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Undone and Art's March Downtown

Dumbo the elephant

Maybe all happy families are alike, but clearly not all happy art scenes. Where artists go, money follows, but each New York neighborhood gentrifies in its own way. Take Dumbo—and its annual Art Under the Bridge festival.

I should have learned the lesson when East Village galleries did not put Soho out of business, but rather moved to Soho, before it in turn gave way to luxury shopping. I should have learned when Williamsburg made hipness rather than art the product. Does that bode poorly for the New Museum, the Lower East Side, Long Island City, or deeper into Brooklyn—all decidedly works in progress? Dumbo, in contrast, has gone straight from studios to condos, with hardly a gallery or dive bar in between. A sign for Half Pint refers not to the Brooklyn Brewery but to children’s clothing. Dumbo may owe more to Disney’s flying elephant than I ever imagined.

Its latest weekend celebration was the most child friendly ever. A carousel spun where Smack Mellon once held its exhibitions, while dancers and musicians instead of sculpture competed for audiences. Summer sculpture had given way to fall, but kids seemed perfectly at home clambering over their weekend replacements. Birds on stilts lit up at night, their bodies stuffed with plastic bottles. Neatly folded cardboard looked like homeless shelters tidied up for that special occasion. Fewer artists opened their studio doors than ever before.

Where Smack Mellon has set up shop now, one could visit its studio program, now ensconced right downstairs. As so often, the gallery proper offers a meditation on a neighborhood and its art taking shape. With Peter Dudek’s New Monuments to My Love Life, tables and other found objects blend into piles of cut-out wooden curves, all as personal and inscrutable as the title. It stands somewhere between sculpture, installation, and furniture display, and circulating the main space becomes an exploration of the vocabulary of architectural models. Elana Herzog also both builds and destroys, with fabric fragments roughly stapled into the Sheetrock. Her raw gashes and spare patterns take one even further from many an installation’s impulsive, unedited tedium.

I thought of how lacking in experiment the cluster of Dumbo galleries nearby always seems. In one at least, Roger Hines leads the eye into what he calls Rooms of the Mind. They resemble Joseph Cornell boxes, in their wood craft, found parts, and dreamlike imagery. His doll heads, often broken off, recall Cornell’s Medici child, but larger, like true artist studios rather than boxed collage. They are ingenious and creepy enough to make one wonder whose mind they describe, whether in front of or behind the masks. Yet the one or two real studios still open on that same floor off Front Street had no visitors at all.

Outside, one could hardly avoid getting into the festive spirit. Yet I always expected the struggles behind those studio doors to seed so much more. Perhaps I was just lazy, drifting with the crowds on a beautiful fall day, where once I had climbed so many stairs. Who then, is the heir to uptown, midtown, and Chelsea? Which neighborhood will soak up galleries and museums next, and will anyone want them? The money machine has its own momentum, and no one knows for certain the sordid headlines of the future.

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