Week 13: Sze Tsung Leong

Sze Tsung Leong

Alameda, México D.F., 2009

Sze Tsung Leong is an American and British photographer who was born in Mexico City, and spent time growing up in all three areas. Leong has three different bodies of work, Cities, Horizons, and History Images, that speak to the image of the city and "Cities in Crisis." In the body of work Cities,which Leong began in 2002, he photographs numerous cities around the world, from medieval towns to more recently constructed urban areas. Although each individual city is quite diverse, Leong stays consistent with his approach to photographing each city, by keeping the point of view, the compositions, and the immense detail of the photograph similar. The height that Leong chose to take the photographs at depicts not only the topology of the city but also the urban planning and layout of the city. There is a quality of the birds eye view to Leong's Cities photographs that allow for such an expansive view, but then the way he places the camera you are allowed to see in the foreground ground a closer detailed look of the city, where you can see cars on the streets and smaller details that you would normally not see from the birds eye view. One of the other qualities of each city that comes through in these photographs is how many cities have a color palette to them.

Xiasha Village, Futian District, Shenzhen, 2008

Malasaña, Madrid, 2009

La Paz, 2010

The city of Shenzehen seems pale and void of most color, while the photos of Madrid and La Paz have a reddish brown color to them. One of the other qualities to the body of work as a whole is how some cities have embraced their history and past and held off on immense urban renewal, while other cities have clearly wiped out their past and replaced it with new

structures.

Tel Aviv-Yafo III, 2007

In the project Horizons Leong does not always photograph a city, but I still see this work as relevant to the class as many of the images are of expansive horizons of cities. Again Leong keeps his picture making techniques consistent in each image, with the horizons falling in the same place, immense detail in each image, and in many images of cities there is a lack of any

real foreground to root yourself in. On occasion there may be some sort of sand, beach, or water, but there is no real way to access the city, lie his project Cities where you can see roads and cars in the foreground. The photographs when exhibited are displayed in a line.

Nan Shi, Huangpu District, Shanghai, 2004

In the project History Images Leong photographs different cities in China as they wipe out large older areas of cities and put up new structures. Many of the photographs show smaller older Chinese homes being torn down amongst mass amounts of rubble, with large skyscraper more westernized buildings. These photographs show a country removing its past architecture and inevitably its history in massive renewal projects.

Leong's work depicts cities of today and how they have developed in numerous ways around the world, some embracing their past and some such as China wiping it out almost completely. Through these images one sees different ways that cities and countries have dealt with urbanization, some of these things can see similar from place to place and others seem very different.

Week 12:

New York, Beside Itself

In Johanna Burton's New York, Beside Itself, begins by analyzing a section of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's book Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity where she discusses her urge to turn and look for the World Trade Center towers after September 11, and how she feels shame for doing this. Her reason for feeling shame came from her comparing the city to a face, a person. She explains that when turning to look for the familiar World Trade Center towers she does not find that familiarity, instead she is left staring/smiling at a "stranger" and this causes the shame or embarrassment. What Burton is interested in Sedgwick's writing is of her comparison of the city to a face. Burton also looks to Freud's writing on how nothing in mental life once formed can perish, and he asks his readers to imagine a city where all the old buildings

that are no longer standing are still there along with all of the new ones, and how this is like the mind. I thought this interactive map of New York that allows you to manipulate Manhattan over space and time was an interesting way to think about Freud's ideas that a space cannot have two different contents.

But this map is really on the base of the different contents and uses of a space, as Burton goes on to explain with artists such as Emily Roysdon and her images of the Pier 49 and her some what of a reenactment of David Wojnarowicz's Rimbaud piece all over the city. Burton claims that Roysdon "underlines the fact that the body occupies the city and is occupied by it and that it is through this reciprocal exchange that both continue to be actively reformed." This also goes back to Jane Jacobs's idea that a space should not have just one single use, and Burton discusses artists that do just that with a space.

Week 11: China and Global Cities

Week 10: China's Global Megalopolises

In Tank Man we are introduced to the public space called Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China where in 1989, mainly led by students, protests broke out against the communist government in an attempt at political reform. During the protests the civilians that were in the streets and square, public spaces, utilized anything and everything that they could find to block the tanks and military from moving in on them. The use of items like cement jersey barriers, heavy construction equipment, crowd barricades, and just large amounts of bodies, were all used as strategies by the protestors to block the military/ government from moving in on them. One single man employes the strategy of using his body to stop a line of tanks from going down the street, moving from side to side as the tank tried to go around the man, "tank man", uses himself as a strategy to try and block the tanks from the set out path.

