I want to take this moment to just write about Rock and Roll. I can’t play guitar. I stink at it. I can’t even learn it properly. Dave Hickey writes in Air Guitar about how Rock and Roll is just getting together to, “just play this fuckin’ song, man,” or something like that. I am paraphrasing. The point is, Rock and Roll is where I want to be in all of my work. I want to be the kid in Andre Rublev who casts the bell. I just want to pull it off.

I have neighbors in my building who are not Rock and Roll. They told me Rock and Roll disturbs them when they are applying gold leaf to antiques. I can’t imagine something worse. To hell with antiques. Gold leaf is only good for R/C Cars. I will take you to task, antique dealers. I remember when I lived in Columbus and Rollins was a guest DJ on the local Alt-pop station for two hours. People called in asking for “nice music.” He said, “I am playing Rock and Roll.” I will never forget it. They couldn’t even handle Rock and Roll for two hours! Just get together and play the fuckin’ song.

Here is the print I have donated to the Art for Haiti NYC charity auction for Doctors Without Borders.

http://www.artforhaitinyc.com/site/

Nick De Pirro

White Strike (Levering and Garrigues)
2009
24″ x 36″
Monotype on Eary 19th-Century Blueprint

This was one of the prints that was made during the Bantam Mechanics session a few months back. The substrate is an early 20th Century blueprint for the Hoboken dockyards. It is part of the series (and really the only current work to speak of) dealing with redaction and destruction of documents.

In light of the current situation in Haiti, we are organizing an auction to benefit Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres/MSF) to support their current work in Haiti. The auction will be held on Wednesday February 10 at 7:30 PM, with previews Tuesday and Wednesday.

601 West 26th Street (@ 11th Ave.)
8th floor
New York, NY 10001

The money will go directly to Doctors Without Borders via their web site as a direct donation.

http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/donate/haiti-share.cfm

We are currently looking for more artists and galleries to participate. If you think you can help in any way, please contact us at info@artforhaitiny.com

Just as we began to take the project out of the planning stages with our print shop live broadcast: Bantam + Mechanics: Precursor: A Press Play we were dealt a significant blow with the murder of Father Ed Hinds, who was integral to the project. Ed had maintained his empty family home in Chatham Township, New Jersey, so that he would have a place to live upon his retirement. In the interest of full disclosure, I won’t provide many details at this time, but the little farmhouse garage on Ed’s property had been slated to become the studio theater for Bantam + Mechanics after the large warehouse lease deal in Jersey City hit the skids.

It was sort of a blockhead move on my part to neglect the perfect locale which was almost literally in my backyard and instead seek another warehouse. The Green Village section of Chatham Township has a micro car culture scene of its own. The Green Village Garage, which is only a short walk down our county road, regularly displays quite a menagerie of amazing automobiles. The current lineup includes a ‘69 Jaguar, a few ’60’s muscle cars, and ‘81 Delorean, the latter being quite a distraction. This, paired with the outrageous toys of the Goldman Sachs types that fuel up at the garage and glide (or blast) up and down Green Village Road, make a Green Village location perfect for locating our garage. It hit me quite suddenly that I had been foolish to think our car would be better off in a big warehouse art studio space. It would be a pointless move that would have taken the project out of context.

I should back up a bit to outline a few aspects of this project before I go to far into the current collapse. Basically, Bantam + Mechanics is the next performance/sculpture/installation from the De Pirro + Williams collaborative team. This one has much broader scope than Circumambulator, but the genre is not much of a departure. It was clear that the next phase would be to move to full scale cars. I will attempt here to outline a wide-view explanation of the aspects of this project.

Both of us grew up watching others rebuilding cars. Ray Freeman back in St. John, Indiana, rebuilt cars on his own terms in his family garage. We want to follow this model and react against the current media trend of monetizing the hot rod and the chopper. Building a car is not driven by a profit motive, it is driven by desire and community. Growing up with Ray as a neighbor exposed me to something very different than what I had at home. My father’s garage was and still is utterly useless There are few times that I can recall ever using the garage for anything, especially automotive work. We used it for sculpture. Having said that, there was the infamous body work on the old red van that I assisted with, I believe that I would have been about ten years old. We welded eighth-inch steel sheet directly to the body of the van, replacing areas that had rusted out. The van was a beater, for sure, used for hauling sand and rocks, and taking ceramics to art fairs. It had a CB Radio with an antenna tall enough to strike a railroad viaduct.

