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The Man with a Thousand Eyes, a Thousand Ears, a Thousand Noses: The Life and Art of Michael Scott Addis

Saturday, March 23, 2013

The artist touching up his work. Photographs by Ricky Vazquez.

 

“O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell

and count myself a King of infinite space.”

– Hamlet, II, 2

 

“… seems we all have a tendency to slip.

Doesn’t it seem only the righteous

can get a grip? I wonder who

that might be – you,

or me?”

– Michael Scott Addis, “Righteousness”

 

The lips and tongue of Michael Scott Addis are not yet fully habituated to their new set of teeth. For equally unaccustomed ears, the cumbersome cadence that issues forth from his mouth takes some getting used to. For Scotty, as he goes by, words like “righteousness” rub up against his Medicaid-provided dentures and then shove their way past with a defiant, self-assured drawl, his eyes atwinkle and secretly knowing.

Born here in Miami on February 25, 1953, Addis is a sculptor who carries the weight of familial abuse, drug addiction, and living on hot and merciless streets for most of his adult life. His works are small, mostly figures: dragons, horses, human and humanoid heads and faces, rhinoceroses.

At once ghoulish yet familiar, and naive yet disconcerting, they sporadically adorn the surroundings along Scotty’s wayward paths through the city, themselves only evident by the abundance of his work. Part decoration, part internal protrusion, they can be found in various states of [dis]repair, and at a glance, in the context of dense public spaces at odds with the natural environment one can scarcely differentiate between them and the milieu of furtive territorial daubs, cultural callouses, and subtropical urban detritus that they consist of.

Horsehead in progress.

Addis crafts using a mix of soap, ash and other materials - mushrooms for mustaches, thorns for teeth, and fish gills for eyelids – affixed to wire mesh frames. His figurations have an uncomplicated elegance and straightforward focus on form that recalls the ancients, but this belies their fierce rawness and exalted feverishness. They’re totems that signal a mind ravaged by the violence of others, circumstance, and the impulse to self-destruct. New scars from old wounds. Portals and mirrors.

Addis grew up in Liberty City and then on Miami Beach. His mother was an alcoholic and his father, Eugene, was a brutal and enormous MBPD detective. Mickey Rourke, the applauded actor of Diner, Rumble Fish­, The Wrestler, and Sin City fame, is Scotty’s stepbrother. After Rourke’s father left his family, his mother Annette married Eugene when he was around six years old, and they moved in.

Rourke recalls the drama of growing up with Scotty. He witnessed his first forays into drugs, wildness, and the perilous street life that they shared. On the first day that Rourke’s family moved in with Scotty’s (they each had several brothers and sisters), they were eating at the dinner table – where no talking was allowed – and Eugene “backhanded Scotty, and he flew about four feet in the air.” Scotty started running away from home at the age of nine and was in and out of juvenile detention centers. It was around this time that he started sculpting.

A young Mickey Rourke playing Motorcycle Boy in Rumble Fish, speaking to Rusty James, his younger brother.

As teens Mickey and Scotty would prowl the streets of Miami Beach and sit on benches with their arms around each other’s shoulders waiting to scam the cruisers who would invariably attempt to pick them up. Rourke also says, admiringly, “He was one of the best burglars around. He could get into any house. We’d be broke and head over to North Bay Road [known for its extravagance] and hit two or three houses.”

Scotty was also a formidable athlete, “a defensive back known for laying people out,” and an amateur pugilist who sharpened his skills on those foolish enough to try them. “There was nobody that had a bigger set of balls. He’d fight guys five feet taller than him. He had no fear.” This is coming from Mickey, who was a championship-winning amateur boxer with a 27-3 record and who trained at the 5th Street Gym on South Beach where Muhammad Ali honed his floating and stinging.

The stepbrothers both found solace in the ring and on the street and, as Scotty says, the two “stuck together like stink on shit.” While Mickey boxed professionally and then entered a mythic film career after receiving a brutal concussion[i], Scotty found himself increasingly alienated. After Mickey left for the Actor’s Studio in New York in the mid-’70s, Scotty spent more time on the streets and eventually became addicted to crack and various other substances. He tried with no success over the years to hold jobs ranging from “house painter, clam digger, handyman, [to] parks department employee.”[ii]

Scotty in his room speaking about his current work.

Scotty’s life is a fractured narrative. It’s difficult for him to place events in sequence, identify years, and give context – and not only because of the traumas of abuse by his father and his long crack habit. He was in a car accident in Charlotte, North Carolina that sent him into a coma for several days and was severely maimed after finding a gas bomb while dumpster diving, which exploded when he dropped it. Scotty lived on various corners but came to settle in a shack he built behind a house in Little Haiti on NE 82nd Street and NE 2nd Avenue. He delivers these details of his life story with the hiccups and bombast of a war veteran.

Though he struggled to survive, Scotty became engrossed in his art. He moved from the rudimentary reproductions of nude statues that he made as a kid to the highly expressive masks that he now sculpts and places in bunches on trees, the walls of buildings, and other surfaces in public view. Fueled in part by the euphoric peaks and despondent valleys of the crack high, he developed a style that characterizes the nuanced array of human facial expression. He’d started out by making “1,000 eyes, 1,000 noses, 1,000 ears,” and went on to forge subjects tragic, comic, and everything in between. They were manifestations, inevitably, of his internal back-and-forth, his despair and ecstasy. But they’re also documents of the rapists, murderers and dealers, as well as the decent and good-hearted, who lived a life with him on the outskirts.

Scott Addis, outside the Rubell Family Collection.

Throughout the ’80s and ’90s and ’00s, people came to know Scotty and his work, and found a man that was kind, funny, and extremely intelligent. They’d bring him food, converse with him, and buy some of the sculptures that he made. Most of the time it was people driving and seeing him all the time in the same areas, but a few collectors took notice too. Edward Soto, an attorney, has bought several works, as has the ethically questionable Martin Siskind, who has a bit of a history of ripping off “outsider” artists (see: Purvis Young). Scotty also had an exhibit at the Miami Beach Public Library after Leonore Barbosa, an aide there, saw him and his sculptures at the library one day and immediately recognized his talent.

