Jacob Tate, Economics + Social Policy Analysis, Class of ’22

Brief Summary: In the emptiness that followed Hurricane Harvey, Houston’s teen arts scene exploded. In this paper, Tate narrates his own experience as part of this movement and explains the difficulties of engagement in the arts within a capitalist system. Through his exploration of Houston history and youth experience, Tate theorizes on the physical, temporal, and psychological empty spaces that made a post-Harvey escape from capitalist hegemony possible.

---

The neighbors didn’t call in a noise complaint this time. We could dance and scream and mosh into oblivion, peering through empty walls at our friends in dusty rooms lit only by clamp lights. There were no nosy old folks, no passive aggressive NextDoor posts, no cops. Just us. You see, there weren’t neighbors anymore. In September 2017, this house was the only one in a square mile with a single light on.

 

A City and A Downpour

 

The extent Houston teenagers thought of Harvey prior to it uprooting our entire existence was limited to that one meme that said “this pinche avocado is coming to ruin my weekend” and showed the meteorological storm cone. We chuckled at the Snapchat story of the sprinklers running in the downpour. But the next morning, the narrative changed. Ruth livestreamed her helicopter rescue that dropped her onto 610. Stephanie frantically texted our group chat to ask if we were safe. Someone sent back a picture of them wading through water up to their waist. Some combination of experiencing floods and hurricanes for years and being seventeen had convinced us of our own invincibility. Now, the water either trapped us on an island or forced us to find an island when our homes flooded. It was pandemonium. Even though I was fortunate to live in a non-flooded area, the aptly named neighborhood The Heights, I don’t remember the first few days of Harvey. After we patched up our roof, my family tried to drive to volunteer at a shelter, but the roads out had turned to rivers. So, we waited. I played piano until my brother yelled at me to stop.

Once the water subsided, the city assessed the damages. I tore out drywall for friends and strangers. I photographed every shoe in Anupama’s closet for insurance claims. I took Esther’s ’83 Jeep to the laundromat to clean Anna’s waterlogged clothes. In a rare moment of respite, I found a guitar in the waters and played a song for Sophie.

After the flooding and cleaning wrapped up, there was yet more chaos. It lasted for the next year, if not longer. But by this point we teenagers had hopped up a few steps of Maslow’s pyramid and wanted to make the most of our longer summer. We rode bikes through dark neighborhoods, had picnics in parks at midnight, and slid down the Herman Park hill on ice blocks. But more importantly, in this free time, we watched movies, played new albums, and sent each other poetry. From our inspiration we then opened our DAWs, our notepads, our guitar cases and began creating. I vividly remember my messages in August 2017 being full of Spotify links to Brockhampton, LCD Soundsystem, and Declan McKenna and URLs to poems  by Tracy K. Smith, Alexander Pope, and Larry Levis. I sent back Soundcloud links to my own music and maybe a poem or two I’d written at the MFAH. Does that set the scene?

The teen art scene in Houston is, and always has been, full of its own contradictions. The High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, supposed to be the locus of teen art, stayed to its own and never produced much publicly performative art, sticking to scripts, paintings, and business casual recitals funded by a consistent stream of millions in donations (Fletcher). Houston’s much lauded diversity, a potential boon, worked against the art scene, as there was little to no unifying message to bond over or promote. Even if there was a desire to work together, there was paradoxically too much physical distance between the regional teen art scenes in Houston yet also no collaborative spaces to work in. To top off region-specific issues, art in the late 2010s had begun to push away from collectivism into individuality. Artists got famous off Insta and YouTube, not local support, killing incentives to create a local scene. As a musician, I had especially noticed the local teen music scene floundering throughout the first half of 2017. No one wanted to sign up for my art performance club and student bands were few and far between. The few artists we could lay claim to like The Catalyst or my former band Anthropocene had graduated and moved on to other endeavors in Austin or out of state.

Somehow, the situation drastically changed after Harvey hit. Bootlegs of No Ghost’s “Girlfriend” traded around like Pokemon cards. Dom from Anthropocene moved into rocking with two bands, The Drive and Takeover. Random Soundcloud rappers started getting hundreds of plays. Maddy Estelle uploaded her first covers to her Instagram page. Perpetual recluse Elijah finally managed to coalesce into the duo of Seakid Mollusk.

