Zoe Beloff

Yesterday, I published a post on Zoe Beloff's "Dreamland" exhibit at the Coney Island Museum. Today, I follow up with an interview with the artist. (On 8/29 at 4:30, attend a discussion with Beloff at the Coney Island Museum.)


In the book that accompanies the show, you say you have a long-standing fascination with Freud and Coney. How do you see the two going together?

In many ways the entrepreneurs of Coney Island and the father of psychoanalysis were worlds apart. The amusement park owners and designers in Coney Island aimed to exploit or tap into the fears, desires, and lusts of the public for commercial gain. The fantastic rides and attractions of Dreamland, Luna Park, and Steeplechase clearly did this. From the Tunnel of Love, to the Insanitarium and Blow Hole Theater to Hellgate and Creation, even their names are richly evocative of primal urges repressed in daily life. Attractions like the Freak Show or “Burlesque by the Beach” continue this tradition.

Freud, on the other hand, was one of the great discoverers of what we call the unconscious. His goal was therapeutic--by helping people understand their inner lives, he aimed to cure their neuroses. I myself am interested in attempts to graphically manifest the unconscious. I see my project in a psychoanalytic light, as a way to make manifest the dreams and desires of several generations of New Yorkers who lived, worked, or played in Coney Island.


photo: Brad Paris

You clearly have a love for the found object. What it is about other people’s lost images and ephemera that inspires you?

I think of myself as someone who creates a dialog with the past through these things. To come back to psychoanalysis, long before I started this project, I collected old home movies. I see them a little like Freud understood dreams, jokes, and slips of the tongue—as an avenue into the unconscious. I think amateur movies often say much more than their makers ever intended and I want to bring that to light.

My interpretation is necessarily shaped by the fact that photographs and films have their own integrity. They speak. On the other hand, because so much is lost and unknown, they allow me a space to dream. Between the object and my interpretation is always, by necessity, a void. And in that void, I want the viewer to ask questions: Was that person really who I say they were? Did they have those thoughts and feelings? I hope people will ask themselves how much we can really know of others through the remains of their lives, through images and objects, cast off, lost and forgotten.

My husband, Eric, is always worried that I will be attacked by some stranger who has wandered into my exhibition and recognized a relative and feel that I have horribly misrepresented them: “My great aunt Mary was never a member of any psychoanalytic society, she was a church-going lady!”


photo: Brad Paris

I’d love to see Mr. Grass’ vision of Dreamland constructed as part of the future Coney. Do you think it is more or less possible in today’s New York than it was in Mr. Grass’ time?

Sadly, I don’t think Mr. Grass’ Freudian Dreamland is any more possible now than it was in 1930, much as I would love to see a 50-foot-high “Libido” pavilion in the form of a naked prepubescent girl, looking out to sea. Grass failed because he couldn’t attract capital. In some ways our culture is more repressed than it was in Grass’ day. Remember that the Fleisher Brothers’ marvelous Betty Boop, the very essence of Brooklyn’s libido, was ultimately done in by Walt Disney’s Snow White. Walt was both anti-Semitic and deeply puritanical (read family values) and it was his culture that triumphed. Grass didn’t stand a chance.

To my mind, the closest thing that came to be realized along the lines of Grass’ vision was Dali’s “Dream of Venus” at the 1939 World’s Fair. Whether Dali knew of Grass’ plan is of course an unanswered question.

Dali actually created his pavilion for the Amusement Zone of the Fair. I think it was the most amazing thing he ever did and it was here he found his true calling as a designer of amusements. It was weird, beautiful, funny, and very racy, with topless young women, “The Liquid Ladies,” swimming around in giant tanks in a surreal underwater landscape. But it was not cheap. Julian Levy, his gallery owner in New York, had to work very hard to find private sponsorship. He finally got money from a rubber manufacture in Pittsburgh who kept trying to persuade Dali to make all the women wear rubber mermaid tails.


photo: courtesy of Zoe Beloff

With all the many designs for a future Coney, what would you most like to see in its redevelopment? What is your “Dreamland”?

I think it is important to remember that the great amusement parks of Coney Island were for-profit ventures funded by major capitalists of the day. To my mind what made them so wonderful was that there were no road maps, so the designers were free to dream up the most fantastic structures, which were in many ways an embryonic version of the skyscrapers of Manhattan (Rem Koolhaas in his book “Delirious New York” describes this well).

