On the Exhaustion of Something of Other

Christian Viveros-Fauné, writing at artnet News, on "Containers and Their Drivers," the Mark Leckey mid-career retrospective presently on view at MoMA PS1:

"Fiorucci [Made Me Hardcore] achieved cult status at almost viral speed, thanks in large part to its timely anticipation of the YouTube generation’s breezy manipulations of digital sources. This accident of history lent the North England-born artist the veneer of being the Cezanne of the interwebs—in today’s artspeak, post-internet art’s analog pioneer. A gifted but ultimately trivial sculptor, filmmaker, poster-maker, installation-designer, lecturer, musician and general jack-of-all-0-and-1-art-trades, Leckey seems to have never recovered from the pigeonholing. [...]

"Traipsing through Leckey’s multiple rooms at MoMA PS1, consequently, comes across as a spiritually exhausting, Reagan-era throwback experience. As captured in his first US survey...Lecky’s life’s work takes physical shape as a concatenated set of new media reworkings of Jean Baudrillard’s 1980s-style vaporings. The majority of Leckey’s current installations, in fact, deal with some unacknowledged version of hyper-reality. Were Leckey American, no doubt this exhibition would have featured the DeLorean from Back to the Future. [...]

"'I see myself in a tradition of Pop culture,' Leckey told artnet News contributor J.J. Charlesworth in 2014. 'I'm a Pop artist – I believe in the idea that you’re essentially a receiver, that you open yourself up to, and you allow whatever is current to come through you and absorb it into your body and somehow process that, and that’s how the work gets made.'

"The work's chief revelation is as simple as it is uncritical: in our era of data glut, everything is everything is everything. Leckey’s replicas (or are they simulacra?) accrue on repeating shelves and pedestals, one after the other, in ongoing, insistent, recurrent, nearly endless succession."

The gist of Viveros-Fauné's critique is hardly a new one. If anything, it very much echoes that of Julian Stallabrass's YBA bollocking of some years hence, High Art Lite. That being, that "pop conceptualism" rapidly degenerated into a a default modus in which postmod irony, long having lapsed into a state of rhetorical depletion, becomes a form of passively (if not somewhat masochistically celebratory) fatalism. We are all merely receptors, culture is effectively like a pinterest page,  and "thinking isn't cool -- shit and stuff is cool."

The prevalence of 1980s tropes, themes and cultural references in Leckey's work is apropos in a way. For those old enough to remember the art of the '80s, this sort of installation art bound to seem so tiresomely familiar, because it's little more that the eternal return of Haim Steinbach -- endlessly reused and recycled and diluted into a thinner gruel with each iteration, a cultural product that exceeded its shelf life with the close of the prior century, a salon art that now signals aesthetic inertia and little else. Except, I suppose, some would argue that in his day there was something about Steinbach's work that seemed simultaneously both humorous and ever-so-slightly horrific. Whereas much of the stuff of this latest generation too often comes across as thoroughly anesthetized.

Everything Falls Apart, Pt 2

Archival post: First published at ...And What 
Will Be Left of Them?, January 2011

A Sum of Possibilites: Gordon Matta-Clark and the Urban Landscape

When the artist Gordon Matta-Clark moved to New York City in 1969, the city as a whole wasn't in the best of economic shape. Declines in post-War manufacturing and shifts in the labor market, loss of jobs, economic stagnation, flight to the suburbs and a shrinking tax base, municipal mismanagement -- all of the problems that were affecting a number of major American cities were beginning to take a severe toll on the city of New York. Nevertheless, artists of every stripe continued to move into Manhattan -- visual artists, writers, and musicians who would play an instrumental role in shaping the City's cultural landscape over the next decade or so. With the real estate market in an extended freefall, many of them had no problems finding cheap and available places to live and work.

Such was the case with the neighborhood of the SoHo (then called the South Houston Industrial Area), a former sweatshop district where obsolete and derelict property was plentiful. Since the late 1950s, scores of artists had settled into the neighborhood, the property owners often letting many of them live there in an off-the-books capacity. This situation allowed Matta-Clark and his peers a number of unusual opportunities, the means of establishing and developing their own interconnected and mutually supportive cultural community. The anarchically-run co-op exhibition space at 112 Greene Street, which allowed artists to stage their own exhibits and performances, was one such example. Another communal anchor was the artist-run restaurant FOOD, which Matta-Clark -- along with his partner Caroline Goodden and several of their friends -- opened in 1971.

L-R: Tina Girouard, Caroline Goodden, and Gordon Matta-Clark 
in 1971, at the storefront that would soon become FOOD.

For Gordon Matta-Clark, making art was a fairly recent pursuit. He’d spent much of the 1960s unenthusiastically earning a degree in architecture at Cornell University. His grades throughout had been consistently poor, perhaps owing to the fact that in the course of this studies he discovered his own deep antipathy for the Modernist tenets of architecture and city planning that his professors adhered to as gospel. Only so much sterile formalism and blindly reckless idealism, Matta-Clark had reckoned. If there was any single experience that proved instructive and inspirational to him during his time at Cornell, it was when he met and spoke with the visiting artist Robert Smithson in early 1969 -- just one year before the latter would create his ambitious Spiral Jetty earthwork on the Great Salt Lake in Utah.




Robert Smithson was a voracious reader across a baffling broad array of disciplines and interests, not the least of which were geology and science fiction. He held a perverse aesthetic fascination for the vagaries of accelerated urban sprawl -- with terrain vague and rough-edged "non-place urban realms" where hapless juxtaposition of prefab modern civilization and the natural landscape resulted in curious new forms of desolation, upheaval, and disfiguration. ("Ruins in reverse," he'd called the suburban developments of his own native New Jersey.) A central idea for Smithson in the course of his own work and theorizing was that of entropy – the second law of thermodynamics that decreed that all entities and systems inevitably gave way to degeneration, decay, and disorder. As in nature, so too with man-made systems. Speaking in a 1973 interview, Smithson explained:

"...It seems that architects build in an isolated, self-contained, ahistorical way. They never seem to allow for any kind of relationships outside of their grand plan. And this seems to be true in economics, too. Economics seem to be isolated and self-contained and conceived of as cycles, so as to exclude the whole entropic process. There's every little consideration of natural resources in terms of what the landscape will look like after the mining operations or farming operations are completed. So that a kind of blindness ensues. ... And then suddenly they find themselves within a range of desolation and wonder how they got there."

