Week 9: Performance and Intervention

Lytle Shaw's essay, The Powers of Removal: Interventions in the Name of the City opens with an account of the writer Henry James returning to Manhattan [his birthplace and boyhood home] in 1904. His account of the rapid and ruthless transformation of the city is apparent. Shaw designates his reaction to the changes within New York City to that of the upper class, the aristocrat. The transitions to modernization were met with horror and shock. When James looks at Lower Manhattan, he laments about the powers of removal, in that the old churches and smaller buildings have been abandoned or razed, the newer ones [buildings] come in and take their place. James saw this as an unstoppable process which was actually part of a larger act of destabilization and would lead to the destruction of all buildings, much like Richard Nickel, 50 some odd years later in Chicago.

By the mid 1970's, Lower Manhattan was further being deconstructed and deindustrialized, the constant shifting of working class positions being replaced with white collar jobs. Although, within this area south on the island, a thinly populated area remained: Wall Street. When the labor jobs were moved from the piers of Manhattan to New Jersey, the money to control the industries remained central to Lower Manhattan where the work and structures to support these systems shifted. The heavy labor was replaced with technology and money exchanges.

Many artists and photographers working at this time were able to show a decaying shell of what once was in New York City, especially in something so modern like the rising of the World Trade Center. From their images we can see it built, services replacing goods which echoed the financial management replacing production and distribution. But what exactly has been removed from Lower Manhattan? Is it more our memory which holds tightly to form the city, its buildings and their subsequent meaning which we or others assign to them? It is at this point within the essay that Shaw talks of a fin-de-siecle of sorts, the end of one era and the beginning of another.

Importantly, the essay asks the reader where does art fit into all of this? If art is concerned with these problems of removal, then where does it direct its strategies? How can artwork look at the forces of urban transformation. The essay and the thoughts swirling around it keep coming back to the definition of what constitutes public art? A lot of the "truths" of the given definition keep circling to another continuous question: Who is providing the definition and directing our gaze?

The city acts as a place of lively interest as it if full of private places breathing in a very public forum, such as apartments, corporate buildings, etc. At the time when James returned to New York City, even he commented on the large number of windows on structures, enabling you now to see into the interiors of buildings. As the newer buildings went up and the older left or wrecked, a rumination by Michel de Certeau seems pertinent as he said, "What can be seen designates what is no longer there." As the landscape of the city changes, who is remembering or easily forgetting these places?

While there are literal ruins of buildings, any vacant building, other remnants of vacancy are present too, as Lytle Shaw states, these "unresolved seams" are between functional buildings, like gaps and cracks. The Shaw essay further points to artist Matthew Buckingham, who through his work asks us to look at what the previous removal attempts were, the ones that came before. In example: the removal of the Lenape tribe to make the settling of the city more possible, as New York City was once New Amsterdam. The city is reappropriated in many forms and reshapes itself based on needs, wants and by those who are doing the shaping. Who are the agents of removal in the city? Shaw's essay looks to the familiar of outsourcing and deindustrialization, but questions if it is not more mysterious and distant? By projecting the common themes to the American landscape, it can seem familiar to paintings by a past figure like Thomas Cole, who urged our national language to take seriously landscapes in America as these ground too were the sites of importance, of revolution or story. A way to push current conflicts of specific sites.

[Thomas Cole: Landscape with Figures: Scene from Last of the Mohicans]



If trying to separate specific sites from specific words, three public places appear to be nearly impossible: Red Square, Tiananmen Square and the National Mall. They are so specific and yet evoke such incredibly varied responses. Michel de Certeau commented on this thought process as well in that the emotions and preconceived notions seem eternally linked with the public. As Shaw describes Buckingham viewing the city in multiple ways, not only up the Hudson, but through the central harbors and canals, he is able to navigate the city in vertical, suspended and totalizing views. Buckingham references the cartographer of the city in this way as a "fictional disembodied eye suspended in high air", this sentiment to me plays reference to Ralph Waldo Emerson's "transparent eyeball" in his essay Nature.


