Category Archives: Urban

Richard Serra, “Tilted Arc” (1981)

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a steel sculptural wall in a plaza

Richard Serra, Tilted Arc

“The story of “Tilted Arc,” a 36.5 meter long, 3.6 meter tall steel sculpture by Richard Serra that was commissioned, installed, and then destroyed by government officials in New York in the 1980s, is one of the most legendary tales in the contemporary art field.

In 1981, the United States General Services Administration (GSA) commissioned Serra to build a sculpture to be installed in the plaza in front of the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building in Lower Manhattan. The location was already a melting pot for various abstract aesthetic positions. The biomorphic plaza featured a circular fountain resembling a sort of elegy to the Golden Ratio. The surrounding brut, Modernist mid-rises meanwhile exemplified the glory of the grid. Serra designed a perfect collaborator in the composition—a massive, linear sheet of steel that leaned ever so slightly, becoming a tilted plane. From an abstract aesthetic viewpoint, it was a masterful gesture. Not only was it formally pleasing, but it brought Modernism up to date with conversations about materiality, ephemerality, site-specificity, and the intersection of art and public life. For the people who lived and worked around the plaza, however, it was a disgrace. The sculpture blocked their path between buildings. It cast a shadow on them while they were eating lunch. It blocked their view of the fountain. And as one worker pointed out during the public trial that was held to determine whether “Tilted Arc” should be destroyed, $175,000 was a lot of public money to spend on “a rusted metal wall.” In the end, a judge determined that the sculpture had to go. The eight-year long saga—which concluded thirty years ago this year—still offers lessons for artists and municipalities, today.”

 

Luis Fernando Peláez, “Plaza de Cisneros” (2002-2005)

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light poles in a plaza at night

Plaza de Cisneros

“In an effort to rejuvenate this area to make it more attractive and more inviting to tourists, this plaza was renovated in 2005 to include the forest of 300 light poles, which are constructed with concrete and metal. And at night, the poles are impressively illuminated with several reflectors in each pole.

History of Plaza Cisneros

Following the death of Cuban engineer Francisco Javier Cisneros in New York on July 7, 1898, the city of Medellín, Colombia determined that the square in front of the Estación Medellín del Ferrocarril de Antioquia (Medellín’s railroad station) would be named Plaza de Cisneros or Plaza Cisneros. Cisneros headed up construction of the Antioquia railroad.

Events at Plaza Cisneros

There are sometimes events held at this plaza. For example, on September 16, 2018, there was the large Maratón Medellín. This Medellín marathon included distances of 42 km, 21 km, 10 km and 5 km. And all these marathons started at Plaza Cisneros.”

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Maya Lin, “Vietnam Veterans Memorial” (1982)

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Vietnam memorial ariel shot

Maya Lin, Vietnam Memorial

“Lin’s design called for the names of nearly 58,000 American servicemen, listed in chronological order of their loss, to be etched in a V-shaped wall of polished black granite sunken into the ground. … When Lin first visited the proposed location for the memorial, she wrote, “I imagined taking a knife and cutting into the earth, opening it up, an initial violence and pain that in time would heal.” Her memorial proved to be a pilgrimage site for those who served in the war and those who had loved ones who fought in Vietnam. It became a sacred place of healing and reverence as she intended.”

Daniel J. Martinez, VinZula Kara and West Side Three-Point Marchers, “Consequences of a Gesture” (1993)

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Daniel J. Martinez, VinZula Kara and West Side Three-Point Marchers, “Consequences of a Gesture” (1993) – image from “One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity”

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In July, Martinez, Kara and the Three Point Marchers organized an ‘Absurdist Parade’ which began in Harrison Park (a.k.a. Zapata Park) a predominantly Mexican neighborhood and finished to the north and west in Garfield Park, a predominantly black West Side neighborhood. Residents from each of the two neighborhoods – who do not usually mix – participated in the free come-one-come-all parade. However effective or meretricious as gestures, the street components of both Manglano-Ovalle’s and Martinez and Kara’s projects were successful in that their content was fundamentally uncontrollable. They bristled with the nervous energy of a social event that knows neither its magnitude nor its consequences, until those present take responsibility for the event upon themselves and shape it into whatever they might.

