dART St. Louis - The story of my entry

I participated in the second annual dART St. Louis event this month. Using the following quote from Susan Sontag as pretext, dART uses photography coupled with random chance to break down psychological and cultural barriers and draw attention to the multitude of overlooked places in St. Louis.

"The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own." -- Susan Sontag

.

Participants exchange a charitable donation for a dart and throw the dart at a wall-sized projected map of the city. Once your dart lands you have one month to create a photograph from within a block of where your dart landed. St. Louis's geographic reality strangely couples with the physics of dart throwing: the favored sector of the Central Corridor extends from downtown straight west across approximately 30º of what is essentially a 180º city. Many of the newly resurgent neighborhoods of the city occupy an additional 30º to the south of the Central Corridor and the middle-class stable and quasi-suburban neighborhoods occupy the outer part of the 20º to the South of that. What this means for dART is that those who are timid in their throw land in comparatively bland neighborhoods. I aimed high and hard and overthrew my intended targets of Vandeventer and Hyde Park, landing near E. Grand in the College Hill neighborhood (not to be confused with the BET series).

Approaching the photography I made several key decisions. The first was to reinforce the concept of dART St. Louis and center my investigation and images on the exact intersection of 19th and Bissell St. where my dart landed. The second was to avoid photographing either one of the iconic standpipe water towers equidistant from my site. Finally, owing to its location, College Hill is one of the first places in the City of St. Louis to see the rays of the morning sun and I decided to shoot as close to dawn as possible.

The blocks around my site have seen a systematic and continued population collapse over the past 50 years. Today, in the four blocks surrounding the site there are only 35 structures within 300 feet of the intersection out of 80 lots and two of the closest eight buildings are owned by the Land Reutilization Authority. The neighborhood was eerily quiet as I began taking pictures at 6:30am.

Morning dew
The juxtaposition of cooly bleached wood and brick warmed by the rising sun caught my eye. This image was chosen for my submission through a crowd-sourcing effort by my facebook friends.

Quiet streets on College Hill
This image captures the quiet and desolation of the particular corner quite well.

A worrisome detail
As I began to look more closely at the details of the place a hidden narrative of tragedy emerged.

momento mori?
Once I got home and was working on the images in post-production, I noticed the small pile of stuffed animals along the wall at the extreme right frame of the image. Whether these were just discarded or a memorial to a victim I do not know, but their presence along with the bullet holes in the storefront casts a pall of unease over the images.

Through a little research, I discovered that almost a year ago an 18 year old male was shot multiple times from a moving car while standing in front of the storefront building I photographed. At the time he was listed in critical condition, but whatever happened afterward remains a mystery.



If the object of dART St. Louis is to make one feel like a tourist in one's own city, my experience reminds me of the single most effective piece of street art I have ever seen. I saw the following wheatpasting several times in New Orleans in 2009, where it was prominently put up throughout the touristy French Quarter:

Alexandre Orion: Subversive Commentary Through Erasure

I previously threw out a link (I believe in the site feed -- Yet another reason to bookmark/syndicate the feed!) to a street/commercial artist in England who used the technique of cleaning dirty surface to both create art and advertising on public walls. While not technically a crime, this technique was quite controversial. I recently came across the new works of Alexandre Orion (via the Wooster Collective). I feel Orion's new series, titled Ossário, which consists of fields of skulls erased out of the petroleum grime of tunnels in São Paulo Brazil, is far more successful by being un-coopted by the forces it protests.



These images, with iconography seemingly derived from both comic book and Panamerican cultural traditions serve to question the toll of our dependancy on petroleum and other (and far more hazardous) chemicals. As the artist notes: "‘Cleaning’ is not a crime. What is a crime is the environmental damage caused by unashamed pollution." Interestingly, such an intervention is only possible as a result of the grime generated by the exact wasteful processes that they are critiquing. Therefore, the critical response becomes subversively part of the system it questions. As such the ultimate goal of this expression is to prevent its own existence by erasing the cause of its media (the grime caused by the abuse of the environment); this I feel has the capability to render it almost incorruptible by commodification. Although, given the way things have been shamelessly going, I wouldn't be surprised to see BP erasing ads out of the grime caused by their oil plumes. Anyway, back to the art:

As Professor José de Souza Martins of the University of São Paulo reflects:

"These images speak to us of love and hate. Love for the city we live in, love for the city we could have, love for an urban utopia that belongs to everybody not just for a few; love for those inhabiting the city who take it to heart and make it part of their own consciousness... Hate, because the city is being consumed in a predatory manner by... those who think they are smart because they appropriate that which does not belong to them."

I know I promised to blog architecture next but...

I feel I should mention the amazing goings on at 11 Spring Street in the Nolita area of Manhattan. The building, long a repository, if not a magnet, for street art will be converted into condos. So, you think, yet another story of gentrification erasing out illegal expression (or alternately another victory of generic neighborhood cleanup depending on your viewpoint)...



Well, that's where the situation becomes interesting. The developers of the property, a massive and long-abandoned horse stables turned icehouse, have joined forces with the Wooster Collective to have internationally famous street artists decorate the facade, culminating in a huge party in December



ABOVE
londonpolice
and
Michael DeFeo

have so far contributed works and one can only imagine who will drop by next. As the Wooster Collective website
notes:

"Watch this space - literally.