Even if artists looking to examine these happening within the city, such as Christopher Wool, Gabriel Orozco, Moyra Davey and Roy Colmer, strive to not necessarily document the street, but examine different ways of looking at spatial organizations within a city and serve to examine the changing surfaces of the street and public spaces. As they look at the normal and hum-drum, the everyday things within our existences, their works also lends to the conversation of just how many subjects there are to look at within these public spaces on the street. If the seemingly mundane finds itself being imaged, just how many interventions could be made? How many things could be photographed?

[Gabriel Orozco]

[Both images: Christopher Wool]

[Moyra Davey]

[Both images: Roy Colmer]

Looking at what the street symbolizes, who creates the rules for the street and how we operate within in its confines or freedom, Frazer Ward's essay Shifting Ground: Street Art from the 1960's and 70's, proves helpful. Although to Jane Jacobs the street could be a place of self policing, it also harbored a place for social unrest, destabilization and resolution. If the problems were born on the street stemming from misunderstanding of street problems, then their place to be resolved could be the street. The public street becomes a space for spectacle culture.



An artist like Claes Oldenburg, who was fully aware of the problems surrounding places like Washington Square Park and people like Robert Moses, shares a similar trope with Wool, Davey, Orozco and Colmer in that their focus tends to shift towards the overlooked, the seemingly trite and ignored. Much of the work becomes a way to shine a light on public spaces for everyone to look. This video is a contemporary memorial to the people and city of Dresden in that "What people hear via bone conduction is the sound of the B-25 bombers, which destroyed most parts of Dresden's Old Town in WWII and which they see on the other side of the river
Elbe. This happened on 13.2.1945 [date on the icons]."



In 2004, the Museum of Contemporary Photography held an exhibit titled Camera/Action: Performance and Photography. I distinctly remember the work in the show by Tehching Hsieh and some of the writings available as synopsis of the show made many parallels to both the essays The Powers of Removal: Interventions in the Name of the City and Shifting Ground: Street Art from the 1960's and 70's. Below are some highlights of the [abridged] text:

[Tehching Hsieh: Time Clock]

"...Allan Kaprow, well known for orchestrating performance events in the 1960s, was bothered not only by the seeming incompatibility between still photography and temporal action-based art, but also by the effect of the camera’s presence on his happenings. He found that it brought an unwanted dimension of spectacle to the event, and that his participants behaved differently the minute photographers appeared on the scene. These attitudes, of course, presuppose a hierarchy in which one experience can be more authentic than another...They also ignore the fact that in the 1960s and 70s the experience of a live performance usually did include watching a photographer moving in tandem with the artist. Performance artists quickly realized that they relied on the documentation of their work to disseminate their ideas and actions to a larger audience. Many also found it helpful to be able to see, analyze and perhaps revise their works after the fact...if art always comes after experience — does it make sense to favor physical participation over imaginative participation?"

Week 8: Chicago in the 1960's and 70's

[Photo of UIC campus post 1970]

When Richard J. Daley took office, he sought the kind of power that could really transform a city. Among the numerous "urban" problems the mayor faced when taking office in Chicago including race relations, the list also included a serious lack of investment in the downtown area. With the general deindustrialization of cities post-WWII, Chicago was constantly being looked at as the "city on the make". The city needed revitalization and structure, out with the old and in with the new. To note the beginnings of the Chicago Housing Authority [CHA] which was developed during 1937 under President Franklin Roosevelt's Public Works Administration, is an important subject to look towards as public housing and its subsequent problems would run parallel to race tensions, politics, urban development and population numbers. The first three housing projects were the Jane Addams, Julia C. Lathrop and Trumbull Park Homes. These structures fell within Roosevelt’s New Deal programs to provide affordable housing for low-income families.
As the middle of the century was passing, ideas of how the structures of public housing should actually look and function swung literally much higher, to high rise operations. Clustering hundreds of apartments among single structures, then closely placing the separate structures together accounted for thousands of living quarters atop of one another. Close to each other, but not close to city amenities and simultaneously not utilizing the entire amount of land assigned for such huge projects.


