The Projective Eye

Sam Jacobs at his Strange Harvest blog, in a reprint of his essay "Nostalgia for the New":

"Ironically for something positioning itself on the bleeding edge of newness, the New Aesthetic reeks of something suspiciously like nostalgia. It’s intoxicating vapours contain soothing notes of antiquated art historical ideas including the quaint notion of aesthetic movements and a belief in linear cultural progression. And that’s even before we even get to its content, which to anyone whose been around the cultural block, seem strangely familiar."

The essay originally appeared under the title "The Future as a Historical Fiction" in the UK publication The Commonplace, as part of a discussion on the 'New Aesthetic.' On the same topic and trailing by a few weeks, Curt Cloninger posts his own critique via the Mute site entitled "Manifesto for a Theory of the 'New Aesthetic'," in which he argues:

"'What might things make of the New Aesthetic?' is not a very useful question. 'What might humans make of the New Aesthetic once we realise that we have been entangled with things all along?' is a more useful question. Bruno Latour says that modernism was simply a time when humans thought we weren't entangled with things, when actually we were. What we made of that time unawares was an even bigger entangled mess (Latour's term is ‘a proliferation of hybrids’) – atom bombs as inverted guardian angels, global warming debates as orthodox scientific catechisms. At this point, it seems unlikely that we are going to avoid further complex human/thing entanglements, so trying to avoid them is probably something we should try to avoid. On the other hand, we should also avoid passively sitting around, techno-fetishistically dazzled by these 'spectacular new developments', blithely watching a real-time documentary of ourselves watching a real-time documentary of ourselves. Probably, we should spend some time figuring out how these systems flow and function so we can more effectively modulate them (or sabotage them), hopefully for reasons other than making more money."

"It bears repeating," Cloninger asserts at one point, "'Things' don't affectively suss New Aesthetic images. Only humans 'get' NA images. There is no machine 'aesthetic', no robotic 'vision.'" This has been a common riposte to the buzz surrounding NA over the past several months. Jacobs has his own criticisms, a number of which -- as with the above by Cloninger -- effectively echo those initially voiced by Bruce Sterling in his Wired essay this past April. Which is fitting enough, seeing how in the same edition of The Commonplace, Jacobs's essay runs alongside an interview with Sterling as conducted by editor Jack Self:

The subject, thumbing through the pages of his own effacement

Or: Post-Fordist Rubbernecking as Surrealist Slapstick

All that stone and concrete patinaed with age, the windows empty or broken or gaping, the random graffiti and intrusions of natural reclamation. The remnants, how they loom. No figures in the landscape. Ah, but if those walls could talk, what might they have to impart?

But chances are that by now you might be bored with ruins. I have been for a good while. They've kind of everywhere these days. More of the same, shruggingly navigate away. Pictures of them, anyway -- all over the web, in coffee table books, etc. And yes, I've blogged about them before; did so very recently in fact. A cultural meme/trend that's been going for several years; which isn't as ubiquitous as all the zombie bullshit and the proliferation of various eschatological scenarios in books and films that've also been quite popular for a while now. The appeal of which makes one wonder about the nature or source of that appeal; which for me has long been the main aspect of the ruins/Detroit meme that I have found intriguing. Intriguing, because there's been so little commentary or analysis accompanying it. Or I suppose there has been, but none of it amounting to anything substantial – not much aiming to get beneath the surface of the allure of so-called ruin porn.

These misgivings of mine being something I tried to address when writing about this topic a while back. The obvious point being that the current allure of ruins being something quite different from that of more Romantic times; because in the previous era that appeal came down to a sublime awe for the remnants of antiquity, whereas today it's a matter of aestheticizing the decaying foundations of the present society. And that latter aspect, I've long suspected, has a lot to do – consciously or not – with the recent proliferation of images, photog projects, magazine spreads, books, and etcetera. Yet the discourse that has accompanied all of it has been either scant or anemic, if not both. And that absence begs any number of questions.

But this is more like it. The '"this" being a piece in the winter edition of the Glasgow-based arts publication Variant, submitted by contributor John Cunningham, entitled "Boredom in the Charnel House: Theses on 'Post-Industrial' Ruins." Of Marchand and Meffre's photography book The Ruins of Detroit, Cunningham at one point observes:

"There’s a sense in that [the photos] reproduce the viewing subject as a consumer of dereliction, the images mediating the ruin as a theme park to be drifted through. A certain distance is necessary to enjoy the accumulation of debris since who would want to live in a ruin? Images of the contemporary ruinscape present the aestheticisation of the destruction of the world in much the same way that 20th century avant gardes such as the Futurists enjoyed the bluster of warfare. Except what is lacking in these images of our dereliction is the passion and joy that animated the parodic virility of the Futurists. Aestheticised might be better read as anaesthetised affect since The Ruins of Detroit for all the wide screen flourish and detail of the images gives me the sense that all of this has simply been curated for the sake of distraction and gazing – or perhaps grazing – upon the ruins. The lack of affect present in such acts of curation is even more accentuated in the repetition of the curating impulse on the web."

As the title proposes, Cunningham offers six possible theses for framing "ruin porn" in various discursive contexts, six possible means of unpacking the pop-cult fixation at hand. He perhaps gets closest to my original thoughts on the matter with his third thesis, "Ruined Passivity"...