Other than the unassuming and easily-missed locations, Scotty also put up his work on a tree on NW 29th Street outside the Rubell Family Collection after being told he wasn’t allowed to come in – “probably because of how I looked,” he says with a smile.

Detail of work outside the Rubell Family Collection.

Though his artistic practice grew and he maintained contact with the people who helped him, Scotty was in the depths. He’d lost touch with his family, was deep into drugs, and was exposed to the everyday dangers of homelessness. Mickey recounted the difficulty of interacting with Scotty: “For years we couldn’t really participate much with him, because you know, he was all fucked up on the crack. When I’d be down there in Miami, I couldn’t really communicate much with him. You couldn’t give him five dollars; you couldn’t give him five hundred dollars ’cuz he’d smoke it up.” Climbing up utility poles to put up his curled-lipped and smirking faces, Scotty remembered, he would just remain there and cry.

Decades passed like this, and then the inexplicable happened. On July 11, 2011, something inside him broke down, or came together – some neurochemical event took place or the hand of God flipped a switch. Scotty walked into the Better Way of Miami treatment center on NW 28th Street and NW 7th Avenue, and asked for help.

 

The hallway leading to Scotty’s room at Better Way of Miami.

He was taken in by the staff and immediately liked for his zealous conviviality, caring demeanor, and capricious habits. Since then, he’s been off drugs and has entered the recovery culture of daily meetings, working the steps, and gradual, never-ending healing. He now works in his small, semi-messy room. At first the space was chaotic, much like his mind and body; his hands would shake and he could barely dial on the phone.

Steven Engram, his primary counselor at Better Way, gushed about Scotty, saying with a deep laugh, “he’s what you call an acquired taste,” and that the work is an anchor for him, “When Michael stops his artwork, you know he’s preoccupied.” A big part of his recovery plan was getting back in touch with his family, and it was through Better Way that Scotty was put back in touch with his stepbrother Mickey.

The entrance to Better Way of Miami.

Going from a life that is frenetic and disconnected to one that is slowed down and in-touch is part and parcel of recovery. When Scotty was on drugs, he thought falsely that he had “a better imagination” while he was making his art. “I would make the same thing over and over. Now that I’m straight, my mind doesn’t go so quick. I can build my thoughts.” The relentlessness of the amphetamine high certainly embedded a skill that comes with intense repetition, but now a growing calm has taken hold. He’s taking it one day at a time, approaching life more honestly, and “giving it away.” He’s shaking less and getting his touch back, and drinking a lot of fresh juices.

The figures Michael Scott Addis  has put up over the years are in various states: bleached by the sun, melted from the rain, torn at by the jealous and vengeful homeless he had problems with. They look back at us as reminders of our individual frailty revealing that in everyone there exists an area that is marginalized; an acre or two of personhood (or personal hood) that is razed or befouled, irrespective of privilege, effort, or nature. Though many of us are stuck in our ways and slaves to being, Scotty and his sculptures render the resiliency and buoyancy of the human spirit, the aptitude for change that, for those rare sorts like Scotty, comes like a flash in the dark[.]

The artist with his work.

 

[i] “Inside the Actor’s Studio: Mickey Rourke.” This interview is required watching. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjneQahhks0

[ii] The Miami Herald, “Dragon Man,” Lifestyles section. Laura Misch, date unknown.

 

**A special thanks to the gracious staff at Better Way of Miami for speaking with us and allowing us to see and photograph the facility and Scotty’s room.

 

This post was contributed by Rob Goyanes. Photographs by Ricky Vazquez.

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THE RISING TIDES OF MIAMI

Tuesday, March 12, 2013

PAMM being built at Museum Park.

Dead reckoning algorithm.

This article is divided into two parts. Here is part one. The second part will follow, soon. While both installments are concerned with Miami’s cultural currents, the first installment takes issue with the change in name that the former Miami Art Museum, MAM, has adopted on account of its physical makeover and relocation and apparent internal dynamic shift as PAMM or Pérez Art Museum Miami. The second installment will take us to the actual currents of the Miami river while taking advantage of a boat ride and an on-deck film screening to examine the practice of “Dead Reckoning,” recontextualized as a cognitive device for navigating the temporal currents of Miami and beyond [dead reckoning is the process of calculating one's current position by using a previously determined position, or fix in time by advancing that position based upon known or estimated speeds over elapsed time, and course. And of course ‘dead reckoning’ is always subjected to cumulative errors].

Catamaran with screen rigged on deck. Image courtesy Domingo Castillo.

Aguirre Wrath of God original German movie poster.

The stage is set in two places: the first is downtown Miami, by the bay of rising seas where an actual building is being built for a Miami art museum to relocate and the second is on-board a catamaran cruising down the Miami River while watching a Herzog film: Aguirre, The Wrath of God, on deck. My point, if it can be found, should be located somewhere in the interstices between the irrational satirical ranting of the first section and the musing contents of the second. Then by combining the two segments into a twisted and convoluted narrative, I hope to create the conditions for an analogy between two protagonist–the first being the films protagonist: a 16th century Spanish conquistador and colonizer, named Lope de Aguirre, the second, an American, Argentine born protagonist named Jorge M. Pérez, whose career in real-estate development represents, to me, through his sordid business practices, a modern day Latin American version of a Spanish conquistador.

Commissioned portrait of Jorge M Pérez.

PAMM AS AN INSTITUTIONAL PROSTITUTE presents AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD. On a cool Miami Saturday evening, MAM / PAMM sponsored a film screening on a boat, motoring down the Miami River. The film was, is by Werner Herzog. To gain passage on the round-trip boat ride, the organizers required all passengers to write a short work about the current show at MAM: NEW WORK MIAMI 2013. The following is a reproduction of the call for submission to climb aboard. Film screening:

“Aguirre, The Wrath of God” Public · By Miami Art Museum Saturday, February 2, 2013 Catamaran on Miami River. Special instructions given upon reservation confirmation. Travel down the Miami River to Biscayne Bay on a catamaran while watching Herzog’s,”Aguirre, The Wrath of God” (1972). The film tells the story of a 16th-century Spanish expedition in search of El Dorado, led by the ruthless Don Aguirre. *Seating is limited* so, how can you gain a coveted ticket and undisclosed information to join this very special screening? SPRING BREAK has asked that you see the exhibition “New Work Miami 2013″ on view at MAM and write a 500 word response. All responses must be the author’s original text. It may be a review, reflection, or creative response that makes reference to the exhibition.”

