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Featuring such prominent participants as The Red Krayola, George Kuchar and Charles Atlas, this year the Whitney Biennial is showing a remarkable number of artists who come from the turbulent days of the New York underground. Where is the underground to be found nowadays? ‘The great artist of tomorrow will go underground.’Marcel DuchampHow far ahead into the future was Duchamp looking when he made the baffling remark above, speaking at a symposium in Philadelphia called ‘Where do we go from here?’ This was in 1961, before Max’s Kansas City and The Velvet Underground, before The Kitchen opened as an experimental music, video and performance venue in 1971, the year when Gordon Matta-Clark co-founded the SoHo restaurant Food, a joyous laboratory of countercultural ideas that played host to the local avant-garde artists and musicians, dance and theatre companies. The heyday of underground culture in its various embodiments – underground cinema, music and art with their different but overlapping chronologies – was yet to come. Fifty years on, does it still make sense to talk about an underground art scene in New York? Is this term and what it conjures up by now relegated to the city’s golden past or, on the contrary, is it undergoing something of a revival?

Bad Old Days

Judging by the artists picked for this year’s Whitney Biennial, the latter would appear to be the case. Besides the late George Kuchar, whose low-budget camp movies are invoked in the same breath as Andy Warhol’s and Kenneth Anger’s as exemplars of underground film (the one field of artistic endeavour where the term ‘underground’ still clearly has some currency and also, incidentally, the one to which it was originally applied in the late 1950s), those with the most obvious underground credentials include the psychedelic rock band The Red Krayola led by artist Mayo Thompson; the experimental filmmaker Charles Atlas, who pioneered dance for camera in films such as Hail the New Puritan (1985-86), starring virtuoso dancer and choreographer Michael Clark, known for his bold punk aesthetic; and the actor and film director Vincent Gallo who started out as a graffiti artist, much like Jean-Michel Basquiat (the two played in the same band, Gray, at some of the city’s mythical underground music venues, Max’s Kansas City and The Mudd Club among them). Many of these influences, from street art to alternative music, come together in the interdisciplinary practice of avant-garde painter and performance artist Jutta Koether, associated with the radical artist collective Grand Openings. If the Whitney Biennial is a barometer of sorts, responding to the current political, economic and artistic climate (rather than merely reflecting the curators’ subjective vision of where it’s at in contemporary American art), then what can be made of the curatorial decision to privilege this particular thread or common aesthetic sensibility that harks back to the heady days of the underground in its New York incarnation? Is it part of a larger and inveterate tendency to romanticize the city’s past, a hankering after a crime-ridden, grittier but at the same time more hedonistic and exuberantly creative New York, prior to the onset of gentrification in the late 1980s and the final deathblow dealt to it by Rudy Giuliani’s clean-up? Or is it the specific qualities of edgy, cross-disciplinary experimentation, the do-it-yourself ethos, the collaborative nature of artistic production and, above all, the subversive potential of underground art that speak to us today at a time of economic strictures and social unrest? Despite the vintage connotations of the name, the ideal (or myth?) of the underground lives on, as the current Whitney Biennial attests. To be sure, the notion that you could find at the Whitney anything that is rather than has been the underground, back in the ‘bad old days’, and in any case before it came to receive institutional sanction, is at best problematic. Museums and art galleries may well go out of their way to uncover new talent: witness the New Museum triennial ‘The Generational’, now in its second edition, more or less ironically titled The Ungovernables. To stay true to its name, the underground has to operate secretly, below the radar, off the grid, as it were, accessible only to a handful of insiders, aficionados, those in the know. It shuns exposure and publicity almost by definition. The versatile composer and musician Frank Zappa – no stranger to the underground himself – hit the nail on the head: ‘The mainstream comes to you, but you have to go to the underground’.

No Name

So where does one head these days in search of the underground? Where is it hiding out? In New York’s shifty artistic landscape, subject to the vagaries of real estate, some areas have always held the dubious distinction of being home to underground-style initiatives for a spell: it was once the East Village, then Williamsburg took over, before the Lower East Side became it. Until recently, Bushwick was the new alternative art scene. In a sense it still is, since that is where a lot of artists are based when they can’t afford the Lower East Side or Williamsburg (the East Village being simply beyond the pale). To Jason Andrews, who set up ‘Bushwick’s original art nonprofit’ – Norte Maar – in his flat on Wyckoff Avenue, the fact that established artist-run spaces like Momenta Art are moving there from Williamsburg is a sign that the area has gone mainstream. He does not consider Bushwick to be an underground community any longer, even if certain aspects of Bushwick life, rave parties and the like, retain that sort of cachet. Now that Bushwick’s once plentiful supply of cheap loft spaces has dried up and artists are increasingly being priced out of the area that they have made trendy, Ridgewood to the northeast of Bushwick, with its own fresh supply of enticingly-named pop-up galleries, such as ‘Small Black Door’ or ‘Valentine’, is emerging as the new art destination. The underground, as artist Jeff Stark who compiles the Nonsense email listings has it, is pushed to the limits of Brooklyn. Styling itself as a ‘reliable source of alternatives’, Nonsense NYC explicitly ‘covers the stuff that has no name, or a name that you feel really awkward and self-conscious saying out loud, like ‘underground’’. The sheer volume of events listed in the weekly instalments, featuring an eclectic mix of ‘independent art, weird events, strange happenings, unique parties, and senseless culture in NYC’, reveals that an underground that dare not speak its name is alive and well in New York or, shall we say, Brooklyn. As befits an alternative TimeOut biased towards the eccentric, the events taking place in Manhattan are for once the odd ones out. If Nonsense is anything to go by, there is no single hub but rather pockets of creative energy dotted around Brooklyn and beyond. That’s not to say that underground-style initiatives are not to be found in Manhattan itself. Amid the numerous nonprofit and artist-run institutions operating in the Lower East Side, PARTICIPANT INC comes top on people’s list of alternate venues with underground leanings, whereas the artist John Kelsey, director of Reena Spaulings gallery, is widely held to be the King of the Underground. According to textile artist Travis Boyer, who has collaborated with Reena Spaulings’ K8 Hardy on various fashion/art projects and whose participatory dyeing performance Indigo Girls – restaged at PARTICIPANT INC in February over the course of three days – is typically the sort of unclassifiable wacky art event that makes it onto Nonsense listings, this is an interesting moment to be an artist in New York because art has become more collaborative. There are more artist collectives and more places to show work than ever before. Boyer’s indigo-dyed pieces were recently exhibited as part of a group show at Louis B. James, one of the new galleries clustered around Orchard Street in the Lower East Side, increasingly a viable alternative to Chelsea’s for-profit galleries.

