Zoe Strauss is a photo-based, conceptual, installation artist. She was given a camera on her 30th birthday and began making photos in her neighborhood. Her photographs consist of dilapidated architecture, perplexing signage, and the ordinary lives of the people in her city. Her work is known for its candid, raw, and gritty reflection of the standard of living in the marginalized neighborhoods in Philadelphia.
I had the opportunity to experience Strauss speak at The Art Institute in 2009. As a photographer, she has been accused of exploiting the inhabitants of her neighborhood who are viewed as living on the edges of society. She fired back at this accusation by stating that she just simply made photos of her neighbors and how they are interpreted has nothing to do with her intent. She argued that if she was seen as exploiting the people in her neighborhood, then she was therefore exploiting herself since she co-existed with the people she photographed. Her work contemplates what she describes as, “the beauty and struggle of everyday life.”
In 1995, Strauss started the Philadelphia Public Art Project to give the citizens of Philadelphia access to art in their everyday lives. The project commissions new works of public art in addition to assisting with temporary art initiatives with non-profit organizations. An inclusion of this project is, Under I-95, which takes place beneath the Interstate highway in South Philadelphia. The area beneath is a functional public space that serves as an outdoor gallery as Strauss displays her photos on the concrete pillars beneath the highway.
Strauss’ work is pivotal to the urban city in that it reflects its most real and deepest aspects. Her work is powerful, sincere, explicit, and influential. Using the city as her backdrop and its inhabitants as the source of her inspiration, her photographs reflect daily life in and ever-changing 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.
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.
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.
In the reading, Reversed Images: Representations of Shanghai and Its Contemporary Material Culture, the transformation of the city of Shanghai is documented by several artists using various mediums. Shanghai has become one of the most productive cities in the global economy. It has defined itself in the technological and commercial world. These transformations have varying affects on Shanghai’s physical environment and cultural history, and are explored through art in Reversed Images using different themes. Shi Guorui’s Shanghai, documents the city’s romantic past and its shift to modernization. Expansion, modernization, and contemporary functionalism are explored in Xu Xixian’s photographs of Shanghai’s landscapes during the 1970’s and 80’s. His son, Xu Jianrong revisited the very same landscapes 20 years after his father had photographed them, just as Ed Ruscha did with his photographs of every building of the Sunset Strip. Xu Jianrong’s photographs showed how the locations and surrounding environment had changed. His sociological approach was an expression of the progression of the city.
A Changing Shanghai, Xu Xixian and Xu Jianrong
Olivo Barbieri spoke at Ferguson Hall in 2009. Shooting from a helicopter using a tilt-shift lens, his aerial photographs documented urban environments. He talked about how using a tilt-shift lens allowed him to decide what he wanted to focus on. His images made cityscapes look like toy models. Shanghai’s highways at night expose modernization in conjunction of contemporary functionalism.
Olivo Barbieri, Shanghai Highway.
Isidro Blasco created sculptures encouraging participants to interact with them. These sculptures mimic aesthetics found in the city.
Isidro Blasco, In Shanghai at Last.
Zhu Feng focused on makeshift sculptures found on worksites. Zhou Xiaohu’s photographs show buildings in the process of being torn down surrounded by contemporary buildings. This reminded me of the photos of the Tompkins Square photos from last week. Su Chang used mixed media to create replicas of old buildings that had been torn down to create new neighborhoods. Jin Shan’s Build a home for your self, building for Shanghai, was an interactive art piece that spoke to the building rush in the city. This piece allowed a person to build his or her ideal home, giving voice to the voiceless. Birdhead was a photographic series documenting the demolition of a neighborhood for the 2010 Expo site. All of these works touch upon the reality of Shanghai (the present) and what has disappeared (the past).
Liu Gang’s Paper Dream series commented on social status and focused on real-estate advertisements.
Liu Gang, Paper Dream No14.
Speedism collaborated the information of several artists.
The role of an artist in a changing environment is explored in Yang Fudong’s The First Intellectual. The multimedia installation touched upon the evolution of contemporary art in a shifting capitalist economy.
Yang Fudong, The First Intellectual.
Individualism and social structures are represented in Ma Liang’s photographs of young, urban Chinese. Lu Yuanming photographed urbanites who despite economic change, continue to live their lives as they always had. Hu Yang’s Shanghai Living documented the living spaces of families from a sociological perspective recording the changes following modernization.
Hu Yang, Shanghai Living.
Yang Fudong’s Honey, explored the emerging middle class. These photographs look at how the traditional values in China have been affected by modernization.
Yang Fudong, Honey.
