Assemblage

“A new form will always seem more or less an absence of any form at all, since it is unconsciously judged by reference to the consecrated forms.”

Alain Robbe-Grillet 

The scream of terror, of pain, of death, still fills my ears as I contemplate the heap of crumpled bedclothes spread like so many rags on the floor, an improvised altar whose folds are gradually dyed a brilliant red, in a stain with distinct edges which, starting from the center, rapidly covers the entire area.

The fire on the contrary, once the match has grazed a shred of lace soaked in gasoline, spreads through the whole mass all at once, immediately doing away with the lacerated victim who is still stirring faintly, the heap of linen used in the sacrifice, the hunting knife, the whole room from which I have just had time to make my escape.

When I get to the middle of the corridor, I realize that the fire is already roaring in the elevator shaft, from top to bottom of the building, where I have lin­gered too long. Luckily there remained the fire es­capes, zigzagging down the façade. Reversing my steps, then, I hurry toward the French window at the other end. It is locked. No matter how hard I press the catch in every direction, I cannot manage to release it. The bitter smoke fills my lungs and blinds me. With a sharp kick, aimed at the bottom of the window, I send the flat of my sole through four panes and their wooden frames. The broken glass tinkles shrilly as it falls out onto the iron platform. At the same time, reaching me along with the fresh air from outside and drowning out the roar of the flames, I hear the clamor of the crowd which has gathered in the street below.  

I slip through the opening and I begin climbing down the iron steps. On all sides, at each floor, other panes are exploding because of the heat of the confla­gration. Their tinkling sound, continuously amplified, accompanies me in my descent. I take the steps two at a time, three at a time.  

Occasionally I stop a second to lean over the railing: it seems to me that the crowd at my feet is increasingly far away; I no longer even distinguish from each other the tiny heads raised toward me; soon there re­mains no more than a slightly blacker area in the gathering twilight, an area which is perhaps merely a reflection on the sidewalk gleaming after the recent shower. The shouts from a moment ago already constitute no more than a vague rustle which melts into the murmur of the city. And the warning siren of a distant fire engine, repeating its two plaintive notes, has something reassuring about it, something peace­ful, something ordinary.  

I close the French window, whose catch needs to be oiled. Now there is complete silence. Slowly I turn around to face Laura, who has remained a few feet behind me, in the passageway. “No,” I say, “no one’s there".

Suburban Salvation

"Where has God gone?" he cried. "I shall tell you. We have killed him - you and I. We are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained the earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not perpetually falling? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is it not more and more night coming on all the time? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God's decomposition? Gods too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? With what water could we purify ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we need to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we not ourselves become gods simply to be worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whosoever shall be born after us - for the sake of this deed he shall be part of a higher history than all history hitherto."

Here the madman fell silent and again regarded his listeners; and they too were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern to the ground, and it broke and went out. "I have come too early," he said then; "my time has not come yet. The tremendous event is still on its way, still travelling - it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time, the light of the stars requires time, deeds require time even after they are done, before they can be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the distant stars - and yet they have done it themselves."

Friederich Nieztsche 

When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.

Umberto Eco

The Men That Do Evel

“I thought I was bulletproof or Superman there for a while. I thought I'd never run out of nerve. Never.”

- Evel Knievel

There have always been items, markets and professions that rapidly bubbled in prominence, only to crash suddenly. This process has accelerated in the neoliberal age. Obviously, domesticated technologies have played a big part. Where once film-making took years of industrial apprenticeship to master, it's now available for anyone accessing relatively cheap software and rudimentary training (itself subject to obsolescence). The 80s promised cutting-edge success to those mastering computers, when for most of us it's largely a soul-destroying, minimum-wage wing of the service economy. The glut of 'food porn' and the financial crash will doubtlessly devalue the status of 00s chefs. Over-saturation, or the realization that it ain't so hard (hello DJs!), can rapidly shrink inflated egos (and incomes) of supposed professionals. Platforms such as this blog demonstrate how audiences don't necessarily result in market value. The death of the music press is proof enough of this. Our economy demands that today's Hot Item is tomorrow's scrapheap. If lucky, obsolescence retires into nostalgia, hoping its fickle middle-aged grandchildren will visit soon to play.

