As Dispatchwork manifests:

Dispatchwork aims to seal fissures in broken walls worldwide, completing the material compilation in urban constructing and adding color to the urban greyscales, by inserting a very basic construction-material:Plastic Construction Bricks (PCBs). In fact, PCBs are one of the first material with which we conceivearchitecture. PCBs are solid and stiff and shape up perfectly rectangular yet, concerning the essential structure, they contradict the purpose, given that the repair is just so very temporary, with the patches crumbling out of the walls in a matter of no time, being taken or washed away. Dispatchwork does not defy deterioration. Rather, it aims to emphasize transitoriness as a chance for the construction and reconstruction of our environments. Adapting to various cities, the project infiltrates walls of cultural heritage, historic facades, fortifications and yet many more less spectacular corners as a colorful repair of shabby walls within our shared spaces.

Not only is this Dispatchwork’s own work, but they have inspired others whose work is also shared through Dispatchwork’s site. You can find them here. A few highlights for your visual pleasure….

Valpariso, Chile

Berlin, Germany

Tel Aviv, Israel

All images are from Dispatchwork’s
website

Van Silcen Avenue, Barbara Ellmann (MTA 2009)

In his posthumously published Arcades Project,1

Walter Benjamin describes the emergent rivalry in the 19th century between the Ecole Polytechnique and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts: between art and technology. Technological innovation and reproduction transformed the architectural and sensual experience of time and the social, economic and material forms of the modern city. Blurring distinctions between engineer and artist, technology took-up residence in the faculty of the imagination, radically transforming the social worlds of Europeans in the 19th century: Relationships to landscapes and nature where transformed through railway travel and the photography; Cast-iron balconies elevated users to the ‘rings of Saturn,’ a world beyond the confines of the previous epoch’s infrastructural imagination. Within this framework, technology emerges as more than banal reproduction and mechanization: It is poetic, affective, and capable of reconfiguring how we imagine intimate and public worlds. Technological systems constitute the look, feel, and experience of urban modernity. Infrastructure is thus not only a question of technology but of aesthetics.

Fred’s soup cans, South Bronx, Martha Cooper, 1980

In January 2013, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York added the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s (MTA) “Help Point” to their permanent collection. By this time, however, the MTA was no stranger to the world-renowned arts institution. The MTA’s metro-card vending machines previously graced the galleries of MoMA in the 2011 exhibition “Talk to Me.” Coinciding with MoMA’s relocation of subway design into the locale of Andy Warhol, Jackson Polluck, and Mark Rothko was the launch of the MTA’s Arts for Transit App, a program that prompted the New York Times to declare that the subway is New York’s most “underrated art museum.”2 By 2013 the subway has become a museum as much as it has become an object for the museum. This statement, however, might be misleading, for the art gallery and the street in New York have never been that far from one another.

Ephemerality

Blade, Martha Cooper, 1980

Almost four decades before becoming New York’s most underrated art museum, the subway was a veritable moving gallery for the emerging art form of graffiti. Subway cars functioned as an extension of the street for its writers, a gallery that came to all New Yorkers without a reservation or admission fee. In the 1970s and 1980s, pieces were the product of hours spent sketching designs in black books, the mechanization of aerosol can technology, and timing. The most elaborate pieces were created under the cover of night at the MTA’s rail yards where young artists would take advantage of the trains’ stationary status to make pieces that covered part of or spanned multiple subways cars. One of the greatest pieces storied to have existed – but taken out of commission before the train could leave the yards – was the “Bicentennial Train,” painted by CAINE, MAD 103, and FLAME ONE, made specifically for the country’s 200th birthday on July 4, 1976. The piece was longer than two football fields (11 cars) and ten feet high.3

“Lee,” Henry Chalfant, 1979

Graffiti was a technique in its own right and simultaneously an art praxis of youth from specific racial and economic backgrounds whose fiscal and material infrastructures were deteriorating as rapidly as the city’s subways. To the extent that the MTA was a public space, it was almost exclusively a particular shade and class of public space in the 1970/80s. Drawing attention to an urban system and city suffering from years of neglect, young artists capitalized on the opportunity to transform their public transit system, arguably launching one of the greatest art movements of the 20th century. Graffiti was a practice of self-expression and social critique, but it was also a mode of intervention – if not one of the primary actors, intentionally or not – calling attention to the decaying infrastructures of the city. Many subway cars with elaborate pieces were disbanded by the MTA and subject to high-pressure “buff washes” that blasted the trains with abrasive chemicals to remove the paint (as was seemingly the fate of the bicentennial train). This was the era of ‘Arts versus Transit.’

Art [vs.] Transit, Martha Cooper, 1980

Note: The “vs.” was cleaned off the window between the two windows.

The redevelopment of the subway and the institutionalization (as well as policing) of graffiti worked hand-in-hand over these decades, for as much as the art movement’s singular ephemerality was accomplished in part by techniques of the MTA, these young artists were drawing attention to a system – as well as an entire city – in shambles. Even in light of the MTA’s extreme publicity and security (at one point using attack dogs at train yards) attempts to eradicate both the practice and pieces of graffiti, by the early 1980s graffiti artists were beginning to gain recognition in the art world, showing not only on trains but in traditional art galleries. It is notable that around this moment that the MTA began to change their approach to art in the subway. While not curbing the policing of graffiti as vandalism and defacement, in 1985 the MTA initiated its own foray into the institutionalization of aesthetics through the creation of the Arts for Transit Program (AFT).