In the documentary The Tank Man Tiananmen Square is described as a public space so large that it is inhuman and gives significance to the government buildings that line the square. This showed how the individual was nothing in comparison to the might of the state.

Later in the documentary there is discussion on how numerous U.S. companies such as Yahoo and Google whom provided internet search engines for use in China as well, had to comply with China's strict internet access policies. When someone in the U.S. does a google search for Tiananmen Square rows and rows of images of the tank man come up, but when this same search in google is done in China no images of the man standing in front of the tank show up. When Beijing University students are shown the tank man picture none of them have any idea what it is or is from. One students says, "is this a piece of art, did you make this up." It is as if this type of image of the city, one that clearly the government of China does not want at the disposal of the public, is being erased.

Reversed Images: Representations of Shanghai and Its Contemporary Material Culture

The exhibition Reversed Images looks at the city of Shanghai's development as a global city at an intensely fast rate, wiping out old structures and neighborhoods and constructing new more Westernized ideals. Curator of the exhibit Natasha Egan describes the city as, "caught between a not-so-distant communism and late-arriving capitalism, between a world founded on its labor force and the world of new technologies." The exhibit is broken into areas/sections; Romance looking at Shanghai's past, Upside down/progressing highlighting the cities fast pace expansion and modernization and the implications of this type of progress, Glorifying the City (Presenting/Future) shows a city that glorifies itself in every facet possible, Artist: Urban Comments shows the roll the artist has today in Shanghai, Interiors describes the secret and hidden spaces of a city of eighteen million people.

Urban Destruction and Construction

In this reading on Huang Yan's rubbings on rice paper of buildings set to be demolished for the constant re-urbanization throughout different cities in China, I am reminded of Charles Simonds very interventionist approach to dealing with the demolition of numerous buildings in New York. There is this same approach to going to the physical buildings and interacting with them. Though Simonds leaves his pieces behind in most cases, Yan leaves behind the buildings he has done the rubbings of. Both artists are aware that these structures, whether they have created them or not, are part of the art and will be demolished at some point. While Yan seems to want to preserve these structures through documenting their textures, Simonds work seems to beckon people to want to preserve it.

Urban China: Informal Cities

In the exhibition Urban China: Informal Cities the magazine Urban China is turned into wallpaper and displayed on gallery walls. The text is printed in a faded red and blue, with the red representing order, formal, or planned government decisions and the blue representing organic, informal and different reactions to policies or events. The wallpaper is organized with an order of top begin about nation, middle about the city, and the bottom about the home and its objects.

In the section that begins with Rurbanization (rural urbanization) the growth of an area is describing as the old villages being the nucleus that area around it. These areas that have been urbanized at an extremely fast pace are developed around the idea of factory. For the U.S. the term urbanization for many years now has meant, culture, the arts, and a white collar dynamic, while in China this has meant for some time now, the development of factories and industries. In China, these rural areas that have been and are being urbanized are very much consumed by a type of "working class/labor class", as opposed to U.S. where the city has become unwelcoming to the working class.

One of the things that seems consistent throughout all of the readings and video clips we watched this week was this push and pull between the old and the new, communism and capitalism, small verses large structures, all occurring at a pace that has never been seen before.

I wanted to link Michael Wolfs photo project 100 x 100 that we discussed in our grad meeting last week. In this project Wolf photographs tenants in there homes in Hong Kong's oldest public housing estate. The spaces they live in are 100 square feet, but each has been decorated differently. We discussed in our meeting how we had yet in class talked about the interior spaces of the city and the image of that. I think Wolf's project speaks well to this, and also to the global cities in China, how space is so limited and there are many people still today in China not benefitting from China's expectance of capitalism and how communism is still ever present.

