Artistic Footprint: Exam- ining Art’s Relationship to Gentrification, A Historical Perspective

ALEXIS KYLE MITCHELL 1 East Village neighbors confronted police officers in Tompkins Square Park on Aug. 6, 1988, to protest a 1 a.m. curfew. Ángel Franco/The New York Times

2 ARTISTIC FOOTPRINT: EXAMINING ART’S RELATIONSHIP TO GENTRIFICATION, A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

Since the 1980s, in cities across North America, artists have often been thought of the ‘footsol- diers of gentrification’, but how did this percep- tion come to be, and is this a perspective shared globally? This module will approach the topic at hand by first outlining some of the political and economic issues globalizing cities are faced with. By learning about the forces that shape our cities, we will come to understand the ways the artistic field has been caught in the fast moving wheels of urban change. After address- ing the North American context as one import- ant example among many, we will then move through a number of case studies from the last few decades, in cities such as New York, Rio de Janeiro and Berlin, to understand where the ar- tistic field has intersected with the larger forces of urban displacement, and will outline places for intervention within this dangerous dynamic.

CASE STUDY: NEW YORK, 1980S

READINGS:

Sharon Zukin, Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hop- kins University Press, 1982. Rosalyn Deutsche and Cara Gendel Ryan. “The Fine Art of Gentrification.” October, Vol. 31 (Win- ter, 1984), pp. 91-111.

SCREENING:

My Brooklyn. dir. Kelly Anderson, 2012.

At the lower edge of the photograph a bum sits in a doorway surrounded by his shopping bags, a liquor bottle, and the remnants of a meal. He is apparently oblivious of the photographer, unaware of the composition in which he is forced to play a

3 major role. Abundant graffiti covers the wall be- hind him, while at the left the wall is pasted over with layers of posters, the topmost of which is an advertisement for the Pierpont Morgan Library’s Holbein exhibition. The poster features a large reproduction of a figure facing in the direction of the bum in the doorway. High art mingles with the "subculture" of graffiti and the "lowlife" represent- ed by the bum in a photograph which is given a ti- tle, likean artwork: First Street and Second Avenue (Holbein and the Bum).

This quote is from “The fine art of gentrification” by Deutsche and Ryan which references a pho- tograph in a catalogue on ‘East Village Art’ from the ICA in Pennsylvania in 1983.

4 New York Magazine 1984. Article by Craig Unger

5 ABC No Rio and The Real Estate Show Artists respond to gentrification in the On New Year’s Eve, 1979, on the Lower East Side of , a group calling itself the Committee for the Real Estate Show broke into a city-owned commercial building at 125 and installed an art exhibition in solidarity with Elizabeth Mangum, a 35-year-old black woman killed by a police officer during an eviction in Flatbush, Brooklyn, earlier that year.

‘ABC No RIo Flyer for Real Estate Show’

6 THE REAL ESTATE SHOW

Manifesto or Statement of Intent Committee for the Real Estate Show, 1980 Printed and distributed to exhibiting artists at planning meetings for the Real Estate Show The occupation and exposition imposes a com- plex human system where previously there was no system -- or only the system of waste and disuse that characterizes the profit system in real estate. It is to create a showcase for de- sires, to reassert the primacy of human effort, to encourage the resistance of commercial initia- tives, to allot extra portion to the increment of human fantasy that lives in all people, however much they may have been reduced to markets, ethnic power blocs, or “problems” of one kind or another. For artists, it is a question of getting out of police. There are so many “representa- tively structured” spaces for exhibitions. The policies of these headmasters, these backstrad- dlers in pinstripe, are not in tune with the aims and ideals of artists. This is a field test of a col- lective working situation -- putting the collab- orative process to the test of the initial set-up, and a pressure test of solidarity in terms of a pre-emptive extralegal action taken together. INVADE, RESTRUCTURE, AND ADMIRE RESPECT FOR THE PEOPLE AND THEIR PLACE “RESPECT” THE WINTER PALACE This is a short-term occupation of vacant city-managed property. The action is extralegal -- it illuminates no legal issues, calls for no “rights.” It is pre-emptive and insurrectionary. The action is dedicated to Elizabeth Mangum, a middle-aged Black American killed by police and marshals as she resisted eviction in Flatbush last year. The intention of this action is to show that art- ists are willing and able to place themselves and their work squarely in a context which shows solidarity with oppressed people, a recognition that mercantile and institutional structures op- press and distort artists’ lives and works, and 7 a recognition that artists, living and working in depressed communities, are compradors in the revaluation of property and the “whitening” of neighborhoods. It is important to focus attention on the way artists get used as pawns by greedy white de- velopers. It is important for artists to express solidarity with Third World and oppressed people. It is important to show that people are not help- less -- they can express their resentment with things-as-they-are in a way that is constructive, exemplary, and interesting. It is important to try to bridge the gap between artists and working people by putting artwork on a boulevard level. It is important to do something dramatic that is neither commercially oriented nor institutionally quarantined -- a groundswell of human action and participation with each other that points up currents of feeling that are neither for sale nor for morticing into the shape of an institution. It is important to do something that people (particularly in the art community) cannot imme- diately identify unless they question themselves and examine their own actions for an answer. It is important to have fun. It is important to learn.

“In our time, capital expansion has no new terri- tory left to explore, so it redevelops, or internally redifferentiates, urban space. Just as the frontier thesis in US history legitimized an economic push through "uncivilized" lands, so the urban frontier thesis legitimizes the corporate recla- mation of the inner city from racial ghettos and marginal business uses”. -Sharon Zukin

8 ABC No Rio poster for Real Estate Show 1979 by Rebecca Howland

9 MODULE LED BY ALEXIS KYLE MITCHELL

ALEXIS KYLE MITCHELL is an artist and scholar whose works have circulated internationally. Her projects make use of the concepts of space and place, to reconfigure relationships to memory, politics and acts of belonging. Mitchell recently completed a PhD in Human Geography and Sex- ual Diversity Studies at the University of Toron- to where she held a SSHRC Doctoral Fellow- ship. She was artist-in-residence at Akademie Schloss Solitude (2015-2017) and at the Mac- Dowell Colony (2018) and had recent exhibitions at Gallery TPW, Toronto and the Berlinale Film Festival. Her writing and research can be seen in books such as ‘Infrastructures of Citizen- ship’ forthcoming from UBC Press and ‘Queer at Camp’ published by Fordham University Press. Mitchell often works collaboratively alongside artist Sharlene Bamboat under the name Bam- bitchell. The duo have upcoming solo exhibitions at Mercer Union Gallery (Toronto), Henry Art Gal- lery (Seattle) and Dazibao (Montreal).

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