The exhibit by the
Agitators Collective at the 58 Gallery on Coles got me thinking about Beauty so much that I even
posted a quote from one of my favorite novels, The Beautiful and Damned.
I think the terms exhibit and installation interchangeably, but it seems the artists prefer the term installation for this specific show, which is entitled: Who Will Save Beauty? Who will Save Beauty is not just the title of the installation, but the motto of this prankster-prone group of Jersey City-based artists. Their premise appears to be: If Art will save the world, and Beauty Will Save Art, who will save Beauty? I believe that Art can save the world. I just don’t necessarily believe THAT it WILL save the world. I like to believe Art is about representing beauty, at least on some level. Who Will Save Beauty both inspires and begs the question, what is beauty? I don’t think this question—whether implied or directly asked or ignored—has an answer, at least a single answer.
The work of the Agitators seems more intent on amusing and surprising than answering their question or the questions the name of the Installation logically leads to. Instead, with a playful social commentary that draws inspiration from both pop and classic culture, they twist any expectation for an answer to question Beauty. The current installation takes up the entire space, but is actually two exhibits—a retrospective of their previous installations and their new work. On one wall are pictures of the collective’s previous installations, an Agitators greatest hits if you will. The new work includes a hopscotch outline made in tape, including a small tape stone for hop scotching (no one was skipping around the boxes during the opening of the exhibit), the hopscotch outline leads to a pike of shredded paper in one corner. On the white brick wall is the centerpiece of the new work, I “heart” JC underwear, with a yellow stain near the appropriate spot.
The number of Agitators and membership in general seems amorphous, and for this show the code names told me were: Bubsy, Triple A, Jungle Unit, Midnight Nat, and Shaboyi. The guys above are Brendan and Jason and the only ones I met so far. Brendan said the code names are to give the group anonymity. Reminded me of the Justice League, which didn’t seem to far from the mark. Code names, doing vigilante art outside of government art enforcement (actually it seems that they get a lot of cooperation for their fun spoofs).
Pee-stained men’s underwear. I thought about how women’s underwear is erotic and men’s underwear is goofy. I guess that’s why there’s no store called Victor’s Secret. Want to emasculate any threatening male—picture him in his underwear, and once you do, you’ll probably see a yellow splotch near the region of his spigot. To read anything more into it, I guess that’s up to the viewer. Novelty underwear is funny in and of itself. It is usually a gift, a gag gift and you generally wear it when you are with somebody who you want to see you wearing your novelty underwear. The Heart symbol instead of the word love has become universally known, but it was created for the I Love New York campaign. The idea of Jersey City adopting the heart symbol, comparing itself to the Capital of the World, is likewise amusing—just across the River, we’re always in Manhattan’s shadow. On the other hand, call us crazy—and most people who don’t live here call those who do live here crazy—we citizens do tend to Love Jersey City. The Pee Stain is the punch line to appropriating a New York Marketing Image and then declaring your love for our city with underwear.
Some of the art, such as the crying babies are variations on clip art. On one wall at the exhibit, were clip art images, such as the diamond, although Jason said them some of the others he had drawn. The idea was to make his drawings look like clip art. Clip art can best be described as generic art, these are images that publications and others purchase so they can be used without copyright infringement or paying an illustrator. They are basically generic art. I worked in local Bergen County newspapers when I started my so called career. Like if a small display ad in the newspaper for home repair needed an image of a hammer, or a grocery store had soda on sale and needed a bottle of pop, you got the images from Clip Art. The same images appeared in different local papers all across the nation; they could do this because all the papers were for different markets. In the pre-digital era, there would be these huge books of clip art publishers who buy every year. It was a huge business and still is—you can get Stock Photographs for the same idea, and in fact, one of the Agitator imagers, which has a naked woman lying down, her naughty bits covered with shredded paper and a photo-shopped Agitators Collective tattoo on her forearm. I later worked for a trade magazine publishing company that as one of its divisions, had a huge clip art and stock photograph business. It is indeed, generic art. The images are devoid of any personality of style, they are anonymous, there are no famous clip art illustrators or photographers, just famous clip art companies and their fame is limited to publishers who utilize their services. “I found the crying baby in old books of clip art, and we used that as a starting point and then drew some variations,” said Jason. “The babies were up on the wall of a Brunswick street garage for a while. They were recently replaced by a picture by another artist.” Another crying baby installation was in the lobby of a building on Newark Avenue, which consisted of the crying images on helium-filled balloons. “The realtor was really nice,” said Brendan. “They gave us the keys and told us not to burn down the place.” There is a child-like whimsy—coupled with a wise-ass college student sensibility, although without arrogance, --to the various projects, which are both art installation and social space stunts. Looking at the Wall of fame—the Agitators were formed in 2006 and have done about 10 installations (about three year)—there seemed a lot to take in, such as the famous Unicorn, a project at a Miami Art Fair where they used plastic cups strategically wedged into wire fence to spell out a quote from the Stephen Foster song, “Hard Times” (come again no more). The installation took place last year, at the height of our current economic crisis, a rare foray into topical commentary. Another project event I remember reading about used 8,000 Peeps—those Easter candies in the shape of baby chicks, they are made of marshmallows and covered in dyed sugar—for an installation in a ragged section of the Jersey City Heights neighbor. “It was across from where there were a lot of homeless men, it was a pretty bad neighborhood,” said Brendan. “After we set up the formation, we went away and came back I saw that some of the peeps had been knocked out of place, and there was a homeless guy putting them back to how we arranged them. I’m most proud of that.”
