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Interview by Elvire Camus & Arnaud Aubry
Sue Jeiven, tattoist at East River Tattoo, using a coil tattoo machine, the main tool of the trade. Photo by Sofia Faga
Mary Kosut has a PhD in Sociology and teaches at SUNY Purchase College. In WG’s search for a more studied view of the “tattoo phenomenon” in Williamsburg, we tapped Dr. Kosut for her knowledge of the sociology of the body—tattoos especially.
Marieke Wegener (in her Williamsburg studio) began interviewing many area artists this summer for her documentary about the artist Mark Lombardi who allegedly died of suicide in 2000. Photography by Ben Lozovsky
Mareike Wegener is a 27-year-old German filmmaker with spot-on taste for the obscure, the quirky, the hard to pin down—particularly when it comes to visual artists. What’s more, she’s got a sweetly fierce determination to follow her instincts to their fascinating, if open-ended, conclusions. While in school in Cologne, Germany, Wegener managed, over the course of four years, to fund and produce a film on the late Al Hansen (wandering conceptual artist extraordinaire, member of the transgressive art movement Fluxus, and otherwise known as Beck’s grandfather). Now she’s hard at work on an even edgier project, but one much closer to home: a documentary on the late, great artist Mark Lombardi, who died at the young age of 49 (suicide) in his Williamsburg studio in 1999. Local gallery, Pierogi, handles his estate: epic drawings that are, at first glance, little more than diagrams in pencil on paper, but which ultimately claim to chart the scandal-riddled courses and interconnected destinies of political movements, presidents past and seated, political parties, world banks, and, most frightening of all, terrorism. Controversy has followed the work since Lombardi’s death, and the FBI is even rumored to have closely scanned one work in particular in the wake of the events of 9/11. Wegener, meantime, is spending the better part of this and last year sorting out the legacy and history of Lombardi, the man—a task that no filmmaker, until now, has dared to take on for its complexity. It’s a project that’s made her a de-facto W’burg resident.
Late mornings you can find her smoking hand-rolled cigarettes on Bedford Avenue, drinking lots and lots of coffee. Jittery, but better for it, we did the same. What ensued was a conversation that, much like a Lombardi drawing, was full of fragments of interconnected lives, open-ended answers, and some beautiful insights into what makes the creative mind tick.
Sculpture by Alexandra Limpert, sculptor who works in steel. www.alexandralimpert.com
The women in our photographic essay are metal fabricators in the spaces where they engage daily in the physically demanding activity of forging and welding metals.
Fara’h Salehi, metal fabricator and sculptor, in her work space on North 14th Street in Greenpoint.
Jonah Byrd and Mary Madsen of Jigsaw Soul
If East Williamsburg is not the most beautiful place on earth, it’s pretty close. It’s a neighborhood where Pentecostal churches hold rousing services in the streets outside their storefronts. It’s a place of industry and warehousing, where vertical tenements look over horizontal shipping yards. Low slung warehouses give the place a big sky. It is massive and sublime in a way that makes the Williamsburg of the waterfront look quaint.
We are in an area that is considered to be part of Bushwick. Into the heart of the valley curls the fetid tail of Newtown Creek. Hither and yon lie great truck yards and old railroad tracks. It is full of trucks. It also full of exotic people. We are at the epicenter of an artist community, one of those aggregations of worldly and professional folks who change everything, completely and forever, wherever and whenever they arrive.
Although we tend to think of trips to the laundromat as dull-but-necessary interruptions in our perusal of neighborhood art, music, and culture—or even of a weekend afternoon on the couch—three clothes-washing establishments on the Northside, contain engrossing, curious phenomena, as well as welcoming communities of customers, proprietors, and staff.
It was the unusual décor that made my first extended visit to the F&M Laundromat at 84 Norman Avenue in Greenpoint an unexpected and mildly transformative delight. Within a rectangular interior, panels of fluorescent lights shine over three rows of silver, orange, and bright yellow washers. Five large dryers are also orange, and a row of light custard dryers matches both the tiled floor and a stretch of decorative plastic shingling just below the ceiling. Laminated faux-wood paneling covers much of the walls, and a long, sleek, red table for folding clothes is composed of two rectangular units and a smaller, asymmetrical abutment. It looks like a piece of neo-plastic sculpture that has been adapted for practical use. The overall effect is warm, artificial, and incubating.
Standing in the back of this comforting and odd space, something about the sharp, blue numerals on the dryer LCDs tripped an inner switch, and I felt as if I was doing laundry in New York for the first time. The feeling made me recall an environmental installation by the Scandinavian artist Olafur Eliasson at MoMA two summers ago. The elements that comprise Eliasson’s 360º room for all colours include stainless steel, fluorescent lights, and wood (real, not fake), and a curatorial description of the artist’s work goes right to the heart of the Laundromat’s appeal: “By transforming the gallery into a hybrid space of nature and culture, Eliasson prompts an intensive engagement with the world and offers a fresh consideration of everyday life.”