White Box: Artists, activists, agents provocateurs?

Volume One, Issue 21, February 16 - 22, 2007

By Chris Lombardi

Juan Puntes, director of the White Box Gallery, in Chelsea, gave a low chuckle when asked if he thinks of himself as an activist.

“That’s what they like to say about me,” said Puntes, a curly-haired Spaniard with a compact body and a constant half-suppressed smile.

The word might still seem apropos for a gallery that had one of its spaces painted in full camouflage on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, that exhibited, in 2003, a project involving 15 inmates from the nearby Bayview Correctional Facility, that ran a 2004 pre-election show called “Democracy is Fun?” that after the election instantly morphed into “Democracy WAS(P) Fun” — and that just last year hosted “Asylum NYC,” in which eight artists spent a week in a simulated “detention center.”

Chelsea Now caught up with Puntes on the eve of his departure for Moscow, where he is co-curating a show at the Moscow Biennale. On the same night was the gallery’s annual Chinese New Year benefit dinner, the sort of function that “I used to hate — but now I’m behaving,” Puntes said.

Puntes has had to get used to benefit dinners, after nine years of running a not-for-profit arts organization in New York City.

During those nine years, White Box has become a fixture in Chelsea’s art scene, if a bit of an anomaly: In addition to being a gallery that doesn’t sell the work it exhibits, Puntes’ space hosts seminars, training programs, residencies and a film series called VideoBox — a good deal of which blurs the line between art and activism. This year, in addition to scheduling new, dense exhibitions featuring artists from all over the globe, a composers’ forum and a seminar marking the 70th anniversary of Picasso’s Guernica, Puntes and has big plans for the 2008 season — including the election season. But Puntes also worries, out loud, whether the White Box will be able to stay in Chelsea after 2010, when the lease runs out on the former horse stable it calls home.

A native of the Spanish province of Saragosa, also home to painter Francisco Goya and the filmmaker Luis Bunuel, Puntes came to the United States in the early 1980s, less than a decade after the regime of Generalissimo Franco. He arrived in a country not yet healed from the Vietnam War.

“I was coming from a dictatorship,” he recalls, “and I come here, and that war isn’t really over. And no wonder, with 50,000 boys coming home in body bags.”

Images painted by inmates at the Bayview Women’s Correctional Facility at part of Whitebox’s artist program with the prison

Puntes first arrived in Philadelphia, studying at the Philadelphia Academy of Art and developing himself as a painter, sculptor and filmmaker, though he stopped making his own work when he founded the first White Box, an “artist’s run-around space,” in Philadelphia’s Old City in 1987.

Like his countryman Bunuel, Puntes has a “funny, morbid, ironic sense of humor,” he said. Thus, the name “White Box” is itself a joke, a satiric homage to the pristine white boxes that enclose the art in commercial galleries.

He brought the name with him when he moved to Chelsea in 1998. That year, he helped an old friend, the Colombian artist Knox Martin, repaint his 25-year-old mural “Venus” on the side of the Bayview Women’s Correctional Facility. They used special paints designed to make it last 75 more years, although as reported last week in Chelsea Now, that mural is soon slated to disappear behind a new condominium tower. Puntes also registered that year for nonprofit status for his New York space: “I am not a merchant, and I knew that already,” he said.

After a year in a smaller space in a 26th Street complex (now the gallery’s annex), Puntes found and renovated a former horse stable at 525 W. 26th St., doing much of the work himself. From the beginning, the space had an international focus: Fifty percent of the shows feature artists and writers from outside the United States, most not yet big names. That international flavor had a political tinge from the start, which intensified after Sept. 11, though Puntes argues he’s just representing reality.

At the end of 2001, White Box sponsored the Irish artist Brian Maguire, who had gone into prisons all over the world to teach inmates art and paint their portraits, to do the same at Bayview Women’s Correctional Facility — the same place Puntes had helped repaint the mural. For 18 months, 13 young women had their portraits painted by Maguire, while they painted their own pictures of things and people they loved.

In January 2003, their work and Maguire’s was exhibited at White Box, and a billboard with their faces hovered over 20th St. Elizabeth Cassarino, a former inmate, told the New York Times that “it shows who we are, that we’re still people and can enjoy art like anyone else.”

Soon after the Bayview exhibition, White Box took on the imminent U.S. invasion of Iraq, with a characteristic twist: Two weeks before the first bombs dropped, the conceptual artist William Anastasi moved into the gallery’s Annex space for his show “Blind.” Anastasi had conceived the show 40 years earlier during the Vietnam War but had never gotten to enact it; now he painted half the gallery in green and brown camouflage, and then painted volunteers in the same colors. “We had a 72-year-old guy who came, and we painted him — he loved it,” said Puntes.

