- Emma Murphy
[1] A Modest Proposal was written by Irishman Jonathan Swift in 1729. His essay, distributed as a pamphlet, proposed a satirical ‘solution’ to the ‘Irish problem’ of abject poverty. Written for (or at) the English, it suggested the Irish peasants rear children who were to be killed and sold for food thus earning the peasants money and a means of culling the exponential growth of the stereotypical Irish catholic family. This, Swift claimed with deep seethed irony, was a means of the Irish to work their way out of poverty. The story is a mimetic of a real solution, a proposal that is obviously no solution at all. It functions to highlight the perpetrators who allowed this absolute poverty to develop: a dystopian proposition indicating just how bad things had become.
Manhattan is the product of an unformulated theory, Manhattanism, whose program [is] to exist in a world totally fabricated by man, to live inside fantasy… The entire city became a factory of manmade experience, where the real and natural ceased to exist …a mythical island where the invention and testing of a metropolitan life-style, and its attendant architecture, could be pursued as a collective experiment … a Galapagos Island of new technologies, a new chapter in the survival of the fittest, this time a battle among species of machines…[1]
1980s New York was a desperate place to be poor. Ronald Regan reigned as US President for two terms, while across the water, Margaret Thatcher stood at Great Britain’s helm for eleven years. Between them, their decade long, neo-liberal policies decimated the social state and plunged the already poor into abject poverty. Between 1 and 1.4 percent of New York City’s population were homeless, or 70,000 – 100,000 people living on the streets.[2] As the 1980s wore on, homelessness became endemic in Ronald Regan’s America. At the close of the decade, the United States had the highest rate of poverty in the first world. Martha Rosler proclaimed in 1991, “The principal economic result of Reganism was that in the 1980s the extremes of wealth and poverty grew far further apart than a decade earlier, producing the widest gap between rich and poor in our history.”[3] In 1988 Regan stated in an interview, with newscaster David Brinkley, he believed people slept on the streets because they liked it.[4] The New York Times reported, on Christmas Day of the same year, “The number of deaths by freezing reported in the United States has more than doubled in a decade…In 1985, the latest year for which complete statistics are available, 1,010 people died from exposure to the cold.”[5]
It was during this time, in 1980s New York, that many artists suggested their own Modest Proposals for the thousands of homeless left out on Manhattan’s streets.[6] Polish born, Canadian artist, Krzysztof Wodiczko’s addresses issues of depravity and social injustices in a profoundly complex manner. He creates work which rests uncomfortably between art and activism, social intervention and parodic commentary. Wodiczko’s projects acted as a prototype to addressing homelessness, not through proposing its solutions, but by making its failings impossible to ignore. He achieved what Richard Noble defines as utopian, he held “up a critical mirror to the world; a glass through which the darkness of the future illuminates the present.”[7] After the failings of 1968, the idea of a mass revolution subsided and the supposed proposition of an idealist, communal future came crashing down. With Ronald Regan’s neo-liberal policies, together with his obsessive paranoia of an apparently imminent USSR missile attack[8], it was clear; the utopian ideology of harmony, peace and love had dissolved. With this somewhat naïve, all be it admirable, aspirations of the 1960s decimated, utopia took on a new trajectory. Wodiczko constructed projections which were shown on buildings and monument around Manhattan and assembled vehicles to aid the scavenger existence forced upon so many people as a means of survival. He perpetually refused to victimise people on the streets or turn them into a voyeuristic spectacle to achieve his own ends. This essay will focus specifically on a retrospective analysis of this work by Wodiczko, questioning to what extent these works function as a utopian mirror and as a proposition of ‘what could be’.
The theories Richard Noble presents on utopian ideology in his anthology Utopia: Documents of Contemporary Art, together with theories from Fredric Jameson’s The Utopian Enclave, 2004, Rosalind Krauss’s Sculpture in the Expanded Field, Hal Foster’s 1985 book Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics also Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau’s reimaging of Claude Lefort’s The Logic of Totalitarianism, 1986 and extensive writings by Austrian artist collective WochenKlausur and Martha Rosler[9] will be utilised in the analysis. The writings of Rosalyn Deutsche are also highly influential in the debate around public space in relation to Wodiczko’s practise of the 1980s. It is two lesser known projection works by Wodiczko: The Astor Building/ The New Museum Projection, 1984 and the Homeless Projection: A Proposal for the City of New York, which will be utilised for this debate. This will follow with a critique of the Homeless Vehicle Project, 1988-89. The investigation will conclude with a brief analysis of contemporary attempts to tackle the issues of homelessness and the influence of this historic work. The work of Michael Rakowitz and Thylacine, a Swiss duo, will be analysed and their attempts to tackle the social stigma of living on the streets today.
Krzysztof Wodiczko was born in 1943 during the Warsaw ghetto uprising[10] and grew up in Soviet occupied Poland. At the time of his upbringing, socialist realist ideology and utopian thinking dominated Communist Poland. This had a profound effect on Wodiczko’s life and practise. Richard Noble stated in 2009, “Communism justified itself in terms of a radical, scientific account of historical change, but it relied on the most radical (and irrational) forms of utopian hope to sustain itself politically.”[11] The utopian society which Wodiczko first encountered therefore was all encompassing and based an illogical method wrongly purporting to function for the common good. Polish born art historian, Lukasz Ronduda wrote in 2005 “In Communist Poland there was no situation outside of ideology.”[12] Nothing existed if it were not for the benefit of this Communist philosophy. Wodiczko stated in an interview in October in 1986, “Only after several years outside Poland was I able fully to comprehend the degree to which artists and designers in Poland were ideologically trapped by the Westernized, “liberal” state socialism of the ‘70s.”[13] In other words, it was necessary for Wodiczko to gain an outside perspective on Poland in order to see just how implemented he had been in a Communist regime.
