Just a quick note about this coming week’s class:
1. We’ll be reading an excerpt from Zygmunt Bauman’s Wasted Lives, which Kevin will be reviewing. It picks up on the economic discussion from last week but is more accessible and emotional in tone.
2. We’ll also be reading pieces about a new subject: ruins. First read Aimee von Bokel’s article about artists’ installations in ruined spaces in NYC. It’s very short — only two pages. Aimee will be joining us at the end of this week’s session to discuss the article as well as her work on urban politics, gentrification, and African American heritage sites in NYC.
3. I added one reading: Andreas Huyssen’s essay “Nostalgia for Ruins,” because it offers a comprehensive introduction to the topic. Read as much of it as is useful to you. He discusses the politics of nostalgia in modernism. He also offers a fascinating analysis of the drawings of Piranesi, whose “prisons and ruins can be read as allegories of a modernity whose utopia of freedom and progress, linear time and geometric space they not only question but cancel out.”
4. The Anik Fournier essay “The Ruin in the Age of Junkspace” updates some of Huyssen’s ideas to contemporary New York City (such as the High Line and related art–architecture projects). The crucial pages are 45-48, 55-57, and 60-61. Her discussion of the piers on the west side and Gordon Matta Clark’s work offers a nice complement to von Bokel’s essay.
5. Gaston Gordillo’s Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction offers a non-Eurocentric perspective on ruins. Pages 1-11 are most crucial, but the philosophical discussions that follow are also interesting.
Blog prompts: Choose one! (and let me know which one you are responding to):
Blog prompt 1 (sociological): Aimee von Bokel argues that two recent art installations (set in an abandoned public school and hospital) provide testimony to a previous economic regime that made a serious “economic investment in a robust and healthy industrial workforce.” As aestheticized ruins, however, the installations “transform the two buildings — constructed as real, material resources — into…cultural capital.” Draw on Zygmunt Bauman’s Wasted Lives to describe von Bokel’s claim in greater depth. That is, explain the “neoliberal” turn, from strong public investment toward individual liability.
Blog prompt 2 (aesthetic): Von Bokel seems to be arguing that the aestheticization of once public resources (hospitals, schools) masks the social problems underlying their abandonment (defunding, etc.) — rather than making a clear critique of the social problems. She seems to be suggesting that art—or at least these particular artworks—mystifies rather than reveals social problems. Draw on either the Huyssen or Fournier pieces to argue for or against von Bokel. Can the aesthetization of ruins ever be a form of critique? Or are ruins always amnesiac and politically sedative?
Blog prompt 3: Generate two discussion questions for von Bokel. In at least one of your questions, draw on another essay in your response (Bauman, Huyssen, Fournier, Gordillo). You may also bring in a specific artwork or other public work that adds texture to or complicates her assertions about the artworks she discusses. (For example, do Thomas Hirschhorn’s “Gramsci Monument” in the South Bronx or Theaster Gates’ public art works in Chicago offer a different way of thinking about waste, ruination, and public disinvestment?)
Blog prompt 3: questions for Aimee VonBokel
1. You write that JR’s installation at Ellis Island and Bradford Young’s at PS 83 in Brooklyn not only “trade on a fascination with structural decay” but also function “as symbols of sophisticated consumer choice” (VonBokel 3). Gastón Gordillo, in Rubble, writes that the ruin “evokes a unified object that elite sensibilities treat as a fetish that ought not be disturbed” (Gordillo 6). Do you agree with characterization? Does rubble, which he presents as “textured, affectively charged matter that is intrinsic to all living places,” offer us an opportunity to view public disinvestment and decay in a more politically-engaged, less-aestheticized manner (Gordillo 5)?
2. Andreas Huyssen writes that ruins, in the “transatlantic north,”
are a sign of the nostalgia for the monuments of an industrial architecture of a past age that was tied to a public culture of industrial labor and its political organization. We are nostalgic for the ruins of modernity because they still seem to hold a promise that has vanished from our own age: the promise of an alternative future. (Huyssen 8)
This suggests that dilapidated public infrastructure—and, by extension, art installations situated near or within—might encourage some political awareness. The viewer of a ruin, in other words, contemplates the decay with a sadness that the industrial past did not deliver a better, perhaps more equable, future. These stance seems similar to the “melancholy of abandonment” referenced in your essay (VonBokel 4), and you ask whether or not we can channel it. Do you think we can channel the nostalgia that Huyssen mentions? Or does it paralyze us since we know that that “alternative future” never came into being?
