Behind the Eight Ball

Allyson Spellacy takes a look across the river...

This is New York City. We go to multiple exhibition openings on one night here, sometimes there are a hundred openings in one week. It's generally easier on your constitution if you stick to one neighborhood - Soho, Chelsea, the Lower East Side - but it's possible to hit several openings in relative proximity, too: the Upper East Side, 57th Street, 5th Avenue. Sometimes excursions of sorts are planned - Dia: Beacon, Queens Museum, Jersey City, the Bronx. If you've got your own transportation you can see DUMBO (a gallery district rampant with artists' studios and exhibition spaces like Smack Mellon, Gale Gates...), Five Myles and Rotunda Gallery, all in Brooklyn, all in one night. And then there's always Long Island City, where the art is spread out enough to warrant a government-funded shuttle bus on occasion. Good weekend day trip that one, but there's nothing like Chelsea or Williamsburg for serious opening-hopping, where we wander from one gallery to the next, from floor to floor, with beer bottle or wine glass in hand. We see shows we want to see, shows we need to see, shows we need to be seen seeing, scene shows, fucked-up shows, expensive shows downtown, cheap shows uptown, good shows upstairs, bad shows downstairs. Sometimes we see the art, too, but during openings it's more often the people who participate in this scene-making - fellow artists in particular, rowdily outnumbering the dealers, collectors, directors, freelance curators, critics, art installers, hangers on, teachers, students, mentors, mentlers, and groupies - that keep it all so invigorating.

This is Williamsburg, Brooklyn. We go to multiple openings in one night here, sometimes ten openings in a week. There are several differences between the Manhattan art world and the Williamsburg art world, located just across the East River from each other. The commercial distinction between the two seems to settle on Manhattan's long history with (and therefore current hold over) the art market; this is where business gets done. Williamsburg, on the other hand, has emerged more than any other neighborhood as the place where the art that has most recently been produced (in every corner of New York's five boroughs) is being exhibited. In a nutshell, in Williamsburg art is made and shown; in Manhattan art is shown and sold. Chelsea holds the table in terms of the secondary market, whereas Williamsburg struggles in the primary. The secondary market is up, the primary market is down. Although Williamsburg has begun to see a few curious collectors arriving in chauffeured cars, museums' young collectors in taxis, and even out-of-towners on buses, the hub around the Bedford Avenue subway stop in Williamsburg is perhaps the best indication of who the art here is really for.

Despite cries of gentrification over the past few years, Williamsburg is still about the artists, and the exhibiting spaces here (many run by artists) are definitely for producing artists. Now home to over forty galleries in a about a two-mile radius, the area has moved beyond its reputation as 'The New Chelsea' by outliving flash-in-the-pan commercial exploitation, while still managing to build a steady and loyal collector base. However, most galleries are still not making money. Financial backers and sponsors, in the case of some commercial galleries, grants and donations in the case of nonprofits, and second jobs for almost everyone, coupled with strong neighborhood artist support, keep the outlook optimistic.

Beatriz Barral: Superaccessspace, 2003; courtesy Parker's box in Brooklyn

This is Parker's Box. Located on Grand Street just off Bedford Avenue, the gallery was founded in 1999 by Alun Williams, a Mancunian living in France and often visiting New York. With a vision of a "venue for contemporary art, taking the form of an experimental initiative to be developed by a team including artists, curators, and others," he named the gallery after a 1920s' billiards rule from circa the same year that the building which currently houses the gallery was operating as a billiards academy. (The introduction of this new rule allowed for a rectangular outline drawn on the surface of the playing area to regulate the course of the game, thus making the game more challenging and unpredictable.) The official explanation of the introduction of what had come to be known as 'Parker's Box' made no attempt to hide the fact that the rule was intended to obstruct perfectionist players, armed with overbearing professionalism and guilty of monotonous and repetitive play, from setting up series of winning strokes, with the express purpose of "preventing boredom in the gallery" (read public). An avid yet sadly unpredictable pool player myself, I joined Parker's Box earlier this year, bringing with me no contacts, no money, and no experience. The last few months have been a baptism by fire - challenging and unpredictable, as well as incredibly rewarding.

Rack 'em... The main focus of the project at Parker's Box is to offer an opportunity for artists to enter into a dialogue about the ways they conceive their work, their criteria of presentation, and how a gallery space can exist as a platform for instigating exchange about these issues with its audience - an artist audience rife with hustlers and pool sharks, amateurs and one-trick ponies, and (as Dave Hickey might point out) participants and spectators. How to keep the game interesting in the face of all this artistic scrutiny? Holding exhibitions driven by artistic vision that not only refuse to cater to the commercial art world but also attempt to push the boundaries on what that world is - and where exactly it is located - is one approach. Collaborative ventures are another. One such successful group effort took place from April to June 2002, where Parker's Box was the Brooklyn coordinator for the Paris Brooklyn Exchange Project.

The idea for the collaboration originated when five galleries from Williamsburg and three from Paris realized they'd been invited together to the Stockholm Art Fair in order to give it a more radical, innovative, and international flavor. Recognizing their common ground, these galleries decided to instigate the Paris Brooklyn Exchange Project, and a total of twenty spaces in Paris and Brooklyn (including eight from Williamsburg: Parker's Box, Pierogi, Plus Ultra, Roebling Hall, Schroeder-Romero, Southfirst, Star 67, and Momenta in collaboration with Four Walls) participated to show artists from both cities. So in late April, a series of parties and events were organized around this first-time occasion and contributed to the already-thronging openings scene, with French artists, dealers, and gallerinas on the streets in Williamsburg. And the Brooklyn art world invaded the French capital that June. It was like the Artworld Cup...