However, today we live in an age of transnational corporations where everything is standardized. So what I, and many people, fear is that desperately needed renewal will bring with it the drabbest of corporate culture. As a small example, there used to be a wonderful old candy store at the entrance to the Stillwell Avenue subway. It had all kinds of quirky concoctions. My favorite was chocolate-covered frozen bananas. After the subway station was rebuilt it was replaced by a Dunkin Donuts.

I would like to see the City thinking much bigger. I wrote letters to my elected representatives suggesting, for example, that they hire a major architect or artist to design some great visionary amusement park rides. Koolhaas himself would be an excellent candidate. Something like this would make Coney Island once more an essential tourist destination, especially for the international art scene. It would be great if they could take a ferry to Coney Island (just like one could in 1900) to see something amazing.

It would, I think, generate all kinds of business in Coney Island, from high-end seafood restaurants on the boardwalk to freak shows and other more visceral attractions. Low and high culture should be all mixed up, just the way it was a hundred years ago when Coney Island hosted visiting dignitaries and poor people who could enjoy a hot dog for a nickel.


photo: courtesy of Zoe Beloff

At the end of your book you include two photos of the Trumps surveying their parcel of Coney. The photos stand out because they are not part of the psychoanalytic society project. What are you saying to readers with the inclusion of these photos?

I specifically chose to put this picture next to the acknowledgments page. It was meant as a big “No thanks to…” or rather if you read the caption, “thanks to Fred Trump, Steeplechase Park was destroyed.” The weird thing is that Fred is wearing a large necktie with big polka dots. It makes him look like a clown. So here is this “clown” destroying the “Palace of Fun.” Psychoanalytically, I thought it was interesting.

Since launching your project, have you found additional materials from the Society? Do you think more Dream Films will ever turn up?

Yes, I am working on additional material. After it became clear in the in the late 1930’s that his Dreamland Amusement Park would not be built, Albert Grass tried a new way of fusing his love of psychoanalysis and popular culture, another venture. I will be publishing this new work in an issue of Cabinet Magazine that will come out next year, probably the spring.

• The exhibit runs until March 21, 2010
• See more at Zoe Beloff's site
• Buy the book--complete with Dream Films DVD

*Everyday Chatter

Grieve has been following the controversial 7th Street Tumor--and now there's a For Rent sign in the window. Today it's the bedroom for two homeless girls and their friendly cat. Tomorrow, this 3,000 sf space may be the next obnoxious bar and restaurant to invade the street.


Save Union Square from death by too much flare--just say no to TGI Friday's. [Gothamist]

In chain stores per acre, the East Village makes the top 5 most chainified in all of NYC. [Curbed]

And the chain stores keep coming as "the recession could have played a role in facilitating the chain expansion." [CR]

Remembering an older Orchard Street. [HNY]

And another old Orchard business dies. [BB]

Get ready for Brooklyn's Michael Jackson block party. [Gothamist]

How weird and scary is Hollister? Mike Albo lives to tell: "We needed to get out of there before we were trapped in this psychic brothel forever. I clutched onto him, and we battled our way past all the beautiful faces. Like sirens they beckoned for us to stop and transfer our lust into $600 worth of distressed denims and 'casual luxury' tees. Stop being so pretty around me, I wanted to scream." [NYT]

Coney Psychoanalytic

For all the deeply depressing events swirling around Coney Island this summer, there is one exciting event you should not miss: Zoe Beloff's "Dreamland" exhibit at the Coney Island Museum.



As the press release states, "In celebration of the centennial of Sigmund Freud’s visit to Coney Island in 1909, artist Zoe Beloff has resurrected the forgotten world of the Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society."

Piecing together bits of history found at flea markets and around Coney, Beloff informs us that the Society, housed in an office atop the Shore Theatre, was founded in 1926 and folded sometime in the early 1970s. It was made up of men and women, most of them working class Jews and Italians, excited by Freud's new ideas about sexuality and the unconscious mind.



With an obsessive eye for detail and accuracy, Beloff brings the vanished Amateur Psychoanalytic Society to life through artifacts and ephemera.

There are photographs and bios of its members (like Stella Weiss, who "had all the makings of a Borscht Belt comedienne," and Eddie Kammerer, for whom "Coney Island was haunted by his mother, forever young and beautiful and out of reach").