His own art, he asserted, was the product of his own efforts at creating "a dialectics of entropic change." In many ways, his ideas coincided with a larger aesthetic shift that was transpiring in the late 1960s and early ‘70s -- new artistic practices and strategies in which artists favored Bataille over Kant, contingency over autonomy, the temporal and indeterminate over the transcendent. Instead of formalism, formlessness; instead of purity, dissipation.

It was Smithson's ideas on entropy and site-specific art that fascinated Matta-Clark when the two conversed in 1969, and it was those ideas that played an instrumental part in the latter's development as an artist. But whereas Smithson was interested in creating "new monuments" in the open expanses of the American landscape, Matta-Clark's prior education steered him in the direction of the nation's urban centers -- to the physical environment of the city itself.

Having grown up in New York City, Matta-Clark returned after an extended absence to find the city in the throes of decline. Speaking in a later interview, he recalled of his youth in Robert Moses’s Manhattan:

"As the City evolved in the Fifties and Sixties into a completely architectured International Style steel and concrete megalopolis. By contrast, great areas of what had been residential [space] were being abandoned. These areas were being left as demoralizing reminders of 'Exploit It or Leave It.' It is the prevalence of this wasteland phenomena that drew me to it."

As an artist Gordon Matta-Clark quickly gravitated to the idea of making art works that were connected to (and more often, arose from) urban topology, mutable space, communal life and cultural memory, property, the disconnect between architectural form and architecture as surplus commodity, as well as the varied economies of expansion and waste that existed in the urban landscape.

Top: Gordon Matta-Clark, "Pig Roast," at the Brooklyn Bridge Event, 1971
Gordon Matta-Clark, photo from Walls Paper series, c. 1972

In 1972 he began to set out to the city's blighted neighborhoods, seeking out the blocks of condemned and abandoned buildings. Sneaking into these buildings with saws and chisels and blowtorch, he made a series of precise and scattered incisions -- carving them up, rearticulating the architectural spaces, exposing their structural and material components. His friend and fellow artist Ned Smyth accompanied him on many of these excursions, helping lug tools and equipment and keeping an eye out for the police. As Smyth described it years later:

"We would break into abandoned buildings in the South Bronx and cut large, geometrically shaped pieces out of walls and floors, opening up the spaces. ...This was always scary, with blocks and blocks of empty, boarded-up buildings, haunted by junkies who would steal copper wire and pipe to sell as scrap to get money for drugs. ...We would haul all his saws and other tools, including a power generator, up into these building shells. Sometimes the apartments looked as if the occupants had simply walked out on their lives, leaving their furniture just as it was, their clothes hanging on hooks behind the doors."

Many of these early "cuttings" were done without permission and amounted to criminal trespassing. As early as 1970 Matta-Clark had drafted a proposal for such work and had been sending it out to various organizations and public officials, presenting himself as an artist who aimed to "make sculpture using the natural [sic] by-products of the land and people."

Top: Conical Intersect (Paris,1975) artist's execution & schematic.
Bottom: Conical Intersect, and Office Baroque (Antwerp, 1977)

Within a few years, however, Matta-Clark would gain permission to realize some of his projects, and during the years of 1972 to 1978 executed a number of site-specific dissections in several cities -- in  locations around New York and New Jersey, as well as in Genoa, Chicago, and Antwerp. Utilizing buildings that had been condemned or slated for demolition, the works were intended to exist for a brief period of time, fated -- like the structures themselves -- for a temporary existence.

On a symbolic or theoretical level, Gordon Matta-Clark's engagement with the discarded architecture of the contemporary city comprised a form of “urban reclamation.”⁵ As such, one might read it an inquest into the dialectical gaps between (use-)value and obsolescence, surplus and salvage; of architectural space as mere material and property and its role in framing or containing and channeling the intricacies of human activity, interaction, and experience -- cycles of births and deaths, moments of private joys or shared sorrows, of everyday life -- that transpired or are carried out within the spatial boundaries of a brute physical environment. In the end, it operated as an inquiry into the production of social space --- as it was perceived, conceived, and lived.⁶

Initially, Gordon Matta-Clark's proposal letters met with little response. He'd continue to send them out over the years. When he approached real estate developer Melvyn Kaufman in 1975, seeking to "collaborate" on a series of projects, Kaufman sniffingly responded:

"Someone said that dying gracefully is an art. Perhaps it is. But I do not like funerals, either as sad occasions or celebrations. I believe in the great demise but I believe in life more, and I resent the infringement of death processes prolonged as a devitalization of the living."

The castigating tone is amusing, as it seems Kaufman considered Matta-Clark's request as being part of a cynical and reprehensibly exploitative enterprise, accusing him of something akin to "playing in (or with) the ruins" of an ailing metropolis. Given the conditions at the time, one can imagine the reasons for Kaufman's consternation. After all, it was hardly an ideal time to be a real estate developer in NYC -- what, especially seeing how 1975 was also the year of the fed's famous "drop dead" decree. Hence Kaufman's pilings-on of funereal analogies. Morbid metaphors for a morbid and entropic time.

Neither Robert Smithson nor Gordon Matta-Clark would live to see the end of the decade. Smithson would die in a helicopter crash in 1973 while surveying the location for his next major project; and Matta-Clark died in 1978 of pancreatic cancer, at the age of 35, scarcely six years after he had begun his series of urban "cuttings" and fully embarked on his work as an artist. By that point, SoHo was already well on its way to becoming a different place than the one Matta-Clark and his friends had known and inhabited. New businesses would begin to move in, and shortly the neighborhood would start to "turn around." And in the decade that followed, it would become a cultural hub -- sweeping with restaurants and boutiques and a number of high-end art galleries that would all help fuel the moneyed-up, inflated art boom of the 1980s.


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5. This idea of urban reclamation more or less falls into step with certain claims that have been made about graffiti -- that graffiti in the act of marking, tagging, and bombing constitutes a recuperative gesture against an alienating and anonymous environment. By some accounts, this sort of connection wasn't lost on Gordon Matta-Clark. He was enthralled by the tags and murals that he saw proliferating throughout New York City in the early 1970s. At one point in 1973, he drove his truck to a street festival in the South Bronx and invited residents to decorate the vehicle with spray paint as they saw fit. He later cut up the truck's body with a blowtorch, and exhibited select segments at a group exhibition. In the same year, he would also document murals on the city’s subway trains for a series of works called Photoglyphs.

