PHOTOGRAPHING SPRAWL: PICTURING THE CONTEMPORARY SUBURB
Robert Altman`s Nashville (1975) is a film whose sprawling narrative structure reflects the equally sprawling fabric of the automobiledominated,
James Glisson / Afterimage
Jan 01, 2008
Robert Altman`s Nashville (1975) is a film whose sprawling narrative structure reflects the equally sprawling fabric of the automobiledominated, postwar boom town in which it takes place. The odd segues with scenes passing like batons from one character to another often depend on the medium of traffic, whether as traffic jams or impromptu roadside meetings. Down to the film`s floating camerawork that captures actors from awkward viewpoints, it is a film in which nothing settles and its narrative momentum, like so much rubbernecked traffic, has a stop-and-go quality.
Like Altman`s film, contemporary photographers of suburban existence in the United States chronicle dispersed, car-centered boom towns with their strip malls, tacky signage, and acres of parking lots. In taking traffic as a narrative medium, the transportation and growth patterns of a 1970s sun-belt city are shown to circumscribe the relations between the characters. In other words, the dispersed urban fabric of Nashville patterns the human interactions in the film. A filmmaker, Altman pieced together a narrative out of a hodge-podge of characters and plots, but photographers Laura Bennett, Vesna Jovanovic, and Brian Sorg do not. Rather, they probe the types of spaces in suburbia that Altman`s wandering camera eschews and our own roving automobile-based gaze is likely to miss. As Americans visit drive-thrus, snag discounted clothing at outlet malls, and purchase particle board furniture, we pass by null spaces: loading docks behind big-box retail, weedy lots in between stores, derelict malls, and office parks of unremitting sameness. What binds the art of these three photographers is their identification of and focus on these null spaces.
If suburbs are thought of as bedroom communities tightly linked to nearby cities through economic dependence and transportation routes, then Bennett, Jovanovic, and Sorg focus on a type of built environment that is no longer suburban. Instead, growth is now dispersed in all directions of varying densities and uses. Rather than concentric rings of development radiating from a historic core with neat divisions between light industry, heavy industry, and residential zones, the real pattern of development is now a web with a multiplicity of nodes that form around expressway exits, malls, or corporate headquarters. ` For instance, the Atlanta region covers a large portion of north Georgia, and there is the band of development in Florida from West Palm Beach through Miami to Homestead, a distance of over a hundred miles, squeezed between the Atlantic Ocean and the Everglades. The uninterrupted development from Northern Virginia to Boston is yet another example. While ostensibly connected to a historic urban core, places like Schomberg, Illinois; Tysons Corner, Virginia; King of Prussia, Pennsylvania; or Anaheim, California, are not economically tied to their respective anchors of Chicago, Washington DC, Philadelphia, or Los Angeles (itself lacking a "core" to attach to anyway). The South Coast Plaza mega-mall in Orange County, California, a city unto itself, claims to do more business than all of downtown San Francisco.2 The new suburb is not ancillary to a city: it is far larger in population, economic power, and land area. The German urban theorist Thomas Sieverts calls the contemporary suburb the Zwischenstadt (literally, "between city"); he defines it as neither urban nor rural, and he finds it uncatagorizable according to conventional definitions that focus on density and centrality.`` The Zwischenstadt is varied but remarkably consistent in its variations. Joel Garreau dubbed these new suburbs "edge cities."4 In common parlance, it is sprawl.
The concept of the suburb is not uniquely American or Canadian. The banlieues (suburbs) of Paris have a larger population, more jobs, and greater population growth rate than central Paris, whose population peaked in 1921. In fact, central Paris contains less than a quarter of Parisians, most of whom instead live in the suburbs.5 Given too that most commutes are within the suburbs, the understanding of the suburb as a subsidiary of a city no longer makes sense: there is no longer an "urb" that the suburb is subordinate to. Calling these photographs "suburban" conjures a vision of twentiethcentury Levittowns and postwar sitcom suburbs when, in fact, these photographs are concerned with a much more recent past. Despite the non-specific nature of the term "suburb," this essay uses it as shorthand for the Zwischenstadt, the edge city, or the catch-all moniker of sprawl. Though methodologically light years apart from urban theorists and historians of the suburb, these photographs nonetheless contribute to these writers` efforts to understand the complexity and variety of the contemporary suburb by attending to aspects and pockets that are normally brushed aside or skipped over.
Sorg`s series "Closer" (2004-2005) consists of forty-two photographs in total. It illustrates the parsimonious architectural vocabulary and visual monotony typical of low cost commercial and industrial structures found in office and industrial parks throughout the United States. The framing excludes corners, roofs, entrances, and any information that might provide a clue about location. Elements repeat across the photographs, like the sky, bricks, plants, or horizontal strips of reflective glass windows. Their placement is an irregular pattern, not a lockstep algorithm. Surveying the series, the particularities of each building start to rhyme, so to speak, in terms of the absence or presence of diagonals, sidewalks, brickwork, fenestration, floodlights, etc. Finally, the playing-card flatness, as if these are two-dimensional stage sets propped up by unseen two-by-fours and ballasted with sandbags, turns the fa莽ade into puzzle pieces to be endlessly cut and pasted, unfixed, and reaffixed to the stable rectangular field of the photograph.
