Conversations with Dan McNulty in Jersey City

Conversations with Dan McNulty in Jersey City by Andrew Blaize Bovasso (a link to his blog.)

He'd take images from this book...

Bovasso basically took the images from the Jersey City 1940-1960: The Dan McNulty Collection (Images of America series) rephotographed the locations at its current time and overlayed the two images. Some on the images are extremely sucessful at portraying the cycle of gentrification and how the buildings are reused/rebuilt/abandoned/demolished. 


The photo above shows the Palace Theater and its current state of non-existence. The combination of the two photos give us a ghostly sense of what was and what is. 


His Blurb Book



I wish he had a website. He only has the blurb preview and a blog that is not easy to navigate. I don't know a lot about Bovasso, except he graduated from MICA with a BFA (maybe in 2009?)


However his photosread with a clear intent (whether he intended this specifically or not.) His pushing the "before/after" shot by combining the two make it much more interesting and relatable to the visible cycle of the building/neighborhood/street.

being with

In Roydson's Untitled, She uses layers of her exploration into
Wojnarowicz, which layered into his exploration of Rimbaud. 

This week's reading touched back on a lot of old artists such as Joan Jonas (Delay delay) and David Wojnarowicz (Arthur Rimbaud in New York)

As well as new ones like Sharon Hayes, Ginger Brooks Takahashi, Zoe Leonard, Emily Roydson, to name a few.

A lot of the artists were being with the city and their interaction with the city. Their response to the city which has been perceived as "living." Some of the artists work related to the definitions of "I" and "we"
("We" not always being person to person, but artist/viewer to building or surroundings.)

LTTR issue number 1

the last lights on Cabrini Green

photo: l.baldeshwiler

Last Monday I decided to check out the Cabrini Green art project. Living about 29 miles away (from Cabrini green) and being later in the evening to travel alone, I jumped in my car and headed up to Chicago. 

When I began I decided to try to document my journey up to the project. I was amazed at what I found in the video afterwards.

Last lights on Cabrini Green - VIDEO

The video starts in a suburb. It can be any suburb really. Take main street along the cookie-cutter houses to a commercialized drag of IL83. We pass a Burger King, Walgreen's, Dairy Queen, McDonald's... Past a car dealer with several of the same exact cars and get on the expressway. Go north, up the great divide and off at Division. Pass over two bridges and Cabrini is on the left. 

I can see the lights from before the second bridge.

I pull around the block and sit in the parking lot and watch the west side's lights flicker. It’s somewhat hypnotic with how this silent building can be screaming with the lights.

I felt really irresponsible. As being a person from the middle working class that hasn't really had (financial) struggle in my life, or has ever suffered neglect from the government (housing wise)- I felt rather off driving 60 miles in total, (which cost me 12 dollars in gas,) to look at the last building of an era of neglect and abuse. 

The artist was successful in creating a dialogue of what we prioritize. 

I am more aware of how good I really have it. I have enough cushion to live in a suburb and drive anywhere I need to. Spend thousands of dollars on post-high school education and equipment. Only to gawk at the dilapidated building of people who didn't have anywhere near as nice as I did. (Just this week my laptop died- within the next day, a new one was on the way….)

And what for? We have become aware of the slumming/unslumming process. Examining who is charge of city planning and unslumming is not the person who has experienced the slums. It’s another person of a similar well enough to do background.

The removal of Cabrini Green may have brought some property values up in that area and also may have lowered some of the crime rates- but I’m sure I’m going to be watching the same cycle- just another day and another neighborhood.

(this video may be choppy. I felt Greenday’s Welcome to Paradise was somewhat fitting of the music I know. If not, mute...)

Made in China

First off- I read this all last night and found it hard to relate without being too opinionated. I figured to wait it out a little and see what the other blogs had to say.

I find it difficult to relate to a country that I’ve never been to that has a different political system than ours. And also has such a restrain on what information that is being passed on to the rest of the world. They’ll stop filming from happening in places that would make them look like a lesser super power. Artists still found a way get their view across.

For example- the 2008 Olympics was an attempt at fairness by allowing the people to have “protest-permits” but were ultimately denied or detained in attempt to silence them.

“Two elderly women from Beijing, aged 77 and 79, who applied five times to protest during the Olympics against what they believed was inadequate compensation for the demolition of their homes in Beijing in 2001,[124] received a suspended one-year non-judicial sentence of re-education through labour for "disturbing the public order".” –Washington Post

Also- the doctoring of fireworks was an attempt to make a larger display to show off China’s “progress” (whatever that may be.)

