PUBLIC IMAGES
April 18 - June 10, 2020
Diane Nerwen
Archival Films from the National Archive
Dan Graham
Howard Silver / James Wines SITE
Yuki Higashino
The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flaneur as phantasmagoria- now a landscape, now a room.
Walter Benjamin
When faced with absence we resort to memory. The experience of the present, which normally includes making plans for the future, is currently on hold. The public realm, already hard to define, has become ethereal, as evidenced by our vacated streets. The very density and hyper-interactivity of cities have become threats, the affirmation of congregation and assembly is withdrawn in favor of public health.
Focusing on images related to public life, and as we speculate on how it might appear in the future, carriage trade will share a set of short films on our website over the next several weeks which collectively address public experience and exchange in urban and suburban settings. This series of films will feature aspects of the public realm as seen through popular movies, archival films, experimental architecture, and sci-fi projections, reflecting on an uncertain present through drawing on images from the past.
This series of short films focusing on the city is dedicated to the memory of Willam Menking, author, curator, educator, and co-founder of The Architect’s Newspaper. Bill’s incredibly generous spirit, intellectual curiosity, and deep appreciation and knowledge of architecture and the city will be sorely missed.
Note: The films in Public Images will screen one at a time through June 10. All the films in the series can viewed on our website from June 20th - July 5th.
June 10 - June 19, 2020
Yuki Higashino
Extinguishment
2020
HD video, sound
Runtime: 18:30
"There is something dystopian about this situation, like the cross between J.G. Ballard and classical Japanese ink wash painting. One can argue that a vacuum was created by Japan’s refusal to accept foreigners, and nature stepped in to fill in this vacuum.
My film examines the situation in Japan as a cautionary tale, showing an extreme result of what anti-immigrant politics* does to a society; desolation, emptiness and slow death of the nation, with the current rise of the far-right in the West in mind. Another underlining concern of the film is the role of countryside in contemporary politics. Its continuous decline fuels right-wing extremism all over the world, and the urban-rural divide is shaping up to be one of the defining features of our world."
Yuki Higashino, on Extinguishment
Yuki Higashino’s film Extinguishment (2020) explores what might await a society where the rapid aging of its population is combined with a reluctance of the country to open itself to foreigners. As the fastest aging country in the world, which also severely limits immigration, Japan finds itself undergoing a depopulation that has led to the shrinking of some communities.
Extinguishment employs a science fiction narrative that imagines a future where humanity has almost completely disappeared due to a lack of new generations coupled with an unnamed ecological disaster, and which is now inhabited by thriving wildlife and autonomous robots originally built for elderly care. Speculating on a "post-society" landscape where the natural world is taking over, the causal links between industrialized society and fragile eco-systems finds is evident in our sudden dramatic awareness of nature’s autonomy, as the presumption of our ability to maintain and control the natural world comes under question.
As the arrested commercial activity in major metropolitan centers across the globe brought an influx of wildlife to temporarily emptied urban streets, Extinguishment’s images of flora and fauna within an unpopulated built environment, though clearly dystopic, reveals the consequences of a kind of ripple effect within the profoundly interconnected spheres of the natural world and social experience. As a sci-fi metaphor, Extinguishment’s cautionary tale anticipates a society dehumanized through its inability to come to terms with overlapping pandemics of systemic racism and biological disaster.
*This is partly due to cultural, practical (the vast majority of Japanese people don’t speak a foreign language) and historical conditions, going back to the complete isolation of Japan until the end of the 19th century. Only about 1.7% of Japan’s 127 million population are immigrants, and they universally face exclusion and discrimination.
Written and Directed by Yuki Higashino. Music/Audio recording/mixing Alexander Martinz. Voice (English): Elisabeth Kihlström. Camera/Editing/Voice (Japanese): Yuki Higashino
With elements taken from Eiri Kyokun Chikamichi (1844) and Sir Roger L’Estrange’s translation of Fables of Aesop (1692). Produced with support from the Art Department of Austrian Bundeskanzleramt
Yuki Higashino (b.1984) is artist based in Vienna. His recent solo and two-person shows includes "something about pictures" (with Kim Schoen) at Rampe, Berlin (2019), "Mladen Bizumic & Yuki Higashino" at Galerie kunstbuero, Vienna, "The Dying Style: Zurich" at Kunstraum luke, Zurich, "The Dying Style" at Contemporary Art Factory, Kyoto, "Perspectives" at Urgent Paradise, Lausanne (all 2018), "Furnished" at Anna, Vienna, "The Portraitist" at KIOSK TABAK, Zurich (both 2017), "Yuki Higashino/Elisabeth Kihlström" at Gallery G99, The House of Arts, Brno and "Purposeless terror that converged upon a particular place at a particular time for no particular reason" at Schneiderei, Vienna (both 2016). He has participated in group exhibitions at Last Tango, Zurich, Le BBB centre d’art, Toulouse, The Living Art Museum, Reykjavík and Fotografisk Center, Copenhagen, among other venues. His writing has been published in journals such as ArtForum, Texte zur Kunst and The Avery Review.