Cops in the train, the Bronx, Martha Cooper, 1981

Deferred Maintenance

Contextualizing decades of fiscal and operational neglect, the current Arts for Transit Program director Sandra Bloodworth characterizes the deterioration of the subways as a specific outcome of World War II era allocation of funds towards highway and automobile development at the expense of public transit.4 “Subways,” Bloodworth states, “became unfashionable [and] deterioration set in, culminating in the 1970s with New York City on the brink of collapse. Subways were also deteriorated, they were crime ridden they were grimy…trains broke down constantly and they were defaced with graffiti.”5 The crime and paint-ridden subways were seen as a sign of societal deterioration, if not an all-out direct cause of the system’s breakdown.

Urban fiscal collapse culminated in technical and aesthetic breakdown. “Deferred maintenance” characterized decades of the MTA’s practice of passing the burden of maintaing the system to the future. The culmination of years of deferral result in a $200 million dollar deficit for the authority in 1979. In 1981, almost one quarter of trains were out of service and average commute time would sometimes be four times that of 1901.6 Coupled with the widespread perception (and experience) of the subway as dilapidated and crime-ridden – captured in such stories as that of the “subway vigilante,” Richard Goetz who, upon being confronted by four Black boys with screwdrivers as weapons demanding his give them $5, pulled-out a gun and shot each one of the boys in December 1984.7 As MTA historian Mark Feinman writes, “between the Goetz case and the uncontrollable graffiti, the subway became a symbol of New York City’s inability to control crime.” Popular representations of the subway as hotbeds of urban vice were epitomized in pop culture and film, such as the now cult-classic film The Warriors (1979).

Steps to improve the technical and social conditions of the subway began with securing funding that could be used to carry-out station and track repair and replace many of the MTA’s defunct subway cars. The MTA also experimented with “graffiti control trains” between 1982 and 1985. These trains painted all white were put into service around the city to determine which routes were more likely to be tagged.

It is certainly the case that the coupling of mechanical and aesthetic repair went hand-in-hand during the transitional “Jekyll and Hyde”8 period of the 1980s. By 1988 graffiti had been almost completely removed from the subways – the result of copious coatings of graffiti resistant paint that would break-up the petroleum-based compounds that aerosol paint was made of. More frequent subway car washes, as well, contributed to this process, along with the $8.3 million funding for the “Clean Car Program.”9

Art as public good

East 105th Street, Michael Ingui (MTA 2009)

The resurgence of the city began with this renewal.

-Sandra Bloodworth, Arts for Transit

Graffiti ramped-up the MTA’s commitment to aesthetics as central to renovating their system in the 1980s, however the roots of publicly-funded (especially federal) uses of visual art – compared to maintenance or graffiti removal programs – as a mode of infrastructural development goes back to the Works Progress Administration (WPA) as part of FDR’s New Deal in the 1930s. The WPA famously employed artists, musicians, writers, and other creative workers in conjunction with construction of numerous public buildings and roads. The Public Works of Art Project oversaw large-scale mural projects depicting local histories throughout the 1930s and 1940s. The MTA, however, has a particular historical commitment to the co-constitutive relationship between aesthetics and infrastructures, which Sandra Bloodworth, the current director of the Arts for Transit program, reminded her audience of in a recent TedX Talk she delivered entitled “Re-Creation of Public Spaces.” Quoting a 1899 memo written by William Barclay Parsons, chief engineer who oversaw the construction of the first inter-borough subways lines in the early 20th century, Bloodworth emphasizes Parsons’ vision of a subway where ” [...] all parts of the structures where exposed to the public sight shall be designed, constructed, and maintained with a view to the beauty of their appearance, as well as to their efficiency.”10 There was a mutual desire for beauty of efficiency and appearance: In order for the subway to function at its full capacity, aesthetics and technology have to work together.

Coney Island – Stillwell Avenue, Robert Wilson (MTA 2009)

The notion of art as a public good, within this historical context, was augmented through federal WPA programs that insisted that infrastructural spaces not only be beautiful, but meaningful and relevant to the communities they served. It was not, however, until the 1980s that commissioning artists and artworks for transit authorities was explicitly mobilized by both federal and local transit agencies across the U.S. In New York City, in particular, the resurgence in interest in public art projects was undergirded by the Percent for Art legislation that former mayor Ed Koch passed for the city in 1982, requiring city building projects to spend anywhere from 0.5%-5% of their total construction budget on art.11 It is within this context that curation and public art (not only aesthetics) becomes integrated into the arsenal of urban renewal techniques. In contrast to artwork like graffiti, both tags and larger pieces, that were experienced as markers of an urban epidemic in the public imagination, public art was controlled and managed – securing safety and freedom for patrons of the MTA.

