Views from the Burning Bridge

...As the twentieth century ends, it looks like the South Bronx's seasons in hell are over...

...for Franz Kafka's Amerika, it was variations on a golden horn...

...Yet it may, down the road, because urbicide keeps happening all over...

...Karl Marx...

...They infused a drab and dilapidated transit system with adventurous graphics and youthful exuberance...

...If the city would back us up and treat us as artists instead of vandals, we could contribute a lot to the beauty of New York...

...0 NE THING that magnifies the trouble here is misunderstanding of some big ideas: "the people," "the community...

...As the Bronx starts a new millennium, it will have a chance to nourish less desperate modes of creativity, and we can look forward to celebrating those...

...In some ways their work evokes the Mexican muralists of the 1920s and 1930s, but the murals and frescoes of Rivera, Orozco, Siqueiros, and others tend toward aggressive flatness, while Ahearn's and Torres's works are especially striking in their exploration of depth...

...Abeam didn't seem to realize that some people wouldn't want statues of Corey, Raymond, and Daleesha around because they didn't like them...

...Like them, it has got "a brand new start," and it isn't so close to the edge anymore...

...but we can be pretty sure what that opinion would be...

...Looking for a way to evoke the full horror of this process, in 1984 I invented a word, urbicide, the murder of a city...

...Their shared desire to communicate with a large public all around the town, and beyond it, set the stage for a brutal, grueling, vastly expensive, materially and humanly destructive conflict with the arrogant and unresponsive bureaucracy of the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA...

...And it made a breakthrough for the whole genre: suddenly, all over America, South as well as North, and all over Europe as well, there were a lot of people out there who wanted to listen to rap...

...It was uncanny how the ruins ran on, building after building, block after block, mile after mile...

...What's wrong with these people...

...Spike Lee cuts corners a little when he has Raheem's boom box smashed by the one white man on his block...

...This dream unfolds itself like a giant panorama...

...But now, in the great cities of the modern world, they have come together again...

...In the end the street is empty, the rap and the rapper both disappear, only the beat goes on...

...And suddenly, the whole world wanted them: colleges wanted K.O.S...

...Women dance in the street, and don't stop dancing just because there's no more street...

...He identifies with two people maimed by violence who get help and somehow survive the violence: They pushed a girl in front of a train, Took her to the doctor, sewed her arm on again...

...Are there any people out there with the largeness of vision and spiritual depth to embrace them all...

...His burden, but also his call, was to sacrifice something he loved nearly as much as he loved the people: his art...

...For Scarlet Letter, it was variations on the red letter "A...

...What was "the message...

...Can it be as close as it looks—we could almost reach out and touch it—or is it, like Kafka's Castle, some sort of existential trap or mirage...

...We can't say for sure, but that's how it looks now...

...For more than a century, these have been New York's overwhelming questions...

...They differed in aesthetics and sensibility: some playful and nonchalant, others existentially desperate...

...It was a magnificent spectacle, but, I felt, somehow too cruel: the destructive process seemed too much like cosmic entropy...

...After that, it's a pretty short list...

...For generations, they held the city together, gave it much of its distinctive flavor, and produced millions of authentic New Yorkers —wise guys and sophisticates, close to the streets but also to a global culture...

...kids, cynical before the age of ten, who want to grow up to be drug dealers because those are the only people they know who command respect...

...Over the roofs, over the water, at the picture's center, our eyes meet the prize: Manhattan's skyscrapers and skyline, bathed in sunshine or radiating electricity and neon light...

...Should we be sad...

...Two of the short stories in "The Message"—the girl pushed in front of the train, the man stabbed through the heart— turn out, a decade later, to be stories of the Bronx itself...

...Then, by surprise, a burst of wishful thinking...

...Then he read to his kids: some books that were in the curriculum, others that were modernist masterpieces...

...Another important fact of life that this sad affair reveals is the culture war among American blacks...

...On other blocks, only a single house is left, with rubble all around...

...For a decade or more, Fashion Moda brought "downtown" artists, musicians, and writers together with "uptown" graffiti painters, rappers, breakdance crews, and curious neighborhood people...

...Stabbed that man right through the heart, Gave him a transplant and a brand new start...

...First they would take polaroid photos of people, to fix the details of what their subjects looked like...

...The first wave of graffitists were at work, coming from all over the city, but from the Bronx most of all...

...He, too, asks, "What's wrong with these people...

...Modern history is full of people, and groups of people, trying to find truth and meaning by going to places where life is a lot harder and more dangerous than the life they live, and trying to connect with the people who live there...

...The big buildings are framed by an infinite day or night or twilight sky, which gives the picture a vanishing point and embeds the dream in the cosmos...

...I don't think so...

...As he told the story to me on the phone in the early 1990s, this is the way he saw it: He believed that anyone who truly loved "the people" had to be prepared to give up everything else...

