The Brooklyn Immersionists were a community of artists, musicians and writers which worked in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, starting in the late 1980s until the late 1990s. The movement focused on ecology, connections across disciplines, and neighborhood communities, rejecting the more formalized categorization of the Manhattan arts scene. This post-postmodern movement contributed to the revitalization of Williamsburg’s industrial waterfront, and also influenced Bushwick, DUMBO, and the rest of Brooklyn.
As the art and music historian, Cisco Bradley, said in 2023: "Immersionism was the next stage of evolution of the New York art scene... Williamsburg had ample space, which allowed immersionist forms of art to take root in huge postindustrial spaces. The spaces were considerably larger than the jazz lofts had been and could accommodate a scale of projects and audiences not seen since the first SoHo artists lofts in the 1950s and 1960s.”
The end of the Immersionist era coincided with the City of New York’s sponsorship of corporate development in Williamsburg. Most of the members of the Immersionist community were low income renters and could not afford rising housing costs, and a majority were forced to leave the neighborhood they had helped revive."Gentrification and Displacement: New York City in the 1990s" by Lance Freeman and Frank Braconi, Journal of the American Planning Association, Vol. 70, 2004, Issue 1, Pages 39–52. Published online November 26, 2007.
Overview
Activities and cultural role The Immersionist movement took root in the early nineties and its growth was noted widely by various publications. Many publications during the decade noted the increasing importance and visibility of the artists' community located in Williamsburg. BKMag notes its founding date as 1989. Started from the Bottom Now We’re Here: A Brooklyn Cultural Timeline, BKmag website, March 10, 2015.
The waterfront community's innovations in interdisciplinary communion, along with their environmental philosophies and biomorphic nomenclature, were discovered by the international press and arts journals in a range of fields. These included The Village Voice, The New York Press,Rose, Mark (March 6–12, 1991). "Brooklyn Unbound". The New York Press. p. 10. The Drama Review, Performing Arts Journal (PAJ), Flash Art, Wired, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Utne Reader, Domus, The Guggenheim Museum CyberAtlas, Die Zeit, Newsweek, and Fuji Television. Art history books that have discussed the movement include Jonathan Fineberg's Art since 1940: Strategies of Being (Prentice Hall), Contemporary Artists edited by Sara and Tom Pendergast (St. James Press), and Cisco Bradley's The Williamsburg Avant-Garde (Duke University Press).
The neighborhood renaissance attracted thousands of artists to a district that had been losing jobs overseas and coping with a burgeoning drug trade,"Brooklyn Youth Gangs Concentrating on Robbery," The New York Times, Thursday, August 1, 1974. eventually transforming New York's most intractable case of industrial recession in the 20th century.
The Immersionists and their activist colleagues built local artists organizations, art installations, exhibition sites, and performance venues that helped to make their community a hub for creative activism, urban ecology and immersive, community-building events and venues.
Writing about the Lizard's Tail cabaret in 1990, the New York Times states succinctly, "The club is unpretentious and serves the neighborhood."“Tomorrow’s Starts Today in Brooklyn’s Small Clubs” by Peter Watrous, New York Times, March 23, 1990 In 1991 the New York Press lauded the waterfront community’s “esthetic activism” and discussed creative street systems like Nerve Circle’s Weird Thing Zone, and the large immersive community events emerging in the warehouses like the Sex Salon, the Cat’s Head and Flytrap. As Mark Rose put it in the New York Press, "Common space is what the Williamsburg art-activist movement is all about; a heady experiment to integrate into, defend, help build and somehow connect with the community at large."
Artist Melanie Hahn noted in a journal article for Drama Review: This sense of "trusting each other and working really hard" is the essential component of these warehouse parties. They were conceived just as big parties, a natural outgrowth of the weekly performances and collaborations spawned at the Lizard's Tail. A few close friends formed the core of organizers; others were invited to perform or make installations, as they wished. Bands were selected by organizers in the hope they would keep the party going all night. Core members spent thousands of dollars of their own money earned from working other jobs. There was no support from outside arts organizations or government sources, though a few friends and family members made small donations.
Neighborhood-centered renaissance An urban ecosystem consisting of dilapidated industry and a weed-strewn, rewilding waterfront influenced the creative community. Ando Arike describes a bucolic atmosphere in the Williamsburg Observer:"The intoxicating vapors wafting from that spice warehouse on Berry Street. Sunbathing and picnicking on the piers which were quickly collapsing into the East River. Swimming in the river at night, with Manhattan’s lights spread out before us like strange constellations. Time seemed to flow a little more slowly here, the sky was broader, and the breeze often smelled of the sea."
The Immersionists and their activist colleagues built many community venues and groups that promoted activism, urban ecology and immersive, community-building events.
Their artistic expression arose somewhat from the punk subculture and other U.S. counterculture movements.
