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]
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:
"...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?"
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