An Interview with Scott Pfaffman, by John Buchanan

John Buchanan: So you and your wife at the time, Florence Neal, came to Red Hook together?

Scott Pfaffman: Yes in 1984 we put together a proposal for an artist housing project at 353 Van Brunt Street. It produced about six citywide artist housing projects.  And we were the lucky recipients of one of them.

I was summoned to the city for a press conference; Ed Koch was the mayor at the time. I was told I was only there for appearances; in other words I was the designated artist. I just needed to be there to prove that there was this person.

But instead, when the press conference began, a woman named Janet Langsam, an assistant commissioner, came to the microphone and said, “We’re very pleased today to have one of the artist housing recipients present. His name is Scott Pfaffman. He’d like to come up and say a few words.” And that was the first I’d heard that I would speak.

I went up to the microphone, and basically said that in New York we have an abundance of creativity, and when we have problems of housing, or crime, or hunger, or whatever it may be, we approach the problem creatively.

Because that’s what New Yorkers do, we’re creative.

And then I thanked everybody and sat down. And then a succession of politicians, including Ed Koch himself, parroted my words.

The refrain went “New York is where creative solutions occur. We believe in creative initiatives to solve our problems. And our advantage is our creativity,” and so forth and so on. And it was a valuable lesson to see how starved the political class was for content. And it, you know, was probably an opening I should have capitalized on, but of course I had other things to do. So the press conference closed, and I went to the bathroom.

Back then, before City Hall became a fortress, you never knew how you’d run in to. As I was using the bathroom, these two old City Hall reporters came in. They didn’t see me. One of them said to the other, “So what did you think about that kid’s creative crap?” The other guy says, “Ah, I don’t know, probably just more bullshit, right?” And the first guy responds, “I don’t know, it was kind of catchy!”

But that was the attitude in New York in the ‘70s and ‘80s. It was a different place than it is now.

JB: How was New York different then?

SP: Well the players were more seasoned, and they were better. I think in some ways they were more familiar with the political apparatus as it existed then. That political apparatus evaporated by the mid-80s to early-90s when Giuliani came in and basically just turned the whole table upside down. And turned the media too into an adversary for any kind of progressive political or social movement. Everything was characterized as corrupt. Those were the waning days of Mayor Lindsay liberalism; as the conservative movement really grew legs, it began to dismantle liberal institutions. But to give the reactionary right some credit, the concept of an artist housing program is a little farfetched. At the time it got all kinds of bad press. People would say, “Why not housing for taxi drivers?!” And so forth and so on.

JB: But back to your housing victory…

SP: It took three years of continued negotiations with the city to finally close on the property. And during that time our neighbors in Red Hook completely trashed the place. You know, it was kind of a lawless sprawl.

There were very few city services. The police were concentrated in the housing projects trying to battle basically a crack epidemic, and the Van Brunt area was left to its own. We had abandoned cars, some junkies, and petty crime. Not too much major crime. There were a few shootings of course because there were plenty of guns around. We had a couple of drug dealing turf wars; one of them played out right in front of our windows. A carload of kids was chased down and shot through the windows at the corner of Van Brunt and Dikeman Streets in broad daylight.

But those were setbacks to what was already under way — the wide scale gentrification and recapitalization of New York City. Which began with the financial crisis of ’74 and ’75. In other words the big capital started getting aligned to come back into the city, and buy it up cheap, and make a lot of money. And now, some 40 years later, the recapitalization of New York is now complete. And we have to deal with what that means to our urban environment, but basically there is not much we can do about it.

JB: How did you come to New York City?

SP: I was living in Alabama, my home state, and where I was in a relationship with Florence Neal. We were both determined to get to New York; she was already there living at The Pickwick, a women’s boarding hotel on 51st and Lexington. I was accepted to Hunter College for grad school; so I moved up and found a loft on the bulletin board at Food, Gordon Matta Clark’s place in Soho. The loft was in Dumbo; it was a giant 5,000-square-foot space for $300 a month.

Pretty soon, a few other people we knew from the south came to join us. Within six month or so Florence and I had a full household of people who were willing to pull up roots and move to New York just on the basis of having a place to stay. At any one time we might have eight or nine people living there.

