Strange Pictures on the Street

Most of my life is spent inside a book, preparing to discuss it or write about it. But the rest is lived in Bushwick, a gentrifying neighborhood of those artists who moved into the lofts when it was still a questionable neighborhood, as well as those post-undergraduates who moved in after Roberta’s accepted credit cards and was covered by the NY Times, who debate if they are willing to dedicate their lives to a struggle that would likely deny them their underlying bourgie expectations of comfort, those places of solace that the career artists have rejected in favor of the rare pleasure they take from their photography, sculpture, theatre sets, traditional painting or street art.

I play the role of strange-but-cool to an eleven year old girl whose parents are good New York parents, keen to introduce her to art, museums, the culture of the city. The street art scene, of which I know little, but that is present both on compound walls and sold at the Factory Fresh gallery in Bushwick, requires a willing playfulness that seemed appropriate to introduce to her increasing blasé attitude towards art–a know-it-all by virtue of being a New York City kid. There is a huge wall outside the my friend's studio, which she got to visit last spring, that is always being redone. It wraps around to the other side, a continuum of 200 feet that uses its ten foot height to both good and bad effect. There are tags on other walls, on the sidewalk, hidden in corners and left prominently to view, done from the loft rooftops and also at street level. There is so much of it in this neighborhood, that many of the international visitors, prominently the Germans, staying at the Loft Hostel, can be seen in the early morning hours with their cameras, taking shots of this transient art for posterity.

There is a street I usually avoid because it leads to the recycling factory and the smell swamps and steamrolls the air into a rancid coffin for three blocks. One Saturday last summer, however, there was no smell which surprise had me wander down to enjoy a different route on the regular dog walks I take with the pitbull who is largely responsible for my knowledge of these streets. On these walks, I occasionally take snapshots with my camera phone of interesting pieces that I then show my young friend when I get together with her mother for our Diet Coke pow-wows. Though there are some brilliant and funny works that I have seen and shared, on this day it was a poster on the corner of a block that stood out, particularly because they are rarer now then they were when I was growing up in New York.

This poster did not advertise an upcoming event, or have any language on it at all. In black and white, I am surprised that I noticed it on the gray wall, but as the wall had other points of color from long forgotten tags, the organized square of printed black and white, with the top left corner peeling down drew me into the image of a street corner with three mice dressed as young gangsters from the 20th Century teens, one wearing a sharp wool suit, leaning against a lamp post, arms crossed, staring out at the street and the viewer from under his bowler, another one, well suited, resting his left arm on the lamp post to lean into the other mouse, as a third, standing away from these two, watches them in his newsboy cap and tie. Behind them, three brownstones with shops on the first floor; one of them a barber shop, the other unspecified with a rolled up striped awning. The shutters on the upstairs windows are battered, reinforcing the desperate tone of the setting. The last building is covered by a carriage being drawn by an oversized kitten, with the markings and the gray tonality that makes it seem to be an orange tabby. The cat looks straight ahead, ignores the mice, harnessed to its carriage load, focuses on each step forward.

The poster was poorly plastered onto the wall, which repeated the falling down style within the image, and provided a seemingly intentional ripple to the streets that made them look dirtier, poorly maintained, and brings me back to the street where I stand. Trash hides beneath the curb, detritus is pressed into the road from the trucks that drive through, and the general poverty of the neighborhood permits the anti-establishment life styles being cultivated until they get priced out by the next generation of SoHo, Tribecca, East Village, Williamsburg parents who disdain the established bourgeois neighborhoods in favor of establishing their own. When I show the picture to Lil Miss Blasé, she loves it and wants to come see it, disappointed that it is gone, ripped, torn, and replaced with something new that she doesn’t like as much, as disconcerted by such temporality as any art critic.