May 21 - May 31, 2020
Howard Silver /James Wines SITE
Excerpts from: Grand Openings / Public Places
1983
Color, sound
Runtime: 16:43
"The main idea was to put art where you least expect to find it. The endless boredom and lack of aesthetic commitment in the American shopping mall became the perfect foil for this kind of intervention. More importantly, the early SITE approach was a critique of architecture. Another aspect of this work was to open up a questioning of the typical commercial environment; meaning a process of motivating people to react differently to their routine surroundings."
James Wines
ArchDaily interview, 2016
Presented as part of carriage trade’s 2014 exhibition Cutting Through the Suburbs, Howard Silver’s films Grand Openings and Public Places document James Wines / SITE Architects Best Stores, which represent a unique moment in retail architecture. Produced in the spirit of public interaction, Grand Openings and Public Places differ from the "top down" model of many films on architecture, which often limit their inquiries to those with expertise in the field. Engaging with the "end users" as well as the trades that produced the Best Stores, these films feature both approving and critical responses as part of a larger examination of the role and possible function of art and architecture within the context of consumer culture.
Sharing his colleague Gordon Matta Clark’s interest in "opening up" a building, James Wines work with SITE architects (Sculpture in the Environment) represented a radical rethinking of the big box structure of the suburban shopping mall, combining the site specificity and interventionist approach of land art with the popular imagery of the commercial strip. Creating facades that seemed to be peeling off (Peeling Wall, 1971), incorporated a whole ecosystem (Hialeah Rainforest Showroom, 1979), or appeared as a ruin from the vantage point of the highway (Indeterminate Façade, 1974), the Best Store showrooms challenged the conformity and caution normally found in retail architecture in favor of a level of experiential engagement rarely associated with consumerism.
Looking back at these Best Store projects, which offered imaginative alternatives to the mostly functionalist aesthetic of commercial settings, the current debate on how and when to return to normal and go "back to the mall" reflects a clear schism in today’s public life. Situating themselves within the landscape of a postwar consumer boom that bore remnants of the New Deal / Great Society investment in the public realm, these SITE projects tapped into a creative tension between public and private space. As we now experience the effects of a lack of investment in our collective welfare combined with the pressures to "get the economy going again," the conflict between public and private interests seems to have never been greater.
Howard Silver (Arts Into Production) documents the arts, architecture and performance for arts organizations, broadcast and social media. He produced The Metropolitan Museum of Art web series, 82nd & Fifth and directed live-stream performance broadcasts for METLive. He wrote and produced for WNET’s CITY ARTS (EMMY); PBS’s ALIVE FROM OFF CENTER – ERIC BOGOSIAN’S FUNHOUSE and DANCES IN EXILE. The films on the architecture of SITE are in the architecture collections of MOMA, The Carnegie Museum of Art and were featured in the Walker/Carnegie/Yale exhibit, WORLDS AWAY. His film of James Wines drawing will be exhibited at the Tchoban Foundation, Museum for Architectural Drawing in Berlin this fall. In 1989 he was awarded a Citation for Excellence in Urban Design by the AIA for NEW YORK CITY WATERFRONT.
