[This is Part Seventeen in The Pride of Phoenix Series. See sidebar.]
In the beginning, we begged for this. But it's not about the art anymore. It's more about being seen.
--Phoenix artist Randy Slack, on First Friday, August 5, 2005.
by Jerome du Bois
August 5, 2005, proved to be an exciting First Friday for the Roosevelt Row art scene, and generated more print and electronic postings than usual. Twisted knickers everywhere. I've been catching up with it. What follows will wander here and there, based on some published accounts. If you can handle it, dear reader, please come along. In my fifty-sixth year, and more alive than ever, I continue to be astounded by operators, by those who work the system, and try to turn the dials their way. This post is full of questions. Are they rhetorical? No. Will I open comments for responses? No! But think about them.
Let's begin with parking. Everybody down there bitches about the lack of parking.I swear, these people are such easy targets. Kimber Lanning, in an article published Saturday, August 6:
"If you're from Scottsdale and your car is going to get towed, you're not going to come," Kimber Lanning, owner of the art gallery Modified Arts, said, referring to the possibility of police cracking down on minor parking violations.
The woman has been there over six years, and she hasn't come up with a solution to a problem she helped to create, and should have seen coming. But this is simple, Lanning, simple.
Let's go back, say, two years. If the half-dozen so-called players on Roosevelt Row pooled their resources, and their good reputations, and put some money down (city matching funds?), they could have already even-graded and upgraded the lot across from Holga's to create at least one firm parking lot --not even asphalt, there are other less-expensive surfaces and processes, and lease portable lights if you have to-- where people pay and you have security and everything's cool and legal. Then upgrade the lot across from monOrchid, too. Actually, they should have started on the west side of Modified Arts itself, to make it nice and neat.
But they didn't and haven't. They just complained, and complain. (And, if they're Wayne Rainey and Reid Butler and Glenn Lineberry, they talk about developing farmer's markets and artist apartments and don't even talk about parking. No money there, I guess. Although it's hard to find out anything about Row Three Artists Homes since November 2004, and there is no open city / farmer's market where they said it was going to be, starting eight months ago. It's a lot of hot air.)
Are you telling me the owners of those vacant lots wouldn't want to make some income on them, while getting a deal on basic upgrading, and while we're all waiting for ASU and the Genome genie to answer our every development dream? (Or even if those two things never happened.) And the city couldn't give them any tax incentives to help what they persist in calling the "burgeoning?" Where's the proactive thinking? Where's the imagination?
In a Valley built around driving, these creative class entrepreneurs, so-called cultural leaders, and city department officials, couldn't or didn't anticipate the need for parking solutions, even while the vacant lots were staring them in their vacant faces.
Enough about parking. On to the "raids." These drama queens . . .
Greg Esser has worked in the bureaucracies of two city governments (Denver and Phoenix; no longer with Phoenix Public Art Program); he's deeply involved as a landlord in several properties on Roosevelt Row; and yet he supposedly got "blindsided" by the unexpected descent and invasion of the eeeevil city note-taking code enforcer gestapo fascists, some even disingenuously wearing "soft clothes" --some of whom he must have had acquaintance with in his previous job.
In a post on the eyelounge website, dated Monday, August 8th, he helpfully includes a list of the invaders. I wonder if he knew any of them in his previous job? I wonder why no one gave him a heads-up? If you read his statement, it includes sentences like the following:
We know that undercover police officers and other city officials have been attending First Fridays for at least several months recording observations and collecting information. The issues they are investigating now appear to extend far beyond underage drinking, open container violations and parking concerns as we have been told.
They knew beforehand --for several months-- that the city was curious about their operations? And they didn't look around, do some research, change anything? Clueless or arrogant?
These were individuals we spoke directly with and observed first hand. They came last night prepared with previous research and background on our businesses. We have no idea how many others or who else may have been working last night in addition to what we witnessed directly.
