For philosophy, maybe the ghosts of the future come out of living in communities more than in academies. Given what a tough year this has been for many of us academics – with precarious job markets and uncertain futures – I’m wondering.
In early December, I saw a post about some of my partner’s old friends. John Burt Sanders, a painter, had a COVID-19-safe show inside a house that Joey Behrens has been restoring as part of her engagement with land and homes. They live in a Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania neighborhood, John with his partner Haylee Ebersole and Joey with her husband,Tony Foster, an IT professional. Within a complex city, they’re working to become part of the place – like in Haylee’s print shop and programs for area youth.
These folks are not academically trained philosophers, but their lives are thoughtful. With them, I get a sense of how anything can be philosophical – even a desolate house. I wanted to know if Joey & John would tell the story of the house-show.
THE SOLUTION LINE
(Joey): John and I had been talking about his transition to a full time studio practice. It’s a shift that, in my experience, can be surprisingly challenging to make, let alone sustain. John said that he wished he had a show lined up somewhere, a deadline, something he had to produce for.
And I thought, Okay, I have a space...
The building, once a single family home, had undergone several remodels with an addition tacked on. These reconfigured it into three apartments, one per floor. My attention was currently focused on the first floor apartment. So I offered John the top two floors.
I don’t think John had been in the house since I had cleaned it out. He came over to check it out, spending a good hour or two with the space taking notes. [He was] excited about the way the light interacted with the wall colors and the way the rooms layer on each other.
(John): [When Joey invited me, I] visited the space, getting to know the light and thinking about the ideas and forms that would help me make the work. Right away, I knew I wanted to build the work around We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, whose language informs most of the titles in the show.
In that book, a future totalitarian state in a glass city is shaken by revolution. Within the city is the “Ancient House,” an old Victorian building turned museum intended to remind citizens of the excesses of their (now historical) humanity. It serves as a revolutionary headquarters.
Most of the work in the show pulls on compositional elements I’ve been using for a while. Generally, they consist of a solution line pulled from a maze (like one on the back of a cereal box) that is then combined with a quartering of the composition either vertical/horizontal (+) or diagonally (X). When combined, these two ordered elements – the solution and the organization – do not add up to create more order. Yet neither do they create chaos.
How this relates to my life is harder to explain. It has become a model for thinking about the world (well, maybe more like cultivating a feel for the world). It helps me not search exhaustively to render everything around me comprehensible but rather to find things indistinct and interconnected.
(Joey): I came to Wilkinsburg because of Haylee. We were roommates in grad school where we were in the same program. I had a desire to create my own, sustainable, version of the artistic communities I was nurtured by in SLC [Salt Lake City].
How could I have a studio? How could I create a space that I could share with other artists as well? Somehow tending to a rundown house became my way to think through things.
My “practice” feels like a meandering and shapeshifting river, one that frequently jumps its banks ~ flooding some areas, then narrowing to carve deeply into others. When I use the word practice, I refer to my art practice but also to my life practice.
Much of how I frame my way of living, making, and being in the world is as push[ing] back on the messages I’ve received from the culture I’ve been shaped in – an attempt to find and even expand the edges of the ways of living I have been given. I work against the voices (including my own) that say “art is an object”, “art is what one finds in art institutions, museums, and galleries,” but also the voices that say, “as a woman, I should be more interested in decorating a home” than physically building – or demolishing – one.
It’s hard to live in a place that has so much blight without immediately wanting to remake it. I’d been given a particular mythology about Wilkinsburg: big houses that needed work but could be bought for a few thousand dollars, fixed up with a lot of elbow grease and a willingness to rough it.
I was drawn to the seemingly abandoned and derelict building next door at 839 Holland Ave. The house was in bad shape, with a three story balcony that was rather dramatically collapsed. Folks on the block talked about what a shame it was, how it had been empty for a long time, and all reported that it was high on a fabled demo[lition] list. The house was a clear danger to anyone living nearby.
I found [that] I increasingly felt protective of the lot next door. It was being used as a dump. I could relate to the abandoned garage in the back alley overrun with plants and filled with debris and garbage. I decided to do something with it.
The garage project was my first effort to work with the land next door. The slow pace and visibility of [clearing out the garage] meant folks saw me at it regularly. That provided opportunities to talk with neighbors and passersby and clearly signaled how the lot was now cared for. What I was doing eventually evolved into the idea of transforming the garage into a lightbox.
The process of working with the garage began early on in my relationship with Tony. He spent several Saturdays helping me clean it out and then, as the project evolved, installing the structure for the garage’s transformation. I’m pretty sure this was where he fell in love with me.
For some reason, we want this comprehensive, everything all at once understanding of the world, but I think all we end up ever getting are bits and pieces[,] and we put the puzzle together over time – and then [the puzzle] changes. … [W]e never get a total understanding all at once.
(source)
THE GRID
(John): I think so many of the houses falling apart here are the result of absent landlords collecting rent on homes without ever reinvesting in their physical structure or maintenance. These absentee landlords siphon out profit from a resource (shelter) used to depletion via rent collected from people in precarious circumstances.
