Week 6: New York in the 1960's - 70s

[Photo credit: Danny Lyon]

Rosalyn Duetsche's introduction to the essays, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics, begins to explain that the writings remain fixed within the times they were produced. The essays explore the connections between contemporary art, space and political struggles as described within the combination of cities, parks, institutions, exhibitions, artworks, disciplines and identities and how these mingle with the ongoing cultural and historical debates of such ideas and movements.
She is concerned with these struggles within a public context as looking, producing and maintaining of spaces. The "spatial discourse" of looking at and combining these ideas continue to examine art, architecture and urban design, while mixed with theories of the city, social space and public space as an interdisciplinary field called the "urban aesthetic". The introduction begins to ask what kind of political relationships form when asking the questions about what kind of issues are at stake in the discourse about art and space? What kind of aesthetic debates examine ideas like "openness" and "accessibility" during the oppressive programs of urban reconstructing within the 1980s to redefine an idea of public space. Deutsche argues that within the removal of structures and peoples deemed undesirable within cities, that the attempts to erase these exclusions are apparent. During this same time period, with a rise of rhetoric about public spaces and urban planning under the cloak of urban development is an increase in public art commissions. What is the relationship between these urban happenings and aesthetics?

[Lilly McElroy, stills from video The Square]

Examining the social functions of art in contemporary urbanism, Deutsche looks at the model that utilizes art and architecture to frame urban redevelopment projects, as the social functions are what neutralize the political character of art and the city. She seems to be observing that the art is masking the redevelopment projects, as a use of distraction and takes away from both the public space and the art work. The art work[s] are looked at through a prism of being dependent on one another. It becomes familiar with suburban developments which are sometimes named after the land or place which it has replaced. As Deutsche comments that space is a rather politically charged idea of place, the public is questioned to their responsibility of the urban sphere including having artwork for the people in public spaces, although these art works appear to pacify the act of the urban redevelopment.



Both Rosalyn Deutsche and Martha Rosler [in her essay Culture Class: Art, Creativity, Urbanism] look at the mechanisms for redevelopment as destroyers to the very conditions of survival, basics like housing and services for the residents no longer deemed "needed" by the city's economic health as there is a constant push to remove poor housing projects and service which help such populations. With the removal of these peoples' homes and places, it seems to create conflicts and problems with public space and how such space is supposed to be represented and available within the city.

Throughout both these essays, public art in public spaces purposes are investigated as needing to be "socially responsible" "site specific" and "functional". Does the art need to aid in the "beauty" and "utility" of the newly redeveloped urban sites on appropriation of spaces? Their writings ask if public art in public spaces needs to be in partnership with the redevelopment of areas to further ingrain the ideas of the good the redevelopment is doing, or is it an artist's responsibility to covertly or overtly draw attention to the conditions caused by such a new space? But what does the term "public" mean now? Is this state control and maintenance over these public places, tax dollars from the public that pays for the space? What would that mean for people who don't pay taxes? For tourists, or children? Or, could there be an understanding that a space can be public by belonging to everyone?

[Richard Serra, Tilted Arc]

To look at defining public space as a public sphere, an arena in which citizens engage in political activity by redefining art as work that enters or creates such a space, Richard Serra's Tilted Arc, seems to achieve this. By equating public space with political space [which politics?] this installation can be examined by remembering how you can't recover something that you never had and that social space is produced and structured by conflicts. When people in the surrounding buildings of the plaza to where Tilted Arc lived became annoyed with having to walk around the structure and it broke up their path, Serra commented that this was the point, "The viewer becomes aware of himself and of his movement through the plaza. As he moves, the sculpture changes. Contraction and expansion of the sculpture result from the viewer's movement. Step by step the perception not only of the sculpture but of the entire environment changes."

When Tilted Arc was torn down, the decision raised many questions about public art which are pertinent still today. What is the role of government or state funding? What are an artist's rights to their work? What is the role of the public in determining the value of a work of art and should public art be judged by its popularity? The arguments look to the conflicts over the ownership of public space, vivid and immediate, something which Deutsche's essay reflects.

