Forcefield: Raleigh’s Decentralized Arts Community

Spokes with no Hub

Raleigh sounds like “Mile End” by Pulp. It boasts the orangest sun and ripcord train sounds, rubble fields and fog silhouettes, but Raleigh’s artistic community lacks a center. Its network is impermanent, hyperventilating in expectation. The city is disconnected with itself, desireless of the will to collect. A field map would render a pell mell constellation of no recognizable form. As I peer down from the topmost floor of the Clarion Hotel at the city below I feel no pull toward its prolix sloganeering of construction and reemergence. Installation artist Olafur Eliasson’s recent comments in W magazine that downtown areas have become increasingly static and museumlike continually text my thoughts. Indeed many of my contemporaries have echoed this sentiment in recent conversation. It is suddenly chic to live downtown. Downtown: the new suburbia? And while there are over a dozen major construction projects in downtown Raleigh it feels less urban—artificially posh. I spoke with several citizens recently who reiterated my feeling that Raleigh is lacking in spontaneous action toward a vibrant and varying forcefield for art.

“It’s difficult to say what comes first.  Great art that needs a venue?  Or great venues that inspire art and creativity,” says Jackson Hodges, a graduate of the NCSU School of Design who recently showed at HL Roaming. He definitely thinks Raleigh is worth it and says, “There is no reason that a city where there is so much talent, education, and energy shouldn’t already have a thriving art scene.” Hodges knows many people feel the same way, but he finds it difficult to draw consistent inspiration from the city. The resounding cry is that Raleigh needs to feel new every day. And as the city swells and metamorphoses into greased new infrastructures comprised of districts, galleries, patrons, curators, and museums it could become swansong of the Southcoast. To be successful, says Hodges, a community needs effective leadership, and parenthetically “not dictatorship, of course, and especially not design-by-committee bureaucracies with overtly conservative political views.” Without upstarts this city could be alienating to any avant-gardist.

Writer Eric Amling runs Human Hair & Co., specializing in Etc’s and Miscellaneous. Amling produces handmade books, postcards, and sundry paraphernalia with a literary bent. He’s designed record covers for locals The Bower Birds and Philadelphia’s Dr. Dog. Sarcastically, he informs me, the most fertile arts scene in Raleigh now is the culinary arts. I talked with Eric in a coffee shop at the declining west end of Hillsborough Street. He says “the community wants these sort of things,” but admits that many people are waiting for someone else to take the lead. He’s concerned the current construction boom in Raleigh and the expected growth will make life more difficult for artists, pushing rents up and tastemakers out.

Shonna Greenwell of pH Seven, a fine art framing and art gallery in Boylan Heights, doesn’t seem as reluctant to embrace the boom. To her more people means more potential art buyers. Greenwell and Amling both acknowledge the glut of empty space in Raleigh and how this reveals a tremendous amount of potential for artists and their function. Some of this space is tied up though, such as the Dillon Supply Co. building, owned by the TTA. Much of it is unavailable because of fading plans to install a rail line on the spot. Oft times if the space isn’t vacant it’s a stress ball for demolition connoisseurs and urban rednecks – reduced to a pile of brickdust. King’s Barcade is a sad example. Westside Studios at 424 S. Dawson Street could be a dazzling forward-garde dancehall. The façade is something like a Belarusian dimestore or a hipster’s Bermuda Triangle—but it’s empty. The lack of dance floors and nightclubs where the ambience is more theatre of cruelty than an Alex Katz painting is a basic impediment. People need a place to go where movement, gesture, and body language are the primary means of communication and catharsis. Art is work and its trade people need a place to interface.

Tim Botta teaches writing at Wake Tech. He’s an impressive poet who’s lived in Raleigh for over 20 years. He tells me, “There are a lot of talented people around here, but I don’t think they’ve met.” Raleigh appears to be out to impress Raleigh but doesn’t possess the scope and attraction that could make it a treasure that people from all over the country look to for inspiration. Its cliques and sceneterisms are flagrantly petty and surprisingly elitist for a city where no one is famous. This disconnection spins more of a spiderweb effect than a forcefield. It becomes startlingly apparent when observing the sentimentally tinged climate of musicianship. It seems there are pockets of initiates committed to single bands replicating an array of nostalgic sounds, but no unified tone across the entire city. I caught Birds of Avalon at Slim’s and saw no one from the Wanko Honcho house party on Lenoir Street. It seems an alienating solipsism organizes show-goers into separate bizarrely indistinct mirages flickering at the horizon of an entertainment desert.

Laurie Simpson is an art spectator and jewelry maker whose latest work was displayed at Dracula’s Daughter in Durham. She believes Raleigh needs more criticism from within and less government. She got “really depressed when they closed down Poole’s and King’s.” Simpson believes that drug culture and unofficial art [graffiti / guerilla] contribute to the vibrancy of a city. She emphasizes that a struggle from the pavement up helps contribute to scene solidarity and enhances the snakehead slash Stasi aesthetic of underground culture so important to attracting dynamic guests to play. Those guests could be fended off by dwindling audiences and Giuliani style sweep-ups. I ran into writer Jordan Hester at the Jackpot last weekend and he told me they’ve been slowly sanitizing this city since the day he was born.

Allyssa Wolf is a poet who’s just recently moved to Raleigh from Los Angeles. Her first book, Vaudeville, was published last year by the Otis College of Art & Design. She sees Raleigh as a cross between a Cronenberg film and a thawing Eastern Bloc, very right now now. She opines, “In Raleigh there is amazing atmosphere and space lying unutilized. From the warehouse district to Europa, Raleigh could be a radical playground for the post-ghostal.” It’s true, newish galleries like HL Roaming and Island Ting show panache. Pitch Media Gallery is like a Greyhound to Lump’s Lufthansa, but it’s a cool brick-exposed basement that could renaissance via its current call for artists.

I recently moved to Raleigh myself for the 4th time and find its acid-washed tones mesmerizingly potent. There’s a beautiful landscape dying to be exploited but a kineticism dormant at the foot of last decade’s Raleigh. The lightning rod rally to pull its creative denizens toward a center is eminent if it can temper its commercial aspirations with the will to assemble a vital and sustainable arts culture. “If you can’t get the artists involved you can’t get the general public involved,” exclaims Tim Botta.

 

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