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Hell, No! Do Please Go! (To See Our Show)

Boys and girls, gather round for a little story about art, New York, real estate, and recession. Our story begins in December 2007, at the height of the market boom, when cash was flying around the city like confetti on V day, and a museum called the New Museum opened its brand new, $50 million building on the Bowery. The building, a gleaming confection with the retail allure of a shiny stack of hat boxes and the auspiciousness of a highly-polished silver wedding cake, bore — and still bears — above its entrance a giant candy-colored sign that reads “Hell, Yes!” — an artwork by Ugo Rondinone, readers, that to this day stands as an unintentional monument to the irrational exuberance of that moment. In September of the following year, as plans for other fancy, starchitect-designed Bowery buildings were announced, the museum inked a deal to buy the structure next door for $16.6 million.

A few weeks later, the market crashed. Lehman Brothers tanked like the Exxon Valdez. Real estate collapsed.  And all over the city, artists wondered what would happen to their world. Meanwhile, in nearby Williamsburg, Brooklyn, contracts were going sour on tall glass condo buildings that were left empty or only partly completed, and a developer’s deal fell through on a purchase of land from a church — a church, the disused Convent of Saint Cecilia, whose clever priest began renting out the property to dancers and filmmakers in exchange for donations.

Last fall, a performance artist named RJ Supa participated in a dance project there, and later got in touch with his friend David Louis Fierman — an independent curator whose day job is associate director at Upper East Side gallery Salon 94 — with the bright idea of doing an art exhibition in the space. which has a kind of bare-bones beauty. Supa and Fierman were inspired by a February 2009 New York Times article by art critic Holland Cotter that they read as something of a “call to arms.” In it, Cotter railed against the market and announced: “I’m talking about carving out a place in the larger culture where a condition of abnormality can be sustained, where imagining the unknown and the unknowable — impossible to buy or sell — is the primary enterprise. Crazy! says anyone with an ounce of business sense. Right. Exactly. Crazy.”

When Supa and Fierman’s exhibition opens this Friday with work by over 30 artists (the majority of them young, emerging, and New York-based), a DIY-ish plywood sign above the convent doors will declare “Hell No!”  Supa explains that his artwork (see below) is “a tongue-in-cheek response to the New Museum, group shows, the Whitney Biennial, etc.” And clearly a direct dig on Rondinone’s piece. “While Ugo Rondinone’s HELL, YES! is a highly manufactured sign adorning a highly manicured, almost sterile building, HELL, NO! is meant to be a bit more funky on the face of a dilapidated, no longer used convent in a neighborhood that sits amongst half-empty glass condos,” Supa wrote in an email. “I thought of it as a proclamation, of the sisters praying on their knees, begging, screaming, ‘HELL, NO!’”

Hm… might it also be something of a comment on the Dakis debacle? “It is in some regards a direct critique of the New Museum’s current show, and its insistence on maintaining its hipness,” he says. “Billionaires collecting art curated by Jeff Koons hasn’t been hip in years.” The sign, he concedes, is also “a giant screaming HELLO! to get attention in an over-saturated art world.”

The idea for it, he recalls, was born “out of conversations with fellow artists who had seen ‘UnMonumental’ and numerous Biennials and were continually asking ‘Why not me?’” Since Supa could come up with no answer to that question, he sees this show as “a way to unify all those left out of, essentially, an art market.”

“We wanted to make something of our own, rather than going through the usual channels,” Fierman adds. How times change….

HELL, NO! April 30-May 7, 2010 The Convent of Saint Cecilia, 21 Monitor Street, Brooklyn, NY Hours: Open Friday, April 30, 2010, 7-11 p.m.; May 1, 12-8 p.m., May 2, 12-6 p.m., Friday, May 7, 2010 7-11 p.m., May 8, 12-8 p.m., May 9, 12-6 p.m.