Blog 2 (aesthetic)
Aimee Von VonBokel – Artist installation
JR’s installation of photographs of people in an abandoned decaying hospital depicts persons awaiting their venture into a new world, leaving behind all that they know. Bradford Young’s Bynum Cutler installation in an old school building screening pictures of elderly parishioners in twilight years in a soft white glow. These depictions beautify the buildings left to languish in disrepair and decay no longer serving their purposes.
However in Nostalgia for Ruins – Andreas Huyssen( pg 17 & 18)Piranesi’s imaginary prison images in etchings can be seen as dark and sinister with no escape, being stuck in a dark and dank space,. The winding stairways devoid of people going nowhere and yet everywhere. (pg 15) Piranesi is nostalgic for the Roman ruins and his etchings depicts his knowing that he won’t be designing such ruins in his future.
While VanBokel essay depicts the aesthetization of ruins by displaying a calm, soothing and serene . Huyssen’s depiction is eerily haunting with never ending stairways making one wonder if you will ever get out of this imaginary place.
Different as they ae in masking the ugly of decaying buildings and funds not available for the upkeep. The decay of ruins that Piranesi will not build, his buildings will become rubble not ruins to be immortalized. The aesthetic of ruins can be a form of critique , as they both depicts the past (ruins), the present(decaying buildings) and the future(what’s to be done with the buildings). As to why the abandoned buildings are beautified and not destroyed or reused and Piranesi building imaginary walls, stairways with no way out.
Prompt 2:
Andreas Huyssen’s article raises some interesting questions about how nostalgia goes against modernity by putting progress at risk, how longing and critical thinking are not opposed to one another and how “The chance for things to age and to become ruin has diminished in the age of turbo capitalism” (10). Anik Fournier’s article concentrates on how New York’s constant state of destruction and reconstruction can lend itself to playing with the city’s urban fabric (i.e. gentrification), but also pointing out that “… it is important not to reduce the built environment of a city to a simple manifestation of political and economic circumstances” (46) and finally concluding that “… the ruin offers a strategic artistic platform from which to provide other experiences and other forms of knowledge about the lived environment” (60). I feel Huyssen and Fournier would fall somewhere in the middle of an argument in regards to being for or against Aimee VonBokel’s conclusion from her article. Or to word it another way, I feel as if those articles feel less in response to VonBokel’s ideas whereas VonBokel’s ideas make more sense to me as a response to Huyssen and Fournier. Based on the examples of a hospital in Ellis Island and a public school in Brooklyn, I would agree that VonBokel’s concerns are warranted. As elegant as they appear, those installations are more (maybe unintentionally) focused on modern people’s tastes and status and less with space and content. VonBokel says “Their dissonant elegance evokes emotion, but the sites remain mute witness to history.” Huyssen and Fournier have similar concerns but I interpret each of them to be writing about ruins from a different perspective (for example, how Huyssen is focused on memory) and yet each of their points intertwine. All three of the articles seem to agree that aesthetization of ruins are not without being problematic, but depending on the lens one views them through, you can find something that isn’t sedative.
Blog Prompt 1: Sociological
In Wasted Lives, Zygmunt Bauman talks about the struggle the Generation X (young men and women born in the 1970s in developed countries) faces, notably unemployment. This generation was directly hit by the wave of neoliberalism, whereas their grandparents’ generation saw a growing economy with strong public investment. The abandoned hospital and school introduced in Aimee von Bokel’s article symbolize the time the previous generations lived. Bauman states that “redundancy worries” of the X generation differ from the troubles of the previous generations. An unusually large part of the generation X failed to jump onto the fast moving vehicle towards neo-liberalism, and many of them were left feeling confused. Moreover, they do not know how tackle the problem. On the contrary, the previous generations just had to follow the clearly spelled out instructions and work hard. Government spent money on building institutions like hospitals and schools, which were important resources for industrial workers. Now as von Bokel writes, it is “the mostly middle-and-upper-class tourists” who visit abandoned buildings such as the hospital on Ellis Island. I assume those people still have access to health care and education. It is ironic how those who succeeded to jump onto the fast moving vehicle into modern economy turned the buildings once were actual resources into cultural capital. Conversely, most public schools in poor neighborhood are underfunded, and working class people have trouble receiving adequate healthcare now. Now one is liable for his failure, and he must navigate this unstable world by learning elusive rules with great anxiety. Obviously, It is a privilege of the middle class and the upper class to treat abandoned sights as cultural capital in modern society.