James Wines (born 1932) is an American artist and architect associated with environmental design. Wines is founder and president of SITE, a New York City -based architecture and environmental arts organization chartered in 1970. This multi-disciplinary practice focuses on the design of buildings, public spaces, environmental art works, landscape designs, master plans, interiors and product design. The main focus of his design work is on green issues and the integration of buildings with their surrounding contexts. In addition to critical writing, he has lectured in fifty-two countries on green topics since 1969. In 1987, his book De-Architecture was released by Rizzoli International Publications. There have been twenty two monographic books museum catalogues have published his drawings, models and built works for SITE. In total, Wines has designed more than 150 projects for private and municipal clients in eleven countries. He has won twenty-five writing and design awards including the 1995 Chrysler Design Award.Wines explicitly expresses his own "concern for the Earth." Having written at length on new modes of architecture, design, and planning: The [20th] century began with architects being inspired by an emerging age of industry and technology. Everybody wanted to believe a building could somehow function like a combustion engine. As an inspirational force in 1910, one can understand it. But as a continuing inspiration in our post-industrial world, or our new world of information and ecology, it doesn’t make any sense. —from the film Ecological Design: Inventing the Future (Wikidata Q2396391)
May 10 - May 20, 2020
Dan Graham
Two-Way Mirror Cylinder Inside Cube and a Video Salon
1992
Color, sound
Runtime: 19m 32s
Dan Graham’s Rooftop Urban Park Project, 1991-2004, at the former Dia Art Foundation on West 22nd Street, provided a meeting place in the nascent days of the Chelsea art district, while activating a perceptual experience which engaged the intersubjectivity of the individual and the group. As an early iteration of an elevated, publicly accessible outdoor space from which to contemplate Manhattan’s far West Side, the Rooftop Urban Park Project, installed in 1991, anticipated the neighboring High Line Park’s repurposing of industrial structures, framing of urban views, and elevated leisure space by over a decade.
Responding to specific elements of its surroundings (the cylinder echoing the shape of the water tower above, the wood plank flooring alluding to the "boardwalk" character of the sprawling Chelsea Piers across 11th Avenue), Graham’s rooftop pavilion offered the public both an experiential and metaphorical engagement with the city, mimicking the urban grid with its rectilinear perimeter which surrounds the cylinder at its center. In Graham’s pavilion’s, made of semi-reflective, translucent two-way mirror glass which merges the viewer’s fleeting, reflected image within traces of their surroundings, the experience is one of perpetual mediation between immersion in the reflective surface and a return to public self-awareness.
Two-Way Mirror Cylinder Inside Cube and a Video Salon, was produced as a video catalog for the project, providing historical and theoretical influences on the development of Dan Graham’s pavilions, including Laugier’s Rustic Hut, 19th Century Parisian arcades, Mies Van Der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion, and the two-way mirrored surfaces of corporate office buildings. Drawing on an expansive set of references relating to art, architecture, and the city, Two-Way Mirror Cylinder Inside Cube and a Video Salon documents a temporary landmark around which New York City’s largest gallery neighborhood would eventually develop, while offering historical perspective on the broader issues of urbanism, identity, and the overlapping realms of public and private space.
Courtesy: Electronic Arts Intermix
Director: Michael Shamberg. Writer: Dan Graham. Producer: Dia Center for the Arts
Narrators: Dan Graham, Stanton Miranda. Music: Glenn Branca
Dan Graham’s work is in the collections of various museums such as the Museum of Modern Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, as well as the Centre Pompidou, Paris. In 2009, he had US retrospective exhibitions at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Previously, he has had European retrospectives at the Museo Serralves, Porto, Portugal; Paris Museum of Modern Art, Paris, and Kröller-Müller Museum in Holland. Important individual exhibitions include The Renaissance Society (1981), Chicago; Kunsthalle Bern (1983), and the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford (1997). One of the significant quasi-functional works that Graham has done was a design for the mezzanine section of the Hayward Gallery in London, involving displays of classic and contemporary cartoons for children and adults of all ages. He has participated in various Documenta exhibitions; Skulptur Muenster, as well as two Venice Biennials. In May 2020, the Whitney Museum of American Art will be displaying on its 6th terrace, Portal, a new entrance work by the artist. Dan Graham lives and works in New York.
April 29 - May 8, 2020
Selections from National Archives:
The City, 1939
Outtakes from Metropolis, 1939
The City
Director: Ralph Steiner, Willard van Dyke
Written by: Lewis Mumford
Music: Aaron Copland, Narrator: Morris Carnovsky
Runtime: 31:39, black and white, sound
Outtakes from "Metropolis 1939"
New York City: Chinatown, Jewish Section, Italian Section
Creator(s): Time, Inc.
Collection: "March of Time" Collection, 1934 - 1951
Series: Motion Picture Films of March of Time Outtake Footage, 1935 - 1951
Runtime: 11m 1s, black and white, silent.
