Islands of the Colorblind

Presently scrounging through texts, attempting to sort through Romanticism's various pushbacks against the tides of Enlightenment, Utilitarian, and Positivist thought in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and encountered the following. Not unlike Jane Jacobs, but 120 years before the fact...

"It is not disputed, that in any land where there are flourishing cities, the territorial aristocracy will be distinguished as patrons of the beautiful in art. But whence has this aristocracy derived the wealth by means of which it indulges so largely in the gratification of those tastes ? Whence has it derived these tastes themselves? And whence came the men of genius possessing the power to minister to those tastes ? On these questions, it is not too much to say, that as the town has made the country, giving to its lands a beauty and value they would not otherwise have possessed ; so the citizen has made the noble, by cultivating in him a taste for art, which would not otherwise have formed a part of his character. For it must be obvious that the countrv which should be purely agricultural, producing no more than may be consumed by its own agricultural population, must unavoidably be the home of a scattered, a rude, and a necessitous people, and its chiefs be little elevated above the coarse untaught mass of their dependants. Burgesses produce both the useful and the ornamental, and minister in this manner both to the need and the pleasure of nobles and kings. What they sell not at home they send abroad. In either case, wealth is realized; lands become more valuable; public burdens can be borne; and along with the skill which produces embellishment, come the means by which it may be purchased. [...]

"We only maintain that the successful patronage of the fine art depends less on the existence of noble families, than on the existence of prosperous cities. Without the former kind of patronage, art may be wanting in some of its higher attributes; without the latter, it would cease to have existence."

- Robert Vaughan, "On Great Cities in their Connexion 

with Art," from The Age of Great Cities (1843).

Or, as a friend of mine said of San Francisco a few years ago, "[It's] been officially pronounced dead. It's a good city to consume culture, but in a very short time it has become one that is completely inhospitable to those who produce it."

*image: Attributed to Tom Sachs. First spotted by the author in 

an alleyway of the Soho district of Manhattan, circa 1997.

Techno Notwithstanding

File under: Prematurely published. Circa 1979, Continental Heritage Press, American Portraits series.

On: Location, V

Place and placelessness; conflicting histories and transmuted genre; mythologized frontiers and one notion of “the West” blurring into a socio-historic another, somewhere just beyond the usual reach of cinematic allegory and metaphor...

"The momentous events underscoring these films are not only associated with emptiness and with landscapes in turmoil but also, particularly in Wings of Desire, with the rise of National Socialism, the tumultuous destruction of World War II, and the resulting emptiness of postwar inner-city 'ruin landscapes' (Trümmerlandschaften); an equally important unifying theme is the generational rupture between fathers and sons following such seismic historical events. In this framework, the American West (and the American Western) served a specific and telling purpose for the postwar German West: to envision both traumatic upheaval and utopian projection. This projection was as much of a socio-cultural project as it was a cinematic fantasy. Wenders has commented that his 'first memory of America is of a mythical land where everything was much better.'"

In a recent essay at Design Observer, Nicole Huber and Ralph Stern write about the sense of emptiness, transcience, and marginality in the films of Wim Wenders; focusing particularly on Kings of the Road (Im Lauf der Zeit), Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin), and Paris, Texas. (It’s an abridged version of a longer essay, the full text to be published in a forthcoming academic volume from MacMillan.)

Admittedly, it’s been years (if not two-and-a-half decades) since I’ve viewed several of the aforementioned films. Still, the thematic tropes – by way of visual impression – lingers in memory. Had never previously read that Wenders described Wings of Desire as a “vertical road movie.” Which would go a long way toward explaining the film’s narrative layers, all of them rippling outward from scattered points – a story about a specific city in the aftermath of a very specific socio-historical trauma; and about the changes besetting that same city and society in the broader context of European/Western history; and – finally – the story of a particular spot on the map in relation to the course of human history as a whole.

The authors similarly discuss Wenders’s use of borderland settings in the three films at hand, the bleak or provisional character of these territories serving as a sort of aporia signifying states of historic ambivalence or abjection. The most obvious border in this instance being the Berlin Wall and the division between East and West Germany. The Berlin Wall figures prominently in Wings of Desire – an ever-present backdrop and obstacle, as inescapable as the sight of the Eiffel Tower is to Paris. Like in Kings of the Road as it follows the travels of Bruno and Robert throughout the eastern perimeter of the country, their route frequently bringing them in contact with the inner border.

