Isaac Cordal

Isaac Cordal is a Spanish artist who produces video, audio, performance, and sculptural art. His interest seems to lie heavily in shape and form, namely with a human element. Though all of his pieces do not relate to cities, one in particular does. This project, entitled Cement Eclipses, is performance, photography, video, and sculpture combined, coming together to create these little public art pieces.

Follow The Leader

Cement Eclipses is a project that exists on city streets in the form of small, sculpted concrete figures that are interacting with the environment in which they are placed. The pieces are an average of 25cm (about 10 inches) per figure, but the photos of the pieces make them appear quite a bit smaller (and some of them are, in fact, smaller). The little men are made of cement, created from clay and silicone molds, and adhered to different parts of European cities with an epoxy adhesive. Not all figures are the same: some are standing, some are sitting in chairs, some are holding inner tubes around themselves, and others are shaped in a crucifix position. Cordal himself calls these Cement Eclipses "urban interventions".

Cordal's home of Galicia, Spain, is a coastal region which was flattened to be reconstructed into a more modern "city". The use of cement was a very powerful factor in this recreation and is therefore why Cordal chose to use it as the material for these figures. It is a representation of the impact of the human being in nature, whether we notice it or not when we walk on concrete sidewalks and into concrete buildings. Though Cordal has his intentions based off of the rise of the city in Spain, this same concept in the city-boom is basically applicable everywhere. As mentioned earlier in the semester, urban growth has reached the point where over half of the world's population is living in cities and their suburbs. Cement Eclipses is Cordal's way of representing this aspect of the human culture on a smaller scale.



Though these pieces are photographed and documented during and right after their placement in the cityscape, there really isn't much of a follow up afterward. Cordal mentions that all but maybe two or three of the pieces placed during the night will be gone within 24 hours, from street and city cleaners removing them, natural destruction of them in a bustling city environment, or people picking them up and keeping them. These little urban interventions are very much similar to how graffitists portray their art: 1) an idea is thought of 2) a piece is either pre-made or sketched out or envisioned 3) a spot is chosen 4) the art becomes part of the chosen location. In both cases, there is a chance of destruction of the art, either naturally or forcefully by the hand of man. Also like grafitti, Cement Eclipses becomes part of both the counterculture and the protest culture. They are created and placed to make a point; to publicly share/comment on a meaning or a viewpoint or a social issue. Because he is one person and not larger mass of people, this aspect of the project seems to sit more on the counterculture side. However, its public nature, political/social commentary, and placement to both public and private property also place this project into the protest culture.

Asking for Spare Change

Though there are some artists who have worked on similar projects, Cordal executes his small cement figures in a very different manner. Slinkachu, who also makes tiny figures and places them in public, is more photographically based and does not necessarily create little scenes for the public to view after they have been set up. Charles Simonds, on the other hand, publicly creates small, clay models of actual demolished buildings, encouraging people to come up to him and explore his ideas and the reasons as to why he is making these pieces. Contrasting Slinkachu, Simonds is very public, but also contrasting Cordal, Simonds wants to speak with people who are curious about his work. Isaac Cordal adheres his figures at night, waiting for people to stumble upon them the next day and figure them out for themselves. Though they may not completely understand the meaning behind them, it no doubt would cause one to think about why this small, 10 inch concrete figurine is glued to the middle of the sidewalk.

Swine Flu

Though Cordal occasionally places these little men in very reachable places, such as doorways or ledges or sidewalks, he also has put them in construction areas and demolished buildings that appear nothing more than rubbish piles. Though not quite as obvious to the passerby, these locations seem to say more about the city than the more obvious locations. For example, one of his placements of the figures was into these little holes dug up in the road.

Still image from video below

Cement eclipses from Isaac Cordal on Vimeo.


The video shows about three or four of the men, standing defiant in the potholes, with looming construction equipment behind them. It is quite clear that this construction equipment will have its way in the end, but the fact that these men stand boldly to their spots is very reminiscent of Jane Jacobs's "movement" and other riots that we have discussed in the past few months. Fortunately, Jacobs won out in the end, but during the conflict of Moses and the people of Greenwich Village, the people stood strong in their positions against the looming backhoe and highways that Moses represented. The Thompson Square Park riot and the Democratic National Convention riots in Grant Park also held to the same principles of people standing up for what they believe in. Cordal does not believe in the upbuilding of cities, particularly represented by concrete, so he places small concrete men in protest against this constant construction.

