Down To Zero




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September 19-25, 2002

cover story

Down To Zero

Standing tall: Bernstein in his Lower Manhattan gallery.

Bad-boy artist Neil Bernstein tries to do some good in a gallery near Ground Zero.

by David Warner photo by Jay Muhlin“

Cool. It’s different.”

“This is it? I thought they sold pictures.” “I’m not sure how I feel about 9/11 showing up in art yet.”

It’s Sept. 11, 2002, in Lower Manhattan. For hours now, people have been drifting into an unlikely art gallery just blocks away from Ground Zero. Some linger for a bit, puzzled. Some turn and leave almost immediately. Some stay for a long time, staring at the explosive assemblages of steel, glass and found objects. They chat with one another and with the artist, Neil Bernstein.

Most of these visitors are stopping by after the solemn memorial services at the World Trade Center site. Intrigued by the stenciled signs posted around the neighborhood, they’ve come to Warren Street to see what’s up. “WTC Memorial Art Show,” the signs announce. Bernstein’s assistant hands out fliers on the sidewalk: “Neil Bernstein at Ground Zero. 911 Artworks & Memorial. Harley & ’57 Chevy Parts. Trade Tower Debris.”

That last detail gets people angry, says Bernstein, who knows from making people angry; he’s the guy who used his own blood in Holocaust-themed artwork hung at the Inquirer last year, causing a small uproar when he listed “Jew blood” among the materials. This time he’s again hearing questions like, “You’re making art from what?”

But this artwork began pissing people off as soon as he started gathering the materials. For instance, there was the time he spirited away a 100-pound manhole cover from the vicinity of Ground Zero. “I was being yelled at by a bunch of Port Authority guys,” he says. “I think they were nervous.”

Maybe they were just suspicious of the $2,000 Armani suit he was wearing at the time, or the Mercedes he was driving. Because Neil Bernstein is hardly a starving artist. A Drexel-trained architect, he’s done residential work for such lofty addresses as the Park Avenue penthouse that once belonged to publishing legend Condé Nast. And he has another job that has allowed him access to Ground Zero (and its debris): he’s a part-time oil broker who works at the Mercantile Exchange.

Which is one reason the attacks on the World Trade Center affected him so deeply. He was supposed to be down there that morning -- he had just begun his broker training -- but his ride fell through. He knows of other oil traders who weren’t so lucky; they happened to be attending a meeting on Sept. 11 on a high floor in the North Tower.

Two days after the attack, he began work on his first 9/11-inspired pieces. They were a kind of exorcism for him, he says. And by October he had found a 3,000-square-foot bi-level space (at a rental price “way below market value,” he says) in an old printing factory just south of the Chambers Street train stop. He opened the Bernstein Gallery Sept. 7.

Why open a contemporary art gallery at such a difficult time, in such a beleaguered place?

“I had to do it in order to keep myself alive.”

“They call it bad-boy art!” Neil Bernstein calls from his seat by the gallery’s doorway, trying to convince a young man with a modified mohawk to check out the art inside.

A former Philadelphian living in Upper Black Eddy, Pa., and Manhattan, Bernstein, 42, fits the part of bad-boy artist almost too well. With his black T-shirt, goatee and ponytail, he’s like a Central Casting version of the downtown hipster.

But his renegade credentials are for real. As a member of the Highwire co-op gallery in the late ’80s and early ’90s, he and his co-conspirators wreaked havoc in Old City. Bernstein once rode an unmufflered Harley up the stairs of the 2nd Street Art Building as part of a performance that also involved slicing through steel with large power tools. “People were crossing the streets for months after that when they saw me coming.”

An installation he did at Penn State’s Reading campus in 1992 convinced some of the town’s fundamentalist Christians that he was possessed by demons; maybe it was the black robe and stilts, or the burial mounds built over a burning coal pit. (The piece was a memorial to the Reading Railroad.) “Administrators cut it down and buried it.”

No such action has been taken against his “9/11 Art Show,” despite the dirty looks he gets from Port Authority officials and the like. A WTC rep did ask him how he’d managed to “appropriate” the Trade Tower debris. But two police officers passing through the gallery comment only that the work is “interesting.”

One reason for the relative lack of concern is that the materials Bernstein uses -- four 20-ounce coffee cups’ worth of dust, for instance -- are incorporated into abstract, multimedia forms whose connection with the WTC is not always apparent (the exception being two towers of glass and steel topped with Statue-of-Liberty-esque crowns). In fact, it’s the abstraction, not the materials, that causes some visitors to object to the show. Five former employees of Windows on the World, fresh from a service for their 73 lost colleagues, come in hoping to see portraits of loved ones, or photos of the buildings collapsing. “This is not what we were expecting,” says Elaine Reid. “I think it’s a little misleading [for] the general public who don’t appreciate this kind of art.”

Others see connections where Bernstein may not have intended them. Steve Gagliano, a city planner who saw “everything” on 9/11, says the inner illuminations in several pieces “remind me of the little glowing light of the flames shooting up.” Swiss student Denise Jeitziner finds a piece using a found factory window to be profoundly disturbing: It reminds her of the people who jumped from the windows of the towers.

Some viewers appreciate the opportunity for catharsis.

“We have photos of 9/11, but no abstract art,” says Dimitri Deharak, an emergency medical technician who drove five hours from his home in Vermont to help out last September. “This is like a standing memory.” He’s particularly fond of Shelby Mustang-Bullitt Smokes bin-Laden, a kind of souped-up children’s playhorse that references the famous Steve McQueen car-chase movie. “It’s fast, it wipes out bin Laden and it kicks ass.”

Auto parts abound in Bernstein’s oeuvre; he spent his adolescence building muscle cars. In Lone Star, an assemblage shaped like Texas, the copper tint comes from a metallic paint used for hot rods. It’s a commentary on America’s fatal attraction to big oil and big cars, which seems ironic coming from an oil trader who currently owns 10 cars. But he sees his latest profession as the extension of what he’s been doing all his life. “Oil traders are scavengers.”

He traces his penchant for scavenging to his childhood, when his father, who ran a security alarm business, moved his wife and children to a dilapidated estate in Bucks County, from which they removed 27 tractor trailers of trash. His recent paintings not only reflect his passion for collecting, but also another important factor in his life: his recovery from near-paralysis after a series of accidents beginning in 1996 when he fell down two flights of stairs and exploded his lumbar spine. Vertebral Tempest, a painting in the “Zero” series, powerfully evokes not only the destruction of a human spine but of New York’s as well.

Bernstein remembers beginning the work “out in the forest with these huge sticks of charcoal.” He escaped into his art, rather than following through on his first impulse: escaping to Colorado, where his brother is a meteorologist. Thinking like a survivalist, he bought two cases of ammo for his sawed-off shotgun, withdrew $18,000 in CDs and put a $20,000 deposit on a Mercedes SUV.

But these extreme measures were, of course, not necessary. He turned to the gallery project instead. Any monies from works sold (they’re priced mostly in the $2,000-$4,000 range) will go back into the gallery and into workshops for Ground Zero survivors. He held one on Sept. 11. Six people joined him for a candlelight walk to the viewing platform, then returned to the gallery “to fire up the music and the coffee and the canvas and start rocking and rolling. I’m teaching them to dance with paint.”

Rocking and rolling and dancing with paint? OK, maybe he’s sounding a little Hollywood again. But he means it.

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