Also, curiously, the authors quote from an old interview in which Wenders spoke of his own (post-war) generation’s “distrust of images.” This, in close proximity to his film Until the End of the World, in which a character remarks about a modern “disease of images” as endemic to the character of modern life. The first comment might explain the source of the latter, suggesting that somewhere in between lies an idea similar to Walter Benjamin’s oft-cited remark about how twentieth-century fascism involved a devised and comprehensive “aestheticization of politics” for the sake of public appeal.*

* * * *

At one point in the article, the authors reference the work of nineteenth-century Irish-American photographer Timothy H. O’Sullivan. Looking at O’Sullivan’s photos again for the first time in many years, I’m struck by how many of the images remind me of another film that falls in a similar orbit to those of Wenders, and involved a contemporary, ironic port-mortem revisiting of the frontier epic – Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man.

Jarmsusch’s work shadowed that of Wenders in many respects, both sharing many of the same influences and fascinations. They also often shared the same cinematographer, Robbie Müller, who ended up serving as a sort of common denominator between the two. For Wenders, Müller shot almost everything up to Wings of Desire; for Jarmusch, he was behind the camera on Down By Law, Mystery Train, Dead Man, and several other films. Having spent the whole of his career working on films with modest (if not meager) budgets, Müller was a virtuoso of scouting and framing locations and capturing them in a sense that simultaneously captured their site-specific atmosphere and their concrete reality.

Likewise with Müller's rendering of the peripheries of Los Angeles in Alex Cox’s Repo Man. The space, the architecture, the peculiar flows, caesuras, and ruptures of a built environment – the vagaries of its presences and blanks, the pushes and pulls and voids that result from how things come to be and then soon elapse into nominal-use marginalia – and how these provide “setting.” A setting that figures so prominently in the miser-en-scène, that it almost explains as mach about the actions of the characters as the characters and their actions do.

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*  A theoretic aside on my part, perhaps better phrased as a rhetorical question. Wenders was, most likely, speaking metaphorically. The “distrust” of his generation of post-war Germans wasn’t limited to images, but extended to narrative in general – an impatience with prevailing silence of the preceding generation concerning events of the recent past, and an instinct skepticism toward whatever offered account of those years (usually conveniently partial or selective in nature) occasionally broke that silence.

Koolhaas contra Greenspan

"...As such they manage to make a walk around the building feel not only unwelcoming, but surprisingly boring. CCTV's shape-shifting forms and daunting seventy-five-meter, thirteen-story cantilever make for stunning views from within and from a distance; they are least engaging from the sidewalk.

"This is a surprise, coming from the author of Delirious New York and a scholar of cities. Years ago Rem Koolhaas taught us to appreciate the richness of the culture of congestion, the tight interlocking of the public life in the street with the private lives of the skyscraper interiors. But at CCTV he trades Manhattanism for the internalized programmatic promiscuity of Bigness and the old city-killing model of the Corbusian 'towers in the park.' In a self-fulfilling prophecy, he argues against addressing the street because the political life that it once supported no longer exists. He treats the existing street as 'residue' and conceives of CCTV not as in the city, but as a city — perhaps the greatest flaw of Bigness. Bigness not only re-establishes architecture as an agent of exclusion, it negates any possibility of fostering inclusive congruency.

"In the end, CCTV is a spectacular object simultaneously rational and irrational, exuberant and withdrawn, monumental and unstable. Sadly, the one contradiction it doesn’t resolve is the choice between icon-making and city-making. Ultimately it rebrands architecture and avant-gardism in service not to the culture of congestion but rather to the society of the spectacle."

Ellen Dunham-Jones at Design Observer, from her essay "The Irrational Exuberance of Rem Koolhaas," published at the site last year and more recently reprinted in the Routledge anthology Architecture and Capitalism: 1845 to the Present. It's a fairly long read, one that may do little more than the echo the assessment of Koolhaas's recent work & career than a fair number of people formulated years ago. The essay has a narrative arc to it: From former architectural student of the radically-inclined soixant-huitarde generation, to current premier “post-critical” starchitect; with the author rehashing some of Koolhaas’s early theoretical yarns, insinuating that much of it may have been little more than the result of youthful contrarianism.

