Coming of age in the heyday of punk, during the late nineteen seventies, I believed that we were living at the end of something–of the American dream, Modernism, the industrial economy, or a certain kind of urbanism. The evidence was all around us, in the cities, which were literally in ruins: the South Bronx, Detroit, downtown Oakland, South Central Los Angeles. Modernist housing projects across the country were in a state of collapse, and the shipping piers that had once been key to New York’s economy had been abandoned, as had the once-great Southern Pacific railyard, Mission Bay, in San Francisco, along with the city’s two most visible breweries. Vacant lots, like missing teeth, gave a lopsided grin to the streets we haunted; ruin was everywhere. Indeed, the ruins of America’s great cities were the emblematic places of this era, the places that gave punk part of its aesthetic. Like most aesthetics, punk too contained an ethic, a worldview, with a mandate on how to act and how to live.
What is a ruin, after all? It is a human construction abandoned to nature, and one of its values lies in its similarity to the wilderness: a place mysterious, slightly dangerous, full of the promise of the unknown, with all its epiphanies. Cities are built by men (and, to a lesser extent, women), but they decay by nature, from the incremental processes of rot, erosion, rust, and the microbial breakdown of concrete, stone, wood, and brick. Nature takes over when, for economic or political reasons, maintenance is withdrawn. Sometimes, ruins are created by active attack, by the vandalism, arson, and war in which humans run wild–or by terrorism, a devastating fact of which we recently have been reminded.
A city is built to resemble a conscious mind, a network that can calculate, regulate, and earn. As such, ruins are the unconscious of a city, its memory, darkness, and lost land. In this, ruins truly bring the city to life. The act of eradicating ruins from the city often functions as an urban lobotomy, erasing its ability to dream. This kind of rationalist amnesia is a current mental illness for American cities, as the Disneyfication of Times Square or the generic developments of Yerba Buena Gardens in San Francisco or Horton Plaza in San Diego bear out. An urban ruin is a place that has fallen outside the economic life of the city, and, as such, it is an ideal home for art, which also is an activity that falls outside ordinary production and consumption. Art, though it may enter the marketplace, needs to be born outside of it–someplace more weedy, wild, unregulated, and erotic–or at least so needs the romantic art that I, who came of age in the ruins, identify with most.
For example, the performance trio Survival Research Labs staged at least one of their mechanical extravaganzas of violence and entropy in the ruins of the brewery in San Francisco’s South of Market, when that neighborhood was still made up mostly of small industrial sites and leather bars. The abandoned beer vats–I think it had been a Hamms brewery–stood like ominous giants amid chunks of cement ringed by a cyclone fence. We stood around and watched, as ingenious machines destroyed each other and menaced the audience in a baleful setting. At the time, we thought SRL’s performances were about the future, just as we thought the apocalyptic film Road Warrior was about the future. But, in reality, they exemplified the concept behind the 1985 Oakland Museum exhibition “Yesterday’s Tomorrows”–depicting only how the future looks from a now-historic point in time. It was the era of Reagan’s nuclear brinkmanship, and postnuclear ruins figured in every anxious imagination. “The living will envy the dead” was the phrase Nuclear Freeze activists recited like a mantra.
SRL was describing what was breaking down, but their industrial aesthetics were already nostalgic, for the great industrial cities were becoming something else entirely: San Francisco and New York were losing their ports to suburban locales, and the small industries of the inner cities were being replaced by artists, along with the smooth affluence that sometimes follows upon the heels of artists. New silicon-based life forms were sneaking into every interstice, without setting off alarms that all would be utterly changed. Nuclear apocalypse was more readily imaginable than was the coming digital revolution. Things may have looked bleak, and we were dressed for it, in sensuously tactile leather, boots, spikes–and lots of black. “London is burning,” called out The Clash, “But I, I, I, live by the river,” as Jacques Reda published in Les ruines de Paris. We young preferred to imagine ourselves dying rather than becoming middle-aged, and apocalypse was the planetary equivalent we anticipated.
Punk’s godfather Iggy Pop–who once sang about “walking down the street with a heart full of napalm”–is today a no-longer-beautiful, golf-playing Republican. A big-box Costco stands where SRL once performed, as generic, efficient, and quotidian a place as could be imagined, a place that shoves urbanism into suburbia. In many ways, suburbia has become urbanism’s middle-age, a blander, safer, more sequestered version of hectic city life. It was only in the intermission between the original Modernist city era of production and today’s era of consumption that the playful anarchy of punk culture could emerge from the ruins.
This all came back to me last year, when I walked into a Chelsea gallery full of the photographs of Peter Hujar, who died in 1986, during the heyday of this lost sensibility. I had been looking at a variety of contemporary art in the several galleries that preceded my momentous visit, art that was sleek, shiny, designed, fashionable, and disaffected. This art, which implicitly referred to the smooth surface of the new city, had replaced the bleak cityscapes that so moved me in Hujar’s work. The very texture of his work was different. In Hujar’s saturated, black and white prints, the world was rough in every sense; its surfaces were porous, decrepit, sensuous, full of age and an ability to absorb–whether light, meaning, or emotion. The city of Hujar’s art had a mystery and danger of the sort urban renewal pledges to remove. Indeed, not far from the galleries is Chelsea Piers, and the history I am explicating is encapsulated there as neatly as anywhere. Chelsea Piers is now a “family place,” a high-end sports and exercise complex, pricey, regulated, safe, and predictable. Full of healthy people simulating activities like golf and climbing, it is in a profound way synthetic–a synthesis of purposes and a simulation of places, though it may yet yield to ruin again. (In the wake of the World Trade Center attack, I was told that it was to be used as a triage center, except that there was no triage: only the ambulatory and the dead.)
