In the reading, Mixed Use, Manhattan, Douglas Crimp references to the postwar utilization of industrial buildings located in Lower Manhattan. The deindustrialization of New York left industrial spaces abandoned. Artists occupied the discarded, industrial buildings and transformed them into their living and workspaces. Artists frequently opened their lofts for presentation creating alternative exhibition spaces. These phantoms of the industrial past led to the birth of performance art.
Matta Clark, Food
The existence of these new loft spaces spawned the beginning of new a style of art and music. Dance clubs and private gay clubs were born. Gay men and women turned an abandoned firehouse in the mixed-use district of SoHo (an area in New York that used to be industrial before it became residential) into a dance hall. This was also the headquarters for the Gay Activists Alliance. The firehouse was eventually burnt down by arsonists. Artists built a community in an abandoned, neglected, industrial area creating a new form of artistic experimentation.
GAA Firehouse, 99 Wooster Street
Many artists found themselves free to experiment with this urban emptiness. Bernard Guillot was a photographer who documented the fading industrial area juxtaposed against the desolation of downtown after business hours. Cindy Sherman photographed herself in many different scenarios as a lone female in Lower Manhattan. Her photographs suggest desolation and absence of people.
Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #21
The isolation of the old industrial piers along Manhattan’s Lower West Side on the Hudson River appealed to artists as well. People risked falling through as they were in ruin. Vito Acconci created a work called, Security Zone, as part of his, Projects: Pier 18, in which he would wait at the end of pier number 18 for an hour every night blindfolded and wait for a stranger to arrive. Upon the stranger’s arrival, he would whisper a secret that he had never revealed to anyone. This work demonstrated the essence of the abandoned district and revealed its psychological vulnerability.
Vito Acconci, Security Zone
Gay men looking for anonymous sex were also using the piers at the time. The abandonment and the emptiness created a space that allowed men to cruise and sunbathe. The vast, underlying beauty of the ruined piers is what drew artists to them as well. Alvin Baltrop was a photographer who started taking photos at the pier as a voyeur. He was determined to, “preserve the frightening, mad, and unbelievable, violent, and beautiful things that were going on at that time.” He photographed the people he came to know at the piers including men and women who had nowhere else to live.
Gay Sex in the '70's
Crimp was an art critic and he found inspiration by exploring his immediate neighborhood. He felt that performance art freed him the formalism that was a prominent in art criticism at that time.
The issues of space, the explorations of it from an artistic standpoint, and the appropriations of city spaces is what Martha Rosler addresses in, Culture Class: Art, Creativity, Urbanism. In this reading, Rosler concentrates on the relationship between artists and real estate, space and the interest of ground rent, and the advanced “creative class” globalization in restructuring economies within urban cities.
Rosler argues that the culture of the art world is the result of postwar urban transformations. The attributes of these spaces contain desirable attributes that draw artists to them in recognition of the urbanist, connecting a capitalism culture with the creative-class. The industrial city that Crimp wrote about has become a developed, artistic community. Rosler argues that this community is itself a product of the urban. The artists living and working in Lower Manhattan in the 1970’s created a new space out of abandonment.
Urban planning includes the engineering of new transportation and new neighborhoods, allowing for the clearing of old industrial spaces. Cities concentrate on the headquarters of large corporations being placed in these spaces, which creates power in state regulations. City planning calls for a totalization of space, ignoring culture and tradition of city neighborhoods. The residents who are adversely affected by these plans are always, inevitably, the poor. Space has a role of the visual and is connected to art. As a result, art and architecture are intrinsically linked and a social relation to art and capitalism.
Deindustrialization gave birth to political art because growing economic expectations gave rise to riots and revolts.
