They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top: , Tompkins Square Park and the Politics of Belonging

Jeff Weston

FINAL PAPER: 4/22/15 ) 2

I am an invisible man . . . I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids – and

I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.

- Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

Control over access is also accomplished by the disciplining of behavior; that is, access is assured only to those who engage in permitted behaviors, which, increasingly, are associated with consumption activities.

- Joe Doherty, “Homelessness and Exclusion”

3

I.

Julius. He wore a mandated cultural badge that read with large black letters on elegant white paper: the black bad man.1 He was sex personified. His typical leather attire gave him a type of sleazy aura. His rich low voice resonated forcibly through all ears in a room. He was approachable, but fiercely intelligent. He was uncontrollable, but confident. His brain worked faster than his mouth. What came out was erratic, unintelligible, and confusing.2 He could not be contained, only erased. He was at once HYPERvisible and INvisible. He was a mediator of visibility and the performance of that role became his life’s magnum opus.

This paper examines the roles of cultural and racial visibility politics as strategic modes of belonging. Utilizing two case studies, I) the biography and analysis of the musical notation of the late- Julius Eastman, II) artistic and cultural belonging in the downtown scene; and their synthesis: III) Julius Eastman’s forced residence as a homeless refugee in

Downtown’s Tompkins Square Park, this paper will explore cultural and racial hypervisibility and invisibility as modes of belonging; suggesting Eastman as a kaleidoscopic mediator of the cultural, political and racial visibility politics of European concert music, Downtown

New York citizenship and blackness.

Visibility implies a state of being seen. Julius was always SEEN. He was overly visible.

Disembodied and pedestaled, Julius’ blackness was affixed to the classical-concert hall. He was a performer and a cultural producer in the Downtown scene; he relied heavily on black

1 “Since the 1940s, with the emergence of Black protest literature and the urban Black bad man into the national spotlight, the discourses by and on Black men have been riveted on images of scarcity, invisibility, silence, deprivation, and lack.” Ross 602. 2 Cassaro 4 activism and the freedom of sexuality found as a frequenter of sex clubs. He was an emerging academic but critiqued the institution at-will. He belonged to many communities that interacted with each other. His belonging was an example of what anthropologist Aihwa Ong details as transnationality: cultural interconnectedness and mobility across spaces and through lines, as well as changing the nature of set communities.3

Nowhere was he more visible, however, than as a classical composer in the European-

American tradition. He was its other. As a flamboyant black homosexual male operating in the European-American art music tradition, his darkness consistently threatened to shadow bright white stage lights. As Nicole Fleetwood attains, hypervisibility describes processes that produce overrepresentation of certain images of blacks and “the visual currency of these images in public culture. It simultaneously announces the continual invisibility of blacks as ethical and enfleshed subjects in various realms of polity, economies, and discourse, so that blackness remains aligned with negation and decay.”4 Julius was viewed through the lens of white European-American concert music. Moreover, he willingly embraced the inescapability of his racial branding. In attempts at purposefully darkening its bright white light, he mediated his own visibility.

Julius Eastman, born in 1940, grew up in Ithaca, New York. He began studying piano at age

14 and presented his piano debut at Town Hall (NYC) in 1966. His collegiate studies began in Ithaca but the budding musician transferred to the Curtis Institute of Music in

Philadelphia for more intensive work. At Curtis, Julius studied piano with Mieczylaw

Horszowski and composition with Constant Vaulican. His lessons with the latter would

3 Ong 4 4 Fleetwood 16 5 spark a search for a new personal voice. This voice would teeter between satirical pop music references, performance art and elegant concert music. This voice would be political. This voice would not be veiled.

