At the Strangers' Gate

by Adam Gopnik

  But one thing is always true: artists are always searching for big spaces at cheap prices, and here they were. SoHo had never been intended for such uses—in truth, the buildings had never for a moment been intended for living in. But painters and sculptors and conceptual philosophers—Sol LeWitt–style large-scale minimalists and Chuck Close–style giant photo-realists—started camping out illegally in the factory lofts. Over time, reluctantly, the city government retroactively regularized the circumstance. The possibility of having your residence actually recognized with a “C of O”—a certificate of occupancy—was spoken of the way Colombian illegals (or Canadian ones) speak of getting a green card. To have one was to enter into a new world of legal uprightness. (And, like a green card, the C of O was accessible by more avenues than the simple letter of the rules suggests. People could spend years, decades, in a legal limbo, with their loft neither quite kosher nor quite not.) Once converted, however simply or, later, overelaborately, the loft spaces were large and inherently beautiful. Where once shirts had been sewn by lonely immigrant girls and candy made and paper boxes folded by their sweating immigrant brothers, now painters could work out their struggle between conceptual cool and expressionist angst in peace, working big all the while.

  Our new building turned out to be an odd warren of kinds, and life among the artists a daily—and sometimes a nightly—revelation. One Monday night, a year or so after we had moved in, I was lying awake at three in the morning, Martha in her usual state of deep, imperturbable slumber beside me, when I heard a funny noise. At first, it sounded to me like some small animal scratching. (All noises at night sounded to me like small animals scratching, because I had always been terrified that some night a small animal would get into the loft and scratch.)

  I got up, without waking Martha (in those days, as in these, you couldn’t), and, taking the flashlight that I keep by the bed for emergencies, which before that night had never arisen, I went to look for the source of the funny noise. I found it near the front door. Water was dripping through the ceiling, like blood in an old Vincent Price movie—dripping spookily down the wall in sheets and puddling on the floor. There was already quite an accumulation. At the age of thirty, I still didn’t know what to do about such things. I didn’t know what to do about anything domestic, really, and in the Blue Room everything had been so close together that to do one thing was to do everything.

  I remembered that in an old Honeymooners episode Alice had taken a pail and put it under a leak. We didn’t have a pail, so I took the copper stockpot that my parents had given us when we got married, and I put it under the leak. Then another part of the ceiling started to leak, so I got the ceramic pasta pot that we had bought over on the Bowery, at that time still a paradise of restaurant ware, and put that in place, too. Together, they worked pretty well. I was encouraged, until I realized that at the rate at which the water was filling the stockpot and the pasta pot I would be up all night emptying them. So I figured that my next move was to call the super. I called him up—he didn’t live in the building—and, speaking softly but forcefully, tried to give him a strong, vivid image of what was happening: the water dripping down, the paint ruined, the beams rotting, mold forming. He said he would come over in the morning.

  So I decided that it was my job to go search for the source of the leak. I went upstairs in my shorts—“sleep shorts,” Martha called them, as though they were specially designed for the work of sleeping—and banged on the door of the artist who lived above us. She came to the door immediately; she was already up. She had heard the funny noise at the same time I did, and had discovered the leak, too. She was in her nightgown—a nightshirt really—and through the half-open door I could see some of her work, suspended from the ceiling. She was a sculptor, a very good one, and her name was—is!—Petah, Petah Coyne, then a beginning and now a quite famous second-generation conceptual-minimalist sculptor, a maker of objects. (In Paris, just a few years later, I would see her picture on the cover of ARTNews.) She made mobiles out of bundles of what look like lacquered twine. I had never seen her loft before. There was a wonderful wholesome scent coming from inside, which I couldn’t quite identify. We figured out together that the leak must have been coming from the loft on the sixth floor (we lived on the fourth, Petah on the fifth), where a landscape painter named Marcia King lived. (Marcia, who has since passed away, had come all the way from Texas to try her hand at disquieting images of contemporary beaches.) We decided to go and wake her up.