6. In the two decades that followed his death, Matta-Clark's work received only fleeting and limited attention among art critics and historians. He did, however, become something of a mythic figure in architectural circles, where his work was viewed as an act of "deconstructing" architecture -- as a wholly aesthetic exercise. In more recent years, that narrow reading of Matta-Clark's work has been challenged by overdue accounts from art-historical quarters, with a number of critics pointing out the social ideas that fueled much of the artist's work.

Unbuilding, II

Returning again to the matter of ruins, there's the current exhibition at the Tate in London, titled "Ruin Lust." One of the exhibition's main curators is Brian Dillon, who's written a number of essays about the aesthetics of ruination in recent years. In fact, the Tate exhibit could be considered a straggling offshoot of an anthology on the topic that he edited for the Whitechapel Gallery's "Documents of Contemporary Art" series a few years ago.

The exhibition takes its name from the German term Ruinenlust, which hails back to the years of German Romanticism back in the late 18th century. In keeping with that Romanticist theme, the exhibit features works by Piranesi, Turner, Constable, and the like. From the looks of it, the selection is overwhelming drawn from the Tate's own collection -- including an assortment of works that include pieces by Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland, John Latham, and a later, seldom-seen piece by Eduardo Paolozzi. Then there's the allotment by the most contemporary artists of the bunch including Keith Arnatt, and John Stezaker. Here we get a sense of the thematic thrust of the exhibit -- what is the sense of ruination that we have now, the sort that seems to too frequently emanate from our immediate surroundings? There's a great deal of recent work to illustrate this theme, be it the photographs that writer Jon Savage took around London over the course of two decades, Rachel Whiteread's photographs of tower blocks, Laura Oldfield Ford's drawings of housing estates, or David Shrigley's grimly sarcastic "Leisure Center."

With these examples, the exhibit zags into more charged territory, into the politics of space (public, domestic, etc.) in the contemporary built environment -- the anomie that too-commonly results from both well-intentioned civic pragmatism or the vagaries of rampantly haphazard real-estate speculation. Whichever the case, each included gives off a foreboding impression, if only because there isn't a human figure to be found in any of them. It's like a neutron-bomb school of urban development, reflective of the estrangement that results in a societal environ predicated on the logics of perpetual, unbroken progress, innovation, and "creative destruction." On this matter, one could turn to Dillon's Whitechapel anthology and find an excerpt from Mark Lewis's 2006 essay "Is Modernism Our Antiquity?", in which the author muses:

"The idea of a modernist ruin in the making, while compellingly seductive, seems depressingly elegiac and tautological at best. Didn't the images and forms of modernism have ruin, decay and obsolescence written into them? Was this not meant to serve as an inbuilt apotropaic function, all the better to protect against the future romantic appeal of their ruining? And do I really want to male an elegy to something like 'modernism's forgotten promise'? There's the rub. For today it is fundamentally a question of what is to be done as the artistic signs and images of emerging and developing modernity are rapidly becoming historical."

Lewis's rumination are, by his own acknowledgment, prompted by Bruno Latour's We Have Never Been Modern, in which Latour argued that modernism was a paradox to begin with -- an a priori double-bind, like a blueprint with the terms of its own abandonment and demolition included as a preconditional contractor's clause.

Also included are excerpts from Jane and Louise Wilson's Sealander, their series of photographs of derelict WWII Nazi bunkers littered along the coastline of Normandy. The Wilsons have repeatedly dealt in this type of subject of the years -- ominous remnants of the Cold War era like underground military nuclear missile facilities, the East Berlin Stasi archives, and the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazahkstan. The Sealander series of course follows after theorist Paul Virilio's Bunker Archeology, his book of photographs of the very same bunkers; his own taken in the late 1950s and early 1960s, after he came across the structures while roaming the beaches of Northern France. In the accompanying texts, Virilio passingly compares the bunkers and the modernist functional architectural forms of Le Corbusier and Brutalism, but asserts that as structures their utility was the product of another logic altogether -- that belonging to the culture of total war. At one point he writes:

"Anachronistic in normal periods, in peacetime, the bunker appears as a survival machine, as a shipwrecked submarine on a beach. It speaks to us of other elements, of terrific atmospheric pressure, of an unusual world in which science and technology have developed the possibility of final disintegration. If the bunker can be compared to a milestone, to a stele, it is not so much for its system of inscriptions as it is for its position, its configuration of materials and accessories: periscopes, screens, filters, etc. The monolith does not aim to survive down through the centuries; the thickness of its walls translates only the probable power of impact in the instant of assault. The cohesion of the material corresponds here to the immateriality of the new war environment; in fact, matter only survives with difficulty in a world of continuous upheaval. The landscape of contemporary war is that of a hurricane projecting and dispersing, dissipating and disintegrating through fusion and fission as it goes along."

At another:

"The immensity of this project was what defies common sense: total war was revealed here in its mythic dimensions. ...A long history was curled up here. These concrete blocks were indeed the final throw-offs of the history of frontiers, from the Roman limes to the Great Wall of China; the bunkers, as ultimate military surface structure, had shipwrecked at lands' limits, at the precise moment of the sky's arrival in war; they marked off the horizontal littoral, the continental limit. History had changed course one final time before jumping into the immensity of aerial space."

Curiously, the exhibit has its own set of accompanying workshops, the last of which is "The Unofficial Countryside," which focuses on "the modern edgelands that ring our cities and soft corners of the countryside," under the premise of asking "Industrial brownfields, landfills, suburbs: Are these the ruins of our modern age?" In the exhibition, this examination of terrain vague is exemplified by images from Keth Arnatt's landscape series A.O.N.B.(Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty); and by excerpts from Paul Graham's Troubled Land, his collection of photos taken throughout Northern Ireland in the 1980s.

Ruin Lust is also rounded out by selection of Tacita Dean's past work, and by the curious inclusion of a re-anacted version of Gerard Byrne's 1984 and Beyond -- a 3-channel video re-enactment modeled after an 1963 Playboy magazine roundtable discussion with Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein and eight other science-fiction authors, in which the participants were asked to give their speculative thoughts on what the future would be like.


