|
Neighbourhood
Threat
by Lars Bang Larsen
In 1963 manufacturing overtook agriculture as Denmark's highest
turnover industry. This change in the country's economic identity
was a sign that social democracy had arrived as a way of life; the
result was a boom in Functionalist architecture. The effect of this
on people's lives - or rather, how people perceive their relationship
with space and how the urban environment has changed since the 1960s
- is one of the recurrent themes of Jakob Kolding's work.
In April 1969 the inhabitants of a housing scheme in Høje
Gladsaxe, one of Copenhagen's new satellite towns, got together
with a group of artist-activists to discuss how they could improve
their immediate environment. One of the first things the activists
did was to rally the town's inhabitants early one Saturday morning
to build a children's playground, which was completed by sunset
the same day. At one level the playground represented a way of throwing
off the constraints imposed by the existing urban space; at another
it was a simple piece of extra-parliamentary protest produced on
a patch of sand between the serried ranks of fir trees planted by
the municipal authorities and overlooked by the housing blocks.
Of course, the authorities ordered the playground to be dismantled
but eventually, after civic protests, they relented. What followed
was an odd drama with libidinal undertones, a discussion of space
and all its various meanings, affects and effects. Something like
this happens in Kolding's work, in which people's emotional lives
and the environment in which they live them are seen as bound up
with fundamental issues about the way people see and interact.
According to the activists, their intervention had tapped a vein
of repressed frustration at the rigid, unimaginative environmental
thinking embodied by the town's tower blocks. What followed was
a generalized rejection of social conformity, as housewives left
their husbands and marital infidelity led to the break-up of a number
of families, while others simply moved away. It was like a real-life
version of High-rise (1975), the sci-fi novel in which J. G. Ballard
depicts a civil war in the microcosm of London's suburban tower
blocks. Except that in Ballard's novel the tower blocks embody the
city's class divide, with the rich on top and the proles at the
bottom, leading to spectacular civic infighting and unrest.
Different as they are in many ways, Ballard's novel and the events
that took place outside Copenhagen both represent modular architecture
as something negative and repressive. The inevitable consequence
will be either an unleashing of humanity's predatory instincts and
the collapse of civilization (Ballard) or the paralysis and alienation
of those with a need for a sense of social belonging (Høje
Gladsaxe). But for Kolding the scenario described in High-rise and
the real-life events at Høje Gladsaxe represent two typical
responses to Modernist urban planning, and it is the responses themselves
that interest him as much as any directly architectural issues.
For such questions relate to a larger interest in how social exclusion
works and how authority can be challenged. One of Kolding's collages
shows the Høje Gladsaxe tower blocks at the bottom contrasted
with the children's playground above. Simple as the image is, its
history and meaning are ambiguous: perhaps the playground is a thought
bubble, the tower blocks' dreaming of their own history.
For Kolding the problem with the suburban developments of the 1960s
and '70s was partly a matter of how they were conceived and represented.
He says "social problems are often considered, almost exclusively,
as a result of the area's architecture, design or types of residents.
The problem with such an approach is that many decisive factors,
which have a direct effect upon the local community but are not
so easily observable, are thus ignored." The way architecture
is carved up and emphasized in his collages and posters resists
any such facile criticism. Should we think of buildings simply in
terms of their sheer physicality rather than, for example, larger
economic or demographic patterns?
In order for human space, for the built environment, to have an
authentic, enabling social role, Kolding argues that we need a broader,
more universal, vision of people's relationship to that space. The
urban fabric is not something that exists independently of behaviour
and its historical context, whether at the level of urban planning
(from high Modernism through to today), youth culture (DJs, graffiti
and skateboarders), group identities (music and football) or art
(vintage 1960s minimalism). It is this interconnection that Kolding's
work so clearly articulates, not simply showing social behaviour
in the context of a given human space but actually questioning the
relation between the two.
Kolding's favoured piece of technology is the photocopier, an inherently
lo-fi tool and a democratic means of manipulating and reproducing
the images that, with the addition of drawings and the odd colour
element, form the basis of his collages. His approach to the collage
form varies: some are posters, made up of just four or five elements
- pictures or text; others take the form of free gallery hand-outs
or flyposted on walls in the city space; a third approach uses huge
expanses of white paper, on which he creates delicate, arrow-like
compositions. The latter style in particular is reminiscent of Constructivism
and the 20th century avant-garde's interest in mechanical reproduction
and the tension between man and machine.
Style itself, of course, has an intimate relation to the question
of how people relate to their environment, and the history of style
can be read like so many growth rings in a tree trunk. In Kolding's
case it is impossible not to see his work within the context of
Minimalism, whose essentially progressivist ethos he both uses and
turns on itself, as he challenges aspects of democratic engineering
over the last four decades.
Snippets of sociological theory - some ringing universally true,
others as dated as orthodox Marxism - appear in some of Kolding's
collages. In one work from 1999 the Joker from Batman has 'Class
Structure' and '3 Class and Institutional Form of a Culture / Class
Form / Institutional Form' placed over his eyes. Kolding probably
sympathizes with what he quotes, but here the Joker seems simultaneously
to reinforce and undermine such slogans. Perhaps middle-class ideology
is always ambiguous: enterprising but hostile to change, conscious
of tradition and heritage but unaware of history as a process of
material and cultural change.
Kolding's engagement with such questions at times takes the form
of what the Situationists referred to as 'psycho-geography'. In
one untitled poster, for example, a footballer is seen heading the
ball towards a terrace of detached yellow-brick houses; the text
above the image reads, "Have there been any attempts, through
planning, to either discourage or promote certain patterns of behaviour
in your neighbourhood? (which/how?)". The footballer is both
a discreetly gendered fantasy in a real environment and a metaphor
for human aspiration in relation to the space we inhabit. In some
of his other collages Kolding uses Star Wars figures as a kind of
psycho-geographic feedback. After all, such films are largely the
work of a suburban generation of American directors portraying their
own childhood fascination with the Hollywood they absorbed through
TV.
Producing black and white collages is a serious business. Historically
collage has been a defiant, subversive medium, making connections
the authorities would rather the public didn't see. But it also
shows the artist's individuality under pressure, producing combinations
and permutations of recycled imagery. Kolding's cannibalized representations
introduce new ways of navigating and producing public space, as
individual and collective social bodies.
Published in Frieze, Issue 66 April 2002
|
|