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”.

Week 7

In Ed Ruscha, Pop Art, and Spectatorship in 1960s Los Angeles, Ken D. Allan argues thatRuscha's paintings tackle the activity "between the pictorial space, the mental space, and theactual space that structures our encounters with works of art as objects. In Ruscha's Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights we see a representation of a city not through a building but an iconic symbol that very much represents Los Angeles. According to Allan one of the most important aspects to Ruscha's paintings is their ability to require from the viewer a bodily participation. Even Ruscha himself refers to the paintings as friendly characters that he picked up and moved around his studio. To Ruscha the paintings were three-dimensional and he helped create that through painting on the sides where the canvas wraps around the stretch bars and then putting text down the side. The bodily participation was also evoked through things like small details some times at the bottom of the paintingand large text across the top half.

In Flash, L.A. Times, Ruscha employed this technique by painting a very detailed rolled up newspaper that would require the viewer to walk up closely to the painting and maybe even tilt their head. The positioning of the paper gives the impression that the paper is lying on top of the surface, like it is on a table. The text FLASH creates the opposite affect creating a vertical space. It is this horizontal and vertical space in one painting that creates issues of spectatorship. The text in Ruscha's paintings are also strong representations of the billboard

and advertising that had become an integral part of the Los Angeles landscape by the 1960s.

In Standard Station with Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half the viewer is still being torn between the vertical and horizontal views. The other quality to this painting is it's comment on the city of Los Angeles's dependency on the automobile and how one was constantly viewing the city landscape from the car. Although the painting still works as an object because of the small comic book in the upper corner creating the horizontal space, making the whole painting seem like a table. It becomes even more clear of Ruscha's concern with ones experience with his work to be a bodily experience with his small books photographs of the vernacular. To look at a book especially as small as Ruscha's books are it becomes a very bodily hand held experience. Ruscha was obviously fascinated with the way one viewed the city of Los Angeles from a car, as in one of his most famous pieces Every Building on Sunset Strip photographs of all the

buildings on sunset strip, are not only taken from Ruscha's car but by the car's motor drive.

In Pop LA Cecile Whiting begins by writing about the highly sexualized qualities of the automobile. Artists Judy Chicago and Billy Al Bengston, and Kenneth Anger all used the shine, the chrome, and physicality of the car to evoke at times erotic imagery, as well as male and female sexual symbols. Edward Kienholz’s approach to using the automobile and sex was not reliant on the shine an chrome of the car, it was reliant on the idea that the car though thought very often to be this place that is private is still can become a very public space. When Whiting writes about Vija Celmins and Ruscha, she acknowledges that they wanted to show the view from the car. Although just as Ken Allan had acknowledged that Ruscha's Standard Station paintings were painted to low to be at the view of the driver, they view was lower to the ground more from the angle of the license plate. According to Whiting, "Ruscha's painting accentuated the features of commercial facades that claim the momentary glance of the driver in transit through the streets of Los Angeles. To me Ruscha's Standard Station paintings shows a much detailed look at the landscape that had become Rushca's home and constant subject matter for his art. Such precise rendering and detail to represent these places and spaces as common place as they were seemed of great concern to Ruscha.

Whiting goes on to compare Ruscha's Twentysix Gasoline Stations to Robert Franks's photograph of a gas station in Santa Fa, New Mexico that appears in his book The Americans. Whiting claims that Franks's gas station photograph is one that shows a pessimistic view of the road, and is a sort of metaphor for diminishing hopes and the entire scene gives off a great sense of loneliness. While Ruscha's photographs are void of any human emotion, with their deadpan style and bleached out skies, the comment on the commercial vernacular within our landscape, not human condition. I am not sure I agree with Whiting here as Ruscha is showing us a human condition of sorts, this was now the American landscape in many places, as common place and repetitive as it was, it was what man had created, and its redundancy alone was depressing.