I never made it to see the exhibition. And if I can remember, I will tell you why later. Below is a longer, more articulate, gentler and possibly nicer version of my original submission to board the CAT.

Rendering of the new Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) as an Institutional Prostitute.

MAM (Miami art Museum) has become PAMM (Pérez Art Museum Miami). Turning MAM into PAMM has caused much grief amongst many locals who care about the direction this Miami art institution is taking. Originally MAM was founded in 1984 as “The Center for the Fine Arts,” then in 1996 it became Miami Art Museum and emerged, in hindsight perhaps wittily genderized, alongside another Miami Museum namely the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA). Both MAM and MOCA were established, respectfully, as competent Miami arts institutions and from their beginnings, till now, have aspired to share a common mission: To represent and foster the intellectual growth of the local arts community while attempting to further an international conversation.

Likely before any international conversations took place, the first Miami natives, the Tekesta, inhabited the area for more than one thousand years before the first non-native colonizing Spaniards arrived to dominate the conversations. Then, years later, after present day Miami emerged from the swamp, after many trials and tribulations, successes and failures, and amongst its notable noble or ignoble histories, Miami became unique for “holding the distinction of being the only major city in the United States conceived by a woman, Julia Tuttle.” Miami has continued to renew itself through its colorful re-beginnings and to separate itself, surprisingly, from much of its sordid past by growing up and of late even out growing a more recent tendency that appeared to be heavily invested in turning the Miami metropolitan area into both a retirement and party capital of the eastern sea board.

The “Magic City”, a nick name given to Miami for its intrepid fearlessness towards rapid growth, shares that common spirit with the psychic mood of those locals who are capable of getting over being type cast as inhabitants of an infamous playground for the nefarious. In addition, most people with ties to the area have learned to overcome that paranoid and over-romanticized allusion that Miami still suffers an Original Gangster stigmata as though blood were still flowing into its rivers and canals due to the fact that Miami was once the most violent narcotics distribution center for all of North America.

Jim Morrison’s Mugshot, Miami Dade county, FL 1970.

Miami [now], shows signs of becoming a burgeoning multi-cultural Cosmopolitan capital, and until recently MAM has played a role in raising that cultural prestige. However the memory of MAM’s role in progressing that progressive milieu, seems to be fading away—MAM as a once community run institution, run by and large with transparency has lately become guarded and opaque since real-estate interest have co- opted the institution…its transparency has given way to subterfuge and concealment, while the commercial usurper has adroitly invaded the institution with the determined presence of a self-serving and self-interested resolute parasite–since then, this living and breathing entity has created a dark cloud over the once altruistic, not for profit, mood that MAM and other public cultural institutions generally strive to uphold.

MAM, MOCA and the Miami art scene have managed to turn the corner over the last decade, from being a minor provincial outsider, on no ones international art map, to becoming more of a maturing player with a gaze towards an international conversation. Miami’s identity and influence has strengthened because of it. However, after too many nights of celebrating this new found sense of self worth MAM woke up one morning with an epic hangover, and desperately sought out a cure. MAM found them of course and was treated to the usual mashed up mix of elixirs and concoctions combining hair of the dog, blended fruits and veggies, raw eggs, spices, vitamins, etc–topped off with a long white feverish toot of desperate relief. Unfortunately though, “someone” slipped MAM a “Mickey,” lacing the hangover cure with the potent mix of god-speed and crony capital, resulting in, changing the convalescing MAM, over night into PAMM who hasn’t looked back or in the mirror ever since. Since that unfortunate turning point, MAM’s independent gaze has glazed over and the voice has become tired and raspy from singing too many vocal sets in too many smoke filled back rooms. As well, MAM’s peripheral vision has lost sight only to be re-focused through the dark pinned eyes of a real-estate developer whose bottom line is to sell Miami as a destination to those transient intransigents whose upward mobility contributes to that haunting spirit of unsustainable growth—Such is the mission of Jorge M Pérez, Chairman and CEO of “Related Group:” “Redefining Cities & Skylines,” marketing new definitions.

Jorge M Pérez, “Related Group”, Condo buildings, Miami, FL via www.related.com.

“Redefining Cities,” is quite the slogan to brandish about a large town especially when one considers, just maybe, only, a very small fraction of the more than 5.5 million inhabitants of the greater Miami metropolitan area look towards a Pimping Pérez to redefine the city for them in the first place. In deference to an existing community spirit, it appears that we’re stuck with this man, this specter of wealth, his colossal cojones, his overinflated ego and overabundant bravado, who has no doubt survived the collapse of a few self-realized real-estate bubbles of his own design. We are stuck with his minions too, these “Related Groupies”, who too think that “Redefining Cities,” our city, is the necessary thing to do as well—All the while, they too, must think, we too, need redefining by their chivalrous codes of commercialized gallantry, inspired by that deluding allusion to a God of free-market, whose pure form guides the dream for a pure form of laissez-faire capital. And like any free market puritans, the “Related Group” went full throttle towards MAM, delivering that financial Mickey, dangled from a carrot and stick in one hand, while waving the flag of PAMM stapled to a pike in the other….The mission, to hatch a coup d’état by breaching that unguarded public facade of MAM. Well of course, the bloodless coup succeeded, even before it started with the aid of MAM’s inner circle, its director Thom Collins, and the other usual band of suspects–a board of cultural felons whose silence before and after the coup showed little or no sign of board tribulation (turns out maybe the nefarious underworld types never left Miami after all).

Thomas Collins, Director of MAM / PAMM.