Other arts sprang up too. An especially extroverted group of visual arts seniors at HSPVA ran impromptu art/music/fashion shows and butted their way into every artistic crowd in the city. The Teen Council at the Contemporary Arts Museum of Houston programmed their hearts out to create another locus point of young creativity. After what felt like an eternity of malaise in teen arts, everything was happening so very fast.

But the true center of the arts explosion of late 2017 was a house on Mimosa street. The plain brick McMansion in Bellaire blended in with its surroundings on the dark street, and one could assume it housed another Little League family funded with oil money. But this house on Mimosa belonged to Zoe, the frontperson of local punk band No Ghosts, who lived there for most of high school with their brother Zak. They lived there until the floodwaters came four feet up from the street, and Zak and his friends tore out every piece of drywall from the first floor. Now it was an empty house on an empty street. Now it was why Houston teen arts blew up. Because of this abandoned house and other places like it, teenagers managed to stumble onto the age-old secret of Houston creatives: empty spaces.

 

A Place and A Vacancy

 

To understand Houston’s empty spaces, we must first understand Houston as a space. The city sprawls over miles and miles, to the extent that driving from one end to the other could take four hours. Houston defines itself by its massive encroachment onto all surrounding land, with new developments like Fulshear pushing the envelope for how far out our suburbs can be (Ybarra and Houston Newcomers Guide). ¹ Whereas New York defines itself by a lack of space, Houston defines itself by egregious abundance. In its growth, Houston limited itself as a purely industrial town, inevitably pushing creativity and culture to the peripheries (in contrast to cities like Los Angeles or San Francisco that laud and promote their art). Houston tucked its museum district well outside of downtown, creating an insular bubble both spatially and culturally for its supposed artistic center.

Thus, the true loci of Houston’s arts scene carved out a residency in the empty spaces the city left for them. The Menil Collection sits on a massive plot of land that would price out a free-admission institution in any other city. Houston zydeco formed around house parties and studios in the typically ignored Fifth Ward. ² For the practice of art, a subversive act in an aggressively expansionist and economically driven city, one had to work with what was left to them.

These empty spaces were historically able to function as muses (or at the very least as broadcasters) for creativity because they provide an oasis away from modern capitalism—the system that values and enforces that one be efficiently productive towards accumulation. The neoliberal capitalist project expands and reinvests into new spaces turned markets, filling the empty with efficiency and production— think of how “backwards countries” are pulled into world trade deals or how tax cuts are zealously pursued in times of economic prosperity to stimulate even more growth (Springer 2 and Boas & Morse).

“At a base level we can say that when we make reference to ‘neoliberalism’, we are generally referring to the new political, economic and social arrangements within society that emphasize market relations, re-tasking the role of the state, and individual responsibility. Most scholars tend to agree that neoliberalism is broadly defined as the extension of competitive markets into all areas of life, including the economy, politics and society.” – Springer, 2

However, in any system there remains that which is useless to the project of expansion undertaken by all systems, especially capitalism. Georges Bataille understands this as “excess” or “waste,” that which is useless and unproductive to capitalism, to be subsequently purged (Bataille 21 and 38, see quote below). The constant goal of neoliberal capitalism is then to continue the destruction of this waste in order to create perfectly efficient markets. In perfect irony, though, the utilization of modern capitalism can even create the waste itself (Magdoff and Williams). The drive towards perfect efficiency led to efforts like Crystal Pepsi or the Justice League movie, which both quickly became unproductive in their own right. On a more serious level, capitalism’s created welfare to make marginalized folks better consumers but simultaneously coded them as a waste of state resources. Ultimately, capitalism engages in a constant search and destroy operation for useless, unproductive waste.

“The living organism […] ordinarily receives more energy than is necessary for maintain­ing life; the excess energy (wealth) can be used for the growth of a system (e.g., an organism); if the system can no longer grow, or if the excess cannot be completely absorbed in its growth, it must necessarily be lost without profit; it must be spent, will­ingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically.“ – Bataille, 38

In fact, empty spaces are often coded as waste, as capitalism by nature sees emptiness as an inefficiency to fill. In our society, a lot is only as good as that which can be built on it, idle time is wasted time, a forest is simply land for a subdivision to expand into, and so on. Ironically, this codification is what allows empty spaces to act as a two-pronged escape from capitalism. Firstly, state apparatuses do not see empty space as valuable and thus do not police and regulate it as much as productive space. This allows for anti-capitalistic projects to not immediately be shut down by the system. Secondly, existing and creating in a space designated as useless and unproductive allows individuals to become useless and unproductive themselves.  By embracing ourselves as waste instead of fighting it, we can escape from capitalism’s atomization, the process of constructing us as individuals competing against one another for productivity (Boykoff 106).

