Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Art Districts

Episode Date: April 12, 2017

Empty buildings, run down neighborhoods and cheap rents. This is the bait you need to attract artists, speculators and urban revitalizers. But in order to attract pioneers you also need illusion and myth. We tour the art districts of New Orleans, Los Angeles and Detroit with writer Peter Moscowitz, activist Maga Miranda, and artist Maya Stovall.

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. This installment is called Art Districts. During the U.S.'s period of deindustrialization, New York deindustrialized like six times faster than everywhere else. And that's because there was this plan in place. Bankers and the government got together and essentially planned how to deindustrialize the city so they could sell real estate. That's Peter Moskowitz. And in his new book, How to Kill a City, I finally got the answer to a New York City history question that's always bothered me. Back in the 1950s and 60s, why exactly were there so many deserted factory buildings downtown,

just waiting, empty for artists to move into. What happened to all those manufacturing businesses? This was not just some natural phenomenon. They were essentially kicked out through different zoning codes. Empty buildings, rundown neighborhoods, and cheap rents. This is the bait you need to attract artists, speculators, and urban revitalizers. But in order to attract pioneers, you also need illusion. Myth. In his new book, Peter takes on the myth of the urban frontier. Some of these myths, like the one about New York, are ancient, while others,

like the one about Detroit, a city that emptied out after it went bankrupt in 2013, are recent creations, as is the one about New Orleans, a city that's been totally remade after nearly being wiped off the map in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina. Obviously, the city didn't plan for the storm, but it planned right afterwards that the storm was a good thing for the city, essentially. The governor at the time, Kathleen Blanco, said it took the storm of a lifetime to create an opportunity of the lifetime. City planners definitely went for it.

Post-Katrina, they dismantled infrastructure, essential to the middle class, like the school system. And tax breaks were prioritized for developers who promised to build luxury housing, rather than housing for the displaced middle and lower class citizens. And tax breaks were also set aside to entice Hollywood to set up shop. Well, seasonal shop. But some neighborhoods, like the historically black Bywater, were entirely remade by newcomers, young, pioneering, white people. People kind of recognize this opportunity post-Katrina to buy houses really cheap and renovate them, essentially create a neighborhood from scratch. I visited the Bywater for the first time this past year, and it felt like an extension of Williamsburg or Echo Park. It had the sheen that all gentrifying neighborhoods now have.

Fake edge, overbearing sameness, lots of coffee shops. But one thing that was different Was the way people talked about gentrification Even though the Bywater has lost over 50% Of its black population post-Katrina None of the folks I spoke with brought up race It was always economics Complaints about how the newly renovated homes

Are being Airbnb'd to workers from Hollywood, complaints about the rent being too damn high. You could call it the gentrification of the word gentrification. I don't think it's the fault of the word that Americans don't talk about race enough. I think no matter what, people kind of still like to think

we live in this kind of colorblind society. It's, you know, deep in our genes as Americans to quote-unquote pioneer through destroying other people's property and cultures. You know, the genocide of Native Americans, slavery. Peter Moskowitz certainly isn't the first person to map that thin line that separates the gentrifiers from the gentrified. But what's really interesting about his book is that he's also mapping out the mental landscape,

the illusions that make these very urban transformations possible. The bubble is necessary to maintain this fiction that you're doing a good thing by building a house on top of the waste of Detroit or on top of where a black family once lived in New Orleans. You're helping the world by doing this. So it's a completely attractive thought to everyone who is complicit in the process.

Last year in Los Angeles, an arts collective called Industry launched a theatrical production called Hopscotch. A $100 ticket got you a seat in a stretch limo. It would take you around downtown LA to various sites where you would experience first hand an experimental opera. They would like bring these limos

full of like you know rich white people from the west side. One of the hopscotch sites was a park plaza in a neighborhood called Boyle Heights. Actually, on Saturdays, there's this group called Serve the People. It's like a Maoist group that sets up to, like, give out fresh produce and clothes to people. And so they kept going there on Saturdays and seeing this opera set up.

Serve the People, along with a couple sort of like community organizers and the Roosevelt High School marching band decided to like disrupt this hopscotch opera and run them out of town. That's how the coalition started to form was anybody who was willing to take direct action and be disruptive and be a little bit extra got together and started this group called Defend Boyle Heights.

