The art of empty houses

Susan Gustavson’s recent post about modern & contemporary art reminded me all over again what it is that I love best about art: how it compels you to see the everyday in a completely new light. All art does this to some extent, but contemporary art – because it lacks much of the pre-conceived intellectual baggage of “historical” art - can be particularly good at surprising you into it. The wonderful thing is that the experience then becomes a ball rolling down hill, and everything starts to look startling and new.

When I first started studying art history, I spent a lot of time looking at art & at art images, and that way of seeing – the looking at art way - soon began to bleed into my regular life. I’d be walking around town not thinking about much of anything, and all of a sudden the Platonic ideas behind the everyday forms would come screaming out at me. The essential truth of a row of rooftops would suddenly be revealed; they were an endless series of intersecting triangles. A random assortment of buildings would be reduced to nothing more than great big blocks of color. A branch bending over a sidewalk would bisect a familiar scene, turning regular houses and driveways into components of an elaborate diagonal composition, and the clouds overhead were perpetually morphing into fantastically complex shapes, like the designs on Persian tiles. It got to the point where the vision switch became so intrusive that I actually wondered if I was going crazy, but eventually I just stopped worrying about it. And after awhile my perceptions adjusted and I settled down. But I miss it, miss the intensity and freshness of that kind of seeing.

So I’m a fan of anything that can temporarily restore it to me, which is why I found myself driving to the MFA up in Boston last month to see the Rachel Whiteread show. For those who are unfamiliar with her, Rachel Whiteread is a British sculptor who uses what is usually regarded as negative space – often in an architectural context - as her subject matter. Sounds complicated, but it isn’t. Simply put, she makes plaster casts of empty space. An early piece of hers, “House, consisted of her filling a derelict London building with cement and then stripping away the shell of the building, leaving a solid concrete cast of the empty space inside. Empty space became densely full, dense matter disappeared, reality was seen backwards, as if in a mirror. Much of what she does involves the space found within boxes, containers, architectural space. How often do we see the empty space we spend our lives inhabiting? For those of us who are realtors, how often do we seriously reflect upon the nature of the empty spaces we sell, or think about the voids that constitute our primary product?

Her installation that I went to at the MFA differed from her usual work in that the empty spaces stayed empty. What she did was to take hundreds of old dollhouses and fill them with light. The interior of every house was completely empty, save for the light, which became in effect a kind of sculptural soft cast of the interior voids. House after house, all glowing, all empty, piled on empty wooden packing crates, hillsides, towns, cities of them. Solid empty space made visible. I’ll never look at a street of empty houses in the same way again. And that, I think, is a good thing.

A life in crime

Abandoned houses have long exerted a peculiar fascination over me. When I was three, we moved from our house in Brooklyn to a quiet suburban neighborhood which had a “haunted house” located diagonally across the street from us. If I stood at our front door, it was one of the first things I saw, and I never contemplated it without a shudder. As a derelict building, it was a classic of its kind – crumbling red brick, broken windows, graffiti, overgrown lawn, an obligatory “For Sale” sign, the works. The place was of course a magnet for every beer-drinking, cigarette-smoking, making-out teenager within a 10 block radius. At night you’d see the flickering yellow lights of matches being struck or flashlight beams bouncing dementedly around., a sight that did not inspire confidence in my three year old mind. And sometimes there were…sounds…voices. Who knew what was going on in there?

Gentle reader, you must know where I’m going with this…One day, a couple of my friends organized an expeditionary break-in. Filled with fear and trembling, but in the grips of an irresistible compulsion, I followed them in. Next thing I knew, I was running out screaming my head off like a victim in a horror movie. What transpired in between I have no idea; where that memory should be is a total black-out. Was I transported to the mother ship? Is that when the probe got implanted in my brain?

Could be.

But the experience – whatever it actually was – failed to break me. Five years later, me and my friend Eileen Jones were gleefully breaking into an abandoned carriage house. First we had to grapple our way hand over hand up the twisty ropes of ivy totally obscuring the facade, and then we had to squeeze ourselves in between the long pointy shards of broken glass of an open second story window. It was tough getting in there, let me tell you. Ivy Cottage, we called it. Off-limits, is what my mother called it. Too bad for her, I grew up. Or at least grew more careful.

Because once you get a taste of that B&E frisson, it’s hard to give it up. Just like how for some people, smoking that first joint plunges them directly into the ravages of heroin addiction, or an innocent sip of their Dad’s beer is the irrevocable step #1 leading them straight into the heart of the worst kind of Bowery-bum type alcoholism, some of us should NEVER be allowed to get that first taste. Because it didn’t stop with Ivy Cottage. Next it was Horman’s Castle on Howard Avenue. The Staten Island Monastery, also on Howard Avenue. The old Gramatan Hotel in Bronxville. An abandoned factory in White Plains. The University of Miami’s Experimental Agriculture Lab.

Now I’m a realtor and I can enter abandoned buildings at will, without having to worry about being arrested. Other people actually unlock the doors for me, hand me keys, give me the lockbox codes. Do they understand who they’re dealing with? Evidently not. So lots has changed. But one thing hasn’t. Every unopened door still holds out a promise for me, a mystery that dangles just out of reach. It’s like getting the answer to a question you didn’t even know you had. For a second, opening that door feels like it has the potential to change everything. It’s huge, that moment when your hand is on the knob and you feel the door push open. Because anything could lie on the other side. Anything.