"This process of the subjectification of a passive, neutralised subject might seem too much to read from the diffusion of images of dereliction but the theme park or art space is also immanent to the contemporary ruin. For instance, photographer and ruin auteur Camilo José Vergara proposed with a kind of blank irony that the ruinscape of Detroit be preserved as a museum of US capitalism. It’s worth noting that in Germany the industrial detritus of the Rurhr valley and the mining areas of the ex-Stalinist Eastern part of the country have already been transformed into such a museum of Fordism. In an essay upon this, Kirstin Barndt goes so far to write of a 'transformation of the subject' from worker to leisured (or unemployed) consumer and a 'new landscape of affect' produced through the aestheticisation of dereliction and its preservation as a post-industrial playpen with walkways, art galleries and perfectly preserved ruins. [...] And what might be termed affective subjects are partially produced through such spaces. As Ganser, the project director of one of the 'post' industrial theme parks in Germany comments: 'People feel better, even though objectively the economic situation remains unchanged'. This can also be shaped as configuring nostalgia in the shape of mourning for the past, a past where the local population was not quite as surplus to the requirements of capital. 'People feel better' is as good a motto as any for the disciplinary apparatuses of contemporary capitalism."

I'd recommend the .pdf version, as it's better formatted and includes the illustrations that Cunningham refers to at various points in the essay (whereas the poorly-set 'text' version doesn't).


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From ruins to wreckage...

"Even with our little lapses, we generally intend the best. We reason, calculate, tabulate. We conspire. We watch our backs, and we sometimes have the backs of others. And yet we stagger forward across seas on which oil from a busted well below is burned. We build reactors, and they are upset when we barricade the railroads that carry away their waste. We make dolls that chew the scalps of little girls. We bury waste in a too-shallow grave and now you can’t eat the cheese. We throw away pairs of shoes and books, and we make more of them, and we don’t burn the ones that should be burned. We starve or are starved. We are surprised that rocks exist."

Evan Calder Williams, currently residing & researching in Napoli, momentarily breaks his blogging hiatus to offer a spiel on a certain recent event. As usual for when he lays forth in long form, it's a corker.

Forget the Future/The Future of Forgetting

Image: Dave Jordano [ # ]

At the Design Observer site Places, "The Forgetting Machine: Notes Towards a History of Detroit," in which contributor Jerry Herron sorts through the aestheticization of dereliction by way of the recent glut of "ruin porn," the Motor City's provisional efforts at urban reclamation, and the fate of Detroit as possible cipher or harbinger of the telos of contemporary economics...

"This is a history created by serial default. Nobody really planned the ends — the ruins — of these buildings, any more than they planned Detroit, or America for that matter, despite our dedication to continental-scale projects, beginning with the Declaration of Independence and moving through Manifest Destiny and continuing with the Urban Renewal programs that destroyed America’s cities. We’ve all had a hand in our collective making, and now we’ll have to live with the consequences, not the least of which is our ignorance about the origin of things, so that we stand stupefied or angry or fascinated — camera at the ready — before the monuments to ruination."

The essay is the first in a new series by Herron. The notion of "forgetting machines" was introduced and explained in the author's earlier serialized essay "Borderland/Borderama/Detroit," which appeared in the 2010 Routledge anthology Distributed Urbanism: Cities After Google Earth.*  In that prior essay, Herron analyzes Detroit's status as a city/not-city via a historical trajectory that circuitously connects Tocqueville's assessment of the American idea of individualism with Rem Koolhaas's observations about American urbanism. Of interest is his discussion of Henry Ford's famous "history is bunk" decree, in which Herron fleshes out something that I long ago recognized as a distinctly American pathology:

"A history reinvented each day is no history at all, of course, at least not in the usual sense, with all it implies about the narrative chain of cause and effect that binds the present inextricably to the past. And that belief in necessary cause and effect is precisely what Henry Ford is calling 'bunk.' We want to live in a kind of perpetually self-renewing now,... That forever present condition of the individual is precisely what Henry Ford depended on to create a modern industrial work force — not people enmeshed in tradition or each other’s affairs, least of all union affairs, but individuals unfettered from the past, whom machine-made prosperity would turn into believers in Ford’s evangel. What he built, then, both the cars and the factories that produced them, might be thought of as forgetting machines — industrial works that became so successful as to make Ford’s point about the 'bunk' of history seem self-evident. [...]

"Where 'nothing' existed before, then, we were free to plan as we saw fit, getting it right this time, in a way that the old world, mired in history and tradition, could never do. Our cities came into being first as designs — as contracts with some higher ideal that entitled us to do whatever it took. Thus liberated from history, these urban idealizations had embedded within them their own inevitable undoing. Nothing real can ever live up to ideal standards of perfection, so that all our cities in a sense have been cities/not — forgetting machines always already sabotaged by history. But that would come later."

The essay was also reprinted at Places in three parts, and can be read here: 1, 2, and 3.


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* Herron's notion having no lack of precendents over recent decades. For starters, much of what rests at the core of Herron's essay touches upon some of the themes explored by Paul Connerton in How Modernity Forgets.

On: Location (Slight Return)

It all starts with an incident of a double cop-killing -- when a strung-out hooker on a supposed spree of random killings kills a pair of police officers. From there it spirals into full-fledged civic agitation and unrest. The cops are sure the incident is testament to a situation of it being "open season on cops" in the community and accordingly over-react, thus sparking a reciprocal response from the precinct's residents.

The community is named very specifically in the film's title -- Fort Apache: The Bronx. The hooker in question was played by Pam Grier, reduced to a bit (and far from "empowering") role in the years following the decline of "blaxploitation" films. An absurdist x-factor to the film's overall story, she has a few scenes in the film before her character is inconsequentially killed off fairly early in the film. Between the setting and Greer's appearance in the film, one could argue that movie served as a multifold signifier of decline.

