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.