Lost in the ArtChurch vol. 1: Awakenings, Asleepenings, Adreamenings, Aschemenings

A few weekends back, we attended the sanctification of an an antinomian church, located deep along the border between Bushwick and Ridgewood. We'd been to the Christian Center Sanctuary of Hope before & had participated and written about the experience and art-exorcism of Gordon Matta-Clark. So we were excited about returning and reviewing the latest event slash artattack to take place far away from the well-trod artist paths of Williamsburg and the LES. The Christian Center Sanctuary of Hope (for simplicity's sake, CCSH) is a former storefront-turned-Latino-Roman-Catholic-church-turned-vacant-room-turned-artist-haunt-slash-performance-space, run by three friends of ours: Matthew Blair, Lech Szporer and Andrew Wingert.
The playbill promised a lot: performances, photography, hot liquored drinks, theater, mime, noise band, and possibly the sacrificing of a live chicken named Lucy. When we arrived at the CCSH we were impressed by the full house of young creative peoples jamming the floor, drinking hot toddies and exploring the decor, which included: tree branches rising out of dirt mounds on the wooden floor; two enormous church pews built on risers facing the stage; a ceiling-suspended rope web large enough to climb into, laden with dangling church organ pipes; candles spinning on a Victrola player; vintage radio microphones and more. The carefully constructed aesthetic of slow but beautiful decay contributed to the atmosphere.

Someone in the audience shouted "Cold as hell tonight" and the burbling laughter belied the fact that CCSH is a church, but instead of religion, it offers experience. The experience, like regular churches, is to pull the church-goers out of their expected levels of comfort, to shift their mode of intake and let that shift permeate other processes of life. To enter the building one way and leave changed. Such is the process of Artaudian theater, named after the great pervert of French theatrical aesthetics, Antonin Artaud. Not an easy accomplishment, especially with today's jaded and ironic youth. However it wasn't for CCSH's want of trying.
The opening act consisted of a not-quite-goth girl playing some plaintive songs on guitar, with good intention. Following the music, Becky the Burlesque performer as Neurotic Jewish Mother Necrophiliac. The stand-up routine that followed would've given Woody Allen a hard-on and material for his analyst. The act subsited of both a comic monologue and a live example of teabagging corpses set to Celine Dion. Subtlety it wasn't, and life-shifting it absolutely aint. Then the third act.

A stocky, not unattractive but not particularly engaging actress in a blond wig took the stage and started to do a Tammy Faye Bakker self-help shtick. The southern accent, the "Yes, you can do it too!" power attitude, the 80s music, all of it, a little tiring and expected. Until she stripped down naked in the middle of this unheated church, and proceeded to give a hygiene and sex-ed course on the proper way to insert objects into one's anus and vagina. It was astonishing - by the gaping mouths and wide-eyed shock it seemed that no-one in the audience had seen anything like it. The performer, Ann Liv Young, was using her own splayed legs as the easel and her cunt and asshole as the anatomy chart. Eventually Ms. Young got up, butt-ass naked and all, and thrashed her way around the church, grinding against audience members as 80s house music thumped. Her aggressively sexual dance piece would have been at place in a megaclub in Chelsea, but performed by a naked woman in a blond wig in the middle of an Art-Awakening truly blew this church-goers mind.
Then Lucy the chicken came into the picture. Lucy was supposedly due to meet the chopping block right on the floor of CCSH, but an unnamed woman in tears (who according to Mr. Blair, wasnt part of the show) rushed the stage and made a plea to spare the chicken's life. Another shifting moment, bringing an audience member to interrupt the show. Lucy, along with Ann-Liv Young eventually escaped, courtesy of Ms. Young, her videographer Michael, and a getaway car waiting outside.

The next act started when an argument exploded between two audience members, who moved down to the central staging area and expounded, in Shakespearean English, the accurate process to live a passionate life. It was entertaining, if a bit too pretentious. My lady and I liked the part where both gentlemen chomped down on raw cow heart, only at the insistence of each other. After the argument, it started to rain inside the church, and a group photograph was called for, so the crowd reassembled themselves outside and all posed, shiveringly.