Until the early 80s, one highly romanticized profession was the stuntman. Although a far more lethal job in silent days, TV shows such as The Fall Guy or films like Hooper (1978) and The Stunt Man (1980) gave the stuntman an aura of mystique and value. From crime-fighting hijinks to existential questions about fate, the stuntman was sold as a figure on the edge of danger and mortality. Former stuntman Burt Reynolds was an apt superstar for the decade in which 'macho' became a mainstream word. This was also reflected in the 70s fetish for car chases, from most of Reynolds' films and extending to musicals and comedies like Grease (1978) and The Blues Brothers (1980). Any number of innocent fruit and veg stalls or chicken coops were destroyed in the name of transient sensation. In the face of widespread uncertainty about who was in charge, these films reassured audiences they could at least steer their wheels in any direction. In the Carter years, this fetish became so chronic that whole films could be built around 'characters' simply known as The Driver (1978) and The Car (1977). Stuntmen gained such prominence in the 70s Spectacle that they could dispense with narrative altogether, staging summer blockbusters of the stunt itself.

It wasn't just the car with which heroes battled physics, nature and boredom. Evel Knievel (born Robert Cray Knievel) was very much a son of the soil with his mining, hunting and fishing skills. He was also something of a juvenile delinquent. His early love of motorcycles led to several scrapes with the law and prison spells. Despite proficiency in several sports - and continued involvement in illegal activity -  he ended up working as an insurance salesman to support his family. Indignant at inadequate rewards for his considerable salesmanship, he went into business selling Honda bikes. Facing assumptions of Japanese technical inferiority and lingering WW2 prejudices, he soon went under. In need of income, his last resort was that most durable of American industries: showbusiness. His sales acumen and sporting prowess led to a series of publicity stunts, and with that growing media attention. Despite slippery maneuvres in gaining that attention (like posing as CEO of a fake corporation to gain access to Vegas bigwigs), he prided himself on being "a man of my word", proceeding with ill-advised stunts to satisfy his own hype. With emerging superstardom and 'role model' status, he even delivered on obligatory anti-drug moralising. He famously rumbled - and won - against Hell's Angels he'd publicly criticised (with his fans joining the fray). This became the basis for one of several movies, this time featuring himself as the action hero.

By mid-decade, stunt publicity stunts were all the rage - from skyscraper high-wire acts to the mysterious Human Fly ("the real-life superhero!"). Although not new to the 70s, stuntmen such as Knievel held a curious mass appeal at the time. His international fame was perhaps due to a lack of 'acceptable' male role models, rather than skill or showmanship. With war less fashionable, sport a site of political antagonism, the increasingly dark motifs of rock'n'roll, and the various excesses or anxieties of New Hollywood, Knievel found a lucratively inflated niche; not least as 'family entertainment' in the growing theme park market. Despite his many injuries, he was at some remove from the bland Nixonian personas of astronauts, the grand guignol of rock stars like Alice Cooper, the controversy of recent wars, or the political potency of a Muhammed Ali. The wide range of toys and tat licensed in his image were testament to a more wholesome idea of masculine risk-taking. Unlike today's wrestlers or 'extreme' sports stars, he was very much in charge of his own business affairs, and actually put his life on the line to entertain. If the 70s saw a crisis in traditional power relations, stuntmen offered a relatively authentic model of 'traditional' masculinity. However, as the gimmicks and vehicles grew more elaborate, Knievel wasn't immune to (literally) jumping the shark. His role in the Spectacle would have a limited shelf-life, and bankruptcy beckoned.

The 70s wasn't short of idolised supermen in decline (or the grave) for the next decade. From John Wayne's mythologised cancer in The Shootist (1976), to Bruce Lee's sudden death, to Muhammed Ali's tragic final bout, to the bloated corpse of Elvis Presley, this twilight of masculine idols was an almost ritualistic process. Not so much reacting to feminism, as vainly preserving an outmoded ideal, male figures recently sold as intimidatingly potent exited from the Spectacle in quick succession. Hubristic icons all, they sunk into a canyon as deep and ancient as the site of Knievel's most spectacular stunt. His malfunctioning rockets were as indicative of changing mores as widespread fatigue with the Space Program. George Lucas and Steven Spielberg offered safer light and magic, convincing us a man could fly - leading the way for video games, CGI and virtual stuntmen. As with manufacturing, stunt cinema would become a growth industry for the far east. In the west, 'hands-on' tasks became increasingly passe. Industry was for losers and sentimentalists. The new tough guy would swing it about on Wall Street; machismo caricatured on the cock-veined biceps of Stallone, Schwarznegger and their Aryan clones, lacking any of Burt Reynolds' humour. Unlike earlier figures, the spectacular male body was to be shielded from broken bones, obesity or sudden death. In denial of the boom in steroids, the New Man was expected to die hard.