So here we are, presently watching the memory of MAM suffer the fate of erasure, while giving rise to PAMM—with no past and future undetermined, PAMM has a new address, a new house, and a newly constructed palace designed by Herzog & de Meuron, this is where Madame de PAMM will hold court for Pérez’s by the bay of rising seas. In doing so, MAM’s transgressed body and soul has been reduced to that of an old school philosophical anachronism, representing that classic relationship between subject and object (between Pérez and MAM) turned into a fading subjective memory of abject thingness—as though Pérez himself had invited Medusa to stop by and have a fateful chat with MAM—MAM’s old address is now nothing more than brick and mortar awaiting a new tenant. There is no doubt that MAM gave in to Pérez and his “Related Gangster Group” coup d’état because of the anxiety created by financial pressure, for as most people know, MAM could not afford to move to new digs on her own. So instead of just staying at the current address, a solid fortress high on a safe hill, higher above the currents of rising seas, MAM decided to give up a safer raised address and let its vessel holdings empty onto a move to Bicentennial Park (renamed Museum Park) by the bay of rising seas— closer to sea level, closer to radical exposure and sublime affects attributable to anthropogenic global warming (AGW).

MAM NOT PAMM logo posted to the topical facebook name change protest page by Mixolidia Gautreaux.

MAM & PAMM unrelated image via www.ikonfx.com

MAM just buckled at the knees when advised to give in to the chivalrous bribes and promises made by the charming courtier developer for no better reason than the man needed the prestige of museum to front to his condo deals whose success, he thinks, depends on the villainous demand that he be given renaming rights to seal the deal– Hence forth, MAM became PAMM after a pimp tricked MAM into becoming a tricked out prostitute named PAMM. Yes its practically medieval the way all the serfs went along with the plan, allowing MAM’s voice to opine her depressing digression into transgression by echos from the hear after, claiming that the cross-addressing and renaming improves its habitus–again, MAM became PAMM after a pimp tricked MAM into becoming a tricked out prostitute named PAMM.

Joan Miro, Le Courtesan Grotesque, 1974.

Picasso, Courtesan with Necklace of Gems, 1901.

However, PAMM is not your average prostitute, mind you, for PAMM belongs to that elite upper-class of tropical concubine perhaps better thought of as a modern day courtesan. PAMM has also been made over with all the lip gloss and painted affectations of southern comfort and cronyism soon to be housed in that emerging palatial palace designed by Herzog and de Meuron…as well PAMM is now complimented by a regional court created by mixing the dysfunctional nature of south Florida politics with the vacuous nature of southern business ethics… all for the sake of Pérez and his “Related Group,” to mime an aestheticized jargon as though it were all just part of the crusading good old boy network, networking a good old boy experiment in relational real-estate aesthetics. Anyway, PAMM is dressed up with nowhere to go. Then someone called out Jorge M Pérez for being the Donald Trump of the tropics– easy enough to envision, especially if you can imagine the two as part of the same American anti-environmental crime family–meaning that Pérez, that self styled emperor of palm and coconut landscapes could easily trade places with Donald Trump–that tasteless builder of towering kitsch camps everywhere. Pérez and Trump are essentially interchangeable–they both build phallocentric towering icons to themselves, that have nothing to do with philanthropy or add to the betterment of any existing community, as well they still work that antiquated modernist myth that natural resources will last forever—But yet like any great modernist real-estate tycoon worth his salt, they hedge their bets by selling that positivist insuring stance that science will always come to the rescue, saving the day, always keeping the empires elevators forever running higher, ever closer to the clouds.

Donald Trump and Jorge M Pérez: furrowed brow and goatee to the right standing next to a bad comb over on the left. This is the misanthropic portrait of the physiognomy of capital. In conclusion.

I obviously, wax the metaphorical potential of prostitution as a subject informing a means to an end. However, I would also like to unequivocally make clear that I do not have a problem with prostitution as long as it is based on a consensual relationship between adults… However, I think it is necessary to assert that the relationship between Jorge M Pérez and MAM / PAMM is not necessarily based on a consensual relationship. I saw this because, in my opinion, the relationship between Pérez and MAM was initially founded on a form of financial concubinage…as just another form of coercion that essentially leads to the same thing: selling the self, or selling the body out of desperation—as sure as Heroin is forced upon a body as a form of coercion…Capital can be too. the strategy is similar, whether it be opiates or capital…its all about letting the addictive power of both real substances or abstract substance (opiates or capital) form a profitable relationship based off a unilateral dependency between the body, the consumer, the prostitute, the institution, [and] the dealer, the pimp, the loan shark, the investor, the banker, the capitalist or what have you.

And finally, I temporarily end this diatribe with the following wrap up before we move on to the next installment: MAM has obviously created a conflict of interest by selling its name, its credibility and its prestige to the greater greed of a developing agent whose self-interest obviously lies with exploiting the future of PAMM by exploiting the existing prestige of MAM…In case you haven’t caught my drift, its all creating a front for marketing condos. It begins by blurring the lines between marketing and exhibiting art and marketing real-estate– And the trick blurs best by branding and artist name dropping and exploiting the addictive power of conspicuous consumption. These procedures have become popular marketing tactics among developers as the real estate boom picks up steam here in South Florida. All this and more gives rise to that other obvious more destructive fetishistic practice: conspicuous construction. As such, the state of Miami’s current and future cultural production can easily be seen as a fragile future especially when its authenticity can be so easily effected by the misguided relational practices and interventions instigated by commercial interest[.]

This post was contributed by Richard Haden.

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Founding Fictions: George Sánchez-Calderón’s “Pax Americana”

Saturday, January 19, 2013

George Sánchez-Calderón, “Pax Americana,” 2012. Courtesy of the artist.

T his grand experiment of a country is always churning out results, one way or another. On November 6, 2012 Mrs. Palermo’s 5th grade classroom at Shadowlawn Elementary – an elementary school in Little Haiti – was filled with adults sitting cramped at tiny tables and talking excitedly as they bubbled-in ballots. A small American flag was hanging forlornly in the corner over a whiteboard upon which a science definition for young minds was jotted with a hasty impatience: “Energy is the ability to cause change or do work.”

A few weeks before the election, George Sánchez-Calderón unveiled his work for the Unscripted series, a public arts project by the seaside Bal Harbour community. Curated by Claire Breukel, an independent curator from South Africa and former executive director of Locust Projects here in Miami, Unscripted is meant to provide South Floridian artists with a platform for engaging the public and draw attention to Bal Harbour as a “creative destination.” George Sánchez-Calderón was the first recipient of the commission and for it he created two works. The works are collectively titled “Pax Americana” and were placed adjacent to the Bal Harbour Shops, a luxury mall containing some of the most expensively priced retail stores in the country.  Together, the two large artworks stand at the busy intersection of Collins and 97th street, as well as at the figurative junction of history – both local and national – memory, and genre.