Within Martha Rosler's essay Culture Class: Art, Creativity, Urbanism, she further looks at space as an investigation of cities throughout their transformations from centering around government to moving towards the marketplace, as a merchant-like center. The terrain of a space is a real world currency and allowed to be negotiated. Rosler states that photography has only helped the rise in tracing earthly space and the closing of land as a document.
[Martha Rosler]

When examining what the role of the creative class is to reshaping economies, Rosler traces clues to the Situationist postwar movement as their argument is that art cannot be separated from politics within a larger milieu. To investigate the "spectacle" which is "not a collection of images, rather a social relationship between people that is mediated by images". In balance with the 19th century advent of the flaneur, the situationist practiced an engagement with city life called "derive" as this was the exploration of urban neighborhoods and being seen, in contrast to directing the experience of looking more to ones self. When looking at these city movements, Rosler sites Lefebvre's arguments against Le Corbusier's views of the street as a place of danger and living disorder to align more with Jane Jacob's take on street life as really the only thing that reduces crime; the street acts as a self and neighborly-policing institution.
As industrialization increased the flow of peoples to the city and still continues to do so as more people live in cities than do in the country, postwar appetites were ravenous to rebuild the destroyed small and narrow spaces with larger structures, create open places, better roads and public transport. Larger buildings became obvious and symbolic pictures of state and corporate administration and financial power. As cities were clearing out the poor and dilapidated neighborhoods with aims to enliven the city with culture, the developers and planners neglected the peoples and culture it was replacing as the focus was only for the benefit of the middle and upper classes.

[Photo credit: Babette Mangotte]

With the deindustrialization of American cities, Douglas Crimp writes about this experience within New York City in his essay, Mixed Use Manhattan, Action around the Edges as looking at artistic culture of this city during the late 1960s and into the 1970s. He writes extensively on artists' resourceful uses of forsaken spaces with Manhattan's light industry areas and the issues that came along with their recontextualization of spaces. Although artists were able to claim benefits from the neglect of New York City during this time, many others found crisis as jobs, homes and services were eliminated for the poor who were being replaced, especially in areas like SoHo and the Meatpacking district. An artist like Gordon Matta-Clark looked at the city as neglected, but usable, dilapidated and beautiful, a general loss to be turned into possibility. The availability of empty and abandoned structures was a constant tangible reminder of the renewal for modernization and growth anticipation of cities.
[Photo credit: Alvin Baltrop]

Although commentary of Gordon Matta-Clark's piece Days End was seen as dangerous, like a sort of abyss meets Gothic cathedral's rose window, Matta-Clark saw it as a peaceful place, away from the rugged nature of the piers in New York City and their environs of culture. He wanted it to be a form of escapism within a place already fused with escapism, a place of refuge.
[Gordon Matta-Clark]

[Photo credit: John Baldessari]

A contemporary showcase of looking at people coming back to cities to reclaim what the poor could not handle is homesteading. A simple way to describe this movement is individuals purchase distressed homes to rework them and live within. A more "gentle" way of colonizing neighborhoods and driving out the poor. Rosler comments that this movement is equated with the Wild West, the same principles applied to the "urban pioneer". When looking at the majority of those people who are moving in, they appear to be mostly artists, part of the creative class. Prime examples of this movement are seen in Buffalo, New York here and here, as well as in Detroit, Michigan. Rosler quotes Sharon Zukin "...artists and the entire visual art sector...especially commercial galleries, artist-run spaces and museums are a main engine for the repurposing of the post-industrial city and the renegotiation of real estate for the benefit of elites within urban change...". Within these three separate essays, it appears difficult to compartmentalize the city, art and public space. The imagery posted this week looks to how these artists and movements examine the city as a series of situations when viewed in pieces, but as a whole with the background of their/our collective visual memory which is brought together to form a vision of composites.
[Photo credit: Thomas Struth]

[Gordon Matta-Clark]
[Lee Bontecou]
[Photo credit: Gabriel Orozco]