As Daley looked to ways of improving Chicago, he focused his attention on the University of Illinois at Chicago having a downtown location. The university was getting by at its location on Navy Pier, but the mayor was ready to expand. After a plan fraught with political, financial and neighborhood problems, sites on the near West side of the city just West of Halsted street was decided on. The new campus of UIC was designed by Walter Netsch, an architect most closely aligned with Field Theory. The architectural group under which he worked was Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, the same organization which developed the Hancock Building in Streeterville. The photographs at the beginning of this post are what the UIC campus looked liked post 1970, the drawing directly below the photograph is the design for areas of the campus which were never built West of the expressway. Note that that drawing was rendered in 1961 and features the Hancock Building, whose construction did not begin until 1965. With how much controversy the buildings of the UIC campus came with, it is startling to think what the further development of the campus could have done to those plotted neighborhoods.

While Chicago became a city to incorporate more highways and expressways within and around its environs, Daley pushed more and more for what the National Interstate Highway and Defense Act, signed by President Eisenhower in 1956 enacted. Chicago was to become a city more accessible by automobiles, keeping in mind that the car culture and transportation infrastructure of this period was leaning much more heavily on automobiles as the focus. With the super roads to be developed in the city, something had to move. Buildings, neighborhoods, people and their cultures became uprooted, displaced and pushed to the side. Even Daley at times thought reflectively at what the influx of roads was doing to the image of the city in which he was raised. So the buildings came down and the roads went up, some with more commotion than others. The photographer Richard Nickel was one who looked to point out of such acts of demolishment. To see the buildings razed, the images were created as an act of preservation, because it was the last option. Nickel's photographs of a city that was becoming modern at the end of post-war America could not replace the buildings, but serve only as a way to provide an option for looking.

Nickel had the impossible task of realizing he would never be able to convince Mayor Daley to the importance of architectural gems the city could afford, much less the entire nation. The photographs act as a visual diagram to instruct those to look who do not have a camera. Nickel looked to present the works of "masters" such as Adler and Sullivan in Chicago, to have the photographs serve as a document. The images were to became a statement, Nickel thought the structures for the people along the lines of "this is all you have", so look at them, really look and think about why their destruction is allowed.

The city at this time is becoming a sign of many unhappy words: filth, poverty, crime and generally was equated with fear. Ignoring, defacing and thus destroying the architecture, whether big or small within the city seemed to be a sign of the times in Chicago. Real estate agencies and various politicians saw the "dinosaurs" of the Loop tired and worn. The downtown was seemingly poised for a push towards the new and modern. The city would build more roadways that made more places accessible by car, city distances to be measured less in pedestrian scale. Even public transit began to fade faster as multiple rail lines were cut throughout this time period and continue their decline today.





[Transit maps in 1898, 1942, 1944, 1975 and 2011 respectively.]


It is a wonder to look at the city mayors of past and what their nods and approvals went to for buildings. Even buildings that appear to be natural alliances to the architectural grounding of Chicago [Burnham and Root] were demolished. What kind of architectural efforts went supported, only to be torn down by the next mayor or developer. Bigger egos and seemingly better ideas as to how a city it supposed to look and function prevailed. Recontextualization of buildings and their purported beauty was not for post-war America and definitely not for Chicago. The sleek, shiny and eventually unusable was manufactured for replacement. The city is seeded within a rebuilding attitude, as it happened tragically and out of necessity due to the fire of 1871, why couldn't it happen over and over again voluntarily if it is to the benefit of the overall city, its environs and populous?