The artist moved to New York in 1983 and it was this proximity to the abject poverty and homelessness which led the Wodiczko to question many of the contradictions and paradoxes implicit in the juxtaposition of poverty and gentrification happening in Down Town Manhattan. He had hoped to find a democratic state when arriving in the US, but soon realised one had to continually battle to achieve their own democracy.[14] “It was winter and I was living very close to the main shelter for homeless men and quite close to a shelter for women.”[15] Wodiczko states in a 1986 interview. “I saw many people living on the streets, trying to survive the bitter cold temperature by burning tires. It was therefore shocking to me to see one of the largest buildings in the entire neighbourhood empty.”[16] The building he speaks of is in fact the Astor building, which housed the New Museum from 1983 until 2007. Wodiczko “learned that the upper floors of the building were awaiting new tenants at a price of nearly one million dollars each and at the time the New Museum received the basement and ground floor space for free, or at least for very cheap rent.”[17] In 1984, during the opening of the exhibition Difference: On Representation and Sexuality[18] at the New Museum, Wodiczko attempted to highlight this injustice by projecting two padlocks and a set of chains onto the side of the building[19], drawing attention to the empty, dark floors. This work became known as the Astor Building Projection, 1984[20]. “What was immediately striking here” Wodiczko says, “was the emptiness of this huge structure when all around it people were living on the streets.”[21] He projected one padlock, as if bolting a door, on the side of the building. The second padlock and set of chains, wrapped around the New Museum and its neighbouring building, “was decided upon later” Wodiczko stated, “when I learned more about the connections between the New Museum and this art/real estate operation[22].”[23] The New Museum was implicit in fostering the gentrification of the Bowery area and the “subsequent conversion of the entire surrounding area into one of art galleries and other art-related institutions and businesses.”[24]
The theories Richard Noble presents on utopian ideology in his anthology Utopia: Documents of Contemporary Art, together with theories from Fredric Jameson’s The Utopian Enclave, 2004, Rosalind Krauss’s Sculpture in the Expanded Field, Hal Foster’s 1985 book Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics also Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau’s reimaging of Claude Lefort’s The Logic of Totalitarianism, 1986 and extensive writings by Austrian artist collective WochenKlausur and Martha Rosler[9] will be utilised in the analysis. The writings of Rosalyn Deutsche are also highly influential in the debate around public space in relation to Wodiczko’s practise of the 1980s. It is two lesser known projection works by Wodiczko: The Astor Building/ The New Museum Projection, 1984 and the Homeless Projection: A Proposal for the City of New York, which will be utilised for this debate. This will follow with a critique of the Homeless Vehicle Project, 1988-89. The investigation will conclude with a brief analysis of contemporary attempts to tackle the issues of homelessness and the influence of this historic work. The work of Michael Rakowitz and Thylacine, a Swiss duo, will be analysed and their attempts to tackle the social stigma of living on the streets today.
Krzysztof Wodiczko was born in 1943 during the Warsaw ghetto uprising[10] and grew up in Soviet occupied Poland. At the time of his upbringing, socialist realist ideology and utopian thinking dominated Communist Poland. This had a profound effect on Wodiczko’s life and practise. Richard Noble stated in 2009, “Communism justified itself in terms of a radical, scientific account of historical change, but it relied on the most radical (and irrational) forms of utopian hope to sustain itself politically.”[11] The utopian society which Wodiczko first encountered therefore was all encompassing and based an illogical method wrongly purporting to function for the common good. Polish born art historian, Lukasz Ronduda wrote in 2005 “In Communist Poland there was no situation outside of ideology.”[12] Nothing existed if it were not for the benefit of this Communist philosophy. Wodiczko stated in an interview in October in 1986, “Only after several years outside Poland was I able fully to comprehend the degree to which artists and designers in Poland were ideologically trapped by the Westernized, “liberal” state socialism of the ‘70s.”[13] In other words, it was necessary for Wodiczko to gain an outside perspective on Poland in order to see just how implemented he had been in a Communist regime.
The artist moved to New York in 1983 and it was this proximity to the abject poverty and homelessness which led the Wodiczko to question many of the contradictions and paradoxes implicit in the juxtaposition of poverty and gentrification happening in Down Town Manhattan. He had hoped to find a democratic state when arriving in the US, but soon realised one had to continually battle to achieve their own democracy.[14] “It was winter and I was living very close to the main shelter for homeless men and quite close to a shelter for women.”[15] Wodiczko states in a 1986 interview. “I saw many people living on the streets, trying to survive the bitter cold temperature by burning tires. It was therefore shocking to me to see one of the largest buildings in the entire neighbourhood empty.”[16] The building he speaks of is in fact the Astor building, which housed the New Museum from 1983 until 2007. Wodiczko “learned that the upper floors of the building were awaiting new tenants at a price of nearly one million dollars each and at the time the New Museum received the basement and ground floor space for free, or at least for very cheap rent.”[17] In 1984, during the opening of the exhibition Difference: On Representation and Sexuality[18] at the New Museum, Wodiczko attempted to highlight this injustice by projecting two padlocks and a set of chains onto the side of the building[19], drawing attention to the empty, dark floors. This work became known as the Astor Building Projection, 1984[20]. “What was immediately striking here” Wodiczko says, “was the emptiness of this huge structure when all around it people were living on the streets.”[21] He projected one padlock, as if bolting a door, on the side of the building. The second padlock and set of chains, wrapped around the New Museum and its neighbouring building, “was decided upon later” Wodiczko stated, “when I learned more about the connections between the New Museum and this art/real estate operation[22].”[23] The New Museum was implicit in fostering the gentrification of the Bowery area and the “subsequent conversion of the entire surrounding area into one of art galleries and other art-related institutions and businesses.”[24]
In 1959, Ernst Bloch stated “utopian consciousness wants to look far into the distance, but ultimately only in order to penetrate the darkness so near, of the just lived moment, in which everything that is both drives and is hidden from itself. In other words, we need the most powerful telescope, that of polished utopian consciousness, in order to penetrate precisely the nearest nearness.”[25] This was precisely what Wodiczko was doing with this work, his projections on to the darkened, vacant building were literally and metaphorically highlighted the “darkness so near”. The projection, “desires to model alternatives to the way things are, in order to force some sort of engagement with them.”[26] The paradoxes Wodiczko is attempting to engage with are worth noting. Firstly the basic principal of architecture is for shelter and protection. Here architecture is used as the exact opposite; it is a means of fostering homelessness. Secondly, the New Museum was created with a socially conscious curatorial ethos[27]. Their fuelling the structures implicit in creating a situation of gentrification and homelessness contradicts this stance.
