So arena's "Belong/Brooklyn" art (advertising?) project concerns fundamental questions about who belongs? It's "tricky" (though two art critics heap praise).
Brooklyn is the vibrant center of New York City, a refuge for explorers and immigrants the world over. Belong/Brooklyn (2021) is an affirmation of this complex and ever-changiung community. These three simple words--YOU, WE, and BELONG--invite every viewer who enters the site to celebrate the present moment, and to consider fundamental questions about who belongs where, and why.
(Emphases added)
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| Photo shows plaza before renovation was completed in mid-December |
A misguided salute
She writes:
I love the text-based public art installation “We Belong Here”, by the Bahamian artist Tavares Strachan, whose rich artistic practice considers how art, culture, politics and science intersect. Deceptively simple, the three words of the piece’s title are written in large cursive letters, and lit up in neon pink. Completed in 2021 and commissioned by the Social Justice Fund, it is one of two pieces collectively called, “Belong / Brooklyn”. It sits high on top of the multi-line subway entrance that spills on to the plaza entrance of the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York.
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| From FT: Tavares Strachan’s ‘We Belong Here’ © Courtesy of the Joe and Clara Tsai Foundation’s Social Justice Fund |
Yes, it was commissioned by the Social Justice Fund, but it should be noted that the phrasing duplicated previous work by the artist, in less contested spaces, as I wrote.
Also note that no advertising would've been permitted there, though it arguably also serves as such.
Recognizing the issues, taking a wave
Okoro continues:
The centre is positioned at the heart of a borough replete with complex issues around gentrification and the displacement of residents. The plaza itself has a history as a place for social justice protests and other public gatherings. In this location, thousands of people pass the installation on a daily basis.
I don’t live in Brooklyn, but when I saw this work there it made me think about the notion of belonging and “dis-belonging”.
Who determines who gets to claim belonging, and how do politics, business and socio-economics intersect with local communal history? Strachan’s art is a reminder to me of the value and necessity of raising questions publicly, in a way that invites people to understand that we are each individually implicated in both the question and the answer.
Sure, we're all individually implicated, but issues of gentrification and accountable development implicate larger entities: powerful government agencies, corporations, and billionaires who can use art as something of a distraction from their failure to deliver on promises or their exemptions from taxes or the ever-increasing price of tickets to the arena.
Until and unless people walking past this installation learn how Empire State Development and Metropolitan Transportation Authority are gubernatorially controlled, and have allowed private exploitation of public assets, and "affordable housing" that's not that affordable, well, the right questions aren't being raised.
Will ESD enforce the $2,000/month fines due after May 31, 2025, for each missing affordable unit (currently 876 or 877)? That's an important public question, and the answer so far seems to be: unlikely.
In the Village Voice
Another dubious salute came in the (online only) shell-of-itself Village Voice, where writer and curator Christian Viveros-Fauné on 4/27/22 published a profile, The Visibility Artist: Tavares Strachan, that focused significantly on the arena installation.
The article leads off:
The meanings, if not the ownership, of public artworks belong to their audiences. Nowhere in New York’s five boroughs is this clearer than in how a sculpture has changed the meaning of the awkward, pie-slice-shaped half-acre of cement hard by the massive sports arena that is Brooklyn’s Barclays Center. Plunked down at the busy intersection of Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues, the venue’s concrete plaza—an architectural afterthought with regard to the complex’s original design—was utterly transformed during the pandemic. When indoor events were canceled in 2020, the space resembled a refugee center: Free Covid-19 testing sites alternated with clothing drives and bustling food pantries for those in need.
That's hype. The sculpture hasn't changed the meaning of the plaza, though it arguably tries to do so--or, at least, to commemorate SeatGeek Plaza role serving the public. (Remember how long it took, after the protests started, for the arena operators to stop showing pre-programmed ads in the oculus, before swapping in a gnomic quote from Martin Luther King, Jr.?)
A refugee camp? It's not even a "refuge."
The writer continues:Then, in late May, after the murder of George Floyd, the site morphed again—first into a hub of protest and then, briefly, into an arena for hand-to-hand fighting between demonstrators and police. As tempers cooled and the smoke cleared, an unlikely truce was declared: The austere plaza in front of Barclays Center became, by dint of an unspoken consensus, Brooklyn’s unofficial town square.