After graduating from Curtis, professional development opportunities immediately began appearing. The landmark 1973 Nonesuch recording of British composer Peter Maxwell

Davies’ Eight Songs for a Mad King would feature Julius’ rich, flexible and deeply emotional singing voice. His vocal, instrumental and compositional talents attracted the composer- conductor , who led the in performance of the composer’s music. Invited to join the Creative Associates at SUNY Buffalo’s Center for

Creative and Performing Arts by Foss, Eastman became a noted composer/performer in the all-white ensemble that worked as a “prestigious program in avant-garde classical music.”5

Eastman would form the S.E.M. ensemble with fellow composer, conductor, flutist and

Creative Associate . Throughout the 1970s, the S.E.M. ensemble and the Creative

Associates premiered over fifteen of Eastman’s compositions in the United States and

Europe, highlighting the composer’s tendencies to blend art music forms with popular music motives creating textural variety dependent on steady beats played by mixed-modular- chamber ensembles; later to be classified as .6 Julius left Buffalo in 1975 following a controversial performance of ’s aleatoric Songbooks by the S.E.M. ensemble. This infamous event included nudity and homoerotic allusions interpolated by

Eastman which were denounced by the elder composer following the performance. Kyle

Gann recalled the performance in a 1988 Village Voice review of writings on Cage:

5 Hanson-Dvoracek 6 Gann 6

Julius Eastman (a fine composer/performer and gay activist) used the direction “Give a lecture” as a pretext to undress a male student onstage and gesture sexually. Cage’s reaction was inscrutable, but the next day, the man whom no one could imagine even swatting a fly fumed, in impressively subdued tones, about the difference between liberty and license. Unbelievably, he banged his fist on the piano and shouted . . . PERMISSION GRANTED. BUT NOT TO DO WHATEVER YOU

WANT.7

Succeeding the Cage event, Julius relocated to where he would spend the remainder of his professional life. While in New York City, the composer’s music became increasingly political, focusing on his own homosexuality and blackness. His compositions obscured the line between the overtly academic music of “uptown” and the experimental- oriented “downtown” scenes; but were championed within the latter. Provocative titles such as Gay Guerilla, Crazy Nigger and Evil Nigger began to appear, radically juxtaposing his earlier romantic titles of Macle, Wood in Motion and The Moon’s Silent Modulation, among others.

Always striving for black visibility, Eastman would coordinate a Brooklyn Philharmonic- outreach community concert series that dedicated itself to bringing music by black to light. He toured incessantly throughout the United States and Europe, promoting his music and the music of his colleagues.

After 1983, pessimistic about what he saw as a lack of admirable professional opportunities,

Julius grew increasingly dependent on drugs. His life fell apart. The majority of his scores

7 Dohoney 19 7 were impounded by the New York City Sherriff’s Office following an eviction from his East

Village Downtown loft. As few recordings documented his music, this legal action has left little written trace of the composer.

Julius was beginning to disappear.

While homeless, he took refuge in Tompkins Square Park and could be found standing in food lines.8 Music critic and colleague states, “He died all alone in a hospital in

Buffalo in 1990, and no one in the music scene even knew about it. But I got wind of a rumor . . . and wrote an obituary in the Village Voice eight months after he died.” The cause of death was generically listed as cardiac arrest, but those close to him speculate AIDS- related influences. His brother Gerry states “They found him passed out on a snowy evening

[in Buffalo]. A very non-specific cause of death was listed on his death certificate, we don’t know what he died from . . . The only reason we knew that he was dead was because a very good friend of his, Karl Singletary, . . . was at the hospital and saw them wheeling him out of the room to the morgue. Otherwise, we would’ve never known what have happened to him.

We wouldn’t know to this day that he was dead because he didn’t have any I.D. on him.”9

Julius had become invisible;

he had been erased.

8 Rosenblum 9 Aldolfo Doring, Without a Net: Resurrecting Julius Eastman.

8

“Everywhere we turn, we see images of Black men. With a visibility far greater than their actual numbers in the national population.”10 The saturation of black male images has become a mirror with the capacity to exaggerate the power of the American “macho”. The figure of the Black man has become a reigning symbol of aggressive American manliness in postcolonial American society; the Black bad man. Ironically, at the same time, the image of

Black male fullness (the myth of the oversized penis) and Black bad man necessitate a disembodiment of the soul from the flesh. The Black bad man has only flesh. His pigmentation emits a hypervisible aggression with nothing underneath. With his flesh,