Zhang Qing’s work created a discourse on freedom using the extremely small apartments in Shanghai.
The film screenings for Nostalgia, and Shanghai Waiting for Paradise, touched upon the urbanization of Shanghai. These films document the traditional housing structures that disappeared from Shanghai’s old neighborhoods.
The artists in this exhibition explored the affects of urbanization and the metaphoric possibilities of globalization.
In the reading, Urban Destruction and Construction, Huang Yan made rubbings from buildings that were about to be destroyed. He made rubbings before, during, and after demolition. His work spanned ten years and the process of making the rubbings was documented using photography, film, audio and video recordings. These rubbings made me think of the last building standing at Cabrini Green. The art project is in collaboration with kids who attended the Cabrini Green workshops. It was surreal to see lights reflecting voices in an abandoned building. These lights gave voice to the voiceless and brought a bit of life back to the discarded building.
Project Cabrini Green, 1230 N. Burling.
Zhan Wang had a salvage scheme for the commercial area in Wangfujing Street where buildings were going to be demolished. Buildings were being demolished for capital and commercial modernization. He felt he was saving half-torn-down buildings by painting a joist red, painting doorframe white, cleaning decorative tiles, and decorating a wall with coating material. The same day, the rest of the building was destroyed. His salvage attempt was temporal.
Zhang Wang, Ruien Cleaning Project.
Wang also created artificial mountains made from stainless-steel plates. He created a copy of the original traditional “artificial rockery” (jiashanshi) mirroring the changing environment.
Zhan Wang, Artificial Rock No. 120.
Chen Shaoxiong photographed the streets of Guangzhou following the Western traditions of painting. By creating a photographic collage, 3D card figures reconstructed street scenes. Urban streets are not static. They are constantly changing at a rapid pace. The street becomes a part of a person’s temporal daily experience.
The Tiananmen Square protests were non-violent and led by students as a movement for political liberation and economic reform. The Tiananmen Square Massacre occurred in the center of Peking. The BBC News clip showed army trucks firing indiscriminately. People stood in shock witnessing as their own army fired at them. The army launched into an unarmed group of students. The people on the streets yelled, “Fascists! “Stop killing! “Down with the government!” Ambulances that tried to enter the square were turned away and even shot at. There were causalities every few seconds. People were shot just sitting in their homes.
The Tiananmen Square Mini Documentary by Anthony Thomas showed the man who is now known as “tank man.” Tiananmen Square is the largest public space in the world. The space exemplifies the insignificance of individual with regards to the government. The peoples Liberation Army converged on the Square on June 4th, 1989. The following day at noon, the tanks “danced” through the streets. A man stopped the procession by standing before the tanks. The front tank tried to move around him but the man continued to block it. Eventually, the tank’s engine was turned off and the rest of the tanks turned off their engines in sequence. Thomas felt that it was his responsibility to record what was happening as accurately as possible. He documented the event.
In March, 2011, China has surpassed the United States as the leading manufacturer. Dateline’s China’s Ghost Cities and Malls, explores the new district of Zheng Zhou in China. The government keeps building on the landscape to maintain economic growth. These new buildings remain vacant yet building continues. The South China Mall was supposed to be the world’s largest mall. Today, it is as empty as it was six years ago. The government grossly overestimated the consumer culture leaving the mall vastly empty. Government obsession with big building structures has left this district vacant. 70% of new units are unoccupied leaving 64 million empty apartments. Over supply promotes economic growth, which is the government’s first priority. The Chinese government dictates where resources are being spent. Buildings are being created when there is no demand and these units cost between $70-$100,000. The annual workers wages are only $6,000. So the people living there cant afford to live in the new housing developments. The occupancy rate is only 25% leaving empty apartments and condos. One resident living in a rented space commented on how he knew that some day his home would be demolished for new infrastructure. From his home, he can see the condos in the distance, which is only a reminder of not being able to afford a home. Where he lives has a communal toilet and sink. There isn’t any room for children and as a result, he only sees his child once a year. He wants to buy a home but he said, “The market pushes prices too high. The government needs to intervene.” It is expressed that the government does not support its people.
Professor Zhou Xioa Sheng spoke about polarization. He said that if China became polarized, it would be an example that reform has failed. He felt that polarization will cause conflict in society and poor people may come out and start a revolution. This is just another example of what could cause a riot or a revolution.
A Dateline journalist looked at a duplex that cost $300,000. Out the window of the duplex, an old neighborhood had been marked to be demolished. In order to buy a unit, a potential owner would have to pay 50% up front and the remaining balance over the next three years. The units are only affordable to high-income people. A month after the first tenants moved in, “for rent” signs went up in several windows. This district is an example of how the financial controls of the Chinese government have impoverished people. Historically, when their own governments impoverish people, social unrest follows.
