Afterall - Spring 2010 - Adaptive Reuse - New Strategies in Response To The Housing Crisis

Afterall • Spring 2010 • Adaptive Reuse: New Strategies in Response to the Housing Crisis 2/25/10 1:18 AM
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Events, Works,
– Spring 2010
Contextual Essays Artists Exhibitions
Related Features:
Adaptive Reuse: New Strategies in Response Print
to the Housing Crisis Share Journal

Claire Barliant Art and Its Cultural
Contradictions
What are the implications of
biennials for urban
regeneration, sustainable
change and social justice? In
this essay from the most
recent issue, Joshua Decter
considers the problems and
potential of large-scale art
events.
Read More >
Journal
Marjetica Potrč: The
Politics of the
Uninhabitable
The uncontrolled urban
manifestations and 'informal'
architecture found at the
margins of the megalopolis are
the subject matter of Marjetica
Potrč's borderline practice
Damon Rich, Cities Destroyed for Cash, 2009, 1431 plastic markers on a panorama of between art and architecture...
New York City, c.30 x 30m. Photograph: Damon Rich
Read More >
I remember when I bought my first home, and how that made me feel […] It's an overused
phrase, but it's part of the American Dream. It's a wonderful feeling […] I don't have any Online
study out there I could point to, but I wonder if the homeownership rate was higher in the
Breaking and Entering
Middle East if you'd have so much fighting and bickering. I'd love to see a study that
Trespassing in an industrial
shows what the percentage of suicide bombers who own their homes is. Because it's yard in the south Bronx, Mary
something you can point to and say 'that's where I live, and I own it'. - Walling Blackburn comes into
contact with a stored Richard
- Robert Couch, former general counsel of the Department of Housing and Urban Serra torqued spiral, in this
Development, 2008 essay on the nature of
touching and trespass.
Perhaps the only instance of homeownership being posed as a solution to the Middle East
crisis, this staggeringly presumptuous comment was recorded by Damon Rich for his two- Read More >
channel video Mortgage Stakeholders (2008). Couch was one of several people Rich
interviewed for the video, in which academics, mortgage brokers and housing advocates
http://www.afterall.org/journal/4214/adaptive.reusenew.strategies.in.response.to.the.housing.crisis Page 1 of 10
interviewed for the video, in which academics, mortgage brokers and housing advocates
explain the current economic downturn, each coming from a particular angle - some, like
scholar David Harvey, theorising from a Marxist point of view, with others subscribing to
the benefits of the free market. Rich filmed each interview separately, but juxtaposes the
speakers on screen, so that while one person is talking another is shown patiently waiting
for his or her turn to speak. The effect is one of even-handedness: if there is blame being
cast, it is spread too widely to have a specific target.
Mortgage Stakeholders was part of 'Red Lines Housing Crisis Learning Center', Rich's
exhibition at the Queens Museum of Art in the summer of 2009. With a toy train racing
around a track, a video of Jim Hensonesque puppets and a large-scale model of a human
head that visitors could climb into and peer out of, the installation had a funhouse
atmosphere. But underneath the carnival-like, playful trappings was a grim and bitingly
thorough account of the history of home finance from the Great Depression to the
foreclosure crisis, describing how the real-estate industry ballooned out of control and then
abruptly collapsed, in part dragging the financial markets and the rest of the economy down
with it. The model railroad told the story of the US Savings and Loan crisis of the late
1980s, after rising interest rates and deregulation pushed Savings and Loans banks from
being small, community-centred banks to multinational financial hubs, while the puppets
told real-life stories of predatory lending. The three-metrehigh head made of plywood that
loomed over the show represented Frederick Babcock, the chief underwriter for Franklin
Roosevelt's Federal Housing Administration, who in 1935 created a real-estate appraisal
system that, reflecting the racial attitudes of its time, ended up codifying biases against
minorities and residents of city neighbourhoods by helping determine where banks should
or should not lend. Starting with the ingrained prejudices of the FHA, and wending its way
forward to the stock market's disastrous dependence on subprime mortgages, Rich's project
used the lens of real estate and finance capital to take a look at race and class in the US.