In a conversation with Wodiczko published in Art Journal in 2003, he spoke of a shift which began in the early 1980s of uneven urban struggle and cultural resistance. He declares; “artists began to think critically about art – the position of their practise – in relation to development in a city and the lives of its people.”[28] This began, Wodiczko claims, in the early 1980s with French philosopher and theorist, Claude Lefort and his utopian ideals of democracy and public space. Wodiczko states, “Lefort proposed that democracy is founded on public space that should be, essentially empty. This emptiness does not belong to any individual or group, but should be available to anyone who can bring meaning to it, recognize others in it, and instigate and perpetuate dissemination and debate about rights. Lefort’s position is a utopian concept. He describes an ideal, non-existent public space, which in reality is not empty but controlled and barricaded by speakers, commercial and political, who speak at the expense of silent others.”[29] This is too idealised for the artist, and does not point to a realisable utopia. It is political theorists Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau’s reimagining of Lefort’s utopian ideology into “agonistic democracy” which excites Wodiczko. Their utopia is far from a flattening of opinion, but rather based on “establishing precise distinctions between difference and conflict, they articulated a democracy based not on hostilities where parties are enemies to each other, but on “agonism”, where parties are constructively adversarial.”[30] Theirs, Wodiczko states, is “not a solution but a process of engaging more actors (and I hope artists as well) in an ongoing energetic discourse…”[31] This theory does not propose consensus between groups, rather the opposite, it purports difference as an embraced form of democracy. With the early Communist influence in Wodiczko’s upbringing, he is all too aware of the fundamental flaws of forced conformity. “In this way” the artist stated, “the aggressive, responsible and critical agonism of a democratic discourse may be organized by social, cultural, and artistic movements and actions as a part of the working of the “oppositional public sphere.” Together they may animate the public space while forcefully holding the state, mainstream media, and even global financial structures ethically and politically accountable.”[32]
The influence of socialist realist ideology is especially evident in his large scale, outdoor projections. These adversarial, political, social and cultural messages, according to Wodiczko “explore or enact democracy”[33] in an agonistic, caustic manner. “It holds up a critical mirror to the world; a glass through which the darkness of the future illuminates the present.”[34] During an interview in October in 1986, fellow Polish citizen and art historian, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, stated Wodiczko’s work “remind[s] me of an important aspect of Polish May Day parades. The focal point of the parades, the pompous facades of the socialist-realist buildings on the main street in Warsaw, used to be adorned with huge, four-story-high portraits of contemporary Polish head of state hung side by side with those of Marx and Lenin. This display was obviously a kind of wish fulfilment of the Polish rulers anxious to secure symbolic continuity between themselves and the unquestioned heroes of the communist past.”[35] Wodiczko subsumes this notion from his childhood of forced reverence and adoration of so called communist heroes. The subversion of expected heroism is paramount in the projection work Homeless Projection: A Proposal for the City of New York.
The Homeless Projection: A Proposal for the City of New York remained just that, a proposal. Shown in 1986, in its unrealised form, at the 49th Parallel gallery at the Centre for Contemporary Canadian Art, Vancouver, the project proposed to project “images of the attributes of New York’s homeless population”[36] on to the surfaces of figurative monuments in New York City. Specifically, the art work purported to project on to the four monuments – George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Layfayette and Mother and Child Fountain - who sat on each side of the recently regenerated Union Square in Downtown Manhattan.
Rosalyn Deutsche explains how Wodiczko hoped to transform the monuments in Union Square: “Wodiczko manipulates the statues’ own language to challenge the apparent stability of its significance, transforming the classical gestures, poses and attitudes of the sculpted figures into those used by people begging on the streets.”[37] Wodiczko hoped to draw attention to the neglected people living on the streets by displaying them on top of plinths and podiums. With the gentrification of Union Square, these people were evicted from a place usually occupied by many rough sleepers. “The photographed images” which were to be projected on to the monuments, Rosalyn Deutsche tells us in October in 1986, “consists of the familiar objects and costumes of the homeless, their means of travel – occasioned by their forced mobility – and the gestures they adopt to secure an income on the streets. Far from transcending the “trivial” facts of city life, Wodiczko’s monuments are forced to acknowledge the social facts they produce. Trivial objects form the content of his images, and while such monumentalized commonplace items as a shopping cart, wheelchair, or can of Windex seem to clash absurdly with the heroic iconography of the neoclassical monument, their placement is also carefully calibrated and seamlessly joined to the formal language of the sculpture.”[38]
Through this appropriation, the monuments are forced to reveal their contemporary surroundings and disrupt their seemingly stoic and static appearances. Hal Foster wrote in 1985 “…art that exposes clichés plays upon them critically. Such art stresses, even rehearses the collapse of art into the media in order to inscribe – against all odds – a critical discourse there.”[39] Wodiczko’s projections function in such a manner. Austrian political artist collective WochenKlausur claimed in 2003: “Art should deal with reality”. It should “grapple with political circumstances, and work out proposals for improving human coexistence.”[40] The artist is fully aware of the absurdity inherent in constructing monuments to the great dead in our society. By reusing this very tradition of heroism to depict the most depraved of society, the artist is exposing their inherent clichéd history.
In 1979, when astutely defining sculptures turn to postmodernism, Rosalind Krauss explored two examples of Rodin sculptures from the 1880s; the Gates of Hell and Balzac. These sculptures were both conceived and commissioned as site-specific monuments in Paris. As events prevailed, no versions ever existed at their intended sites but exist instead in other, non-intended museums. “With these two sculptural projects” Krauss stated, “I would say, one crosses the threshold of the logic of the monument, entering the space of what could be called its negative condition – a kind of sitelessness, or homelessness, an absolute loss of place… producing the monument as abstraction, the monument as pure marker or base, functionally placeless and largely self-referential”[41] These monuments by Rodin were liberated from their plinths and function as “essentially nomadic.” Wodiczko’s choice of appropriating the monuments in Union Square as a means of expressing the forced nomadism of the homeless is therefore highly attuned to this rupture in the history of the monument. Their ideology of non-place becomes two-fold: the sculptures are themselves a reference to placelessness and, his projections of signs of the homeless on their surface are a reference to their forced nomadic existence.