If you're an artist who we've featured on the Wooster website in the last 5 years and you're coming through Manhattan in the next six week, drop us a note.

And if you're in New York, don't make any plans for the second week in December ;)"

As "D" summarizes in his comments at Gothamist:

"There's a big vacant building on which people started to put up unauthorized art (or whatever), the owners responded by saying, "hey, let's get an artists' collective to curate the way the building is decorated so it has some cohesiveness and flow (and so that some established artists are inspired to contribute), the artists agree to abide by a deadline, it's all free (!!), there's gonna be a big party at the end, and everyone gets along?? No divisiveness? No bitterness? No unreasonable squattters [sic] demanding to stay rent free or artists demanding that the art be preserved forever? No black-hearted landlords crushing the art with wrecking balls?
No government intervention or regulation?

this is too good to be true."

I believe the art will be removed during the renovation next year, but given the temporal nature of the form I believe this offers a wonderful paradigm for cities with numerous abandoned buildings and buildings stuck "in progress." Here in St. Louis Chivvis Development did something similar (albeit with artists of much less renown) on several buildings it owns at Chouteaus Landing on S. Fourth. I think such "legal walls" offer an opportunity to enhance the visual density of the city, celebrate diversity, and at least partially redeem the gaps (or more specifically dents I suppose) left in the urban fabric by abandonments.

Here's to hoping we see much more of this phenomena both locally and nationally!

The man is on fire!

Banksy hits again...
This time bringing a slice of Gitmo to Disneyland.



From Wooster Collective:

"Families visiting Disneyland on their holiday this week saw a life-size Guantanamo bay inmate standing inside the Rocky Mountain Railroad ride at Disneyland in Anaheim California.

The sculpture, consisting of an inflatable doll dressed in an orange jumpsuit with its hands and feet manacled remained in place for one and a half hours before Disneyland's security staff shut down the ride and removed it amid fears over public safety."

As regular readers know, I'm a strong advocate of Banksy's illicit deployment of art to challenge societal norms and foster social advocacy. It seems he must have been in LA to set up his upcoming secret art show and taken some time off to conflate those caught in the catch 22 of macronational, post-globalized prison camps and the happy spectacle-blinded apathetic citizens who allow the phenomena to persist.

RELATED:

Weekend News: Banksy takes on Paris Hilton

Lost deep in my slumbers on this last golden three day weekend of summer, (or more actually struggling to come up with a garden design that is radical enough for my aesthetic... ironic that the first landscape project I've ever done is the first project in architecture grad school) I pretty much missed this story when it broke. British graffiti/street art/media jamming superstar BANKSY previously known for his amazing stencil work, illegal art installations in world famous museums, murals on the Israeli Containment Wall, and industrial re-designs has locked his sights on America's sluttiest, richest, most notorious ex-debutante.

First a quote, then my analysis:

"The secretive artist has smuggled 500 doctored copies of Paris Hilton's debut album into music stores throughout the UK, where they have sold without the shops' knowledge.

In place of Ms Hilton's bubble-gum pop songs, the CDs feature Banksy's own rudimentary compositions. On the cover of the doctored CD, Ms Hilton's dress has been digitally repositioned to reveal her bare breasts; on an inside photo, her head has been replaced with that of her dog. On the back cover, the original song titles have been replaced with a list of questions: "Why am I famous?", "What have I done?" and "What am I for?" Inside the accompanying booklet, a picture of the heiress emerging from a luxury car has been retouched to include a group of homeless people. In another shot, Ms Hilton's head has been superimposed on a shop window mannequin beneath a banner reading: "Thou Shalt Not Worship False Icons."

Instead of Ms Hilton's own compositions, the replacement CD features 40 minutes of a basic rhythm track over which Banksy has dubbed Ms Hilton's catchphrase "That's hot!" and other extracts from her reality TV programme The Simple Life.

--The Independant 03 September 2006


This is a fortuitous confluence for this mild-mannered blogger. Last autumn I actually wrote and presented a paper using Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition as the starting point for a discussion on radical attempts to retake recently privatized realms back to the public sphere. Using concepts dating to Situationist International (derive, detournement, etc...) I exposed such actions as Urban Exploration, Shop-Dropping, and graffiti as inherently public and controversial due to their inherent opposition to a hyper-capitalized, privatized culture.

And what happens?

My example of "post-graffiti radical practitioner" goes and pulls what might be the greatest shop-dropping stunt ever. (Well the Barbie Liberation Organization's operation was pretty sweet too...)

With gleeful abandon Banksy photoshopped a dog onto Paris Hilton's neck (a nice surrealist move if ever there was one) and devised an unforgettable soundtrack (download below). Banksy's questions are blunt, unforgiving, and cut through the simulacra (vapid image of pop stardom rooted in vapid stereotype of spoiled heiress) that is Hilton: Why Am I Famous? What Have I Done? What Am I For? With these three questions Banksy, who has made a career of graphical social activism under illegal to life threatening conditions, challenges not just Ms. Hilton, but her target demographic as a whole to reconnect and involve themselves within the world and focus their illusionary lives around a concrete goal of social justice.


LINK TO IMAGES

LINK TO BANKSY's MUSIC

WATCH BANKSY IN ACTION [YouTube]: