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

Within the context of the Lower East Side, with its graffiti covered brickwork, handmade store signage, street graphics and didactic murals, the "Real Estate Show's" polymorphic sea creature appeared inevitable, natural, like a denizen attracted to the region's visible ecological fatigue. Howland also put her octopus icon on the "Real Estate Show's" fliers and posters, some of which were printed over actual page-spreads from the New York Times Real Estate section, thus turning the creature into a veritable logo for the squat-action.

Howland would in fact continue to use the mollusk image in her work for years, her most ambitious version being a large three-dimensional sculpted metal piece, 3 x 6 feet, from 1983 titled "Real Estate Octopus with Dead Horse," that she created for the walkway of the Williamsburg Bridge. "Real Estate Octopus with Dead Horse" presented Howland's now emblematic invertebrate writhing beneath the towers of the World Trade Center as if it were the radioactive spawn of a secret Port Authority experiment.

One likely source for Howland's initial octopus effigy may have been the mural "Chi Lai - Arriba - Rise Up!" (1974) by Alan Okada on a building just five blocks to the south of the "Real Estate Show." Within Okada's four-story-high painting a squirming cephalopod, draped in a U.S. flag, clings like a parasite to the figure of a money-grubbing landlord. Another source for Howland's image is undoubtedly the 1901 novel Octopus by radical socialist author Frank Norris, where the railroad is represented as a many armed monster: ". . . with tentacles of steel clutching into the soil, the soulless Force, the iron-hearted Power, the monster, the Colossus, the Octopus."(15)

It is difficult to miss Howland's version of real estate speculators with their "tentacles . . . clutching into the soil" of the Lower East Side. But the Real Estate "insurrection" was itself a mixture of anarchistic bravado and analytical naivete. The artists mimicked the "direct action" strategies of the Civil Rights Movement of 1968 and in so doing they imagined that the community would be inspired to take similar action and stop the irrational warehousing of useful property. There was, however, nothing irrational about the city's plan for the neighborhood. It was part of a long-standing grand design to weaken investment and living conditions in certain low income areas so that re-development could attract real estate developers and upper income residents.(16)

Neither did neighborhood people necessarily get the point of the exhibit. According to artist Joe Lewis, a fellow COLAB member, ". . . a lot of people saw the show, the community people, they thought it was just a group of artists protesting that they could not show their work anywhere."(17) The day after the opening of the "Real Estate Show" the city padlocked the building. Then, after receiving some bad press exacerbated by the appearance of artist Joseph Beuys, the city reversed itself and offered the artists a smaller space a few blocks away to resume the exhibition.(18)