What maybe most likely saddened Nickel even more was the fact that the subtle aspects of the architecture did not yield the passerby, only when the wrecking ball was present people stopped to look. Nickel appears in the end even more adamant about looking at and to the structures even though he is moving away. There is a constant pulling, Nickel wants to look and document the buildings to urge the public, the masses, to keep looking at their greatness
but when asked to lecture to college students on the subject of the demise of architectural art, he refuses. Besides being a private person, his ideals wrapped up in what he thought the newer generations would do to the past made his thoughts migrate towards thinking of this newer generation being incapable of appreciating the power of the word. Within argument to the buildings' lives and adequate living means he must have surmised to be best projected using a powerful impact of visual attempts as a presentation tactic. For the lecture request he suggested a film be made instead to show other people about building demise and to throw the spotlight on money grubbers and gangsters, the "business as usual" course within the city. The film could act as a way to really look at the happenings of destruction if you were so blind to not see them on the everyday street.

[Photo credits: Richard Nickel and photograph of Richard Nickel with salvaged ornamenture.]

The role of witness proved difficult for Nickel, although it appears he used the act of making his photographs as a way of looking, which made those moments both depressing and therapeutic in nature. Nickel, a reclusive character found solace and unrest within the entire process: scouting, stalking, looking, gazing, creating, imaging, development and then rest. Where did the pictures go, hopefully in his mind to a place where more of the common would see them like City Hall versus a more restrictive environment like the Art Institute. The photographs served to show areas all over the city. The "master gems" were not just destroyed in Daley's front and center Loop, but also in middle-class and lower-income neighborhoods, noting once again road development and public housing as CHA moved in with the mentalities of Le Corbusier for development practices.

The creative efforts in Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool race towards the visualization, both documentary and staged, in an ever changing city as Chicago was being imaged and imagined in many ways during this period. The political, social and racial tensions that rose directly after WWII came to a full boil during the summer of 1968. Some of the musical choices and staging of the two main characters in the film, John and Gus, camera and sound man respectively, very much resemble the 1966 film The Endless Summer. This classic beach movie follows two surfers in search of the perfect wave during one long summer, like John Cassellis is to follow the one big story. Even the use of actor Peter Boyle as the shooting range manager somehow felt predictive to aspects of his role as Wizard in Taxi Driver, another film which follows stories of tension closely but also so pinpoints the atmosphere in a city [New York City per Taxi Driver]. The character states that the role of the journalist is to record, much like Nickel felt his job to entail. They both look at the problems, while Nickel focuses on a two-dimensional presentation of three-dimensional objects, while Wexler uses a motion picture full of actual footage, staged drama and sound to fully captivate your attention to mounting city problems, rising in the film's conclusion during the 1968 democratic convention in Chicago, where the whole world was watching.

[Photo credit: Art Shay]

As Chicago was changing and photographs were made in response, each person works with their own strategy of looking while at the same time appears to work in tandem by including small details or an overall sense of the changing climate.



[Photo credits: Vivian Maier]

[Photo credit Art Shay, Nelson Algren Amuses a New Friend]

[Photo credit: Art Sinsabaugh]

No building was too insignificant to photograph, thus to look at. Nickel provided a private tour to the city, the neighborhoods, the peoples. His matter of fact way of looking provided a clear view, his attempts always trying to pull between the subjective and objective as Nickel repeatedly photographed the same thing over and over in different seasons, with different angles, different everything, a constant pursuit of the "right" way to see a building. Before his sad demise, Nickel was able to show a new city of shrouded masterpieces to a city that thought it knew its own place and secrets. He was able to point out just where to look, as there was always another building or rather ethos to focus on, so many more photographs to make.

Week 7: Los Angeles in the 1960s - 70s

[Photo credit: Edward Burtynsky]

When Ed Ruscha first drew the sketches to Trademark Study it became an introduction to a centralized motif of using text within his work. When looking at Ruscha's work we can begin to dissect the issue of spectatorship, along with stressing the importance of having the viewer engage with his [the viewer] encounter to the material and spatial complexities of his work. This nature of looking that Ruscha starts to present and asks of his viewer was a strategy that pushed beyond the confines of artwork that was circulating in Los Angeles during the 1960s. This is important to note as his work actually responded to the spatial experience of L.A. as a new art scene emerged within this time.

