| You couldn’t be blamed for responding to Fiona Jack’s work emotionally and then figuring out the meaning later. Like a song that you don’t know all the words to, but sing along anyway, Jack calls her viewers into a chorus before we are even sure what we are singing about. Her recent installation After The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy is deeply rooted in a complex theoretical critique of modern urbanism, but its emotional honesty is so profound that you ought to enjoy it while you’re there and think about the rest later. |  |
Watts Urban Planning? – Anna Jackson
You couldn’t be blamed for responding to Fiona Jack’s work emotionally and then figuring out the meaning later. Like a song that you don’t know all the words to, but sing along anyway, Jack calls her viewers into a chorus before we are even sure what we are singing about. Her recent installation After The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy is deeply rooted in a complex theoretical critique of modern urbanism, but its emotional honesty is so profound that you ought to enjoy it while you’re there and think about the rest later.
Jack's career began in the design world where she commented on subjects as diverse as the war in Iraq and the promotion of “nothingness” as a consumable item. Her practice has manifested itself in as many media as political voices. A New Zealander at heart, she is now based in LA, and the aforementioned installation forms part of her exhibition “Two Projects” at Two Rooms Gallery in her hometown of Auckland.
One room of the gallery space is painted floor to ceiling—almost every surface is covered, creating a mysterious cubbyhole of permeable energy. Since the work is too detailed to be read at a distance and too large to be seen up close, it thus demands a subjective encounter. The walls are covered by a combination of abstract paintings and marginally legible scribblings that are overtly visceral, and yet there is an apparent system or ordering of subjects and a composition that makes you think twice. If you really take your time, the notations begin to direct you, in a sense, throughout the room as you collect tidbits of information, albeit nonsensical. As you move throughout the space, the abstract paintings begin to reveal themselves and emerge as a result of a self-conscious mapping project.
Jack's paintings and drawings are conceptual responses to and notations that trace her wanderings throughout the Watts district in south LA. Jack was initially drawn to the Watts district as a subject because of its stark contrast to its neighboring boroughs. Jack sometimes volunteers for a needle exchange program and for a juvenile prison, both of which regularly take her into and near this district. Jack found that, while geographically close to her own neighborhood, the Watts district is light years away from the culture of LA that the world recognizes. Reportedly, the community has the lowest household earning in all of LA and nearly 50% of families and individuals live below the poverty line. For Jack, the Watts district is emblematic of the racial and class segregation that continues to suppress the underprivileged in the United States.
The Situationist text, “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy,” written in 1965 in response to the racially driven Watts Riots of the same year, became the basis from which Jack derived her mapping technique. Rather than moving through the city on the kind of autopilot that would usually govern her actions, she would wander aimlessly throughout Watts, led by her intuitive responses to the terrain of the city itself—by both its enticing and repelling features.
By recording some of the encounters experienced and by noting the ephemera gathered on these journeys, Jack creates a psycho-geographical map that is translated into an installation. Ironically, when viewing the work, our encounters are also determined by the subconscious allure of our own wandering. Like all maps, Jack’s is a symbolic depiction of a space that highlights relations between the components in that space. While her map may be so personalized that it is utterly impractical, it does hint at an insightful method of exploration and, as the Situationists suggested, this may be an effective way of urban planning.
The Situationists felt that the normal motives for moving throughout a city, going to work, etc., created a kind of dehumanization of space. To counter this, they proposed that their notion of psycho-geographic mapping could be a useful way of planning, as it would also incorporate the intuitive responses of its residents to designated spaces. While that may seem a little euphoric and absurd, it may have some plausible efficacy. Rather than a community like Watts, using a homogeneous system of urban planning (which is largely a political and social structure designed to suppress the under-privileged), perhaps the residents should be allowed to be, at least to some extent, self-determining. If a specific area in the city already arouses the same affective or aesthetic response for a number of people, then perhaps this approach would initiate some pre-planning and designate that space in response to its particular affective or aesthetic response. The result could see an effective use of public space determined by and reflective of its residents.
While her practice is largely politically driven, this work is subtler in its suggestion that social injustices should be discussed in whichever field we work. Jack has not gone as far as to attach a sense of agency within this work nor does she suggest that the urban mapping of places such as Watts is responsible for its social problems, but her ideology is a valid suggestion. Without the suppression of homogeneous state systems, such as planning, perhaps urban areas like Watts would have the chance to develop, through their own vision, and to alleviate some of the perpetuating social strain found there.
The implication may be a little too idealist for some, but Jack, nonetheless, highlights the importance of listening to and conversing about such issues. And, if all of that seems a bit far-fetched, or you just don't care, the energy and honesty of her work will have you caught in its rhythm anyway.