Week 6

In Action Around the Edges Douglas Crimp begins by writing about his moving from an apartment in Greenwich Village to one in Tribeca. I was at first confused why Crimp was writing about moving to a new apartment, until a little further into the reading when one learns that the article is all about the reusing of spaces. Crimp was himself moving into a loft that had been converted form a commercial space to a residence. Not only was he himself participating in the reuse of the old industrialized parts of New York City, but also he was concerned with his “spatial implementation” of moving out ofwhat he referred to as the gay scene to the art scene. He felt by surrounding himself with people from the art scene this would allow himself to be more serious about being an art critic. I question this notion that living in an area recognized by society or those within the city as an artist neighborhood, or neighborhood that somehow embodies the art scene makes one more of an artist or knowledgeable about the arts. Crimp himself suggests that his move was a failure of sorts. This notion that the “area” or neighborhood one lives in defines you so thoroughly is one that is very prevalent in Chicago, not that I agree with it. It is widely accepted that the neighborhood of Boys Town is a gay neighborhood, Wicker Park is a hip young neighborhood, that some would consider to be an art scene neighborhood, though it has become less and less of one as years have passed, and new neighborhoods take that title such asPilsen and Bridgeport. What Crimp really focuses on though is the artists’ resourceful use of the industrial areas of New York City in the1970s. Crimp starts with Gordon Matta-Clark’s work and describes it as the city itself, and that he shows the city “simultaneously as neglected and usable, as dilapidated and beautiful, as loss and possibility. Matta-Clark worked with abandoned structures and looked for emptiness within the city that he could use as his canvas of sorts. Other artists that Crimp writes about all have this quality of emptiness of the city, abandonment in their work. Crimp mentions photographers Bernard Guillot, Peter Hujar, and Cindy Sherman who all managed to create an image of New York city that seemed with out people and empty. Then Crimp brings up the work of Louise Lawler who created a sound piece of loud bird like noises that she made when walking through the area near the Hudson River pier to feel safer. This reminded me of Jane Jacobs’s theory that the more people mingling in an area the safer it would be. The pier space that Matta-Clark and other artists were using as their canvases was also a placethat many gay men utilized for a place to sunbathe and cruise. I thought of photographer Doug Ischar’s work Marginal Waters, where he photographed the area Belmont rocks along Lake Michigan in Chicago that was a popular sunbathing spot for gay men in the 1980s. Now the area like the pier in New York has since been destroyed. Culture Class: Art, Creativity, Urbanism begins to discuss the link between art and urbanism. Martha Rosler writes that she is going to explore the position that Richard Florida an urban studies theorist, takes by creating the term “creative class” and how this has played a role in shaping our cities. What Roslar really writes about, in what seems to be an introduction to more writing, is what role culture, particularly the arts has played in shaping the postwar city. Once the industrial parts of the city were unnecessary and the identity of the city itself was no longer that of industry what was it then? This new idenity of the city was not going to be onethat included the working class that had populated the city during the height of industrialization. Cities were now being created to cater to the middle and upper classes. What took place would later be called gentrification, the large purchases of homes in need of remodeling, was a way for neighborhoods to be redeveloped, but this forced out the poor. Many of these areas were perfect for the artist who wanted a large loft space. It is very easy to trace back through the process of gentrification of a neighborhood and see that it begins many times with artists. The idea of artists moving into neighborhoods cities deemed in need ofredevelopment was embraced by city officials as a way to shape a city culturally while driving out the working class and poor.

Though I found Rosalyn Deutsche’s Evictions Art and Spatial Politics, a tough read that I am not quite sure I fully understand I will give this a try. Deutsche is trying to investigate the relationships between contemporary art, space, and political struggles. She goes about doing this by showing how ideas about art are combined with theories on social and public space. In the first section of her book she explores the social function of art within urbanism, and how art is beneficial to the urban environment. Deutsche examines how space is political and the struggle over that space. I was reminded of the project that occurs all over the world once a year called PARK(ing) Day. People go to a metered parking spot in a city and create a park within the confines of the space for people to utilize for the time that it is up. In Deutsche’s essay Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Homeless Projection and the Site of Urban ‘Revitalization’, she looks at how things like parks and historic preservation of buildings were used as disguises of the ugly parts of urban redevelopment, that was really gentrification. She goes on in subsequent essays to discuss the role public art had on public space, such as beautifying, being socially responsible and functional. In her essay Property Values: Hans Haacke, Real Estate, and the Museum Deutsche discusses the work of Haacke’s that was meant to be shown at the Guggenheim Museum is 1971, but was canceled at the last minute. The piece was of photographs of numerous tenement buildings and empty lots in sums of New York City, as well as charts laying out real estate transactions, which showed connections between some of the museum’s board of trustees. Deutsche saw the work’s censorship as an example of the museums’ exclusionary qualities and how institutions such as the Guggenheim have created the slum environment through numerous actions. Not only that but the museum art environment, such as artists, galleries, and the building of museums raised rents in this slum areas forcing people out of their homes.