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a parade

Daniel J. Martinez, Consequences of a Gesture, Chicago 1993. (credit)

“Daniel J. Martinez’ work “Consequences of a Gesture” (1993), was one of the events organized as part of “Culture in Action” in Chicago (1991-95), an ambitious series of public projects aimed at a radical re-definition of “public art.” It took the form of a parade developed by Martinez over two years and involving the participation of 35 community organizations and 1000 Mexican Americans and African Americans, children to the elderly. Participants paraded through three neighborhoods: Maxwell Street public market that was removed by the city the following year (1994) to make way for the University of Illinois’s expansion, thus an ode to the market’s demise after more than a century; and to two ethnically divergent areas of Chicago: African-American Garfield Park and Mexican-American Pilsen. For more information on this and recent works by Martinez, see: Culture in Action (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995); www.stretcher.org; Daniel Joseph Martinez: A life of Disobedience (Cantz, 2009), www.frieze.com/issue/article/culture_in_action; Exhibition Histories: Culture in Action and Project UNITÉ (London: Afterall Books, 2013), Tom Finkelpearl: What We Made – Conversations on Art and Social Cooperation (Duke University Press, 2013).” (credit)

Dread Scott, “Slave Rebellion Reenactment” (2019)

people walking during a reenactment

Credit: The Guardian, a still from video piece

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A community-engaged artist performance and film production that, on November 8-9, 2019, reimagined the German Coast Uprising of 1811, which took place in the river parishes just outside of New Orleans. Envisioned and organized by artist Dread Scott and documented by filmmaker John Akomfrah, Slave Rebellion Reenactment (SRR) animated a suppressed history of people with an audacious plan to organize and seize Orleans Territory, to fight not just for their own emancipation, but to end slavery. It is a project about freedom.

The artwork involved hundreds of reenactors in period specific clothing marching for two days covering 26 miles. The reenactment, the culmination of a period of organizing and preparation, took place upriver from New Orleans in the locations where the 1811 revolt occurred—with the exurban communities and industry that have replaced the sugar plantations as its backdrop. The reenactment was an impressive and startling sight—hundreds of Black re-enactors, many on horses, flags flying, in 19th-century French colonial garments, singing in Creole and English to African drumming.

Kate Gilmore, “Walk the Walk” (2010)

women walking in yellow dresses on a yellow structure

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Like the mazes of office cubicles in so many of the buildings that surround Bryant Park, Walk the Walk comes to life over the course of a working day.

From Monday to Friday, Kate Gilmore’s performance-installation creates a spectacle of color, movement and sound from 8:30am to 6:30pm. Gilmore (b.1975, Washington, D.C.) presents a cubic structure, open on all sides, with a flat roof that functions as a podium. Working in shifts, groups of women take to the roof where they perform an improvisational choreography of everyday movement, such as walking, shuffling, and stomping. Neither professional dancers nor theatrical performers, Gilmore’s participants resemble a random sample of female office workers. They vary in age, race, and body type. Free to perform their artist-assigned task as they choose, they must nevertheless conform to a strict uniform of yellow dresses and beige shoes.

Members of the public are invited to observe the piece from the surrounding Fountain Terrace, but also to enter the open structure. The yellow theme of the women’s dresses continues on both the exterior and interior walls of the structure. Once inside, visitors may hear the reverberating sounds of the movement overhead. In this eccentric concerto of irregular footfalls, the physicality of Gilmore’s performance is experienced anew.

Kate Gilmore is best known for her physically demanding performance videos in which she is typically the sole protagonist. Walk the Walk is Gilmore’s first live public project and also her first to deploy other participants. Her interest in striking and often incongruous images continues in this piece, with its unexpected transformation of architecture, figures, actions, and location. In this way, the artist makes us aware of our assumptions about the codes of appropriate behavior and the limits of self expression. How do the attributes of gender, age, and appearance shape our perception of both social roles and personal desires? In Walk the Walk, Gilmore literally and metaphorically turns the inside out, inviting us into a world at once all too familiar and strangely provocative.

Conor McGarrigle, “WalkSpace: Beirut-Venice” (2012)

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As part of THESTATEOFMIND for the Lebanese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale of Art 2011. WalkSpace: Beirut-Venice invites the participant on a drift through Venice guided from Beirut and in Beirut guided from Venice.

The work involves two simultaneous dérives (drifts) through the historic cities of Beirut and Venice, connected in real time to each other and to the world. Two interconnected groups of participants will walk in each city, each receiving instruction and guidance from the other as they wander, get lost and explore the psychogeographical ambience of the city.

The progress of each group will be broadcast as a live video stream via Bambuser, tracked in realtime on a map with Google latitude and tweeted with followers having the option of giving instructions via twitter.

The object is not to create a finite discrete work but to create a peripatetic relational space which can evolve and respond to the situation, the desires of its participants and serendipity, with the work being created through the actions of its participants. The space is furthermore overlaid with a hybrid, networked space connecting both cities and augmenting each space with the absent presence of the other.

