Stability and equality struggle to find ground when unparalleled, and unsettled, classes manifest disparate living conditions. How should we respond when the powerless are pushed outwards? After the Plaster Foundation, or, “Where Can We Live?” organized by curators Larissa Harris, Sophia Marisa Lucas, and Lindsey Berfond, is taking place at the Queens Museum until January 2021. It provides critical insight through video, sculpture, site-specific works, drawings, installation, and photography for questioning the hazardous social situations inherent to gentrification and all of its complicating affects. The group exhibition, including twelve New York City artists and collectives, deconstructs issues regarding our rights to continue occupying spaces and places we call home when the invisible hand of the market forces changes upon the physicality and relationality of these sites. Addressing the complexities of property ownership, land use, habitability, and the environment are inspiring standalone artworks as well as works from the Museum of Capitalism’s collection located in the substrate of the museum.
The artworks are fixed in space at perpendicular axes across the ground floor, seemingly meeting one another each at an angle or corner. From the places where each installation sits, we feel as though we are looking outward from within, and we are imparted with a structural perspective overall that lends the mind to think of the city as a whole. Disorderly neighborhood zones turned upside down by gentrification sum up the era of the 70s. This is the tone of the exhibition which portrays abducted land, exclusionary policies, and entire constellations of livelihood shifted to new realities, all connected to “a long postwar history of land use in New York and the way the politics of space relate to the art world.”[i] Artworks guide us through relationships between people, locality, intrusion, and reclamation.
The Plaster Foundation was the home of underground performance artist Jack Smith from which he was evicted in 1972. His eviction preceded a shifting New York City landscape that saw communities under construction due to the changing market. Eclogue for [in]Habitability (2017-2019) by Sondra Perry is an installation that embodies this. It feels as though it is the work that has entered and invaded the space, when actually the audience would naturally take this place. The installation is alive, a spider-like sculpture resembling a backhoe used for breaking ground and digging up dirt. Its mechanical, utilitarian, and procedural movements and its attachment to a video recording device assert its appetite for surveillance and displacement without discernment for the world it haphazardly maneuvers.
Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Drawing for Poliscar (1991) offers a two-dimensional perspective like a blueprint on the accompanied sculptural work, Poliscar Variant 2 (1991/2017). They are shown together among an assemblage of avant-garde apparatuses as well as a large, stretched tapestry with an image of a void terrain printed on it. The former is a triangular vehicular sculpture which projects loud shouts of policemen out to the viewers with large speakers. It could, purposefully, act as a secured makeshift home for those who need it, calling attention to the contradiction of homeless existence as both nonexistent yet always visible. It was originally installed in Tompkins Square Park as a public work and feels as tactical in the Queens Museum as it was in 1991. Transient citizenship, freedom, and the reoccurring invisibility of the forgotten and dispossessed are exposed with this work.
While walking through the many rooms in the exhibition, we notice that the curators have put the audience within the world of transformation, known as gentrification, that reframed the city. The exhibition is informative, yet also holds a resistant and provoking tone. We leave with objective overviews of the landscape as well as impressions regarding the voiceless and marginalized and perspectives from New York artists and the neighborhoods they have resided. We leave continuing to contemplate the still important issues around where we live today.
[i] Petrossiants, Andreas. “Andreas Petrossiants on ‘After the Plaster Foundation, or, 'Where Can We Live?'" at the Queens Museum.” Andreas Petrossiants on "After the Plaster Foundation, or, 'Where can we live?'" at the Queens Museum - Artforum International, November 25, 2020. https://www.artforum.com/slant/andreas-petrossiants-on-after-the-plaster-foundation-or-where-can-we-live-at-the-queens-museum-84526.