Decay or Death: The Fate of Place Under Capitalism

An essay that twists from an appreciation of the resilient powers of working class people to create “cherished memories” even in the most blighted landscapes to the “melancholic nostalgia” for abandoned institutional sites. A critique on the lack of real political economic change that accompanies such feelings of “longing” through analyzing an artist’s photo series and TikTok videos.

Through “(Un)seeing like a Prison: Counter-Visual Ethnography of the Carceral State,” Judah Schept examines the dynamics of visuality, where the state constructs, legitimates, and normalizes a hegemonic “common sense.” Unpacking the “common sense” of prisons opens other broader questions of capitalism: investment/infrastructure and decay/abandonment. Distorting the humanistic senses of placemaking, capitalism constructs divested neighborhoods and abandoned structures as natural and creates a twisted sense of attachment to the aesthetics of places failed by capitalism.

In a four-picture series labelled “American Decay,” photographer Joey Miller reveals the eerie comfort of a neighborhood captured during dawn and/or dusk (attached below). With tarp-covered boats and cars, fence-lined mattresses, and overflowing garbage, the bleak scenes scream American working-class normalcy. A Twitter user commented, “Mixed emotions...so real so sad I feel at home comfortable” (@iJmillz). The photographs illustrate neighborhoods that capitalism deems unworthy of investment, strategically excluding them from capital circuits because of its insatiable thirst to profit. However, even though they may be resource-blocked places, they still represent the spaces where individuals built their livelihoods, created cherished memories, and developed their sense of selves—all bright moments that overpower any anguish capitalism may have caused.

@iJmillz. “American Decay.” Twitter, 3 Oct. 2020, 7:09 p.m., https://twitter.com/iJmillz/status/1312530198491877376

In another version of this eerie comfort, “urban explorers” venture to abandoned buildings in post-boom capitalist places such as mining towns or automotive cities and share their findings on TikTok with the hashtag #urbanex. As private spaces represent tender moments, these abandoned places (homes, schools, movie theaters) nonetheless represent human interaction and connection. But, under these soft associations of natural decay is the reality of capitalism that maneuvers investments only in where it decides as necessary. One TikTok user connects this realization, commenting under a video of an abandoned church, “In 200 years people will be filming similar videos at old abandoned Walmart stores” (@shelldecay). However, most are left longing to know the memories associated with these dead buildings without ever addressing or understanding the people and processes that forced them to die.

Rather than prioritizing community needs and global connectivity, capitalist placemaking centers around profit, and because these places are produced to imitate the intimacy of private areas, they are associated with comfort. Abandoned spaces stand due to capitalism’s unnatural and indestructible instrafrustructure, emitting melancholic nostalgia rather than inspiring rage against a system that did not, does not, and will not take care of us—evident in the widespread nature and abundance of empty structures.

Perpetuating Patriarchy: Needing Feminists in Art Criticism

A critique of critic John Berger’s treatment of Frida Kahlo and its relationship to larger problems within the art world

In his final piece Portraits, world-renowned art critic John Berger memorializes his brilliant analyses of artists and their work, among them being Hieronymous Bosch, Frida Kahlo, and Peter Kennard. He responds to artists’ manifestations of how to speak to each other’s existential beings in his answers of what makes art powerful. Then why, when examining works and their worth, does Berger answer Frida Kahlo’s power by enmeshing her with her toxic partner and validating her ability through a male poet? Berger’s framing of Kahlo represents common problems within the art community and institution regarding women, perpetuating archaic associations of female artists with their partners and minimizing their merit.

Kahlo’s chapter begins not with “her” or “she,” but with “they” (Berger 335). In a space designed to be dedicated to her, she must share with her partner, a man 20 years her senior, whom she met when she was only 15, a student, and he 35, an expert. Their uneven relationship forever remains romanticized in art history, where its turbulence supposedly represents an awe-inspiring example of undying love. Berger points to Diego and I, a self-portrait with a miniature Diego face tattooed on her forehead, as encapsulating her compelling “feelings and ontological longing” that are so well known (336). He situates her continual longing, her need to place Diego at the center of her mind, as healthy. It stays unquestioned.

Writer Alexxa Gotthardt reacts in the same way, titling her article on Artsy, “Frida Kahlo’s Love Letters to Diego Rivera Reveal Their Volatile Relationship,” where she recognizes the troublesome nature of their relationship to some extent. She goes on to quote parts of Kahlo’s diary, where in one instance Kahlo compares herself and Diego to the “yin and yang of color theory,” in which one gives and one takes (7). While Gotthardt follows it with an acknowledgment that Kahlo’s metaphor reeks of “inequality and imbalance,” she ultimately condones it, saying that “despite turmoil, this is a relationship on which [Kahlo] thrives” (9). Even after identifying warning signs of abuse, she ignores the final red flag in order to reinforce the myth of their everlasting love.