...It is strange that Koch, so often a boastful man, never boasts about his housing rehabs...

...What seems to have happened next is that Ahearn decided that if "the people" could be so mad at him, then he was failing to communicate, and he must be in the wrong...

...K.O.S...

...Rollins worked the system to develop a splendid art library and art studio, where kids could learn and experiment with every material and style...

...Was it really true that nothing could be done...

...Look at the faces in the crowd, yearning to be cast or just marveling at the work, and you could almost be in a Renaissance painting or a movie scene where Jesus performs a miracle...

...And yet, its city of ruins turned out to be a place where, thanks to art, people coming from very different places started to talk together and work together and recognize each other in ways people had never quite done before...

...Even in its greatest misery and anguish—and in some sense, I think, because of its misery and anguish—the Bronx became more culturally creative than it had ever been in its life...

...Would it be the Garden City of Eden...

...nice girls turned into addicts and whores...

...They all hoped to learn something from the people they encountered, and also to give something back...

...Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens...

...In fact, like every modern city, the South Bronx is deeply divided within itself...

...New York magazine did a headline piece that suggested Rollins was exploiting the kids' native genius, and they should go solo and become superstars...

...some wound up with MTV...

...the building may well be far more striking, now that it is all alone, and if you examine its curves and details, you can often see that once, maybe not long ago, this sole survivor was quite grand...

...and were glad to wash their hands of the promise...

...MARSHALL BERMAN teaches political theory and urbanism at CUNY and is the author of All That Is Solid Melts Into Air and Adventures in Marxism (Verso, forthcoming 1999...

...Whole blocks have vanished or disintegrated into wreckage and debris...

...I was teaching in Harlem, and the kids on the Harlem streets looked a lot better fed...

...But when you see it day after day, year after year, it gets to be a drag...

...His plan turned out to be that, for several years, all of the city's share of federal community development money 82 DISSENT / Summer 1999 would be channeled here, while other city neighborhoods would get nothing at all...

...Some of the images suggest even more: there is a series of photos of a multiple casting of what looks like a Walton Avenue block party on a lovely summer day in 1985...

...We could have interesting discussions about this, in the Bronx or in Manhattan...

...The most luminous visions of New York are views from the bridge...

...Later on, when he and other graffitists got a chance to make money, they took it and ran...

...Looking at their life stories, we can see their graffiti years as first steps up a ladder, and admire their resourcefulness in finding markets for themselves...

...I've described this tragic conflict as a Bronx problem, a black problem, an art problem...

...As a Bronx character in Grace Paley's short story "Somewhere Else" put it, "The block is burning down on one side of the street, and the kids are trying to build something on the other...

...It's like a jungle sometimes it makes me wonder how I keep from going under...

...the narrator can't stand the pain, can't stand the noise, but "got no money in my pocket, so I got no choice...

...THIS WAS the context in which Stephen Eins, an artist from Vienna, established Fashion Moda, a gallery and "alternate space" in a storefront on Third Avenue, just below "the Hub" of 149th Street in the South Bronx...

...junkies in the alley with baseball bats...

...And if we do make the leap, if we make a life inside those buildings, if we make ourselves into authentic New Yorkers, what will it do to us as human beings...

...Vergara feels a special empathy for architecture, for buildings...

...He didn't grasp how terrifying a presence this large street person is to the people who live on Spike Lee's street...

...Fekner's billboards often dominated their environments, and provided ironic commentary on some of the photo ops that various politicians grasped in front of the ruins...

...But rap's first great hit, when it finally came, was heavy, dark, and deep...

...Even as the fires and violence were wrecking the Bronx's old roads downtown, a great outpouring of cultural energy was forging new connections with downtown...

...Some blocks that not long ago were claustrophobic, perpetually shadowed, packed too tight with people, are sun-drenched now, wide open and empty as deserts...

...John has gone farther than any downtown artist I know in "going to the people": he didn't just work in the South Bronx, but lived in it, all through the 1980s and into the 1990s...

...So do I, and it's right to celebrate the modern city street as a primary source of creativity...

...Nobody seems to have asked Alcina Salgado her opinion of the rap music that would be the most likely sound to come out of Corey's boom box (as it came out of Radio Raheem's...

...The Message" showed that there was not only a national but an international audience for rap...

...The two I know best are Mel Rosenthal and Camilo José Vergara...

...During the troubles, the Bronx lost over three hundred thousand people, and the South Bronx plummeted past census tracts in backwoods Louisiana and Mississippi to become, so the media said—I haven't been able to document this, but it could be—the poorest congressional district in the country...

...Then the chorus again...

...A few years ago, he displayed one of his grandest series: the gradual disintegration of an apartment house on Vyse Avenue into nothingness...