This from a guy who used to run the Phoenix Public Art Program, and who brags about "fighting" crack sales and prostitution when the cops wouldn't.
And speaking of the ones in the know getting the heads-up, I wrote in my last post:
Where were DPAC and Artlink before this official visit? Why didn't they know? The city officials didn't bother to tell them, and why should they?
Get the point? DPAC has only been around a couple of years, in its present form, anyway, so I was willing to give them a partial pass on developed relationships, until I read this post by DPAC on azindymediyecchh:
Less than a week before August's First Fridays event [on Tuesday, August 2], the Phoenix Police department held a meeting with local art community activists and leaders to discuss their plans to put a small contingent of police officers at that First Friday. They indicated that their main concerns were that of public safety and orderliness. They indicated that 1 county agency would be there to inspect street vendors (ostensibly again for the public good).
From this meeting, the arts community representatives worked to spread the word through email and flyers that parking and vending areas would be restricted, and worked with various city officials and business owners to find alternative sites. The art community members left the meeting with the understanding that a police presence would be at First Friday to advise and issue warnings where appropriate.
What ultimately occurred was a phalanx of representatives and enforcers from city and county offices descending on the First Friday event, some giving out information, some taking notes and many unwilling to identify from what department or office they were sent. The same art community leaders who had worked with the city officials to help the process of education and solutions felt blind-sided by the all-out assault of regulatory agencies and secretive information-gathering.
In addition, the show of force with patrol cars, motorcycle officers, plain-clothes, "soft-clothed," armed and mounted police to a historically benign monthly event was unnecessary, expensive and intimidating.
The brash actions exhibited by these city and county departments points to a policy reversal of cooperation from the city, and the open and transparent communication process the city had said it would maintain.
It's all on the city, see; the ball is always in the city's court, according to these artists' reps; the artists bear little responsbility. Why is it always on the city to keep the communication process open? If what DPAC said happened, what does that say about the political savvy of the art people who have been down there so many years? They seem quite lame.
Now, Artlink is a different culprit . . . After a half-dozen years or so, nobody from Artlink has bothered to cultivate friendly relationships with every damned city department that might ever have to intersect with the domain of Artlink's supposed mandate. It simply has not been a priority, even though the steady, reliable, ongoing city mechanisms, neatly organized by department and ready to work for the public good, provide the very foundation and infrastructure for the so-called creative endeavors of the faux-called creative class.
They --every one of the board members of Artlink; I say it-- have been very very poor midwives of the future of this city. If any single one of them --it doesn't even matter who, really-- had a real relationship with the city --daily, vital, ongoing, push-pull, clarifying and mutually supportive-- Boo-Hoo Friday may have been completely avoided, and the inspectors and code enforcers, who may have preferred being home with their families, may not have been called up for their sworn civic duty.
But Kimber Lanning and Shari Bombeck and Michael the Magic Number and Wayne Rainey and Glen Lineberry and Cindy Dach and Greg Esser and Steve Gompf and Ted Decker and Beatrice Moore and that whole hoo-haw crew --some of whom have money hanging in the balance, in the form of the Phoenix Artist Storefront Pilot Program-- can't come up with a parking lot; and they can't, over ten years, cultivate one person, or muster even one phone call from a sympathetic insider, to give them a heads-up on any drop-ins or sudden ambushes. That is lame, lame, lame. Leaders, eh? If I was one of Artlink's sponsors, I'd re-evaluate my position in light of this failure of leadership. If I was a member, I'd reconsider my dues. And yes, I know everybody's a volunteer at Artlink. So? That doesn't mean you do less than one hundred percent.
Artlink --link, link, link-- implies connection and communication and cooperation and we're all just exchanging wisdom at a geometric rate in the internet age . . . But the so-called #1 artwalk in the USA, I think I read somewhere, organized by Artlink, got busted. Why?
Okay, I'll provide the standard movie line:
What we have here . . . is . . . fayl-yerr . . . to gummincate!
