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...like dancing about
architecture
by Jörg Heiser
According to Henri
Lefebre, roughly simplified, the following equation can be made:
city = space + everyday life + reproduction of capitalist conditions.
An equation however, that is complicated - like every attempt for
planning - by each "plus" being possibly replaced by "times" or
"divided by" depending upon the specific situation. In this equation
the work of Jacob Kolding can be discovered, translated into the
language of montage and drawing: space is pictured or drawn in the
form of suburban architecture and terraced house facades, but also
left free-standing in almost Malevich-like charged zones of white,
which are defined by their edges. Everyday life appears, above all,
in the form of scraps from pop and fan culture: hence where it,
at least potentially, thwarts urban planning. The reproduction of
capitalist conditions shimmers in the grimace of the joker and is
structurally present in the advertising slogan-like staccato shapes
of the collages. And in the end toge! ther, they equal the city,
which proves to be the site of the production of hybridity in, of
all places, Kolding's seemingly so severe, reduced "purist" set
of experiment. Successful sociability often seems to occur in spite
of residential architecture rather than because of it - something
almost everyone knows from a number of examples from his or her
own region. But Jakob Kolding does not have only negative to report
on Albertslund, the satellite town of Copenhagen where he was born
in 1971 and raised. Built in the context of a socio-political ideal
of social compensation and half-way just basic provisions, and on
the fundament of a relatively unprecarious economic situation, Albertslund
offered a 70's kid enough possibilities for socialisation in a secure
environment -what one would call "family friendly". Exactly this
factor is simultaneously the one that - at the point of "everyday
life" in the suburban equation - becomes a corset for the adolescent's
will to break free. 'The Clash' spoke of the boredom in a planned
world that already seems to want to program destiny as the father
or mother of a family with one to two children. The unalike
match of functionalist customisation and the cosy home of family
mythology produces monsters of ossification. Kolding's works are
about how planning anticipated such 'units', carefully thought of
everything - but the need for precisely a break with everything
being planned out.
In 1979 The Clash brought out the film Rude Boy, a film that even
then could hardly sell its own amateurism as deliberate, and perhaps
this is just why it creates a particularly exact feeling for a lost
era and its music. It begins with images of suburban high rises,
of police cordons and street battles, white Bobbies against youths
of colour. We are introduced to the figure of the 'typical' - white
- Clash fan, Ray, a shuffling character, gawky and carrying a last
bit of baby fat, standing in a Bob Marley T-shirt at the back of
a concert, at a safe distance from the stage, with a slightly upturned
lip, awkwardly bobbing to 'Police And Thieves', the reggae song
that, for Clash standards, is rather relaxed but still remains twitching
under the teetering Frankenstein current of Punk.
On the way home he crosses a market place where the elder Caribbean
residents of Brixton shop, and the images are put to Junior Murvin's
original version of 'Police and Thieves': "...police and thieves
in the street, fighting the nation with their guns and ammunition."
As if Ray were taking the song home to Brixton, poor and predominantly
inhabited by Afro-Britons - in its authentic version to its authentic
site (even if it really refers to Kingston, Jamaica), into the housing
schemes with their Per Kirkeby-like opaque brick passages, home
to his parents' small flat where the dole is waiting for him.
All of this is like preparation for the one 'great' moment Ray experiences
as a Clash fan and the band's more tolerated than hired roadie:
in front of 50,000 people, at the 'Rock against Racism' concert
in Victoria Park, in London's East End, The Clash play 'White Riot',
that ecstatic, fast vision of a revolt of the white youth modelled
after the blacks example, "...white riot, I want my own riot". It
is a vision in which the recognition of the fact that a revolt of
the white youth would owe to mainly other and less dramatic conditions
(boredom, meaning disagreement with the conditions they chose for
themselves to at least some degree) than those of the blacks (discrimination),
threatens to turn around into the idea of an inflamed crowd of rebellious
and exclusively white boys that definitively points in another direction.
Ray himself is one of those characters on the edge. He goes to the
microphone just after the band left the stage and gestures toward
the dark apartment ! towers rising over the perimeter of the park
and screams: "For the people over in the towerblocks, so they can
hear you, cheer for The Clash." For one moment, Ray finds his amplifier
in the crowd, whose roar should destroy the petty bourgeois undemandingness
of the brick facades.