The Levey Family in front of their original Levittown house in Cape Cod, 1948. Courtesy of Peter Bacon Hales of the Art History Department at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

George Sánchez-Calderón, “Pax Americana,” 2012. Courtesy of the artist.

One of the works is a re-creation of a Levittown-style house, the original suburban home in the United States. Introduced by the Levitt & Sons Company after World War II, it was the model used for a housing program through the Veterans Administration. The program sold cheap, standardized homes to returning veterans at deep discounts. The home, with its white-picket fence, lawn, and colonial aesthetic – as well as the model of the suburban neighborhood – eventually came to dominate the American topography as families fled the city in search of greater privacy, larger property, and idyllic community.

Calderón’s reproduction of the Levittown house is meant to touch upon the beginnings of Bal Harbour, which shared similarities with the suburban developments that came after the war. The community was fully planned before it was built (Coral Gables was the only other neighborhood in Miami that had a master plan), and it served as a site for the post-war housing boom. The area was utilized during WWII as a barracks before development had begun; where the luxury Bal Harbour Shops currently stand, there was a German POW camp.

The differences are stark though between “Florida’s Paradise” and the other post-war communities – Bal Harbour was created with the wealthy and elite specifically in mind, whereas the areas with Levittown-style houses were for the middle classes. The contrast of Calderon’s reproduction with the surrounding high-rises is striking, more so because the scaled-down reproduction is uncannily smaller than a full-sized house. The outside of the structure is painted-on, so you can only see the surface and not within.

George Sánchez-Calderón, “Pax Americana,” 2012. Courtesy of the artist.

The other work is a stainless steel sign that reads “AMERICANA.” The sign was installed in front of the current St. Regis Bal Harbour Resort and references the site’s previous tenant; the notorious Americana Hotel that hosted some of Miami’s biggest, booziest parties stocked with thousands of hookers and, in its heyday, many a US president too.

The sign evokes the memory of the historic hotel built by the iconic architect Morris Lapidus in 1956, who also designed the Fountainbleu and Eden Roc hotels just south of Bal Harbour. Lapidus was integral to defining a Miami Modern aesthetic and was both applauded and harangued for his then-risky architectural flourishes. His buildings were critically mocked for their curvy facades, seemingly useless application of holes (the famed “cheese-holes”), and their gaudy, bright color schemes.

A postcard showing the Americana Hotel.

The Americana Hotel had all these hallmarks of Lapidus’ design plus a gigantic glass terrarium with rare plants and alligators in the lobby. He came to be revered after Miami Beach experienced a commercial boom in the ’50s and ’60s and the public took strongly to his work. Lapidus has since been praised as a proto-postmodernist, an architect who was gettin’ weird before everyone else was. Look around Miami and you’ll see his work or influence, especially on the beach and the Biscayne corridor.

The “Americana” sign is a sleek, modern ode to the hotel. Its nostalgic for the time when Miami Beach was just becoming instead of being; when the city was a splendored vista filled with opportunity rather than just filled, and when a man like Morris could make millions from the sheer gusto of his flamboyant ingenuity. But it doesn’t only reference the hotel, its builder and location. Both the sign and the Levittown house speak to larger questions of American identity.

“Americana” is not only the famed hotel – it’s also a term that encompasses all of the symbols, artifacts, and narratives that harken the American Experience. It is Lady Liberty. It is a Norman Rockwell painting. It is jazz music and baseball and apple pie; it is the overuse of clichéd sayings and imagery. This Land is Your Land, Elvis, jeans and Coca Cola. It’s the summation of civilizing activity and myth production that goes on to form and inform the American identity – for better and for worse, and for outcomes that can sometimes be ambiguous.

Though usually used to describe the Americana music genre – folk and alt country and bluegrass amongst others – the genre covers the gamut of cultural work that seeks to define, or makes a claim to represent, the American way of life. So when Calderón makes a huge sign that says AMERICANA and sticks it somewhere, it’s going to spark a million ideas and feelings in anyone who has ever given any thought to this country and their place in it.[i]

Politicians, interest groups, and individuals routinely claim that their views represent what is truly “American” but, when you look at the content of their stances, you find a wide spectrum of opposing positions. “Americana” and what it really means to be American is impossible to define by the contingent nature of our democracy. Because the USA is not (supposed to be) centered on a single race, ethnicity or linguistic group, all we really got is time and space, the diverse canon of stories we tell to make sense of the landscape, and the tiring struggle between narratives. So, things can get a little confusing and tangled up since, as the arts writer Hrag Vartanian recently commented, “the only things that unite Americans are a few ideas.[ii]” A few ideas and a whole lot of kitsch.

Calderón’s “Americana” sign is left wide open to interpretation – letter to shining letter – and not only because of the reservoir of meaning that the word holds. As Calderón said, “Meaning and interpretation of my work has never been didactic. I am comfortable with various readings and embrace them all. Working in the public realm, displaying objects where anyone can see them, read them, interpret them and deny them is at the core of public work.” Things, of course, change with time too. The sign has an aura that the original hotel sign never had because, in 2012, to be American means something different than in 1956. The looming sign invokes both a hope and burden. It is intensely reflective and burns the eyes at the right time of day.

Courtesy of the artist and thereisnothere.org.

The son of Cuban exiles and a Miami resident for most of his life, George Sánchez-Calderón is a multistoried man. Towering with a booming voice, his physical stature pairs well with his artistic endeavoring: the creation and repurposing of large scale artworks that either employ or relate to architecture. Among his works, many of which are site-specific, Calderón built a reproduction of Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye underneath the I-395, just near Overtown in 2001. The piece was titled “La Bendicion,” and stood alit with the incandescence of a UFO from sundown to sunrise for two years.

Courtesy of the artist.

The original Villa Savoye, finished in 1931, was and by many is still considered to be the “quintessential modern home.” Its creator, the renowned Franco-Swiss architect in espousing a philosophy that architecture should relieve the tension of crowded urban living and improve life for the masses and conforming to an aesthetic creed that every conceivable detail permitted must serve a function, conceived the Savoye house to utilize almost everything from elevation – to provide greater continuity with outside spaces – and large windows – for light and ventilation – to a roof acting as a garden or terrace.

