Round-Up of Recent Articles and Blog Posts on the Artists/City Standoff

 
"Union Square Showdown: Holiday Market Versus Art Vendors"
DNAinfo - December 21, 2010 - By Amy Zimmer

“Artists at Union Square say city is a portrait of hypocrisy with holiday market”
New York Daily News - December 19, 2010 - By Adam Lisberg
 
“City Blocked Again From Enforcing New Artist Vending Rules In Parks”
A Walk in the Park - December 20, 2010 by Geoffrey Croft
 
“Artists, City Duel on Rules”
Wall Street Journal - December 18, 2001 - By Pia Cottan

Breaking News: Appellate Judge Issues Interim Stay Blocking Enforcement of New Park Rules; Artists to Work Through the Holiday Season

In a dramatic turnaround, just one day after a New York State Supreme Court judge ended a Temporary Restraining Order and denied a motion for a Preliminary Injunction blocking the enforcement of new NYC Parks Department Rules, Justice Peter Tom of the Appellate Division, First Department, issued a new Interim Stay that will effectively allow artists to continue working in four key New York City parks through the holiday season. The decision came late yesterday evening, December 16, 2010, after arguments on an emergency motion filed by the artists’ attorneys, Phillips Nizer LLP.

Reached today by phone, attorney Jeffrey L. Shore, litigation counsel with the Phillips Nizer team, stated that the interim stay will be in effect at least through January 7th. Whether that stay is continued past that date will depend on Justice Tom’s full decision on the motion to block enforcement of the new park rules till the appeal of trial court’s December 15, 2010 denial of a preliminary injunction is settled, possibly sometime later in January. A Phillips Nizer press release dated today, December 17th, states that they believe that there are “at least six legal errors” in that decision.

Judge Denies Preliminary Injunction; New Park Rules To Be Enforced for Now

Judge Milton A. Tingling, Jr. of the New York State Supreme Court has ruled against a Preliminary Injunction in the Dua et al v. NYC Parks Department case. The judge also vacated the temporary restraining order against the city issued on August 25, 2010, almost four months ago. That means that the Parks Department's new rules dramatically restricting the ability of artists to work in four New York City Parks (Central Park, Union Square Park, Battery Park and the High Line) will go back in effect.

Although the ruling is clearly not a good sign for the artist plaintiffs, the judge, writing in an eleven page decision, did indicate areas still open to argument as the case moves forward. He called the City's assertions that the rules were created to prevent congestion and address issues of park aesthetics "somewhat specious" and stated that there was "insufficient evidence adduced at this time to confirm or deny" the artist plaintiffs' claim that congestion and aesthetics are "merely pretextual." The case will continue in February as will two other cases filed by artists in Federal court.

Robert Lederman, president of the street artists organization A.R.T.I.S.T., has provided the following link to the compete text of Judge Tingling's ruling:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/45350354/Dua-v-City-of-New-York-12-8-10-State-Court-De\ cision-Denynig-Preliminary-Injunction

More commentary to follow soon.

The Edict of 1853

"Clown Playing a Drum"
  Honore Daumier, c. 1865-67
The British Museum, London

“… he met the challenge with a swift and flexible drawing style that could summarize a situation with arresting economy. The soft, greasy lithographic crayon was his ally in this effort; compliant and responsive, ‘it followed [his] thoughts,’ he reportedly said, whereas ‘the lead pencil was stubborn and did not obey’ him.

Théodore de Banville remembered seeing the artist in his studio on the Quai d’Anjou drawing with the ‘débris’ of used crayons, which he repeatedly rotated in order to sharpen them. It was this habit of using broken ends and stumps, de Banville observed, that gave his lines ‘hardiesse.’”

Colta Ives, “Drawing at Liberty: Daumier’s Style,” Daumier Drawings, (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1992), p. 8.