If one of the direct causes - and consequences - of the current financial crisis is a rash of
foreclosures across the US, how these vacancies are affecting the growth of cities and towns
remains to be seen. For example, what will become of the unfinished buildings now dotting
New York's landscape, abandoned construction sites whose structural metal posts rise like
monuments to failed capital? Or the empty storefronts turning up throughout Manhattan,
with 'Vacancy' and 'For Lease' signs in windows that once boasted elaborate displays of
luxury goods? Joseph Grima, director of the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New
York, has noted the specifically architectural nature of this downturn. 'It's quite fascinating
how this is possibly the first crisis of our times that has a distinctive architectural aesthetic
- empty, detached suburban mansions connected by deserted streets, or slum-like frame
houses in varying states of dilapidation,' he wrote in the online journal Where We Are
Now. 1 In the 1930s, the Great Depression found its emblem in the winding breadlines; in
the 1970s, it was a line of cars waiting at the gas pump. Today's crisis is symbolised by an
empty house.
Over the past several months, I have been following the work of three North American
artists - Mary Ellen Carroll, Julia Christensen and Damon Rich - who are making work
positioned somewhere between art, architecture and advocacy. While their practices are
only tangentially related, they all share an interest in the forces driving property values and
in broadening the definition of the public, in the sense of creating an arena that is
democratic, transparent in its operations and encouraging of open debate. Both Christensen
and Rich employ a research-based methodology pioneered in the 1970s by Hans Haacke
and Marth Rosler, while Carroll's work is perhaps more closely related to land-art projects
by artists such as Mary Miss. Though each artist is based in (or is making work based in) a
different US city - Cleveland, Houston and New York - considered together, the projects
offer a unique perspective on the dramatic economic shifts unfolding right now across the
United States. Crucially, each artist's work examines the American dream of
homeownership, opening up the possibility for something less fantastic and distorted to be
put in its place.
put in its place.
'Real estate is a commodity with some unusual features,' Rosalyn Deutsche wrote in
response to Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System,
as of May 1, 1971 (1971), Hans Haacke's critique of notorious landlord Harry Shapolsky,
who bought buildings in poor Manhattan neighbourhoods and then jacked up the rents.
The Shapolsky piece resulted in the cancelling of Haacke's solo show at the Guggenheim
Museum, which had been scheduled to open in April 1971 - Haacke had singled out
Shapolsky because he was on the museum's board.2 Buildings and land may seem
immutable, Deutsche continued, but they 'embody relationships of exploitation and
domination open to change'. Investigating relationships of exploitation and domination is
the driving force behind institutional critique, and, when crossed with the real-estate
boom, has meant that affordable housing and urban renewal have been increasingly visible
subjects of art over the past few years. But there is a difference between the way artists are
looking at private property today versus twenty and thirty years ago, when Gordon Matta-
Clark made sculpture out of his interventions into abandoned buildings, and Haacke
documented the shady and speculative dealings of slumlords. Today the attitude among
artists manifests itself in pieces that are less strident - there are fewer examples of
subversive acts such as Matta-Clark's Window Blowout, in which he shot out the windows
of Peter Eisenman's Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York in 1976, and
replaced each pane with photographs of shattered windows from the Bronx housing
projects. Instead, the current crop of artists is changing the nature of relationships that
were once defined by 'exploitation and domination' through a willingness to utilise the
resources at hand. Taking on the roles of researchers and community activists while
capitalising on their position as artists - mainly by staging exhibitions to promote ideas or
accessing funds via collectors or foundations that support the arts - they choose to use
negotiation and diplomacy rather than displays of force or gestures of critique.