The strategy of serial presentation drives home the replaceability and transience of these buildings. It will also be shown to set his work apart from a strain of photographic representations of the suburbs that turns on one hand to the macabre and surreal (often with a concomitant dose of kinky sex) and, on the other hand, to the transfiguration of the commonplace and the aestheticization of the quotidian. Falling into the first trend, Diane Arbus during the 1960s pictured the bizarre as it co-existed with the predictably pedestrian and middle class. In Larry Sultan`s series "The Valley" (2001), the living rooms and bedrooms of ranch homes in the San Fernando Valley are transmogrified into porno sets, fake plants and chintz drapes included, as if the families who really lived in them had stepped out for an errand. The second trend is represented by William Eggleston whose hallmark is to take the unremarkable and saturate it with rich color and light, transforming it into sometiiing otherworldly, as he does in Memphis, Tennessee (1971). Robert Adams`s black-and-white photographs of Colorado Springs, Colorado, from the late 1960s perform a similar transmutation of a manufactured and plastic town into something uncanny. Closer to the present, Catherine Opie`s formalist studies of interstate cloverleaves embody, however pleasingly, what is characterized here as a disengaged automobile-based viewpoint. Because their images are skeptical, unsentimental, and lacking an erotic or libidinal undertone, Bennett, Jovanich, and Sorg do not fit into either trend.
The primary, saturated colors of the miracle mile came out of the preference in the 1950s and 1960s for laconic corporate identities with iconic graphics and easy-to-read fonts, especially Helvetica. Even with the advent of graphic design programs that enabled complex, multilayered images, the signage and architecture of gas stations and fastfood restaurants remains wedded to a reduced color scheme, laconic logos, and few colors. There is Ikea`s blue and yellow, a riff on the Swedish flag, and British Petroleum`s green and yellow sunburst. There also is the Shell oil scallop (yellow outlined in red); the red, white, and blue of Exxon; and the Golden Arches. Harkening to recognizable corporate identities, while retreating upon close inspection into an unrecognizable, generic identity, Sorg`s series of photographs of office park and aluminum box facades are of buildings as anonymous as they are ubiquitous. Their color schemes allude to corporate giants that have impressed their identities into popular consciousness through mass media advertising along with distinctive signage-a sort of plumage to single out otherwise undistinguished metal boxes.
Just as the series schematizes the buildings` architectural components, so too is the natural in the form of sky and grass. A slender rectangle of grass in one photograph is cement in another; a block of sky morphs into aluminum siding. The natural is just another element in the permutations of structures that these photographs explore. The sky can be kept or taken away-it is just as manageable as the manmade elements. Such is Sorg`s serialization. To have placed these structures amidst a mountain landscape, next to agricultural land, or under a vast dome of sky would have pastoralized them, making them minute against the immensity of the earth and mitigating the hard reality of environmental impact. As John Barrell and Alan Wallach have shown, the pastoral in painting and literature operates in a tightly woven dialectic with human interventions on one side and a mythical, pre-human nature on the other.6 Raymond Williams goes farther to argue that there is no "nature" because there is no landscape and nothing natural prior to human apprehension of it.7 For humans, there is no nature in itself because we can only process it through preexisting cultural and linguistic forms. To suggest otherwise would be to obfuscate and shrug off responsibility: the landscape is the product of human actions and, as such, can be changed.
While Sorg deploys seriality, it is not of the Minimalist variety. Take, for example, Dan Graham`s Homes for America (1969), a project realized as a two-page spread in Aris Magazine. Benjamin Buchloh places Homes at the intersection of minimalist concerns about seriality and the need to up-end the too easily commodified, unique, crafted object 脿 la Donald Judd. Realization in a magazine article meant it existed only as a reproduction, therefore it is not unique, and the two-page spread layout was not a craft." As Buchloh argues, Graham delineated suburban housing patterns right down to their absurdly bucolic names. He simultaneously pokes fun at the pretense of real estate marketing and its paltry smorgasbord of choices and exposes the pseudorationality of a serial system.
Sorg`s work adopts a mode closer to that of Bernd and Hilla Becher and Ed Ruscha`s photobooks of gas stations, pools, and the Sunset Strip. The only determined aspect of their photographic projects and Sorg`s is the selection of subject matter and a generally consistent photographic format, with the subject centered-the photographic composition straightforward and not the least bit artful. Without describing every possible instantiation, it is not the closed system of a Minimalist artist like Sol LeWitt in, say, Variations of Incomplete Open Cubes (1974). It is a field of oppositions: the various factors (drainpipe, sidewalk, shrubs, floodlights, windows, sky, grass, and so on) can be laid out in a grid of sorts that would predict all the variation of these metal framed sheds. This is a series but not a sequence: the order of the photographs cannot be predicted. Within the limits of the field, the series could go much further than its current forty-two images. With one building succeeding another without surprise or punctuation and without closure or finality, it is limited but not in linear sense: it is not from A to B and back again, but a modulated continuous loop.
Jovanovic`s photograph Twlight (2003) contains a blank, white billboard; a few orange sodium vapor lights; a square non-descript building that could be a factory, self-storage facility, or the back of a retail store; and an aureole of early evening light that erodes the contours of the building, billboard, and power lines. There may be a road to the right, following the power lines. There are numerous indicators of decay: the reflection of the street lamps -warm and orange to the left and growing cooler to the right-reflects off the cracked surface of the cement. The blank billboard advertises nothing, but it is still illuminated, calling attention to its availability, a wordless "For Rent" sign. The very title of the photograph, too, suggests a time of day and a state of disrepair and decrepitude.