He's leaving out the "accidental" part and the "totally appropriated" part. He continues:
Twenty-three months later, the transformation of Barclays Center Plaza appears complete. The site’s new status has, at the very least, been aptly and gorgeously memorialized. That is thanks to Belong/Brooklyn, a pair of huge neon signs installed atop the entrance to the borough’s busiest transit hub. Above the MTA graphics and underground network of trains, the two tractor-trailer-size signs hold forth, one reading simply “You Belong Here” in brilliant white light—an inspiring 45-by-15-foot declaration of basic human rights. The second, in hot pink, thrums in the elusive first-person plural: “We Belong Here.”Wait a sec. It's most of all a commercial enterprise.
From the article:
The work of Bahamian-born New York artist Tavares Strachan, this double-barreled sculpture affirmatively voices an unusual kind of civic renewal that has little to do with the usual tectonic forces that shape and bedevil New York City: the thumb-on-the-scale strivings of real estate titans, eminent domain lawyers, tractable politicians, gentrifying starchitects, and ambitious captains of industry of the sort who own sports franchises, like, say, the Brooklyn Nets, which Forbes estimates is worth $3.2 billion. The opposite of top-down development—which has troubled Barclays Center since it was first foisted onto the area’s downtown as the Atlantic Yards Project in 2008 and is now home court for the Nets—Strachan’s public sculpture channels a charge that is at once more powerful but more elusive: the groundswell resolve of a community.Wait--the sculpture itself is still top-down development, installed with zero consultation and top-down permissions, in line with the rest of the project. The "resolve" largely reflects the outrage channeled in 2020.
Overstating the gain
From the article:
“It’s an affirmation, a call to action,” Strachan said about the complex message animating his sculpture, on a crisp October day during its unveiling. Dressed in a navy-blue jumpsuit of his own design, he stood on an outdoor dais, beneath a large banner promoting Joe and Clara Tsai Foundation’s Social Justice Fund—a $50 million Brooklyn BIPOC loan scheme that these owners of the NBA’s Nets and the WNBA’s New York Liberty had launched just months earlier. “‘You belong here’ is a starting point,” he told the mixed crowd beneath the building’s distinctive oculus. “Who decides if we belong? Is it in the power of the individual or the group? I am trying to work this out as a member of this community myself.”Not at all. It's a $2.5 million loan fund, part of a ten-year, $50 million commitment about which details remain scarce. How much of that Social Justice Fund total went to the installation of this art project?
Interviewing the impressario
Viveros-Fauné interviews Clara Wu Tsai:
Instead of asking what possessed her to stand on contemporary art’s third rail—public art—I enquire about commissioning challenging artworks at a time when ordinary meanings, like facts, are often bitterly contested. “I met Tavares years ago,” she begins tentatively, “and was initially fascinated by the idea that he was working at this intersection of art and science. At some point, I thought that we would commission him to do something relating to invisible heroes in Brooklyn—there are so many. When he presented his ideas for the signs, I liked them. But it wasn’t until after the murder of George Floyd that I knew his sculpture was meant to be here. We wanted to honor the fact that Barclays has become the unofficial town square. When people drive by and see Tavares’s sculpture today—I’ve heard this from people who were very active in the protests—it honors their efforts and those of others. Which is exactly what I hoped it would do.”
Yes, the facts are contested.
I've asked dozens of people, from visitors to workers, neutral questions about the meaning of the signage/art, and have generally found bafflement--plus a suspicion that it's aimed to nudge people to buy tickets and/or an assertion that the arena itself is deserving of belonging.
Another take
Maybe it's about fandom.
19th season as STH, 18th with ND. pic.twitter.com/WZAtxMReoW
— NetsDaily (@NetsDaily) October 3, 2022
A "tricky" explanation, perhaps
The art/advertising project to my mind is "tricky," to use the term that TrueHoop's Henry Abbott used regarding Russian oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov, the previous owner of the Nets, shrouded with questions and whiffs of impropriety.
How tricky? I found another way to think about it, after reading Alice Gregory's 7/25/22 report for the New Yorker, Can an Artists’ Collective in Africa Repair a Colonial Legacy?, regarding a project in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Gregory observed:
But in mounting an art project that appears to masquerade as development work—or is it development work that masquerades as art?—[Dutch organizer Renzo] Martens both compels criticism and inoculates himself against it.
That might be transposed to Belong/Brooklyn, perhaps, with this framing:
But in mounting a social justice/art project that also masquerades as arena advertising and reputation enhancement—or is it arena advertising and reputation enhancement that masquerades as a social justice/art project?—the billionaire Tsais both compel criticism and inoculate themselves against it.
At least if the cultural critics notice.
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