Take the Old Grey Mare Out and Shoot It

Tropics of Meta has decided to move to a shiny new site.

It has been a great two and a half years since we first hatched the idea of a semi-scholarly site that could serve as an outlet for our extracurricular writings, photography, and other projects.  Most of our contributors were in various stages of grad school or had recently departed from an MA or PhD program, and we all felt a need for a space to discuss and share our ideas that we otherwise lacked in the often isolating world of academia.  We also loved to write and felt like the dry, laborious style of most academic writing in journals and monographs was too limited; there had to be another voice or register in which we could talk about our research.  (A more extended discussion of the relationship between blogging, writing, and scholarship can be found here.)

Over time we have accumulated a pretty substantial body of work centering on urban history, technology, pop culture, diplomatic history and more.  These areas of concentration reflect the interests of our editors and writers, and the new site features sections devoted specifically to topics such as Cities and Media.  We hope that you will check out the new and improved Tropics and continue reading our work.

Joy and Pain: What Jeremy Lin Tells Us about 21st Century American Race Relations

 

What would Kobe say?

Jeremy Lin is a good player but all the hype is because he's Asian. Black players do what he does every night and don't get the same praise.

-- Floyd Mayweather, Jr.

It is precisely the unfixed liminality of the Asian immigrant – geographically, linguistically, and racially at odds with the context of the “national” – that has given rise to the necessity of endlessly fixing and repeating such stereotypes.

-- Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 19

Floyd Mayweather is not a brain surgeon. The man punches for a living and he punches very well. However, all that head trauma must have knocked more than few synapses loose, why would Mayweather begrudge the new Asian American icon Jeremy Lin of his place in American sports lore? Mayweather has a long history of this from his choice to wear a sombrero when fighting Oscar De La Hoya to his numerous comments regarding Manny Pacquiao (who Mayweather once confusingly mocked for eating “sushi” which of course is Japanese not Filipino). Certainly, he’s not the only African American to begrudge an Asian athlete success. Shaquille O’Neal famously dismissed Yao Ming with the comment, "Tell Yao Ming, 'ching-chong-yang-wah-ah-soh." So what’s this all about and what does it tell us about 21st century America?

To be fair, Mayweather has a point. While Yao Ming and a handful of other Chinese basketball stars have successfully navigated the league, the league has NEVER seen an Asian American basketball talent perform at this level on this stage. That Lin plays for New York no doubt helps - the Knicks remain one of the league’s franchise teams. Even when they suck, and the Knicks have sucked mightily in recent years, the team has always turned a profit. So yes, the combination of Lin’s ethnicity/race and his location, the Big Apple, and his team, the New York Knickerbockers serve to highlight his success in ways that a player in Minnesota simply can’t. With that said, seven straight wins for a team without one of its key players matters, no matter the race or ethnicity of the player dragging the Knicks to a possible playoff spot.

Yet, Mayweather also points to a reality of American race relations: as the nation’s diversity increases over the 21st century, we will need to figure out how to discuss and think about race in America. The black white binary that dominated American racial thought – popularly and academically - seems to have little relevance in a nation where Asian American and Latino American residents seem to increase their numbers every year. Racism affects each of these groups, but in different manners and through different pathways. No one doubts the long established prejudice against Black citizens in America. The historical legacy of slavery and Jim Crow remain central aspects of our nation’s history. Yet, Asian Americans and Latinos, notably Mexican nationals and Mexican Americans, have their own histories of struggle.

The transnational nature of Asian American and Latino identity adds confusion for many observers. It goes without saying that media outlets like ESPN have noted how the Chinese government remains wary of Lin as a figure: 1) for his Taiwanese background and 2) for his devout religiosity. While ESPN and other outlets note this relevant fact, writers like Lisa Lowe and Charlotte Brooks have noted the stereotype of the “perpetual foreigner” attached to Asian American citizens has often served to undermine their status. With the internet, twitter, and the countless forms of social media out there, undoubtedly, Chinese citizens will be drawn to the Jeremy Lin narrative and ESPN should discuss this. However, it also reinforces the idea that Asian Americans maybe citizens but they belong to different shores. Overall, the media’s behavior has been mostly positive, though there have been several hiccups along the way as USA today documented Thursday (2/16/2012).

In Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends, Brooks charts the intense discrimination and segregation endured by West Coast Japanese and Chinese American populations in the first half of the 20th century. Even when finally accepted by white homeowners, this acceptance hinged on the international connections of Asian American populations rather than their place as American citizens. Brooks points out that this “transnational identity” undermined Chinese claims to national membership as they were seen as permanent foreigners, albeit welcome ones. Also, as with the Japanese American example, the arrival of larger numbers of African American residents recast white homeowner concerns that now Chinese Americans came to be seen, along with other Asian Americans, as the “model minority,” to be contrasted with more “troublesome” racial/ethnic groups. Accordingly, Brooks suggests that American interventionism in Asia along with pervasive domestic fears of communist infiltration and agitation “spurred white Californians to reconsider the impact of their segregationist decisions. In the end, the deepening Cold War short circuited the emerging pattern and replaced it with a far different one.” (193) Really, considering that the nation interned its Japanese American population during WWII, these shifts in attitudes are notable.

White homeowners continued to exhibit a desire to live apart from nonwhites; even when they accepted Chinese or Japanese American neighbors, they did so out of a sense of anti-communism rather than any nod toward racial equality. One white resident, who supported Nisei WWII veteran Sam Yoshira’s attempt to buy a home in Southwood (South San Francisco), commented, “My property values aren’t as important as my principles.” (Brooks, 206) Such admissions reveal not only latent racial attitudes but also the effect of FHA/HOLC housing policies that dismissed communities with nonwhites as eligible for home loans and the like. 

