Photographer Edward Fausty documents ‘Fragile Utopia,’ an arts commune of sorts, in an exhibit at the Bernstein Gallery.
By: Ilene Dube
(In "Dog Sleeping, Eric Lowenstein/Sandra Malak Studio, 2004," "The elegant dropped bedroom through the fire door was ingeniously and surreptitiously built into the adjacent studio, which was used only for storage by an absent tenant," writes Edward Fausty. Facing page, from top: "Artwork in the Community Gallery, 2003" and "Bathroom Décor, 2005.")
Everywhere, it seems, beautiful old industrial spaces rendered into galleries, studios, lofts and theaters are being bulldozed to make way for towers of metal and glass.
Classic red brick structures, refitted many times over, with mismatched windows or no windows at all, made into temples of beauty with a splash of paint here, augmented with classic furnishings recovered from the dumpster since the early 1970s, from Soho to Noho, artists have created beauty where no man would go. No man or woman, that is, with the means to afford higher rent.
This is happening in Trenton, with city planners looking for developers to bulldoze Artworks an old warehouse converted to an art school, gallery and studio space and put up condos. It’s happening in Old City, Philadelphia, a neighborhood that saw new life from the Fringe Festival and galleries, now sprouting high rises with the names of huge developers. And it’s happening in Jersey City.
"A story about an address named 111 First Street is, for me, irresistible," writes photographer Edward Fausty in the catalog for his exhibit at the Bernstein Gallery, A Fragile Utopia: Studios and Spaces at 111 First Street. "It is an address that represents all addresses. It is a center point, and like many mythical center points, it is a scene of conflict and of drama."
Peter Applebome of The New York Times describes 111 First St., a former Old Gold cigarette factory, as "a ruined industrial landscape of half-deserted 19th-century warehouses and grimy streets, with the air accented by the occasional smell of a burning car or a stray trash fire." He goes on to capture the magic of every nook and cranny filled with surprises. "Along the way, it has become a symbol of the funky, iconoclastic side of this city’s quite remarkable renewal. The issue being fought over now is this: Do the artists get to stay in the neighborhood they helped create, or does this become the urban version of a suburban subdivision named for fauna and flora that were destroyed so it could be built?"
Sadly, all the tenants were evacuated in March 2005. Bernstein Gallery Director Kate Somers says "It is a classic story between speculative absentee landlord/developers and the local citizens impacted by their projects."
Mr. Fausty, who lived and worked in the building, documented the process, creating 4-foot square prints on Arches rag paper using pigmented inkjet technology. His images show the physical space, and although there are no people in the pictures, their presence is felt in the way their personal artifacts create a feeling of home in an industrial space. He describes it as a "living art museum with beautiful, if raw, gallery space, open working studios and free admission it was almost too good to be true. This was made more poignant as it disappeared…"
There had been 200 artists living and working here, attracted by the affordability ("The rent was reasonable some paid and some didn’t," says Mr. Fausty) and freedom, as well as a sort of communal lifestyle. Thousands of people would come to see the gallery shows and studio spaces.
"We helped each other out," says Mr. Fausty. "A pint of ice cream for a recipe, help with putting up a wall for help with plumbing. It wasn’t an institute with a board of directors, just a living organism."
With a studio in another old factory building in Union City now it, too, is slated for development, and Mr. Fausty will have to evacuate in eight months Mr. Fausty looks back at 111 First St. as a building in a phase of evolution. "We were naive when we moved in," he says, "but the fact that we were allowed in means the building would be sold and torn down."
These days, in Union City, he’s not fighting it, nor is he chronicling it. He remembers 111 First St. as anarchistic and like a commune. "No one managed the gallery," he says. "Whoever wanted a show went to the building management." When this interviewer expressed surprise that the very team responsible for the demolition was also in charge of the gallery shows, Mr. Fausty responds, "No one is entirely a monster it’s just that things happen."
Growing up in Scarsdale, N.Y., Mr. Fausty, whose father ran a camera shop, was given a Kodak Brownie camera. Photography wasn’t anything he considered as a career, and he was more inspired by the psychiatrist father of a friend. At the University of Rochester he studied psychology. "I was enthusiastic about the subject but not in the academic requirements of footnotes in papers, so was criticized for not being rigorous in my academic writing," he says. "I wanted to express myself and went back to photography."
Moving to New York City, Mr. Fausty was admitted to Cooper Union where he studied with Joel Meyerowitz. "He was very charismatic and intense, filled with an appreciation for pictures, but I almost walked out of his first class," Mr. Fausty says. "I was black and white and his class was about color. We did the sit-in-a-circle-tell-about-yourself thing, and then I got up to leave but he encouraged me to stick around. I discovered color through him and developed a latent appreciation for color and fell in love with it. It was a very exciting discovery."
Certainly the color prints in the Bernstein Gallery are testament to his love for color. The whitewashed red brick of industrial architecture contrasted against a purple sky with golden glowing lights in the skeleton of a new building under construction, and lights flickering in distant skyscrapers the subtle twilight gradations help make Mr. Fausty’s point, about how the old buildings were built to last, are solid and rich compared to the new towers of power.
After Cooper Union Mr. Fausty earned his master’s degree at Yale School of Art, where he became interested in ink on paper, rather than manufactured photo paper. He created collotypes, using a lithographic press. With this technique, he was able to create the images he wanted on the paper of his choice, but the 3,000 pound press meant he could no longer use a corner of his apartment in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District; he needed industrial space, and so in the late ’90s found his way to 111 First St.
"I was thrilled to be doing this, it was real work, manually using a practically extinct process, and I felt so proud of myself," he says.
All that changed when he bought a little Epson printer for his office work. "I took a look at this, then at the press. I put nice European paper in and the feeling of the print was similar," he says. "I had to do so much prep on the press, but here you just push a button."
He has switched to a larger printer, and the press has become his work table. All the images in Fragile Utopia have been made with the Epson printer on Arches cotton paper. What attracts him, time and again, to ink on paper is the "something’s missing" quality. "There’s a pastel feeling in the colors, like not everything’s there," he says.
In "Bathroom Décor, 2005," against seagreen walls, the room, with two urinals painted a matching sea green, has been decorated with a white upright piano, a gray upholstered chair, a neon Bud Light sign and an abstract painting. "All I know is, someone had the urge to decorate the men’s bathroom. It involved the communal qualities of doing your own plumbing whatever you want, you do it; we helped each other out. In exchange for the low rent, (building management) didn’t do much in the way of maintenance.
"We were just borrowing it for a finite period of time before we had to vacate," continues Mr. Fausty. "In a psychological sense, we felt like it was ours, and it was too good to be true."
Fragile Utopia: Studios and Spaces of 111 First Street is on view at the Bernstein Gallery, Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Robertson Hall, lower level, through Oct. 20. Reception: Oct. 13, 5:30-7:30 p.m. Gallery hours: Mon.-Fri. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. For information, call (609) 258-2222.

