June 15, 2013
In January of 2011 Matthew Mazzotta began working with the Coleman Center for the Arts (CCA.) Adopting the CCA methodology of developing projects through social engagement, Mazzotta invited area residents to join him for a creative discussion about public space. Sitting in an outdoor living room nestled inside of orange cones on the middle of Avenue A, area residents brought items from their homes to lend to the outdoor living room. The conversation that followed highlighted participants love for York but also their frustration with the community’s loss of public space, the spread of blight and the lack of racially integrated and secular social spaces. The conversation served as an impetus for “Open House” which has transformed a blighted property into a public outdoor theater in downtown York.
Mazzotta’s sculpture is a theater in the shape of a house. An unlikely object, in it’s closed state it is a neatly cubed house made with the faded pink siding that covered it’s blighted predecessor. An iconic, “housey” looking house, it projects the very idea of a house itself. Shelter, charm, warmth, safety. When transformed it unfolds in ten pieces on specially commissioned industrial hinges into seats for nearly 100 people. The seats, graduated for height, face a raised earthen stage. It is a public space made from the remnants of a privately owned blighted property, like those that still litter the landscape across rural Alabama and so many other parts of America, urban and rural alike.
Open House Transformation from Coleman Center for the Arts on Vimeo.
“Open House” began as a conversation amongst residents, and in it’s implementation the project had to overcome all of the issues it sought to mitigate. The story of the project reveals the very loss of public space the artist sought to reverse. Mazzotta’s original concept was to transform a blighted property–a private space that is negatively impacting public space–into a public space that would serve as common ground, a space for creative exploration and expression that would bond citizens together and forge a common identity.
Striving to build something that would reveal transformation and defy what seems possible, the artist conceived “Floating Free,” a floating theater on York’s Lake Louise that would be made from salvaged materials from a blighted property. A space free from connotations of the materials’ previous incarnation, and literally floating on new ground. “Floating Free” would facilitate the deconstruction of social barriers and the construction of new possibilities. A space like that could provide the kind of atmosphere residents were seeking in their previous conversations with Mazzotta.
All of this came to a halt in the summer of 2012 when York’s Lake Louise was in danger of being seized by the IRS due the City of York’s unpaid payroll tax debt, totaling over $300,000, a huge amount for a small municipality with a limited tax base and income. The IRS was just one of a number of the City’s debtors, and the City proceeded to take out a $700,000 high interest loan. Lake Louise, in addition to the Hightower Center (York’s town hall and polling place) and the City sales tax were put up as collateral for the loan. While the lake, town hall and city income via sales tax remained in jeopardy if the struggling municipality could not pay its loan back, a new additional round of IRS debt was announced and the fate of the lake was inextricably tied to the City’s interminable financial woes. In November of 2012 a new Mayor and City Council took office and with the citizens of York they now face the significant challenge of paying back the staggering debt for the tiny town.
As the loss of a vital community space loomed over York, Mazzotta re-conceptualized his project and “Floating Free” became “Open House.” Now an even more direct transformation of a private space into a public space would happen on the site of the blighted property. A dysfunctional house would be turned into a sculpture of a house that in it’s closed state has no function, but in its transformation becomes a public space for performance, celebration, dialogue, fellowship and community.
The house has been depicted by artists (and people) throughout time. Perhaps one of the first images any of us might have drawn as children, the iconic square and triangle signify the shape of our shelter. Artists in the public realm have tackled the house itself in various forms. In her “House” (1993) Rachel Whiteread cast in concrete the entire inside of a former Victorian house in East London. The controversial work monumentalized and entombed ideas of unknown lives that occupied it. An apt comparison to “Open House” lies in Gordon Matta Clarke’s architectural explorations of the 1970’s including “Split House.” Matta Clark cut an abandoned house in half with a chain saw. It is a critique of the failed utopianism in architecture, and even the American Dream, which is said to rest on homeownership itself.
What is the relationship between blight and public space? Why do homes, businesses, investments, inheritances, turn into blight while public spaces deteriorate and disappear? A web of globalization, economic decline, low property values, low property taxes, poverty, racism, absentee land owners, and a municipal lack of resources and infrastructure conspire to make blight and declining public space inevitable. These systemic conditions dictate the fate of structures and property, and yet each house contains it’s own story of who lived there and how it fell into disrepair, or didn’t.