"Crisis, what crisis?" says Labour's prime minister Callaghan in
the cold January of 1979, before the era of Maggie Thatcher begins,
Punk collapses and the already shattered picture of a social polity
is finally drowned in the ice-cold water of absolutist economic
liberalism. In the 80's, the proverbial high rise finally became
that clich it had already threatened to become with The Clash,
a sort of dystopic ruin of the Babylonian tower. On the conservative
side, the satellite towns were understood as the breeding ground
of crime and waywardness that had to be brought under control by
means of the police and neighbourhood surveillance. In the coming
peace and ecology movement, the opinion was often that the anonymous
estates had estranged people from nature and an original rural sense
of community.
As in almost every ideological bias there is also a grain of truth
in both views. Just as the middle-class retreated to a green belt
of single-family houses, the high rises - no matter how cleverly
designed to promote a sense of community - did actually function
as a sort of junk yard for those lives that were spit out by the
economic process as useless and senseless. And in the anonymity
of the housing schemes the ensuing sense of loss and exclusion from
whatever kind of social structure was actually often increased.
But, at the same time, was that not also clear proof that "quality
of life" is less determined by misplaced or missing social common
areas than the fundamental economic structure and its political
flanks, i.e. by factors that exist in advance of urban development
and constantly call its results into question? Kolding's works show
which dreams stood at the beginning of such planning, how they began
to be ground threateningly small by the crunching of the millstones,
and how, on the other hand, one wants to escape the dilemma with
good planning and control, and how extremely fleeting popcultural
moments successfully thwart the planned-out suburban world and its
socio-political co-ordinates. A group of four collages in poster
format (Untitled, 1999?) line up these elements from left to right
almost like pearls on a string. On the left we see city planners
bent over a model and helpers busy fidgeting with model houses.
Mounted next to this in large letters: "CONCEPTIONS OF THE CLASS
STRUCTURE AND POLITICAL IDEOLOGY: SOME OBSERVATIONS ON ATTITUDES
IN ENGLAND AND SWEDEN". What sounds like a plain chapter title from
a sociological study becomes the mission for the other visual elements.
You start to track down the attitudes in the city planner's 70's
hippie shirts and hairstyles. In the second poster element, on the
lower end of the vacuum of white the planners seem to have left
behind, we see the grid-shaped keyboard of an 80's rhythm computer
as if there might be a possibility of reprogramming the gird of
balconies mounted below. The upper portion of the third poster shows,
in typewritten letters, a catalogue of questions, which are obviously
directed at the developers of council flats and first raise questions
on the functional criteria of the planning, on the income groups
they had in mind, where children should play, etc. Finally, questions
19, 20 and 21: "To what extent has an attempt been made to make
the precinct aesthetically pleasing? How successful has this been?
To what extent do the residents think that these aesthetic touches
have proved successful?" The succinct answer is the high rise pictured
below the questions, with its windowless side facade tarted up with
garland shaped patterns of colour, probably in the early 90's, as
if it were enough to put fresh make up on the "malfunctions" of
the social which, among other things, become visible in the grid
shaped buildings (in an earlier untitled series of drawings from
1997, Kolding already proposed ironic and fictive suggestions for
the beautification of facades with cheerful patterns of colour).
In the fourth image Carl Andre floor elements collide with the weedy
coarse concrete tiles of a public square that was probably planned
to be a "meeting place" at the high rise. In between hangs an isolated
skateboarder with his board in the air, as if he just reached this
short-circuit of the realm of Minimalism with the downfalls of the
failed planning of "social meeting places" in a single courageous
leap, while simultaneously, and even in flight, he had already become
the icon of the youth culture industry.
Kolding encircles the biggest mistake made by the city planners
of the 60's and 70's, namely, that they thought socially successful
life could be architecturally planned at all. The attempt at endowing
a sense of meaning through formal-functional means can not replace
the attempt to achieve that through socio-political means - only
dream it away and postpone it to a rude awakening. Social housing
is turned on its head by the geography of the separation of rich
and poor, white and non-white, domestic and foreign.
At the same time, today the flexibilisation of capital and its accumulation
dissolves traditional structures, sends off the unemployed, and
replaces the cramped and ideologically poisoned concept of the nuclear
family with the vacuum of the sad lives lived by singles in the
block of flats. Is this the dead-end where the possible adolescent
attempt at breaking free is steered?
Adolescent outburst as "culture" (whether as Pop music or in other
art forms) is naturally always already translated into the form
of goods. And there is no real utopian outside, anyway, to a digitised
reproduction of capitalist conditions pervading all areas of society
- especially everyday life. Obviously, however, there is a dystopic
outside: The process of utilization today, globally as well as locally,
resembles a policy of burnt earth. It strives for disengagement
from all those who not even seem to be worth being exploited anymore,
and the places where they live. Cultur can only prove itself to
be an amplifier of disobedience with/to the smoothness of this severing
process if it tries to produce feedback between these places and
the market centres. Put another way: Exactly to the extent that
culture, and especially the so-called youth culture, functions as
an 'upwardly mobile' careerist trying to erase the traces of his
socially marginalised origins (as understandable and excusable this
attempt may concretely be), it threatens to be uncoupled, as if
generated under laboratory conditions for target groups defined
by market analysis. On the other hand, to the extent that culture
functions like a skinhead who exclusively refers to his origins,
it becomes a zombie, trying to extinguish the very last bit of life
in a place that has already been uncoupled anyway.
