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Old Posted May 6, 2011, 3:32 PM
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The legacies of artist Andy Warhol and urban thinker Jane Jacobs

Jane Jacobs, Andy Warhol, and the Kind of Problem a Community Is


04.27.11

By Timothy Mennel

Read More: http://places.designobserver.com/entry.html?entry=25878

Quote:
Andy Warhol and Jane Jacobs both came to New York City from industrial cities in Pennsylvania — Jacobs from Scranton, Warhol from Pittsburgh. Yet the kinds of people they found and the social values they cultivated in New York could not have been more different; and their divergent perspectives point to notions of community that still resonate — and still conflict. Warhol’s apparent ideas about urban life undercut some of the ideals that Jacobs's books popularized, and they begin to suggest why those ideals have not found — and perhaps cannot find — greater traction in the contemporary city.

- Warhol's "cool" sensibility stood in sharp contrast to the "hot" Abstract Expressionism that had dominated the New York art world in the 1950s. Overtly macho artists such as Jackson Pollock had created a style fueled by emotion, personality and energy, a style that seemed to embody the postwar American sensibility: robust, idiosyncratic, ultimately exclusionary. In the postwar years representational art had not so much fallen as been hurled out of style. So with the flatly representational soup-can paintings, Warhol was undercutting the cult of personality by creating works ostensibly devoid of emotion, point of view, or personality. They seemed to hide in plain sight; they depicted icons of lived American culture — cans, labels, Green Stamps, car crashes, movie stars, flowers — without appearing to have anything to say about them.

- Jacobs’s work is characterized by belief in a certain kind of community — a community with a mix of classes, in which citizens have clearly defined roles, and in which there is constant activity in the streets that is often being observed by what she called "eyes on the street." Jacobs depicts this kind of “warm” community as lively and engaged, with positive social benefits arising from the free association of people who might have different functions and beliefs but who all exist within a circumscribed social environment called the neighborhood. In Death and Life Jacobs contrasted this environment — exemplified by her own Greenwich Village neighborhood — with others being created in the postwar city, places that she saw as defined by coldness in both building materials and social qualities. The communities being formed in the new housing enclaves were not, by her lights, real communities: They were not only transparently artificial but also reductive — residential zones devoid of retail and commercial activity, bedroom communities where people lived but didn't work.

- As his career and personality took new shape in the early '60s, Warhol generated and represented a kind of social environment dramatically at odds with Jacobs’s — and also not much in tune with the thinking of today’s planners as they try to create vibrant public realms. But ultimately it is Warhol's notion of community — which requires reckoning with people’s complexity and potential unruliness — that seems more realistic today. As Richard Sennett has observed, many traditional ideals of community are rooted in the fear (and avoidance) of traditional participation, even as they claim otherwise. Warhol’s crowd was a self-consciously aloof set of artists, photographers, musicians, actors, show-offs, talentless cretins, fools and geniuses. Few held traditional jobs; many lusted for fame. Collectively they formed a world that became profoundly influential on the American city: a world that celebrated impersonality and disengagement and laid the groundwork for today’s literally spectacular cities, where significant economies revolve around the touristic gaze (what there is to see) and the culture of celebrity.

- This is not to suggest that Jane Jacobs consciously promoted an ideal that may well diminish the strength of communities. But the implications of her work — and the uses to which it has been and is being put — require moving beyond the platitudes and engaging fully with the complexity of urban experience. The contemporary city is in many ways more Warhol's than Jacobs's — and that's not a bad thing. Warhol did not promote the idea of community, yet he helped create the actual thing, even if his wasn't the kind of community that Jacobs or most contemporary planners might endorse. Whether or not the results are aesthetically or politically pleasing, our cities must make room for the misfits, the self-defined, the antisocial, the anti-communitarian and the spectacular, as much as they do for tight-knit neighborhoods and engaged citizen-activists. The dance among these different interests and complex forces is a difficult one, and there is no simple guide to how to perform its steps.

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