Even before these developments, as writers like Nayan Shah and others have pointed out, Asians were denied the right to own land in many western states (look up the Alien Land Act in CA 1913) and later prevented from achieving naturalized citizenship (they were labeled unable to assimilate). US policymakers depicted America's violent occupation of the Philippines much like Rudyard Kipling's "White Man's Burden": bringing the torch of civilization and democracy to savages. To make matters worse, as Paul Kramer points out in The Blood of Government, despite living under US imperial rule for several decades of the 20th century where US imposed education systems stressed American ideals of equality, Filipinos encountered violent racism on the nation's western shores when they migrated in the early decades of the century. Filipinos of the 1930s and 1940s had been raised under “benevolent assimilation” which cast America in idealistic and unrealistic terms. The history of struggle against American forces no longer existed (erasure through education) such that Filipino immigrants to the US articulated a sanitized version of US-Philippines history, while remaining shocked at the overt racism that few American educators bothered to mention.

The Warriors didn't play him much but they pimped him for AHN

Ironically, considering how Asian men and women are sexualized in modern America, white observers feared Filipinos, with their flashy clothes and sensual nature would seduce white women while Chinese men would ply innocent white ladies with gifts and opium. As for Asian women, one need only look at the Page Act of 1875 (it basically prevented Chinese women from migrating to the US using morality and their lack of male attachment as factors contributing to their rejection), to know that American officials viewed most Chinese women as sexually licentious and disease ridden. I won’t even get into the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), the Gentlemen’s Agreement or the numerous “driving out” campaigns along the West Coast in which Chinese and Japanese populations were forcibly and violently driven from towns. Needless to say, these campaigns resulted in economic distress, emotional strain, and often numerous deaths. In this environment, like Blacks in the South, Asian populations provided elites with a scapegoat for the larger economic ramifications of expanding capitalism and corporate development that largely punished local working class white communities. Collectively, the Page and Chinese Exclusion Acts served as foundational texts for immigration laws (often restrictions based on race, class, gender, and ethnicity) of the 1920s to today (see Erika Lee).

Rudyard Kipling would be proud

When addressing Mayweather’s comments, it helps to consider these facts. Though Asian Americans endured stark racism in the first half of the 20th century, the arrival of large numbers of African Americans on the West Coast via the Great Migration (and the Second Great Migration) drove whites to accept Asian Americans as the lesser of two evils. While I doubt Mayweather had such historical constructs in mind, one can see parallels in today’s American culture that might drive some African Americans to resent Lin’s success. After all, as recently as the mid-1990s, Douglass Massey and Nancy Denton noted that though housing segregation persists, Black Americans continue to endure its most pernicious forms while Asian and Latino Americans have been able to suburbanize at higher levels including integration into white communities. Moreover, plenty of East Asian and South Asian Americans have expressed racism towards Black Americans as well. To paraphrase Toni Morrison, the first thing every immigrant has done once reaching America was illustrate how he or she wasn’t black. So some African Americans surely see themselves as more “American” than recent Asian or Latino American arrivals yet economically, they have yet to enjoy the same level of success. Granted Obama’s presidency and the rise of a significant Black American middle class blunts this somewhat, yet still for some people, these issues bring up negative feelings.

Lin himself acknowledges that even when playing for Harvard, it was not unusual to hear racial slights – comments regarding “sweet and sour pork” – or the slur, “chink”. Such obvious outbursts of racism don’t really deserve our attention, whatever place they come from, nearly everyone condemns them. No, it’s the subtle institutional form that plays a factor here. ESPN analyst and former NBA player Tim Legler suggested that Lin’s lack of opportunity may have also played a factor in his late bloom. Legler, who is white, noted that while Black players in the NBA believed he was a capable shooter, front office executives and some coaches, most of whom were white, viewed him as a liability largely because of his race. As Legler pointed out recently, Lin probably endured similar doubts. Granted, being from Harvard didn't help, most people don't recognize the Ivies for their basketball talent.

If Asians were denied citizenship, land ownership, and decent housing because of fears about disease, morals, and sexuality in the first half of the century, Lin’s ascent had been mitigated by nearly opposite racial concerns: Asian Americans' rise to “model minority” status meant they were great college students, lawyers, and IT specialists, not athletes. Of course, this model minority status probably rubbed some minorities the wrong way. Numerous writers have argued that the “model minority” construct, promoted by White American and sections of the Asian American community arose in the 1960s and 1970s as rebuke to other minority groups protesting for equal rights, notably the Chicano and Black Power movements. Grantland editor Jay Caspian Kang, who is Asian American himself and frequently writes about race for the site pointed out that though white Americans promoted this construct, segments of the Asian American community held some culpability:

It has become standard issue for successful Asian Americans to just sort of avoid talking about race. This, I guess, makes sense along the spectrum of assimilation, but it's an inherently elitist stance that plays a bit too coy, especially in a country that has largely decided to turn a blind eye toward racism against Asian Americans. I have no doubt, given his comments in the past, that Lin thinks about his peculiar role in America's blackest network TV show. But for now, he and the Knicks have not said much about anything, really.

The larger point here is that Lin remains a symbol of 21st century America, positively and negatively.  He embodies the kind of social and political changes that we need to acknowledge. Discussions of race in America must incorporate these complex dynamics to fully understand, how we got here. White America does not own a monopoly on racism or racial antipathy. It exerts its own prejudices and biases, but so do other communities.