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. Lee Friedlander's work influenced Acconci's Following Piece. By including his shadow, Friedlander's photographs exerted philosophical and reflective characteristics.
New York City, 1966. Lee Friedlander.
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.
The Bowery In Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems, Martha Rosler.
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.
Francis Alys created a photographic archive walking through the streets of Mexico City. In a similar work, Green Line, he creates a metaphor about the history of Jerusalem. Using his body and a can of green paint, he emulated the concrete partitions separating Israelis and Palestinians by walking through a divided country. Alys' direct contact with the land was a performance that revealed the complexity of the inhabitants of the space. This work has been argued to blur the distinction between art and documentation.
Robin Rhode also used a simple line to create stop-action videos. He physically engages with his work, as Alys does. Both artists approach the representational power of the street by direct interaction with it.
Catch Air: Robin Rhode @ Wexner Center.
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. The 1965 Watts Riots challenged the systems of power and the modes of transformation within the city of New York. The merger of art practice and social behavior politicized events.
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. Jean-Michel Basquiat used graffiti to address and critique the dominating influences within the art world. His work revealed the separations within classes in a postmodern city.
Untitled, Basquiat.
The City of Chicago considers all types of graffiti vandalism and therefore, the gesture of graffiti is not a welcomed one.
The argument between graffiti as vandalism and graffiti as art continues to be an ongoing debate. But who is to decide what is considered art and what is considered vandalism?
A scene from Beat This! A Hip Hop History, 1984.
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 sky rocketed and the rents in Pilsen were more affordable, creating yet another cycle of gentrification.
The restructuring of the Tompkins neighborhood left its inhabitants feeling 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. Gary Simmons's Everlast Champion is a comment on identity within the hip-hop culture which, according to the documentary, Beat This! A Hip Hop History, grew out "devastation, bad housing, gang wars, and desperation." In Beat This!, Dj Kool Herc takes a drive through the Bronx ghetto, exposing the abandoned.
An scene from Beat This! A Hip Hop History
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, and street art has become a form unrestrained revelry.
The functionality of the street was the primary subject contained within all of the readings. According to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary, one of the definitions of the street is, “a promising line of development or a channeling of effort.” In the reading, The Powers of Removal: Interventions in the Name of the City, Lytle Shaw speaks of Henry James’ return to Manhattan in 1904. James was revolted by the sense of impermanence and the modernization of his childhood neighborhood. The line of expansion created by urbanization channeled the efforts of developers in the 1970’s.
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.
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. The 1965 Watts Riots challenged the systems of power and the modes of transformation within the city of New York. The merger of art practice and social behavior politicized events.
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.
Political corruption and Chicago have been synonymous since the middle of the 19th century with the manipulation of elections and organized crime payoffs to the police. Recent federal investigations into the Richard M. Daley administration have proven that this corruption stands strong today. These investigations led to indictments, trials and convictions caused by the skimming of city contracts, using political work as a basis for awarding jobs and promotions in city departments, and manipulating real estate markets. As Mayor, Richard M. Daley has stepped into his father’s shoes and has established himself as one of the most powerful and influential big-city mayors.
Richard J. Daley was notorious for being the boss of Chicago when he was mayor from 1955-1976. He was responsible for massive downtown development in an attempt to maintain Chicago’s power on a national economic position. In his first year in office he built the Prudential Building, which provided residents with jobs and the city with tourists. This appealed to investors and developers. This would mark the beginning of the revitalization of the city since the Great Depression. Daley faced the challenge of suburbanization and what was called “white flight” as mentioned in the Jane Jacobs reading. Chicago was viewed as a city surrounded by affliction. The dismantling of this blight would call for the mass razing of neighborhoods, land clearance, and displacement of people and marked the beginning of class, racial, and political upheaval.
Up until the University of Illinois, a four-year college didn’t exist in Chicago or in Cook County. Daley chose the University of Illinois location. He stood against residential opposition who felt that they were promised more housing. Much like Jane Jacobs' fight against Robert Moses in her attempt to save Washington Square Park, resident Florence Scala led most of the protesting but to no avail. She did, however, persuade university trustees to preserve the Jane Addams Hull House.
Florence Scala speaking in the garden of the Jane Addams Hull House Settlement, 1963.
Clearing of the University of Illinois site, 1963.