These early experiences inform some common aspect of our two very different characters. Understand that this project is not quoting or mocking or usurping American car culture. It is not some tiresome multicultural mash up as is so common in contemporary performing arts and music. It is purely participating in it as artists rather than consumers or collectors. We participate as artists because that is what we are.

As artists we must take the act of rebuilding a car and imbue it with aspects of our collaborative and individual art practices. The activities in the garage become performance. Kaprow would see this as a performative of the everyday as artwork, and to make it such only two things are required. The first is our declaration, quite simply, that this act is art. The second is an audience that is aware of this declaration. Again, the reason for this is that we participate as artists. Within our lives and in this economy, we have limited time for anything other than work, family, and art. Therefore, the garage becomes the studio, mechanics becomes performance.

Audience is that critical issue that defines performance art from a private act. Social media and streaming technology are the perfect means for us to achieve an audience outside of a gallery space. The virtual space has finally become so powerful in our culture that we can use it and have an actual audience. As with the print shop episode, we can stream video live from our performance space and relay that video to an almost unlimited audience. The garage, in other words, would be fully wired. In addition to this wired garage, we fully intended to open the doors of our garage for events, visits by neighbors and friends, and even free, and likely incompetent, car repairs.

This is not to say that we would not or will not show aspects of the work in a gallery. In fact, this is another very important facet to the project. Bantam + Mechanics: Precursor: A Press Play is precisely what I am referring to here. The prints, drawings, video, etc. of this work is gallery ready. This extra stuff is really the artistic product that we will provide for public consumption. The restored Bantam roadster is not really the artwork, it is simply the intellectual focus.

With the loss of our perfect garage space, we are in a bit of a pinch. Without the proper context, we can’t enter the local car culture in the way that we prefer. The loss of the garage is a massive setback, however, the project is not on hold. In fact, the tragic death of Ed Hinds will serve to push the project forward more rapidly, and if it hits a wall during this next phase, it will likely be abandoned for something else.

There is a bit of irony the redaction prints that we produced during the recent print shop episode. We used a sort of burnout mark in ink to block out or disregard historical documents from the city of Hoboken. The print substrate was a set of turn-of-the-century blueprints for the construction of Hoboken’s (now redacted) shipping yards. The Bantam Roadster itself will carry this concept forward. The antique will be saved and likely destroyed at the same time. We will take the historical object and give it a new role as sculpture. The irony is now the project itself has become edited.

How does one begin to enter the American car culture? In grade school, we drew flaming hot-rod Mustangs, Army tanks, and fast fighter jets. Now, as we enter this culture in earnest, with real desire, we follow that same path. Printmaking allows us to once again work together, and begin to define a path for this project. A literal blueprint is used, for example, in some of these prints, that is then altered or even destroyed by a artist’s mark. The blueprint is a plan, and the mark is the effort to take the pedestrian or commercial antique object and convert it to artwork. In doing this, yes, the antique is destroyed, but a new object is born. This is a model for what we will do with our Bantam Roadster in many ways. The new object, in our case, respects the original albeit antique automobile, but we do not fear the damage of provenance that will likely occur.

Our prints are marks of redaction and burnouts on historical documents and plain paper.

These prints illustrate the simplest reduction of what the overall long-term work will be.

http://www.bantammechanics.com/precursor/

De Pirro + Williams

Here is the first good plate that I ran with the new felts that I bought. It is a 10-year old plate from Indiana University undergrad printmaking. Pretty good, and one of about three plates that I would still bother to put ink onto from that old pile of metal.

Taurobolium from Nick De Pirro on Vimeo.

As promised, albeit rather late, here is the mostly edited two-camera video sequence from Taurobolium. Thanks to freelance videographer Brian McGinn, and Mark Remollino of Ambush for the camera work; editing by Project Studios. The original audio composition was created Brian Beard. This is documentation footage. The artwork is the performance, this is not intended to be a replacement for it.