Floyd Mayweather may be an ass, but his comments at least open up space for discussion.   Hopefully, we can fill these spaces with a useful dialogue that helps us understand each other and our nation more completely. To be honest, the aforementioned King may have articulated the awkward role that race continues to play in this story best. Speaking to fellow Grantland editor Bill Simmons, Kang summed up the past two weeks neatly:

There's always going to be some shit kicked up by haters, but the outpouring of excitement and love has overwhelmed the usual racist clatter. That doesn't mean I haven't rolled my eyes a couple times or even gotten angry. But there's a difference between someone who says something a bit insensitive out of genuine enthusiasm and someone who is just trying to get off his bitter rocks. It's important to not hawk over Linsanity with that much vigilance; it's basketball and it's a bunch of dudes typing reactions on Twitter. There's just no reason to let a few racist assholes ruin the best party of the year. Yes, some of these comments have highlighted that we, as a society, don't treat all racism equally, but if you didn't know that already, you've been living in a hole somewhere. More important, if you can't look at Jeremy Lin and see why America is the greatest country in the world, well, then you don't understand America.

Who knows what the “greatest country in the world” is, but “Linsanity” makes me feel better about this one.

[Editors Note - To its credit, Grantland addressed the racial aspects of Lin's rise early and often.  In addition to those articles mentioned above, Rembert Browne's recent essay only adds to the mix]

Ryan Reft

Subculture Rub: Tracing the Winding Path of Street Art

From our perch in the early 21st century, when multinational corporations hoover anything remotely hip, it is easy to forget how hostile the climate for hip once was. The church, the law, capital and mass opinion all lined up against hip, as against a disease.

-- John Leland, Hip: The History, 2009

When the image of scarf wearing, bespectacled black man in the vein of the famous 2008 Obama campaign poster began popping up around D.C., Prince of Petworth blogger Lydia DePillis wondered just who was responsible.  After a circuitous route than took DePillis to DC “wheatpaste” artists DIABETIK and DECOY, the local writer concluded the prints belonged to one Steven Cummings.  Of course, Cummings seemed to take no real interest in reveling his identity.  DePillis and the Prince of Petworth  agreed that the portrait deserved recognition awarding it the 2011 best wheatepaste for D.C.   Yet DePiIlis admitted the art itself seemed almost secondary:

One of the most widely disseminated images appears to be a portrait framing a somber man of indeterminate age, who stares directly ahead through large circular glasses; a bowler hat and high collar complete the vaguely Victorian ensemble. The impressive part is the distribution: The artist has deployed the image all around the city, on telephone booths and boarded-up windows, as well as via small stickers attached to free newspapers.

While some blog commentators suggested the images reminded them suspiciously of the iconic 2008 Obama posters produced by Shepard Fairey, others recognized that Cummings’s efforts were both an emulation and extension of the kind of street art popularized by Fairey and Banksy.  Cummings’s prints served simultaneously as subliminal adverts for his own art exhibit at the Smithsonian affiliated Anacostia Community Museum and a means to reshape abandoned D.C. buildings into something more the urban detritus.   

Fairey Fairey Everywhere

Inspired in part by the work of Andy Warhol and built on earlier movements like graffiti and punk/hardcore, the rise of street art over the past few decades helped to reorganize conceptions of public space and people’s relation to it.  However, though it shares obvious similarities with graffiti and is often miscategorized as such, its aesthetic and ideological impulses stem from different sources. Much like punk and hardcore before it, debates about street art encompass several important issues.  How do we debate art’s value? How much does the process or act count in the creation of this art? To what extent, does the trajectory of street art reflect broader trends of commidization of subcultural movements?

Punk Rock Redux

The Clash

[T]he tensions between dominant and subordinate groups can be found reflected in the surfaces of subculture – in the styles made up of mundane objects which have double meaning. On the one hand, they warn the ‘straight’ world in advance of a sinister presence – the presence of difference – and draw down upon themselves vague suspicions, uneasy laughter, ‘white and dumb rages.’ On the other hand for those who erect them into icons, who use them as words or as curses, these objects become signs of forbidden identity, sources of value.”

-- Dick Hebdige, Subculture the Meaning of Style, 1979, 2-3

Writing in 1979, Birmingham School icon Dick Hebdige set out to examine the meaning of style and subculture and its connection to race and class.  Hebdige juxtaposed the development of various subcultures including Mods, Teds, Punks, Skins, and others, illustrating how the style from each transmitted messages internally and externally.   Though he highlighted the political aspects of style, Hebdige also cautioned that “the meaning of subculture is … always in dispute, and style is the area in which the opposing definitions clash with the most dramatic force.” (3)

Context meant something as well. Punks took a post-modern bricolage of items ranging from safety pins to rape masks to swastikas (ugh), all meant to separate the objects from their original meanings.   The rearrangement and transmuation of objects, in use and meaning, set punk apart making it “kinetic [and] transitive … concentrat[ing] attention on the act of transformation performed upon the object…” (123).  Yet, as Hebdige also noted media, society, and business recuperate subcultures through commodization, making it less threatening but also freezing their importance. “Once removed from their private contexts by the small entrepreneurs and big fashion interests who produce them on a mass scale,” argued Hebdige, ”they become codified, made comprehensible, rendered at once public property and profitable.” (96)

Thirty years later, New York Times reporter, John Leland placed the punks, mods, and other subcultures seen as “hip” in a longer historical context, noting that what once threatened the status quo was now marketed as a consumer necessity by corporations and multinationals. As Edward Morgan noted in his recent book on mass media portrayals of the 1960s, political meanings of important historical epochs have been overwhelmed by profit driven media and culture.  Figures like Che Guevera, silk screened onto countless t-shirts, no longer represent rebellion (or at least not real revolution) but rather have been transformed into “a mass produced commodity itself or the seductive hook to draw one into consumption.” (Morgan, 264)  With these warnings acknowledged, one can argue that even in this more ambiguous environment, movements and subcultures emerge that at least momentarily challenge dominant ideas and ideologies. 