There was still the noise band and mimery to follow the intermission, but we had experienced enough moments of suspended comfort, and besides, I had worked all day while fighting a cold. It was a fast, long walk to our apartment where a warm bed and hot tea were waiting to soothe our souls. Following burlesque necrohiliac stand-up and naked lessons in sexual physionomy, after the almost-slaughter of a chicken and consumed raw cow hearts, tea and sleep will do just fine.

Lost in History vol. 66: Art Revival, by way of Queens

On the corner of Onderdonk and Harman streets in southern Ridgewood lies a church façade. As spelled out bilingually on purple canvas, the previous occupant of this space was the Christian Center Sanctuary of Hope, a Roman Catholic Latino congregation. The new occupants of the space are also called the Christian Center Sanctuary of Hope, but with an entirely different bend to their professed spirituality. There hasn’t been a straight-up religious sermon in the Center for years, but this past Saturday night, a different kind of sermon was held, spiritual in nature but preaching art and aesthetics, noise and performance, and the very strange story of a very famous artist and his attempts to buy oddly shaped lots at tax auctions in NYC.
We know the backstory because we are friends with the occupants of the Christian Center Sanctuary of Hope, and they asked us to emcee the evening’s events. The good men who live at the Sanctuary — three literary and visual artists by the names of Matthew Blair, Lech Szporer and Andrew Wingert — have built lofts and incorporated the layout of the former church into a communal performance space. They opened on Saturday with a Revival that featured installation art, sculptures, music, tap dance, mime, an exercise bike that masturbated a man in a lazy chair, feedback noise, preaching, and a mysterious excursion that led to a former piece by the aforementioned very famous NYC artist. Lesser known (but no less serious) artists included yours truly, along with David Button, Trevor Lukert, Superman’s Guestlist, Marisa Mickelberg, Issac Zal, the Buddy Hollyco$t, Amery Kessler, Carrie Fox, Shana Paleologos, Andrew Hurst, Phillip Battikha, Ryan Brown, and Justin Horne. And of course, Gordon Matta-Clark.
Matta-Clark was not present at the opening — he died in 1978, at the age of 35, of pancreatic cancer. During his short but powerful life he was known for various artistic experiments and performances as well as for catalyzing SoHo as an artistic neighborhood during the derelict 70s. His works, called “anarchitecture”, involved removing pieces and slivers of buildings before they met the wrecking ball; he opened a restaurant/ongoing performance piece in SoHo called Food, staffed entirely by working artists; he also purchased tiny, unusable slivers called “gutterspace” of NYC real estate during the city’s regular purging of such lots. Due to surveying, zoning and public-works anomalies, various infinitesimal slices of real estate came to be owned by Matta-Clark, who found in them a perfect bureaucratic extension of his own anarchitecture. Fourteen lots were located in Queens and one in Staten Island. Unfortunately, Matta-Clark passed away before he could do whatever he was intending to do with these lots, and the ownership passed over to his wife, who eventually stopped paying taxes on them; control reverted back to the city. One of these lots — Lot 116 — is walking distance from the Christian Center Sanctuary of Hope, and the evening’s high point included a walk to the Lot, and a sermon about separate spaces.
As the preacher-on-site, we weren’t all that prepared for the crowd of 100 artists, gallery fags, rockers, intellectuals, confused locals, friends and family. We also didn’t know that much about Matta-Clark, or how to talk about this sliver space —2’3” wide by 355’ long – in order to make it applicable to the crowds and the evening’s events. We eventually focused on the relationship between this sliver space and the rest of the alley, and how it reflects the separate spaces inside each of us, and how they relate to the rest of us. It was complicated. Whiskey fueled most of the preaching. But it was intense. We had a few Amens! and Hallelujahs! Afterwards, when the crowd had calmed down, we all returned to the church to continue that perennial method of moving with the spirit — we had a dance party.