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.

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.