Cultural Studies

Volume 7, Issue 2

Lawrence Grossberg, Janice Radway, Lawrence Grossberg, Janice Radway

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134863556
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

Cultural Studies explores popular culture in a uniquely exciting and innovative way. Encouraging experimentation, intervention and dialogue, Cultural Studies is both politically and theoretically rewarding.

■ Articles ■

Dick Hebdige

Redeeming Witness: In the Tracks of the Homeless Vehicle Project¹

You don’t need no painting on a wall. You might want a painting but you don’t need it. This is what we need. (Homeless woman commenting on the Homeless Vehicle, interviewed in Krzysztof Wodiczko: Projections [dir: Derek May, National Film Board of Canada, 1991])

Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to be free:

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me

(Emma Lazarus, Inscription at the Base of the Statue of Liberty)

No Man’s Land

New York 1991

A friend tells me how she’s at Union Square one morning waiting for the uptown express when a body rolls out from under the platform. She watches a middle-aged man climb up, stand, swaying unsteadily at first, getting his balance, as he pats the dust off his suit before heading off purposefully, a plastic attaché case jammed under one arm, towards the stairs and the EXIT. Cautiously, one eye on the tunnel out of which her train is due to plunge at any moment, she leans over to inspect the dark space squeezed between the side of the platform, tucked out of sight beneath the narrow concrete overhang, and the rails.

Could anybody really sleep down there?

Waiting for his uptown express, Herzog made a tour of the platform, looking at the mutilated posters – blacked out teeth and scribbled whiskers, comical genitals like rockets, ridiculous copulations, slogans with exhortations: Moslems the enemy is white. Hell with Goldwater, Jews! Spicks eat SHIT. Phone, I will go down on you if I like the sound of your voice. And by a clever cynic, ‘If they smite you, turn the other face’. Saul Bellow (1974)

The other Face

Today many city dwellers (in Latin America) live in shanty towns, and these have become the most telling and guilt-inducing image of ‘third-world poverty’, inviting the voyeuristic horror of the westerner (Elizabeth Wilson, 1991).

There are no dead spaces in today’s cities. In Manhattan where the ownership and use of every inch of territory is nailed down in the fine print of countless property deeds and city ordnances, those tiny temporary interstitial spaces that do open up get occupied immediately by PWAs (people without apartments). Buildings earmarked for demolition, construction sites, border zones where ownership or jurisdiction is blurred or in dispute – each can serve as a temporary landing pad. Hence the hobo cities of the thirties, hidden behind billboards on the edge of the freight yards. Hence too, the tent cities erected in municipal parks and transit points (e.g. Grand Central Station) in the eighties, pitched on the nervous urban line between leisure and work, departures and arrivals until, finally, the police arrive with bulldozers and razor wire to move them on again.

One morning in December 1991 I go to see what I’m told is the last remaining Tent City in Manhattan. The police have recently cleared an earlier settlement (established in June after the closure of Tompkins Square Park) dubbed ‘Dinkinsville’ by the evicts who resided there in ‘honour’ of the mayor. Now a friend tells me there’s a vast, haphazard city of canvas and lean-tos spread out under the grey bulk of the Manhattan Bridge as it reaches out across the East River into Brooklyn.

‘You should go,’ she says, ‘you’ll get a sense of the scale of the problem.’

I spend a couple of hours criss-crossing back and forth between East Broadway and the river, wading in the bridge’s dank shadow, hunting in vain for the city of nomads I’d imagined nestling round the concrete columns which at the riverside lift the bridge 100 feet or more into the air. Eventually I thread my way back up past the projects and the demolition yards, the chop-suey houses and Chinese gift stores – right back almost to the Bowery, to the point where the bridge begins its half-mile elevation before heading on in a sweep to span the river.

Here, at the bridge’s root, I get to see Tent City or what’s left of it in December 1991. A bunch of maybe ten or fifteen rusting corrugated iron shacks and packing cases crammed on to a narrow muddy triangle of land at the intersection of three busy roads. In the centre there’s a single canvas wigwam. This location, beset by every imaginable inconvenience – lack of privacy (it’s visible from every side), lack of drainage, proximity to traffic, noise, exhaust fumes, lack of cover from rain and snow – would hardly be anybody’s first choice. No one would choose to put down roots here – however briefly – if they had any kind of alternative.