The original Villa Savoye. Courtesy of the artist.

Le Corbusier railed against the trends of art deco and other movements that praised style in excess – the types of movements that Morris Lapidus was working with a few decades later – and is now regarded as the bringer of architecture into the modern machine age, where high-rises and parking garages dominate. Many criticisms have been doled out to Le Corbusier and his strand of utopianism, particularly because it failed to consider just whose functions were being served. Calderón’s juxtaposition of “La Bendicion” with the highway that cuts through Overtown was a potent, critical indictment of a city bent on a very specific idea of progress.

Once called the “Harlem of the South,” Overtown was the area where Henry Flagler’s black railroad workers settled in the early 1900s and was a place of bustling commercialism and cultural activity following World War II. Hundreds of businesses owned by blacks were opened and countless black (and non-black) cultural figures performed and worked there. Overtown, formerly “Colored Town,” was the place where Nat King Cole, Billy Holiday, and Ella Fitzgerald stayed when they weren’t allowed to lodge at the hotels they were performing at – namely, the aforementioned Fountainbleu and Eden Roc.

In the 50s and 60s, Overtown experienced a series of paralyzing setbacks and intrusions. Efforts at “urban renewal,” the tumult of desegregation marked by a greater police presence, and the building of the I-95 and I-395 interchange caused a social and economic divide the damage of which persists. The highway systems displaced 80% of Overtown’s residents, interrupted businesses to the point of shutting down, and fragmented the psyche of a once thriving community.[iii] This is not to say that Overtown didn’t have problems before these events unfolded, but it is clear that the building of the highway – in the name of greater access to Miami Beach – led directly to Overtown’s turning into a ghetto; a place now haunted by high poverty, drug addiction, and gun violence. Of course, it is not only a wasteland of crime and destitution: it has positive community leaders and members making efforts at revitalization. Still, it remains one of the poorest areas in the country and a place where adults and children are killed in the street.

If Overtown is a diamond gone rough, Bal Harbour is the city upon a hill – a living quarter and playground for the wealthy. It’s the sort of exclusive, condo-ridden tropical paradise that only late capitalism could produce with its transnational flow of finance and snowbirds. Bal Harbour is one of the most affluent zip codes in all the United States, and it prides itself officially as being a “pristine community.” It had zero murders in 2012, one sex offense, and a mere fifty boating citations.[iv] It has the highest concentration of palm trees in the world.

The sterility and exclusivity of Bal Harbour doesn’t preclude it from good public work. Though Calderón’s pieces feels a bit out of place, “Pax Americana” develops strong questions about history – Bal Harbour’s but also the time of the US after WWII – and space too. Through his past work in Overtown we’re able to see diametrically facing worlds that exist in the same city, and how those two places are developed and constituted in relation to each other.

On a larger scale, the works illustrate the function of myth in the US. The Levittown house – and the home more broadly – is a sanctuary for citizens, a place we’re allotted our ultimate privacy; it’s where we raise our children, house our grief, and whisper our secrets and needs. The White House is a house. The story of the home is linked up to core ideas of being American.

The Americana sign is a simpler explication, but also comes more fully loaded. It shows the range of things that can be used to define an identity and an experience. The sign displays the contingent nature of our democracy – how the liberty that enabled my voting for President at Shadowlawn Elementary can also enable Adam Lanza’s killing spree at Sandy Hook.

“Pax Americana,” meaning American peace, references the period of relative calm that the world entered after WWII and when the US became the preeminent global power. There’s obviously much to be argued, but Calderón’s use of it doesn’t lead to obvious conclusions – it can be accepting or incredulous, praising or critical.

In March of 2013, George Sánchez-Calderón will ritualistically burn the Levittown house that he made. A burning house is a gesture too that gets many Americans right in the gut[.]

[i] I’d suggest too that those people who just glance at the sign and turn away without considering it are also performing an American-style analysis: the sort of passive not-giving-much-of-a-shit that is no less valid but is considerably less mineable when writing a grandiose article on American art, politics, and society.

[ii] Hyperallergic. “Piecing America Together,” Hrag Vartanian, 2012. http://hyperallergic.com/59971/sarah-rahbar-flags/

[iii] I strongly encourage you readers to check out Charles “Stretch” Ledford’s project “Overtown: Inside/Out,” a collection of videos by residents who recorded their stories at interactive kiosks placed throughout Overtown, which also contains much information on the history of the place. http://overtowner.com/overtown/

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Basel Salts

Saturday, December 29, 2012

Blue posturing.

A prelude to ART Basel Miami 2012:

I ’ve just run about seven and a half miles, to a bar named “Times Square Inn” were I often take a break before heading back home. But today I’ve been rerouted to another place in the Opa Locka Triangle where I’m sitting in a small crowded room, with Ray Ray on my lap and Love to my left. It’s an unplugged social network and a nefarious world to the uninitiated. It’s not my scene and apparently not my lap, yet I am suspiciously tolerated here because I run through this neighborhood often and have gotten to know Ray Ray, and Love.

Times Square Inn in the Opa Locka Triangle.

The Opa Locka Triangle is approximately an eleven block area that was created by erecting barricades inside the greater city of Opa Locka back in the 80’s by law enforcement attempting to curtail an epidemic drug scene responsible for numerous murders, assaults, and other related crimes. However it’s not the 80’s anymore yet the drugs and the subsequent war on addiction is still desperately going on behind outdated barricades. Police still answer aggressively to the call of crime, but are also now required to give out citations for saggy, baggy pants as a fashion crime–really.

Times Square Bar interior.

I once thought to simply hang here for the sake of documentary, but along the way it’s become more than that–it’s become breaking down and stealing barricades, barriers, walls, what have you. It’s also become making friends outside my usual comfort zone, rather than maintaining that presumptuous critical distance practiced by traditional documentarians.

 

Map of Opa Locka Triangle courtesy Google Maps.

 

Part of the old Barricade in the Opa Locka Triangle.

