The Chronicle of Artistic Failure in America

The New York Times today reports on the goings-on at Governors Island, a 172-acre cultural refuge just 800 yards off the shore of a larger island of somewhat more cultural renown, Manhattan. The article describes how, over the past four years, as the Manhattan boom reached a peak and then turned quickly to bust, artists have begun a daytime habitation of the non-residential island. (Governors Island is described a quirky amalgam of empty Victorians, a high school, forts, parade grounds, ball fields, an artificial beach, and an “encircling promenade.”) It describes the happenings today as “ingrown and wildly experimental,” akin to an Art Wonderland.

Governors Island was originally, before the 20th century, a military base. It has been managed through the years by the State of New York, the U.S. Army, and the Coast Guard, until it was finally was shuttered by the federal government in 1997. Thanks to the efforts of Leslie Koch, who runs the Trust for Governors Island, the island now is replete with such ongoing cultural whimsies at “artsy miniature golf, avant-garde theater and whimsical sculpture.” Its participants include “trapeze artists, bicyclists, conceptual artists, D.J.’s, musicians, dancers and dramatists,” and its attractions range from “a free miniature-golf course designed by an arts group, where fanciful stations allow players to take metaphorical potshots at a national missile defense shield or putt a ball in support of carbon-neutral footprints” to “outdoor dance performances in one of the island’s forts, a mock archaeological dig meant to play with ideas of the island’s past, an African film festival, outdoor Shakespeare,” an Art Fair, “and Civil War re-enactments.” So far, this season the island has attracted 250,000 curious gawkers, a sharp uptick from only a year ago.

As you and I know, artists are like this. They’re opportunistic like bacteria (the good kind, you know, that helps you digest food and so on). When the economy, or political factors, or the standards of society blocks to them and many of the rest of us from doing what we most want to do, artists are among the only ones of us who will not rest until they find a place to rest. In the gutted sections of a gutted city, in the blown-out industrial areas of a postmodern city, even on an abandoned island — you can bet that artists will be among the first to begin looking for creative and sustainable ways to rebuild, reconfigure, restore, and recover.

Course, I don’t have to remind you what usually happens next; once the artists have brought a place back to life, once the culture of the formerly dead and dilapidated and all-but-destroyed parts of our society is restored, then come the moneyed interests, the developers, the scammer, skimmers, and other scabs who would never do the hard, dirty work and who capitalize on those who do. The article notes a “master plan” that outlines  “development zones,” phases of construction, and so on. And Ms. Koch herself makes no bones about using artists as a launching point for creating an “island culture,” even as her $12.5 million budget includes no money to pay artists or for programming. She talks, without apparent irony, about the island’s “brand” being “summer vacation with irony.”

Still, as this is the new feel-good CAFA, we’ll not be our usual cynical selves and just try to enjoy the whimsical, populist, free-ranging and free-spirited Art Wonderland that currently inhabits Governors Island. Then, when island development inevitably takes off, and the artists are shuffled off in the usual unceremonious fashion, we’ll go find the next Art Wonderland that artists create.

(Photos are courtesy the Figment Project)

It’s been nearly a year since I’ve posted anything on The Chronicle of Artistic Failure in America. You may be wondering a few things. First, why have I been away so long, especially after chronicling with singular obsession the ongoing failure of art in this country for nearly two long years. Also, more importantly, why am I suddenly back and posting again now after such a long hiatus? What gives?

Well, in answer to the first question: It’s complicated. I stepped away from CAFA in the summer of 2009 for several reasons. The biggest was simple burn-out. I had simply grown tired of covering, week after week, month after month, the ongoing failure of our citizens to support the arts and what that failure was engendering for the country and its future. I was depressed and cynical and growing full of repressed anger and resentment of humankind — something that is not part of my usual nature. Also, I should add, at the time — in August, 2009 — my wife and I were planning the biggest creative step our lives: We were expecting our first child, and I did not intend to step into that experience with a pocketful of bad feelings. So for my own well-being, and for the well-being of my daughter-to-be, I stepped back and stopped following the madness that is the struggle to make and support art in America. I turned my back on it, and I don’t regret that.

As to the second question — Why revive CAFA now? — well, that’s simple. Because, for the first time in a few years — indeed, for the first time since I started this thing — I feel hopeful again. About art, about my life, about our prospects for the future. I am full of hope.

Why? I don’t know exactly. It’s not like there are many tangible signs of success out in the arts landscape (nor, for that matter, in my current professional life). Arts organizations and nonprofits continue to suffer in Minnesota and elsewhere. Arts organizations, in clear view of the increasingly ambivalent moneyed class, continue to struggle. Groups are being kicked out — both nationally and locally — of their locations and forced to scramble for alternative digs. Meanwhile, the art market continues to be in the tank. And, of course, individual artists, who almost always exist in a state of struggle, are feeling the recession particularly acutely. Plus, there are my own circumstances: Wherein, after twelve productive years in the arts writing biz, suddenly pretty much all freelance writing gigs have all but dried up; and, to put icing on the cake, this past spring I was laid off (for the first time ever) from my day job at a local nonprofit.

Still, despite all this I’m hopeful because — as I pointed out in another venue in 2008 — the arts and artists often stand at the front gate of innovation and recovery. Indeed, as the New York Times reports today, this is exactly what’s happening in one of America’s Ground Zero locations for artistic and economic failure. In an article titled “Wringing Art Out of the Rubble in Detroit,” Melena Ryzik reports that the failed urban landscape of Detroit, dotted with abandoned buildings and decimated neighborhoods, blighted with its own “particular brand of civic and economic decay” has also drawn something unexpected: “a small but well-publicized movement of artists and other creative types trying to wring something out of the rubble.” She sites the upcoming appearances in Detroit of Maker Faire, of the brainstorming conference TEDx, of the performance artist Matthew Barney — fitting for a place that is suddenly home to a “slew of handmade salvagers” and a growing D.I.Y. culture. Among the Detroit-based projects that the article lists are: Loveland, a “micro real estate” enterprise that sells parcels of Detroit by the square inch for $1 a piece; the Heidelberg Project, which turns houses into found-object sculptures; Mitch and Gina, who buy up houses for art and gardens; and more. Go and check out the article — it’s an object-lesson in what creative thinking can accomplish.

In the end, I figure, if Detroit can lift its weary, embattled head once again, so can the arts. So can you. And so can I.