A conference on postwar interactions with the urban realms
Amsterdam 11-12 May 2006
www.artandthecity.nl
Report by Jerneja Rebernak
Ongoing transformations of the city after the leftover destructiveness of the Second World War led to a fast conceptual remaking of physical spaces from the perspectives of architects, urbanists and designers. However, artists, filmmakers and institutions helped in carrying on representations about the collective imaginaries of the city. In this context, it becomes important to dig into the history of artistic urban activity from which to understand cities as networks in terms of public space.
This conference was speaking in tones of marking current theories and research on the urban realm, raging from Isidore Isou lettrist movement to issues of urban queerscape, elaborating on Robert Rauschenberg’s perspectives on the transformation of New York City in the 1950s to images of New Babylon and street art. Understanding the changing role of contemporary urban »geographycal« landscape needs an emphasis in conceptualising and imagining public spheres and spaces as both utopian although virtual, but visible.
Reimagining a public sphere
Most western cities transformed into commodified and privatised urban spaces, which caused a declining role of utopian agoras on a global scale. In his keynote lecture, Malcolm Miles (University of Plymouth) remained cynical about the existence of a public space as a physical site, which he himself defines as a romantic concept, stressing the impossibility of reclaiming something that has never actually existed. Eventually, their existence is rather confined in small self-sufficient communities outside dominant societies where a functional public space can be formed and sustained. Indeed the urban space is being marketised and all spaces tend to look the same under global capitalism. Public spaces depict identity formation under symbolisms of images and names. He cited Zygmut Bauman, who has argued in his book »Liquid Modernity« that the role of critical theory is to defend the public realm, to seek a reflourishment of the public sphere. In this case, Miles looks out for metaphorical spaces, starting his quest for (un)existing public sphere. The iconic images of the video screen placed in squares create a »public media space«, however its content is most of the time only dedicated to advertising messages to be absorbed by the passing public. Since Nancy Fraser defines public sphere in terms of the exclusion of performativity from the standpoint of gender and property, the metaphorical space that Miles is looking for happens to be laying in the image of the soviet kitchen, its role representing a transitional space between the public and the private where underground and alternative activity literally provoked dominant status quo. It is in this light that he highlights spaces of autonomy, like the neighbourhood district of Res Publica in Vilnius or the learning processes inside rural communities in Rhajastan, where group activity is shaping the formation of a new logic of public sphere. In the conclusion of his speech, he opened up a positive light on existing public spheres outside the old patterns of residence of the public sphere. It is in the formation of networks, by sharing knowledge and solidarity that creates room for an existing public sphere, that new patterns can be discovered in the micro public spheres around the globe.
New York into Art
In this session, artistic production as well as personal engagement on social relations in New York City were presented from the worlds of Robert Rauschenberg, Donald Judd, David Wojnarowicz and Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Robert S. Mattison (Lafayette College) depicted the perspective of the artist Robert Rauschenberg on the reshaping of the South Street Seaport in the New York of the ’50s. This area has went under major transformation in order to become the new financial district of New York city, with skyscrapers becoming its symbol icons. This city planning created more homogenisation and have erased spaces for creativity and artistic production around the most dynamic city areas. He defines Rauschenberg’s artistic production as having a critical viewpoint on these dramatic interventions in the urban area. Rauschenberg uses building material and debris on canvas, which, as Mattison concludes, represents an antitotalitarian gesture towards the city programming establishment. His use of construction material shows us his close relation between ideas of a declining urban diversity in the city. His perspective on the evolution towards abstract planning from above can be found in Jane Jacobs’ description of the concept of new psychogeographies of urban space in her book: »The death and life of great American cities« from which Rauschenberg and the whole neighbourhood artistic production (also John Cage and Merce Cunningham) took inspiration. In the second presentation for this session, Joshua A. Shannon (Univ. of Maryland) talked about the artist Donald Judd and the postmodernisation of New York. The artist uses minimalistic squares and plexiglass boxes, which resembles the actual industrial forms of the city. His artwork is defined as literalism in art, where shapes and forms don’t stand for any kind of metaphor or symbolic expression of reality. It is in the close similarity with skyscrapers that Judd’s work receives acknowledgments, not to forget the cubical shapes of shipment containers. It is also in the atmospheres of office design, where geometrical lines separate spaces and where abstract lines creates the postmodernisation of New York city, which is reflected through Judd’s untitled pieces.
Urban queerscapes
Royce W. Smith (Wichita State University) emphasised in his presentation the art of David Wojnarowicz (born in Red Bank, New Yersey, 1954) and his focus on the representation of bodies in the urban space, which often through their marginality escape the lights of dominant social activities. His writings have a perpetuating angle of thinking about the private being contrasted with the public, which always carries notions of control. Smith directed his attention to photographs taken in the late 1970s, where Wojnarowicz started to use techniques of photomontage where he questions the licit and illicit boundaries of dominant and queer bodies inside urban streets, decaying buildings and private atmospheres. This intervention, if so we could call it, represents a private intrusion of his body into spaces like teashops, where he is a guest. One part of the series of those photographs illustrates himself walking the streets of New York in a mask of Arthur Rimbaud’s young face. Rimbaud’s juvenile rebelliousness and his illuminating talent resembled the artist’s own experience, such as his vagabondage and his early discovered homosexuality. In fact, Wojnarowicz begins his exploration of spaces such as the street zone of movies, on one hand those that shows porn and the classic film industry flicks. It is in this space that he is being photographed, showing his body on the side of the street where porn is being shown, making a statement against the normative body. The series of photographs closes dramatically with the author being photographed in empty buildings and ends with him shooting drugs in the toilet. It was in this pessimistic view about the impossibility of achieving recognition that Wojnarowicz chose to comment on his own radical erasure in his further artwork. He writes his own manifesto of the impossibility to escape the exclusion he receives as a homosexual. He narrates his own experience, which he galvanised in words, pictures and objects, outside his own privateness.
