Nature as an icon of urban resistance: artists, gentrification and New York City's Lower East Side, 1979-1984 - social conditions depicted in art

Afterimage, Sept-Oct, 1997 by Gregory Sholette

The state of this Lower East Side of New York City provides pictures for painters, operas for actors and poets from urban shambles of a slum where monstrous inequity is met with savagery, a nearly perfect specimen of malignant city life . . . yet this neighborhood has also functioned as a cultural insulator. Within its bosom minority cultures have remained intact, and new ideas have incubated.(1)

Urban cycles of decline, decay, and abandonment followed by rebirth through rehabilitation, renovation, and reconstruction may appear to be natural processes. In fact, however, the fall and rise of cities are consequences not only of financial and productive cycles and state fiscal crises but also of deliberate social policy.(2)

Metaphors of urban decay, rebirth and incubation suggest that the process of "constructing nature" has its corollary in the act of naturalizing culture. This complementary operation ascribes organic processes to the workings of human labor and economic systems. In this essay I will look at the way the inner city is naturalized(3) through the work of several artists active on Manhattan's Lower East Side between 1979 and 1984. What makes these artists' works exceptionally coherent is that each uses natural iconography - nature as image or as idea - to critically respond to the entwined processes of real estate speculation and class displacement known as gentrification while effectively treating the neighborhood itself as a thing brimming with "malignant city life."(4)

By and large the work examined here was initially seen in outdoor locations, often on abandoned buildings. These "street" settings presented their own artificial ecology, where competing species of images inhabited an environment of licit and illicit visual chaos of wheatpasted hand bills, commercial advertising, signage from retail businesses, fluorescent graffiti, stencils, murals and posters, some of which also presented anti-gentrification messages to the public. How and why these artists chose natural imagery to agitate or comment on housing and economic issues is the concern of this text. The answers that present themselves place the battle to maintain low income rents in inner-city neighborhoods within a broader cultural and political context.

One response of these artists was to satirize the naturalizing language of the real estate industry itself. Through advertisements and press releases, land developers, speculators and even the city government described low income neighborhoods such as Hell's Kitchen and the Lower East Side as "untamed territories" where upwardly mobile white renters were called upon to serve as "trail blazers" or "urban pioneers."(5) Another way artists "naturalized" or challenged the myths surrounding gentrification on the Lower East Side is less straightforward. It involved what cultural critic Craig Owens described as a search "for lost difference [that] has become the primary activity of the contemporary avant-garde."(6) Owens's critical remarks were aimed at the appropriation of subcultures by the East Village art scene in the early 1980s, a process of "recycling" that he attributes to the contemporary avant-garde which "seeks out and develops more and more resistant areas of social life for mass-cultural consumption."(7)

Owens's acerbic analysis frames in historical terms what he called the "shifting alliances between artists and other social groups" by comparing the 1980s avant-garde fascination with the "racial and ethnic, deviant and delinquent subcultures" of the Lower East Side to the infatuation of a previous avant-garde with the "ragpickers, streetwalkers and street entertainers" of mid-nineteenth-century Paris.

Against what he calls the "puerilism" of the East Village art scene, Owens champions the anti-gentrification imagery produced by members of Political Art Documentation and Distribution (PAD/D), a project that I helped organize and which I detail in part here. Yet in championing PAD/D's work as "mobiliz[ing] resistance against the political and economic interests which East Village art serves,"(8) Owens overlooks the way a left version of this search for "lost difference" operated within progressive cultural formations, including the work of PAD/D, even if this longing occasioned more reflexive practices. By not critically engaging this oppositional art and only using it as a counter-example, Owens misses the way a certain naturalizing of the neighborhood (as difference/as a lost plenitude) also allows some artists to identify and constructively engage with the social and economic plight of the inner city.(9)

In various and often unexpected ways, the work under consideration naturalizes this urban culture, extending this process to all parts of the Lower East Side, or "Loisaida" as its Spanish speaking residents called the neighborhood, including the streets, the political economy, the history and even the heterogeneous population of the neighborhood. Within the work of these artists, Loisaida is represented variously as: an endangered species or as one that is biologically out of control, a tableau in which predators and prey are locked in a primeval struggle, a cyclical organic process revealed to be man-made or a corrupted ecological utopia in need of liberation. It is this last instance that I will turn to in my conclusion when examining some of the art from the late 1990s, art that reworks the ecological themes of the last decade but so far remains primarily wedded to art world display.