Performance and Intervention

Frazer Ward's Shifting Ground: Street Art of the 1960s and '70s and Lytle Shaw's The Powers of Removal: Interventions in the Name of the City explore the ideas of the city street, the art that simultaneously encompasses and is encompassed by the street, and the power of the public person.

Frazer Ward begins by giving examples of what a city street is and what it can be used for. Some of these examples are for social conflict and revolution, as a corrupted public sphere, that it belongs to the commodity culture, and that it is a space of human interaction not interrupted by normal regulation. Two groups that he identified, the Protest Culture and the Counterculture, both use the streets as their own, but in very different ways. The Protest Culture was anti-war, anti-Vietnam, and for black power, women's liberation, and gay rights. They used the streets as a public space to explore, express, and challenge these rights. The Counterculture, though somewhat embodied in similar ideas and movements, was more identifiable by hippies and the sex, drugs, and rock and roll culture. They used the streets a stage for performances and ideas. Karen Jones talks about riots and the ideas behind them: what they are, what they do, and how they function. In the definition she gives, "the riot is a logical consequence of the oppressive forces within the capitalist modern and postmodern space" that can be either spontaneous or brought to violence by police brutality, and threatens to disrupt social order. Having said this, it can be assumed that the Protest Culture, maybe somewhat obvious because of its title but nonetheless important to break down and understand, would be the group that would use the streets for riots that Jones describes.

Ward gives us quite detailed descriptions of a few types of street art that emerged from the '60s and '70s, some based on the same ideas that riots are based off of (where there is an obvious overtone of power struggle and social calling), and some that questioned other aspects of society in a "real-time" way. Hi Red Center performed a piece entitled Movement to Promote the Cleanup of the Metropolitan Area (Be Clean!) where the trio dressed in face masks and lab coats and got to work cleaning sidewalks square by square in Tokyo, questioning the government's priority in the appearance of the city and public space, specifically in the street (in preparation for the Tokyo Olympics). This branch of Protest Culture, though non-violent and non-rioting, still made its point and was viewed in the public eye. Ridiculous as it may seem, it no doubt made passersby question their motives and ideas.

VALIE EXPORT used the street as a place of tention between the private and the public, taking the idea of the female figure from cinema and placing movie curtains on her body for people to open and and view/touch her body. Though this does not have much to do with the street besides the fact that she chose it as her location (for its public space and mass audience, it can be assumed), she is questioning the same ideas that Yoko Ono and John Lennon posed in their 1969 film Rape. This idea in question is, again, this unclear line between how public space, like a street, can be used and is seen. Is it public? Is it private? In Rape, we begin to understand just how public one's private life can seem, from being followed on the streets when seemingly nobody else notices you, to being "violently" approached in your own private space (which, up until fairly recently and with modern technology, was not questioned as being anything but private).

VALIE EXPORT, Touch Cinema 1968

Lytle Shaw approaches the idea of the city street in a less "art-based" form than Ward. Though still giving examples of some video pieces and hand crafted cityscapes, Shaw focuses the discussion more on the idea of the stories of the streets rather than what happens on them (maybe more appropriately, what happened on them and how it is constantly changing). Henry James comes back to America after spending two decades abroad, and comments on the changing of New York City; how its buildings cannot be a permanent aspect of the city because as things change around them, they either change physically to "keep up with the times", or their meaning is changed by their changed context. A small neighborhood that may have been home to generations of families may all of a sudden find itself next to 50 story sky scrapers, almost deeming these small homes as a lesser aspect of the city, regardless of their form or function. In fact, it may even be decided that these homes are not good for the capital in that region, and they may be torn down, as was James's old childhood home. This idea of constant movement and change inquires as to the placement and meaning of other aspects within the public realm, such as art (or James's placard). To help define this idea of a public space, Shaw relates public to urbanism, which is not a "neutral or technocratic domain...in...urban planning, but rather the diverse critical discourse produced by" those dealing with many aspects of society and the arts. It is all encompassing and multilayered.