This shift coincides with the waning of institutional critique as a strategy used by artists,
perhaps because of a disillusionment with its capacity to resist co-option and to actually
change the power relations it critiqued. This type of activist practice has its precursors,
artists acting as conduits and thereby linking communities, the art world and government
bodies. Bonnie Sherk created a farm underneath a highway interchange in San Francisco in
1974 that lasted six years. Mierle Laderman Ukeles has been an artist in residence with the
New York City Sanitation Department since 1976. (In her 1969 manifesto on maintenance
art, she wrote: 'After the revolution, who's going to pick up the garbage on Monday
morning?') In her seminal 1989 exhibition 'If You Lived Here…', held in a space run by the
Dia Art Foundation, Martha Rosler staged four group exhibitions and a series of lectures
and town hall meetings by artists and activists engaged in helping New York City's
homeless population. This essay is therefore not proclaiming the arrival of a new
movement or aesthetic sensibility, but rather is an attempt to understand how this type of
artistic practice might respond to the contemporary housing crisis - using these three
examples as case studies - and to look at how artists are negotiating the overlap between
their work and that of community organisers, activists and city planners.
In the summer of 1999, the New York-based artist Mary Ellen Carroll went to Houston to
buy a house. 3 She was determined to find one in Sharpstown, a stable, middle-class
neighbourhood on the southwest side of the city. Guided by Betty Townes, a realtor who
had been selling properties in Sharpstown for thirty years, Carroll drove through numerous
shady, quiet streets filled with the kind of modest,singlefamily homes she was looking for.
Sharpstown was masterplanned by a developer in the mid-1950s, and it still has the
pleasantly leafy, commodious feel of a post-World War II suburban environment.4 As they
cruised down Sharpview Drive, Carroll spotted a singular looking house adjacent to Bayland
Park. Its yard was overgrown with weeds and tall grass, in dramatic contrast to the neatly
mowed and manicured lawns on the rest of the block.
Carroll was immediately smitten. 'That's it,' she said to Townes. 'That's the house.' Towne
informed the artist that she was out of luck. The house hadn't been inhabited for twelve
years (which was obvious from its rundown condition), and several people had tried and
failed to locate its owner. If Carroll wanted that house, she would have to contact the
county herself to find out who owned it. After she sent a certified letter stating her interest
in the property, she finally met its owner, Dr Ramesh Kapoor, in 2002. Thus commenced a
protracted, painful negotiation lasting six years, during which time she assembled a group
of individuals to form a corporation to buy the property. By late 2008, 6513 Sharpview
Drive was hers (or more accurately, the corporation's).
This seemingly run-of-the-mill story about desire and real estate was actually the initial
phase of a public art project: Carroll's reason for wanting to purchase the house was to lift
it from its foundation and rotate it 180 degrees, reorienting it so that the 'back' of the
house would face the street, while the 'front' would overlook the park. When she realises
prototype 180 - on 8 October 2010 - she will make the architecture 'perform', and in the
process unsettle assumptions about how a building should appear. The rotation will serve
as a catalyst for other alterations to the house, turning it into a laboratory to test new
innovations in construction and sustainability.
During a warm May weekend last year, I visited Carroll's house in Houston. Built in a
straightforward contemporary style in keeping with the modern architecture popular at the
time, the house is surrounded by a generous, if slightly scruffy, lawn. Just behind it,
separated by a chain-link fence, lies the vast expanse of a park, where kids play soccer and
baseball on fields illuminated at night by giant klieg lights. As we wandered the premises,
Carroll patiently described her myriad plans for the house, explaining that she was going to
take it off the energy grid by installing solar panels, a geothermal heating and cooling
system, and a hydroponic wall (that may run through the house) to serve as a cooling
device. Such plans for energy sustainability are not just fashionable; in Houston, where air
conditioning during the brutally hot summers usually results in exorbitant utility bills,
innovative alternatives are essential.
