Brooklyn Immersionists
The Brooklyn Immersionists were a community of artists, musicians and writers that moved beyond the distancing aesthetics of postmodernism and immersed themselves and their audiences into the world where they lived. First emerging in the late 1980s and coming to fruition in the 1990s, the experimental scene in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, catalyzed the largest New York renaissance to take root outside Manhattan. Stressing organic vitality and rejecting the cloistering of the arts in disciplinary siloes, the Immersionists created fully dimensional experiences in the streets and abandoned warehouses, and cultivated rich webs of connection with their surrounding world. The dynamic, post-postmodern culture helped to transform Williamsburg’s deteriorating industrial waterfront and spread a wave of environmentally rooted creativity to Bushwick, DUMBO, and throughout Brooklyn.
In 1999, the City of New York began to leverage Williamsburg's creative revival for the benefit of corporate developers and wealthier apartment seekers. Zoning laws were changed on the waterfront to favor high rise construction and eventually billions of dollars in tax abatements were provided to developers. Writing for the New York Times, Russ Buettner and Ray Rivera questioned this undemocratic development, stating in 2009 that “Comptroller William C. Thompson has said the mayor focuses too much on large developments that go to favored builders who receive wasteful subsidies." Often mislabeled as “gentrification,” which is a free market process initiated by individual home buyers, the City's privileging of both local real estate aggregators and corporate enterprises is more accurately described as corporate welfare. Most of the members of the Immersionist community were low income renters and could not afford the subsidized corporate economy that was imposed on the neighborhood in the new millennium. After a decade of innovative creation, a majority were forced to leave the neighborhood they had helped to revive.
Overview
Village-centered renaissance
According to the art historian Jonathan Fineberg, the “Williamsburg paradigm” in the 1990s was characterized by a deep enchantment with living context and the nurturing of "a richer, more dynamically interacting whole." The ecosocial movement explored new forms of interconnected and immersive art, technology and culture in the streets, warehouses, rooftops and local media networks. The movement grew out of several groups and venues that began to gather in the late 1980s and early 1990s near the district's abandoned industrial waterfront. These included Epoché, the Green Room, Keep Refrigerated, The Lizard’s Tail, Minor Injury, Nerve Circle and the Outpost. Early publications associated with this scene included Waterfront Week and Worm Magazine. The Immersionists brought an experimental, and often primal, modality to an urban renewal process already underway in Williamsburg to the east and north. These activist neighbors and educational organizations included Los Sures, El Puente, and The People's Firehouse. The waterfront community's innovations in interdisciplinary communion, along with their environmental philosophies and biomorphic nomenclature were discovered by both the international press and museums. The village-centered renaissance attracted thousands of artists to a district that had been losing jobs overseas and coping with a burgeoning drug trade, eventually transforming New York's most intractable case of industrial recession in the late 20th century.Although most of the Immersionists came of age during the rebellious Punk and postmodern era of the 1980s, many also had childhoods during the civil rights and environmental movements of the 1960s and 1970s. A creative mix of the two sensibilities easily served the creative community that had moved into apartments and industrial spaces near Williamsburg's decaying waterfront. A complex urban ecosystem consisting of dilapidated industry and a weed-strewn, rewilding waterfront had its own impact on the creative community. The artist, Tony Millionaire portrayed the area’s state of abandonment as an urban wilderness, using the title “Urban Pastoral” for an episode of Medea’s Weekend, his cartoon series on Williamsburg. Ando Arike recalls a similar bucolic atmosphere in the Williamsburg Observer:
"The intoxicating vapors wafting from that spice warehouse on Berry Street. Sunbathing and picnicking on the piers which were quickly collapsing into the East River. Swimming in the river at night, with Manhattan’s lights spread out before us like strange constellations. Time seemed to flow a little more slowly here, the sky was broader, and the breeze often smelled of the sea."
While finding a certain Punk romance with urban decay, a childhood exposure to more proactive strains of U.S. counterculture encouraged a search for healing, neighborhood communion and a more ecological sense of being. Despite exploitation by city-sponsored developers and Manhattan's commercial press in the new millennium, the Immersionists and their activist colleagues played a significant role in establishing Brooklyn as an international hub for creative activism, urban ecology and immersive, community-building events and venues. Their innovations in "submodern," "omnisensorial," and networked culture anticipated developments in social practices in the arts, relational art, ecopsychology, and queer ecology that came to fruition in the late 1990s and the 21st century.
