Art vandals? Who knew?

Alan Feuer has an article in The New York Times about a guy taking photos of some obscure art:

In the windy darkness of a recent spring morning, thirty people of an arty, mostly Brooklynite persuasion gathered after midnight for an illicit get-together in a maintenance shed, high atop the Williamsburg Bridge. Billed as the Third-Annual NYC Undercover, You-Might-Be-Arrested, Clandestine Errantry Trespassing Adventure Party, the event attracted members of a distinct, risk-taking subset of the New York art world— heights-loving writers, courageous painters, a devil-may-care guitarist, a guy lugging bongos, and the Williamsburg photographer, Tod Seelie— all of whom had been quietly invited to the late-night affair by its pseudonymous organizers, Agent Verde and Agent Rojo.
After scrambling over a ten-foot-high security fence, the partygoers climbed a steel staircase— the lights of Manhattan glimmering below— as part of a vertiginous, invigorating trip that culminated in a catwalk, a ladder, and finally a narrow hatchway, leading up to a low-ceilinged room of riveted metal plates. There, for more than an hour, the group made music and unauthorized public art. Light was provided by votive candles and flashlights. Mr. Seelie, a bald man sporting tattoos and a Fu Manchu mustache, camera at his eye, stood taking pictures in the middle of the room. “When a trip takes this much effort,” he said, “there’s usually something worthwhile at the end.”
For Mr. Seelie, who is 33 and could be called the house photographer for the Kings County art-vandal underground, something worthwhile might include: a female mud-wrestling match, a violent punk show, an illegal party in an abandoned warehouse, a guerilla theater event in the snow, or a group sailing trip through New York Harbor (and beyond) on rafts made of junk. Last month, he sat down for a coffee at the Cafe Orwell, in Bushwick in Brooklyn, a few nights after shooting an art show at the Gowanus Ballroom. “It turned out pretty good,” he remarked offhandedly. “The band performance ended with naked people running around with watermelons on their heads.”
Mr. Seelie’s work— which can be seen on four sebsites and in publications as various as Spin, Vice, and The New York Times— often documents occasions that may seem weird for weirdness’s sake (a randomly burning car, say, or a randomly burning drum kit still being played by the drummer). But his images at times elevate mere weirdness to a more striking realm of visual intrigue. Strange, vivid, baffling, and relentlessly unexplained, they leave their viewers transfixed by certain questions: Who are those people running down that hill in their underwear? Did someone punch that kid with the black eye? Why is that man vomiting on the street?
“He’s a guy who’s always had an interest in the extreme— in interesting, envelope-pushing opportunities,” said Mr. Seelie’s friend, Todd Patrick, a music promoter better known in Brooklyn circles as Todd P. “He’s all about showing smart, sometimes privileged, people doing stuff they probably haven’t done before. He likes to catch upper-middle-class white kids actually doing interesting things.”
Whether that means Williamsburg eviction parties, where artists can be found careering down stairs, toboggan-style, in bathtubs, or gatherings of the outlaw biker gang Skidmarxxx (which may include the decapitated head of a pig), Mr. Seelie has brought his camera and, with it, his audience, into some of the city’s most unusual and arresting (at times, literally) happenings, while remaining true to the disturbing or evanescent nature of those happenings. Unlike some photographers, he is not a tourist or a journalistic transient, calling ahead to make arrangements, then parachuting in to steal a shot. “Tod’s not from the outside,” said Sarah E. McMillan, an artist with the guerilla art collective, the Madagascar Institute (motto: Fear is Never Boring). “A lot of documentarians think the eyes of the future are more important than the eyes of the present. Not Tod. He’s noninvasive. He knows where to stand.”
A few weeks ago, Mr. Seelie was standing where he often stands— at the lip of a stage in Williamsburg— for a tinnitus-inducing concert by the Rhode Island band Lightning Bolt. Lightning Bolt, some years ago, achieved a kind of fame by playing on the floors, not the stages, of their venues, a practice they had to give up after being mobbed so thoroughly by an audience that they couldn’t hoist their instruments. The Williamsburg concert began with the band’s bassist asking the crowd not to swarm the stage once the music started. The request was disregarded by the second bar of the first song. After gathering momentum in a mosh pit, a wave of human bodies crashed into, then onto, the stage, tumbling everywhere as entangled limbs and torsos spilled at the feet of the musicians. Mr. Seelie, crouching with his camera, was caught beneath the crest. “Nothing serious, just a few scratches and some bruises,” he wrote later that night, in a text message explaining how he fared at the concert. The text message was written at 2:34 a.m. Most communications from him bear a similar time stamp.