In retrospect, the spaces underneath the bridge look positively penthouse in comparison to this – roomier … quieter … more sheltered … better views. If a larger camp had existed once, then the police must have driven them back and back from the river until only a few seasoned veterans are left hanging on, dug in on this bleak, exposed peninsula pounded by a sea of traffic. The teepee at the centre of Tent City, the structure that perhaps gave this other miniature metropolis its name, is the landmark focus of this alternative ‘development’ – its single distinguishing feature. It towers over the other makeshift shelters – a cone of dirty undyed fabric held upright round a tall, treelike wooden pole. The megatent is functional. It no doubt offers rudimentary shelter to however many people crawl into it at night but it also functions as a beacon and a sign – a reversed reflection of Liberty’s torch held aloft in welcome out there in the Bay to light the tempest-tossed passage to the New World of the earth’s huddled, homeless masses. The Manhattan teepee has this disconcerting monumental aspect. It draws attention to itself as if it’s been designed like Tatlin’s Tower to make a historical point. Only the point this monument is making in its dingy 3-D grandeur is diametrically opposed to the one proposed by Tatlin’s model which, of course, remained just that – an unexecuted project stuck for all time at the design stage. For, whereas Tatlin’s utopian project was meant to herald the imminent (though as luck would have it, eternally delayed) arrival of the streamlined city of a heroic socialist future, Tent City’s wigwam announces the return of the repressed in the grimy nodes of New York’s ultra-rationalist grid system. It advertises the enduring failure of the capitalist city – and the abstract, technocratic regimes it represents and on which it depends – to cater for its own.

Made by the homeless for the homeless after a ‘primitive’ design that dates back long before New Amsterdam was acquired from the natives for the legendary handful of beads, Tent City’s teepee is both an invocation and an indictment – an invocation of the history of expropriation and genocide which accompanied the founding of the nation and an indictment of a system that continues to uproot, ‘vanish’ and dehumanize the ghosts that (against all odds) go on dancing in its margins. As such you could almost say it functions like one of Krzysztof Wodiczko’s projections to disrupt the architectural ‘order’ of the city by superimposing a temporary ‘counter-factual’ image on a familiar city landmark, by superimposing that memory on this site …

Perched on the central divide separating the two streams of traffic crossing the bridge as I stand for a moment self-consciously contemplating this architectural ‘statement’, a figure in a tracksuit steps from its interior into the cold winter sunshine. The black man stands there in the mud scratching for a moment, straightening the towel round his shoulders. Then he looks directly up at me, dissolving in an instant with the intensity of that stare the distance between us so that the roar of the traffic seems suddenly to drop away and all I can hear is him drawing all the morning’s phlegm up into his throat, siphoning as much as he can squeeze out of himself and letting it collect there, viscous, on his tongue, before moving his head back slightly and sending out a great fat spume of spittle in an arc on to the road that separates him – a refugee in the City of Tents, interrupted in his morning ablutions – from me and the harder, higher ground I’m standing on …

Tramp Steamer

As necessarily as it produces machines and men-machines, the bourgeois world … produces the Tramp, its reverse image. The relation between the Tramp and the bourgeois order is different to the relation ‘proletariat-bourgeoisie’. In particular it is more immediate, more physical, relying less on concepts and demands than on images. (Henri Lefebvre, 1991a)

TRAMP, v. 1. To walk with a firm, heavy step; to trudge, n. 1. a heavy footfall; b. A heavy rhythmic tread, as of a marching army 2. A walking trip or hike 3. A person who travels aimlessly about on foot, doing odd jobs or begging for a living, as a vagrant 4 a. A prostitute b. A promiscuous girl or woman 5. A cargo vessel that has no regular schedule but takes on freight wherever it may he found and discharges it wherever required. Also called ‘tramp steamer’. (The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Houghton Mifflin, 1969)

The first time I saw Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Homeless Vehicle was in a square-cropped monochrome photograph on a black catalogue cover where it sat, suspended in the gloom, like one of Wodiczko’s nocturnal projections – ominous and dislocated – as if transplanted from another dimension. The image showed a streamlined four-wheeled metal object, reminiscent of a high-tech version of a supermarket cart encased in a skin of plastic or rubberized fabric stretched across a skeleton of metal hoops. A wire cage containing cans and plastic bags was visible, bolted or welded to the chassis. But what drew the eye instantly was the gleaming metal nose-cone pointing off over the viewer’s shoulder so that the whole vehicle bore a strong resemblance to a missile primed and locked on to some invisible target. Parked under direct light on the parquet gallery floor, its hard, reflective surfaces shone with the spooky luminosity of a UFO in a 1950s sci-fi movie. Exhibited in this image like a prototype in a pamphlet at a munitions or medical appliances trade fair, the Vehicle appeared imbued with a powerful mystique as ‘a superlative (designer) object’.²