Outtakes from "Metropolis 1939"
New York City: Ethnic neighborhoods, Harlem, Garment District
Creator(s): Time, Inc.
From: Collection: "March of Time" Collection, 1934 - 1951
Series: Motion Picture Films of March of Time Outtake Footage, 1935 - 1951
Runtime: 10m 17s, black and white, silent.
The film The City, with commentary by Lewis Mumford and music by Aaron Copeland, along with outtakes from the 1939 film Metropolis, which document life in New York City, were both produced during the same historical period explored in the 2012 carriage trade exhibition Color Photographs from The New Deal, 1939-1944, which drew on source material from the Library of Congress photographic archives.
The City presents a critical history of the process of urban development, from agrarian to industrial, outlining the environmental and human costs of unchecked growth, while offering a New Deal era example of a progressive, communal alternative realized through the garden city model. Metropolis was originally produced as part of the March of Time newsreels shown in movie theaters on a weekly basis, and features daily life across several of the city’s neighborhoods, including Little Syria, Harlem, Chinatown, and the Lower East Side, and is now part of the National Film Archive.
Beginning as a radio program in 1931 and shifting to film in 1935, the March of Time newsreels were referred to by the producers as "pictorial journalism", offering news in a pre-television era via motion pictures that addressed social and political issues of the time. In contrast to the commercial focus of entertainment and mainstream news that often construct and shape the narrative of contemporary life in New York City, the vantage point of the camera in Metropolis has a disinterested perspective that resembles that of a bystander on a street corner, idly taking in everyday events as they unfold. Documenting their subject with an almost anthropological detachment, these images seem to quietly celebrate the overlapping yet highly cohesive ethnic character that comprised many of New York’s neighborhoods of the time.
Metropolis also features two New Deal era housing projects; The Harlem River Houses, built in 1936-37, notable for low-rise buildings and comparatively lower density than many which followed, and the Queensbridge Houses, shown under construction*. Writing on the Harlem River Houses in 1938 in Sidewalk Critic, his regular column in the New Yorker, urbanist, and architecture critic Lewis Mumford claimed - "So much for what is plainly visible from the outside. What are less visible in the Harlem Houses, but no less important for decent family living, are four social units for adults, a nursery school that can accommodate sixty children, and a health clinic. Here in short is the equipment for decent living that every modern neighborhood needs: sunlight, air, safety, play space, meeting space, and living space."
*The Queensbridge Houses are also the site of "Work and Play", a mural produced by the artist Phillip Guston as part of the FAP (Federal Arts Project) 1935-1943.
April 18 - April 28, 2020
Diane Nerwen
Traveling Shots: NYC
2014
Color, video
Runtime: 15m 57s
Diane Nerwen’s 2014 film Traveling Shots: NYC, exhibited in carriage trade’s Picture City III in 2016, describes an urban odyssey which draws on seven decades of movies filmed on location in New York City. Making our way through the subways, streets, and highways in and around what might be the most filmed metropolis on the planet, Nerwen’s subject, unlike the many films that it’s derived from, is the environment of the city itself.
Rarely revealing the faces of actors whom we may recognize, Traveling Shots emphasizes the complex choreography of routine movements within a city of eight million people. Assembled from a vast archive of the less glamorous bits of Hollywood films that appropriate New York as a backdrop, the background is brought forward, reversing the hierarchy of star actor to city, while also threading through several decades of films to arrive at a new semblance of a whole.
In the absence of an identity driven narrative that adopts urban clichés of grit or glamour to support or enhance a particular storyline, Nerwen’s film liberates the fixed subject / viewer relationship, replacing it with a kind of utilitarian mindset that many of us adopt as we navigate the city in our everyday lives. As it teases out non-fiction elements underneath the representations of popular media, Traveling Shots: NYC creates a kind documentary effect through the rearrangement and reconstruction of the process through which the city is perpetually fictionalized.
Diane Nerwen is a video artist and media arts educator. She has shown her work internationally, including screenings and exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, NY, the Guggenheim Museum, NY, the Tate Modern, London, carriage trade, NY and the Berlin Film Festival. Her work has been supported by grants from the New York State Council on the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts and Creative Capital Foundation. She was awarded a DAAD Artist in Residence Fellowship in Berlin in 2001. Her work is distributed by Video Data Bank, Chicago and Vtape, Toronto. Nerwen was born in Montreal and lives in Brooklyn, NY.