...Rollins began in 1981 as an art teacher in Junior High School 52, working with about forty early-teenagers who were classified as learning disabled and at risk of dropping out...

...And, to an amazing extent, they really did...

...When Salgado offers an instant analysis of the class structure that cleaves the South Bronx in two—"the people who go to school and the people who go to work" versus "the people you find on the roof"—this grim dualism rings true...

...towns all over America and in Europe wanted horn murals for their Town Halls...

...His work with these kids and his emerging love for them crystallized into a distinctive sort of art workshop...

...But sometimes the self-criticism was so corrosive as to bring on paralysis...

...There are differences in their styles: Torres's faces are more monochromatic, Ahearn's more layered...

...In "The Message," Mellie Mel chants in a rich and intensely dramatic voice: Don't push me, 'cause I'm close to the edge, trying not to lose my head...

...some addressing their audience with respect and esteem, others driven by an in-your-face punk disdain...

...His serial photographs of buildings in the 1970s and 1980s dramatize, year by year, the disintegration of that glory...

...Maybe the city has sealed it off with a steel fence or maybe it is wide open and you are welcome to take whatever fragments you want...

...Myriad horrors are compressed into a couple of minutes...

...Ironically, as the fires have abated, and the ruins have been rebuilt, it has become a less compelling subject for art...

...What would be the wider ripples of neighborhood collapse...

...Can we live in, can we even imagine, a city that includes them all...

...Both of them have done serious work outside New York—Rosenthal in Puerto Rico and Central America and Vergara in Detroit and Los Angeles —but it was in the South Bronx that they came into their own...

...But the power to imagine was itself an achievement...

...They were supposed to fuse their kids' energy and desire with the city's primal sources of energy downtown...

...Indeed, his recent work shows Vyse Avenue inhabited again...

...I can't say very well...

...In the course of the 1980s, as public services kept shrinking, with gang violence and AIDS killing the young, it would get even harder...

...For years, the Bronx existed in an urbicidal hell, over the edge...

...Howard Cosell barked on national television, during the 1976 World Series at Yankee Stadium, as the camera from the Goodyear Blimp showed a building on fire less than a mile from the field...

...There were plenty of journalists and pseudo-social scientists (often subsidized by right-wing foundations) only too glad to tell them their character flaws...

...I went to the people, and it worked...

...Moreover, his voice reveals that he sees himself as one of "these people": the story is about "us," not "them...

...Compared with the radical dualism that haunted Alcina Salgado, there seems to be a far more complex and highly differentiated social structure in place today...

...We have to remember to celebrate that...

...Our neighborhoods, including the poorest ones—maybe especially the poorest ones—were supposed to be roads and bridges leading to the city's heights...

...In the midst of dying, it was busy being born...

...David Finn's work featured life-size figures sculpted out of garbage bags, old newspapers, and street debris, arranged and displayed provocatively in buildings or on streets, in ways that suggested political prisoners (the South Bronx was full of Latin Americans and Africans who could tell stories), massacred victims of the drug gang wars (there were plenty), or (this was the kids' favorite idea) space invaders...

...but after the nightmarish monumentality of the ruins, the absence of monuments may be a relief...

...but, no thanks to him and his friends, the Bronx today seems to have a lot more blood than it did...

...When they came to define themselves as artists, they were all committed to making art that would mean something...

...They gradually developed a signature form, the literary mural...

...But this vision of the people's wholeness has more to do with mythology than with demography...

...You could say the Bronx has lost its aura...

...Imagine yourself dropped into the Bronx DISSENT / Summer 1999 77 around 1981, enjoying the familiar view downtown...

...Devoid of mutual understanding, they fight, the Tower crashes into ruins, and they "scatter . . . over the face of all the earth...

...but for us, going to those same places, even to meet them there, was going "downtown": we took it for granted that we and Manhattan's wonders were part of the same town...

...Can it be real...

...He paid to have the statues taken down, and soon after he left the Bronx...

...For people who stayed, life was hard...

...This was "The Message," by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, released by Sugar Hill in the Reagan summer of 1982...

...It isn't in the news very much...

...In the 1950s, when I was growing up in the Bronx, the act of crossing over into Manhattan seemed like a smooth and easy flow both ways...

...It is as if the people of the Bronx have begun building the Tower of Babel again, reaching for Vergara's luminescent blue sky...

...But Rollins says reports of its death are exaggerated: he is still there on Longwood Avenue, the workshop is still open, they are still doing murals all over the country, his senior class had 100 percent college acceptance last year...

...I visited some of these classes on Longwood Avenue a decade ago, and I don't know what his kids' standard reading test scores were, but I can testify that they were there...

...If you walk or drive around the Bronx today, after a few years of being away, it looks like miracle or magic...

...Alongside these graffitists, sometimes the same people, were the Bronx rappers...

