No Job No Home No Peace No Rest: An Installation by William Steacy

Immediately upon entering the Silver Eye Photography Center, you come face to face with The Beast.

A 170 foot collage of newspaper clippings, advertisements, and pages torn from the artists’ journal, this piece presents Will Steacy’s investigation of the problems underlying American culture.

This piece dominates the current exhibit at the Silver Eye Photography Center like a many-headed monster, presenting different issues in the form of headlines, which jump out at the viewer much like headlines in an actual newspaper do: ‘Betrayed!’, ‘Immoral’ ,‘Fraud’, ‘Heartbreaking!’.  Steacy’s clippings range from stories involving gun violence and poverty to pop culture, featuring The Monopoly Man, a blood-drenched Carrie, and Freddy Kruger.  Recurring motifs such as skulls and guns create visual touchstones, illustrating the connections Steacy has made between various topics.

Steacy does not believe that ‘The American Dream’ is a myth, as most critiques do.  Instead, he believes it was ‘stolen’ from the people, by big businesses and greedy politicians, and traces the trouble to very specific origins lying in Reaganomics.

Steacy makes his stance on this history evident both through the wall text and the excerpts from his journal, included throughout.  His journal entries as well as the wall text (which states that he “comes from five generations of newspaper men”) clearly show that he identifies himself as part of the downtrodden masses currently suffering through the economic downturn. His personal presence in this piece strengthens its message, rather than weighing it down with personal bias.  His identification with the everyman is also shown through his idolatry of heroes such as Bruce Springsteen and Charles Bukowski, to which small homages are built within the collage.

The relationship between ‘The Beast’ and the photography, however, is less successful.  In a way it seems like Steacy’s photography is a variation of his collage-work: the same message in a different form.  The photographs are taken from his projects Down These Mean Streets, All My Life I Have Had The Same Dream, and We Are All In This Together. Steacy photographs in the same way that he collages:  culling moments, places, and people from the cultural landscape to bring the economic and social problems of our country to light.  These works seem to be most successful when they portray objects such as storefronts or fading advertisements, such as the text “Someplace Else” spray painted onto a wall in Detroit.  These images become almost poetic when taken out of their environments and placed in a gallery.  However, when this gaze is applied to people, Steacy’s portraits feel empty and place-less.  These pieces offer no specifics or context to their subject’s circumstances than what the viewer can glean from their personal appearance, and from the wall text.

The disjointed nature between the front and back rooms created a sense of imbalance in the exhibit, as though Steacy had said his point much more forcefully and clearly in The Beast than he had in his photographs.  Though in both cases, Steacy definitely achieves his goal of bringing the hardships endured in America to light.

Silver Eye Photography

Gang violence leaves seven dead. Foreclosures rise. Little help from the government. Banks request a bailout, receive one, and subsequently reward their top-executives with exorbitant bonuses. Iraq witnesses its deadliest month since the war began, a record surpassed the following month. Conservatives demand a return to traditional American values. Politicians snuggle in a bit closer with their primary donors, representing interest groups at the expense of the American people. Iraq death toll rises. Afghanistan nudges its way into the spotlight. Grim. Grim. And grimmer still.

Absolutely covering the surface of nearly 40 feet of drywall, the collage that forms of centerpiece of Will Steacy’s no job no home no peace no rest leaves little room for sunlight. Comprised of “thousands of newspapers collected over many years, his own photographs and writings, and found objects,” the giant mural consciously overwhelms the viewer with its bleak catalogue of all the problems facing America. Steacy organizes his collage around vague thematic “nodes,” with specific parcels of the piece devoted to different subjects – one section, for example, focuses on gang violence, while another centers on the bank-bailouts. After a time, the collage becomes a constellation of despair, imbuing the reader with the sense that these problems are insurmountable. Not a single of ray hope emanates from the piece – the artist seems to believe that a cutting humor is enough to provide the collage with lightheartedness. One small section, for example, juxtaposes cards featuring naked women, overlaid with hands cupped and ready to receive the Eucharist, all beneath a newspaper clipping relating congress’ renewed search for donors. Such portions make one chuckle, but it’s the kind of laugh that aches more than it lifts.

The rest of the show seems like an attempt to complement the collage with a more human dimension, as well as a more visceral “impact.” Several portraits adorn the back walls of the gallery, featuring solitary men and women set against backgrounds stereotypically emblematic of economic hardship. One man sits on a stone staircase leading to a cellar, while another leans against a streetlamp. The idea is clear: the difficulty of life in America as a result of all those rather dry, abstract realities described by the collage in the previous room. However, the portraits lack enough distinct information, so much so that, much like the centerpiece, the photographs begin to meld together, nullifying the humanizing aspects of these pictures that seem to be purpose in the first.