JB: How was that?

SP: It was fun. We were young, 22, 23 years old. It was 1977 and the art scene was really still tiny. You could take in the whole thing in an afternoon basically, or two afternoons. And there was a lot of excitement. I quickly met a whole array of artists through my contacts in grad school and then through my friendship with this painter and artist named Richard Mott, who I met in Art Park in 1977. I subsequently met sculptor Lyman Kipp and he hired me to help him fabricate a couple of pieces at Art Park in Lewistown, New York.

He’d received a commission there. So we set up a studio to build these big sculptures. Richard Mott had also received a grant and was there holding court. He brought in all these extraordinary people from New York, who were mind blowing. Under their influence I quickly jettisoned one world to embrace another. It introduced me to the Time Square Show, and all kinds of you “downtown aristocracy”. They weren’t aristocracy; they were all punks. But they turned out to be the beginnings of the lower Manhattan scene.

JB: Like who?

SP: Oh, like Basquiat, later on. Tom Otterness, Kiki Smith, Cara Perlman, and Jenny Holzer, the whole crowd. There was a vibrant scene going on, basically; the Time Square Show was 1980. By luck I happened into it, although part of my luck was having a vehicle, which was rare in that time and place. Having a van that I could move stuff in made me a prime player in the downtown art scene. In fact when we opened the Real Estate Show, it was my step-van that we used as the staging operation for breaking into 123 Delancey Street. Ann Messner had the bolt cutters inside the guitar case.

One thing led to another, and you know, I found this park out on the waterfront in Dumbo — The Empire Fort and Ferry State Park — which was in disuse. I put it to use, curating what might now be called “installation art”. In 1980, I put in a big piece of sculpture I’d built myself, and publicized it. It was my first one person show in New York City. And didn’t get much press, but it did get a little buzz, largely due to the professor I was studying with, Tony Smith.

Tony was very supportive of my work, and was the first person to create that buzz that is essential to establishing a career as an artist in New York. Things began to coalesce. And I was subsequently encouraged to curate an outdoor sculptures show in that space for about 10 years, from 1982 to 1992. I had a show in that park every year with 18 or 20 sculptures in it, and it was a herculean task.

It took a tremendous amount of energy, and Florence was very instrumental in that. She did all the graphic design for it, built us our catalogues and so forth. I would try year after year to get funding for artists’ stipends, or publishing, or publicity, or anything. And they were very stubborn. If you do something for nothing one time then they’re not inclined to pay you the next time. It’s just the mindset. There is no value somehow.

JB: So where did this Red Hook real estate project fit in?

SP: I guess you could say I became a public art player. I was opening outdoor sculpture projects all over. I did one on the Williamsburg Bridge, Bryant Park, Central Park, Queens Bridge Park, another in Houston, TX. The money was peanuts, but it was exciting.

Taking on the project in Red Hook took so much energy. And it definitely distracted from my sculpture production, even though I was able to put together a studio and continue working. By ’92 it kind of eclipsed so I decided to decamp, and move to Amsterdam. And I did a show in Cologne, and Vienna. I was trying to jump ship kind of and restart my focus in Europe. A classic American artist strategy. All this coincided with the end of my marriage to Florence in ’92. As part of the divorce settlement she got the artist housing project. And now she is the steward of that, and of course the director of the Kentler International Drawing Space, the exhibition space we co-founded in 1991. And that’s still an ongoing success, I’m very proud of that. It was a kind of an anchor in Red Hook in a lot of ways, certainly one of the first.

JB: Who were the others?

SP: Richard Mott did a show, Earth Remembers, in ’84 or ’85. Richard Van Buren had some kind of open studio show down here in the 80s. Also, Chris [Gilbrith] was down the street, and [Bob Grenier], [Brent Barker], John Morton, and all those artists had arrived on the heels of the musicians who had first pioneered Red Hook.

JB: Like who?