Importantly, the escape from capitalism into waste of emptiness is critical to the survival of the arts due to the arts’ status as anti-capitalist by nature. Blaine Merker explains that art production is when “the ultimate value is produced independently of commerce […] “art” being a convenient category for cultural goods that are an end in themselves” (Merker 51). Especially in a city like Houston, where culture and arts are not as economically commodified as in other areas, the production drive of capitalism pushes artists away from their pursuits towards those coded as “more efficient.” When artistic organizations like the Eastside Latinx group Talento Bilingue are shuttered because of “poor finances,” capitalism makes clear that all art must be profitable or productive in the eyes of the powers-that-be who administer grants (Tallet). Therefore, art needs to exist in anti-capitalistic spaces or risk destruction by the system.

In Houston, the parking lot provides the best example of the relationship between capital, waste, and the arts. A fundamental sign of capitalist expansion into the open lands of the suburbs, parking lots reflect a tool of the business cycle that provides a space for the transportation of labor. A car parked in a parking lot represents either a producer going to work or a consumer going to restaurants or movie theatres. However, parking lots inevitably become empty at some points. Whereas businesses lock their doors and houses rest workers so they may be more efficient the next day, parking lots are neither closed nor productive when they empty. In these moments, they are true waste.

This empty space was promptly claimed by the two nascent movements in Houston’s black culture in the 1980s: SLAB culture and hip hop. The establishment of the SLAB (an acronym for “Slow, Loud, and Bangin’”), an old-school, candy-painted, low-riding, bass-thumping car in Houston’s consciousness revolutionized culture as artistic feats of engineering and painting.³ These cars were flaunted in local area parking lots in an act dubbed “parking lot pimping” (Stewart). As Houston’s rap scene grew, it meshed with SLAB culture, with the first two rap singles out of Houston aptly titled “MacGregor Park” and “Car Freak” (Stewart). The empty space of the after-hours parking lot had been claimed for the artistic movements.

This example also demonstrates the ability of empty spaces to act as the mediums for repossession, an act that Laura Kipnis defines as the process of existing within capitalistic structures but using these very own structures against the system (Kipnis 16-17). Operating within an empty space accepts waste, a foundational challenge to the productivity drive. In the case of the parking lot, there is not an attempt to make the unused lot productive. Instead, the capitalistic uselessness of the empty space is celebrated and even reified. More symbolically, black culture reclaiming the parking lot challenges the narrative of the commuter, a white consumer fleeing from the black inner city who returns only to produce. Empty spaces springboard the anti-capitalist crime of the artist.

 

A House and A Skeleton

 

The wake of Harvey left an abundance of these promising empty spaces. Entire neighborhoods flooded out, with neither the rich nor poor spared. Entire blocks of wealthy areas like Braeswood and Bellaire went dark, leaving behind the bare bones of huge neo-suburban houses. But the empty space left in Harvey’s wake was not solely the physical playgrounds post-devastation; it was also the three weeks off school and the time spent trapped in our houses that created an emptiness in activity and productivity. Finally, many felt the psychological “empty space” that comes with loss and suffering, either individual or collective. Each of these contributed in their own way to the artistic explosion.

When our dancing kicked up drywall dust and we slipped between two-by-fours devoid of insulation in that Mimosa house, we were taking the space that had been left for us. The abandoned houses had been deemed wholly useless and unproductive, so it was easy for artists to be equally useless and unproductive right along with them. If a mosh pit started pushing people against a torn-out wall, that was much more acceptable than shoving people into a baby blue wall in someone’s living room. These spaces were already destroyed, condemned to teardown or exhaustive repair. Concerts could be had. Paint could be splattered. Roofs could be climbed on. Historically, the deprioritization of arts in the industrial city of Houston led to a complete lack of carved out space for teen artists, except for elite, application-only schools and programs. Houston had failed, mostly from a lack of trying, to monetize its residents’ teenage dreams, so it lacked an incentive to develop a teen infrastructure. Most resources concentrated in professional, adult artists or art camps for small children that could generate revenue. Hence, teenagers rabidly seized whatever abandoned houses their peers had the keys to. The literal unlocking of these empty houses catalyzed the Houston teen arts movement.

