never dogsit a 9 month old siberian husky. nothing will get done except the destruction of your house...

Shifting ground

In Shifting Ground, Frazer Ward says that streets have anonymity and the physical street as a highway, not necessarily a highway but a network for information and people interaction.

The decollage went to the street to reclaim a form of specifically public expression. The ads were meant to be public when they were first put up. So for it to be reclaimed and then to be affixed on the street anonymously, just as they were first put up.

“The experience of the street was conditioned by the images and various forms of publicity.”  

Ward mentions that Moses was a czar, which was humorous but true. Moses didn’t care about the people using the space quite as much as how much he can get people to move through the space quickly.

Ward introduces fluxus. I honestly was unaware of this until now, however it somewhat links in DADAism.

Fluxus—a name taken from Latin word meaning "to flow"—is an international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s.

In Yoko Ono’s Rape, a camera crew follows a woman, Majiate, through her time and basically chases her into her apartment. "No one in the street appears to pay the slightest attention to her plight.”

George Maciunas Manifesto

This adds to the anonymity of the street. The film “represent(s) the street as the site of disciplinary surveillance, which, in pursuing Majiate into her apartment, obliterates the distinction between public and private realms.”

Ward was careful when he juxtaposed the two words “Voyeurism/surveillance” the juxtaposition of these makes

There are thousands of people on the street and the entire duration of this woman is being chased, no one seems to care.

“The conceptions of the street that evolved from the intertwined phenomena of protest culture and counterculture.”

FLUXUS TANGENT  an article by George Macuinas.

Powers of Removal

Lytle Shaw Spans a few things from performance art that may possibly fit as fluxus to a more contemporary version of flaneur. 

“Afterwards, outside, again and again. the powers of removal struck me as looming awfully… the newest mass of multiplied floors and windows visible at this point. They ranged in this terrible erection, were going to bring in money-and was not money the only thing a self-respecting structure could be thought” Henry James’s film, illustrated the reconstruction and reuse of space to transform what we use it for. James points out in the writing of his piece that the building upwards is horrifying.

“de Certeau's previously quoted "Walking in the City, "In the dream of vertical ascent and hovering flight, we glimpse the cartographer's view, a fictional disembodied eye suspended high in the air. But as soon as we follow one line, or one river, and not another, a journey emerges” He describes what would be paths and borders. Recognizable landmarks that we orientate ourselves to get through the city.

Jimbo Blachly's About 86 Springs. Blanchly explores a guide to the springs of Manhattan from 100 years previous to his exploration.  The result is a remapping of the city through the medium of the walk a remapping that combines the kind of urban taxonomy mentioned above with a more explicitly perlative dimension. As de Certeau says: "The long poem of walking manipulates spatial organizations, no matter how panoptic they may be."

Adrian Piper, Mythic Talk

Adrian Piper's Mythic Being explores the deliberate anonymity of an androgynous but more masculine figure navigating the city through a type of performance art. She would then take the photos from when she was out and create drawings from them.

Chicago

The Pacyga reading basically was giving an insight as to the influence of the Daley (the 1^st one) mayoral reign on Chicago. While doing some good things, like greatly improving the highway system (at the cost of underrepresented minorities) some things did get away from him.

Quonset- similar to some of the temporary
housing the CHA enacted. 

The Prudential Building paved way for the development boom in the loop. The economy was on its way back up because of the war and with the excess of people there was a need for improved and increased housing. The Chicago Housing Authority was established which began phases of its housing for war workers, veterans, and low-income housing. It started with three and four story row houses and two story row houses. Then it went to townhouses, and then to the high-rises.

“Rows and rows of houses constructed during this period seemed like army barracks.”

The (racist) white people were voicing their concern with having African Americans living too close, which caused the beginning to the white flight and that “Chicago might have kept costs down and high-rises to a minimum if land on the outskirts of the city had been available.”  

map of CHA properties

 

Robert Taylor Homes (Dan Ryan in upper right corner)

Because of the development of the suburbs, Chicago was choked into the space it was currently occupying and that was all it could have.

The construction of the highways added to the racial divide on the southside. More specifically, the Dan Ryan. 

Richard Wiser, in regards to the highway system, “its not at all well designed.”

I drive the Dan Ryan every time I go to school, and I agree with Wiser. The traffic is terrible and I can only imagine how stopped-up it was back when it first opened.

September 28, 1969 - CTA service begins in median strip
of Dan Ryan Expressway. 

When it comes to the riots, Martin Luther King wanted to use Chicago as a northern state role model. Unfortunately the racism that was being shown towards the blacks was heartless, it reached a boiling point. “exploit, distort and ridicule [the African Americans.]" -Medium Cool. That’s where we can weave in the scenery and themes from Medium Cool.

