Many artists photographed this transition, documenting the removal of familiar buildings. According to Shaw, this removal was not just a physical one, but a mental and emotional one. It was a reflection and symbol of the loss of optimism in the modernization of cities.
Abandoned West Side Highway. Photo credit: Andy Blair, 1975.
Different concepts of the public arena are discussed, as well. Something that is considered public domain is exposed to the general view. Beyond the general definition of the word public are the varying conceptions of what is public. Shaw stated that one concept is that of the social normative but there is not one singular public as it is never all-inclusive. According to Deutsche, the concept of public art has a nostalgic and regressive use because he believed that it is never inclusive or universal. He also believed that urbanism is a tangible form of the public and is exposed to diverse critical discourse.
Artists have been critiqued using the regressive transformation of the city in symptomatic and critical ways. David Harvey felt that Cindy Sherman’s work, Untitled Film Stills, was symptomatic of the transformations taking place in Lower Manhattan at the time where Deutsche felt that Sherman’s work was used as a critical intervention. This debate contains two sides including totality and identity. According to Shaw, totality maintains accurate and objective points of view whereas identity is closely connected to the feelings and experiences of the artist.
Artists such as James Nares created work not intended as a confrontational public action. His film, Pendulum, exposes the desolation, isolation and decrepit industrial architecture of Lower Manhattan by filming the motion of a wrecking ball which brings attention to the transformation within the environment creating a metaphor between the action of the wrecking ball and the symbolism of urban development. Much of the street art created during this time symbolically represented the destruction of a city and the effects on its inhabitants, who were driven into active social responsibility and political consciousness.
A connection to one’s city is activated through history. Artists living in Lower Manhattan during the 70’s brought its history to life. America has survived a series of risings and perishing, removal and building, living and dying. I moved to Pilsen in 1999. I remember walking to the local grocer on my street and old women sitting on their porches called me puta as I walked by. Hand painted signs displayed in apartment windows said, "Gringo, go home." Many of the people living in that neighborhood had been there their whole lives. They were angry and threatened by my coming into their neighborhood and taking up residence, and I understood. These women maintained a sense of meaning and had a history of experiences connected to their neighborhood. I meant no disrespect to the old inhabitants. It was just the neighborhood that I could afford at the time. It was just the beginning of the cycle of gentrification in Pilsen.
Matthew Buckingham’s film, Muhheakantuck-Everything Has a Name, focuses on the landscape and the previous removal of Native American’s that made the settling of the city possible. He believed in the deactivation of urban names. This cannot be obtained without addressing personal vantage points and the differentiation between true history and claims to knowledge. The debate about the view of the city must be addressed by unlearning the familiar. Buckingham’s narrative touches on the machines of capitalism, a culture of violence, and the ethnocentrism of explorers. Through examining Lower Manhattan’s past, he brings forth a new history. The idea of public is an element of city life that remains transient. According to Shaw, documentary art is in gathering the overlooked rather than making a statement. A documentary photograph becomes documentary when it is articulated into a category. In Jimbo Blachly’s About 86 Springs, he remapped his way through the overlooked spaces through occupying, visiting, and moving within the space. History is created through a cycle of building and destruction, removal and gentrification. Because of constant cycles, the inhabitant’s of an urban city constantly have to remap their way through the familiar.
In the reading, Shifting Ground: Street Art of the 1960’s and 70’s, Frazer Ward discussed the status of the street in relation to art practices. Conflicting views of street art existed between the protest culture and the counterculture during the 60’s and 70’s. The protest culture focused on filling the streets with people in order to generate change. In turn people claimed the street as a public arena. According to Ward, the counterculture used the streets “for the appearance and performance of the new, anti-normative styles of behavior.” In referring to the Shaw reading, the protest culture made the street public. The counterculture created a self-positioning debate.
LSU Public Relations, Peace Rally, 1970. Photo credit: University Archives, LSU Public Relations.
Summer of Love, 1968.
Jacques de la Villegie’s, Decollage was a way to reclaim a form of public expression and bind together tensions of the time. He used the street as a political arena. He viewed the overlooked urban environment as a struggle between the everyday and the recast.
Decollage, Jacques de la Villegie.
Claes Oldenburg’s The Street, conveyed the struggle between the modernist renewal and used, leftover materials, similarly to Nares wrecking ball.
Announcement: The Street, Claes Oldenburg.
