The Scorched Earth, and notes by way of a dérive (drifting)

Stepping toward the canvases in Los Angeles-born artist Mark Bradford’s exhibit, Scorched Earth, one immediately notes the resemblance between assemblages of apparently "burnt," cut-up, and layered pieces of drywall, canvas and glue, with utopian visions of modernist planning (see image below). In Lights and Tunnels, for instance, a central point radiates outward, transected by linear demarcations of functional zones (and/or major traffic arteries) along with what looks like a waterway. However, closer proximity of the viewer to the pieces underscores the multi-dimensional and layered production of urban space (Lefebvre 1991), peeling corners of adhered media are like little windows into the layers of the sprawling city (bringing to mind comments made by Justin in our seminar, and metaphors of the city as "patchwork" brought up by Nasim). At about this moment, the charred layers (actually produced by chemical reaction in the adhering process) and the fleshy red color of some of the layers open to a tactile sensation in what Merleau-Ponty (1968) described as an intertwining, a chiasmus, or "crossing-over", senses of phenomenological estrangement encountered through transference of the body between subject and object; embodied dimensions of structural violence and racism concretized through the postwar period of urban "restructuring" (in Bradford's experience, in Los Angeles), that erupted in the riots of 1992 are powerfully represented through a repurposing of the infrastructural medium of postwar construction (drywall), not unlike the material agency of "project heat", leaky pipes, and itinerant handrails to vibrantly evoke "contagious" sensations of sympathy (Fennell 2015). However, Bradford seems (like Fennell) to be skeptical of the agency of materiality to facilitate on its own more egalitarian and just urban publics, instead opting to integrate the "contagious" or "intertwining" agencies of repurposed matter as art within interdependent relationships of care designed "to create an educational platform that supports the acquisition of practical skills for foster youth and stresses the cultural importance of art within a larger social context" in South Central Los Angeles (http://artandpractice.org/about/).               

Mark Bradford (2015) Lights and Tunnels 
Mixed Media on Canvas, 84 X 108 inches, photo by Joshua White
Screen capture by author http://hammer.ucla.edu/exhibitions/2015/mark-bradford-scorched-earth/

Bradford's bio at the Hammer Museum website cites influence from psychogeography, the urban geography movement associated with the Situationists of Paris, culminating in the student revolution of 1968 (with articulations with other revolutions, including the civil rights movement in the U.S.) (Harvey 2013). Psychogeography calls for a re-orientation toward chance encounters with the built environment, toward moments of surprise and re-enchantment, when tilted visions allow us to engage urban landscapes anew, to shift our perspective in relation to an overdetermined ambiance, to recognize the potential that resides dormant beneath the thickened crust of capitalist modernity. Guy Debord's concept of dérive (French, drift) invites us to chart an alternate mapping of the city derived entirely from aimless drifting. For Debord, the practice of dériving is fecund with potential to transform all of urban life into “an exciting game”, calling to mind Catherine Fennell’s (2015) invocation of Simmel’s emphasis on “play” in sociability, an insight further underscored by a recently released smartphone dérive app that “guides” you through “random” interactions designed to invite you "get lost in familiar places" (http://www.brokencitylab.org/drift/). It might be worth considering such apps in contrast to navigation apps designed to help you avoid areas of major cities most deeply effected by disinvestment. 

Mark Bradford (2015) Sample 1
Mixed media on canvas, 62 X 48 inches, Photo by Author
Hopefully this image captures better the multiple layers
and scorching (most clearly visible on Hammer museum website)  

Thinking of methodology, I am wondering what insight might be lent to an ethnography of urban publics (specifically in my case, hybrid physical-virtual publics mediated across data-sharing platforms) by dérive. After all, aren’t the most memorable ethnographic vignettes comprised of chance encounters (like the kind imagined by New Urbanists to configure the lines of a new, interdependent “investment” in each other via self-management through (planned) chance interaction vis-à-vis the built environment)?

I imagine Catherine Fennell skeptically interjecting at precisely this methodological intersection. Rather, relationships with friends and interlocutors in the field, as she shows, require deliberate planning and continual care. As she brilliantly sketches, ostensibly idiosyncratic engagements vis-à-vis infrastructure, rather than reconfiguring the built environment within Chicago’s south side as an egalitarian public, are ironically recirculated within asymmetric relations of power (i.e. re-constituted as “sympathetic” publics reliant on racialized narratives of insufficient “self-actualization”). As she puts it, interactions with “haywire infrastructures” produce “haywire bodies.” I thought that this portion of the text could have benefitted from a more thorough unpacking, perhaps more consciously leveraging what I think is at the same time, the most important insight and most sordid history of (American) anthropology; systematically contributing to the construction, and then dismantling of scientific categories of race. That said, I thought her ethnographic representation compellingly mediated between the ways in which infrastructures decayed in response to welfare retrenchment and neoliberal restructuring such that their material agency became enfolded within an ostensibly post-racial assemblage of sympathy, how collective publics form around “causes” that emerge in the vacuums left by retrenchment, and how these publics compare and contrast with the “ambiances” materialized around Fordist-Keynesian infrastructures of indiscriminate provision and collective “comfort” (if only to make redlining and other technics of racial marginalization across the city more politically palatable).

References and Sites

http://hammer.ucla.edu/exhibitions/2015/mark-bradford-scorched-earth/
http://artandpractice.org/about/
http://www.brokencitylab.org/drift/

Fennell, Catherine. 2015. Last Project Standing: Civics and Sympathy in Post-Welfare Chicago. A Quadrant Book. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Guy Debord. 1955. "Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography" Les Lèvres Nues #6, Translated by Ken Knabb http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/presitu/geography.html

Harvey, David. 2013. Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. Paperback ed. London: Verso.

Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Vol. 142. Oxford Blackwell.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible: Followed by Working Notes. Northwestern University Press. http://timothyquigley.net/cont/mp-chiasm.pdf