Another project by the artist, the Homeless Vehicle Project, is an astute use of utopian ideology and representation of its modernist shortcomings. The Homeless Vehicle was designed in conjunction with homeless people of New York[42] in the 1980s. It was used as a functional object on the streets throughout the decade and exhibited in galleries from the end of the 1980s[43]. The object looks like “a streamlined, four-wheeled metal object, reminiscent of a high-tech version of a supermarket cart, encased in a skin of plastic and rubberized skeleton of metal hoops. A wire cage containing cans and plastic bags were visible, bolted or welded to the chassis. But what drew the eye instantly was the gleaming metal nose cone… so the whole vehicle bore a strong resemblance to a missile[44], primed and locked onto some invisible target.”[45]
The vehicles acted as an absurd dichotomy between the world of art as a social intervention and art as commodity. In a 2010 interview, when Wodiczko was asked about the vehicles, his first response was oddly, “we sell them.”[46] Wodiczko was trained in Poland in the 1960s “to be a member of the elite unit of designers, skilful infiltrators who were supposed to transform existing state socialism into an intelligent, complex, and human design project.”[47] The artist is highly skilled in influencing people’s behaviour through the industrial design of commodities and entirely attuned to societies perpetual need for the acquisition of objects to produce shallow emotions of fulfilment. It is of fundamental importance to the artist that these constructions are to be understood as more than just objects of reverence or vehicles of social change. The artist continues “we wanted to create the condition for people who have homes, homeful people, to imagine a situation where there would be a hundred thousand Homeless Vehicles taking over the city, because that was the amount of homeless people at that time in New York City. That was an impossible vision.”[48] This project was, as Martha Rosler described it, a “stop-gap solution to homelessness show[ing] up the absurdity of official responses.”[49]
In 1979, when astutely defining sculptures turn to postmodernism, Rosalind Krauss explored two examples of Rodin sculptures from the 1880s; the Gates of Hell and Balzac. These sculptures were both conceived and commissioned as site-specific monuments in Paris. As events prevailed, no versions ever existed at their intended sites but exist instead in other, non-intended museums. “With these two sculptural projects” Krauss stated, “I would say, one crosses the threshold of the logic of the monument, entering the space of what could be called its negative condition – a kind of sitelessness, or homelessness, an absolute loss of place… producing the monument as abstraction, the monument as pure marker or base, functionally placeless and largely self-referential”[41] These monuments by Rodin were liberated from their plinths and function as “essentially nomadic.” Wodiczko’s choice of appropriating the monuments in Union Square as a means of expressing the forced nomadism of the homeless is therefore highly attuned to this rupture in the history of the monument. Their ideology of non-place becomes two-fold: the sculptures are themselves a reference to placelessness and, his projections of signs of the homeless on their surface are a reference to their forced nomadic existence.
Another project by the artist, the Homeless Vehicle Project, is an astute use of utopian ideology and representation of its modernist shortcomings. The Homeless Vehicle was designed in conjunction with homeless people of New York[42] in the 1980s. It was used as a functional object on the streets throughout the decade and exhibited in galleries from the end of the 1980s[43]. The object looks like “a streamlined, four-wheeled metal object, reminiscent of a high-tech version of a supermarket cart, encased in a skin of plastic and rubberized skeleton of metal hoops. A wire cage containing cans and plastic bags were visible, bolted or welded to the chassis. But what drew the eye instantly was the gleaming metal nose cone… so the whole vehicle bore a strong resemblance to a missile[44], primed and locked onto some invisible target.”[45]
The vehicles acted as an absurd dichotomy between the world of art as a social intervention and art as commodity. In a 2010 interview, when Wodiczko was asked about the vehicles, his first response was oddly, “we sell them.”[46] Wodiczko was trained in Poland in the 1960s “to be a member of the elite unit of designers, skilful infiltrators who were supposed to transform existing state socialism into an intelligent, complex, and human design project.”[47] The artist is highly skilled in influencing people’s behaviour through the industrial design of commodities and entirely attuned to societies perpetual need for the acquisition of objects to produce shallow emotions of fulfilment. It is of fundamental importance to the artist that these constructions are to be understood as more than just objects of reverence or vehicles of social change. The artist continues “we wanted to create the condition for people who have homes, homeful people, to imagine a situation where there would be a hundred thousand Homeless Vehicles taking over the city, because that was the amount of homeless people at that time in New York City. That was an impossible vision.”[48] This project was, as Martha Rosler described it, a “stop-gap solution to homelessness show[ing] up the absurdity of official responses.”[49]
In his Utopia anthology, Richard Noble attributes literary accounts such as George Orwell’s 1984 as utopian in the sense that it embodies “both the positive, future-orientated aspirations to improve human society, but also in a sense [it is] intended not so much as actual blueprints for new social organizations but rather models that allow us to see how far we are from what we have the potential to be.”[50] Wodiczko’s vehicles act in just this manner. They “offer two things that seem to pull in rather different directions: on the one hand a vision or imitation of a better place than the here and now we inhabit, and on the other some insights into… the contradictions and limitations that drive our will to escape the here and now in the first place.”[51]
Iraqi American artist Michael Rakowitz suggested his own Modest Proposal to tackle 21st Century homelessness. His project, paraSITEs (2000-ongoing) function as an uncomfortable – and somewhat unsuccessful - juxtaposition of art object cum social intervention. Constructed from discarded plastic and duct tape, each paraSITE, created in conjunction with its homeless user, is attached to the vent of a building[52] and inflated by the residual heat. The participant crawls inside the plastic structure and is kept warm, thus becoming a parasitic body of the architecture which supports them. Learning from Wodiczko’s vehicles which “postulates models of another way of being”[53] Rakowitz, much like his Polish predecessor, is not trying revolutionise homelessness, merely to indicate its potency.
Iraqi American artist Michael Rakowitz suggested his own Modest Proposal to tackle 21st Century homelessness. His project, paraSITEs (2000-ongoing) function as an uncomfortable – and somewhat unsuccessful - juxtaposition of art object cum social intervention. Constructed from discarded plastic and duct tape, each paraSITE, created in conjunction with its homeless user, is attached to the vent of a building[52] and inflated by the residual heat. The participant crawls inside the plastic structure and is kept warm, thus becoming a parasitic body of the architecture which supports them. Learning from Wodiczko’s vehicles which “postulates models of another way of being”[53] Rakowitz, much like his Polish predecessor, is not trying revolutionise homelessness, merely to indicate its potency.
Rakowitz stated in an interview in 2005 “I don’t necessarily have a hope for what the citizens I’ve worked with take away from the experience. I view my projects as performing a necessary disturbance or jolt in everyday experience...”[54]
Shown in The CCAC Wattis Institute, Oakland in 2011, as documentary footage, paraSITE formed part of an exhibition titled Utopia Now![55] These objects were forced to function, rather ineffectively, both inside and outside the white cube. In terms of both artistic object and utopian mirror the Homeless Vehicle Project, conceived thirty years previously, is vastly more successful than Rakowitz’s paraSITE project. Wodiczko’s vehicles antagonistically drew attention to the issues of the homeless plight, while also aiding a scavenger existence. They function as aesthetic objects that do not need the homeless body to activate them inside the gallery space.
Shown in The CCAC Wattis Institute, Oakland in 2011, as documentary footage, paraSITE formed part of an exhibition titled Utopia Now![55] These objects were forced to function, rather ineffectively, both inside and outside the white cube. In terms of both artistic object and utopian mirror the Homeless Vehicle Project, conceived thirty years previously, is vastly more successful than Rakowitz’s paraSITE project. Wodiczko’s vehicles antagonistically drew attention to the issues of the homeless plight, while also aiding a scavenger existence. They function as aesthetic objects that do not need the homeless body to activate them inside the gallery space.
