This article addresses how the problem of homelessness and of their residential place emerged as a subject of artistic practice in the late 20th century, focusing on the lower Manhattan, New York. Particularly, pursuing the trajectory of artistic practices dealing with homelessness, this article articulates the process that the homeless people participated as the subject in coping with the issue.
Before artists directly got involved in the issues of urban development and homelessness, there had been some attempts to explore the urban space and to rethink the residential space beyond functionalism of the modernist architecture. Gordon Matta-Clark developed his idea of ‘Anarchitecture’ by examining the moments of architectural absurdity. Dismantling the vision of ideal urban space and imagining new possible residential spaces for the homeless and the nomad, he came to include them as the subject of architectural consideration.
Martha Rosler’s meta-critical documentary photography series, The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems (1974-1975) is an example to show a different perspective on the drunken homeless and their portal space. Removing people from her photographs and including abandoned liquor bottles instead, she transforms her deadpan photographs into a metaphoric representation of them, and suggests a new way to overcome the dominating aesthetics of spectacle in the modern urban planning.
In the early 1980s, Colab and PAD/D conducted some activist practices against displacement caused by gentrification in the Lower East Side. Colab’s Real Estate Show (1980) was a guerrilla exhibition project to occupy the city-owned old abandoned building and to show their works against the urban renewal that forced poor tenants out. The artists participating in this show tried to communicate with the local community. PAD/D was much more aggressive in communicating with the local community. In conducting Not For Sale project (1983-1984), they directly participated in the Joint Planning Committee, and prepared for their exhibition as a kind of propaganda to unite with locals and made young artists to recognize the seriousness of gentrification and the housing issue.
Rosler’s If You Lived Here... was a project that combined two different fields of art and activism by bringing the problem of homelessness to the institutions of art. Arranging diverse activities dealing with the housing issue, this project enclosed individual artists and homeless people. Leading participants to collaborative programs, this project collapsed the distinction between ‘they’ and ‘we.’ The alternative space located in SoHo functioned as a new communicative field for art, society, artists, and activists.
In sum, throughout the 1970s and 1980s the artistic practices involved in the urban space and development went beyond the conventional relationship between artists and audience intermediated by works of art, and proceeded to mutual communication in the social context, in which artists and works of art became part of a social bond.