Tod Seelie was born and raised in Rocky River, Ohio, a semi-affluent suburb on the west side of Cleveland with old homes, new strip malls and lakeside views. His father was divorced from his mother when Mr. Seelie was twelve. He said he and his father were estranged for many years due to Tod’s refusal to attend St. Ignatius, an elite Catholic preparatory school for boys. Instead, Mr. Seelie says, he chose a more obscure religion, devoting his adolescence to the worship of Cleveland’s punk rock bands. “What I remember most growing up,” he told an interviewer in 2009, “are tall trees, industrial wasteland, the gray expanse of Lake Erie, the silence of a winter night, and how popular Phil Collins’s music was.”
He came to New York City in 1997, on a scholarship, to study sculpture at Pratt, and started taking snapshots of his friends (among them the artist known as Swoon and Ian Vanek, who went on to found the band Japanther) while working as an art assistant on the side to help defray the cost of his education. “Tod and I had to work a little harder than some others did to get where we were,” said Swoon, whose real name is Caledonia Curry. “But I think we both appreciated how focused and committed it made us.”
After graduating from Pratt with a photography degree, Mr. Seelie joined Ms. Curry in an art collective called Toyshop, which in the early 2000s undertook a sly series of public art projects, like mud wrestling in Walter De Maria’s New York Earth Room, or dressing up in pirate garb in an attempt to confound commuters on the Staten Island Ferry. Toyshop grew out of a goofily rebellious crew of art students and art-school hangers-on who were, as Mr. Vanek put it in an e-mail, “DIY punks with adventure spirit and wanderlust— a bit criminal at the right moments and a bit flower power at others.”
New York at the turn of the millennium was passing through a seemingly endless real-estate and capital-markets boom, and it appeared that every other city block was being colonized by condominiums. The art world, in particular, seemed to be defined by the glass-and-steel Chelsea galleries that specialized in transferring work from artists to well-heeled Wall Streeters in exchange for enormous sums of money. Mr. Seelie’s troupe of Brooklyn-based, bicycle-riding street artists adopted tactics that placed them in opposition to this new Gilded Age. If they wanted to make a painting, they didn’t wait for gallery space to become available; they painted on the walls of a building in their neighborhood. If they wanted to stage a concert, they didn’t solicit booking agents at overpriced nightclubs; they used someone’s apartment, or commandeered an empty warehouse and rigged the lights and speakers by themselves.
“Most of the things I’m drawn to are done by DIY people who make what they want to happen, happen,” Mr. Seelie said. “You want to put on a play? Great. Find an abandoned power plant.”
Mr. Seelie and his circle of friends have known each other for many years, from bike kills (rallies of competing ganglike bicycle clubs) and from secret parties in abandoned or illegal spaces, said one of those friends, a disc jockey who goes by the nightclub moniker D.J. Dirtyfinger. “His people in New York are people who don’t do stuff within the confines of standard bars or parties. They’re out there being creative almost to a renegade level.”
This renegade aesthetic was clearly formed in response to capitalist economics, though not necessarily in a self-conscious way. The pictures Mr. Seelie has taken over the years— of the Critical Mass bike group, of artists like Swoon, of men with lances jousting on bicycles— are arguably representative of a broader reaction to globalism and corporatism, made plain in events as diverse as the Idiot-arod, a shopping cart race based on Alaska’s Iditarod sled race; or SantaCon, the raunchy Christmas costume parade; or Grub, a semimonthly, Toyshop-derived, Dumpster-diving dinner party where participants eat communally cooked food, sometimes taken from the trash.
“DIY is obviously a moving target,” said Mr. Patrick, the music promoter. There are extreme cases— the Crusties, as he called them— “who live in squats and hop trains.” But then there are those, he said, “who live in the world of jobs and apartments and who simply make room in their lives for anti-establishment culture.”
“Ultimately, Tod’s passion is for experiences that are only really possible if you’re living at the extreme,” Mr. Patrick said.
