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.