Carroll's previous art projects include Federal (2003), a 24-hour video composed of two
stationary shots of the northern and southern façades of the federal building on Wilshire
Boulevard in Los Angeles. The video is a response to Andy Warhol's Empire (1964), making
similar demands on viewers in terms of duration, but also putting the viewer in the position
of monitoring an imposing government institution - the FBI's LA offices are in this
building. The making of this work included almost a year's worth of correspondence with
officials in order to get permission to film the building, a comment on, among other things,
surveillance and tightened-up security in the wake of 9/11, as well as being a literal
interpretation of a 'representation of power'. Carroll has also travelled to Argentina with
virtually nothing aside from the clothes on her back and the passport in her pocket for a
2007 performance, and has transported a car from New York to Munich in order to crash it
on the steps of a museum (Late, 2005). 5 This is all to say that she is accustomed to
collaborating with corporate or government individuals, and jumping through numerous
bureaucratic hoops to realise her projects - a process that is as much a part of the work as
the final gesture or document. Last summer, for instance, she arranged a mayoral forum on
the subject of land use in Houston's Contemporary Arts Museum (the mayoral candidates
gathered around a prototype conference table that will ultimately be installed in the
house). 6 In light of this willingness to patiently manoeuvre through established power
channels, it is not hard to imagine her convincing the neighbourhood association that
installing a windmill in Bayland Park would provide a solution to soaring utility bills.
In any city other than Houston, lifting a house from its foundation and rotating it 180
degrees would be nearly unthinkable. But Houston - which was founded by two real-estate
developers in the 1830s - famously lacks zoning laws, meaning that developers have
unusual leniency to build whatever they want, wherever they want (although
neighbourhood associations do enforce their own, often strict, standards). This is at least
neighbourhood associations do enforce their own, often strict, standards). This is at least
one reason why the oil-rich city is among the fastest growing in the US, with a population
that increased by 19.4 per cent between 2000 and 2007.7 It is also what allowed artist Rick
Lowe to purchase 22 abandoned shotgun houses in Houston's mostly black Third Ward
neighbourhood in 1993, using them to start Project Row Houses, a combination exhibition
space, artists residency and temporary housing for young, single mothers.
Halfway through the tour we arrived at the threshold of the house, which is located along
the side rather than facing the street, and we noticed a used condom lying on the stoop. The
condom, in this context of a house as artwork, seemed wholly intentional, a flagrant token
of trespass, both assertive and slightly mocking, as if announcing: this is our space. Carroll
laughingly pointed to it as a metaphor for the house's openness to both the park and the
street. 'The house is a conduit,' she says, 'from private to public.'
Siting prototype 180 in a quiet, residential neighbourhood creates an opportunity for

pioneering new ideas in urban planning on a local level, rather than in a removed setting,
such as a university.8 For example, Carroll is currently working on enabling free wireless
internet access for the entire neighbourhood. This may seem like a relatively minor
accomplishment, but mobilising individuals to agree to share free wi-fi is no easy feat.
Carroll has been influenced in part by urban policy scholars Gerald E. Frug and David J.
Barron, who have argued for the decentralisation of legislative power in the US, saying that
state governments should relinquish some of their decision-making control to cities:
'Working out a problem in a localised setting can reveal solutions that a more abstract
consideration cannot identify.'9 prototype 180 illustrates how neighbourhoods might
coalesce more strongly and efficiently, collectively figuring out ways to save money and
improve their environment, and could become an important model to communities
everywhere about how to envision homes as being part of a larger environment rather than
discrete entities.
