Uninvited Creations:
Abandonment and Appropriation in the Concept-City
The pier…was frightening… It is dangerous…to go into an abandoned
place and chop it up—I don’t know what I thought about that. The destructive
aspect, I mean…The piece was dangerous to the viewer. It was large; it had
scale. He was creating some kind of edge—flirting with some sort of abyss.[3]
Joel Shapiro, an
American sculptor, was describing his encounter with Gordon Matta-Clark’s 1975
piece, Day’s End, at New York City’s
Pier 54. Shapiro’s language dramatizes a shaky phenomenological experience. He
uses a terminology of harm and fear—the piece was ‘frightening’ and ‘dangerous
to the viewer’—to demonstrate that this piece poses a threat to the visitor,
causes discomfort and apprehension. Furthermore, his understanding of the piece
as ‘destructive’ makes clear that the work breaks down structures—both literal
and symbolic. Finally, the implication that the work creates ‘an edge’ and
flirts with an ‘abyss’ reveals that this piece operates at the social and
physical limits; it implies a transgression, an engagement with something
taboo-ed, an ‘other side.’ It is, in a word, a violation.
I
am interested in investigating the intentions of and responses to uninvited,
unexpected acts of creation in the urban context. In particular, I would like
to look at street art as a transgression of the perceived order of the modern
city. I will take as my starting point the work of two geographically and
temporally distinct artists. Gordon Matta-Clark worked throughout the US [and
occasionally in Europe] in the 1970s creating a body of work known as the Building
Cuts. Tyree Guyton has been working on The
Heidelberg Project in Detroit since 1986,
beginning with his own street and expanding to encompass the entire city. Both
artists work explicitly and exclusively with spaces of abandonment—leftovers
and cutouts from the [American] modernist street grid. Each of these artists
engage with dismantling, disordering, disrupting, and disgusting through an
artistic activation (or charging) of spaces of urban abandonment.
I will endeavor to reveal both the
broader narrative of urban order that their work violates and the specific ways
in which they violate it.
THE ORDER
Both Matta-Clark and Guyton’s work operates on the modernist
street grid of America’s cities. Their work does not respond to or comment on
European medieval or American colonial urban form—both quite continuous,
chaotic, and improvised. They operate within an urban system imposed in the 20th
century through the Modernist planning project. In order to understand the ways
in which this modernist order is violated by their work, it becomes crucial to
understand the essence and intention of modernist planning. Modernist urban
planning can be understood as a break from the immersive path-based
accumulation of a grounded pedestrian world to the totalizing formal and
geometric planning of an aerial perspective. To immerse ourselves in this
discourse of modernity, I will turn to French architect Le Corbusier, a
profoundly influential modernist thinker and designer.
Le
Corbusier’s ideology was crystallized in two enduring documents—his 1923
manifesto Towards a New Architecture and
the following series of plans for the ideal modern city form published in 1933
as The Radiant City. In these two
documents, Le Corbusier developed and articulated a coherent and complete
ideology of modernism advocating "a radical synthesis of the classical
perfection of the Parthenon and the design aesthetics of the machine age...the
inefficient and unhygienic structures of the past should be thrown on the scrap
heap, just as a workman discards an outmoded tool. The city itself should be
orderly and legible..."[5]
This vision of an ordered and legible city is what Michel De Certeau dubs The
Concept-City in his 1984 book, The
Practice of Everyday Life. De Certeau
explains the Concept-City as
"the 'city' founded by utopian and urbanistic discourse [and] defined
by...the production of...[a] rational organization [that represses] all the
physical, mental and political pollutions that would compromise it."[6]
With this statement we begin to see the vulnerability of this vision, the very
real threat of ‘pollution,’ ‘disorder,’ and ‘deviance’ to it’s comprehensive and
totalizing ideology. De Certeau reiterates this modernist compulsive control
claiming that the city is "organized by 'speculative' and classificatory
operations. On the one hand, there is a differentiation and redistribution of
the parts and functions of the city...on the other there is a rejection of
everything that is not capable of being dealt with in this way and so
constitutes the 'waste products' of a functionalist administration
(abnormality, deviance, illness, death etc.)"[7]
Matta-Clark and Guyton’s work is positioned in relation to this Concept-City,
as a challenge to that city through the foregrounding of what this modernist
order excludes and casts off. Through their progressive violation and erosion
of the modernist ordering project, they proclaim, "the Concept-city is
decaying"[8] and in doing
so challenge not only the integrity of the modernist planning tradition but
also the authority of the modernist state. It is in this latter violation that
they encounter their most brutal opposition.
