Carly Berwick

Education reform, the Jersey City way

What is education reform exactly? Is it Chris Christie giving noogies to each and every failing child? For the Jersey City Independent, I explored the complexities of the issue in Jersey City, a city of ~250,000 whose schools have been under state control since 1989; some responsibilities were returned to the elected, all-volunteer Board of Education in 2007. That means the locals get to hire their first superintendent since the 80s. The state and Mr. Christie don't seem to want to leave it at that.

So many striking things about the details of this story, but the most impressive may be  the fact that, as in many cities, a volunteer group of 9 adults gets to manage a $630 million annual schools budget, twice the size of the city's.

Ask first, plan later

That motto serves as a new model of civic engagement, across disciplines. In urban planning, in education, in international development, the cutting-edge trend is to ask your end-users what they need and want, then deliver. Sounds kind of obvious, right? But for decades, the model has been has been the noblesse oblige model: we know what's best for you and you will like it. (Think Le Corbusier, or pretty much any French public intellectual.) I wrote for October's Art in America (Download Urbanism) about the intersection of these two models in museums, which are trying to keep up with artists who are jumping into city planning in mostly inelegant but sometimes highly generative ways.

Happy days in the art world

That's the title of Elmgreen and Dragset's Performa 11 commission, set to debut somewhere in downtown New York on November 1. It's an amalgam of Beckett's Happy Days and journalist (and media-famous libel case winner) Sarah Thornton's book Seven Days in the Art World, a kind of unholy mix of the existential and the farcical, which also describes Elmgreen and Dragset's art-world navel-gazing puppet shows and videos to date. It's also one essential show of about 20 on my fall preview list for New York magazine. Performa commissions, the Bearden Project, Civic Action, and Infinite Jest are probably my personal picks among my personal picks.

"Big development can wait"

That's the headline for a fascinating take on what's going on in Gowanus, Brooklyn, in the New York Times' real estate pages, usually the least likely place to find critical thinking in the paper. Short version: southern South Park Slope, known as Gowanus, had "hundreds of developers knocking at our door" in the late aughts; now "no one," thanks to a Superfund designation of the canal in 2010. But as the big condo developers fled, some interesting things happened. Locals pressing down from the Slope and up from Carroll Gardens continued to develop collaborative art spaces like Old American Can Factory and the Gowanus Studio Space. And with relatively affordable rents and a burgeoning market, small-business innovation flourished. Some sample quotes: "Because you have rents that are not yet astronomical, you're seeing some great businesses that you might not see in a pricier neighborhood," says Bell House music hall owner Jim Carden.

The piece is a timely case study for my neighborhood, Lincoln Park/McGinley Square in Jersey City, portions of which are currently under consideration for being declared "an area in need of redevelopment." This innocuous-sounding designation actually has significant powers: it opens any area up to eminent domain and it allows the city to designate a single developer without RFPs and open bidding process. As I wrote in a letter to city planners and city councilpeople, without necessarily endorsing one option or the other, "We should consider, at a fundamental level, whose interests are driving the initiation and implementation of the current plan."

What if, for instance, the city took all the resources it spent wooing developers and drafting plans at their requests and invested in small businesses? I asked one successful small businessowner in Jersey City today what the city had done to help her get started. "Nothing, absolutely nothing. We [small business owners] all talk about it." 

There are so many open questions. I wonder what best-practices case studies or large surveys have found: Has the build-big-and-let them-come approach worked well in mid-sized cities? Which ones? How do developer-initiated redevelopment plans fare in the long run? Are they successful over time--and how do we define success? In Jersey City specifically, where redevelopment plans have been enacted, such as at the MLK Hub, how have they served existing and new communities? Have they made places safer and filled in vacant lots with gardens, homes, and varied retail?

The local community group in fact proposed a community-driven development vision (support small businesses, work with existing nonprofits and community groups, develop local jobs and mixed income housing, etc) for the exact same area in 2005. It seems to have either died quietly or have taken the slow train to piecemeal accomplishments in fits and starts. Like most community groups, it operates on little-to-no budget, and the senescence of its plan may be simply because little-to-no money attracts little-to-no political will.

In another country

I stayed one summer with a French family near Biarritz, when I was about 13. I spent most of my days cycling around a little lake and reading the Hemingways at the local library. This was pre-Internet, so I often was forced by sheer boredom to go to the beach, an activity I was realizing I increasingly didn't have to pretend to like. (The escapability of sand in food, hair, toe crevices just kills it for me.) The best part of the local beaches were the views from stone walls of French surfers, making the most of flaccid waves. They didn't quite look like this or get to dry off in places like Steven Holl's new surf museum, but their jouissance, their elan, their savoir faire, almost compensated for the fine particulate matter in swimsuit crevices. I wrote about Holl's white-tiled, sand-free monument to surf for Conde Nast Traveler.

