The Privilege of Broken Windows

A Report on Two Conversations: Geography, Imagination, and the Traffic
in the Everyday (San Diego - Institute of the Americas, UCSD) + A
Dialogue on Urbanisms (Centro Cultural Tijuana), May 27/28

The drive back to Los Angeles from Tijuana was a bit louder than the
initial drive South. A busted out rear window on my anonymously dull
Corolla made 80 miles per hour on I-5 sound more like I was approaching
the sound barrier at 30,000 feet. The window must have been broken by
someone who mistook my travel bag for something more valuable, like a
purse. It was surely an unpleasant surprise for the person, who
realized this only after finding a half-used tube of toothpaste instead
of bundles of cash, credit cards, or a passport. I'm recounting this
banal anecdote not because it speaks to where it happened, but because
of how it pulled me from the distanced, comfortable conversations about
culture I had just attended, and reminded me that what was being talked
about is not an abstraction that exists somewhere else, but is an
ongoing process of negotiations and movements within a material system
of asymmetrical distribution.

The conversations I'm referring to were part of the inSite_05 series of
panel discussions and art events that explore the complex border
ecology of the San Diego-Tijuana region. Since 1992, inSite has brought
together cultural workers of all kinds to foster discourse about this
US-Mexican border zone, as well as add to the larger body of work on
social, political and economic borders in general. inSite_05's
programmatic theme is "Bypass," a broad concept that continues inSite's
historical mission and participates in the current art world interest
in formulating cultural utopias. On 27 and 28 May, two Conversations,
the third and fourth in a series organized by San Diego-based art
historian Sally Yard, were held, one at the University of California,
San Diego, the other at the Centro Cultural Tijuana.
The first, held at UCSD's Institute of the Americas, and entitled
"Geography, Imagination, and the Traffic in the Everyday," included
presentations by Arjun Appadurai, Judith Barry and Sally Stein.

If there was a unified theme to the panelists' talks, it was a concern
for the role of visual culture in formulating understandings and new
possibilities for social relationships. Appadurai, a professor of
social sciences who has written on different aspects of globalization,
discussed the "politics of hope," often referring to his current work
with housing activists in Bombay. For Appadurai, "hope" is a socially
generated and reproduced meme, so to speak, that is the product of a
social imaginary, or what he calls the collective "work of the
imagination." The social imaginary is responsible for both the positive
and negative aspects of culture according to Appadurai, and was
discussed in terms of the coexistence of both repressive and
emancipatory organizations in Bombay. Underlying this seeming
contradiction of experience (something arguably present in varying
degrees everywhere) is what the speaker refers to as the "capacity to
aspire" - the cognitive map of life possibilities that determines the
decisions available to each of us.

Multimedia artist and writer, Judith Barry (US), presented an
illustrated thesis that connected the phenomenological orientation of
early minimal and land art to the ongoing development of critical
site-specific art practice. Tracing the interest in ephemerality and
action-based experience to Tony Smith's famous account of his nighttime
drive on the incomplete New Jersey Turnpike through Robert Irwin's
development of an incidental optics, Barry brought her discussion up to
the present with Francis Alys' "When Faith Moves Mountains" work that
involved the displacement of an entire sand dune in Peru and the recent
"My Doomsday Weapon" performance by Jakob S. Boeskov that spread
(fictional) rumors across the net of a rifle that shoots traceable
microchips into unsuspecting civilians.

The moderator and respondent, Sally Stein, followed with a fairly brief
polemic on the role of information communication technologies in the
construction of social spaces. Stein, a historian of photography and
media teaching at UC, Irvine, as well as a self-described "elected
outsider" to cell phone culture, projected a series of photographs
picturing cell phone users in urban space and invited the audience to
turn on their cell phones to create a participatory "multimedia
experience." While the presentation was humorously critical of these
new "umbilical cords" of communication, it is the technology's role in
facilitating both connection and isolation that was of interest to
Stein. "We may be more 'connected' more often, but to whom?" she asked.
Are our social circles more inclusive or exclusive as a result of how
we choose to use communication devices?

