IMG MGMT: Ruin Value

[Editor’s note: IMG MGMT is a series of essays produced by artists. This week’s author Aaron Williams is an interdisciplinary artist working in Queens. Through sculpture, photography and video, his work takes a critical look at common art-making practices and ideologies.

His work has been exhibited in New York at spaces including Max Protetch, Baumgartner Gallery and Mulherin Projects, where he most recently showed at their Spring Break Art Fair booth; at LaMontagne Gallery in Boston and the Portland Museum, as well as various galleries and project spaces in the US and abroad.]

I keep a folder of images on my desktop, culled from internet searches and random meanderings around the net. Many of these phenomena continue to have a prominent presence on the internet, and my interest is partially based on their persistent cultural fascination. There isn’t much curation involved in these images, and I’m not always sure why an image calls to my collection, but themes arise nonetheless. A unifying quality is the sense of reality which sets in after the breakdown of a system: bygone expressions of power like Brutalist architecture, panopticons, and military camouflage. I feel ambivalent about these images; as an artist, I’m attracted to their formal qualities, and as a citizen, I am equally repulsed by the images of mass control. From an artistic standpoint, does one type of viewership take precedence over the other? Does form preclude content?

When it was erected in the 1950s, the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex in St. Louis was heralded as a progressive remedy for an ailing city. The 33 building project sought to provide much needed low-income housing for a growing poor, urban community.

But the complex, which was conceived of by architect Minoru Yamasaki, quickly became an area of crime, segregation, and poverty. There are several reasons for this, but many believe that this Modernist high rise’s design is itself to blame. The stark, concrete structures, and objective design plans lent to a disorder that was not immediately evident to pioneers of Modernist architecture. Le Corbusier, for example, once noted that “To create architecture is to put in order. Put what in order? Function and objects.” While this is a beautifully articulated goal, it does not always leave room for basic human interaction or the creation of a community. The failure of Pruitt-Igoe laid this reality bare.

March 16, 1972 marks the destruction of the first building in the Pruitt- Igoe complex and has been referred to as the day modern architecture died.

In an effort to build something of aesthetic value and utility, some projects realize a darker reality, one that sees a perversion of its stated goals. Corrupt utopias, overreaches of power and abortive diplomacy can hold an odd aesthetic fascination, while also being horrific markers of societal and ideological failure.

The Panopticon design, pioneered in the 18th century, has been used in a variety of public buildings, but it saw its greatest application in prisons. Formed on the basis of control through surveillance and not brute force, the panopticon encourages control by having all of the architectural parts visible from a central point. This design has had a lasting influence on designers and thinkers; current arguments surrounding population surveillance through wiretaps, monitored computer usage and CCTV cameras can find their roots in the Panopticon design. Many of the original prisons have fallen into disuse, as the structures seemed to inherently invite corruption. These images invoke a beauty, both in their historical, humanely-intended ethos, and as current symbols of nature reclaiming a flawed ideology.

Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon design, 1791

A more contemporary rendering of the architectural ideology

The Round House at the Stateville Correctional Center outside of Chicago, IL. The center of authority is quite small compared to the general population of the prison.

Prison tower in Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)

The now defunct, Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia, PA. (1896- 1995). Holmesburg is notable for being the site of several, secret medical experiments conducted on inmates from 1951 to 1974. Sponsored by Dow Chemical, Johnson & Johnson, the CIA and the US Army, experiment subjects ranged from topical creams to dioxins and psychotropic drugs.

Presidio Modelo, Isla de Pinos, Cuba (defunct, 1928- 1967). The Presidio Modelo once housed many prominent Cuban political prisoners.

Caseros Prison, Buenos Aires, Argentina (defunct, 1979- 2001). Originally created to house political prisoners during the dictatorship of Jorge Rafael Videla, Caseros became a prison for common criminals in 1983. Corruption grew rampant, as guards and prisoners colluded in and outside of the prison. Among many other crimes including robbery and murder, Caseros was used as a chop shop for stolen cars in the 1990’s, while still operating as a prison.

Parramatta Correctional Centre, New South Wales, Australia (defunct, 1798- 2011). Closed in 2011, Parramatta was Australia’s oldest prison.

