A Proposal for the City of New York, the Avant-Garde, and Current Art Practices - Essay Example

Krysztof Wodiczko: Homeless Projection: A Proposal for the of New York, the Avant-Garde, and Current Art Practices Krzysztof Wodiczko’s workis situated at the end of a long line of avant-garde art that attempts to disrupt the patterns of daily existence. While his work remains mysterious and malleable to the point that characterizing it through a definitive methodology is impossible, significant themes of Marxist expression carried through a myriad of artistic lenses are identifiable. Observable throughout all of Wodiczko’s works are elements of the historic avant-garde, coupled with the socially-engaged leanings of Brecht, and elements of neo-avant-garde post-modernism. This essay explores Wodiczko’s Homeless Projection: A Proposal for the City of New York (1986) and situates it within the broader avant-garde and historical contextual process. Wodiczko himself seems particularly tied to the revolutionary Situationist International, often referencing them in regards to his work. The Situationists incorporated Marxist ideology and combined the sense of political ideology and art. It originated in the late 1950s as a critique of capitalism. With regard to its social and artistic avant-garde structure, it harkens back to what Poggioli sees in The Theory of the Avant-Garde as the beginning of the avant-garde. Poggioli identifies the artistic origins in 1870s France as, “…the connections between the political left and the literary left were sufficiently clearly defined and important to a generation that experienced “LAnnée Terrible,””1 LAnnée Terrible being a series of poems by Victor Hugo that fused contemporary French political concerns regarding the Franco-Prussian War with literary avant-gardism. Indeed, many writers have identified the early connections between artistic and intellectual movements and the desire to institute progressive social reforms. Linda Nochlin quotes art critic Théophile Thoré, who wrote in 1855, “Art changes only through strong convictions, convictions strong enough to change society at the same time.”2 In the early 19th century Henri de Saint-Simon suggested that to change modern society it would be only necessary to organize intellectuals and artists and join then with engineers and inventors. Saint- Simon valued artists very highly because they were capable not only of foreseeing the future but also of showing others what the future ideal state would be like. It’s notable that inherent in this early definition of the avant-garde is a connection between the industrial inventor type and the artist, as Wodiczko spent many years as an industrial designer before transitioning into the art world. It seems Wodiczko over a century later is the confluence of these traits, almost a new form of art/industrialist capable of envisioning the future and enacting these visions of the urban landscape The connection of Wodiczko’s work to Situationist art practices is very strong. While both share a political slant heavily reliant on Marxist ideology, they have also adopted the perspective of semiotics in critiquing and disrupting mainstream means of signification. In Homeless Projection: A Proposal for the City of New York (1986) Wodiczko fuses historical avant-garde standards with the detournement destructuring strategies of the Situationist International. In this work Wodiczko proposes to project images of homeless people onto the state-sponsored statues in New York City’s Union Park. In these projections we see a statue of George Washington with a wheelchair and a can of window cleaner projected onto him; another statue of Abraham Lincoln is projected onto with a crutch; the Marquis de Lafayette is seen with a cast on his leg and a sick person’s head band; finally, the Charity statue was superimposed with a low-rent building. While Wodiczko has constructed over seventy projections onto monuments across the world, Homeless Projection: A Proposal for the City of New York is unique in its structural form that molds to the person-based statues, where other work is generally projected onto buildings of relevant architecture. It seems this technique is heavily influenced by the Situationist International’s use of detournement effects in attempting to disrupt mainstream signification. The process of détournement involves the capturing of mass cultural images and co-opting them in a new presentation in order to subvert the authority of the sign and the significations it sets in order.3 In the instance of the statues in Union Park, Wodiczko is clearly detourning them for political means. In Critical Vehicles: Writings, Projects, and Interviews (1986) when discussing the Situationist urban project he writes: The basic practice of the theory of unitary urbanism will be the transcription of the whole theoretical