     Charcoal on newsprint: these are the preferred materials of the professionals making portraits in New York City’s Central Park. Not just any charcoal but a particular Chinese crayon manufactured in Shanghai. Marked '3-Stars' on the box, each stick is similar in size and form to a Conté crayon but slightly greasier. You can see several, gifted to me by Xiang Yue Chuan, in the photo below, one neatly wrapped in masking tape to keep the fingers clean during a long workday outdoors.

     These coal black sticks give a vivid painterly hue to a drawing, although personally I find them unforgiving. Unlike the hard and dusty German-made Faber-Castell Pitt Charcoal pencils I use which allow me to lift pigment with a kneaded eraser, add highlights or make corrections, the Chinese 3-Stars require the accurate placement of a mark the first time around. Indeed it is these punchy, confident marks that give the best of the Central Park artists’ work, like Daumier’s in the quote above, their “hardiesse” – a boldness of line and form.

     Of course, if you have time on your hands, a twig of willow vine charcoal, a waxier French-made Conté crayon or a round stick of machine-compressed charcoal does allow you to build up a richness of tones which is impossible to get with the brassier Chinese crayons, especially if you are sprinting to complete the likeness of an over-scheduled tourist in a busy park on a blustery Manhattan afternoon.

      The 3-Stars are made for speed. One edge of the tip lays down a clean line, the other a broad stoke of shadow, the crayon’s oiliness giving a fine inkiness to a drawing with no room for erasure. These are still charcoals, though – nowhere near as fatty as Daumier’s litho crayons which bend and melt like chocolate in the hand under the warmth of an artist’s fingertips.

     This is no idle shoptalk. This is political economy focused to a diamond-like perfection: materials plus knowledge plus skill plus labor produces the customer’s image and the artist’s livelihood. The wrong mix of these ingredients and the artist loses the commission.

     There is no coincidence in my choice of Daumier, the paid caricaturist, as a reference point when discussing the work of the artists in Central Park. Daumier, who captured the bustling vibrant public space of nineteenth century Paris streets, exemplifying Baudelaire’s call for artists to abandon the ancients and embrace the modern world, routinely gave image to the barrel-organ grinders, the ‘saltimbanques on the move,’ the itinerant street musicians of that city. 

     Like today’s Central Park portrait artists, those “expressive matter vendors” of the 1850s and 60s were under concerted attack by municipal forces. Indeed, as described by T.J. Clark in his classic study “Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France 1848-1851” (London, 1973), the 1852 arrival of Empire in the aftermath of a coup d'etat against the short-lived Second Republic produced an immediate crackdown against street entertainers. "From that moment, the war was on against the saltimbanque. The high point of the campaign came in 1853, when the government drafted a law against the whole profession, and ordered its Prefects to put it in force" (p.121). The Edict of  1853 established Paris’s own licensing scheme to control street artists and performers, driving them from location to location as they attempted to make a living.

     It is this battle over public space by street artists and Daumier’s grappling with understanding the provisional place of artists in modern society that is so ruthlessly conveyed in his drawings and watercolors of that time.

“plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose”

Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, January 1849
(wikitionary.org, retrieved December 5, 2010)

Peter Walsh drawing Wei Chen in Central Park, Manhattan, May 17, 2010.

 NOTE: The 3-Star Drawing Charcoal mentioned in this post, and other supplies used by portrait artists in the park, are available at UDAC in Long Island City, Queens at 30-10 41st Avenue, 4th Floor.

Non-Monetary Exchange, Part Two

What about behind the scenes?

How do the documentary photos that you see on this blog get taken? What about the video or the brochure that was created?