But what could a re-coupling that skips this choice between assimilation
and barbarism look like? Its constant, explicit incantation is not
enough: When Hip-Hop's 'keeping it real with the projects' (translated
into the language of social studies teachings: retaining authentic
social ties to the social housing where the rapper is from) is declared,
that is almost already a warning sign that maybe something has been
askew here for quite some time. The proverbial high rises - and
already at the time of The Clash - start to function like emptied
signs of rawness and abstract radicalism, like Potempkinesque ruins
of the social war zone, no matter how real they may have once been
in people's lives.
Architectural critique shares an odd pleasure with popular culture,
sometimes an almost open satisfaction in pointing out the "toppling"
of the utopian housing schemes that were once fired on with enthusiasm.
The image of the gloomy suburb - from Kubrick's Thamesmead in Clockwork
Orange (1971) to Neukölln, where Christiane F. in We Children
from Bahnhof Zoo (1981) comes from - becomes an empty shell of social
criticism that omits the possibility that a humane life could even
exist in the grey housing blocks if something fundamental would
change in the general social framework that causes the inhabitants
there to stagnate.
Jakob Kolding's collages and posters work with the techniques of
re-coupling isolated elements from aesthetics and politics in order
to go beyond such a one-dimensional description of the question
of the suburbs. One of his images (untitled, YEAR) is dominated
by the photocopy of a stairs that is not coincidentally reminiscent
of the Bauhaus-"Scene on the Stairs" immortalised by Oskar Schlemmer
in the painting of the same name from 1932. Only this time it is
not populated by faceless and enraptured ballet bodies floating
along their way, but by a battle robot from the Star Wars ice planet,
a Drum & Bass DJ bent over his Technics turntables and a frail boy
with a bare chest and a sinister look on his face who pauses over
his BMX bike as though he were looking into that uncertain future
described by the slogans next to him: "How working class boys get
working class jobs", and "9 Monday Morning, dub version ++(5:15)".
It becomes clear that Kolding consciously draws a direct lineage
from the original mixture of the plainly Constructive and the passionately
Romantic that was characteristic for the Bauhaus, to the beginnings
of the deconstructive-sober Agit-Prop of Dada montage (Hanna Höch,
Raoul Hausmann, John Heartfield) and its Pop variations of the 60's
and 70's (Sex Pistols designer Jamie Reid, Martha Rosler), to the
recombining sampling of contemporary dance culture, which in turn
has its origins in the reductive mixing technique of dub reggae.
One could perhaps compare it to the technique of contrasting conflicting
elements that Style Council employed in the song "Come To Milton
Keynes" (1985). Peter Weller (who as the singer for The Jam flirted
with wanting to vote for the Torries during Labour times) sings
of the ambitious satellite town project Milton Keynes located north
of London to an almost perversely exhilarating music. The "rolling
lawns" and "lovely flowers" in the "nice new town" become places
of insanity for those who moved there "looking for a job", yet to
see the promise of "community" destroyed by the privatisation furore
of the Thatcher Era, "on this fine Conservative night". "I read
the ad about the private schemes/I liked the idea but now I'm not
so Keyne." You could say Style Council and Kolding mount a text
right into the middle of the sound of pretty-coloured housing schemes,
a text that raises the question of the political reasons for their
downfall.
Structurally, Kolding takes up, above all, Martha Rosler's retrieval
of what had been banned into the media to the site of decked-out
domesticity. Where she suddenly has victims and perpetrators of
the Vietnam War pop up between the kitchen pantry and the sofa,
he makes questions that are only raised in sociology text books,
or DJ sets which only take place in the cool clubs of inner cities,
find their way back to the high rise fortresses: perhaps most clearly
when the title of the New Order record "Power, Corruption and Lies"
from 1983 floats above a shower curtain and dirty clothes basket
in cut out letters like blackmail (untitled, JAHR?).
The montage/collage of the Dadaist tradition is, so to speak, the
Surrealism not of dreams but of everyday experience. It shares Surrealism's
advantage of being able to confuse symbolic order through recombination,
and the danger of deteriorating into a "symbolisicism" of archetypes
on the way, that only produces clichs of resistance instead of
imagination and humour. Said differently: The productive whirr of
relationships of signification turns into deceptively unambiguous
classifications.