The fuzzy, emotive focus and the richly modulated light might make the image nostalgic were it not for the gargantuan empty billboard that hovers, blimp-like, in the middle of the photograph. In contrast with the muted, warm tones of the evening sky, searing artificial light sets off the billboard. Jolting the otherwise bucolic photograph of a parking lot, the stadium spotlights do not blend into the evening glow. A looming square whose size and prominence is multiplied by the worm`s-eye perspective of the camera, the billboard is an anti-monument to the transience of the now vacant, purely functional, profit-generating commercial space. These photographs chronicle an essential part of real estate development. In the same way that slagheaps and fouled wells are the by-product of a mining operation, badly maintained, abandoned properties are the outcome of real estate operations.
In other photographs, Jovanovic also focuses on the residual interstices of suburban development: the derelict space behind shopping centers, the unkempt exteriors of non-descript commercial space whose purpose could be anything from manufacturing to self-storage units. Buildings require service spaces for circulation, storage, sewage, and so forth. The guts of the building are not on display: retention ponds for rain runoff, stripes of brushy land in the narrow spaces required by zoning codes for building setbacks, loading docks, alleys with garbage dumpsters, and parking lots for employee cars.
In Shopping Cart (2003), Jovanovic evokes the back alley or the unused side exit, the perspective from which the big box store is not meant to be seen. In the absence of other features, the anthropomorphized red shopping carts stand in for missing shoppers emphasizing the absence of people. Like the billboard in the previous photograph, the shopping carts call attention to disuse, to a sense of abandonment, as if this were a suburban ruin. Unlike the remains of ancient civilizations in Rome or Central America, it is not exactly romantic much less picturesque, even as the pinhole technique lends it a softened, aged air. Indeed, gaudy red shopping carts, perhaps from a Target store, are awkward signifiers for something so profound as absence. Like Twilight, the uneven tone that might be mistakenly taken for an oversight acts as self-critical gesture, leveraging facets of the photograph against itself, keeping it from falling into sentimentality.
At first glance Bennett`s photographs from the series "Remnants" (2007) of raw, scarred land with massive piles of rubble, yellow construction equipment, and silty retention ponds might appear far from human habitation. Costumare Gardens and Harvest Hills are titled after the subdivisions pictured in them. However, half-hidden by the piles and weeds, there are clusters of single-family homes whose large windows look out onto the construction equipment and dark, toxiclooking, water-filled pits. Instead of agricultural land laying fallow as part of the rotation of crops or a field left to return to bushy grass, this land is on the threshold of development, suitable as the site for compressed rows of three-bedroom-two-bath balloon frame homes, or, if the market is soft, left unmolested until interest rates fall and demand increases. It is not even a non-place, to use Marc Aug茅`s term, for places like parking garages, airports, shopping malls, and highways that are truly globalized spaces have a marked, identified purpose.9 Likejovanovic`s photographs, Bennett renders interstitial zones nesded in between sub-divisions, roads, strip malls, and agricultural land. It is neither built nor exactly un-built, neither cleaned up for a purpose, nor a piece of land left to vicissitudes of nature. It is deeded, tided, taxed. Despite all appearances to the contrary, it remains productive though seemingly fallow-its proximity to new construction no doubt increasing the value.
In The Painting of Modern life (1985), T.J. Clark identifies in Impressionist painting a fascination with the castoff, half-improved, banlieue regions beyond Georges-Eug猫ne Haussmann`s brilliant boulevards. The most mordant example Clark describes is Vincent van Gogh`s The Outskirts of Paris ( 1886), in which a lone gaslight sits at the crossing of dirt paths in an empty field with factories and a windmill in the distance. The lamppost is a harbinger of the development to come in the now empty space. "The factories ... will replace the windmill, and the villas will march across the mud and cornfields until they reach the premonitory gas standard."10 Like the wastelands singled out by Bennett, they are in proximity to developed areas and, through the invisible strings of the real estate market, bound up to unseen events and growth patterns. While centralized, government-mandated Haussmannization governs the van Gogh, the haphazard, bullish real estate market of suburban Toronto haunts Bennett`s photographs.
In a roundabout way, Bennett`s photographs respond to the arguments in Robert Bruegmann`s recent study, Sprawl: A Compact History (2005). Bruegmann convincingly points out the crude and fuzzy use of the term in vociferous debates over growth regulation: it presses emotional buttons rather than encouraging clear-headed descriptions of growth to form better policy. His conclusion seems to be that sprawl reflects what consumers want and that given population growth and the level of affluence in the developed world it is an inevitable outcome. Throughout history, all cities have bled at the edges with dispersed, low-density setdements around them. He also points out that Europe, despite its long tradition of restrictive and comprehensive urban planning, has sprawl. Regardless of the overheated rhetoric, critics of sprawl are responding to a real dissatisfaction with the prevailing pattern of American urban development." Bruegmann himself acknowledges the aesthetic aspect of the problem, but counters the issue by calling the concern an imposition of elites. Indeed it may be. Lacking hard numbers, graphs, charts, or data, these photographs are aesthetic documents-testaments, in a sense, of perceptions and viewpoints. They signal dissatisfaction with and even dread over what is commonly if indiscriminately called sprawl. These artists present in-between spaces that are the leftovers, afterthoughts, and garbage of the predominate land-use patterns of the past thirty years; they put on display what lies behind the brash, colorful development we are supposed to see. While Bruegmann is difficult to counter (and it is beyond my competence to do so), these photographs portray the unappealing visual facts that incite critics of sprawl to the excess and empirical sloppiness that he so carefully picks apart.
