Frozen Moments Lost In Time.

11 Spring Street 16 Dec 2006

<blockquote>
This is the shit that should be in MOMA, boys and girls, \'cause it\'s the only avant-garde art left in NYC. &#8212; JAC
</blockquote>
<p>
11 Spring Street (Between Elizabeth & Bowery) Manhattan, NYC 15-17 December 2006, 11am-5pm
</p>
<p>
An old carriage house and stables at 11 Spring Street has been a mecca for street art for decades. Taggers, bombers, posterers, stickerers, muralists, sculptors, you name it; all slapped their art up on it at some point.
</p>
<p>
The owners had, for years, a policy of benign neglect (those less charitable would say urban blight) and, as William Gibson so succinctly noted, the street has its own uses for things. But all is flux and chaos in NYC, nothing ever constant. The cancer of gentrification has overtaken this bastion of street art, and the new owners are building luxury housing for yuppies. (Which warms my heart; every day yuppies are unable to buy condos inside their meager budget of ten million dollars and must, instead, pay fifteen thousand a month for shabby, cold-water tenement walkups in dangerous neighborhoods far from Manhattan.)
</p>
<p>
In an effort to pacify the street-art community, or to, perhaps, enhance the value of their condos by trading on the historicity of the place and the fact that underneath all that plaster is amazing street art, the new owners opened up the building\'s 30,000 square feet of walls for decoration by street artists. The catch, and there always is one, is that the exhibit only lasted for three days only, and then workers powerwashed the exterior and drywalled the interior, and the art vanished from sight.
</p>
<p>
I waited on line for two hours and twenty minutes to get in, but it was well worth it. (These are shot using my crappy point-and-shoot digital.) At the end of the day on Saturday, after they kicked me out with all the other stragglers, I made one final homage: I tagged the building. (See photo.) Then I headed uptown, never looking back.
</p>

Popular tags

Random image

Album Tree