On Saturday night, I headed to Brooklyn to check out the galleries in Williamsburg. They had organized an After Hours event for Armory Show weekend, and were staying open until 11 pm.
Taking the L train there involved some measure of nostalgia, because I lived in the area roughly ten years ago. Wandering east and then south, I set foot in a number of galleries, but despaired of finding anything to write about. More interesting was how much the landscape had changed: A yoga studio on North 7th Street? A tattoo gallery on Roebling? Cleverly designed restaurants and boutiques on Grand? It felt like Berkeley or Northampton.
Gentrification is a tiresome topic, but it's hard to visit the galleries scattered north and east of the Williamsburg Bridge without thinking about it. Yes, there are artists who have lived in Williamsburg for some time, like the friendly proprietress of Holland Tunnel, on South 3rd Street, who told me she started her tiny gallery in a garden shed in 1997. But like a college town, it has a quality of ambitious people just passing through, underscored by the businesses that cater to them. (And the babies being toted along to gallery openings don't contribute to a sense of permanence; I don't imagine many of them will one day enroll in the local public school.)
Out of the roughly ten galleries I visited, I'll mention just three: Black & White, Jack the Pelican Presents, and the Sarah Bowen Gallery.
Black & White Gallery is showing large paintings by German artist Ina Geissler in its indoor gallery. Colorful and technically proficient, they seem to depict elements of modern architecture - minus the structural engineer. More faithful to physics is the model of a house in the outdoor gallery, installed by Peter Franck and Kathleen Triem.
At the Sarah Bowen Gallery, Yumi Janairo Roth presents police barriers that are covered with mirrors, like a disco ball, and wooden pallets carved with an elaborate decorative motif.
Jack the Pelican Presents was like a shot of testosterone compared with everything else I saw - in terms of both the art and the atmosphere. War is the general theme for Guerra de la Paz (Cuban artists Alain Guerra and Neraldo de la Paz), along with gay sex in the military, vivid brutality, and general degradation. Among the sculptures and videos are two soldiers posed in the manner of Michelangelo's Pietà , and a group of children dressed in camouflage holding hands and circling a bomb.
[Saturday footnote: Slobodan Milosevic is found dead in his cell.]
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