The last section of the show, on the other hand, works very well. The remaining photographs feature inanimate objects, often ironically juxtaposed with their environment, and make vividly clear the effects of the Great Recession. Condos, Chicago – the show’s most impactful piece – portrays a sign advertising the future site of condos behind a chain-link fence, beneath a bright moon. Eerie as an old-horror movie, this piece succinctly summarizes the theme of the show: the gradual inaccessibility of the American dream, and the possible phantasmal nature of that dream.

Works Cited

“Silver Eye.” Silver Eye. N.p., n.d. Web. 19 Nov. 2012. <http://www.silvereye.org/exhibitions.htm&gt;.

Silver Eye: No Job No Home No Peace No Rest

Knowing that five generations of Will Steacey’s family (including himself) worked in the diminishing newspaper industry, we better understand the blend of photographs, pages of handwritten thoughts, and newspaper clippings that make up The Beast, a colossal collage that takes over the first room of the Silver Eye Center for Photography. In “No Job No Home No Peace No Rest” he portrays the death of the American dream, the core of American lifestyle. He appoints himself spokesperson for those who have had to bear the brunt.

Thousands of clippings, obsessively amassed over the years and carefully assembled with deliberation encapsulate the economic slump and the people’s growing desperation, from the prosperity of post-WWII to the changes triggered by 9/11. Headline after headline, some words crop up repeatedly: Nightmare. Promise. Crisis. Hell. Concerning the American Dream, this collage is truly disenchanting. In Steacy’s handwritten notes, his shock, and anger that it’s gone this far, shows through – and he’s not forgiving. Everything that’s going wrong in America makes The Beast; it’s monstrous, and once it charges, seems unstoppable. And it’s trampling over everyone.Steacy attempts to “hold a mirror to America” so we can review our mistakes. But, the mirror is tinted – it’s through the perception of the national media that we see, so it can eventually seem too blunt and excessive (like INVITATION TO A BEHEADING being placed above THE AMERICAN DREAM) because headlines are dramatic and provocative in order to get a reaction. However, he uses the collage to cover several subjects, which is not as easy to accomplish in a single photograph.

After the overwhelming information-crammed walls of the first room, the following two rooms feel quiet. Unless you’ve been desensitised by the staggering collage, Will Steacy’s photographs have an unnerving subtlety that tells the stories of individuals in a way that the collage can’t; The Beast is the nation’s agonising lament of its own condition. The photographs depict a building that has been planned but never realised, a “Set for Life” Lottery ticket that has been vigorously scratched. Some photos fall short of surpassing a normal view on a lower-class quarter of a city, like the two jack-o’lanterns on garden chairs or the discarded cup in a newspaper stand. Likewise, the portraits only work in the context of the economic crisis; without any captions to help us imagine their woes, his subjects are simply dispirited.

For those who aren’t struggling from the effects of the issues covered by Steacy, his works might make the magnitude of America’s problems dawn on you, or perhaps they just make accusatory generalisations. And for those who are strongly impacted, you may realise that the situation is worse than you thought. It would be futile to look for any signs of hope in the exhibition. There’s so much going wrong, how do we even begin to make amends? Is it possible to think of solutions if faced with an apocalyptic view of all the problems of America at the same time?

No job no home no peace no rest

“No Job No Home No Peace No Rest: An Installation by Will Steacy”, currently on view at the Silver Eye Center for Photography on the South Side, exhibits Will Steacy’s collage the Beast, along with thirty-two individual photographs from earlier and ongoing projects–Down These Mean Streets, All My Life I Have Had The Same Dream, and We Are All In This Together. The exhibition takes its title from Bruce Springsteen’s song The Ghost of Tom Joad, and shares its view that Americans have grown adept at ignoring the increasingly sharp divide between the rich and the poor. Steacy, who has been creating photographic work dealing with contemporary social and economic issues for over a decade, presents the story of the American Dream told through the eyes of those who been left behind in the ashes of the Great Recession, peeling back the scab of America against the backdrop of the 2012 electoral season.

 

The Beast, if only because of its enormous size, emerges as the focal point of the show. No less than 170 feet long, the wall of material it presents consists in thousands of clippings from newspapers and magazines, journal entries, as well as photographs from Steacy’s own Down These Mean Streets series.  Steacy’s own photographs in the work examine the neighborhoods of America’s inner cities, where people from the outside rarely go, leaving it in a state of abandonment and loneliness. Steacy aims to reveal problems of the American urban world, such as the decline of the local economy, lack of proper nutrition and healthcare, and the prevalence of violence and drugs.  He blends his own voice–in the form of hand written journal entries and photographs–into found images and texts, the products of years of accumulation. His voice becomes indistinguishable when interweaved with other media presentations, none of which swings too far away from Steacy’s opinion on the issues. The collage begins by laying out a history of twentieth-century America, one that runs from the post-war promise of prosperity, to the Reagan administration’s deregulation of the economy, to the 9/11 attacks, to the financial crisis and the Great Recession–a downfall of American society unfolding in slow motion.