The reason for the pride—the Agitator Collective wants to engage the community—and having someone who appears to be the least likely to appreciate art becoming engaged enough to save the integrity of the installation indicates the effectiveness of a project. It also seems to embody the Who Will Save Beauty credo. We have to save beauty. We, the people I mean. The beholders of beauty! We who are looking at art and by looking at it experiencing it and by experiencing it, participating in it. In one installation, a variation of a mythical creature was drawn on a wall in another neighborhood in Jersey City that has so far been untouched by gentrification. I believe the image was a variation on a griffin (it had an absurd pair of women’s breasts). “After we put that up, people came up asking, is something coming here,” said Jason. “People want art.” The public space installations by the Agitators build on the concept of “Found Art.” The art is generally made by materials from the surrounding area—in most cases Jersey City—for example, the “Peeps” project consisted of the candies being all purchased at Jersey City stores (after Easter, when Easter Candy prices were 75 percent off). In fact, the use of Clip Art is also a form of Found Art, and also in a way, the old chestnut Wharolian pop culture ideal, but instead of say, painting a soup can, they are taking a familiar form of everyday popular culture, then stretching the definition of context, by creating art than putting that art in a public space where heretofore art was not to be found.
I went early to the opening. I’m not much for hanging out too late these days, and I thought it might be a nice change of pace to see an event at the start rather than its peak. The edition of the Art crowd celebrating the Agitators seemed to trend younger than similar events.
Kayt Hester, famous J.C. tape artist, tended bar, she refused to serve me a glass of jersey city tap water even though it had been over a week since the last boil before drinking warning was issued by United Water. See, writing a blog gets you the Poland Spring!
I got to see the back portion of 58 Street, hidden from view. Pleasantly dark, a little dingy, looked like a great hang out. Instruments were set up, a band was scheduled as part of the night’s festivities. On the exterior walls, the Agitators had put some other images, copies of archival looking pictures, a Minotaur, a circus monkey balancing itself on a globe. The images were familiar pieces of our collective popular culture memory, but they were also a form of graffiti, which was also part of the Exhibit. The Exhibit didn’t just over flow out the gallery space, it transformed to some degree, and temporarily at least, the gallery into art. The I Heart JC
Underwear didn’t conceal the white brick wall, it was painted to emphasize the exposed brick.
The hop scotch on the floor of the gallery made that floor be an extension of the sidewalk on the other side of the window. The Gallery’s name comes from its physical street address. The subtle joke was that the exhibit made the gallery part of the street, not just a gallery on a street. And, as the Who Will Save Beauty installation consisted of the new images that made us see the gallery as a different physical space, it made it part of the other half the exhibit—the documentation of other installations in public spaces that made those experiencing rethink the concept of public space (as well as the concept of art and beauty and saving beauty). Who Will Save Beauty? Maybe it will be revising how we look at the world we live in, revising the rigidity of categories like art, like public space, like beauty. So far, the Agitator Collective has made transitory installations. Although each installation is well documented, the specific items are not saved. The present installation, according to Jason, will be destroyed—the underwear painting painted over by the next exhibit, the hopscotch removed from the floor, the exterior images painted over or graffiti-ed over then painted over. The “Peeps” are gone, the crying babies gone. The
Unicorn painting is still on the fence somewhere between Brunswick and the turnpike—surprisingly, in the three years since it was first painted, it has remained untouched and untagged.
Was that part of the point? Art that was as disposable as our culture? “I don’t think of it as disposable,” said Jason. “I think of it as ephemeral.”
Ephemeral? Just like life? Just like art? Just like beauty?
I wander as I wonder. Walking up 6th from the Mall, saw that the embankment levy had a break in it, a semi-path up the hill. An opportunity to see the famed embankment, our city’s very own plateau and future home of the Hudson County High-Line.
Rugged Terrain did not deter my escalation, nor did obstructions of litter, trash and garbage. The air got thinner and as the wind picked up. Had to keep moving. A storm was moving in. You do not want to get caught in something up here, they won't find your body until after the thaw.
Pipe, wood, what civilization used to be here; what are these protrusions remnants of? Back then, in the before-time, goods were carried by what poets called the “iron horse.” Was this part of the drainage infrastructure? Amazing, the city had a working sewer system at one time.
Railroad Ties. Lonely for tracks, and only memories of ballast. Piled here for decades. Happy trains no more. I yearn for railroad days of yore. 
Couldn’t quite make out what was tagged on this concrete memorial stone.
