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

Yet in spite of this sense of "zero" option combined with such ominous signs as the energy crisis, where people shot each other at gas stations, or the unprecedented global nuclear build-up of the 1970s, the punk years were filled with a sense of macabre festivity. As one observer put it:

The first generation to grow up under the specter of nuclear annihilation angrily came of age in an era of diminishing expectations. It was in this atmosphere that a rock club CBGB [in 1975] opened in New York's East Village . . . CBGB launched the punk movement, and it's no coincidence that many of the early punks looked like survivors from a nuclear holocaust. . .(11)

By 1979 Presidential contender Ronald Reagan was offering tax cuts for the wealthy and trickle-down leftovers for the working poor (in a plan dubbed "Supply Side Economics" a.k.a. "Voodoo Economics"). Combined with his bizarre remarks about a coming biblical showdown, Reagan's persona became proof enough that the world had all but ended and that the only option was to party (or to imitate one at any rate). Nevertheless, throughout the 1970s there were artists within this anarcho-apocalyptic mix who claimed a specifically political agenda. These art activists understood that they were themselves central to the displacement process because as artists they enhanced the desirability of the neighborhood for potential middle and upper income residents. When a second wave of artists began arriving in the late 1970s this political awareness would become exceptionally, if temporarily, focused.

Copping an Octopus

The smoke of burning buildings fills the street. . . Rats and dogs are coming out to eat . . . the landlords have been buried in the basements of their buildings . . . throw away your clothes - you no longer need them. . .(12)

On the last day of 1979 a splinter from the one-year-old artists' group Collaborative Projects (COLAB) entered a city-owned building on Delancey Street that had been sitting empty in Loisaida for years. Aiming to liberate and occupy the site as a means of exposing "the system of waste and disuse that characterizes the profit system in real estate"(13) the Committee for the Real Estate Show opened their "squat-gallery" to friends and the public on January 1, 1980. The show was filled with coarsely made artworks that decried rent-gouging landlords, city-run development agencies and what would become a favorite target of the new scene: the "suburbs," as a series of suburban real estate photographs with sardonic captions like "3 BR, no rats, no unemployment" demonstrated.(14)

in a move that prefigured the pop-piracy of East Village art, Rebecca Howland copped the image of a monstrous octopus - the consummate left-caricature of big business - and painted it onto the bland facade of the appropriated space of "The Real Estate Show." In the creature's tightly coiled arms were depicted two tenement buildings, a bundle of cash, a gem (signifying the speculator's perception of the building) and a dagger. But one of the beast's arms had been violently severed. The artist positioned this liberated limb pointing to just above the entrance to the building, forming an arrow that directed the eyes of the neighborhood toward both the exhibition and to the example set by the artists' collective action.