindly asked to exhibit my work in a new space opening up in Long Island City called The Homefront. It's in a central location, right off Jackson Ave. very near the E and V (or is it it M now?), towards the Sculpture Center, not too far from PS1, but also directly in the whirlwind of several HUGE construction sites for office buildings.

Since last fall I've been using a large format 4x5 camera to shoot a project based on the large number of stalled building sites in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Half of the show at The Homefront will consist of a selection of these images. The other half will be a large site specific collage installed on the walls.

I began exploring the neighborhood in the direction of Queensboro Plaza (roughly north and west). This area is mostly huge construction sites, some waiting to be started, others slowly rising, but unlike Williamsburg these sites are not all condos but primarily office buildings. Surrounding these sites are a bunch of low rise commercial spaces, a few aging tenements, some loft condo warehouse conversions, and several overpasses from the Queensboro Bridge. It's like a dystopian novel where the office-y business people are gentrifying aliens, building huge glass cities in the midst of the native species' brick and mortar villages.

One thing that I honed in on was the proliferation of mark making. The streets are ripe with brightly colored shapes and lines, some freshly painted, all denoting a code that the transient construction workers can translate; they are foreign to the average passerby . Buildings, conversely, display identifiable vestiges of time, fading handmade signs warning of obsolete violations, worn metal doors to shuttered garages, house numbers scribbled in sharpie. Construction barricades contain and endless variety of "sidewalk closed" or "sidewalk" with an arrow texts.

here are some images:



Some new buildings near the gallery (the tall Citibank building completed in 1990 has been there for quite awhile though)





Typical LIC buildings



View towards Manhattan from near 5 Pointz

Locals and Tourists #2 (GTWA #1): New York

Locals and Tourists #2 (GTWA #1): New York, originally uploaded by Eric Fischer.

This visually beautiful project has convinced me to start to use Flickr in a more active way, in terms of comprehending the power of the modern photograph's metadata and geotagging.

I'm beginning to understand this idea that there is this collective archive of space, place, time, and technology which is happening almost unconsciously worldwide. People put pictures up as a record of an event/moment and through their metadata they are instantly linked with everyone else who has posted images from that same location throughout time. I've always thought about metadata in a creepy way, as a sort of surveillance tool (how can you not having lived though the 90's), but now i can almost see it as a transcendent way of creating a collective memory of a place/time/space. One that, though mediated, is directed by the masses and not a professional eye. Yes, most of the millions of photos uploaded everyday are mediocre, banal, compositionally horrible, and technically lacking, but if I think of them less as "photographs" and more as "artifacts" they come alive. They are documents. Documents which now live in cyberspace and have gained meaning in history by their relationship to other "documents" - i.e photos.

I've been lamenting the fact that we are losing these sorts of moments because people no longer print out pictures. They get shot, downloaded, and put into a folder, which gets put in a folder then onto a hard drive or CD/DVD somewhere and forgotten. In the old days everything would have been printed. Everything had a negative, somewhere, even if it was blurry or out of focus. "mistake" photos could be thrown away, but some record of them still existed. Often nowadays people delete the photos they think are not perfect, erasing potential histories. While this will forever be true, I see now that places like Flickr can/will/are actually may, in effect, become the dresser drawers of the future. Publicly accessible dresser drawers. Kinda mind blowing.

Ugh, more to say but I have to get some other work done tonight. More soon.

 

very wet day, late march, wandering from midtown to union square

http://www.flickr.com/photos/beatricethecat/sets/72157623738648552/