Reflecting on capacities for art to transform the experiences of riding public transit, the Federal Transit Authority (FTA) in 2006 describes art projects as doing “much more than adding an essential human dimension to transit — they assuage community concerns about disruption of transit construction, improve passenger comfort and safety, and reinforce the spirit and identity of cities and towns.”13 Citing case studies from around the U.S., the FTA describes how arts projects helped assuage communities “fearful about the gentrification and crime that [new transit] projects might bring to their neighborhoods” and, furthermore, that public art can be used as a tool to help residents “cope with change.” That is to say, public art can do more than enhance public space: It can advance a more far-reaching role in the social and economic revitalization of urban neighborhoods. Public art projects demonstrate how communities can use public art to deal with conflict “creatively and constructively.”14 It is in this sense that we see, once again, how the well-being of the public and of its infrastructures are entangled within one another, producing the capacity for the experience of safety, and the freedom that accompanies it, for a system’s ridership. This is art in its political capacity, facilitating change and fostering social good, at least in the eyes of the ‘authorities.’ To be sure, graffiti encompassed its own politics as well, albeit the continuum of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ seems rather limited considering its legacy and staying-power as a fine art and urban art form.

Diagram of aerosol paint can (left); Subway “buff wash” (right)

Durability

Art for transit, publicly funded and commissioned art, is distinct from art made in the studio or on the street. Art as a public good and community resource is the result of collaborations between artists, engineers, and materials. All of these aspects distinguish public art for transit as distinct from other contexts for art-making, but it is the latter part, materials, that is pivotal. As the AFT states, “we encouraged artists to use durable materials – ceramics, mosaics, bronze – materials that would last hundreds of years (like the original artwork in the subway),”15 and this is certainly the animating ethos of the AFT’s projects. In contrast to the ephemerality characteristic of graffiti, the MTA’s aesthetic is one of durability. “Vandal resistant material,” specifically, was an organizing principle of early collaborative projects between artists and engineers. One early example of this is of the MTA’s collaboration with Laura Bradley in 1989 on redesigning entrance grilles for subway stations to address the $60 million the MTA was losing annually to fare evasion.16 In a similar vein, projects such as Milton Glaser’s Untitled, 1986 work at the Astor Place station employs the use of terra cotta and mosaics to create a series of enamel panels that both complements the historic motifs of the station – beavers that represent the Astor fur traders – and embodies the material durability of the history of the Astors.17

Railings with medallion design (FTA 2006)

Artist designed grille (FTA 2006)

“Bringing that which is above below” reflects AFT’s commitment to creating art installations that reflect local histories or the environment above. Examples of this are abound in the AFT’s projects: The Coney Island amusement park ride “Cyclone” is monumentalized in the undulating steel, ceramic tile, granite, and fiberglass station structure called Wavewall at the New York Aquarium subway station;18 at the Church Avenue station in Flatbush mosaics representing the Caribbean culture of the neighborhood above adorn the platform19; in Manhattan, glass, stone, and marble mosaics that depict rock outcroppings, tree roots, and pipes that adorn the walls of a subway connection corridor underneath Bryant Park (42nd Street).20 These are but few of the many AFT projects that incorporate past, present, and future into the rehabilitation of the subway stations they are located in.

Under Bryant Park, Samm Kunce (MTA 2002)

Designing the Urban

While the exteriors of subway cars are no longer the moving gallery of an (ironically, in this context) ephemeral art form, the MTA maintains a robust connection to the arts, visual and performing, through AFT which curates the experience of art on the trains. AFT enables art to exist and circulate through the subway and bus systems in a different way than the graffiti of the 1980s did: In this epoch, art is circulated through a particular mechanism of curation constructed upon the doling-out of permits for performance, didactic materials labeling and explaining art installations, juried competitions for visual art, and glass frames that contain and protect artworks within various subway cars and buses. AFT in this regard uses curation – processes of jurying, selecting, and contextualizing the production of art works – as technique of not only urban renewal but urban design.

Submissions for artwork are subject to numerous reviews by a selection panel of five members: Two representatives from neighboring museums and cultural institutions, one artist, an Arts for Transit representative, and the project architect along with community representatives who are invited to participate in an advisory capacity.21

In this regard, public art does not work the same as it does in a museum or a gallery, especially in terms of the creation process. AFT creates a distinct form of aesthetic experience: One where curation coupled with technological engineering creates pieces of artwork for display within the subway system and facilitates the ongoing viability of a public transit system that carries almost 7.5million riders every workday. The materials and the system in relation to one another coalesce as media and mediators of works of art. It seems to be no accident that ‘Urban Design,’ encompassing all the above mentioned factors, is the newest phrase tacked on to AFT’s moniker.

The extent to which technology and aesthetics are enfolded upon one another is most aptly articulated in MoMA’s recent ‘uses’ of MTA works. MoMA’s 2011 exhibition Talk to Me about the communicative dimension of design reflects what was the emergent relationship in the late 20th century between urban infrastructures and aesthetics/design. As their curator’s note:

Whether openly and actively or in subtle, subliminal ways, things talk to us. Tangible and intangible, and at all scales—from the spoon to the city, the government, and the Web, and from buildings to communities, social networks, systems, and artificial worlds—things communicate [...] New branches of design practice have emerged in the past decades that combine design’s old-fashioned preoccupations—with form, function, and meaning—with a focus on the exchange of information and even emotion [...] Designers are using the whole world to communicate, transforming it into a live stage for an information parkour and enriching our lives with emotion, motion, direction, depth, and freedom.22