Separated by the East River from Manhattan's arts establishments, the Immersionists rejected the neighboring borough’s removed, postmodern preoccupation with simulacra and issues of interpretation, and began to employ collective strategies of creation and a visceral relationship with their immediate world. Writing about the Lizard's Tail cabaret in 1990, the New York Times states succinctly, "The club is unpretentious and serves the neighborhood." In 1991 the New York Press lauded the waterfront community’s “esthetic activism” and discussed creative street systems like Nerve Circle’s Weird Thing Zone and the large immersive community events emerging in the warehouses like the Sex Salon, the Cat’s Head and Flytrap. As Mark Rose put it in the New York Press, "Common space is what the Williamsburg art-activist movement is all about; a heady experiment to integrate into, defend, help build and somehow connect with the community at large." Underscoring the community's rejection of "art world" individualism for a more ecological form of being, Rose quotes a 1990 statement in Worm Magazine by Nerve Circle's director, Ebon Fisher:
"Our western myth of the passive, consuming being who sits in a brain surrounded by concrete objects of prey and repulsion is beginning to dissolve... we are beginning to place the locus of attention beyond the mythical 'self' and into a psycho-physical swirl as we might call common space."
A periodic collaborator with the Lizard’s Tail and Nerve Circle, and co-producer with Myk Henry of the Flytrap, Anna Hurwitz brought to Williamsburg her own ecological view of culture that she had cultivated at the College of the Atlantic in Maine. Speaking of her early cultural experiments with The Lizard’s Tail, she states in the Organism catalogue in 1993: "It wasn't done to change the face of art. It was done to change the face of our existence."
By 1998, Suzanne Wines was describing Williamsburg's creative community in Domus as "immersive" and "New York's most vibrant art scene... constantly responding to new input.” In his book, The Williamsburg Avant-Garde: Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront, Cisco Bradley underscores the unusual integration of living things, living systems and recycled machinery from the waterfront that was being explored at the nightclub, Keep Refrigerated:
“On the top floor there was the 'technorganic cave' with installations of plants and environments, tape loops playing recordings, smells, flashes of light, temperature changes, machines, smashed glass, wobbly floors, and even live chickens all curated by Airaldi. They also sometimes hosted a free Argentinian barbecue that could fit twenty guests there, running from 9:30 in the evening until three in the morning."
Underscoring the ecological depth of the immersionist movement in The Williamsburg Avant-Garde, Bradley states that the community not only shifted the center of New York's creativity towards Brooklyn, but significantly helped to change the discourse of the arts in New York from a conceptual play of surfaces to deep, living immersion:
"In many ways, Immersionism was the next stage of evolution of the New York art scene, which had evolved from the rationalist works of figures like conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth or minimalist Donald Judd to the postmodern rebellion of the 1980s... As some of the early theorists of Immersionism stated, ‘ helped to shift cultural protocols away from cold, postmodern cynicism, towards something a whole lot warmer: immersive, mutual world construction.'"
While creative districts in New York had begun to emerge in Manhattan's West Village in 1900, Harlem in the 1920s and 30s, the East Village in the 1950s, SoHo in the 1960s and 70s, and reemerged in the East Village in the 1980s, Williamsburg's Immersionist community gave rise to a renaissance that not only took root outside Manhattan, but spread to an entire borough three times its size. This was a significant shift celebrated as early as 1993 in the exhibition, Out of Town: The Williamsburg Paradigm, curated by Jonathan Fineberg for the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois.
Healing and disruption
After a decade of creative immersion, the Immersionist community and its activist neighbors helped to catalyze a renaissance in Williamsburg that revived the district and its local businesses. According to a 2004 report in the Journal of the American Planning Association, the inclusive, dynamic culture brought down the rate of attrition for Williamsburg's disadvantaged in the 1990s. In 1999, however, New York City's Board of Standards and Appeals granted a zoning variance that allowed for an apartment complex to be built on Kent Avenue near the river. This was the first of dozens of high rises to be supported by the government through rezoning and billions of dollars in tax abatements. Marketed with superficial labels like “hipster” which no one in Williamsburg used, and pseudoscientific terms like “gentrification,” the new high rises and chain stores began to overwhelm the locally-rooted economy and the area’s neighborly, immersive culture.Williamsburg’s steep rise in the cost of living in the new millennium was caused less by gentrification, which is a free market process, but rather by its opposite: a form of subsidized corporate socialism. The repeated misuse of “gentrification” since it was coined in the 1960s has led many journalists to even blame artists, activists and local businesses for a policy that is effectively a form of corporate welfare. The largest factor in raising the cost of living in Williamsburg was corporate inflationary pricing induced by the city, not the DIY culture of artists, activists and local businesses. Corporate welfare accelerated in the new millennium, forcing many of the Immersionists and their neighbors out of the district they had collectively revived. As Su Friedrich showed in her documentary, Gut Renovation, a demonstrably less gentle culture moved in, making the term “gentrification” even less appropriate. Artists like Friedrich were renters, not home owners, and were in no position to take advantage of the corporate welfare program that spread through Williamsburg and the surrounding borough. Friedrich was even forced out of her own loft by a developer while making her film.