[Photo credit: Ed Ruscha]

Ruscha became more aware of the agency in which he worked, asking the viewer to see the piece[s] in the way one could read a commercial sign, being conscious of the style of text. These associations are linked with speed, action, instantaneity - the photograph. How are we supposed to talk about represented space? Much like Jasper Johns, the goal is to suggest a physical relationship to the picture that is active, or at least shine a light on the possibility of that relationship. Ruscha utilized the typography of highly legible signage which dominated American streets, places and highways especially in Los Angeles, creating pieces like Twentysix Gasoline Stations. Experimenting with the qualities of an object, bodily scale and trompe l'oeil techniques as Ken Allan states really starts to examine the interplay of qualities used in given quantities as: medium, material and object which were beginning to surface. A book like Twentysix Gasoline Stations demanded a whole new kind of sensory skills required to handle the artwork, the actual object. Ruscha stated that this format moved away from the precious and limited edition, but to a mass-produced object of the nth degree. It was also a way of turning a small book into a monumental sculpture to be physically negotiated.

By looking at these visual supports, the artist is asking us to connect spectatorship and the spatial experience of the new urban landscape under the impact of heightened outdoor advertising, a new kind of visual pollution. Although Ruscha's paintings and photographic books of locales around Los Angeles can be read about how central the automobile is to the theme of L.A. itself, it also at the time was in direct relationship to the push for a cohesive arts scene within Los Angeles, to form a gallery walk, which occurred on La Cienega Boulevard. These art walks happened on Monday nights and many of Ruscha's earliest works were featured and seen within this environment first. It is important to note within this car centered city, were attempts to make things more walkable and pedestrian friendly.

A few of Ruscha's books like Some Los Angeles Apartments, Every Building on the Sunset Strip and Thirtyfour Parking Lots in Los Angeles begin to ask how the reader of these books need to feel compelled to answer questions the books raise. As the photographs explore the dynamics of spectatorship, a representation of urban space and a presentation of ways to reread an experience of L.A.; within these books it appears as though Ruscha is intending more to look at spaces, rather than presenting street photography or a narrative. As he quotes, "At the time, I was into making pictures that happened to be photographs, rather than making 'photographs'." Ruscha was able ask the viewer to closely examine the photographs, to really look at the spaces and places as he changes the size, scale and perspective of buildings, specifically in "The Dolphin", [found within Some Los Angeles Apartments]. With small details, we must bring the book closer and further away from us like a perpetual eye exam to continually examine what Ruscha presents. The books allow for the renegotiation of relationships to urban spaces, those which are typically recognized as some of the more alienating elements of the southern California landscape. This photographic work in book form is like much of Ruscha's paintings which ask the viewer to walk back and forth from the canvas to see things closer and away from the overall image, and vice-versa.

The physical negotiations of Ruscha's work appear to be most present in the book Every Building on the Sunset Strip. As he presents an unedited view of the street on both sides, the book is an accordian shape which allows for the viewer to reshape the book and put sections together that do not exist on the actual street. It allows to viewer to alter space and reshape reality. Henri Lefebvre states that this approach invites the the viewer to take an active role in the use of this book, it becomes a way of appropriating a dominated and dominating space. Within the vocabulary of looking at Ruscha's work, issues of spectatorship to Los Angeles appear secondary to Ken Allan as he argues this work responds to the surfaces and signs of Los Angeles, but also challenges conscious and unconscious bodily participation to unique and everyday aspects of the L.A. landscape. Ruscha continues to look at the relationships between the viewer and the art, seen both as material and object.

