Installation Mobilization

ON A SATURDAY in September, Michele Gambetta was dressed for a downtown insurgency, wearing camouflage pants and a black shirt as she guarded her mobile art gallery in front of the Robert Miller Gallery on W. 26th St.

"Our goal is to provoke the galleries of Chelsea as best we can," said the 38-year-old photographer and founder of Art-Anon, a Williamsburg art collective, as she hustled perplexed tourists into the RIDER Project, a gallery in the back of a truck.

Two weekends ago, the staid art galleries of Chelsea got a shot of guerilla art, when the RIDER Project parked in the area. The inside of the 15-foot truck had been meticulously sheetrocked, taped and painted white, turning it into a white cube art space showcasing the work of 17 emerging artists.

"This project is meant to be an empowering event," said Gambetta, as heavy foot traffic moved by. "Any artist with a credit card can get a truck and show off his work."

For five days, the RIDER Project parked in front of various Chelsea galleries, from 21st St. to 26th St., bounded by 10th and 11th Aves. Every day the routine was the same: Art-Anon members opened the door, turned on the generator that powered the gallery lights and set up wooden steps to the tailgate. A table with a guestbook, price lists and artists' statements was set outside.

The truck exhibit was titled, "RIDER Project 2004: Cell, A Mobile Exhibition."

"We are as big as a prison cell," said Gambetta. "Art is also the red blood cell that moves through the city, that nourishes us."

Some of the gallery owners were not so pleased. On Thursday, a peevish man at Metro Pictures Gallery on 24th St. complained that the noise of the RIDER generator was interfering with his show. Legally speaking, he had little choice but to stew in his juices. After the Giuliani administration directed the cops to arrest artists selling their work on the streets, a subsequent court ruling said that they were protected by the First Amendment. The court victory was part of the inspiration for the RIDER Project.

"A big part of what we do is hang out and talk to people, to have dialogues about art," Gambetta said. "In an optimal setting, we want to create a scene."

Later that night, as the gallery owners locked their doors at 7 p.m., Art-Anon threw a tailgate hibachi barbecue and wine party.

Even with an MFA from the School of Visual Arts, the Queens-born Gambetta found the New York art world nearly impossible to break into. She founded Art-Anon and went her own way. But Gambetta is frank about the insider/outsider tension in her own group.

"We are being upstarts with this truck, but some of our members would be interested in selling their work with established galleries." Prices for the truck gallery's 22 photographs, sculptures and paintings range from $180 to $2500.

For Gambetta and the other artists in Art-Anon, Williamsburg is not the grossly cute "Billyburg" of Bedford Ave. It's the much more gritty East Williamsburg, where granite yards, live-poultry businesses and bodegas still dominate. Likewise, there's nothing cute about the Grand Ave. art studio building where Gambetta works. The back entrance stairs are covered in pigeon dung and the building next door houses illegal immigrants. The artists in Gambetta's collective have no trust funds; most work full-time jobs and do their art late into the night.

For instance, Tracy Gilman teaches art at a high school in Westchester, and furiously does her own work on school vacations. Her piece for the truck is five handcrafted soaps made out of glycerin and mounted on a light box. The soaps have pieces of Gilman's skin, hair and fingernails embedded in them. It's "about the neuroses of cleanliness," the artist said. "Soap offers the potential to be clean, but it can also be repellant, like soap scum or abrasive soaps. We are constantly shedding skin when we share soap. By cleaning yourself, you are accepting other people."

Asya Geisberg had two photos in the show of salt formations in Death Valley. A former assistant director for a Manhattan art gallery, she expressed frustration at the isolation of being a working artist in New York.

"The longer you are in New York, the more artists you know and the more galleries you know," she said. "You also feel less and less connected. Art-Anon is a place where artists can work together, which is not what the New York art world is about."

Gigantic canvases hang in the masoleum-like Paula Cooper Gallery on 21st Street, a former Soho mainstay. In the barren art barns of Chelsea, receptionists don't look up as people come in to look at the artwork. The cold, callous sales calls go on in the back office, like a boiler room operation.

The Annina Nosei Gallery sits on 22nd St. Nosei made her money in the 1980s selling the paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat and other graffiti artists. Graffiti was taken out of the context of the New York streets and hung on sterile, whitewashed gallery walls.

In an ironic and pitiful rebellion, the front of Nosei's red-brick gallery facade has been bombed. "Where did all the real art go?" asks a scrawled lament. Underneath a self-portrait of a face, another: "Free the Art."

Surreal scenes abounded in this neighborhood. At the Barbara Gladstone Gallery on 24th St., an installation by Polish artist Miroslaw Balka had projectors showing black-and-white footage of deer in Poland cavorting through the grim barbed wire of an abandoned Nazi concentration camp. In front of the projection, a solitary plate circles around on a six-foot wide turntable.

When outside the Gladstone Gallery, as the artists of the RIDER Project coaxed gallery workers into their truck, a flatbed truck drove by with a cage on the back. Sponsored by the newly omnipresent Falun Gong human rights activists, the cage held two or three bloody, tortured mannequins tied upside down on the bars. A mechanical dummy dressed as a Chinese police officer slowly and eternally bashed a baby doll with a police baton as the truck faded into the distance.

The first RIDER Project truck ran last fall from Williamsburg through the East Village to Chelsea. The $5000 cost of renting a truck, sheetrocking it and curating the show was financed by Chase Visa. For the second truck, an Art-Anon art auction raised $2300.

In more candid moments, Gambetta admitted that going from 16-hour days of office work to nights as a photographer and art revolutionary takes its toll. "I sometimes wonder if the sacrifice is all worth it," she said. "An artist's life is purely insane."

The visitor-count topped 150 people each weekday, with 200 on Saturday. The truck was gutted on Sunday and cleaned so the truck rental place would never know there was a gallery inside. Art-Anon has deemed the second truck a success and are planning their next guerilla assault on Manhattan.