Following on the heels of Talk to Me the MTA’s “Help Point” was acquired as part of MoMA’s permanent collection and included in a follow-up design exhibition in 2013 Born out of Necessity. The exhibition showcases not only how design responds to human needs, but how designers work towards crafting design solutions to problems of technological/infrastructural failure – material and social – that do not yet exist. It is, as the New York Times wrote in their review of the exhibition, an exhibition that compels visitors to “project [themselves] into situations where these things might come in handy.”23

Help Point, MoMA

Most New Yorkers and millions of tourists rely on the subway system to navigate the city. Help Point Intercoms, currently installed at the 23rd Street and Brooklyn Bridge–City Hall subway stations along the Lexington Avenue line, aid in relaying travel and emergency information. The integrated microphone and speaker provide direct contact with security personnel twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and the compact design is resistant to vandalism and breakage. A blue light identifies the device, providing a sense of safety and security in a manner that is not obtrusive during everyday activities but is recognizable in an emergency.24

The future orientation of this exhibition is marked, yet it is worth noting how fluid relationships between past, present, and future have pervaded the infrastructural imaginary of the MTA from as early as 1899 (despite the fact of a marked shift in the 1980s). If design talks, then the MTA’s “Help Point” might state that it imagines a future where access to a 24-hour security and navigation system can provide a sense of safety and security resistant to vandalism and breakage while being unobtrusive to the everyday activities of riders. As this exhibition and the first installations of the “Help Point” on subway platforms in 2012-2013 makes clear, the fantasy of the social and technical infrastructures of tomorrow shape the work of designers and users today. Thus, we see the future of urban design telling us a history of the present: Whether that story is one of “human growth, social change, and expanding capacity,”24 or the failure of society to provide adequate care for its people and infrastructures, it seems clear that questions of governance, perhaps now more than ever, are contingent upon and tangled-up within the work of art, aesthetics, and design.

Rendering of a proposed art installation at the 96th and Broadway Street Station (NY Times 2009)

References

1 Benjamin, Walter. 1999. The Arcades Project. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

2 http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/14/mta-to-introduce-public-art-app/

3 Austin, Joe. 2001. Taking the Train: How Graffiti Art Became an Urban Crisis in New York City. New York: Columbia University Press.

4 Bloodworth, Sandra and William Ayres. 2006. Along the Way: MTA Arts for Transit. New York: The Monacelli Press.

5 TedX Talk “Re-Creation of Public Spaces: Sandra Bloodworth” (2012)  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLEgCMpxmAg

6 Feinman, Mark S. “The New York Transit Authority in the 1980s.”  http://www.nycsubway.org/wiki/The_New_York_Transit_Authority_in_the_1980s; “Subway Odyssey” New York Times Magazine January 31, 1982. Ari Goldman.

7 Feinman, Mark S. “The New York Transit Authority in the 1980s.”  http://www.nycsubway.org/wiki/The_New_York_Transit_Authority_in_the_1980s;

8 Ibid.

9 Ibid.

10 TedX Talk “Re-Creation of Public Spaces: Sandra Bloodworth” (2012)  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLEgCMpxmAg

11 Cocuzza, Julia. 2010. “MTA’s Arts for Transit: The Most Public Museum’s Problem of Publicity.” Unpublished http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CDMQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.juliacocuzza.com%2Fblog%2Farthistory%2Fjcocuzza_artsfortransit.pdf&ei=N5qGUdDlD-TH0QGrq4HoBQ&usg=AFQjCNHB99VUFyZ9Ejd6KGH2zrH5V7262A&sig2=Xx-jOfCrbiavK3ewGtXT5g&bvm=bv.45960087,d.dmQ; See also Heartney, Elanor and Adam Gopnik. 2005. City Art: New York’s Percent for Art Program. London: Merrell Publishers.

12 Kelling, George and James Wilson, 1982.”Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety.” The Atlantic. 1 March 1982.

13 Federal Transit Authority. 1996. Arts in Transit…Making it Happen. Federal Transit Authority.

14 Ibid.

15 TedX Talk “Re-Creation of Public Spaces: Sandra Bloodworth” (2012)  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLEgCMpxmAg

16 Federal Transit Authority. 1996. Arts in Transit…Making it Happen. Federal Transit Authority.

17 http://www.mta.info/mta/aft/permanentart/permart.html?agency=n&line=6&station=21&artist=1&img=2&xdev=2280

18 http://www.mta.info/mta/aft/permanentart/permart.html?agency=nyct&line=Q&artist=1&station=22

19 http://www.mta.info/mta/aft/permanentart/permart.html?agency=nyct&line=5&artist=1&station=31

20 http://www.mta.info/mta/aft/permanentart/permart.html?agency=nyct&line=D&station=4&xdev=0

21 http://www.mta.info/mta/aft/about/opportunities.html

22 Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY. “Talk to Me” (2011) http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/1080

23 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/20/arts/design/born-out-of-necessity-moma-design-show.html?_r=024 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/20/arts/design/born-out-of-necessity-moma-design-show.html?_r=0

“This is a unique opportunity to preserve a large section of what was once a death strip. If you remove the sections, you’re destroying the authenticity of this place,” Guardian quotes Noir whose painted section of the wall is to be removed. “It’s unbearable to see that the wall here is being so brutally torn down.”

When I saw this article fly through the web I had to share. As an admitted “tourist” of the East Side Gallery with a curiosity for how the politics of the Wall have changed over the past 50 years, I found it incredibly fascinating to think of the former death strip – once vehemently protested against – now finding itself transformed into a cultural artifact that is currently causing protests for preserving the culture and authenticity of the former borderland.