SP: [Howard Colins], and Janet, and Olga Bloom, they’re the ones who came down here in the early 70s when the neighborhood was really forlorn, and still looked like Selby’s book, “Last Exit to Brooklyn.” They didn’t have to do much set dressing when they did that movie. Musicians discovered these disused industrial spaces because they lead improvised lifestyles, and they can make music in them. You cannot play music at five o’clock in the morning in an Upper West Side apartment, right? A musician doesn’t care where they live, as long as they can make music. So they’ll live in some pretty run down circumstances, you know, an improvised toilet, maybe bathing with a bucket. They’ll forgo all the other creature comforts in order to have a place to perform and make their art.

Artists on the other hand will sleep with anyone.

And so one morning one of those artists woke up in one of those musicians lofts and said, “Say, do you mind if I use that corner over there to do a couple of paintings?” And that’s how artists found Red Hook, or Soho. They should not be given much credit for discovering it.

JB: When you moved to Red Hook was there any kind of art scene in Red Hook itself?

SP: Oh for sure, yeah. We piggybacked on to stuff that was already here.

JB: And what was that like, the scene?

SP: Brent Burger had been on Union Street, and then he moved over to Luquer, bought a place for maybe $15,000. Richard Van Buren was in that firehouse on Van Brunt Street with [Bacha Zamir]. Bob [Brenier] lived in the bagel shop. Richard (Mock?) was over on Commerce Street, he was a late arrival in ’84. And so by the time we got here in ’87 it was kind of old news, except that we were at the tail end of the crack epidemic.

JB: Yeah, well it was going on.

SP: It was still pretty heavy, and so the police were completely overwhelmed and pre-occupied with that; it seemed to be where the biggest damage was being done. So we were kind of ignored. But as a result of this artist housing program, our building at 353 Van Brunt Street became the first significant project in the neighborhood to achieve a code compliant renovation. The work in this neighborhood on all the houses had always been done without permit, without license, and just ad hoc.

The neighborhood had been decimated by the extraordinary efforts by the Port Authority back in the late ‘60s and ‘70s to claim the whole area for a container port. Then came the waste treatment facility proposal for where the sugar plant was. There was a whole succession of urban renewal projects, which would have been the death knell of the neighborhood. But somehow we managed to dodge it, largely because of John McGettrick’s efforts frankly; he’s sort of the patron saint of Red Hook.

JB: When did he move here?

SP: John McGettrick got here on the heels of the musicians. He knew Jonas Mekas, and some other of the musician crowd. I think he might have even known Howard Collins. Howard was an unrepentant racist, but a brilliant jazz guitar player. And he lived in 190 Coffey and owned 192. He owned those two buildings at the end of the block on Coffey Street, and that’s where Richard Gins and I ended up living in ’92.

JB: Was Greg O’Connell having pier shows at this point?

SP: No, Greg’s pier shows didn’t start until ’91 or ’92. And that was through the Brooklyn Waterfront Artist Coalition, Fred Skelinger, and [Brian Yost], and I did a huge collaborative project in one of the old bays down at the end of the block. Giant, it was 8,000 square feet we consumed with a giant fucking installation and performance piece.

JB: A lot of big installations were happening there.

SP: Yeah. Brian called it A Bridge Too Far. We did a big project in the vacant lot where Tony, the sculptor who has the crazy sculptures on Dikeman Street, is now. That whole lot was empty, and I managed to convince Tony to let me put a outdoor sculpture show there too. I did a thing called Picnic Mass. I think that was ’91. And that had I think eight or ten people in it, including Brian. And [Jennifer Protis], myself, John Borba did a piece, a pyrotechnic piece, Gary, what was his name? Anyway, but I don’t think other than the Earth Remembered show over on Commerce Street that there had been an art show in the neighborhood per se.

So when the Kentler opened in ’91 we did a thing called Red Hook Remembered. It was an archive of a local who had collected photographs of Red Hook through the years. He even had some of the photographs of the old Hoover Town, which was on the parade grounds near the swimming pool. And of course the swimming pool wasn’t there then, that was all WPA. JB:

JB: What did the Kentler Gallery look like then?