The simple revolution of a single-family home is also a complex gesture relating to notions
of public and private, whose more theoretical consequences are here slightly blurred by the
emphasis on community enhancement. In fact, in observing the practices of all three
artists, I often noticed the constant need to define the difference between their work and
that of community activists, architects or designers, and it is notable that this distinction
still sparks debate. The April/May 2009 issue of Bookforum featured a roundtable
discussion on cultural practices that utilise and attempt to redefine geography. During the
discussion, Eyal Weizman, author of Hollow Land (2007) - an analysis of Israeli settlement
architecture - expresses his reservations about positioning artists as agents of change, as
though they could do more in a short period of time than people who spend years studying
how to modify a particular socio-political situation. Weizman writes: 'I am still rather
careful about not undoing expert knowledge as a gesture of democratisation and
liberation… I also think that placing rights versus power could sometimes end up as an
appeal for the moderation of power's excess and replace more fundamental questioning. So
a right to the city must be articulated as a programme, rather than a critique, and this
means it should not work only from the bottom up.' 10
All the artists I spoke to for this story are highly aware of the delicate nature of their
position, and echo Weizman's sentiment that short-term efforts should not be confused
with or obscure the ongoing work of urban planners and policy makers. Damon Rich, who
is not only an artist but also a city planner for Newark, New Jersey, is particularly sensitive
to interpretations of his work in either field as having an interventionist agenda. 'It's a
romantic way to think about it,' he tells me, 'but ultimately terms such as "interventionist"
or "sabotage" have violent, masculinist overtones.' 11
II
Since writing her 2008 book Big Box Reuse, which looked at different adaptations of large-
scale buildings built by chain stores in the US, Julia Christensen has been asked by more
than one municipality about revamping vacant big-box stores. Inspired by the razing of a
than one municipality about revamping vacant big-box stores. Inspired by the razing of a
former Wal-Mart store in her hometown of Bardstown, Kentucky in order to make room
for a new courthouse, Christensen travelled across the US, meticulously documenting the
transformation of vacated Wal-Mart buildings. The book consists of ten case studies of
adaptive reuse, examining how buildings have been appropriated as churches, libraries and
schools. In some cases, such as the SPAM Museum in Austin, Minnesota, the renovation is
startlingly transformative, while other adaptations are less dramatic. In an interview with
Walker Art Center curator Andrew Blauvelt, Christensen has acknowledged that her role as
an artist gave her some freedom in terms of her approach to documenting the sites: 'I'm
not sure why, but I think people are more willing to share their story with an artist in a way
they would not with an academic, or corporate entity, or a governmental agency, for
instance. Throughout the big-box research, I have recognised a freedom that the subjects
feel in knowing they are part of an art project.
In a way, taking part in an art project contextualises what they have done as a creative act,
which empowers them to think critically about reuse, and so they tell me all about it.'12 For
Christensen, one of the most important aspects of her work is its ability to disperse
information. When Blauvelt asked whether she sees herself as neutrally documenting or
acting as an agent for change, she replied: 'In regard to this project, I do not see the
difference, honestly. I think that I can document this phenomenon as it is emerging on the
ground, and that in itself will indeed spark change. No matter how "neutral" the
presentation remains, the subject matter is anything but neutral! It does not need me to
render it political, because that is inherent.'13 Christensen's reflexive position is necessary -
she doesn't view her project as having redemptive qualities that could somehow transform
the life of an unidentified 'other'.
Instead, her stance recalls Heisenberg's principle of observation, which states that one
cannot observe without changing the event being observed. Although it may be possible to
point to a progression from the documentary practice of Haacke or Allan Sekula to
Christensen's work, what is more striking is how the responses to socially conscious
documentary work remain constant, as evidenced by Blauvelt's question. There has been
and will continue to be confusion over a lack of clearly defined roles (as well as the need to
define the artist's purpose in society), and a craving for evidence of positive social impact
from these works - in other words, concrete results.
On 28 April 2009, the day I visited Christensen, Cleveland's newspaper The Plain Dealer
sported a dramatic headline - 'Casualties: Pontiac, Many Jobs, Dealers' - below which six
short squibs detailed the carnage resulting from General Motors's restructuring - 'Workers:
21,000 will lose jobs as many plants close' and 'Suppliers: Several likely to go out of
business'. The last prediction was particularly apt, since our first stop was HGR Surplus,
which, as Christensen puts it, is a graveyard for the rust belt. A resale market for used
factory equipment, the twelve-acre 'store' is something of a shock. As far as the eye can see
are rows and rows of metal equipment and parts. The purpose of most of the machines
eluded us, and as we walked through the industrial cast-offs Christensen mentioned how
she, in her research for a subsequent art project, looked at these mechanical contrivances
different to the way other scavengers do, who roam the aisles in search of a good deal on a
metal press or forklift. What isn't bought in the store ends up on a scrap heap or is junked.