...Meanwhile, other people surfaced within the city bureaucracy who had nothing to do with the neighborhood, but who attacked Ahearn for having politically incorrect skin...

...Art and artists were among the forces that helped it up, and helped it get back into the flow of normal, ambiguous modern life...

...Almost insensibly, in barely a decade, the South Bronx has gone through a great leap, from apocalyptic horror to ordinary city life...

...In a short time, working fervidly, they created a number of gorgeous and inspiring horn murals...

...The Message" became an instant classic, endlessly quoted, parodied, and sampled...

...That was how some people imagined the Bronx a hundred years ago...

...Can we get there on the subway...

...A surprising alliance of the Fire Department, the Mayor's Task Force Against Arson, the insurance companies, and the urban left (the Village Voice, City Limits, and so on) focused instead on the character of the South Bronx's landlords...

...Some early rappers came from musically sophisticated families, with strong backgrounds in jazz and R&B...

...It was to dread...

...Sometimes there is a whole new zone, kind of a fore-foreground, that stands between you and the buildings: a blanket of cracked and burnt brick and wood and stone and tile and marble and steel and fabric and paper and plastic, shards of thousands and thousands of lives...

...What would happen if all the peoples who make up a modern city could understand each other...

...Arthur Symes, an assistant commissioner in the Department of Cultural Affairs, delivered this verdict: "He's not of the community because he's not black—it's simply that...

...Jimmy Carter was there in 1976, appeared moved, and promised to rebuild the South Bronx—only, as with many Carter initiatives, it wasn't supposed to cost the federal government an extra dime...

...like virtually everybody there, he became the victim of both random and intentional violence...

...Sculptor Rigoberto Torres is the most important artist who found his calling by walking off the street and into Fashion Moda out of sheer curiosity) Eins was immensely resourceful at working various government bureaucracies and helping artists get space to mount innovative installations in schools and parks, in abandoned apartment buildings (there were so many), and on the streets...

...But Daze, who had worked with the relatively sympathetic school and park bureaucracies, must have known what an implacable fortress he faced in the MTA...

...For many black Americans, especially (though not only) kids, rap, and the street life that rap celebrates, is part of the solution...

...One Fashion Moda artist, John Fekner, used the walls of abandoned apartment houses to create what in effect were giant billboards, with captions like BROKEN PROMISES and LAST HOPE...

...Because he really feels it, and makes us feel it, the process of its destruction is so heartrending...

...BUT THERE were even better accelerants at work in the social stereotyping process...

...they are not only survivors but pioneers...

...some emphasizing pure visuals, others blending images with texts (IF ART IS A CRIME, MAY GOD FORGIVE ME...

...Now many tenements and apartment houses are cracked, burnt, split apart, caved in...

...One thing that gave this situation an especially sinister twist is how many Bronx people came 78 DISSENT / Summer 1999 to see themselves as "these people," how many victims of suspicious fires came to think of themselves as prime suspects...

...The mural's background was always a reproduction of the text...

...Lloyd's of London was said to have lost $20 million in the 1970s on Bronx insurance pools...

...K.O.S...

...some conveying instant entertainment, usually through parodies of Disney or Warner Brothers cartoons, others more ruminative, abstract, even hieroglyphic...

...If even a few people are mad at Ahearn—and there's no evidence it was ever more than a few—he blames himself for trampling on a whole community...

...Meanwhile, we can think about the Tower of Babel again...

...You can see, from both his friezes and his Walton Avenue photos, how much John Ahearn loves the street and the people who spend much of their lives on it...

...The ruins of the Bronx became a place where people could imagine modern life together afresh...

...In 1980, in the midst of this conflict, Daze said: If the MTA really understood graffiti, they would know it's one of the best things subways have going for them...

...Among the most famous and most beautiful are Double Dutch, Back to School, and We Are Family...

...In the dream, our eyes reach longingly over our tenement or brownstone or rowhouse roofs, and the smooth roofline (most New York neighborhoods have uniform rooflines) looks like a road...

...Charles Saatchi and Mary Boone wanted all the work they could get...

...He especially loves the aspiration toward Renaissance and Baroque grandeur that makes Bronx apartment houses so special...

...Then maybe, as God said, "nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do...

...For several years, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, more than a thousand Bronx buildings each year were destroyed by fire...

...The persistence of the ruins became embarrassing to public officials, and their embarrassment produced unconscious comedy...

...It never did...

...Is any of us ready for fifteen minutes of American fame...

...was a splendid fusion of uptown and downtown, and it was sad to see it mangled by its own success...

...Whatever the reason, these thousands of effective rehabs are his greatest political accomplishment, and he deserves credit, whether he wants it or not...

...Should Jesus be on it...

...But anybody who cares about the Bronx has to see that a sacrifice of noble and dedicated people and their work is the last thing the Bronx needs...