Even as we move into a digital age of interaction, physical gathering remains critical to the exchange of ideas that comprises the arts scene. Whereas New Yorkers gather by virtue of sheer urban density, a sprawled city like Houston needed a mecca like the house on Mimosa that could physically unite creatives. Once gathered, artists synthesized. I met Decarte while dancing to one of DJ Frecklz’s sets and he told me about the photography film he shipped in from Seattle. I got to know John, who played a set before mine, and we made a cover band together later that year. I ran into Caroline on the back porch where we talked about modern art and philosophy. Through Decarte, I met Sophie. Through John, I met Lucas. I could name names for this entire essay. As teenagers unsuccessfully attempted to waltz to Amanda’s Italian folk, they got to know each other.

Equally important to the artistic osmosis was the increased accessibility and visibility of the teen arts scene to non-participating onlookers or, as I’ll likely call them for the rest of this essay, fans. For the neo-suburban, “upper middle class” students of schools like Bellaire, Lamar, and HSPVA that would come to define the specific movement I was part of, the teen arts scene had remained unknown and inaccessible. However, once houses emptied after the flood, gigs that had been in seedy dive bars on Eastside were relocated a half mile away. Suddenly, concerts attracted hundreds instead of dozens. Not only would this inspire many future musicians, it also expanded the teen art scene, as fans are equally part of the community.

Though we didn’t recognize it at the time, this gathering and synthesis only occurred due to the ability of empty spaces to escape the productive drive of capitalism. Increasingly defined by their extracurriculars and the resulting acceptance letters, teenagers face more capitalist encroachment into their lives every day. I strained to sell tickets to shows junior years, met with the repeated rationale of “I’m sorry, I have homework.” However, empty spaces meant venues were nearer and free. They also allowed artistic subversion to be hidden behind accepted affective enjoyment. Somehow, we found that “I’m going to hang out with friends” or “I’m going to a party” are seen as reasonable actions, while “I’m going to a concert” is viewed as wasteful.

We needed to be wasteful, though. The empty houses we possessed had become useless to the capitalist project, incapable of housing workers, providing leisure, or being sold. As waste, teens claimed them as their own and existed within. Free from productive expectations, we could revel in our own existence, with art as a means in and of itself, instead of feeling burdened or restricted by thoughts of our own statistical accumulation. This created even more art, sure, but more importantly, it created legitimate, liberated enjoyment in what was for many a suffocating adolescence.

In this way, our performances within these empty spaces also repossessed the home as a concept. Inside the home resides the expectation and pressure placed on teenagers. While the eight hours we spend at school ask us to get good grades and not misbehave, the thrust of socialization pressures comes when we return from school to our parents grilling us about colleges and careers. School may be where we are taught how to be productive, but it is the home that tells us that we must be productive in the first place. In the Communist Manifesto itself, Marx claims that “family” as a concept is a bourgeois monopolization of culture in order to further productivity (Marx, 24-25). Marxist feminist Alexandra Kollontai clarifies this in asserting that families become a creator of affect⁴ and education only in order to further production and consumption, best exemplified by the narrative of the nuclear family in the 1950s (Escalante).

Thus, teenagers’ claims of empty houses repossess the capitalistic narrative of the home that families wield against their children. Instead of being places for suffocation, these empty houses became places we could breathe. This was by-the-book repossession, wherein the subjectivity-inducing nature of the home was hijacked from indoctrinating the subject of capital towards the subjectivity of the artist. This multiplied the effect of these empty spaces, as instead of just providing a place to escape capitalism, they also created subjects outside of capital.

 

A Teen and An Obligation

 

Harvey vacated more than the houses it flooded. The storm and resulting fallout eliminated two to three weeks of school, jobs, and extracurriculars for most Houston teenagers. Adding to the natural post-disaster shutdown, Harvey timed itself as a perfect storm for the creation of vacancy, falling after the end of summer activities but before school began. This unprecedented mass cancellation, already within a liminal period, opened more empty space for a generation who had constantly planned out their life or had it planned out for them. On top of physical emptiness, there was occupational emptiness.