Museum of good gimmickry?

When I first heard of the Adobe Museum of Digital Media, it sounded like pure marketing: an online museum with about three things in it but an expensive, flashy platform conceived and launched by a software company's outside marketing agency. I am deliberately refraining from adding "gimmick" here, since the phrase is either redundant or reductive, I'm not sure which: that is, all marketing may be gimmicks but it is not necessarily bad--don't we want to know more about objects and initiatives? Or is gimmickry the idea that all marketing involves some deception--I want to sell you A but I get you interested in it by talking about B, since A is of no actual inherent value . . .? 

In the software maker Adobe's case, then that would mean that this pretty nice web site which subsidized some substantial artist projects was all a veil for getting you to feel fuzzier about their products, which include many of the computer programs that allow us to make images and send them around to each other digitally. This very computer on which I'm working hosts Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign, Photoshop, and Adobe Acrobat. And while (as far as I understand it, which is not so far), there are varieties of programs that do what Photoshop and InDesign do, there is little competition for Acrobat, which makes those files with .pdf appended. So why would a company with an apparent monopoly need to engage in marketing gimmickry (where gimmickry is defined as talking about cool thing B for the purposes of selling A)?

Maybe there's no gimmick after all; we all often do things just because they are nice. Or the sleight-of-hand is more profound. Precisely because they have a near-monopoly on some of the things we use pretty much daily, they need to make us like them more, so we don't feel controlled and disgruntled.

Regardless, the museum is worth the trip, which is as arduous as typing the url into your browser. I wrote about it for ARTnews, in the May issue.

The disappearing monochrome

 

Glenn Ligon's text-based paintings have that quality particular to great art that they look both fresh and timeless on each new viewing. I wrote about his consistent engagement with text as image and with image as disappearing act for this month's Art in America. It doesn't hurt that he is also a pretty decent editor: he picks text to paint (over and over) that bears the scrutiny, such as James Baldwin's Stranger in the Village. It's not actually possible to read Baldwin's words in Ligon's paintings: the oil and coal dust make the letters more inscrutable the more physically imposing they become. But creating such a rich mystery around Baldwin's words leads us straight back to them. "The word is white no longer," Baldwin concludes in 1955, "and it will never be white again."

The currently unavoidable lure of the local

We obsess over what we lack, some have said. That may help explain why travel writing appeals to more people than can actually get themselves away. I myself stick to the tristate area, as the list of potential exploratory adventures in future decades grows longer (Istanbul, Bamako, Chiloe). For a piece in Conde Nast Traveler's May issue, I spoke with Olafur Eliasson about Harpa, a new concert hall in Reykjavik, which he helped to design, inspired by Iceland's extremes of seasonal light and giant basalt columns. One day, I may get there.

The gigapixel effect

With the launch of the Google Art Project, visitors to the web site can see not just the brush strokes of 17 masterpieces but cracks in the brush strokes, thanks to Google's gigapixel image-capturing technology. The pictures reveal more than the naked eye. What would Walter Benjamin say? 

I covered the events leading up to the Google Art Project's debut for April's Art in America. I did not get into the positively uncanny effect of visually processing, via computer, an image of something handmade that is not actually visible. That is, a person made it, but that same person, unless blessed with super-artist-power sight, could not actually see things like the fleck or break in a particular swath of paint that millions of internet users now can glance at inbetween HuffPo stories.

There is some use to this for conservationists. What is the use for viewers? Do we know more about the art? I think Benjamin would say it only increases the aura of the object, transposing "the response common in human relationships to the relationship between the inanimate or natural object and man." The wondrous Benjamin, writing in the 1930s, predicted not only the impact of the Internet on our relationship to images, but also the compounding effects of social media. Google says it is not planning to monetize the site. But I wonder if, after Benjamin, the gigapixel view makes art that much more of a commodity?

Found: One vintage web 'zine

Found: one late-90s-era web zine, beloved by a few, most of whom were its writers, most of whom as well operated under the delusion that one could get rich off a web zine, or least make a living wage while virtually conversing with an imagined group of farflung peers and colleagues. 

The archives of Feed Magazine, for which I wrote a few stories about art and politics, turned up online recently. After the online 'zine closed in  2001, it disappeared from the web. That's not supposed to happen. Today, online seems to be forever: sign some crappy email petition once, there's your name associated with it on Google in perpetuity. But Feed's first posts pre-dated Google. Hard to believe but true. Its only real competitors at the time were Word and Salon. Its founders went on to become a yoga devotee and write about it and to become the Malcolm Gladwell of digital/information culture. I was proud to have written for them.