Shanzhai Lyric had intended on \u201ctracing the pathway of a shanzhai T-shirt\u201d, with visits to informal markets in South China, and the Museum of Counterfeiting in Paris, but as was the theme of 2020, \u201call our plans were cancelled\u201d.
\n
\nFounded by Ming Lin and Alexandra Tarkovsky in 2015, their research practice started in Beijing; where they collected \u201cshanzhai lyrics\u201d found on T-Shirts during their daily visits to a multi-level women\u2019s clothing market. Shanzhai is a Chinese neologism meaning \u201ccounterfeit, replica, knock off or rip off\u201d, describing bootleg clothing, phones, perfume, and bags; but shanzhai more precisely translates to \u2018mountain hamlet\u2019. \u201cIn reference to this enclave on the outskirts of empire, where bandits stockpile goods to redistribute among people living on those margins, or in the mountain stronghold area\u201d, says Shanzhai Lyric.
\n
\nDescribing their research practice as \u201cparasitical and responsive\u201d, Shanzhai Lyric invented the Canal Street Research Association \u2014\u00a0a \u201ctemporary centre of operations\u201d \u2014 in direct response to an opportunity to work from an empty retail space. They dug into how aesthetics signal what\u2019s going on in a space, and sought to exist \u201cambiguously between categories\u201d. They got to know long-time residents, passers by, and street vendors, who would come in to see their archive of poetic garments, various versions of Statue of Liberty crowns, bootleg Mickey M(ice), caricature portraits, postcards, and other collected ephemera; contribute to a photographic timeline of every building on Canal Street \u2014\u00a0adding personal anecdotes about places they recognised or once were \u2014 watch performances, film screenings or attend lessons. People would come back several times a day \u201cchecking in on us, or to drop off ephemera. Anybody who was intrigued really became a close collaborator\u201d.
\n
\nAdopting the space had been proposed to them by curators Constanza Valenzuela and Jack Radley, who had been offered it as Canal Street emptied out during the pandemic. Despite its central location, Canal Street, and particularly the strip west of the intersection with Broadway, had long resisted the kind of \u201cupscaling\u201d that property owners, and city bureaucrats, sought. Since an operation against counterfeit merchandise in 2008 \u2014\u00a0when Mayor Bloomberg shifted the financial liability of illicit trade onto landlords \u2014\u00a0the practice of shops operating as souvenir shops in the front, and warehousing for counterfeit goods in the back, had largely been eliminated. Spaces stood empty until the potential of \u2018art as advertisement\u2019 entered the mix, as a spatial placeholder and deliberate strategy that both allows landlords to appear generous \u2014\u00a0as if they are contributing to the arts \u2014 and in most cases, add value to their properties. \u2018Artwashing\u2019 rinsing off as gentrification. The landlords, United American Land, had been operating a pop-up model \u2014\u00a0alongside other property owners on the street \u2014\u00a0with creative agency Wallplay, which closed in early 2020, leaving many spaces unoccupied, open to interpretation, and ripe for spatial \u2018subversion\u2019. \u201cThe project has always been like an open research question of how it might be possible to take resources that are available, and redistribute them, while also attempting to subvert the very circumstances that made it possible for us to access those resources\u201d says Shanzhai Lyric. But the CSRA ultimately became a \u201cdepressing, but also interesting\u201d dialogue with their landlord, which concluded in them being kicked out. \u201c[They] became the arbiter of aesthetics and art. Our aesthetics didn’t fit the scheme he\u2019d imagined, which was a validating process for his property.\u201d
\n
\nWhile working from their storefront, Shanzhai Lyric continued their research into the etymology of the poetic phrasing of shanzhai garments, and found that they could chart \u201cthe evolution and disappearance of experimental English, as proportional to the homogenisation of cities\u201d, an observation distilled by their space on Canal Street. \u201cWe both grew up nearby, and feel very connected to the block\u201d Shanzhai Lyric tells me, \u201cIt became a chance to reflect more deeply on how the global flows and trade routes we had planned on following around the world, could actually be found on one block of Canal, between Mercer and Greene Street. We think of Canal Street as a hamlet of sorts\u201d.