And now there's another group called Boyle Heights Against Art Washing and Displacement, which is the bigger coalition. Maga Miranda was an early member of both of these protest groups. She was also born and raised in Boyle Heights, a historically non-white neighborhood on the east side of L.A. Boyle Heights is like a working class barrio, but it's also like this sort of cultural mecca of Chicano culture, counterculture.

Growing up in Boyle Heights, I felt very privileged to sort of be able to walk the streets and see all of that history on the walls and in the infrastructure. Boyle Heights has a non-white history by design. In the era of redlining, Boyle Heights was one of the few neighborhoods where non-whites were allowed to live. Today, residents feel like they're once again being targeted by racist city planners and developers. A year and a half ago, the big iconic 6th Street Bridge was torn down. It's the one that you see in all the films like Grease, you know, the famous scene where they're driving down in their cars. So yeah, it was torn down to make way for a sort of easier connection

between the East Side and the Arts District. And with the demolition of the 6th Street Bridge, I think it was like the city of LA saying, we want to intentionally bring the Arts District and this sort of redevelopment stuff to the east side. As soon as the bridge came down, the speculation ramped up. CalArts graduates, Williamsburg expats, entrepreneurial art dealers, all in search of the next L.A. hotspot,

started cruising the streets of Boyle Heights. There were a rash of gallery openings. Nicodem, Self Help Graphics, The Vanity East, Museum as Retail Space, and of course the obligatory pioneering references, 356 Mission, and Little Big Man Gallery. And one called Psst, that's P-S-S-S-T. Maga has a friend who filled her in on the backstory for this one. One of the gallerists who wanted to open Pist goes up to their friend like, hey, I'm going to take you to this cool neighborhood on the east side and the beautiful things that we don't have to be complicit in gentrification because there's nothing there.

Now, this is a highly comical scene because these two guys, they're having this conversation in front of a housing development called Cielito Lindo, a housing development that the Union de Vecinos, a group of women from the community, had fought long and hard for. The kind of place that would immediately be put at risk by the opening of a giant gallery. Also, and this should be obvious, there was of course already a thriving art scene in Boyle Heights. For the past 10 years, at the same time that you saw a rebranding of the art district in downtown L.A., you were seeing like a sort of similar rebranding in Boyle Heights, but around specifically community-oriented Chicano art. You know, there was like Espacio 1839. There was like these radical bookstores.

You have these like muralists, like installations all the time. So it's not that there wasn't art. It's that it was a separate but parallel sort of art movement. This is part of a sort of cognitive dissonance that we talk about when we're talking about certain artists who imagine themselves as like sort of the pioneers of social practice. They think that they're actually doing a ton of good for the community by bringing art when, you know, there's already art there. What pissed activists like Maga off about Pissed

was this insistence that they were there not to change the character of the neighborhood, but rather to help it, to do, you know, community engagement. Pissed opening up with the intention of being like a social practice, community-oriented gallery was definitely just adding insult to injury for a lot of people because it did feel like art washing. I mean, you know, we started sort of pushing this term art washing because that's what it felt like, right? Like, you know, we had to be happy about being gentrified out of our neighborhood.

So the people of Boyle Heights decided enough was enough. They didn't want their neighborhood to end up like Echo Park, a hipster-filled neighborhood of L.A. that not too long ago looked more like Boyle Heights. They decided to fight. Defend Boyle Heights and BAD had one demand, which was for all the art galleries to leave effective immediately. Here are some of the things that happened. You are hereby notified by the people of Boyle Heights...

Fake eviction notices were pinned to the doors of some of the galleries. The phrase piss on pissed was projected onto the gallery's storefront. And someone painted fuck white art on the gates of the Nicodem gallery. And a group of artist activists called Eleonda published a How to Disrupt a Fancy Art Opening Guide. People took the call to direct action very seriously. No one wanted to play nice. No one cared about hurting the artists and gallery owners' feelings.

You are a gentrifier. Yes, you are. Is this your fucking gallery? Is this your fucking gallery? It was time to pop the bubble. Step back and listen! Step back and listen! Step back and listen!

