Wall Street Journal: A New ISSUE Arises
RAISING A NEW ISSUE IN DOWNTOWN BROOKLYN
Published in the Wall St. Journal on December 21, 2011
By STEVE DOLLAR
Four years after winning a rent-free, 20-year lease on its new home, Issue Project Room is finally taking up full residence at 110 Livingston St. in downtown Brooklyn.
“The space is really unique for the city,” said Ed Patuto, the executive director of the nonprofit arts presenter, which makes its big move on Jan. 25. The inaugural event will be the first American staging of the Dutch new-music festival Gaudeamus Muziekweek.
The Livingston Street site, which resides on the ground floor of a stunning Beaux Arts-style building designed in 1926 by the architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White, has been the focus of a $3.7 million fund-raising campaign, boosted in 2009 by a $1.1 million grant from Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz.
Along with more conventional renovations, that sum was necessary for an overhaul of the space’s raw, intensely reverberant interior—which includes a dramatic, 40-foot-high vaulted ceiling—not only to enhance listening quality, but to protect neighbors living on the floors above in what are now condominiums developed by Two Trees Management Company. (The firm purchased the former Board of Education site from the city in 2003 for more than $45 million.)
“New York doesn’t have a European-style chamber-music hall,” said Mr. Patuto, who this year secured another $1.1 million in funding from civic sources to reach the $2.3 million mark—sufficient to proceed with plans to occupy the organization’s new home. “And it doesn’t have a space that is that flexible in terms of how it can
transform. We’ll have everything from black-box capability to a complete white box: We can put visuals anywhere around the room for a completely immersive environment.”
Mr. Patuto took over at Issue Project Room in November 2010—a year after the death of its founder, Suzanne Fiol—and has devoted much of his energy to the transition. With more than 200 performances and 30 commissions in 2011 (much of them focused on avant-garde music and mixed-media work of both local and international significance), the current venue at the Old American Can Factory in Gowanus was bustling.
But the downtown space, in the epicenter of the growing Brooklyn arts corridor—which includes the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Mark Morris Dance Center and Roulette, among others—offers a richer spectrum of possibilities.
“The room is really live and has a beautiful, sweet sound,” said Mr. Patuto, who has already overseen a series of special concerts there. Beyond what such acoustics can do for a string quartet, they open all sorts of creative opportunities for experimental artists. This year, in one particularly memorable example, the composer Ellen Fullman ran 50-foot wires across the room. “It became a resonating box,” Mr. Patuto said.
Throughout its new season, the venue will test which kinds of acoustic treatments suit it best. The plan calls for the use of about 50 acoustic panels to deaden specific parts of the space, which features “marble floors, marble columns and brass doors,” Mr. Patuto noted. The organization arrived at a modular approach to design for the space, working with architects Dan Wood and Amale Andraos of WORK AC and acousticians from Arup. It will allow for traditional seated presentations and more ambient events, including performances using a unique 16-speaker array currently installed at the Can Factory.
“There will be no fixed stage, no fixed seating,” Mr. Patuto said. “The experience of coming to Issue Project Room will be as unpredictable as the performances themselves.” …
Of course, Issue Project Room hasn’t quit the Can Factory quite yet. January will offer a closing slate of performances, including a farewell party on Jan. 20 with headliners Jonathan Kane and his minimalist blues band, February.
“Issue’s almost our home base,” said Mr. Kane, who will be celebrating the release of an album recorded live at the venue in 2010 as part of a festival for the experimental music label Table of the Elements. The album also marks the first project to be released on Issue Project Room’s own in-house label, which will document performances fostered by the organization.
He added, “It’s maybe what the Southside clubs were to Muddy Waters or what CBGB was to the Ramones. People dance a lot and there’s a lot of audience enthusiasm.”
BETTER TV interviews Steve Buscemi, Jo Andres & Elliott Sharp at ISSUE’s benefit
Better TV, a nationally syndicated lifestyle TV program, interviewed Elliott Sharp as well as benefit hosts Jo Andres & Steve Buscemi at ISSUE’s first benefit at 110 Livingston earlier this month. “I really feel like my roots are in this world,” Buscemi said in the interviews. Check your local listings to see where it’s airing near you.
Wall Street Journal: “A New Leader in the Room”
The Wall Street Journal profiles ISSUE’s new Executive Director Ed Patuto and gives their take on our ongoing capital campaign to move to 110 Livingston in Downtown Brooklyn. WSJ says ISSUE’s programming ranges “from vintage minimalism to mixed-media experimentation to transcendental rock music.” In the article, Ed stated our (not-at-all-secret) goal as one where we’re able to ask artists to “Tell us what would take your creative practice to another level…and let’s see if we can help you realize that.”
Check it out on WSJ.com (because we know you’ve always wanted an excuse to register on the WSJ comments page).
NY Times features ISSUE’s new home at 110 Livingston
An Avant-Garde Arts Group Bites Off a Lot to Chew
When it comes to the avant-garde side of the arts, the numbers tend to be pretty small. Record sales of a thousand or two, if you’re lucky; theater audiences in the dozens, not hundreds.
But last year Issue Project Room, a nonprofit arts space that was founded in the East Village and for the last four years has been in Brooklyn, was dealt a dauntingly large number. As part of a city deal, a developer that was converting the former Board of Education building in downtown Brooklyn into condominiums was required to offer 5,000 square feet on its ground floor to a cultural group on a 20-year, rent-free lease.