Wandering in the City

In Wandering in the City Christel Hollevout discusses urban drifting from the flanerie to the derive and how this type of spatial investigation of a city has continued through modernism into postmodernism. Hollevout starts out with Baudelaire's flaneur and claims that it is the starting point for all artists who have tried to represent the feeling of being within a public space of a modern city. the arcades in Paris became the space for the flaneur to exist for the writer Walter Benjamin. He saw the flaneur's experience in "the city to that of a child who perceives it as a collection of places and situations charged with mythical powers. " To Benjamin there seems to be a real link between what a place represents to a person and reliving the past. Hollevout describes Benjamin's investigation into the past as a representation of a moment event or place that has a historical context. Hollevout saw this type of urban drifting that Benjamin writes about as extremely important to later artist practices. Reading Hollevout's Wandering in the City I thought a lot about Vito Acconci's Following Piece and how he allowed himself to be an urban drifter by following a stranger until he could not follow them any more. That this person was a sort of map through the city for him. This article from the Wall Street Journal marking the 200th anniversary of the grid in New York city highlights different mapping techniques of the city.

This particular map gives the person on the street the opportunity to also at the same time view the city from the bird's-eye view that Michel de Certeau writes about in Walking in the City. The Situationist elaborated on the concept of the derive that really came about from Guy Debord, they created unitary urbanism, "active participation and experience in social spaces of cities." The Situationists were concerned with reality of the everyday, not dreams or the beauty of things. The concept of psychogeography that they utilized was on of playful mapping of a route or not a route really, through out the city. Hollevout claims that since the 1960s artists have moved from documenting and representing the urban environment to literally using it and creating art out of it, such as sculpture and performance. The use of mapping and performance became integral to the Fluxus movement, in there Free Flux-Tours of New York city. Hollevout writes how the Fluxus Tours were also a representation of the shift in the art world from the critique of art to the critique of everyday life. The numerous artists who are mentioned in Wandering in the City that follow an almost Surrealist Dada like games of chance where artists have someone else direct them to random locations, or the idea of flipping a coin to decide where to wander to next.

Week 10" The event, archive, and the riot for public space.

Henri Carter-Bresson

Event

Eugene Atget

Archive

In Lydia Yee's Two-Way Street she begins by comparing two different types of french photographers and their different approaches to photographing, Eugene Atget and Henri Cartier-Bresson. Yee writes that Atget's photographs were seen as time exposure, using a large format camera and long exposures he photographed old Paris, which was disappearing under Baron Haussman's plans for Paris. While Bresson took images "on the run" with a small hand held camera, and photographed the instantaneous or "the decisive moment". Yee argues that these two types of photography, "the archive and the event remained distinct until the 1960s". She goes on to discuss to exhibitions put on at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, New

Documents (1967) and Information (1970). New Documents was curated by John Szarkowski and focused on the photographers Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Garry Winogrand. "Their aim has not been to reform life, but to know it" states Szarkowski. Yee goes on to claim that Szarkowski distanced photography from documentary and photo journalism, and that these photographers paid more attention to their individual styles than any sort of social message.

Information Exhibition Catalog

The exhibition Information curated by Kynaston McShine, the first conceptual art exhibit in the United States, was about mass media, the cover of the catalog for the exhibition featured things such as the telephone, car, camera, TV, and so on.

In a memorandum to Arthur Drexler dated February 5, 1970 Kynaston McShine described the exhibition:

"As you know my exhibition 'Information' is primarily concerned with the strongest international art movement or 'style' of the moment which is 'conceptual art,' 'art povera,' 'earthworks,' 'systems,' 'process art,' etc. in its broadest definition.

The exhibition will demonstrate the non-object quality of this work and the fact that it transcends the traditional categories of painting, sculpture, photography, film, drawing, prints, etc."

Some of the numerous artists in the exhibition were Vito Acconci, John Baldessari, Hans Haacke, Edward Ruscha, and many more. Yee uses Ruscha's Every Building on Sunset Strip and Acconci's Following Piece as an example of work that slips into two categories one of street photography, photojournalism and conceptual art.

Yee compares Friedlander's self-portrait pieces with his shadows looming on people to Acconci's Following Piece particularly that of the photograph were Friedlander's shadow falls on the back of a woman's coat that he seems to be following.

Lee Friedlander

Under Yee's section Archive she discusses numerous artist who have added to the discourse on the street and the document. One of the artists she discusses Nils Norman photographs different devices to prohibit different types of human intervention within the urban environment, Ongoing Urbanomics Archive. Norman document's these different devices such as uncomfortable benches and anti-skateboarding devices such as placing round balls on edges where a skateboard would glide. It seems clear that as Yee continues on in her argument that artists have blurred the line that once divided the event and the archive. The two seminal exhibitions that took place at MoMA a few years apart from each other helped to begin to blur that line.