The film received, at best, lukewarm reviews on its release in 1981. It's greatest notoriety, however, came about due to the protests it inspired among resident of the maligned neighborhood, and among critics at large who objected to the way the film pandered to ethnic stereotypes. I remember the controversy at the time, and whenever the late '70s-early '80s genre/not-genre of "urban exploitation" comes up, its one of the first films to leap to mind -- right up there with the Hobbesian fantasies of Assault on Precinct 13, The Warriors, and Escape from New York.¹ Considering that the film was released at the time that Ronald Reagan had secured the White House after campaigning on anecdotes about "welfare queens" and rhetoric about "making America great again," it wasn't difficult to figure out how the film's premise and portrayal of the South Bronx dovetailed with a certain burgeoning sentiment.²

So Fort Apache: The Bronx fits very squarely into the category I mentioned earlier, and has always been one of the first films that comes to mind whenever the topic of "urban exploitation" films comes up. I only mention now it because yesterday National Public Radio did a short segment on the film, revisiting it thirty years later. There's also this article from the NY TImes archives circa 1993 that deals with the closure of the 41st Precinct House (the "Fort Apache" of the film's title). And then there's this bit from Media Justice History Project chronicling the public protests of the movie.


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Speaking of which: A friend recently loaned me a copy of Joe Bob Briggs's Profoundly Disturbed: Shocking Movies That Changed History!. It's an uneven affair, but I've been surprised to find that certain chapters are more nuanced and deeply researched than I would've expected. One of these is the chapter about Shaft, in which Briggs situates the film in a number of broader contexts -- about its place in the career of Gordon Parks Sr., about its status in the "blaxploitation" genre, and about the history and inevitable fate of said genre. On this latter count, Briggs dwells on how blaxploitation films were received, from the criticism leveled by NAACP leader in the 1970s to how some of its participants saw it when looking back in hindsight. Among these is an interesting spiel from Isaac Hayes himself, who said:

"There were white writers, and they wrote their interpretation of how they thought it should go. They didn't have a deep understanding. They didn't live there. And they just kept dishin' out the same kind of thing, and it was insulting that they had the audacity to do that. But again, the people in the 'hood were eating it up because they finally had their own people on the screen. So that's what was wrong with it. I had some problems with blaxploitation. You had whitespolitation films, too: Chained Heat, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and all that junk. But they had other choices. We only had one."

To my surprise, I learned a couple of things from Briggs's chapter on The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, too.

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1. Another highly controversial film of the time was the 1980 film Cruising, in which Al Pacino played a police officer going undercover to track a serial killer through the gay subculture on NYC. The film's portrayal of said subculture -- itself a metonym for societal decay -- unsurprisingly incited an outcry from the gay community. As far as the period-specif bankability of the "urban exploitation" cinematic meme, I suppose all signs point back to Taxi Driver.

2. The "welfare queen" anecdote had been in circulation for a while, having been frequently used by Alabama governor George Wallace during his own campaigns for the presidency in the early 1970s. Reagan revived the story and used it repeatedly, despite that fact that some of his campaign advisors recommended that he drop it, since the tale was an urban myth and had no basis in fact.

That which we have now, having never been

As some readers already know, before moving to my current locale, me and my wife lived in Chicago for many years. The last five of those spent in an apartment on the southside. Making the decision to vacate wasn't an easy one. My wife wanted to be closer to her family, which I definitely understand on account of them being such warm and wonderful people. I'd previously been very much averse to the idea of ever returning to the South; but in the wake of the grand financial meltdown of a few years ago, I was finding that there was no job market to keep me in the city I'd long considered "home."

And in the run-up to that meltdown, we'd been increasingly being priced out of most neighborhoods in the city. Ah well, I eventually shrugged, why not? The place had been losing some of its prior appeal for me anyway -- a couple of exceptionally long and punishing winters in a row, the homogenizing effects of the mayor's years-long "Giuliani Lite"/disneyfication of the city, the neglected infrastructure...there were a lot of factors in the equation in the end, far too many to list, but ultimately they amounted to a decision that perhaps it was time to move on, see how things fared elsewhere.

But most importantly we had to get out of the path of the bulldozers.

Y'see, our entire block was scheduled to be razed at the end of summer of 2010. The original reason for this had been to make way for a hospital expansion. But after the economy cratered, many institutions around the country had halted such projects as they watched their funds and endowments shrink. But supposedly the nearby university was looking for other ways to leverage the effort. Or that's how one story had it.¹

The other story, one that began circulating in the community as the clear-out date approached, was that it had to do with the city's bid for the 2016 Olympics. The main stadium that the city had proposed building for the games was to go up in the park directly across the street from our building. So rumor had it that we were suddenly in a real estate hot spot, that developers were moving in with plans on what all could be done with properties in the area.² So everyone get out right now -- no dawdling. At the time the city was pretty certain that the Olympic bid was in the bag. Within a few months of having left the city, news went out that the games were being awarded to Brazil instead. Which made me wonder: is there such a thing as a Schadenfreude Samba?


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I only mention this because it connects with something that popped up today over at the Things Mag site, in which the editor muses over the mixed response to Iain Sinclair's latest effort, a quasi-psychogeographic tour of London as the city prepares and refurbished itself for the 2012 Olympic games.³ Things describes the book as "a sprawling trawl around the undeniably banal and venal regeneration surrounding the Olympics, haplessly mired in a stubborn nostalgia," further noting:

"Happily, we’re not alone. A recent Fantastic Journal post takes Sinclair to task: 'Like Marvin the Paranoid Android wandering Hackney Marshes, he suggests that all new building is pointless, all attempts at planning doomed and any development always the product of base venality.' ... What emerges from all this is more evidence of the steep valley that lies between history and nostalgia, wherein a penchant for the latter tends to shape one’s attitude and interpretation of the former."

From there, the author broadens the frame...

"The Internet exacerbates this condition, building up our perception of the past through the endless reproduction and celebration of past ephemera. The past is filtered through a lens of celebration, a perpetually art directed world, be it the gritty black and white world of life sold from a suitcase in these images of Brick Lane in the 80s, or Soviet ruins, or abandoned lunatic asylums, rusting machinery, filleted libraries, caches of Eastern European match box covers, esoteric ephemera from long-forgotten Olympic games, boring postcards, found photographs, passive aggressive notes left on refrigerator doors, weird LP records, shopping lists, ticket stubs, or even our own almost entirely context free Pelican Project.