Week 5: Master Builders and Resistance, The Planner vs. The People

Jane Jacobs clearly states that her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, is an attack of current city planning [circa 1961] and city rebuilding. Jacobs' arguments are focused from the standpoint that "she likes dense cities...cares for them most" and what she believes most detrimental to the city are the principles that have shaped modern orthodox urban planning. Some of her opinions are focused on ideas that were built off the Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago which turned the ideal of a "City Beautiful to City Monumental", in the cropping up of civic and cultural centers in cities across the nation. But, "when the fair came to the city, somehow it did not function like the fair". At the nucleus of the book, clarifying what constitutes a city neighborhood is questioned. Jacobs laments the idea that "if only we had more money, we could fix things" and shifting the aim towards better planning as a way of halting the waste of money. To look at planning by not needing to elevate [and possibly invent] the greatness of a city, but first by not tearing them down by means of dissecting and demoralizing their populous and it's environs is crucial to Jacobs' theory. If price tags are put on different sectors of the population, who decides who deserves what in the city and why? Jacobs states that "cities are an immense place for trial and error", something which I previously touched on from ideas within Kevin Lynch's The Image of the City as he comments that the "goals of the city are ever changing, always in sight, but the finish line in nonexistent".

Jacobs' argument that as the city has been "unstudied and unrespected...[they] have served as sacrificial victims" intersects with her criticism on the faulty pre-planning of cities that begins with looking at her interpretation of Robert Moses' attempt to completely understand how traffic functions could operate in a neighborhood, without being able to actually understand this until you analyze the true role of the city and what its people need first. She compares city planning and the rebuilding of cities to the pseudosciences which resided in 19th century medicine, full of complicated rules, criticism if questioned and dogma.


As she continues to describe the need for functional mixtures within communities in the chapter "The Need for Aged Buildings", Jacobs describes that not only the beautiful and grand architectural marvels, but generally older, ordinary, low value and even run down buildings supplement a large function for the foundation of cities. Only time can affect the economic outcome for aged buildings, but a bargain can be found out of the previous generation's high cost for such a space. Those peoples and enterprises that can afford the rent of an older building can start work and if needed within the community will [hopefully] flourish. Jacobs believes that "old ideas can use new buildings, but new ideas must use old buildings". The only commercial endeavours which can provide for new construction are those with established old ideas, are high in value and can commit to the high overhead. If what is old eventually ages and the new becomes the old and so forth, a constantly changing mixture is available for neighborhoods which can use mixed-use environments. This approach could align with her ideas of "primary diversity mixtures" where the minglings of building ages are necessary as well as living costs and tastes to get populations of living quarters as well as enterprises grouped. Small businesses could lead the light for others to follow suit if a model is shown that these neighborhoods encourage growth.

[A mixture of buildings for living and enterprise in Oregon, USA]

Jacobs argues that the successful side of the street is the one with mixed aged buildings as it creates more room for diversity. How one equates older buildings with an assigned 'charm' and others with 'broken' status could examine why turn-of-the-century spaces are snatched up and newly developed condos lay vacant in some cities and vice-versa. As the economic value of aged buildings can only progress over time, although be sustained for many years; Jacobs further pushes for these uses because "once a neighborhood becomes a place of dullness, it becomes a place to leave". Jacobs states that "when people comment on how much the neighborhood has changed", it refers "mostly to their feelings and less about the physical structures".

Her belief is that cities need to implement a "close-grained diversity" which utilizes balance and support to many different systems and peoples. As she describes a housing project within New York City's East Harlem neighborhood, constant tenant complaints were voiced about a beautification project installed in the form of a grass lawn; when all the people really wanted within their sites was a place to sit down, congregate, get a cup of coffee and read the news. What may be more beautiful to the planner can have no real interaction or purpose to its intended user and/or inhabitant.

[Public housing, Chicago, Illinois]

This link to the Encyclopedia of Chicago provides fascinating documents on the building of public housing options like Cabrini Green.


Below is an example of mixed use property, although a new development, illustrates some of Jacobs' ideas.