Knievel would be regarded as something of a joke in the following decade, a fragile relic of 70s kitsch. The new consensus required illusions of non-stop victory, even if it was with tongue in cheek. Mike Tyson could rebrand his failures into the tribulations of an ex-con badass. Rocky and Indy would fight their paunch into the next century. The King of Rock'n'Roll was replaced by a King of Pop endlessly reconstructing his own head. Even the new president survived a bullet with a smirk, after stiffing Mr. Peanut at the polls. The un-greying Reagan represented 'old values', but unlike his predecessors he was no war veteran. Despite the gung-ho rhetoric, his success owed more to the petty banality of taxes, interest rates and quarterly profit margins. For all its horrors, it was conservative aggression with a small 'c'. Apart maybe from media management (the most elaborate stunt of the 80s), the old men of the New Right largely avoided innovation or danger. Its enemies were the weak, poor and dispossessed; its imagination venturing no further than the 19th century. The values of that period could be revived as easily as its industries could be disposed of. Exploration was reserved for abstract finance - the new frontier without a map. The neoliberal Spectacle doesn't encourage progress or risk so much as perpetual downsizing, reshuffling, merging and rebranding; forever jiggling its jewels towards shallower pockets. Stunts have been outsourced to game show amateurs, and the only astronaut most of us recognise is Buzz Lightyear. The cultural logic of post-modernism consoled its audience with a final resting place for deflated, spent conviction: parody.

Everything Falls Apart, Pt. 2

A Sum of Possibilites: Gordon Matta-Clark and the Urban Landscape


When the artist Gordon Matta-Clark moved to New York City in 1969, the city as a whole wasn't in the best of economic shape. Declines in post-War manufacturing and shifts in the labor market, loss of jobs, economic stagnation, flight to the suburbs and a shrinking tax base, municipal mismanagement -- all of the problems that were affecting a number of major American cities were beginning to take a severe toll on the city of New York. Nevertheless, artists of every stripe continued to move into Manhattan -- visual artists, writers, and musicians who would play an instrumental role in shaping the City's cultural landscape over the next decade or so. With the real estate market in an extended freefall, many of them had no problems finding cheap and available places to live and work.

Such was the case with the neighborhood of the SoHo (then called the South Houston Industrial Area), a former sweatshop district where obsolete and derelict property was plentiful. Since the late 1950s, scores of artists had settled into the neighborhood, the property owners often letting many of them live there in an off-the-books capacity. This situation allowed Matta-Clark and his peers a number of unusual opportunities, the means of establishing and developing their own interconnected and mutually supportive cultural community. The anarchically-run co-op exhibition space at 112 Greene Street, which allowed artists to stage their own exhibits and performances, was one such example. Another communal anchor was the artist-run restaurant FOOD, which Matta-Clark -- along with his partner Caroline Goodden and several of their friends -- opened in 1971.



L-R: Tina Girouard, Caroline Goodden, and Gordon Matta-Clark 
in 1971, at the storefront that would soon become FOOD.

For Gordon Matta-Clark, making art was a fairly recent pursuit. He’d spent much of the 1960s unenthusiastically earning a degree in architecture at Cornell University. His grades throughout had been consistently poor, perhaps owing to the fact that in the course of this studies he discovered his own deep antipathy for the Modernist tenets of architecture and city planning that his professors adhered to as gospel. Only so much sterile formalism and blindly reckless idealism, Matta-Clark had reckoned. If there was any single experience that proved instructive and inspirational to him during his time at Cornell, it was when he met and spoke with the visiting artist Robert Smithson in early 1969 -- just one year before the latter would create his ambitious Spiral Jetty earthwork on the Great Salt Lake in Utah.




Robert Smithson was a voracious reader across a baffling broad array of disciplines and interests, not the least of which were geology and science fiction. He held a perverse aesthetic fascination for the vagaries of accelerated urban sprawl -- with terrain vague and rough-edged "non-place urban realms" where hapless juxtaposition of prefab modern civilization and the natural landscape resulted in curious new forms of desolation, upheaval, and disfiguration. ("Ruins in reverse," he'd called the suburban developments of his own native New Jersey.) A central idea for Smithson in the course of his own work and theorizing was that of entropy – the second law of thermodynamics that decreed that all entities and systems inevitably gave way to degeneration, decay, and disorder. As in nature, so too with man-made systems. Speaking in a 1973 interview, Smithson explained:

"...It seems that architects build in an isolated, self-contained, ahistorical way. They never seem to allow for any kind of relationships outside of their grand plan. And this seems to be true in economics, too. Economics seem to be isolated and self-contained and conceived of as cycles, so as to exclude the whole entropic process. There's every little consideration of natural resources in terms of what the landscape will look like after the mining operations or farming operations are completed. So that a kind of blindness ensues. ... And then suddenly they find themselves within a range of desolation and wonder how they got there."

