The Black Von Scrolls

objectivecorrelative:

(Rendering of the High Line, James Corner) 

I was having a conversation with someone the other day at a book party and said that I didn’t like the High Line — that I thought there was something vaguely sinister about the whole thing, that it was too shiny, too wrapped in the rhetoric of good-living-through-design, that I found it disturbing in the same way I find New Urbanism disturbing; implicit in this idea of safe, healthful, walkable neighborhoods is a moral message: we should all live this way (I remember asking a professor in college, in a course on post-war urbanism and aesthetics, if he thought houses in Celebration, Florida were allowed to have wheelchair ramps out front — presumably yes, lest the town be sued for discrimination, but would you really want to live in the sort of place where an absolutely necessary implement enabling your ability to go about daily life was considered a blight upon the neighborhood?) This person, needless to say, did not agree; he loved the High Line — the High Line was, he said, the best thing to happen to New York in years. The fact that I did not love the High Line, that I found it to be representative of disturbing tendencies in urban planning rather than some kind of refuge from the city’s more unpleasant bits—this apparently spoke volumes. “Have you been up there?” he asked; “Are you really telling me you don’t think it’s nice?” “Of course it’s nice. That’s the problem.” 

“So what you’re saying is that you hate nice things.” 

“Essentially.” (a reductive response, to be sure, but the conversation no longer seemed worth pursuing.)  

——

That the High Line is currently projecting Gordon Matta-Clark’s film City Slivers seems to have its own bitter irony: Matta-Clark’s work is all about relishing in the contradictions and complexities of the city: its tendency towards decay, toward entropy. When he sliced holes into its abandoned structures and crumbling facades, it wasn’t a matter of renewing these spaces in the sense of covering up their deterioration, as the High Line does, but of insisting that we see it. However, it’s not an embrace of decay, of urban degeneration, in the manner of Detroit ruin porn—there isn’t that sense of nostalgia or loss, nor the same kind of fetishization of the aesthetic of ruins—instead, there’s a fascination with waste, with spaces that are no longer functional, that don’t participate in the productive operations of the (capitalist) city. You get this most clearly, I’d argue, in the Fake Estates, in which the artist bought plots of so-called “gutterspace,” the inaccessible, undevelopable slivers of land between buildings, auctioned off by the city for pocket change (relatively speaking—usually around $20-$50). The title, of course, is a pun on “Real Estate” but also hints at the absurdity of land ownership as an ideal, the foundation of the American Dream.

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