Eastman signified upon the preexisting text of black male hypervisibility and hypersexuality, and with his music, he signified upon the various classical, popular and racial traditions that contributed to his own style. Eastman’s flesh and musical aesthetic became intertwined as a performative self-exoticising of political, racial and cultural visibility.11

Marlon B. Ross notes, “The irony of Black protest literature is that it figures the Black body

(usually male) as silent and invisible through a form and tone that require its hollering

[hyper]visibility.”12 Julius, having been born at the same time of the emergence of black protest literature and disappearing, ironically, during the high profile mass cultural obsession with the black male of the 1980s and 90s through such iconic figures as Michael Jackson,

Michael Jordon, Bill Cosby, Mike Tyson, Rodney King, O.J. Simpson, and Tupac Shakur, among others; embodies the ongoing tension of black hypervisibility and invisibility in

American postcolonial society. Julius lived as a real disappearing act. His attempts at

10 Ross 599 11 Cook 306 12 Ross 602 9 wrestling with the hypervisibility and invisibility inscribed upon him are evident throughout his life as a musician and black citizen. This mediation becomes strikingly evident in the materiality and notation of his music. The visual language of Eastman’s score becomes the anchor that telegraphs the sonic, performative and cultural visibility of his blackness.

10

Two words, prominently displayed and overtaking any available top margin immediately draw one’s eye to the page. These two words “Evil” and “Nigger” appear next to each other as if providing a message in which they could care if the viewer notes; they appear provokingly, insistently reminding you that they are here to be SEEN, that they will be

SEEN. Will you overlook these words? Will they become hidden behind your white mask?13

They tempt you to make them invisible. Both words appear overstressed in finely drawn ink.

The exaggerated font mocks your colonial Baskerville, your realist Helvetica, There’s a weight in this ink that the white page is struggling to bare. “Evil” appears bold against a lighter drawn “Nigger.” This juxtaposition is unmistakable; the weight of the word “Nigger” needs nothing to highlight its tightly worn, neck-braking history. Evil, however, cannot rest next to such a frightening word without change. Evil, filled with histories of the world’s most grotesque creatures, actions and events bares no weight against Nigger. It must be bolded; it’s the only chance the adjective stands to be read with the same weight. There is no-mistaking the two words together, “Evil Nigger” projects off of the page and grabs us as we struggle to look away, denounce its use and wrap back into comfortability. Eastman was prepared; these were words he knew well and the words of his history. He would not allow the warmth of comfortability. Addressing the community, students and faculty at his 1980

Northwestern University Residency concert, he spoke:

Now, there was a little problem with the titles of the piece[s]…there were some students and one faculty member who felt that the titles were somehow derogatory in some manner, being that the word “nigger” is in it. These particular titles, the reason I use them, in fact there is a whole series of these pieces and they can be called the nigger series. Now the reason I use that particular word is

13 Fanon 11 because, for me, it has a, what is what I call a basicness about it, that is to say I feel that in any case, the first niggers were of course field niggers, and upon that is really the basis of what I call the American economic system. Without field niggers, you wouldn’t really have such a great and grand economy that we have. So, that is what I call the first and great nigger, field niggers. And what I mean by

“niggers” is that thing which is fundamental, that person or thing that attains to a basicness, a fundamentalness, and eschews that thing which is superficial or can we say elegant. So a nigger for me is that kind of thing which attains himself or herself to the ground of anything, so that’s what I mean by nigger.14

For Eastman, “nigger” is an exoticising term signifying a figure that is forcibly darkened behind the brightness of the elegant or modern, that thing which is labeled the other against its will. Eastman’s “nigger” becomes lost through its basicness, its forced capture, its branding of savage. However, without that dark basicness, there would be no bright elegance, no modern. An entire world is built upon Eastman’s veiled “nigger”, but that world is reluctant to recognize it. Only when boldly exaggerated against the white page, does

Eastman’s “nigger” become hypervisible.