Ray Ray is an androgynous looking woman in her early 20’s who usually sports dark baggy athletic shorts, basketball shoes, a Tee or jersey and stocking cap to hide her femininity while Love always flaunts her feminine form by wearing tight strapless dresses, tops, short shorts, etc., she is also always adorned with a long black lustrous wig.

Ray Ray sitting in a truck.

Love.

We are all sitting where little sun filters through semi-opaque encrusted windows–while in the evening the darkness summons a solicitous retreat each time the door opens. This room is furnished with a bed, a couch, a hot plate, a small refrigerator and an old 36 inch TV that’s lost its color standing before a desperate weathered bathroom. This place is normally a cheap one room efficiency for its occupant. But tonight it’s become a sacred space for ritual; it’s become a pop up semi-non profit, crack and heroin dispensary, benefitting the old tenant who barters his home for product.

 

Bathroom with small brown bag to dim the light.

An old skin popper, aka Doc lives here, given the name for his knowledge of pharmaceuticals. Shirtless, Doc, sports a couple of close range shotgun wounds on his shoulder and stomach, healed over from the 60’s, resembling small lunar craters. He is the most gracious host…

The mood in the room is crowded much like a subway station at rush hour with people bracing uncomfortably close to the ledge–even though we are all close, inches apart and bumping shoulders in turn, most visitors volunteer to maintain expectant margins of personal space. This is the stiffening feel of the scene until the door opens to let in the Man. A tall man looking remarkably like Snoop Dog in his 70’s. The mood quickly changes in the room as the aged crack don brightens everyone’s face with anticipation. Once in, the chatter waxes and private space wanes.

I manage to avoid breathing second hand smoke, but can’t avoid the noxious odor of burning crack cocaine–it’s an overwhelming sulfuric stench combined with burning chemicals and plastic, topped by the flavor of sweet citrus, which adds to the existing aromas that already permeate the atmosphere in this small dank room. It’s acrid to my senses, but no doubt an acquired taste to the olfactory receptors of crack connoisseurs.

Bathroom curtain.

For some off reason, my thoughts wonder from this scene to another–to other space inhabited by a different consuming crowd. To larger halls in enormous salon vitrine, where square ridged Ringling like tents stand side by side strong yet give way to brick and mortar palaces, which in turn bow in reverence before Basel art. It seems so distant in the moment from here yet close enough to be reminded by the familiar glow of electric luminescence bathing eclectic desire. Crack is sold here today and tonight where over there, at the other place, rock hard or soft retinal eye candy teases gazing desire, selling reified coolness, conceptualized Post-Fordism, often dubious kitsch and camp or what ever else passes for sincere or ironic artful willingness, this season.

As the outsider, let in to this modern speakeasy–the only white guy amongst a convivence of Black living Americana. Here tonight it’s a Black thing, in this part of the Triangle, run by an old Black man who could easily pass as an event planner / relational artist, doling out the conviviality fit for clean “works” and a three dollar “stem”. Like an ‘old school’ OG situationist, this doling situational event leaves no record or trace other than the anecdotal memory. It’s an institution of sorts that spins and spawns the quotidian conversations.

The situational event is an illusive nomadic gathering playing hide and seek in a small community within an 11 block area–it’s bearing dysfunction is by and large granted a pass by the empathy of the larger community. Ray Ray showed me this room and this room shows me it’s history inscribed on the walls.

Bathroom wall.

Like other rooms down the road this room is similar to situations I’ve been caught up in before in my own past haunting. My past…Ray Ray and Love’s past and present…This is where Ray Ray and Love let their hunger live outside their skin accompanied by the fear of not being fed. It’s in their eyes; it’s in their gestures. This is where others gather as well to hunt satisfaction for haunting desire–searching for lost ambrosia.

Ray Ray constantly speaks about escaping this place–speaks about an all purpose fear–which is the fear of not getting straight or the fear of living straight or clean (being “straight” is just another way of saying you don’t need a fix, yet).

Eventually the smoke clears and old school soliloquy quiets the return to the phantomization of the self. Until the next cloud builds, the fog catalyzes yet another round of tit for tat chatter waxing echoes off these hallow walls.

I ran here first before making my way to that annual event known internationally as ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH. From here I got roughly a 10 mile run before hitting Midtown Miami. I am on my way to visit one of the more modest art fair satellites, but when Blue calls I run home instead to get the truck then drive to meet her at a corner on NW 20th, to say ‘hello.’

Blue watering Max and Sparx.

I regroup in “Overtown”–a mostly Black American community below Midtown and Wynwood, Miami. Overtown is similar to the Triangle, but geographically larger–Blue is a friend who lives in Overtown, and she is like others I know lately who unflinchingly walk the walk and talk the talk.

‘Hello’–she jumps in the truck…then I ask to take her to a small art venue titled “SEVEN”, to see what she thinks about the Basel invasion. Despite her timidity and crack induced insecurity, I get her in the door, at NW 2nd Ave 22nd Street (known by some as the northern part of Overtown–renamed Wynwood in the spirit of gentrification).

As Blue and I tour the compact satellite art fair “SEVEN” [seven art galleries from New York] I take pictures of her standing, sitting and leaning with art work. Curious eyes are staring at me and Blue as she does her best to hold herself back, mockingly close to caressing or kissing this or that sculpture or painted form.

Blue Posing.

Licking Blue.

Eventually, Blue notices a freestanding bricolage with blue ribbon cordoning off a square around a sculptural assemblage made up of a wooden stand, and small birdcage with cat taxidermy inside anointed by a stuffed parrot. All of a sudden Blue is under the ribbon, determined to act up in the demilitarized zone, safely posing with arms pretending to caress the sculpture–when FUCK!, I see a couple of angry gallerists hurrying our way, who then over react and begin yelling as I try to calm the non-negotiable situation. Finally, I overreact as well and resort to a stern ‘shut the fuck up’ which disarms the gallerists.

 

Blue’s transgression.

Not wanting to waste time waxing insensitivity with New York gallerists, Blue and I leave. Blue seems elated to have pissed anyone off at this point. As well I feel I succeeded in having maneuvered Blue out of her usual comfort zone–the street. Later I return to “SEVEN” alone to explain to all concerned, the pleasure I had visiting their temporary insensitive existence in Miami.