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Speculative futures, ruination and entropy, terrain vague -- these things were a constant source of fascination and inspiration for both author J. G. Ballard and the artist Robert Smithson. It was this that provided the focus for Tacita Dean's recent film project JG. In a way, the film is reflective of a sort of aesthetic love triangle. Dean has long been inspired by the work of Smithson and Ballard. In turn, Ballard wrote admiringly of Dean's work (especially her texts). Smithson was an avid reader of science fiction, and was particularly taken with Ballard's work, which proved a huge influence on the artist in the mid-late 1960s. And Ballard was quite taken with Smithson's earthworks, no doubt recognizing that he and Smithson shared similar interests and ideas.

In a write-up of the film at the East of Borneo site, contributor Rachel Valinsky fleetingly references a tertiary text by Ballard titled "Robert Smithson as Cargo Cultist." Not having encountered the Ballard piece before, I do a quick scramble to locate it. It's a short piece, only some 7-8 paragraphs long, the last portion of which reads:

"Fifty thousands years from now our descendants will be mystified by the empty swimming pools of an abandoned southern California and Cote d’Azur, lying in the dust like primitive time machines or the altar of some geometry obsessed religion. I see Smithson’s monuments belonging in the same category, artefacts intended to serve as machines that will suddenly switch themselves on and begin to generate a more complex time and space. All his structures seem to be analogues of advanced neurological processes that have yet to articulate themselves.

:Reading Smithson’s vivid writings, I feel he sensed all this. As he stands on the Spiral Jetty he resembles Daedalus inspecting the ground plan of the labyrinth, working out the freight capacity of his cargo terminal, to be measured in the units of a neurological deep time. He seems unsure whether the cargo has been delivered.

"His last flight fits into the myth, though for reasons of his own he chose the wrong runway, meeting the fate intended for his son. But his monuments endure in our minds, the ground plans of heroic psychological edifices that will one day erect themselves and whose shadows we can already see from the corners of our eyes."

It seems the Ballard piece in question has rarely been reprinted, but the full text of it can be read here.

Some Lateral Thoughts, I (Playing Through)

Speaking of Cartographies of the Absolute in the prior post, I see that a while back they posted the above clip of reporter Charlie LeDuff golfing through Detroit. Which was a bit of a plate of shrimp, since I recently hear an interview with LeDuff where he was discussing his recently published Detroit: An American Autopsy. I found the interview heartening in some ways. Sure, one might disparage his sense of optimism in the face of Detroit's more-likely futures as being more a matter of denial than defiance. And his argument about "if you're boring, you're dead" might seem a bit wrongheaded if you're inclined to think of how factuality has become such a slippery and superfluous thing in the age of "new media." But whatever the case, I could connect with his earnestness and dogged commitment to his home turf.

As far as the matter of "ruin porn" and Detroit are concerned, I come across Steerforth at the blog The Age of Uncertainty saying a few words about "Abandonment," accompanied by some photos of derelict fisheries structures in Iceland...

"It is shocking how quickly buildings fall into decay. As the roofs of these structures rust, the late rains will seep into the walls, freeze and create fissures until, eventually, the inside is hard to distinguish from the outside.

Every ruin is a reminder that even the most solid-looking building is in a state of flux. We struggle to maintain the illusion of permanence, but the moment we abandon the fight, we find ourselves in Detroit."

Perhaps this has something to do -- albeit tangentially -- with my fascination with the topic of "ruin porn" as a recent cultural meme/trope/morbid fixation/whatever. Because I grew up in a place very much the opposite of Iceland. In the Deep South subtropic region of the SE United States. Where anything and everything constructed or devised by human hands was immediately pitched in a battle against the climate and the elements. Recently-laid roadways and sidewalks cracking, greenery sprouting through. Or sporting huge fissured bumps and ripples from the tree roots sprawling out underneath. The cloak of kudzu that -- during its non-dormant seasons -- rapidly grew to consume entire treelines, abandoned roadside shacks and homesteads, telephone poles, and the like. (If if was stationary, if was fair game.) Driving through parts of Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, and upwards into Indiana and Ohio, where the abandoned barns and silos sinking in on themselves -- sitting out in a field with a hundred yards of so from the highway -- were a common sight. Houses that had burned down, with only their foundation and chimney still standing, which sat that way for years afterward. There were constant reminders that entropy, decay, and calamity held all the cards -- were inescapable, inevitable.

Someone Still Lives Here (and: Returning to the Topic of Ruination)

Returning to two prior topics, for the first time in a long while...

It seems that 2012 two saw a bit of a slowdown with the "ruin porn" meme. Perhaps there were a few too many photo books and essays of the stuff published around the beginning of they year, leading to a saturation effect and prompting appetites to slack. If anything, the previous year showed a turn from the usual gratuitous ruin-porn offerings and a turn toward analytical discussions of "Why the popular fascination with Detroit and ruin porn?"

The Design Observer, however, has stayed with the topic throughout; with various contributors focusing the discussion on Detroit's history, framing it in the larger issues of sustainable urban planning and the socio-economic dynamics of inner-city communities. Recently they posted a slideshow of some work by photographers Aaron Rothman and Dave Jordano, each of whom chose to turn their cameras away from the city's often-photographed monuments of urban decay and focusing instead on the lives of the citizens of the city -- aiming to capture life as it's lived in the city, and to also "counteract the aestheticizing and mythologizing effects of much Detroit ruin photography."

The post was closely preceded by an article by Andrew Herscher, associate professor of architecture at U Mich; and Herscher's piece almost serves as an accompanying or introductory text for Rothman and Jordano's photographs. In his essay, Herscher discusses grass-roots urban reclamation in terms of a city's "unreal estate"; the creation of a "proto-commons" from the spatial and infrastructural voids and ruptures left by the abandonment of capital from previously industrialized cities...

"What if Detroit has lost population, jobs, infrastructure, investment, and all else that the conventional narratives point to — and yet, precisely as a result of those losses, has gained opportunities to understand and engage novel urban conditions? What if one sort of property value has decreased in Detroit — the exchange value brokered by the failing market economy — but other sorts of values have increased — use values that lack salience or even existence in that economy? What if Detroit has not only fallen apart, emptied out, disappeared and/or shrunk, but has also transformed, becoming a new sort of urban formation that only appears depleted, voided or negated through the lenses of conventional architecture and urbanism?"