lie of urbanism, detourned [diverted, appropriated] for the purpose of de-alienation4 The exact ramifications of meaning in Wodiczko’s work are left to be determined. Indeed, his exact intentions remain ambiguous. When discussing his concern specifically with the homeless a consistent theme seems to be Walter Benjamin’s theory where the victors determine how history is written. Wodiczko adopts this theory and applies it to the cultural assumption regarding the homeless, what he deems the “culture of the victors”. Benjamin talks about the need to speak for these people, as their authentic history has been ignored. It seems that in part this is the intention of Wodiczko in appropriating the homeless in his art.5 When attempting to contextualize Homeless Projection: A Proposal for the City of New York, it’s necessary to analyze the critical responses to Wodiczko’s thematically similar work. In the Homeless Vehicle Project (1988), Wodiczko constructed a functional vehicle that could be used as part shelter, part tin-can holder, and part shopping cart. The video Krzysztof Wodiczko: Projections6 demonstrates in great detail the elaborate process of construction Wodiczko went through and how he conducted a series of interviews with homeless people on the best way to structure the vehicle. Upon completion of the vehicle Wodiczko is derided in the media by a leading homeless supporter claiming that the project is actually condescending and if Wodiczko truly wanted to help the homeless there are better ways to achieve it. Wodiczko’s response to these criticisms is that the work actually functions to draw attention to the absurdity of the problem and not to offer a function alternative to homeless existence. That the fact these vehicles even can exist should be an alarm that there is a major problem with the social formulations of society. In light of this, when considering Homeless Projection: A Proposal for the City of New York one must also consider the absurdity and humor in placing a wheelchair on George Washington or crutches on Abraham Lincoln. While Wodiczko is overtly stating that this is to bring attention to the homeless problem, one must question the snide authority he assumes when altering the images of America’s forefathers. It’s easy to read a critique into the fundamental structure of an America that would allow capitalism and materialism to run rampant while the poor suffer for lack of shelter. One can see a similarity here between Wodiczko and the playful Modernist absurdity of Marcel Duchamp. There is a theme in Wodiczko that seems to mirror the readymades of Duchamp, particularly the famous R. Mutt Urinal, as both works revel in duping mass culture, and the art establishment. This is clearly evident in Wodiczko’s explanation for the Homeless Vehicle project, as this duping of people extends even to the homeless that he interviews into buying into his sincerity in creating the vehicle. In other works, such as the Memorial Arch in Brooklyn, New York where in 1985 Wodiczko was able to convince an event organizer for “Heart of the Nation” that he would was merely going to exhibit hands on a building.7 The event organizer mistook his intentions and approved the project. When the festival finally occurred and Wodiczko unleashed his projection it showed two rockets with corresponding American and Russian signs chain-linked together, clearly a comment on the Cold War arms race. In his elaborate and skilled construction of the vehicle one can see similarities to the well-labored creativity that went into Duchamp’s mysterious Étant donnés (Given: 1 The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas) or the gigantic The Large Glass. Both artists also make a point of self-reflexively commenting on the art establishment as well. In Duchamp, we see this with the status his readymades achieve when placed in the museum context, whereas the temporalities of Wodiczko’s projections fuse notions of performance art with political commentary to step-aside the traditional bounds of the museum. In one projection, The Astor Building/New Museum (1984)8, Wodiczko blatantly criticizes the museum by projecting a lock and chain around the real estate building on the floors above it, drawing attention to the foundational relationship of necessity between the art world and the capitalist mode of production. Wodiczko asserts that Homeless Projection: A Proposal for the City of New York is not so directly a critique of America as it is a critique of the urban planning situation that co-opted that statues as scenery to sell real estate. One can think of the Derridean sense of the sign wherein dichotomous forces are actually competing. In this instance one sees the signification shift from one of nobility and freedom to one of capitalist exploitation. In a sense, the homeless projections function to shift the signification to more humane concerns. Wodiczko also argues that due to the lack of power among the homeless they have themselves become statues -- decorations within the urban landscape. In Dialogues on Public Art, he writes: The homeless must display themselves in symbolically strategic and popular city “accent.” To secure their starvation wages (donations), the homeless must appear as the “real homeless” (their “performance” must conform to the popular myth of the homeless): the homeless must become the homeless. 