The main examples Shaw uses to discuss his writing all deal with ideas of indirect meaning. James Nares produced Pendulum, a film showing a wrecking ball swinging at different angles. It does not immediately make a direct statement about its destructive qualities, as it is not destroying anything that we can see, but it most definitely implies this power and what it has done, and will do. In the context of Manhattan, the wrecking ball may be seen as the machine that was responsible for much of the demolition and rebuilding around the time, though whether that be positive or negative is up to the viewer.

Still Image from James Nares's Pendulum, 1976

Charles Simonds began making small clay models of different cities, built for fictional miniature people. These cities were constructed in the same view as the city in which he was in at the time of the model's creation, complete with dilapidated buildings and brickwork. It was a performance piece, where people approached him and asked questions and watched, and Simonds speaks of keeping the small city standing for the sake of the little people in it. It seemed to sway some onlookers who commented that everything that can be done should be done if it can save these small people. Whether they realized it or not, those onlookers were involved socially on another level of thought and understanding involving their own environment, for in fact, they are the little people. These small models also bring up other ideas, as they are reminiscent of ancient civilizations, bringing us into the past in a present state of mind. Who is the destroyer of these crumbling places? Are they anonymous? Do we know them? Is this good or bad?

Continuing this connection between this uncertainty of the past and present, Matthew Buckingham creates a film called Muhheakantuck, showing aerial footage up the Hudson River and narrating what had happened at this land before it was the Hudson, when it was still the Muhheakantuck. Though we are hearing this story from Buckingham alone, it is likely to be biased, as all art, and stories, are, but cannot be overlooked for its link to this disappeared Native American population. It forces us to rethink our surface level understanding of the city around us, as absorbed as we are in this level of understanding of the city. We live in the here and now, but we rarely think about what happened on these locations in order for us to be able to live there. Shaw ends by ultimately saying that we are blinded by historical stories that paint a certain, narrow way of viewing the past, in which removal is at the main point of many of these issues with the historical past. We are not seeing it from a more unbiased standpoint of "change", but of destruction and demolition (regardless, some of this change can be quite obviously negative destruction, but Buckingham does make a clear point that what we see in his video is the result of change. This positive/negative aspect of it is in the eye of the beholder. Without this change, Manhattan would not be Manhattan. But is this good? Bad? Indifferent? I feel like Barbara Kruger in her Untitled (Questions), 1991).

This age of riots and rebellion, of public and private, of then and now, seems to all come together on the streets of a city, meshing into one giant explosion of culture, art, experience, movement, and ideas.

Pacyga, Cahan, and Medium Cool

Chicago in the 1960s and 1970s is approached in a few different ways through Dominic Pacyga's "Chicago", Richard Cahan's writing on Richard Nickel, and the fictional/documentary film Medium Cool.

Dominic Pacyga goes into quite a bit of detail regarding Mayor Richard J. Daley's coming into Chicago Mayoral offie, and a lot of the political upheaval and controversy involving both issues that arose at this time, and what Daley did (or did not do) to help fix these issues. When Daley entered office, the city was just getting back onto its feet after having been brought down by the Great Depression. The Prudential building was opened in 1955, bringing into the city a slight boom of new business and people. Based on this success, more than thirty-six million square feet of office space was opened up in the loop. This change in structure, population, business, and financial state of the city opened up new doors for changing demographics.