But that's bullshit. What we have here is arrogance, and arrogant ignorance, and the stink of artists' egos and artistic privilege, easily dispelled by some handy room freshener. They have had years to link. Ginger Richardson, in her August 8th article, mentioned a "tenuous relationship" between the artists and the city. Still tenuous after all these years. Why?
We claim that Artlink right now is failing in its mission, and it showed on August 5th, as embarrassingly obvious as a mandrill's red ass.
There's a lot more. Next, definitions. First I'll separate out the continued conflation of "artist" and "gallerist" and "arts representative" in these recent stories. Then, clarifications of edgy and seedy. Oh, please, come along, come along --some of you will tear your hair out, Hallelujah! you've earned it and you deserve it! and some of you will shake your heads at the ranting man, what's new, but some of you will understand that we --Catherine King and I-- stand for reason, and standards, and some goddamned respect for art.
In the several articles about Boo-Hoo Friday, the writers often conflate exactly who were wearing what and how many professional hats in these meetings with the Police Department and various "city officials." That is:
artists;
gallerists;
artists who are gallerists;
arts representatives (e.g. Artlink board members, DPAC) who are artists;
arts representatives (as above) who are not artists;
arts representatives who are "community activists" as well;
combinations of all the above
--were all conflated in the articles. This is sloppy, at the least, and if someone were to tease some threads apart, potentially interesting networks may emerge.
In the meantime, Ginger Richardson et al need to dig deeper.
Now, about edgy:
From an anonymous editorial in the Arizona Republic, August 12, 2005:
Hurt feelings notwithstanding, the city and the artists are still reading from the same First Friday book. One is simply on the chapter titled "Keeping it Edgy," while the other is deep into "Keeping it Safe."
Okay, what is edgy, even inexactly? Body suspension? Sword swallowing? Human flamethrowers? Onsite tattooing? Bondage demonstrations? Human branding? Rabbit skinning? Renting out yo mama for unspeakable acts? (It's all been done.) We've already seen, at Holga's, paintings of eight-year-old females urinating ("The Seven Deadlies," by some forgettable jerk), or just lifting their skirts (Beatrice Moore) . . . TIME OUT!
In November 2004, politician Tom Simplot wandered around with a microphone downtown on that First Friday. I shall be sampling many inadvertent nuggets from this mine. First, this brief exchange with Prudence Crosswhite of @Central Gallery at the Burton Barr Public Library:
MR. SIMPLOT: You are a grandmother, grandfather, you want to take the kids out for a Friday night, is there [he refers to Roosevelt Row, including Holga's and Modified] where you would go?
MR. CROSSWHITE: I think so.
MR. SIMPLOT: Good.
MR. CROSSWHITE: I think that a lot of this is appropriate for all ages, and I see all different ages, people from all over the Valley every First Friday.
"Grandpa, why is that little girl lifting--"
"Oh, look at the balloon clown! Over here, Tyler, Taylor, and Towner! . . . Oh, look, he's making a French poodle!"
It's time to admit that the so-called art downtown is simply the bait in the bait-and-switch. None of it has to do with artworks proudly, respectfully displayed on a wall or standing on a floor or filling a room as an installation. The First Friday scene is not about intellectual or emotional contemplation without distraction. Art --real art-- is the first time-honed concept among many disrespected and sacrificed down there. Human dignity is another, and respect for women. It's all about a carnival on First Fridays: loud, adolescent, drunken, and cheap and hollow as Mardi Gras throws. A nitwit parade. Woodwork squeaks and out come the freaks.
We lay our cards on the table, old-fashioned as they might sound. Visiting art, for us, should be like visiting church, or at the very least the most special library you could imagine. I know it sounds romantic, but too bad. We don't accept low standards, or whatever fools half our age are trying to pull on the gullible down there every month. We know high quality, we know high standards, we promote comparisons at those levels --the intervals are clearly marked for the reasonable-- and we will condemn every damn venue that promotes crap like pole dancing and burlesque and pathetic narcissism, while still claiming any kind of artistic high ground. Baiting with spoiled bait, and switching way down in quality. We don't accept it. We expose it and fight it.
