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

Norman's models, even more than Dion's largely symbolic investigations, borrow from the little known history of left politics and ecological utopianism, including the kind of iconographic and polemical uses of nature that I have touched on in this essay. Nevertheless, in light of the present anti-progressive and the self-satisfied insularity of the '90s art industry, it is often the less than ideal history of actual political work by artists in places like the Lower East Side that is in danger of being simplified and treated as an exotic, organic thing.

There is, however, a seductive pleasure in the new ecological art, not least of all derived from the conceptual linkage, especially in Norman's projects, to the history of collective practices and militant political resistance. And while New York City's Lower East Side continues to serve as the "natural" site for locating these alternate histories, what can not be stressed enough is the need to move beyond idealized exhibition settings and into long range political commitments where conceptual theorizing, such as Norman's, can be field tested through site specific collaborative work involving artist and activists on the Lower East Side, or in the outer boroughs where many of these issues over housing and displacement have now moved. In other words, for this work to be useful within the political and historical arena that it has appropriated, artists must engage the contradictions and compromises that comprise the "malignant city landscape" of the urban activist.

NOTES

1. Alan Moore and Marc Miller, eds., "The ABC's of No Rio and its Times," in ABC No Rio Dinero: The Story of a Lower East Side Art Gallery, (New York: ABC No Rio, 1985), p. 1.

2. Martha Rosier, "Fragments of a Metropolitan Viewpoint," in If You Lived Here: The City in Art, Theory and Social Activism, Brian Wallis, ed., (Seattle: Bay Press, 1991), p. 25.

3. The city also appears as a malevolent "natural thing" in sources like the detective novel and film-noir cinema, as well as in the urban naturalism of writers like Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser. Readings of the city as a form of "second nature" can be found in the work of Walter Benjamin, especially in his unfinished Arcades Project, as well as in discussions about public space; for example, the work of Richard Sennett and Simon Pugh.

4. A concise analysis of the gentrification of the East Village that also focuses on the role of artists within this process can be found in Rosalyn Deutsche and Care Gnedel Ryan, "The Fine Art Of Gentrification," October 31 (Winter 1984), pp. 91-111.

5. Consider the language used in this advertisement from a full page ad in the New York Times as quoted by urban geographer Neil Smith: "The Armory [a new condo facility] celebrates the teaming of the Wild Wild West with ten percent down payment and twelve months' free maintenance. The trail blazers have done their work. West 42nd street has been tamed, domesticated, and polished into the most exciting freshest most energetic neighborhoods in New York." In "Housing: Gentrification; Dislocation and Fighting Back," in Wallis, If You Lived Here, p. 108.