Collectively, we've managed to make a fetish of the failed, forgotten and the marginal, mashing them together with the Utopian and the celebrated until the edges are blurred. Whether its the decline of manufacturing and urban centres or nuclear catastrophe or the collapse of the housing market is all rendered flat and equal by the vivid resonance of the image. This is where the overwhelming emotional content of a carefully filtered past meets our nostalgia for now ('...a mourning for the transience of a moment when you are still in that moment'), and the result is a state of being that appears to seek out the romantic past in every captured moment."

I suppose this "a fetish of the failed, forgotten and the marginal" has been a recurring theme here, if only because--it seems--it's been a fairly common fetish, of late. It takes different forms, and the reasons for this are numerous. Running a broad spectrum, some of it's fueled by the more mundane pursuits of collectors and enthusiasts, some of it is just the po-mo modus of cultural retro- appropriation siphoning out into a uncritical kitcshification of the past, while yet another variety of it it is the product with a certain aesthetic ennui with the present. But there's a portion of it that (I detect) that suggests by a deeper sociological narrative, springing from a sense of dread or impasse with where we've arrived in recent years.


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Chicago is, as far as its population is concerned, a very Polish city. One cliché has it that in the years immediately following WWII, there were more Polish residents in the city of Chicago than there were in Warsaw. Owen Hatherley has apparently spent a good portion of this past year in Warsaw, and writes...

"The thing about Warsaw that everyone knows is that 85% of it was destroyed in 1944, and that it was then reconstructed to the letter after 1945. ...Accordingly, for a certain type of architectural critic or historian, Warsaw is irresistible. It is, for traditionalists, the road not travelled -- a city where, instead of modernism, we got a dignified reconstruction of the old world. In fact, neither of the statements is exactly true. Recent research makes clear that the 85% figure includes much that was more damaged than irretrievably destroyed, and it's also clear that the reconstructed city took frequently huge liberties with the historical fabric -- how could they not? And after some acquaintance with it... it's also clear that the modernist objection to the place -- as a Disneyfied simulacrum of interest only to tourists -- isn't quite right either."

The "road not traveled" theme is a recurrent topic in Hatherley's work, be it his defense of UK post-War neo-Brutalist architecture in his book Militant Modernism, or his more recent A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain. About the core inspiration for the latter title, Hartherly remarked:

"The short explanation is that I have become intrigued by the fate of "urban regeneration" in the light of the financial crisis; what the speculative redevelopments of inner cities look like after the debts have been called in. They have become the new ruins of Great Britain. These places have ruination in abundance: partly because of the way they were invariably surrounded by the derelict and un-regenerated, whether rotting industrial remnants or the giant retail and entertainment sheds of the 80s and 90s; partly because they were often so badly built, with pieces of render and wood frequently flaking off within less than a year of completion; but partly because they were so often empty, in every sense. Empty of architectural inspiration, empty of social hope or idealism."

For the uninitiated, Hartherley's blog can be found here and his regular Guardian column here.


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1. As it was, our end of the neighborhood -- the one facing demolition -- was home to an odd assortment of residents, not the least of which was a lot of pensioners and elderly (with fixed incomes and capped rents) that the University had moved there due to its prior expansions and displacements into other parts of the community over the years.

2. Add to all this that the neighborhood I'm talking talking about was also gaining a lot of media attention at the time on account of it being the home of the newly-elected POTUS. To see the news reports in national outlets, the community looked vibrant and idyllic. All of which was ironic, because during the 'Noughties we'd watched the neighborhood go into sharp decline because of politicians and developers inept and hapless attempts at making it attractive to potentially gentrifying northsiders. (For instance, over half the shops on the main drag being forced out of business by real estate speculation, and still sitting vacant some 18-24 months later.)

3. Admittedly, this isn't something I've followed, but I have on occasion bumped into the odd caustic bit about it over the past year.

Scarification

Expectoration, December 2005, Darrow, LA (detail)



Untitled, June 2010, Gulf of Mexico (detail)



Nightmare, Carville, LA, 2010



Gangrene, Luling, LA, 2010

By way of the latest photo gallery at The Morning News, above is some work by eco-minded photographer J. Henry Fair, from his recent series Industrial Scars. Fair's been doing a great deal of work on this theme, much of which has been collected and is about to published in book form, which is to be published sometime this month.

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And once again, because critical discussion on this topic seems to being going full pitch these days, over at Guernica contributor John Patrick Leary weighs in on the recent trend of "Detroitsploitation":

Ruin photography, in particular, has been criticized for its 'pornographic' sensationalism, and my bookseller friend won't sell much of it for that reason. And others roll their eyes at all the positive attention heaped on the young, mostly white 'creatives,' which glosses over the city's deep structural problems and the diversity of ideas to help fix them. So much ruin photography and ruin film aestheticizes poverty without inquiring of its origins, dramatizes spaces but never seeks out the people that inhabit and transform them, and romanticizes isolated acts of resistance without acknowledging the massive political and social forces aligned against the real transformation, and not just stubborn survival, of the city. And to see oneself portrayed in this way, as a curiosity to be lamented or studied, is jarring for any Detroiter, who is of course also an American, with all the sense of self-confidence and native-born privilege that we’re taught to associate with the United States.

Quite a long and thorough piece -- comprehensive, intelligent, and astute. Full article here.

About the only question I have from reading the thing is...someone's making a Red Dawn 2?

(And no, I haven't been researching this topic lately. Just seems like it keeps popping up in a number of places.)

Ruin Porn Reprise

Hyperallergic contributor Kyle Chayka posting about a recent edition of WNYC's Studio 360 that addresses the recent cultural meme of 'ruin porn'...