There are Dream Films, created by the members, playing on screens. And, everywhere, elaborate plans for a Freudian vision of Coney--a psychoanalytic Dreamland where bumper cars express unconscious drives, and wavy mirrors reveal your deeply buried, Id, Ego, and Super-Ego.



The Freudian dream park was the brainchild, Beloff tells us, of Albert Grass, founder of the Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society. Sadly, Grass' vision for a new park was squelched by George Tilyou, owner of Steeplechase.



Tilyou's rejection letter appears on the wall, typed on ancient letterhead. Grass' notes and sketches (many of them sexually explicit) are stained with coffee rings. Painted plywood boards for a bumper car game, discovered in an abandoned lot, are on display. And the beginnings of a wax sculpture of Freud, found in the World in Wax Musee, are preserved behind chicken wire.



The New York Times published an extensive article, with audio slide show and film, on the exhibit. Explaining her work, Beloff said, “I travel back into the past and explore the world of the imagination, the paranormal... I feel like I’m like a medium, and the voices of the past speak through me. I don’t make it up, I try to conjure it up.”

It is an impressive conjuring. Too good to be true. I asked the woman taking tickets, "Is it real?" She gave me a vague, existential answer, "What is reality? Especially in Coney Island."



The Times asked Beloff the same question, "Did the Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society really exist?"

“That’s a good question,” she said with a smile. “What do you think? Let’s think about interpreting this. That’s what Freud was about, taking real things and recontextualizing them to see what that says about us. Maybe that’s the approach I took.”

As Coney is set to undergo a violent, criminal Disneyfied surgery, I find myself wishing that Albert Grass, Stella Weiss, Eddie Kammerer, and the rest of the amateur psychoanalysts would appear to make Beloff's brilliant vision a reality. New York needs a Libido Funhouse far more than we need yet another (and another) luxury hotel tower.

*Tune in next for an interview with Zoe Beloff*

*Everyday Chatter

Ghostly mural of Dash Snow, "East Village artistic rebel", appears in Soho:


A quick look at the closing of the Beatrice Inn and New York's noise wars. [NYT]

"The terrace is not your living room." A note to the noisy jerks of Ave A. [EVG]

A peek inside the Crusader Candle Factory--where your 7-day prayer candles come from. [FIB]

You're not the only one annoyed with the endless number of "petition-waving college students" on the sidewalks. [NYT]

"After seven and a half years in office, Bloomberg, who is now sixty-seven, has amassed so much power and respect that he seems more a Medici than a mayor." [NYer]

Bloomberg lets slip he'll be Mayor Forever. [Gothamist]

Mom & Popism

On Saturday, for just one day, the rooftop of Gawker Media was open to the public to display "Mom and Popism," a collaboration between Gawker Artists and the storefront photography of Jim and Karla Murray. The duo's photos were blown up to near life-size, mounted on fronts, then enhanced with graffiti art, creating a kind of revised virtual New York.



But the full emotional experience of Mom & Popism begins on the street level. The building is located on Elizabeth, one of the most jarringly gentrified streets in town. Where I used to eat hot bread straight from LaRosa's, where old Italian ladies used to sit on the sidewalk to peel potatoes, there are now high-end shops, multi-million dollar homes, and European investo-tourists. The only mom and pop left here is Albanese Meats, still open for business.

At 210 Elizabeth, you walk up the stairs and through the Gawker offices, a vast and airy loft with curved brick ceilings and polished wood surfaces on which dozens of flat-screen monitors sit waiting for the day's new-media broadcast. Up on the roof, a DJ is banging out the beats.



Surrounding the seating is the virtual city. Not life-size, more like clubhouse-size, this shrunken city speaks to your child self, for whom a miniature house is just right. In this way, the storefronts tantalize. Their doors seem like they might open to another, more intensely Technicolored world.

You want to step through the entrance of the Stage deli and order a greasy breakfast in this alt-NYC. The counterman is there, just as he always is, wiping down the counter. At Esposito's Meat Shop, you want to inhale the smell of cured pork.



But you can't. This isn't real. The graffiti art splashed across the storefront's faces, often intermingling three-dimensionally with the signage, tells you that you're not looking at reality. This is the hyperreal. These are simulacra.



In the future, when the entire city as we've known it has vanished, when all the mom-and-pops are gone, what will remain are photographs. We rely on them now, to remember and rebuild the lost city in our minds.