The hypervisibility of the title is juxtaposed against a musical score that has been purposefully branded with invisibilities. When observing Eastman’s score against another, more standard, western-musical notation, exclusions quickly become apparent. The performance score to Evil Nigger contains no information regarding instrumentation, tempo, articulation, dynamics or meter. Further, time is registered as a performative temporality, through cellular notation. Notated to the left and right of the staves counting up from :00 to the piece’s end at 21:09. Each temporal cell is further delineated with four slashes between

14 Eastman Unjust Malaise 12 staves. Within these temporal cells, performer(s) are give information regarding pitch

(including accidentals), register, and, at times, duration through stemless note heads. In the first two pages of the score, Eastman indicates a single repeated pitch with an arrow. This arrow becomes repurposed to show attaca movements into following cells. Any other repetitions of pitch are notated as text (“2”, “8”, “any number”) above select notes or motivic figures in the cells. Although there is much musical information that is purposefully omitted from the score, moments of clarity do appear against this veiled backdrop.

As the rounded binary form of Evil Nigger evolves, the score demonstrates a reoccurring motive found in popular music. The d-minor motive, in fifths, is notated “play only once.”

The motive, highlighting chords i-V-VI-III-iv-V-I appears seven times throughout the piece and is employed, at first, by instruments in a rhythmic and pitched unison that slowly becomes juxtaposed against an enveloping chromaticism of all 12 pitches in the chromatic scale. This reoccurring figure is visibly noticeable at the beginning of the piece due to

Eastman’s demarcation of “play only once,” but as the rhythmic duration of the cells augment through the piece’s progression, this demarcation is lost. In spite of losing “play only once,” the chorus figure in its original black note head state, becomes more visible against stemmed white-note heads; turning the reoccurring motive into an aspect of the piece’s hypervisibility. Sonically, the reoccurring d-minor motive becomes hypervisible, and jarring, when placed against the piece’s progressing chromaticism. The visibility of the motive, however, is threatened at the beginning of the B section of the piece (11:00), when the composer employs the motive to be played “In all keys” at the same time; swallowing the motive through chromaticism. This direction foreshadows the enveloping chromatic dissonance that will take place in the B section, but also creates a new beginning from which 13 the motive can now emerge and fight against. This “basic” motive, juxtaposed against a gradually complexing chromatic landscape becomes the piece’s sonic punctum.

Eastman’s notation does not operate externally to his music; nor do his titles. Both, notation and title serve as part of the unified whole: the music operating as a sonic, cultural and performative entity. Adorno writes “reification through notation is not merely external to the composition . . . but rather seeps into it as an aspect in itself, as the frictional coefficient of its externality, so to speak, the resistance strengthens it.”15These written symbols serve as what musicologist and music theorist Nicholas Cook deems as signification, rather than reproduction. By placing the notation, titles and performance as acts of “signification is not only to place it in the social context of players and listeners but also to locate it at a particular point in time. To signify is to draw upon the past in order to shape a still ongoing future.”16

Eastman’s notation creates a referent cultural and musical framework from which to draw.

What players do may stick relatively close to what is written, or it may stray far from it. What is required from the individual performer and larger ensemble, however, is that they play with the framework to unveil the music. The performer(s) must not simply play the framework but, rather, they must play with it. They must unveil it. What follows, then, is an emphasis on what is not notated, what the framework hides. Performers of Eastman’s music construct visibility through exploring the vagueness of the score and the hypervisibility of its cultural context. The invsibility of the score anchors the musical whole. What results, then, is a social act of community making through performative unveiling turned visibility.

15 Cook 225 16 ____ 248 14

The rough and experimental notation of the score only highlights its place as the other.

Vague and indescriptive against the prescriptive and unassuming notational tradition found throughout the classical European-American canon, Eastman’s score serves as a visual tool asking in the words of Fanon, “Where am I to be classified? Or, if you prefer, tucked away?”17 Inkblots muddy the notation; staves are left unfinished or are without content floating as messages of invisibility against a white backdrop. Undoubtedly, the score raises more questions than it answers: What is to be played? Upon what instruments? What tempo?