In the apex of our era of high-flying capitalism, Detroit ruin porn functions as just such a momento mori, a call to remember that the same fate as Motor City could befall all of our great cities, all of our unstable accomplishments. I think Detroit ruin porn is so popular, and such a well-traveled visual avenue, in part because we want to be reminded that it could all fail. The voyeurism isn't just gawking at the old buildings; it's gawking at the possibility and the danger of death.

Which more or less covers my own thoughts on the topic some time ago; as well as echoing what Dylan Trigg, a number of Urb Ex-ers, and anyone who's ever given the matter a little bit of contextual thought might've said on the matter, as well.

And it seems this is the meme that's going to keep giving for a while, because Sean O'Hagan also had a piece on the topic in the Guardian a couple weeks ago, specifically about the noted Detroit work of photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre and their book The Ruins of Detroit. O'Hagan provides a bit of pertinent background info about the duo:

Marchand (29) and Meffre (23) have been taking photographs together since they first met in 2002. They are both children of Paris's banlieue, hailing from the southern suburbs of the city. Without formal training, they describe themselves as 'autodidacts who share an obsession with ruins', which, says Meffre, 'allow you to appear to enter a different world, a lost world, and to report back from there'.

Having photographed old buildings -- 'mainly disused theatres' -- in Paris, they happened upon an image of Michigan Central train station in Detroit while surfing the internet for pictures of abandoned buildings. 'It was so stately and so dramatic that we decided right then we had to go,' says Meffre, 'but we were naive; we had no idea of the scale of the project, of the vastness of downtown Detroit and its ruins. There is nothing comparable in Europe.'

All of which mean, I suppose, that we'll continue to hear more on the topic in the future. Perhaps at some point there'll be some international academic symposium at some point, one involving a call for papers from scholars from a variety of disciplines (cultural studies, sociology, urban studies, art and architectural history, philosophy, etc.), with a published collection of the contributions appearing after the fact.

On Location

From a recent bit at Salon in which author Jonathan Lethem offers a walk-through of John Carpenter's 1988 cult movie They Live. Somewhere between his discussion of the fake graffiti title sequence and the absurdly long fist-fight scene, Lethem explores the film's physical setting:

"'Every film is a documentary of its actors,' declared Godard. The same is true of cities, according to Thom Andersen's 'Los Angeles Plays Itself,' an essay-film on the subject of Hollywood's inadvertent enshrinement of Southern California settings as backdrops. 'They Live' shows up in Andersen's documentary as a typical example of how the city idles in the background, candidly disclosing itself to whatever eye may care to notice. Carpenter's film neither declares its Los Angeles setting as a subject nor troubles itself to conceal it. ...

The most distinctive location in the film isn't architectural, per se: the blasted rise on which the homeless compound Justiceville has assembled itself, and from which it will shortly be cleansed by an army of bulldozers and riot police. I asked Thom Andersen for more on this location's history: a marginal zone west of the Harbor Freeway, it had in fact been cleared by speculative developers in the late seventies and early eighties precisely to make way for more of the luxury towers contemplated by Nada and Frank as they gaze across the freeway in the distance. So, 'They Live's' urban-renewal subtext embeds a bit of real urban history, knowingly or not. According to Andersen, the planned towers never exactly showed up. When the area filled in, it was with cookie-cutter, middle-class condominiums."

If memory serves, at some point in his book Dead Cities, Mike Davis cited They Live as (he felt) a rare example of unvarnished urban vérité; going so far as to extend the film's underlying anti-yuppie subtext into an allegory that was more pointedly about gentrification. Davis viewed the fictional inner-city L.A. location of Justiceville and its inhabitants as a holdout against encroaching municipal urban renewal programs and greedy real estate developers. Interesting arguement, that; but perhaps overly generous in second guessing Carpenter's narrative intent, since we’re talking about the same director who had helped pioneer the non-genre of "urban exploitation" films with his prior efforts Assault on Precinct 13 and Escape from New York.



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Carpenter’s Escape from New York was released in 1981, which just happened to be the same year that the (admittedly lower-profile) film Wolfen hit the screen. Over at Cartographies of the Absolute, Jeff Kinkle focuses on the way the city of New York operates as a setting in the latter of the two films:

"The New York of Wolfen feels eerily depopulated. Not just the South Bronx, which is depicted as a complete wasteland, but the city as a whole, which feels like a dead city. There are no shots of crowds, street life, or loud traffic that are staples of most New York films: the only location that could be said to be bustling in the film is the morgue. You have the inevitable skyline shots, but they are always silent and still. The city is more of a rubble-strewn desert than an asphalt jungle."

Adapted from a novel by Whitley Streiber, directed by Michael Wadleigh and starring Albert Finney (while he was in something of a career slump), the premise of Wolfen hinged on a scenario that explicitly involved real estate development and gentrification in the blighted South Bronx.^{1, 2} Kinkle, among other things, discusses the film's failures and “idiocy” in terms its intended "political" subtext; as well as its place in the general trend towards urban exploitation films in the 1970s and early 1980s:

"There are a myriad of films that came out in the seventies and eighties that depicted, documented, exploited, and/or contributed to this dystopian image of a section of one of the world's greatest cities reduced to rubble, not through aerial bombardment but so-called 'benign neglect' and 'planned shrinkage'… Most of these [films] say little about what created the situations, usually implying that urban decline is a natural process and that the resulting depravity is the inevitable result of packing people together (especially non-white people)."

And elsewhere:

"An argument can of course be made that these films are in fact best classified as exploitation films, and they were both the result of and contributed to the (racialized) fear of the American inner-city. What's remarkable is how hopeless the situation seemed to be and how the era’s imagination saw total urban collapse as being just around the corner."

