{"id":3003,"date":"2013-08-14T06:29:36","date_gmt":"2013-08-14T12:29:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/?p=3003"},"modified":"2014-06-20T13:23:43","modified_gmt":"2014-06-20T19:23:43","slug":"draft-urbanism-art-in-the-cityscape","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/?p=3003","title":{"rendered":"Draft Urbanism: Art in the Cityscape"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a previous post<\/a> I evaluated the architectural installations of Denver\u2019s Biennial of the Americas exhibition of Draft Urbanism<\/i>.\u00a0 In this post I examine the billboard art.\u00a0 More than 30 artists, poets, and philosophers contributed pieces covering a 10 square mile area of the city, each annotated with a museum label.\u00a0 According to curator Carson Chan the outdoor exhibition re-sensitizes us to the metropolitan experience. \u00a0It turns the city into a “space of inquiry”, and invites the public to examine it with \u201cfresh, discerning eyes.” \u00a0It provides an opportunity \u201cfor a communal reckoning of our shared environment.\u201d<\/p>\n

Denver’s billboard artists reflect on many dimensions of the contemporary urban condition. \u00a0Accordingly, the Architectural Record<\/i><\/a> opines that the artwork \u201cfeels scattered, both geographically and thematically.\u201d\u00a0 But I think this depends on how you interact with it.\u00a0 Certainly, there are some compelling themes that connect the various pieces.\u00a0 And, in my experience, these themes are often enriched by the location and immediate context of the particular work.\u00a0 Minimally, the distribution of the art invites citizens to physically visit parts of Denver where they might not ordinarily venture. Indeed, this might be the most<\/i> important accomplishment of the exhibit.\u00a0 This experience in turn suggests that the problems of the contemporary city are going to be a lot tougher to solve than these guys<\/a>, this bunch<\/a>, and the advocates of these paradigms<\/a>, think.<\/p>\n

My survey begins with this billboard from Douglas Coupland<\/a> that\u2019s located on what the Architectural Record<\/i> calls \u201ca lonely stretch of road in an industrial area north of downtown.\u201d That road is Brighton Boulevard:<\/p>\n

\"1<\/a>

Welcome to Detroit<\/em>, by Douglas Coupland, 5055 Brighton Boulevard (D. Saitta)<\/p><\/div>\n

\u00a0As described by the exhibition\u2019s curators, Welcome to Detroit<\/i> is a<\/p>\n

Reaction to Detroit\u2019s long term deindustrialization and depopulation\u2014as well as a chilling foreboding <\/i>[of] new meanings for a city whose twentieth century raisons d’\u00eatre have largely vanished. Coupland\u2019s slogan functions as a welcome sign much like those one would find entering other cities of speculation like Las Vegas and Reno, as well as a welcome sign into a new and unmapped era in human history.\u00a0 He says \u201cThink of Detroit as one million primates needing 2,500 calories a day sitting on a cold rock in the middle of the North American continent, with nothing to do all day. It is an unparalleled crisis of purpose, and Detroit just happened to get there first\u2014but sooner or later we\u2019ll all be there.\u201d<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The piece works pretty well, especially on the increasingly dark and threatening day when I visited, and when framed against the backdrop of Denver\u2019s remaining industrial center.<\/p>\n

Playing on the theme of urban dystopia, Pia Camil<\/a>\u2019s Rise to Ruin<\/i> is located on an even more isolated stretch of north Broadway, adjacent to the gated and barbed-wired scrapyard of an electrical supply company:<\/p>\n

\"Rise<\/a>

Rise Into Ruin<\/em>, by Pia Camil, 10 West 49th Street at Broadway (D. Saitta)<\/p><\/div>\n

According to the curators Pia Camil\u2019s practice explores<\/p>\n

\u2026the urban ruin\u2014including photographs of halted projects along Mexico\u2019s highways.\u00a0 The image shows the opposite side of the billboard; that is, the backstage, riddled with chaos, detritus, and deterioration.\u00a0 Camil\u2019s work, however, is imbued with a sense of hope, something that is reinforced by the vibrant colors.\u00a0 The phrase \u201crise into ruin\u201d suggests the cyclical nature of the world, the phoenix that rises from ash to become, inevitably, ash again.\u00a0<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In a stretch of west Denver\u2019s Federal Boulevard that\u2019s dominated by automobile service and pawn shops, Brazilian artist Ricardo Domeneck<\/a> offers Continental Scar Tissue, <\/i>a <\/i>poetic commentary about history that riffs on the American urban grid<\/a>. The billboard\u2019s message is reinforced by the name of the auto service shop that\u2019s located right below it:<\/p>\n

\"Continental<\/a>

Continental Scar Tissue<\/em>, by Ricardo Domeneck, 1025 Federal Boulevard (D. Saitta)<\/p><\/div>\n

For the curators,<\/p>\n

Domeneck\u2019s poem follows a precise measure like downtown Denver\u2019s city grid. It traces both the geography and history of the Americas, mixing the current locale with his native Brazil, illustrating subtle tensions.\u00a0 In the first two stanzas Domeneck jumps from one location to the other, juxtaposing landscape, histories, and cultures.\u00a0 With this hopping from one to the other, the trail of tears from the Arawet\u00e9<\/a> \u00a0tribe can be located in S<\/i>\u00e3o Paolo as well as in Colorado ski resorts, as if this violence can be seen and felt just about anywhere…By the time we reach \u201cCentennials for the Americas\u201d the poem slowly drifts out of a specific location to the idea of America, claiming that the transcendentalist<\/a> thinkers Emerson and Thoreau are dead.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A couple of blocks east of this site, on Decatur Street in a food delivery company\u2019s gated and barbed-wired parking lot, is a piece by Dmitri Obergfell<\/a> called Free Money<\/i>.\u00a0 The slogan \u201cThe Golden Age Was The Age When Gold Didn\u2019t Reign\u201d is taken from a radical 20th<\/sup> century movement called the Situationist International<\/a>, and was originally written in graffiti throughout Paris fifty years ago. In this early 21st<\/sup> century iteration it appears in conjunction with a burning sports car:<\/p>\n