The artist Tony Smith`s widely cited experience of driving down the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike at night factors largely in Michael Fried`s and Robert Morris`s essays on art in the 1960s and the radical turn posed by Minimalism. Smith describes a quintessentially suburban experience: driving on a limited-access highway. Given the resolutely urban, New York City-centered nature of the art worid of the 1960`s, it is odd that driving down the Turnpike should be the subject of a tale that is so central to our current understanding of the artistic watershed of that era. Smith recounts the experience in an interview: "It was a dark night and there were no lights or shoulder markers, lines, railings, or anything at all except the dark pavement moving through the landscape of the flats, rimmed by hills in the distance, but punctuated by stacks, towers, fumes, and colored lights."12 It is not a cruise down the FDR or up the West Side Highway or the BQE; it is Jersey, a suburban state between New York and Philadelphia.
Smith has pastoralized new road construction. He experiences the landscape as purely phenomenal, thereby eliding and suppressing the reasons-the human actions, the political machinations-for the landscape appearing as such. Driving on an interstate with the one-thing-after-another flicker of rest stops, gas stations, signage, and the rise and fall of the road at interchanges and overpasses, seems about as routine an experience as one could possibly have next to eating or waiting in line. Driving in a car, one sits still, focuses with watchful attentiveness on the road, scans signage, tracks the blinking of turn signals and flashing break lights, and glances in the rear-view mirror. Smith`s description tracks both the immediate passing of the road in front of him and the distant view of backlit factories and smokestacks. Keeping the car on the road and scanning the landscape divides his attention. He fluctuates between distraction and attention as he engages in activities simultaneously. A driving, car-ensconced viewer is not engaged in considered looking or scrutiny.
The photographs discussed here do not line up with Smith`s spectatorial and pastorializing vision because they do not align with predictable views of suburban sprawl as seen through the windshield. Sorg enables an all-at-once take in which disparate structures can be examined singly and simultaneously. Jovanovic`s worm`s-eye views are impossible without the camera`s mediation and Bennett`s spaces are passed over on the way elsewhere-an abandoned lot is never a destination. Unlike the roving camera in Nashville or the car-bound Smith, these photographers dwell on aspects of the suburban, built environment that are inaccessible from a car. With a slight shift in viewpoint, Bennett`s messy lots would transform into Astroturf green lawns in the pristine, picket-fenced subdivisions that she uses as tides, and Jovanovic`s menacing back alleys would metamorphosize into the Technicolor panoply of the miracle mile. These are squarely images about prosperity, but fhey are not Ronald Reagan`s neo-liberal utopia, a "city on a hill."
It is difficult not to consider these photographs as portents of the unfolding financial crisis caused by irresponsible lending fueled by an unexamined faith in the power of homeownership and lax oversight by the federal government. Suburban single-family homes dependent on automobile transportation despite the rising price of oil, environmental impact, and instability of the housing market continue to be the dominant vision of the good life, American Style. While, at first glance, an aspect of the neo-liberal agenda that everyone can agree on (private home ownership encourages pride, grants substantial tax breaks, and builds equity), the recent collapse of the sub-prime loan market and the fall in home prices in a volatile housing market suggest that a society of "ownership," as President George W. Bush calls it, is not a pohcy panacea. Though brick and mortar, our homes are not necessarily a more solid investment than stocks and bonds.13
FOOTNOTE
NOTES 1. Urban historians have challenged the old ring model by demonstrating the mixed uses and wide-income variations in pre-WWII suburbs. In other words, the concentric ring model has not been an accurate model of American cities since before 1949. See Richard Harris and Robert Lewis, "The Geography of North American Cities and Suburbs, 1900-1950, "Journal of Urban History Vol 27, no. 3 (March 2001), 262-292. 2. These statistics and characterizations come from Dolores Hoydens Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000 (New York: Vintage, 2003), 171-172. 3. Thomas Sieverts, Cities without Cities: An Interpretation of the Zwischenstadt, Daniel de Lough, trans. (London: Spoon Press, 2003). It is worth noting that Sieverts takes Germany as his focus, a country with a long tradition of centralized urban planning and an extensive public transportation system that would arguably have mitigated low density development or sprawl 4. Joel Garreau, Edge City: Life on the New Frontier (New York lhubleday. 1991). 5. These statistics come from a book that deflates any idea that European cities have developed along substantially different lines than American ones over the past century Robert Bruegmann`s Sprawl: A Compact History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 54-55 and 73-75. S. see John BarrelL The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Paindng, 1 730-1840 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983) and Alan Wallach, "Thomas Cole and the Aristocracy" Arts Magazine Vol 56, no. 3 (November 1981), 94-106. 7. Williams writes, "[w]hen nature is separated from the activities of men, it even ceases to be nature, in any full and effective sense, " Raymond Williams, "Ideas of Nature [1972]" in Culture and Materialism (London: Verso, 2005), 81. 8. Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, "Moments of History in the Work of Dan Graham [1978], " in Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955-1975 (Cambridge, MA: MTT Press, 2000), 179-201. 9. Marc Auge, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, John Howe, trans. (London: Verso, 1995). 10. T.J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life (New York: Knopf 1985), 29. 11. Bruegmann, 132-135. 12. Quoted in Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz, Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 127; originally appeared as Samuel Wagstaff, Jr., "Talking wish Tony Smith: `I view art as something vast,`" Artforum 5, no. 4 (December 1966), 14-19. 13. The author wishes to acknowledge the aid and input of Nancy Lim, Adrienne Posner, and the artists themselves.