Punk did this.  In Britain appropriating the language of crisis, punks mocked the “alienation and emptiness which [had] caused sociologists so much concern, realizing in a deliberate and willful fashion the direst predictions of the most scathing social critics,” writes Hebdige.  They celebrated in “mock heroic” language the decline of community and the “collapse of traditional forms of meaning.” (79) The spectacle of punk’s commodification aside, today, street artists like punk style and graffiti art before them, use fairly blunt instruments to populate public spaces created by neoliberal economics with distorted visions of consumerism. 

McLaren at work

Yet if Malcolm McLaren, the Sex Pistols manager and widely acknowledged cultural conman, used the Sex Pistols to promote himself and punk more widely while cashing in on the controversy, what are we to think of street art practitioners like Banksy, Shepard Fairey, Space Invader and others?    McLaren’s antics with the Sex Pistols drew inspiration from the Situationist movement, which promoted public acts of absurdity or provocation to force social change.  Yet, looking back at his experience with Johnny Rotten et al., McLaren argued it really wasn’t about what the band created: “I never thought the Sex Pistols would be any good … But it didn’t matter if they were bad.” With this in mind, how do we think about street art? What do Cummings' above provocations mean in 2011?

Exit through the Gift Shop

Bansky

I am quite willing to agree that graffiti is Art, but I don't believe the act of painting them is an art form, if you see what I mean. Or maybe you don't. You may be too old to understand my argument.

-- Roger Ebert

It probably sounds rather obvious to note how much the process of making art, and the background story behind the artist have come to reflect artistic worth in the eyes of critics, collectors, and to a certain extent, the broader public.   In many ways, the Banksy directed Exit through the Gift Shop cleverly interrogated this idea. 

Though meant to be about the brief history of street art it came to be defined by Thierry Guetta, a street art enthusiast and amateur documentarian who spends nearly a decade serving as roadie to some of street art’s greatest practitioners (for what it’s worth Guetta, like McLaren, ran a clothing shop).   For years, Guetta filmed and aided Bansky and others’ in their artistic endeavors. Though Guetta filmed hundreds of tapes, his lack of organization and poor filmmaking skills never resulted in any real documentary.  When asked by Bansky to produce one,  Guetta’s finished product left the mysterious street artist shaking his head. Yet, Guetta didn’t spend all those years at essentially apprenticing for naught.  Instead, with the encouragement of Banksy, the entrepreneurial spirited Guetta developed his own moniker, Dr. Brainwash, and proceeded to knock off derivations of those artists for whom he had apprenticed. He managed to get an article in the June 12, 2008 of the L.A. Weekly - more or less hyping his upcoming show – which ultimately resulted in Guetta selling millions of dollars of street art.  

more Banksy

While some have called the documentary a brilliant distillation of all that is wrong with the art world, others have applauded the documentary as a film but questioned the veracity of its story.  “As a documentary, Exit Through the Gift Shop is as about as reliable and structurally sound as that house-front with the strategically placed window that falls on top of Buster Keaton,” admitted the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw.  Ebert acknowledged the same in the opening line of his review but argued this “only adds to its fascination.”  The movie’s inclusion in the best documentary category at the 2011 Oscar’s only ratcheted up the controversy; after all, This is Spinal Tap (1984) might be the greatest doc about rock music ever, I mean providing it wasn’t fictional, which uh, it was.   

Certainly, many critics noticed the movie’s arc seemed suspiciously perfect. On-line magazine and “cultural aggregator” thesuperslice.com perceptively broke down ETTGS, pointing to numerous scenes that suggested Banksy and Fairey collaborated to pull the wool over the audience’s eyes.    Others pointed out that the movie’s authenticity remained beside the point:  the capriciousness of the art world and the increasing importance of hype served as Bansky’s message, the truth behind Guetta didn’t matter. “The fact that the art world was unable to see through the hype is not in dispute, and that’s the important part of this story,” noted one observer.  Besides, the same critic noted, if process matters, didn’t Banksy deserve credit for basically proving that not only could he counterfeit money (the movie features a scene in which Bansky reveals thousands of fake 10 pound notes with Princess Diana’s face on them) but also an entire movie.    

Still, as superslice argued, Bansky’s “hoax” accomplishes several goals.  It widely publicized street art, documenting a phenomenan that seems perfect for the post X Games extreme age. Remember, the street art skill set revolves as much around selecting the most spectacularly difficult spaces for appropriation.  Gymnastics and a keen disregard for personal safety might be as important as aesthetics.   

Yet, much like the celebrated skateboard doc Dogtown and ZBoys in which director Stacy Peralta documented the very Zephyr skating team he helped pioneer, ETTGS serves as a vehicle for Banksy and Fairey to secure their place as street art icons (a dubious term considering the anonymity of most street artists).  Peralta raised the Zephyr team to godlike status. As numerous critics noted, he never adequately addressed this obvious conflict of interest.  Superslice alleges a similar occurrence with ETTGS:

It’s A Banksy Film that’s deifying Banksy as the greatest living street artist and will soon make the case for him as the greatest living artist by trashing both the opinion makers (those duped by MBW and the so-called greatest living artists, Hirst & Koons et. al.)...

Again, like punk and street art, context mattered for Team Zephyr.  Whether one considers skateboarding akin to ballet or vandalism, the Zephyr team’s appropriation of local schools for honing their craft re-imagined these spaces into places of creativity and opportunity. Style proved as important as content not only to the teams’ coaches but too all its key members. 