Kahlo’s pain and suffering becomes conflated with the troubles that “come along” with making art—the sustained misconception that artists need enduring trauma in order to be an artist. Did Kahlo want to depict her suffering for it to sit stagnant on museum walls or online exhibitions? Knowing how Kahlo did not only spend her life as an artist, but also as an activist, the answer points to no as she was deeply engaged in working toward equality. While Berger comments on how she was able to share her pain in an attempt for “refinding of dignity and hope” through her art (340), his commentary weakens if he saw it simply as her personal journey, failing to acknowledge her commitment to constructing a world that assures dignity and hope for all.

When Berger does recognize Kahlo’s genius and addresses her form of corporeal symbolism as trailblazing, he diminishes it with “(Although Diego in his own way sometimes used a similar symbolism)”—as if his use of parentheses would negate his unnecessary dismissal of her innovative craft (336). Again, after explaining Kahlo’s special method of painting that holds a sense of “double touch of hand and of surface of skin,” he critiques her self-portraits, stating she has a paradox because “how is it that a painter so concentrated on her own image is never narcissistic?” (337). Though it is a valid question, humans have been representing themselves since the beginning of time and it begs the question of if Berger also criticizes the egos of male artists who also mainly make self-portraits.

Throughout his analysis of Frida Kahlo, her pieces, and her influence, Berger continues problematic narratives within the art community, romanticizing toxic relationships and shrinking women’s identities. When supposedly praising her, he challenges her brilliance only to justify it through other men, not allowing her to speak on her own. It is important that Berger and other art critics or commentators work to preserve her and all female artists’ memories, pointing to their individuality and talents, only identifying their partners within their works when necessary and not taking space from them.

Police Performance: The Cultural Weapon of Taking a Knee in BLM

A cross-national analysis of how police use particular techniques of cultural appropriation as a means of deception to cover acts of violence against the citizenry

In The Art of Torture and Place of Execution: A Forensic Narrative, Stephanie Kane creates a space for testimony in order to properly memorialize 17-year-old Tito whose death was ruled a suicide by Argentinian law enforcement. They not only refused to conduct a thorough investigation into his death, but also were assumed to be active participants in the murder. Through the adoption of the criminalized art form of graffito, local officers employed an aesthetic of violence in order to communicate their power, marring Tito’s character and framing his death as a warning to other “deviants.” Similarly, after the death of George Floyd, police officers in the United States used their own form of an aesthetic of violence, the tactic of taking a knee, as a cultural weapon in order to perform their “support” of the Black Lives Matter movement, disrupting the message’s power and removing their responsibility in the institutional acceptance of these common murders.

San Francisco 49ers’ quarterback Colin Kaepernick first employed the “taking a knee” strategy during the national anthem in 2016 to bring attention to racial injustice, where his name flooded headlines and his character became the subject of public debate. At a time when the phrase “police brutality” was always accompanied by the word “alleged,” thousands contested whether this action was appropriate or disrespectful, uninformed or revolutionary. However, the San Francisco Police Officers Association reacted quickly with a letter to the owner of the San Francisco 49ers, condemning Kaepernick as spreading a “false narrative and misinformation” by placing unjustified blame on law enforcement for the country’s racial divide (San Francisco). While Kaepernick’s tactic could not be criminalized as it is protected in the first amendment, the fraternal order did not stop from criminalizing it within societal consciousness.

Fast forward four years and police officers across the United States responded to the police killing of George Floyd by taking a knee in order to visualize their support. Unlike the complete denunciation in 2016, this action seemed to symbolize a recognition of necessary changes and a possible unity of law enforcement and the Black community. In one instance captured through photos and posted on Twitter, officers kneeled outside of Oklahoma County Jail, where even the Oklahoma County Sheriff responded, “Respect” (Johnson). In the daytime photo, the peaceful nature of kneeling contrasts the officers’ layers of protection, guns on hips, and rifles in hands (a naturalized site/sight as police in the U.S. have become militarized). However, later that night they fired rubber bullets and tear gas at protestors, proving their actions to be simply appropriated, a sheer performance (LaCroix). These organized perpetrators of violence shoved themselves into the cultural atmosphere, establishing themselves as allies in order to remove themselves from blame and avoid systemic changes.

The police support vanished when news broke of an officer killing a Black woman sleeping in her own bedroom. Here, law enforcement relied on their previous “activism” in order to construct the narrative of “bad cops,” reducing it to isolated incidents and individuals. They distracted from the racist foundation of policing, one that literally served as a “form of organized terror” as stated on the website of the National Law Enforcement Museum (Hansen). Held so closely to their chests is the genocidal roots of capture, control, and murder—a legacy so barely and rarely reformed that the same star that carried the name of “Slave Patrol” are the ones that carry officers’ identifying numbers today.

The memories of and events surrounding Tito and George Floyd serve as bleak reminders of the reality of violence, appropriation, and co-optation that exist within the arena of activist arts. By kneeling, police officers are able to become active participants in portraying the legacy of the same people from whom they stole their personhood, and because of these performances, mainstream society (temporarily) excuses the violence of law enforcement. Meanwhile, George Floyd’s and Breonna Taylor’s names are added to the ridiculously long list of Black folks who have been unjustly removed from this earth by people cloaked under the guise of protection.