The parody of professional design and display codes in the presentation of the Homeless-Vehicle-as-late-modern-gadget is integral to Wodiczko’s critical probing of ‘the symbolic, psychopolitical and economic operations of the city’.³ It is a key part of that larger strategy of projection which, as Rosalyn Deutsche has argued, might be chosen as an evocative title for all the work, once we acknowledge that the word ‘projection’ designates not just a technical mechanism but also, ‘first, a symbolic operation by which concepts are visualised as external realities and, second, a rhetorical device for speaking with clarity at a distance’ (Deutsche, 1990: 31).

The Homeless Vehicle was unveiled before the gallery-going public in an exhibition in New York in 1988, though the rhetorical strategies it embodies had been prefigured in Wodiczko’s public projection works. Three earlier ‘event-pieces’ are of particular relevance. In 1984, Wodiczko projected images of a giant padlock and chain on to the exterior of the Astor Building on Broadway which houses the New Museum of Contemporary Art to draw attention to art’s complicity (as investment and decorative adjunct) in the logic of real estate development. (The inflated asking price for the empty luxury apartments stacked on top of the gallery had, presumably, been partly determined by their physical proximity to the symbolic capital art represents.)

Two years later Wodiczko proposed to ‘disable’ the statues of Lincoln, Lafayette, Washington and Charity which had presided over the recent ‘refurbishment’ of Union Square Park by projecting images of bandages, wheelchairs and derelict buildings directly on to them. The Homeless Projection Proposal memorialized the eviction of the homeless from the Park prior to the implementation of a renovation program designed to complement the new offices and condominiums springing up in the vicinity. By ‘dressing’ the statues in bandages etc., Wodiczko drew an analogy between commemorative architecture and that ‘new symbolic architectural form’ (Wodiczko): the homeless themselves. The Proposal was another attempt literally to ‘throw light’ on the process whereby architecture ‘denying the homeless as its own social outcome … must continually repress the monumental condition of the homeless deeper into its (political) unconscious’ (Wodiczko quoted in Lurie, 1986; also Lajer-Burcharth, 1987).

In both projections, the homeless are revealed to be less the victims of their own inadequacies than of that linked process of economic and social transformation which Marshall Berman has dubbed ‘urbicide’ (Berman, 1986), whereby speculative property developments, the suspension of planning controls, redlining, blockbusting, gentrification, soaring rents, the casualization and deskilling of manual labor and drastically reduced welfare and public housing programs actively conspire to produce homelessness.⁴

One example – the spectacular failure in the early nineties of Canary Wharf and parallel developments in London’s docklands – should serve to clarify the social and economic costs of ‘urbicide’. Since its inauguration in 1981, the state-appointed but not publicly accountable London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC) had spent over £700 million of public money in a largely failed attempt to attract national and international capital to the area. With little regard for the housing and employment needs of the indigenous, overwhelmingly working-class population (30 per cent of whom were unemployed by 1987 after the closure of the docks), the LDDC erected luxury riverside apartments, private estates and office blocks aimed at wealthy buyers from the then burgeoning financial sector of the nearby City of London. The LDDC took over most of the land reserved for housing held by the Greater London Council, a since abolished publicly elected body, along with its residual planning powers. Meanwhile, a virtual block was placed on the GLC’s house-building program by central government. The docklands area was declared an ‘Enterprise Zone’ and new businesses were exempted from paying rates for ten years.

Jadwiga Przybylak

By the end of 1987, homelessness had increased by 120 per cent in comparison with its pre-1981 level. Thousands of families were being housed in temporary bed-and-breakfast accommodation at inflated rents paid by Newham Borough Council and it was estimated that only 1 in 30 local residents could actually afford to buy one of the ‘affordable homes’ the LDDC had pledged to provide. In Docklands, house values tripled in two years. By the late eighties the docklands ‘miracle’ was being routinely described in the media as a ‘fiasco’ or ‘disaster’. The Isle of Dogs, socially deprived for decades, was now a bleaker environment than ever: a socially divided landscape of half-empty office blocks, overcrowded public housing and unsold luxury...