Something Possible Everywhere: Pier 34, NYC 1983-84

Something Possible Everywhere: Pier 34 NYC, 1983–84 is the first exhibition to revisit the extraordinary place and time when David Wojnarowicz and Mike Bidlo, together with friends and peers seized a city-owned pier and filled it with art. This show brings together the work of over 30 artists who were part of the community working on Pier 34.

Andreas Sterzing’s remarkable photographs, along with related images by Peter Hujar, Marisela La Grave, and Dirk Rowntree, document how these artists turned the Ward Line shipping terminal at the foot of Canal Street, into a series of makeshift art galleries and studios. Its rooms were filled with art that was often shocking, testing the boundaries of acceptable behaviour and presenting life on the edge. Each creative mind, furthermore, shared ideas and inspiration with another, short-circuiting the hypercompetitive nature of the art market

As rumors spread in the spring of 1983 of what was happening on the waterfront, Bidlo and Wojnarowicz released a statement to friends in the press, explaining that their aim was to create an opportunity for everyone “to explore any image in any material on any surface they choose. It was something no gallery would tolerate”. Above all they claimed that Pier 34 forged a community where many artists, for the first time, “experienced fulfillment in terms of contact with the art scene and strangers.” And they claimed there was and is no reason it could not happen somewhere else in the future:

“And this is just a start for all of us. We are all responsible for what it currently is and what it will become. This is something possible anywhere there are abandoned buildings. This is something possible everywhere.”

Sadly, the building was demolished and almost all of the art made on the pier no longer exists, but the presence of contemporaneous work in the exhibition makes tangible something of the physicality of the waterfront art and its larger aesthetic context.