In reaction to the Garden City [a response of 19th century London as evil and in direct war with nature, to move people away from cities and repopulate the country] from planners like Ebenezer Howard to Le Corbusier's "Radial City" [a combination of the Garden City and building upwards, by keeping people off the street and inline with Garden City ideas to keep them in the park], Jacobs is able to compile arguments against the rise of the "Decentrists", whose "primary use of regional planning was to decentralize cities, thin and disperse the population and enterprise to smaller roles over more space". These physical utopias tended to shift towards social utopias, as these city plans were conceived as problem solvers to the metropolis, by abandoning them all-together. As Jacobs figures the ideas within these movements are bridging on the authoritative, especially when looking at the role of the street as "bad", her argument shifts to looking at street for a starting point to investigate the need for the city to work for the pedestrian to help showcase an urban place as multifaceted and full of cultural life .

In parental views of city planning, Robert Fishman writes that the master builder Robert Moses was bound to appropriate only what he wanted. Even though Jacobs and Moses couldn't be more polar, Jacobs still recognized for all his faults he was still someone who "got things done". To sustain Moses, it required an audience to believe that Moses was needed to save and sustain 20th century cities. His radical ideas on running a highway through Washington Square Park in New York City were to fall under Lewis Mumford's criticism of "civic vandalism", although Moses pushed onwards believing that these ideas could be completely inline post-National Housing Act of 1949 which heavily concentrated on slum clearance and riding with Le Corbusier's view that "the city that achieves speed achieves success".

[1811 approved Commissioner grid of New York City]

Although the Washington Square Park debate was won and no highway was to bisect its space, the events ignited the conversation for the national debate of urbanism in America. This same language is important today in 2011, especially with the push for the green movement over the past decade. The fight for the reuse of buildings and spaces to the petition of stopping the demolishments of entire neighborhoods can be viewed throughout the entire country. Two separate blogs in particular look at grassroots preservation efforts in cities like St. Louis and Buffalo. The recontextualization efforts to bring new ideas to existing things, echoes Jacobs' fight for restoration over clearance. A neighborhood and city can always have its values built upon, in that I would state that Jacobs' argument is similar to Moses' which is that "cities must be rebuilt, not abandoned", but instead her focus is not to "rebuild" but to "repurpose and reuse". As slum clearance, foreclosure and abandonment is occurring at rapid pace nationally, it has never been more poignant to look at cities for the needs of people.

Week 4: Phototgraphy in the Urban Milieu, 1930s-50s

One of the defining moments in the history of American photography to come into its own as being considered a true medium as an art form is during the beginning of the 20th century, both pre and post-World War II. Curator and art historian, Jane Livingston, argues that the sixteen different photographers who make up the 'New York School', share a number of different subjects, influences as well as clear aesthetic assumptions and clues. With existential values, but ambitions not as clearly defined, Livingston makes a direct comparison to abstract painters of the same time block. Her point rooted in the fact that many of the New York School Photographers began their careers as painters, or attempted painters.

Looking to influences of the New York School Photographers, all appear to share and identify with the film noir movement. The stylistic choices in film noir seem to point to the shared photographers' desire to express a sense of "presentness" within their work. With more modern artistic movements and conventions to rebel against than seemingly nurture the New York School aesthetic, the group of photographers react strongly against Pictorialism and the giant role of the artist Alfred Stieglitz. Although the Pictorialism movement disappeared quickly after it began, the ideas it formed around as to what photography as an art form should align with and run parallel to lasted much longer and served as a jumping-off point to the New York School theories. Below are 2 different images of New York City, made roughly 8 years apart from one another [1892 and circa 1900 respectively].



[Photo credits: Alfred Stieglitz [top] and Detroit Photograph Co. [bottom]].

Also, a small selection by Life magazine of "Portraits of New York".

When Roy Stryker culled a group of photographers to work under the Farm Security Administration, the FSA, to document the conditions of rural America, a new idea of a "straight" approach to making photographs emerged, helping documentary photography of Depression-era America quickly redefine its way of looking. One of the forerunners of the "straight" way of looking in photography, was Berenice Abbott. She aligned herself with making images that were not manipulated when approached, formed and developed. Her images of New York in the 1930s, while hired by the FAP [Federal Arts Project] not only lend themselves to visual cues of a new approach to documentary photography, but also make linear literature connections to critical essays of the period, especially Lewis Mumford's writings and musings of cities and urban life, summarized in part by his 1939 film, The City.




