The Latest at Goethe

A tiny storefront in a residential building on the Lower East Side houses the current pride of New York’s Goethe-Institut: project space Ludlow 38. This is where you can find a vibrant alternative far from institute headquarters on Central Park and the Chelsea art district. By Sebastian Moll

It is ten o’clock on a Wednesday morning and Ludlow Street is still damp from the municipal street cleaners that just winded through the narrow lane on New York’s Lower East Side. The scent of ginger and coriander is already wafting onto the street from the soup pots of Yian Ying Food Products and on the corner a Hasidic Jew is talking with an old Chinese man and gesticulating fervently. Tobias Maier pushes up the rolling security gate of number 38, a tiny storefront on the ground floor of a typical tenement building, which once served as the crowded quarters of primarily eastern European immigrants on the Lower East Side.

The purpose of the at most eight foot wide room is, at first glance, just as obscure as that of the many Chinese storefronts in the neighbourhood, in which one can often see only a table and a couple of chairs from the outside. A stairway leads from the threshold up to a balcony, blocking the view to the rear part of the room, the actual art gallery. This is a feature that Tobias Maier is particularly proud of. “It forces the artists to deal with the special circumstances here,” says the curator of Ludlow 38, the new art space of the Goethe-Institut in New York.

The stairs were the idea of the two artists Ethan Breckenridge and Liam Gillick. It is a radical alternative to the uniform white boxes of the galleries in the commercial art district of Chelsea in the same way that the art scene of the Lower East Side, where the Goethe-Institut moved the focal point of its cultural events last year, is an alternative to Chelsea’s.

Where the anti-establishment was once established

This was where decidedly anti-establishment art initiatives settled back in the 1980s, when the Lower East Side was still a blend of the remains of shtetl life, rapidly growing Chinatown and a just as rapidly growing punk scene,. Artists like Keith Haring, Sol LeWitt and Cy Twombly were the pioneers who lived and worked, exhibited at semiprivate events for friends and partied on the Lower East Side. Anarchical art collectives like ABC No Rio, which is still here, launched campaigns such as the iconic “Not for Sale” graffiti that showed up all over town in those days.

Photo gallery: Get hip!

Since then, a lot has changed on the Lower East Side. The area is dominated by the spreading club scene and with it the new generation of Bohemians, who care more for parties than for art or protest. The alternative art initiatives have increasingly been supplemented by art galleries that hardly differ from those in Chelsea. Last year, with the arrival of the New Museum of Contemporary Art on Bowery Street, the Lower East Side finally and officially became The Place for Art.

Yet, in spite of unrelenting gentrification, the Lower East Side remains different. Walking through Chelsea is like strolling through a huge art mall: the galleries stand side by side and the art business has displaced all other life. By contrast, the Lower East Side is still an old lived-in neighbourhood where you often need to search for the art galleries in between the bars and noodle shops.

“You can’t just hang pictures on the walls”

Stephan Wackwitz, programme director of New York’s Goethe-Institut, smiles as he recalls the day he negotiated over the lease for Ludlow 38 with an elderly Chinese woman in the backroom of a betting office: “I tried to explain something about our cultural mission to her, but I don’t think she had any idea what I was talking about.”

The way that art is made and presented also still differs on the Lower East from the established art business. There is continued commitment to non-commercial conceptual art, for which famed initiatives such as Orchard, Participant Inc. and Reena Spaulding stand. “On the Lower East Side you can’t just hang pictures on the walls,” explains Fabienne Stephan, director of Salon94, an art gallery on Freeman Alley. “Here, it’s all about ideas and about cooperation and dialogue, not just about profit and competition.”

Ludlow 38 perfectly fits into this biotope. The space follows the tradition of the German Kunsthalle and Kunstverein – the ideal of artistic self-management and of citizen patronage, which also inspired many of the initiatives on the Lower East Side. It is no coincidence that Ludlow 38 was curated during its first year in cooperation with the Kunstverein München and this year with the European Kunsthalle Cologne.

Tea with Rosa von Praunheim

“We see the rooms more as a structural representation of German culture than a literal one,” Stephan Wackwitz also therefore explains. For instance, Ludlow 38 recently showed Július Koller and Jirí Kovanda, two concept artists from 1970s Czechoslovakia, who are still largely unknown in the United States, and then Lili Dujourie and Ion Grigorescu, a Belgian and a Romanian artist, who are also both new to New York’s stage.

It is less a matter of bringing Americans closer to the best and latest German art, as the Goethe-Institut frequently did in its New York headquarters across the street from the Metropolitan Museum, and more a matter of using a German approach to art dissemination to set a course in the New York scene.

For Wackwitz and Maier, however, the exhibitions are equally as important as the events held in Ludlow 38 and in the Wyoming Building only ten minutes’ walk away in the Bowery. Recent examples include a “Tea Time” with Rosa von Praunheim and a conversation with choreographer Nejla Yatkin about her work for the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall. After all, the combination of art, debate and social life continue to characterize cultural life of this part of town. “On the Lower East Side, all of this blends together seamlessly,” as Fabienne Stephan says.

The multi-culture of ethnic residential districts, Bohème and nightlife still enters a fruitful symbiosis with the arts on the Lower East Side. Stephan and many of her peers down here hope that the economic crisis will also delay the inevitable urban gentrification and sterilization of the district just a bit longer. It is a good time for the Goethe-Institut to be here.