Archive Art: A Rosler Project Revisited
By Sarah Mills
Martha Rosler’s homeless project is back, only this time in archival form. The exhibition, “If You Lived Here Still…,” currently on view at New York’s e-Flux gallery, revisits numerous materials on homelessness and housing, which Rosler first began collecting for the exhibition, “If You Lived Here…,” held at the Dia Art Foundation in 1989. In the mole-hole space under 41 Essex Street one finds a documentary video, a slideshow projection, a tac-board wall of documents (flyers, posters and advertisements), five file boxes (with lecture notes, real estate holdings, letters and articles) and five work-station tables—all part of the 1989 exhibition which now makes up the current archive. This text-laden version of Rosler’s ongoing project includes several new document additions as of August 28th, 2009. These inclusions have helped keep the essence of her activist-oriented, research-based artwork alive. Since homelessness has reached record levels in New York City recently, e-Flux seeks to encourage viewing and research by opening up the archive to the public. However, it is uncertain as to whether the transformation of the archive into an art exhibition subtracts from or strengthens the intensity of Rosler’s original concept.
In the heyday of the original Dia exhibition, Rosler confronted multidimensional aspects of America’s and New York’s festering-sore-like social system to address the causes of, and remedies for homelessness in America. Her work, in keeping with the spirit of many other socially-minded artists from the early 1990s, embraced tasks—such as holding public meetings, conferencing with architects, interviewing the homeless—akin to those of a small-town politician, social service educator, urban planner or human rights activist (out went Modernist aesthetics and formalism, in came interventionism). At different times over the course of the year-long exhibition, Rosler recruited and involved a team of urban planners, designers, architects, film makers, Rutgers University students, homeless people, and advocacy groups. These people along with other key collaborative players—the artist Dan Wiley, the self-organized group of homeless people known as Homeward Bound, and the Atlanta-based group of young architects and designers known as Mad Housers—formed the core team in Rosler’s real-world, real-time engagement approach. Their entire exhibition production consisted of four public meetings, a three-part exhibition cycle followed by “Town Hall Meetings,” and numerous auxiliary events. The first exhibition, “Home Front,” acknowledged those in jeopardy of losing their homes in various cities as well as their bench-sleeping prevention efforts. “Homeless: The Street and Other Venues,” followed as a second exhibition, responding to questions of “(in)visible” homelessness. More answers finally arrived in the last of the three exhibitions, “City: Visions and Revisions,” which examined urban problems and solutions of all kinds—from realistic to utopian schemes. This collective and cumulative project, while belittled as non-art by US art critics at the time, seems to be one of the more appropriate ways in which an artist utilizes the high art of exhibition making. Borrowing Dia’s authorial “space,” both mental and physical, Rosler was able to draw attention to a new platform from which the voices of the city’s homeless could be better heard.
E-flux’s present archive installation seeks to reactivate similar concerns, to revive awareness a second time around, of an issue increasing in its severity in New York City: that of homelessness and the almost-homeless which Mayor Bloomberg’s take-a-hike plan (one-way ticket “home” for homeless people) has failed to curb. Yet, I am not entirely convinced that any one particular argument is clearly articulated within the confusion of discursive propaganda found at the e-Flux space other than the one inherent in the exhibition experience itself: that despite the rise of media attention, new social programs, and activist involvement, there remains a never-ending and still increasing occurrence of housing loss.
My first serious encounter with Rosler’s work came in a course on twentieth-century photography. This medium, aside from her own art historical writing, is what Rosler is best known for and it shows up often in her art projects—photomontage, photo-texts duos, and documentary photography—which range from installations to video to the gelatin silver print. After studying other photographers who captured poverty, housing or property loss as subject matter in their work (I’m thinking mainly of the Farm Security Administration photographers here), I soon developed an appreciation and preference for Rosler’s work, particularly her photo-texts entitled The Bowery In Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems (1974-75). Not that the FS A photographs lacked any particular aptitude or insight, but they drew upon a Christianizing humanism when rendering their images, evoking pity and sorrow from all those who had a bit of change in their pocket and a stable home. Rosler’s Bowery photographs oppose any necessity of creating sympathy for the down-and-out “bum.” In fact, she avoids the representation of the human subject altogether and instead creates a visual account of an emptied-out urban environment ridden with beer bottles, litter, and other human remains. Juxtaposed next to each of her forty-eight black and white photographs are a few typed words: synonyms for drunkenness in the middle of a white page. The absence of the human subject, referenced to only by images and words of their environment, allows the viewer to come to terms with the circumstance and presence of homelessness itself without sentimentalizing individuals, an act that might ironically yield an enabling passivism or misunderstanding of real socio-environmental factors.
