Living with Legends

Bettina had never allowed us into her apartment before, but the painter Robert Lambert described it as a bat cave, with narrow corridors winding through piles of papers and boxes that stretched almost to the ceiling.  Hotel workers couldn’t get in to repair the radiator, and so Bettina, who lacked the physical strength to move the boxes around, had to heat the place with electric space heaters.

“But you’ve gotta see it now,” Robert told me recently.  “It’s been totally transformed.  Now it’s a museum.  It’s beautiful.” 

And so it is.  It turned out that those papers and the contents of those boxes represented a lifetime of work in painting, photography and sculpture.  Now, the inessential carted away, and the bulk of the work neatly sorted and stored on newly erected shelving units, the more spectacular pieces can finally once again be properly displayed in all their glory in Bettina’s large, wide-open, airy studio.

The change came about due to the timely intervention of Sam Bassett, a documentary film maker who recently moved into the Chelsea.  Sam is documenting the life and work of several of the Chelsea’s older residents, and as part of his project on Bettina, he enlisted a crew of volunteers to clean and restore the artist’s live/work space.  He came down and filmed us as we toured the rooms.

“In her work, Bettina seeks to reveal the Noumenon [the mystical aura or spiritual substance] in the Phenomenon,” Sam says, revealing that Bettina takes inspiration from the writings of spiritualist guru P.D. Ouspensky’s Tertium Organum, an influence she shares with another of Bassett’s subjects, poet and mystic Ira Cohen.

Sam’s goal, now almost fully realized, is to provide Bettina with a proper living, working space again, as well as a place where she can showcase her art, so that critics and the public can view the artistic treasures that have been buried away for all these years.  The next step in the process, Sam says, is to engage a knowledgeable person to archive Bettina’s huge collection of photographs and papers, with the ultimate aim of finding a gallery or museum to stage a long overdue retrospective of her work.

Highlights of the newly reopened Institute include: Bettina’s marble sculptures which she made while studying in Italy in 1970 (the curved surfaces were cut with a straight blade using a special technique); her non-Euclidean wooden sculptures from the Watergate era, reminiscent both of space-age forms and simple clam shells; her splash paintings, representing her frustration with corporate structures, which somehow morph into organic, calming forms; her series of photographs, from the early 80s, of the same square of concrete beneath her window as various people walk by; her folded paper sculptures; her non-converging line paintings and sculptures, and her large print of a dandelion leaf that looks like a Japanese character, its poignancy increased by Bettina’s revelation that it was plucked from the grave of her father.  A series of photographs comments on the relation of the city’s buildings to its people, showing the similarity in their forms in an attempt to bridge the gap that alienates New Yorkers from the surroundings that physically dwarf them.  And in a boxed series of photos, a man unloads boxes from a pallet, the resulting creation coming to look oddly similar to one of Bettina’s own sculptures, as the life of the street comes to mirror Bettina’s own inner reality that she has in turn recreated in her art.

Bettina’s life’s work is extensive and varied, but all her pieces demonstrate, as the name of her institute suggests, the whiff of the spiritual that lies just beneath the surface of the mundane, animating and invigorating what would otherwise be lifeless and ultimately uninteresting phenomenological forms.  The rebirth of Bettina’s Institute for Noumenological research was long overdue, and restores to the Chelsea an important and vital—and still ongoing–part of its glorious history in the magic realm of the creative arts.  It also helps us to better understand and appreciate a beloved and integral member of our Chelsea community.

Bettina certainly enjoys the renewed attention, and was spry, smiling and seemed years younger when we visited her studio last week.  When asked to describe Sam’s filmmaking techniques, she said, “He inserts himself into your life and then films the results,” becoming a part of the finished creation.  However he does it is OK with us.  But for Sam, it was clearly a labor of love, as he reveals that he had to sit outside Bettina’s door for two months before she would let him into her room.  Highlights of the as yet unfinished documentary include a scene where Sam skateboards down 23^rd street with shelves purchased from Home Depot, and—what’s sure to be the highlight of the film—footage of Sam repeatedly carrying Bettina up a hill at the Strom King Japanese sculpture garden. I can’t wait to see that.
            Oh, and by the way, hotel workers, now able to gain access, recently installed a brand, spanking new radiator in Bettina’s studio.  Now it’s warm and toasty in there, so Bettina doesn’t have to sit around in her coat anymore.

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