Public Spaces and Their Uses

Through three readings this week, Douglas Crimp's Action Around the Edges, Martha Rosler's Culture Class: Art, Creativity, Urbanism, and Rosalyn Deutsche's Introduction to Evictions, the idea of public spaces, how they are used, and how art plays a role in this usage was thoroughly examined.

Douglas Crimp's piece went in to great detail in describing his home neighborhood in the mid 1970s, near what is now SoHo, and the ways in which the "abandoned" piers played a role in the atmosphere of the area (abandoned is here used to mean an abandonment of their original purposes). These piers were fairly populated on what seemed to be a regular basis, with people that the general society most likely would have looked down upon, but whom sparked a huge artistic movement that later was ultimately able to incorporate politics and public support of the arts. These piers had their violent times, with rape, murder, and theft; they had their "taboo" times, with drugs and sex and well, prostitution but with seemingly no exchange of anything but sex; and they had their "normal" or creative times, where artists would come down and create works of art (painting, sculpture, installation-like work, photography, performance art) and Crimp, at least, would come down and watch the sun set behind Jersey on the other side of the Hudson. This idea of such a mixed usage of space was then able to translate into other parts of the surrounding neighborhoods. Empty lots and abandoned, half-finished construction projects (which ironically enough were started by inspiration from Jane Jacob's ideas of giving the people what they need, but turned out to be underfunded and abandoned), as well as people's loft apartments and flats, and abandoned industrial buildings (following the industrial crash) became locations for new types of expression. Orgies, apparently, were prominent in truck yards, dance and performance pieces were shown in artists' flats, and an old firehouse was turned into a gay disco club. This was the epitome of Jane Jacobs's ideas: where the residents would use the spaces to their liking and to their disposal (though this is obviously a very raw, very hippie movement, it satisfies the same points as an up and coming neighborhood would). Artist's didn't have spaces to show their work in because their type of work had never been really though of before, so, they created their own spaces and brought their own audience (and drugs of course). From these small private/public "venues", public art sponsorship began to take form. Performance pieces at the piers were documented and photographed and publicized. It was the quintessence of public art. Joan Jonas, whom Crimp quotes, produced a handful of performance work and films, embodying the idea of space and the city in saying "My own thinking and production has focused on issues of space - ways of dislocating it, attenuating it, flattening it, turning it inside out, always attempting to explore it without ever giving to myself or to others the permission to penetrate it." Crimp adds that "The film [Songdelay] also uses these techniques to thwart our desire to know or possess the city beyond our immediate experience of it in the moment of use." Through the use of upside-down film, a telephoto lens, and this weird flattening and distortion of space, Jonas transforms the city into how she wants it to be seen. This style reminds me slightly of some of Barbara Probst's work, such as:

Exposure #39: N.Y.C., 545 8th Avenue, 03.23.06, 1:17 p.m.

Though quite different in several ways, the idea of transforming a space, literally a building top into a photography "studio" as well as the visual distortion of this woman being in the mountains when she is really on a roof top in downtown NYC, shares some of the same ideas of being unable to penetrate this city.

Martha Rosler in her Culture Class, comments not so much on the ideas of what fits into public spaces, but the issues that have arisen culturally and sociologically within a city, and how art has attempted to change and/or fix some of these problems. She begins by stating that art and commerce coexist, and that capitalism drew on a new basis through the art market as gentrification in these cities began to take hold.