 

The form of collage made from photographs and newspapers has particular importance to Steacy. This fact is perhaps unsurprising, given he comes from five generations of newspapermen. For him, the newspaper is not only a mirror of the society, but ultimately the best history book for the future. His pessimistic view on America has a lot to do with his personal life in the past few years, a set of experiences he characterized as “devastating.” In such a condition, Steacy made The Beast a personal story, too. For this project, he worked 16 to 18 hours a day, and at the time he was finishing the piece, he felt physically exhausted, as well as mentally drained. What we are looking at in the gallery are sheets of paper that have been soaked by blood, sweat, and tears. It amounts to a real search for resilience during hard times, for Steacy himself, but also for the whole nation.

Silvereye Center for Photography: No Job No Home No Peace No Rest: An Installation by Will Steacy

At the Silvereye Center for Photography on East Carson Street, No Job No Home No Peace No Rest, an installation byWill Steacy, showcases an interpretation of modern America through wall-sized collages of newspaper clippings, his own journal entries and photos, and remnants of what is presumed to be his own consumption.  Current and past events are depicted in the personage of the dashed, the beaten, and the hopeless state of mind that has become that of the American in the modern world.  This is a portrait of the thoughts of a downtrodden American dreamer.

In the corner of the room, the collage starts with the words “Down These Mean Streets. Will Steacy.” What follows are the declarations of his reasoning.  Newspaper clippings advertise tragedy in the woes of the modern American. His proposal of the today retorts that the everyday reality is a product of what is given to us through the sensationalized media.  By pairing media portrayal with pages torn from his own diary and photographs he has taken, his view on the rupture of the ruggedly individualistic American is revealed in his emotionally wrought musings. Complete with arrows depicting his thought process, he diagrams how he might conceptualize certain historical events or the way America’s economy works.  These musings are placed purposely next to articles about fiscal deficit or war.  Three packs of Newman cigarettes are pinned underneath a ripped section of a tax return form.

In the back room, photographs, some incorporated into this collage, are shown in a more traditional manner.   Scenes of derelict USA become serene through the framing of a shot, his portraits of people across the nation attempt to capture a gritty side to the land of the beautiful.

One most striking photograph is a portrait of a woman, Valerie, in Atlantic City.  It is the only portrait in the exhibition that is not perfectly in focus; the left side of her face is somewhat blurred, and she is squinting one eye against something coming at her from the left: wind, or light.  Her hair is pulled tightly back, and her lips are just beginning to open.  The expression on her face is hard to pinpoint. She seems to be looking at the photographer, perhaps questioning what on earth he might be doing, or his character.   She is blurry, yet out of all the portraits she seems the most real. It is as if she had somehow managed to just barely escape with safeguarding her identity and her emotions.  What is left is an imprint of her color, her blurry, windswept expression, and her blank stare.

One can easily sink into Down These Mean Streets at any point.  There is no beginning and no end to the events portrayed in the exhibition. It is rather circular and unreadable chronologically. After a while of looking at the photographs in particular, it becomes questionable what it is that can and should be aestheticized.  Through photographing the derelict inner city nighttime neighborhoods of the USA, Steacy is capturing a night world usually left alone and purposely avoided.

No Job No Home No Peace No Rest: An Installation by Will Steacy

Amongst newspaper headlines and dated magazine photos, the Hulk has Captain America locked in his vice grip, forcing him to concede defeat. Just a small snippet of Will Steacy’s monumental collage work, the comic of the star-spangled hero is allegory for an America that is struggling to recapture the vitality it once reveled in, one that Steacy aims to expose in his exhibition, No Job No Home No Peace No Rest at the Silver Eye Center for Photography.

Located in Pittsburgh’s South Side, Silver Eye is interested in photography as an expressive medium and as a socially engaged practice that can inform as well as engage. This current work strikes these chords, as Steacy considers his work to be “both a chronicle and a critique of a nation where a once-attainable “American Dream” has been replaced, for so many, by a desperate effort to survive.” Steacy, a Philadelphia-born photographer from a long line of newspapermen has had work in a slew of major publications including CNN, BBC, The New York Times, and Newsweek, among others.

The exhibition borrows its title from The Ghost of Tom Joad by Bruce Springsteen, who in turn borrows the emblematic figure of Joad from John Steinbeck’s novel, Grapes of Wrath. Steacy’s work takes up Joad’s mantle, channeling that same overwhelmingly fervent nostalgia for an America where an honest day’s work will bring a better life.

The 170-foot collage installation dubbed “The Beast” overwhelms, submerging the audience in a deluge of images and words, harnessing a relentless march of newsprint to evoke the daily struggle of impoverished, distressed Americans. Through the barrage of media, the audience can find scraps of text that belong to the author’s pen; quick, emotional responses to expressions of Steacy’s sociopolitical thoughts, and, slipped below a slew of cut out images of jailed terrorists, three innocuous slips of paper, each brandishing a lipstick smear and the words “I Miss You”. The result of this sensorial maelstrom is the notion that nothing is entirely political or personal, but rather, the America in the media is a real place with people struggling to get by, against enormous odds.