The vacancies of Harvey took a few different forms: the days of rain confined us to our houses, the following week when everything closed, and the overall period without structure or guidance. These empty spaces provided both boredom and an escape from a productivity drive. For Houston teens, the former spurred creativity, while the latter allowed that creativity to manifest and grow.

Life stagnated during Harvey. Even if the news ran new stories every night, all seemed to permutate from the same basic hurricane and flooding narratives familiar to every Houstonian. Even the process of cleanup grew repetitive after the tenth or eleventh house. But as we hauled waterlogged sofas onto the street, we hummed little melodies we would throw into our music making software that afternoon. Before the house parties, the Soundcloud links, and the exhibitions, teenagers produced art as a logical response to the mind-numbing boredom of the post-Harvey weeks.

Boredom allows, or maybe even forces, the brain to create. A bored mind realizes that its current existence is unfulfilling and therefore attempts to nourish a better reality via creative daydreaming. A study by Heather Lench at Texas A&M University found that participants exposed to menial work like copying numbers from a phonebook demonstrated more creativity in subsequent problem-solving activities (Thompson). Just like test subjects in College Station trying to find uses for a cup, teenagers tried to find uses for all their time and idle brainpower.

However, society has fused itself to our brain’s understanding of idleness. The increasingly negative connotation of boredom derives from the capitalistic drive that has psychologically primed us to desire constant self-productivity. We are told to solve boredom with more projects, like cleaning our houses, starting a “side hustle,” or getting ahead on our homework. Arts justify themselves for teenagers only in their capacity to be productive—is it for a class? Can you put it on a college essay? Many times, the justification for arts in school is not their intrinsic value, but instead that they increase test scores.

Hence, the escape from capitalism provided by the destructuring of daily life after Harvey  allowed creativity to function as an alternative to boredom. Teenagers, yet to start school or meet with college counselors, lacked access to productive projects and had no scheduled events to make them busier. While capitalism inevitably codes whether our brains are enticed or not by our current reality, boredom cannot be “solved” with cycles of productivity within empty spaces due to the nature of waste. Since empty schedules become capitalistic waste, they are already coded as useless and therefore escape from attempts to be useful. Essentially, if your schedule is already empty, you can further fill it with the supposed “emptiness” of art.

This means that empty spaces act as a prerequisite to aimless, untargeted creativity as a mode of escape from boredom. If three whole weeks have already become wiped out and totally unproductive, the anti-capitalistic arts of Houston become a viable option, as we saw with the en masse teen creation that occurred during the empty schedules after Hurricane Harvey. Aside from their facilitation of creativity, empty schedules provide an independent good as an escape from capitalism. The increasing atomization of teenagers manifests in their increasingly packed schedules of debate tournaments, swim meets, and SAT-prep. Teenagers’ value only exists in productivity asserted by competing with and vanquishing their peers. A schedule literally represents an attempt to maximize our productivity and make our time as efficient as possible. Therefore, even when we weren’t strumming our guitars, teenagers escaped from the productivity drive that evaluates our lives only by what we do, not what we are. This temporary removal from the hyperreality of unattainable standards let us take a breath, maybe for the first time in some people’s lives. This ontological peace could eventually manifest in more artistic creation, crafting a virtuous cycle between boredom, escapes from capitalism, and temporary self-harmony.

 

A Memory and An Ontology  

 

Unfortunately, some teenagers were unable to participate in this occupational emptiness, finding their schedules consumed by the daunting task of survival and reconstruction. While some teenagers repaired their houses or found new lodging within a week or so and others didn’t see their house flood at all, a group of teenagers found the weeks after Harvey one of the greatest struggles of their life.  Through this struggle, though, these teenagers found another form of emptiness to precipitate creation: trauma.

The project of capitalism constantly attempts to separate the mind and body in order to eradicate the mind, as the body is the terminus of production and consumption. Workers are not to let familial problems affect their performance, doctors prescribe legions of pills for even the slightest mental tic, and so forth. Trauma challenges this separation as it directly impacts the bodily existence of those that experience it, forcing them out of efficiency. The shock of trauma simultaneously disrupts capitalism’s forced dualism of mind and body, leading to a recognition of the self as an entire unit.