AUTHOR AFFILIATION
JAMES GLISSON is a PhD candidate in art history at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
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Like Altman`s film, contemporary photographers of suburban existence in the United States chronicle dispersed, car-centered boom towns with their strip malls, tacky signage, and acres of parking lots. In taking traffic as a narrative medium, the transportation and growth patterns of a 1970s sun-belt city are shown to circumscribe the relations between the characters. In other words, the dispersed urban fabric of Nashville patterns the human interactions in the film. A filmmaker, Altman pieced together a narrative out of a hodge-podge of characters and plots, but photographers Laura Bennett, Vesna Jovanovic, and Brian Sorg do not. Rather, they probe the types of spaces in suburbia that Altman`s wandering camera eschews and our own roving automobile-based gaze is likely to miss. As Americans visit drive-thrus, snag discounted clothing at outlet malls, and purchase particle board furniture, we pass by null spaces: loading docks behind big-box retail, weedy lots in between stores, derelict malls, and office parks of unremitting sameness. What binds the art of these three photographers is their identification of and focus on these null spaces.
If suburbs are thought of as bedroom communities tightly linked to nearby cities through economic dependence and transportation routes, then Bennett, Jovanovic, and Sorg focus on a type of built environment that is no longer suburban. Instead, growth is now dispersed in all directions of varying densities and uses. Rather than concentric rings of development radiating from a historic core with neat divisions between light industry, heavy industry, and residential zones, the real pattern of development is now a web with a multiplicity of nodes that form around expressway exits, malls, or corporate headquarters. ` For instance, the Atlanta region covers a large portion of north Georgia, and there is the band of development in Florida from West Palm Beach through Miami to Homestead, a distance of over a hundred miles, squeezed between the Atlantic Ocean and the Everglades. The uninterrupted development from Northern Virginia to Boston is yet another example. While ostensibly connected to a historic urban core, places like Schomberg, Illinois; Tysons Corner, Virginia; King of Prussia, Pennsylvania; or Anaheim, California, are not economically tied to their respective anchors of Chicago, Washington DC, Philadelphia, or Los Angeles (itself lacking a "core" to attach to anyway). The South Coast Plaza mega-mall in Orange County, California, a city unto itself, claims to do more business than all of downtown San Francisco.2 The new suburb is not ancillary to a city: it is far larger in population, economic power, and land area. The German urban theorist Thomas Sieverts calls the contemporary suburb the Zwischenstadt (literally, "between city"); he defines it as neither urban nor rural, and he finds it uncatagorizable according to conventional definitions that focus on density and centrality.`` The Zwischenstadt is varied but remarkably consistent in its variations. Joel Garreau dubbed these new suburbs "edge cities."4 In common parlance, it is sprawl.
The concept of the suburb is not uniquely American or Canadian. The banlieues (suburbs) of Paris have a larger population, more jobs, and greater population growth rate than central Paris, whose population peaked in 1921. In fact, central Paris contains less than a quarter of Parisians, most of whom instead live in the suburbs.5 Given too that most commutes are within the suburbs, the understanding of the suburb as a subsidiary of a city no longer makes sense: there is no longer an "urb" that the suburb is subordinate to. Calling these photographs "suburban" conjures a vision of twentiethcentury Levittowns and postwar sitcom suburbs when, in fact, these photographs are concerned with a much more recent past. Despite the non-specific nature of the term "suburb," this essay uses it as shorthand for the Zwischenstadt, the edge city, or the catch-all moniker of sprawl. Though methodologically light years apart from urban theorists and historians of the suburb, these photographs nonetheless contribute to these writers` efforts to understand the complexity and variety of the contemporary suburb by attending to aspects and pockets that are normally brushed aside or skipped over.
Sorg`s series "Closer" (2004-2005) consists of forty-two photographs in total. It illustrates the parsimonious architectural vocabulary and visual monotony typical of low cost commercial and industrial structures found in office and industrial parks throughout the United States. The framing excludes corners, roofs, entrances, and any information that might provide a clue about location. Elements repeat across the photographs, like the sky, bricks, plants, or horizontal strips of reflective glass windows. Their placement is an irregular pattern, not a lockstep algorithm. Surveying the series, the particularities of each building start to rhyme, so to speak, in terms of the absence or presence of diagonals, sidewalks, brickwork, fenestration, floodlights, etc. Finally, the playing-card flatness, as if these are two-dimensional stage sets propped up by unseen two-by-fours and ballasted with sandbags, turns the fa莽ade into puzzle pieces to be endlessly cut and pasted, unfixed, and reaffixed to the stable rectangular field of the photograph.