OUTSIDE ORDER: SPACES OF ABANDONMENT
Matta-Clark
and Guyton’s relation to and commentary on the modernist project is rooted in
the siting of their work. Both work with abandoned spaces, places that have
been forgotten, written out, alienated or ignored. The critical power of
activating these unused spaces is immense. The self-proclaimed coherence and
comprehensiveness of the modernist project is undermined by this activation—to
highlight things that are left out, discarded, discounted and unincorporated
into this vision is to shake the very foundations of this totalizing ideology. Guyton
explained the Heidelberg Project as "his way, as an artist, of reclaiming
a neighborhood forgotten by civil society."[9]
This theme was reiterated by every source that addressed Guyton’s work—he
“incorporates cast-off, abandoned objects to highlight problems such as blight,
abandonment, homelessness, drugs, racism, and child abuse”[10]
and “to call attention to and provoke thought about ways to address ignored,
cast-off urban problems, Guyton began affixing found and discarded objects to
vacant houses on Heidelberg Street.”[11]
Guyton’s work did not allow the city to hide or discredit these defilements of
the urban order. He celebrated them. Les Levine echoes this sentiment in
speaking of Matta-Clark work with abandoned structures: “the metapsychology of
Gordon’s art was to embrace the abandoned. He worked in old buildings,
neighborhoods in a state of rejection. He would nurture a building that had
lost its soul.”[12] This tender
empathy for and embrace of the rejected and removed violates the modernist
coding of these objects as disgusting and devalued. In this light, Matta-Clark
and Guyton’s appropriation of these coded objects is a violation, regardless of
the ultimate form this appropriation takes.
The
concept of appropriation, then, becomes worthy of scrutiny. Hegel offers
perhaps the most comprehensive, potent and sensitive definition of
appropriation:
to appropriate
something means basically only to manifest the supremacy of my will in relation
to the thing and to demonstrate that the latter does not have being for itself
and is not an end in itself…This manifestation occurs through my conferring
upon the thing an end other than that which it immediately possessed. I give
the living creature, as my property, a soul other than that which it previously
had; I give it my soul.[13]
Hegel’s definition can be
understood as the willful imparting of a counter-narrative, but it doesn’t
carry the sort of impersonal and pointed tone that most definitions
possess—Hegel’s definition, instead illuminates the tender intimacy of the
relationship of subject and object, of appropriator and appropriated. It is, in
essence, an adoption. However, while ‘adoption’ may faithfully capture the
intention and character of Matta-Clark and Guyton’s working process, it is
crucial to maintain the more politically violent implications of appropriation.
Every individual appropriation is a re-writing of meaning and hence a
re-writing of order. Several theorists help to frame methods of appropriation
in relation to the state’s meaning-making machine.
James Holston
positions appropriation relative to state authority and modernist theory in his
notion of Insurgent Citizenship. He characterizes the relationship in this way:
insurgent forms are found both in
organized grassroots mobilizations and in everyday practices that, in different
ways, empower, parody, derail or subvert state agendas. They are found, in
other words, in struggles over what it means to be a member of the modern state...
[which] has never been a static identity...Citizenship changes as the new
members emerge to advance their claims, expanding its realm, and as new forms
of segregation and violence counter these advances, eroding it. The sites of
insurgent citizenship are found at the intersection of these processes of
expansion and erosion.... they are sites of insurgence because they introduce
into the city new identities and practices that disturb established histories.[14]
Holston notes that “erosions of
citizenship are particularly evident in the city’s disintegrating public spaces
and abandoned public spheres.”[15]
It is this erosion—rather than expansion—of citizenship that Matta-Clark and
Guyton’s work addresses. They both operate within a post-industrial, post-modern
urban landscape calling attention to the erosions of modernity’s promises. They
are physicalizing theorist Henri Lefebvre’s Right to the City—a "demand...[for] a transformed and renewed
access to urban life."[16]
Bibliography
Attlee, James. “Towards
Anarchitecture: Gordon Matta-Clark and Le Corbusier.” Tate Papers: Tate’s
Online Research Journal (Spring 2007):
1–17.