Given the sense of personal attachment in the collage, there is a quietness and detachment in the prints in the rear room. In glossy, large-format prints, thirty-two works from three series, Down These Mean Streets, All My Life I Have Had The Same Dream, and We Are All In This Together are intended to capture the truths about distress and poverty, exposing the places where grit and visual poetry collide to detail critical issues in the American inner city. The portraits scattered among the evidence of decay are remarkably honest images, but they document existence without divulging narrative. Liz, Philadelphia, 2007 is a striking shot of a windswept young woman, but devoid of any context, she becomes anonymous, another emblem of a depressed America just like the crumbling buildings with which she shares the gallery walls.

No Job No Home No Peace No Rest: An Installation by Will Steacy

As you enter the Silver Eye Center for Photography, you are thrust into the belly of The Beast. This 170-foot wallpaper overwhelmingly portrays the modern American story. Featuring newspaper clippings, photographs by the artist, empty cigarette cartons, Monopoly cards, signs, and other assorted items, No Job No Home No Peace No Rest: An Installation by Will Steacy discusses a wide variety of topics: politicians, gun control, terrorism, and economic segregation to name a few. The walls are densely covered with headlines strewn together, creating phrases like “Earnings Soar”, “Rich Get Richer”, “Recession Depression”. Clustered together in one section of the wall is a discussion on gun control in America. Handwritten on a scrap of paper:

“The streets are RED

The chalk lines are WHITE

And the bodies BLUE.

These colors don’t run…”

A pistol has been cut out and placed into the hand of the Statue of Liberty, as she points it into the air.

Many of the items found on the wall are handwritten journal entries. The artist’s voice is that of a poor American. He speaks as if his situation is miserable. The wall next to The Beast tells us that his work is widely collected, featured in a whole litany of publications and news outlets, including CNN, NPR, Time, Newsweek, and The New Yorker. He has three successful books in circulation, and travels between New York and Philadelphia frequently. He may not be wealthy, but he’s better off than his work reflects. This brings to question whether or not these scraps of writings he’s written are legitimate or dramatized. Are these merely invented tales of the average American? His work appears to be more self-referential than it puts on to be.

His portraits, for example feature an individual in a neutral environment. While these individuals may appear to be homeless, battered, or alone in some regard, no contextual information other than a city location and first name (or preferred name) are given. The portraits are too neutral to say anything themselves. But what the viewer casts onto these blank slates of individuals are negative and likely highly inaccurate readings of an entire lifestyle based only upon visible hygiene and wardrobe. One individual, an African American named Jack Rabbit, was photographed in Memphis, wearing an extremely large t-shirt featuring a print of a multitude of diamonds. Since it lacks much other contextual detail other than his physical state of appearance, I personally make the jump to homeless or otherwise very poor. And when I realize that his portraits force the viewer to impose labels upon uncontextualized individuals, it makes me question these assumptions about the subjects of the photographs.

While Steacy’s discussion may suggest the American dream is dead, he’s still clearly living it. His success through pointing out America’s failures is surely unintended and likely undesired, but as it is becoming the case, Steacy’s work will appear to be from outside looking in.

The City & The City: Wood Street Galleries

“Go where we may, rest where we will, 

Eternal London haunts us still.” 

-“Rhymes on the Road” by Thomas Moore, Irish poet, singer, and socialite of London

‘Haunting’ definitely describes the exhibit currently at Wood Street Galleries.  “The City & The City: Artwork by London Writers” is curated by Justin Hopper, and features seven British artists who have created works utilizing fiction,  poetry, video, and installation to investigate various aspects of the city of London.

Rod Dickinson and Tom McCarthy alter history in Greenwich Degree Zero, which reimagines the outcome of the attempted bombing in 1894 of the Greenwich Observatory.  Visitors get a sense of intrigue and excitement from their ability to examine real newspapers and pamphlets up close, which have been altered to portray French anarchist Martial Bourdin’s attack as a success.  Dickinson and McCarthy’s artist statement voices their desire to interrogate the notion of an ‘event’ through media in this recreation, but although this notion is conveyed, the reader is left without a sense of the impact or importance of the event itself.  The newspapers condemn the anarchist movement and Bourdin, but one would imagine that they would do so anyway, in the actual course of events.