Public housing was a huge deal in Chicago starting in the late 1930s, and merging into the '40s. The Chicago Housing Authority created (ultimately) a three stage housing plan to help combat poverty in the city. The first stage went underway with new houses and three to four story flats, complete with courtyards, walking space, and statues. Following this, the second stage took place, as townhouses were quickly put up for returning war veterans. This mass amount of wartime living relocations, both permanent and temporary, led to whites feeling trapped by this ever expanding black ghetto, and blacks being pushed away by whites who didn't want their neighborhoods to be anywhere near each other. Around this gime, almost a quarter million white people moved out of downtown Chicago to either the outer edges of the city, or into the suburbs. A third stage of public housing was then created. This stage, though Daley fought for low-rise public housing, ended up becoming the largest high rise public housing project in the world. This seemingly "obsession" with building these massive structures, left a few questions unanswered, such as how so many units could be filled by tenants who passed the criminal background and adequate income checks. Ultimately, they could not, and in a haste to fill the buildings, the rules were sort of let go, leading to criminal activity, gangs, and violence that erupted out of some of these housing developments (most notoriously, Cabrini Green). These public housing units were also very much overcrowded, as the old slums had been, and for awhile, they were at a standstill in dealing with these pressing issues.

Around the same time, there was a huge push forward in the United States for a reliance on the automobile. The government funded the building of tollways that connected everywhere with a vehicle-accessible road. Chicago was connected to the east coast through a system of highways, and all of the Chicagoland was able to be accessed by private vehicle. However, as we saw before in New York specifically, the building of these massive freeways through a major metropolis poses some huge issues. Whereas in New York the issues were based on some wealthier neighborhoods fighting to keep a highway from cutting across their neighborhood (though I'm sure the issue was brought up in some not so well-to-do neighborhoods as well), no wealthy communities were bulldozed (or in the original plans to be bulldozed). As I read that Daley had fought for a small community church to be saved from highway demolition, I though "Wow, he's completely not like New York's Moses who cares about nothing but how this plan could best work out for him personally. He actually wants to help these communities." But then I read the part where Daley and his wife had gotten married in that church, and the previous thought very quickly floated away (although, he did question the continued splicing of the city, wondering if it was a good thing for Chicago or not). Even though this one, historic church had been saved, the highway didn't spare other community's churches. The Italian neighborhood relocated their church, only to have it torn down again four years later for more construction. The Polish neighborhood was disrupted by the highways, too. This construction was not based on race or skin color, but on the wealth of the communities: no wealthy communities had to fight to keep their churches or buildings standing.

Following the highway boom, the Civil Rights Act became the main political issue. Daley backed this act, but did not enforce decisions made around it, even when Martin Luther King came to Chicago to help change the city's clear cut borders between white and black. He subsequently then lost support from both the black and white populations. The white communities did not want any integration of the black community into their neighborhoods, and, god forbid, into their schools. This brought about many protests, though mostly peaceful, in Chicago. However, when Martin Luther King was shot and killed, violent riots broke out, complete with arsonists and looters. The city was in upheaval.

This emotion that was wiping over the city was then added to by the arrival of the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Protestors staged riots, both peaceful and violent (or turned violent by the use of violence upon them by police) all over the city. It ultimately resulted in the famous riots in Grant Park, as seen in the film Medium Cool. Though this film was part fictional, part documentary, it brought up powerful ideas about the influence of the camera and its use in the public media. Documenting the actual riots, the film crew is not safe from being hit with gas and jostled around. Their footage, though still attempting to continue the scripted storyline, cannot deny the events that occurred: cops beating peaceful protestors and people being dragged down to the ground. It was definitely a wake up call to the world.

This film also has direct relation to issues surrounding photography and media in Chicago now. I can't find the article on it, but I believe it was last summer where Chicago cops had beaten (I believe) a photographer recording an incident between the cops and the bicyclist. There have also been recent arrests of photographers and confiscation of photographic equipment by officers in Chicago, just because a photograph was taken of them or what they were doing while in a public space. These ideas in mind, I am very cautious about what I photograph in public, and seeing this footage of the cameraman standing directly over cops as they beat young adults in 1968 was almost a shocking idea. From what we saw, no officer took a billy club to the cameraman. That would be very different today.