For some background context, the cities were built up and populated in a highly industrial time period. When the industrial market began to decline, the reason for people to live in cities (at least for many of the middle and upper class populations) became a mute point and they relocated into the surrounding suburbs and white picket fence neighborhoods. The cities were then left with lower class citizens in their center, and limited commerce, so they needed a way to bring back in those who had left. They began to give tax breaks for companies who based their headquarters in the downtown area, changing cities into a concentration of corporate administration. The French-based group Situationist International had ideas similar to Jane Jacobs at this time, being that these people already living in the city should be able to use what is at their disposal in a free way to better their living standards (versus the government or city coming in and telling them what they could or could not do). This unfortunately did not happen, or at least not fast enough, because city planners and urban developers, still on track to bring in people who had left, flattened many of the housing projects and poorer neighborhoods and sent those living there to subsidized housing complexes just outside the city. Gentrification at this point became prominent, as artists, poets, architects, writers, and others (many were creatives) began to "infiltrate" these poorer areas and rebuild and remodel the buildings. Though this began to happen in the 1970s, we can still see gentrification even in Chicago today, in neighborhoods such as Pilsen, Lincoln Park, Wicker Park, and Lake View. The changes that this brought into the city in regards to the previously mentioned issues, were immediate. The issues of addressing the poor began to change to issues in addressing the artists, and thoughts of revitalization turned to capitalism based off of market research and advertisement. Though political art still had its structure and bias, reminiscent of the renaissance and medieval periods, artists had somewhat of a free-reign in their work for commerce. Taste (not only in art, but all aspects of this new society) was attempted to be marketed as personal and not based off class or social status, but this idea only regrouped classes and created similar problems as before. Ultimately, this stage of "revitalization" turned a worker based city into a capitalist city fit for a very small margin of the social class ladder.

Rosalyn Deutsche, in her introduction to Evictions, gives slight background on her included essays and their roots. The first two sections of the introduction I found to be very wordy, but to not say too much in any sort of influential way. A few main points struck me more than others, such as a city's spacial organizations need to be organic and natural, but that the space is political and therefore cannot be natural, but must be "taken". I understand that this is sort of a quick summary into the rest of her essays in the book, but maybe without having read those, the introduction seems very disjointed and choppy. For example, she mentions that there is this connection between the homeless population and gentrification, which makes perfect sense if people are made to leave their homes because they cannot afford the cost of their increased taxes or the general increase of wealth in the area, but this point, unless I missed something, just sort of dissipated when I was really hoping it would continue (especially after Rosler had brought up gentrification, but had mentioned nothing about the homeless, I was intrigued by Deutsche's point. Maybe I'll have to read the essay to figure it out). Deutsche spoke a bit more on art and it's political roots and how it is created based on these political reactions, etc., but what really interested me was the last section of the introduction. Here, she talks about this idea that feminism would be frowned upon if it were brought forth through the medium of a public art piece in a public space; that people would be disapproving and uninterested. She states that feminist art is crucial to a more democratic public space, though using the idea of feminism is just a filler word here. Basically, public art is voiced in the concealment, rather than the questioning, of power in public art's urban sites. Public art is created usually for political means whose purpose seems to be almost solely influential, rather than enjoyable. Though people will fight that this art is "democratic" because it resides in this "public" space, the work is neither democratic, nor purely public.

The Oxford English Dictionary's definition of the two terms are as follows:

1. Democracy: social equality/rights without hereditary or arbitrary differences of rank or privilege.
2. Public: of or relating to the people as a whole; that belongs to, affects, or concerns the community or the nation; not restricted to the private use of a particular person or group.

I am not saying that public art cannot be politically driven, but that if it has political basis, it should be evenly distributed politically. What I mean to say, is that Deutsche's point of feminism is a valid point, that I had actually not thought of before. Something publicly controversial would not be placed in public space (such as thoughts on abortion, or homosexuality). The government, the political realm, decides that it is best to keep people "happy" with that 'abstract sculpture entitled "The Bear at Noon"' which means absolutely nothing that the public is aware of, nor makes a bold statement politically. Here in Chicago, we have something similar: Alexander Calder's "Flamingo", installed at the Chicago Federal Plaza in 1974. I guess it was meant to contrast the black blocky buildings around it, but that is the only meaning to it I could find. It is not intellectually intriguing, nor politically questionable. As far as the government is concerned, it is the perfect public art piece: art for art's sake (again, very similar to the bourgeois ideals of art in the renaissance era). Those that oppose this type of art, are the ones who are creating the politically controversial art, but that is not something that would be seen in the "Parlor"; I guess we'll have to wait for a time when the "Salon des Refusés" of the twenty first century is created for our cities.

*Sorry this is about 2 hours late. This new 'due on Sunday' thing completely threw me off!