As far as the crux of the critique is concerned – it doesn’t seem like a difficult case to make. There’s a bit of an ad-hoc character to it, in which Koolhaas serves as subject due to s work being so conspicuous; but one could easily imagine a similar critique being directed toward any number of other figures. For instance, how about Zaha Hadid’s World Cup stadium in Qatar as monument to ruthlessly inhumane labor practices and the brazen corruption of FIFA? Or, similarly, Anish Kapoor’s “Orbital” Tower in London as the same, but with the IOC standing in for FIFA? Or – while we’re at it – the dwarfing, subsuming Bigness of Kapoor’s recent “Leviathan” installation as a visual metaphor the ongoing art-market bubble, and to the colossal dynamics of global finance? I suppose one go on. And if this sort of thing seems too easy, it’s because present circumstances make it so easy.

Ease of Access

Nevermind the obvious deterministic economic factors and incentives. Can a city engender a certain culture of criminal activity by dent of its design?...

"The burglar — like the FBI agent who tracks him — is thus operating by way of a different spatial sense of how architecture should work, how one room could be connected to another, and how a building can, in a sense, be stented: engineering short circuits where mere civilians, altogether less aggressive users of the city, would never expect to find them.

This is perhaps the most extreme, and interesting, example of how ways of interpreting the city borrowed from the world of crime — both from those committing it and those preventing it — belong in the architectural curriculum. The insights offered by slicing through the complex topology of the built environment can be extraordinary, despite the fact that, or perhaps precisely because, acting upon these insights is illegal. They are, we might joke, crimes against space."

BLDGBLOG founder Geoff Manaugh writing in the latest edition of Cabinet, theorizing about the link between urban topology, architecture, and Los Angeles's former status as "bank robbery capital of the world," full article online here.

Habitat, No.6

Photos by Mathieu Bernard-Reymond, from the 2010 series Phnom Penh.

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?"

* * * * *

And yet the feeling of arrival never wanes upon departure, and vice versa, so the two coalesce and become less than one

"Because we abhor the utilitarian, we have condemned ourselves to a lifelong immersion in the arbitrary...LAX: welcoming -- possibly flesh-eating -- orchids at the check-in counter...'Identity' is the new junk food for the dispossessed, globalization's fodder for the disenfranchised ...."

"...the end of Enlightenment, its resurrection as farce, a low-grade purgatory..."

"Continuity is the essence of Junkspace: it exploits any invention that enables expansion, deploys the infrastructure of seamlessness..."

"Architects could never explain space; Junkspace is our punishment for their mystification."

"...Junkspace is the body double of space, a territory of impaired vision, limited expectation, reduced earnestness, ...a Bermuda Triangle of concepts... it cancels distinctions, undermines resolve, confuses intention with realization. It replaces hierarchy with accumulation, composition with addition."

"A fuzzy empire of blur, it fuses high and low, public and private, straight and bent, bloated and starved to offer a seamless patchwork of the permanently disjointed. ...welcoming an infinity of virtual populations to nonexistent theres."

"Junkspace is a domain of feigned, simulated order, ... flamboyant yet unmemorable,..."

"Murals used to show idols; Junkspace's moduless are dimensioned to carry brands; myths can be shared, brands husband auras at the mercy of focus groups. Brands in Junkspace perform the same role as black holes in the universe: they are essences through which meaning disappears..."

"There is no form, only proliferation ... Regurgitation is the new creativity; instead of creation, we honor, cherish, and embrace manipulation..."

"Junkspace sheds architectures like a reptile sheds skins, is reborn every Monday morning. ... At the exact moment that our culture has abandoned repetition and regularity as repressive, building materials have become more and more modular, unitary, and standardized .... Instead of developement, it offers entropy. ...Change has become divorced from the idea of improvement. There is no progress; like a crab on LSD, culture staggers endlessly sideways..."

"Traditionally, typology implies demarcation, the definition of a singular model that excludes other arrangements. Junkspace represents a reverse typology of cumulative, approximative identity, less about kind than about quantity. ..."

