Driving through the Rosebud Indian Reservation, Alice and I were struggling to get a clear signal.

We’d passed through roads filled with dancing snow and planes where the January night arrived at 4pm. Our eight hour drives compressing the route between Chicago and Portland into four days. Do-It-Yourself touring enfolded our ambition and naivete. We were unfettered sound, bouncing between houses, basements, lofts, and venues, hoping to cover the west coast and to drive back to New York City in rapid time.

DIY touring is more about relationships than music. Who’s couch you sleep on, who lets you play music in their home, how you get paid, who performs with you, who listens to your road stories, and who rolls their eyes at your stupid decisions–we were enmeshed in a network of ears, eyes, hands, voices, sweat, and sound. A network actualizing desire.

Finally, the signal stabilized. Zev, the director of the experimental music non-profit ISSUE Project Room, had wanted to chat with us about our first program as the 2023 Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellows. My research and performance project with Alice, evil dentist, had been selected to curate three shows throughout the year. Vibrating with the chaos of our tour, we chattered with Zev about our vision of “The Corporate Retreat,” a series of performances within underutilized office spaces throughout New York City. We felt performance could question the role artists should play in shaping real estate usage following the reorganization of offices and retail spaces in response to the Covid-19 Pandemic. Somewhere between our dreams and the word “durational”, Zev quipped, “DIY desires must meet institutional needs.”

Desire is expansive, filling a map of the country. Needs are borders delineating how far you can wander. Philosopher Gilles Delueze notes that “to desire is to construct an assemblage, to construct an aggregate,” explaining that the act of desire is not for an object, but for the world and the relationships contained within the embodiment of desire. Touring does not embody my desire; becoming the type of person to bounce between new places, to feel enlivened by temporary encounters, to share in others’ strange, creative worlds–all of this is the embodiment of my desire. My desire is for a way of life.

Can DIY desires–those found within the chaotic expanse of our tour–be circumscribed within art institutions? What life do DIY desires presuppose? And, how does it intersect with the world as organized by arts non-profits, the art market, economists, urban planners, and governments?

The Corporate Retreat confronted these questions not as an artistic reflection, but as a political problem. The role of artists–both within and outside of institutions–is in question. We are called to rebuild our cities (or to gentrify them); we are asked to question authority (but not too much lest the donors get upset); we are encouraged to build community (within the confines of the gallery or concert hall). What The Corporate Retreat sought to identify as a political problem is the status of art as distinct from the institutions, organizations of property, and forms of governance that surround it.

ISSUE Project Room offered a novel yet fraught platform for confronting these issues. Founded in 2003 as a project space in a garage in the East Village by artist Suzanne Fiol, ISSUE Project Room has transitioned over the past 20 years from a scrappy artist-run organization to a formalized 501c3 arts non-profit. ISSUE Project Room commits itself to supporting challenging performances outside of commercial restraints. Fiol noted the name “Project Room” spoke to the importance of having “a space where you can try something new and, if you don’t succeed, you don’t succeed,” centering experimentation within ISSUE Project Room’s mission.

These commitments have created a strain for ISSUE in the difficult financial context of New York City. The organization itself faced the possibility of failure in the early 2010s as revenues ran negative according to the non-profit’s tax returns. This period coincided with significant changes in the organization’s board, executive management, and location. After moving from the East Village to a grain silo in Gowanus and then to a loft within a former canning factory in Gowanus, the organization acquired a 20 year rent-free lease for a theater space at 22 Boerum Place in 2008. Organizational changes and financial restructuring created stability within the organization, eventually resulting in a deal with Two Trees Management, the owner of 22 Boerum Place and its surrounding building 110 Livingston Street, to donate the space to ISSUE Project Room in 2022.

Do-It-Yourself venues, particularly in New York City, are often experiments that fail. As journalist Liz Pelly describes, DIY venues are self-organized entities “run by artists, on a formal or informal collective basis, to house non-commercial music, art, and community organizing projects” prioritizing anti-capitalist practice over long term financial stability. Having immersed ourselves in the world of DIY venues, the particularities of ISSUE Project Room served as both a source of frustration and inspiration. We began with the belief that criticizing corporate real estate interests, the New York City government, and the distribution of resources for living and producing art is best achieved through building alternative social, political, and artistic structures. The Corporate Retreat was an attempt to think inside and against art institutions to sketch a creative life. This curatorial project was therefore always an inquiry into DIY desires. What would it mean to embody our desires through dreaming different social worlds? Art as the practice of building alternative ways of living.