This decision was monumentally historic as the affects of it were still being felt in the late 1990’s and today. When the university was built, a retail market thrived on adjacent Maxwell Street. This market was the largest open-air market, known as the Ellis Island of the Midwest and the birthplace of Chicago Blues. University officials decided against keeping local businesses and slowly began expanding south, buying land in the Maxwell area, and demolishing buildings. Residents petitioned to make the Maxwell area a historic district but Daley ultimately turned down their petitions. This proves to be another seminal example of how Daley Jr. implemented the work of his father.
Sign indicating that the fight for Maxwell Street will continue, with activists signatures. Photo Credit: Steve Balkin, 2000,
Young boy with sign protesting the destruction of Maxwell Street. Photo Credit: Steve Balkin, 2000.
According to the reading, To Collect Photographs is to Collect the World, Richard Nickel refused to lecture on the demise of architectural art because he felt that it wouldn’t be worthwhile. He said, “Everything good and decent will have been wiped out by the shysters, hucksters, and money grubbers.” I suggest instead the production of a short film, the most cutting, sarcastic production imaginable to show what a bunch of clods and gangsters and twaddlers run this town.” The destruction of the Maxwell area is an example of the mass destruction of the architectural masterpieces Nickel was photographically documenting. He fully understood what he was photographing by researching perspective of the ideas behind the buildings and photographing them over and over again. He discovered the character of the buildings he photographed by being objective. He attempted to show what people were ignoring about the magnificent architecture surrounding them. He witnessed their destruction and felt a responsibility to watch and record what he saw. The demolition of historical buildings has always been and remains a topic of discourse within the city of Chicago. A sentence within the Nickel reading reverberates; “Money built these buildings and money will destroy them.” The following video provides a historical summary of Daley, the University of Illinois in conjunction with the Urban Renewal Act, and the effects on Maxwell Street.
During the 1950’s, the automobile changed the face of the city. The prospect of connecting cities with super highways and improving conventional roads gave way to trucks competing with trains and local business owners competing with roads, facing the demolition of entire neighborhoods to make way for the new highway system. The highway construction cut across neighborhoods claiming slum removal, creating a mainline linkage to the coasts and provided a major economic bounty. Jacobs called the automobile the, “erosion of cities.” These highways left large holes in neighborhoods and dislocated people, businesses and institutions. Automobiles were paramount in the readings from last week, as well, specifically in addressing Los Angeles as a car city.
Chicago is also synonymous with racial inequality. Established immigrants fighting for their territory and political stance caused the race riots of 1919. Race riots occurred yet again during the 1950’s. The city decided to redevelop the Black Belt, which made the problem worse by causing friction. Race has always been an impetus for political appeal and power, as well. With regards to public housing, racial segregation was the guiding principle of the federal government and city planners. The Chicago Housing Authority was struggling with the difficulties of Depression Era housing. Public housing historically represents the failure of the city’s attempt to solve these problems. The multiple examples listed in the Pacyga reading further reinforce the severity the publicly funded, postwar urban renewal systems had on the land and the residents of the city. Often these public housing complexes were placed in desolate places without any neighborhood institutions. This calls attention to the issues Jane Jacobs addressed in her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Jacobs believed that public housing developers possessed a meaner quality, “and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretend order achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served.”
As the only sanctioned place where Chicago's black citizens could live or own property, the Black Belt became overcrowded with apartments like these, from a 1941 photo, that were eventually torn down as slums. Photo credit: Library of Congress.
During the 1960’s, race was at the fore with the issue of school integration. This issue is yet another example of how political power was the decisive proponent on any issue within the city. In regards to Chicago, Martin Luther King stated, “I have never seen such hate, not in Mississippi or Alabama, as I see here in Chicago.” Public policy, race relations, and political power were tantamount during Daley’s reign and continue to be discordant issues in Chicago.
The 1968 Democratic Convention and the King Riots changed the face of Chicago forever. Daley ordered the police to “shoot to kill” arsonists and to “shoot to maim” looters. This decision attracted national attention. According to the Pacyga reading, Daley was seen by the media as a “rampant reactionary.” The convention produced several nights of protests and violent confrontations with the police. The results of this historical event forever changed the Chicago Police Department, as well.
Police and demonstrators clash during the Chicago Democratic Convention, 1968. Photo Credit: Les Sintay
The Chicago machine quickly lost national power and influence. However, Daley Sr. remained in power while his allies were indicted on corruption charges. Based on recent events, Richard M. Daley has mirrored his father, choosing the same paths his father walked over 30 years ago. Placing “big brother” cameras on various street corners and making city assets privatized, like the parking meters, have enraged voters and lessened the power Daley has maintained over the city for years.