In true DIY spirit, most, if not all, of Mr. Seelie’s photos can be found online at the four personally curated websites he maintains: the.everydayilive.com, the.ofquiet.com, suckapants.com and todseelie.com. The first he describes as a “crazy kind of place for burning cars and naked people” where, indeed, you are likely to find photographs of long-haired men on stilts and bare-breasted women against a backdrop of mud pits or graffiti. The second consists of landscape photographs: the broken roads and decaying industrial structures Mr. Seelie describes as what might result if “William Eggleston took photos of Detroit.” The third is mostly a concert site, containing Mr. Seelie’s shots of bands like Parts & Labor or Team Robespierre. Todseelie.com is “the professional site,” he said, designed to sell the images he produces to newspapers, publishers, and magazines.
Earlier this spring, Mr. Seelie was contacted— out of the blue, he said— by a video production company working with Lexus, the automaker, which wanted to use footage of him shooting his pictures for an advertising campaign. In exchange for a few hours’ work, he received a payment of $10,000. There were two unlikely aspects to this transaction. First, Mr. Seelie doesn’t drive a car, let alone a Lexus. (He actually gets around on a Raleigh bicycle he salvaged from the street.) Second, the assignment paid him, in one lump sum, more than what he had made in all of 2010.
Mr. Seelie currently makes ends meet by installing other artists’ gallery shows— a friend unwittingly invited him last month to the opening of a show he helped to hang— a job which pays about twenty dollars an hour. Over the years he has designed calendars (of puppies, kittens, and golfers) for Workman Publishing and served as a handyman at the Bowery Poetry Club. He once caulked sinks for the artist Dorothea Rockburne, and Cindy Sherman, the photographer, hired him one day to paint a chair.
“He works hard as a photographer, but he’s also incredibly handy as a crew person,” said Jeff Stark, a producer of guerilla theater and the editor of the strange-happenings newsletter, Nonsense NYC. “Tod’s the kind of person who will take pictures and then jump in and help wire up your electrical.”
Mr. Seelie’s personal distillation of the art-versus-commerce conundrum goes something like this: “It’s less about trying to make money and more about figuring out ways not to spend money.” He travels frequently— he has worked on projects in Haiti, Chernobyl, and Detroit— and usually pays for his expeditions by subletting his Williamsburg walkup and living cheaply.
That maddening aspiration of most working artists— the big break— has so far eluded him, but the seeds of such a break may be found in his latest and most ambitious project: a book-length collection of images documenting the last ten years of the underground art scene. Stored in boxes and on hard-drives, the photographs depict, Mr. Seelie said, the dawning of the New York street-art movement, the birth of the local chapter of the Black Label Bike Club and the early years of bands like Black Dice, Japanther, and Matt & Kim. While the material may not mean much to those unfamiliar with these groups and events, Mr. Seelie speaks with a historian’s pride when he says, “I’ve got shots of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs literally playing in an auto parts garage.”
In the meantime, he moves about nocturnally, showing up at performances by Big Freedia, the self-styled “Queen Diva” of New Orleans hip-hop, and at Cerebral Ballzy concerts. Late this winter, Mr. Seelie found himself at an art show at the Clocktower Gallery in lower Manhattan. The event featured the So So Glos, an indie band from Bay Ridge in Brooklyn, and was called unironically— Puttin’ on the Ritz. The evening’s producer, Joe Ahearn, had thought it would be clever and refreshing if the habitually sneaker-shod denizens of the alt-arts world were forced to attend an event in formalwear. (Mr. Ahearn was himself dressed in a morning coat with tails.) In the top-floor gallery space, undernourished men in bowties mixed with women whose metallic-colored ball gowns matched their dyed hair. People made fun of the wooden “spaceship” in the corner, sculptured, it was said, by the actor James Franco. As the So So Glos accompanied them, two Russian dancers from a local studio waltzed.
Throughout the evening, people could be heard whispering to one another that there was something vaguely recognizable about the space or, more correctly, about the building that contained the space. At some point, word went around that a lower floor of the building housed the summons part of the Manhattan Criminal Court, where misdemeanor offenders— pot smokers, trespassers, traffic violators— went to pay their fines. Judging by the number of knowing smiles and chuckles, half the room had visited the building before, in its judicial capacity. “I thought it looked familiar,” Mr. Seelie said.