In Karen Jones The Urban Event: Spectacle, Resistance, and Hegemony she argues that the Native American term Potlatch, which means a negation of division as a way to affirm a community, dismissing claims to private ownership, and the riot have similar qualities. Jones claims the riot is a response to policies or social conditions that challenge the collective interests of the group rioting. Jones compares the Situationists concept of the derive, a drifting through urban environments, to David Wojnarowicz's Arthur Rimbaud in New York, where the artist documents himself with a mask of Rimbaud on drifting through different locations in the city that pertained to everyday life.

In the section Graffiti and After Jones claims that the practice of graffiti has an effect that goes beyond set limits and declared space to elevate ones status. She claims though that the art world has exploited works of graffiti by taking them out context and making them into commodities. Jones uses Jean-Michel Basquiat as an example of a graffiti artist that used the urban space of the art world in New York, such as SoHo, the East Village, and Tribeca to place his SAMO tags. If Basquiat's purpose of this was to get noticed by influential people amongst the art world, it worked as he would be become quite famous in the art world even after his death in 1988 he is still shown today with his last exhibit listed at the Musee D'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in October of last year.

In The Riot section Jones claims " the riot is a logical consequence of the oppressive forces within the capitalist modern and postmodern space." Jones sees the riot as a political and social action threatens social order, activating public space, and that the underlying conflict that causes the riot is usually race, class, or labor conflict. Using the Tompkins Square Park Riot as evidence of the class struggle associated with the specific event. The Tompkins Square Park Riots were caused by the cities massive redevelopment of the areas around the park, causing an upsurge in the homeless, Tompkins Square Park became a place for these homeless to reside. When the city decided to in act a closing time for the park, they were met with a demonstration to try to maintain public space. Jones uses quotes of eyewitnesses of the event, who state the police seemed out of control cause unnecessary chaos inflaming the crowd of people.

In Krzysztof Wodiczko's The Homeless Vehicle he creates a a mobile shelter structure to recognize the mass amounts of homeless that occur from "transformation of the city".

It becomes clear that Jones is getting at the point that public space means something different to different people. To the homeless of Tompkins Square Park that public space was no longer public to them. Some how someone declared that the acts of sleeping and most likely defecating, taking place in a public space was not allowed, but in turn where should the homeless then go, are they to just not exist, according to these "rules"? If the park closed at 1am, that left the homeless who were still in the park to be arrested, for just physically being.

Week 9: Art of the Street

Shifting Ground: Street Art of the 1960s and '70s by Frazer Ward discusses the status of the streets role in art, but also how the street represented a public space for protest culture and counterculture. Ward explains that the '60s and '70s was a time when the street became a place of performance for artists who explored the anti-normative behavior within the public space. Artists that Ward starts off by using decollage artists jacques de la Villegle and Raymond Hains to as evidence of the street as art.

122 rue du temple by Jacques de la Villegle

In 122 rue temple Villegle and Hains took street posters from the address 122 rue du temple which then became the title of the piece, and tore it down in pieces and reassembled it on canvas. Artist Claes Oldenburgs The Street is discussed in how it deals with the urban renewal projects of Greenwich Village by using banal and discarded materials to create

elaborate sculptures. In Fluxus artist George Maclunas's performance piece Street Cleaning Event Ward writes about how the space that the piece is being performed changes the meaning of the piece radically. When the piece was performed in Tokyo it was meant to reference the

Japanese government's emphasis on cleaning the city for the Olympics that were coming to the city, bringing in to question the governments priorities. But when the piece was performed in Brooklyn, "it becomes a humorous and absurdist encounter between the daily activity of

cleaning and the endless context of the street." writes Ward.

George Maciunas, documentation of Hi Red Center

performing Street Cleaning Event at Grand Army Plaza Brooklyn, 1966.

Ward writes about artists such as Valie Export and Yoko Ono who created art that brought

into question the female in the street, whether it be about the objectification of the female body

or the supposed danger the street environment purposes for women. In Export's piece

Touch Cinema she goes out into the street with a "cinema" strapped to her torso, with curtains.

She then with the help of a male friend encourages men to reach in and feel her breasts for real.

Yoko Ono's film Rape shows not only how the street can be threatening, but also how the

camera itself is a threatening device to the young woman that is being stalked or "raped"

by it.