In their straight cut and paste simplicity, Kolding's montages walk
along the edge of this abyss. When Kolding mounts the buttons from
electronic music equipment next to the facades of balconies, that
is not supposed to mockingly assert the superiority of taste of
the former over the latter. On the contrary, parallels are made
between the "industrial", precise time of dance music and the industrial
method of construction, eventually a clue to their common numerical
basis.
In Constructivism there was always the ideal of design being founded
in mathematics. El Lessitzky said, "Plastic F. [Form, note.] - like
mathematics - begins with counting. Its space is made up of physical,
two-dimensional, flat surfaces. Its rhythm, the elementary harmony
of the numerical series 1,2,3,4..."1 With this statement El Lessitzky
secularised the desire of Suprematism to found itself in metaphysical,
eternal laws, in the simultaneously fervent and sober calculation
of the artist-engineer who, starting from the simple, clean numerical
basis, arrives at increasingly complex and simultaneously more sound
models. It was not without reason that Malevich's Suprematist-abstract
compositions made of simple geometrical elements became, in El Lissitzky's
work, boldly imagined, compartmentalised and spike-shaped cityscapes
from the perspective of an aircraft.
It is as though Kolding were to turn this shift from Suprematist
abstraction to Constructivist concreteness up another notch when,
much in the style of such El Lessitzky compositions, he pushes elements
into the space of the otherwise white page like spikes, yet not
geometric elements but semiotic ones. Thus the headline "SOCIAL
EXCLUSION AND THE NEIGHBORHOOD" clashes with its 8:21'' dub version,
surrounded by facade grids, the grimace of a comic book antagonist
with diabolically narrowed pupils, a football player in overhead
kick whose movement is continued in a diagonally placed high rise,
and cheerful children in Carlsberg t-shirts. Kolding puts El Lessitzky
on the basis of the Do It Yourself Ideal of Punk fanzines.
With El Lessitzky himself and the Constructivists, it was still
about putting the art of the proletariat revolution on a scientific
basis. We know enough today about the pitfalls of functionalism
- when the politicisation of art and science turns into the aestheticisation
and pseudo-scientification of politics (this fate was spared Constructivism,
in a tragic-ironic way, by the brusque rejection on Lenin's part).
The fascinating thing about Modern architecture and design, be it
in Le Corbusier or El Lessitzky - the courage of radically stating
the new, negating handed down tradition - is also their largest
problem. They are in danger of obliviousness to history, and in
the same moment that Le Corbusier describes skyscrapers as "machines
for abolishing time and space"2 they have already become historical
monuments to a continuation of the male gaze of power from the commander's
hill to the executive floor.
In the meantime the dreams of utopian tabula rasas on a mathematical
basis have already become historical particles themselves, and they
appear in pop culture as such. It was no coincidence that Techno
and House originated in the early strongholds of industrial-Modernist
production (Detroit) and methods of construction (Chicago). Roughly
simplified: they were created by the children of the first generation
of a black middle-class who, in an ambivalent way, tried to distinguish
themselves simultaneously from their parents' traditional idea of
Black Culture and the image of the black kid from the ghetto.3 And
this desire was expressed in a sort of "europhilia", that in the
enthusiasm for the technoid, enrapturedly metronomic music of Kraftwerk
seemed to be the exact mirror image of the "negrophilia" of white
British Rock musicians who were inspired by Robert Johnson.
It is exactly in this failure of full identification with the other
side - one could also say in the failure of a futuristic model of
history - where the power of renewal lies, an amalgamation of historical
particles. Mistaken are also the critiques of dance culture that
sweepingly denounce its supposed soldier-like metronomic rhythm
as destroying what is humane in their "black roots". In electronic
dance music, there is a pleasure in the relentlessness and monotony
of the mechanical beat precisely where it is subjected to a sort
of funky twist - in the music itself (the stumbling, the gap) as
well as in the dance moves meandering around the beat.
This meandering may be exactly what Jakob Kolding looks for as a
social function also in the high rises of the suburbs: making the
metronomically timed grid of the buildings inhabitable through pop
culture. That becomes especially clear, perhaps more so than the
explicit montage of turntables and facades, in the series of drawings
where a monotonous series of flat, single-storey buildings with
one door each are put in a row (Our House, 1997). The doors are
the only colourful elements and, in seemingly random order, four
saturated orange doors follow two frontages with dark red doors,
divided by stylised wooden gates and a single line for the horizon.
And in the next image, three night-blue doors follow three orange
ones. In the third there is a lemon yellow one after four blues.
