During the cold war, if a BBC drama team wanted to recreate the
concrete jungle of any eastern bloc regime they came to Scotland.
Alan Bennett’s play about the spy Guy Burgess’ depressing
exiled existence in a drab Moscow flat, was faked using locations
in Scotland. Along with the diet of deep fried mars bars and chronic
heart disease, Scotland’s housing is one of its most notorious
and disastrous claims to fame.
How urban spaces are planned, constructed and maintained is a reoccurring
source of interest to Helen McCrorie. Specifically she’s sought
to reanimate the ghosts of the cities dead, by focusing on the surfaces,
facades and spaces of derelict non-sites. In her various video works,
the impassive gaze of the camera, still and silent, invites a bit
of ‘radical nostalgia’. Looking at the crumbling ruin
of what was once probably a shiny new modern interior, its difficult
not to experience a sense of the lost hopes and the dented dreams
which planners and inhabitants must of felt. In her work there’s
a palatable sense of what happens when idealised plans, come face
to face with the hard facts of everyday living.
In modern urban planning a counter productive spirit of architectural
competition has often prevailed. Increasingly an architects main
business centered upon analyzing, then prescribing solutions to
social problems. The resultant levels of success or notoriety led
to the cultivation of an architectural personae, potentially at
odds with the needs of social planning. His (lets face it , it was
always a he) buildings became the individual models for his grander
vision of widespread utopian innovation. Unfortunately the cult
of the superstar architect, with architects akin to creative urban
troubleshooters, meant that their visions were inevitably going
to clash with the rival alternate visions of other architects better
tomorrows. The disastrous end results for the ‘mere’ inhabitants
was that they often found themselves living within islands of planned
housing, disconnected and isolated from the unifying fabric of the
broader community. A striking by product of this competitive individual
planning was the growth of dead spaces between distinct spaces –
a bit of wasteland between estates. These are the spaces that McCrorie’s
camera gaze fall upon, the apparently inconsequential spots –
a piece of wasteland underneath a motorway. It’s precisely
these negative spaces which, for her are best able to communicate
the fatal gap between the plan and the reality.
Her work seeks to tease out the manner in which the organisation
of social space is implicitly or overtly political and ideological.
Many commentators have noted the grid structure often imposed on
cities is the direct articulation and necessary component of capitalist
logic. New buildings can be easily built without substantial inconvenience;
tear one down erect another. Likewise as Paul Virillo detailed in
his book Speed and Politics, the layout of a city is often directly
related to the need to be able to quickly and efficiently exercise
military and political power. After the early revolutions in Paris
in the ninetieth century, Napoleon III destroyed the old warren
like structure of Paris, replacing it with large boulevards, which
the army could quickly and easily move along to crush any future
uprisings. While McCrorie’s work is far from a crude illustration
of such analysis, her reoccurring choices of derelict houses, vandalized
public spaces and rubbish filled canals, all point to spaces where
the imprint of individual anger or desperation has been powerfully
left. Planning is never neutral; somebody is always paying, while
somebody is getting rich.
John Beagles |