His own art, he asserted, was the product of his own efforts at creating "a dialectics of entropic change." In many ways, his ideas coincided with a larger aesthetic shift that was transpiring in the late 1960s and early ‘70s -- new artistic practices and strategies in which artists favored Bataille over Kant, contingency over autonomy, the temporal and indeterminate over the transcendent. Instead of formalism, formlessness; instead of purity, dissipation.

It was Smithson's ideas on entropy and site-specific art that fascinated Matta-Clark when the two conversed in 1969, and it was those ideas that played an instrumental part in the latter's development as an artist. But whereas Smithson was interested in creating "new monuments" in the open expanses of the American landscape, Matta-Clark's prior education steered him in the direction of the nation's urban centers -- to the physical environment of the city itself.

Having grown up in New York City, Matta-Clark returned after an extended absence to find the city in the throes of decline. Speaking in a later interview, he recalled of his youth in Robert Moses’s Manhattan:

"As the City evolved in the Fifties and Sixties into a completely architectured International Style steel and concrete megalopolis. By contrast, great areas of what had been residential [space] were being abandoned. These areas were being left as demoralizing reminders of 'Exploit It or Leave It.' It is the prevalence of this wasteland phenomena that drew me to it."

As an artist Gordon Matta-Clark quickly gravitated to the idea of making art works that were connected to (and more often, arose from) urban topology, mutable space, communal life and cultural memory, property, the disconnect between architectural form and architecture as surplus commodity, as well as the varied economies of expansion and waste that existed in the urban landscape.





Top: Gordon Matta-Clark, "Pig Roast," at the Brooklyn Bridge Event, 1971
Gordon Matta-Clark, photo from Walls Paper series, c. 1972

In 1972 he began to set out to the city's blighted neighborhoods, seeking out the blocks of condemned and abandoned buildings. Sneaking into these buildings with saws and chisels and blowtorch, he made a series of precise and scattered incisions -- carving them up, rearticulating the architectural spaces, exposing their structural and material components. His friend and fellow artist Ned Smyth accompanied him on many of these excursions, helping lug tools and equipment and keeping an eye out for the police. As Smyth described it years later:

"We would break into abandoned buildings in the South Bronx and cut large, geometrically shaped pieces out of walls and floors, opening up the spaces. ...This was always scary, with blocks and blocks of empty, boarded-up buildings, haunted by junkies who would steal copper wire and pipe to sell as scrap to get money for drugs. ...We would haul all his saws and other tools, including a power generator, up into these building shells. Sometimes the apartments looked as if the occupants had simply walked out on their lives, leaving their furniture just as it was, their clothes hanging on hooks behind the doors."

Many of these early "cuttings" were done without permission and amounted to criminal trespassing. As early as 1970 Matta-Clark had drafted a proposal for such work and had been sending it out to various organizations and public officials, presenting himself as an artist who aimed to "make sculpture using the natural [sic] by-products of the land and people."





Top: Conical Intersect (Paris,1975) artist's execution & schematic.
Bottom: Conical Intersect, and Office Baroque (Antwerp, 1977)

Within a few years, however, Matta-Clark would gain permission to realize some of his projects, and during the years of 1972 to 1978 executed a number of site-specific dissections in several cities -- in  locations around New York and New Jersey, as well as in Genoa, Chicago, and Antwerp. Utilizing buildings that had been condemned or slated for demolition, the works were intended to exist for a brief period of time, fated -- like the structures themselves -- for a temporary existence.

On a symbolic or theoretical level, Gordon Matta-Clark's engagement with the discarded architecture of the contemporary city comprised a form of “urban reclamation.”⁵ As such, one might read it an inquest into the dialectical gaps between (use-)value and obsolescence, surplus and salvage; of architectural space as mere material and property and its role in framing or containing and channeling the intricacies of human activity, interaction, and experience -- cycles of births and deaths, moments of private joys or shared sorrows, of everyday life -- that transpired or are carried out within the spatial boundaries of a brute physical environment. In the end, it operated as an inquiry into the production of social space --- as it was perceived, conceived, and lived.⁶

Initially, Gordon Matta-Clark's proposal letters met with little response. He'd continue to send them out over the years. When he approached real estate developer Melvyn Kaufman in 1975, seeking to "collaborate" on a series of projects, Kaufman sniffingly responded:

"Someone said that dying gracefully is an art. Perhaps it is. But I do not like funerals, either as sad occasions or celebrations. I believe in the great demise but I believe in life more, and I resent the infringement of death processes prolonged as a devitalization of the living."