Urban Doom Loop

Art gathers us to dream together. Dreaming is a break with reality. To dream is therefore to embrace the crisis of the present. Channeling historian Reinhardt Kosseleck, anthropologist Janet Roitman argues the evocation of a crisis is “the marking out of ‘new time’ insofar as it denotes a unique, immanent transition phase, or a specific historical epoch.” Crises are central for urban development. The financial crisis of the 1970s in New York City inaugurated a shift in how urban change was managed as the city government divested from public services, welfare, and public sector jobs. These austerity measures were aimed at attracting the finance, real estate, and insurance industries. The shrinking state resulted in planning decisions moving away from neighborhoods and local communities to private sector interest.

For housing policy, the second half of the 20th century produced a state less interested in building public housing and more focused on creating attractive investment opportunities for private capital. New York State’s creation of the Emergency Finance Control Board in 1975 prioritized the city’s municipal bond rating over quality of life for residents, effectively “giving the financial sector a virtual veto on general city policies”. Within this climate, tax relief, government subsidies, zoning changes, and strengthening the police force became central policy strategies to empower property owners and real estate investors.

The financial crisis of the 1970s marked a new time extending to the present wherein private development and subsidized property ownership are key strategies for managing the housing supply. Geographer Neil Smith identifies this strategy within a 1982 construction industry consultants’ report: “The city has now given clear signals that it is prepared to aid the return of the middle class by auctioning city-owned properties and sponsoring projects in gentrifying areas to bolster its tax base and aid the revitalization process.” In short, gentrification–the process by which long term residents and businesses are replaced by whiter and wealthier citizens and businesses that cater to bourgeois taste–became the goal of state policy. Empowering the real estate industry was and is profitable for the state through boosting tax revenues. Gentrification became a policy goal.

Covid-19 and the George Floyd Uprising of 2020 initiated their own crises in New York urban development. Analysts warned of an “urban doom loop” within New York City that would initiate a new municipal financial crisis. Echoing the 1970s financial crisis, economist Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh outlined an urban doom loop in which diminished local tax revenue and economic activity from declines in office space usage in midtown and downtown office spaces would strain local government, leading to reduced service provision, diminished quality of life, and more departures of workers from New York City. The urban doom loop is a specter of the City’s reliance on the real estate and finance industries. The abundance of unproductive privately owned office spaces raised concerns of a potential real estate crisis, threatening the economic health of surrounding neighborhoods and businesses as spending associated with offices and office workers dried up.

For private developers and City government, the crisis represented an opportunity. Van Nieuwerburgh notes that his article prompted an increased interest in the conversion of office spaces into residential properties as developers saw the potential for government support for costly renovations. This approach builds off plans implemented following September 11th, 2001 where, finding workers’ hesitate to return to their offices Downtown, building owners and developers converted older office buildings into residential apartments, often with state support. Since 2000, 59 Downtown office buildings have been converted, generating 12,009 housing units. Increased housing in Downtown Manhattan has not led to increased affordable housing, with the median income in the neighborhood increasing from $92,000 in 2000 to $172,000 in 2019.

A crisis is an opportunity to gentrify. Just as city government and real estate interests saw the financial crisis of the 1970s and 9/11 as opportunities to reshape the city for middle and upper-class interests, current plans for underutilized offices center loosening of regulation, rezoning neighborhoods, and subsidization of private sector to generate housing. Commenters argue this technique fails to address affordability concerns for multiple reasons: 1) the production of affordable housing is outstripped by the demand for affordable housing which continues to grow as wages fail to increase with the cost of living 2) developers producing mixed-income developments skirt regulations mandating affordable rents within their state subsidized properties 3) developers prioritize rapidly producing market rate apartments to gentrify neighborhoods, reaping higher rents and profits off of newer, more affluent tenants. DeBlasio’s affordable housing policies positioned the real estate industry as the agent of urban change, allowing corporate interests to prioritize returns on investments over the particular racial, cultural, and social connections long term residents have to their neighborhoods.

Why should artists be concerned with the city’s plans for office spaces? Government-sponsored development efforts identify artists as instrumental in attracting higher-income residents to gentrifying neighborhoods. Artists remake the cultural perception of neighborhoods in the absence of significant state and private investment by utilizing the space afforded by lower, pre-gentrification rents to show work, host events, and develop artistic communities. Artists’ remaking of their neighborhoods attracts wealthier residents because of “the societal valorization of the cultural competencies of the artist,” situating artists as unwitting middlemen within the transformation of neighborhoods for gentrified tastes.

Keenly aware of this dynamic, current New York Mayor Eric Adams’s “New New York Plan” argues for “opening up underutilized private buildings for local artists” by exploring how City government can work “with a third-party operator to serve as a matchmaker for spaces—like empty storefronts, religious institutions, and empty commercial office spaces—to be used by visual artists, performers, writers, and other artists.” The New New York Plan’s section’s heading “invest in culture, supporting artists, artist spaces, and artist organizations” embodies an economic language conceiving of artists as economic engines rather than cultural producers.