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The Secret Life of Plants

Contra Marinetti & co., contra the notion of an 'industrial sublime':

"Today, when the truly wretched aesthete, at a loss for objects of admiration, has invented the contemptible ‘beauty’ of the factory, the dire filth of those enormous tentacles appears all the more revolting; the rain puddles at their feet, the empty lots, the black smoke half-beaten down by the wind, the piles of slag and dross are the sole true attributes of those gods of a sewer Olympus. I was not hallucinating when, as a terrified child, I discerned in those giant scarecrows, which both excited me to the point of anguish and made me run sometimes for my life, the presence of a fearful rage. That rage would, I sensed, later become my own, giving meaning to everything spoiling within my own head and to all that which, in civilised states, looms up like carrion in a nightmare. I am, of course, not unaware that for most people the factory chimney is merely the sign of mankind’s labour, and never the terrible projection of that nightmare which develops obscurely, like a cancer, within mankind. Obviously one does not, as a rule, continue to focus on that which is seen as the revelation of a state of violence for which one bears some responsibility. This childish or untutored way of seeing is replaced by a knowing vision which allows one to take a factory chimney for a stone construction forming a pipe for the evacuation of smoke high into the air — which is to say, for an abstraction. Now, the only possible reason for the present dictionary is precisely to demonstrate the error of that sort of definition.

"It should be stressed, for example, that a chimney is only very tentatively of a wholly mechanical order. Hardly has it risen towards the first covering cloud, hardly has the smoke coiled round within its throat, than it has already become the oracle of all that is most violent in our present-day world, and this for the same reason, really, as each grimace of the pavement’s mud or of the human face, as each part of an immense unrest whose order is that of a dream, or as the hairy, inexplicable muzzle of a dog. That is why, when placing it in a dictionary, it is more logical to call upon the little boy, the terrified witness of the birth of that image of the immense and sinister convulsions in which his whole life will unfold, rather than the technician, who is necessarily blind."

From Georges Bataille's "Factory Chimney" entry in the Dictionnaire critique, c. 1929.

The Changing Sameness

Just above, a photograph. A photograph that I took the liberty of flipping into black & white. I'm not giving credit to the photographer, which might (or might not) be deemed problematic seeing how the photographer slapped a copyright on the image. Which I can't help but find odd, since the image is a recreation of something someone else did fairly recently, which was itself a twist on something someone else did a good many years before that, which itself was slightly modeled after something that someone else had done far earlier.

The rabbit hole, such as it is, ends there. Perhaps if you were to turn this series of repetitions and permutations into an equation, the equation might run as such: A something being repeated -- the first time as history; the second time as semi-ironic hommage; the third time as highly-ironic parody; the fourth time as utterly fucking pointless, ranking well below a fart in the wind tunnel in terms of cultural significance.

At which point I feel tempted to double back and revisit Lester Bangs's "Who Stole Punk?" spiel for the first time in many years. But instead I was recently thumbing through a copy of Paul Morley's Words and Music for the first time in a long while, a number of things jump out at me, but most particularly this bit, which echoes a common geezerly complaint of recent years...

"The Strokes were great are re-creating moments but not as great at creating moments. They were conservative (they conserved); they weren't radicals (they didn't remake the world). Their music was a tribute to a radical spirit, while missing a radical spirit. Ultimately what was lacking was the sense of newness, the sense of coming-out-of-nowhereness, that gives essentially simple, honest bursts of communication a power beyond the immediate. If Television had not made 'Little Johnny Jewel' in 1975, and we had first heard it in 2000, it would still have been as uncanny a piece of music...but it would have had twenty-five years of other things that have happened to contend with...

If 1949 Charlie Parker had in fact first popped up in 1964, well, it would have been quite arresting but, really, pretty pointless. This is the problem I began to see at my age as rock music began to photocopy itself: what was lacking for me was the suddenness that must be attached to the sound, the suddenness of its appearance and its newness. The suddenness of sound when it sounds like new sound connected to but adrift from other sounds."

At any rate: Some blog-realm cross-chatter blahblah-ing, a few clearing-the-attic thoughts on some things I'd flagged for comment some weeks ago.

One being: Phil's recent yarn on the subject of older music outselling new, but more specifically talking about of eternal returns and revivalism in pop music. I'm intrigued -- unsurprisingly, I suppose -- by his introducing the idea of entropy into the discussion, particularly linking it to bygone notions of progress and dynamic evolution in music. (Yes, we know...postmodernism told us such stuff was a very dubious and distinctly modernist idea, right? Yet we still sort of believe in it, expect it, perhaps even desire it. That suddenness, that newness, that jolt of uncanniness, that creation of a moment.) Simon offers a brief aside musing that sometimes things progress by way of crabwalking -- laterally, sideways, not necessarily in any strictly linear, teleological way. Which may or may not overlap with Phil's later thoughts about change versus "progress" in broader socio-historic terms.

This condition, of course, partly provided the premise for Simon's recent book Retromania. But I say partly because Simon's discussion of the "atemporality" of certain stripes of contemporary pop music ultimately encompassed more; is is many ways bound up with the idea of hyperstasis, having as much to do with the influence of digital culture and the internet -- with its alinear and across-the-board, equal-access-to-everything-at-once character -- rather than the matter of mere sonic stylistic apery and recycling.

Of course, part of Phil's initial post addresses the music's diminished cultural status -- about it no longer being a "driver of youth culture." Which points to how pop music now (and long has been) just one commodity among many; in most cases signifying little more than any other lifestyle accessory, something that long ago spent its own artistic and "cultural capital" through sheer market-glutting, quantity-over-quality overkill.Much of which rings familiar, echoing certain critique about information culture; about how the democratized deluge of facts and opinions ends up being a scenario of one piece of information -- regardless or truth- or use-value -- canceling another out, on and on ad infinitum, resulting in an reciprocal and comprehensive nullification of content or meaning, leaving little but a diffusive pink noise across the spectrum.

And I suppose there's any number of angles one could take to analyze or explain this entropic state of affairs. For instance, extrapolating on stats: the increase of venues of distribution in relation to surplus cultural production and income, the proliferation of channels in an pluralistic media landscape and the increasing splintering and atomization of niche audiences viz market demographics, "narrowcasting," and etcetera, etcetera. Other possible models? Two come to mind, two that have less to do with pop music but (much like that image above) with music's connection with the the larger realm of cultural activity and "creativity"...