The strategy of serial presentation drives home the replaceability and transience of these buildings. It will also be shown to set his work apart from a strain of photographic representations of the suburbs that turns on one hand to the macabre and surreal (often with a concomitant dose of kinky sex) and, on the other hand, to the transfiguration of the commonplace and the aestheticization of the quotidian. Falling into the first trend, Diane Arbus during the 1960s pictured the bizarre as it co-existed with the predictably pedestrian and middle class. In Larry Sultan`s series "The Valley" (2001), the living rooms and bedrooms of ranch homes in the San Fernando Valley are transmogrified into porno sets, fake plants and chintz drapes included, as if the families who really lived in them had stepped out for an errand. The second trend is represented by William Eggleston whose hallmark is to take the unremarkable and saturate it with rich color and light, transforming it into sometiiing otherworldly, as he does in Memphis, Tennessee (1971). Robert Adams`s black-and-white photographs of Colorado Springs, Colorado, from the late 1960s perform a similar transmutation of a manufactured and plastic town into something uncanny. Closer to the present, Catherine Opie`s formalist studies of interstate cloverleaves embody, however pleasingly, what is characterized here as a disengaged automobile-based viewpoint. Because their images are skeptical, unsentimental, and lacking an erotic or libidinal undertone, Bennett, Jovanich, and Sorg do not fit into either trend.
The primary, saturated colors of the miracle mile came out of the preference in the 1950s and 1960s for laconic corporate identities with iconic graphics and easy-to-read fonts, especially Helvetica. Even with the advent of graphic design programs that enabled complex, multilayered images, the signage and architecture of gas stations and fastfood restaurants remains wedded to a reduced color scheme, laconic logos, and few colors. There is Ikea`s blue and yellow, a riff on the Swedish flag, and British Petroleum`s green and yellow sunburst. There also is the Shell oil scallop (yellow outlined in red); the red, white, and blue of Exxon; and the Golden Arches. Harkening to recognizable corporate identities, while retreating upon close inspection into an unrecognizable, generic identity, Sorg`s series of photographs of office park and aluminum box facades are of buildings as anonymous as they are ubiquitous. Their color schemes allude to corporate giants that have impressed their identities into popular consciousness through mass media advertising along with distinctive signage-a sort of plumage to single out otherwise undistinguished metal boxes.
Just as the series schematizes the buildings` architectural components, so too is the natural in the form of sky and grass. A slender rectangle of grass in one photograph is cement in another; a block of sky morphs into aluminum siding. The natural is just another element in the permutations of structures that these photographs explore. The sky can be kept or taken away-it is just as manageable as the manmade elements. Such is Sorg`s serialization. To have placed these structures amidst a mountain landscape, next to agricultural land, or under a vast dome of sky would have pastoralized them, making them minute against the immensity of the earth and mitigating the hard reality of environmental impact. As John Barrell and Alan Wallach have shown, the pastoral in painting and literature operates in a tightly woven dialectic with human interventions on one side and a mythical, pre-human nature on the other.6 Raymond Williams goes farther to argue that there is no "nature" because there is no landscape and nothing natural prior to human apprehension of it.7 For humans, there is no nature in itself because we can only process it through preexisting cultural and linguistic forms. To suggest otherwise would be to obfuscate and shrug off responsibility: the landscape is the product of human actions and, as such, can be changed.
While Sorg deploys seriality, it is not of the Minimalist variety. Take, for example, Dan Graham`s Homes for America (1969), a project realized as a two-page spread in Aris Magazine. Benjamin Buchloh places Homes at the intersection of minimalist concerns about seriality and the need to up-end the too easily commodified, unique, crafted object 脿 la Donald Judd. Realization in a magazine article meant it existed only as a reproduction, therefore it is not unique, and the two-page spread layout was not a craft." As Buchloh argues, Graham delineated suburban housing patterns right down to their absurdly bucolic names. He simultaneously pokes fun at the pretense of real estate marketing and its paltry smorgasbord of choices and exposes the pseudorationality of a serial system.
Sorg`s work adopts a mode closer to that of Bernd and Hilla Becher and Ed Ruscha`s photobooks of gas stations, pools, and the Sunset Strip. The only determined aspect of their photographic projects and Sorg`s is the selection of subject matter and a generally consistent photographic format, with the subject centered-the photographic composition straightforward and not the least bit artful. Without describing every possible instantiation, it is not the closed system of a Minimalist artist like Sol LeWitt in, say, Variations of Incomplete Open Cubes (1974). It is a field of oppositions: the various factors (drainpipe, sidewalk, shrubs, floodlights, windows, sky, grass, and so on) can be laid out in a grid of sorts that would predict all the variation of these metal framed sheds. This is a series but not a sequence: the order of the photographs cannot be predicted. Within the limits of the field, the series could go much further than its current forty-two images. With one building succeeding another without surprise or punctuation and without closure or finality, it is limited but not in linear sense: it is not from A to B and back again, but a modulated continuous loop.
Jovanovic`s photograph Twlight (2003) contains a blank, white billboard; a few orange sodium vapor lights; a square non-descript building that could be a factory, self-storage facility, or the back of a retail store; and an aureole of early evening light that erodes the contours of the building, billboard, and power lines. There may be a road to the right, following the power lines. There are numerous indicators of decay: the reflection of the street lamps -warm and orange to the left and growing cooler to the right-reflects off the cracked surface of the cement. The blank billboard advertises nothing, but it is still illuminated, calling attention to its availability, a wordless "For Rent" sign. The very title of the photograph, too, suggests a time of day and a state of disrepair and decrepitude.
The fuzzy, emotive focus and the richly modulated light might make the image nostalgic were it not for the gargantuan empty billboard that hovers, blimp-like, in the middle of the photograph. In contrast with the muted, warm tones of the evening sky, searing artificial light sets off the billboard. Jolting the otherwise bucolic photograph of a parking lot, the stadium spotlights do not blend into the evening glow. A looming square whose size and prominence is multiplied by the worm`s-eye perspective of the camera, the billboard is an anti-monument to the transience of the now vacant, purely functional, profit-generating commercial space. These photographs chronicle an essential part of real estate development. In the same way that slagheaps and fouled wells are the by-product of a mining operation, badly maintained, abandoned properties are the outcome of real estate operations.