Another piece that left me wanting is Rachel Lichtenstein’s Sight Unseen, in which she has created an homage to the jewelers and craftspeople who work in London’s Hatton Garden, which she describes as “the most secret street in London”.  Found objects and artifacts are displayed inside glass cases, and no text accompanies these objects, save for an audio clip that is playing  near a display case featuring a doll-sized jewelers desk. The audio is from an interview with Dave Harris, a 90 year old diamond dealer, but it is muffled and of poor quality. I found this piece frustrating in that Lichtenstein references such a fascinating section of London’s history through artifact, but provides nothing else to enable the viewer to imagine the community behind the objects. This installation coincides with the release of her book Diamond Street: The Hidden World of Hatton Garden, which may provide the information lacking in Lichtenstein’s exhibit.

The most successful piece was Sukhdev Sandhu’s Night Haunts: A Journey Through the London Night, a hypertext fiction featuring eleven chapters, each telling the story of a different tribe of London’s night wanderers, ranging from cab drivers to ghost hunters.  This piece also exists as a physical book (commissioned by Artangel) but Sandhu’s narrative translates beautifully into an interactive installation.  One viewer controls the pacing of the narrative, virtually ‘turning the pages’ by clicking a mouse.  The music is just as haunting as the text itself, composed by London-based artist “Scanner” (Robin Rimbaud).  The eerie music and the ghostly white glow of the text on the screen creates a magical atmosphere that perfectly complements the complex narrative itself.

Though the work of the artists varies greatly in terms of their focus and medium, each contributed to an overall ethereal, ghostly tone throughout, which imbued the show with the kind of magic contained by the ancient city itself.

Wood Street Galleries

Guest Curated by Justin Hopper, The City and the City: Artwork by London Writers explores “new ways to combine art and literature in an examination of the modern city.” Wood Street Galleries, with its location at the heart of Pittsburgh’s cultural district, is the ideal location for such an exploration. The exhibition itself, spread out over two-floors, features work in a variety of mediums, from wall to wall video displays to row-upon-row of newspapers and other textual media. Unsurprisingly, given that the artists are also primarily writers, a great deal of reading is required. However, the exhibits themselves incorporate varying degrees of text, from Greenwich Degree Zero, which is largely language based, to Flying Down to Rio, which is almost entirely visual. (Several street signs appear in the video.) This textual asymmetry does a great service to the exhibition as a whole, preventing the viewer from getting bogged down within the sheer deluge of information. Overall, the show is very successful at conjuring the experience of urban life, especially on the second floor, where the three exhibits meld together to form a startlingly affective portrait of modern London.

But any guest for the show will first be dumped on the third floor, as the elevator which ferries people throughout Wood Street Galleries appears incapable of initially stopping at the second floor. At any rate, upon exiting the elevator, one encounters a rather dimly-lit environment – reminiscent of an area in which one would not linger long in an actual city – split into two exhibits: Greenwich Degree Zero and Sight Unseen. The former offers a enormous amount of textual data, organized around a failed bombing attempt of the Royal Observatory in London’s Greenwich Park in 1894. The latter features a series of physical materials related to London’s diamond and jewelry quarter, a “site-specific installation that coincides with the launch or Lichtenstein’s new non-fiction book”.  Taken together, the two exhibits seem positioned to play off one another – with Greenwich functioning as a manifestation of those different voices that inhabit London and Sight subbing in for a physical environ. However, the sheer volume of text in the first and the relative “calmness” of the second ensures that the two exhibits do not play off one another, but instead drain each other of whatever vitality they might otherwise have possessed.

The show fully recovers from this slow start on the second floor, however, where three different exhibits collude in conjuring a effectively spectral London. Middling English and Flying Down to Rio serve to add texture, in the form of audio and visual information, to the true star of the show, Night Haunts: A Journey through the London. Incorporating the writings of Sukhdev Sandhu into partially-interactive audio-visual display, the exhibit casts an enthralling spell, drawing the viewer into numerous distinct realms of the London night, from the experiences of cab drivers to that of custodians. Coupled with the other two exhibits, Night Haunts manages to enchant the viewer, giving him or her access to a once off-limits world.

Works Cited

“The City & The City: Artwork by London Writers – Wood Street Galleries.” Wood Street Galleries. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Nov. 2012. <http://woodstreetgalleries.org/portfolio-view/the-city-the-city-artwork-by-london-writers/&gt;.

Review: The City & The City at Wood St. Galleries

At the Wood Street Galleries in downtown Pittsburgh, The City & The City, an exhibition curated by Justin Hopper, displays works by authors based in the London area and making work about the city.  The presentation of fact and artifact to create truth and the relation of narrative as a way of capturing place and time connect the works that claim “London” as their central theme.

On the second floor, you become a child in a Mercedes Benz in Chris Petit, Emma Matthews, and Iain Sinclair’s piece Flying Down to Rio. Four wall-sized projections show the view out the windows of the vehicle as you are driven in slow motion, London drifting by as if you were on a boat. Suddenly, the projections change to an almost purely white, silent body of water, and you are left to float on an endless and beginningless sea for eight minutes.

