Flux Factory
Flux Factory
I was an exhibit in an art gallery . . . for a month.
In 2005, I saw an ad on craigslist and I applied for the gig. Could I write a novel in a month, while living in a house in an art gallery? (Could I write a novel in all the time I had left to live?) I wanted to live in a house in an art gallery, and I got the gig.
The project, called Novel, was the brainchild of Morgan Meis, who was a guiding force at the Flux Factory, an experimental art lab and commune in Long Island City, Queens. He’d dreamed up the experiment while writing his dissertation on Walter Benjamin, believing he’d have nailed it, boom, boom, boom, if he’d been confined to a box without distractions.
On a snowy afternoon, Morgan and I met in a restaurant to check each other out. He was dressed in pin stripes and suspenders like a crime boss in a noir cartoon, and as he talked, he rubbed his thatch of close-cropped hair, pulling out ideas. He said, “I like rules. There are creative incentives in limits.” He had a theory about “making writing visible,” since the houses the writers would live in—there would be three of us all together—would be partially visible to visitors during viewing times. The writers would give weekly readings of their novels-in-progress and post sample chapters on blogs. I said I thought I would make a good lab rat. I also said I couldn’t finish a novel in a month although I’d start one. He shot me a crooked smile and said, “Safes are made to be cracked.”
In early May 2005, I and two other writers, Grant Bailie from Ohio and Ranbir Sidhu from Brooklyn, arrived at the Flux Factory to start the game. We’d agreed to remain at the gallery for 29 days, and this we did. Other rules, if memory serves, lasted about five minutes. We weren’t supposed to make phone calls except on Sundays. We were supposed to record the time we spent outside our boxes and the reasons we left them on punch cards pinned to a wall. To use the bathrooms and showers, we were free to drift into the commune space adjacent to the gallery. There, 20 young Fluxer artists lived in rabbit rooms off public areas, furnished with worn velvet couches and steam punk discards from the streets.
We would come to love the Fluxers and join their band. To them, we were something between exotic pets they had to look after, and—depending on how you looked at our different trajectories—grounds for grave concern or hopeful arrows to where an art life could lead you. The Fluxers wore boots and leather. Their faces, before you knew them, projected a cool I’d not imagined possible before. What did it take? An inner life of knowledge so successfully plowed through and attractions so easily fulfilled you were left in a continual state of, “What’s next?”
We writers had a fridge in our gallery stocked with food we could order for breakfast and lunch, and each night a different guest chef prepared dinner for us. For exercise, there was a large, tarred roof that looked onto a blurred postcard of Manhattan. A potted rose bush sat beside several weathered chairs and stacks of old bricks. From the roof, we watched green-tinged rainstorms and nuclear sunsets. If you looked over the edge, you saw a snake’s nest of train tracks, where you could reasonably expect to see the hatching of a dinosaur egg.
Our “boxes” were actually tiny houses built for each of us by designers who, too, had competed for the gig. On an icy day the previous March, I’d visited the office of Salazar Davis, the architects who would build my house and wanted to tell me about their ideas. The associates worked in a large, open area. They were visible to each other, and they could hear each others’ conversations. The office space, situated in a garment-center high rise, was circled by tall, unshaded windows, and across from them, 50 yards away, was another building, where you could see strangers looking at computer screens, talking on phones, and wandering around, as people do in offices.
Mauricio Salazar said, “They don’t know us, and we don’t know them but in a sense we share our lives. We’d like to build a house that would allow people to see you and interact with you in ways you wouldn’t necessarily know were going on. Visitors could slither into spaces where they might glimpse a part of you while you were working. We’re wondering how that would feel to you and the visitors and what a house like that would look like.”
The truth is, as I listened, I felt, “What! I’m actually going to be a lab rat? Is this a good idea? Is this what my life has come to?” I kept my mouth shut. I was practicing being a mensch and a good sport at their party. In reality, once the project started, I didn’t feel peeped at, at all. When people came to the gallery, I stepped outside to talk to them. It was fun. Visitors came from all over the world.
As Mauricio talked, I kept looking at the unknowing figures across the way. His plan reminded me of a dream I often had, where I’m living in a roofless house and I can see the moon and stars from my bed. The exposure feels scary in some versions of the dream, as if it’s the result of a war. In all the dreams, I think I live out of sight of other people, only to discover that, down a hall, there’s a fuzzy area, like the lobby of a hotel, where strangers wander in and out, and I feel unsafe and unprotected.
The house built for me by Mauricio and his partner, Paul Davis, had translucent walls. When the lights were on, it glowed. When you were inside, looking out, the shapes you saw looked like ghosts moving along. Looking at the house from the outside, you could see my clothes and other objects, hanging on the walls. My bed was on a shelf, and near it was a window people could look in though. If I lifted the mattress, I could see visitors crouching along in a tunnel that divided my house into two parts of a brain.
