Concrete Islands

"Photographed by Bel Geddes’ associate Richard Garrison, 'The City of Tomorrow' appears as a pristine metropolis only slightly occluded by wisps of fog and yet draped in dramatic shadows. Some photographs utilize shallow focus to give a sense of the extraordinary scale and space being depicted. In others, the model appears as if photographed on a sound stage. Yet all of the advertisements follow a similar structure. They begin with a quote from Bel Geddes, touted in the ads as an 'expert in future trends.' From that point on, explanatory texts describe Garrison’s photographs, many which focus on the relation between the city and the highway (or architecture and automobile). Everything about these images indeed suggest that the relationship between these two is unequal. More importantly, they envision the year 1960 as much more than an era of mobile urbanism, but one where highway planning becomes the primary engine for urban design."

Where B. F. Skinner and Le Corbusier cross paths. Behavioralism, advertising, urban design, and the commercial branding of the future. Enrique Ramirez at a456 offers an overview of the team behind the City of Tomorrow from General Motors' "Futurama" exhibit at the 1939 World Fair.

Peak Production

Iraqi Oil, photography series by Pieter Ten Hoopen, 2009.

The Ownership Society, II

"The faux-pas term of the 2000s, intellectual property is nearly impossible to protect. There are only two options left: a police state, or to turn the whole thing off -- to drive tanks into the Ukraine (major server farms such as Tangram are based there) and shut down every single machine. Let's just abandon it now; the idea of intellectual property never helped artists or those on the receiving end anyway, just corporate interests. Richard Prince -- unthinkable today! And the old European business model that grounds the concept doesn't translate well to other cultures. For example, the Chinese language has many words to describe things that are neither copy nor original, some even suggesting that a copy is the more valuable of the two."

- Christian von Borries, Berlin composer, conductor

and filmmaker (in the April issue of Artforum)

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"As in the United States and Europe, a handful of contemporary painters in China can command hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars for each of their highly creative works... . But the main push by China has been in the broad market for works that retail for $500 or less, with painters who work from postcards or images on the Internet or, in Mr. Zhang's case, a large, dog-eared copy of an art book in English on van Gogh."

- New York Times, July 15, 2005

photos: Michael Wolf, The Copy Artists, China, 2006

Illadelph Halflife

Partly of urb ex interest, but mostly concerned with historical documentation, the wordpress blog Ruins/NFR is devoted to "a continuing series in the social history of Philadelphia’s built environment, a study of the forces that cause landscapes and structures to come into and pass out of existence." Sifting through accounts of the city's past as well as charting its contemporary development, the site appears to be the work of a sole proprietor. Considering Philly's size and complexity, I can't help but wonder how the site would shape up if it were the work of multiple contributors.

In other Philly-related news, it appears that Schoolly D has been writing a weekly column for Philebrity these past several months.

Processed Instant God: Straggling Endnotes to an Era

NYT piece on Chayevsky's notes to self throughout his development of the screenplay for Network.


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And then there's this item, hot off the wire...

'You Light Up My Life' composer kills self, police say.

The man who composed the pop hit "You Light Up My Life" ended his own life Sunday, New York police said.

Joseph Brooks, 73, was facing charges on 11 alleged rapes and sex assaults, New York Police Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne said.

The songwriter was found dead in his Manhattan home by a friend with whom he was supposed to have lunch at 12:30 p.m. Sunday, Browne said.

A plastic dry cleaning bag and a towel were wrapped around his head, with a tube connected to a helium tank attached, he said. A suicide note was found nearby, he said.

Brooks' son, Nicholas Brooks, was charged in January with the murder of his ex-girlfriend, according to the Manhattan District Attorney's office.

No Accounting for Taste

Via a recent edition of the e-flux journal, Boris Groys on "Art and Money," and the notion that certain kinds of the former exist due to the support of an "elite"...

"Our contemporary world, though, is primarily an artificially produced world—in other words, it is produced primarily by human work. However, even if today’s wider populations produce artworks, they do not investigate, analyze, and demonstrate the technical means by which they produce them—let alone the economic, social, and political conditions under which images are produced and distributed. Professional art, on the other hand, does precisely that—it creates spaces in which a critical investigation of contemporary mass image production can be effectuated and manifested. This is why such a critical, analytical art should be supported in the first place: if it is not supported, it will be not only hidden and discarded, but, as I have already suggested, it would simply not come into being. And this support should be discussed and offered beyond any notion of taste and aesthetic consideration. What is at stake is not an aesthetic, but a technical, or, if you like, poetic, dimension of art."