[Ed Ruscha handling Every Building on the Sunset Strip]

The photographs within the book Every Building on the Sunset Strip were made with motion picture film, using the camera mounted atop a moving car and from this the views of and from the car speak to the auto culture of Los Angeles. It is the car and our experience from and around the automobile that shape the spaces within L.A.. The car becomes the centralized lifestyle to a city and Ruscha seems to cast this subject matter within a perpetual problem. What appears to structure our encounters with works of art as objects is the dynamic between the pictorial, mental and actual space. Even in Ruscha's early paintings, he seems to be asking the viewer to start questioning the space and perspectives in comparison with the memory of the actual object represented. By employing compositional strategies that subtly link the space to the experience of viewing simple juxtapositions of text and everyday objects, Allan states that Ruscha asks his viewers to engage with his work by active bodily participation.

This entire mode of looking becomes dependent on the idea of the pedestrian, as the work shifts, it is to be viewed about highway centered environs of L.A., by an act of "walking". By presenting actual photographs of hands flipping through a book like Twentysix Gasoline Stations, it shows that the format of the book enables to viewer to understand the flexibility and impact of the photographs within the medium. You can flip to one page or another, in no particular order or go through it in a very strict pattern. This much allows the self an editing freedom. The photographs of the actual hands with the book are reminiscent of the photographs taken of installations/performance pieces by the likes of Gordon Matta-Clark, to show the piece as a document, but later shifting to an idea of how to reinterpret the piece. This diversity of flipping options enables a performance aspect as well by allowing the viewer to edit at will and provide an option of keeping it open or putting it away. This book format not only dictates the way the art is viewed but also enables liberty of choice for modes of viewership.

Within typical complaints about how a city like Los Angeles operates, many like Langsner commented on how the city was alienated from the rest of civilization and was so auto-focused that it has no grip on reality. In comparison "what every other city was seemingly doing" became linked to an idea that L.A. had no connection to local history, which has lead to the rootless and frivolous lives of its city dwellers. Within their dependency on the car, the author also remarks on how the entire view of the city and the interaction of the people with the city is shadowed behind the glass of a car as you are zooming by a space or place. Ideas like these provide key reasons for the development of a walkable gallery area, as to create something of a focal point for people in which to look and respond to art.


[La Cienega Boulevard currently and Ferus Gallery past]

Cecile Whiting also examines artists in Los Angeles during the 1960s and 70s who are working around and in the city as a place under the obsession of car culture. The fetish of 'kar kulture' as the epicenter of a place is creating an entire gaze of objects that shifts as everything is determined from mobility, the speed of the automobile. The visuals are predicted and determined by the observational experiences seen from a car, through a car and around cars. In direct opposition to the flaneur who viewed things slowly under a mindset of "the faster we see things, the less we see", the occupier of L.A. is in constant transitory movements through an urban space of faster, faster, faster.

[Still from film American Graffiti]

Artists like Dennis Hopper and Ed Ruscha were able to observe the banalities and rhythms of modern Los Angeles appearances through a car. Layouts presented in the single image or book format allow the viewer to scan over what is showcased, not to rest on things for too long. The actual subject matter seems to dictate how it is viewed, especially when the subject matter and way it is presented have no change, climax or conclusion within their structure; instead the imagery further pushes the spatial experience from that of a driver's vantage point. The driver looks with quick glimpses of the commercial vernacular.

[Photo credit: Dennis Hopper]

When looking at a book like Thirtyfour Parking Lots in Los Angeles, the aerial agency takes root from the prominence of helicopters at the time, a rise in the machines due to massive freeway expansions. Whiting remarks that these photographs highlight standardization over singularity. These kinds of photographs are a contemporary example to what Reyner Banham speaks of in the film Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles. He states that photographs and cinema provided an image of the city that made him already know L.A. even before he arrived in the city. Many of the conventions in which these photographs were made act as the graph/map/diagram to help aid in the evolution of urban planning, whilst at the same time also look to how these artists and residents can examine how people in these urban environments actually viewed their city and oriented themselves within these spaces. Whiting refers to Kevin Lynch's models of viewing a city written out in The Image of the City, asking how the residents of L.A. orient themselves within a city that is laid out in distances for high speed travel only?

[Photo credit: Ed Ruscha]