urban art forms

"…urban art is not site-specific but relationship-specific. The relation always arrives, coming to us through a leading perceptual edge-- usually visual-- in advance of its next sequential unfolding. In other words, it arrival is a promised event that has yet to occur: an appointment with a known but not yet actually afforded outcome. To afford oneself of the outcome is to eventuate the relationship, to perform it: to follow through with its actual step-by-step unfolding.
…The art parasitizes the expected event with its own happening. The Situationists also had a name for this practice of inserting unexpected encounters-with-potential into existing landing sites: detournement (hijacking or detouring).
"Documentation is the art event’s park bench: the form in which it rests. Except that documentary rest is for transport, since it is in documentary form that the event may move from one “park” to another. Documentation as vehicular event benching. To vehiculate the event, the documentation cannot be conceived merely as reflecting or representing it. It must be thought of as, and designed to be, the event in seed for. If the documentary germ falls on fertile urban ground, the performative prototyping may well resprout. … It is the event’s way of angling itself, or generally affording its own rehappening. (11-12)
-- Massumi, Brian. “Urban Appointment: A Possible Rendez-Vous With the City.” In Making Art of Databases, ed. Joke Brouwer and Arjen Mulder. Pp. 28-55.

The Lure of Modernity

They consecrated the rest of their time to their waning dreams in the hills. … Sure, one survived, sure, one was free, but the aftertaste of misery was rising quickly. It was the bitterness of a land whose promises fly away. It was from the boredom with nature that did away with all patience before the least wish came true. … The hills had neither schools nor lights. You just found yourself with the sky over you like a lid, getting anxious, sometimes destitute, and always without perspective. The still hills did not care for any weakness. Thus, year after year, the maroon Trail began to go down to the Factory. There was opportunity there.

-Patrick Chamoiseau, pg. 139, Texaco, trans. Rejouis & Vinokurov

beware of the city

And she asked, What is City, Ternome? He, full of secular learning, exaggerated: City’s a quake. A tremor. There all things are possible, and there all things are mean. City sweeps and carries you along, never lets go of you, get you mixed up in its old secrets. In the end you take them in without ever understanding them. You tell those just-off-the-hills that that’s how it is and they eat it up: but the City has just gulped you in without showing you the ropes. A City is the ages all gathered in one place, not just in the names, houses, statues, but in the not-visible. A City sips the joys, the pain, the thoughts, every feeling, it makes its dew out of them, which you see without being able to point to it.

-Patrick Chamoiseau, pg. 173, Texaco, trans. Rejouis & Vinokurov

violence, urbanity

Urbanity is a violence. The town spreads with one violence after another. Its equilibrium is violence. In the Creole city, the violence hits harder than elsewhere. First, because around her, murder (slavery, colonialism, racism) prevails, but especially because this city, without the factories, without the industries with which to absorb the new influx, is empty. It attracts without proposing anything besides its resistance -- like Fort-de-France did after Saint-Pierre was wiped out. The Quarter of Texaco is born of violence. So why be astonished at its scars, its warpaint?

THE URBAN PLANNER’S NOTES TO THE WORD SCRATCHER
FILE NO. 6. SHEET XVIII.
1987. SCHOELCHER LIBRARY.

- Patrick Chamoiseau, pg. 148, Texaco, trans. Rejouis & Vinokurov

on the urban planner

The angel of destruction had come that morning to familiarize himself with the setting for his future exploits.

- Patrick Chamoiseau, pg. 26, Texaco, trans. Rejouis & Vinokurov

the triumph (danger) of the city

But the city is danger; she becomes a megalopolis and doesn't ever stop; she petrifies the countryside into silence like Empires used to smother everything around them; on the ruins of the Nation-state, she rises monstrously, multi-national, transnational, supranational, cosmopolitan... and becomes the sole dehumanized structure of the human species.

NOTES OF THE URBAN PLANNER TO THE WORD SCRATCHER.
FILE NO. 20. SHEET XVI.
1988. SCHOELCHER LIBRARY.

- Patrick Chamoiseau, pg. 356, Texaco, trans. Rejouis & Vinokurov

on drawing large generalizations, terrifying universality of prisons

What is now imposed on penal justice as its point of application, its "useful" object, will no longer be the body of the guilty man set up against the body of the king; nor will it be the juridical subject of an ideal contract; it will be the disciplinary individual. The extreme point of penal justice under the Ancien Regime was the infinite segmentation of the body of the regicide: a manifestation of the strongest power over the body of the greatest criminal, whose total destruction made the crime explode into its truth. The ideal point of penality today would be an indefinite discipline: an interrogation without end, an investigation that would be extended without limit to a meticulous and ever more analytical observation, a judgment that would at the same time be the constitution of a file that was never closed, the calculated leniency of a penalty that would be interlaced with the ruthless curiosity of an examination, a procedure that would be at the same time the permanent measure of a gap in relation to an inaccessible norm and the asymptotic movement that strives to meet in infinity. The public execution was the logical culmination of a procedure governed by the Inquisition. The practice of placing individuals under "observation" is a natural extension of a justice imbued with disciplinary methods and examination procedures. Is it surprising that the cellular prison, with its regular chronologies, forced labor, its authorities of surveillance and registration, its experts in normality, who continue and multiply the functions of the judge, should have become the modern instrument of penality? Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?