First: That of the interpenetration and eminence of design into every realm of cultural and material culture over the past few decades, if not the way it's become the essence of culture (as we now know it) itself. Or as Hal Foster has described: the all-eclipsing "value added" (ugh) manifestations of the "political economy of design," which and the way it bypasses the condition of reification in the ways that it articulates and embodies "subject-less" desire -- reducing its own essence and efforts to an endless perpetuation of cultural production "that is all image and no interiority -- an apotheosis of the subject that is also it potential disappearance."*

The second being a concurrent trend that arose and gather momentum over the same stretch of time -- that of the culture of curation and its accompanying archival impulse, the many ways in which the aesthetic of mixing and re-presentation loomed to the fore. This has not only run parallel to the first aspect but is closely connected as well, due to its obsession with an aesthetics of display and exhibition. And it's the aspect that's mostly responsible for the ouroboric process by which culture operates at present -- consuming and re-presenting itself, without having to signify much of anything outside its own culture-ishness.

The above two points being perhaps a little too tied to discussions of visual culture, as far as the whole matter of critical discourse is concerned. Still, I see them as being part of a similar critical enterprise, one that coincides with the sort of things that both Simon and Phil are addressing; although by different route. And the above probably amounting to little more than me daubing on a wall, a meager attempt at hammer out some thoughts that deserve far more time & space to address.**

At any rate, there are some other things Phil mentioned in his posts, concerning the notion and the nature of progress in all of this. Which is a slippery topic, and one that brings some other ideas to mind; but which will have to wait for another time, a possible part two. (But perhaps done a some point when I'm not so tired, and hopefully more lucid.)

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*  "When Surface Became Depth" was how Michael Bracewell summed up the decade of the 'Nineties. In hindsight, the '90s would seem -- as Warhol would have put it -- "very full," all-too willing and capable of delivering (as far as music was concerned, at least) its share of ecstatic or transcendent moments, compared to much of what has followed in its wake. Yet somehow Bracewell's dismissal has a ring of truth to it, if only because anyone who was paying attention could perhaps notice an underlying emptying-out going on beneath it all...a silence gathering beneath the masking din.

**  Have been busy with other things lately, many of which has been siphoning of time and mental and temporal "bandwidth." Case in point, I think I started this post many weeks ago, and...well, here we are.

Unbuilding

Above we have images of one of bigger hits of the Spring 2011 exhibition season, the installation "The Recovery of Discovery" by the artist Cyprien Gaillard, which was exhibited at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin back last March.

The work consisted of boxes of (room-temp) beer stacked in the form of a four-sided pyramid, amounting to some seventy-two thousand bottles in total. With an apparent come-one-come-all door policy for the gallery, crowds were allowed to freely collect and linger in the gallery -- to climb and sit on the structure, to raid its contents as they saw fit. "The audience became its own event," Hal Foster wrote in Artforum, noting that the open invitation "attract[ed] a crowd above the denizens of the art world." Speaking with KW Institute curator Susanne Pfeffer in an interview in Flash Art last year, Gaillard said of the installation...

CG: This is why we love ruins so much. Because they tell us we survive, we made it. They are de­caying but we survive. I am here and that’s great. That’s what a lot of modern buildings don’t tell you. They don’t tell you where you are.

SP: This might also be linked to the question of the social impact the pyramid at KW had. Did you expect that?

CG: I was secretly hoping it. I was hoping that younger people who have never stepped foot in a museum would come. All these high school kids coming here, and how many times did we see people barfing in the court yard? Then, just going back to the parents all drunk… I can’t even imagine what they would say coming back home. Why are you drunk?' 'I was in a museum! I spent the whole day in a museum!' What kind of museum would promote such things? I’m still amazed that we were able to pull off such a thing. ...I don’t know how difficult it was on your side, because I know I was walking in there and it was complete anarchy and smashing bottles and people smoking and drinking, homeless people, unemployed people, people still climbing, this whole idea of broken glass everywhere, and the staff not being able to control it.

All of which, of course, is the sort of thing that's bound to attract a lot of attention, to get people talking. Fairly straightforward, in a way -- offering a bacchanalian twist on another artworld crowd-pleaser of some years ago, Felix Gonzales-Torres's pile of candy circa 1991.*  Yet on the other hand, I find the work intriguing because of the way it's subtly rich with a number of cleverly layered geopolitical and aesthetic references.

There's the archeological angle, for starters. In speaking of ruins in the Flash Art discussion, Gaillard wasn't only referring to the eventual decimated state of the installation at the end of its run, but also to what inspired the work in the first place -- the Pergamon Altar, which is housed nearby on Museum Island in Berlin. In much the same way that the Pergamon Alter was reconstructed in an indoor setting, Gaillard has erected his own facsimile of a ziggurat -- a structure that not only invokes the waning and pillaging of empires, but also summons the thought of the current situation in Iraq by way of ancient Sumeria. And then there's the matter of the beer itself, a brand of pilsner called Efes imported from Turkey, which in turn alludes to issues of global capital and immigration -- bringing to mind not only Germany's decades-long difficult relationship with its labor force of Turkish gastarbeiters, but also the recent rhetoric of a "clash of cultures" and the swerve toward anti-immigrant sentiment and legislation throughout parts of Europe over the past ten years. And whether the result of sheer coincidence or not, the beer's packaging triggers its own set of significations. Primarily there's the fact that certain shades of blue have long carried an Old-World Orientalist association with the Middle East -- specifically those of turquoise and lapis lazuli.

It's on that specific shade of blue that thoughts turn toward art-historical references and precedents -- of how the piece involves a collision of aesthetic notions involving purity and impermanence, endurance and ephemerality. More obviously, there's the thought of Yves Klein's International Blue. But at the same time, the installation's basic physical form also connotes mind the severe and pristine formalism of Minimalist art, specifically as carried out in some of Sol LeWitt's geometrical permutations. Then there's the ghost of process-oriented Conceptualist practices lurking in the wings; those late '60s manifestations that resulted in explorations of "anti-form" and the "dematerialization of the art object."

