PARKING LIKE A SETTLER

 During that last snowstorm I pulled into the haphazardly plowed Trading Post without paying too much attention. As I got out of the truck I noticed the blue stripes demarcating a "handicap zone" where my truck trespassed. Disregarding the obvious rule breaking, I headed for the front door to buy a loaf a bread. That's when I ran into Pigpen Rothman who had parked right in front of me. My indiscretion had not gone unnoticed by Pigpen. "Parking like a settler, huh?" he accused me with a smile and a nod towards the blue zone. Busted.

Let's go back a bit. The first Osterhout settler sailed from Amsterdam, Holland to New Amsterdam, New Netherlands in the early Spring of 1653 on the Spotted Cow. He arrived in the Fall. The city was rocking. Like any Osterhout who has moved to town since, Osti #1 (Jan Jansen Van Oosterhoudt) probably double parked his horse outside the Corlear's Hook Trading Post, and after surviving a week in the city considered himself a local. Fuck the rules. I own this town.

Almost 400 years later and little has changed. The "Trading Post" is still there. When I was a kid you could still buy a gun, a fishing pole, a sack of flour, and a sandwich with your ax at the place. You didn't pay for your goods with a beaver pelt, but that's about the only difference. Now, in the year 2024 the word "settler" is also reappearing at the Trading Post. This time it's not the Colonial Dutch and English who are being referred to as such in the Blew Mountains, but the ever increasing local Orthodox Jewish community. Is such an assignation anti-semitic? Let's see.

After recently being accused in public of being anti-semitic by a vocal, local, Jewish woman, I have done plenty of soul-searching to make sure my baked-in bigotry and generational racism is acknowledged and in check. Check. Years of historical study and thousands of words written on the subject of genealogical depredations has given me a certain perspective regarding the Osterhout's interaction with different races and groups. Initially we marginalized and killed the Esopus/Lenape. We owned slaves and gave them the Osterhout surname. Who knows how we treated our "darker brethren." We killed (and were killed by) the French, the English and the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee. Eventually we adopted the identity of "Americans," secure in our position as original white, "Nativists," in a landscape of generational segregation and disinheritance..........not inclusion.

The joke of being accused of parking "like a settler" by a man who was raised Ultra-Orthodox, fought in the Israeli Army and disagrees with me (on almost every point) over what we are all witnessing unfold in Gaza was not lost on me. I got it. Here's the deal. I do what I do art (and parking) wise, say what I say on social media and publications, and generally operate in the world trying to be honest with myself. Since I don't have any specific religious faith or plan, I could care less what anybody else's is. Most anti-settler (Orthodox) sentiment  comes from my Jew-ish friends and cohorts in the community. I wish these settlers would drive (and park) better and leave my art alone. That's it. I'm good with all the rest. 

The (legal) Orthodox settlements that have spread out from Williamsburg to Monsey to Kiryas Joel to Lenape County over the decades will continue to increase, eventually becoming year round communities. This is our (and their) future. We are all settlers. Even the Lenape arrived here from somewhere else. When I installed a bare-breasted mannikin with a tree growing from her head in the Social Sculpture Park it was no more directed at the Orthodox/Settler community than an ax stuck in a log. Yet, both pissed off the Jewish and non-Jewish "settlers" enough that they consistently have taken it upon themselves to remove, displace, and cleanse the park of my art. My motivation is never to insult or instigate a particular group, but to display work that satisfies me sculpturally, outside of the market and institutions that are usually relied upon to validate it. This is one of my many limitations that I embrace working this way. All I ask in return is to be left alone. 

I promise I'll try to be more conscious regarding where I park. I'd hate be called an "anti-handicap settler" on top of everything.