Using schools

It must be noted, in many ways, the kind of vertical skating style Zephyr created, through appropriation of public and private spaces (empty swimming pools that didn’t belong to them), had never been seen before.  As numerous skaters admitted, Tony Alva, Peralta, and others drew on surfing for their style but there were no antecedents for the ramp based maneuvers that show up on today’s ESPN X Game highlights.  Individuals like Banksy do not emerge out of the artistic ether without drawing upon earlier inspiration. For observers like superslice, Banksy exhibits a love hate relationship with Andy Warhol.  One moment Bansky emulates Warhol’s sense of self and manipulation of media, while a second later, he is using his art to promote an anti-capitalist critique of the world. Warhol seemed to have fewer problems with capitalism, art and commerce or at the very least he never displayed the same kind of political discomfort that Banksy exudes.  Of course, while Banksy should be applauded for voicing reservations about capitalist hunger, it also remains a truism that as a recent Economist article pointed out, some of history’s greatest artistic epochs depended on rich patrons and nefarious moneylenders. “Great financial centres have often been great artistic centres – from Florence in the Renaissance to Amsterdam in the 17^th to London and New York today,” the British magazine opined.  “where would New York’s SoHo be without Wall Street.”  (Economist, The Dangers of Demonology, January 7, 2012)   Would Banksy’s images mean as much had the West not witnessed over 20 years of neoliberal economic development often hollowing out public spaces for corporate logos and adverstisement? In this way, the old debate rages on regarding the balance between art and commerce.  How much was Cummings “wheatpaste” explosion about reshaping vacant D.C. buildings into a medium art and how much was just about Cummings?

Street Art 2012 

I was fearless /wanted all of it/high on pcp/I could do anything /we were rubberheaded /we got tranquilizers from a leather motorbag/Peace in Hermosa, Wings over Inglewood/I surfed the walls on angel dust/four finger baggies across those ruling hills /my reckless driving , I’m in your living room/I crashed my face and broke my tooth /exposed a nerve was spitting blood/chorus/check under the wood forgot his pills/he’s kind of in a riptide/try not to see/Peace in Hermosa, wings over Inglewood.

-- "Peace in Hermosa", OFF!

When Southern California hardcore OFF! put out their First Four EPs album in 2011, writers noted it sounded like music for the current age. “It's an economic shithole out there right now-- the same conditions that led to hardcore in the first place,” grumbled Paul Thompson. “This music is built for a climate of frustration and powerlessness, and its bare-knuckled punch-in-the-face is a long-needed wake-up call to nostalgic escapism.”  The album’s final song, “Peace in Hermosa,” both lyrically and sonically sounded like a night spent on uppers gone awry.  Clocking in at 1:32, Keith Morris’ vocals fade out in a slow dirge as the pills wear off and dark reality comes seeping back into the narrator’s life. 

Unlike hardcore’s heyday, the early 1980s where Ronald Reagan’s optimistic credo of “It’s morning in America” contrasted with the threat of nuclear annihilation, today Americans struggle through much worse economic times and live under the hazy unknown of terrorist attack.  OFF! doesn’t so much challenge the status quo as document it.  Punk rock and hardcore simply meant more in their original contexts: deindustrializing crisis ridden Britain and  falsely optimistic Reaganite America. The Dead Kennedy’s “Kill the Poor” sounds a lot funnier in this context.  One should not forget that punk and hardcore pushed back against a bloated music scene, filled with progressive virtuosity (King Crimson, Yes, Styx, REO Speedwagon) but devoid of passion. Process – or the lack thereof – meant everything.  Knowing how to play your instrument paled in comparison to the act of playing it.  On OFF!’s new album not a single song lasts more than 1:45 and like a Banksy piece it’s gone before you know what happened. It’s not hard to see the symmetry between bloated 1970s arena rock and a twee art world invested in ivory tower video installations of the 1990s.  Street artists embraced a more visceral take on creativity, one that like punk and hardcore, provided a big tent for anyone with the right instincts.

In many ways, street art represents a snarky update on the graffiti and hip-hop of 1980s, but it also demonstrates an ideological symmetry with punk and hardcore . Good street art both documents and challenges the staus quo, yet as with rap, the tag or print used operates as an alter ego.  As Hebdige noted at the outset, for both those who place such work on a pedestal and others who denigrate its existence, Banksy’s simpering apes and menacing rats and Fairey’s Andre the Giant mean something.  How’s it’s positioned, where it’s placed, the art itself, all matter.  Though the act of graffiti can certainly be considered political (tagging NYC public transit subway cars must say something right?), much of its direct message wasn’t.  If graffiti grew to international popularity, it did so through individuals applying their craft in specific locales.  Street art like Fairey’s Andre the Giant/OBEY image multiplied through a transnational network of like-minded people.  Though Fairey argues the message one draws from it remains idiosyncratic, the whole idea of placing it in these settings is to force people to reconsider their environment. Graffiti may have promoted this subconsciously but fewer artists wrote manifestos like Fairey’s 1991 take on Phenomenology (and no William Upski Wimsatt's Bomb the Suburbs probably doesn't count since half of it is about hitchhiking.)

The process by which street art comes into being shares more than a little in common with punk and hardcore: the strict DIY ethic.  Populating public spaces with guerilla art characterized by irony or sarcastic critiques of foreign policy, consumerism, race, and countless other political positions, heightens the very importance of its placement and the space it occupies. If English punks employed the language of crisis to mock the very authorities so worried about Britain and its youth, so too do street artists use the very marks of consumerism and coporatism as a means of critiquing those very systems.  Unsurprisingly, characteristic of such a diffuse movement, there exists a diversity of street art styles.  For example, aesthetically, the brutal Andre the Giant/OBEY images of Fairely send one message, while the tongue in cheek work of mysterious street art collective (well it could be an individual but the anonymity of the movement makes these distinctions tough) Trustocorp blend in colorfully with the wider environment.  In recent months, Charlene Weisler's urban montage blog, much like superslice, has documented "yarn bombings" across NYC. More organic and craft-oriented than Trustocorp, artists like Jessie Hemmons cover familiar objects in brightly colored "yarn bombs", perhaps most famously the Wall Street Bull.