Going back to the beginning of the semester, there was a discussion about the ways in which people interact with the city. The very first article by Michel de Certeau, Walking in the City, explored the ways in which people navigated the streets. This mechanical motion on worn down, beaten up paths where each person places their left foot in the exact same spot on the cross walk every morning takes a very human element out of being human. Most people navigate the city going from A to B, not thinking about anything in between. The flaneurs seem to be the only ones who take the time to look; to watch. The rest of us just get to where we're going, not noticing the people that pass us or the things along the way. Cement Eclipses act as these urban interventions to draw us out of the "zone" of 'Current position to destination, current position to destination, current position to destination...oh, there's a small concrete puddle bather. Wait...why is that there? Who put it there?'

So although Isaac Cordal bases his Cement Eclipses on a more human vs. environment idea (there's also men in gas masks sitting by oil stains and a hazmat suited man in a swine flu infected area), they come to mean much more than that. These cement figures symbolize a public protest in the form of art, an intervention in the monotonous daily activity of a concrete city, and, to some extent, a similar idea that Lemn Sissay speaks about in his "Darwin Originals: What if?" poem/video. This may be a stretch, but Sissay speaks of "what if we got it wrong?" in relation to our industrialization and building of cities and "what if our impenetrable defense sealed us in?" (speaking about the city swallowing us and misleading our progress). Though the video is a comparison of the melting arctic and the polluted cities and their relation to one another, and Cordal wants his innertube men in puddles to be experiencing a "global warming", these ideas both relate to the larger picture: over 50% of us are living in these concrete cities and urbanization is at its highest. We are not thinking about the impact of our actions, whether on each other or on the environment, and maybe, as Sissay poetically states, it's "the small things that make great change". Perhaps these small things come in the form of miniature concrete men.

BP

The City Beside Itself

Mapping

Johanna Burton, in her New York, Beside Itself, explores the ideas of time and space in relation to artists and their "movements". Through multiple artists, their works, and philosopher's and writer's ideas, Burton shapes a model of how this living organism, this city, is created (its metaphorical inner framework and structure) and how this seemingly constant changing is really just a rotation of the past and present intertwining.

Perhaps one of the best explanations of how this layering and mapping works, comes through Jonathan Flatley's Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism. In this "affective mapping", we are made to view our actions and social relations as both compulsory and divergent. This mapping "also traces the paths, resting places, dead ends, and detours we might share with those who came before us." A prime example of this "sharing what came before us" would be in Emily Roysdon's David Wojnarowicz Project, mimicking Wojnarowicz's Rimbaud in New York. To keep the essence of the idea of being in a place at a certain time (and the timelessness of the photographs made of that moment), and what it meant to be in that certain place at that time (in relation to Wojnarowicz's and Roysdon's comment on homosexuality), Roysdon does essentially the same thing that Wojnarowicz did, but with a Wojnarowicz mask instead of a Rimbaud one.

Emily Roysdon, Untitled (David Wojnarowicz Project)

Emily Roysdon, Untitled (David Wojnarowicz Project)

Flatley states that because of these circumstances (stated above...this mapping), we cannot view ourselves as independent or our actions as original or unique. Everything we do and think is based off of something that has already happened, whether that be an action, an event, art, or just an idea. This "affective mapping" gives us a visualization of a tangled city, where time is no longer a dimension and everything is weaving through everything else. The paths that one chooses to take today blends into the paths of those taken twenty years ago, creating endless loops of overlap and layers.

Because of this overlap, the history of what happened at certain locations can drastically change how one is to view a new action in the same location. That is to say, if I were to do some sort of political performance art in Grant Park, there would definitely be a different sense of understanding and interpretation there compared to the same performance piece done on, say, Navy Pier. Though the riots in Grant Park happened over forty years ago, time, as I said earlier, is a lost dimension in this layering and these events resurface themselves as present day markers of meaning and interpretation.

