The Cyclic City

In Johanna Burton’s essay, New York, Beside Itself, she explores the concept of the living city. She referred to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s experience with the World Trade Center. The historical implications in the absence of the World Trade Center changed the landscape but didn’t change Sedgwick’s act of looking over her shoulder to view it, although it was gone. The cityscape was a part of her personal experience as a New York City resident.

World Trade Center Site, September, 2007. Photo by: Orrin Otherwords.

In Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud attempted to prove that nothing in mental life could perish. What he concluded was that in attempting to visualize what has past alongside what the latest development, created an unimaginable and absurdist world. The only way to show history is through the juxtaposition in space.

The idea that the same space can’t possess two different contents has produced work from artists who have claimed space within the history of the city. New York can be seen both actually and perpetually through the personal and public experiences of the people who inhabit it.

The City in History, Absolutism and Urbanity, Lewis Mumford. 

In his book, Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism, Jonathan Flatly considers the self in relation to social relations connecting the past and present as one. The city is a shared territory with the past, present, and future. A person’s relation to the city is not independent and can only be experienced taking into consideration what has gone before, buildings that have been destroyed never to exist again. The independent exists within the unexpected space of this absence. Space in the city is seen as a reincarnation in constant shift.

Burton referred to Joan Jonas’s performance, Delay Delay, which was photographically documented. Jonas claimed the space of the land to ritualize movement through time. Manhattan is defined for Burton through one of the photographs, blurring the experience between her actual experience and the interceding visual impression.

Joan Jonas, Delay Delay. 

http://techtv.mit.edu/videos/4155-joan-jonas---performative-city

Artists such as Emily Roysdon explore art as public. In, Talk is Territorial, Roysdon’s work with the Christopher Street Piers, known for gay sex in the 70’s, explores how these piers still exist not just as an architectural relic but also as a history of experience. Roysdon claims the piers history for women. 

Emily Roysdon, Talk is Territorial.

In, Untitled, Roysdon mimics David Wojnarowicz’s, Arthur Rimbaud in New York, in an attempt to intensify the queer relationship to history through time. Her work was layered in that she didn’t’ mimic Wojnarowicz, she was occupied by him. In being occupied by him she became him, keeping the impulse for his art alive. 

Emily Roysdon, Untitled.

In, Bodies-Cities, Elizabeth Grosz writes about the city as an assemblage of parts, substances and linkages. The interrelations between these create systems in temporary alignment. In, Space, Time and Perversion, Grosz explores the city as individual and populace. She argues that codes and conventions of the city can never be neutral or conclusive. Therefore Roysdon’s work shows the reciprocal relation between a person in the city, accentuating that the body occupies the city and the city occupies the body creating a mutual and constant reformation within the city.

The occupation of space makes that space more dimensional. Artists such as Tom Burr, John Miller and Donald Moffett explore the meaning of sites and what lies beneath the surface of the exterior. Their work refuses to let go of and memorializing what threatens to be the past. Burr emphasizes the “tension between things being held together and things falling apart.” This tension exists within the urbanization infrastructure and continues to be a source of artistic discourse and productivity. Burr’s photographic collages draw attention to the remaining and the unconscious existence within the city.


http://www.publicartvienna.at/files_e/11_burr.html

Photographer Zoe Leonard provides citations of subjects represented in the photos. Her photographs show the history of what is left behind. The subjects are represented and understood without being present in the photo. She photographs in a way to show that social space and conventions are framed by meanings experienced in those spaces. She photographs the insignificant. Rosalyn Deutsche discussed the ideal of public and the invisible operations that generate spaces. She concluded that meaning only exists in an interactive space consisting of social relationships. Leonard’s images are social relationships existing in unexpected structures that induce interaction. 

 Sharon Hayes’ work, In the Near Future, documented her demonstrating with signs. Her work was a reflection of identity. Her lone interaction with the space was not an act of demonstration but was recognizable as such because of the viewers learned identity and embrace of the characteristics of that learned identity in society. This is further explored in John Searle’s, Speech Act, in which he argues that language’s operations are an emphasis on systems and rules of speech. It is only through digression that one can define behavior. To recognize an act is the ability to grasp the concept of an act. Through art, Hayes asks the viewer to revise conventions by revisiting conceptions. In standing in a space, Hayes’ occupation is about presence in that space; by physically standing in a space, she creates a discourse for dialogue and generates conversation. Her work encompasses time, self and space. She stands alone yet stands in and with the community. Jean-Luc Nancy distinguishes between the phrase common being, as a desire for a community as a whole and being-in-common as being with, where commonality exists within the uncommonness.

Sharon Hayes, In the Near Future.

According to Burton, the phrase, being with, represents a capacity for, “an impossible occupation of time and space.” Being-in-common creates spaces of relational possibility. In redrawing or translating the past, one can live beside a city sharing a collective mapping through time. Beside allows for a more spacious idea in relation to distinct modes of thinking. Beside possesses discourse between relations in a shared cyclical existence of the city.