   

"I am you demon cleaner"

I'd like your finest fake tabloid please

Delancy St. (Lower East Side)

Wall Street

While, Trustocorp’s work questions consumerism, race, and foreign policy cleverly, one could argue the context and clandestine process mean as much as the image.  The work draws attention for its placement as much as its aesthetics.  Many reviewers called Dr. Brainwash’s work derivative, but to uncultured viewers like myself, Guetta created some clever images.  Besides, couldn’t one argue that Fairey’s OBEY campaign was built on a derivative image reproduced and rearranged in public spaces countless numbers of times?  As noted by DePillis at the outset, the ubiquity and pervasiveness of the image might be just as important as the print itself.

Street Art + BK Adams + Steven Cummings = 

Was there ever any doubt?

My idea was to make BK be known and recognized. I really enjoyed BK’s art and the things he created, I just felt nobody knew who he was. The quickest way to get recognized is to be seen as someone who is hip or cool. In our conversation BK told me a story how he liked to sleep outside, that he had gathered some trees and he was going to build a bed where he could sleep outside. I went to his studio on Maple View Place to photograph him as he built this bed.

-- Text from Steven Cummings photography exhibit “Call and Response: Community and Creativity" at the Anacostia Community Museum

When people try to get to pure about it, hip leaves the building.

-- John Leland, Hip, 11

The 2012 photography exhibit “Call and Response: Community and Creativity” by Steven Cummings illustrates the influence that street art has had on more conventional artists but also demonstrates the ways in which it has become (and perhaps always was) as much a tool for self promotion.  Local photographer  Cummings spent the last couple years collaborating with D.C.’s “eccentric” BK Adams (or Art Man as he calls himself) whose work had been featured in 2010 at the Anacostia Community Museum.  Local media depicts Adams as an elusive eccentric working near the now hip H street corridor, an area that features run down store fronts next to fast food joints next to homeless shelters next to boutique “new American creative” restaurants.  Throughout Cumming’s retrospective, Adams appears like the lost member of TV on the Radio, nearly always maintaining perpetual motion, like an artistic inspector gadget (or as a 2010 Washington Post article described him “a walking matisse” who lived in a “Never Never Land of art” obsessed with making found objects “beautiful”).  

Who put this fucking chair here?

Adams drew attention in 2010 for his numerous public art works that apparently were independently installed.  In an attempt to “beautify the city,” Adams clandestinely planted pieces throughout the city, perhaps most famously, a blue chair atop a poll that led the local Hill Rag to ask “Who put up that mystery chair?”  However, in the vein of Banksy and others, Adams splashed photos of himself with the words “I AM ART” all over the city.  One Columbia Heights blogger complimented the prints but asked, “I’m not an art expert so I’m not sure who is depicted …”  Adams’s “self-portrait” prints bear more than a passing resemblance to Dr. Brainwash and others.

Dr. Brainwash

The collaboration between the two men appears to be mutually influential. Working and occasionally residing in, appropriately enough, a Victorian home perched on the hills of SE Washington D.C., one can see Cummings’ interest in working with Adams.  Adams’ backstory makes for an intriguing narrative. A former truck company owner turned public artist working in a home that overlooks the largely African American community of Anacostia.

Cummings’s collaboration with Adams reveals two artists playing with ideas about race, history, and identity (one could toss in street art here as well). Steven Cummings photos of himself, others, and Adams playfully ask questions about Black identity without stridency or even any direct racial implications. Cummings’s text provides a straightforward narrative that admits to wanting a larger audience and professes to be following in the footsteps of Andy Warhol and Basquiat.  If African American style and culture seemed trapped in doo rags and hardcore rap in the 1990s, Cummings suggests a myriad number of ways out of this sartorial corner in the 21^st century.  Others have noted the shift in style among prominent Black Americans.  With Kanye’s Bipster fashion, Odd Future’s skatepunk aesthetic, and the “rise of the nerd-look” among NBA players from Kevin Durant’s press conference backpack to Lebron James’s hipster glasses, Black style seems far less limited and more diverse today than 20 years ago.  Granted, one could argue this has as much to do with who the media decided to highlight, but Allen Iverson – incredible talent that he was – was never going to rock a backpack to a press conference. Cummings’s photo of Adams, replacing Huey Newton in the iconic photo of the Black Panther leader only enhances this aspect of his work.   

Does it matter that the way in to Cummings’s work depended in part on street art origins that amounted to self promotion?   Sure Cummings remained silent about bombing the city with his "wheatpastes," but since they effectively served to advertise his work across the city- they stretch as far as Takoma Park near the D.C.-Maryland border - one can't discount this point. To their credit, Adams and Cummings appear completely aware of street arts' radiating meanings. One could even argue that Cummings and Adams purposely appropriate and gently mock the very street art discussed here. Obviously, street art’s credo can’t be summed up by one person, but whatever definition one ascribes to, Banksy and others clearly intended to engage their audiences politically.   Adams and Cummings do this, but also don’t hide their hope that others will see their work and be inspired.   

In the end, who even cares anymore how an artist gets our attention? Forest rockers like Grizzly Bear sell their songs to car manufactures and in the process expose themselves to thousands of new fans who never would have known about them.   Street art like skateboarding and punk  has probably crested as a underground political movement, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t valuable. OFF!’s new album reimagines hardcore in its most stripped down form, making something very old sound very new.  It won’t sell any copies and but it remains a stark take on 21^st century existence and probably one of the greatest hardcore albums of the last 30 years.   Twenty years from now, someone will revisit street art’s early days, remapping it in old ways that seem new. In fact, maybe Steven Cummings, BK Adams, and others already have.