The other article, an excerpt from Richard Cahan's writing on Richard Nickel, did not focus on political or social issues, but that of the actual structures of the city. Nickel, an architectural photographer, was very much focused not on the glorification of these buildings, but their realistic representation. If a building was magnificent for its height, Cahan would emphasize this quality in his image. If the building were crumbling and entering a state of disrepair, which many of his photographs focused on, he would translate these broken beams and dusty bricks into his photographs. More so a documentary photographer than an architectural one, Nickel fought for the restoration of older buildings (rather than their destruction) through his images. He the photographs as symbols of the buildings' stark reality in an attempt to show that these buildings are our history and most public art form of the city. "Nickel wanted to use the camera to teach others to see without a camera", and he used the realistic qualities of the buildings he shot to try to do this.

Sullivan's National Farmer's Bank, Richard Nickel

Garrick Theater, Richard Nickel

Destruction of the Garrick Theater, Richard Nickel

Los Angeles: 1960s-1970s

This week's materials were composed of a short video by Reyner Banham entitled Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles, and two readings relating most directly to Edward Ruscha's work in and about LA: Pop L.A.: Art and the City in the 1960s by Cecile Whiting and Ed Ruscha, Pop Art, and Spectatorship in 1960s Los Angeles by Ken Allan.

As an overview, the Banham video was shot in 1972 by BBC, sort of documenting Reyner Banham's excursion through LA and its not so well known "touristy" areas (or, rather, it's well known areas that are not pegged as tourist locations). The entire video is based off of this made-up "Baede-Kar" guidance system, where a horrible automated female voice directs one around the city via cassette tape in the car's tape player. To make the viewing experience more "edgy", Banham decides to boldly ignore some of her recommendations to go to places, such as Malibu, and head to spots that he has pegged "tourist-worthy". A few of these destinations, whether they be Banham's or Baede-Kar's, are simply landmark objects seen in passing from the freeway, such as billboards. Most all shots in this film are taken from the car, where the world can be seen blurring by behind Banham, or out the front windshield. Towards the middle of the film, we are taken on a bus tour, where all landmarks, whether originally intended or not, are seen merely in passing. In the late '60s, early '70s, there was also this huge movement of "van culture". Though there really isn't a solid definition to give to this term as to what exactly it would encompass, it is broadly the idea that people became enthralled with the ideas and versatility that vans could provide. You could paint them, live in them, play piano in them, sell food from them, have sex in them, drive in them...the possibilities are quite endless. They became just as much an art form as they did a practical driving object for which they were created. Cecile Whiting described a piece entitled Back Seat Dodge '38 by Ed Kienholz, which depicts a sexual act between a plaster woman and a chicken wire man in the interior of a rusting vehicle (not a van, but same idea).

Ed Kienholz Back Seat Dodge '38, 1964

Banham also asks some interesting questions about the idea of LA as a city. "Is LA a style or a frame of mind? A sort of mass-produced fantasy for people to live in? Could this city be a mechanism and style to impose on the rest of the world?"

Cécile Whiting goes more in depth with the idea of this infatuation over car culture in the 1960s. Billy Al Bengston created works on canvases using techniques of paint application on motorcycles and cars, asking viewers to relate his paintings to the motorcycle culture he was deeply a part of. Judy Chicago used male and female abstract sexual forms in her painting of a car hood (Car Hood), and was on track with the rest of her male peers in combining sexuality and hot rod culture. Though these ideas, when placed in the '60s and '70s seem sort of, well...super ambitious, or maybe humorous, for something as simple as a car, it's quite ironic that we are still using our cars and vans (okay, vehicles) for the same types of things today. Though not as outwardly prominent as this new idea of hot rod culture was then, a good number of people are still involved in "pimping" their cars today. There are tv shows about it, there are car shows (Chicago's auto show just ended), and there are specialized body shops everywhere that pursue it. Not to mention the number of people who work on their cars in their own driveways. Maybe it's less about flashy paint now, but this idea of creating a car into something other than a mechanism of getting from point A to point B is still valid. People still have sexual encounters in cars. People sell food from cars: ice cream trucks, taco trucks, hot dog trucks. The culture has interwoven itself into the threads of society more seamlessly, but it is definitely still there.