Medium Cool

First off, I’m concerned that the 13/15 parts of Medium Cool on youtube was either edited in adding new or changed sounds and some of the sequences didn’t seem to fit at all. But that might the nature of the film.  The further I got into it, the more I got annoyed. The riot scenes seemed ridiculously faked. One part was missing sound and  the A.D.D. moments were hard to keep up with. But I feel I got the basics of it, with mentions to the riots of 1969, the depressing state of the school systems, the censorship of the media and the racism. 

The Cahan reading was more about the physical shifting of the buildings. Either how they fell into disrepair, was degenerated into “lower” uses (beautiful storefront into laundry mat) or demolished despite its architectural beauty. The reading centers around Richard Nickel and his photography life as he documents buildings as they follow the changes with the city. He recorded what they looked like at the fraction of the moment as they slid into their own depression. 

Los Angeles

Pop L.A.

The view from the car

detail of Back Seat Dodge '38. Ed Kienholz 

This reading touched on a lot but mostly staying centered around the car. Los Angeles boomed with population and in result of poor urban planning, it just sort of plopped outwards. Because of this poor planning and little to no central hub the population used cars as their main source of transportation. This was also while the car itself was being pushed past its mass produced uniform look and was being customized. This attracted artists to focus on the car as a symbol and a vessel for transition and momentum.

Illegal Operation, Ed Kienholz

Directly relating to the people of the city; “(Edward) Kienholz, often motivated by anger, outrage, or a satirical impulse to explore highly charged topics ranging from illicit sex to illegal abortions, summoned forth passionate responses to his art… … At the same time the theatrical staging of the private in public and it’s monitoring by the museum inevitably made viewers aware of their own voyeurism and sexual desires.” Kienholz’s sculptures and art demanded the viewers and museum higher-ups directly. An attempt at censorship, failed, was a great examination on the public’s realization on their voyeurism.

Where does the museum as a “general” ambassador get to draw the line of what is to be viewed by the public or not? If its protecting some of the population, then put up a warning sign not to see it, after all- some people don’t even like driving past strip clubs or adult bookstores, while other people see that its no big deal.

Watts Towers (flickr artist unknown)

Artists in LA greatly reacted to the car culture. A number of projects either centered around the car or shot from a car surfaced. Celmins’s freeway drives, Ruscha’s typology of apartments, gas stations and Sunset Boulevard transformed these “urban freeways into landscapes.” But drew attention to the commercial landscapes built around cars. In the Banham video he traveled everywhere via car, noticed all of the signs directed at motorists, talked with artists who use the car as their mode of transition on their art.  

Based on the car culture alone, I feel the city itself is getting a little lost. LA as a city was said to “break all the rules” because of the business buildings being thrown on top of the residential districts. The artist with the plastics said he feels like he could only do that work in LA because of it being LA. That the city “gives him a mechanism.” The interview in the car at the drive-in, Banham mentions that he there are no monuments for people to locate and guide themselves through the city. Ruscha’s solution mentioned drive-ins, car washes and car related businesses and nothing that is a physical landmark, (more of a commercial landmark or nodes where you relate “this is where I wash my car”) like the Willis Tower, World Trade Centers, etc. the walkers in this interview and first reading were ignored.

The walkers are better addressed in the Allan reading as “spectators.” They’d participate in art walks and flood the streets. “Ruscha’s paintings could only benefit from the heightened awareness of the spectator as a pedestrian, with a mode of vision conditioned by the fundamental reality as well as one shaped by the free-way centered lifestyle in Southern California.” Allan mentions that there is two ways of seeing a painting and I’m guessing this would be if you are used to the high-speed movement on the freeway or if you’re not.

(this reading helped me relate as a person walking in the two books instead of being in a car, although the Sunset book is specifically shot in the middle of the street)

Addressing the space Ruscha illustrates in his books (Sunset and Apartments) it’s more of the spastic relationships the buildings have with each other along with the streets that make up the photographs in the book. That the users of these spaces were the ones intended to be using the books he made of those spaces.

Jumping back to Banham’s film. He made a great mention on Venice Beach and the Pacific Ocean Park and how they were to be un-slummed. The voice on the fictional car tour said that the new plan for POP and Venice Beach was that of some expensive yacht club neighborhood. His vocal reaction interrupting the narrator on tape “Where will all those people go?!” is the same that Jane Jacobs mentioned in her slumming/unslumming reading. Urban planners have these big ideas for the first part of their plan but when it comes to the residents, they fall short and don’t plan for them.