Living testimonies

Dorothy Parker, American poet, short-story writer, critic and satirist, famously referred to Los Angeles as “72 suburbs in search of a city.”

By CARL HOFFMAN
Dubai (photo credit: thomas meyer)
Dubai
(photo credit: thomas meyer)
Dorothy Parker, American poet, short-story writer, critic and satirist, famously referred to Los Angeles as “72 suburbs in search of a city.” For this very New York City-oriented author and raconteur, Los Angeles simply did not look, feel or behave anything like what she regarded as a “city.”
Similarly, watching news reports on CNN about the fledgling new country of South Sudan, one sees images of Juba, the nation’s capital, appearing to most of the cable network’s Western viewers as not much more than a huge sprawling village. But Juba – established as a trading post by a few Greek merchants in 1922 – is now universally acclaimed as a city, not a village or a town.
So what exactly is a city? This is the underlying question that runs through an engaging new photographic exhibition called “The City Show,” currently on display at the Center for Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv. Curated by Yanai Toister, who informs us, “I’m not really a curator. I’m an artist – an artist who curates,” the exhibition is presented with the assistance of the Goethe Institute and comprises 40 images by 19 Israeli and German artists.
The Israelis photographed mostly in Israel; the Germans throughout the world. The images run an intriguing gamut of everything from half-built houses near Petah Tikva to vacant lots in Inner Mongolia; from small settlements in the Golan Heights to abandoned hotels in Ukraine; and from the archeological remains of ancient cities in the Negev to a city being built in Abu Dhabi.
Says Toister, “I think the most important thing that I would like a spectator to leave this exhibition with is perhaps an idea of what a city is today. When does a village stop being a village and start being a city? When does a city stop being a city and start being a megacity or megalopolis? Obviously, the answers to these questions are abstract, vague.
That’s one important issue that I’d like to bring up – what constitutes a city. Is it just its human inhabitants, or a type of construction? What is a city? “An important thing that I would like to note also is that as far as I’m concerned, the definition of a city is not only something that is independent of size but also something that is very difficult to frame within the definitions of time. Is an archeological excavation a city? Is Abu Dhabi a city? Will it ever be a city? Does a city require the type of urbanism that we are familiar with? Those are the issues that are coming to the surface here.”
Visitors expecting to find some sort of “celebration of the city” in this exhibition are certain to be disappointed.
There are no charming views of Paris, exciting vistas of New York or breathtaking studies of spectacularly designed buildings in Singapore or Dubai. The images are, by and large, somber and straightforwardly grim. A few, like a photo of construction workers riding in ski lifts over an empty, blighted landscape, are whimsical in the style of “deadpan photography,” but most portray scenes that many would describe as ugly. Toister says, “Well, if you want magazine photography, you might as well turn to a magazine.
This is an art gallery. Our responsibility is to present a view of more complex narratives.”
BUT DO those narratives constitute a study of the city, or an indictment? Do the photographers in this exhibition have a problem with urbanism? “No, we don’t have a problem with urbanism.” Toister insists. “And it’s not for me to say whether urbanism as we have known it is good or bad. I don’t think that there is an indictment here at all. As far as I’m concerned there is no moral judgment. I don’t think that ‘decay’ or ‘urban decay’ is ugly. It certain cases, and actually here, it’s quite charming.”
And yet, in his introduction to the exhibition’s catalogue, Toister informs us, “In his Planet of Slums, Mike Davis contends that in the future, urban population will not live in cities as we know them today.
Instead, it will be based in megaslums, in which various policing forces will fight with armed militias over the control of billions of people living in the gutters, surrounded by chemical waste and exposed to all kinds of pestilences.”
Predictably then, the exhibition duly includes two quite compelling images of present-day urban slums: one spreading around a swamp in Lagos and the other sprawling along a canal in Manila.
But there are also photographs that say something quite different – images of cities being built in Abu Dhabi and Ma’aleh Adumim, an empty lot marked out with surveyor’s chalk in Mongolia and the archeological remains of cities in the Negev and the Golan that vanished thousands of years ago.
Says Toister, “A lot of the images here – I would say most of them – don’t fall within the clear borders of the traditional definitions of a city.
Many images are of what we might call ‘pre-city’ conditions. Others are of ‘post-city’ conditions. For example, we have images of Shivta and Halutza, which were Nabatean cities.
We have an image from an archeological excavation at Sha’ar Hagolan.
Thousands of years ago, this was a major urban center, much more important than Tel Aviv is today. And we have images of what are supposed to be cities of the future, such as Abu Dhabi. And neither of the two poles – pre-city or post-city – actually come closer to the city as we know it today.
My intention in any case is to present the two opposite poles, the two different polarities within the spectrum of what might be called ‘the city.’” The exhibition is displayed in two galleries, one upstairs from the other.
From a special vantage point on the second floor, the viewer can see the two photographs – one upstairs and one downstairs – that Toister considers to be the key pictures of the exhibition, a decaying building in Shoham (the oldest photo in the exhibition), and a decaying building in Inner Mongolia. The two pictures are virtually identical – same perspective, same background, same color and lighting and what almost looks like the same decaying building.
This, according to Toister, is another point that the show is making: that places are like other places elsewhere in the world. The equivalency between the building in Shoham and the one in Inner Mongolia, along with other pairs of similar images, is meant, says Toister, “to demonstrate that certain contemporary issues here in Israel aren’t unique to Israel, but are rather more in line with general urban sprawl and planning issues.”
The alert viewer is likely to notice that there are very few human beings in the pictures of this exhibition.
The few that appear seem almost to be added to provide size perspective for the scene, rather than as an integral part of the story. “It just seemed like a better way to tell the story,” Toister explains. “Humans tend to get stuck on images of other humans, and therefore tend to avoid or miss the story altogether. This was a way to tell a narrative that is more complex, more complicated.”
There are no explanatory signs or cards anywhere near the photographs.
Information sheets are available on tables outside the galleries.
The images on the walls are displayed without comment. Toister wants nothing to get between the image and the viewer.
Whoever comes to see this show will likely leave with at least one image stuck in his or her head that simply refuses to go away. For this viewer, there were two. One is a photo of what appears to be a bombed-out, gutted post-World War II Berlin, which, upon later investigation, turns out to have been taken in 2009. The other is a garishly colored, almost surrealistically lit abandoned street corner in the ruined inner city of Detroit, which looks like it was painted by Edward Hopper after coming back to life in a post-apocalyptic nightmare world.
“The City Show” is on display until August 24 at the Center for Contemporary Art, 5 Kalisher Street, Tel Aviv. For further information, call (03) 510-6111 or visit www.cca.org.il.