...It's hard to see, it's not on the street, it's not in your face...

...An archetypal Mel Rosenthal shot is kids playing in broken buildings, or families passing by the ruins, or the last old man or woman (whose face looks centuries old) in a building that looks about to collapse, or looks like it already has collapsed...

...Together they developed what became a signature style...

...These enterprises include Christian missionaries in Africa, China, and all over the world...

...The building is on a smaller scale, twoDISSENT / Summer 1999 83 story row houses, as against yesterday's vanished palaces...

...he may have configured himself this way), Raymond kneeling with his pit bull, and Daleesha on her roller skates...

...When the Bronx, after decades of peaceful anonymity, finally made it into the mass media as a symbol of all that could go wrong in city life, it wasn't just the buildings in the Bronx that were breaking down: it felt like a rupture in both New York's everyday reality and its archetypal dream...

...But, in their connection to New York's downtown art scene, they were also products of a radically skeptical modernist culture that put all traditional and conventional meanings in doubt, so that, circa 1970, although they wanted to mean something, the meaning of "meaning" was not at all clear...

...Salgado, along with her daughter (B.A., Sarah Lawrence), stood on the plaza and denounced Ahearn, his models, and his art...

...on any real block he would find plenty of black volunteers...

...As it reaches for the sky, this complex of buildings beckons us to a life of passionate striving, feverish intensity, and expressive fullness, and it seems to deny that there are any limits on what human beings can do...

...On bad days I go and look at my effigy, and feel better...

...Now John has paid plenty of dues, and if a belief in the holiness of sacrifice helped him get over, then anybody who cares about him has to be glad...

...The city center in Manhattan, with its spectacular cluster of big buildings and bright lights, has a magical aura...

...They felt they were different from, and better than, missionaries or imperial troops, in that they were not trying to enforce a system of meanings whose truth was pre-established, but rather to work with the people of the Bronx to create new meanings that could light up the whole world...

...Meanwhile, none of "the people" from his block stepped up to help him...

...These children won't be robbed of their childhood: they don't stop playing just because their playground has been destroyed...

...On the other hand, he didn't make any moves to mobilize defenders, though the South Bronx always was and still is full of them...

...he lacks the inner cynicism to be a guide through the circus of art...

...This interplay is the subject of the movie Wild Style, where Lee is a star...

...Some of these kids developed careers as designers...

...In many versions of this story, including Ahearn's own, there's a slippage between "people" and "the people...

...I'm part of a frieze of CCNY People, painted by Torres, mounted above the entrance to the college cafeteria...

...Abeam is a native of Binghamton, a graduate of Cornell...

...In Genesis 11, God is frightened by people's powers, and undertakes to "confuse their language" so they won't be able to understand each other...

...Can we stay...

...Many blocks 86 DISSENT /Summer 1999 are still empty and fenced off, but that expressionist dreamscape, those jagged haunting forms of ruins, are nearly gone...

...The people most visible on the South Bronx streets were kids, and lots of those kids looked startlingly hungry—hungry like kids in turn-of-the-century photographs by Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine, hungry like American kids weren't supposed to be any more...

...his twin brother is the filmmaker Charlie Ahearn, director of Wild Style...

...if you didn't recognize streets and buildings, you could almost feel you were on a different planet...

...But in the 1970s and 1980s, the Bronx's view from the bridge was radically impaired...

...DISSENT / Summer 1999 85 Ahearn himself seems to have lived through this affair by framing it in starkly Christian terms: suffering, trial, ordeal, sacrifice...

...His refrain warns us, "So don't push me 'cause I'm close to the edge/Trying not to lose my head...

...and Bronx graffitists, violently banned from the subways, found a new life covering broken buildings with enormous inscriptions: "This is a decal," "This is a fake," "This is a ruin...

...At the end of the 1970s, wherever blacks lived, rap was busting out all over, but a concentration of the first great DJs came from the Bronx—Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, Grandmaster Flash—and they vied with each other, in dozens of small Bronx clubs, parks, and school auditoriums, with thousands of participant young listeners, to create a distinctive rap sound of samples, beats and rhymes...

...But it's really a human problem...

...This is usually across the water (where four-fifths of the city's population comes from), but it could just as well be on the Lower East Side or in Hell's Kitchen or Little Italy or Chinatown or Harlem...

...TuRN Now to the visual art that was made by people from downtown who came uptown, who worked and sometimes lived in the South Bronx in its fire years, and whose work was shaped by being there...

...Doing Amerika together at once bonded and inspired them...

...I missed the one from the USSR...

...Seven years later, the large pedestals are still empty...

...If we go, can we come back...

...some went to Hollywood...

...It is the focal point of every New Yorker's primal dream...

...In Rosenthal's photos it looks more like heavy artillery...