In Night Haunts, an interactive installation by Sukhdev Sandu, you make your way through the stories of London’s night dwellers. Projected onto a wall, the narratives wind to create the violent and tragic candidly relayed tales of London’s night walkers without glorifying the darkness.

Caroline Bergvall’s Middling English explores the evolution of language and its usage through recordings of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales coupled with those of street vendors shouting and modern day slang.  Each recording is printed and pinned to a wall repeatedly, as if a crowded noticeboard were advertising the same narratives one hundred times each.

On the third floor the recontextualization of object and happening in museum display create new histories that present the past in a curated environment.  While Rod Dickenson and Tom McCarthy completely rewrite history and falsify the evidence in their piece Greenwich Degree Zero, Rachel Lichtenstein uses words and stories as grounds to create a fabricated reality of artifacts and small objects presumed to be made by the artisans of Hatton Garden in her piece Sight Unseen. What used to be commonplace goods are collected and arranged in jewelry cases: a little circular box full of watch gears, a cracked watch face delicately sleeping on a velvet cushion. They are dimly lit and displayed as precious relics, telling a story of their own falsified past.  Placed together, the question arises of if it matters whether or not these objects are “true,” or whether the object is simply the stories portrayed. In a corner of the room, a recording of stories detailing the lives of the artisans in Hatton Garden and interactions with them acts as an origin for the work. A small diorama serves as a conclusion to the rest of the small display cases in its inclusion of the human presence through the small table and tools left out, remaking a scene with an absence left by the lack of human presence.

The City & the City questions the viewer’s perception of reality and truth in history.  Although London is used as a significant point of congruence, the exhibition is ultimately held together through the artists’ mention of the malleable nature of the past.

The City & The City, Woodstreet Galleries

The urban landscape has long been described as a living organism, with a distinct temperament that morphs both with the flow of time and those that inhabit it. Currently on view at Woodstreet Galleries in Pittsburgh, The City & The City picks apart what belongs to the modern city, and looks at humans carve out spaces in its landscape. The City & The City is a collection of installations by artists who are internationally known for their work in nonfiction, novels and poetry. Caroline Bergvall, Rod Dickinson, Tom McCarthy, Rachel Lichtenstein, Chris Petit, Emma Matthews, Ian Sinclair, and Sukhdev Sandhu delve into a cross-disciplinary exploration of psychogeography.  The works deal with the cultural interaction with urban landscape, which these artists model after London, England, their hometown.

 

The exhibition takes its title from China Miéville’s 2009 fictive crime novel, The City & The City.  Parallel cities share geography, but citizens are psychologically blind to the city they do not inhabit, fabricating a third city that is dictated by perception and perspective. Justin Hopper, the writer and conceptual artist who curated this show, has traversed the line between tangible and intangible. Hopper has a background in journalism that has arguably motivated his artistic and curatorial work to pull at the seams between what we understand via tangible data, and specter-like, origin-less psychological intuition.

 

Night Haunts by Sukdev Sandhu is a study of the nocturnal London and those that populate its lonely and despondent geography, like cab drivers and cleaners. Sandhu, like Hopper, is well known for his journalistic work that is primarily film criticism. In this case, he takes on the role of narrator, illuminating the nocturnal city which surfaces when the sun recedes.  Commissioned by UK curatorial organization, Artangel, this installation was originally manifested as book, and was performed live in Pittsburgh. The second floor of the gallery is filled with the soundscapes that accompany the projected text, which scrawls across the screen with a limping gait. Some words linger while others spill forward, one after the other, calling forth pictures of a cityscape that has multiple faces, not all of them pleasant.

 

French-Norwegian Poet Caroline Bergvall’s Middling English toys with expressions of poetry through print and spoken word. Leaflets flock on the wall; text is punctuated with powerful black ink splotches. While there are headphones mounted on the gallery wall for personal listening, Bergvall’s voice breaks the ambient sounds of the gallery every so often. With the swooping articulation of a street hawker, the half-recognizable words of O Sis! hang in the air. Within the private world of the headphones, Fried Tale borrows from the argot of rhyming slang sci-fi/horror of Anthony Burgess’ dystopian novella A Clockwork Orange. Its Middle English cadence permits you to grasp narrative while the muddle of jargon and slang keeps content just out of reach.

 

These, as well as the works in The City & The City, evoke a visual and written poetry that calls to question the objectivity of the architecture of urban life.

The city & the city

The “city” is a geographical concept as well as a psychological one, the meaning of which oscillates between reality and imagination. London, a place of complex urban landscapes and dynamic cultural interactions, a place imbued with psychological associations made by modern writers, continues to sustain creative interests. The city & the city, currently on view at the Wood Street Gallery, features five installations and new-media artworks by eight UK-based artists, who are influenced by the Psychogeographic movement—a literary movement focusing on the specific effect of the geographical environment on the emotions and behaviors of individuals. In the exhibit, the artists explore how the seen and the unseen, the real and the fictional aspects of the city, interweave and complicate the urban experience. Best known as writers of nonfiction, novels, and poetry, the artists employ language, images, sounds, and material objects to create innovative forms of conceptual art that rely heavily on text.