Maybe, someday, the re-construction of virtual neighborhoods will become a ritual. Artists and other nostalgists will erect wooden fronts and paper them with giant photographs (thank goodness for Jim and Karla's exhaustive work). Old ladies will unfold beach chairs, sit down, and peel potatoes. The butcher will stand at the door of his shop, wiping the blood from his hands.

Someday, we won't have the real city. But we will have this.


"RIP NY"

See all my photos of Mom & Popism here

*Everyday Chatter

NYC really is turning into one big dorm/frat/sorority house--because today's newcomers admit they are terrified of the new and the different, and being alone makes them very anxious. Says one broker, they're no different than the immigrants who came through Ellis Island. You know, just more of those poor, huddled masses. [NYDN]

What happens when you just want to complain but you're not sure why? [Blah]

This interview, in which the self-proclaimed "high-class bitches" of Scores weigh in on politics, makes me really miss the old-school gals of Billy's Topless and the Baby Doll Lounge. [BB]

Revisit the 1980s EV on flickr. [EVG]

The Loews Village 7 has started showing classic films on Sundays. This weekend it's Casablanca. Next up--Hitchcock and more. Check out the schedule here:


If you don't have the coglionis to enjoy Manganaro's in person, or if you just want to whet your appetite before your next trip, check out the Bourdain video (begins at 4:50). [youtube]

8/27: Hear New York Stories from a Brooklyn mortician, a flophouse photographer, and the big gay ice-cream man. [Gelf]

Yes, the Howl! Festival is happening this year--kicking off with some performance art on 9/3. [EVH]

Visit New York's long-gone underground clubs. [BB]

The Bowery Boombox is alive and well. [Boogie]

In the Popper

After visiting the Shore Theater, Mermaid Avenue, the Shore Hotel, and Henderson's Dance Hall building, let's wrap up the tour of doomed Coney Island (though that's not an exhaustive list) with a property not owned by Thor: the Herman Popper Building.



It was built by brewer Herman Popper and his brother sometime between 1890 and 1906, first as a distillery and then as a tavern, says Forgotten NY. According to historian John Manbeck, via the Brooklyn Eagle, Popper opened the tavern on Surf Avenue "to better serve the Irish bars that sprang up on Coney Island’s Bowery, joining the German restaurants. Victorians crowded the streets, lubricated by a 'growler' or 'bucket of suds.' Irish waiters, who doubled as tenors, served a brew with a 'Coney Island head' on the beer—more suds than liquid—to unsuspecting rubes.'"


1932, NYPL

Today, on the first floor where there was once a tavern, then a penny arcade, and more recently a Carvel ice-cream shop, there's a jumbled, cluttered flea market that looks like it's been there forever.



You walk down a narrow passageway, past stalls packed with used electronics--stereos and computers piled perilously atop each other; glass cases full of wristwatches; stacks of videotapes, books, clothes, and stuffed animals. A sign says "Bike Repair Shop," but I didn't see any bikes.



Since 1998, the Popper building has been owned by a Ukrainian art dealer who runs a gallery on the second floor called "Surf Art Exchange." (I heard someone lives on the third floor.)



Walking up the staircase, you'll find one wall covered in graffitied messages from around the world, in many languages. "This place is absolutely wonderful!" says one.

On the opposite wall, there's a drawing of a bearded man sitting in a chair, surrounded by Russian words. It might be a portrait of the building's owner.



I encountered the owner in the gallery. A big, gray-bearded bear of a man, he was shirtless, dressed in only a pair of red swim trunks, bending over a bright red-felt pool table in a room packed from floor to ceiling with dark, Eastern European oil paintings in gilded frames. It was one of those odd, New York moments--and a photo I wish I could have taken.

His billiards companion, another big-bellied Ukrainian man, was also stripped to the waist and barefoot in swim trunks. The owner took his shot, handed me his business card, then went back to the game. I stood and stared for a few minutes, awe-struck by the scene, before heading back down the stairs.



The Columbia Journalist has an excellent article about the owner. "One needs to be a kamikaze to open up an art store in this neighborhood," he said.

Will he ever sell the Popper building? He told the Journalist that "he would be delighted to sell the entire Surf Avenue building if he got a reasonable price for it. What would he do then? 'I don’t know. Maybe I would go to Saint-Petersburg and buy The Hermitage,' he answered.

In the City's Plan for Coney, a disastrous vision just approved by the City Council, the Popper Building has totally vanished.