...On the local news, you could see families weeping in front of their smoking buildings, and asking, "What did we do...

...their big brothers, who go from unemployed to killers to dead...

...That would mean embracing not only the work-and-school people, and the street-androof people, but also the art people who try to embrace them both...

...Anyone coming to New York for the first time in the 1970s, or returning here, had to be struck by thousands of subway cars satuDISSENT / Summer 1999 79 rated with luminous primary colors...

...Early in the 1980s, insurance companies stopped paying claims on Bronx fires, and the burning of the Bronx came to an abrupt end...

...I was delighted: what it meant for me was the power of the word, which was what I'd been trying to teach all along...

...THE CATALOGUE of their 1991 HoustonCincinnati-Honolulu show, entitled South Bronx Hall of Fame, contains many photographs of Ahearn and Torres working out on the street, in a festival atmosphere, caught up in creative rapture, at home at last...

...This rapper's attitudes here are complex and hard to keep in any sort of emotional balance...

...If the MTA really understood...

...And, although different artists responded differently to graffiti and rap, they all felt inspired to be working with a generation of kids who not only knew how to be active and creative in the midst of great pain, but knew how to be citizens, seeking a public meaning for their lives...

...0 NE OF THE most striking art initiatives in the recent Bronx has been Tim Rollins's studio, which he named "K.O.S.," Kids Of Survival...

...But he doesn't settle for any cliché answer—not even the answer that they are victims, though he makes it clear that they are...

...It will be a time before they can do all they imagine...

...When City Council representatives of those other neighborhoods protested, Carter's aides said, in effect, "What's wrong with these people...

...some projecting spontaneous overflows of powerful feeling, others tending toward elaborate patterns of design...

...but for many others, especially their parents, it is part of the problem...

...A great burst of creativity emerged from the Bronx's ruins, and it deserves remembrance and celebration...

...Like much exciting public art in the Bronx (and everywhere else), it elicited enthusiastic support from children and anger from many of their parents...

...Alas, even expensive decals still looked like cartoons...

...Then, once more, the concrete jungle...

...Or maybe, We come from ruins, but we are not ruined...

...There are no monuments of transformation...

...But it's important to recall that behind the private success there was a public failure...

...I MACES CHANGE their meanings over time...

...to give a workshop...

...The vita of Jean-Michel Basquiat, who could have been a character in "The Message" —an art star before he was twenty-five, dead from a drug overdose before he was thirty—must have cast a long shadow in these kids' lives...

...But many people found it easier to protect themselves from the flames than from the carpet bombings of invective that blamed them for the ruin of their world...

...The picture's foreground is the dreamer's neighborhood...

...Then, after placing their subject on a pallet, they would pile on layer after layer of plaster, while the model breathed through a straw and prayed that it wouldn't break...

...Then a collage of street sounds, culminating in a police siren, a (black) voice ordering everyone to freeze, motors taking them all away...

...His people use the rubble as sites for new dances and new games...

...Gauguin going to Tahiti, and Van Gogh going to peasant sharecroppers and coal miners...

...What a relief it must have been to think of the fires as something "these people" were doing to themselves: then you wouldn't have to worry about whether the Bronx's troubles were somehow your troubles...

...Finn's work was visually striking and beautifully realized: it evoked Picasso in his African mask and his "Guernica" periods...

...In Genesis 11, God worries about this: if people can build and maintain such a city, then "nothing will be restrained from them, that they imagine to do...

...Artists working in the Bronx were aware of these very mixed examples, recognized the potential for exploitation—as in, "Take me to the burning buildings...

...Look at the pieces, and the pictures, and you can see that, at least for a while, it did...

...Many outstanding photographers appeared in the Bronx in the 1970s and 1980s, not only documenting the horrors, but portraying powerful visions of the human condition, and putting together impressive bodies of work...

...Huhh huh huh Huhh) Mellie Mel then takes us on a Bronx neighborhood tour: Broken glass everywhere, people pissing on the streets like they just don't care...

...American civil rights workers of the 1960s, going from the North to the South...

...This cityscape has the chutzpah of the biblical dream of Babel: An earlier version of this essay was published in Urban Mythologies: The Bronx Represented Since the 1960s (New York: The Bronx Museum of the Arts, 1999), which accompanies an exhibition on view at The Bronx Museum of the Arts from April 8 to September 5, 1999...

...Lee was one of many who liked to incorporate "views from the bridge" in their murals, thus carrying on a dialogue and interplay between uptown and downtown...

...In the poorest congressional district in the United States, rap was an exemplary musica povera...

...They all were (and still are) part of the sixties generation: they grew up, and defined themselves as artists, during the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War...

...John hoped to strike a friendly chord by casting Corey, the wannabee Raheem...

...On the horizon, you can see that the towers of Manhattan's Oz are still there, as alluring as ever...

