No Comment: Occupying Wall Street with Art
A view out of 23 Wall Street, site for the “No Comment” exhibition, on October 13 / photo David Balzer
In a small acoustic concert at Hunter College last week, held in conjunction with “9.11 Babelogue,” her recently opened art exhibition, musician-poet Patti Smith read journal entries she wrote immediately after the World Trade Center fell. These were musings that eventually inspired the work now on display. The difficult task of creating in the wake of a political crisis—one articulated and rearticulated over the past decade in America and elsewhere as, perhaps, a main cultural struggle of our time—was the inevitable topic. Smith was horrified by the bareness of her studio, and so began by taking streamers she had collected from a street parade and taping them to its walls. It was a beginning, her journal attests, and a discourse soon formed around those eerie, monolithic shapes.
A similar concept was at play at “No Comment,” an intriguing impromptu group art show held at the ground floor of the J.P. Morgan Building at 23 Wall Street, close to the New York Stock Exchange. It was, of course, a response to the Occupy Wall Street activities happening nearby at Zuccotti Park and, now, taking place internationally. The show started on the 8th and finished on the 14th, with a silent-auction fundraiser for the protesters on the 13th, which went late. The mood at that fundraiser was lively: people debated; one corner was filled with screen-printers furiously making T-shirts; iPhones were aloft everywhere, catching whatever important thing may or may not have been going on. (Such enthusiasm certainly contrasted with what was happening concurrently at Zuccotti, where protesters fretted over the possibility of being cleared away by Brookfield Properties and police.)
The art assembled by “No Comment” curator Marika Maiorova was noisy, messy and, often, hilarious about its polemics. The scene—a vast space in an empty Financial District building frequently used as a film set—combined well with the sheer spectacle of it all. The cardboard and mannequins employed by several artists made the space uncannily like a Thomas Hirschhorn installation. Indeed, the work functioned as a collective: its message, like that of the protesters, was multifarious discontent; its effect, above all, was cathartic. Some of Wall Street’s walls had, for the moment, been satisfyingly occupied.
This is the third in a series of postings by assistant editor David Balzer, who is in New York for the fall season. For earlier articles in this series, continue reading here and here.
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