[Photo credits: Berenice Abbott]

So many of the New York School Photographers looked at an approach to image making from many disciplines, such as film noir and painting, but also much in step with students and practitioners of the New Bauhaus movement planted at the Institute of Design in Chicago. The multidisciplinary approach headed by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy at ID resonated in many of these photographers arsenal of visual cues to the creative process. In the same breath, many artists at this time were striving to form a less literal, "more metaphoric" language, while still wrestling with social looking: Could artists and artworks change the way a society functions? Photographers like Jacob A. Riis and Lewis Hine would have informed a romantic notion and mentality of social equality related to their period and the future.

Helen Levitt, one of the photographers associated with the New York School, who was born and lived her entire life in New York City had her book, in collaboration with friend James Agee, A Way of Seeing: Photographs of New York published in 1965, [although the photographs were from the 40s and the book started taking form in the 50s]. The book was a representation of "photo-journalistic concerns...while being removed from the confines of the magazine...and picture story". The layout of the book is narrative, although not completely story telling in nature as the sequencing of the images and their style is alternative with cropped images using negative space or even full bleed and some spilling across the gutter. Levitt's style was highly influenced by Henri Cartier-Bresson, as well as Walker Evans. She, with many other photographers and artists, had a high level of interest in the everyday street life of New York and made this her central vision. Like photographer Aaron Siskind [of the ID], Levitt found a sense of beauty in the everyday language of street life: street vendors, children moving about to and fro, public communication and transportation devices, etc.





[Photo credits: Helen Levitt]

Notably figured within the New York School Photographers is Robert Frank, whose entrance into the realm of modern photography can be greatly credited to the publication of his book The Americans. His photographs pointed to something "fundamentally new" having a "untameable...raw power" states Livingston. Robert Frank's photographic style is romantic, straight and curious especially encapsulated around the embarking of photographing a post-war America that was swirling all around, but may have been too pedestrian for anybody to take real notice, let alone make a photograph of the seemingly ordinary and the every-person. His business of looking by use of available light, the 35mm format and choice of subject formed the tenor of his style and is "widely thought to have changed forever the very grammar of the medium of photography".


[Photo credits: Robert Frank]

One of Frank's contemporaries was William Klein, whose original aspiration was to be a painter, seemed to focus early on in his career to a more "serious education in avant-garde art". Although both Klein and Frank have similar features in the careers [film making ventures, creating ambitious books], Klein is quoted to see Frank as someone "who is part of the establishment", which from Klein distanced. Although Robert Frank in Klein's eye may have been part of something more not in-line with what Klein gravitated towards, Frank seemingly was able to blur the lines better as completing commercial assignments with the same level of artistic voice and freedom to anything he wanted to accomplish within his own "personal" work, he very well could blend the two.

When Klein returned to New York after traveling in Europe, he wanted to venture into a book, one of intimacy, focused around a diary-like mode. His investment in the ideas of The New Landscape, [filtered through Leger, from Gyorgy Kepes book, who heavily shaped Kevin Lynch's ideas in The Image of the City], was to direct his focus to "gathering evidence". Klein's tabloid-like approach to having glaring headlines and a sense of urgency for "the dumbest, most ordinary stuff" was rejected by editors in New York. He brought his wide-angle approach of "grain, blur, contrast and accidents..." to publishers in Paris instead and the book New York was born.


[Photo credits: William Klein]

William Klein's approach to photography by likening it to painting in a sense can be conjured even through Levitt and Frank, simply looking through of lens of chiaroscuro. Although one of the photographic approaches found in the New York School was to be informed of straight looking and the use of available light, the creation of shadows and dimensionality for figures and shapes within the compositions of these photographers is legible.

Week 3: The Navigators - Flaneurs

The rise of the flaneur emerges from the city as a territory meant to be traversed. The flaneur can be dictated by the innovations within multiple environments and the living conditions of its human inhabitants. Georg Simmel goes on to describe the flaneur as "visually obsessed...although seemingly disinterested, he is highly visually invested in the perceptions of styles of others". I would consider "others" both people and things due to both Simmel's observations on the flaneur traveling through the city observing its population, but also the sites to be seen, as in "shop windows with mirrors and lights".