 

This by no means suggests that trauma benefits those who experience it, but trauma does incur a state of waste, wherein a trauma survivor’s mind has become an empty space in and of itself. The state of trauma, challenging the foundational goals and separations of capitalism, become waste to be purged. However, trauma proves an unbeatable enemy in two ways. First, it derives not from social order like capitalism, but instead from human biology. A constructed dualism of mind and body cannot overcome a brain’s base reactions to trauma. Second, capitalism produces trauma by operating under the mind-body separation assumption. The capitalistic order necessitates the concept that the perfect capitalist subject mindlessly consumes and produces, but this attitude will always produce trauma by failing to consider mental, non material implications of actions. Like parking lots, trauma is waste that capitalism cannot instantly purge.

Capitalism, refusing to allow excess without a fight, answers trauma with self-inflicted ontological violence. Society pressures trauma victims to deny their trauma and continue normally, and thus victims enact alienation and violence upon the self due to the unattainable ideal they are told to strive for. However, capitalism’s gambit mitigates the waste at best. The cracks in forced dualism have already been revealed to trauma victims, as the mind’s effect on the body has indomitably proved itself.

In the case of Harvey, an even greater obstacle blocked capitalism’s war on trauma: the hurricane destroyed any “normal state” to return to. All of Houston reeled when faced with the trauma of the complete annihilation of the life it once knew. Regardless of how the hurricane impacted one, some degree of trauma traced its way into the psyche. Despite existing on a sliding scale for individuals, trauma manifested itself collectively after Harvey.

For the Houston teen art scene, both individual and collective trauma made its mark, continuing a long tradition of trauma-inspired art. Creators ranging from Mark Rothko to Gerard Way have channeled trauma into art, naturally finding the connections between two methods of escaping from capitalism. Artistic creation simultaneously acts as an affective oasis to offer respite from the mental ramifications of traumatic experience as well as a methodology to continue subversive action against the capitalistic culture that likely precipitated the trauma in the first place. Additionally, the rupture of the body/mind dualism means individuals no longer feel the need to suppress the imagination of the mind for the productivity of the body. In fact, Paula Thompson of California State found in a study that artists who underwent trauma experienced more vivid and imaginative spates of creativity (Puiu).

In Houston, individual trauma informed the resulting art. No Ghosts ruminated on the irony of being swim captain and their house flooding in “Chlorine.” Many HSPVA photography exhibitions centered around images of devastation in personal lives. Other artists used art not as a trauma descriptive, but instead as an escape, an oasis away from the trauma of Harvey and the oppressive structures of capitalism. Just as much as other empty spaces post-Harvey, trauma created a space wherein individuals could be creative, even if the resulting art did not directly reference Harvey or related struggles.

Along with individual traumas, collective trauma influences the art scenes within which it operates. Psychologist Gilad Hirschberger explains collective trauma not only as a crisis of material existence, but as a crisis of meaning (Hirschenberger). Within this crisis of meaning, art and creativity acts as a mode to explore one’s own existence. This may come in the form of the Harvey-influenced scripts Audrey wrote, the irreverent mixtapes of Soundcloud rappers like 713, or the outpouring of abstract visual art following the storm.

Collective trauma also provided the sense of unity that Houston desperately needed. At an obvious level, the entire group of teenagers could rally around chants of “fuck Harvey” at parties or bond over hurricane horror stories. The diverse populations of Houston finally had something in common. On top of that, the fact that everyone in the destroyed Mimosa house had been affected by Harvey created a space for artists to share their individual traumas. Knowing that every Houstonian shared a similar existential crisis allowed artists to portray their issues, whether related to Harvey or not. In turn, audiences used art as a conduit for their own trauma. When Maddy Estelle sang “I Talk to the Sky,” she crafted an intensely personal narrative of individual pain, but when the crowd sang it back, they inscribed their own traumatic experiences upon it.

In this way, trauma was the third empty space that catalyzed the teen arts movements in Houston. In conjunction with the emptiness of buildings and schedules, the emptying out of the capitalistic, dualistic propaganda that creates our ontology led to a blank psyche where other forms of existence could be inscribed.

 

A Theory and A Future

 

Empty spaces provide both a canvas for artistic creation and a line of flight from capitalism. These two products, in turn, inform and enforce each other. The unproductive waste of artistic expression strengthens escapes from capitalistic society, while the hollowing out of anti-capitalist spaces stops arts from being subsumed by the productivity drive. As proven in Houston after Harvey, empty spaces are key to the emergence of artistic movements that challenge normative existence.