This is about the art, after all. Parties are good; good painting is better. Continuing in the vein of noncommercial-driven endeavors to accommodate artistic vision, in January 2003 Parker's Box opened the season with Superaccesspace by Beatriz Barral. Arriving from Madrid to Brooklyn in the bitter cold of mid-December, the artist made the gallery her studio and emerged with an expansion of her work from unorthodox painting surfaces with allusions to architectural space, toward the takeover of the exhibition space itself. Impractical to purchase, impossible not to be drawn into, Superaccesspace enveloped visitors, sucking them directly through an access hatch right into the artist's universe, which itself hovered on a razor edge between high-tech design space, futurist film set, chill-out lounge, and artwork.

It is this accessibility to the artist's practice that makes studio visits so crucial to the determination of the exhibition program at Parker's Box; we've conducted studio visits on artists' kitchen tables, in closets, on the sidewalk, in big lofts, on rooftops, in basements. Open-studio nights in Brooklyn are a great way to see work - as good if not better than openings. Beer in hand, we wander from floor to floor, building to building; the work is in progress, the artist is relaxed, all your mutual friends are there. It is the open-studio model that has influenced so many shows at Parker's Box, instigating a residency program of sorts where artists - like Beatriz Barral last spring and Tere Recarens and Geraldine Pastor Lloret this summer - can use the gallery as a studio that becomes an exhibition space when the artist finishes the project. This is increasingly important for international artists, without the resources or opportunity, to create work in an informal art environment as nurturing as Williamsburg.

Caroline McCarthy: From the Testors Military Range, February, 2002, courtesy Parker's Box in Brooklyn.

In the spring of 2002, Caroline McCarthy was invited to Parker's Box 'studio' to produce work in Brooklyn to be shown in Brooklyn. McCarthy has already attracted considerable attention for innovative work that explores situations and things generally so familiar that they go unnoticed. For Parker's Box she completed From the Testors Military Range..., a subtle manipulation of a variety of everyday trash from coffee cups to detergent containers. McCarthy painted these objects with paints provided by the Testors Corporation for model makers (Testors was a generous sponsor of the artist's project and the inspiration for the piece's title), investing the items with new and unexpected identities, as was evidenced by a visit from the local precinct during the exhibition to inspect the gallery's license for selling electronic equipment.

Back behind the eight ball. Placing ourselves in the commercial context without producing viably marketable shows, it's clear that Parker's Box is either naïve, irresponsible, or (we hope) taking the long road to being self-sufficient - a self-sufficiency that can only come with continued support from the community of artists, critics, and collectors that endorse our shows. Given free curatorial rein by our own financial underwriter makes programmatic choices at Parker's Box heavy with personal investment and responsibility to the artists and the program, ensuring that we keep the integrity of our mission intact yet flexible, and beyond the influence of outside mandates (i.e., other funders). Although we have nothing against incorporated not-for-profits, we have confidence in a free economy where an exhibition program built on risk-taking, collaboration, and, above all else, artistic process, can survive and even support the artists that make it happen.

This project would not be possible without the support of Tim and Nancy Grumbacher.

Allyson Spellacy is a Director of Parker's Box in Brooklyn.

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Resources for commercial and nonprofit galleries - the pros and cons

A nonprofit is a service or activity-based organization recognized by the Internal Revenue Service as a tax-exempt entity. There are several sources of funding available to nonprofit galleries and arts organizations in New York, ranging from federal government programs like the National Endowment for the Arts, to small private foundations, like the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. There are entire websites dedicated to researching how to become nonprofit and where to go for funding, from the IRS' own site (www.irs.gov) to The Foundation Center (www.fdncenter.org). With all this help and money available, why wouldn't struggling commercial galleries entertain going the nonprofit route?

Many commercial galleries (including several established and commercially successful ones) have backers who may provide them with different financial services, such as:

- underwriting the physical gallery space through real-estate purchase, donations or loans;

- funding general operating costs (phone, gas, electric);

- purchasing artworks from exhibitions or underwriting expensive production costs;

- acting as gallery emissaries within the international art/corporate/political world, etc.;

- influencing curatorial programming (or choosing not to).

Other sources of income available to commercial galleries include: selling artwork; selling publications; and renting out the gallery to artists or outside curators (although galleries who do this habitually are often derided as 'vanity' galleries). In addition, in-kind contributions of materials and equipment are good sources of income, as are international grants secured for transportation of artists or large artwork - all help offset gallery costs.

Nonprofit galleries who do or don't have financial backers can additionally compete for funding from:

- Government Agencies*

a) the aforementioned NEA, who lost 40% of its funding in 1996, had a fiscal-year 2003 operating budget of $115 million for the entire country;

b) New York State Council on the Arts: FY 03 operating budget of $50 million;

c) New York City Department of Cultural Affairs: FY 03 - $120 million;

d) Local arts councils in all five boroughs had FY 03 operating budgets ranging from $500,000 to $3 million, with some money available for regrant programs for performing and non-performing arts organizations as well as individual artists;

- Private foundations (very competitive especially given current fiscal climate);

- Corporate giving (very competitive especially given current fiscal climate).

Other means of income available to nonprofit galleries include: selling artwork (nonprofits can sell work and take a commission but generally take much less than the going rate - 50% - although some are now taking as much as 40%); selling publications; and board-member contributions.

In the current atmosphere of budget cuts, instability in art sales and rising exhibit production costs, commercial and nonprofit galleries constantly juggle energies spent networking, grant writing and prospecting with making studio visits, putting together good shows and, oh yeah, attending openings.

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