  A bunch of Marcia’s canvases were propped outside her door. We called out to her, but there was no answer. “Maybe the air conditioning is on and she can’t hear us,” Petah said wistfully. Marcia was the only one of the artists in the building at that time who could afford air conditioning. (You need a big unit to air-condition a loft, and it costs a lot of money. In those days, although almost every uptown space, at least on the East Side, had an A/C, lofts didn’t. It meant that SoHo was one place where, when a heat wave hit, you still saw people out on the street at night trying to escape it, as in a forties musical.)

  We were silent as we imagined Marcia cocooned in the roar and comfort of twenty-eight thousand BTUs. Then, looking down, we saw a little trickle of water coming out from under her door, and Petah said, “Maybe the air conditioner has exploded.”

  We started pounding on the door. Suddenly, Petah put a hand to her mouth and gasped. “My hay!” she cried, and rushed back to the stairs. I followed her down into her loft, looked around, and discovered the source of the wonderful scent. Along the wall nearest the door, behind some of the mobiles, towered an immense haystack—a pile of bales fourteen feet high and about twenty feet long. The hay, I realized, was her material, her clay and plaster; it was what all the mobiles were made from. She wrung her hands. “Oh no!” she moaned. “If it gets wet, it’s going to fester.”

  I didn’t know what happens to hay when it festers, but the idea still appalled me.

  “Get a ladder,” I said, with a note of grim decisiveness that I had never before achieved with a woman. “We’ll shift the bales.”

  I don’t know where those words sprang from—some deep farm instinct, I suppose, or maybe just a scene in an old John Ford movie.

  We sprang into action. She had a ladder—I guess she used it to get hay down as needed. I mounted it, and began grappling with the bales. I had always thought of hay as something silky and homogenous—something that looked and felt the way it smelled—but as I hefted first one bale and then another, I discovered that it was dense stuff, and as varied with incident as the meadow it must once have been. It was filled with thistles and burrs and small dried flowers, and scratched your hands as you gathered it. Up close, the smell was still good, but fatter and duskier than it had been at a distance.

  Once we had shifted the highest rank of bales, my initial rush of adrenaline and determination waned. It seemed to me that I was likely to be restacking hay for most of the night. For one ungallant moment, it even occurred to me that the fate of my neighbor’s hay was, after all, not my problem. But then her husband came down from their little sleeping loft, rubbing his eyes. He stood and watched us. I guessed from his passivity that he considered hay shifting in SoHo unusually delicate work—a specialist’s job, to be left in the hands of artists and their explicators. I kept on with it.

  It took us about an hour and a half to move all the hay from one side of the loft to the other and pile it up again. When we were finished, we stood together at the foot of the new haystack (the husband had gone back to bed) and panted in the heat. It was a pleasant, oddly intimate moment; we brushed some burrs out of each other’s hair. Meanwhile, the flow of water had eased up. (We found out the next day that the tank of Marcia’s toilet had broken—she was out of town—and all the water had sprung from that small well.) Just as we agreed that our worries were over, we heard a siren outside. A fire truck pulled up. You could see it, red and chrome, from the window, in the streetlights. The super, apparently, had done the logic
al super thing: he had called up the Fire Department, told them about our problem, and gone back to sleep. We shouted down to the firemen that everything was now okay, that we had saved the hay from festering. They gave us steady, opaque looks, and got back in their truck.

  After that, Petah and I shook hands, a little formally, and, as we were saying good night, she told me, “My husband has a bad back, you know. He can’t pick up anything heavy.” That explained a lot.

  When I got back downstairs, I looked at my watch. Five o’clock. I didn’t try to brush off any of the hay that was still clinging to me. I was too tired. As I slipped back into bed beside Martha, all I could think about was how I would tell her in the morning about everything that had happened over the last two hours: my ingenuity with the pots, my forcefulness with the super, and the hour and a half I had spent, one floor up doing…farm chores. How pleased she will be with me, I thought, and how wonderful I will still smell.