The potency of empty spaces derives from their subversive relationship with capitalism. Instead of aiming for a total rejection of neoliberal society, an impossible task, empty spaces accept that capitalism is a prerequisite to their existence. The ability to operate inside of, rather than against, the state allows empty spaces to generate special conditions for repossession. In the fall of 2017, teenagers repossessed the very things that had caused them so much grief: houses, schedules, and harmful mindsets. Repossession, in turn, breaks down the semiotics and logics of capitalism from within by stealing and repurposing the system’s modes of signification and subjectification.

Even if empty spaces fail to conquer the capitalistic thralls of society, they nevertheless provide a setting for ontological regeneration. The ability to embrace waste within an empty space means that individuals no longer force themselves in an impossible, deathly race towards perfect productivity. Even if one only inhabits empty spaces for an hour a day or an hour a week or an hour ever, they nonetheless escape from violence enacted against the self.  Monumentally, the combination of pleasure (positive affect from creation) and pain (recognition of capitalist traumas) that occurs in empty spaces nears Lacan’s jouissance that posits itself as an ideal form of anti-capitalist existence.

The call to arms, however, is not to create or even accumulate empty spaces. Since empty spaces are defined by waste, one cannot create an empty space without using the same capitalistic mindsets that designates objects, people, or states of existence as useless. Instead, empty spaces must be recognized when they appear in our lives already coded as empty. With an open mind, we can notice the empty spaces that present themselves in our lives and understand how to use them to resist societal ills.

The importance of localizing empty spaces lies in the fact that, definitionally, empty spaces will be destroyed by neoliberal expansion. Even though empty spaces derive from potent foes as varied as hurricanes and trauma, capitalism nevertheless finds some trick to destroy waste and make these empty spaces productive again. In Houston, empty houses became capitalistic machines, generating billions in remodeling and real estate flipping. Schedules made up for lost time after the hurricane by forcing even more productivity. Teens were encouraged to commodify trauma for college essays.

The teen art scene that followed Harvey in Houston was the perfect seizing of empty space, the lightning-in-a-bottle result of teenagers who didn’t know any better than to take what they saw. An empty house would become a concert because why not? An empty schedule would become an art exhibition because why not? An empty psyche would become a sing-along because why not?

Hegemonies are not static and never will be, they are instead a constant struggle for supremacy between opposing forces. Through the emergence of a post-Harvey culture, Houston teenagers realized that they are far from doomed to a singular restricted path of existence and used the arts as a way to challenge hegemonic norms of behavior. Completely by accident, these teenagers stepped foot into a battle and came out victorious for a couple years, using the subversive nature of empty spaces as not only a means to escape but also as an affective end in and of themselves.

While most of the participants in the scene now work or attend university with art as a side gig, the times and lessons created from these empty spaces will last a lifetime. We developed friendships and memories outside the quid-pro-quo framework of capitalism, where excess was embraced and life could be enjoyed without productivity. Intriguingly, this year or so of art and empty spaces primed a generation of Houstonians for anti-capitalist movements. Not only did this movement reveal that neoliberal hegemony can be challenged and even perhaps vanquished by embracing waste, it also introduced empty spaces as an operative theory for experiencing the world. Now, artists can consciously identify empty space, be it literal or figurative, and find their lines of flight within its framework.

I can’t say what happened to teen arts in Houston, as I am no longer a teenager. Plenty of groups and individuals are still making phenomenal art and throwing concerts and holding photography shows. These teens were just as affected by Harvey as my generation was and likely remember the surge of creativity after the storm. One can only hope the modern Houston teen art scene is able to find their own empty spaces to claim.

But that’s besides the point. Capitalism wants us to always worry about implications and sequencing and the future in order to distract us from the simple and simply subversive action of existing in the present. What matters, ultimately, is what happened within the walls of the house on Mimosa street, within the three weeks of emptiness, and within traumatized neurons. For that year after Harvey, we could stroll in the blissful present. Even though capitalism continued to code our art and scene as excess, we reclaimed that excess and preserved it through the empty places that would become our muses, our facilitators, our partners in crime, our oases, and our homes.

 

A Playlist and Some Youtube Links

 

It is very hard to find the works of the artists that floated around and through this post-Harvey world, especially for non-musical arts.