SP: The first Kentler gallery was just a little tiny room in the front. The rest of that floor was my studio and fabrication place. I had a job working for [Steven Wills] over on Duane Street in that little triangle where Richard Serra’s studio is. He provided most of the capital for the renovation of 353 Van Brunt Street.

JB: Who was Steven Wills?

SP: Steven Wills was a cheese, butter, and cheese distributor on Duane Street. His was a profitable organization, and he needed facilities management. One of his workers recommended me. I worked for Steven for seven years. We did all kinds of improvements on the place; I cut my teeth in construction there. We built elevators, and loading docks, and bathrooms; huge big renovations.

JB: You’ve always had community spirit or maybe it’s that artist’s spirit. You went to art school. You knew tools. You could do things. If people needed houses, you helped them build. And at a certain point you seemed to commit to Red Hook as a community and seeing it that way.

SP: I think you’re right. Once we got the Kentler up on its legs and I realized I wasn’t going to be part of it, I knew I still wanted to stay in the neighborhood. And I did. I found a place. I bought a place over on Beard Street where Allan Bladder lives now. And I bought this place here at 360 Van Brunt Street. But I’m not sure how much it represents a commitment on my part, other than the kind of serendipity of what’s presented, what’s available, what resources you have. I committed to Red Hook but would I have moved to Buffalo if somebody had offered me a big studio there? Probably.

JB: Well how do you think Red Hook, the community, the art scene, real estate scene are all developing now, and how do you project into the future?

SP: Red Hook has always attracted eccentrics, probably from the first waterfront carbuncles that settled here in the 1600s. It’s sort of a remote location surrounded by water. Not all people are attracted to it or find its rough maritime industrial landscape charming. The fact that you’re surrounded by people who don’t have money and so forth create refining effect. So the neighborhood has consistently attracted eccentric people. But now the eccentric people have a lot of money. There is no rule that says eccentrics can’t be wealthy. In fact as you know many famous eccentrics are wealthy.

JB: Give me an example.

SP: Howard Hughes, Edward James. Dustin Yellin is a great example. He came to the neighborhood, appreciated all these qualities, like I say this distressed maritime industrial landscape, found that appealing. Had the means to purchase a couple of buildings at deep discount, because the owners didn’t recognize the potential. And he managed to buy the Pioneer Works and the another one down the street. So we’re seeing it now, the new neighbors tend to be well heeled and slightly eccentric. You see them walking their pedigree dogs in their $600 loafers. That’s the new reality.

JB: And how are the old-timers handling it?

SP: Frozen in amber in the state when they went to their first orgy. It imprints in your mind that everything has to stay as it was when you were 23 years old. So I can understand that resistance. But I think it’s unfounded. I think the pessimism about New York’s losing its soul or something to the overarching influence of commercialism and capitalism is probably misplaced too. The city is continuing to develop all kinds of extraordinary venues, create relationships between artists, and between artists and communities that had hitherto not existed.

Think about Bushwick. Bushwick is unprecedented. There are 40 times the artists in Bushwick than there were at Soho at its peak. ‘Cause Bushwick is that much bigger and that many more artists are involved. The scene has grown exponentially.

JB: What do you think those Bushwick artists think of their predecessors in Soho and such?

SP: I think young people are probably preoccupied with market strategies and politics that I wouldn’t understand. And they’re also involved in a dialogue with culture that’s more advanced than mine, I mean I have stayed in a kind of retarded state of 1970s formalism as far as I can tell. I did for a long time believe that I had political, social direction in my work. And the public sculptures that I did were almost like giant political cartoons in some ways. But that’s not the case now. I’ve retreated into a much more private studio practice that is not really political and doesn’t share much with contemporary art.

JB: Is your work here satisfying?

SP: I find it pretty rewarding. I enjoy doing my drawings. I’ve had some limited success with them. I’ve done enough of them now I might begin to think I need to take another turn. It would be a little absurd to have more than three or four thousand of these. I do a back of an envelope kind of calculation, where I say well let’s see, I sell about six drawings a year now, so I can do some quick math and see how much inventory I have to satisfy demand. And right now I have enough inventory to satisfy demand for almost 2,500 years.

JB: Well good retirement.