Project Descriptions (artist statements)

Vintage Projects

Urban Inversions

This project started in 1970 in a thirst to make images about the industrial quality of Midwest cities. As it worked out I covered mostly Milwakee and a bit in Chicago and Cleveland. At first I was just trying to absorb what Midwest and industrilal felt like. As a kid from New Ypork City environs I didn't see much of that growing up. But now it was fascinating and yet sad. Sad because it looked like these places were falling slowly into neglect.

I didn't know it then but I was seeing the earliest stages of decline of industry in America and particularly in the upper Midwest. From the start of this project in 1970 until the 21st century Milwaukee went from 13th largest city to smaller than 40th. Cleveland lost half it's population.

That transition to intellectual capital and services meant a type of change Americans may have welcomed. The service economy was friendlier to woman workers, produced the chance for higher income and made people feel they were not toiling at what could be defined as some form of routine assembly line work. I don't have an opinion on these choices but I think humans loose something when they stop using their hands and a lot of their daily effort is only in thier heads.

Imagine the people who worked in industrial settings and their trials and hopes. They left traces of themselves here and there on there work environments. Then their children, who didn't get to work in those plants used the abandoned walls for their spray can art expression. What is left is decay, art, history, and a visual poetry that narrates much about how fast humanity changes through development.

The decay of industry is a piece of a larger metaphoir - a patina that descibes human existence on this planet, and like the large reptiles, that existence is nothing we can count on for the long haul.

 

Old Worlds

Old Worlds looks at change quite differently then Urban Inversions. Europe did not go through the type of post-industrial change America did unaided by a sense of its own history preceeding the industrial revolution. The states had not developed a culture separate from their English roots so the early national identity included the industrial age. As that industrial life has passed it's zenith I think we find ourselves in a challenging position. Can we survive as a national culture for long essentially not making anything? UIf we have been defined by our industry for two centuries then what will define us now? Maybe we would be wise to look at Europe and Asia where the cultures were around long before the industrial age. Old buildings get preserved and despite modernity the sense of culture surviving the long haul is visible. Europeans look at themselves as the progeny of an elder experienced culture wise in its wasy after so many horrendous mistakes. So many wonderful places in Europe protect the icons of that long culture. As a cntrast half century old buildings in America are coinsidered inefficient and planned for destruction.

The images I have made take a crack at trying to understand this difference, between America and Europe. In a way Old Worlds was a short term primer for my far deeper connection to Ha Noi, one of the world's oldest cities and cultures. Right now in 2010 that city also faces a great crisis tryibng to resolve its history with its need to be a first world competitive economy and culture

As time takes us through this young century we can look at Europe and Asia to see how they fair with so much technological and therefore cultural change as compared to America.