Not dealing with the sexual themes and flashy styles that Bengston and Chicago were, Vija Celmins and Ed Ruscha created work dealing with the automobile as well. Celmins work, specifically here Freeway, explores the idea of this arbitrary moment: driving down the San Diego Freeway. Whiting describes this painting as having "transform[ed] the urban freeway into a landscape with its own unique space and topography while drawing attention to the experience of viewing through a car's windshield." What is curious here, is the use of the word "viewing"; that this is an "experience of viewing", as if this experience was not before noticed before we had freeways such as this one to focus our attention upon. Even Banham states that the freeway is a "complete way of life." Maybe what Whiting did not realize, was that the experience of viewing had been noticed and utilized at least a hundred years prior by a type of people that have been referred to as "flaneurs"; and this is just what the car culture allowed people to become in LA.

Vija Celmins Freeway, 1966

Ruscha, though not quite able to be referred to as a flaneur, was still an observer of sorts. He created a handful of different photo series and paintings, documenting, such as the Bechers began producing in the '80s and '90s, similar items in a almost sickeningly repetitive way. Some Los Angeles Apartments, Twentysix Gasoline Stations, and Every Building on the Sunset Strip are just three examples (and probably his most well known). Through these series, Ruscha, unlike other artist's of the time, was creating a practical way of looking at the city versus making a social commentary about whether it works or does not work.

Ken Allan describes Ruscha's work as going against the norm "to conjure up associations with a later era of urban development that would produce an entirely different city in form and experience." The way in which Ruscha photographed was not in the typical photographic way; he did not aesthetically compose his images and was not worried about their beauty or aesthetic qualities as a photograph. He made images. Ruscha's Some Los Angeles Apartments were all photographed very straightforward from street level, sometimes at a slight angle and sometimes straight on. Each image in and of itself did not mean much, but as a whole collaboration between all of the images, it represented a certain style of apartment living with in the LA area. This is LA. Or, rather, this is ink on paper representing what LA looks like. He was very careful to make sure that people were not able to step into the images that he created. Though some of this has to do with composition and the type of splicing he used in his Every Building on the Sunset Strip series (where different cars were spliced together and buildings edges were repeated and cut off at strange points as each image was bumped up against the next), it also has to do with how Ruscha presented his pieces. His paintings, as well as his photographs, were very physical objects. The pages of his book were meant to be handled and be held. They were palpable. He even produced a photograph called Hand Flipping Pages, where it shows hands turning the pages of his book Twentysix Gasoline Stations. In his paintings, he would paint a large word, and then make the viewer step up to the canvas to look at a life-sized image (perhaps a pencil, or a newspaper with writing to be read), where the paint and canvas would be very much a real part of the piece. Sometimes, he would even change the plane of view from the top half of the image to the bottom half, whereas the word on the top would be looked at from an upright position, and the newspaper on the bottom half would be seen as being looked down upon. It seems that his play against the convention of the upright picture frame mimics the way in which LA plays against the convention of the standard city. Ruscha's work "asks us to connect spectatorship, painting, and the spacial experience of the new American urban landscape of the 1960s."

The idea of these photographs as tangible objects and not places, seems in stark contrast to one of Stephen Shore's images:

Stephen Shore Beverly Boulevard and La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, California, June 21, 1975

As I'm sure you've noticed, this image was taken in LA as well, a little over a decade after Ruscha produced his Gasoline Station work. Not only is this in color, but it is taken at street level by somebody standing on the sidewalk (unlike Ruscha's Every Building on the Sunset Strip, taken by moving picture from his car), and everything seems very...real. It would seem quite simple to walk right onto this image and down into the depth of the vanishing point.