In The Death and Life of Great American Cities Jane Jacobs is not concerned with how a city “ought” to look, she is concerned with how it works. The brunt of her argument is that cities have intricate and diverse uses that give each other mutual support economically and socially. Jacobs breaks up her book in four parts, with the first part focusing on ordinary scenes and events, the social behavior of people in cities. The second part is her argument that economic behavior of cities is the most important factor. Part three is about decay and regeneration, how cities are used, how cities and the people in them behave in real life. The fourth part is about the problems that cities create and suggests for changes in housing, traffic, design, planning, etc. Although Jacobs writes that the most important part of her argument is the economic and social behavior of cities, it is clear that one of the most important factors to Jacobs is REAL LIFE. Jacobs writes in her introduction that unsuccessful city areas that do not have the mutual support economically and socially and “ that the science of city planning and the art of city design, in real life for real cities, must become the science and art of catalyzing and nourishing these close-grained working relationships.” It is the lack of urban planners and anyone else involved in the development of great cities observing how real cities function well and how real life functions with the cities that Jacobs calls out. Jacobs uses a brief example of a housing project’s grass in New York and how everyone hated the grass who lived there because it was an illusion that all was well with the housing project when it really wasn’t. When developers built the place they never asked the people who were going to live there what they wanted, again the lack of dealing with real life. Jacobs then goes on to list people who have had the greatest impact on city planning theory such as Ebenezer Howard, Sir Patrick Geddes, the Decentrists (Lewis Mumford, Clarence Stein, Henry Wright, and Catherine Bauer) and Le Corbusier. Howard’s did not like cities and his ideas for them according to Jacobs were city destroying. Howards Garden City model that was also embraced by the Decentrists, was to thin cities out, de-center them, create smaller separate cities or even towns. Streets were bad, people should never be on them, commerce and residence areas should always be separate from each other, and the city should be self-contained and never change or grow. Jacobs claims that the Decentrists only looked at the failing parts of a city and nothing else, which left them with no understanding as to how a successful city would look and work. Although the Decentrists were against Le Corbusier, he also adopted some of Howards’s Garden City ideas in his Radiant City, a “vertical garden city.” Le Corbusier’s vertical city was a city of towers with green all around and it embraced the unchangeable aspect of the Garden City plan. Le Corbusier felt that skyscrapers were the answer to the problems of cities. Many of these ideas became plans for low-income public housing. In many of the city of Chicago’s public housing developments, such as Cabrini Green, Robert Taylor Homes, Henry Horner Homes, and Harold Ickes Homes, the city embraced the high-rise building surrounded by green, and island off. All of these public housing plans have been deemed as failures that segregated low-income families off from the rest of the city, fostered gang activity, and created dangerous living environments. Today almost all are torn down and some are in the process of redevelopment in to smaller town homes with mixed income within the same space. The Garden City of the Decentrists and the Radiant City of Le Corbusier has had a great impact on the city of Chicago. Jacobs also claims that when she wrote the book in the 1950s city planners were combining the two plans to create cities and that this was a mistake. In Jacobs’s chapter The Curse of Border Vacuums, she discusses how borders function in cities. Jacobs claims that massive single uses in cities create borders and those borders are damaging for neighborhoods in cities. Jacobs is concerned not with the social results of borders, but the physical and functional effects of borders on their direct surroundings. Things she lists as boarders are train tracks, waterfronts, big-city university campuses, civic centers, hospital grounds, and large parks. Since all of these types of boards she lists are not necessarily noisy unattractive, or undesirable of a location, there must be another reason that blight develops around these boards. Jacobs says that these boards form dead ends and walls for those who use city streets. She claims that for streets to stay safe there must be a constant mingling of people within these places for different reasons. The evidence Jacobs provides for this is an article published in the New York Post around the time she was writing the book, about a murder in an area that had become increasingly vacant once the construction of the Cross-Bronx Expressway began. Jacobs saw the construction of the Expressway creating lesson of a reason for people to go to that border causing fewer people to mingle in the area, causing shops to close early. Jacobs divides all land in to two types general land and special land. General land is anywhere people circulate on foot in public, streets, small parks, and maybe building lobbies used like streets. Special land is not for public passage; people walk around it or next to it, it is technically in the way. A person circulating on foot in public is either