Ryan Reft

Teaching the New Deal in the Occupy Era

During a graduate seminar this Fall, we discussed Jefferson Cowie and Nick Salvatore’s excellent article on the New Deal, “The Long Exception,” and our thoughts inevitably turned to comparisons of the 1930s and the present moment.  These were the early days of the Occupy movement, when the protests were first beginning to confuse those who believe every political action needs to come with a bullet-point policy platform, and critics of the Left were already sharpening their critique of the smelly, lazy folks who had nothing better to do than sit around in the park all day.  To me, the protest seemed to function so beautifully because of its aimlessness.  The inertia of its participants symbolized the problems of poverty, unemployment, and homelessness more perfectly than any statistic about jobless claims or any proposal for tackling the economic crisis ever could.  I looked at it and saw Hooverville.

Yes, the Occupiers included many militant anarchists, some of whom espouse the creed of “Fuck work,” and the encampments inevitably included many people who were already permanently out of the labor force—homeless men and women who slept in the parks and public spaces before the Occupy movement arrived.  But most of the participants represented a younger generation who looked to the future with little hope for success, as traditionally measured—the endless hours they spent idling in public space were a visible testament to the fact the bigger economy did not have a lot of use for them.  If it did, they would be somewhere else—teaching school, building roads, packaging bad mortgages as valuable investments, or whatever it was that people did before our society starting hemorrhaging work.

So Occupy has provided a powerful visual message of a system gone awry, in a way that thousands of individual foreclosures or firings never could.  Such tragedies appear to be isolated incidents; they happen behind closed doors, in offices and factories; at their most noticeable, we see their traces in neighborhoods where dirty, mildewed toys and furniture pile up on the curbside, the remnants of a some unlucky local’s former home life.

I mention all this only because our class discussion of the contemporary crisis turned on such signs.  The graduate students in the course said that they know, in an abstract sense, that there is a profound crisis affecting the country, but they admitted that the evidence of the ongoing, grinding recession was hard to find in the course of everyday life.  They have homes; most of them have jobs and families; they are going to school; and when they go to Target, they do not see chaos in the streets or lines of people snaking around the corner next to a soup kitchen.

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Actually, one can easily see such scenes in Atlanta on any day of the week and in any year in recent memory.  The churches of downtown are nearly always surrounded by disheveled, dislocated individuals who wait for money, food, and help in general, but most Atlantans have been so long inured to seeing these people that it eventually stops making much of an impression.  My first impression of Atlanta, when I visited over a decade ago, was that of “a giant Starbucks full of homeless people”—and in that regard it has not changed much, boom or recession or anything in between.

 

Nevertheless, my students and I can know that unemployment is high, home prices are at catastrophic lows, mortgages are under water and families are suffering from hunger and homelessness, yet American society somehow seems to be going happily about its business.  The immortal image of the Depression is a bread line—a long queue of people in black and white, in trench coats and floral print dresses and fedoras, standing on a corner, waiting to eat.  Or men selling apples on the street—presumably men who were lawyers or architects before the collapse.  We think of ruined businessmen jumping from hotel room windows.

For better or worse, I do not know of too many Wall Street tycoons who felt compelled to end it all after destroying the livelihoods and savings of thousands, even millions of ordinary people around the world.  If anything, they have taken their bonuses instead.

 

Of course, all these symbols might be described as a kind of Depression kitsch.  For many people, the real Depression was probably not as deeply felt as we imagine, just as the 1960s for most Americans did not really mean smoking dope and jumping into leftist radicalism.  (Look at any yearbook from 1967—you will probably see more crew cuts than love beads.)

But these images are what we think of when we think of the Depression, and the Great Recession of 2007-now does not seem to fit the bill.  Perhaps the explanation is simply a Trumanism.  The thirty-third president famously remarked that a recession is when your neighbor loses his job; a depression is when you lose yours.  For a lot of people, maybe the current crisis does not hit close to home, especially if one comes from a prosperous, educated, solidly middle or upper class family.  I know that many members of my family have been hit by layoffs and the threat of foreclosure or homelessness, but that may not apply to all of my students.  I was surprised to see that almost no one in the class raised their hands when I asked if they knew someone who had gotten a college degree but could not find a job, or a good job.  (I had assumed that was quite normal, although I am told that the unemployment rate for holders of a bachelor’s degree in Atlanta is actually 4%.)
 

I do not think it is just that the students at Georgia State University are privileged and insulated from economic hardship—far from it, in fact.  The real reasons why the toll of today’s crisis seems invisible for many have to do with culture, policy, and the New Deal itself.  Jefferson Cowie and Nick Salvatore’s perceptive argument in “The Long Exception” is that we should not look at the New Deal as the historical norm, from which we have deviated as the liberal welfare state has been dismantled since 1970s.  Too many narratives, they suggest, assume that an interventionist economic policy that aims to ensure the public good by propping up employment and providing social services is the main current of American history, and the counterrevolution of Ronald Reagan and George Bush has somehow taken us off the track of normal historical development.  Cowie and Salvatore suggest that the New Deal itself was the aberration, a set of policies that were out of step with the broad sweep of American politics.  The 1980s and 1990s were not just a Second Gilded Age; they were America reverting to its norm, which before and after the New Deal era was always committed to individualism, property rights, and the free market.

Cowie and Salvatore make some excellent points.  The 1880s and 1980s look a lot alike in some ways, and not just in terms of venal politcians and a general economic free-for-all.  As Paul Starr has noted, the supposedly libertarian era of the late nineteenth century also saw morality campaigns against pornography and other forms of vice that mirrored the Reagan Era’s strange combination of free market ideology and puritanical hysteria about threats to public virtue.

But I am not sure that calling the New Deal an exception is quite right.  It did represent a historical break, as Americans had to discard trusty bromides about limited government and individual initiative to consider the benefits of collective security.  (Jennifer Klein has discussed the meaning of “security” as a new ideal for Americans in her excellent work on Social Security, insurance and healthcare.)  The Depression was a crisis that forced a profound rethinking of American assumptions about government and policy, and I do not believe that we have truly abandoned this set of ideas, no matter how much we find rugged individualism seductive and the “nanny state” unacceptably un-American.

