12.20.2006

Death by Freeway

If the angel of history is propelled into the future by the storm of progress, then this storm is most certainly stirred by desire. This desire is a complicated subject, its objects being both the conservative nostalgia of reconstructing the past and the radical utopianism of constructing the future. The present is continuously deconstructed, perceivable only in fragments of vague images. In our attempts to piece them together the immediacy of want betrays the bipolar temporality of desire, that abrasive symbiosis of hope and regret, while the fertile yet one-dimensional collective mind produces of what it is only geometrically capable (chronology).

The aggressive and unyielding vectors of causality cut through the city unrelentingly. The anonymity of the grid is freedom. Comfortably coddled by his mobile psychological infrastructure, the iPod-toting hipster becomes a stoic simulacrum of his more vibrant silhouette. The arteries of the city, lifted as if to meet him, peel away from the valley’s floor and commence the aerial tangle. The automobile, like the progress that it so singularly symbolizes, is fluidly transferred while down below the cells, betrayed, coagulate in the shadows. Trapped as we are in these cells (willingly or not – it is unclear), where the ossifying joints of memory seize us upon our nostalgic trajectory toward utopia’s monolithic asymptote, should we push forward in directions unknown or do we risk desiring nothing more than to meekly tend the glass menagerie?

In the ancient Greek cities the dead were buried in the necropolis, just outside the city walls. This practice both allowed the citizens to use the space within the city walls more effectively and potentially observe prohibitions on burial within the city limits. In the American metropolis today, the city limit is no longer the boundary of inhabitation and hasn’t been for some time. The complete domination of suburban sprawl as the model for American city growth since the 1950s means that the dead buried outside the city limits in the 20th century are now the occupants of new suburban city limits. Colma, California, for instance, is a sprawling landscape of the dead located south of San Francisco and serving as its neighbors burial grounds since the early 1900s when the city passed an ordinance outlawing cemeteries within its limits. Colma now has its own BART station.




Colma, California. The city that waits for the city that waits to die to die.
The desire to remember the dead is dissociated from their physical remains. The bucolic cemetery landscape is a bloated leach in the urban fabric. The paradigm of grave stone architecture territorializes a space and a program that should be a communal space of collective memory. Likewise, we turn our collective mind away from the space beneath the urban infrastructure. The soaring concrete highway overpass is a beautiful, lonely behemoth. I propose to regard the space beneath the freeway as a collective space of memory and desire dislocated from the temporality of being and the linear domination of the automobile.

The act of making is inescapably a process of layering, but the art of making – to borrow Calvino’s words – is “the sudden agile leap of the poet-philosopher who raises himself above the weight of the world, showing that with all his gravity he has the secret of lightness, and that what many consider to be the vitality of the times – noisy, aggressive, revving and roaring – belongs to the realm of death, like a cemetery for rusty old cars.” As during the first industrial revolution when we carved a space in our hearts for the hand crafted, we must now make room for an even more perverse nostalgia – that of the mass-produced monolith. The subject here is the representation of that which is slipping away and only momentarily captured by words. My initial study is to understand what is revealed and what is occluded by the detritus of making.