The contemplation of art should be totally separate from any kind of festival atmosphere. It seems obviously quaint to point out.
Because they don't want you to look at the art. It's a charade, a three-card monte game. It's about the artists and gallerists and reps and imposters and pretenders, not the "art" they make. It's about their careers and a place to develop them. They think they are entitled to an arts district, and that is the core of their ignorant folly. The city --and the Copper Square people who have fostered this corrosion at their northern rim-- have so far gone along with this folly, but they ought to begin to question such entitlement thinking.
Not long ago Phoenix artist Jason Nye moved to Las Vegas. In response to the recent brouhaha here he posted these words on the new Artlink discussion forum:
I moved to Vegas and went to my first First Friday. They block off a portion of the streets and have vendors, bands and street performers. Artists have their work under tents and there are also galleries in an area about 2 square miles. It was more like a festival. They also had busses picking up people for free. I was impressed by the work I saw as well.
I really hope Phoenix reaches this point because it was really cool and clearly Las Vegas supports the arts and artists.
Phoenix probably will reach that point. It would be easy to close off Roosevelt Row from Sixth Street to First Street, to make room for the chainsaw-juggling Ukrainian unicyclist, and all the colorful distractions who follow in his wake to keep you from seeing that the art doesn't sell.
I can't imagine any self-respecting artist wanting to share space with these clowns, and I mean that literally in some cases.
Now, about "seedy."
Beatrice Moore loves the seedy and knows the grime, as we've written before. From the August 5th AZ Republic article:
The event brings as many as 10,000 diverse people to downtown Phoenix, an area in dire need of energy and nightlife. Over-regulating it could kill the very spirit that makes it such a success.
"It has to be applied carefully," said Beatrice Moore, one of the driving forces behind Phoenix's arts community. "You don't want to kill the fun, eclectic nature of the event and make it too sterile, too tame."
It's about the event --look, world, like a million places on Earth, we can assemble 10,000 fools in one place for no reason that advances anything in any way, except the breathless anticipation of more of the same next month.
Kimber Lanning offers up a couple more nuggets through Tom Simplot, back in November 2004. One excerpt:
. . . And we also, thirdly, we're going to need a little bit of defense from the city when we start getting upper-scale people coming in sort of gentrifying the area, who are like, well, I don't think that building [she means her place, Modified Arts] is very pretty. You know what I mean?
>> MR. SIMPLOT: Well, and let's admit it, that's happening right now.
>> MS. LANNING: It is happening right now, and we need to have--
>> MR. SIMPLOT: You have some great stuff going in down the street.
>> MS. LANNING: --ah, but we need to make sure the city values what we have enough to say to people--
>> MR. SIMPLOT: That's right.
>> MS. LANNING: Wait, you chose to move to an urban area, you're going to have to deal with the night life and the festivities that are happening here.
Let's pick this exchange apart, slowly. Lanning sounds pretty defensive herself. What does "upper-scale people" mean? And "gentrifying the area?" Isn't that what Esser and Dach did with Sixth Street Studio --e.g., make it neater and cleaner than Modified has ever been? But they are her chums, and certainly not her targets.
But here's the core: she wants the city to defend her from improving her place in any way whatsoever. Even from criticism. Can you believe this shit? This is what she is saying:
Come on down, rich whoevers, plunk your money down for a new-old place or loft or house or whatever; but just hunker down and contribute your money, your presence, and your living occupation of your property, but shut up about any civic improvements in your neighborhood. Kimber Lanning and the Grant Pimps have got the scene sewed up, so shut up, upperscales, and spend your money --but locally, dammit! locally!