The castigating tone is amusing, as it seems Kaufman considered Matta-Clark's request as being part of a cynical and reprehensibly exploitative enterprise, accusing him of something akin to "playing in (or with) the ruins" of an ailing metropolis. Given the conditions at the time, one can imagine the reasons for Kaufman's consternation. After all, it was hardly an ideal time to be a real estate developer in NYC -- what, especially seeing how 1975 was also the year of the fed's famous "drop dead" decree. Hence Kaufman's pilings-on of funereal analogies. Morbid metaphors for a morbid and entropic time.

Neither Robert Smithson nor Gordon Matta-Clark would live to see the end of the decade. Smithson would die in a helicopter crash in 1973 while surveying the location for his next major project; and Matta-Clark died in 1978 of pancreatic cancer, at the age of 35, scarcely six years after he had begun his series of urban "cuttings" and fully embarked on his work as an artist. By that point, SoHo was already well on its way to becoming a different place than the one Matta-Clark and his friends had known and inhabited. New businesses would begin to move in, and shortly the neighborhood would start to "turn around." And in the decade that followed, it would become a cultural hub -- sweeping with restaurants and boutiques and a number of high-end art galleries that would all help fuel the moneyed-up, inflated art boom of the 1980s.



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5. This idea of urban reclamation more or less falls into step with certain claims that have been made about graffiti -- that graffiti in the act of marking, tagging, and bombing constitutes a recuperative gesture against an alienating and anonymous environment. By some accounts, this sort of connection wasn't lost on Gordon Matta-Clark. He was enthralled by the tags and murals that he saw proliferating throughout New York City in the early 1970s. At one point in 1973, he drove his truck to a street festival in the South Bronx and invited residents to decorate the vehicle with spray paint as they saw fit. He later cut up the truck's body with a blowtorch, and exhibited select segments at a group exhibition. In the same year, he would also document murals on the city’s subway trains for a series of works called Photoglyphs.

6. In the two decades that followed his death, Matta-Clark's work received only fleeting and limited attention among art critics and historians. He did, however, become something of a mythic figure in architectural circles, where his work was viewed as an act of "deconstructing" architecture -- as a wholly aesthetic exercise. In more recent years, that narrow reading of Matta-Clark's work has been challenged by overdue accounts from art-historical quarters, with a number of critics pointing out the social ideas that fueled much of the artist's work.

Everything Falls Apart, Pt. 1

Certainly the End of Something or Other, It Seemed

"Do you think a city can control the way people live inside it? I mean, just the geography, the way the streets are laid out, the way the buildings are placed?"
"Of course it does," she said. […]
"Yeah...But thinking that live streets and windows are plotting and conniving to make you into something you're not, that's crazy, isn't it?"
"Yes," she said, "that's crazy--in a word."

- Samuel R. Delaney, Dhalgren

“Architects tend to be idealists and not dialecticians.”

- Robert Smithson

In 1975, science fiction author Samuel R. Delaney published his eleventh novel, Dhalgren. Weighing in at 800-plus pages, knottily metafictional, equally praised and reviled by readers and critics alike, Dhalgren would prompt comparison to another similar novel that had appeared only two years previously -- Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Commenting in an interview years later, Delaney countered, "Gravity's Rainbow is a fantasy about a war that most of its readers don't really remember, whereas Dhalgren is a fairly pointed dialogue with all the depressed and burned-out areas of America's great cities. ...To decide if Gravity's Rainbow is relevant, you have to spend time in a library. ...To see what Dhalgren is about, you only have to walk along a mile of your own town's inner city."¹

In many respects, Dhalgren was very much a product of its time. The setting of Dhalgren involves a city -- a fictional city called Bellona that lay somewhere in the American Midwest, a city that has been cut off from the rest of the country by some mysterious and unexplained rupture in the space-time continuum. Post-apocalyptic, ethnically diverse, gang-infested, and pornographically rife with all nature of pan-sexual couplings, Bellona embodied the cultural phobias that many Americans held about the nation's metropolitan centers at the time -- represented many of the reasons that the white middle classes had fled in ever-increasing numbers to outlying suburbs over the two preceding decades. It was the sort of setting that would appear again and again in the years that followed, often in films of the "urban exploitation" nature; films like John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 and Escape from New York, The Warriors, Fort Apache: The Bronx.² If this setting would had become a predictable cliché by decade’s end, it was a cliché that hinged on an underlying Hobbesian-Darwinistic dread that much of America had about the fate of its urban centers. As Richard Nixon had reputedly mused to his aides at some point in 1972, "Maybe New York shouldn’t survive. Maybe it should go through a cycle of destruction."