Separated by the East River from Manhattan's arts establishments, the Immersionists rejected the neighboring borough’s removed, postmodern preoccupation with simulacra and issues of interpretation, and began to employ collective strategies of creation and a visceral relationship with their immediate world. Underscoring the community's rejection of "art world" individualism for more ecological forms of being, Rose quotes a 1990 statement in Worm Magazine by Nerve Circle's director, Ebon Fisher:
"Our western myth of the passive, consuming being who sits in a brain surrounded by concrete objects of prey and repulsion is beginning to dissolve... we are beginning to place the locus of attention beyond the mythical 'self' and into a psycho-physical swirl as we might call common space."
A periodic collaborator with the Lizard’s Tail and Nerve Circle, and co-producer with Myk Henry of the Flytrap, Anna Hurwitz brought to Williamsburg her own ecological view of culture that she had cultivated at the College of the Atlantic in Maine. Speaking of her early cultural experiments with The Lizard’s Tail, she states in the Organism catalogue in 1993: "It wasn't done to change the face of art. It was done to change the face of our existence."
By 1998, Suzanne Wines was describing Williamsburg's creative community in Domus as "immersive" and "New York's most vibrant art scene... constantly responding to new input.”Introduction by Jonathan Fineberg to the catalogue for the exhibition, Out of Town: The Williamsburg Paradigm, curated by Fineberg for the Krannert Art Museum (University of Illinois, 1992). In his book, The Williamsburg Avant-Garde: Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront, Cisco Bradley underscores the unusual integration of living things, living systems and recycled machinery from the waterfront that was being explored at the nightclub, Keep Refrigerated:“On the top floor there was the 'technorganic cave' with installations of plants and environments, tape loops playing recordings, smells, flashes of light, temperature changes, machines, smashed glass, wobbly floors, and even live chickens all curated by [Mariano] Airaldi. They also sometimes hosted a free Argentinian barbecue that could fit twenty guests there, running from 9:30 in the evening until three in the morning."The Williamsburg Avant-Garde: Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront by Cisco Bradley, Duke University Press, 2023, p. 39
Underscoring the ecological depth of the immersionist movement in The Williamsburg Avant-Garde, Bradley states that the community not only shifted the center of New York's creativity towards Brooklyn, but significantly helped to change the discourse of the arts in New York from a conceptual play of surfaces to living immersion: "In many ways, Immersionism was the next stage of evolution of the New York art scene, which had evolved from the rationalist works of figures like conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth (b. 1945) or minimalist Donald Judd (1928–94) to the postmodern rebellion of the 1980s... As some of the early theorists of Immersionism stated, ‘[The Immersionists] helped to shift cultural protocols away from cold, postmodern cynicism, towards something a whole lot warmer: immersive, mutual world construction.'Susie Kahlich, Ethan Pettit, Ebon Fisher, "Immersionism, a Brief Introduction," Facebook, February 13, 2011, https://www.facebook.com/notes/ethan-pettit/immersionism/501003277687"
While creative districts in New York had begun to emerge in Manhattan's West Village in 1900, Harlem in the 1920s and 30s, the East Village in the 1950s, SoHo in the 1960s and 70s, and reemerged in the East Village in the 1980s, Williamsburg's Immersionist community gave rise to a renaissance that not only took root outside Manhattan, but spread to an entire borough three times its size.Steinberg, Claudia, "Vis a Vis Manhattan," Die Zeit, September 19, 1997, p. 77 This was a significant shift celebrated as early as 1993 in the exhibition, Out of Town: The Williamsburg Paradigm, curated by Jonathan Fineberg for the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois.Out of Town: The Williamsburg Paradigm, catalog to exhibition by the same name at the Krannert Art Museum curated by Prof. Jonathan Fineberg (University of Illinois, 1992).
Conflict with affluent real estate developers After a decade of activity, the Immersionist community and its activist neighbors helped to revive Williamsburg and its local businesses.Martha Schwendener, "Chasing a Dream and an Unalloyed Ethos," The New York Times, April 3, 2014. According to a 2004 report in the Journal of the American Planning Association, the inclusive, dynamic culture brought down the rate of attrition for Williamsburg's disadvantaged in the 1990s.
In 1992 Waterfront Week took a formal stand against the city's plans to privilege developers over residents. Endorsed by the zine's founder, Genia Gould, and penned by one of the Green Room's contributors, Rolf Carle, the weekly called for "no new building on the waterfront""Development on the waterfront" by Rolf Carle, Waterfront Week, Vol. 2 #10, March 26 – April 2, 1992 and insisted that it "maintain its M3 heavy industrial zoning." M3 allowed for mixed uses of the waterfront area, but not the construction of high rises. Waterfront Week also supported "ecologically correct" industrial zoning and took a stand against an array of potential polluting industries: "No incinerators, no garbage transfer stations, no sludge factories that the city would like to see and we as a community would not like to smell." The weekly also called for existing buildings to be renovated and "recycling centers and alternative energy stations developed."
In 1999 New York City's Board of Standards and Appeals granted a zoning variance that allowed for an apartment complex to be built on Kent Avenue near the river. This was the first of dozens of high-rises to be supported by the government through rezoning and billions of dollars in tax abatements. These new high rises and chain stores began to overwhelm the locally rooted economy and the area's culture.