Corporations and monopolies exercising such sway over a neighborhood in the United States was not a normal practice until a Supreme Court decision authored by Lewis Powell in 1978 set in motion the legal framework to make it possible. The Bellotti decision, along with its 1976 Buckley predecessor, enabled corporations to donate to political campaigns. Many politicians are now habituated to top-down governance favoring monopoly capital that the possibilities of actual free market economies and local, immersive culture have been overshadowed. The small enterprise culture of Williamsburg, an echo of Benjamin Franklin’s vision of the village economy in Poor Richard’s Almanac, is a paradigm that has now been rendered nearly invisible by unlimited corporate political spending. Hollywood and corporate advertising, extensions of such concentrated wealth, have echoed the new corporate order. In his inaugural address in 2002, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg stated that his administration, not the residents who had already established a local renaissance, would thenceforth "bring new life to our waterfront and stimulate new investment in housing." According to Freeman and Braconi, Bloomberg's corporate welfare policies caused the attrition rates for economically disadvantaged populations to rise again, suggesting a transfer of vitality from the poor and middle class to the top economic tiers of society. As Buettner and Rivera describe the city-wide, Bloomberg initiative in The ''New York Times: "His administration poured $16 billion into financing to foster commercial development." They then cite New York City's Comptroller to clarify that the commerce in question wasn't small businesses, individual home owners and nonprofit cultural enterprises:
"Comptroller William C. Thompson has said the mayor focuses too much on large developments that go to favored builders who receive wasteful subsidies. When the new Yankee Stadium came up in Tuesday night's debate, he said: ‘This is just another example of a giveaway, of the mayor's giveaway to another one of his developer friends in the city.’ ”Given that the rate of attrition for the disadvantaged went down in the 1990s and up following rezoning and corporate subsidies, a more accurate picture of the Immersionists’ rise and fall presents itself: artists, activists and small businesses helped an industrial district to thrive again after jobs were sent overseas, and the city exploited the revival to benefit monopolies. Such corporate welfare reflects a larger process taking over democracies around the world. According to a 2004 report in the Journal of the American Planning Association, Lance Freeman and Frank Braconi point out that creative neighborhoods like Williamsburg "improve in many ways that may be appreciated as much by their disadvantaged residents as by their more affluent ones". In a discussion of their report for the Journal of the American Planning Association, "Gentrification and Displacement: New York City in the 1990s," Freeman and Braconi state:
"The study described in this article residential mobility among disadvantaged households in New York City during the 1990s. We found that rather than rapid displacement, was associated with slower residential turnover among these households. In New York City, during the 1990s at least, normal succession appears to be responsible for changes in gentrifying neighborhoods."The counterintuitive results even surprised the researchers. As Lance Freeman states in The Atlantic: "Much to my surprise, our research findings did not show evidence of a causal relationship between gentrification and displacement." The review of the study in The Atlantic claims that the term gentrification, at least in reference to an aspirational culture that encourages the arts and education, may have lost its usefulness: "They came close to debunking the very idea of gentrification" Freeman states. Subsidized corporate development, however, remains a more decisive, yet poorly examined, cause of displacement.While the arrival of high rises and big box retailers may seem to represent an infusion of prosperity, corporate operations not only replace intimate local businesses with a highly mechanized and depersonalized business culture, they often hire workers from outside the area and siphon off profits from the local economy. Large businesses with their monopoly leverage can also drive up the cost of living for the original residents. A corporate takeover of immersed, neighborhood-based culture and businesses has been shown in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization'' to increase levels of depression, poverty and crime for citizens left out of the corporate system which their own elected officials have subsidized. The Immersionist cartoonist, Tony Millionaire vividly predicted this process in "Bathos on the Beach," an episode of Medea’s Weekend in 1992. The panel on the top opens with a protest effort by artists on the waterfront. A potato depicting a psychology student from Williamsburg, Adil Qureshi, states “I will stand here forever to rebuff any insensitive lout who would exploit the vulnerable!!” The protestors are then depicted years later as tiny figures in a bottle while the proprietor of the popular Ship’s Mast Pub laments the takeover of Williamsburg by futuristic, but unaffordable high rises. In a second panel, an alcoholic is blamed for his drinking problems, not the depressing macroeconomic context presented in the first panel.