Below is some links for the art of people involved in the scene—though many of the links do not directly tie into the post-Harvey timeline, they are representative of some of the aspects of the scene.

Girlfriend (Acoustic Car Trunk Version) by No Ghosts – Music

Set by Ilona Altman – Performance Art

World Peace, Bitch by Anthropocene – Music Video

Stressy Woo by Audrey Mills – Music Video, Creative Writing

Circles by Cathy Le – Visual Art

Meta-Four Houston Brave New Voices Final Round – Slam

Uccelino by Amanda Pascali and the Family – Music

Red Hair by Seakid Mollsuk – Music

A Pre-Harvey Concert at the Mimosa House – Everything

 

Works Cited

Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share. Zone Books, 1988.

Boas, Taylor C., and Jordan Gans-Morse. “Neoliberalism: From New Liberal Philosophy to Anti-Liberal Slogan.” Studies in Comparative International Development, vol. 44, no. 2, 2009, pp. 137–161., doi:10.1007/s12116-009-9040-5.

Boykoff, Jules. “The Leaf Blower, Capitalism, and the Atomization of Everyday Life.” Capitalism Nature Socialism, vol. 22, no. 3, Sept. 2011, pp. 95–113., doi:10.1080/10455752.2011.593896.

Escalante, Alyson. “The Family Is Dead, Long Live the Family.” COSMONAUT, Cosmonaut Inc, 11 Mar. 2020, cosmonaut.blog/2020/03/11/the-family-is-dead-long-live-the-family/.

Fletcher, Abner. “Should Beloved Arts School Be Renamed Kinder HSPVA?” Houston Public Media, University of Houston, 5 July 2017, www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/education/2017/06/27/219882/should-beloved-arts-school-be-renamed-kinder-hspva/.

“Fulshear.” Houston Newcomers Guide, Houston Newcomers Guide, 20 Mar. 2019, houstonnewcomerguides.com/moving-to-fulshear/.

Hirschberger, Gilad. “Collective Trauma and the Social Construction of Meaning.” Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 9, 10 Aug. 2018, doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01441.

Kipnis, Laura. “Repossessing Popular Culture.” Ecstasy Unlimited, University of Minnesota Press., 1993, pp. 13–32.

Magdoff, Fred, and Chris Williams. “Capitalist Economies Create Waste, Not Social Value.” Truthout, Truthout, 17 Aug. 2017, truthout.org/articles/capitalist-economies-create-waste-not-social-value/.

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Manifesto of the Communist Party . Marxists Internet Archive, 1848.

Merker, Blaine. “Taking Place: Rebar’s Absurd Tactics in Generous Urbanism.” Insurgent Public Space: Guerrilla Urbanism and the Remaking of Contemporary Cities, by Jeffrey Hou, Routledge, 2010, pp. 45–58.

Puiu, Tibi. “Performing Artists with a History of Childhood Adversity Have More Intense Creative Experiences.” ZME Science, ZME Science, 7 May 2018, www.zmescience.com/science/childhood-adversity-creativity-0432423/.

Springer, Simon, et al. The Handbook of Neoliberalism. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2016.

Stewart, Shelby. “Parking Lot Pimpin’: Houston Slab Culture.” Haus of Lean, Haus of Lean, 8 Aug. 2019, hausoflean.com/2019/08/08/parking-lot-pimpin-houston-slab-culture/.

Tallet, Olivia. “Talento Bilingue De Houston Is on the Verge of Insolvency. Latino Leaders Are Determined to Save One of the Arts and Culture Group.” Houston Chronicle, Houston Chronicle, 2 Sept. 2019, www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Latinos-demand-government-support-to-save-14405775.php.

“Teen Council Programs.” Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, 12 Dec. 2019, camh.org/programs-events/teens/teen-council/teen-council-programs/.

Thompson, Clive. “How Being Bored Out of Your Mind Makes You More Creative.” Wired, Conde Nast, 11 Sept. 2018, www.wired.com/2017/01/clive-thompson-7/.

Ybarra, Hilary. “How Urban or Suburban Is Sprawling Houston?” The Kinder Institute for Urban Research, Rice University, 21 Sept. 2017, kinder.rice.edu/2017/09/21/how-urban-or-suburban-is-sprawling-houston.