Comparatively, Rakowitz is forced to use documentary footage of the project in order to construct meaning in an artistic environment. Reinstalling these structures in the white cube becomes hollow, if not completely contradictory, thereby removing their function as artistic objects and becoming social intervention. The Homeless Vehicle Project successfully highlight the “darkness so near”[56] equally on the streets and within the confines of the gallery walls.
Swiss duo Thylacine created a highly visceral and insightful critique of the perception and treatment of homelessness in the art world in Germany in 2010. The duo, Fabian Hachen and Mischa Düblin, created a project titled On the Floor. Their work consisted of standard, all be it beautiful, photographs of homeless people hung on the gallery walls. These images, like so many others pictures of supposed victims, were to be admired as a voyeuristic, pleasurable experience, perhaps evoking pity from the gallery going community.
Swiss duo Thylacine created a highly visceral and insightful critique of the perception and treatment of homelessness in the art world in Germany in 2010. The duo, Fabian Hachen and Mischa Düblin, created a project titled On the Floor. Their work consisted of standard, all be it beautiful, photographs of homeless people hung on the gallery walls. These images, like so many others pictures of supposed victims, were to be admired as a voyeuristic, pleasurable experience, perhaps evoking pity from the gallery going community.
Sitting outside, each member of the audience had passed by, the homeless person depicted in the images, begging near the gallery door. This work “thematizes social gaps by drawing attention to the artifice between them and the boundary between an art context and reality.”[57] This work, similarly to Wodiczko, twenty five years previously, ponders on a new way of being by pointing; rather ironically, to just how far we are from the utopia dream.
Krzysztof Wodiczko’s homeless projects of the 1980s function as an astute use of dystopic ideology in order to highlight just how far the US are from the ideal utopian society of democracy and egalitarianism. The artist’s projection works strived to penetrate the darkness of the present. Each Homeless Vehicle emphasised another person forced to live on Manhattans streets, collecting rubbish in order to survive. These vehicles drew attention to the issue of homelessness without victimising or evoking pathos for each user. These heavily designed vehicles shrewdly pointed to the absurdity of the situation both inside the gallery walls and on New York’s streets. The critique of ‘community art’ has become increasingly pertinent in contemporary artistic debate. Community based artistic practises are often founded on notions of uniformity and consensus. They serve to essentialise a group of people into a presubscribed notion of homogony and overidentification for the interest of the participating artist. Wodiczko’s practise, in the 1980s (and still to this day), functions as a prototype to community based work which counters these essentialist concepts of harmonious identification. Through vigilant reflexivity he refuses to stereotype or speak on behalf of his participants. He simply shines a light, emphasising to us, just how far we are from any real solution.
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Community Art’, Afterimage, 22 (January 1995)
Koolhass, Rem, as cited in Marshall Berman, ‘In The Forest of Symbols: Some Notes on
Modernism in New York’, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity
(USA, 1982) pp. 287-349
Krauss, Rosalind, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and
Other Modernist Myths (The MIT Press; London, 1986) pp. 277-290
Krohn , Silke, Art & Agenda: Political Art and Activism, Ed. Robert Klanten, Matthias
Hübner, Alain Bieber, Pedro Alonzo, Gregor Jansen (Prestel Publishing; USA, 2011)
Laclau, Ernesto, Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical
Democratic Politics, trans Wilton Moore and Paul Cammack (Verso; London, 1985)
Noble, Richard, ‘Introduction’, Utopia: Documents of Contemporary Art, (Whitechapel
Gallery; London, 2009) pp. 12-19
Ronduda, Lukas ‘Soc Art – An attempt in Revitalizing Avant-Garde Strategies in Polish Art of
the 1970s’, Piktogram, 1 (Summer, 2005) pp. 125-131
Rosler, Martha, ‘Fragments of a Metropolitan Viewpoint’, If You Lived Here: The City in Art,
Theory, And Social Activism, Ed. Martha Rosler (Dia Art Foundation; Washington,
1991) pp. 15-44
WochenKlausur, ‘Art and Sociopolitical Intervention’, Utopia: Documents of Contemporary
Art, Ed. Richard Noble (Whitechapel Gallery; London, 2009) pp. 79-81
Wodiczko, Krzysztof, ‘Conversations about a Project for a Homeless Vehicle’, October,
No. 47 (Winter, 1988) pp. 68-76
Online Sources Cited
http://blogs.artinfo.com/artintheair/2012/10/25/krzysztof-wodiczko-bringing-union-square-abe-lincoln-statue-to-life-for-a-whole-month/ [accessed 19th April, 2014]
‘Death From Cold Soar as Homeless Increase”, The New York Times, (25 December, 1988) http://www.nytimes.com/1988/12/25/us/deaths-from-cold-soar-as-homeless-increase.html [accessed 15th April 2014]
In Dialogue: Krzysztof Wodiczko and John Rajchman, Walker Art Centre, December 4th, 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5v4-3uSj73g [accessed May 3rd, 2014]
http://archive.newmuseum.org/index.php/Detail/Occurrence/Show/occurrence_id/97 [accessed April 14th, 2014]
http://www.walkerart.org/calendar/2012/this-will-have-been-art-love-politics-in-the [accessed April 20th 2014]
Conversation: Michael Rakowitz, Symbolic interventions in problematic urban situation, 2005. http://current.nyfa.org/post/73238855414/conversations-michael-rakowitz [accessed May 4th, 2014]
Conversation: Michael Rakowitz, Symbolic interventions in problematic urban situation, 2005. http://current.nyfa.org/post/73238855414/conversations-michael-rakowitz [accessed May 4th, 2014]
[1] Rem Koolhass, as cited in Marshall Berman, ‘In The Forest of Symbols: Some Notes on Modernism in New York’, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (USA, 1982) p287
[2] Neil Smith ‘Contours of a Spatialized Politics: Homeless Vehicle and the Production of Geographical Scale’, Visual Culture: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies Ed. Joanna Morra, Marquard Smith (Oxen, 2006) p.275
[3] Martha Rosler, ‘Fragments of a Metropolitan Viewpoint’, If You Lived Here: The City in Art, Theory, and Social Activism (New York, 1991) p21
[4] Ibid. p21
[5] ‘Death From Cold Soar as Homeless Increase”, The New York Times, (25 December, 1988) http://www.nytimes.com/1988/12/25/us/deaths-from-cold-soar-as-homeless-increase.html [accessed 15th April 2014]
[6] Artists such as Martha Rosler, ACT UP, Dan Graham and Jenny Holzer
[7] Richard Noble, ‘Introduction’, Utopia: Documents of Contemporary Art (London, 2009) p.19
[8] The Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI) was established in 1984 by Roland Regan and the US Defence Forces, to use ground and space weapons to defend the US from nuclear ballistic attack from the USSR. Regan became increasingly paranoid about the USSR’s possible attack on the US throughout his presidency. He created a bubble of public fear and paranoia around potential attack. This helped draw attention away from the neo-liberal policies he was implementing at home and his complete disregard of low income citizens. This event became known as the Star Wars in the media.