\n
\nLike many places around the world, New York was \u2014 albeit, temporarily \u2014\u00a0unrecognisable during the first months of the pandemic. With lockdowns in place, offices emptied out, shops were boarded up, businesses permanently closed, advertisers went quiet; street life shifted from one shaped by consumerism and the privatisation of public space, to one where it was possible to take in the city anew. \u201cMany people who have lived in New York for a long time remarked that during Covid the city felt in some ways more similar to a city they remembered from many years ago. Without business owners around to police and criminalise the act of gathering in front of their spaces, street life became possible again\u201d.
\n
\nRight across from their shop space was Little Senegal, where street vendors set up shop. \u201cWe met Khadim Sene, who\u2019s a vendor, musician and teacher, and we held outdoor lessons with him. Khalifa Thiam, another vendor, who\u2019s trained as a film maker shared hours of footage recorded on Canal Street between 2008-12. He\u2019s captured this former era of [the street], which he considers the best years of his life in the US, because that\u2019s when Obama was president\u201d. After meeting street vendor Leo Liu, a caricaturist, they learnt that portrait art can be pursued without a vendors licence, as it\u2019s covered under freedom of expression laws. \u201cFollowing that line of the possibility of redistribution, we were interested in how art could be operational. How could we [mimic these strategies] of skirting legal parameters [by citing artistic expression]?\u201d
\n
\nAdopting shanzhai strategies \u2014 and knowing they were about to lose the space \u2014\u00a0the CSRA became a \u201cstore in drag\u201d; \u2019ripping off\u2019 the aesthetic language of retail\u00a0\u2014 \u201cmaking something shiny to cover up the real mechanisms of redistribution, and so-called theft, that might be going on\u201d. They enjoyed a final round of adaptive ambiguity, which also functioned as an homage to the history of the neighbourhood: \u201cof artists using retail as an experimental medium to disseminate experimental ideas to the masses\u201d. One of the objects in their shop, as an offering and proposal of how to make use of loopholes and the privileges afforded to art objects, was a counterfeit bag: \u201cwhich is technically illegal, but in this case was categorised as a ready-made art object, thereby skirting that legal parameter.\u201d
\n
\nAll these interactions, relationships and adaptations happened quite naturally, a consequence of just being in one place for a long time \u2014\u00a0also a consequence of the pandemic. There was a period of several months on Canal Street that had a sense of freedom and calm, before the city worked out how to monetise outside space through permits, and hide communal life. \u201cThere had been a lot less police presence\u201d says Shanzhai Lyric, \u201cuntil around Christmas when raids started again.\u201d Since then, police presence had increased and permanent surveillance apparatus was installed, making it dangerous to be conducting street trade. \u201cIt\u2019s really something to think about, how the threat of genuine class mobility is what needs to be actively destroyed by the state.\u201d
\n
\nCanal Street has always been in flux, and people adapt, \u201cstrategically shape-shifting as a survival mechanism and tactic\u201d. Although the CSRA lost it\u2019s retail space, Shanzhai Lyric has moved up the street to an idle office, where they plan to enter the realm their collaborators operate in, \u201cdoing your work on the street, en plein air\u201d. \u201cWe\u2019re in the planning phases of thinking through how there could be a street school, a collaborative film crew, or market.\u201d
\n
\nReflecting on the past year, and the time and space that opened up as commercial units became available, street life became possible and government financial support provided temporary respite from a system that characteristically lacks a safety net, Shanzhai Lyric considered how \u201cprecarity, high rent and financial anxiety make experimentation really difficult in a city\u201d. \u201cIt begins to seem very deliberate, right, that people are too exhausted and too anxious to indulge in open exploration that\u2019s really about time, being without a goal, and welcoming whatever happens.\u201d<\/div><\/div>
<\/div>
<\/div><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":142,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-572","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-profiles","category-uncategorised"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.billiemuraben.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/572","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.billiemuraben.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.billiemuraben.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.billiemuraben.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.billiemuraben.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=572"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.billiemuraben.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/572\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":601,"href":"http:\/\/www.billiemuraben.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/572\/revisions\/601"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.billiemuraben.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/142"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.billiemuraben.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=572"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.billiemuraben.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=572"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.billiemuraben.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=572"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}