\"Free<\/a>

Free Money<\/em>, by Dmitri Obergfell, 860 Decatur Street (D. Saitta)<\/p><\/div>\n

For the exhibition\u2019s curators Obergfell\u2019s critique is clear:<\/p>\n

Cars are a symbol of status and freedom in America. Nevertheless, they are also a necessity\u2014in Denver, as in other American cities like L.A., an automobile is a basic requirement to navigate the urban landscape. Obergfell, then, seems to be calling for a change in the system of values\u2014perhaps proposing that our values are entangled in places where they should not be.\u00a0 But questions arise: does reproducing text originally hand-painted on walls validate its claims when it is printed as a billboard slogan?\u00a0 Does it subsume it into a culture of consumption and spectacle? <\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The class divisions and racial segregations produced by consumer culture and speculative capitalism\u2014inequalities that are very effectively reproduced by even the (theoretically) egalitarian urban street grid\u2014is captured by Isabella Rozendaal<\/a> in her New Orleans 2011<\/i>, on Champa Street in central Denver:<\/p>\n

\"New<\/a>

New Orleans 2011<\/em>, by Isabella Rozendaal, 2600 Champa Street (D. Saitta)<\/p><\/div>\n

For the curators, Rozendaal\u2019s piece<\/p>\n

\u2026 takes the innocuous, a road sign at an intersection, and charges it \u00a0with the political.\u00a0 Every city is replete with clues as to how it can be read, and Rozendaal\u2019s photo\u2014which has the name of the city where it was taken\u2014exposes New Orleans as a city clearly divided by racial and religious lines\u2026Rozendaal reveals the store of information that is hidden in plain sight but crystallized when reexamining everyday objects through art.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This particular piece is enhanced by its location in a vacant lot at the precise juncture of three electoral precincts within the Five Points<\/a> neighborhood. \u00a0\u00a0It draws additional strength from the opposition of a rehabbed apartment building to the right of the billboard and the dilapidated houses directly across the street on the left.<\/p>\n

Also in central Denver, the Canadian artist (of Turkish descent) Erdem Ta\u015fdelen<\/a>\u2019s Postures in Process<\/i> reflects on another aspect of today\u2019s urban condition, the popular uprisings occurring worldwide in response to government efforts to privatize public space. \u00a0The piece is inspired by the insurgency in Istanbul\u2019s Taksim Square<\/a>.\u00a0 <\/b>Looming (appropriately) above a gated and barbed-wired Enterprise Car Rental lot on (appropriately) Broadway, Ta\u015fdelen\u2019s work presents a string of adverbs that describe the strength and fortitude of those who are protesting the privatization of public space in Turkey and elsewhere:<\/p>\n

\"Postures<\/a>

Postures in Protest<\/em>, by Erdem Tasdelen, 2209 Broadway (D. Saitta)<\/p><\/div>\n

Finally\u2014and staying with the theme of popular insurgency\u2014there\u2019s this remembrance, from Steve Rowell<\/a>, of the early 20th<\/sup> century working class struggle at Ludlow, Colorado. I\u2019ve occasionally written about the Ludlow Tent Colony<\/a>\u2014now a National Historical Landmark marking the 1914 killing of striking immigrant coal miners by the state militia\u2014on this blog because of what I take to be its relevance for theorizing, and tactically implementing<\/a>, intercultural city ideals.<\/p>\n

\"Ludlow,<\/a>

Ludlow<\/em>, by Steve Rowell, 4707 Brighton Boulevard (D. Saitta)<\/p><\/div>\n

For the curators,<\/p>\n

Ludlow is now a ghost town and a sense of conflict and desolation is apparent in the photograph of a man <\/i>[actually, a Colorado militiaman] inside an odd-shaped grave <\/i>[actually, the tent cellar where the bodies of 13 suffocated women and children were found after the colony was burned in a militia effort to break the strike], with one hand jutting out\u2026Nearly a hundred years later, Rowell reminds us that this struggle is still present. Rowell\u2026aims here to convey a site of memorial through an economy of means.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ludlow<\/i> is located on Brighton Boulevard just a few blocks south of Welcome to Detroit<\/i>. Thus, it brings us back to the industrial heart of north Denver, and the related themes of urban struggle, ruin, and renewal.\u00a0 Like the other pieces, it draws power from its evocative context and\/or associations. \u00a0In this case, the piece is squeezed into a small, dark, cellar-like space between a Latino grocery store (there was a significant Latino presence in the southern Colorado coalfields both during and after the troubles of 1913-1914) and the fenced-in house next door.<\/p>\n

In conclusion, there\u2019s lots to like in Draft Urbanism<\/i>\u2019s city-wide exhibition of artwork. There\u2019s certainly lots of meaning for one to construct for oneself<\/i>.\u00a0 Citizens and urbanists alike are richly rewarded by seeing the city in this way.<\/p>\n

This essay was reposted to Sustainable Cities Collective<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a previous post I evaluated the architectural installations of Denver\u2019s Biennial of the Americas exhibition of Draft Urbanism.\u00a0 In this post I examine the billboard art.\u00a0 More than 30 artists, poets, and philosophers contributed pieces covering a 10 square […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[6,18,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3003","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-denver-urbanism","category-intercultural-city","category-urban-studies"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1H2bI-Mr","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3003","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3003"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3003\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3263,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3003\/revisions\/3263"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3003"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3003"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3003"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}