Artists are better dreamers than economists. As the state and real estate interests confront the housing crisis as an investment opportunity, artists are positioned to imagine a different way of managing the crisis. The now defunct Brooklyn-based DIY venue Chaos Computer, for example, hosted varied experimental performances and provided affordable housing for trans and BIPOC artists, connecting performance and community building through mutual aid projects, fundraisers, and political advocacy. The approach taken by City government restrains the organizational playfulness of artists by reducing the dream of a different society to participation within the existing economy.

Taking dreaming seriously means taking art seriously as a political act. The Corporate Retreat identified the problem of underutilized office space as a political problem concerning who shapes collective decisions over how space ought to be used. The housing crisis represents an opportunity for artists to organize as workers and tenants to demand equitable and affordable access to space in New York City. This demand must confront the complicity of art and art institutions itself within the housing crisis. The Corporate Retreat dreamed a break from the everyday operations of ISSUE Project Room, initiating its own crisis in the process.

Remapping the Office Space

Telephones ring incessantly. An analog buzz greets guests’ ears when they pick up the receiver. The disembodied voices of previous guests loop. In a cubicle, sorting through the seven cream colored phones, the plastic desk cools the skin. Eyes wander to motivational posters plastered haphazardly on the walls. A clownish FRANK/ie Consent moves from whisper-sung ballads over the hum of forest insects to crawling over the cubicles. Their body flips over the barriers. Pausing momentarily, they bring a lighter to their neon bodysuit, setting bits of it on fire as a crowd watches from outside the conference room.

Inside the conference room, two water coolers duet. Their spigots connected together to create a never ending flow. The slow drip echoes between them; the impact of water against plastic. a soft touch washing across the room. Saxophonist Kate Mohanty improvises with the water cooler, letting a wandering tone intermingle with the water’s flow. The microphone amplifying the drips begins to feedback, but Mohanty merges their performance with it, sustaining the resonating pitch as an extension of their instrument.

The office is a received form, a place in which how one conducts oneself is predetermined by the discipline of corporate culture. Posture assumed at a desk, the phone waiting to be picked up, water cooler chat only a momentary reprieve from work. How do we disrupt how a space can be used? Walkouts, slowdowns, and strikes all transform the mundane workplace into a political arena. The underlying conflict between workers and owners is laid bare through a refusal to continue acting as you are supposed to within the workplace.

Our first program with ISSUE, “A Night at the Office”, used performance to disrupt what an office space could be. Staged in an underutilized office space at New York University, the night paired performances by FRANK/ie Consent and Kate Mohanty with a sound installation. We sought to render the banality of the office uncanny. In the context of abundant open office space, we dreamed what the City would be like if the floors of empty offices were filled with performance. Queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz muses about the utopian impulse of performance. Performance gestures towards an unrealized future while living within the absent present of our desires. Our little utopia was the office space, overrun by ravers, punks, and artists, scheming worlds to build within the ache of their absence.

As everyone arrived at the office, we ceremoniously “hired” each audience member, all while demanding they sign an “evil dentist employment contract”. This gave us the authority to boss everyone around, order them to go from performance to performance over the three hour duration, demand they answer the phones–a sound installation piece recording and playing back conversations between paired phone lines–and mingle in the conference room. As time progressed, our workers started to ask for more, eventually unionizing and presenting a list of demands.

Disrupting the office meant demonstrating that a community can form regardless of the predetermined use for a space. We wanted to dream what would happen if collectives appropriated Midtown office space, drafting their own plans for what could bloom on each floor.

But this indulgence in utopianism only made apparent the limits of our vision. As curators and artists, we engaged with the office as an aesthetic. We substituted aesthetic subversion for political engagement. We hosted a temporary reinvention of the space, but failed to commit to the difficult work of holding space for political, artistic, and social experimentation. Urban studies scholar Claire Colomb identifies the temporariness of creative interventions within cities as strategically useful for economic development strategies, writing, “temporary uses, nonetheless, are at the same time often (although not always) perceived by public authorities as an intermediary, second-best option for vacant urban spaces in the absence of other development options, or as a prelude to more profitable ventures to be launched by the initial users themselves or by external investors.”

To avoid becoming unwitting actors within urban development schemes, artists must build lasting and confrontational spaces. When 1 in 3 New York City tenants spend half their income on rent, how can such spaces be sustained? Within the context of our fellowship, our access to the NYU offices was facilitated by ISSUE Project Room. We did not perform the work of securing the space instead relying on institutional support.

Was our temporary reimagining of space in service of a future, more profitable venture?

How do artists resist becoming someone else’s profit?