Décollage: Hains’ aesthetics of action
Hannah Feldman (Nothwestern University) is currently writing her book Art during War: Visible Space and the Aesthetics of Action, Paris 1956/2006 and gave a presentation on the exhibition La France Déchirée (1961) of the artist Raymond Hains. In the contest of the structures of the Empire as a political entity, Feldman argues that inside public spaces culture, political identity and the possibilities for alternative publics that exclude colonial structures are being created. It was during the period of colonial dispute over Algeria that in the streets of Paris an unconscious and collaborative spirit engaged in contesting the political engagement through claiming the right to expression in the city. Hains actively polemicised the role of nationalism and closely engaged with discourses on the Algerian conflict. In addition, Hains’ action of décollage worked to overturn the role of mass media, since the public sphere in the urban geography was visibly declining. He collected torn political posters from the streets of Paris and combined them with a technique called décollage. Hains’ work, strongly motivated by the massification of advertisement, was exhibited inside galleries and museums, despite the fact those artworks were not corresponding to regular art objects. The artists made the forgotten and invisible Algerian conflict legible through his work, which remained out of the public discourse in France. Hains’ new visual language proliferated into the French intellectual scene, at the same moment as Debord, who acknowledged the work of Hains, engages with the concept of the society of spectacle. Hannah Feldman engaged with Hains political interventions as vivid examples of the emerging culture that takes an active stand in the dominion of the privatised public spheres. She cites Fanon, for whom the location of culture is to be found in public action. Furthermore, it is inside the inscription of action that he finds the truth. This model of cultural action interrupts the normative paths of action in the public space. Public action becomes a struggle for sovereignty of representing people that have been yet unrepresented or found in the shadows of the public discourse. She defines this forms of interventions as »aesthetics of action«, which give another angle to the debate of the public sphere, a positive one, where through political and cultural action subjects are formed.
A radical take on the public sphere: Constant’s New Babylon
Lara Schrijver (Technische Universiteit Delft) presented the idea of an aesthetic collective through the work of Constant Nieuwenhuis, one of the innovators of Unitary Urbanism. He understands creation, mobility and play as being the central activity of the Homo Ludens (Man the Player). It is this creative individual that will build a city, the New Babylon, which in return will allow and create a new type of creativity. Constant unites politics and art in a totality, which he hoped would create a new being that does not separate space as a psychic dimension from the space of action. His drawings and architectural sketches of the new city are based on the idea of socialisation and automation of the production, where the nomadic existence and the unnecessesity of work form this new social context. The formation of the New Babylon is a revolutionary and progressive idea that aroused the interest of Guy Debord and the Situationist International, in fact until 1961 Constant was active part of the movement. They found mutual interest in the concept of individuation, where man would be liberated from everyday work and would reveal his playful human nature in this nihilistic environment. In this environment, collectivity would maintain the urban, which will allow individual identities to be transformed in active as well as creative beings. In contemporary aesthetic community, moments of association are fragmented and superficial. In this prototypical space of the New Babylon, Bauman’s ethical community or Tönnies idea of Gemeinschaft (community) would become crystallised. Lara Schrijver searched for examples that would nowadays illustrated the idea of New Babylon. Could the architectural shapes of squares and public spaces reintegrate this model of viewing a new public sphere or should public spheres be searched for elsewhere? She sees the proliferation of New Babylons in the digital space, where public forums reflect the idea of the individual flexibility in the creation of mutual as well as singular environments. She finished her presentation with an enveloped vision of »punctual architectural interventions« that will allow a recreation of communities in public spaces as it is now happening in virtual networks.
Logo Parc: design projects for the Zuidas area
Daniel van der Velden (graphic designer, Jan van Eyck Academie) illustrated new design solutions for the Zuidas area, the business district in Amsterdam South that will soon be built in a shape of a modern »airport city«. He acknowledged the many communicative layers that exist in the city. These layers can be used by governments and market, which regulates them. There are less and less possibilities free spaces for communication. Cities are increasingly becoming ‘furniturised’ in order to play an active role in the public space and communicate you need a big budget. Van der Velden communicates a necessity to express disagreements in the public space; public spaces where we can all agree to disagree and to contest forms of power. It means that these signs of possible »accidents« in the public space would communicate their spirit of an open society, a democracy. Some of the ideas that emerged from the team working on the concept of Logo Parc are indoor advertising, corporate graffiti as well as the reintegration of historical monuments inside these areas. The idea is to build a communicative forest that would reflect the current spirit of privatised communication in order to critique branding and the limitation of access (for the homeless for example) in the new regulated cities.
Jerneja Rebernak
jerneja99(at)gmail.com