Private Places on the R

A belch precedes the train, the exhalation organizing constellations of people and their things over the gum- and garbage-dotted platform. Squealing to a stop, the chugging R aligns them, however chaotically, at its sliding doors. Ear buds face old-school cans, their podcasts breaking the train’s squeal. Reading materials bob and droop, bob and droop, bob and droop, resigned to their wrinkly fate. Bags jump from between the divisions of the station’s wooden benches, rising apart and floating apart. Sunglasses hide curious eyes, their wearers made mysterious -- a deeply cheesy brand of mysterious.

The R doors slide open in a synchronized swoosh. The station briefly reanimates, galaxies stream from train cars as our constellations stream in, objects orbiting their associated people. Once inside -- “stand clear of the closing doors!” -- subsets rush to work, feeding the seconds-ago depleted galaxies of struggling things. The faux-wood membrane of the third car from the rear keeps its communicating contents ignorant as to the physics of their trip, allowing for the manufacture of private places.

Private places, facilitated by orange and yellow seats -- seats that dip and rise horizontally, supporting individual claims to space far more effectively than riders’ bottoms. But those seats, those prized seats, have to be caught by the same bottoms or saved in advance by a colonizing book or eager garment during the course of the initial scramble. Print and technological objects struggle among those constellations not quick enough to take a seat into orbit early on. The strain of hanging from ill-placed bars causes the personal walls of the standing to buckle as they come up. They are hanging exhibitions. The cleverest constellations, in contrast, find their way to end and corner seats, coveted for their comparative seclusion and broad range of sight.

Sight: in a sealed galaxy where no one is looking for fear of everyone looking ("see something, say something!"), how can patrons rest? How can products act properly to produce self-contained universes with all those damned eyes bearing down on them? Distracting advertisements prevent staring to some degree, yes, but how long can a body take to fake read the lone "LEARN ENGLISH" sign in the third car from the rear? Sunglasses then? Few constellations can bear the conspicuousness. Teetering between hip and creepy, sunglasses make for an awkward sense of place. Sleeping, or, more commonly, fake-sleeping, puts the finishing touch on the private universe of the person-object constellation -- a strongly bodily component in a largely orbiting process. And the R squeals to a stop, fresh inputs clustered along its sliding doors, tired constellations pressed against its windows.

Representations of New York through Museum Collections

This post comes out of a side interest that I have had for a couple of years in cultural heritage protection, the international trade in antiquities and art, and the role that the US plays in both these arenas. As an archaeologist, these topics are particularly important because of the implications they have for solving the problem of archaeological site looting. For this first post however, I would like to discuss, very simply, a few points about this large, discipline-wide issue that relate to us and this class, namely, the representations of cultural heritage that we can find in New York, and what these representations might signify about New York’s culture

New York has had a long history with global cultural heritage going back to the establishments of its first major art collections. During the 1800s, art collecting in the US surged alongside the country’s growth as a powerful industrialized nation; wealthy New York citizens were the first to amass huge collections of art objects, antiquities, and “curiosities” from different cultures around the world. Over time, these private collections were donated to public museums and have become the cores of many of New York’s most famous museum collections (ex: The Lehman Collection of Art at the MET). In addition, wealthy New York denizens were also the sponsors of large-scale explorative expeditions that aided not only in the continued building of these collections, but also in jump-starting the careers of many of the today’s most heralded pioneers of anthropological, ethnographic, archaeological, and art-historical scholarship.

Looking back upon the history of this time period, it is possible to infer a connection between wealth and power, intellectual pursuit, and emergence of New York City as an international center of elite culture and Western civilized society. In many ways, the formation of large art collections that were eventually to become the pillars of museums like the Metopolitan Museum of Art were signs of New York’s (and in many ways the US’s) entrance onto the global scene. They were physical representations of New York’s wealth and intellectual prowess.

At the same time, however, these art collections were also physical representations of other cultures. Although largely incomplete and usually quite biased, the objects within the collections were meant to recreate (imperfectly) the culture of a distant land and people, contact with whom the average US citizen, no matter how wealthy, was unlikely ever to have. They were thus simultaneously signs of “otherness” as well as signs of New York elite culture.

My point in bringing up this topic in particular is to try and think about how New York’s representation through these collections has changed from the early days of their creation. The days of direct, large-scale art and antiquities collecting is over, and with the advent of cultural heritage protection laws, museum policies have come under serious scrutiny. In the past several years, many of the Western world’s most elite institutions have been pressured to return objects that source nations claim were unlawfully removed (one of the most notorious of these cases was the recent return to Italy of the MET’s Eurphronios Krater). What do these issues signify about New York’s history of art and antiquities collecting? Was it a bad thing? Have these recent legal troubles changed the way in which New York elite society is represented?