Occupy?

Duchamp’s curious prophecy about the great artist of tomorrow somehow ‘going underground’ tallied with what he himself was up to at the time. After withdrawing from the art world, he laboured away in secret for twenty years at his last enigmatic masterpiece, Etant donnés (1946-66), which was only unveiled after his death. Duchamp’s veneration by New York artists of all ilk amounts to something of a cult following. His example is invoked as often as his work is cited – not least in Joanna Malinowska’s large-scale rendering of Duchamp’s Bottle Rack fashioned out of mammoth and walrus bone, one of the Polish artist’s offerings for the Whitney Biennial. And yet, for all their admiration of the artist and his uncompromising critique of art institutions, few artists working in New York today, no matter how radical, would pass up an opportunity to work with a large institution or an art gallery of some standing and financial clout (typically found in Chelsea). And who could blame them? But as soon as they sign on, they become part of the institutional and commercial mainstream. Take for instance the Greek, New York-based performance artist-cum-activist Georgia Sagri, one of the younger artists selected for this edition of the biennial, on the strength of her work, one would hope, rather than as a form of acknowledgement of her aborted but highly publicized ‘Occupy Artists Space’ action. The fleeting, largely contested occupation of the SoHo nonprofit Artists Space drew inspiration not so much from the Occupy movement as from historical examples of European communes and squatters movements, aligning it with underground protest art. To its detractors, the action with its contradictory motto – ‘Take Artists Space: Take that which is already yours’ – was misguided on account of its target rather than of the methods deployed: why would a supposedly radical artist choose to lay siege to an artist-run institution that has been serving the artist community since its inception in the 1970s? Why not occupy a blue-chip gallery or an auction house instead? The art critic Caroline Busta eloquently put it her comment on Facebook: ‘Occupy MoMA, occupy Gagosian, occupy Sotheby’s and get arrested if you want change, but don’t occupy your own backyard and think you are radical.’ Others were less charitable still, suggesting that Sagri, while she was at it, should occupy Anthony Reynolds Gallery, ‘a posh art space in London that still sells her work’, and speculating as to whether she was planning to occupy the Whitney Museum too, once the artist list had been leaked.

Rearguard

To artist Nils Norman, there can be no underground – other than of the Utopian variety, that is – in a neo-liberal landscape like New York where everything is rapidly harvested into Capital. Witness his models for the Tompkins Square Park Monument to Civil Disobedience (1997), proposing an anarchist-style occupation of the East Village park, or a Lower East Side tenement turned into a housing project and garden catering to and cared for by ‘Underground Agrarians’. Together with Andrea Fraser, who turned institutional critique into an art practice, Norman set up Parasite, an artist-run think-tank active in the late 1990s, specifically dedicated to ‘project-based art’. Some of its members reconvened to stage a lively debate at a well-attended meeting hosted by Artists Space in October, not long before it came to be ‘occupied’. The resurgence of interest in project-based art, often ephemeral in nature, site-specific, small-scale, availing itself of low-tech means, and, crucially, operating outside of the institutional mould of the gallery or the museum, reflects a growing appetite for work at the confluence of art and life. ‘Art not as representation but trying to be the thing itself’ is how curator-provocateur Nato Thompson summed up the phenomenon, speaking at the Creative Time Summit (24-25 September 2011) that served as a prelude to the Living as Form exhibition located in and around the Essex Street Market in downtown New York. Under the capacious umbrella of Living as Form, Nato Thompson – assisted by a team of over 25 curators – proposed to map out two-decades-worth of ‘cultural works that blur the forms of art and everyday life, emphasizing participation, dialogue and community engagement’. The occupation of Zuccotti Park (that few had even heard of at that stage) lent an added urgency to the summit. Socially engaged projects at the cusp of art and activism, such as Cuban artist Tania Bruguera’s Immigrant Movement International presented by Creative Time together with the Queens Museum of Art, suddenly took on a new relevance. Life had actually become more subversive than art. And art, one could argue, is struggling to keep up.Agnieszka Gratza is a writer and critic based in New York