Trying to Build Community under Neoliberal Covidism

Painter, installation artist, post-postmodernist. www.philrabovsky.com Capital A, unauthorized opinions on art and culture—listen on iTunes, Spotify, and Ancho

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By driving us indoors, discouraging public assembly, and turning each person we encounter into a potential threat to our very lives, Covid-19 is the paradigmatic something corroding our ability to lead complex social lives. Yet for all its horror, this pandemic is merely the logical endpoint of processes that have been atomizing us as individuals and breaking up our communities for many decades all across the developed world.

There are a few fundamental things we as human beings need to build community. Among the most important are physical spaces to hang out, meet friends, and engage one another in unstructured conversation. Cultural movements have long been associated with the places where people gathered to exchange ideas: cafes in Enlightenment-era London and Paris; clubs in 1920s Harlem and Montmartre. These spaces have been threatened by the dramatic rise of real estate prices in big cities, closing down beloved haunts, pushing people out of city centers, putting hours of commuting time between friends and families, and converting the public realm into Privately Owned Public Spaces—places that “might ostensibly be open to all, but participation is invitation-only,” as Claire Bishop has observed. It is hard to imagine analogous communities forming among the upscale galleries and bespoke real estate opportunities that pass for today’s “cultural spaces.”

Another critical component for community is time. All the space in the world is no use if you spend your waking hours working multiple jobs to satisfy the rent, or commuting to and from the far-flung borough where you keep your bed. At an art talk a few years ago, I was startled to hear the performance artist Coco Fusco say that when she first came to New York in the 1990s, she would attend a lecture, art opening, or panel discussion practically every night of the week. The New York that I know is a different place. Here, few artists or human beings I have ever met are able to summon the energy to attend more than a handful of cultural events a month, even before the pandemic hit. We are simply too tired working increasingly unremunerative jobs to make the long commute out to Chelsea, Orchard Street, or Bushwick, where the beautiful people discuss art in carefully curated bubbles.

For many years, Steve Cannon, the founder of A Gathering of the Tribes, was able to run the kind of special space where community just happens—first out of his gallery on East 3rd Street, and later his apartment on East 6th. Wherever Steve was, you were welcome to come in. People dropped by and stayed however long they wanted, talking, meeting, laughing or arguing furiously. There were no barriers to entry, no tacit expectations. No one tried to sell you anything. It was just a place where people gathered. And when Steve passed in July of 2019, the sheer volume of people who showed up to his memorial service—lining up for five hours to give prepared or impromptu speeches—is a testimony to the power of the space he built and the need for others of its kind.

Since Steve’s passing, I have felt the absence of the community he naturally accrued around him, and which I felt a part of for a few brief years. In searching for something to keep those conversations going, I have turned to the imperfectly-privatized spaces of the internet, creating a podcast called Capital A: Unauthorized Opinions on Money, Art and Culture. For now, it is a meager substitute—not a conversation but a monologue, not in space but on a platform. Like Tribes, though, it exists in a somewhere partially ungoverned by the spacetime of neoliberal covidism. My hope is that one day, this small somewhere will support the kinds of conversations, gossip, and ideas that help to build community. For until our space and time can be regained, as the perfect storm of Covid and neoliberalism rages, we must cling like barnacles to whatever scrappy spaces we can find, resisting the urge to turn in early and finding the strength to form connections across the systems that divide us.