Same wall, two different histories. Yet as this picture states, the similarities are ironic if not outright uncanny: To the left, 1989. To the right, 2013.

A distinct convergence of art, memory, politics, and development. The sections of wall being removed are to facilitate the constructions of a new high-rise development – whose developer declares that the sections removed will continue to be preserved, only a few meters away from their current resting place. The developer has been receiving threatening emails. Guards in front of the wall yet again. Eternal return with difference?

Too bad we couldn’t be there to see the live action. Here are some old Fallopia shots of the East Side Gallery from a few years back.

Black-White Wealth Disparities

The billboards note not only the persistence of systemic racism that is a hallmark of American society, but also brings forward the question of neighborhood change and its relationship to the politics of race and racism that have shaped the contours of America’s cities for the past century, and how it is tied to the evolutions of neighborhood formation and change. Race and gentrification have a rather uneasy relationship in Brooklyn (was well as many other cities). As the article notes:

It’s no accident that of all of New York City’s neighborhoods, the billboards have targeted this one. A historically black neighborhood, Bed-Stuy has become one of the most contested spaces in New York City. A 2012 study from the Fordham Institute found that Brooklyn is home to 25 of the country’s most rapidly gentrifying zip codes. That’s created a stark contrast between those in the neighborhood who have more upward social and economic mobility than others. Several high profile media accounts have recently noted Bed Stuy’s so-called “hip” transformation and “resurgence”, but the borough’s medium per capita income in 2009 was just $23,000, which was $10,000 below the national average.

Gentrification is not stranger to Brooklyn, and the racial and class patterns of displacement are all too predictable, yet the fight against neighborhood change is also taking an interesting form in other ways at the street-level, not just with new businesses, new rents, and new neighbors, but with bike parking. From the City Room blog of the NYTimes:

In a city where gentrification debates usually involve real estate, the bike corral has emerged as a curious symbol, one that conjures feelings of displacement in some and empowerment in others…Roger Malcolm, who has lived in Crown Heights for 12 years and is also a cyclist, scoffs at the idea of locking either of his two bicycles at the corral. Mr. Malcolm believes the bike corral, while it is public property, sends an implicit signal that it is only for patrons of Little Zelda. It is an example, he said, of how newcomers are “changing the neighborhood.

I’m thinking of bringing this piece into my class because I think it helps to draw out the difference between the saliency of race as an identity that is tied to place and the troublesome nature of racism as an aspect of what creates strong community ties around race. I’m not only curious as to whether or not my students think that the RiSE campaign is tackling racism in an effective way but also if you can have both a campaign against racism (that effects where people live) and a campaign for a resistance to particular, racial and class, changes in neighborhoods, as some of the residents of Crown Heights are trying to mobilize around the potential removal of the bike corral.

There is just something so interesting to me about looking at these street markers next to each other: Markings of continuity and change in the big city – the more things change, the more they stay the same?

Little Zelda, photo: NYTimes

Racial Disparities in NYPD Stop and Frisk

Here’s the story: A jewelry maker has recently been acquiring illegal guns confiscated by the Newark Police Department – who amasses a ridiculous amount of guns and shell casings every year -melting them down, and transforming them in bangles (jewelry) complete with up to 8 diamonds infused into the metal, along with the word “Newark” imprinted on the bangle and the serial number of the gun the metal was melted down from. It is called the “Caliber Collection.” Portions of the proceeds from the bracelets – costing anywhere from $150-$1,275 – go to the Newark Gun Amnesty  and Buy-Back Program, operated by the city of Newark, that offers up $200 in exchange for illegal weapons. The jewelry sales enable the city to help get guns off the street by providing them with supplemental funding for appealing to illegal gun owners to get ride of their weapon, with the hope of eliminating the ‘senseless’ violence that is so often attributed to the nation’s third oldest city. “The result,” as the maker’s website states, ” is a series of pieces that embody the gun’s transformation from a destructive weapon to a powerful symbol of renewal.”

Steel Bangle with 1 Diamond, $350

To be sure, gun violence is a serious problem that threatens many lives in Newark as well as myriad other places around the world. Certainly raising money for the Gun Buy-Back program is a positive thing (although I cannot personally account for the relative long-term success or challenges of such a program). There are many civic, charitable, and non-profit programs working in Newark to combat gun violence, geared not only at getting guns off the streets, but providing education and public programming and activities that will attract the attention of predominately young Black men away from the streets. These organizations surely get their funding from a number of partner organizations at the local and national level as well as through their own marketing – often selling goods like clothing, accessories, music, art, etc. to raise money for their cause. It would seem that the “Caliber Collection” is working along the same lines with their idea. And it is certainly a good way of re-purposing such devices into less potentially fatal metallic forms (wonder where all the guns that get confiscated go anyway…back into the gun market? A holding cell at City Hall?).

