Banking on Art - artists exhibit in former bank during Art Miami

Art in America, May, 2000 by Paula Harper

Forty-four artists recently transformed a soon-to-be-demolished bank tower into a temporary "real world" exhibition site.

Miamians have grown accustomed to Art Miami, the international fair that materializes each January at the Convention Center in Miami Beach. Dealers from the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Europe and Latin America lease booths to display their wares, a seductive army of mostly 20th-century painting, sculpture, prints and photographs. The art community stages special events and parties to welcome the influx of art lovers drawn by the fair; last January, collector Martin Z. Margulies opened his newly installed photography collection--from Lewis Hine to Walker Evans, and from Richard Prince to Andreas Gursky--in a warehouse space north of downtown Miami, close to the Rubell Family Collections' pioneer warehouse. (The Margulies installation can be visited by appointment.)

The most extraordinary event of the week took place in a more unlikely venue, the former Espirito Santo Bank on Brickell Avenue. The nine-story, 250,000-square-foot, glass-walled structure was uninhabited, damaged by a broken water main in April 1999 and slated for demolition to make room on the prime property for a bigger and better 36-story, 1.2-million-square-foot tower by Kohn Pederson Fox. By way of a celebratory farewell, the president of the development company for the new building, William Ross, had the idea of turning over the old bank to young artists to do with as they wished in its last days. He called on gallery owner Frederic Snitzer, who shows many local artists, both established and emerging, to curate the event. Snitzer galvanized a group of 44 artists and art students and gave them five days (Jan. 17-21) to transform the empty offices, corridors, stairways, lobby, closets and elevators of the bank into a giant, vertical art exhibition called "Departing Perspectives" that was open to the public for only three days, the weekend of Jan. 21-23, simultaneous with the art fair. The result was a happy confluence of energies in a dramatic "alternative space," a sort of un-Art Miami, full of high-spirited improvisations.

The artists involved were enthusiastic about working together in a collective adventure that included students at the high school and college levels from the New World School of the Arts, from Miami's Design and Architecture Senior High (DASH) and from the University of Miami, as well as established artists like Lynn Golub Gelfman, Robert Thiele, Edouard Duval-Carrie, Maria Martinez-Canas, Purvis Young and Jose Bedia. They created an exhibition which had the effect, among its other virtues, of making the local art community visible to itself.

Presented with the challenge of the spaces available to them, so unlike those of a gallery or museum, the artists produced an exhilarating range of imaginative installations. Carol Brown took the opportunity to do something very different from her usual metal sculptures. She cut into the walls of her space and installed miniature doors, reached by tiny, meticulously crafted wooden stairways. The visitor who opened one of those dollhouse doors was confronted with a small, printed verbal assault of the kind common to domestic disputes: "How dare you talk to me like that!" or "Don't you turn your back on me!" The experience was enhanced by the sound of an argument played on a tape recorder hidden inside a wall.

Some artists responded to the function of the building as a place devoted to money and business. Karen Rifas filled a cubicle and corridor with pries of soft, gray spewings from an indispensable office machine, the shredder of dull corporate secrets. Bert Rodriguez cashed his most recent paycheck (as an assistant at the Rubell Collections) into one-dollar bills and stacked them into a compact cube that radiated monetary value through the window of another office. A group of New World students created a labyrinth of false corridors at the end of which lay a pathetic plaster figure, fallen (exhausted? bored to death?) in front of the copy machine. The students made this life cast using the George Segal method.

Others responded to the concept of demolition. The rubbish esthetic was so ubiquitous in messy piles of wallboard and carpet that it began to seem a too-facile solution. But Brian Cooper's corner office exploited a more complex response to the imminent destruction of the building. His installation vividly evoked a scene of lunatic violence; the walls were gouged with an axe, and bags of plaster were gashed and upturned on the concrete floor along with strewn shotgun shells. Blinding spotlights and an audiotape of heavy breathing and gunshots completed the stunning sensory assault.

Several artists focused on the people who had worked in the building. Ruben Torres Llorca imagined the musings of the night watchman on his solitary rounds in a series of texts inscribed on a black background strip painted around the perimeter of the lobby. Robert Chambers cut an eye-level hole through the door of a janitor's closet; the viewer peeping into the tiny, darkened space saw a spotlit sink and bucket filled with gorgeous swirls of green, orange and fuschia liquid (for which Chambers used dyes usually employed by lab technicians to stain tissue).