  But, then, art always reflects the spaces it’s made in. You can feel the crowded labyrinth studios and blue-gray Paris light coming in the windows, the angular chaos of the view from the Bateau-Lavoir, somewhere in the background in every Cubist painting. You can sense the espresso and raw alcohol lofts of Tenth Street in the scumbled, midwinter nonfinish of the Abstract Expressionists in the fifties. SoHo spaces produced art big and sober and a little austere. The lofts lent themselves to scale—they provoked not the crowded grubby biomorphs of Tenth Street, redolent of espresso and gin, but

  the more spacious systematics of Sol LeWitt and then of Donald Judd. The expected scale of avant-garde art changed in tune with the accidents of these spaces, so that, when the avant-garde at last did return to Paris in the nineties, it was no longer to garrets and studios in Montmartre but to converted factories out on the edge of the city.

  This made the basic vibe of SoHo confident and forward-looking, not embattled. Though there was as much unhappiness in lofts as in any other human abode, the sadness was the sadness you brought with you. The spaces themselves—tin ceilings supported by classical columns, floor-to-ceiling windows with warped old glass—were, in every way, cheerful. They made for a more confident art, an art in communion with industry, in every sense. Someone said around then that it was the work ethic, the religion of work, the constant talk of it, and the puritanical edge of labor that made SoHo unique among Bohemias. SoHo was devoted to an idea of work—in fact, “work” was its magic word; and though “work” meant art, it was important that art be seen first of all as work, with a residual sixties affection for a proletarian façade, however comical. (The first paper I wrote for was called Artworkers News.)

  Largely stripped of that kind of spirit of play or blague that filled past Bohemias—there were lots of court reporters but no court jesters, lots of clerks but no clowns, SoHo of the seventies and eighties was a Bohemia without bohemianism—a place where sexual play and dissipation and all the other good stuff that avant-gardes had typically claimed for themselves had been pointedly, at times prudishly, replaced by an admiration for effort. I am sure there were as many affairs and as much alcoholism there as anywhere else. But the shoptalk of art was not of affairs and alcoholism. It was of effort and growth and the advancement of art—of “vocation” in that more priestly sense.

  High ceilings make for happy painters. Beautiful spaces make for productive artists. Bohemian squalor produces sporadic poetic inspiration more often than productivity. Artists in beautiful places want to add more; artists in ugly ones need to drug the ugly away. Architecture inspires art inasmuch as it gives it a certain kind of space to fill. Big rooms may not produce big ideas, but large studios make confident art. When you have to back away to look at what you’ve made, you make something worth backing away to look at.

  I see now that the spell SoHo cast lay in its being both a cathedral village, dedicated to the religion of advanced art, and a market town, devoted to selling produce of the true faith. The cathedral village was visible at night; the market town blossomed on Saturday mornings. A Saturday morning in SoHo in the 1980s was one of the most beautiful and moving and optimistic of New York rituals.

  The galleries had first colonized the ground-floor spaces of the cast-iron buildings, and then begun to blossom upward into the upper floors. They became a demonstration of an eternal principle: nothing demonstrates the power of the free market more than avant-garde art made in its defiance. Art isn’t betrayed by commerce; it begins there. In truth, the merchandise on sale, the works of art, could have been sold privately. (These days, they often are.) The number of walk-in purchasers at all those galleries lining the SoHo streets must have been tiny. But there were enough to let the business of showing the art matter, and then there was a genuine altruistic sense that sharing the pictures was a part of presenting them for sale. The surplus of good will that Adam Smith thought the essence of liberal market societies was present in SoHo then—Smith’s point, still not sufficiently grasped, being not that markets make people free but that free people move toward markets; the instinct of sociability, allowed to flourish outside the suspicious watchfulness of clans and tribes, brings people together, and one of the things they do is buy and sell and share.

  A SoHo Saturday morning was the best possible demonstration of Smith’s liberal principle—though both the people making the art and the people who hated the art that got made were in vehement denial of this truth. The conservative critic Hilton Kramer loved freedom and hated command economies—but the SoHo art world he despised was an extremely good example of what free markets alone can make happen. People brought their wares to market; others chose to buy them; the order and reciprocity emerged organically from the intersection. Meanwhile, the crowd around the then influential post-structuralist magazine October loved the art that critiqued the system of commodification, without seeing that a system of commodification was exactly what had allowed the critique to emerge in ways it never could where commodification was prohibited.

