Dennis Del Zotto and the Williamsburg Scene

By Ethan Pettit

Dennis Del Zotto is an artist of pitch-perfect economy and timing. He is one of the most well-liked and respected artists to emerge from the Williamsburg art scene of the early 90’s, where his work was invariably a fixture and a feature of the “warehouse culture” of installation art, new media, and performance that went variously under production names like Lalalandia, Keep Refrigerated, El Sensorium, Fake Shop, Ongolia, Galapagos, Hit & Run Theater, and many more. He has collaborated with movers and shakers from that scene such as Gregor Asch (aka DJ Olive), Ignatio Platas, Daniel Smith, Owen Bush, Jeff Gompertz, Robert Elmes, and many others.

Del Zotto is notable for having done more with less. He falls into the category of those lucky artists who have found a simple material that goes a long way and does many things. For 20 year he has used a single material — polyethylene plastic. And his nickname is “the inflatable man”. During the 90’s, large inflated plastic bubbles, tunnels, tents, mazes, and billowing sails of plastic became a craze in nightclubs, galleries, performances and raves in cosmopolitan centers around the world. It was a cheap and efficient way radically to alter a space, and to distract and disorient trendy club goers as well as the most inscrutable hipsters. By the mid-90’s, everyone was doing “inflatables”. Some called it “air-chitecture”, and it became a kind of pillar (or pillow?) of the resurgence of installation and multi-media art during that decade.

But it is almost certainly safe to say that no one on the international circuit of the more rarefied art spaces and nightspots did more to develop and refine the inflatable than Dennis Del Zotto. Over time, one could spot a Del Zotto inflatable as surely as one could spot a master drawing or painting. There was the deft line, the confident workmanship of seams and curves, the clever use of light and currents of air, and the economy of form and execution.

In the course of his career, Del Zotto’s vocabulary and range of expression has expanded — without ever leaving the confines of his one chosen material of polyethylene. His earliest work at SUNY Purchase in the 80’s, where he studied under the performance artist John Sturgeon, is crisp and “conceptual” in the American minimalist tradition. There he “co-opted” a gallery space, caused it to “disappear” by inflating a plastic sheath tight against the walls, floor, and ceiling, and into the nooks and crannies of the room, thereby “laminating” the interior, rather like the inverse of a Cristo wrapped building.

By contrast, some of his most recent work is explosively romantic — great grottoes of sweeping light and shadow, recalling the cliffs of the Hudson Valley, where Del Zotto was born and raised, and where he enjoys rock climbing.

Del Zotto is precise. He chooses his theme and his “palette”, and sticks to the subject matter. His inflatables are not as arbitrary or “improvised” as one might at first assume. In [1995?] at the Galapagos art space in Williamsburg, he chose to move away from 3-dimensional space and his usual all-around construction, and instead compressed his inflatable into a kind of large lens of white translucent plastic. This was presented frontally on a stage. From behind it he created a shadow play with is body, and called the piece “Organic TV”. The performance was featured on the Japanese edition of Good Morning America, not surprisingly, since Tokyo was onto Williamsburg several years before Manhattan.

In 1998, Del Zotto’s artist colleagues gave him his due as the principal “city planner” of all things inflatable. They invited him to oversee the construction of an “inflatable world” in a large warehouse in Brooklyn. The result was a multi-level network of rooms, tunnels, catwalks, plazas, a beautiful chapel, and even an observatory with “stars” poked into the overarching roof and lit from behind. It included soundscapes and videoscapes, and was a richly textured inflatable city. Each segment was designed and built by a different artist, with Del Zotto as principal “air-chitect” and planner.

Among other things, the inflatable world was Del Zotto’s social comment — about the city, about competition, stardom, who gets credit for what; all in all, a glorious and collaborative send-up of the “inflated egos” of artists and visionaries.

There has only ever been one art movement — cultural movement really — that can be uniquely attributed to Williamsburg. That is to say, a group project that occurred in direct response to the local environment, and whose style could not be found elsewhere. No art occurs in a vacuum, but the warehouse scene in Williamsburg in the early to mid 90’s was about as unique and unprecedented as it is possible for culture and a style to be.

The existence of enormous, abandoned warehouses along the waterfront, and the abundance of cheap loft space, compelled large-scale work, and hurled the pioneering young artists up against questions of space and scale that had not been in play since minimalism and conceptualism some twenty years hence. But in the 90’s, of course, the artists had the benefit of new technologies, and also a baroque sensibility inherited from postmodernism. Nonetheless, they cleaved more to the philosophy of the sixties than to that of the eighties. They were interested in sensation, phenomena, science, and weirdness, and abjured the literal imagery and referential work that still prevailed in the Manhattan art scene.

In this regard, the Williamsburg warehouse artists were neo-formalists — but with the stress on “neo”. Their work was less contained by the gallery and museum system than that of the so-called “liberated” postmodernists. They were the first generation of Internet artists. The warehouses spawned music and performance in tandem with visual art. The club maker Mariano Ariadne called his practice “entertainment research” and flatly turned down invitations to show in galleries. The media artist and theorist Ebon Fisher ran his own institute called Nerve Circle, and worked to formulate a theory of what was going on in Williamsburg.

Critics and curators in Williamsburg today generally are quick to applaud the “diversity” of art in the neighborhood, and the fact that there is no dominant style or theory. But that has not always been the case. In fact, Williamsburg was quite taken up with ideological debate in the 90s, and there was a self-conscious movement that took in perhaps a hundred artists at most. It was, probably, the last big art scene of the 20^th century. We have briefly glossed it here, and placed the work of Dennis Del Zotto in that context — surely not the only place to put it, and surely not the last word on his art, but an interesting place to start.

7 June 2006

Park Slope, Brooklyn

Recent highlights of Del Zotto’s career:

2002 — Created an environment at White Columns gallery with Leo Villireal and others, for a music festival curated by Oblaat.

[2003?] — Invited by art patron Josh Harris to inflate “the Loveplex”, two massive bubbles enveloping an entire storefront gallery.

2004 — The prolific and enigmatic club-maker Jeff Gompertz included Del Zotto in a group show of “inflatable art" at Volume in Williamsburg.

Del Zotto also plays electronic music on laptop and drums, and he has performed at Share, PS 1, Tonic, the Bass Museum in Miami, and in Nuremberg, Germany, with performance artist and vocalist Shelley Hirsch.