Blog prompt 2:
In her article, Aimee VonBokel argues that restructuring public resources which over time decayed into ruins, throws a shadow on the social problems that intially caused the abandonment. Although she doesn’t engage in the discussion of these problems, she addresses the challenges cities face today. Among thses is gentrification, a problem that Anik Fournier talks about in her reflection on the Manhattan’s west side transformation. She presents a case study of a space along the Hudson River that has undergone a major redevelopment and critiques the social problem that has impacted the community and residents.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the dictrict transformed from industrial and manufactoring atmospere into a residential area that was a home to artists and gay communities. However, in 1980s when the industrial railroad track had fallen into ruins, residents fought against Chelsea’s property oweners not to demolish the ruins, but rather preserve them and turn into a public park. As soon as the ruins were repurposed, a new and modern life was brought into the dictrict, with its former people and history being erased. The area that was meanwhile hit by AIDS crises has been gentrified, and the gay community moved to outter neighborhoods, as the living costs increased and an imposed need for a “clean” and “safe” environment was reinforced.
Nevertheless, the ruins evoke a memory of a suppressed history. as Aimee VonBokel states, “the sites remain mute witnesses to history” (4), amnesiac to social problems and politically sedative. Alvin Baltrop’s photographs depict a harsh reality of the west side, where “rape, suicide, and the danger of living in the decrepit remnants of industrial structures was, for many, part of everyday life” (VonBokel 55). Even when aesthesized, these ruins possess an array of historical traces that a facade or aesthetics cannot repress. “The ruin functions here “like a memory open like an eye, or like a hole in a bone socket that lets you see without showing anything at all, anything of the all””(VonBokel 57). Still today, LGBT youth fights against redevelopment and gentrification, and demands social justice and change through collective action.
Prompt 1
JRs Ellis island installation and Bradford Young’s play an ironic roll is their setting of abandoned buildings. The immigrants depicted in the ruins of the old hospital on Ellis island were people who at the time were waiting to gain entry to America and new lives. Now that gateway lays in ruin. Young’s installation in the old school building also shows a time that has since past where things were perhaps simpler. todays world or generation X look at these buildings as installations. The are not there to see doctors or to go to class. today things are not as spelled out for people, the generations today have more opportunities and yet that makes things more complicated and confusing for many.
Option 3:
1. Huyssen writes that it is “Difficult to walk the line between sentimental lament over a loss and the critical reclaiming of a past for the purposes of constructing alternative futures” (7). Is walking this line precisely what VonBokel thinks these installations fail to do? Do the artists proffer an aesthetic based on pure sentimentality, rather than a nostalgia that returns toward the future and the public?
2. Fournier asks “How can art critically engage with a public space that is increasingly codified” within a capitalist logic “without the art itself being absorbed into its workings?” (48). Similarly, VonBokel seems to suggest that the Young and JR installations fail to critically engage because they have been absorbed into the workings of capitalism: these abandoned buildings have become “consumable,” transformed into spaces proffering cultural capital to their visitors (4). Are Fournier and VonBokel asking too much of art? Is it necessary or even possible that art stand completely outside of capitalist workings, which after all are precisely the workings that the artist finds her/himself in?
Blog prompt 2:
In the article Nostalgia for Ruins, Huyssen argues that people’s obsession for ruins hides a nostalgia for an early era of modernity. He analyses a modern consciousness that is unable to assume the present and is blinded by nostalgia for ruins. “This contemporary obsession with ruins hides a nostalgia for an earlier age that had not yet lost its power to imagine other futures.” (Huyssen, 7) Huyssen support Von Bokel’s argument that the aestheticization of once public resources, that are now just ruins, masks the social problems. He supports Von Bokel’s when he explains that such ruins and their representation “in picture books, films, and exhibits are a sign of the nostalgia for the monuments of an industrial architecture of a past age that was tied to a public culture of industrial labour and its political organization”(Huyssen, 8). According to him we are captured in the past and cannot engage in a present life. Architectural ruins arouse nostalgia because they firmly combine temporary and spatial desires of the past. Huyssen does not explicitly say that ruins are amnesiac, but he refers that they can be used as utopia of freedom and progress.
Von Bokel very explicitly asks: why are private developers buying and repurposing civic structures? She sees ruins as trash that takes people back to past and they could be considered to serve for this generation of people, as they did in past. In my opinion she raises a problem of politically sedative and amnesiac. History is objective and scientific but memories are subjective, individual, and emotional. Therefore, it is easy to manipulate with the aestheticization of ruins and evoke certain emotions among people witnessing the history of it than, in this case, hide the question of why these two buildings does not have any purpose.