Another artifact of the era was the 1979 documentary 80 Blocks from Tiffany’s. Focusing on life among black and Puerto Rican gangs of the South Bronx, the film graphically illustrated the advanced urban decay and socio-economic breakdown that afflicted the South Bronx in the late 1960s and the 1970s. The film's very title is curiously awash in ironic implications. Firstly, in its highlighting of distance and economic disparities, but second in the way these disparities invoked a specter that haunted the history of modern urbanization from its very origins -- pointed to a social legacy that could be traced back to the "Haussmannization" of Paris in the previous century.

Eighteen years in the offing, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann's redevelopment of Paris was the most ambitious and expensive undertaking of its sort in modern history, requiring inconceivable amounts of leveraged financial backing and a labor force that employed upwards to one-fifth of the city’s working population. It amounted to an infrastructural overhaul that completely transformed the city. The project required the dislocation of thousands of the city’s citizens, the course of which resulted in the destruction of numerous poor and lower-income neighborhoods (those potential pockets of political unrest in the Second Empire); in the end pushing much of that population into slums on the city’s margins. In the place of some of these demolished neighborhoods arose housing for the city's more affluent and middle-class residents, districts in which the broad avenues converged on a series of arrondissements and commercial hubs that included such newly-built department stores as Le Samaritaine and Le Bon Marché.




Robert Moses: 'Look upon my works, ye haterz...'

Haussmann’s Paris would become a modern model city for urban planners the world over, and an inspiration to American twentieth-century men of vision such as Daniel Burnham, Frederick Law Olmsted, and Robert Moses. Hailed as a "master builder," it was Moses who presided over the extensive projects of city planning and urban renewal in New York City from the late 1920s through the 1970s. It was also his Cross-Bronx Expressway -- begun in the late 1940s and completed in 1972 -- that many critics blamed as the primary factor in the demise of the South Bronx. Between the Expressway and the compounding factors of "white flight," strained social services and budget cuts, and the city's policies of municipal redlining and "planned shrinkage," the neighborhood entered a steep downward economic spiral. Within the span of a few years, the blighted South Bronx would become -- as a sort of idée fixe in the public imagination -- the epitome of an "urban wasteland," a testament to the dysfunctionality, failure, and obsolescence of the modern city.³

By some accounts, the mid-1970s may well have marked the official end of the Modernist social vision. The demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project by the city of St. Louis in 1972 was framed by many as de facto evidence of the failure of modern urban renewal and social engineering. That same year, architects Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour published the first edition of their anti-Modernist decree Learning from Las Vegas. The following year brought Daniel Bell’s The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. And in 1975, Robert Caro’s The Power Broker appeared -- a comprehensive and deeply critical account of the life and career of Robert Moses that met with a broad readership and would eventually land a Pulitzer.⁴ The ground was shifting, all that was solid was melting into air.




President Jimmy Carter visits the South Bronx, October, 1977.



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1. No doubt Delaney’s dismissive remarks will rankle some readers. So perhaps it should be pointed out that numerous critics have argued that Gravity’s Rainbow couldn't have been more crucial and timely. Publishing in the midst of the Watergate disclosures in 1973, the book's unstable narrative unfolds in a densely intertwining sprawl of conspiracy theories, shadowy global alliances, conflations of actual and speculative histories, the irresolution of its narrative and structural slippage embodying the paranoia of its milieu. As author and historian Andreas Killen summed it up, Gravity’s Rainbow is ultimately about how "the loss of historical consciousness becomes a function of image culture...and its rewriting of the past" in contemporary/postmodern America.

2. To name just a few notable examples, admittedly.

3. Sociologically, this all shaped up in a very tautological fashion. Advocates and apologists for increased suburbanization routinely pointed to the decline of inner-city conditions to argue for the increased relocation of jobs and families to the suburbs, conveniently ignoring the very same relocations were in part responsible for the conditions in question.