"Like radioactive waste, Junkspace has an insidious half-life. Aging in Junkspace is nonexistent or catastrophic; sometimes an entire Junkspace -- a department store, a nightclub, a bachelor pad -- turns into a slum overnight without warning: wattage diminishes imperceptibly, letters drop out of signs, air-conditioning units start dripping, cracks appear as if from otherwise unregistered earthquakes; sections rot, are no longer viable,..."

"Fascism without dictator. From the sudden dead end where you have been dropped by a monumental, granite staircase, an escalator takes you to an invisible destination, facing a provisional vista made of plaster, inspired by forgettable sources. ...Toilet groups mutate into Disney Stores then morph to become meditation centers: Successive transformations mock the word 'plan.'"

"...Can the bland be amplified? The featureless be exaggerated?..."

"JunkSignature™ is the new architecture: the former megalomania of a profession contracted to manageable size, Junkspace minus its saving vulgarity."

"Half of mankind pollutes to produce, the other half pollutes to consume."

"Comfort is the new justice."

"Not exactly 'anything goes'; in fact, the secret of Junkspace is that it is both promiscuous and repressive; as the formless proliferates, the formal withers, and with it all rules, regulations, recourse..."

"Through Junkspace, old aura is transfused with new luster to spawn sudden commercial viability: Barcelona amalgamated with the Olympics, Bilbao with the Guggenheim, Forty-Second Street with Disney. God is dead, the author is dead, history is dead, only the architect is left standing...an insulting evolutionary joke..."

"Junkspace reduces what is urban to urbanity...Instead of public life, Public Space™: what remains of the city once the unpredictable has been removed..."

"In the past, the complexities of Junkspace were compensated for by the stark rawness of its adjunct infrastructures: parking garages, filling stations, distribution centers routinely displaying a monumental purity that was the original sin of modernism. Now, massive injections of lyricism have enabled an infrastructure -- the one domain previously immune to design, taste, the marketplace -- to join the world of Junkspace, and for Junkspace to extend its manifestations under the sky."

"Deprivation can be caused by overdose or shortage; both conditions happen in Junkspace (often at the same time). ...[The stylistic minimum] does not signify beauty, but guilt. ...Ostensibly a relief from constant sensorial onslaught, minimum is maximum in drag, a stealth laundering of luxury: the stricter the lines, the more irresistible the seduction. Its role is not to approximate the sublime, but to minimize the shame of consumption, drain embarrassment, to lower what is higher. The minimum now exists in a state of parasitic codependency with the overdose: to have and not to have, craving and owning, finally collapsed into a single signifier..."

"Museums are sanctimonious Junkspace;...Monasteries inflated to the scale of department stores; expansion is the Third Millennium's entropy, dilute or die."

"We used to renew what was depleted, now we resurrect what is gone." 

-- Rem Koolhaas, "Junkspace" (selected excerpts)

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.

'All we do is complain.'

Rem Koolhaas, in an interview with Spiegel Online, speaking about assembly-line cities and working in an unstable ideological environment:

"Under neoliberalism, architecture lost its role as the decisive and fundamental articulation of a society. ...Take, for example, the prefabricated building. No matter how misguided this ultimately turned out to be, it actually was a very clear articulation. But neoliberalism has turned architecture into a 'cherry on the cake' affair. The Elbphilharmonie is a perfect example: It's icing on the cake. I'm not saying that neoliberalism has destroyed architecture. But it has assigned it a new role and limited its range."

Interesting to me is the part on the second page where Koolhaas states: "In an age of mass immigration, a mass similarity of cities might just be inevitable. These cities function like airports in which the same shops are always in the same places. Everything is defined by function, and nothing by history." Which is more-or-less Marc Augé's idea of the non-place, but applied on a larger civic scale. Which makes me think of a comment that turned up in Glenn Gould's radio documentary The Idea of North: "When the time comes that every place is like everyplace else, will anyone want to go anywhere?"

via Down With Utopia

Towards an Aesthetics of Entropy, Part II

Returning to where we left off a ridiculously long while ago. And in the same location, in the newly-sprawling suburbs of New Jersey of the mid 1960s...