Sweeping up from the bed was a steep, carpeted slope that led to a perch on top of the house that had no roof. Just like in my dreams, the sense of being inside and being outside kept switching and was never a fixed thing. Somehow, quickly, the entire venture calmed my fears. I was too excited by my life to have fears. I liked being part of something I didn’t have to audition for each day. In this house, I slept more soundly than I ever did in my apartment.
The house breathed with me, and I could hear the other boxes breathing, too. Ranbir’s house, designed by Tricky Ink, was made of crates and other packing materials and had the look of those precarious, half-built forts kids build and play in. Grant’s house, designed by Ian Montgomery, was thatched with velvety beds of clover, rye, wheat grass, and vetch, and the different crops tufted up in patterns like mini hedge mazes. The lushness of the plantings combined with the roughhewn carpentry formed a vibrating hub for our space.
But to be honest here, as well, after a while, Grant’s house attracted insects, and since the roof plants needed watering, his house became a bit of a bog, and Grant, being the sweetest of uncomplaining sweethearts went with whatever flow flowed at him.
We established that our area would be silent, except during visiting hours. (In truth, I bullied the others into this.) Maybe on paper we didn’t have that much in common. Grant, who was self-deprecating and funny, had kids, a wife, a job managing security in a giant mall. Ranbir, who said he was unanchored, had long, nervous hair and spoke with murmuring plummy vowels—he’d grown up in England and California with parents who’d emigrated from India. Before arriving at the Flux Factory, mabe each of us had imagined we’d detach ourselves from our worlds and slide into a sense of heightened concentration. In reality, we became an instant family, even with the bickering of family, and I’d had no idea how happy this would make me.
There we were, on the morning of day three, snug in our art prisons, when an editorial in the New York Times accused the project of trivializing “the nature of writing” and predicted we’d produce either “teeny-tiny novels or very bad ones.” I thought a “teeny-tiny novel” sounded fantastic, although still beyond my capabilities. We received lots of other press coverage, and most of it was positive, including two features by Julie Salomon in the New York Times and a praising column by Michael Greenberg in the Times Literary Supplement.
People saw the project as a stunt, and it drew comparisons to reality TV, although no one was filming us and most days we had few interruptions. The physical installation, as a whole, was dramatic and beautiful, and the weekly readings attracted crowds that grew larger each Saturday. Some people came every week, as if following a soap opera with real and fictional plots woven together.
The Times editorial might have saddened us, but the way we were perceived didn’t much touch our sense of life in the moment. At the same time, we knew we were being watched, and like any creatures on display, we wanted to put on a good show. It was striking to me in a way I have not forgotten how fast I began to live in the collaboration and feel a need to add my fair share to anything we did. To feel in my body the sense of being part of a Russian doll configuration of interlocking collaborations—our writing, the architects’ structures, and Morgan’s uber plan.
In the days leading up to the opening, I’d watched the architects, their tool belts strapped sexily around their hips, sawing things, and hammering things, and nailing things, as they transformed their ideas into solid forms. I’d collected screws that fell on the floor and slivers of wood. I’d swept saw dust into mounds that looked like cottage cheese. The architects worked through the nights, catching naps and picking on chicken wings and salads. It was like being on the set of a movie. Remember Day for Night, Truffaut’s love letter to the camaraderie of shooting a film? Like that.
My first day in Novel, I posted a blog describing the opening night party and our transition into captivity. Before arriving, I didn’t know what I would write. My mother’s health had crashed, and she was in and out of the hospital, then back in it. I figured I’d find a lit match of an idea somewhere, and just go. But now, plunked inside the efforts of so many people, I had to think fast. What about a comic mystery, involving a mother who gets sick and a daughter, who is a detective and finds a stack of secret letters written to her mother? I wrote in proximity to two other writers in houses. There was a humming energy around us that more than one visitor compared to a meditation circle.
The Times editorial was written before the project began. The writer didn’t visit the installation, interview any of us, or consider the way environments and collaborations generate particular forms of art that aren’t only about what individuals produce. The writer of the editorial didn’t calculate the stimulus of weirdness to people willing to look foolish.
We got ideas from our food. In a sense, we were living the way we ate. One night artist Miwa Koizumi prepared a meal for us that was also a performance and a commentary on packaging and transformations. She made newspaper placemats. Our menus were written on paper towels that were also our napkins, and our four courses were presented in milk cartons, juice containers, plastic bottles, and jelly glasses. Food normally served in solid form was liquefied in surprising (and tasty) combinations. In one course, three stately white fishes rested on beds of ramps under blankets of béchamel sauce, all snugged into milk carton barges.
Architects think about the ways spaces effect emotions and how they change the ways people perform in them. At a panel for the artists, Mitch McEwen, a partner in Tricky Ink, said she was interested in “the secret nature of a box” which led her to think about secrets in building structures, like cavity walls, and about espionage and the ways spies exchange messages in “dead letter boxes.” “The secrecy of writing appealed to me,” she said, clicking images on her computer screen while sitting on her skateboard.
