Visualizing Globalization 2.0

Imagine this: you’re walking down a side street in Midtown Manhattan and turn onto Fifth Avenue, facing uptown. But there, instead of the void of sky that usually greets the vista north toward Central Park, a massive mountain blocks the view, crowned with an uncharacteristic religious symbol. Then it strikes you: you’ve seen this rocky mass before. It looks every bit like Rio de Janeiro’s Corcorvado peak, topped with its famous statue of Christ the Redeemer. And that’s because it is Rio’s Corcorvado mountain — moved right into the heart of New York.

Welcome to the world of Ciro Miguel. The São Paulo architect spends his spare time dreaming up landscapes in which familiar urban landmarks from around the world collide. The images he’s kitbashed together are his own; most involve elements from his home country, Brazil, or New York, where he was a graduate student. Others encompass his world travels. It’s in the way Miguel’s collages represent the places and ways many travel now, in fact — reflecting trends in trade and politics driven by globalization — that they can be seen as more than mere dreamscapes, representing connections and evoking experiences that have become very real.

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Lido di Ostia – ruine, fantasme et nostalgie

Renato Guttuso, Spiaggia, 1955-1956

J’embarquai dès le matin dans ce fantasme au bord de la Mer de Rome et qui traine toujours avec moi, comme un paysage qui me harcèle.

Ce n’est qu’un paysage, une carte postale tragiquement exotique – et qui me fit revenir en mémoire avec force l’oeuvre Spiaggia de Guttuso, le peintre sicilien mort à Rome. Seulement un panorama, de ruines et de routes ceinturées par ces pins parasols, et qui, tel les bras du Tibre, se jettent dans la mer azure qui borde la cité de Rome et son antique port d’Ostia.

On commence par prendre ce train, à la Basilique San Paolo, et qui nous mène au travers des banlieues pavillonnaires jusqu’à ces paysages de la campagne romaine. Nous ne sommes pas encore à la mer, que déjà nous accroche le Quartier Euro et où le souvenir du fascisme nous domine et crée cette étrange amertume d’une époque que pourtant je n’ai pas connu, mais qui me fascine comme tout architecte cherche à comprendre cet homme nouveau que le modernisme souhaitait façonner. La Rome nouvelle et le romain moderne imaginés par Mussolini. Cet échec d’une recherche de la perfection, idéologique.

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Walk This Way

Only a block north from the construction barriers surrounding the former site of the World Trade Center, which brim with boastful renderings of progress on the nearly-complete September 11th Memorial, another, less conspicuous hole opens up in Lower Manhattan’s lapidary landscape. Compared to the blocks bordering Ground Zero, it’s a stretch of Church Street that’s relatively empty. Maybe that’s part of why the netting surrounding this construction site was passed up as glossy adspace showcasing the real estate to come and instead given over to art — currently, Israeli artist Maya Barkai’s installation “Walking Men,” which juxtaposes images of pedestrian walk signs from around the world.

In North America, it’s easy not to devote much thought to the design of “walking men”. While the pictograms are relatively new to the US — until recently, it was still not uncommon to come across a spelled-out “WALK” sign on the streets of New York — bright-white walk symbols are now not only fairly uniform across dense American cities, they’re also uniformly ignored by jaywalkers, who normally treat the signals as well-meaning but unnecessary suggestions.

Elsewhere, though, walk signals are much more diverse — and sometimes more meaningful. In Germany, pedestrians who cross against the light aren’t really braving traffic as much as the reproachful glances of those dutifully remaining at the opposite corner. From Munich to Münster, old women wait at otherwise empty street crossings for the signal to change — on principle. Ordnung — the organizing principle of German civilization — begins at the intersection.

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Recovery by Design

The violence of the 9.0-magnitude earthquake that shook Japan on March 11th was shocking enough, but what followed was almost unimaginable. Thirty minutes after the quake, a massive tsunami swept through the northeastern Tohoku region with waves up to 120 feet high. Entire towns were crushed and swept away. By the time the water receded, tens of thousands of people were dead and half a million left homeless.

