The Brooklyn Rail

It’s 1977, about five years after Bettina Grossman moved into the Chelsea Hotel and eleven years since a devastating studio fire in Brooklyn Heights reduced much of her work to ashes. Sitting in her room on the fifth floor, she looks out on 23rd Street with her camera, continuing her ritual as the city’s oblique witness. Bettina scales the length of a building. She sets her lens on the warped images reflecting off the windows and begins to record.

Bettina composes her vision of New York. It appears like a dream, or an associative memory. She chooses the same stretch of sidewalk caught in the glass, the passersby’s legs dissolving into prismatic windows. Or maybe she picks one of Manhattan’s glittering castles, zooming in on a warbled reflection of the American flag. The stars and stripes beat limply in the wind, dipping out of the grid that a windowsill imposes on them. Later, Bettina will return to this spot. The wind will carry the flag in the blue light of day, and it will wave fiercely this time, an emblem in thrall to its quixotic underpinnings.

But no matter the imagery caught in the windows, or the passersby whose reflections bend and spiral in the storefronts, Bettina always subdues the city. She condenses New York into a system of intimacies and cropped shots, repeating the location, time of day, and camera angle to reveal dynamic contours of architecture and space, the ceaseless dance between a kingdom and its people. In the cold metropolis, where are the divine entrances into the human world? Where do the material constraints of the world loosen? Can asceticism penetrate our gritty reality?

The process of repetition is crucial to accessing these sacred portals. As photographer, painter, and sculptor, Bettina resisted labeling a single object, choosing instead to work in serial groupings. The project, “Phenomenological New York,” (1976–86) is a series of stills and a video, Urban Energy Strategies. Within Bettina’s output, titles were constantly subject to change, echoing the malleable nature of her works. In a manuscript titled “Your Moral Right, Your Proprietary Right,” she explained:

Each work is but an element in a process to be woven into a vast world of interrelational hidden meanings whereby each is relative to the other, incidental to each other, interdependent upon each other, unified and shaped according to each other, materialized according to each other into a greater whole.¹

Bettina’s work was an index of her own life. She spent the fifties and early sixties apprenticing in Europe: sculpting marble in Italy and making stained glass in France. She would probably find parallels for the diaphanous streams of colors that dissolved over French chapels in New York’s own cathedrals of glass and steel.

For Bettina, capturing New York’s constant flux could be of metaphysical consequence. Artist Yto Barrada, who organized a show featuring Bettina’s work at MoMA, has called her practice “shamanic”: “The work was self-referential, with repetitive geometric forms that had a transcendental dimension.” Raised in an Orthodox Jewish household, Bettina perhaps drew from the Jewish practice of mysticism, the Kabbalah. The Tree of Life is a diagram in Kabbalah similar to the Chakra systems in Hinduism or Buddhism, a means of attuning consciousness to the body and the world. The Tree of Life can be visualized as a chart with ten Spheres of Manifestation, or Sefirot, each a mirror reflecting a divine entrance into the human world.² Bettina teases out these entrances in taxis, revolving doors, even a kettle of boiling water and its upturned reflection of the street outside. It’s like a crystal ball without its portents, turning habitual moments into studies of chance.

Bettina accessed transcendence through multiplicity, and incorporated this ethos into each project. After the 1966 fire she felt the need to start over, and made the Chelsea Hotel her home—one she would occupy until her death in 2021. From 1977 to 1985, she shot over eight thousand slides and clips from her studio balcony, which ultimately became part of either Phenomenological New York or a separate work, The Fifth Point of the Compass, which Bettina described as “anthropological.” Art historian Marina Caron distinguishes between the two:

Whereas The Fifth Point of the Compass is characterized by the omnipresence of the sidewalk grid, Phenomenological New York focuses on movement in the city as seen through distorted reflections in the glass and metal of surrounding buildings, cars, and windows.³

Watching Urban Energy Strategies, I wonder in what state Bettina came to each site. Whether from her balcony or the street corner, she was entangled in the action; she made the city block a hallowed passage where the stiff lines of a skyscraper become fluid and capricious. How does one evade a teleology of architecture and escape its capitalist underpinnings? Aspiring towards spiritualism, Bettina transforms the prosaic into something sublime. Around minute seven, in the mid-day reflections across four windows, a man in a red sweater leans against a trash can, keeping watch over pedestrians. They pass him on his right, onto the crosswalk. The buildings cast shadows over most of his body. At some point, as Bettina’s view encompasses our own curiosities, we want to inhabit the man’s viewpoint. Another man appears, this time in a red tracksuit. The two become a syzygy of color in New York’s shadows and light.

Was Bettina caught up in their interaction? The exchange is never overly friendly, with their ambivalent body language, and the man in the sweater’s laconic responses to the tracksuit. Or was this encounter of color—ineluctable as the day, yet unlikely to repeat itself—what drew Bettina in? Later, when she takes us back to a similar scene, the camera appears to be on the side of the crosswalk, rather than shooting at it. The time of day seems similar—but the shadows that bore these crimson figures now swath pedestrians on the pavement.

Bettina’s insistence on capturing the unending animation of the same street corners, repeating each shot with a new use of its lines and graph, finds inevitable similarities in the work of Hanne Darboven, who harnessed repetition as a means of making spiritual contact in transcribing canonical texts like The Odyssey, appropriating the Gregorian calendar to organize transcriptions alongside a wide-range of other written material. Both artists capture exhaustive cosmologies, tracing changes over sameness and sameness over change; reiterating the primacy of the grid, capacious, always in flux, holding in its borders any number of idioms that mark time’s passage.

Meditate on these portals, Bettina implores us. She is the interlocutor of a conversation between the city’s edifices and its citizenry. This conversation is never the same—though it may contain similar themes of color and shadow, it never repeats its exact words. Here is the threshold, where patience cultivates a stillness amidst the clamor, rewarding the city’s ascetic novitiates with insight, a glimpse of beyond from within the mundane. In the fractured light, Bettina’s New York brings us closer to God.

1. https://files.cargocollective.com/c1459427/PR-Bettina-New-York-1965-86.pdf
2. https://www.geneseo.edu/yoga/sefirot-tree-life
3. Marina Caron, “Bettina: The Fifth Point of the Compass,” Bard Center for Curatorial Studies (2023): 19. Bard College.