Issue Project Room won the bid. (Yes!) But then found that the space needed $2.5 million in renovations. (No!)
The organization’s leaders managed to raise about $350,000 but finally were able to exhale when Marty Markowitz, the Brooklyn borough president, called late last month with the news that he was allocating $1.1 million for Issue Project Room’s renovations, as part of the $37.7 million in capital funds that he has the authority to distribute for the current fiscal year.
The building, at 110 Livingston Street, was designed by McKim, Mead & White and opened in 1926 as a home for the Elks club. By 1940 the Board of Education had taken it over, and the city sold it six years ago to the Brooklyn developer Two Trees Management for more than $45 million.
With Issue Project Room, whose proposal to Two Trees won over those from more than 100 other organizations, the building will become a home for all kinds of experimental music, theater, dance, literary readings and film. “A Carnegie Hall for the avant-garde,” Suzanne Fiol, the group’s founder and creative director, said.
“I truly believe that this is the work that keeps our culture going forward,” Ms. Fiol said. “We want to be an important space for music and film and literature and poetry and video and sound art. And a little bit of dance.”
Most of the space is a wide, marble-lined room somewhere between a courtroom and a dance hall, said Sarah Garvey, an Issue Project Room spokeswoman. In addition, there is room for offices and an additional space that could be used for a library.
Ms. Fiol opened the first Issue Project Room in 2003 in a former garage on Sixth Street in the East Village and two years later moved to a former oil silo on the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, where she put on shows like an extremely rare visit by the reclusive Texas musician Jandek.
In 2007 Issue Project Room had to move again, to the former Old American Can Factory, nearby in Carroll Gardens. This month that space has its Floating Points Festival, with experimental musicians like Alan Licht and Tony Conrad (who is an Issue Project Room board member) making use of a custom-built hemispherical speaker system that hangs from the ceiling.
Whether the idea of a big, official institution like Carnegie Hall is antithetical to the spirit of the avant-garde is an open question. But with Manhattan rapidly losing performance spaces devoted to experimental arts — like Tonic on the Lower East Side, which closed in 2007 — some kind of home is necessary, and Mr. Markowitz believes that Brooklyn is the perfect place for it.
“Issue Project Room is well respected, avant-garde, cutting-edge, in-your-face — you know what? That’s Brooklyn too,” Mr. Markowitz said. “I don’t understand half the things they do, and when they tell me about them, they lose me. But that’s not the point.” The point, he added, was that “the arts create jobs.”
His contribution brings the renovation budget to within about $300,000 of what it needs for the nuts-and-bolts first phase.
Ms. Fiol said she was at first reluctant to apply for the new space because at the time her organization had no money. But having three homes in six years taught her to keep an open mind.
“Everybody gets kicked out of their space, or they end up shutting down,” Ms. Fiol said. “But instead of getting all flipped out about that, I took the road of just finding a new space. And I’ve been really lucky.”
ISSUE Soundwalk-a-thon in the New Yorker
Two Sundays before Make Music New York, the Brooklyn-based venue Issue Project Room, an indispensable site of offbeat programming, organized its own sonic jamboree. Twenty-one musicians led groups on “soundwalks” around Brooklyn and other boroughs, treating the city either as an audio source or as a stage for their work. (The term “soundwalk” was popularized by the Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer, who, in the spirit of Ives and John Cage, has long blurred distinctions between composed music and ambient sounds.) Two dozen people signed up for a soundwalk with Betsey Biggs, a young Princeton-trained composer and interdisciplinary artist who often creates site-specific performances. Beforehand, Biggs directed participants to a Web site where they could download “Detox Project,” an electronic piece that she had assembled for the occasion. It consisted largely of sounds recorded in and around the murky old Gowanus Canal, in Brooklyn: machine noises, trucks backing up, the bell of a rising drawbridge, sirens, pedestrian chatter, and, for a long while, a voice softly humming a childlike, three-note melody.
Late in the afternoon, we met at a boarded-up house at the corner of Third Street and Third Avenue and began following Biggs’s lead, listening to “Detox Project” on earphones. The streets were deserted, except for a few hipsters pushing strollers. It was unsettling to hear loud sounds without seeing their source. Conversely, certain noises that seemed to emanate from the soundtrack actually came from real life: I was surprised to see live birds in a dead tree. The experience proved to be psychologically complex, exposing how we orient ourselves with our ears. And, as Biggs notes in her Princeton dissertation, this kind of work plays off Internet-era listening habits—the use of manicured playlists to create what she calls a “cinematic lull,” a “solitary dream state.” When the walk curled through the quiet streets of Carroll Gardens, the collage of noises subsided and the human voice took over. Biggs began banging on a tin drum that she’d brought along, and a friend played an accordion. An electronically mediated experience veered toward old-time music-making. At the end, we stood on the Third Street drawbridge and applauded the composer, who smiled bashfully, nodding toward the strangely beautiful ruined landscape behind her. ♦
On January 25, ISSUE Project Room will inaugurate its new space at 110 Livingston with Gaudeamus Muziekweek, a four-day festival celebrating groundbreaking and challenging new music by emerging composers from around the world. Working in partnership ...
ISSUE is starting off the New Year with a change of scenery. That's right, Issue Project Room is moving out of our space at the Old American Can Factory and into 110 Livingston in Downtown Brooklyn. We've had a great run at the Can Factory,...