Vincent, Smash!
“The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.”
December 21, 2008
Stephen Sprouse's archives are currently in a temperature-controlled art storage facility in New Jersey, but previously, they were in a Brooklyn warehouse. The owner of the Brooklyn space called me the other day to say he had found some of Stephen's small canvases from the late 1980s. They were in excellent shape, he said, and might be appropriate for the upcoming retrospective, so I rushed to collect them.
On my way inside, I noticed there was a nice, new bicycle lane running past the warehouse and that the parking regulations had changed: No parking on the street in front of the warehouse.
"No parking outside anymore, eh?" I said, as he let me in. "That's gotta be a pain in the ass."
"Listen," he said, "I'm an avid bicyclist. I've ridden a bike my whole life, and I ride all over the place. I ride to work every day. But that fucking bike lane is really messing me up. The guy next door pulled up in front of his place to unload a few things. He wasn't there more than five minutes when a traffic cop showed up and wrote him a ticket. It makes it hard to do business. I don't know what's going to happen. It's the city's way of telling the few industrial businesses still on this strip — and there aren't many left — to get the hell out. Catering to the condo developers. I don't know how much longer I'm going to be in business as it is. No one even uses that bike lane! Not during the week, not when I need to park there."
I nodded, not knowing quite what to say.
"Sorry," he continued, "but you really opened up a can of worms here. I don't know what to do if I lose this place. I'm unemployable. I'm fifty years old and I don't know how to do anything else. I have no skills."
"What about getting a job for one of the big art moving companies?" I said. "It's what you know how to do, and you wouldn't have to deal with the headache of owning your own business."
"I'm spoiled," he said. "I can't work for some place like that, have some punk kid with his feet up on the desk, telling me what to do. I'd rather sell hot dogs. Seriously, I'll go out and get a hot dog cart before I'll work for a place like that. I might not sell hot dogs in my neighborhood, you know, I mean, I might not want my neighbors to see me doing it, but I would have no problem selling hot dogs."
The warehouse is usually crammed with all sorts of objects d'art, things in storage or in limbo on their way to or from a gallery or studio, but as we spoke, our voices echoed in the cavernous garage.
"The galleries don't want to pay the storage fees for art that isn't selling, and the artists don't have room to store this stuff themselves, or the money to keep it here, so they ask me to destroy the stuff. That's how I'm making my money lately. Breaking art."
"That sounds kind of fun," I said.
"Remember that big globe that used to be in that corner over there?"
I never knew what it was, exactly, as it had been wrapped in layers of plastic, like an eight-foot-tall tangerine wrapped in cling film, but I knew what he was talking about.
"I had to destroy that the other day. I'd been here for years. I had to document the destruction — take a video to prove it had been trashed. When the gallery saw the video, they told me I didn't break it into small enough pieces. They wanted me to go back and smash it some more. Are you kidding me? Forget about it, it's destroyed, it's broken, it's gone. Anyway, that's about seventy percent of my business right now. It's kind of gratifying, I have to admit, but how long can it last?"