In relation to the latter, Gaillard says the piece was partially inspired by the work of Robert Smithson, by Smithson's fascination with entropic processes. In a way, "The Recovery of Discovery" follows from the Duchampian logic that it is the viewer who completes the work the work of art, in this instance the interaction of the audience with the work leads to the works completion by an act of undoing; an undoing brought about by active human agency (rather than the erosion brought about by natural or elemental forces). This, in turn, raises question regarding civic and societal dynamics. As Hal Foster wrote of the piece:

"Certainly the nasty remains of the installation did not present a rosy idea of community. For foregrounded here was not so much the irreducible antagonism in the social that relational aesthetics is said to gloss over, but rather the psychic instability of the crowd...an instability that rendered the installation insecure as both structure and event."

Naturally, because when you throw a party and everyone's welcome, you can expect any number of things might happen -- broken furniture, maybe a punch-up or two, all variety of messes, and the likelihood that no one will be mensch enough to offer to return the next day and help you clean up. And pertinent to "current events," Foster sees fit to additionally point out:

"The Efes cost forty thousand euros, which were paid, indirectly, by German taxpayers, who would soon balk at a further bailout of Greece – another act that many Germans regard as one of self-preservation and many Greeks as one of destruction."

There you have it -- wanton consumption meets reification. So it goes in the contemporary realm of the civic.

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*  There is, naturally, yet another art-world dimension to this -- that being the common practice of Friday evening openings in gallery districts. The "gallery walk" sort where galleries throw open there doors for all & sundry, and people roam the sidewalks going from venue to venue, generous helping themselves to the free wine and beer on offer, giving the wares on display a quick galnce-over while socializing and getting a buzz on.

Vinyl Reckonings

Some months back, Mark "K-Punk" Fisher curated a guest podcast over at Pontone. Beginning, ending, and threaded by the leitmotif of crackling vinyl surface noise and featuring tracks by the likes of Philip Jeck, William Basinski, and The Caretaker, the mix played out like a musical séance for moribund audio media. By way of accompanying liner notes, Fisher wrote about the spectral (there/not-there, presence versus absence) nature of phonography in relation to Derrida's ideas about the "metaphysics of presence," adding:

"With vinyl records, the more that you often hear is crackle, the sound of the material surface of the playback medium. When vinyl was ostensibly superseded by digital playback systems – which seem to be sonically ’invisible’ – many producers were drawn towards crackle, the material signature of that supposedly obsolete technology. Crackle disrupts presence in multiple ways: first by reminding us of the material processes of recording and playback, second by connoting a broken sense of time, and third by veiling the official ‘signal’ of the record in noise. For crackle is of course a noise in its right, a ground becomes a figure."

The concept of spectrality and haunting was a central theme in The Caretaker's project from the very start, with the artist having derived both his moniker and his creative premise from Kubrick's The Shining. Basinski emerged on the scene some years ago with his acclaimed requiem cycle The Disintegration Loops, which deals with mortality and entropy by way of the material and sonic degradation of timeworn magnetic tape. And Jeck's work owes it melancholy creakiness to the notions of obsolescence and abandonment it invokes...








Many of these tropes harken back to the work of noisician and artist Christian Marclay, who himself began working with LPs and record players back in the late 1970s. From the beginning, Marclay was fascinated the materiality of recorded media, especially with the record LP as a physical object – as document of a performance, an ephemeral and intangible moment in time, arrested and affixed in material form, commodified and mass manufactured in serial units, circulating in the cultural domain of commercial society.

Plasticity aside, there was also Marclay's affinity for "the unwanted sound." Primarily this was the sound of technology being intentionally misused and abused, but it was also the sound – or the combination of sounds – of all the bygone and discarded musical products of previous years and decades, now amounting to only so much landfill fodder or cents-on-the-dollar clutter in the bins of second-hand music shops. All of it – the exemplars of former zeitgeists, even – rendered equal by its outmodedness, its use-value amounting to little more than the part it plays in a layered cacophony. Same too with Marclay's later works involving album sleeves or other formats such as audio tape – in the end it comes down to the utility or stylishness of last year's model seeming so remotely quaint or clunkily alien when seen from just a little further down the evolutionary chain.




Sure, LPs and turntables were the dominant technology for home listening at the time that Marclay first started working with them. And he wasn't the only one messing about with gathering and manipulating these items for the sake of making noise in the late 1970s.

Some quotes...

GRANDMASTER FLASH: At the time, the radio was playing songs like Donna Summer, the Tramps, the Bee Gees – disco stuff, you know? I call it kind of sterile music. Herc was playing this particular type of music that I found to be pretty warm; it has soul to it. You wouldn't hear these songs on the radio. You wouldn't hear, like, 'Give It Up or Turn It Loose' by James Brown on the radio. You wouldn't hear 'Rock Steady' by Aretha Franklin. You wouldn't hear these songs, and these are the songs that he would play.

TONY TONE: I was working in the record shop, so I used to know all the records....but I didn't know the records Herc was playing. So now it's grabbing me, now I'm trying harder to order them for my record shop, but I can't find them 'cause they're not records that are selling right now – they're older records, jazz records, whatever.

So "digging" always involved hunting and unending quests to excavate the rare and the funky, but it also – once upon a time – meant sifting through the unwanted and the forgotten. Used bins, "cut-out" bins, thrift stores, or even – in the case of Grandmaster Flash – running the risk of catching an ass-whooping from your pops after being told, "Don't ever touch my records."

By now it's a little trite to make a case for framing the creation of cutting and scratching (and eventually sampling) as a street-level, mother-of-invention version of musique concrète. But one may as well make one for the first-gen practitioners of hip-hop DJing – Herc, Bam, Flash, and many others – as being early pioneers of some musical equivalent of salvagecore, if only for the sake of "keeping the funk alive" in the face of the monocultural sweep of disco.

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But: Surface noise as sonic patina – as signifier of the music's physical format and vintage, as a deliberately skewed figure/ground relationship. That's a later and different development. Initially, it was something to be avoided at all costs – only so much noise contaminating the signal, or undesirable syntagmatic slippage.

