"Bullet Space" Review by Elizabeth Hess, Artforum, October 1991
"For the past five years, the squatters in Bullet Space have been fighting with the city for the right to become legal homesteaders in the ruin once owned by the notorious Harry J. Shapolsky, the subject of Hans Haacke's 1971 Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971. In 1986, when the group chose to inhabit the building, it was a total ruin, and the garbage in the backyard was ten feet deep. Two years later, the small yard was transformed into a communal area, and Bullet Space was born.
Your House Is Mine, a three-year poster project b Bullet, organized by Andrew and Paul Castrucci, the only remaining original members of the group, and Nadia Coen, is a remarkable collection of images and writings by about 70 Lower East Sider writers and artist that have been silk-screened on poster paper for mass distribution in the streets. The entire collection will also be published as a limited-editon artists' book sometime in the late fall. As I write, the posters going up in the neighborhood have been to form an organized response to the current housing crisis on the Lower East Side. Done by artists of all ages and degrees of celebrity, they have the same urgency that graffiti had in the late '70s. Work from the front lines in 1991 is, however, more organized, more formal, and less random. These posters describe an onboing class war against landlords, drugs, and AIDS and eloquent protest against the lack of a safe environment for children. "Stop Ware-Housing Apartments," one of the most straightforward demands, is plastered all over the Lower East Side, along iwth the more moody and illusory statements. For example, an abstract poster by Andrew Castrucci places a large silver fishhook in a dense sea of black – the point is sharp. The hook raises concerns for the extinction of certain animal species, while the emptiness of the black filed speaks to the extinction of us all. Who's on the hook for the homeless?
Bullet, not unline Hammons, uses art to express the concerns of a broad, generally disenfranhised commmunity that includes the homeless but is not limited to them."