In other photographs, Jovanovic also focuses on the residual interstices of suburban development: the derelict space behind shopping centers, the unkempt exteriors of non-descript commercial space whose purpose could be anything from manufacturing to self-storage units. Buildings require service spaces for circulation, storage, sewage, and so forth. The guts of the building are not on display: retention ponds for rain runoff, stripes of brushy land in the narrow spaces required by zoning codes for building setbacks, loading docks, alleys with garbage dumpsters, and parking lots for employee cars.
In Shopping Cart (2003), Jovanovic evokes the back alley or the unused side exit, the perspective from which the big box store is not meant to be seen. In the absence of other features, the anthropomorphized red shopping carts stand in for missing shoppers emphasizing the absence of people. Like the billboard in the previous photograph, the shopping carts call attention to disuse, to a sense of abandonment, as if this were a suburban ruin. Unlike the remains of ancient civilizations in Rome or Central America, it is not exactly romantic much less picturesque, even as the pinhole technique lends it a softened, aged air. Indeed, gaudy red shopping carts, perhaps from a Target store, are awkward signifiers for something so profound as absence. Like Twilight, the uneven tone that might be mistakenly taken for an oversight acts as self-critical gesture, leveraging facets of the photograph against itself, keeping it from falling into sentimentality.
At first glance Bennett`s photographs from the series "Remnants" (2007) of raw, scarred land with massive piles of rubble, yellow construction equipment, and silty retention ponds might appear far from human habitation. Costumare Gardens and Harvest Hills are titled after the subdivisions pictured in them. However, half-hidden by the piles and weeds, there are clusters of single-family homes whose large windows look out onto the construction equipment and dark, toxiclooking, water-filled pits. Instead of agricultural land laying fallow as part of the rotation of crops or a field left to return to bushy grass, this land is on the threshold of development, suitable as the site for compressed rows of three-bedroom-two-bath balloon frame homes, or, if the market is soft, left unmolested until interest rates fall and demand increases. It is not even a non-place, to use Marc Aug茅`s term, for places like parking garages, airports, shopping malls, and highways that are truly globalized spaces have a marked, identified purpose.9 Likejovanovic`s photographs, Bennett renders interstitial zones nesded in between sub-divisions, roads, strip malls, and agricultural land. It is neither built nor exactly un-built, neither cleaned up for a purpose, nor a piece of land left to vicissitudes of nature. It is deeded, tided, taxed. Despite all appearances to the contrary, it remains productive though seemingly fallow-its proximity to new construction no doubt increasing the value.
In The Painting of Modern life (1985), T.J. Clark identifies in Impressionist painting a fascination with the castoff, half-improved, banlieue regions beyond Georges-Eug猫ne Haussmann`s brilliant boulevards. The most mordant example Clark describes is Vincent van Gogh`s The Outskirts of Paris ( 1886), in which a lone gaslight sits at the crossing of dirt paths in an empty field with factories and a windmill in the distance. The lamppost is a harbinger of the development to come in the now empty space. "The factories ... will replace the windmill, and the villas will march across the mud and cornfields until they reach the premonitory gas standard."10 Like the wastelands singled out by Bennett, they are in proximity to developed areas and, through the invisible strings of the real estate market, bound up to unseen events and growth patterns. While centralized, government-mandated Haussmannization governs the van Gogh, the haphazard, bullish real estate market of suburban Toronto haunts Bennett`s photographs.
In a roundabout way, Bennett`s photographs respond to the arguments in Robert Bruegmann`s recent study, Sprawl: A Compact History (2005). Bruegmann convincingly points out the crude and fuzzy use of the term in vociferous debates over growth regulation: it presses emotional buttons rather than encouraging clear-headed descriptions of growth to form better policy. His conclusion seems to be that sprawl reflects what consumers want and that given population growth and the level of affluence in the developed world it is an inevitable outcome. Throughout history, all cities have bled at the edges with dispersed, low-density setdements around them. He also points out that Europe, despite its long tradition of restrictive and comprehensive urban planning, has sprawl. Regardless of the overheated rhetoric, critics of sprawl are responding to a real dissatisfaction with the prevailing pattern of American urban development." Bruegmann himself acknowledges the aesthetic aspect of the problem, but counters the issue by calling the concern an imposition of elites. Indeed it may be. Lacking hard numbers, graphs, charts, or data, these photographs are aesthetic documents-testaments, in a sense, of perceptions and viewpoints. They signal dissatisfaction with and even dread over what is commonly if indiscriminately called sprawl. These artists present in-between spaces that are the leftovers, afterthoughts, and garbage of the predominate land-use patterns of the past thirty years; they put on display what lies behind the brash, colorful development we are supposed to see. While Bruegmann is difficult to counter (and it is beyond my competence to do so), these photographs portray the unappealing visual facts that incite critics of sprawl to the excess and empirical sloppiness that he so carefully picks apart.