It was Japan’s worst disaster since World War II, but this is a country familiar with nature’s wrath, and not long after the quake, Japan’s designers sprung into action with plans to help deal with the catastrophe. Their attitude was summed up by architect Shigeru Ban. “We don’t need innovative ideas,” he told the New York Times. “We just need to build normal things that can be made easily and quickly.”

Ban speaks from experience. For years, he has been used paper tubes as a material in his buildings. When an earthquake devastated the western Japanese city of Kobe in 1995, he put the technique to use in building emergency shelters with beer crate foundations and paper tube walls. He has done the same thing for earthquake survivors in Haiti, Turkey and China. He has even built a paper tube concert hall in the earthquake ravaged Italian town of L’Aquila, whose opening was marked in April by a performance of Japanese musicians with an Italian orchestra.

This time, Ban focused on building partitions for earthquake survivors living in emergency shelters. With a frame made of paper tubes and walls of white canvas, the partitions create flexible rooms that offer privacy, which becomes increasingly important as the wait for temporary government housing drags on for months. “People are evacuated to locations under a big roof, such as gymnasiums,” said Ban. “For the first few days, it’s okay, but then people suffer because there’s no privacy between families.”

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Marching for Ai Wei Wei

Ai Wei Wei has become a cause célèbre in Hong Kong since his arrest by mainland Chinese authorities on April 3rd. In the week since I wrote about “Chin Tangerine“, who covered the city with “Who’s Afraid of Ai Wei Wei?” graffiti, artists have rallied to Ai’s support with a blizzard of interventions, homages and protests. Their efforts have ensured that Ai’s plight has remained on the front page for weeks.

You could see that effect at work on Saturday afternoon, when a group of artists organized a protest march in support of Ai. Hong Kong is a city with an engrained protest culture — people here observe the July 1st handover holiday by taking to the streets — but most protests are a mishmash of interest groups, each with its own cause or grievance. Saturday’s march, by contrast, was clear in its message: Ai Wei Wei has been unjustly detained and he should be freed. Even though its attendance was less than 2,000 — a somewhat small protest by Hong Kong standards — it was the biggest story of the weekend.

The march was more spectacular than any Hong Kong protest I have seen. Installation artist Kacey Wong built a large “grass mud horse” out of wood and wool, a reference to a popular meme that mocks government censorship in mainland China. (A grass mud horse is a mythical creature whose name sounds like “fuck your mother” in Mandarin.) River crabs — another swipe at Chinese censorship — made an appearance. Somebody made a large paper worm called the White Terror Bug.

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Meet the Plumber King

Last summer I wrote about the Plumber King, who writes advertisements for his plumbing services in unusual corners of Hong Kong. Contractors usually promote themselves by scrawling their name, number and occupation on utility boxes or lampposts. But Kui Wong, as the King is known in Cantonese, carefully paints his ads in back alleys, street markets, bollards and on retaining walls.

I liked the idea of a mysterious, eccentric plumber who painted the city at night, but curiosity got the best of me. Earlier this month, I called the Plumber King — whose name is actually Mr. Tong — and asked him to come to my apartment to fix a broken toilet. Truth be told, he tried to overcharge me, so I ended up paying a consultation fee and sent him on his way. But he was a genuinely nice guy and we chatted a bit about his graffiti.

Here, in his own words, is Kui Wong, the Plumber King.

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Ghosts of Occupied Amsterdam

Amsterdam’s Jo Hedwig Teeuwisse lives history. The company for which she works as a historical consultant, Historisch Adviesbureau 30-45, specializes in digging up archival material for clients pertaining to “daily life in the years 1900-1950″. In addition, Jo confesses in her Flickr profile, she has “a 1930s lifestyle,” donning clothing from the era and “attending 1930s theme parties”. Even her house has been carefully decorated to look not a day older than 1943.

But Jo is more than just a professional researcher and history buff. Beyond her archival sleuthing, she’s engaged in a number of reconstructive and interpretive projects that bring to life historical material in the present day. One is an effort to recreate 1920s Berlin as an environment for the virtual world of Second Life, allowing users to immerse themselves in the German capital’s long-gone prewar heyday.