Working from a changing set of basic instructions such as ‘describe what you see’, ‘follow that person’, ‘take the next left and then the first right’ or the more loaded ‘take me to the heart of the city’ the two groups will walk in tandem each guiding the other, walking in Beirut as if in Venice and Venice as if in Beirut.

The project draws on early dérives carried out by the Situationists in Amsterdam and Strasbourg which connected groups in different parts of the cities with walkie talkies and Ralph Rumney’s 1957 Psychogeographical Map of Venice.

Participate

We invite the audience to follow us in real time using Bambuser for video, Google latitude for locations and with geotagged tweets. We invited those not in Venice or Beirut to follow us virtually with the following services.

Latitude: We will be broadcasting out location in real time during the event using Google Latitude. To track the event first sign up for Latitude and send a request to share location to allegora.venice[AT]gmail.com, or alternatively email allegora.venice[AT]gmail.com and we will share our location with you. You do not need to share your location to follow us.

Bambuser: To view our live video feed simply visit bambuser.com/channel/stateofmind

Mona Hatoum, Performance Still [from Roadworks exhibition] (1985-95)

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white woman with shoes tied to her ankles walking forward

Mona Hatoum, Performance Still (1985–95)

 

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Performance Still 1985 records one of three street performances which Hatoum carried out in Brixton for the Roadworks exhibition organised in 1985 by the Brixton Artists Collective. The performance consisted of the artist walking barefoot through the streets of Brixton for nearly an hour, with Doc Marten boots, usually worn by both police and skinheads, attached to her ankles by their laces. Performance Still, printed and published ten years later turns the original documentary photograph of the performance into a work in its own right, and has therefore come to identify this aspect of Hatoum’s practice.

Gallery label, October 2013

Krzysztof Wodiczko, “Alien Staff” (1993-94)

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In the Alien Staff project, alien means a state of being and ‘becoming’ both political and metaphysical, nomadic and migrant – a sort of psychological encampment in the space and time of today’s displaced and estranged world.

No aliens, residents, non-residents, legal and illegal immigrants have voting rights, nor any sufficient voice nor image of their own in official “public space”. When given a chance by the media (mainstream or ethnic) to communicate their experience or to state their opinions, demands and needs, immigrants find themselves framed and silenced.

The Alien Staff is a form of portable public address equipment and cultural network for individuals and groups of immigrants. It is an instrument that gives the individual immigrant a chance to “address” directly anyone in the city who may be attracted by the symbolic form of the equipment and the character of the “broadcasted” program.

The Alien Staff resembles the biblical shepherd’s rod. It is equipped with a high-tech mini-monitor and a small loud-speaker. The central part of the rod, the ‘Xenolog section’ is made up of interchangeable cylindrical containers for the preservation and display of precious relics related to the various phases of the owners history. A small image on the screen may attract attention and provoke observers to come very close to the monitor and therefore to the operator’s face, the usual distance from the immigrant, the stranger, decreases.

Upon closer examination, it will become clear that the image on the screen and the actual face of the person are of the same immigrant. The double presence in ‘media’ and in ‘life’ invites a new perception of the stranger as ‘imagined’ (a character on the screen) or as ‘experienced’ (an actor off-stage – a real life person). Since both the imagination and the experience of the viewer are increasing with the decreasing distance, while the program itself reveals unexpected aspects of the actor’s experience, the presence of the immigrant becomes both legitimate and real. This change in distance and perception might provide the ground for greater respect and self-respect, and become an inspiration for crossing the boundary between a stranger and a non-stranger.

As the identities of these persons are not only unstable but also often in antagonistic relation to each other, the only common ground they share is their resistance against any imposed (even self-imposed) uniform or generalised notion of a so-called immigrant identity.

The first model of the Alien Staff was built and tested in Barcelona in June 1993, following the first comprehensive exhibition of Wodiczko’s work in Europe in 1992, entitled Instruments, Projections, Vehicles, at the Fondació Antoni Tapies, Barcelona. A second model was built and its design further transformed in Brooklyn during the summer, fall and the winter 1992-93. The Alien Staff was used by many immigrants in New York, Paris, Houston, Marseille, Stockholm, Helsinki, Warsaw.

In Rotterdam, before and during Next 5 Minutes (1996), local operators walked through the city with Krzysztof Wodiczko projects Alien Staff and Mouth Piece. Aided by electronic walking sticks and mouth-size monitors they demonstrated how to communicate in an unfamiliar cultural environment and language.