The Work, and Communities, of Mark di Suvero
CreditAnne Leigniel, courtesy the artist and Spacetime C.C.
The
sculptor Mark di Suvero’s New York studio occupies a complex of
warehouses on an isolated stretch of the East River in Astoria, Queens.
But the outward anonymity belies what’s inside: something like a
bustling artists’ commune, over which di Suvero presides. There are
large, live-in studios set aside for younger artists, and several glossy
exhibition spaces display his work. (The legendary dealer Richard
Bellamy, who gave di Suvero his first show and helped find the studio,
which the artist purchased in 1980, ran a little-known gallery out of
one of these rooms for close to 15 years.) There’s a touch of luxury
outdoors — a small vineyard near the bank of the river — but it’s
buffered by di Suvero’s brutal workroom, which functions as a kind of
graveyard of unfinished sculptures, scattered among forklifts and laser
cutters. In a common room, stacks of books stretch to the ceiling.
On
a recent morning, two large dogs slept in a corner there, and a group
of assistants sat around a large wooden table. Many of them had worked
with di Suvero for years and had, at one point or another, lived in the
warehouse or in one of his other studios. A small di Suvero sculpture — a
sturdy mass of steel sitting atop a vertical chassis that looked like
some immovable, upside-down anchor — was situated between them. Di
Suvero entered the room wearing an orange hard hat and a dirty red work
shirt, walking with two canes, the result of a construction accident
that broke his back just before his first solo exhibition, at Bellamy’s
famous Green Gallery, in 1960. Di Suvero uses a wheelchair more and more
these days — he’s 83 — but he still does much of the work on his
sculptures by hand. “It’s important to him,” one of the assistants said.
“It’s his reason for getting up in the morning.”
Di
Suvero is one of the last surviving Abstract Expressionists, and
virtually the only artist from that era still making new work. (He’ll open a show
at Paula Cooper Gallery in New York on Nov. 3.) His sculptures have
been celebrated since the first Green Gallery show, but in his
six-decade career, di Suvero has also given his time and resources to
other artists, playing a quieter role as a political operator.
The
studio in Queens has provided work space or housing for so many artists
— including Ursula von Rydingsvard and Heidi Fasnacht — that di Suvero
has lost count. He built it out of a crumbling pier on a section of the
East River called Hell Gate, and for years after he moved in, the
surrounding neighborhood lived up to this name. The artist described a
stretch of road where Astoria Boulevard comes to an end as a popular
spot for carjackers, who would hide behind the tall bushes at the
intersection, embracing the element of surprise. When people in the
neighborhood complained about the situation, di Suvero said, the city’s
solution was to trim the bushes.
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Di
Suvero had a different response. He hired residents from the Smith
Houses in Manhattan, as well as the nearby Astoria Houses project — he
still refers to them as “my kids” — to help him build out his studio and
the surrounding land, which had primarily been used as an illegal
dumping ground. (“Rat Park,” as he used to call it.) He transformed it
into the city’s first outdoor sculpture park, Socrates. Over the last 30
years, over 1,000 artists have exhibited there — and it has broadened
the acceptance of public art in the city. The work was touch and go for a
while. Di Suvero was mugged at his door one night by someone who had
been working to help clean up the park during the day. “I knew the guy —
not only his name, but his Social Security number,” di Suvero said. He
was on the artist’s payroll. “And he’d been paid, like, $65 the night
before, but he needed money right then.” (Di Suvero’s Great Dane helped
ward off the attack.)
Bellamy
opened his gallery, called Oil & Steel, in the studio in 1985. Di
Suvero gave him the space for free: “There was no question of him paying
rent,” he said. “He discovered the place.” Bellamy, whom di Suvero
described as “a brother,” showed work mostly by his friends, like
Richard Nonas and Walter de Maria. He also had the ceiling painted a
sickly blue color, an embellishment that still stands. The gallery
remained something of a secret. “Nobody would come here,” di Suvero
said. “It looked like a dump. They didn’t want to come in.” It was
certainly an odd location for a gallery championing the avant-garde.
There weren’t many collectors who made the trek to Queens (“he was a
terrible dealer,” di Suvero said of Bellamy, because “he didn’t care
about money”), but there were other visitors. One day, a local kid stole
Bellamy’s computer — again, the perpetrator was known around the studio
— and the dealer had to send an employee out into the neighborhood to
buy it back.
The
Queens complex is only the most current example of di Suvero’s utopian,
collaborative vision. In 1962, he co-founded Park Place, one of the
first artists’ cooperative galleries in New York, which became a model
for the SoHo gallery district later in the decade. (The artist-dealers
never sold much work, but they did start a short-lived and possibly
doomed jazz band, in which di Suvero played the steel drum.) And in the
1970s, he began installing his sculpture in public areas long before
this was a common or even desired practice. Di Suvero’s old studio on
Front Street, above the former Fulton Fish Market, was a meeting ground,
and occasional residence, for artists like Linda Fleming, and Danny
Lyon used the space as inspiration for his photography book, “The
Destruction of Lower Manhattan.” And di Suvero would later turn a
converted barge in Chalon-sur-Saone into another quasi-commune called
“La Vie des Formes,” giving artists from all over the world a place to
live and work.
The
Astoria Houses project is still standing, but the neighborhood
surrounding di Suvero has been transformed, in no small part because of
the artist’s presence. Around Socrates, there are now luxury apartment
towers. “And they advertise that one of the reasons they can rent them
out,” di Suvero pointed out with an exasperated smile, “is because of
Socrates Sculpture Park.”
This
social element to di Suvero’s work isn’t so much accidental as
unconscious. He doesn’t publicize it, and it has made him difficult to
categorize: You couldn’t quite make the argument that John Chamberlain, a
di Suvero contemporary, was a community builder. When asked if he
identified with the label most commonly applied to him — Abstract
Expressionist — di Suvero cringed: “Oh, God. No.” He tapped a corner of
the sculpture at the center of the table in the common room with his
hand. It started to spin silently around its base, not nearly as rigid
as it had seemed at first glance, and di Suvero laughed: “I’m a
corrupted constructivist.”