...But now there is a new trajectory, going upward after decades of coming down...

...They would discuss the books together, and try to imagine how they might be represented...

...The rebuilding of the Bronx has been incremental, but enormous...

...predatory repo men...

...Stanley Simon, Bronx Borough President during the worst troubles, proposed covering the miles of broken buildings along the Cross-Bronx Expressway with decals that portrayed curtains, plants, and peaceful domestic scenes...

...Arthur Symes may be able to help us see this...

...Martin Luther King, Jr...

...The urbicidal ruins that came to afflict American cities, the Bronx worst of all, felt like a savage destruction of that dream...

...That history filled them with a high seriousness and a sense of human urgency...

...the whole anthropology profession, from its beginnings in remote islands and valleys to its current embrace of inner-city neighborhoods...

...WHAT ART IS being created in the Bronx today...

...Full disclosure: They also did me, while they were in residence at CCNY's art department in 1985...

...Some of them showed obvious artistic talents —Revolt, Futura 2000, Daze, Crash, Sonic, Phase II, the United Artists, Fab Five Freddie, Dondi, who died this past April, and others I've long forgotten...

...Some apartment houses are split by their courtyards (the Bronx was once known for its splendid courtyards), lived-in on one side, burnt-out on the other...

...Or maybe loaves and fishes: the power of art creates enough for all...

...These men and women worked in very different styles, with radically different (and sometimes DISSENT / Summer 1999 81 inwardly contradictory) imaginative visions, but there are human contexts they had in common...

...She offered an arch definition: "There are people who go to school and people who go to work, and then there are the people we find on the roof...

...Alcina Salgado, a retired housekeeper who agitated against his work, described Ahearn's subjects as "roof people...

...But it's also true that cities today are full of people like the Salgados, who feel it's a matter of life and death to protect their children from the street—and they're right, too...

...In cities that have become poor and broken by urbicide, the divisions have become radical polarizations...

...The first time you see a landscape of ruins, it is terrifying but magnificent, sublime...

...It's as if Ahearn is telling us, "Behold...

...On September 25, 1991, the bronze figures were installed...

...Vergara said Wait, the story wasn't over, he was sure he would be back...

...Torres's faces suggest folk art, and (like much modern art) seem to want to look more primitive than they are...

...Political boss Raymond Velez is still bleeding the Bronx from his ever-thriving Hunts Point Multi-Service Center, just off Westchester Avenue...

...Although plenty of terrific art springs from desperation, I think most great art grows out of normal life...

...Ahearn's faces seem to want to look more archaic than they are (also a great tradition in modern art), time-travelling toward the Christian anguish of Tintoretto, Rembrandt, Van Gogh...

...People called it the Ruins Section, and I knew many people who, like me, read the Ruins Section first of all...

...the Carter Community Employment and Training Act program, which could have paid unemployed artists to camouflage broken buildings, expired under Reagan...

...Water into wine...

...Another brilliant initiative, with a more tragic denouement, was launched by the painter John Ahearn...

...Others had grown up too poor to take music lessons or have their own instruments, but had strong feeling for rhythm, powerful voices, and sharp wits...

...It doesn't signify the way it used to...

...This overall feeling seems to be confirmed in sharply diminished crime—even those who are reluctant to admit that anything has changed finally concede that a lot fewer kids are shooting each other— and in improved public health and AIDS statistics...

...But the Bronx did not have to hide its light under a decal...

...Many of these kids had hardly been out of the Bronx in their lives, and they weren't ready for celebrity...

...Russian intellectuals in the 1870s, "going to the people...

...In 1986, Ahearn, here working without Torres, won a city competition for bronze sculptures to adorn a plaza in front of a new Police Station, under the Jerome Avenue el (the IRT Number 4), a couple of blocks from where he lived...

...In the late 1970s, at the City College of New York (CCNY), where I taught, up in Harlem, every Thursday during Club Hour, somebody brought out turntables, and a DJ scratched and collaged dozens of records together, while kids in the audience took turns playing MC, rapping over an open mike...

...From the cast they would 84 DISSENT / Summer 1999 make a bust or full-body sculpture, which one of them would paint...

...Then Simon went to prison for bribery and extortion, and people laughed about the politician's new clothes, and wondered what his decals would cover now...

...The spirit of early raps tended toward dancehall and party music, with funny, shal80 DISSENT / Summer 1999 low lyrics like these from "Live Connection '82," by The Grand Wizard Theodore: "The people in the back, you ain't the wack/The people in the middle, let me see you wiggle/ Young lady in the blue, I'm talking to you/but don't you stop that body rock...

...Rats in the rooms...

...I thought this word would be my contribution to the American idiom, but although I've seen it used a couple of times, it hasn't really caught on...

...In the commercial sector, some did very well...