The gallerists at PIST did try to talk to the protesters, but they just couldn't understand why anyone would be against community galleries. And they really didn't understand why the women of Union de Vecinos kept demanding things like child care centers and laundromats. So in an attempt to get the gallerists to take these women seriously, Maga and her fellow activists presented the women as local artists. The demands of the so-called creative class always stand, like have more value in the community than the demands of the people that are already there who are usually working class people of color.

They don't get to claim the label of artists, even though a ton of the work that they do is very creative. The fact that these women are not even in the conversation because they supposedly don't exist in the first place, right? It's like empty space is part of the problem. And it's the reason why we've been saying like, okay, if you don't want to accept these women as, like, residents of this neighborhood who already existed there, then, like, we're going to push for you to try to accept them as artists. Now, this might sound like a silly provocation, but it wasn't. The activists wanted the gallerists to understand that in Boyle Heights, art and life were seriously intertwined. The collective Eleanda even had a term for this kind of arts practice, rasquachismo.

Maga recently co-authored a piece about rasquache with Kyle Lane McKinley of the Social Practice Arts Research Center at UC Santa Cruz. Rasquache, they write, is derived from a Mexican Spanish word, and it most likely originated as an insult, a pejorative term, to deride the homemade aesthetics of Mexican peasants. Rescoache refers to the hodgepodge, bricolage, and do-it-yourself aesthetic strategies for making do with that which is readily available. Rasquachismo is the celebration of those same aesthetics, specifically in the Chicano context of making do in spite of,

and effectively through, the economic pressures of low wages and the political pressures of state repression. In other words, the context of economic and political hardships provides the raw materials to be repurposed by rasquachismo. It is an aesthetic practice of recycling and reuse in the service of the everyday. When the art galleries came into Boyle Heights and they were sort of like insisting that we should accept what they imagine art to be. How we've been trying to like subvert that is to say like, this is what we mean by art. This is what the kind of art spaces that they want is spaces where they can do laundry because the laundromat burned down. And if you've ever been

into like a working class laundromat, you do see that it is like a, it's like a creative space, right? Like it's a space where community comes together if they usually have like bulletin boards on the walls where people are announcing like that they're teaching skill sets and and etc and like we need those kinds of spaces to maintain like the social fabric of this community and then this past February, something extraordinary happened in Boyle Heights. Piss decided to close down. Our young non-profit struggled to survive through constant attacks. This is the farewell letter the Pissed Gallerists posted on their Facebook page.

While our closure might be applauded by some, it is not a victory for civil discourse and coalition building at a time when both are in short supply. Bad and DBH called it as a victory for the movement. Nonprofit art spaces versus the residents of Boyle Heights. Our voices were being heard as activists and as people in the community. Fundamentally in opposition with the very intersection. and as people in the community. At the same time, I don't think it's a victory because real estate speculation continues to be a thing and development continues to be a thing and getting pissed out of the picture

isn't going to solve all that overnight. But I do think it sends a message that Boyle Heights is not going to take it laying down. Okay, it's not like gentrification is going back in the box. The battle of Boyle Heights is far from over. And as Peter Moskowitz says, urban planners now have pretty clear blueprints and designs for how to kill cities.

And while the artist certainly doesn't have a responsibility to the community or the people, this is definitely a moment of opportunity. I think there are ways to make art that incites change. Like, I don't know, do something illegal. Be inventive. be ungovernable like be invaluable The first day felt like jumping off a cliff. We get to this store, and it's me and one other dancer, this just beautiful statuesque dancer named Nadia Chia.

And so we just started dancing, and the temperature changed immediately. This dancerly presence completely shifts the dynamic. Artist Maya Stovall is a fourth-generation Detroiter, and for the past few years, she's been dancing and talking to people outside of liquor stores in her neighborhood. There were people who I knew from the neighborhood who were like, what is going on? And they're like, what are you doing? And I'm like, can I interview you? What is this?

It's liquor store theater. Dance performances and conversations in the streets and sidewalks and parking lots surrounding liquor stores on the east side. Want to talk? Four of Maya Stovall's liquor store theater videos are in the New Whitney Biennial. This is where I first encountered her work, and I was blown away. The audacity and absurdity of these videos, I couldn't stop watching. She was in town for the opening, so we met up for a conversation. It really started with my relationship with the neighborhood.