The artist Tony Smith`s widely cited experience of driving down the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike at night factors largely in Michael Fried`s and Robert Morris`s essays on art in the 1960s and the radical turn posed by Minimalism. Smith describes a quintessentially suburban experience: driving on a limited-access highway. Given the resolutely urban, New York City-centered nature of the art worid of the 1960`s, it is odd that driving down the Turnpike should be the subject of a tale that is so central to our current understanding of the artistic watershed of that era. Smith recounts the experience in an interview: "It was a dark night and there were no lights or shoulder markers, lines, railings, or anything at all except the dark pavement moving through the landscape of the flats, rimmed by hills in the distance, but punctuated by stacks, towers, fumes, and colored lights."12 It is not a cruise down the FDR or up the West Side Highway or the BQE; it is Jersey, a suburban state between New York and Philadelphia.
Smith has pastoralized new road construction. He experiences the landscape as purely phenomenal, thereby eliding and suppressing the reasons-the human actions, the political machinations-for the landscape appearing as such. Driving on an interstate with the one-thing-after-another flicker of rest stops, gas stations, signage, and the rise and fall of the road at interchanges and overpasses, seems about as routine an experience as one could possibly have next to eating or waiting in line. Driving in a car, one sits still, focuses with watchful attentiveness on the road, scans signage, tracks the blinking of turn signals and flashing break lights, and glances in the rear-view mirror. Smith`s description tracks both the immediate passing of the road in front of him and the distant view of backlit factories and smokestacks. Keeping the car on the road and scanning the landscape divides his attention. He fluctuates between distraction and attention as he engages in activities simultaneously. A driving, car-ensconced viewer is not engaged in considered looking or scrutiny.
The photographs discussed here do not line up with Smith`s spectatorial and pastorializing vision because they do not align with predictable views of suburban sprawl as seen through the windshield. Sorg enables an all-at-once take in which disparate structures can be examined singly and simultaneously. Jovanovic`s worm`s-eye views are impossible without the camera`s mediation and Bennett`s spaces are passed over on the way elsewhere-an abandoned lot is never a destination. Unlike the roving camera in Nashville or the car-bound Smith, these photographers dwell on aspects of the suburban, built environment that are inaccessible from a car. With a slight shift in viewpoint, Bennett`s messy lots would transform into Astroturf green lawns in the pristine, picket-fenced subdivisions that she uses as tides, and Jovanovic`s menacing back alleys would metamorphosize into the Technicolor panoply of the miracle mile. These are squarely images about prosperity, but fhey are not Ronald Reagan`s neo-liberal utopia, a "city on a hill."
It is difficult not to consider these photographs as portents of the unfolding financial crisis caused by irresponsible lending fueled by an unexamined faith in the power of homeownership and lax oversight by the federal government. Suburban single-family homes dependent on automobile transportation despite the rising price of oil, environmental impact, and instability of the housing market continue to be the dominant vision of the good life, American Style. While, at first glance, an aspect of the neo-liberal agenda that everyone can agree on (private home ownership encourages pride, grants substantial tax breaks, and builds equity), the recent collapse of the sub-prime loan market and the fall in home prices in a volatile housing market suggest that a society of "ownership," as President George W. Bush calls it, is not a pohcy panacea. Though brick and mortar, our homes are not necessarily a more solid investment than stocks and bonds.13
FOOTNOTE
NOTES 1. Urban historians have challenged the old ring model by demonstrating the mixed uses and wide-income variations in pre-WWII suburbs. In other words, the concentric ring model has not been an accurate model of American cities since before 1949. See Richard Harris and Robert Lewis, "The Geography of North American Cities and Suburbs, 1900-1950, "Journal of Urban History Vol 27, no. 3 (March 2001), 262-292. 2. These statistics and characterizations come from Dolores Hoydens Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000 (New York: Vintage, 2003), 171-172. 3. Thomas Sieverts, Cities without Cities: An Interpretation of the Zwischenstadt, Daniel de Lough, trans. (London: Spoon Press, 2003). It is worth noting that Sieverts takes Germany as his focus, a country with a long tradition of centralized urban planning and an extensive public transportation system that would arguably have mitigated low density development or sprawl 4. Joel Garreau, Edge City: Life on the New Frontier (New York lhubleday. 1991). 5. These statistics come from a book that deflates any idea that European cities have developed along substantially different lines than American ones over the past century Robert Bruegmann`s Sprawl: A Compact History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 54-55 and 73-75. S. see John BarrelL The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Paindng, 1 730-1840 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983) and Alan Wallach, "Thomas Cole and the Aristocracy" Arts Magazine Vol 56, no. 3 (November 1981), 94-106. 7. Williams writes, "[w]hen nature is separated from the activities of men, it even ceases to be nature, in any full and effective sense, " Raymond Williams, "Ideas of Nature [1972]" in Culture and Materialism (London: Verso, 2005), 81. 8. Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, "Moments of History in the Work of Dan Graham [1978], " in Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955-1975 (Cambridge, MA: MTT Press, 2000), 179-201. 9. Marc Auge, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, John Howe, trans. (London: Verso, 1995). 10. T.J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life (New York: Knopf 1985), 29. 11. Bruegmann, 132-135. 12. Quoted in Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz, Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 127; originally appeared as Samuel Wagstaff, Jr., "Talking wish Tony Smith: `I view art as something vast,`" Artforum 5, no. 4 (December 1966), 14-19. 13. The author wishes to acknowledge the aid and input of Nancy Lim, Adrienne Posner, and the artists themselves.
AUTHOR AFFILIATION
JAMES GLISSON is a PhD candidate in art history at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
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