The exhibit by the Agitators Collective at the 58 Gallery on Coles got me thinking about Beauty so much that I even posted a quote from one of my favorite novels, The Beautiful and Damned.
The number of Agitators and membership in general seems amorphous, and for this show the code names told me were: Bubsy, Triple A, Jungle Unit, Midnight Nat, and Shaboyi. The guys above are Brendan and Jason and the only ones I met so far. Brendan said the code names are to give the group anonymity. Reminded me of the Justice League, which didn’t seem to far from the mark. Code names, doing vigilante art outside of government art enforcement (actually it seems that they get a lot of cooperation for their fun spoofs).
Remnants of our railroad past. The iron horse splendor of days gone by, when our nation and our city had factories that exported goods, a blue collar middle class that could work for a better future for their children, and trains that carried materials to make those good and then took those goods so merchants could bring them to market. The trestles are all that are left, in the shadows of the turnpike, the edge of the neighborhood where the tall grass grows. The teenagers hang out there now, no cops or parents or dreams to bother them, only trestles to nowhere
Veteran’s Day Parade in a nation fighting two wars with no armistice for either in sight. I was working in the NYC office, saw bits of the parade during my lunch break. This U-Haul float was bizarre and sad. Now, I have nothing against this company and I have nothing against companies participating in any parade, showing community support and getting some good publicity while doing so. That’s fine and dandy. And, U-Haul is pretty cool; it’s truly a national company that helps a nation perpetually on the move to be on that move. It was this float that gave me a sour feeling. The three women were singing Karaoke Andrew Sisters, Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree and Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy. Okay, I hate camp and camp was always presence in these songs even back when they were first popular, decades before they were popularized again by the Queen of Camp, Bette Midler. But this was different, fabricating nostalgia for when the entire nation welcomed and celebrated our soldiers. One reason for that nation-wide moment was that the entire nation, the rich and the poor, were involved in the sacrifice. The men were in battle, and you knew one of them and even if you didn’t, there was rationing, civil defense corps, a huge government-financed industrial revolution where Rosie made rivets. Daily life was filled with reminders. Everyone sacrificed knowing that millions of others were risking the ultimate sacrifice. Not today so much. Enlisted men and women (and their families) are a small percentage of our population. Maybe we feel bad when we see an Iraq or Afghanistan story in the news, but do we honestly feel as bad from that empathy than as we do from the potential of the current recession ruining the next ten years of our lives? Beyond putting We Support Our Troops magnetic ribbons on our cars, what else can we do? I don’t know the answer. But I sure feel depressed and disappointed seeing fabricated nostalgia for when we as a nation cared enough to honor those who fought for freedom in a contemporary Veteran’s Day Parade. We have to go back 70 years to find a symbol and music we can all coalesce around in a unified show of support for our Veterans. What is wrong with this picture? Why celebrate ancient USO tours when we can celebrate USO Tours of own era? I guess we need a reenactment of when we gave a shit about Veterans to substitute for honestly giving a shit. Shut up, give me one of those magnetic ribbons and lower my property taxes. I support the veterans of today , they say, as long as they keep out of my neighborhood! 
Read the top line there, “Another Generation of Veterans. Right on! Right wing blow hards love to invoke the lie that it was the counter culture that shunned the soldiers returning from Vietnam. That’s not the truth at all. It was the so called Greatest Generation. The World War II vets who shunned them. They didn’t want those crazed, dirty long hairs in their VFW Hall. There were more members of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War than in the VFW. World War II Vets didn’t want those who didn’t fight in the big war into their club. Vietnam was a police action, not a real war. Besides, we lost. It was the counter culture who struggled to stop the war and get our boys home, which was what the soldiers wanted because they know pieces of crap like Westmoreland were lying to the nation at the expense of their lives. It was the counter culture who supported Vets in their struggles for decent healthcare and the recognition of the effects from Agent Orange and Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. It was the counter culture that gave us films like Coming Home, Apocalypse Now, Platoon or records like Born in the USA or books like Going After Cacciato or Paco’s Story, which publicized what the soldiers went through. It was a “counter culture” president, Bill Clinton, who transformed the Veterans Association from a national disgrace to one of the best healthcare systems in the world! No one needs it spelled out. The so-called Greatest Generation let the Vietnam Veterans down. Baby Boomer Right wingers may treat the officers who come from elitist families, like John McCain, with honor and respect. But the grunts—those who enlisted or who weren’t lucky enough to get deferments like the chicken hawks back in the day or who today join the national guard to help pay for college and then are in Iraq dodging roadside bombs—the right wing sees them as saps. It’s the Vietnam Veterans who are leading the nation in taking care of the soldiers coming home form Iraq and Afghanistan. They do not want to commit the same sins as their fathers did.
I did some googling on this Satans Lil Angel. It may have been restored by the Military Transportation Organization of New Jersey. It’s not clear whether they plan to restore apostrophes.
Dress Uniforms. I don’t think they were doormen who wandered down from the Dakota. I wondered if they were part of some contingent of current soldiers giving official props to the forbears or just some guys who got into their dress blues to watch the parade. 