...They were united by empathy for people who, as "The Message" said, were living "close to the edge...

...In the late 1970s, the New York Times had a little box, on page two or three of the Local Section, that listed all the buildings burned or destroyed the previous day or night...

...My favorite was Lee Quinones, whose murals fused surreal landscapes with provocative texts: STOP THE BOMB, WAR IS SELFISH DEATH, MAN IS ALMOST EXTINCT...

...You will spot the difference right away: the foreground is broken...

...DISSENT / Summer/999 87...

...When our relatives from Brooklyn went to a Broadway theater or Madison Square Garden, they would say they were going to "the city...

...Rollins is a great teacher of the wonder of art and the discipline of art...

...These kids, mostly (though not entirely) black and Latin and male, were denounced and repeatedly arrested, but in the course of the 1970s their work developed a bold and adventurous visual language...

...He insists on the self-destructive idiocy of the people in the slum he lives in, but also on their human dignity...

...Rosenthal works in the tradition of humanist snapshots developed by Europeans like Henri CartierBresson, and by great war photographers like Robert Capa...

...But don't doubt it's there...

...The metamessage is something like this: not only social disintegration, but even existential desperation, can be sources of life and creative energy...

...The capacity for soul-making in the throes of suffering lit up the Bronx with an aura all its own...

...The ensuing debacle has been vividly described by Jane Kramer in her 1994 book Whose Art is It...

...You can't hurry love, no, you just have to wait...

...but also, in the news every day for years, the American armed forces going to "win the hearts and minds" of the Vietnamese people, and destroying their villages in order to save them...

...Some of the kids went on to art schools and began artistic careers, and even those who didn't stay with art learned some things about life that have surely helped them grow up...

...But Kramer finds something else he says (she cites it on the same page) that may be more relevant here: "He saw John's pieces as monuments to everything he'd been trying to save his community from...

...On Bronx walks I met people from camera crews, sometimes from the local news—working on the latest disaster—but also from Canada, England, Italy, Sweden...

...For that matter, Rollins himself, who had been out of the Bronx plenty—he had grown up in Maine, graduated from the School of Visual Arts, worked for Joseph Kossuth—wasn't ready for it either...

...Has he moved so far to the right that he is embarrassed to be identified with the lives of the poor...

...Together they cast and painted hundreds of figures, mostly neighborhood people, individually and in groups, posing or hanging out, talking or kissing, and many environmental friezes that adorn South Bronx walls...

...suddenly the kids were bigshots in Soho and all over town...

...But when the graffitists of the Bronx began, they had more than self-marketing in mind: they saw themselves as citizens, and insisted on the civic and public meaning of their work...

...But it helps if you have an idea of what you are waiting for...

...Now, everybody loves Shakespeare, even four hundred years later, because we know he loved them all...

...He grasps one of the glories of the Bronx, for which it will go down in history: its ability to deliver real grandeur to the working classes...

...Around 1980, he moved from downtown Manhattan to Walton Avenue near 171st Street, a dilapidated but lively neighborhood about a mile from Yankee Stadium...

...The figures he chose for this plaza, all neighborhood people he knew, were named Corey, Raymond, and Daleesha: Corey with a boom box and a basketball (he was configured as a homage to Radio Raheem in Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing...

...But the company imploded...

...And it wasn't the kids who failed...

...Symes, remember, was the black bureaucrat unearthed by Kramer who said John was the wrong man because he had the wrong color skin...

...There he began to work with Walton Avenue native Rigoberto (Robert) Torres...

...Maybe, We can be home in the middle of the end of the world...

...Another theme they all absorbed from modernism was the idea that authentic art could be created only by experiment, constant experimentation not only on raw material (paint, canvas, plaster, bronze, paper, wood, steel, plastic, and so on), but on the artist himself, on his or her whole being...

...The rapper addresses a handsome corpse, asks him how he could be so dumb: "you lived so fast and died so young...

...In Kramer's reconstruction of the day, Ahearn tried to engage them in dialogue, but the more he tried to talk, the more angrily they condemned him...

...Cosell asked, in a tone that supplied its own answer, "Don't these people have any self-respect...

...but close to the ground, the Bronx's yellow brick roads have crumbled into craters and minefields...

...lives...

...Rosenthal understands how people can make themselves at home in negative spaces...

...I want a lover from the ruins"—and hoped that endless self-criticism could help them avoid it...

...Are there any artists out there who can embrace both CoreyRaymond-Daleesha and the Salgados...

...On block after block of the South Bronx, it is clear that Mayor Ed Koch's five-billion-dollar, ten-year plan for housing rehabilitation has been a tremendous success...

...This complex of feelings forces him to walk a thin line...

...the foreground, exquisite variations on the common theme...

...The Fire Department listed the great majority as "suspicious fires," which left behind traces of fire accelerants...