Walking down Madison Avenue on the east side, one encounters the shops of dozens if not hundreds of art and antiquities dealers. The owners of some of the largest of these establishments are powerful denizens of New York society, carry much weight in elite circles, and often have large collections of art and antiquities themselves. In many ways, the continued existence of well-regarded private art collectors and dealers, many of whom pride themselves on their connoisseurship signifies that the old ideals of intellectual culture still thrive among New York’s elite despite the somewhat harsh criticism that collecting has garnered in the past several years. That the art market is a multi-billion dollar industry today also shows that the connection between art and wealth has also been retained.

I suppose a question to close with could then be: What part of New York is represented through its art collections in the modern world? New York has become so diverse since the days of its first art collections, and the cultures that were once represented and glimpsed only through art objects can now be seen, heard, and tasted on any street corner of the city (ie: there is no need to visit a museum in order to experience Ethiopian culture). New York’s multi-culturalism is one of its most interesting aspects, so what have the art objects that were once the only window into the outside world come to signify these days?

The context of public archaeology in NYC

Yesterday I attended a symposium called “Archaeology and the Public in New York” held at the African Burial Ground National Monument. The five speakers discussed publicly-engaged archaeology at various sites across the metro area, including the African Burial Ground, Seneca Village, Washington Square’s potter’s field, the ship at the World Trade Center, and Joseph Lloyd Manor on Long Island. What I found most compelling about the symposium presentations was the idea that archaeological sites frequently take on significance (signify) outside of the context in which they are interpreted by most archaeologists. This is particularly apparent in the case of the African Burial Ground, as its tortuous and tumultuous history from rediscovery to landmarking amply illustrates.

The notion that archaeological sites exist and are shaped in a present and public context becomes more complicated when examined in light of questions raised by practitioners and critics of contextual archaeology. According to Johnsen and Olsen (1992: 420) the concern of hermeneutic philosophy is how we understand: “What conditions make understanding of otherness, past or present, possible?” Hermeneutic philosophy (however problematic are its various incarnations of Volk and “objective mind”) asks us to consider the connection (or leap) that we make between the material culture we find and the meaning it had for its users. Frequently the public(s) and descendent communities intuitively make these leaps, unconsciously (or consciously) connecting their own contextual experience to material culture in order to understand the past, in much the same vein as the Historicists advocated. Some archaeologists working at the African Burial Ground who feel deeply connected to both the buried and descendent communities freely make these connections. Many archaeologists, however, express a greater reluctance to make such leaps, yet that we do indeed leap is undeniable. In public archaeology, perhaps a relevant question is how do we leap together?

The question of connection is a difficult one. Bloch and Thomas (discussed in Buchli 1995) raise additional challenges for considering the question of interpretation and connection: the significance of objects is shifting both in the past and the present, and the significance of material culture is what we in the present take from it and use in our own understanding of ourselves. Both public engagement and the epistemology of our discipline thus challenge us to reconsider prevalent notions of what constitutes valid knowledge production, how we connect the past to the present (which we inevitably do), and the goals of archaeological investigation.

"the actual topography of New York is garbage-based"

"Archaeology's object is garbage." -Michael Shanks

The Believer recently published this delightful interview with Robin Nagle, the NYC Department of Sanitation's anthropologist-in-residence, who's probably the only person to have been employed both as a professor at NYU and a sanitation worker in the Bronx. The conversation touches on topics like the history of urban sanitation (and the issue of smell I raised in the post below), the role of waste in forming the micro-geography of the city, and the paradoxical infrastructural scale and social invisibility of sanitation work. The following exchange seemed particularly relevant for this blog:

BLVR: You’ve also written about how sanitation workers commented on how they get to know a block’s trash on their route over time, down to the specific households. I was wondering if this was at all surprising, or useful, for you in regard to your training in anthropology and social science, which aim to coax out subtle information but in very different ways.
RN: It’s just archaeology. But it’s archaeology in the moment, very temporary, nothing formal. It’s a folk archaeology of contemporary household trash on the curb.
It takes time, because you don’t get a steady route, necessarily, until you have some seniority. But senior men and women who’ve been on the job for a while, who’ve had the same route for a long time, they know. I’ve heard stories of a guy who watched a family: watched a couple marry, move into this building where he picked up, and they had a child. The child came to know him. He watched her grow up. He watched her go to college. He watched her have children of her own. And they became buddies over time. And then when he retired, she was heartbroken. It was a nice little vignette.
We assume when we put our garbage in the bag—especially if, you know, it’s a black bag, usually, or a green bag, we can’t see what’s inside. We don’t want people to see what’s inside. How embarrassing! But those bags break. Or it’s just in a bin and then it’s tipped and all the contents spill. And sure, you can read it. Over time, if you’re doing that same set of blocks for ten years, you will be able to give a pretty savvy account of what’s happened there across that decade.