Taurobolium was performed for the Hoboken Studio Tour event October 19. 2008. I just recently got my paws on the second DV tape, so the delay is now over. We created a small-scale poster campaign for the show using my big Xerox Phaser. The first poster uses the infamous Neumann emblem and the second poster usurps a Frederick Remington image of a steer being roped for branding. The Phaser can print wax right to heavy printmaking paper, so the posters had a good weight to them and looked like they came from a silkscreen shop.

I might as well describe a bit of what this performance was about. At the time, the Neumann Leathers factory complex was the center of a development and zoning dispute in Hoboken. From the start, I was always skeptical and am still convinced that the developers will get their hands on the property very soon.Taurobolium was representative of the face offs that were very literally happening once a month at Hoboken City Hall. Ian and I wanted to create a face off of our own, borrowing loosely from the Agamemnon battle scene from Time Bandits. The minotaur is a anthropomorphized factory, and the gladiator is progress, development, etc. Taurobolium is a historical term describing a Roman practice of bull sacrifice, and in this case, the tragic figure of the Minotaur, with the unfortunate circumstances of his conception, is a perfect representation of the factory. Dirty, toxic, neglected, and exploited, the factory stands to loose. Progress wears him down like a matador wears down his opponent through tricks and choreography. The bull only knows the basic rules for fighting and can’t see what is really happening to him.

Visually, the piece consists of two performers, a twelve-foot clay powder circle ringed by a plaster powder stripe. The space is a derelict room in the Neumann Leathers factory on the ground floor. The space is unused and thick with dust. It also contains a massive tumbler used in the tanning process. The tumbler room is lit from the inside, so spectators can get a good look at its details. The Neumann Leathers logo crest is outlined in white plaster in the center of the clay ring. The bovine character’s body is coated in wet clay slip. Additional wet clay leeches out of a yoke around his neck built of bundled leather strips made in the former factory itself. The bovine mask is a modified and exaggerated bull skull with a maine and a tail that drags at his feet.

The opponent wears the clothing of a factory worker, including a leather apron, work gloves, boots, and coveralls. He is dusted with clay powder, and wears an elaborate Roman centurion’s helmet. He is a hybrid figure having the features of both destroyer of the minotaur and the maker of leather goods.

This battle, for me, is the perfect model for the labyrinthine machinations of a development project as it engages the target and destroys it. Every word and every maneuver is dubious. The old factory that served a purpose becomes an anathema and must be destroyed so that the future can take its path and forget its mistakes.

I suppose the factory itself is a labyrinth as well, with the Taurobolium at the center of the maze, but this is perhaps the first read of the piece. The factory is a maze in a very practical sense, an unknown black spot for most of the residents of Hoboken. If for some viewers, this is the maximum depth of meaning for the performance, we would be satisfied. The battle itself is intended to carry the underlying narrative of the battle between the future and past, or in the site specific context, development versus the past. Whether or not the viewer sees the link between themselves and the matador is another question altogether.

As the performance progresses, the audio track becomes more energetic and the face off of the performers gets a little more aggressive. It is all posturing and compensating; a chase. The clay and plaster drawing becomes destroyed by charging feet, and the bull eventually crashes into the center of the ring, wiping out the emblem.

A few links to other images and stories from the event are below. There was not much press, mostly because Hoboken’s art scene is pretty weak no matter what they tell you.

NJ.com’s Jersey Journal

Photo of one of the posters

Studio Tour Map

Project Studios is a thin-profit company; our purpose is to support the arts using a small business model rather than a sales or grants model because we believe that art can be profitable for individuals within their own studio practice. This is achieved by providing inexpensive studio space so that artists can function as professionals even without substantial income. Project Studios LLC has its own ground floor studio space in Neumann Leathers where artist Nick De Pirro has his main studio. Other artists who lease space may use the shop if they have a project that they can’t accommodate in their personal studios.

Project is currently undergoing an expansion as we re-purpose warehouse space in Jersey City, New Jersey for a new common studio and printshop, music rehearsal space, and private studios for visual and performing arts. We are also upgrading our website, so please be patient as we add content to promote our services and the artists that we serve.