Anyone who was around and somewhat culturally attuned to films and television in the 1970s, or who's seen The Warriors or Fort Apache: The Bronx, mostly likely knows what Kinkle is referring to. In terms of setting, it was a common theme. It was as if there was a shared phobia about the fate of American urban centers at the time, as well as the unquestioned assumption that major cities were at the Hobbesian forefront of societal deterioration.

Declining industry and unemployment, shrinking tax bases, "white flight," etcetera — the downward spiral of problems that peaked in many major American cities as the country's post-war productivity and affluence began to wane. And I've often wondered if it wasn't a similar sentiment of "inevitable" urban decline that lurked behind the famed "Ford to City: Drop Dead" scenario of 1975. For me, it sometimes seemed like there was an undercurrent of schadenfreude to it all — as if, in what amounts to an inversion of the chain of causation, the middle classes were looking for vindication for having fled the cities throughout the 1950s and 1960s.³ Not much of anyone could get a grasp on the various socio-economic reasons for why the cities were in such a state at the time, there was just a view among held by part of the population that perhaps big urban centers had outlived their function.⁴

But the sociological pendulum often swings both ways, and in the past two decades this trend has completely reversed itself, with people piling into NYC and Chicago and a number of other cities in increasing numbers. If the city serves as any sort of apocalyptic or depopulated wasteland in recent cinema, it’s usually been the sort that involves an alien invasion, some sort of disaster or another, or zombies. The whole "asphalt jungle" meme probably seems pretty trite and quaint to audiences who came of age in the late 1980s or during the years during or after Giuliani's "Disneyfication" of New York.


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Asides & digressions:

1. As to Wolfen's muddled and confused political themes, some of the details included in this bit about the film and its making provide a likely explanation as to why this was the case.

2. I'll admit that I haven't seen this film since shortly after its original theatrical release. So my own recollection of the film is pretty hazy.

3. It is, of course, a common scenario when people look for information to validate their own fears or prejudices, and this was always the case with the urbanophobic attitude of the era in question. This, I suspect, had much to do with people’s willingness to believe the distorted tale of the Kitty Genovese slaying back in 1964. Chalk it up to "popular delusions" or whatever, but they don't call them "urban myths" for nothing. We watched something similar happen recently with New Orleans, with the reports of the alleged chaos that erupted in the wake of Hurricane Katrina — reports that were later proven to be unfounded. Some people's tendency to seek out and believe the worst being what it is, it wasn’t any huge shock to hear these reports circulating in the press and public sphere outside of New Orleans. Likewise for all the gusty "Thomas Hobbes was totally on the money" think-pieces that turned up in a few right-leaning magazines shortly after the levees broke. But when the city’s own mayor proved all-too-ready to accept these rumors as fact, perpetuating untruths as he blubbered hysterically into the media microphones outside his hotel room, one has to wonder.

And as far as the "outlived their function" verdict is concerned, it should be noted that there were a number of architects and urban planners crowing to the same effect at the time. (As some still are. ) In retrospect, it all comes across as a sort of chorus of triumphalisms of the suburbanite middle class.

4. In the cinematic context, this makes for an interesting contrast to the visual devil-in-the-details sense of suburban dread that permeates many scenes in Todd Haynes’s Safe (1995).

Nothing to See Here

photo: Timothy Fadek / Polaris

Some thoughts on the topic I touched upon earlier, in relation to Julien Temple’s “Requiem for Detroit?” documentary, since it very much intersects with recurring subjects that I’ve been thinking and routinely blogging about, lately.

Yes, the decrepitude of Detroit has become something of a minor pop-culture cliché in recent years. It's even been labeled a “hipster meme” for the way its ongoing appeal in certain quarters, and for how it's lately a recurrent subject for numerous professional photographers, books, and news programs. As the website The District & the D recently noted, there were 4,300 photos of the abandoned Packard plant in Detroit as of this time last year, versus the 6,900 pictures of the similarly abandoned Michigan Central Station. So, what’s with the recent fascination with ruins in general — either those of Detroit or of other American cities?

As the publication of Stanley Greenberg’s Invisible New York and Julia Solis’s New York Underground earlier in the prior decade suggests, much of this has paralleled and overlapped with the emergent popularity of urban exploration and recreational psychogeographics within the past ten years or so. True, these activities only have a limited and relatively small number of adherents; so that doesn’t account for the broader allure and public fascination with the state of Detroit, and the overall trend of what some have lately labeled “ruin porn.”

Ironic thing about the BBC doco: About the same time that Temple was putting it together, VICE magazine ran an article about Detroit's recent claim to notoriety, about how the city had become a magnet for photographers and journalist looking to profile the city's archetypal examples of Advanced Urban Decline. In the article, contributor Thomas Morton addressed the selectivity of photojournalist’s forays into Detroit — citing the way certain photographers would often scope out the most desolate sites and the city, making sure that any evidence that contradicted a narrative of Overwhelming Blight and Decrepitude stayed outside the frame. As the caption for one of the article’s illustrations bluntly put it: “[Photo of the author] climbing a hillock for a better view of the grassy wastes surrounding Jane Cooper Elementary School. If you move the camera just a few inches to the left you’ll get a bustling, well-maintained food-packaging plant in frame, so be careful to crop that shit out.”

Soon thereafter, Morton appeared on WNYC's On The Media, but the discussion boiled down to the following pedestrian conclusions...

OTM: Do you have any thoughts as to what compels us as humans to be so fascinated with this kind of documentary photography? Is it rubbernecking, like as if you were passing the scene of a car crash?

MORTON: A little bit. I think people just like a good ruin. I mean, setting aside like any kind of like deep philosophical implications of it, it’s just people like a good smashed-up thing. I know I do.