In 2007, Jo embarked on what might have seemed like a more conventional project — she took her camera around Amsterdam, capturing street scenes from the same vantage points as old photos she’d found of the city under Nazi occupation during the Second World War — in addition to the archives, she’d located many of the shots in flea markets or on other Flickr members’ accounts. What she did next was less conventional: Jo fused the then-and-now shots into singular collages, juxtaposing ghostly remnants (and residents) of the occupied city with representations of the present day.

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The Reluctant Urban Artist: Anish Kapoor

The contemporary art world can be a fickle place. Less than a decade ago, Damien Hirst somehow managed to earn an overnight fortune by preserving a dead shark in a fish tank. That was before a host of personal troubles — and the ongoing recession’s damper on the market for ostentatious art. These days, Hirst’s star is falling — fast. But at least one international art sensation of the last decade, sober sculptor Anish Kapoor, is still rapidly on the rise.

Born into Bombay’s community of former Baghdad Jews and educated in Israel and Britain, Kapoor has always been a consummate cosmopolitan, but he’ll have a truly unique place on the world stage all to himself in 2012, when his wild design (co-conceived with Cecil Balmond) for a centerpiece to the London Olympics — a 115 meter high tower, complete with a sort of pretzeloid roller coaster frame that looks even more mad than the games’ controversial logo — is likely to be lingered over by the cameras of broadcasters around the globe.

If Kapoor’s Olympic piece is a coup — it’s already touted as a future landmark on par with the Eiffel Tower — it may cement his everlasting fame. But as a practitioner of urban art, the work he’s left behind to date — more intimate, intricate, and people-friendly — may yet prove more valuable. Warmly embraced wherever it’s been exhibited, Kapoor’s outdoor oeuvre has represented a rare popular success for conceptual sculpture — reflecting, and unavoidably engaging with — the surrounding city, even if that isn’t quite what the artist originally intended.

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Macau Art Space: Lun Hing Knitting Factory

Just a brisk walk from the Ox Warehouse is another one of Macau’s contemporary art spaces: the Lun Hing Knitting Factory. When I arrived, a group of old people sat in the lobby playing mahjong as the security guard watched idly. There’s little to indicate the presence of artists, when I took the lift up to the third floor, I found the spacious new home of AFA Macau, an arts organization set up by six artists to host exhibitions, give artists space to work and promote Macau artists abroad.

Photographer James Chu Cheok-son and sculptor Wong Ka Long are two of AFA’s founding artists. “The art market in Macau is not well-developed — there are virtually no galleries,” said Chu as we sat at a table near the back of the gallery. AFA was established in 2007 when it opened artists’ studios and a gallery in partnership with a bar and restaurant next to the ruins of St. Paul’s. Last year, though, the financial crisis and decline in tourism took a toll on the restaurant’s business and AFA was forced to leave. It opened in the Knitting Factory late last year; they share the space with Macau Creative, a design group that often incorporates the work of Macau artists into its work.

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Macau Art Space: Ox Warehouse

Tucked away next to the slopes of the Colina de Mong-Há, halfway between the dog-racing track and the Red Market, the Ox Warehouse doesn’t call much attention to itself. But inside the slightly ramshackle quarters of this former cattle depot is one of the avant-garde spaces that are nurturing the arts in Macau.

Frank Lei Loi-fan has run the space since it opened in 2003. “At the time there wasn’t much going on,” he says. Few organizations existed to support Macau artists and not many artists were working full-time, especially not in the realm of contemporary art. So the Ox Warehouse began organizing exchanges between Macau and overseas artists. “Before, the Portuguese just had official galleries in the centre of town that showed artists who weren’t local,” he says. “Now we see that young people want to organize their own activities, ones that are closer to our local culture in Macau. Macau has a lot of people who like to take photos or to draw, but they needed to branch out and learn to absorb knowledge and experience from others.”

Macau’s art scene has always been fluid, with many artists coming from Portugal and other European countries, while local Chinese artists leave Macau to study overseas or on the mainland. After studying journalism, Lei moved to France, where he studied film and photography. When he returned, he first resisted joining an arts organization. “There’s too many cultural associations in Macau and they exist only to ask for money,” he says. But he realized that, without something to support local talent, Macau’s art scene would never develop.