(By the way, all these years since, Mitch and I have remained close friends, as have Paul Davis and I. Mitch is now a professor in the Architecture Department at Princeton, and Paul leads an architecture firm in Venice, Ca.)
At the artists’ panel, a young man thought blogs expanded the visibility of writing, by allowing a window into the process of work that wasn’t finished. He said that, with the ability people had to comment, interactive technology was prompting new forms of collaboration, authorship, and invention. I thought, ah, people are seeing “cavity walls” and “dead letter boxes” in texts they think they can leave messages in. Not so fast in my texts, I may have felt at the time, but now all I can say cheerfully is, “Welcome to Substack.” During the project, I posted two fragments of my novel on the Flux blog, and I enjoyed the responses. Did I learn from them? I hope so.
Another day, a panel of writers met—including Morgan, Josh Tyree, Tom Bissell, and Myla Goldberg. They gathered to ask if the novel, however it was formatted, was already dead. The male humans worried they might be dedicating themselves to a form not that many people cared about. They thought smart people were going to nonfiction to learn how we live now. Goldberg didn’t care. She said, “There’s alchemy in fiction between the writer and reader. The reader is changed, becomes sad by reading about sad events. The novel gets to draw on anything it wants to. The toolbox is unlimited.”
Before Novel began, a reporter asked me if I’d feel nervous about reading unfinished writing aloud and whether I felt competitive with the other writers. What if one of us finished a manuscript or found a publisher first? Would that matter? I said no, because either I was lying or I’m an idiot. The thing about “unfinished” work is less a big deal for me, because my writing remains unfinished even after it’s published. But I did feel vulnerable after the readings.
Grant was speeding along with a parable about a man who loses the ability to sleep. Ranbir was chronicling the world’s youngest pornographer, a 16-year-old boy, and his world weary, 26-year-old handler, Amy. One night, he gave an electrifying performance. The dialogue was sharp. The satire of characters maddened by displacement was rollicking and harrowing. As he read, you could hear “yeahs,” and “hmms,” and “that’s rights” in the audience. It felt like the stakes had been raised for all of us.
After the guests left, we sat by the open window. Actually, it was before a missing pane. Grant hung out of it, sucking on one of his last cigarettes. He had promised himself he would quit when we left the box. Ranbir snapped his fingers and told us a story that was maybe also about us. In Enland, he used to sit with a man on a bench. Occasionally one of them would grunt and point to the dive across the street and say, “Looks like they need to fix the masonry.” The other one would say, “Yeah, they do.” Ranbir said, “We had a connection. We had an experience.”
A few days before the end, Paul Davis and I talked about dismantling my house. I said I wanted to keep the library stool I’d used to climb to my bed. Its rubbery, glandular smell had produced an image in my book. (I still have the stool, by the way. It’s beside a bookcase in our house.) Paul considered numbering some of the pieces and placing them in storage for a time when the firm could build another version of the house. Then he said, “Maybe we should let it go and just remember it.”
I told Stefany, one of the Flux artists, I was sad my house would disappear. She was a talented performer, a beauty with long hair who glided around in long skirts, backless tops, and combat boots. She gave me one of her get-real looks and said, “Everything at Flux Factory dies. Like us.”
After the closing party, people carted away pieces of our houses. The rest was donated to Materials for the Arts. The meaning of what we did—as it relates to how books get made, or how writers work, or whether you can witness any of it by marking off a place to watch it—the meaning of our time together was not about these things.
I was 58, and at 58, I was the oldest person in the entire Flux Factory. I got the gig because they wanted me and I was easy to get. I wanted to live in a tiny house and give myself to someone else’s plan. Morgan was interested in confinement. Confinement in this context meant nothing to me. In this context, I found people, and in these people, working and living together, I found freedom. During my stay, I was happy. I didn’t need more than I had. I thought about death but not about my own death. I wrote eighty pages.
When I landed the gig, my friend Esther said, “You’ll hate it.” She meant the sounds of other people. She meant the water tracked on the floor of the common bathrooms. About these things, she was right, of course. But I want to tell you about the joy of looking back at this experience. An idea floats out like a net or a smell, and people show up for reasons they can’t name. They look at each other and wonder what they have to say to each other and how they can be kind and express love. Then they do exactly that.
The next Zoom Conversation is on Saturday February 24 from 3 to 4pm EST.
All paid subscribers are welcome at no extra charge. A community is forming. It’s beautiful. Everyone is also to send ahead a question about their own writing projects. To RSVP please email me here: lauriestone@substack.com.
There are three buttons at the bottom of every post: “like,” “share,” and “comment.” Your engagement is a huge factor in expanding the reach of the stack. Please comment on the content of what you read and on writing craft. AND PLEASE SUGGEST THE STACK TO ONE FRIEND. ❤️
Cool. That's all I can say. Cool.
Fabulous story, Laurie--and fab retelling of this singular and unique experience. Would make a great play 🙂