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DIA Beacon: Not Minimalist Enough
What a gift it
seems at first to be traveling to DIA Beacon, to be flying along
in the air conditioning under the trees, to be so free, so expansive.
No longer in the shadows, seeing just the rectangle of sky, but
now the entirety, the all around of light and, oh, wow, the shock,
of mountains on mountains. Next, the zip over the bridge, the
up and down of cute little hills with mansions nestled in dappled
light. Look, a riding academy! Isn't everything just so lovely,
so perfect?
Then suddenly we are in Beacon. First thing, a woman pushing
a stroller by the side of the highway, then a young boy poised
to cross where there is no light, where the cars zoom around
a curve toward him. Finally, a woman with three children, all
lagging behind, one child pulling back on her hand, another plopped
down in obvious protest, clearly wanting to be carried. It is
a hot day.
This is Beacon, a Section 8 town, the contemporary version of
economic segregation.
Section 8 is a Federal voucher-based rental subsidy program
for low income adults, primarily single mothers and children,
and the disabled. In New York City, a family can wait as long
as ten years for the voucher, biding their time doubled and tripled
up with relatives or in sub-standard housing with rat holes stuck
full of steel wool and hope for the savior voucher. Once it arrives
their troubles are not over. They have a specified amount of
time to cash in the voucher, to find a landlord willing to offer
a price acceptable to the program, willing to wait for payment
from the government and willing to deal with the paperwork. Where
could you find a landlord like that? Some particularly depressed
sections of the Bronx, Bed Stuy, or upstate in Binghamton, Newburgh
or Beacon.
Faced with economic downturn, a depleted population, and
empty apartments, Beacon is a perfect Section 8 town. A desperate
landlord is happy to take the Section 8 voucher because it guarantees
payment and few Section 8 people, having waited so long for the
voucher are likely to leave. It solves the problem of turnover
and empty apartments. For a speculator, it is an opportunity:
buy foreclosed property for almost nothing, break it up into
small units and sit back and collect your riches. You've seen
it on late night TV: It 's the Rich Man/ Poor Man story only
in reality it's Rich Man/ Poor Woman, or more precisely, Poor
Aspiring Person with a little capital or enough time to get property
with no down payment and Poor Woman with children and one emergency
after another and not a minute to do much but try to be in compliance
with one government program or another.
The other problem is that the depressed areas where landlords
are likely to take the Section 8 vouchers are not places where
one is likely to get off the Section 8 voucher. They are usually
places where jobs have already been lost, businesses have closed
and services are almost non-existent. Beacon, for example, was,
until recently, a main street of closed businesses. The movie
theater for years has housed an evangelistic Pentecostal revival-style
meeting house, where I imagine I would be were I the mother of
the young teenager poised to cross the highway. I would be praying
my son makes it home safe or makes his way far, far away from
Beacon. The empty stores have lately been converting to antique
stores, galleries, and a coffee shop. Thank goodness for the
grocery store and the drug store, the only two businesses that
seem to have any thing to offer the automobile deprived Section
8 recipients and, it seems the only two stores that appear to
have hired any of them.
So, then, we turn and look down on the DIA Beacon, an
old biscuit factory, actually a printing facility for the biscuit
boxes. It is an exquisite location. on a hillside next to the
Hudson River. The literature says that the state gave DIA incentives
to build the museum here. Presumably the state tried to get a
company that would have provided jobs to take over the building,
since it remained vacant for many years. How many people from
the area are actually working at DIA Beacon seems difficult to
gauge. All of the five guards I spoke with were art students
from New Paltz.
That the space beautifully holds the art is indisputable. Could
Walter de Maria have envisioned a more perfect location? The
Serra sculptures are profoundly placed, holding the squares of
light from the overhead windows, seeming even more strong, even
more robust, even more full of surface nuance. The Louise Nevelson
is hidden in the attic. I don't care whether or not they are
spiders, it still seems like a snub. The Agnes Martin could be
missed, tucked in an insignificant side room. The Chamberlain
sculptures, however, march like a high school band in their own
confident, masculine parade. Somewhere else this might have been
a fun art experience, but in this town, it seems gaudy, ostentatious
and meaningless. All I could envision in the huge air conditioned
space was the woman and children I had seen earlier. I pictured
the mother now standing up, fanning them with a newspaper while
they napped, or else praying that the old fan in the window with
the suspicious electrical cord would not cause a fire.
Can we assume the state, listed as a benefactor on the
brochure, had the best intentions in supporting the DIA project?
Who does art development help? Didn't anyone see the John Singleton
movie where the father explains to the teenagers how first drugs
are dumped in a neighborhood, then the speculators buy everything
in sight, then artists are encouraged to move in with incentives
and low rent studios, then wa-la, there is allegedly "Improvement."