[9] Martha Rosler made profoundly important work in relation to the New York homeless such as The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems, 1974-75 and If You Lived Here…, 1989. Rosler also wrote extensively on the ramifications and results of urbanisation. This essay will utilise many of these writings and theories developed by the artist.
[10] The Warsaw Ghetto uprising was the single largest revolt by the Jews during WW II, occurring in the German occupied city of Warsaw. For one month, in spring of 1943, the Jewish community resisted the Nazi’s final endeavour to transport all at the ghetto to concentration camps. 400,000 Jews were densely packed into a 3km square area. The ‘Ghetto Fighters’ as they became known, fought valiantly but were ill-equipped to deal with the Nazi onslaught. 13,000 were killed during the uprising and 60,000 were sent to concentration camps.
[11] Noble, 2009, Op. cit. p.13
[12] Lukas Ronduda, ‘Soc Art – An attempt in Revitalizing Avant-Garde Strategies in Polish Art of the 1970s’, Piktogram, 1 (Summer, 2005) p.125
[13] Krzysztof Wodiczko, ‘A Conversation with Krzysztof Wodiczko’, October, 38 (Autumn 1986) p.32
[14] In Dialogue: Krzysztof Wodiczko and John Rajchman, Walker Art Centre, December 4th, 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5v4-3uSj73g [accessed May 3rd, 2014]
[15] Wodiczko, 1986, Op. cit. p.43
[16] Ibid. p43
[17] Ibid. p43
[18] An exhibition which included: Martha Rosler, Mary Kelly, Jeff Wall, Barbara Kruger and Hans Haacke, among many others http://archive.newmuseum.org/index.php/Detail/Occurrence/Show/occurrence_id/97 [accessed April 14th, 2014]
[19] Thiago Carrapatoso, ‘The Expanded Projections: Krzysztof Wodiczko Interferences in the Public Space’, Virus, (2013)https://www.academia.edu/2553892/The_expanded_projections_Krzysztof_Wodiczko_interferences_in_the_public_space# [accessed April 14th, 2014]
[20] The project was also termed The New Museum Project, retrospectively
[21] Wodiczko, 1986, Op. cit. p44
[22] The connection between art and real estate which the artist is referring to is in relation to a previous comment made by Douglas Crimp. In an interview, Crimp notes the symbiotic relationship known between the Museum of Modern Art ‘Tower’ – which contains luxury housing - and its generation of income for the museum’s operation costs. Wodiczko is implying here a similar relationship with the New Museum and the, then yet to be developed, prime real estate above the Museum.
[23] Wodiczko, 1986, Op. cit. p.44
[24] Ibid. p.43
[25] Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, (1954-59) trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight, 3. 12 (Oxford, 1986) p.14
[26] Ibid. p15
[27] Exhibitions such as Let The Record Show, 1987, by AIDS activist group ACT UP, which fought against the marginalisation of the gay community in New York.
[28] Wodiczko, 1986, Op. cit. p.33
[29] Ibid. p.34
[30] Ibid. p.34
[31] Ibid. p.34
[32] Ibid. p.34
[33] Ibid. p.33
[34] Noble,2009, Op. cit. p.19
[35] Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, ‘A Conversation with Krzysztof Wodiczko’, October, 38 (Autumn 1986) p29
[36] Rosalyn Deutsche, ‘Krzysztof Wodiczko’s “Homeless Projection” and the Site of Urban “Revitalization”, October (Autumn, 1986) p93
[37] Ibid. p.94
[38] Ibid. p.92
[39] Hal Foster, Against Pluralism, Recoding: Art Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Seattle, 1986) p.28
[40] WochenKlausur, ‘Art and Sociopolitical Intervention’, Utopia: Documents of Contemporary Art, Ed. Richard Noble (London, 2009) p.79
[41] Rosalind Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (London, 1986) p.280
[42] Grant Kester notes in Aesthetic Evangelists: Conversion and Empowerment in Contemporary Community Art, 1995, this to be an exemplary characteristic of this work.
[43] The Homeless Vehicle Project was unveiled as a physical object (as oppose to plans and drawings as it had been shown previously) to the gallery going public in the Clocktower Gallery in New York in 1988. This work was also included in a 2012 travelling show This Will Have Been: Art, Love and Politics in the 1980s, organised by the Walker Art Centre and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. The show endeavoured to explore the “ruptures that permanently changed the art world during the 1980s”.
http://www.walkerart.org/calendar/2012/this-will-have-been-art-love-politics-in-the [accessed April 20th 2014]
[44]Wodiczko, with his missile shaped vehicles, was making an obvious connection and parody of the absurd and extremely volatile situation Regan had constructed with the 1980s Star Wars crisis and the paranoia created by the US of a USSR attack
[45] Dick Hebdidge, ‘The Machine is Unheimlich: Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Homeless Vehicle Project’, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Ed. Duncan McCorquodale (London, 2011)
[46] http://blogs.artinfo.com/artintheair/2012/10/25/krzysztof-wodiczko-bringing-union-square-abe-lincoln-statue-to-life-for-a-whole-month/ [accessed 19th April, 2014]
[47] Wodiczko, 1986, Op. cit. p.33
[48] Martha Rosler, ‘Fragments of a Metropolitan Viewpoint’, If You Lived Here: The City in Art, Theory, And Social Activism, Ed. Martha Rosler (Washington, 1991) p.14
[49] Ibid. p.14
[50] Ibid. p.14
[51] Ibid. p.14
[52] Rakowitz installed these objects in many cities including New York, Baltimore, Cambridge and Boston
[53] Noble, Op. cit. p.14
[54] Conversation: Michael Rakowitz, Symbolic interventions in problematic urban situation, 2005. http://current.nyfa.org/post/73238855414/conversations-michael-rakowitz [accessed May 4th, 2014]
[55] Other artists included in this show were Vito Acconci, Shigeru Ban, Santiago Cirugeda, Crimson, Amy Franceschini, Chad McCail, Nils Norman, Raketa, Superflex and Torolab
[56] Bloch, 1954-59, Op. cit. p.15
[57] Silke Krohn, Art & Agenda: Political Art and Activism, (Prestel Publishing; 2011) p.138
Krzysztof Wodiczko’s homeless projects of the 1980s function as an astute use of dystopic ideology in order to highlight just how far the US are from the ideal utopian society of democracy and egalitarianism. The artist’s projection works strived to penetrate the darkness of the present. Each Homeless Vehicle emphasised another person forced to live on Manhattans streets, collecting rubbish in order to survive. These vehicles drew attention to the issue of homelessness without victimising or evoking pathos for each user. These heavily designed vehicles shrewdly pointed to the absurdity of the situation both inside the gallery walls and on New York’s streets. The critique of ‘community art’ has become increasingly pertinent in contemporary artistic debate. Community based artistic practises are often founded on notions of uniformity and consensus. They serve to essentialise a group of people into a presubscribed notion of homogony and overidentification for the interest of the participating artist. Wodiczko’s practise, in the 1980s (and still to this day), functions as a prototype to community based work which counters these essentialist concepts of harmonious identification. Through vigilant reflexivity he refuses to stereotype or speak on behalf of his participants. He simply shines a light, emphasising to us, just how far we are from any real solution.