Tamas Banovich, owner of (and security for) Postmasters gallery.

By and large, at this point I am feeling sequestered so I run a few miles around to the outside, circling to witness the affects on the mood of the local neighborhood–as if to see polychromed street murals and artistically painted walls rising up to create a new southern aurora borealis–trumpeted by an illuminating mood indifferent to that flash of lightning fast Bic lighter already sparking the mood of the hood’s smoking shadows of cigarettes and three dollar stems.

Plotted by subsumption of Miami’s profane tranquility–cultural tourist wonder about the hood without really being present in the hood. The native narrative is visibly underwritten by real-estate bestowing onto itself pillaging rights of those things pretending to be the left overs of past relational history. Hence forth carrying on an imagined dialectical relationship between Global mobility and an enlightened court of celestial nobility–the result signaling the illusion that new embodied immortal forms have arrived [here] to think somewhere else–res cogitans versus res extensas!

I am done and have abandoned the truck and decide to run back to the Triangle, where I began this story–it’s about a 12 mile run, just short of a half marathon, by way of Overtown and Liberty city where I pause for conversations. The Triangle lacks chatter about conventions, but is none the less inhabited by similar wondering bodies so familiar and uncanny to those wondering bodies from whence this traveler came.

“What dreams may come, When we have shuffled off this mortal coil.”

Such was my cure for Basel Salts this year[.]

This post was contribute by Richard Haden.

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Thoughts on FOMO and Q-Rage

Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Credit NyTimes.

Art Basel Miami Beach is over. Before we Miami residents inevitably begin preparing for the next one – in some cases almost immediately – we thought it might be useful to reflect. Aside from the declining quality and increasing quantity of samey fairs, artwork, and a general increase in human traffic, malcontent, and a longing among locals to leave Miami in December despite of the usually great weather, there seems to be a mounting realization among the international arts community that Miami is generally savage and uncouth. Lets discuss!

After reading the article I Almost Died on Miami Beach, I, as a resident of Miami and a proponent of its arts community, felt palpable shame. Also, as someone whose time is torn between projects, work, writing, parenthood etc etc I felt, as I always do, a deep sense of guilt (and shame too) for not seeing as much as I perhaps could have during fair week. This guilt feeds the fear discussed in the article above and while I thankfully had no opportunity to experience Q-Rage this year, it is a phenomenon I am well aware of.

So I’d like to open the floor to comments to discuss in a forum style conversation what we experienced collectively, how we feel about this year’s fair and what, if anything can be done to save the reputation of Miami so that the fair(s) and/or those who visit them will want to continue to come; if this is even a priority. In any case I think its important to be seen to be responding to press that is not just bad, but which might also be very telling and true[.]

Have at!

This post was contributed by Thomas Hollingworth.

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ART in Miami

Wednesday, December 5, 2012

ART preview.

The yearly Art Basel Miami Beach VIP vernissage party is over (it was OK) and tomorrow the fair opens to the public for a subsequent four days of sensory overload; an obscenely condensed amalgam of modern and contemporary art exposed and peddled in a complex, but ultimately commercial matrix by which our cultural legacy is being selectively bred. Every year about this time I think about writing about the fair, but decide instead to trawl through the hundreds of emails – some releases, some submissions – in the hope of finding a suitably distracting alternative. Usually my search is in vain, but this year, huddled between something on the West Collection and yet another email from Susan Grant Lewin was a submission from an unknown writer, about a piece showing this week by two equally unknown artists. On the main land, not so far from the maddening crowd at a little place called Merc’s Studio (299 NW 36 Street, 33127), you will – if my source is reliable – find a large shipping crate. A collaborative, ostensibly predictable mock exhibition space with a difference… the art won’t be ready for nine months, if at all. Catch it Friday 6pm-12 am, Saturday and Sunday afternoon and evening.

___________________________________________________________

On ART (Assisted Reproductive Technology)

“There remains something uncommentable to save him.  But don’t think that you can join him by saving him.  This uncommentable has nothing mystical about it: it is simply the incommensurable brought back into commentary. Commentary will perforce be incongruent with the work.”
-Lyotard on Duchamp

ART is so repulsive that any enumeration of its transgressions threatens to proliferate the very same disgust that the piece initially engenders. I presume that most people writing about ART will do exactly that, so I will not. I would like simply to touch on a few problems raised by ART,  problems that have helped form my own incongruent understanding of the work.

There is a certain genealogy in the history of modern art that can be identified by its tendency to make art by pushing art out of its proper territory and into other fields and practices. For example, Warhol pushes art into capital, and art as such is thereby redefined based on its relation to the market. In other words; art as a reflexive, epistemological deterritorialization. The question, “what is art?” is answered when the discourse of art absorbs, or is absorbed by, a field exterior to it. The most well known progenitor of this practice is, of course, Duchamp – though there are numerous other examples, from before and after Duchamp.

Read in this way, ART reterritorializes the field of art by merging it with the sphere of biopolitics. This is also the precise reason for the shock that it creates: “what business does art have in the sacred realm of human reproduction? That is, after all, a personal, familial, or medical issue that art has no right to invade.” Agreed: ART is unsettling because it displaces the stability of our humanisms. Though it is worth pointing out that artificial insemination is widely practiced today, and that there really is nothing radical or transgressive about it in itself. ART’s radicality emerges from its (art’s) direct and public engagement with the biopolitical.

I cannot  presume to know what effect this  - to my knowledge, unprecedented  - proximity will have on art, science, the media, or on life. I have many reservations. For me, the task of art is primarily ontological and phenomenological, and secondarily epistemological. Art departs from problems of being, sensation, and perception, to arrive, potentially, at some knowledge about the world  - not the other way around. Clearly, ART raises questions about creation, life, our relationship to technology, etc. -but I find that part of the work difficult to see, as it cedes the foreground to the blinding spectacle of inflammatory political issues.

ART could exist simply as a thought-experiment. My initial reaction to the project was: “Okay. That’s a crazy idea.  Isn’t that enough?”. Its actualization is both exciting and frightening, like something of a contemporary biopolitical sublime, with its incommensurables and unpresentables rising up and foiling all attempts at commentary[.]

-Heath Valentine

This post was contributed by Thomas Hollingworth.

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