One way to interpret the duality of the city implied in the title of the exhibit, is to focus on the real and the fictitious elements that the artists deploy. In their joint project, Rod Dickinson and Tom McCarthy worked from extensive research into historical events and created scenarios that subtly diverged from the historical record. Dickinson and McCarthy’s Greenwich Degree Zero is an installation of recreated 19th century media, one that creates a fictionalized version of a real attempted bombing of Greenwich Observatory in 1894. The whole installation is silent, and designed to resemble an archive or reading room. The exhibited newspapers, journals, and ball tickets, which possess the aura of authentic objects, easily trick the viewer into believing that the bombing attempt—in reality a spectacular failure —actually succeeded, as the fake reports on display say it did.  The installation questions the ways in which the media constructs events, and the degree to which one can trust the knowledge it claims to supply. Rachael Lichtenstien’s Sight Unseen also blends fiction and reality, re-imagining the materials and artifacts in Hatton Garden, a London street that hosts a secretive world of family businesses in the jewelry trade. The installation resembles a jewelry store with display counters wrapped in ultramarine velvet cloth. The counters are, however, material representations of Lichtenstien’s own written work, Diamond Street: the Hidden World of Hatton Garden.

Strolling around these reconstructions of specific events and districts in London’s history, viewers will feel plunged into temporally remote places. They will not retrieve their consciousness of the contemporary until  experiencing work such as Sukhdev Sandu’s Night Hunt.

Sandhu’s Night Hunt deploys the new technology of electronic reading to create a journal about London’s contemporary nightlife, a journal that imitates the Victorian genre of the midnight traipse through the metropolis. Reading Sandhu’s account of London nightlife on the big screen, one encounters marginal characters such as mini cab drivers, street cleaners, and samaritans who live like ghosts in the nasty, depressing capitalist city. While Sandu reconstructed the events in a journalistic manner, the visual and sound effects that accompany the text cause the real to appear fictitious.

Woodstreet Galleries: The City & The City

“The City & The City”, guest curated by Justin Hopper, is not a portrayal of London that one might ordinarily see on a trip as a tourist. From wandering, observing, and contemplating, selected artists (who are primarily writers) give us a sense of how geographic environments affect the human psyche. All the reading asked of visitors is unusual, but in skipping it, one would leave with a very different experience. The artists bring us new awareness and ways to interpret our surroundings through their works on their city’s history, memory, language, and its contrasting existences during daylight and darkness.

Depending on with what floor you begin, you either start with London’s history, or end up there after seeing explorations of the present the floor below. In “Sights Unseen” Rachel Lichtenstein draws from her roots, her grandfather being a watchmaker/jeweler, to uncover quarters of London where diamond merchants have thrived, unobserved, over generations. However she does not go much further than documentation with her display cases of artefacts, whereas Dickinson and McCarthy rewrite an historical event, making an anarchist’s failed bombing attempt successful in “Greenwich Degree Zero”. In a darkened room stands, softly lit, prop up journal reports, letters, and photos, as if they were light-sensitive documents in a museum or library archive. They are altered to fit the new story; history, memory, and the way events are recorded are part of the city even if we don’t see it.

Sukhdev Sandhu’s  “Night Haunts” records impressions he had amongst the night-dwellers of London, from the avian police to Samaritans, cleaners, and graffiti-artists, who see the city in an entirely different light and mindset than other Londoners. The rules of the day do not seem to apply. Through writing so perceptive and poignant, we feel the same darkness, loneliness, and beauty of the city that they do while the rest of the city is asleep. The eerie ambiance sounds and curious noises, the fragmented images, and the trickle of words, slow down the time and help us empathise with the stories being told. A title like “Night life” would not quite capture the “different texture and gravity” of the night. Petit, Matthews, and Sinclair’s “Flying Down to Rio”, on the other hand, is a voyage in daylight; the screens act as windows simulating a car ride through East London. Very little makes it differ from Google map’s streetview – a strange soundtrack, the ornament on the bonnet, the lines of the defroster on the rear window. But at certain moments, all four screens are identical and the scene quickly becomes unreal.

London is explored in ways that we might not be able to, as it exists in people’s minds, and as it exists in reality. Pyschogeography changes our perspective of the world around us, relating our immediate environment to our subconscious. Although the history of Pittsburgh is hardly as long as London’s, it seems an appropriate place to hold the exhibition because of how rapidly it has gone through change.