The disallowance of contemplating human subjects, which proved profound in the Bowery photo-texts, is precisely what I dislike about Rosler’s archive project at e-Flux. There is too much absence or talking around the subject that leaves me wondering: what is really being addressed by her work? The inundation of text-based materials from the late 1980s—a pamphlet pinned to the wall from the “NFHA: National Fair Housing Alliance,” a magnet with writing, “311 Save Your Home Hotline,” an article on the “Protest in Detroit; Photographers Show a City ‘Demolished by Neglect,’” and a book entitled Artists’ Housing Manual—speaks to the ambitiousness of Rosler’s personal media collection on housing issues more than anything else, but leaves unanswered the question of who her intended audience is. Rosler’s exhibited archive also raises questions about the consequences of particular art-exhibition practices, which I believe do injustice to the real concerns found in the works of some artists, including Rosler. The organization and layout of materials at the e-Flux space made them impossible to really use; pamphlets and documents were overlapping and tightly pressed underneath a thick layer of plexi-glass on a workshop table. More flyers were pinned to the wall—again, presented in a way that precluded any thoughts of thumbing through their contents.
A month earlier I was leafing through fifteenth century pages barehanded in an open-air pavilion at the State Archives in Venice. This gallery, by contrast, asked me to wear white gloves when flipping through twenty-year old files. It is not the ironic, hyper-genetic preservation issue that annoyed me most, but rather my sense that the archive was not meant to be a user-friendly archive-art project at all. Instead, it is an archive visually on show, at a safe distance so that the viewer can admire the materials but not necessarily learn from them. The formal aestheticizing cleanliness, and the white cube setting that accompanies too many institutionally-conformed art exhibitions and which had, indeed, seemed intentionally ejected from Martha’s first “relational” project, felt clearly reinserted for this show. The exhibition style beckoned art connoisseurship, point blank, whether it wanted to or not.
Art on the theme of homelessness has not always crystallized under the auspices of an art-designated space. Two years prior to the opening of “If You Lived Here…,” Krzysztof Wodiczko, a prominent Polish artist, beamed up individuals displaced by urban planning in Boston, New York, and in many other cities by projecting their photographed image onto monumental buildings in a work he called “Homeless Projections” (1987). A year later, based off ideas he received from interviews with homeless people, Wodiczko began designing “Homeless Vehicles,” which were tubular carts designed for sleeping and carrying bottles and cans. I tend to favor Wodiczko’s ambitions to Rosler’s for the simple fact that Wodiczko views society’s perception of homelessness as more of a problem than housing loss itself. However, I would also entertain the idea that Rosler’s and Wodiczko’s work is, together, complementary and harmonious. Rosler’s work provokes, creates space for unknown voices to be heard, cheerleads, fights verbally and textually, wakes up the public, and continues to document the challenges of the entire affair in an archive. Wodiczko takes the hands-on approach by inventing practical tools with an aesthetic, urban sensibility. One finds emotional fervor in Rosler’s work, such as her 1989 Times Square animation “Housing Is a Human Right.” In contrast, one finds stability in the Buckminster Fuller-like inventiveness of Wodiczko. We should feel lucky to have both artists living in the New York City area, at least part time.
For the current revisited exhibition, I am certain that e-Flux and Martha Rosler were well aware of just how timely the archival publicizing would be. The show opened August 28, 2009 and will close October 31, 2009, just days shy of the mayoral elections. Is all the info-loading to push politics? I actually don’t think so. But, the drop-hint texts, marrying negative connotations with the word “Mayor,” found scattered about the archive space, were no subtle message either. I am left wondering to what extent the political nature of the “archive presentation” will provoke critical rehistoricization of Rosler’s less politically-geared content.
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