- Michael Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 485-486

consumers: on mall-logic

To survive profitably, it must operate within the enormous disjuncture created between the objective economic logic necessary for the profitable circulation of goods and the unstable subjectivity of the messages exchanged between consumers and commodities, between the limited goods permitted by this logic and the unlimited desires released by this exchange.

- Margaret Crawford, "The World in a Shopping Mall," 13, Variations on a Theme Park

buildings: on disparate pieces

What's missing in this city is not a matter of any particular building or place; it's the places in between, the connections that make sense of forms.

- Michael Sorkin, xii, Introduction: Variations on a Theme Park

consumers: on browsing

By extending the period of "just looking," the imaginative prelude to buying, the mall encourages "cognitive acquisition" as shoppers mentally acquire commodities by familiarizing themselves with a commodity's actual and imagined qualities. Mentally "trying on" products teaches shoppers not only what they want and what they can buy, but, more importantly, what they don't have, and what they therefore need. Armed with this knowledge, shoppers not only realize what they are but also imagine what they might become. Identity is momentarily stabilized even while the image of a future identity begins to take shape, but the endless variation of objects means that satisfaction always remains just out of reach.

- Margaret Crawford, "The World in a Shopping Mall," 13, Variations on a Theme Park

buildings: on differentiation

The new city replaces the anamoly and delight of such places with a universal particular, a generic urbanism inflected only by applique. (xiii)

- Michael Sorkin, Introduction: Variations on a Theme Park

building: the bleakness of a complete system

If commodities no longer dominate, this is because the salable product no longer carries the same importance, since history, technology, and art, as presented in the museums, have now become commodified. The principle of adjacent attraction is now operating at a societal level, imposing an exchange of attributes between the museum and the shopping mall, between commerce and culture.... The world of the shopping mall-- respecting no boundaries, no longer limited even by the imperative of consumption-- has become the world.

- Margaret Crawford, 30, "The World in a Shopping Mall," Variations on a Theme Park

building: epigram

William Kowinski identified mal de mall as a perceptual paradox brought on by simultaneous stimulation and sedation, characterized by disorientation, anxiety, and apathy.

- Margaret Crawford, 14, "The World in a Shopping Mall," Variations on a Theme Park

building: the misuse of art

The greater the separation of events from their constitutive geography, the more powerful the mythology and the more cliched the geographical landscapes expressing and expressed through the mythology. (69)

The rawness of the neighborhood is part of the appeal. "As for ambience," continue the critics, "the East Village has it: a unique blend of poverty, punk rock, drugs, and arson, Hell's Angels, winos, prostitutes, and dilapidated housing that adds up to an adventurous avant-garde setting of considerable cachet." (75)

...the artistic invocation of danger is usually too oblique to highlight the sharp conflicts over gentrification.... The art world's cooptation of violent urban imagery generally trivializes real struggles and projects a sense of danger that is difficult to take seriously. Social conflict is recast as artistic spectacle, danger as ambience. With the rapidity of openings and closings, movings and renamings, gentrification and decay, a landscape of happy violence becomes the stage for a dynamic and breathless form of geographical performance art. (77)

- Neil Smith, "New City, New Frontier: The Lower East Side as Wild, Wild West," Variations on a Theme Park

continual building

Prehistory all over again: the ring-within-a-ring representing progress and modernity, disenchantment flourishing when the outer limits are reached. Now modernity itself is being displaced by deliberately postmodern architectronics, by a new kind of campus (field, level, plain), as the inner rings are left behind.

- Edward W. Soja, 104, "Inside Exopolis: Scenes from Orange County," Variations on a Theme Park

setting identity in a consumer world

Presented with a constantly increasing range of products, each promising specialized satisfaction, the shopper is forced to fragment needs into constantly smaller elements. These are not false needs, distinct from objectively determined "real" needs; rather they conflate material and symbolic aspects of "needing" in an ambiguous, unstable state. Because advertising has already identified particular emotional and social conditions with specific products, the continuous fracturing of emotions and artifacts forces consumers to engage in intensive efforts to bind together their identity and personal integrity. Consumption is the easiest way to accomplish this task and achieve at least temporary resolution.

- Margaret Crawford, 12, "The World in a Shopping Mall," Variations on a Theme Park

on what drives

I don't believe in need as a force at all. Need is a current, everyday affair. But desire -- that is something else again. Desire is the forerunner of a new need. It is the yet not stated, the yet not made which motivates.

- Louis I. Kahn, in conversation, 1973

on locational character

Of course there are some spaces which should be flexible, but there are also some which should be completely inflexible. They should be just sheer inspiration... just the place to be, the place which does not change, except for the people who go in and out.

- Louis I. Kahn, in conversation, 1969

on mutual beautification

A great American poet once asked the architect, 'What slice of the sun does your building have? What light enters your room?' -- as if to say the sun never knew how great it is until it struck the side of a building.

- Romaldo Giurgola & Jaimini Mehta, Louis I. Kahn, pg. 187