The property at 202 Main Street was an iconic piece of blight in York, a bright pink mess that littered a main downtown intersection across the street from the Piggly Wiggly, the town grocery store. Home to numerous families over it’s lifetime, the property was most recently purchased by a group of local women intending to open a daycare center. The house was outfitted with toys and interior walls were painted bright rainbow colors, but an inability to repair forced the house into decline. Pre-demolition the house was an eery metaphor for the sad potential of unused space–a place for children to grow and learn had become a community danger. The house, much stronger than originally estimated, was eventually demolished with the help of volunteers, local experts, city employees and the City of York Fire Department.
As was clear from Mazzotta’s initial conversation with area residents, blight spreads a permanent sense of loss and frustration across the community. Its tolls are emotional, visual, physical and economic. It paints a picture that community members don’t care about their town, even though much of the blight is owned by families who no longer reside locally.
Blighted homes subvert a powerful human icon. As Michael Pollan writes in A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams, “Like the clothes that Adam and Eve were driven by shame to put on, the house is an indelable mark of our humanity, or our difference from both the animals and the angels. It is a mark of our weakness and power both, for along with the fallibility implied in the need to build a shelter, there is at the same time the audacity of it all–reaching up into the sky, altering the face of the land.” Blight is a corrupted icon, dangerous instead of safe it alters the landscape with futility instead of function. In “Open House” Mazzotta flips this paradigm again by creating an emotionally charged symbol that transforms physical space threefold.
Despite public rumor that “Open House” operates on hydraulics at the push of a button, the metamorphosis was designed to require cooperation. It takes four people two to three hours to unfold “Open House.” The foundation of the work is made of locally sourced railroad ties, and on top of this sits the central row of seats–five church pew style rows graduated in height. When closed these rows are covered with ten symmetrical sections, five on each side, that unfold into flanks of seats. Custom designed industrial hinges anchor the sections to the foundation that open with the help of a marine wench crank and enough man power to counter balance the hefty structure. Concealed compartments store various jacks and tools needed for the transformation.
At the premiere event a ribbon cutting and invocation was led by the Mayor of the City of York and Reverend Willie Davis. Catherine Shelton and James Goodwin offered an emotionally stirring rendition of “Amazing Grace” and “Sweet Home,” whose chorus appropriately resounds “Sweet home, it’s such a beautiful home. My Lord, how I wonder will I ever get home?”
Sweet Home, Open House Premiere from Coleman Center for the Arts on Vimeo.
Afterwards, the Time Zone Band played as participants danced and celebrated on the site of the former house.
Time Zone Band, Open House Premiere from Coleman Center for the Arts on Vimeo.
At dusk families gathered for a showing of the movie The Lorax, based on the book by Dr. Suess, that tells a story about the importance of community and the resurrection of shared resources. It was a joyous day of heartfelt celebration.
“Open House” will now function as a community theater. Open to the public free of charge for self organized public events, the space will be host to a new set of emotional connections and memories as events take place. The CCA will continue to host movies, concerts, talent shows, artist projects and performances in the new space.
Mazotta’s structure and engineering boggle the mind. An embodiment of transformation, “Open House” defies expectations. As the project faced significant external challenges in coming into existence, “Open House” persevered. The structure and the process that brought it into being are equally determined. What better metaphor for transforming our communities physical and social conditions? In the words of German conceptual artist Joseph Beuys, “Optimism has really nothing to do with what is necessary! Our actions must be based neither on optimism nor pessimism… This means that it’s not a case of hoping, believing or doubting but rather realizing that something must be made which is a real creation.”
We must act because we are doing what must be done.
-Shana Berger, Co-Director
This project has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Alabama State Council on the Arts, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Visual Artists Network, York Drug, the City of York, the City of York Fire Department and countless individual supporters of the Coleman Center for the Arts and Matthew Mazzotta. A special thanks to Elouise Finch, Brenda Carole and Lerene Johnson, Alpha Kappa Alpha of the University of West Alabama, John’s Welding of Meridian, MS, Beany Green, James Marshall, Jegan Vincent Depaul, Cory Vineyard, Curtis Oliveira, Pam Dorr and CCA employees and Board of Directors.