Big brash borough: at the freshened-up Brooklyn Museum, a large, crowded exhibition showed the borough's art scene growing in scale, diversity and ambition

Art in America, Sept, 2004 by Gregory Volk

I'd like to begin with full disclosure. I've lived in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, since 1987, and the Brooklyn ethos--whatever that is--has enormously influenced and inspired me. Long before I began writing about contemporary art, I spent countless hours, day and night, in studios and in bars (Teddy's Bar and Grill, The Ship's Mast--in those days there were just a couple of artists' hangouts), talking shop, talking ideas, talking impassioned plans to make something out of nothing. To be honest, I had little obvious to contribute. I wasn't writing about art, I wasn't a curator and I certainly wasn't a collector. Nor did I know any dealers or collectors in Manhattan. I was just an enthusiastic outsider with laughable gaps in my knowledge, moving (although I didn't know it at the time) from literature to visual art. Someone would mention influences from Judd and I'd be, like, Judd?, while someone else would mention Clemente and I'd immediately think of the Pittsburgh Pirates' revered right fielder. Gaps and all, I felt welcomed by artists, and while I was educating myself I was on more or less permanent lookout for wonder, which I often found.

For me, the superheated SoHo of the late 1980s was something else entirely: exotic, flashy, self-important, addled by money and oftentimes annoying. All that posing and posturing, all those idling limousines. What seemed a lot more pertinent to me were the artists who were my neighbors in Williamsburg, working with zeal and belief. Like Manhattan artists of an earlier era, the Brooklynites found unorthodox ways to exhibit their work: in artist run galleries and temporary spaces in abandoned warehouses, or down at the dilapidated docks. Word traveled. Someone made something that was worth seeing, and you'd see it. There was little obvious hankering for commercial success here, across the river. We found ourselves together in a generous, incubating time, and that was sufficient.

I went to things in Manhattan, of course. It was part of my education. I paid attention, but I nonetheless found myself hightailing it back to Brooklyn, away from all the invisible rules and panoramic hype. When the art market crashed in the early 1990s, much of the glitz evaporated and SoHo became a lot more hospitable. Still, I preferred performances at the Green Room, exhibitions and events at artist run galleries like Minor Injury and Brand Name Damages, and freewheeling discussions and one-night exhibitions at Four Walls, which doubled as a clubhouse for the Williamsburg scene. Risk and nutrition were in the air, friendship fueled everything, and the whole situation was wonderfully human and refreshingly unpretentious.

When I first began writing about art in 1992--for Greenline, a Williamsburg weekly--the most influential art criticism in Manhattan had become ultra-theoretical. French poststructuralism, translated into English a decade or more earlier, had been rerouted in the direction of visual art, and there it often sounded, in poet Randall Jarrell's words, "like something written on a typewriter, by a typewriter." Manhattan was first hijacked by money and then by theory, or so it seemed to me. In Brooklyn, there was little money and plenty of skepticism on the part of very intelligent artists. But the works I encountered were not at all beholden to, or illustrative of, this or that by Foucault, Derrida or Baudrillard.

Keeping It Real

Sometime in the mid-1990s, Manhattan began to discover Brooklyn and to characterize it in language that has pretty much persisted to this day. Brooklyn is "scrappy," "scruffy," "alternative" and ruled by artistic "relationships," as in friends and friends of friends. Attracted in the early days by "low rents," artists had "set up shop" and were making a "vibrant" scene, replete with galleries, restaurants and bars. Like most overviews for tourists, however, this characterization doesn't really get at exactly why the borough has been so fruitful for artists.

I'll hazard a few guesses. In Brooklyn, artists are encouraged to pursue unexpected tangents and to abide in the process, as opposed to angling for the next gig. Much more than in Manhattan, hierarchies are suspended, between older and younger artists, renowned and emerging artists, and artists and art professionals. When stratifications are cleared away, when people aren't decked out in the costume of the hot artist, the important critic, the hip dealer, everything feels a lot more free and unencumbered.

However vital, the scene ultimately depends upon the quality of its art, and Brooklyn has generated some of the liveliest art of the past 15 years. It is extremely varied. Still, I think one can divine some distinctive traits, especially in comparison to Manhattan. To generalize: the Manhattan market tends to encourage and perhaps compel artists to continue working in defined territory. Early John Currin paintings of grotesque women are not all that different from recent John Currin paintings of grotesque women. He may have developed, but there have been no radical shifts in substance or style. The same goes for Elizabeth Peyton, the lauded portraitist, who has been making similar works for the last decade or so; and I'd also say it is true, too, of Matthew Barney. The "Cremaster" cycle can be seen as a kind of niche art in extremis.