Manhattanville Urban Terraine Vague.......can gentrification be far behind?

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Manhattanville Urban Terraine Vague.......can gentrification be far behind?

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uploaded by Eliud Martinez

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All rights reserved.This is a composite/double exposure of two images taken from the elevated 125th Street subway station.  It's a study on the semiotics of billboard advertising and how the messages contribute to an ironic vagueness and ambiguity that seems to characterize this urban terraine.  The reason for the superimposition of images was  to collapse the profusion of huge signs of this site into one image. 

Artist Statement
The images in this Flickr set are part of a NoMa photo group project I'm involved in. The NoMa (North Manhattan) Photo Group is a dynamic group of talented community minded artists who support each other and promote the work they are doing. For images of the NoMa Photo Group please check out this exciting Flickr group. See: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/groups/manhattanville/pool/">www.flickr.com/groups/manhattanville/pool/</a>

We are documenting the Manhattanville area (Broadway between 125th St. and 137th St. in Manhattan) that will be razed to make way for the octopus expansion of Columbia University. There are of course issues relating to the displacement of a poor and working class neighborhood that may be priced-out of the existing rental housing market through the use of QUESTIONABLE (unconstitutional) eminent domain maneuvers.

The legal concept of eminent domain allows the government and municipalities to take over and raze properties that are partially “blighted”, in order to transfer their sites to private institutions such as Columbia University.  Community advocates and protesters argue that this approach to urban redevelopment favors wealthy redevelopers and private institutions at the expense of poor and working class residents, and encourages profligate municipal expenditures and tax variances in support of dubious or marginal benefit to the existing community.

“Terrain Vague” is a French term used by Spanish architect and critic Ignasi de Solà-Morales to describe ambiguous, unresolved, and marginalized spaces in the urban landscape. Terrain vague refers to sites that are often ignored in the mainstream discourse on architecture and design, such as industrial wastelands and monotonous suburban developments.

Solà-Morales notes that photographers and architects address terrain vague in differing ways. The photographer sees these spaces as places that are imbued with a storied past. Architects, however, approach these spaces as problems to be solved through design. Solà-Morales asks:

What is to be done with these enormous voids, with their imprecise limits and vague definition? Art's reaction . . . is to preserve these alternative, strange spaces. . . . Architecture's destiny [by contrast] has always been colonization, the imposing of limits, order, and form, the introduction into strange space of the elements of identity necessary to make it recognizable, identical, universal.   The voids, imprecise limits and ambiguities typical of  “vague terraine” conjure visions of a species of twilight zone.  Rather than being submitted for entertainment and approval by Rod Serling, the haphazard spaces of discontinuous improbabilty of Manhattanville are being submitted for exploitative redevelopment.

True to Solà-Moraleshas' observation, as a group of photographers, we have chosen to address “terrain vague” by documenting aspects of a neighborhood community that will soon disappear into what could be termed as the “vague terraine” of Orwellian amnesia. The Manhattanville community has historically given sustenance and a sense of place to a succession of working-class poor but soon will give way to trendy gentrification. The proposed draconian development project is occurring in the context of an insular university institution that has continually expanded at the expense of its surrounding minority neighbors. Understandably, this has resulted in a significant amount of conflict dating back to at least the 1960's.

I found the proliferation of advertising signs in the ManhatanviIle community to be visually oppressive and amplified my own sensation of “terraine vague.”  On some level I felt the huge advertising signs were selling “solutions” and “fixes” for manufactured needs that could not be openly discussed. The intrusive messages seemed to overwhelm, dilute and diminish legitimate signs calling for urgent action such as: “Halt Columbia University's abuses of eminent domain!”  

Some billboards pictured self indulgent, self-satisfied mercenary role models enticing us as they flaunt their wealth, fame, lifestyle and accomplishments. As if to say….I got mine,….and you? They insinuate to pedestrians what cannot legitimately be articulated or promised in words.

By adopting a certain pose, “look” or attitude, the powerlessness and soul sickness of poverty are somehow transformed.....quickly, effortlessly, magically….. Without the bother of self-awareness or struggle for social justice. The bigger and bolder the sign, the more power and prestige behind the message……the more potent and subliminally suggestive the fraudulent promises seem to become..... The act of photographing them became an exorcism or antidote against their oppressive powers of misdirection.. 

  “Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need.”  ~From the movie Fight Club, based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk

For that matter, the mixed messaging  (vague?) of political advertising and policy makers, etc.,  keep voters confused and easily misdirected, by so-called &quot;wedge issuues&quot;, that appeal on the basis of mass low self esteem driven uncertainty and fear.  Induced mass low self esteem is an interesting phenomenon that drives passive mass consumption of ideas, values, decision-making......and, yes, let's not forget.....material consumption!  

For more  informatio check out In the book “Happiness: Lessons From a New Science”, by Richard Layard exposes a paradox at the heart of our lives. Most of us want more income so we can consume more. Yet as societies become richer, they do not become happier. In fact, the First World has more depression, more alcoholism and more crime than fifty years ago. This paradox is true of Britain, the United States, continental Europe and Japan.  <a href="http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2007/11/the-consumer-pa.html">www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2007/11/the-consumer-pa.html</a>

Mind control, anyone?

An important aspect of my very personal approach to this art project is the understanding that the enormous voids, imprecise limits and vagueness implicit to the concept of “Terraine Vague” also apply to the built-in economic, cultural, societal-political and ideological underpinnings of city planning and urban development.  For me, the ideas that drive this photographic essay are connected to the vagaries of urban space usage and how the meaning of community is constructed, understood and communicated at various levels

This art project hopes to bring attention to these ideas and inequities. It is expected that this work will result in an exhibition at the gallery of City College of the City University of New York sometime in the Spring of '08.