“As the ceremony got under way with a dramatic, drummed countdown, viewers watching at home and on giant screens inside the Bird's Nest National Stadium watched as a series of giant footprints outlined in fireworks processed gloriously above the city from Tiananmen Square.

What they did not realise was that what they were watching was in fact computer graphics, meticulously created over a period of months and inserted into the coverage electronically at exactly the right moment.

The fireworks were there for real, outside the stadium. But those responsible for filming the extravaganza decided in advance it would be impossible to capture all 29 footprints from the air.” –London Telegraph

Freedom of press coverage was also promised, but not delivered. There were to be no live reporting from Tiananmen Square for fear of rioting and protests.

…

The readings and info for this week…

Youtube (1 and 2)-

Tiananmen Square Massacre with the gunshots was just like the heads being bashed in from behind. Only the army had the guns. “Might of the state”

“Cameras in others hands are dangerous.” You can portray the truth as you want it or show the truth in general that may not want to be shown. Again the “might of the state” monopolizing what is to be shown to the public of the protests happening inside the square. This was getting out of hand of the government and they didn’t want this embarrassing moment to be shown.

Again, they (the state) didn’t want to be perceived as weak, or as failures. 

Reversed Images: Representations of Shanghai and Its Contemporary Material Culture and Contemporary Chinese Art-

An awesome array of artists that followed what they wanted to say and made their art through photography, collage, graphic design and other media such as texture rubbings on buildings to be demolished.

Dateline’s Ghost city and the Made in China-

Showcasing the economic growth but how it’s an empty shell that could possibly be a horrible collapse of the market. 

their aim has not been to reform life but to know it. (week 10)

Atget's way of documenting

Two-Way Street by Lydia Yee uses strong key words like natural evidence and live witness to compare Atget and Cartier-Bresson’s photographs. But these can be pushed throughout the article with the archive, portrait and performance pieces (and their artists.)

Nikki S. Lee

This article was jammed with artists that used the street as their primary canvas for their art and used photography as their recording technique and information medium in order to record their ideas. People of the street being followed and photographed and performances that use the street as an identifier. Nikki S. Lee embodied several different “classes” and explored those regions. From senior citizens, to punks, tourists and Latinos- she fit in with the groups well. Her success was illustrated by the photographs. These groups/projects all have a largely recognizable public establishment. Her photos with the punks weren’t as if we didn’t know what that group was- we knew who she was trying to be because of the public-ness of the cultures.

“The simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression.”

(Cartier-Bresson)

New York Groove - Daniel Guzman. Pretty awesome song to put this street performance to. 

Amy Arbus

Friedlander’s “series of self-promotion pieces might be seen as a kind of performance piece.” All street photography could primarily be classified as performance because of the act of flanuerism that the photographer engages in to find and follow the specific subject that interests them. Amy Arbus photographed the people that interested her- so did Jamel Shabazz (so did practically everyone.)

"The streets of the city are constantly changing, providing artists with a continuous source of images and ideas. In the century that separates Atget’s rue Vielle-du-Temple in Paris and Leong’s New Street in Beijing, daily life on the streets has become extremely complex — serving not only as thoroughfare for pedestrians and vehicles, commercial zone, and public space but also as cultural, political, social, domestic, and private space. While the street and its uses are transformed, contemporary artists continue to reinvent the possibilities of the street, crossing the median between traditional artistic genres and contemporary practices."

Shabazz

In Karen Jones’s article, she starts by defining potlatch as the exchange of gifts eventually leading to the value of materialism not being able to be topped and then the destruction of their own property in order to make the value of the other’s go up. (From what I understood the “chief” of some culture did and its events that occurred in result of.)

She then goes to say that riots and potlatch have similarities as the shared community interest. I didn’t quite understand what she meant comparing the two, but I think she was trying to say that the community as a whole gets to a boiling point and will together act in unison. Hoping to achieve a common goal.  Unless it was like a negative potlatch. The government gave them small shitty things and they rioted in order to have a bigger mess? Degenerative?

Winning.

Keith Haring

The next section of graffiti gets a little clearer. “The graffiti artists utilized public space both to comment on access to elite institutions and as a means of rupturing social order.” They’d graffiti in subways as a medium to communicate with a vast number of people.  The story of how Keith Haring started because of the empty spaces looked like chalkboards and an open invitation to create.  

She describes the cycle of the artist’s struggle within their community. They’ll have a message, it becomes harder to convey the message, they try again in new and different ways, they still get knocked back- but they keep trying to figure out to gain their status and that their voice counts. 

CIRCA clown army - I found this on CPA and found it fascinating. They use this mob of clowns as a protest and manage to get some sort of a point across. (i'm at a loss for what the point is now- but it was started as a protest of a visitation of George W. Bush to the UK)