Home is where the art is…
Graffitti on the walls of 475 Kent Ave. Williamsburg, sprayed on during evacuation. Photo via BruceLabounty802 on flickr (see here for the entire set.)
It’s called gentrification. You take a bad neighborhood with low property values and good location. You set up a squat with a public kitchen run by anarchists. You rent out the surrounding factories, warehouses, and tenements as housing and production space for artists and rock bands. Soon, the area becomes a bourgeois bohemian hotspot with nice authentic cafes full of art students and music groupies. The startup precariat moves in with its MacPros, and all the cafes suddenly have WiFi. One or two cafes burn down. Bookshops go broke, and finally, the art spaces are replaced by boutiques, and everyone’s having babies.
This sad story has been played out over and over again, at varying speeds. In some places – such as Moscow – gentrification can take place over night. Art plays a purely representative role. The artists are moved in for a quick exhibition or two. And that’s it, you’re done. Let the renovations begin.
Elsewhere the process is more gradual, in part because the bohemians actually do put up a fight. A “fine art of gentrification” emerges (name of an article in October by Rosalyn Deutsch about the East Village) as does its critical counterpart. So the struggle is politicized and ideologized to some degree, eventually turning into what the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci called “a war of position.” Entire institutions of civil society are predicated on the resistance against further accumulation of capital through the expropriation of communal space; if sustainable enough, they can delay the inevitable for years. But one day, the commons are enclosed. And the war is over. Until it starts again in another bad neighborhood.
Entire cities consume themselves and one another like this, year in, year out. You get used to it. After a while, you stop moving and have babies of your own. Or, closer to reality, you have babies in the trenches. You hope that you won’t have to move. But you realize that the front could shift at any time, literally leaving you out in the cold.
This is what happened to the inhabitants of 475 Kent Ave., an apartment building in one of the world’s longest-standing artsy neighborhoods of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. On January 20th, “over 200 men, women, children and their pets [were evicted] from their homes in the darkness on one of the coldest nights of the year,” writes blogger james wagner. Most of these people were artists and other creative professionals. You can read the story of their eviction at bloggy. It hilariously involves an unsanitary illegal matzoh bakery. But despite the gags, it is a sad story indeed.
Eviction of artists from 475 Kent Ave. in Williamsburg. Photo via bloggy (see his flickr show here).
“Home is where the art is” can be read in the same ambivalent way, as a anguished yet witty declaration – just as funnily stubborn as the name of 475 Kent Ave.’s press release, which is “Matzohgate!” – but it can also be interpreted as a real question: which practices can we develop to feel at home in heartless, artless urban environments about to become occupied territories, common land right before yet another enclosures movement?
Do “protest art” or – more recently – “immaterial-critical artistic practices” have to be sociological and boring, constantly obsessed with their own status as commodities? Or can they actually be quite funny and strange without casualizing the struggle at hand?
My own encounter with Williamsburg was definitely both sad, funny, and weird in precisely this way.
A couple of years ago, a few of my Moscow colleagues (including the philosophers Oxana Timofeeva, Alexei Penzin, and Vlad Sofronov, as well as the artist Dmitry Gutov) and I were in New York, where we met with a group called 16 Beaver. (I might do a feature on 16Beaver sometime soon; they run a space next to Wall Street, where they hold lectures and seminars on a daily basis.) Two of the group’s members, Rene Gabri and Aireen Anastas , invited us to take part in a “Gentrification Walk” through their neighborhood. There is a great flickr set of this walk by the guys from the activist-artist group notanalternative here, which you might enjoy.
Gentrification Tour 2006. Photo via notanalternative on flickr.
I was expecting this walk to be a boring tour of the neighborhood’s disputed territories, sore spots and hotbeds of resistance, but it actually wasn’t at all.
After everyone arrived, Rene and Aireen (you see them in the picture above) took us to see one of Williamsburg’s most symptomatic and prominent places, a monument to gentrification, a building called the “Finger” by the local population. It is an unfinished construction site right off Bedford Avenue that sticks out about five stories higher than all the surrounding one family brownstones, in blatant violation of all the housing codes. Our guide Rene explained that the reason for this monstrosity had something to do with the instability of zoning laws and a landlord who had foolhardily signed a contract with real estate raiders that allowed them to build on top of his building.
[Photo via Flickr/TresspassersWill/Will Femia]
Suddenly, a balding man came up to us. “You’re telling them about the building? Are you from the City (meaning city officials)? Or what?”
“We’re artists.”
“OK, so then I can tell you. I like artists.” And he launched into a long, incoherent performance of a story involving Chassid real estate raiders from Borough Park, debts incurred by operating a restaurant that went broke (“it was the dream of my lifetime”), easy ways out (“I thought they would help me, no strings attached, but they broke the contract right after starting construction”), and mental instability and depression (“right after I realized I was totally fucked and moved back out onto Long Island”), which explained why he was gesticulating madly as he shouted “I’ll get those motherfuckers in court soon, and then we’ll see…”
“Don’t listen to him, he’s crazy,” yelled another voice, “I have a court order that says he can’t come within 10 yards of the place…” And here was one of the Chassids. “Oh no, not you again,” shouted the ex-restaurateur, and their argument quickly threatened to get physical, until the ex-landlord backed off, ending this little episode of street theater after spitting on the ground.
“Only in Brooklyn…,” said Dima Gutov on the way down to the waterfront. “This is an amazing place,” he said, pointing out to New York Harbor.
Gentrification Tour 2006. Photo via notanalternative on flickr.
PS: As our guides told us, the city was trying to cover up for the expropriations in the community by making at least some of the land on the Williamsburg Watersfront into a “community park.”
The blog Daily Dose of Architecture has images and background text on the development plans for this particular piece of land:
But the eclectic residents of Williamsburg have already moved on to the next battlefield. Home is where the art is.
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