AN ASCENT TO LIMINALITY: ABANDONED BED, BATH, & BEYOND, SEATTLE
October 29, 2024
Scarlet Meza
Blue decals announced “There’s more upstairs!” I knew where I was—or should be—1930 3rd Avenue, downtown Seattle, 98101. Through tarnished windows sat what was at first glance an art installation: a gorilla suit sat on a row of deserted airport chairs.
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On my two-week road trip from San Diego to Seattle, my boyfriend’s green 1992 Land Rover Discovery rumbled past co-op ladies, confederate waiters, a man selling mushrooms (not the magical kind—we asked), and even spent the night in a lovely airstream with a “farm wife” who worshiped God and organic butter. Yet the most uncanny sight I encountered was still “Bed, Bath and Beyond”.
This pop-up installation left me craving more, luring me inside. So, we followed a hand-Sharpied sign to the back entrance. In a world where noticing is rare, where passersby would more likely be looking at a screen than through tarnished windows: I wanted to crawl in the gorilla’s cage, I wanted to become part of the installation. Instead, we stumbled into what I can only describe as a quintessential “Seattle-type”. He bolstered his mountain bike as a barrier between himself and some overly interested art kids. Answering our impromptu interview, he said “Bed, Bath and Beyond” is set to be turned into a new techno / fine arts space run by Cannonball Arts.
New Rising Star, the group behind Cannonball, produces the annual Bumbershoot music festival. Bumbershoot—like the abandoned BB&B decals—is the last stronghold of Seattle’s grunge scene, featuring performers from Hole to Bob Dylan.
After the chain closed all in-person locations following brief meme-stock fame, Bed, Bath and Beyond became Overstock.com. But nobody was ever clamoring to get in behind the sliding doors of your local store. It was their big blue papery coupons that came in the mail which dragged my mom and a young me in the shopping cart seat to the white fluorescents and faux birchwood aisles. Yet, part of me still wondered at what happened to those thousands of forgotten square feet?
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Liminality is defined as both a physical threshold and as a transitional period or process. When I ran into the Cannonball team at those once-automatic doors, they mentioned there was still a lot of “polishing” to be done. And yet, the rubble is what I find compelling about 1930 3rd Ave. Big blue decals, fluorescents, stagnant escalators shuffling nonexistent customers. Bits of plaster and plywood on the floors–signifiers of this transitional period of abandonment. I fear the erasure of liminality.
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But the potential fate of 1930 3rd Avenue, speaks to a larger phenomenon that began nearly 3000 miles across the country, in New York’s gentrifying SoHo of the 1970s and 80s. The post-industrial aesthetic: where bygone shopaholics become cult(ural) connoisseurs on the cutting edge.
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Life in early SoHo functioned much like my boyfriend’s duct-tape suspension repair that held up from Yosemite to Portland—jankily and with a prayer. Take Donald Judd’s 101 Spring Street studio/home: a nineteenth century cast-iron building whose quirks ranged from exposed brick to leaking oil. Robert Rauschenberg is said to have showered with a hose and bucket in the early days when he wasn’t sneaking into his friends’ bathrooms. These OGs worked with the building’s quirks–good architecture leaks. An appreciation of dilapidation. Judd is often blamed as an early proponent of gentrification, but he actually insisted that, after his death, Spring Street should remain just as it was. Instead, the interior was plastered over to stop the oil, the iron replaced, the exterior shipped and cleaned. “The industrial grime had been preserved into art, ” Madeline Schwartz in Dissent magazine puts it.
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Publications from the New York times to the Village Voice made the first SoHo camp out to be conquerors of the Lower East Side, bohemian land of the working class. Now only white-collar workers could afford to live in Manhattan proper. But it wasn’t the artists’ fault; New York City’s employed a twofold strategy: 1) to dislodge the working class by turning property over to real estate developers and 2) the development of new houses for late capitalism’s labor force.
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My summer began in the Lower East Side. Walking around in the sweltering East Coast humidity, Industrial Age buildings housed trendy “bowl” restaurants. Residents walked small dogs in even smaller shorts. Not to mention, the wild west standoff of Margiela vs. Rick Owens on Crosby Street–the raciest thing to hit the streets in decades. Exiting a gallery opening, I was excited to see a queue for a warehouse fashion show – until I watched everyone leave by 9pm.
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So, a complete facelift of abandoned buildings, I fear, poses an aesthetic issue, but also a disservice to Bed, Bath, and Beyond’s ethos of collecting up and selling things which ultimately end up in the junk drawer (or pantry).
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Craig Owens writing for Art in America amidst the great SoHo revival, argues that SoHo functioned “as a culture-industry outpost where ‘subcultural’ forms are fed to that marketplace as products of consumption, their vital resistance to dominant culture thereby defeated.” Counterculture itself too has become commodified, as soon as city planners realize they can exploit the post-industrial aesthetic. Today, over 45 percent of city planners say they use artists’ residencies as a means for gentrification and in revitalizing towns with shrinking populations. It appears that the new SoHo is abandoned department stores.
Furthermore, artist Eric Orr’s work in the Light and Space movement, inspired by “reverberantly empty spaces that archeologists have found in the plundered tombs of ancient Egypt as by the indefinite and somewhat transcendental spaces…”. I believe in minimalism in its time and place. To create a new space as Orr did, yes, minimalism works there. Orr’s deal was the absence of people. A techno space shouldn’t be a tomb. Its purpose is to serve the community, seeing this Bed, Bath, and Beyond completely plastered over gives a similar uncanniness as an overly-botoxed face. Call me a sucker, but there is some comfort in the bygone burlesque of the masses of the department store. The techno scene is meant for dance, to let your hair down. Only a sense of the lived-in supports this. Remnants are necessary.
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Said by Madeline Scwartz in Dissent Magazine “a mattress on a low platform suggests poverty and squalor—until one notices that it is surrounded by millions of dollars of art.” Industrial items thus take on a dualism of ontology, as objects both of materialism and idealism. The wide windows which once aided factory workers in seeing their product become ethereal portals to skyline views. The bare lightbulb becomes a symbol of a kind of beautiful destitution, that infatuation with the starving artist. Bed, Bath, and Beyond already made a liminal space, and for artists to add onto this would create an uber-liminal monstrosity. A department store escalator is both bygone lift and stairs to a sky-high liminality.
Sources
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-art-of-gentrification/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/17/bed-bath-and-beyond-stock-price/
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/donald-judds-house