Consider the concrete self-storage facility at 183 Lorraine Street, Brooklyn. Completed in 1923, the five-story fireproof structure is zoned M1-1 for industrial and manufacturing use: “light industrial uses, such as woodworking shops, repair shops, and wholesale service and storage facilities.” In recent years, the self-storage company's third floor has been converted into an astonishing warren of rental 'artists studios'. Don't even think about natural light. Most studio spaces are windowless interior cells strung along stark, double-loaded corridors. Studios cannot be distinguished from self-storage spaces of the building's others floors where urban consumers stockpile jettisoned accumulations.
What motivates sculptors, painters, printmakers and ceramicists to submit their labor to a carceral framework superimposed onto the very terrain where the factory model once disciplined industrial workers?
From their nodes of power in global flows that link networked artworlds and creative cities, the curator at the the New Museum, the Whitney or MOMA casts omniscient vision across a key terrains of operations: the exploitable natural resource of unknown artists whose very invisibility in the broad spectrum of culture workers helps validate the high-end market valuations of 'major artists.' Subordinated in windowless studios, unknown artists obediently internalize the curator's gaze, projecting through inner windows of their imagination fleeting prospects for recognition and affirmation awarded by auctions, art fairs, festivals, group shows and collector desire.
Deborah Natsios + John Young in Nicholas Korody, “The Whistleblower Architects,” 2016