Groys navigates his argument by way of (perversely enough) two noted essays by Clement Greenberg -- specifically "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" and "The Plight of Culture." Admittedly, the piece meanders and gets a bit knotty at times, yet Groys manages to stay fairly on-point in terms of unpacking and demystifying certain misconception about how the artworld supposedly "works." Ultimately, his thesis is has it that it isn't so much monied, bourgeoisie, institutional elites that keep foster or bolster certain types of seemingly esoteric art modes and practices, but rather the judgement and support of the "productivist" elites of artists themselves.¹

This, of course, raises all sorts of theoretical considerations. What interests me more is the more at the issues that fall more squarely in the domain of aesthetics. Specially, the matter of how a given work or art engages an audience, how it expresses or communicates something to someone, and how the canon shapes up in relation to these considerations.

There are "artist's artists," just as there are "musician's musicians," "writer's writers," and so on. Anyone who devotes their time of energy invested in any given area of artistic activity knows this. How a given artist/writer/whatever achieves this status varies, but it often hinges on a specialized knowledge of the matters of craftmanship -- a critique or appreciation based in technical or formalistic considerations.²

For the past 3-4 decades, formalism has taken a consistent bashing, having long since become a dirty (or, at the very least, dismissive) term in critical circles. But I'd argue that any artists that's worth their weight in salt is ultimately a formalist -- whether consciously or innately. They're geared to think in terms of things like color, composition, texture, materials, physical properties, scale, etc. (Effectively, the syntax by which a work communicates with the viewer/audience.) If they're not, then they've pretty much got it all ass-backwards and the likelihood is very high that they're making lousy work -- work that fails to engage or impart anything to the viewer.

Critics factor into this too, naturally. And they're also considered (rather naively) viewed as constituting some sort of powerful "elite" of their own in all of this. But the role of the critic in much of what Groys is addressing is a little more peripheral. There is, I believe, also a fundamental disconnect or a major degree of removal that spereates the judgement of critics from those of producers. Critics and art historians most often tend to think in linear or compartmentalizing terms -- to imposing or applying those types of narratives in terms of situating a work or artist into some context or another. On the other hand, artists (the good ones, anyway) generally have a much more oblique or diffuse way of making connections across a broad range of artworks and cultural artifacts -- connection that are not only visual, but also thematic, materialistic, and critical in nature.

Joseph Bueys stating to an audience that the work of Jackson Pollock was one of the century's greatest artistic achievements; and that if you don't get that, then you don't understand art. Richard Prince responding to an interviewer that if there was one piece of art he'd like to own, it'd be a DeKooning. Gerhard Richter getting all huffy with Benjamin Buchloh when the latter asserted that Richter's smeared abstract paining were ironic postmod corruptions of the authorial gestures of Ab Ex. If you do much reading in the history of contemporary art, you occasionally runs into this sort of scenario. And it never fails to amuse when you encounter them, because they demonstrate the disconnect I mentioned above -- an instance of a critic or historian projecting an aesthetic position on an particular artist, basing their assumption on a readymade or commonly accepted reading of the artist's work. But it's seldomly as simple or limited as that.³

image: Christopher Wool, Untitled, 1990

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1. I know, nothing so murky as bring the term/idea of an "elite" (or "elitism") into a discussion. I long ago dropped the term from my own vocab due to its rhetorical bankruptcy. And employing the term "avant-garde" in this day and age is as equally embarrassing and problematic. But since those are the terms Groys uses (if only for the sake of notional shorthand), we'll let them stand for the time being.

2. I realize that this hardly makes for a finalizing, airtight thesis. For instance, over the years I've known more than a few musicians that I thought had (sometimes) lousy taste in music. Reason being that their technical knowledge and ability sometimes drove them to appreciate something merely for technical reasons -- i.e. to bravura and "virtuosity" for its own sake, thus occasionally being taken in by what some would call "vulgar showmanship." Yes, Al Di Meola can play "really fast." Yeah, Maynard Ferguson can play really loudly. And yes, Rachmaninoff's Third Piano Concerto is really complex. And...?

3. As far as the matter of canon-shaping and art practices are concerned, and I also found that the Groys essay touches on topics that turn up (in varying degrees) in this and this item which've crossed by path recently.