Christensen is currently making a work, titled Surplus Rising, which tracks the migration,
from point of origin to destination, of the used equipment found in the store, so we brought
a tape recorder and microphone to better document our trip. Two women carrying
recording equipment piqued curiosity among the store's mostly male employees and
patrons, and after learning the reason for our visit, one of the managers introduced us to a
regular customer, David, who had been coming to the store since it opened seven years
ago. He does repairs, and comes here to search out spare parts. David, who is in his forties,
has lived in Cleveland all his life, and having witnessed the slow drain of industry from the
city, his outlook on its future is bleak. HGR takes in about twelve to twenty truckloads of
material a day, David told us. 'Some days it could be nothing other than ladders and
material a day, David told us. 'Some days it could be nothing other than ladders and
lampshades. There was one day, several years ago, and one truck came in and it had a
single lane of a bowling alley. The next truck that came in, from Northrop, had an ion
implanter to make subconductors, which is almost several million dollars worth of
equipment.'
David then informed us that his mother used to work in this very building, back when it
was an automobile plant called Fisher Body. 'Now a quarter of the whole facility is a surplus
outlet,' he said. The amount of unused space was difficult to fathom, since the store itself
seems enormous. It is hard to imagine it expanded by three quarters, and full of people.
'Obviously they don't build cars here anymore,' David said. 'Jobs have gone out of this
area.'
Cleveland is widely acknowledged as having been hit especially hard by the foreclosure
crisis. It is estimated that one in thirteen houses is vacant, and the city has experienced an
exodus of some 100,000 people since 2002 - something not seen in the US since the forced
exodus from New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina.14 Euclid Avenue, where HGR is
located, was described in a Baedeker's guide in 1893 as 'one of the most beautiful
residence-streets in America'; the four-mile thoroughfare, which once boasted some 260
elegant homes built by industrial barons, is now a stretch of commercial and institutional
buildings. The change in architecture reflects the city's transition from the thriving
industrial and manufacturing hub it was in the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries
to the struggling and uncertain economy it is today, a slow decline that started with the
closing of American steel mills in the 1960s. And yet Cleveland retains its grandeur, or at
least parts of it seemed so to me in the course of a day-long tour spent largely on the city's
main roads. The landscape often consists of rolling hills and verdant elms, and there are
many signs of growth and resiliency, both historical and contemporary: the lock that opens
onto Lake Erie and feeds water into the Erie Canal; the Progressive Stadium; the Hope-
Memorial Bridge with its WPA sculptures of Art Deco- style figures wearing winged
helmets and cradling automobiles (locally dubbed the 'guardian angels of traffic'). Later, on
a flight back to New York, I saw the city in miniature; from an aerial view Cleveland's
travails are more obvious. Abutting the bridge is a dilapidated strip of factory buildings, a
blackened, burnt-out hole surrounded by smoothly interwoven highways curving like the
leaves of a four-leaf clover.
III
In light of my experiences in Houston and Cleveland, cities that respectively represent the
'boom' and 'bust' extremes of the real-estate market in recent years, Damon Rich's project
filled in some of the gaps. The emphasis of his 'Red Lines Housing Crisis Learning Center'
(2009) is on education. In 1999, Rich founded a non-profit design organisation called The
Center for Urban Pedagogy, which uses the built environment to show how power is
distributed in society, spreading this information through high-school curricula,
exhibitions, tours and design partnerships with other non-profit organisations in the city.
