Deviant Inspiration

The Homeless Museum of Art in New York is an art project that satirizes the conventions of the typical cultural institution and questions the definition of an alternative art space.

The New York contemporary art world’s identity crisis appears to be worsening, as was evident during the first week of March, when the city was busy with The Armory Show and its numerous satellite events. A faux post-2008 disillusionment with the excesses of the art market even encouraged one of these fairs to disingenuously name itself “Independent.” Just how can an art fair be independent from the need to sell?

“Alternative space” is a vaguely defined term, frequently bandied about by both commercial or nonprofit galleries. “Alternative to what, exactly?” one should ask. “In the land of no alternatives, anything that still calls itself ‘alternative’ is either delusional or phony,” says Belgian-born artist Filip Noterdaeme. “Now, even the word ‘independent’ has lost its meaning—ditto the prefix ‘anti-.’”

Admission to the Permanent Collection

In 2002, Noterdaeme, now a resident of New York for twenty years, founded the Homeless Museum of Art (HOMU), an art project that parodies and satirizes the conventions of the typical cultural institution. Located in his bright, white-walled two-bedroom apartment on the top floor of a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights, the Museum is run by himself in his alter-ego as the “Museum Director” and his partner, artist Daniel Isengart, as “Madame Butterfly”—the Director of Development. There, the bedroom is home to the Staff & Security Department, the bathroom houses the Curatorial Department, and the kitchen is, of course, the museum café.

HOMU’s collection houses numerous artworks made by Noterdaeme and Isengart, all of them reflecting their makers’ wry sense of humor. Most prominent in the Main Hall (the living room) is the Homeless Simulator (2003–05), a large box made of translucent plastic that one enters through a small hatch, one person at a time. Inside, one turns on a dough mixer aimed into a metal bowl filled with pennies, causing the coins to fly out. Meanwhile Liquid Gold, an edition of ten flacons of gold-tinged fluid, was assembled in October 2005, when the unidentified liquid began to drip through a crack in the Museum’s ceiling. Over the next month until the roof’s repair, Noterdaeme collected the substance and pronounced it “an anonymous donation to the Museum.”

An Itinerant Idea

The HOMU project was inspired by the marginalized social status of homeless people. Although HOMU has an ostensibly permanent physical location, Noterdaeme has not allowed the project to stagnate or become institutionalized. Reflecting the itinerancy of the people who inspired the project, Noterdaeme brings HOMU to the streets. For four consecutive afternoons in late 2008, he set up a small kiosk on the Bowery, between the New Museum and the neighboring Bowery Mission, one of the last faith-based homeless shelters in the rapidly gentrifying Lower East Side of Manhattan. There, Noterdaeme wrote open letters to museums and artists, and offered one-to-one sessions with anyone interested to talk to him—visitors ranged from passing art-world aficionados to bankers and homeless people, and reactions varied from interest to bemusement to outrage. Noterdaeme is continuing to stage these performances on weekends at the foot of the stairs to the High Line Park on West 20th Street—the heart of the Chelsea gallery district and a prime location for a willing audience.

From One Peer to Another

In addition to his open letters, which he publishes on the HOMU website or hands to people he meets at his mobile kiosk, Noterdaeme also sends satirical letters directly to the directors of New York’s biggest art museums. In 2003, he wrote to Thomas Krens, the then-director of the Guggenheim Museum, following the museum’s decision to abandon plans to construct a new building on the East River. He proposed that HOMU establish its headquarters on the Guggenheim’s roof: “This partnership would doubtlessly attract new audiences to both our institutions, and we are convinced that the uptown cultural community would embrace HOMU’s presence on the Upper East Side.” Though Noterdaeme was approaching Krens as an underdog—HOMU receives only marginal recognition from the mainstream New York art world—the biting subtext of his letter is that the Guggenheim, however much admired, is losing its relevance and must surely be in need of HOMU’s assistance.

Though Noterdaeme’s HOMU project is a thorough and dedicated means to raise critical questions about the role that contemporary art institutions should play in society, he has not fallen into the trap of taking himself or his art too seriously. Gesturing toward the permanent collection in HOMU’s Main Hall, he breaks into a smile and says, “I’m doing this because I can—Je m’amuse! HOMU is not an anti-museum, nor for that matter, an alternative museum, but more of a deviant museum. In the land of no alternatives, deviance is divine.”

Ashley Rawlings, editor based in New York.

HOMU