Everyone was doing everything: The post-punk polymath on the Lower East Side

This article outlines the utility of the term ‘post-punk polymath’ to describe the sustained multi-medium and intertextual artistic practice engaged in by artists of the post-punk scene on New York’s Lower East Side in the late 1970s. Through the example of Kembra Pfahler and a detailed analysis of Lydia Lunch, it discusses the unique environment of artistic collaboration in the city that was sustained by the subcultures that occupied the dilapidated neighbourhood of the Lower East Side. In this countercultural interzone, which flourished because of, rather than despite New York’s municipal degradation, Lunch remembers that ‘everyone was doing everything’. As both Lunch and Pfahler are artists whose practices encompass music, visual art, installation, literature and film, it is only by understanding their work across a multitude of artistic mediums that a sense of their wider artistic strategy can be arrived at. As I argue throughout, they are not musicians who also happen to produce film or installation, but post-punk polymaths engaged in a unified practice sustained and encouraged by the subcultural environment that they matured within.