With over 115 studios and nearly a dozen galleries listed, this three-day fest is simply too big for one correspondent to cover, and though I tried, I could hit only a few of the highlights, The Bushwick Biennial, along with Bushwick Open Studios, is an example of the huge clusterfuck art happening that makes for exhausting, touring, great partying, occasionally interesting discoveries and headachy mornings. What better time for this tough, grungy nabe to have its debutante ball? The glitterati have all jetted to Europe for the champagne circuit of Biennales and art fairs. The commercial art world is wallowing in the first wave of what one accountant has termed “an invisible blood bath:” galleries are closing, dealers are skipping town in the middle of the night, leaving their artists holding the bag. Peddling east on Flushing, I chuckled to myself. For thirty years, this clan at the margins has been drifting ever farther east, first across the river to DUMBO and Bedford Avenue, then the BQE and with this latest iteration, to the vague reaches of Bushwick/Williamsburg Industrial Park, or more picturesquely, MOJO (between the Morgan and Jefferson Street stops on the L train). Since the emergence of the East Village in the early 80s, artsy types have been building scenes and garnering attention with a mix of DIY gumption and wide-eyed naïveté. We got a canal-the Gowanus-a Grand Street, and sky-rat-pigeons that’ll sucker-punch their Venetian cousins and use their bones for stickball. Mark’s Square melds into a Turneresque haze of sundrenched yellows and aseptic ochers. A flock of cream-colored pigeons wheels overhead, the woofing of wings echoing the shuffle of exquisite leather soles on ancient cobblestones. The sun, burning through the mist, glimmers off the Grand Canal.
The bitter satisfaction of morning caffe lingers on the back of the tongue.
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