The City & the City

At the Wood Street gallery in Pittsburgh, The City & the City aims to bring about a psychogeographic analysis of the concept of “the city”. The exhibit borrows its title from China Miéville’s novel of the same name, published in 2009, in which Miéville creates two fictional cities that inhabit the same location. That is, an urban environment in which citizens of one “city” must entirely disregard any aspect of the other “city” by legal mandate, though they occupy the same space. Pittsburgh is often cited to be one of the most livable cities in the world, while simultaneously regions within the city are often ordained by the masses as unlivable. This split idealism of Pittsburgh as a city makes it a prime location for a discussion that these London artists hope to bring about.

Middling English by Caroline Bergvall portrays cultural language generation and degeneration through solely English. Borrowing the writing style of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Bergvall mixes modern slang, terminology from Clockwork Orange, and a litany of Cockney verbiage to create an incomprehensible telling of tales. A narrator eloquently recites one tale from headphones upon the wall. His professional tone mentally persuades you to believe that you are capable of understanding what is being said. Above said headphones is a speaker projecting a melodic chant, which utilizes amalgamations of text lingo and street slang to disorient your sense of understanding of the modern English language.

Video artists Chris Petit, Emma Matthews, and Iain Sinclair collaborate to create Flying Down to Rio, which presents a disillusioned version of the fast-paced modern car ride through the city streets of London. By filming forward, backward, and both sides out of a car window with a high-speed camera and dramatically slowing down the footage, the resulting peaceful car ride allows viewers to observe bicyclists unhurriedly pedal down the road as pedestrians move by at a snail’s pace. Projecting the four videos on the four walls of a room which features only a bench for viewers’ comfort successfully reimagines the city space in a slower state of observation and leisure, as opposed the hustle and bustle we know it to demand.

Night Haunts: A Journey in the London Night was perhaps the most poignant of the pieces. Artist Sukhdev Sandhu interviewed a variety of individuals about their life in the nights of London and displays their stories in an interactive format designed to avoid the “TLDR” online culture of skimming text and have viewers absorb the story in bite-size pieces. One collection of tales featured taxi drivers describing the world of the night cab; dehumanizing use of cabbie drivers as confessionals, drunken individuals speaking their mind too freely, muggings and inebriated refusals to pay among other topics.

The individual pieces were successful. And while these London artists may have attempted to discuss the city as a concept, discussing the city of London alone comes across as purely an analysis of London rather than a case study of the conceptual city.

Unblurred: First Friday’s on Penn

It’s the first Friday of the month, which means it’s time for Penn Avenue Arts District to come together and present Unblurred to the people of Pittsburgh. Featuring a wide variety of well-known and up-and-coming artists alike, Unblurred brings the crowd to Garfield in Pittsburgh, PA. While the prime hours were from 7pm to 10, the art crawl ran from 6pm to 2 in the morning, offering a bit of something for everyone. Children and parents ran around in the early evening, while a young distinctly hipster nightlife came around later in the evening. In all, there isn’t a clear definition of what is and what’s not a part of the event, which allows most of Penn Avenue to become a part of the party. While many locales offer discounts to customers, it’s easy to find cheese, crackers, and drinks to satisfy your palette free of charge.
Artisan featured self-taught documentary photographer Linker Caldwell’s photography of the local LGBTQ scene. If the 2,400 dollars of penny-tiled flooring doesn’t make this place unique enough, this tattoo store/art gallery plans to turn the lower floor into a cafe as well. Modern Formations presented The Good Fight, featuring works by Christian Wolfgang Breitkreutz. Using exaggerated and fantastical wartime imagery, Breitkreutz comments on the inner wars we all face in our daily works. Much of his work alternates between Jesus-like imagery of either himself (as he has a very well groomed beard) or George Harrison.
Andrew Karaman’s “Kaleidoscope” was featured at Imagebox. Manipulated images of hot air balloons and more mundane objects created kaleidoscopic geometric shapes that were intended to spark your imagination. The Most Wanted Art Gallery presented “A Year in The Life”, which featured Instagrammed photography of prices around $20 for sale. A table also allowed gallery crawlers to create their own buttons and wear them out.
The most populated exhibit was found at the Irma Freeman Center for Imagination. Viewers were welcomed in the entrance by The Golden Throats, a fiddle/accordion duo that lifted the spirits of the room and brought children and adults alike to their feet, dancing to the distinct sound of his voice accompanied by exciting fiddle and accordion. “Pittsburgh by Pittsburgh Artists II” featured the works of over 40 artists in one small space, ranging from merely locally known to Andy Warhol and the like. The common theme found in the works was Pittsburgh; one piece was hanging from the ceiling and created by combining collected receipts from supermarket Giant Eagle; an action-packed video piece displayed Steeler Nation and the Pittsburghers who it consists of.
While the art may not be as nearly as well curated or as professionally and technically well done as a museum exhibit, Unblurred brings a variety of locals together to enjoy the Pittsburgh art scene. While I’ve enjoyed past exhibits I’ve gone to, the socially lively aspect of this art crawl is the reason I know personally I’ll be bringing my friends to this in the future.