Right, it's hardly breaking news that Detroit has problems. But all questions of journalistic ethics and media distortions and exploitative practices aside, the implication here is that it’s little more than a case of pandering to baser appetites; with the photographers and publishers in question merely supplying the goods to meet a particular demand. Because, hey, “people just love a good ruin.”

photo: Andrew Moore

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Hubert Robert, "The Finding of the Laocoön," 1773



Casper David Friedrich, "The Abbey at Oakwood," 1810



Victor Hugo, "Ruines du Grosnez," 1854

Looking at a "good ruin" isn't an entirely new trend. Back in the in 18th century at the dawn of the Modern age, the spectacle of ruins constituted a subcategory all its own in the genre of landscape painting. Initially, this was a manifestation of the Neoclassicist sensibility that evolved from the Baroque movement, a means by which artists expressed their admiration for the artistic and architectural foundations established by earlier civilizations. This Neoclassicist aesthetic also overlapped with the Enlightenment, and dovetailed snuggly with the latter's positivist affinity for rationality and timeless Plutonic idea(l)s.

Images of ruins were still a frequent subject for artists in the decades that followed. But by the turn of the nineteenth century, they had evolved into multifold ciphers in the hands of Romanticist painters like Caspar David Friedrich and his contemporaries. When framed within a larger cosmology, ruins served as a sort of vanitas — not only a meditation on mortality, death, decay, and the transience of human existence, but also a fatalistic reminder that the greatest of human endeavors must ultimately succumb to the elemental forces of nature and to entropy.

In this respect, the spectacle of ruins in Romanticist painting operated as an ironic negation of the original Neoclassicist impulse; exemplifying the movement's embrace of subjectivity, passion, the deformed and the fragmentary and the deformed as a reactive strategy against the rationalism of the Enlightenment.¹ These ideas would later be adopted by the English Romantics and the Symbolists of the nineteenth century as they pushed against the tide of Utilitarianism, against the social, economic and cultural upheaval wrought by the Industrial Age.




Arnold Böcklin, "Castle in Ruins at Twilight," 1847

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photo: Timothy Fadek / Polaris

Returning to contemporary times, and to the connection between modern ruins and urban exploration...

As far as the "deep philosophical implications" that VICE contributor Thomas Morton alluded to earlier, philosopher Dylan Trigg interviewed Infiltration founder Ninjalicious on the practice of urban exploration back in the earlier part of the previous decade. Their exchange yielded a variety of incisive observations on the topic at hand…

DT: The majority of buildings or sites you explore are either derelict or 'barred'. For the most part this entails a negative presence. What implications does this have, if any? Or is the active site structurally the same as the inactive one?

N: I love beautiful buildings, so I hate to see them fall apart, but there is no denying that the whole tragic process of decay is breathtaking to behold. There's a powerful sense of entropy, particularly when you see nature struggling to reclaim an artificial area as its turf. Nature's efforts always look pitiful at first — a mushroom or two vs. a gigantic 20-story brick train station — but you know that eventually nature will win.

DT: Indeed, and no doubt this conjunction between the artificial and the organic invokes a sense of the uncanny. For me, the presence of decay creates a distortion in time. Even when nature is vehemently reclaiming the artificial as its own, there seems to be a collapse in any kind of linear notion of time. You mention that decay is a 'tragic process' and I wonder if this has anything to do with mutability and a sense of loss?

N: Absolutely. While many aspects of life are probably much better today than they were in the past, cities and buildings have really gone downhill, at least here in North America. No one takes the time or effort to make really inspiring edifices anymore, and it makes me sad to see so many of the buildings that could serve as positive role models for modern architects just sitting unappreciated and occasionally vandalized until they eventually collapse.

Later in the same interview, the topic shifts to the topography of specific cites:

N: ... Standing at the top of Michigan Central Station [in Detroit] looking at the Renaissance Center you really can't help but ask yourself what on earth happened. I think I'd be willing to give up my private galleries of decay for the good of civic architecture and the future of the city. Besides that, I don't know if my desire to explore buildings like the MCS would be dampened if they were somehow put back into use. It would depend how the sensitively the renovations were conducted and what the new use was, I suppose. Obviously it would be a crime against humanity if it were to become a casino, but I wouldn't be against it being turned into public offices or a hotel or something like that, provided they didn't destroy its character in the process.

DT: Yes, this always the delicate thing — conversion, restoration, or decline. The balance between being either overly nostalgic or dismissive of the past. Since 9/11 there is perhaps a greater propensity to look ahead, to be stoic when confronted with both human tragedy and architectural ruin. Do you think that derelict sites are in some way seen as symbols of regression or failure, and as such dismissed on account of their pernicious overtones? To put it another way, most people who are unfamiliar with Urban Exploration might regard it as a kind of negative aesthetic. Do you agree?

N: I think that's how it has been, traditionally, but I think this is changing, probably just because people who live in towns made entirely of sloppy junk buildings can't help but notice the amount of beauty and character that these old abandoned buildings still exude, even beneath all the dirt and decay. Here in Toronto, an abandoned Victorian-era brewery complex was recently reopened as a ‘distillery district’ full of bars, restaurants and museums, and it's becoming pretty popular, in spite of still seeming just a little gloomy, in a Jack-the-Ripper's London kind of way. If this spot wakes a few hundred people up to the fact that most of the places they live and work are phony and awful, and makes them hold architects and city planners to higher standards, then I think losing one of my old exploration playgrounds will have been totally worthwhile.

Above, Ninjalicious touches on one explanation for the appeal of modern urban ruins. It’s a sensibility that’ has emerged in the past couple of decades, especially among younger designers and creative types. That being a deep and genuine they-don’t-make-‘em-like-that-anymore admiration for certain types of artistic (or in this case, architectural) style, design, and craftsmanship from the not-too-distant past; the sort that began to disappear from the cultural landscape during the 1960s.

Of course, something else in the U.S. went into gradual decline about the time: manufacturing and industrial productivity, as a whole. And of course it was this latter process that left a lot of "Rust Belt" and U.S. port cities in the lurch. Later in the interview, the discussion expands to situate the topic of urban ruins within this larger socio-economic context...