Bibliography
Sources Cited
Bloch, Ernst, The Principle of Hope, (1954-59) trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul
Knight, 3. 12 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986)
Carrapatoso, Thiago, ‘The Expanded Projections: Krzysztof Wodiczko Interference in the
Public Space’, Virus, No. 9 (2009)
Deutsche, Rosalyn, ‘Krzysztof Wodiczko’s “Homeless Projection” and the Site of Urban
“Revitalization”, October, No. 38 (Autumn, 1986) pp. 63-98
Crimp, Douglas, Rosalyn Deutsche, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Krzysztof Wodiczko,
‘A Conversation with Krzysztof Wodiczko’, October, No. 38 (Autumn, 1986)
pp. 23-51
Foster, Hal, ‘Against Pluralism’, Recoding: Art Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Bay
Press; Seattle, 1986) pp. 13-32
Hebdidge, Dick, ‘The Machine is Unheimlich: Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Homeless Vehicle
Project’, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Ed. Duncan McCorquodale (Black Dog Publications;
London, 2011)
Jameson, Fredric, ‘The Utopian Enclave’, Utopia: Documents in Contemporary Art, Ed.
Richard Noble (Whitechapel Gallery & MIT Press; London & Cambridge, 2009)
pp. 69-75
Kester, Grant, ‘Aesthetic Evangelists: Conversion and Empowerment in Contemporary
Community Art’, Afterimage, 22 (January 1995)
Koolhass, Rem, as cited in Marshall Berman, ‘In The Forest of Symbols: Some Notes on
Modernism in New York’, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity
(USA, 1982) pp. 287-349
Krauss, Rosalind, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and
Other Modernist Myths (The MIT Press; London, 1986) pp. 277-290
Krohn , Silke, Art & Agenda: Political Art and Activism, Ed. Robert Klanten, Matthias
Hübner, Alain Bieber, Pedro Alonzo, Gregor Jansen (Prestel Publishing; USA, 2011)
Laclau, Ernesto, Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical
Democratic Politics, trans Wilton Moore and Paul Cammack (Verso; London, 1985)
Noble, Richard, ‘Introduction’, Utopia: Documents of Contemporary Art, (Whitechapel
Gallery; London, 2009) pp. 12-19
Ronduda, Lukas ‘Soc Art – An attempt in Revitalizing Avant-Garde Strategies in Polish Art of
the 1970s’, Piktogram, 1 (Summer, 2005) pp. 125-131
Rosler, Martha, ‘Fragments of a Metropolitan Viewpoint’, If You Lived Here: The City in Art,
Theory, And Social Activism, Ed. Martha Rosler (Dia Art Foundation; Washington,
1991) pp. 15-44
WochenKlausur, ‘Art and Sociopolitical Intervention’, Utopia: Documents of Contemporary
Art, Ed. Richard Noble (Whitechapel Gallery; London, 2009) pp. 79-81
Wodiczko, Krzysztof, ‘Conversations about a Project for a Homeless Vehicle’, October,
No. 47 (Winter, 1988) pp. 68-76
Online Sources Cited
http://blogs.artinfo.com/artintheair/2012/10/25/krzysztof-wodiczko-bringing-union-square-abe-lincoln-statue-to-life-for-a-whole-month/ [accessed 19th April, 2014]
‘Death From Cold Soar as Homeless Increase”, The New York Times, (25 December, 1988) http://www.nytimes.com/1988/12/25/us/deaths-from-cold-soar-as-homeless-increase.html [accessed 15th April 2014]
In Dialogue: Krzysztof Wodiczko and John Rajchman, Walker Art Centre, December 4th, 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5v4-3uSj73g [accessed May 3rd, 2014]
http://archive.newmuseum.org/index.php/Detail/Occurrence/Show/occurrence_id/97 [accessed April 14th, 2014]
http://www.walkerart.org/calendar/2012/this-will-have-been-art-love-politics-in-the [accessed April 20th 2014]
Conversation: Michael Rakowitz, Symbolic interventions in problematic urban situation, 2005. http://current.nyfa.org/post/73238855414/conversations-michael-rakowitz [accessed May 4th, 2014]
Conversation: Michael Rakowitz, Symbolic interventions in problematic urban situation, 2005. http://current.nyfa.org/post/73238855414/conversations-michael-rakowitz [accessed May 4th, 2014]
[1] Rem Koolhass, as cited in Marshall Berman, ‘In The Forest of Symbols: Some Notes on Modernism in New York’, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (USA, 1982) p287
[2] Neil Smith ‘Contours of a Spatialized Politics: Homeless Vehicle and the Production of Geographical Scale’, Visual Culture: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies Ed. Joanna Morra, Marquard Smith (Oxen, 2006) p.275
[3] Martha Rosler, ‘Fragments of a Metropolitan Viewpoint’, If You Lived Here: The City in Art, Theory, and Social Activism (New York, 1991) p21
[4] Ibid. p21
[5] ‘Death From Cold Soar as Homeless Increase”, The New York Times, (25 December, 1988) http://www.nytimes.com/1988/12/25/us/deaths-from-cold-soar-as-homeless-increase.html [accessed 15th April 2014]
[6] Artists such as Martha Rosler, ACT UP, Dan Graham and Jenny Holzer
[7] Richard Noble, ‘Introduction’, Utopia: Documents of Contemporary Art (London, 2009) p.19
[8] The Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI) was established in 1984 by Roland Regan and the US Defence Forces, to use ground and space weapons to defend the US from nuclear ballistic attack from the USSR. Regan became increasingly paranoid about the USSR’s possible attack on the US throughout his presidency. He created a bubble of public fear and paranoia around potential attack. This helped draw attention away from the neo-liberal policies he was implementing at home and his complete disregard of low income citizens. This event became known as the Star Wars in the media.