Despite this I still pause. I hesitate to commend this effort on a number of levels that may or may not be fair to assert – but I will assert them here. The first is the transformation of Newark into an object, not only to be saved by those who would buy the bracelets, but also by the vary design: Is Newark’s gun violence an ornamental accoutrement? The inscription of the city and gun number on the band is meant to remind the bearer of the “transformed gun” of the efforts they (the consumer) are making to stop senseless gun violence in a place that is mostly likely somewhere they have passed by, as we all have, on the NJ Turnpike. I am sure that there are folks who own the bangles who do have a more regular relationship to the city, but the brand of feel-good liberalism that inscription and even the oval-shape of the bangles are meant to invoke make me think that the designer and purchasers of the bangles might not have spent enough time seriously contemplating all the various factors that contribute to creating an environment were so many illegal guns can be freely circulated and used fatally, nor the variety of approaches that many organizations (not only the Newark Police Department) are utilizing to address not only gun violence but the overall economic and social disinvestment that has plagued a city like Newark for close to four decades now. Can the struggles of a community or the friction of a fired gun be translated into a brass and diamond bracelet? As the designer notes:

The Caliber bracelet is shaped as an oval, not a circle. It’s shaped like the trigger cage of a gun, an area that, if you put your finger in and pull, could cause so much destruction. But in this case, when you buy a Caliber bracelet, you’re giving back to the gun buyback amnesty program…The side of the bangles and cuffs are hand-hammered, to show that it takes the hard work of members of a community in order to create the beautiful surface that you see on top of the bracelets.

The bracelets are packaged in a rendering of an evidence bag, [which] was this incredible visual for me—I never wanted to see a caliber bracelet packaged with pretty tissue paper and a bow. If you gave this bracelet as a gift, I wanted to make sure that the recipient understood the story of caliber and what it really represented. So on the front of our packaging, it talks about the meaning of the word caliber, and where the guns are from.

“Guns can now be used to make peace,” as the designer, quoting a customer, notes in a recent interview with Time Magazine. The seriousness should of course be conveyed, but I fail to see the difference between a “pretty bow” and 8 diamonds. Frills are frills.

This brings me around to the second reaction I had to this collection: Can illegality be remedied by aesthetics, by style and, if so, who can afford to transform a gun into a weapon of style, a symbol of piece? Much of my own discomfort with with program is accompanied by my general distaste for capitalist ventures, and particularly practices of consumption, that market the selling of products as a way to combat problems like cancer, gun violence, poverty in African. I am all for bringing whatever skills you have to a cause, because we are certainly in need of creative people who are willing to bring their experiences, insights, and love to places and people that have suffered from long-term neglect and invisibility from the majority of the nation, and Newark is unfortunately an example of this. I am all for raising money for good causes as well, but these are treacherous waters. While campaigns such as the Breast Cancer research funds “Pink” business represent quick ways of gathering a lot of cash for good causes, it seems to me that making progress takes a lot more than throwing money at temporary solutions. I’m sure the bracelet-gun buy-back approach will have an effect in Newark, but I wish it could be a little more discreet aesthetically – i.e. not advertising martyrdom for the inner-city – and perhaps also putting funds towards a variety of ventures in the city that approach gun violence from multiple angles. But then again, it might be just as important to call Newark by its name, and link the bracelets directly to the city’s cause.

I can’t help wondering if there is another way to raise money or to put one’s skills to work in transforming a community. I think about Glassroots in Newark, that works under the auspices of teaching youth (as well as the Newark community at large) the skills of glass-blowing and shaping – offering mentorship, after-school and summer programs, as well as a gallery where community members can come to purchase objects made by participants in the glass-blowing studios – with the belief that the experience of making objects and working with dangerous materials such as glass and fire will be more alluring that hanging out on the corner. Or I think about the BlackLight project or Sadie Nash, both programs near to my heart, who draw upon teaching artists and scholars to share their skills with youth in the Newark community with the intention of building a stronger city through sharing knowledge, creative/artistic skills, and leadership to young people, empowering them to critically and compassionately engage their communities and work for positive change. In terms of addressing gun violence specifically, Stop Shootin’ Inc. continues to be an exemplar of community outreach for the prevention of gun violence (founded by some of Newark’s very own).

From afar it might not be so easy to create something like a jewelry-making school or metal foundry in Newark – although the idea of setting up a shop where gunmetal is transformed into art or other infrastructural pieces sounds like it would appeal to many folks in Newark – so making bracelets might be the next best thing if you want to help raise money to support the city’s anti-violence programs. But does it have to come so heavy handed, and with diamonds to boot? There is nothing beautiful about gun violence, but that does not mean that re-purposing guns into something new cannot be an powerful way to engage in a conversation about what to do about eradicating gun violence. As a friend notes, “The fact that they are destroying actual weapons makes each piece seem much more significant than say, a Livestrong bracelet, etc. But do they need to be so expensive?,” to which another, metal-working/artist comrade replied, “I think it is a viable fundraising tool, I agree about the heightened significance of wearing a piece that was once a weapon. As for the cost, it is not a cheap or easy process to turn the metal from guns into metal for jewelry. The other perceivable advantage to the cost is that it makes raising a significant amount of money more of a reality.”

Must it call Newark by name and champion the cause of saving the city? Who can afford to combat gun violence in this way? Couldn’t they just write a check  for $1,275 directly to the Gun Buy-Back program? My intention is not to overly critical because Newark needs all the help it can get, but nevertheless there is something off-putting to me about the endeavor. I understand that these pieces may be incredibly valuable to people, perhaps those who have even had loved ones killed on the streets of Newark, however I wonder if there are better ways to address the issue of gun violence in such a way that does not make it commodified, branded, object of neoliberal pride in helping the inner-city. Nevertheless, the designer takes the issue of gun violence seriously. Here is one of their promotional videos, shot in the style of “The Wire.” What do you think?

