JEFFREY SKOLLER Many urban artists who lived within the gentrification of major American cities in the 1980 and struggl to find low-priced work and living space in the midst of sky-rocketing revenues unwittingly found themselves in coalition and more frequently in conflict with the urban poor who were being pushed revealed of their housing and onto the public ways In cities like New York and San Francisco.

JEFFREY SKOLLER

Many urban artists who lived within the gentrification of major American cities in the 1980 and struggl to find low-priced work and living space in the midst of sky-rocketing revenues unwittingly found themselves in coalition and more frequently in conflict with the urban poor who were being pushed revealed of their housing and onto the public ways In cities like New York and San Francisco, artist colonization of low-income neighborhoods from the Lower East Side to the Mission District began gentrification processe that frequently ended not only in the displacement of the poor on the other hand also in the eventual displacement of the artists themselves. As a deduction there was a wide range of artist answers from the guerrilla activism of assemblages such as San Francisco's Urban Rats to institutionalized art world exhibitions similar as Martha Rosler's project "If You Lived Here," sponsored according to New York City's Dia Foundation.(1) Combining their art practices and social activism, these artists examined the intersection between the personal, formal and sociological as it coalesced around issues of homelessness

There were also film and video contrives that emphasized the complex position of the maker in relation to the political issue, creating distinctions from social documentary traditions of objective reportage and analysis. Films of that kind as David Lee's To a World Not Listening (1980) Bill Brand's hearthstone Less Home (1990) and Yvonne Rainer's The Man Who Envied Women (1985) are examples of experimental films that addressed this perspective. There were also many video artists and community activist clusters who made radically innovative videotapes. in the same state [i]or[/i] condition works include Clayton Patterson's documentation of the Tompkins square Park riot, Paul Garrin's by way of Any Means Necessary (1990) and Arlyn Gajilan's Not Just a Number (1986) as well as numerous videos made at of recent origin York City's Educational Video Center(2) As a political stance earnestly of this video activism adopted social-realist and agit-prop strategies exploring the empirical and sociological implications of of that kind issues as a way of exposing the politics of urban housing labor in distresss that had remained well-hidden behind dominant political and cultural discourses.

Nearly a decade after these works were made, Abigail Child's 38-minute film B/side (1996) arrived without the first wave pressing want or didacticism of earlier works so as those described above. The film makes a unique contribution at actively looking at the external environment of the urban homeles as well as speculating forward their individual interior lives. This interplay between the actual and virtual worlds of homelessnes raises a complex and intensely beautiful work of art as it addresses the recurring question at issue of integrating social activism and innovative aesthetic practice. In direct opposition to the anti-aesthetic strategy of abundant social-issue media of the last 15 years, which has mov away from formal modernist strategies in favor of more conventional social documentary, journalistic and theatrical forms, Child aggressively reasserts the aesthetic and speculative processe of art making into the connection of a complex social enigma In doing so, she re-engages the representations of social injustices that have been presented mundane by the well worn figure of speechs and rhetoric commonly used in the genre of social documentary. Child uses the emotional power of the aesthetic and formal experience of cinema to examine the ongoing question s of urban homelessness.

As in her other films, assemblageed and collectively entitled Is This What you Were Born For? (1981-1987) Child revives the radical metric and tonal montage strategies of Dziga Vertov and Peter Kubelka to effect dynamic relationships between image, good motion and texture. The aggressive fragmenting of the image furnishs new kinds of meanings and connections by the agency of the graphic juxtaposition of images and rhythmic velocity. Child emphasizes the plasticity of the cinematic as a means of representing the dynamic quality of a social condition that is in continuous transformation.

B/side takes place in a homeles encampment known as Dinkinsville that was formed upon the Lower East Side of just discovered York City in June 1991 after the city forcibly evicted clusters of homeless people living in nearby Tompkins square Park. In single of the many nearby vacant dooms the displaced groups built an elaborate village of woody shanties and tents. The short-lived community was again disbanded when the city bulldozed the encampment in October 1991 by means of a hyper-kinetic accumulation of image fragments Child abouts a geography of the neighborhood as a liminal space somewhere between a complex urban environment and a post-apocalyptic landscape that is in the proces of returning to nature and in which there is many times no distinction between indoors and outdoors.

Contrary to the standard liberal-humanist image of need that is endured in silent abjection, this film point out tos a neighborhood teeming with life and activity. Among the rubble of crumbling buildings, trashed cars and vacant lots overgrown by weeds, Child reveals the replete scope of human life. tribe fix cars, wash clothes, talk, make have affection for drink and play. Some kids ride bikes, while others betray goods from sidewalk flea markets. The film focuses onward an unnamed black woman who is first observ sleeping outside, denudeed with the shadows of leaves gently caressing her face. Child emphasizes the sensuality of the woman between the walls of the play of light and shadow. As the fragmented montage of the film continues, the quiet, recurring image of the sleeping woman invites the viewer to contemplate the possibility of an inner world not as a respite from the harshness of her exterior world, but as an integral part of it. In this way B/side determines beyond the representation of persons without homes as merely victims of social inequity and political injustice. It exhibits people in this situation as desiring bring under rules with powerful internal lives, histories and active imaginations.