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

The state of this Lower East Side of novel York City provides pictures for painters, operas for actors and author of poemss from urban shambles of a close where monstrous inequity is met with savagery, a nearly finished specimen of malignant city life . . yet this neighborhood has also functioned as a cultural insulator. Within its affection minority cultures have remained intact, and of recent origin ideas have incubated.(1)

Urban circle of times of decline, decay, and abandonment followed through rebirth through rehabilitation, renovation, and reconstruction may appear to be natural processe In fact, however, the fall and rise of cities are results not only of financial and productive periods and state fiscal crises on the other hand also of deliberate social policy.(2)

Metaphors of urban decay, rebirth and incubation give an inkling of that the process of "constructing nature" has its corollary in the act of naturalizing tillage This complementary operation ascribes organic processe to the workings of human labor and economic combination of parts to form a wholes In this essay I will gaze at the way the inner city is naturalized(3) end the work of several artists active upon 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 rejoin 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, oftentimes on abandoned buildings. These "street" settings at handed 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 bills some of which also not awayed anti-gentrification messages to the public. by what means and why these artists chose natural imagery to agitate or remark on housing and economic issues is the pertain to of this text. The answers that not absent themselves place the battle to maintain depressed income rents in inner-city neighborhoods within a broader cultural and political context

One answer of these artists was to satirize the naturalizing language of the real estate industry itself. from one side advertisements and press releases, land developer speculators and flat the city government described depressed income neighborhoods such as Hell's Kitchen and the Lower East Side as "untamed territories" where upwardly mobile white tenants were called upon to work for as "trail blazers" or "urban pioneers."(5) Another way artists "naturalized" or challenged the myths surrounding gentrification upon the Lower East Side is les straightforward. It involved what cultural critic Craig Owens described as a search "for not to be found difference [that] has become the primary activity of the contemporary avant-garde."(6) Owens's critical remarks were aimed at the appropriation of subculture by dint of the East Village art show in the early 1980s, a proces of "recycling" that he attributes to the contemporary avant-garde which "seek on the outside and develops more and more resistant areas of social life for mass-cultural consumption."(7)

Owens's acerbic analysis frames in historical limits what he called the "shifting alliances between artists and other social groups" by means of 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 highway entertainers" of mid-nineteenth-century Paris.

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

In various and frequently unexpected ways, the work beneath consideration naturalizes this urban tillage extending this process to all parts of the Lower East Side, or "Loisaida" as its Spanish speaking residents called the neighborhood, including the ways the political economy, the history and plane the heterogeneous population of the neighborhood. Within the work of these artists, Loisaida is exhibited variously as: an endangered species or as single that is biologically out of ascendency a tableau in which predators and pillage are locked in a primeval try a cyclical organic process revealed to be man-made or a corrupted ecological utopia in ne of liberation. It is this last instance that I will revolve to in my conclusion when examining a certain number of of the art from the late 1990 art that reworks the ecological themes of the last decade on the other hand so far remains primarily wedded to art world display.