We know for a fact that Kimber Lanning has not applied for an award in the Phoenix Artist Storefront Pilot Program. (We have appended the list at the end of this post, supplied by Sheryl Taylor of the Phoenix Downtown Development Office.) She doesn't think her facade needs improvement, apparently; or she will improve it on her own, with her vaunted volunteers; or she'll do nothing, as usual. She will leave it skanky as it ever was. Why not?
While we're on Lanning, and quality, let me recover another nugget from the Simplot interview. This person, Ms. Lanning, is supposed to be an aesthetic gatekeeper. I know; I've had my portfolio interview with her, reflections upon which I have published elsewhere. Read this:
MR. SIMPLOT: And how do you decide, you have so many artists to choose from, how do you decide who to show?
MS. LANNING: You know, I go with my gut. It's I don't have a specific thing that I'm looking for, but I look at portfolios a couple times a week, and I just-- you know, I see something and I know. Right now, I'm booked, I'm usually booked almost a year in advance, and I have several artists that have stayed with me and they come back and they show year after year, so--
Clear it up any? Not at all. She might as well be blind. Did you get anything out of that paragraph, reader? Any ruler or guide or list of criteria or art movements she wishes to avoid or thinks are passé. Nothing about personal, aesthetic preferences, developed over a lifetime of contemplation, or trends she sees in these portfolios that pass under her . . . nose, might as well be, for what we learn. And this is one of the major players down there, aesthetically; she knows it, in her gut.
My next subject is whether the art sells. We are so far on the outside that we have nary a whisper of what's going on down there; so I scratch away with whatever figures fall before me.
No gallerist is required to publish their sales records, but I sure would like a peek at theirs. I wonder . . . 10,000 people attend First Friday. If one percent --100 people-- buy a work of art averaging $100, that comes to $10,000 --one dollar per attendee-- and spread over, say, 50 galleries (out of 80, they say), that comes to an average of $200 per gallery. A $200-dollar average yields $400 per gallery. Ten percent would make it $2000 per gallery. That would be the beginning of respectable and professional, but . . . Ya think? I think not. (If I remember correctly, the nut on our modest upstairs gallery was $300 per month. And we weren't getting paid.)
Look closely: the very existence of First Friday in Phoenix is a testimony to the impotence and limpness of the falsely-named "burgeoning." It's a protective shell around a failure. It really isn't about the art anymore, as Randy Slack admitted; it's about how many warm bodies you can get down there on a regular basis to justify squeezing money out of the city, county, and state --and to look vital, anyway. But what's so vital about street vendors of t-shirts, or some funky pseudo-percussionist, or the contorting mime, or the jugglers and the clowns when they all did tricks for you . . . ?
Once a month, or even four times a month, for a half-dozen years at least, with galleries coming and going with the transience of fireflies . . . Real galleries have regular hours --and steady appointments with regular clients-- and don't depend on two weekends a month, hyperventilated and oversexed, to make their nut.
Real galleries have legitimacy. And they show quality art. I would love to hear a list of the great, lasting, institution-owned, appreciating-in-value artworks that have burgeoned out of downtown Phoenix in the last dozen years. I really would. You know, the ones everybody knows about --and I don't mean an old Randy Slack twelve-foot banana, or the monkey guy who left town, or some popped-art boys.
In November 2004 Tom Simplot interviewed Wayne Rainey, too. I know that was awhile ago, and may not seem to apply to August 5, 2005; but it throws light on how people try to fool themselves and others.
First, and I'm not going to excerpt the inane exchanges, Rainey and Simplot talk as if shade magazine was still viable then. Neither one mentions that the last issue of that magazine hit the deck two months before and they both knew it was a dead duck.
Second, affordable housing for artists. Again, why should artists --and not, say, supermarket clerks-- get special deals for housing? Well, because that way Rainey and his crew can get "city help" for their projects. Supermarket clerks just don't have the cachet that artists are supposed to both exude and attract.