For the artist Vito Acconci's Following Piece he followed a person at random out on the

streets daily, where ever that person may go for however long it takes for the person to enter a

space such as a home or business. Acconci let go of control as to where the street would take

him, he hands that control over to the person that he was following.

Vito Acconci Following Piece, 1969

In Lytle Shaw's The Powers of Removal: Interventions in the Name of the City she begins by telling the reader what Henry James thought of New York City after a twenty-one year absences from the city. James sees the city as lacking an permanence and Shaw describes what James feels of New York City's ability to destroy the old and put up the new as, "a sequence of abrupt melting's and just-as-sudden solidifications." James felt that the tall skyscrapers that began to dwarf the small structures within the city only allowed him to imagine the

monstrosity that would follow in its place.

Artists that Shaw writes about who were making art about the demolition of buildings in New York City, whether it be the literal destruction of them with the film Pendulum or photographers such as Danny Lyons who photographs showed the changing views of New York City, were all about a city go through a massive change.

Danny Lyon, Brick Crew on West Side

In Charles Simmons work Shaw sees it as inviting both exploration and removal, it shows actual ruins with the tiny dwelling that he constructs amongst crumbling buildings. In the film Dwellings Winter (1974) made by Rudy Burckhardt, documenting Simonds constructing his dwellings, Shaw sees it as showing how Simonds manages the ruins spatially, with his finished art work that is contained in the ruins that is the neighborhood itself. Through out the film Simonds continues working on his dwellings amongst the chaos of the city that surrounds his work, from a car burning and the fire department coming to put it out, to music playing, children running around, and construction noises. None of this seems to distract him from continuing to constructing his dwellings within the space destroyed buildings.

In all the readings this week the street not only becomes a space to document, but also a space to create art in. The street becomes a canvas for many of these artists, Simonds does this by utilizing the buildings that are crumbling and creating a new dwelling within it. While others like Acconci and Export place themselves physically in the street and interact with it as a performance. These artists all begin to question what the street is, especially whether that space is public or private.

Chicago

In Dominic Pacyga’s Chicago: A Biography ‘Daley City’ we learn the influence one man had over one of the largest cities in America. When Daley began as mayor of Chicago the cities downtown, area faced immense problems because of lack of any investment in the area. Daley shaped major institutions and civic buildings, such as the U.S. Courthouse. He also pushed for there to be a four year state university within the city limits. Many public housing developments had come out of the New Deal, such as Jane Addams Homes and Lathrop Homes. The inner cities hit a major set back though when investments were made in suburbia after the war and not in the downtown area. From the 1940s until today the city has continued to decline in population with many people moving to the out skirts of the city or suburbia. After World War II the city of Chicago just like New York City began constructing high-rise public housing. Although Daley tried to fight, the high-rise plans more then once in Washington, advocating for smaller four-story buildings, they were built anyways. They would later become some of the most problematic areas within the city of Chicago. The housing projects such as the Robert Taylor Homes created massive population density, and the overcrowding soon allow the newly constructed developments to become horrific spaces. In the 1950s housing projects were predominately populated by African Americans, while the suburban areas were mainly Caucasians. Because Caucasian aldermen opposed construction of any public housing in their communities and African American aldermen saw the public housing as a better form of housing and also a solid way to get votes in an area.

With the construction of the Congress Expressway in the 1950s cutting right across the city. “The new system tied the city and suburbs together and cut great holes in the cityscape bringing dramatic demographic changes in its wake.” To describe the expressway construction as cutting holes in the cityscape is visually drastic way of describing the effects that the highway had on the city. Chicago a city that had developed

up because of the railroad was now shifting away from this form of transportation of goods to trucking because of the government’s investment in the country’s highway infrastructure. The construction of the Dan Ryan Expressway continued to segregate the city separating whites and blacks. The expressway was constructed through “poor and working-class white and minority neighborhoods.” The areas surrounding the Dan Ryan Expressway were predominately populated by blacks when it was constructed. In the 1960s, Daley’s support from the black population began to slip with the increasing civil rights movement throughout Chicago and the country.

Photographer Richard Nickel collected photographs throughout Chicago, with an immense focus on photographing Louis Sullivan’s architecture before it was torn down or while it was being torn down. It was clear that Nickel’s found beauty through the photograph of buildings during their “death”.