An artist who uses these layers of history to her benefit, would be Sharon Hayes. Hayes, in 2005, created a performance piece called In the Near Future, based in New York City. Over nine days, she went to nine locations in New York City, holding a single sign in each place that had some almost ambiguous statement written upon it (each phrase having been a borrowed or invented phrase from some past demonstration). The locations which she chose to enact these performances were locations "that were themselves highly coded, such as Saint Patrick's Cathedral, the site of a famous 1989 ACT UP protest." Through these performances, she brought into question our interpretation of them. Do we understand them as "demonstrations"? And if so, how? Do we relate the locations and phrases to previous demonstrations we have either studied or seen? Or do we just get a feeling that these performances are supposed to represent the basic structure of what a demonstration is? Hayes herself refers to In the Near Future as quasi work, not quite living up to what a demonstration is, but still sharing some of the same qualities of a real one. John Searle addresses this "knowing but not quite knowing that this is a demonstration" as a borderline case, stating that "we could not recognize borderline cases...as borderline cases if we did not grasp the concept to begin with", and that we grasp this concept through its deviation from ordinary behavior. Here this deviation would be her lack of specificity in this "protest", the fact that she is the only one "protesting", and that there doesn't seem to be any match up between her location choice and the reason for what is written on her sign.

Sharon Hayes, In the Near Future

Sharon Hayes, In the Near Future

Sharon Hayes, In the Near Future

Hayes, in a recent discussion with Burton, brings up something she has been considering in her work: this idea of common being versus being-in-common. This distinction between the two, spoken about by Jean-Luc Nancy, is a subtle yet important one. "Common being...is based on a desire for a community that shares a common body: an organized whole or entity." In other words, this common being believes in the commonality on almost all, if not all, levels of their being. Its existence, though basically impossible, allows for an opposing existence: being-in-common. This being-in-common is the absence of the common being, believing "that our commonality is experienced in the essential truth that we have nothing in common except our uncommonness." This distance in the being-in-common is defined by Hayse as with. Being-with, according to Hayes would be ultimately the same as being-in-common, but uses the word "with" to allude to distance and space. This space (with) is a representation of the impossibility to possess the dimension of time and space, that no  matter what we choose to relate ourselves to or what we find in common with others (the intertwining in the city), there is still an emptiness between us (time?) that we cannot possess. Another word used in the understanding of this relational space, would be beside. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick attempts to define "beside" as the "mapping between bodies, between sites, through time...[comprising] a wide range of desiring, identifying, representing, repelling, paralleling, differentiating, rivaling, leaning, twisting, mimicking, withdrawing, attracting, aggressing, warping, and other relations." In using "beside" instead of "with", the idea of a relationality between beings is still held, albeit loosely, and not completely disregarded. The space is not so open and unrelated.

With all of the overlying, intertwining, looping, endless mapping of relations in the city, there are certainly spaces in between where the past and present, and maybe even the future, lay beside one another, forming what we experience as the living, changing city.

Urbanization in China

*Sorry this is a little late! I went to photograph the 8k this morning and was unable to get back to my apartment for awhile because the race cut right in front of it.*

Through this week's materials, the MCA's Urban China: Informal Cities, the MoCP's Reversed Images: Representations of Shanghai and Its Contemporary Material Culture, excerpts from Contemporary Chinese Art, and three short video clips, two on Tiananmen Square and one on China's Ghost Cities and Malls, an issues arises regarding the clash between the government's ideals and the people's needs.