Axioti, Eleni. “The
Interruptive Spaces of Gordon Matta-Clark.” Floater Magazine, n.d. http://www.floatermagazine.com/issue02/The_Interruptive_Spaces_of_Gordon_Matta-Clark/.
Barberie, Peter. “Zoe
Strauss Under I-95.” In Zoe Strauss: Ten Years, 114–139. Philadelphia, PA: Philadelphia Museum of Art Publishing
Department, 2012.
Bataille, Georges. “Notion
of Expenditure.” In Visions Of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, 14:116–129. Theory and History of Literature.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.
Bataille, Georges. “The
Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy.” translated by Robert Hurley,
1:19–41. New York, NY: Zone Books, 1991.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction:
A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984.
De Certeau, Michel.
“Walking in the City.” In The Practice of Everyday Life, 91–110. Berkeley and Los Angeles, California:
University of California Press, 1984.
Che, Deborah. “Connecting
the Dots to Urban Revitalization with the Heidelberg Project.” Matieral
Culture 39, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 33–49.
Douglas, Mary. Purity
and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London and New York: Routledge, 1966.
Holston, James. “Spaces of
Insurgent Citizenship.” In Cities and Citizenship, 155–173. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999.
Knox, Skaie. “The
Heidelberg Project: Building Inspiration With Abandoned Objects.” Diggers
List, February 4, 2011. http://blog.diggerslist.com/2011/02/04/the-heidelberg-project-building-inspiration-with-abandoned-objects/.
Lee, Pamela. Object to
Be Destroyed. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press,
2000.
Lefebvre, Henri. “Social
Space.” In The Production of Space,
translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith, 68–93. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell
Publishers, Inc, 1991.
Lefebvre, Henri. “The
Right to the City.” In Writings on Cities,
147–159. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, Inc, 1996.
Moore, Ryan. “Tyree Guyton
Demolition Man: Picking up the Pieces After the Fall of Detroit’s Heidelberg
Project.” Juxtapose, June 1999.
Nasar, Jack, and David
Moffat. “The Heidelberg Project--Detroit, Michigan: Tyree Guyton.” Places:
Forum of Design for the Public Realm 16,
no. 3 (2004): 14–17.
Walker, Stephen. “Discrete
Violation.” In Gordon Matta-Clark: Art, Architecture and the Attack on
Modernism, 13–27. London, England: I.B.
Tauris & Co Ltd., 2009.
Walters, Wendy S. “Turning
the Neighborhood Inside Out: Imagining a New Detroit in Tyree Guyton’s
Heidelberg Project.” The Drama Review
45, no. 4 (Winter 2001): 64–93.
[3] Lee, 130.
[5] Atlee, 5.
[6] De Certeau, 94.
[7] De Certeau, 94.
[8] De Certeau, 95.
[9] Nassar and Moffat, 14.
[10] Che, 33.
[11] Che, 38.
[12] Lee, 56.
[13] Lee, 56.
[14] Holston, 167.
[15] Holston, 170.
[16] Lefebvre (Right to the City), 158.
[17] De Certeau, 97-8.
[18] De Certeau, 100.
[19] De Certeau, 101-102.
[20] De Certeau, 110.
[21] Atlee, 6.
[22] Atlee, 13.
[23] Atlee, 3.
[24] Lee, 21.
[25] Walker, 19.
[26] Atlee, 3.
[27] Che, 34.
[28] Che, 41.
[29] Lee, 162.
[30] Walker, 16.
[31] Walker, 17-18.
[32] Nassar and Moffat, 15.
[33] Lee, 21.
[34] Walker, 13,
[35] Walker, 15.
[36] Douglas, 2.
[37] Knox.
[38] Moore, 55.
[39] Nassar and Moffat, 14.
[40] Bataille (Accursed Share), 29.
[41] De Certeau, 91.
[42] Douglas, 37.
[43] Lee, 26.
[44] Lee, 2.
[45] Walters, 66.




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