It was the suburbs of New Jersey that the aspiring artist Dan Graham found himself in 1965, having moved back in with his parents after a short-lived attempt at running his own art gallery in New York City. Alighting there and trying to figure out his next move, Graham roamed the surrounding community and its streets with his Kodak Instamatic, taking tightly-composed snapshots of the middle-class subdivisions that were sprouting up to fill the landscape. Acres of tract homes, identical in design, lining the streets like rows of boxes, block after block. The resulting photos would finally appear in the pages of the 1966 year-end issue of Arts magazine. Bearning the title "Homes for America." These photos were imbedded in an accompanying text that Graham had also supplied. Inconspicuously wedged in between other features and art reviews, the article read like a stray fragment from a real estate trade publication:

Each house is a lightly constructed 'shell' although the fact is often concealed by fake (half-stone) brick walls. Shells can be added or subtracted easily. [ ... ]

Each block of houses is a self-contained sequence -- there is no development -- selected from the possible accepted arrangement. As an example, if a section was to contain eight houses of which four model types were to be used, any of these permutational possibilities could be used:

AABBCCDD       ABCDABCD

AABBDDCC       ABDCABDC

AACCBBDD       ACBDACBD

AACCDDBB       ACDBACBD

AADDCCBB       ADBCADBC

Running several pages in length, the "article" continued...

"...This serial logic might follow consistently until, at the edges, it is abruptly terminated by pre-existent highways, bowling alleys, shopping plazas, car hops, discount houses, lumber yards, or factories.


... Although there is some probably some aesthetic precedence in the row houses which are indigenous to many older cities along the east coast, ... housing developments as an architectural phenomenon are peculiarly gratuitous. They exist apart from prior standards of 'good' architecture. They were not built to satisfy individual needs or tastes. The owner is completely tangential to the product's completion. His home isn't really possessable in the old sense; it wasn't designed to 'last for generations;' and outside of its immediate 'here and now' context it is useless, designed to be thrown away. Both architecture and craftsmanship as values are subverted by the dependence on simplified and easily duplicated techniques of fabrication and standardized modular plans."

Presented like copy lifted directly from a brochure picked up at an industry trade show, "Homes of America" operates as a canard. Doubly so, when you account for the way Graham's text -- with its discussion of simplified forms and standardized modularity -- often paralleling the measured, methodical rhetoric of many artists' tracts and statements of its day, especially that connected with the then-emerging Minimalist movement. Take, for example, Donald Judd's essay "Specific Objects," published in the Arts Yearbook in 1965:

"Three dimensions are real space. That gets rid of illusionism and of literal space, space in and around marks and colors – which is riddance of one of the salient and most objectionable relics of European art. The several limits of painting are no longer present. A work can be as powerful as it can be thought to be. Actual space is intrinsically more powerful and specific than paint on a flat surface. Obviously, anything in three dimensions can be any shape, regular or irregular, and can have any relation to the wall, floor, ceiling, room, rooms or exterior or none at all. Any material can be used, as is or painted."

Or from Robert Morris's "Notes on Sculpture," circa 1966...

"A simple, pure sensation cannot be transmissible precisely because one perceives simultaneously more than one property as parts in any given situation: if color, then also dimension; if flatness, then texture, etc. However, certain forms do exist that, if they do not negate the numerous relative sensations of color to texture, scale to mass, etc., do not present clearly separated parts for these kinds of relations to be established in terms of shapes. Such are the simpler forms that create strong gestalt sensations."

Graham's "Homes for America," in its own ingeniously resourceful way, epitomizes a major shift in art that had taken place in the late 1950s and early 1960s -- that it's a prime example of the postmodern closing of the gap between art and everyday life; of an artist responding to his or her present-day "common culture." But steering things closer to the topic at hand, it also serves as a pertinent companion piece to -- if not an inspirational source for -- Robert Smithson's "A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey," which was published in Artforum magazine at the end of the following year.



* * * * * * * *




The 1960s were something of golden age for artists' texts. It was a time in which, for perhaps the first time since the early part of the century -- that period of the aesthetic manifestoes and bombast of early High Modernism -- that an artist's statement of purpose or theoretical ramblings carried significant weight. To some degree, this new situation mostly came about by default. In the wake of recent developments and shifts, traditional art criticism was lagging behind the times, and there was a breech to fill.