DT: I myself find it hard to conceive of Urban Exploration emerging in a time in history which isn't attuned to a sense of decline. And indeed the pleasure we take in urban ruins seems to suggest a kind of voyeuristic glimpse into decline, not only architecturally but culturally too.

N: I think the main cultural trends that have caused the idea of urban exploration to resonate with a lot of people are the increasing absence of public spaces and the increasing absence of real places. I suppose some people might view the way our cities have evolved over the last few decades as progress, but I think the vast majority would agree that cities have gone downhill, and that the people who live in them are worse off because of it.

The above interview was conducted while Trigg was doing background research for his book The Aesthetics of Decay. Trigg’s book wasn't about urban exploration per se; but rather an academic philosophical inquiry into the role of urban ruins in contemporary cultural memory. (Or, as the author describes it, "a phenomenological analysis of the built environment" made possible since "the supposed antithesis of progress — decline — is the means by which a critique of [the idea of] progress is possible.") I've been curious about the book, but haven’t read it in full since copies are difficult to come by. But from what I gather, Trigg touches upon a number of things that have crossed my mind concerning the topic of ruins.

Central to all of this is matter of decline and how it is embodied or evidenced by contemporary ruins. Naturally, this sense of decline is linked to feelings of anxiety, apprehension, and uncertainty. Belonging to the recent past, urban ruins evoke a stalled or aborted momentum — a ruptured narrative that speaks of an alternate present or future that was to be, but isn't.² In this respect, the spectacle of urban ruins lends itself to a "hauntological" experience in the way they instill an ambivalent form of nostalgia. And the crux of this ambivalence, it could be said, stems from a sense of dread. Still more specifically, one might describe this state of dread as akin to what Georges Bataille identified in his writings on abjection.

The abject, in Bataille’s formulation, is that which is of a dominant system or order, yet is also outside of it by way of expulsion of degeneration — that which cannot be reified or assimilated; and what thereby, through the persistence of its existence, disrupts or undermines the totalizing grand narrative of said order.^{3, 4} In encountering the abject, Bataille asserted, person or subject commonly experiences an unsettling sensation; a mixture of feelings that includes both attraction and a sense of repulsion.⁵ Broadly speaking, this idea isn’t a far cry from the impression of "agreeable horror" that the Romantics claimed accompanies an encounter with "the Sublime."

There have been numerous references to "the post-industrial sublime" in recent discussions of urban sprawl, urbex, and modern ruins; so much so that the phrase has almost become an inherent cliché.⁶ As such, the term suggests that a practice aestheticizing of ruins might currently be in the offing. This presents a curious scenario: Are we party to a process in which that which can’t be reified or re-assimilated by the sacrificial economies of the existing social order are instead being "brought back into the fold" by a set of marginal or subaltern practices and predilections? Perhaps. At the least, I suppose one could say it makes for a new form of aesthetic scavenging, if not for an intriguing new type of urban reclamation.⁷



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Endnotes / Asides:

1. Schopenhauer had complained of the Platonist aesthetics of the era: “That the Idea comes to us more easily from the work of art than directly from nature and from reality, arises solely from the fact that the artist, who knew only the Idea and not reality, clearly repeated in his work only the Idea, separating it out from reality, and omitting all disturbing contingencies.” On the imperatives of these "contingencies," Victor Hugo would argue a few years later in favor of the use of the grotesque — the deformed and ugly, the anomalous and incongruent, the absurd, the visceral, etc. — as a necessary element in art of the modern age.

2. This of course brings the matter of economics into the equation. In the book's introduction, Trigg cites Walter Benjamin's writings on the abandoned arcades of Paris, which Benjamin had identified as an architectural embodiment of surplus commodity in the processes of capitalist production. In the instance of the ruins of Detroit, however, the presence of contemporary urban dereliction represent not so much surplus commodity, but implies — by way of their disuse and massive scale — a much larger and more ominous fate lurking on the economic margins.

3. For the unfamiliar: Bataille’s formation of the abject occurred in the context of his own association with Surrealism, and thus operated as theoretical extension of Surrealist strategies for scrambling the rational and aesthetic hierarchies of “bourgeois” society.

4. Or as Trigg states in his introduction, in relation to Benjamin: “Whereas the capitalist logic classifies things in terms of their productive value, thereby rendering entire industries obsolete not long after they began, the logic of the ruin contests this assumption. In dereliction, the ruin attests to the inherently tenuous foundations of the logic of capitalism: what was once built to testify to a singular and eternal present becomes the symbol and proof of its mutability.” {Emphasis added}

5. In recent years, the notion of the abject has been more often associated with Julia Kristeva, who (much later) had extrapolated her own theories of abjection from those put forth by Bataille. As Rosalyn Krauss has taken pains to distinguish, Kristeva gave the concept an exclusively psychoanalytic spin that was rooted in the corporeal and in thematic tropes and metaphors concerning bodily functions; whereas Bataille’s initial application of the idea was primarily social(if not socio-economical) in its orientation.

As an additional aside: How about the proliferation of secular apocalypses in recent years? Seems like it's been yet another cultural trend that's paralleled those of the topics at hand. So I suppose one could potentially extend Kristeva’s metaphor of abjection and excreta in the context of discussing ruins — perhaps extending it in such a way that it links the scatological with the eschatological. Or has someone already done that already? [Haha.]

6. For instance: Even Trigg has used the phrase on rare occasion, and Anthony Gormley uses it as well in the piece I cited in a recent post.

7. Curiously enough, it seems that Trigg anticipated this possibility. At one point he warns against “abstracting [ruins] from their context. Such a beautification of the ruin succumbs to a wholly romantic perspective. Instead of opening the space in which rational progress is contested, the static identification of ruins, through rendering them novelties, implicates a detachment whereby the ruin’s powers are diluted.”