In the open discussion that followed, many questions, both directly
connected and tangential to the formal talks, were raised regarding the
role of visual culture in the various current geopolitical situations
surrounding US foreign policy. Of particular interest was the power
assigned to images, and the emerging technologies that allow for their
quick, and global, dissemination, exemplified by the photographs of US
military abuses in Iraq. This was followed by a related line of
questioning about the importance of narrative in some recent art,
similar to the perceived "allegorical impulse" of the 1980s.

The next evening's event, entitled "A Dialogue on Urbanisms," at the
Centro Cultural Tijuana, while still centered on concepts of borders
and the cultures that operate in such spaces, was concerned with the
material structures that make up border zones, rather than actions
occurring within them. Tijuana-based Raul Cardenas talked about a
recent series of projects undertaken by Torolab, a collective he helped
form in 1995 to investigate the spaces of the Tijuana/San Diego border
zone. This series of projects included work with nine Tijuana families
to co-design new residential structures using modular building
materials as one way that the group is exploring the concept of
"emergency architecture." This is not a response to catastrophic
situations, but rather a structural answer to necessities by those
needing them, rather than by architects and urban planners - or what
were called "human," as opposed to "architectural" conditions.

Next, architect and curator, Peter Zellner presented a photo essay
called "Culture or Bust," that looked at the booming area of the Inland
Empire, a vast collection of suburbs just east of Los Angeles. The
essay, a project by ValDes, a non-profit co-founded by Zellner, used
photographs (by California-based photographer Alex Slade) and info
graphics to explicate the current decline of urban LA and the rise of
low density, suburban communities that are, for the most part,
unplanned. "Culture or Bust," theorized one potential reason for the
problem: while LA attempts to "revitalize" its downtown with new, high
profile structures (the Gehry designed Disney music hall) and other
examples of "high culture" (plans for "Gallery Row"), the 'burbs
prioritize such mundane things as communications infrastructure and
providing low cost, large spaces for business. But, as Zellner made
clear, the Southern California suburban boom has huge costs. In order
to accommodate the population that must commute from the Inland Empire
to the more urban coastal counties for work each day ("supercommuters"
they're called), there are plans to construct a massive freeway tunnel,
under the Santa Ana Mountains between LA and Riverside.

Jose Castillo, an architect working in Mexico City, looked at the
periphery of large urban centers to find what he called the
"pathologies of urbanisms." The problem of urbanism, according to
Castillo, is one of knowledge as much as of physical space. Using
Mexico City as primary source material, Castillo illustrated a theory
of urban space as a complex set of coexisting languages, where the
margins form a kind of "horizontal Babel" made up of informal
organization, much like creative slang and creole linguistics.

All three speakers performed an interest in the periphery and marginal,
whether it is represented by disenfranchised residents of Tijuana or
the very different examples of suburban sprawl in Southern California
and Mexico City. This connection was taken up in some of the questions
posed by audience members, one questioning the authority given to
Western scholarship and practice in analyzing global problems while
another wondered about the use of language that seemed to naturalize
the development of suburbs, when it's been well documented that they
are actually a product of deliberate planning and regulation, at least
in the US.

When I arrived at the North-bound US border post, I showed my passport,
stated the purpose of my visit and said that I had "nothing to
declare." Thanks to the national origin of my passport, the process
took under two minutes, and I was home in less than two hours. I wasn't
even stopped at all crossing into Mexico (the security is all focused
on traffic moving in the other direction). The broken car window became
a uniquely urban symbol for me, not because it speaks to an "urban
condition," but because the imaginary border between the private and
social urban space is often depicted as constantly threatened - by
difference, by density, by the proximity to the problems of others. In
the car culture of Southern California (or the suburban US Midwest for
that matter), the moving second home of one's car is just another
protective border used to quarantine the inside from the outside. As I
headed north for LA, my attempts to describe the discussions to a
friend by cell phone were drowned out by the noise of public space
rushing past at 80 miles per hour.

Ryan Griffis

For more info:

inSite http://www.insite05.org/

ValDes http://www.lab71.org/issue04/l71section180/l71section180.html

Torolab http://www.metropolismag.com/html/content_1001/ob/ob07.html

My Doomsday Weapon http://events.thing.net/Boeskov_text.html