the gowanus canal

This post is draws on an ongoing project about the Gowanus Canal, a severely polluted industrial waterway in South Brooklyn that was named a Superfund site in March 2010. The canal was constructed in the mid-nineteenth century, and by the 1880s, it was a vital conduit for moving building supplies (including the stone for Brooklyn’s brownstones) into and manufactured goods out of the rapidly growing borough. A range of industries mushroomed around its perimeter: manufactured gas plants, coal yards, tanneries, cement and paint factories, printing presses, and chemical works. In the 1920s, the canal was the busiest commercial waterway in the U.S., but postwar deindustrialization brought about its rapid decline as a transportation infrastructure. Today, the area hosts continuing small-scale manufacturing, several public housing projects, pockets of rapid gentrification, art studios, empty warehouses, a plethora of development proposals, grassroots environmental activism, hipster dance parties, and EPA research teams.


I. Death and Decay
There's a longstanding popular association of the canal with death, criminal activity, and uncanny hauntings. In Jonathan Lethem’s novel Motherless Brooklyn, a character jokes that the Gowanus is “the only body of water in the world…that was ninety percent guns.” Newspaper reports from the nineteenth century record frequent drownings in the canal, often suicides; the twentieth century saw the emergence of the rumor that the canal served as a dumping ground for the corpses of those killed by the mob. I'm interested in the semiotic process that linked the canal to morbidity and criminality.

One of the things that's sparked my curiosity about the canal is its evident attraction, in recent years, for a growing number of artists, urban explorers, anarchist squatters, photographers, writers, amateur historians and archaeologists. They (or we, I should say) are drawn to this uncanny legacy, and to the aesthetic and affective qualities of the canal and the surrounding landscape, with its derelict factories and crumbling warehouses. Many of the visual artists work with images of ruin, contamination and decay—in the words of one photographer, who’s been shooting the canal for decades, “the pollution creates...a great canvas.” The New York Times City Room blog, citing the canal’s “faded industrial-maritime glamour, beautifully framed vistas, de Chirico-esque natural lighting and abiding mood set somewhere between peaceful and desolate,” recently appealed to readers to submit entries for a “little online show of Gowanus artwork,” and received hundreds of images in response. I've mostly thought about this aspect of the canal in terms of aesthetics (in particular, those of the modern/industrial/urban ruin, a subject whose appeal seems to be rising), which suggests to me a question about the relationship of aesthetics to semiotics.


II. Smell and Contamination
Even in its early years, the large quantities of sewage and industrial effluent dumped into the canal created a pollution problem that earned it the nickname “the Lavender Lake.” During the 1880s and 1890s, the canal's notorious stench was noted in sanitary reports, newspaper coverage, and even songs.


The problem persists today, compounded by the presence of a century's accumulation of industrial waste (Walter Mugdan, EPA's Region 2 director, says that in many Superfund sites, the EPA measures contaminant concentration in parts per millions or billions, but that in the Gowanus Canal, they must measure in parts per hundred—the sediment layer at the bottom of the canal is 4.5 % coal tar, a byproduct of manufactured gas production). The canal is still a dumping ground for biological waste--more than fifty times a year, rain overwhelms New York City’s sewer system, dumping some 27 billion gallons of raw sewage and storm runoff into urban waterways. It's mainly this sewage that's responsible for the characteristic stink of the Gowanus today. I've argued elsewhere that the stench of the canal has become a means of indexing other forms of contamination in the canal--the dangerous, unseen materials like PCBs and PAHs--and the fears they inspire. Unlike these slow-acting carcinogens, the smell is a palpable register of the canal's pollution, perceptible in immediate sensory form. (Betty Lester, a local resident and activist, echoes other locals when she links the two: “I'm no scientist and I'm no expert, but I believe they gonna find it's more contaminated than they thought. You knew from the smell that it was unhealthy.”) My limited encounters with semiotic theory so far have emphasized visual and verbal (or at least aural) signs, but I'd suggest this is an example of a semiotic relationship materialized as scent. So another thing I'd like to consider might be the ways to think about semiotics in relation to different sensory registers: touch, smell, taste, and so on.