Meanwhile, in the other half of the gallery, a small white-box space offered a sofa, TV and the training video meant for employees of Tower Records, at once soothing and comically repetitive. A similar strategy, dislocating images and words, anchored “What War?” a more recent anti-war show in October 2006 — just in time for the midterm elections.

Explaining the strategy, Puntes quoted a Latin American existentialist: In the end we resort to the creative process to avoid despair. “And the way you do that,” he added. “is with humor.”

The “Democracy is Fun” projects, like the Iraq shows, pushed the same dynamic of anger and humor. The first show’s window display, in fall 2004, used the phrase as a question; on Nov. 7, the night President George W. Bush was re-elected, “I took the question mark off, crossed out the Is and wrote Was,” said Puntes. He called local curator Raul Zamudio and told him, “We have six days to put together a show called Democracy WAS Fun.”

The result brought together 33 artists, including Javier Telles, who spray-painted the verb in the title til it read, “Democracy WASP Fun”; British painter Conrad Atkinson; and Sarajevo video/installation artist Shoba Seric. The exhibit featured, among other things, explicit Texas cowboy imagery: boots, chaps and weapons. “We had M-16s, other kinds of guns,” said Puntes, who later took the show to a Los Angeles art fair and showed it by driving it around inside a Winnebago.

Puntes also stressed, rattling off dozens of show titles in rapid-fire succession, that throughout the years, many White Box shows had little explicit political content.

“We did a beautiful show called “Political Ecology — a French surrealist.” We brought in a group of Dutch neorealists, who turned every inch of our space into a church, taking us back into time, where art began,” Puntes said. Each year, he added, the space regularly features “seminal” artists, such as Atkinson and Carolee Schneeman, along with emerging figures. Every summer, its “Six Feet Under” series (named for the depth of the space, which sits six feet below the street) offers a “divertimento…something different, lazier. Like summer.”

Still, the Box also continues to invite groups that more explicitly tilt at power. In spring 2006, the Berlin-based Wooloo Group organized “AsylumNYC,” turning the White Box cavern into “a detention center” and bringing in the eight selected artists from all over the world. Carefully chosen to reflect the demographics of people seeking refugee status, the eight tried to make art under restrictive conditions; the “best in show,” Serbian painter Dusanka Komnenic, won free legal help from prominent immigration attorney Daniel J. Aharoni.

Aharoni, contacted this week at his Madison Avenue office, said the Wooloo Group got in touch with him because he’d already worked with artists for years. “I said yes, because of the terrible conditions facing so many people trying to get into this country. Anything that drew public attention to that was worth” giving his services pro bono, just as the gallery itself does.

Here, again, Puntes denies that his intentions were political. “People had a lot to say about that show, but why I liked it was, with the sense of despair people have around the world, they still want to come to New York!”

By the time his interview with Chelsea Now ended, Puntes was an hour late to his own benefit, but so were the donors, curators and interns arriving behind him. Tall women, splendid in cheongsam, kissed him hello. Interns in pencil skirts were too busy running around to talk much, especially on a night like this. Dinners like this help keep White Box afloat, along with grants, individual donations and a small number of auctions of donated works.

Puntes wonders, and worries, he said, that none of it will be enough to keep the White Box in Chelsea once its lease expires in 2010. He has been watching the area’s transformation since his arrival, with rents tripling and boutiques displacing artists.

“I knew when [designers] Balenciaga and Commes des Garcons came in on 22nd St. that it was all over.” Last summer’s “Six Feet Under” show, therefore, was subtitled “Flagships for Chelsea” and included critiques of Chanel and other designers.

But for now, Puntes brightened when he spoke of the nearer future. In April, for the 70th anniversary of Picasso’s Guernica, “we’ll bring in survivors of the bombing at Gernika” [he spelled out the Basque spelling of the town’s name]. A grant will enable a composers’ series, and there are plans for a year of art from all over Africa.

For the 2008 election season, Puntes plans to revive “Democracy Was Fun.” This time, he said, there will be seven Winnebagos crossing the country with the exhibition.

Not activism, he insisted, just communication — the type that has nothing to do with “the sanctity of the gallery space.”

“We’ll go to shopping malls, churches, parking lots,” Puntes said, his smile growing wide. “We’ll film it, too.”