If the flaneur chooses or is allowed to "use his time deliberately and generously", with a "freely roaming attitude, leisurely lack of purpose and slight indifference", what does the flaneur give most importance to? Simply the act of looking?

With the advent of gas-lighting in the 1840's it enabled the ability for the flaneur to thrive, allowing the all day pursuit of continual looking at everyday exteriors. A modern flaneur of sorts could be embodied by the ever present security cameras, cropping up more frequently. It looks with equal importance to all it "sees".


As the industrial age progressed and there was more to observe, reflect upon and have an emotional connection with, a continuous shift of external stimuli was circling. With these shifts in the urban space, with more things ever present, visual sensitivities increase to respond to the outward demands of the senses. The flaneurs' slow movement is in direct reaction to the age of acceleration. Their mentality as "the faster we see, the less we see". Visual aspects of the modern life manifest themselves through a "bombardment of images, as well as images with text". There is a significant rise of advertising [including: "billboards, posters, placards, store signs, shop fronts, display windows"], all which "competes for the attention of passengers, pedestrians and passerby in the city". This kaleidoscope of images and text attempts to composite one whole image.

How do we filter out all the information in our modern cities? Can one take in all the information equally and justly as the 19th century flaneurs' skill-set boasted? What do we give priority to? Who and what dictates how we give priority to readership?


A style of the "litfabsualen". A cylinder shaped structure used for posting advertisements at eye level, on all surfaces, as to attract visual contact from all directions.

Photo credit [Matt Siber].

As Baudelaire talks of the arcades of Paris, which helped aid the rise of the flaneur, he is quoted to seemingly "love the life" of strolling and looking. He found solitude while being immersed in the crowd. Before and during Haussmann's modern changes for Paris in the Second Empire, arcades flourished as a place to showcase new lighting and what that did to transgress the lines between the interior and exterior. Arcades created a virtual interior of the boulevards of the outdoors. These arcades served as a management of sorts to contain the outdoors and make it more tangible.


Simmel suggests how the eye is used more than the ear in the big city. With the advent of public transportation, we freely choose or are forced to look at and be with one another. But, we can use looking as one form to learn something of one another. In Edgar Allen Poe's Man in the Crowd, he follows the decrepit old man to and fro from his stance in the coffee shop through the streets of London. Poe summarizes the generalities of his physique. When following closer, but as not to be seen looking, Poe takes a chance to examine his person. He notices the change of gait. When the old man gets to a bazaar and traverses through the shops and inspects the variety available by the sellers, he slows and travels with less object. Poe looks at the flaneur in his story without being looked upon. This sense of voyeurism and attempting to learn, or just feel by looking is reminiscent of Merry Alpern's photographs from her "Dirty Window" series.


If at times of social destabilization the flaneur can arise, the American Theodore Davis writes post Civil War about how art should have increased access. He pressures the National Gallery of Art in 1870, to accommodate the "poor, uncultivated, the businessman and the flaneur" to browse the galleries. Two years later, the museum reverses its policy and remains open on Sunday to "be friendly to the masses".

American painter Childe Hassam [1859 - 1935], who frequently painted scenes of Boston's Back Bay area circa 1880's, commented on his "interest in simply looking at the driver" and the desire to learn about his comings and goings.


Another American's point of view of the flaneur was critic: Mariana Griswold Van Rensselar. In response to the Columbian Exposition in Chicago of 1893, she writes an article "At the Fair" in Century Magazine #46 [May 1893] on how to have the best experience while at the fair. "To act as flaneur.". If the true flaneur has interest in only one thing, his capacity for the reception of new ideas and emotions, not craving knowledge but delighting in impressions; she stresses to really absorb it [the fair], one cannot rush. If you set a leisurely pace, you can create passive absorption.


The flaneur's object could be explored at home and when traveling if possible to treat sight seeing as not such hard work - but easy going. Holding oneself passive, but perceptive.