MR. RAINEY: It's getting harder and harder to develop anything downtown that's market rate, much less affordable. So, I think we have this slim window of time, the time that we can set aside some affordable housing for artists. There's a couple of projects that have already started like the Row Three Project, that's started, and there's some others that are in the wings that could happen, but they're going to need a lot of help. They need a lot of fostering.
Fostering. Earlier, Rainey says that the Row Three Project has received city funding. Incidentally, it's very hard to find out anything about this project on the internet. It's also interesting that he is/was/might be embarking on this new project when monOrchid is wilting on the original vine. But I'm not a real estate mogul. I'm not the one who said, "Let's build this city and built it well." Wayne Rainey to the rescue!
And when you go down there, just behind monOrchid, as we two did today, we find that there was no groundbreaking in January for the Row Three Project; there is no Project, yet; there's just the same condemned buildings with the same forlorn chain-link fence around it that we've seen there for years. Maybe the project is just delayed, right? Maybe. These highfalutiin' high-talkin' city movers and shakers, you know, they may be dealin' behind the scenes, or . . . Maybe the slim window of time closed.
MR. SIMPLOT: The artists aren't only here around the Roosevelt Row area, they're also --let's face it, artists are living down around Grand, right?
MR. RAINEY: Yeah, actually, Roosevelt is almost like the done scene now, you know, this is where the established guys are, it seems like to me. So, we've got a lot of high end galleries are starting to proliferate down here. Grand is the hot, new cutting edge scene that's really happening.
Hard to believe we're looking at the same streets. Again, I know he's talking in November 2004, but by now . . . monOrchid has FOR RENT signs out front. It does not exhibit artists anymore. Rainey's and Joshua Rose's magazine is toast. Holga's is a shithole. Row Three Artist Homes seems to be on hold or in thin air. And there is no such thing as a high-end gallery on Roosevelt Row. He's deluded.
After driving around the whole area again today, we saw that nothing much has changed; it's blasted and dusty and chain-linked and funky. It doesn't really matter what the crowds hide at night; the sun tells the truth with every sunrise.
And looking at the list of those taking advantage of the PASPP, we see little reason to be enthusiastic about the burgeoning.
Which brings me to the applicants, so far, for the Phoenix Artist Storefront Pilot Program.
Copper Gate Plaza: Tom and Alice Mattingly (realtors)
Paisley Violin: Derrick & Gina Suarez (restauranteurs)
Garfield Galleria: Donna Trigilio
Michael Anderson, Sculptor: Michael Anderson
Legend City: Randy Slack (painter)
eyelounge & MADE LLC: Cindy Dach and Greg Esser (m/m artists)
Arizona Testing Laboratories: David Therrien (pretentious asshole)
Lumbre Gallery: Gabriel & Salcido, et al (metal artisans)
The Chocolate Factory: Hector Ruiz (wood sculptor)
Rocket Surgery Studio: Patrick O. McCue
501 E Roosevelt: Kathy Petsas
Alwun House Foundation: Dana Johnson
Studio Art Warehouse: S. Hofberger, C. Suiter et al.
Thirteen applicants out of over eighty galleries so far. A little less than half the money still available ($224,000). No takers. Part of the problem: a lot of these galleries are just one-artist vanity places; they rent; they have no capital behind them, no money in the bank, source of matching funds, no line of credit, no patrons, and no weight.
I'm curious about a couple of these folks on the list. David Therrien, who has been trying to wangle angles out the city for over twenty years, is still snuffling up to the public trough? Well, why shouldn't they give him money, since he did such a fine job with his vision for Jackson Street?
And the Alwun House? Another old grant-getter. And the Paisley Violin, an unremarkable salad bar, just because they might throw some art on their walls on a regular basis (as they did with mine, so long ago)?
The burgeoning is inflated, and First Fridays is a charade. It is not about the contemplation and promotion of serious art; it is a carnival of twits, and its only end is the continued legitimization of bureaucratic operators masquerading as a faux-creative class.
Posted by Jerome at August 17, 2005 07:50 PM | TrackBack