Share this with the young ones in your life, and watch out for future episodes!

Kicking it with Ama-G the Black and SamiLOVE at Ibisumizi Records, Kigali, Rwanda. 

What do you call your style? 

A.G.: It’s Ama-G Style. Just

S.L.: And SamiLOVE style. You know.

Ha.  Okay. Tell me, where is your favorite place in Kigali to find clothes? The best place? 

A.G. : On de street.

S.L.: Safik Boutique

A.G.: Mm. Yeah. Safik Boutique. Uh huh.

Where is it? Here in Nyamirambo?

S.L.: Yeah.

What’s your favorite piece of clothing?

S.L.: These. This. Soft window (pointing to her tights).

A.G.: This (holding up his glasses).

All glasses, or those glasses? 

A.G: All. NO. This one. (He takes the glasses off his face, and replaces them with another, small wire pair.)

Haha okay. How many glasses do you have? 

A.G.: Many.

Who is your fashion icon? Best dressed?

A.G.: DMX.

DMX? Seriously? He’s always wearing black.

A.G.: DMX.

S.L.: And for me, Rihanna.

Okay. Thanks!

A.G.: Sawa

More Ama-G Swag HERE

In my recent adventures about New York with a collaborator from omnivorous geographies, we decided to take in the new film by Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing, “Detropia.”

The first thing that struck us – as several reviewers have mentioned – is the beauty of the film. Images of Detroit as well as other US cities we consider ‘fallen’ to the ills of de-industrialization and the numerous social and economic dis-investments that come along with it, tend to always be striking: Emanating some form of beauty out of the ruins that is profoundly intimate, especially for Americans, yet cold and distant. The landscape is uncannily stirring because it feels so perfectly unreal while horribly familiar and mundane. The filmmakers work in this tradition while giving the motor city their own aesthetic: Deeply saturated hues of orange, yellow, and blue light linger on the screen just long enough to draw you in, but not exhaust your attention. There is something about the richness of the film’s scenic shots that transports you into the empty lots, freeway exchanges, and deteriorating buildings. The city pulls you in and expands around you, radiating its rather uneasy atmosphere.

We felt as if we were watching a painting but instead of standing in a room full of tourists, school kids, and docents on tour, we were lucky enough to see the film at the IFC, sitting in a small theater on what was more or less a leather love seat. A setting that is impeccably conducive to the atmosphere of this film.

I begin with the look and feel of the film because this is the bulk of its narrative structure. One of the most interesting things about this film is it silence: long-shots of the city, the stories of a few Detroiters the filmmakers followed, and a small collection of one to two-sentence factoids about the city’s history (historic decline). That is all. The film is moved by image and people, not by the artists or overly-didactic statistics about urban decline and decay. In this sense, Detroit ceases to be a trope of itself or fodder for the ‘creative class’ that seek to capitalize on the city’s hard times by piloting a project for turning the city into a zombie amusement park. Instead it urban tapestry, woven by image, personal saga, and operatic sound – another narrative subplot of the film – that sounds this city upon you.

“Detropia” is sincere in form and content. Tracking the stalwart pluck, love, disillusionment, and imaginings of several Detroiters – a union president, a teacher/blues bar owner, an urban blogger – refusing to settle upon a simple agenda of hope and despair but, in exchange, enters into the worlds of those that move through the city, remembering the good old days of ample factory work and union wages, thriving neighborhood life with people and music pouring out onto the streets, and musing about the city that used to be through the rummage of decaying urban architecture. We see through these characters how relationships to place forged through boom and bust times are never straightforward or easy to understand, but a complex intermingling of memory, economic struggle, and dreaming. Several of the main characters struggle themselves as amateur economists and social theorists in coming up with stories that will enable them to explain what they see around them and keep living in a city that feels like all but a memory haunting the future of Detroit. The filmmakers follow these Detroiters, letting them narrate, philosophize, and sigh, as viewers do, as they move simultaneously through a city they imagine and remember, and a reality that stubbornly refuses to match.

The film offers little comment on race, which I found  strange at first, considering that it is very difficult to tell the story of a city like Detroit solely through the perspective of economic boom and decline without mentioning how much the history of race in America intersects the story of de-industrialization and economic decline in cities like Detroit. But perhaps that is not on the minds of Detroiters in 2012, or at least the ones the filmmakers decided to engage. If the film is about the struggles of the middle class in Detroit, it seems to be a story told by mostly middle-aged men of color, with the occasional nod to working-class white men and, of course, the films’ young female urban archeologist and imaginative force, Chrystal. With no heavy-handed criticism – for the film is innovative and provocative on a number of levels, as I have indicated – I am a little dubious about the fact that economic decline is depicted in such particular terms: I’m left wondering about families at home and the other outlets and phenomenon that make a city run, that make its residents feel at home and alive in their city. This is much to ask of a feature-length film, and I’m not so much asking for it as much as I am noting these absences. My fear is that somehow audiences might take away that Detroit’s decline is the sole result of foreign outsourcing of jobs or the 2008 economic recession, and that would be just too simple of an explanation.