4. Adding another pivotal book to this stack, Gayatri Spivak’s English translation of Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology appeared in 1976.

Flowers Won't Grow, Bells Won't Be Ringing

 

"The end of the bourgeois ego, or monad, no doubt brings with it the end of the psychopathologies of that ego -- what I have been calling the waning of affect. But it means the end of much more -- the end, for example, of style, in the sense of the unique and the personal, the end of the distinctive individual brush stroke (as symbolized by the emergent primacy of mechanical reproduction). As for expression and feelings or emotions, the liberation, in contemporary society, from the older anomie of the centered subject may also mean not merely a liberation from anxiety but a liberation from every other kind of feeling as well, since there is no longer a self present to do the feeling."

- Fredric Jameson

Soul is now a rare term of appraisal in music discourse. When discussed as a genre, it is usually as nostalgic totem, the distance travelled from Ray Charles to contemporary R'n'B, but nominally regarded as a sound of the 60s and 70s. The great labels Stax, Motown, Philadelphia etc. have long vanished into corporate takeovers, along with the local identities that defined them. Ways of life, classes and struggles that soul once inspired have formed different shapes in recent decades. Traces of gospel in Afro-American pop have all but vanished, and even the pastiches of 'neo-soul' are largely secular. Performance arts schools have overtaken the church in nurturing talent. Unlike the soul music that emerged from churches, the locus of success relies more on lyrics or production styles. Not the voice that vocalists distinguished with their cry of "please!", as they extended emotion outside the boundaries of song. Marvin Gaye was particularly distinguished in this, among other things. As an artist who bridged the era from doo-wop to MTV, his career rose, innovated and died with the genre itself. His 70s work was somewhat emblematic in its struggle with war, urban decline, sexuality, family, faith and personal expression. When the 'death of the author' rubbed against a new 'permissiveness' (creative or otherwise), he was also symptomatic of a time when the 'me generation' tentatively lumbered from the social ruptures of the 60s to the face-lifted restorations of the 80s.

As with most of Gaye's 70s work, What's Going On synthesised all the strands of post-war Afro-American music - blues, jazz, gospel, doo-wop, soul and funk (he would later make disco his own: a No. 1 hit about his fear of dancing). As a song cycle, it begins with greetings to a party and ends with a prayer. The ongoing crises of Viet Nam and economic insecurity loom large, where faith struggles with apprehensions of impending apocalypse. It plays as an extended hymn, to western society as much as God, a plea to "find peace sublime" by spiritual or secular means. The album is also a document of his struggle for autonomy in Motown's production line (he always sounded just a little too mature for 'the sound of young America'), shortly before the label abandoned Detroit ahead of heavy industry. Such assertions of "the individual brush stroke" were common in the early 70s, with many black performers attempting to transcend industrial limits. As with society in general, hard-won 'permissiveness' wasn't without its pratfalls. Without road maps, the 'dizziness of freedom' could result in unaccountable indulgence or crippling anxieties, as much as it could lead to innovations in social relations or modes of expression. It could also lead to a loneliness that the culture wouldn't absorb, a disquiet that ego, faith, or indeed 'soul' may be unable to compensate.

Deciding not to repeat What's Going On's success by recycling its subject matter, Gaye moved from The Waste Land to Eliot's dictum of: "Birth, copulation and death. That's all the facts when you get to brass tacks." Let's Get It On was a manifesto of sorts, but not as clear-cut as the liner notes suggested. Gaye was plagued by sexual neurosis, reputedly a result of his harsh fundamentalist upringing. Compared to the previous album, God is barely mentioned. This is a hymn to the body, where faith in its pleasures nevertheless remain open to question. The desperate fear of rejection is of course a common motif in soul ("please!"), but the album still aims to seduce. Along with soul, Gaye foregrounds his roots in doo-wop, arguably the prettiest of post-war pop genres, that seductive crossroads between blues, gospel, soul, rock'n'roll and the Great American Songbook crooners that Gaye longed to join (he eventually did, posthumously). Yet as with his other songs of the period, background harmonies were provided by Gaye himself. Without the camraderie of doo-wop's backing singers, it leaves his serenades sounding all the more anxious: Scared that if I close my eyes/When I get ready to wake up/I might find you gone. Desire on the verge of splintering into duality and doubt, widening the gulf between serenader and his object of seduction, but paradoxically creating more intimacy with the listener. This is also the case with its more cavernous and fragmented follow-up I Want You. For all of Let's Get It On's erotic charge as the 'luurve' album par excellence, there's an overwhelming sense of absence to it.