The show did not try to make its visitors into experts, but rather to equip them to ask
questions. Its favoured experts seemed to be the New York-based Neighborhood Economic
Development Advocacy Project (NEDAP), an advocacy group which provided 'Red Lines'
with foreclosure data and whose directors are also interviewed in the aforementioned video
Mortgage Stakeholders about elderly women losing their homes in Jamaica, Queens. Much
like Rosler's 'If You Lived Here…', the exhibition functioned as a temporary meeting place,
with a rack holding flyers from housing advocacy organisations that had also participated in
extensive public programming developed by the QMA in the Queens neighbourhoods
hardest hit by the crisis. One component of the show capitalised on the museum's exquisite
panorama of New York City, using pink triangular markers to designate city blocks on
which three or more houses had filed for foreclosure. It was a startling illustration of how
New York's minority neighbourhoods are being particularly decimated by foreclosures.
During a panel discussion in which the participants walked around on the panorama
(mainly in New York City's waterways), the better to comment on the city's situation, urban
(mainly in New York City's waterways), the better to comment on the city's situation, urban
historian Kenneth Jackson towered over a particularly dense patch of pink triangles in
Brooklyn, and said: 'Each one of these triangles is really marking a personal tragedy.'
The centrepiece of Rich's project was Frederick Babcock, a New York City bureaucrat from
the 1930s whose connection to the current crisis is not immediately apparent. But
Babcock's role in American urban development was decisive and powerful. 'There is one
difference in people, namely race, which can result in a very rapid decline,' he wrote in The
Valuation of Real Estate (1937). 'Usually such declines can be partially avoided by
segregation, and this device has always been in common usage in the South where White
and Negro populations have been separated.' This statement was printed on one of a
handful of light boxes, along with Rich's diplomatic commentary: 'Unfortunately, Babcock
misread the nature of neighbourhood change, seeing decline as a result of race mixing
rather than as evidence of racist real-estate properties.'
In essence, as Rich's exhibition showed, Babcock turned racism into official practice.
Following his guidelines, neighbourhoods that were deemed risky for lenders - that is,
where a bank might be less likely to get its money back - were delineated in red ink on
maps developed in the late 1930s by the Home Owners Loan Corporation. 15 'Red lining'
became a term for unfairly denying loans in certain neighbourhoods, with the result that
buying or improving a home - and the surrounding neighbourhood as a result - was often
out of reach for minorities or immigrant populations.16 Although red lining was
acknowledged in the 1970s as a tacitly racist practice and eventually outlawed by the
federal government in an episode also chronicled in the exhibition, by the 1990s red lining
had transformed into its opposite: now, in the name of affordable housing, there was too
much credit available, often in extremely predatory forms. These very same
neighbourhoods that were once ignored were directly targeted by mortgage companies,
who often portrayed themselves as heroically reversing a terrible trend. In a New Yorker
profile on Angelo Mozilo, the former chairman and CEO of Countrywide Financial
Corporation, one of the leading US home-loan providers (which was eventually sold in
near-bankruptcy to Bank of America in 2008), Mozilo is quoted as saying of his customers:
'So they're not upper-middle-class white people - so what? They're Hispanics, and maybe
their money is not in a bank - but they are responsible.' 17
In Rich's video, we hear another perspective from Don Baldyga, of the Episcopal
Community Development in Newark, who says: 'These people were sold the American
Dream. You wave that in front of them, and even if there's a downside, they don't hear it.'
But his main contention is that, even though these people may be guilty of not paying their
mortgage, each additional foreclosure hurts the rest of the neighbourhood. 'For every
abandoned house on a block, that's like a 15 per cent decrease on the value of neighbouring
homes.' Baldyga's comment hits home after viewing the pink triangles dotting the
panorama, which showed the extent of the impact of foreclosures in New York City with
clarity and immediate comprehensibility. It was one of the most striking elements of the
installation. This piece, as was true of most of the show, demonstrates that Rich's
visualisation of complicated information borrows as much from graphic designers and city
planners as it does from early Conceptual art. With its pointedly museological display and
objective tone, 'Red Lines', like Christensen's work, is not caught up with measuring its own
virtuousness. The evidence of the events leading to the foreclosure crisis is laid out for
viewers to absorb and digest, allowing them to freely develop their own opinions.