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If the nature of the "hauntology" rubric has been difficult to nail down with any sense of certainty, it might be due to the facts that (a) it was never that firmly formulated of a concept to begin with, and (b) the term and corresponding concept suffered a denotational shift as soon as it began to circulate more broadly. At first it referred to something slightly intangible and impressionistic; something not too different, in certain ways, from Freud's notion of the Uncanny (especially in that both involves varieties of cognitive dissonance and a sense of dislocation or "dyschronia"), and how it plays out aesthetically.¹ But soon enough discussion of the hauntological began to focus less on the nature of the sensation or condition, and rather on the mere things that might bring the notion to mind. And by things I mean just that – books, toys, films and TV programs, photographs, and various other ephemera from one's childhood, from prior eras. In the end – objects and the associations projected onto them. Which, in many ways, borders on mere, mundane nostalgia of a sort. Not that nostalgia doesn't factor into this in the first place, but that's a whole other line of theoretical speculative – a line that could draw from a rich backlog of philosophic ink that's been spilled on the topic over the past century and a half.

And I'm fairly certain that aspects of all of this overlap – however tangentially – with the topic that Simon addresses in his new book Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its own Past. I haven't read or even gotten a copy yet, so I can't say for sure. But Alex Niven recently posted some thoughts on the book's focus that struck an intriguing note...

"Moving quickly into the realms of massive theologico-cultural conjecture, the whole retromanic thing seems to me to have something to with the occlusion of death in a modern technocratic society. Death has replaced sex as the great taboo. We just don't know what to do with death – the one thing a culture of pluralism and excess cannot find a space for: the absoluteness of an ending. Hence, things that are obsolete become weirdly fetishized. The sobering fact that the past is absolutely no more is replaced with a sort of adolescent inability to let go of childhood toys and move on."

An "occlusion of death" perhaps, a way of stacking some barricades against the door in an effort to hold off a particular type of existential dread. Or what happens when a schizophrenic economy of scarcity and surplus flatlines into one of equally-available "pluralism and excess," and – sensing it may have hit some teleological impasse – suffers an extended spasm of insecurity in regards to where it was all supposed to lead in the first place, and compulsively doubles back on itself in a frenzy of archiving, retrofitting, taking inventory and what-have-you.

Static, surface noise and signal interference, however, is more bluntly about the big D. It ultimately points to the corporeal fragility and impermanence of it all, a nagging momento mori that nothing will ever ever be as it was despite whatever effort or technology is employed to stave death and degeneration away. If, as K-Punk once phrased it, the history of recording constitutes a "science of ghosts," then the metaphysics of crackle (or of the sputtering, atomizing digital glitch) serves as a reminder that it's an imperfect science. Or as he stated early in the discussion, the figure and ground are inextricably linked by the sheer materiality of the medium...

The spectres are textural. The surface noise of the sample unsettles the illusion of presence in at least two ways: first, temporally, by alerting us to the fact that what we are listening to is a phonographic revenant, and second, ontologically, by introducing the technical frame, the unheard material pre-condition of the recording, on the level of content. We're now so accustomed to this violation of ontological hierarchy that it goes unnoticed.

The rest, as they say, is just noise.


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1. Or I suppose another way that this could be discussed, given the excretal economy of consumption and waste that all of this points involves, might be by way of Kristeva's notion of the Abject.

Trümmertanz, zwei

"The loudest noise you can get for nothing." Reduce, re-use, recycle...




Versus: Recup and rehab. Or, when Bataille shakes hands with Bob Vila. Tsk.


Anyway. Finally received my pre-ordered copy of Even Calder Williams's Combined and Uneven Apocalypse, which I'm looking forward to plowing through soon.¹ Given the increased traction that apocalyptic themes have had in pop culture these past several years or so, it's a topical trend that's slightly intrigued me for some time.

At some point, someone proposed labeling this sort of aesthetic "no-go." Not sure where it originated, I just know that it never rose above obscurity it certainly never caught on. (No matter, the sound wasn't destined to be any sort of next-big or permanent thing, anyway.) As such, the label seemed most applicable to Bargeld & crew at the time. Admittedly, it was as if they'd taken 23 Skidoo's notion of "urban gamelan" literally, but instead replacing the gongs and marimbas with whatever discarded scraps were littering the landscape. Given the economic blight that had resulted from the slowdown and stasis of postwar industrial production, the music's clanging and decrepitude probably sounded like fairly loaded and ominous sonic signifiers.²

Yeah, it generally fell under the umbrella of early, first-gen "industrial" fare. Yet most of the other units that trafficked in mined that general vein (Throbbing Gristle, et al), never seemed to sonically suggest much more than a sense of decline.³ Yet looking back, I'd have to admit that Neubauten -- on their first couple of discs at least -- were about the only ones out of the lot who managed to sound genuinely apocalyptic. Considering the arc of West Germany's social and cultural evolution in the decades following WWII and its peculiar Cold War situation, the "no-go" moniker probably best encapsulates the racket and its catastrophic implications.⁴

But back to the matter of end times and such. Personally, as someone who had deep and extensive exposure to a variety of evangelical "if-the-Lord-tarries" dispensationalist eschatologies (i.e., the Book of Revelations interpreted in the most literal sense), the idea of apocalypse is far from new to me. Which is why over the past 5-10 years I've been watching the pop-culture proliferation of secular apocalypses with wry interest. Add to this that these formative years if mine fell in the decade of the 1970s, a time when many concerns with direct bearing on many of these recent scenarios (environmental degradation, unsustainable economic growth, increased oil scarcity, etc.) were first raised as pressing issues. But in the all-too-human course of such stuff, as soon as the economy recovered it was back to business as usual, with the "sky-is-falling" concerns of "alarmists" quickly shoved beyond the margins. In some ways, the whole matter may constitute our own modern equiv of the notion of an "Eternal Return."

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1. The bulk of which, I admit, is available in some form or other on the author's blog. But I never seem to get around to methodically sorting through the archives.
2. Not to mention serving as a thoroughly ironic, unromantic, and antithetical bookend to the Futurists' "Art of Noises" thesis.
3. I suppose the first couple of releases by SPK might come close to qualifying. But by the time Neubauten hit the scene, most of the first-wave industrial lot had either called it quits or were -- as was the case with SPK -- starting to descend into a morass of neo-tribal and "body music" clichés.
4. If there seems to be a recurring Germanic fixation afoot in some recent posts, it's on account of something I've been working on recently; something that's caused me to revisit certain sidealleys that I hadn't ventured down in a long while. All of which manifests itself in a number of tangents and spiraling-offs. About which, there'll be more here soon enough.

Always Negate

From "Advertisements for Architecture," Bernard Tschumi, 1976-1977.

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).