After its sequence of sexual and romantic longing, Let's Get It On ends on a note of sadness and regret. 'Just To Keep You Satisfied' dispenses with the funk and doo-wop; and harks back to the more desolate work of Frank Sinatra, particularly his post-Ava Gardner song cycles of the 50s. The song had several versions, originally written for second-tier Motown acts like The Originals, but here Gaye edited out the percussion and rewrote its promise of devotion into a meditation on separation and loss. The bittersweet irony is that his departing wife Anna (Berry Gordy's sister) co-wrote the original song. Appropriate to this act of erasure and reappraisal, the album closes on a far more ambivalent note than its opening anthem:

  
Now it's too late to live and love and it's too late baby
It's too late for you and me, much too late for you to cry
Ohhh it's much too late
Well, all we can do is, we can both try to be happy...

Their separation would form the basis for an entire double album in 1978. Here My Dear was a flop upon release, but its reputation has improved considerably. Made to raise money quickly (for alimony and child support), at a time when Gaye was already living beyond his means, it was intended as a "lazy, bad" album to appease both his ex-wife and Motown. With declared despondency, its stream-of-consciousness vocals and fragmented collage of moods sound strangely compelling and immediate today. It's an album of disillusion, where passion is not so much an open question as avoidable error. The ugly, perplexed emotions that divorce brings - not least its awkward sense of alienation - are arguably more au courant with our contemporary mores than the frank expressions of desire of his earlier albums (which now seem more suitable for solitary listening). The bitter humour and references to financial quarrels were also ahead of their time - few soul singers of the time would foreground money as a component of emotional heartbreak. After further disputes with Motown, another divorce and exile, the 80s brought radio-friendly success with In Our Lifetime and Midnight Love. Even with greater polish and sales, his haunted duality and anomie remained.

Baby, your life and mine is grooving on the danger

Revelation's prophecy is nearly fulfilled

We are blessed to experience a changing world

So let's love before our fate is sealed

The implications of Gaye's classically tragic fate could be the subject of a whole other chapter. After his death, soul (as genre, as affect) would fade. As with many musical genres, it survived by retreating into subculture. Something to be curated (specialist radio and nightclubs), borrowed (a badge of 'taste' for white and/or British performers, a source for samples), or rented out to other merchandise (fashion, film, advertising). There are still soul survivors of the 60s and 70s who carry on regardless. Yet despite any continued commercial appeal they may have, they are as marginal to 21st century pop as those delta blues legends revived in the 60s. It's difficult to speculate which musical path Gaye would have taken had he lived; especially when we consider how Afro-American pop has changed in the past thirty years, not least market expectations of its performers. Popular culture - and the economic circumstances informing it - now communicates in a different emotional register.

The all-consuming success of Motown baby Michael Jackson - the commercial, sexual and racial disturbance that he (dis)embodied, the face of neoliberalism - effectively put the brakes on emotional (and textural) 'authenticity' in Afro-American pop. Jackson and the dominance of video (not least MTV's racism) resulted in widespread compromises of image and attitude that still reveberate. 'Realness' was reserved for the downsized alienation of hip hop, a genre so austere it even forsakes the comfort of song.  The 'real' became acknowledgement of socioeconomic pressures, not emotion or 'soul'. That in turn influenced the timbre and temperament of R'n'B, and any number of 'urban' genres (Joe Carducci's reactionary warning that repressing live 'heat' would "come back to haunt black music" may yet prove correct). It was as though production methods became a way to establish boundaries on desire. Lyric-wise, collective and emotional aspirations congealed into an emphasis on individual wealth and fame. Mention of marriage or work became increasingly rare in pop, and 'urban' charts are dominated by hymns to callow status. Vulnerability is defeated by impervious declarations of strength, yearning by the paranoid maintenance of impregnable ego. Songs of love finally surrendered to songs about fucking. And God? He's just another celebrity to thank at the MTV Awards.

Incompatible, Errant Parents of Hip Hop

From left to right: The crumbling New York Transit system of the 70s, schoolyard skipping chants, Muhammad Ali, Michael Manley (the austere subversion of DJ/MC culture), Milton Friedman, porn, Sesame Street, the Black Panther Party, Marvel superheroes, Governor Nelson Rockefeller (also Vice-President to Gerald "drop dead" Ford), wrestling feuds and tags, Redd Foxx, Blaxploitation cinema, and TV remote control (hand-held 'sampling' in every home).