[9] Martha Rosler made profoundly important work in relation to the New York homeless such as The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems, 1974-75 and If You Lived Here…, 1989. Rosler also wrote extensively on the ramifications and results of urbanisation. This essay will utilise many of these writings and theories developed by the artist.
[10] The Warsaw Ghetto uprising was the single largest revolt by the Jews during WW II, occurring in the German occupied city of Warsaw. For one month, in spring of 1943, the Jewish community resisted the Nazi’s final endeavour to transport all at the ghetto to concentration camps. 400,000 Jews were densely packed into a 3km square area. The ‘Ghetto Fighters’ as they became known, fought valiantly but were ill-equipped to deal with the Nazi onslaught. 13,000 were killed during the uprising and 60,000 were sent to concentration camps.
[11] Noble, 2009, Op. cit. p.13
[12] Lukas Ronduda, ‘Soc Art – An attempt in Revitalizing Avant-Garde Strategies in Polish Art of the 1970s’, Piktogram, 1 (Summer, 2005) p.125
[13] Krzysztof Wodiczko, ‘A Conversation with Krzysztof Wodiczko’, October, 38 (Autumn 1986) p.32
[14] In Dialogue: Krzysztof Wodiczko and John Rajchman, Walker Art Centre, December 4th, 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5v4-3uSj73g [accessed May 3rd, 2014]
[15] Wodiczko, 1986, Op. cit. p.43
[16] Ibid. p43
[17] Ibid. p43
[18] An exhibition which included: Martha Rosler, Mary Kelly, Jeff Wall, Barbara Kruger and Hans Haacke, among many others http://archive.newmuseum.org/index.php/Detail/Occurrence/Show/occurrence_id/97 [accessed April 14th, 2014]
[19] Thiago Carrapatoso, ‘The Expanded Projections: Krzysztof Wodiczko Interferences in the Public Space’, Virus, (2013)https://www.academia.edu/2553892/The_expanded_projections_Krzysztof_Wodiczko_interferences_in_the_public_space# [accessed April 14th, 2014]
[20] The project was also termed The New Museum Project, retrospectively
[21] Wodiczko, 1986, Op. cit. p44
[22] The connection between art and real estate which the artist is referring to is in relation to a previous comment made by Douglas Crimp. In an interview, Crimp notes the symbiotic relationship known between the Museum of Modern Art ‘Tower’ – which contains luxury housing - and its generation of income for the museum’s operation costs. Wodiczko is implying here a similar relationship with the New Museum and the, then yet to be developed, prime real estate above the Museum.
[23] Wodiczko, 1986, Op. cit. p.44
[24] Ibid. p.43
[25] Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, (1954-59) trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight, 3. 12 (Oxford, 1986) p.14
[26] Ibid. p15
[27] Exhibitions such as Let The Record Show, 1987, by AIDS activist group ACT UP, which fought against the marginalisation of the gay community in New York.
[28] Wodiczko, 1986, Op. cit. p.33
[29] Ibid. p.34
[30] Ibid. p.34
[31] Ibid. p.34
[32] Ibid. p.34
[33] Ibid. p.33
[34] Noble,2009, Op. cit. p.19
[35] Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, ‘A Conversation with Krzysztof Wodiczko’, October, 38 (Autumn 1986) p29
[36] Rosalyn Deutsche, ‘Krzysztof Wodiczko’s “Homeless Projection” and the Site of Urban “Revitalization”, October (Autumn, 1986) p93
[37] Ibid. p.94
[38] Ibid. p.92
[39] Hal Foster, Against Pluralism, Recoding: Art Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Seattle, 1986) p.28
[40] WochenKlausur, ‘Art and Sociopolitical Intervention’, Utopia: Documents of Contemporary Art, Ed. Richard Noble (London, 2009) p.79
[41] Rosalind Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (London, 1986) p.280
[42] Grant Kester notes in Aesthetic Evangelists: Conversion and Empowerment in Contemporary Community Art, 1995, this to be an exemplary characteristic of this work.
[43] The Homeless Vehicle Project was unveiled as a physical object (as oppose to plans and drawings as it had been shown previously) to the gallery going public in the Clocktower Gallery in New York in 1988. This work was also included in a 2012 travelling show This Will Have Been: Art, Love and Politics in the 1980s, organised by the Walker Art Centre and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. The show endeavoured to explore the “ruptures that permanently changed the art world during the 1980s”.
http://www.walkerart.org/calendar/2012/this-will-have-been-art-love-politics-in-the [accessed April 20th 2014]
[44]Wodiczko, with his missile shaped vehicles, was making an obvious connection and parody of the absurd and extremely volatile situation Regan had constructed with the 1980s Star Wars crisis and the paranoia created by the US of a USSR attack
[45] Dick Hebdidge, ‘The Machine is Unheimlich: Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Homeless Vehicle Project’, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Ed. Duncan McCorquodale (London, 2011)
[46] http://blogs.artinfo.com/artintheair/2012/10/25/krzysztof-wodiczko-bringing-union-square-abe-lincoln-statue-to-life-for-a-whole-month/ [accessed 19th April, 2014]
[47] Wodiczko, 1986, Op. cit. p.33
[48] Martha Rosler, ‘Fragments of a Metropolitan Viewpoint’, If You Lived Here: The City in Art, Theory, And Social Activism, Ed. Martha Rosler (Washington, 1991) p.14
[49] Ibid. p.14
[50] Ibid. p.14
[51] Ibid. p.14
[52] Rakowitz installed these objects in many cities including New York, Baltimore, Cambridge and Boston
[53] Noble, Op. cit. p.14
[54] Conversation: Michael Rakowitz, Symbolic interventions in problematic urban situation, 2005. http://current.nyfa.org/post/73238855414/conversations-michael-rakowitz [accessed May 4th, 2014]
[55] Other artists included in this show were Vito Acconci, Shigeru Ban, Santiago Cirugeda, Crimson, Amy Franceschini, Chad McCail, Nils Norman, Raketa, Superflex and Torolab
[56] Bloch, 1954-59, Op. cit. p.15
[57] Silke Krohn, Art & Agenda: Political Art and Activism, (Prestel Publishing; 2011) p.138
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