What dynamic? This score serves as a map that necessitates frustration, interpretation and inquiry, not a plan that is easily decipherable. We are left struggling to turn back to a place of comfortability, of ease, of “elegance.” These are Eastman’s attempts at making the hypervisiblity and invisibility prescribed to blackness become visible through the materiality and notation of the score.

17 Fanon 113 15

II. possible advertisement for Downtown New York, 1974-1984:

Want the purest heroin in New York? Come on down.

Want to watch Richard Hell gesticulate on stage wearing nothing but a t-shirt stating “Bugs Bunny

Has Too Munch Money”? Come on down.

Want to live in poverty while being unabashedly activist and aggressively political? Come on down.

Want to see the gaunt faces, emaciated bodies and political questioning of a hetertofore unknown disease to be identified as immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS)? Come on down.

Want to mount a full-scale assault on the structures of society that led to grinding poverty, homelessness, the Vietnam War, nuclear power, misogyny, racism, homophobia? Come on down.

Want to feel like the world is listening/understanding? You’d be better off Uptown.

Jean Michel Basquiat Leeches 16

East Village. Urban Village. Below 14th street. . 1974-1984. Downtown. New York was in a state of physical and economic decline at the beginning of the 1970s, and the malaise deepened as the decade progressed.

The AIDS plague peaked

Police raided illegal lofts

The city was in the midst of an economic recession.

Subways danced with graffiti.

Pollution hung in the air.

Trash collected on street corners.

Traffic congestion intensified

as did unemployment and crime.

“The white middle class judged the East Village (including Alphabet City, or Avenue A through Avenue D), Harlem and Brooklyn too black and too Latin to be safe, while the Cast

Iron District was deemed terrifying because it lacked any kind of demographics at all – it was without residents and light industry had relocated to calmer, more functional zones.”18Municipal workers striked and the City was tottering on the verge of bankruptcy.

The Emergency Tenant Protection Act regulated and allowed wide-eyed artists to live in deserted buildings and commercial lofts. Writing about Downtown literature, Robert Siegel identifies a central insurgency against the structures of culture in Downtown works: “It is,

18 Lawrence 47 17 then, an insurgency, but not one that expects to break free of some kind of specific corrupt institution. It is an insurgency against the silence of institutions, the muteness of the ideology of form, the unspoken violence of normalization.19

Downtown artists worked to explore the “cracks and fissures” where human experience, the actual events of everyday life, undermines the oppressive, prescriptive structures of society.

As Marvin Taylor states: “Downtown work exploded traditional art forms, exposing them as nothing more than cultural constructs. Verbo-visual work, installation art, performance art, appropriation art, graffiti painting, Xerox art, zines, small magazines, self-publishing, outsider galleries, mail art, and a host of other transgressions abounded.”20 The artists worked in multiple aesthetics: they were filmmakers, punk musicians, video artists, writers, actors, painters, poets, graffiti artists, performance artists, experimental composers; all furiously creating within an urban geographical space that was not more than twenty-by- twenty square blocks.21 Musicologist Tim Lawrence notes the diversity of the scene: “Irrespective of their training, the new crop of composers embodied a level of demographic diversity that was largely absent in earlier generations. Eastman and [George]

Lewis boosted the previously negligible presence of African Americans in the compositional strata . . . Women were much more prominent than they were in the orchestral establishment thanks to the notable work of composers Kroesen, Maryanne Amacher, ,

Joan La Barbara, Mary Jane Leach, Elodie Lauren, Annea Lockwood, and .

Meanwhile Eastman and [Arthur] Russell articulated a more openly queer presence than

19 Taylor 21 20 ____ 23 21 ____ 31 18 earlier experimental composers had (aside from ).”22 Downtown became a place of visibility and belonging for artists wishing to explore the culturally subversive.