The short version: Modernist art and the supremacy of painting and other traditional media had reached the end of an evolutionary arc. Pollock and de Kooning and their fellow travelers had (by some accounts) punched their way out of the conundrum of Cubist spatiality, and in doing so had brought one chapter in the book of art history to a close. (Sure, there was the "post-painterly abstraction" that followed, but not much of anyone found it anything worth getting terribly worked up about.) In the years that followed, art practices splintered off in a number of directions, with a new generation of young American artists producing works that -- in terms of style and materials and content -- fell outside the domain of conventional accounts. New ways of making art required new ways of looking at it, which required new ways of thinking and talking about it; and the old set of critical tools and concepts and terminology wasn't up to the task. Sure, there were a few younger critics who were able to rise to the challenge, but it seemed that -- with all the criterial slippage that was afoot -- the entire art-crit community was going to have to scramble to catch up.


Which is where a number of the younger artists came in. Unlike their brooding and inarticulate Ab-Ex predecessors, they were pretty savvy when it came to stringing words together and methodically working their way through the whys and whatfors of formalism and aesthetic theory. Judd, Morris, and Smithson proved to be the most verbose and cerebral of the lot, and a number of their writings would become primary documents of the era. Graham's "Homes for America" occupies a unique position in this critical continuum, by dint of being an instance when text becomes an integral part of the artwork itself. As such, it was an indicator of things to come. By the time Conceptual Art emerged on the scene in the latter half of the decade, it became a more common practice to supplying text as works of art on their own.



* * * * * * * *

Smithson in his studio, c. 1960

The early half of the 1960s had been a period of artistic floundering for Robert Smithson, a protracted stretch of casting-about and indecision as he sought to find a way of producing work that was relevant, contemporary, and engaged with big ideas. He'd started out painting, producing canvases that were thick with mythological and religious metaphors and heavily modeled after Byzantine iconic imagery. By 1964, he'd transitioned into a brief quasi-"Pop Art" phase -- acrylic paintings of explosions and bolts of electricity rendered in a flat, emblematic style, and a sculpture involving mirrors and neon.

The following year, Smithson showed up at Dan Graham's short-lived John Daniels Gallery in Manhattan, looking for a new venue to show his work. Through his association with the gallery, Smithson began working his way into the network of gallery's other artists -- artists whose work was then starting to gain a lot of critical attention, artists who would soon be ranked as Minimalism's pioneering figures. Graham later recalled his first impression of Smithson as being of "someone who was trying too hard," explaining:

"He was thought to be someone who was politically muscling in,…although his intellectual ideas about the work were compelling and interesting which made me even more guarded, and also made me even tougher on him as I tried to figure out his 'position.' …Bob was trying to make a connection with the Minimal artists we were showing, because he was very adaptable in terms of influence."

Smithson's "compelling and interesting" ideas concerning the work of his Minimalist contemporaries were very much his own, the product of his own peculiar autodidact erudition. This was very evident in his essay "Entropy and the New Monuments," which was published in Artforum magazine in June of 1966. Among the first of Smithson's ambitious writings, the essay is a loopily eccentric text; enough so that the reader can't help but wonder if it wasn't -- like Graham's "Homes for America" -- intended to be something of an artwork in itself. Dense -- some might say over-reachingly so -- with associations and citations from a variety of disciplines and from popular culture, frequently spiraling off into outer-orbit tangents, the text demonstrated Smithson's affinity for connecting far-flung ideas and conceptualizing in oblique and esoteric ways.

Ronald Bladen, Three Elements, 1966

With "Entropy and the New Monuments," Smithson presented his own (highly peculiar) reading of the work of the first wave of so-called Minimalist artists -- specifically that of Judd, Morris, Sol LeWitt, Dan Flavin and a number of other artists, inlcuded those associated with the "Park Place Group" (Mark di Suvero, Robert Grosvenor, at al). Departing from the formalist concerns of Judd and Morris, Smithson foregoes any discussion of "neither painting nor sculpture" or "unitary objects," instead arguing in the essay's opening paragraphs:

"The works ...bring to mind the Ice Age rather than the Golden Age, and would most likely confirm Vladimir Nabokov's observation that, 'The future is but the obsolete in reverse.' In a rather round-about way, many of the artists have provided a visible analog for the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which extrapolates the range of entropy by telling us energy is more easily lost than obtained, and that in the ultimate future the whole universe will burn out and be transformed into an all-encompassing sameness. ...


