All Over the Map. Michael Sorkin
parallels with the historic effect of American inner-city highways in isolating and destroying poor communities of color.
The extreme politics of planning in Israel and Palestine results in a situation that is separate and unequal at many levels. Systems of water supply, sanitation, energy, transportation, green space, and other elements of infrastructure are—despite many decades of pieties on the part of the municipal administration in Jerusalem about equalizing services—totally skewed to Israeli benefit. While Israeli Jerusalem has a reasonably integrated system of transportation, including highways, bus lines, airports, a train to the coast, and a good collective taxi system, the Palestinians are highly constrained in their ability to move, a product both of draconian and humiliating security arrangements that can extend a twenty-minute commute to hours and of a fundamental lack of transport services.
To get around, Palestinians must rely either on the Israeli systems—when available to them—or on their own network of cars, buses, and a collective taxi system of great potential efficiency, thwarted only by oppressive security delays. What is frustrating about all of this from the point of view of planning is that an efficient system for both Israeli and Palestinian Jerusalem is easy to imagine in purely technical terms. Jerusalem is a node on a linear urban system that runs from Nablus in the north through Ramallah, Jerusalem, and Bethlehem, to Hebron in the south—a classic linear city, considered in purely physical terms.
For transportation planners, the logic of a north-south system would seem clear-cut. Given the density of settlement and the relatively small distances, such a system might be both highly efficient and profitable, and an instrument of accommodation, convenience, and peace. Unfortunately, politics stands in the way.
Still, there are precedents for cooperation. There is one part of the urban infrastructure where all of Jerusalem works together: the municipal sewerage system is joined. Perhaps this is an earthy harbinger of greater possibilities should justice and reason ever prevail.
2002
19
On SITE
Modern art, born to rebel, chafes at the boundaries of its site. In the name of originality, out go easel painting, representation, bourgeois taste, the museum, the gallery system, the art academies, the anxieties of influence, Oedipus, the object. Trotskyesque, the avant-garde aspires to its own permanence. The sites and sources of innovation float. Whether embracing social revolution or simply revolutionary manners; the technical innovations of video, photography, or computing; the coalescence of abstraction; the arrogation to an “expanded field” of disciplines across such traditional boundaries as architecture and landscape; or the willful reductionism of minimalism, modern art has thrived on its apparent flouting of recent convention. The cult of the new persists.
In his prescient De-Architecture of 1987, James Wines points out a fundamental contradiction in this history: the disproportion between the revolution in artistic practice and any actual social change in the societies parent to this imaginative innovation. It’s an observation that stems from both a particular moment in the life of art and a particular moment in Wines’s own career, a crisis in meaning. Wines began as a sculptor, co-generationalist to minimalists like Judd and Serra and to more environmentally attuned figures like Heizer, de Maria, and Christo. His own sculptural work—powerfully shaped by a sense of fecundity and historicity gained during formative years in Italy—developed along strong tectonic lines, assimilating place to a powerful artistic autonomy. Little worlds.
Wines’s commitment to the public nature of his work flows from this investigation of the meaning of the context of site. The dilemma of embodiment—both literally and conceptually—was crucial to someone who sought a practice infused by politics, and Wines’s project rapidly took a critical turn. In this, he shared an emotional, if not formal, sensibility with the quasi-political interventions of Gordon Matta-Clark, Alan Kaprow and Dennis Oppenheim. Each of these artists begged the question of participation both by relocating the spatial and social site of art and by the explicit content of their work, whether it took the form of cheerfully subversive “happenings” or cautionary propaganda.
By moving out into the space of public life, by provoking reactions that exceeded the bounds of conventional ideas of the beautiful, and by scaling up, these artists quickly hit the edge of architecture. Architecture, after all, is historically the discipline that has combined artistic principles—style, composition—with the deliberate framing of social life. The characteristic hubris of the architect has long lain in the assumption that architecture—through its propagation of forms and spaces—actually invents social exchange by elaborating its forms and rituals.
Although this has led to much of the blithely disengaged polemic that Wines so articulately denounces, there is an element of truth in architecture’s claim. Certainly, its power to oppress is brutally clear. Wines’s own critique of architectural modernism and its craven universalism—most grossly in the thread running from Le Corbusier to Pruitt-Igoe—hammers a well-battered nail on the head. But Wines’s muse has a mellower vibe, relishing architecture’s power to please. Italy is surely the model, especially the way in which the architecture of its townscape provides rich and varied settings for both communal and private satisfaction. Up against this bivalence, Wines rapidly transferred a relatively traditional sculptural practice to building.
The fervent sixties and seventies were a backdrop. While no progressive doubted art’s oppositional duty, there was much ferment about its expressive location and styles of relevance. The forms of the counterculture—happenings, squattings, demonstrations, Woodstocks, merry travels, and rural idylls—provided exuberant experiences but somewhat baroque visuals, the first real postmodern system of signification. Although stopping short of psychedelic, Wines’s taste had surely been liberated, swayed by the unabashed hedonism of youth culture and by its desire to link art and life.
The “sixties” was a genuine period of popular creation, and the birth of a distinct critical practice. The art world was both stimulated and incapacitated by the outpouring, responses dividing along generational lines. The slightly older cohort—Wines’s—was deep in the minimal. This might be seen as a critique of the effulgent excesses of the consumer society against which so many were in revolt. But minimalism was a dead end—further domestication of a movement with a long pedigree and a closet of grim outcomes, especially for architecture. The minimal represented nothing left to lose . . . or to do.
Minimalism’s cultic purification dovetailed with that of functionalism and its worship of the idea of an asymptotic fit of form and use. The architectural reading of this ideal, the existenzminimum of modernity’s universal worker-subject, extended this one-size-fits-all fantasy of form reduced to a core of pith, a vision that turned out to be a nightmare, penetential both socially and expressively. Artistic minimalism was a last gasp at recovering the aesthetic vitality of the sparse branch of modernism, stripping it of the social meaning that informed it in the first place, retaining only a whiff of the anti-bourgeois origins of modernism’s rebellion against the over-stuffed visual culture of the Victorian and Edwardian ages. A million dollars for a plywood box.
What not to do was clear. The logic of the turn to architecture was clear. The logic of rebellion against pure formalism was clear. The logic of seeking sites for the reattachment of politics to form was clear. The logic of invention was clear. What was opaque was precisely what to do, what language to embrace, and what program to champion. Certainly, it had to begin with collectivity. In a declarative and optimistic act, Wines and his partner Allison Skye, with Michelle Stone and Josh Weinstein, founded SITE—“sculpture in the environment”—proclaiming their desire to unify ideas of form and place.
The architectural climate at this moment was particularly preoccupied with issues of symbolic meaning, of the expressivity of building. The seminal text was Robert Venturi’s “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture” of 1967, a work itself rife with contradiction. On the one hand, its l’art pour l’art defense of the prosody of architecture was gratifyingly antithetical to the devolutionary functionalism that still served as mainline architecture’s threadbare theoretical cover. On the other, though, the politics was not entirely clear. Although Venturi’s “messy vitality” in many ways reflected the urbanistic argument of Jane Jacobs—whose The Death and Life