Alongside Eastman, George Lewis was a notable black composer, academic, improviser and trombonist associated with the scene. He states” In Hal Foster’s memorable phrase, pluralism becomes a location where ‘minor deviation is allowed only in order to resist radical change. The radical change during this period, however, is that a new genre – ‘new music’ – was being created that valorized diversity of musical practice and was trying to learn to valorize diversity of cultural reference.”23 The poverty, politics and geography of the scene exposed the irony of it all near the scene’s end: the artists who were at once visible, became shadowed. The light would be dimmed.

Downtown New York’s reputation for an artists’ haven traces its roots back to as early as the 1850s, when the original Bohemians, German refugees from the 1848 Revolution, poured into the city. The Bohemians took up lodging in the poorer parts of the then developing city, now known as the Lower East Side. The term Downtown was first applied to artists below Fourteenth Street in the late 1950s. The geographical term became synonymous with the musical work of John Cage. Downtown not only signified the geographical location of where Cage lived, but also differentiated his experimental musical aesthetic from the more traditional and serialist composers of Uptown institutions such as Columbia University, the

Julliard School, and Carnegie Hall. On the heels of Cage and other New

York School composers (such as Julius Eastman’s teacher at Buffalo and

22 Lawrence 66 23 ____ 80 19

Earl Brown, Christian Wolff, among others) the first large influx of young experimental artists yearning to cut their teeth began in the early 1960s.

Yoko Ono, a pianist soon associated with the movement, opened her loft for a concert series organized by early minimalist and pioneer

Richard Maxfield in 1960. That concert series included Young’s Composition 1960 #7 – which instructed the performer to hold the pitches B and F-sharp “…for a long time” – and Ono’s

“Wall Piece for Orchestra,” which required performers to hit their heads against the wall.

The Ono/Young/Maxfield concert series was the first to draw adventurous music lovers downtown, and it offered new musical experiences that the uptown classical concert-givers wouldn’t have considered music, or at least not “serious” music.24 These artists lived, and often squatted, in loft buildings south of Houston Street. In his article “One Brief, Scuzzy

Moment”, visual artist George Indiana describes the scene: “I lived in the East Village when it sill had the narcoleptic desuetude of downtown Detroit…The East Village was an ideal refuge for any artist born without a silver spoon.” Fluxus artist and pioneer George

Maciunas, was an advocate of cooperative living and assisted in purchasing several former light-industry buildings to be converted into living and working spaces. The lofts, known as

“Fluxhouses”, lacked plumbing, heating and other amenities; but provided ample working space.

The Downtown scene was a zone of sovereignty that contained a unique culturally marked class grouping.25 This class grouping of “experimental artist” became subjected to regimes of

24 Gann xiii 25 Ong 7 20 rights and obligations that varied from other boroughs in the larger metropolitan area. Three prominent events occurred in 1974 that shaped the visibility and obligations of this zone; defining it as a staple of geography and art, and aiding to create a rough date of its inception.

In May 1974, New York Magazine ran a front-cover story that claimed SoHo’s galleries, lofts, and performance venues made it “The Most Exciting Place to Live in the City.” On June 15,

1974, the Emergency Tenant Protection Act, ch. 576 (ETPA), also known as the “loft law”, was enacted by the New York State legislature. The law’s purpose was to “prevent exaction of unjust, unreasonable, and oppressive rents and rental agreements, and to forestall profiteering, speculation, and other disruptive practices tending to produce threats to public health, safety, and general welfare.”26 By specifying that residents had to be verifiable artists

(or manufacturers), the act also encouraged artists to live in an area that, in the words of one resident, resembled an “artists colony.”27 With so many creative people living in once- deserted and derelict buildings, the new law regulated illegal occupancy of lofts in Lower

Manhattan and prevented abuse by landlords. The 1974 “loft law”, as it was deemed, encouraged the southern-Manhattan expansion of young experimental artists below Houston

Street; solidifying the geography and landscape of the Downtown scene. Also in 1974, downtown minimalist composer would burst onto the international music scene with the three-record Deutsche Gramophone release of his works Drumming, Six Pianos,

Music for Mallet Instruments and Voices and Organ. This first international thrust of American minimalist music, strongly associated with the loft scene and performance venues such as the

Kitchen, carried Downtown music and art into the public eye.