Instead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future. Instead of being made of natural materials, such as marble, granite, plastic, chrome, and electric light. They are not built for the ages, but rather against the ages. They are involved in a systematic reduction of time down to fractions of seconds, rather than in representing the long spaces of centuries. Both past and future are placed into an objective present. This kind of time has little or no space; it is stationary and without movement, it is going nowhere, it is anti-Newtonian, as well as being instant."

A few paragraphs later, he segues into an extended aside about the High Modernist architecture of Park Avenue (as epitomized by Philip Johnson), commenting:

"This kind of architecture without 'value of qualities,' is, if anything, a fact. From this 'undistinguished' run of architecture, as [Dan] Flavin calls it, we gain a clear perception of physical reality free from the general claims of 'purity and idealism.' Only commodities can afford such illusionist values…"

"Primary Structures" exhibition, The Jewish Museum, NYC, April 1966

Robert Smithson had little interest in methodically dismantling Greenbergian Modernist formalism, a task that very much preoccupied many of his immediate peers. But like a number of artists at the time, Smithson was intrigued with certain ideas that Mesoamericanist art historian George Kubler had put forth in his 1962 book The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things. In his book, Kubler had proposed an alternate framework for contextualizing art history; abandoning the traditional linear model for another (somewhat structuralist) approach that involved diffuse cycles -- or "sequences" -- of development, problem-solving, and eventual dormancy or discontinuation. What's more, Kubler offered a continuum that was more openly anthropological in character, broadening the concept of art history to include a society's "material culture" as a whole (if not extending it to include intellectual culture, as well). Kubler's expansive and interdisciplinary approach was destined to appeal to Smithson, bound to appeal to Smithson, who -- still harboring a childhood fascination with natural sciences -- was similarly prone to thinking in trans-epochal historical sweeps, more inclined to think in terms of geologic time rather than that of specific historic or aesthetic moments.¹

It is with the essay's discussion of the element of time (rather than that of formal or spatial concerns) that Smithson most sharply diverges from the theorizing of his peers, and which introduces the essay's core idea -- entropy. By opting for the monument analogy, Smithson effectively likens the "specific objects" or "unitary forms" of the Minimalists to dolmen or stele or obelisks -- to archeological artifacts, of a sort.² Yet, he counters, these works are monuments built "against the ages" -- embodying the material culture and sensibilities of the immediate present, by dent of being products that owe their existence to contemporary manufacturing techniques and synthetic materials.³ It is, by Smithson's reckoning,this degree of temporal hyperattenuation, this narrowing of reference to the point of instantaneity, that he viewed as a manifestation of entropy -- an "energy-drain" or halting of historical momentum, embodying or signifying nothing more than the material values of the present, mute on all matters of what came before or anything that might come after.

Smithson's brief association with Minimalism marked a turning point in his development as an artist. And as the most significant of Smithson's early texts, "Entropy and the New Monuments" illustrates the artistic ideas that Smithson was formulating at the time, and how theses ideas would -- in turn -- soon cause him to veer in an entirely different direction with his own work.



{ End of part two. }

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1. For instance, when Michael Fried's "Art and Objecthood" appeared in the June 1967 issue of Artforum, it drew a number of cranky rejoinders from Donald Judd and others. Smithson wrote his own response, from which it's difficult to tell if he actually bothered to dissect or fully understand Fried's argument. But given his own concerns as artist, the matter's probably neither here nor there, since Smithson seems to have very little (if anything) at stake in the theoretical debate in the first place.

2. The terminology here ("specific objects," "unitary forms") belongs to Donald Judd and Robert Morris, respectively.

3. This assertion of Smithson's curiously parallels an argument that would become something of postmodernist cliché a couple of decades later, the argument being that the history of Modern art and the so-called avant-garde came to an end with the emergence of Pop Art and Neo-Dadaism -- e.g., when "high art" merged with/was overtaken by the popular culture.

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.