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Man on Fire: Expanded Narratives on Art and Ecology at WhiteBox
https://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/at-whitebox-by-stephen-zacks/6517
By STEPHEN ZACKS August 8, 2024
It’s important for Juan Puntes, founder of WhiteBox, to stipulate that the art space, located on Avenue B just above Houston Street, is not a gallery. Despite the name, suggesting a traditional blank-walled exhibition environment, WhiteBox belongs to the “alternative space” tradition, rooted in the artist-run galleries in SoHo and Tribeca in the 1960s and seventies. It’s a not-for-profit organization founded in Chelsea in 1998 and supported by grants from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and New York State Council for the Arts, its production costs partly offset by co-curators and collaborators.
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At the street level, the Expanded Narratives show has been appended by a last-minute addition: Noah Fischer’s speculative/humanist newspaper New York 2044, commissioned as a project by More Art, which funds socially engaged public art. Printed as a one-sheet newsprint tabloid at Linco in Long Island City, New York 2044 reports on policy visions for the future of the city, interviewing public figures, policymakers, and activists, drawing from each figure’s personal stories, then extending their ideas into an imagined policy landscape twenty years hence. Each page becomes a split-screen layout in which personal stories are illustrated by Fischer’s comics adjoined with a news story reported in the year 2044.
New rent-regulation legislation is passed, causing multi-family buildings to become unprofitable; the city is then able to purchase and convert the buildings into social housing, as New York 2044 reports “from the imagination of” Miguel Robles Durán, a professor of urbanism at the New School born in Mexico City. Public housing agencies win a lawsuit against Amazon Robotics defending their patent of building maintenance technologies, in a story drawn from the life of Marquis Jenkins, a tenant organizer in the Lower East Side. As a result, agencies are able to improve living conditions and sustain affordable housing in the city.
The future-oriented policies are woven together in news stories that iterate a changed set of conditions. Low-to-middle-income friendly rules join new density regulations to make additional units available to those with the highest demand for housing. Food-delivery drones go haywire and barrage a one-time commercial building in Williamsburg converted for supportive housing. Bad landlords are forced to surrender ownership of their properties, which are turned over to residents to purchase with low-interest loans, in the vision of New York 50th district Assemblymember Emily Gallagher. The newspaper is distributed free in a mockup of a typical news kiosk, installed in WhiteBox’s windows. Five full-color pamphlets, sold for $2 each, expand the stories and policy ideas. Fischer has been sitting at a card table in front of WhiteBox drawing people’s portraits and having conversations as a part of the installation.
Fischer, an activist in the 2010s Occupy Museums group of the Occupy Wall Street movement, calls the project a form of social sculpture, in the manner of Joseph Beuys, who helped establish the Greens as a viable political party in Germany. The idea of “sculpting” a process of social change remains a salient form of political expression in art, raising the stakes of political effectiveness, as opposed to work that merely appears to be virtue-signaling. It’s a crucial aspiration, given how loosely the art field commonly evaluates political gestures. Someone as eminent and widely esteemed as art historian Claire Bishop, who writes extensively on social and political projects, conceded that her evaluation of such work ultimately has to remain limited to the aesthetic domain.
This is where a “project space” operating in the nonprofit sector has the chance to be more potent than the for-sale gallery world and museums that depend on patronage. The art field has glaring blind spots that often make it seem ridiculous to outsiders. While stridently embracing the jargon of inclusionary social movement theory, its constant celebrations of high-achieving artists from groups that have been historically discriminated against sometimes comes off as empty self-congratulation, merely replacing the top of the meritocratic pyramid with a more diverse group of commercially successful elitists. As a reward for embracing a new coteries of art stars, we are subjected to turgid academic doublespeak and repressively doctrinaire declarations of canned group affiliation.