26 Taylor 18 27 Lawrence 50 21

By 1975, in the midst of a growing attention on the scene, New York City would be bankrupt and on October 30th, President Gerald Ford would tell the city to “Drop Dead.”28

Asked to explain the president’s position, Ford’s spokesman compared New York to a drug- abusing child and stated, “You don’t give her a hundred dollars a day to support her habit.”29

Downtown artists would utilize the city’s economic, racial and political failings to create artworks that, as composer Kyle Gann states, exposed a “deeply felt and collective response to an oppressive economic and cultural situation.”30 The scene would find its end in the beginning of the 1980s. The visibility of the light was slowly lowered, until it fully burnt out in 1984.

28 Taylor 19. Ford’s opinion was captured in the October 30th, 1975 New York Daily New headline “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” 29 Lawrence 48 30 Gann 6 22

III

August 1988 New York Times Headlines:

“Park Curfew Protest Erupts Into a Battle” – August 8, 1988

“A Playground ‘Derelicts’ Can’t Enter” – August 20, 1988

“Class Struggle Erupts Along Avenue B” - August 10, 1988

“Condominiums Divide Angry Tompkins Square Residents” - August 26, 1988

“Residents Clash with the Police in Village Park” – August 1, 1988

Julius moved to New York City in 1975. He would be evicted from his East Village

Downtown apartment in 1983. His drug use became more frequent. Tompkins Square Park became his homeless refuge. Eastman was fading. The Downtown scene was becoming more visible, but, in turn, fading as well.

By the early 1980s, the Downtown scene had gained wide attention. One resident of the East

Village states, “The neighborhood got younger . . . and it got more popular . . . . In an apartment where maybe a husband and wife [had lived], now there might be three or four students living . . .so [there was] more of a concentration of people, and a younger population.”31 The resident focuses on two big changes in the East Village during that time: the aging of the working-class residents and the arrival of the students and yuppies. By the mid-1980s, the village and the Downtown scene were drawing considerable media attention.

31 Zukin 110

23

However, many of the establishing artists within the Downtown scene and long-term residents of the Village were being forced to evacuate. Rent was rising and people were forced to leave. Elderly people and earlier residences were replaced by young professionals.

NYU began to expand into the area from its campus on Washington Square. To counteract the poverty and artistic subversion of the Downtown scene, realtors and journalists began to celebrate the new shops and restaurants that were popping up in the midst of squalor. As

Sharon Zukin explains in Naked City: the Death and Life of Urban Places, these marketing techniques and magazine articles became a part of the new phenomenon of “lifestyle shopping,” a way of selling the authenticity desired by the counterculture to the next generation of consumers.32 While more young professional residents moved in, equally young retail entrepreneurs opened vintage furniture and consignment stores. The scene was being hyped as the New Bohemia. This attention had a negative effect on the initial creativity of the scene. The punk/new wave movement lost much of its impetus, while the jazz scene also fell away sharply. Lawrence notes that both developments can be attributed broadly to the gentrification of Downtown (which was linked to the rise of neoliberal capitalism in the city) and the evacuation of the area by composers, musicians, and other cultural workers who could no longer afford to live there.33 The displaced the Kitchen

(which was the main arena for musical experimentation, operating on the borders of rock, funk, jazz and art music as the Downtown performance venue, and did so by marketing itself as a commercial space that, in contrast to the Kitchen sold liquor, paid performers from the

32 Zukin 110 33 Lawrence 80 24 door, and put on concerts every night.34 The Downtown scene had gained a marketability that would soon kill it.

In 1981, gay men began dying of AIDS. By 1984, more than 11,055 cases of AIDS were diagnosed in the United States, and 5,620 men had already died. This Orwellian year would mark the demise of the scene. AIDS would spread in unprecedented amounts among gay men in New York. The major art journals, galleries, and auction houses had co-opted the restricted field of Downtown art. Superstars were created and economic capital would overtake symbolic capital.35 Ronald Reagan was re-elected in a landslide on November 6,

1984 and the country turned to a hard right. Twenty years of arts funding were quickly cut, censorship was heightened, the Culture Wars peaked and the National Endowment for the

Arts was decimated. The once vibrant Downtown scene was now dim. The light was turned off in 1984.