This is a film worth watching on the big screen and thinking about. It will make you want to go to Detroit. It might even make you go through your old record collection and give those old Motown tracks a good listen and begin to imagine the place that used to be. I would not be so bold as to assert, as one of the main Detoriters in the film does, that this is the direction America is heading in and that your city might be next, but it seems important to take the time to consider, as this film does, what might compel a Detroiter to deliver such a message to the rest of us.

I could have cried.

This is the same answer I have gotten from every Rwandan I have asked about music in Rwanda. In all three languages, I’ve been shut down. Whether I am asking where I can go in the city to see live music, or am asking someone if they personally know any popular or traditional Rwandan songs, I am turned away. “We don’t really have music in Rwanda, not really,” they all tell me. “You should go to Congo.”

Yet this is clearly not the case. The Rwandans are not the only people in human history to develop an entire culture and build a lasting civilization that includes no melodies or rhythms. And in pieces, in the madding moments where I am teased by a hum or a whisper that I cannot isolate or identify, I hear it. Eddie singing in the kitchen. The lilting voice of the teacher asking her students to stand in a line. In a pulsing coming from a house down the hill. In the wistful humming of a woman sitting in from of me on the bus. I have been chasing these leads, grasping hauntings and puffs of air. Nothing! I’ve got nothing. I’ve only been at it for 3 days, but already I’m worn.

I doubt I can articulate how consuming of experience it is to know that you cannot reach the information that is hiding right before your eyes until you figure out how to ask the right question. Knowing that your own alien and ignorant nature is preventing you from making a vitally human connection, and everything you reach for is withdrawn, at the moment of encounter, behind a veil of mist.

The hills in Kigali are misty in the mornings. The sun rises almost instantly. The night comes early. The moon has been full and bright since I arrived. There is a ring of blue light, around.

Zürich is a dreamy city, and also the most expensive place I have ever been. It made me long for the $8 beers in New York City. Not unlike New York City you situate yourself in Zurich in relation to two rivers that border the city center on the East (Limmat) and the West (Sihl). The transit system however, puts NYC to shame, and includes luxurious feeling river ferries that stop at various points along the east and west banks of the Limmat.

Across the Sihl, above the train tracks, is the neighborhood known as West Zurich. After growing tired of the flashy boulevard lined with Loius Vuitton and Burberry facades, I wandered that way along the river bank. After crossing the river, I first went the “wrong way”. This means you walk along a simple, quiet street that could be anywhere New Jersey. The antiquitous daunting  stone gives way to simple wood frame apartment buildings, gas stations, and empty lots. I stopped to watch a young man spray painting “Über Gang Club – Coming Soon” in neon orange  on the side of a wall. I asked him where I could sit and have a beer, and he said, confusingly, that he didn’t know. With that, I turned around and hopped a ubiquitous tram heading the other way.

Great luck and destiny brought me to a street corner that looked a lot more Williamsburg, and a lot less Newark, where I was drawn by nostalgia and already emerging lust for Americana to a purple neon-lit bar called “Chicago-Bar”. As I approached the doorway, I was discouraged by the lone, lonely looking man sitting at the bar and instead ducked into the tiny room behind it.

Chrigi’s Bar to save the day. 

The bartender/owner/host, Chrigi is a charmingly charismatic man with mischievous eyes. I joined the only other patron on the stools, pointed to the tap, and asked what it was. “Beer,” he said with a grin. Fair enough. I had a few “small” ones, as well as a couple delightful “house shots” that Chrigi served with great flair and hospitality. His drink menu is organized by human capacity, from the first page “drink this and drive home”, to the middle, “drink this and call a cab”, to the last page with a sentiment something like “drink this and you will die”.

Chrigi opened his bar 10 years ago, as commemorated by the assortment of international $10 notes taped to his ceiling, signed by adoring patrons. His family owns the bar, as well as the Chicago-Bar I narrowly missed and the 22 apartment units above. The rent in those apartments averages about 1000FR/ month, which I’m told is a very low rate for Zurich.

“It’s not a great area,” the Swiss gentlemen Matthias & Jan who sat beside me said. “Here, in Switzerland we would say these people are very low, very poor…Still,” Matthias qualified, “it is not like the US. Maybe there, you would not say that they are poor. But to us, yes.”

A handful of men and women came in and out of the bar, and Chrigi greeted each of them as friends. A woman left her drink at the bar, and Chrigi put it in the fridge for her inevitable return. Some sat alone, others with friends, but everyone, truly everyone, came to talk to Chrigi. He laughed, made shots, told jokes, and kept the music going on his electronic jukebox. I was at home almost instantly.

I asked Matthias to help me ask Chrigi a few questions about the place. He agreed, but when I asked the first question, “What is your favorite thing about the neighborhood?,” Matthias paused. “That is a very difficult question you are asking,” he said with narrowed eyes. “I don’t know what he can say. Here, people mostly stay where they are from. You don’t often get away from where you live. But I’ll try…” he said, and waved down Chrigi to translate my ignorant question into something that might make sense. Chrigi’s response?

“The chief surgeon, he is always coming here. He keeps coming back”.

I think this answers the question I meant to ask. If I make it back to Zürich one day, I will certainly go back to Chrigi’s Bar for the trademark hospitality, good feelings, and good friends that make this place feel like the place to be.