We still have Social Security.  We still have food stamps and FHA loans and the minimum wage (at least technically—many people work for a lot less).  We still have the Great Society addenda to the New Deal, and Medicare is one of the most politically explosive and technically problematic components of government today.  No matter how much the Republican Party would like to end and/or privatize the program, they also realize its great utility as a sacred cow.  All of these programs have at least ameliorated the most brutal effects of the economic meltdown, making life minimally bearable or sustainable for many people who would otherwise be hungry, jobless, homeless, sick, on the street—and potentially disruptive.

 
From this perspective, the New Deal era never quite ended.  We tend to think of the heyday of liberalism ending in 1968, or 1972, or 1980, when political forces that were hostile to the welfare state gained a great deal of power and momentum, but from their own perspective their gains agains the welfare state have been relatively paltry.  They lowered taxes on the rich, broke the political power of unions such as PATCO and the Teamsters through anti-labor policies and deregulation, and ended Aid to Families with Dependent Children in 1996.  Many of the liberal policies of the 1930s and 1960s remain in place, helping to sustain the ordinary function of society and cushion some of the worst blows of the recession.  That we are in a moment when the political zeitgeist seems to have turned toward dismantling many of these government programs that make life minimally sustainable for the poor and unfortunate is frightening, but their durability should give some cause for hope—greater hope than one would feel after reading the prodigious liberal historiography of New Deal decline.

Indeed, we might look at the New Deal as merely a response to a uniquely catastrophic crisis, but such a perspective assumes that such crises are genuinely unique and exceptional—i.e., that capitalist democracy trends toward an equilbrium, and only a truly exceptional event could throw American political culture off its normal course.  The economic crises of today (and likely tomorrow) suggest otherwise.  We may be in another New Deal moment—though, as the students in my class suggest, the current emergency remains poorly understood and inadequately addressed, even by the critics of the status quo.

This is why the Occupy movement has been so important.  The Depression was not just breadlines spooling out from soup kitchens; it was also workers engaging in sitdown strikes, disrupting the normal flow of production by occupying their workplaces and refusing to move.  Such tactics have since been disallowed by the courts and Congress, but their militancy and physicality lent an urgency to protest that no handbill or speech could express.  Occupy Wall Street/Atlanta/Charlotte/Des Moines has been a modern sitdown strike, and the legal and political authorities have taken typical steps to snuff it out.  The symbolism of a contemporary tent city remains—it calls people’s attention away from Kim Kardashian’s wedding, as well as the tired explanations that pin blame for the recession on feckless homeowners.  It focuses attention on problems of inequality, poverty, and injustice—where the focus ought to be, in my opinion, and where it clearly has not been for most of the time since 2008, despite the occasional flare-up of discontent toward bankers and their bonuses.
 

There are deeper currents of discontent and opposition, of course, and we have seen these sometimes ugly, irrational outbursts in recent years.  Since Obama’s election, we have seen instances of terrifying violence: Joseph Stack flying a plane into a government building in Austin, Nidal Malik Hassan’s shooting spree at Fort Hood, an attack on the National Holocaust Museum, and Jared Loughner’s deadly assault on Congresswoman Gabriell Giffords, which claimed the lives of several other victims.  Such events need not be barometers of political or economic disorder.  A wave of school shootings hit the country in the mid-to-late 1990s, when unemployment was low and wages were rising for some Americans.  As Lawrence Goodwyn pointed out in his classic study, The Populist Moment, most people for most of history have been poor and oppressed, yet uprisings against injustice have been relatively few and far between.  Unpleasant conditions do not necessarily give rise to resistance, and prosperity does not necessarily ensure social placidity.  If anything, the idea of a “revolution of rising expectations” can explain why people in a society where conditions are actually improving can imagine a better future and seek even greater social change—such a development arguably occurred throughout the Americas, Europe and Japan in the 1960s.  People see that change is possible, and want more.  Likewise, one might expect that widespread suffering and injustice would prompt people to riot in the streets, but social disorder has been relatively limited in the United States.  The same, of course, cannot be said for Europe or the Middle East in 2011.

Political and social change is, ultimately, not a mechanical process.  The past is unpredictable, as the Soviets used to say, and the future is even more so.  In retrospect, the Occupy movement looks like a belated and inevitable expression of people’s frustration with an unfair system where those who wreaked havoc on the lives of millions were allowed to go free and a grinding “recovery” has failed to help many people in dire straits.  But there was little that was inevitable about the men and women who endured the heat and cold, arrest and imprisonment to make their case against the inequity of the American establishment.  People may very well express their rage through other channels, such as self-destructive drug or alcohol abuse or random acts of violence.  Recently, a series of devastating arsons has affected Los Angeles, with the suspect's motive reportedly a "rage against Americans"; around the same time, several firebombings hit a mosque and  Hindu temple in Queens, the most famously and proudly diverse borough in New York.  The attacks at first appeared to be hate crimes, motivated for religious prejudice or racism or xenophobia.  While the alleged perpetrator seems to have been motivated by a personal vendetta, the real story remain unclear.

 

At such moments, we see America burning—in much the way one would expect a society where great gaps separate the fantastically wealthy and the barely surviving, where people cannot find education or housing or healthcare at a cost that is even remotely sustainable, despite the fact that resources exist in abundance.  The Great Recession may not be the Great Depression, but it has its own resistance and its own anger and its own combustible and unpredictable ingredients.  The exclamation point on a long era of free markets, fear-mongering, inequality and unemployment might be the molotov cocktail that hit places of worship throughout Queens: a Starbucks frappucino bottle, lit aflame.

Alex Sayf Cummings