All of the liquor stores are in my neighborhood, these eight liquor stores. One of them is closed now, so the first one actually, the Blue Store, as it's called, is now closed, so it's seven. Rumor has it there's a coffee shop and bookstore coming for that liquor store. But anyways, these liquor stores spoke to me in a really powerful way. The crumbling of Detroit has led to a lot of what some folks call ruin porn. Artists show up to take pictures, videos of the city's decrepit infrastructure and culture. Liquor store theater is definitely not ruin porn. In fact, it's a pushback.

Trying to find a good paying job right here in the area. Liquor store theater is also ethnography. Maya dances, and then she records short interviews with the people she meets. Yeah, it's a lot of people looking for work. A lot of people looking for, you know, help any kind of way they can get it. Sometimes using professional equipment, and sometimes using her iPhone. Like in this neighborhood, what do you think is missing from it? Life.

I always ask about the city and I ask about the neighborhood. And from there, I sort of, you know, let the person I'm speaking with guide me. You got a lot of young kids out here not doing nothing with themselves. You got a lot of robbery, drug dealing, and stuff like that. I used to be better than this back in the day. I always ask people, what's going on in the city? What's going on in the neighborhood? Tell me about the changes in the city. I mean, they's going on in the neighborhood. Tell me about the changes in the

city. I mean, they're going to do their drugs. They're going to do their drugs. Maya often asks the people she meets about art, and she gets a lot of responses to this question. People are very aware of what's going on with the Detroit museums and the bankruptcy. I'm glad we don't have to sell the Detroit Institute of Art because all that money come through. We need positivity. We don't want the museum shut down. Even at the liquor store, people really like talking about art. Without art, there's no creativity. There's no creativity, there's no mind.

There's no mind, there's no... One man said, you know, without art, we have nothing. Without art, we have nothing. It's the dancing, Maya told me, that makes all these conversations possible. You know, the only way that people would engage is, you know, in sort of like significant, in a significant way is after they sort of take in this, the performances and this dancerly presence. And it's, it, I mean, it, it really was a sort of dancerly prompt. You know, if you just go up to people at the store and say, I'm doing a documentary about Detroit, let me talk to you. The answer will be no. I mean, I, of course, received the answer no still, even with this dancerly presence. But what the performances do,

I think, is they touch on some of these unspeakable things that connect us in a way. It becomes like a zone that's somehow open, somehow, you know, this special space. You know, like what y'all doing, you don't see people around here doing stuff like this. What I usually see up here is like people drinking, smoking, fighting, stuff like that. That's why y'all kind of stood out to me. I was like, what's going on? The people who are there on the scene,

it's the easiest to explain it to, and they grasp it and get it the fastest. I'll say, you know, dance is how I explore the city. Will you talk to me about the city and talk to me about your life? And people immediately get it on the street and on the scene. You know, it becomes much more difficult in sort of the art world, dance world, and even the anthropology, ethnography world, where I also, you know, work as an artist, ethnographer, it's much more difficult to sort of tease apart different kind of explanations in those realms

than it is when it's happening on the street, because it's there, it's in the momentum, it's in, you know, it's in our movements. It's in the people. And we're all there together on the scene, you know, feeling it and making this happen. People know what this thing is and people feel this. I realize how ridiculous I must sound. I mean, I'm podcasting about choreography, for God's sakes. But Maya Stovall is really good. She's forging connections with every move she makes. Art that crosses boundaries, pierces bubbles, and jumps walls. You know, when you try to explain things like

this too much, I think it's hard because we're talking about the unspeakable, you know? We're trying to explain why these fundamental questions of, you know, the project of being human, like how we're touching this. And so it's really problematic to do it linguistically sometimes. It becomes platitudes. Whereas, you, whereas on the scene of the liquor store, this event just unfolds. You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called Art Districts. Benjamin Walker with Andrew Calloway. It featured Peter Moskowitz, Maya Stovall, and Maga Miranda. Special thanks to Todd Stovall,

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