Though I'm sure Tiananmen Square is not an unknown event to most people, it is important that we are still able to take a step back and understand how and why these events happened as they did. This is crucial especially today because of the current turmoil in Egypt and Lybia. Though China is attempting to portray itself as a thriving, exponentially growing economy and country, this must not be accepted at surface level. Perhaps the best example of this would to look at the Australian Dateline clip China's Ghost Cities and Malls. China is building city after city, huge metropolises set to house twelve million people or more, and they don't appear to be stopping anytime soon. These massive cities that are being constructed would seem to prove that China's economy and market are thriving more than anyone could imagine. However, upon closer look, one can see that these cities are empty. In some of these huge centers, over 70% remains unoccupied and newly built giant malls only house a small handful of shops that are somehow still in business. The high rise residential buildings are at maybe 25% capacity, but most buildings remain devoid of life; yet China keeps building. So how is it that this is possible? The government controls where and how funds are spent and they are set up to spend a certain amount per year. The easiest way to spend this money? Build. Build a lot. However, these structures, specifically the residential ones, are basically built for failure. The prices that they are set at are not even within a dream's reach for millions of people living in China. Not only can nobody afford to move into these luxurious places, but the land that these buildings are constructed upon used to be where small neighborhoods sat. Though we can sort of see this happening in the US, even in Chicago (as gentrification...sort of. Well, Cabrini Green may be a good example, as a Target is set to go up in its place. Or New Orleans, where people were moved out because of the hurricane, and houses in low income places were torn down even though there was no damage to them), it is happening nowhere near as fast as in China. The urbanization in China seems almost instantaneous: a neighborhood is torn down, luxury high rises are put up. One real estate agent from the Ghost Cities clip even said that the people in the torn down neighborhoods would then just live in the new buildings. Pipe dream? You bet.

Though China seems to still be contained within its booming financial bubble, it will eventually pop. At this time, millions will have been displaced from their homes, expected to find some other place to live, and the government will more than likely be seen as the main player in this displacement. Unfortunately, the government's control and the people's desire for liberalization and political change was what spurred the Tiananmen Square protests, and history tends to repeat itself.

The MCA's "brochure" on Urban China: Informal Cities gave a bit more detail as to how a lot of this urbanization started (although the translation was horrible and made it quite frustrating to read). In the 1970s there was not any funding left for further education for many students in the cities. So, students began to move to the rural areas. This movement out of the cities is known as rural urbanization. As small rural towns became larger rural towns, these larger rural towns then became small cities, which became large cities. These large cities had no relation to their original small rural villages.

This process of displacing those that originally lived in the area (gentrification still doesn't seem like the perfect word, but for lack of a better one, I'll use it), naturally spurred artists to make art about this process. Xu Xixian had photographed Shanghai in different places, and, 20 years later, went back with his son, Xu Jianrong, and rephotographed the same locations to show just how much had changed with urbanization and modernization of the Chinese metropolis. Zhan Wang would go to the sites of mostly demolished buildings and fix up some pieces that were left standing. At one site, there was a red pillar and a partial white doorway. He brushed off both and repainted them, then cleaned up some tiles and brushed away the dirt and dust. He came back later and it was all demolished.

The one project that fascinated me the most was by Chen Shaoxiong. Understanding photography in its most basic purpose, to document things, Chen set out to photograph every detail of the streets of Guangzhou. He photographed rubbish bins, stop signs, people, trees, cars, sidewalks...everything. He would then print these things to scale in a miniature version of the street (so that everything in the miniature version is to scale with everything else in the miniature version, even compensating for distance within the "frame" of this model), and place them on a flat board in a recreation of the street. In doing this, he believes that he is encompassing something beyond photography. Whereas photography can only include a singular moment in time, and only does so within a specified frame, these collages are pieces of these brief moments, but merged into one scene. So that The woman with the buckets and the street vendor can exist in the same moment in the collage where they could not in the street. In essence, it is a still version of a moving picture, but not a photograph.

Chen Shaoxiong 

Chen Shaoxiong

Performance and Intervention 2

Karen Jones's The Urban Event: Spectacle, Resistance, and Hegemony and Lydia Yee's Two-Way Street discuss public art movements and how photography fits into ideas, events, and art in the streets.