Although never confirmed due to his invisibility, many close friends link Julius’ deterioration to AIDS-related conditions.36 It was not until 1987, six years after the disease was identified, that President Ronald Reagan would speak about the disease in public. Julius would die three years later. The Downtown scene would be fully decimated by the 90s, many of its most active artists dead from AIDS or drug overdoses. If not dead, others would suffer from burnout or grief and moved away from New York. Many others simply could not afford to stay.

34 Lawrence 81 35 Taylor 36 36 Bampfa.Berkely.edu 25

Once thriving Downtown artists, such as Jim Power who adorned scores of lampposts in the

East Village with mosaics, were evicted from their East Village lofts and forced to find refuge in the near Tompkins Square Park. Julius was one of these immigrants. The park was used around the clock. Close to 200 homeless refugees camped in one corner, drug dealers claimed another and punks and anarchists shared the rest. The park became a confinement for those left-behind, those that were shut out by the growing upper-class lofts, forcibly dimmed by the new affluent high rises; those that Eastman defines as “nigger.” They were basic. They were the figures that were forcibly darkened behind the brightness of the elegant or modern, those things which were labeled the other against their will. Eastman, the residents and the scene became lost through their basicness, their forced capture, their branding. Those that were once visible were now all too visible. They became hypervisible.

They had to be dimmed; forcibly forgotten.

On the night of August 6, 1988, 450 riot-equipped New York Police Officers met with resistance from the park’s residents and demonstrators trying to enforce a new 1 a.m. curfew in the park. Police batons cracked heads, bottles flew, and mounted officers galloped up

Avenue A in bizarre cavalry charges. Calling the park a “cesspool” and a “homeless hotel,” the curfew was a ploy by Mayor Koch to rebrand the area and, in turn, New York City. In total, 38 people, including several photographers, reporters and seven police officers suffered cuts, bruises and minor injuries. Over 100 complaints of brutality were filed against the police department. Koch’s office portrayed the situation as an effort to halt late-night noise and rowdyism in the park that had generated a feud between the neighborhoods “quiet living older residences on one hand, and its younger denizens, drug pushers and punk-rock

26 skinheads on the other.”37 Although noise and nuisance complaints were filed by members of the community prior to the riot, the decision to impose a curfew was opposed by many

East Village residents who viewed the closing as “one more imposition, like rising rents and other unwanted changes.”38 Koch’s office placed no light on the displaced artists and gentrification that placed many of the residents in the park, in the first place; a move of forgetting the situation at hand.

The Tompkins Square Park Riot was a result of the extreme gentrification of a once vivid arts scene. At one time, the East Village served as a mecca for young experimental artists.

Within ten years of its establishment, the scene would die out due to rising costs, media exposure, an AIDS epidemic, the political right, and a host of other cultural situations. Julius was caught in the middle of it all. He was a resident of the scene, saw the effects of its demise and served as a physical and artistic mediator of its visibility. Julius was political, unapologetic and “damned outrageous.” The scene was too. He was part of the light that burnt so brightly beginning in 1974, only to be eclipsed, thrown out, and forgotten.

A signature pens the score as if an extension of the title: same page, same margin, same line, same invisible figure: Evil Nigger (subtitled?): Julius Eastman; September 10, 1979. Where are you Julius? Why have you detailed such an exact date while the rest of what you have penned remains so vague? You are hypervisible within your invisible score. You are found.

You have left us an imprint of a vibrant Downtown Scene, a crowded Tompkins Square

Park, a story of visibility; all at once lost after your forgotten death, but now recovered to be

37 Park Curfew Protest Erupts Into a Battle and 38 Are Injured 1 38 ______2 27 uncovered. You encourage us to perform for you long after you have vanished. You have passed, the scene has passed, the park is empty; but we remain searching, salvaging, uncovering, and lifting the veil only to fight more shadow.

28

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