9 In this regard, there is a double meaning behind Wodiczko’s projecting the homeless characteristics on the statues as it dislodges the capitalist assumptions that situates them as statues within the materialist landscape. While the detournement effect and discussions of signification clearly place Wodiczko in a neo-avant-garde context, many of these techniques and ideals hearken back to the pre-war Berlin Dada movement. Because of its proximity to the German war front, the Berlin Dada movement differentiated itself from other Dada movements in its adherence to political commentary. One can draw a connection between an underlying existential malaise infecting both the Berlin Dada movement and Wodiczko’s avant-garde; while Dada emerges as a reaction to the terrors and futility of war, Wodiczko’s neo-avant-gardism functions within the destruction of pre-war artistic ideals – with both reflecting on the absurdity of nature and attempting to formulate a political response. The Berlin Dada’s incorporation of ephemeral art events also has much in common with the latter day temporality one finds in Wodiczko’s projections. In the Dada photomontage we see an early incarnation of the decontextualization processes that Wodiczko would latter incorporate into his projections. One of its founding members of this technique was artist John Heartfield. Heartfield’s work exhibited clear tenants of political activism through a demonstration of leftist leanings. While Heartfield was largely a photomontage artist, his incorporation of well-known signs such as the Nazi symbol into his art, offered a commentary on the nature of propaganda and parodied the Nazi regime. In a famous photomontage Millions Stand Behind Me, Heartfield combines an image of Hitler with a large man to comment on the interrelated nature of Hitler and capitalism. A parallel can be drawn to Wodiczko’s work in his incorporation of projector effects to develop comments on contemporary politics through a Marxist lens. Wodiczko even once projected the Nazi symbol onto the South African House building in Canada in a protest against apartheid in Africa. In instances such as these, one sees Heartfield’s influence in the co-optation of symbols for political effects, along with the influence of Brechtian alienation techniques wherein the audience is left questioning their very role in society and lulled out of their daily existence patters. As can be seen the art of Kyrysztof Wodiczko covers a wide array of categories and is influenced by the history of avant-garde art. The way he fuses art and social concerns can be traced back to 19th century French artists and his experience as an artist and industrial designer place him as a hybrid form of the early avant-garde idealization of artists who collaborate with industrialists to achieve revolutionary social changes. Wodiczko also exhibits strong influences from the 20th century Marxist Situationist movement that originated in 1960s France. In Homeless Projection: A Proposal for the City of New York the myriad of ways in which Wodiczko combines avant-garde influences to achieve these social aims. In this work we see traces of Duchamp’s playful absurdity, Berlin Dada, and elements of the Situationist movement. Works Cited Buchloh, Benjamin H. D. Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975. Boston, MIT Press. 2003. Finkelpearl, Tom. Dialogues in Public Art. Boston: MIT Press, 2000. Ford, Simon. The Situationist International: An Introduction. London: Black Dog, 2004. Lajer-Burcharth, Ewa, “Understanding Wodiczko,” in Counter-Monuments: Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Public Projections, MIT Committee on the Visual Arts, 1987 Krzysztof Wodiczko: Projections, VHS, Directed by Derek May, 1990. Canada. National Film Board of Canada, 1991. Nato, Thompson. The Interventionists: User’s Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life. Boston, MIT Press. 2006. Nochlin, Linda. “The Invention of the Avant-garde: France 1830-1880,” in The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society. Poggioli, Renato. The Theory of the Avant-garde. Cambridge, MA, Harvard Univ. Press, 1968, Scheunemann, Dietrich. Avant-Garde/Neo-Avant-Garde. Editions Rodopi BV, 2005. Wodiczko, Krzysztof. Critical Vehicles: Writings, Projects, Interviews, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1999 Read More