Karen Jones explores the different aspects of public, city art in her The Urban Event: Spectacle, Resistance, and Hegemony. She uses the phrase "unitary urbanism", meaning "a theory of the combined use of arts and techniques for the integral construction of a milieu [a person's social environment] in dynamic relation with experiments in behavior." This idea allows theories and rebellions to happen through experiments of transformation of the city (such as performance art and graffiti) in relation to the government, oppression, and political and economic systems. David Wojnarowicz photographed Arthur Rimbaud in New York, where he wore a Rimbaud mask and stood in places that he had inhabited as a homeless teen. In doing so, he does the same thing that Buckingham does: draw out a past in something that cannot be immediately seen at surface level, but demands that the viewer understand the images (or story) at a different level. Lydia Yee and Frazer Ward speak quickly of this in their writings as well, but more-so dealing with a racial aspect of it. When Ward mentioned Adrian Piper and how she visually changed her identity as a racial commentary, I immediately thought of Nikki S. Lee, whom Yee mentions. Lee, a Korean-American woman, studies different subcultures within the American environment and then "becomes" one of the group. She then has herself photographed in this scene, blending into a hispanic neighborhood, a skatepark teenage scene, a yuppie shopper, and a cubicle businesswoman. Lee makes quite a clear racial statement that even on the streets, things taken at surface level are skewed and incorrect, and that not everything is as it immediately seems.

Nikki S. Lee, #4 from the Yuppie Project

Nikki S. Lee, #7 from the Skateboarders Project

Nikki S. Lee, #6 from the Hip Hop Project

Another form of art that Jones mentions is the graffiti art that exploded in New York from 1971-1982. During this time, graffiti artists gained "recognition" for "taking back" public space from a controlled power and producing street art that was name-making and free. It was seen, but not through anybody's (the public's) intentions; this is not art in a gallery or museum. It is public and it is unavoidably viewed. The rebellion of taking back what some would deem public space, is exactly what spurred on the Tompkins Square Park riots in 1988, when many of the students, artists, and homeless that had been removed or relocated because of gentrification in the area attempted to take back their public space in the park after they had been getting kicked out at 1am.

As Yee breaks down, Public events such as these were usually documented photographically under the category of documentary photography or photojournalism. Allan Sekula, however, states that there can also be an anti-photojournalism style within the same documented event. According to Sekula, this anti-photojournalism is "not in the headlines of the mainstream media, but 'the lulls, the waiting and the margin of events.'" Though I understand where he is coming from, I do not agree with his statement as it seems he is afraid to fall into the photojournalistic category and therefore made up his own "type" of photography. Photojournalism, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is simply "the use of photographs in journalism; journalism consisting primarily of photographs." So although Sekula may photograph "in between" major events happening, the fact that he is still documenting the people that were involved in the event when they are at the event, qualifies his images as photojournalistic. Interestingly enough, Sekula was not the only photographer to fear being lumped into a distinguishable photographic category: Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, and Diane Arbus attempted to "distinguish their work from previous documentarians by privileging individual style rather than a social message." Ultimately, they wanted to know life through their images, not reform it. 

Following this section of photographers not wanting to really be categorized, Yee categorizes some other photographers into archives, portrait, or performance. For the archive category, photographers such as Eugene Atget, Sze Tsung Leong, Zoe Leonard, Nils Norman, and Francis Alys were mentioned. These photographers created documentation of the cities they were in at the time, some making political or economic points, such as Leong's History Images, and some, such as Alys's Instantaneas simply capturing the essence of the street.

Eugene Atget

Sze Tsung Leong

Zoe Leonard

The Urbanomics Archive trailer from dismalgarden on Vimeo.

Francis Alys

For portrait, Yee brought up August Sander, Amy Arbus, and Jamel Shabazz. Though not always in the street, and some photographs obviously posed and set up in a more traditional "studio style", Sander created a sort of portrait archive of people in Germany in the 20th Century (Menschen des 20 Jahrhunderts). Amy Arbus, in similar style to her mother's subject matter, photographed people on the streets that had unique style or personality. Shabazz made more of a political statement by documenting the Lation and African American youth in NYC at the time.

August Sander

Amy Arbus

Jamal Shabazz

The performance category is slightly different as it relies less on still images and more heavily on video. Kimsooja made a film entitled A Needle Woman, "following" a woman around different capital cities. Robin Rhode made animations and graffiti with simple drawings and interactive stop motion. Daniel Guzman created a music video of one of Kiss's songs, filming in the streets of Mexico City.

A Needle Woman by Kim Sooja (30 seconds silent... by OUTVIDEO

Robin Rhode

Though categories help to organize and break down elements of art and the street, they seem irrelevant in the long run. What is most interesting is not which art is under which category, but how all of these types of photography and street art came together to create representations and ideas of the street that we can still see and relate to today.