  This contradiction, mostly invisible to its participants, governed the intellectual life of the art world in the 1980s. The conservative cultural critics hated what they saw as the ingratitude and impiety of these things, without quite seeing that impiety is exactly what free markets in culture always produce. The radical critics, in turn, loved the “subversive” nature of the impieties, without quite seeing that only free markets in culture produce them. Radicals hated the system that forced avant-gardes into commercial galleries to be sold to rich people; conservatives loved the system that made avant-garde art, and hated the art that it made. Neither absorbed that the art and the system were the same thing seen at different moments in their propagation: A Jeff Koons was only possible under capitalism! And only late commodity capitalism could make a Jeff Koons.

  Here is how a Saturday morning in SoHo would unfold in the middle years of the 1980s. You would take the 6 train down to Spring Street if you lived outside the neighborhood, or you would walk out your door onto Broome Street or Wooster, or one of those, if you lived nearby. Getting out of the subway, you would find yourself in an area still almost entirely Italian immigrant in feeling—Balthazar brasserie and the spread of French bakeries was still far off. There was a newsstand, a magazine stand, that only went out of business recently; the Italian immigrants who ran it were hockey fans, and liked to talk to me about the Rangers, at a time when there were still Ranger fans intact in Manhattan.

  Crossing Broadway, still a strip of discount clothing emporiums and blank-faced brick buildings, with only an occasional cast-iron façade, you would cross over into SoHo proper—where the Cast Iron District began. Was it just my passion, or was it really like coming to the moment when you finally finish crossing the end of that blank stretch of the Adriatic, with the smell of gasoline and fish your only clue that you are entering Venice? Certainly, the first building that asked for attention was Venetian Gothic in style, complete with Lombard Gothic arches—the exquisite small palace at the corner of Spring and Mercer that (when did I learn
this?) belonged to Donald Judd, the archdeacon of the minimalists, the most minimalist of them all. His simple shelves and boxes were so austere as to make Carl Andre’s row of square concrete slabs look rococo, and the pale, pure grids of Agnes Martin seem like the work of a kitschmeister.

  Judd was a hero of mine without actually being a favorite: I admired everything about him without much liking to look at his art. I recall the thrill of hearing him speak once, at a gathering of art history students, where he showed slides from the very beginnings of the museum in Marfa, Texas, devoted then only to his work and Dan Flavin’s. “If you’re interested in modern art you really have to come,” he said flatly. “There’s more modern art in this place than any other.” And then he added, “Oh, I suppose the Museum of Modern Art has more artists.” And he meant it! The thrilling self-assertion of it: If you want to see modern art—pure, hard, and intense—look at me. Look at us! Don’t look over there. What distinguished Renaissance men was not the range of their interests but the force of their obsessions. He had that. He had earned his building on Spring Street—a Renaissance palazzo in cast iron.

  Then across Wooster on Spring (there was a café with Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, still a rarity in the New York of Häagen-Dazs), until you finally reached the two-way, sunnier street of West Broadway. At number 420, you would always begin by taking the elevator up to the top floor, to the Charles Cowles Gallery, and from there you’d descend by the stairs to Sonnabend, then to Leo Castelli, and finally on downward toward the rookie Mary Boone. Each gallery had a house style, while strenuously denying it. At Castelli you saw blue-chip oldsters—Johns and the rest—from the most distinguished stable in the New York art world, along with a few decisive choices among the new. Uptown, Castelli had always been classy, and here he stayed classy by taking on the newly hot with an air of bemused European detachment that cooled the hot down just enough to make it seem sage. Castelli’s ex-wife Ileana Sonnabend showed the friskier of the younger artists and the more demanding of the older. Big abstract canvases here, small sporty sculptures there—every eye was attuned to the arrival of the next thing, the necessary thing, and of course, eyes being eyes, made to recognize things seen before. We mostly landed on a variant of the familiar to stand in for the new.