not allowed in this special land or does not care to enter it, such as homes or places of work. Although special land contributes the people for general land, it also interferes with it. The evidence that Jacobs provides is a term used by downtown merchants “dead place” a place that goes empty on a downtown street. A dead place causes significant loss in foot traffic in the area around it because there is no use for it, and no reason for someone to go in to it or even go near it. This causes a “geographical obstacle to the general land.” Again, Jacobs shows when a border has only a single use than less people will come to it and mingle. Jacobs’s approach to correcting these single use borders is to create a seamless border. She suggests that parks should not put their activities such as ice-skating rinks in the center of the park but on the border. Then with corporation of the areas next to this border create something like a cafe or a place to rent skates in the area across from the border. This approach will allow for a seamless border that will help create multiple uses. Robert Moses In Robert Fishman’s Revolt of the Urbs the argument is that Moses’s critics of his plan to put a highway through Washington Square Park led to the larger debate on American Urbanism. One sees how Robert Moses convinced the public that he knew what was best for them, which was usually a massive clearing of any section of land that happened to be in his way for his great bridges, highways, expressways, and even parks. Moses forced relocation for numerous people who he saw as in the way of his projects. The battle to build a highway through New York’s Washington Square Park in the 1950s is where Moses met his greatest opposition, particularly that of Jane Jacobs. Moses wanted to build a highway through the park linking to his Lower Manhattan Expressway. This goes against everything Jacobs writes about in her chapter on boarders. According to Jacobs’s theory on borders, the highway would create more borders and fragment the park into single use pieces, which would diminish mingling of people in that area. The issues Jacobs and others bring up that were against Moses’s ideas were that diverse neighborhoods were at the heart of a city, pedestrians and mass transit should be focused on over the automobile, the importance of public space, and the “traditional streetscape” over skyscrapers in the park. Lastly, and probably the most important idea especially to Jacobs was listening to the people living in and using the city over the urban planner. This is where we come back to Jacobs’s argument that we need to observe “real life” to see how a city can function successfully, not just accepting the vision of the urban planner with the administrative power. Extremely influenced by Le Corbusier’s ideas for the city of high towers with lots of room for automobiles on the ground, Moses embraced the automobile in the city. He rejected the small garden city town ideas of Mumford, but wanted to completely wipe out slum areas and rebuild a modern landscape. The House Act of 1949 not only secured government funding for many of Moses’s ideas, but also secured the support for clearing out the land he wanted to construct those ideas upon. It is clear that Moses’s unsuccessful attempt to fragment the park did not work, but he was responsible for many other projects that did just that through out the city of New York. In Claes Oldenburg’s “The Street” and Urban Renewal in Greenwich Village, Joshua Shannon claims that Oldenburg relied on the “flames and wreckage” of New York’s Greenwich Village in the 1960s. He used this changing environment as his sort of canvas for his productions. The changing city was due to the modernist vision to create order within the city and to eliminate chaos. This meant getting rid of streets because that is where the chaos lies. The streets that photographer Helen Levitt photographed were the embodiment of this chaos with children using the streets as their playroom. In another of Oldenburg’s pieces, Snapshots of the City at the end of the performance he is hit by a cardboard car which is the final thing that finishes him off. This comment on the automobile is extremely appropriate for the time and the place. Oldenburg lived in the area around the Washington Square Park that had only just won its long battle of banning cars from the park. Shannon points out the difference between Jane Jacobs’s view of the city and Oldenburg’s The Street was that Jacobs fought for a “delightfully quirky city” while The Street, portrayed it as dirty, violent, and full of poverty. The claim is that The Street’s image of the city is one of disorder or “of obdurate stuff refusing to be abstracted into order or legibility.” The point that Shannon is trying to make about Oldenburg’s work is that if he is trying to show an image of the city that is chaotic and disordered, he does not sell this image as a good one by depicting it as violent and dirty. All of the readings this week discuss the ever-growing need by urban planners and city administrators to organize the chaos that in their eyes had taken over cities. Influenced from many different people from different countries what seems to be the biggest misconception by urban planners was their belief that one plan worked for all city problems and that this plan would be a permanent solution that would never need changing. This really leads me to agree with Jane Jacobs writing that there was a lack of observing real life in the city by urban planners and that without doing so they would never understand how a city could function well.