IV
Though Cleveland, Houston and New York differ vastly in terms of culture and economy,
they share the same problem now visible in all cities: an increasing number of vacancies
and a shortage of ideas about how to deal with them. It would be an overstatement to say
the artists discussed in this essay are stepping in to help close the gap. Yet Christensen,
who has developed a versatile set of ideas about big-box stores that, as a book, may be
widely distributed, and Rich, whose reflexive displays concisely deliver complex
widely distributed, and Rich, whose reflexive displays concisely deliver complex
information to museum audiences, have both compiled data and developed theories about
housing that are as useful to city planners and architects as they are compelling to casual
readers and viewers. They thus have expanded the purview of their work and made it
difficult to categorise their practices as 'pure' art, if such a thing ever existed. And while
Carroll's prototype 180 - sculpture as discursive site - started from the basis of an
aesthetically driven project, it has evolved to encompass a much broader range of issues
related to urban housing. There may be a difference between the deliberate neutrality in
work by these artists versus that of earlier generations, yet it seems too soon to make a case
for a distinct break. Instead, these artists are worth singling out for their unveiling of new
strategies to counteract the effects of an economic slowdown, and their ability to see
possibility where others might agonise at the prospect of being strangled by red tape.
Footnotes
1. Joseph Grima, 'Foreclosure Tourism', Where We Are Now, Issue 1, Summer 2009.
Available at http:// wherewearenow.org/vol1/intimacy/forclosure/ (last accessed on 30
November 2009).
2. Rosalyn Deutsche, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics, Cambridge, MA and London: The
MIT Press, 1996, p.181.
3. Account follows conversations between the author and Mary Ellen Carroll, September
2009.
4. According to Carroll, Sharpstown is one of the first masterplanned communities in the
US.
5. The piece was commissioned for the exhibition 'wir arbeiten immer noch daran, nicht
mehr zu arbeiten' ('we keep working, to no longer work') at the Galerie der Künstler,
Munich, 12 March-8 April 2005.
6. The table was included in the exhibition 'No Zoning: Artists Engage Houston',
Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, 9 May-4 October 2009.
7. Edward L. Glaeser, 'Houston, New York has a Problem', City Journal, Summer 2008,
vol.18, no.3. Also available at www.city-journal.org/2008/18_3_houston.html (last
accessed on 25 August 2009).
8. Both Rice University's School of Architecture in Houston and Columbia University
Graduate School of Architecture in New York are supporting prototype 180 and
students will have opportunities to work with it directly.
9. Gerald E. Frug and David J. Barron, City Bound: How States Stifle Urban Innovation,
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008, p.50.
10. Tom McCarthy, Nato Thompson and Eyal Weizman in a roundtable discussion
moderated by Jeffrey Kastner, 'The New Geography', Bookforum, April/May 2009,
p.50.
11. Conversation between the author and Damon Rich, August 2009.
12. Andrew Blauvelt, 'The Afterlife of Big Boxes: A Conversation with Julia Christensen', in
A. Blauvelt (ed.), Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes (exh. cat.), Minneapolis:
Walker Art Center, 2008, p.210.
13. Ibid., p.214.
14. Alex Kotlowitz, 'All Boarded Up', The New York Times Magazine, 8 March 2009, also
available at www.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/magazine/08Foreclosure-t.html (last
accessed on 25 August 2009).
15. The Home Owners Loan Corporation is the same agency that transformed millions of
Depression-era defaulted adjustable-rate mortgages into the thirty-year, fixed-rate
mortgages we know today.
16. It should be noted that although the red areas on the maps would seem to explain the
source of 'red lining' as a term, the origin of the phrase is unknown.
source of 'red lining' as a term, the origin of the phrase is unknown.

17. Connie Bruck, 'Angelo's Ashes', The New Yorker, 29 June 2009, p.55.
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put in its place.

Siting prototype 180 in a quiet, residential neighbourhood creates an opportunity for

source of 'red lining' as a term, the origin of the phrase is unknown.

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