Preserving and Politicising the Alternative Space

As the long-term impact of the global recession on federal arts funding is felt in American cities from Los Angeles to Detroit, a number of recent publications have turned to the subject of earlier self-organised and largely non-commercial art venues in the USA, primarily the development of so-called alternative spaces in post-industrial New York from the mid-to-late 1960s to the mid-1980s. As Alan Moore notes, early alternative spaces were ‘sustained by special conditions’, both economic and aesthetic (p. 49). When its traditional shipping and light manufacturing industries declined in the mid-1960s, New York accumulated a glut of derelict buildings, many of them were warehouses or former factories with large lofts that could accommodate the increasing scale and new materials of post-minimal sculpture and provide space for group shows and public performances. The city's deindustrialisation coincided with the rise of activist artists' organisations such as the Art Workers Coalition and the Guerrilla Art Action Group, collectives that exemplified a growing disenchantment among younger artists with the commercialism and sexism of much of New York's post-war gallery scene. The empty buildings downtown offered a cheap and spacious alternative to the dominant institutional networks uptown. As New York neared bankruptcy in the mid-1970s and federal arts funding was heavily cut by the Reagan administration in the 1980s, the need for self-organised artist initiatives grew and the number of alternative spaces in the city increased.

Art · Commercialism · Downtown · Political science · Post-industrial society · The arts · Visual arts · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Cultural Industries and Urban Development · History · Law · Public Administration

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