In the fourth, then again, there are six yellows followed by nothing
more than the wooden gate and the thin horizon, before in the fifth
and last image seven frontages with a blue door each areres tricted
on both sides by wooden gates. Looking back, one realises that the
impression of it being an irregular series was only created by what
in reality is a completely regular series of seven doors each taken
apart and therefore 'tripped up' by a different regular series,
namely the five same-sized details. They are actually isolated fragments
from an estate of terraced houses in Albertslund, where the colours
of the doors indicate the subdivision of the houses according to
the names of flowers into "rose" or "violette" areas. Through an
asymmetrical break in this beat, a constantly changing rhythm is
then produced. In a video from 1998 for the piece "Star Escalator"
by the electronic act Sensorama (who are from Darmstadt, a rather
faceless city south of Frankfurt apart from the Malthildenhhe,
its famous Art Nouveau estate) something similar happens. A monotone
series of coloured garage doors is set into motion. They go up and
down like legs in a musical's chorus line to th! e rhythm of the
music.
"Writing about art is like dancing about architecture", the comedian
Steve Martin once said. And dancing about architecture is obviously
possible (as is writing about art). I lay two regular patterns on
top of each other and a third, irregular flickering pattern is produced
- the optical moir effect. It may be the most accurate visual metaphor
for the funky twist and its history reaches from El Lessitzky (the
painting Proun 99 from 1924 in which a moir plane stretches toward
the horizon in the lower third of the image) to Op Art and current
electronic music. On the CD "loop-finding-jazz-records" by Jan Jelinek
from Berlin (scape records, 2001) there are even two pieces called
"moire", hinting at the parallel between the optical moir effect
and laying two different sound loops on top of each other.
Dance culture can thus be seen as a possible means of setting the
immobility of the fully planned suburban world into moireesque oscillations
with the help of reduced digital technologies. And for no other
reason it appears in Kolding's work as both an iconic reference
(turntables, skateboarder, drum computer) and as the structural
element of creating rhythm with loops (the breaks in the white or
between the series of images). Instead of being stuck onto the facades
as "beautification", it penetrates the grid pattern and makes it
dance. That would be the social meaning of music (and some other
forms of pop culture) at this point. Instead of gothic-dystopic
complains about the uninhabitableness of the earth, a coming to
terms with the architecture is aspired, making it inhabitable under
self-determined conditions. At the same time, in the rhythmic flickering,
the utopian opportunity of other, better, as yet undefined, breathing
spaces is opened. In successful moments, prisons of families, education
and work are transposed with provisional, illegitimate, "artificial"
families, self-developed knowledge and independent productions.
In order to get there, pop subcultures basically always used two
dialectically linked strategies. ,The first is what could be called
the Schweijkian strategy of overaffirmation, taking the conditions
literally in order to reveal their structure: perhaps most openly
expressed in the 80's song slogan "Wir sagen ja zur modernen Welt"
(we say yes to the modern world) by the band Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle
from Munich - you yourself can become a machine, or high rise. The
other is the strategy of settling the peripheries and in between
zones (from trains sprayed with graffiti to illegal raves in deserted
hangars to the street parties of Reggae and Hip Hop sound systems),
all those transitory traffic zones Le Corbusier so hated and wanted
to either build over or put underground.
The re-coupling of both of these strategies - which is more or less
equal to the above mentioned re-coupling of the places of marginalisation
and the centres - is perhaps expressed in William Burroughs' famous
demand: "Where are the personal helicopters you always promised
us!" Taking technology and power by their word and claiming air
space at the same time. Very similar links are conveyed in Kolding's
images. Finding the high rises beautiful in their historically oblivious
uniformity while simultaneously demanding them to be unconditionally
handed over to the remix by their inhabitants! Embracing Conceptualism's
administrative design and Minimalism's reduction in colour and form.
At the same time chipping away at their spatial placement from the
edges, with the dirty fingernails of popular culture.
It looks as though such remixes and re-couplings were not only possible
in works on paper. The inhabitants of the Brixton estate Angell
Town (which seems very similar to the one where Clash fan Ray at
the end of Rude Boy, and the 70's, disappears into the twilight
of the sundown) took things into their own hands at the beginning
of the 90's and founded the Angell Town Community Project Ltd. They
commissioned the Urban Regeneration Consultancy at the Oxford Centre
for Urban Design to develop a plan for restructuring.4 Deserted
pedestrian paths were turned into usable terraces, and into the
dark and unused parterre garages there came stores, workshops and
also a recording studio...
by Jrg Heiser
(from Kunstverein in Hamburg catalogue)
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