Tyler Myers

Within the world of drag, there’s a sharp divide between the mainstream and alternative drag (otherwise known as alt drag). Performers in the former category tend to embrace womanly (or “fishy”) looks, haute couture, and Broadway-inspired dance numbers; within the latter, you’ll find more androgynous (or “genderfuck”) styling, DIY outfits, and productions that draw from performance art. And drag’s present moment, which is so defined by the success of RuPaul—who just won a Reality TV Host Emmy this Sunday night—has created, in the minds of many, a stark division between the mainstream drag we see on TV and the alt drag of edgy clubs and underground queer nightlife.

Last weekend’s Bushwig drag festival in New York City—a two-day celebration of LGBTQ art, culture, and, most importantly, alt drag—attempted to prove the fluidity of those divisions, and that they don’t (or shouldn’t) prevent queens from coming together, especially now that drag is bigger and more visible than ever before.

This weekend was an epic drag. Cherry-topped by a long-overdue Emmy win for famed drag queen RuPaul Charles, the real fun kicked off during a weekendlong festival of drag, queer performance and music known as Bushwig.

“We’ve really envisioned MAMI as a hub of activity, and want to make the most of this home base while we have access to it. The artworks serve as the anchors of this home which keep us grounded as we crack up, debate, hug, drink, and dance together.  We aim to do this work with love and empathy, and by dispersing authorship through chain curatorial strategies. How can we help spread resources as far and wide as possible? How can we hold each other closer while also letting go?”

In their newest exhibition, So Much Dirt But Not Enough Soil, NYC-based artists Loney Abrams and Johnny Stanish challenge the superficial and highlight inherent conflicts in global systems and societies through a material mash up of ingredients like THC oil, human hair, Subway sandwich wrappers, and body odor. At the Knockdown Center in Queens, the art is dwarfed by the surrounding ruins of an old marble and door factory. Soap reliefs created with consumer materials such as hair extensions, cigarette ash, Forever 21 jeans, and Smirnoff Ice hang side-by-side on an old brick wall exposed to the elements, allowing for the possibility of rain to lather them and juxtaposing the idea of sterilization with that of chaotic, dirty consumption.

At the heart of the labyrinth, lived the Minotaur, according to Greek mythology. The half-man, half-bull creature fed on the lost souls cast into its winding paths.

No such fate awaits visitors to the maze that is the centerpiece of “You Are Here,” a conceptual art event that runs through Monday at the Knockdown Center in Maspeth, Queens. What they will find, instead, staged in the center of a 60-by-60 foot maze, is a series of musical performances.

“Can I touch you?” asked a young brunette woman in a black polo shirt, taking my hand and leading me into the cavernous main space of the Knockdown Center in Maspeth, Queens. Around us, about a dozen individuals in identical attire paired up with audience members. We made small talk for a few minutes, until she broke off the conversation. “Sorry, I have to go do something for my job,” she said, as her colleagues murmured similar statements. Suddenly, the black-shirted performers were dancing in unison before us, performing a sequence of simple, controlled movements reminiscent of the choreography in early 1990s hip-hop videos. They moved mechanically, like marionettes conducted by invisible strings.

This was the introductory sequence of Authority Figure (May 20-22), an evening-length performance at the Knockdown Center directed by Monica Mirabile and Sarah Kinlaw. The event, featuring more than one hundred and fifty performers and collaborators, spread across the 50,000-square-foot former glass factory and its industrial grounds. Conceived by Mirabile and Kinlaw as “a social psychology experiment that uses choreography, sound and installation to elicit emotional response from the audience,” the performance comprised fourteen different vignettes on the themes of obedient relationships, from the familial to the pedagogical to the political. One point of departure was the Milgram experiments of the 1960s, wherein participants administered what they thought were life-threatening electrical shocks to actors when prodded by an authority figure. Another was the continued and escalating violence against racial and sexual minorities.

THE KNOCKDOWN CENTER This refurbished 19th-century brick factory compound at 52-19 Flushing Avenue (at 54th Street) in Maspeth, Queens, initially produced glass and then prefab, or knockdown, doors. Now, four years old, it is its own kind of strange hybrid. Overseen by the artists Michael Merck and Tyler Myers, it survives by renting parts of its 60,000 square feet for weddings, performances and other events. But along with Vanessa Thill, the two also oversee noncommercial art exhibitions. The best of the three current shows is “Transactions,” organized by Carolina Wheat and Liz Nielsen, who run Elijah Wheat Showroom, a small Bushwick space. They invited artists to contribute a favorite object and explain its importance. Nearly two dozen responded, including Carol Bove, Lisa Yuskavage and Yevgeniya Baras, and their often telling selections hang above little rugs and pillows that invite intimate contemplation. One of the most tangible effects of this barely-visible show is the hand-drawn map by Mr. Merck. In the courtyard, the capable sculptures and paintings of John Furgason, Serban Ionescu and Carlos Little all gain from being displayed in a romantic ruined boiler. A two-person show introduces the work of Anna Mikhailovskaia, a promising young Brooklyn sculptor, and John Schacht(1938-2009), a little-known Chicagoan, whose watercolor-gouaches of patterned biomorphic forms expand the legacy of the Hairy Who. The Knockdown Center brims with unrealized potential. It already has a restaurant.

I don’t think I’ve ever had my breath taken away in New York the way I did when I first set eyes on the not-for-profit artist-run operation in Brooklyn known as Knockdown Center. Not only did I not feel like I was in New York, I remembered the jealousy I always feel when I’m in Berlin or Los Angeles, walking in off some street through an unassuming doorway to a hidden huge courtyard and a magical vast building for art. I was staggered at what I saw, and then starting seeing, as possible art-world futures. New York must have a lot of derelict industrial spaces like this, in Maspeth and elsewhere, I thought. It was the most hopeful real-estate moment I’ve had in New York since the days of the East Village in the early 1980s (or maybe since galleries settled Chelsea in the 1990s). Somehow the man who saved Knockdown Center from developers coveting the site found a way to transform this magnificent 50,000-square-foot former door factory into a “radically cross-disciplinary” space devoted to “diverse formats, nourishing experimental impulses, questioning traditional notions of authorship, cultural production, and reception.” The space also “accepts proposals” for shows. You can propose something. I met an artist who did and the show is there now.

A serious conversation on the topic of play appears to be at work in the two-person exhibition, Anna Mikhailovskaia and John Schacht, currently on view at the Knockdown Center. With very few right angles or orderly readings available, the show calls into question larger assumptions about the association of irresponsibility with playfulness, the assumed randomness of organic forms, and predilections toward linear thought.