Working on these houses as Haylee & I have [John and Haylee have renovated two houses –jbk], I’ve come to realize that so many homeowners make repairs in circumstances of urgency while lacking resources. The most affordable fix is a patch, and so many of these homes are patch upon patch – haunted by the less than fantastical, all too mundane ghosts of extraction and austerity.
(Joey): Tony & I had started a free artist-in-residence project in our home. It offered artists time and logistical/intellectual support by providing room, board, and studio space. However, locating the residency project within our home alongside our large and exuberant canine housemate impacted who the residency worked for!
While I was attracted to the idea of residencies as an opportunity to encounter other ways of thinking and making, I couldn’t afford to travel around and participate in them. If I couldn’t go out into the world as much as I wanted, perhaps I could invite the world to me.
Although technically vacant when put up for sale by owner, 843 Holland [Ave.] had recently been inhabited by the owner’s family. Like many of the buildings in the region, a lot of maintenance had been deferred. It needed a lot of work. But when 843 came up for sale, the immediate thought was to relocate the residency there.
We bought the building in July-August of 2019, and while we bought it with the intention of creating a space for the residency, we also wanted to provide a decent place for folks to live that wasn’t solely focused on extracting rent/making a profit.
843 Holland – Blank Space (the LLC that owns the building and that Tony and I formed) – is where John’s show took place.
“INDISTINCT & INTERCONNECTED”
(John): The renovation of our current home has been different from either of Joey’s projects. The place had been stripped down to framework and siding, little left from the original interior that wasn’t just dust or lath.
The evidence of history has been slim, limited to shards of things dug up in the lawn or penciled measurements on the studs from when they built the place in 1910. The tiling on the downstairs fireplace has two tiles depicting a white man and woman (well, it’s green tile) in what I guess is Victorian dress. Tonge (our downstairs tenet) and I have dubbed them the “colonizers” and I’ve been meaning to remove them.
The process of renovating houses meant we were out on the sidewalk, porch or driveway where everyone is walking, driving by or saying hello, asking what we are up to and commenting on our progress. Small, repeated interactions lead up to names, where people live nearby, and how long they’ve been here. Nice and easy and small community stuff.
Despite the pandemic, we’ve sustained some of that, bracketed by safety guidelines. Right now, there’s the small, remote stuff we can do for each other. Normally, it’d be stopping and chatting with one another when you might happen by, impromptu backyard get togethers, trading veg[etable] growing tips, produce, local news and gossip. It’d be community emails threads (informative, confusing, repetitive) and group texts.
We’ve received so much help: a handy neighbor fixed up our busted bumper, a passerby helped move a stove into the house. [There were] tools freely lent and food readily gifted.
We’ve tried to put back that care: car rides for friends and neighbors who need to get somewhere, pharmacy pick-ups, reading over an eviction threat letter, helping out with yard work and making and delivering more food. It happens in an unplanned way, and sometimes it feels like a rising chorus.
But there is still such disconnection [that] you can chart along age, race, income, housing, location.
(Joey): A lot of what I’ve been doing – cleaning out 843, spending time with the ghost of 839 (the house that I tried to gentle the demolition of), and now being present with the land – is a form of tending.
As I’ve been working with these buildings, I’m thinking about the ways that I am uncovering, undoing, and redoing other people’s labor. The ways I am adding my own and that of the folks that I’ve hired to work with me.
I feel like I’m getting lost in the weeds a bit, and maybe that’s okay. I’ve connected with all sorts of neighbors. Some have given me bits and pieces of these houses’ histories along with stories of the rest of the neighborhood. Others have lent me tools, given advice, and even provided labor. I’ve been learning about lead paint and plaster, drainage, roofing; various construction materials, tools, and techniques. I’ve loved puzzling out what was done, problem solving involving forms of historical excavation and mapping.
The work has generated an abundance of questions. I’ve spent little time in the studio the past few years but have (literally!) gathered materials, knowing that these will, at some point, make it into art objects: door knobs from 839, lath, nails and other fasteners, keys, lists of the “weeds” growing around 839, sections of the ivy that had formed a roof over the garage, photo-documentation of the structures …
Tending these three lots has provided so much! I’ve honored my instincts about how to work with the lots and structures in respectful and meaningful ways.
(John [from an old interview]): “The first time my friends and I stayed in Wilkinsburg, we had a little campfire going, and throughout the afternoon 10-15 people from around the neighborhood stopped by and we got a chance to meet them. It was a really big welcome and I think that was the instance that solidified our decision to move here. …
“[I]t would be near impossible to build a community like the one we have here[,] and we don’t want to give it up. That’s really what’s kept us here in Wilkinsburg permanently. In all of the places I’ve lived, I’ve never known and appreciated my neighbors as much as I do here. When we sit on our porch, [many a] person that walks by is someone we know.” (source)
It’s not always a party around here, but there’s still some glue.
~
This is an installment of Into Philosophy.
Jeremy Bendik-Keymer
Professor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.A., land of many older nations