Again, barter is the modus operandi when intangibles like art are being created in social spaces that are invisible to cash economies. A good example is the hours of superb digital video that Emmy-award winning filmmakers Kathy Brew and Roberto Guerra shot on the first day of the Portrait Exchange. Although they were incredibly busy, Kathy and Roberto agreed to shoot for a variety of reasons including their own interest in the project and its focus on art-making in an unexpected place, and also, friendship – I’ve known them for years. Still, we also made a deal for a pair of portraits drawn by me, a deal which is as yet unredeemed (One of the intriguing aspects of barter economies is that the barter tends to slow down the pace of economic interactions between individuals, which is generally considered a negative. Yet my debt to Kathy and Roberto has drawn out our exchange to many months, in some ways magnifying our connections by ensuring that I contact them again down the road. This burden to reconnect hangs in the air like a thread between us until the barter is completed. I’m bound to their generosity. Economic exchange of this kind is not like anonymously buying a cup of coffee, or even, quite frankly, like hiring someone to do a one day video shoot.).

In the case of the Central Park Portrait Exchange, another issue of importance is the development of new internet driven barter tools. I’ve relied heavily on an artist/barter website called OurGoods.org. OurGoods, founded by a group of artists and designers including Jen Abrams, Louise Ma, Carl Tashian, Rich Watts, and Caroline Woolard, describes itself as “a community of cultural producers matching "needs" to offered "haves".” I would describe it as being like a barter Ebay for artists, except that barter economies are fundamentally more complex than cash-driven economies in terms of person-to-person interactions and are more capable of bringing people together in relationships that may play out over years.

By using the OurGoods site I’ve received the photographic skills of four different artists, help on the ground during the portrait exchanges, Mandarin translation services and the design of a brochure to hand out onsite in Central Park! In exchange I’ve provided many bags of organic fruits and vegetables and a variety of as yet unfulfilled promises such as studio visits and grant-writing advice. I find it gratifying that the barter system that OurGoods uses rhymes so well with the goals of the Portrait Exchange.

Still, in the end, my own donated labor is the prime animating force of the project.

How does an art project like the Central Park Portrait Exchange come into being?

    
Mostly through non-monetary exchange.

What’s that?

Trades, favors, apples for oranges, my labor given for your labor.

For example, each artist – professionals like Wei Chen, Dario Zapata or Artashes Karslian who regularly work in Central Park – has contributed a drawing and sat for another, but no money has changed hands (at least not yet). What do they get out of the deal and what do I, Peter Walsh, as organizer of the Portrait Exchange get out of this “non-monetary exchange”?

Well first, as the project organizer I have temporary physical possession of the drawings, which I hope to be able to exhibit down the road as a group exhibition. Maybe the work will be sold. Or not. At some point, if the drawings are not sold, the physical portrait exchange will be completed. I will receive all the drawings of myself and each artist will receive the portrait that I drew of them.

As the exchange organizer I get the added value of helping to create a group artwork which, outside of its considerable value as a meaningful artwork, has the potential to provide me with other opportunities in the art world and theoretically helps to build my career.

For the artists working in Central Park who have chosen to participate in the exchange, there’s been a savvy calculation that doing so will result in publicity and other intangibles that may help in their fight against New York City’s new rules restricting their ability to work in the park. That gambit has already paid off in articles such as journalist Leslie Koch's article "Artists sue Mayor Bloomberg, NYC Parks Department over new regulations", ongoing blog posts on this site and even in courtroom testimony on their behalf.

On September 13, 2010 I testified in New York State court to the veracity of video footage that I had shot because I’ve been working regularly on the exchange in Central Park. That video, which showed artists being forced by the city to run a footrace every morning in order to work, is part of a body of evidence that has kept in place a Temporary Restraining Order against the city’s new rules – and has given several months’ relief for the artists from the new regulations. How much of that is connected to the portrait exchange is one of those difficult to measure “intangibles,” but the gain is real and has kept work and money coming the artists’ way.

So far, the gamble of participating in the Central Park Portrait Exchange appears to be paying off for everyone.

Cold Weather

Cold weather has arrived.

A Temporary Restraining Order is in effect against the City of New York.

The courts are pondering a Preliminary Injunction against the new New York City Park Rules that drastically reduce the ability of many artists to work and show their work in the parks.

Stay tuned for a mid-project evaluation and commentary on the Central Park Portrait Exchange.