The Brooklyn Rail

Walking down Bergen Street in the spring of 2009, I looked into a huge raw space at number 51. The door was open, so I walked in, and found myself surrounded by artifacts from a half-century of industrial disarray: belt buckles, many colored ropes, and strange stiff dog leashes with a halter attached to the end. In the middle of all this there was a table, and at the table there was a man. He barely spoke English, so we spoke in French, and he told me that he was planning to open an art center in the space and was holding a flea market to get rid of some of the detritus that had piled up since its original use as a factory for a briefly trendy mid-century gag: the invisible dog.

I had just started writing freelance for an old friend who was an editor at T, the style magazine of the New York Times, so I pitched him a story about this energetic French guy, Lucien Zayan, and his ambitious project, which seemed to come out of another era of the city, when new transplants could find unused spaces and take them over for art. That’s what he did, actually, and what’s even more amazing is that he kept it up for sixteen years, in an era of Brooklyn’s gentrification that transformed that block of Bergen Street. The Invisible Dog at 51 Bergen hosted sixteen years of installations, performances, film screenings, readings, parties, art fairs, and all kinds of events. I did performances there, I went to so many parties there (and hosted some), and I got married there.

This spring, the space at 51 Bergen closed its doors, but The Invisible Dog, now a nonprofit, will continue its adventurous and always surprising projects elsewhere. On April 10, Lucien and I had lunch and talked about this history.

Shonni Enelow (Rail): Lucien, we have known each other for sixteen years. And at almost every event that I’ve attended here, you very sweetly recount the story of our meeting.

Lucien Zayan: I’m not sure it’s the true story.

Rail: I think we embellished it.

Zayan: I’m sure I add a little thing every time. The truth is, I had started to work with Muriel Guépin, the gallery that was here before; that’s how I discovered this building. It was called Shop Art Gallery, and it was one of these new projects after the recession, where there was affordable art and local things, and it was a very good idea. She hired me for a month to help her to launch the gallery, and that’s how I found the building. I remember perfectly asking her, look, you have this whole building, why don’t you show art here? And she answered, oh no—you do it, if you want to!

Rail: You had just come from France for three months?

Zayan: I needed a change. I started working in national theaters when I was twenty-three. I was the youngest director of public relations of the National Theater when I was twenty-five. I was working with the best directors in the biggest festivals and at forty, I was co-director of festivals. I was making the ideal career. I think I was scared about that. But it was only when I arrived here that people started to talk to me about the middle-aged crisis. I never even heard about that, the mid-life crisis!

I decided to quit my job. And I took a year of sabbatical. And after nine months, I said, I have to be alone and focus. Where can I do that? New York was exciting, frightening, scary. Though my idea of New York was absolutely not New York.

Rail: What did you imagine?

Zayan: The city of sex, the city of drugs, the city of danger.

Rail: 1970s, dirty, gritty, Martin Scorsese movies.

Zayan: New York for me was that. And the cliche of Fifth Ave, stuff like that. But the most important thing I was thinking was that art here was very mixed. I had in mind that John Cage was working with Merce Cunningham, Andy Warhol working with musicians and writers, everybody writing and smoking and creating all together.

As soon as I arrived here, just the fact of being here gave me a kind of confidence. The two first months were miserable. It was the beginning of the recession. Things closing and people crying in the street! October 2008. And then the third month arrived, and I discovered the building. The rest is history.

Rail: I wanted to talk about the first project, which I remember very well, The Ant.

Zayan: The opening was two group shows. One with No Longer Empty. And the other was Recession Arts.

Rail: I’m realizing The Invisible Dog was conceived entirely as a recession project.

Zayan: Entirely.

We did those two group shows, but I didn’t have any money; I didn’t know what I was going to do after that. But the night of the grand opening, an artist came to me, Xavier Roux, and said, “I have a project, I never found a space big enough to make it, but I heard about this space, and it’s exactly what I need.” And he said, “It’s a giant ant, based on a poem by Robert Desnos, where an ant is the metaphor of the concentration camp trains.” And I said, “Why not? Let’s do that.” And actually, this ant gave the tone of what I wanted to do with the space. Site-specific installation.

We also had this famous party with Ugly Duckling Presse around The Ant. So The Ant was also the beginning of my understanding that the space must be a multidisciplinary space. A space where people gather for everything. Not just an exhibition space, not just a performance space, but all of it together.

Rail: If you had to name two more big landmark projects, what would they be?

Zayan: Definitely Prune Nourry’s Anima (2016)—you remember this one, the forest?

She recreated a forest with a group of artists, a forest made in wood, with a lake, and in the middle of the lake there was this massive head statue floating, and everything was visual effects. The space completely disappeared, you didn’t even see the ceiling—everything disappeared.

Then there was the show of Oliver Jeffers and Aaron Ruff, The Exploded Mind of Mulholland Hwang (2013). They recreated the bedroom of these kids dreaming about animals that fight in dreams, animals that never fight in real life. There was like, a big hippopotamus fighting with butterflies. There were huge drawings of Oliver Jeffers and small, very small sculptures from Aaron.

There were many great things, like Dataatadata: Everything and Nothing (2018) by Chris Klapper and Patrick Gallagher. That was a fantastic show. But then there was a moment of revival post-COVID with Dog Show #1: The Dinner Party (2021) by Stephen Morrison. Everything was closed for a year and all of a sudden we reopened the space with what? A dinner party. With people having fun. A wild dinner party. Drinking and having drugs and dogs. Absolute joy, happiness.

Rail: You know what strikes me hearing you talk about this? The animal theme is huge.

Zayan: It’s funny, I never thought about that.

Rail: It makes sense, right? The wildness of the space, the roughness of the space lends itself to thinking about animals, untamed things.

Zayan: I remember this article in the New York Times where they were talking about the industrial chic of the space.

The thing is, the space is really an industrial, raw space. No doubt about that. But I didn’t touch anything in the space—not because I was conceptually thinking, “Oh, I should keep the industrial chic.” No, it was because I didn’t have money. So I was doing everything myself.

But very quickly I realized that because I let the space be raw, artists were able to do whatever they wanted. And because they have their freedom, this freedom to do whatever they want in space, they were able to make big projects. And big parties.

Rail: Let me ask about the theater and performance that you did in the space.

Zayan: I knew I wanted to have music, dance, theater, and all of that, but theater is the love of my life. That’s where I started. But it was very difficult for me to understand anything because of the language. So I did more dance.

But the other thing is I never really looked at the projects people brought to me. I have to say almost never. I would just have a good feeling with people. And it was more about our conversation.

You know there is this famous story with the theater company 600 Highwaymen. I saw a piece by them at the Prelude Festival and I loved what I saw. So I said to them, would you like to develop this project? And they came and I was looking at the rehearsal, and I said, “Well, that’s funny.” Nothing like what I’d seen. But I though, okay, maybe I forgot. And the premiere happened. It was a big success. And then on the last day we went to dinner or lunch. And I said, “Let me ask you a question. What you did here was not what I saw before, right?” And they said, “Oh, yeah, it was totally different.” I said, “You didn’t tell me.” And they looked at me and said, “You didn’t ask us.”

I never asked anything. I invited artists into the space—I didn’t care what they did.