Fluxus was a name given to artists who combined different mediums in their work. These artists were lured to the street and blurred the distinction between what was considered art and non-art through performance. Some artists used the street as a way to express the every day and the ordinary while others saw it as a place where behaviors were shaped by the mass media. Artists such as Valie Export and Yoko Ono addressed the distinction of women as real human beings juxtaposed to the women that are represented in the media. In Ono’s Rape, the street is rendered a dangerous place, which shreds a person’s privacy. It also portrays the street as surveillance. Vito Acconci’s Following Piece explored the relations between voyeur and object. A distinction between public and private is established when the subject stops at an apartment building’s door. His location of the self is positional. This establishes the street as an object of inquiry that isn’t allowed to seem neutral or natural as Shaw stated, meaning that subjectivity to it isn’t neutral or natural, as well. Acconci’s view was more personal and positional whereas Export’s and Ono’s were representational of women as a whole.
Fluxus Manifesto by George Maciunas, 1963.
Adrian Piper’s, The Mythic Being series accentuates the relationship between identity and representation and accentuates that race is connected within representation. David Wojnarowicz’s series of Arthur Rimbaud in New York also explores identity and representation. The street is constantly changing and transforming itself. Artists shift through the streets and used them as a critique of art creating a subtle political character in a public sphere.
In the reading, Two Way Street, Lydia Yee discusses photography from New Documents. She argues that this photo exhibit explored personal style rather than conveying a social message. The photographers involved with New Documents were more interested in living life than reforming it. Other artists involved in the Information exhibition embraced mass media and used photography to document their art. The banal is discussed again as Yee references to Ed Ruscha’s, Every Building of the Sunset Strip. In the late 60’s, Acconci, like Ruscha, balanced his work between street photography, photojournalism, and Conceptualism.
In Martha Rosler’s, The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems, she photographs the area in New York known as “skid row.” She includes words along with her photographs in an effort to criticize. The existence of the words breaks the debate between documentary and conceptual photography.
Using photography to archive the urban transformations in China, photographer Sze Tsung Leong documents historic areas reduced to rubble using a large format camera. Photographer Zoe Leonard has been archiving small shops disappearing in gentrifying neighborhoods. Nils Norman photographs in commercial and financial districts that include barriers toward its inhabitants. Francis Alys created a photographic archive through walking. All of these photographers utilize the street in their art. The complexity and ever shifting movement of the street provides artists with subjects being reinvented and paths to be remapped on a daily basis.
No. 3 Huashizhong Fourth Lane, Chongwen District, Beijing, 2003. Photo credit: Sze Tsung Leong.
In the reading, The Urban Event: Spectacle, Resistance, and Hegemony, Karen Jones addressed the powers of removal in historical terms by noting the Native American practice of Potlatch, which was the “destruction of property to an act of communal social exchange/negotiation value.” She stated that the practice of the potlatch is very similar to the riot.
Merriam- Webster Dictionary.
Graffiti art emerged as urban youth claimed the streets as public spaces available for representation. Graffiti artists used public space to gain cultural validation and as a forum to comment on the social order. Their art was a representation of the experience of the postmodern city. The urban social conditions in New York during the late 70’s and early 80’s were unequal and graffiti art politicized these conditions. The graffiti gesture isn't a welcomed one in the city of chicago.
According to Jones, the word “riot” is synonymous with the re-negotiation of power. The act of resistance challenges an existing order and becomes social domain. Riots are political, social, and activate public space. She addresses the Tompkins Square Riot of 1988 as a significant conflict. The East Village art scene forced rents up and displaced residents who had been living there for a very long time, similar to what has happened in the Pilsen neighborhood. This transformed the neighborhood and displaced people, creating a recycled neighborhood. Because of gentrification, there were a large number of homeless people who had taken up residence in the Tompkins Square Park. The police tried to enforce a curfew, which they felt would clean the park of the homeless. The riot occurred through the effort of people to claim access to public space. Wicker Park experienced a similar cycle of change in the 1990’s. Many of the artists that I knew, including myself, who lived in Wicker Park moved to Pilsen because the rents in Wicker Park skyrocked and the rents in Pilsen were more affordable, creating another cycle of gentrification.
The restructuring of the Tompkins neighborhood left its inhabitants feeing abandoned. According to Jones, homelessness is a result of urbanization and a technology based economy. This is a topic of discussion that has existed within all of the readings so far, and is a reality in society to this day. Just as art practices reclaim agency for people who are oppressed by the realities imposed by the postmodern city, the riot has become an urban event.
No comments:
Post a Comment