William S. Eherlich, New York developer, art collector
and architect said in a New York Times article (5/26/02) that,
after he heard about DIA's plans, he bought up all of Beacon
he could get his hands on, bragging that "I'm now Beacon's
largest tax payer." He has started the Beacon Cultural Project,
setting up David A. Ross, former director of the San Francisco
Art Museum, as director. The summer of 2003, Ross featured two
video artists, Ruben Ortiz Torres and Eduardo Aborao, from LA
and Mexico, and previously he featured a Chicago artist Sieben
Versleeg. Not to get upset, several times a year they will be
"reaching out" to local artists with "10 X 10,"
an open mic-type evening where the first 10 artists that sign
up will be able to show work for a "conversation" evening.
Certainly the fourteen galleries of Beacon will be showing
local artists and there are plans that the old high school will
offer artist studios during the interim before it becomes the
Decorative Arts and Design Institute. But will that mother with
her three children be able to take advantage of such offerings
or will it be the relatively poor artists of Williamsburg who
will come and fill the void until the rents get up to a developer's
projected level?
The Beacon Cultural Foundation, supported by money from
Eherlich, will hire Carrie Mae Weems as an artist-in-residence
in which for a year she will collect stories and document the
historical and current life in Beacon. While this may put some
money in Carrie Mae Weems' pocket, will it help the woman with
the baby in the stroller? I suppose the woman's story will be
cataloged at the "Record Shop- A Social Studies Project,"
a show that will open in October, but I imagine the mother will
be long gone by that time (or will by this time at least have
seen the writing on the wall, and I do not mean Sol Lewitt's).
She will probably see no other alternative but to move to Newburgh,
the next closest Section 8 town, still in the drug dumping stage
of the real estate evolution, or evil-ution, as the East Villagers
used to call this phenomenon of gentrification.
'Tis a Gift to be Simple...
I can guess that the people who donated anywhere from one dollar
to millions for the DIA Beacon wanted to create a meaningful,
perhaps even sacred space. Perhaps they wanted me to feel serene,
optimistic and inspired while I walked among the giants of the
minimalist era, a period influenced by the Bauhaus artists, those
visionaries who hoped to end all war by creating simple, plain
shapes with no reference to national and patriotic ferver.
Unfortunately, instead of awe, I felt horrified shock,
instead of serenity I felt discomfort and instead of meaning
I saw narcissistic ego. I can only hope that the days of building
Pyramids with slave labor, the days of building huge Gothic churches
on the backs of people who are the true owners of the stone and
the land, the days of philanthropists throwing money around in
the face of abject need will truly be a sad shame from the past.
If we want to end war, we artists can do more than make stylish
decorations and expensive furniture for the rich. How did the
Bauhaus artist react in the face of Hitler. History says not
well, not well at all.
We must finally put first things first: if we want to
be comfortable we must work for real solutions to an equitable
distribution of wealth and resources, and we artists must draw
the line and stop being complicitous with real estate developers
with their "offers" of inexpensive studios and housing
that displaces others. Instead of spending our time, energy and
money furthering our "careers" so we can get that one
in a million teaching job or one in a trillion gallery show,
or that cheap studio or movie deal we artists could work together
to put our creativity to the service of solving the problem of
economic injustice.
Instead of competing against each other, let us form collectives
that work for peace, for world-wide economic justice, for renewable
energy sources, non-polluting transportation, co-operative living
arrangements, reparations to our First People, non-polluting
food production and hope for our children. Let us ask questions
of our philanthropists. Let us ask questions of our institutions.
Let us ask questions about the policy implications of our government
programs and social reforms. Let us protest that polluting golf
course on Long Island that is being planned in our backyard,
against the community's needs and despite ordinances. It is a
gift to end up where we want to be. Let us be concerned about
the plans for our empty buildings, for our communities. Let us
question what is being done in our name. Let us use our art for
a purpose. It's a gift to be simple. Let us, as Pete Seeger urges
us to do, put our efforts together, bringing our efforts to weigh
on the side of conscious action. Let us not back down, let us
not settle for less than what we want, what we know is true,
and let us take a stand, finally, for what we know is right.
-Katherine Arnoldi
This appeared on Tribes.org on line
magazine 2003----Tribes.org
Other Non-fiction:
PUBLICATIONS
2004 "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit
of Education," essay, You Look Too Young to Be a Mom, ed.
by Deborah Davis, (Penguin, NY)
"Thanks, Mom," in Big Apple Parent, May issue
2003 "DIA Beacon: Not Minimalist Enough, (Section 8 and
real estate development)," Tribes web magazine, Tribes.org
"Thanks Mom," Illustration/ Cartoon in HipMaMa
2002 "She Has Small Successes," Catalog, Women Cartoonists
from the USA, Secession Gallery, Vienna, Austria,
2000 "Tribute to the Nuyorican Poet's Cafe," Tribes#9.
2000 "Single Moms of the World Unite," in World War
3, New York.
1999 "How I Became a Cartoonist," HipMaMa, Oakland,
CA.
1994 "College is Fun" in The Welfare Mother's Voice
edited by Pat Gowans
(Milwaukee, WI) Fall.
1992 "Single Mother's Bill of Rights" in The Welfare
Mother's Voice Summer.
"Is Equal Access to the University of Arkansas Denied Single
Parents?"
The Grapevine, Fayetteville, AR and also in The Arkansas Gazette,
Little Rock.
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