Metropolis M December 2018, Jeffrey Babcock

My profile of Jeffrey Babcock and his underground cinemas in the Dec/Jan issue of Metroplis M. On newsstands now in Nederlands and in English below.

The Squatter: Jeffrey Babcock

As Wikipedia would say, “Cet article concerne un événement récent ou en cours.” (Normally my search engine knows I’m a Netherlands-based English speaker, but as I’m writing this from Paris, all my results are in French). So disclaimer given, but I imagine anyone described as “representative” of 2018 would consider that a dubious honor. It was for real kind of a horrible year.
“It says, ‘Scraps for the Dogs.’” Several weeks ago, I’m in the Rabozaal at the Stadsschouwburg for the annual Amsterdamprijs voor de Kunst given by the AfK. The three awards come with a hefty cash honorarium. The stage is arranged with modular furniture populated by the nominees and their guests, and I walk across it to get to the other side of the auditorium. On the way I see Jeffrey, whose underground film screenings I attend on a regular basis, and who has been nominated for Beste prestatie. There’s a larger than life-size photograph of him at the back of the stage in which he’s holding what looks like a shillelagh and a scythe. I almost never see Jeffrey outside of his screenings, which take place in squats, independent cinemas, self-organized spaces, and the occasional gallery space or cultural institute. Tonight he has stitched big square patches onto his jacket and pants, and I ask him what’s written on them.
He’s always just been Jeffrey to me, and I didn’t even know his last name till I asked him to voice a part in one of my audio works. I knew Jeffrey’s voice pretty well, because before each screening he gives a spirited introduction that begins with a guttural and booming “HELLO!” He closes his eyes behind his narrow reading glasses through each semi-improvised lecture on the film, its director, and the politics of its moment. Jeffrey never fails to indict what he sees as the forces that stifle creativity: corporate culture (particularly in Hollywood), gentrification (particularly in Amsterdam), and more broadly the fascistic behaviors that “constitute the tyrannical bitterness of our everyday lives,” as Michel Foucault put it.
When I talk to Jeffrey outside after one of his films, I ask him how he feels about his nomination by the AfK. He’s frankly not thrilled; the money has very little appeal to him. Some people I know couldn’t care less about €35,000, but even they can’t help but desire the legitimacy that money grants, the way it distinguishes the serious artist from the amateur. It’s not just that Jeffrey doesn’t have much interest in making money, aside from what he needs to live and be well; it’s that money simply has no validating power for him. His cinemas derive their value from a wholly other source.
The only appeal of the prize for Jeffrey was that he could use the platform to discuss how Amsterdam has been sold to developers, how artists (and anyone, for that matter) must either resign themselves to the singular task of making money or get pushed to the edge of the city. Of course, if people are struggling just to make their rent, what about the spaces where Jeffrey runs his cinemas? Where the films are either cheap or free? Jeffrey related all of these points in an interview with a newspaper as part of his nomination, but the published article was cut down to something entirely self-promotional, as if he was simply running a film appreciation club. The separation of aesthetics from social reality is nothing new, but it’s still surprising when it’s enforced so bluntly.
I hope Jeffrey stays in the squats and independent cinemas, and I hope he stays mostly peripheral to the art galleries. Usually, when things are taken up in the art world, it suggests they are probably becoming obsolete in the actual world. This is one way of reading the rise of social practice art, as Chris Kraus does in her essay “Kelly Lake Store”: “these activities have become so degraded and negligible within the culture that the only chance for them to appear is within contemporary art’s coded, yet infinitely malleable, discourse.” More than rendered obsolete, these activities are transformed into value-added performative versions of themselves. The appendage of “artistic practice” to any of these activities marks them as ready for re-investment, like a bad mortgage repackaged as an asset-backed security.
In an article about the artist Paul Thek, Antek Walczak wrote, “Thek was squatting in the art world at a time when the world outside of art was still squattable. It’s not possible to squat in the same way any longer.” As the world squeezes and evicts, the art world poses a faint kind of shelter. Walczak’s point is that squatting in the art world is largely semiotic, a poverty-chic indifference to money (remember those friends who couldn’t care less about €35,000?) but actual poverty fails to signify, except as a threat. Jeffrey isn’t squatting in the art world; he’s trying to squat in the real world, so that there’s some place left for the art world to be squatted in. Turns out you can’t squat your gallery if the gallery can’t pay its rent.
Back at the Amsterdamprijs, Jeffrey is on stage with the other nominees and the evening’s host. He discusses how he was misrepresented by the newspaper article, how his message is getting lost. The interviewer then gives him forty seconds to say his peace, and seems genuinely surprised when he does it in about fifteen. I’m not surprised – I’ve seen him say it a hundred different ways at his screenings. I keep returning for these speeches, like re-reading a favorite passage in a novel. No, what surprises me is that he actually wins the prize. Asked how he feels, award in hand, his answer remains consistent: he feels ambivalent. L’esprit de 2018.