Because of under funding of maintenance and the evacuation of the poor from dilapidated city neighborhoods, housing projects built to withdraw the poor and banish them from the city were destined not to succeed. These state sponsored housing projects illustrated the description of postmodernism. Young people and minorities began demanding political representation and city recognition in housing initiatives. Many people were “squatting” in abandoned buildings. This recognition of the young and the political unrest contained within these groups of people led to a new ways of populating neighborhoods in turn, driving out the poor. Artists moving into threatened communities and taking up residence was called gentrification. As a result, artists made loft living, “comprehensible, even desirable.” This repurposing of an industrial city gained recognition of the real estate and land use commissions.
Pilsen, Chicago
The transformation of these areas connected historic preservation and the arts and suggested a new platform to politicians. The arts industry became an important platform for politicians interested in capitalism, building on the success of artists’ districts. During the 1960’s, advertising and marketing strategies attempted to appeal to the counterculture that rejected urbanism. Studies on the concepts of taste were connected to consumerism. This led to the birth of Pop art. But what is interesting is that artists longing to take a stand against political affairs of the time and wanting to establish a distance the bourgeois unfortunately catered to the preferences that market.
Andy Warhol
Rosler believes that, “the values of the countercultural world have infused the business world.” According to David Brooks, “in this new information age, members of the highly educated elite have one foot in the bohemian world of creativity and another foot in the bourgeois realm of ambition and worldly success.” The values and ideas of the creative class has become money making market and according to Rosler, “a blueprint for urban planners.”
In the reading, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics, Rosalyn Deutsche addresses public art and critical theories of public space in relation to the connectivity of art and political struggles such as feminism and homelessness. She explores the struggles taking place inside public spaces and also the struggles that produce and maintain these spaces, as well.
New alliances have been developed and formations have occurred between urban and esthetic disciplines since these essays have been written. Deutsche analyzes this alliance and criticizes the relationship she says is, “mutually supportive.” She writes about authoritarian strategies that attempt to, “construct unitary images of social space.” But, she argues that public space cannot, and is structured by exclusion, not constructed to be all-inclusive. This conflict is the condition of its existence.
There is a relationship between art’s social function and urbanism. The political character of a city is built upon promoting art and architecture. Art in the urban city is beneficial and complies its conditions. The production of space for art becomes political. With this, cities create beautification movements and restore historical monuments.
Michigan Avenue
Gentrification is a common topic of discussion within all of the readings. Urban restructuring and redevelopment of cities under private and state control, creates homelessness, which is a symptom of urbanism. Deutsche argues that homeless people and public spaces are products of the conflicts that exist within the restructuring of a city. This creates a socio-spatial conflict that the city conceals through historic preservation plans. A definite connection exists between the social function of art and redevelopment of urban cities.
Deutsche argues that new public art (socially responsible, site-specific, functional) contributed to the utility of redeveloped urban areas. These were a reflection of the states capitalist power. She believed that those who are excluded from the larger space create public space. The meaning of art in a redeveloped city becomes socially constructed. The connectivity of art and urban ideologies becomes a social production and spatial arrangement. There is a social relation between urbanism and the aesthetic. The result is art collaborating in the design of the redeveloped city.
Deutsche goes on to write that there is a lack of feminist social analysis in urban development. Urban planners see social totality of a city by ignoring the spatial politics of women and the poor. She argues that, “urban theory’s resistance to contemporary cultural criticism” is a “symptom of its underlying preoccupation with sexuality.” Concluding that spatial theory is part of the production of urban reality.
Because of state control over urban spaces, the meaning of public space is unclear. The public defenders of public space are in favor of public democracy. This brings to the fore the definition of democracy within the public space and what constitutes public art. Cities have redefined public art as work that enters or helps create a public space.
"Egg" Sculpture at Millenium Park
Deutsche argues that the idea of a unitary public space is deceptive because they are not inclusive. There is a struggle between public art for a common good (being constructed by a masculine way of exercising reason and inclusive social space) and the feminist critiques arguing against the mastering of “difference and otherness” in an absolute, social space creating democracy. Unitary public spaces disregard feminist critiques and create a political space open to debate. According to Claude Lefort, the idea of social unity in a city has to be discarded and conflicts have to occur in order to create democracy.
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