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The Art of Personal Space

In New York, bulging sidewalks have led to the partial pedestrianization of Times Square and plans for something similar along teeming 34th St. In Cairo, fed up pedestrians often take matters into their own hands, competing with cars to form express lanes off the sidewalks of window-shopping meccas like Talaat Harb. And anyone navigating a busy scramble crossing like the one just outside Tokyo’s Shibuya station might feel like an extra in Braveheart, surging into battle against the horde on the opposing corner.

Ever since the concept of “personal space” was first coined in the late 1960s, the increasing density of the world’s rapidly urbanizing population has meant that it’s gone largely forgotten or ignored. Now, two artists on two different continents are fighting back — in a manner of speaking. As a Digital Arts postgraduate at Johannesburg’s University of the Witwatersrand, Nathan Destro created a “personal space protector” to keep strangers at a distance.

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Moving on from Fort Point

The bridge where Summer Street crosses over A is literally the bowels of Fort Point, the shadowy bottom of a neighborhood where buildings reach different heights depending where they meet the grade of the street. In October, the underside of the bridge was covered in rainbow-colored, neon slinkys. Closer to the holiday season, it was bedecked in the brilliant illumination of hundreds of blue lights.

A block away, prints by Shepard Fairey — infamously arrested last year for promoting his show at the Institute of Contemporary Art, just a stone’s throw from Fort Point, with a guerilla street art installation — cover an abandoned diner, and ghostly photo portraits intermittently stare from walls.

This prevalence of open-air art — not even counting what’s in the neighborhood’s galleries and studio spaces — give one the impression that Fort Point’s art scene is thriving. But stroll just a few feet from the Summer Street bridge and a pair of homemade, laser-printed posters bearing the logo of the Fort Point Artist Community proclaim it an “endangered neighborhood”.

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The City, Alive On Canvas

Montreal: The Old Port, oil on linen, 2007

I’d seen images of John Hartman’s work before. Great bird’s eye views of landscapes and cities in autumnal reds and blues. But it wasn’t until I stood before one of the canvasses from his new Cities series of paintings, that I fully experienced it. I was reminded of the hours I had spent, as a kid, pouring over every detail in aerial photos of cities from around the world. Hartman’s paintings are like those old images, only better: sensual and exhilarating, they bring the city to life in a way that is impossible to achieve by photograph.

Hartman, a native of lake country Ontario, has been painting natural scenes for decades, but in the early 1980s, he started to experiment. By combining a variety of perspectives, he created complex works that brimmed with nuance, detail, information and historical narrative—all of them presented in the form of an aerial image. “When I was a teenager, I used to have dreams I was flying over landscapes,” he tells me from his studio in Lafontaine, Ontario. “They would roll underneath me just like I was a movie camera.”

His move from painting natural scenes to cityscapes was gradual but, in a way, inevitable. “I had always been painting communities in the landscape in my earlier work. I sort of went from little outport communities to towns to cities, so it was a fairly natural kind of progression.” In 2006, Scotiabank, looking for a way to mark its 175th anniversary, commissioned Hartman to paint Halifax, the city where the bank was founded in 1832. The end result was a triptych that weaved narrative and historical threads into the city’s fabric; a dense, captivating work in which Halifax appears visceral and alive.

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Purgatory on the C-Train

“No Name” by Jason Mark. Digital composite

I first met Jason Mark when he came to live in my apartment. Actually, I should be more precise—I met him when he came to sublet my apartment. I was living in a cheap studio on Park Avenue near Fairmount, pleasantly appointed but also quite small and dark. When the opportunity arose to move up the street into a bright two-bedroom place with my girlfriend, I put out a call for subletters. Jason answered and, not long thereafter, he settled in with a few boxes of stuff and some leftover furniture I have yet to reclaim from him.

Jason is an artist, born and raised in Saskatchewan, where he received a degree in fine arts from the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. When he moved into my old apartment, he set up an easle in the corner of the kitchen and hung some of his paintings on the walls. It wasn’t until last week that I took a closer look at his art, though, and I was surprised to find a lot of public transit imagery and themes of cultural confusion and hybridity.

“Purgatory.” Oil on canvas

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