Santo Stefano Prison Island, Tyrrhenian Sea, Italy (defunct, 1797- 1965)

El Paso County Jail, Colorado. A reflective film was installed on all of the windows facing the central core of the ward to thwart prisoner gang-sign communication. In the classical design, the panopticon encourages surveillance not only from the administration but also monitoring between prisoners. The reflective windows create an even greater sense of disembodied authority.

Huron County Jail, Ontario, Canada (defunct, 1842- 1972)

Old Provost Jail, Grahamstown, South Africa (defunct, 1838- 1937)

Many of the tenets of modern art have carried into architecture over the past 100 years, and it’s instructive to see what elements are sustained as they transition into real life applications. Brutalist architecture in particular speaks to the modern primacy of formal elements: the rigid framework pioneered by Le Corbusier contains beautifully articulated successes, but it also demonstrates significant failures, as form often couples uncomfortably with function. The late Brutalist period of the 1960’s and 70’s saw the development of many civic buildings in North America, notably universities. Because of this austere ideology, which often incorporates small gathering areas and easy monitoring, students might assume that their colleges borrowed inspiration from contemporary prison design. This is almost certainly false, as architects such as Paul Rudolph– designer of Yale’s Brutalist, complexly-tiered concrete Art and Architecture Building– had utopian ambitions of carving out culturally unique, egalitarian spaces. But as the dour, severe materials came to be associated with institutional zones, this architecture quickly began to be seen as a totalitarian formula, something the university was assumed to be inherently opposed to. The buildings, though beautiful from a formal perspective, fail on a critical level, a fact put into sharper focus by their intended use as a forum of creativity and learning.

Ryerson University Library, Toronto, Canada

Brunel University, London

Northwestern University Library, Evanston Illinois

The D. B. Weldon Library, University of Western Ontario

Community College of Rhode Island

Killam Library, Dalhousie University campus, Halifax, Nova Scotia

Yale University Art and Architecture Building, New Haven

Wean Hall, Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh

Briggs Hall, UC Davis, California

Classical High School, Providence, RI

Dana Arts Center, Colgate University

Today, the word redaction refers to government documents that have been edited to protect sensitive information. The reasons for redaction commonly fall into a few categories, though federal regulations are so broad as to allow the censoring of most documents under one reasoning or other. The black blocks which are used to obscure information can also be read as graphic elements, a foil to the remaining text, bringing to mind the paintings of Ad Reinhardt or Malevich and creating a frisson between this traditional formal language and its tacitly disturbing content. The discussion of aesthetics here belies the immediate evidence of an overreach of power and a potentially corrupt system that hides facts from the populace.

A redacted document can also become an aesthetic object. Patterns and rhythms naturally emerge in the accumulation of abstract marks, or the accidental, organic use of language. Words are altered by shifting their context through exclusion and reshaped, much like dadaist poetry or the cut-ups of Williams Burroughs.

During the final decades of the Cold War, the Soviet Union was experiencing a building boom, utilizing many of the same general formal design tenets of the west, though under very different circumstances. New construction in the US was a symbol of a burgeoning progressive, educational culture; their Soviet counterparts were discovering a newly-found freedom among builders who were taking advantage of a crumbling system. In a communist society, the practical utilitarianism of western Brutalist architecture would have seemed compatible. However, once that societal structure was compromised, architects discovered a romantic quality in modest materials to create innovative, radical structures. Architecture finds new forms, born of the remnants of a decaying system.

Ministry of Highways, Tbilisi, Georgia

Petrova Gora, Memorial to the Partisan Victims of World War II, Croatia

Mount Suleiman Museum, Kyrgyzstan

Technological Institute, Minsk, Belarus

Sanatorium Kurpaty, Crimea

Institute of Robotics and Cybernetics, Saint Petersburg, Russia

Wedding Palace, Tbilisi

Susnjar Memorial Complex, Sanski Most, Bosnia

Stadthalle Chemnitz, Chemnitz, Germany

Ilinden Monument, Krusevo, Macedonia

Dazzle camouflage– an optical illusion patterning used on WWI and WWII battleships– makes for fantastic and unlikely images that confound our expectations of what are ordinarily somber machines of war. A primary read of formal pleasure of decorative patterning downplays its sinister purpose: to hide the type and distance of an attacking war machine.

Ultimately, the effectiveness of so-called dazzle camouflage during this time was inconclusive. Developments in radar technology further reduced its relevance, and US Naval ships have since adopted a flat gray tone, as it provides the minimum contrast between ship and its surroundings at sea.