Chelsea Piers lies where the Hudson starts to become an ocean (and, by extension, where the American insularity of the Hudson River School became international Modernism). The piers officially opened in 1910, the year about which Virginia Woolf famously remarked, “On or about December, 1910, human character changed.” One can imagine it as Modernism’s own port: immigrants, like those in Stieglitz’s famous 1907 photograph Steerage, landed there, as did luxury liners. The Titanic was headed for those piers when the iceberg intervened, and the survivors docked there a little later on the Carpathia. From those piers, the Lusitania embarked, and its bombing by Germany brought the United States into the First World War. One imagines the Modernists embarking for Europe there, and some of them, fleeing the Second World War, disembarking there, too. So, high culture was in transition at the piers, and continued to be so as late as the nineteen sixties.
Today, the Chelsea Piers’ website steers clear of its history between 1976 and 1992, when its current phase began. “The Chelsea Piers just sat there, rusting in the harbor air, until destiny called them back,” is all it claims. But they didn’t just sit there, of course. During those years, every kind of sexual outlaw and riff-raff made itself at home in this temporary, autonomous zone. On or about 1977, as attested to on the piers, human character changed again with the birth of punk, as thousands bore witness throughout the country, the voices of what now, in the shrinking vision of hindsight, look to be a generation.
While Peter Hujar photographed the Chelsea Piers, his protégé David Wojnarowicz cruised them: “Paper from old shipping lines scattered all around like bomb blasts among wrecked pieces of furniture; three-legged desks, a Naugahyde couch of mint-green turned upside down, and small rectangles of light and wind and river over the far wall. I lean towards him, pushing him against the wall, lifting my pale hands up beneath his sweater…. In the warehouse just before dark, passed along the hallways and photographed the various graffiti on the walls, some of hermaphrodites and others of sharp-faced thugs smoking cigarettes….” The emotional, erotic, aesthetic, and ethical intensity of Wojnarowicz’s words seems inseparable from this kind of place. If he–queer, punk, desperado, activist–was an artist of his time, it was because the time in which he lived was exemplified in places that are ruinous and bleak, but somehow still imbued with a romantic outlaw sense of possibility and freedom, even the freedom to be idealistic–in the bitter vein of the Sex Pistols’ “No Future,” perhaps, but idealistic all the same.
To read Wojnarowicz on his travels through the city’s ruins is to read a description of the city as a forest in which its inhabitants, like wild animals, meet, rut, fight, and vanish again into a thicket of pillars and rubble, strange creatures that seem to walk in leather pants with racks of antlers casting streetlight shadows on old brick walls. Walter Benjamin, writing of Paris a century earlier, mused, “But to lose oneself in a city–as one loses oneself in a forest–that calls for quite a different schooling. Signboards and street names, passersby, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a crackling twig under his feet, like the startling call of a bittern in the distance, like the sudden stillness of a clearing with a lily standing erect at its center.”
Ruins are the city gone feral. The photographer Francesca Woodman knew this when she explored her body and sexuality in a series of self-portraits in ruinous interiors, from about 1977 to 1981. In some ways, the ruins served formal purposes for her artworks. Their roughness and patina of age contrast with her young flesh. But they do more. The stains and scrapes and wear are signs of a history, of the passage of time. They speak of sadness, experience, and the eternal imbalance between the tangible length of past and the utterly intangible, unimaginable future before it arrives (as it never did for Woodman, who committed suicide in 1981, at the age of 22). They whet the appetite for the present, for the moment of consummation and destruction, risk and decision. In these old ruins, Woodman lost herself in erotic reverie, self-invention, and the spaciousness of a half-abandoned world.
That kind of age was not only sensuous, but explicitly sexual. Perhaps, in spanning vast amounts of time, it put quick acts of passion into perspective; perhaps it offered the melancholy that is so close to eros. In recent years, the painter Delmas Howe returned to the subject of the Chelsea Piers in its outlaw heyday, painting them as homoerotic Stations of the Cross, in which leathermen and other naked guys cruise, suffer, embrace, and generally stand around the industrial setting. His Chelsea Piers (reconstructed from slides taken by a friend dead of AIDS) have the spaciousness and majesty of classical architecture and magnify the dignity and drama of the buff figures in Howe’s paintings. But this neo-Acropolis burns and crumbles, as though the place itself and that heroic, pre-AIDS era of sexuality were what really were crucified, never to be resurrected.
Cities were reborn in the nineteen eighties and nineties, and most of their ruins have been redeveloped. Our new cities have no room for unproductive places; everything abandoned has been reclaimed as income-producing real estate. The ruinous trainyards of Mission Bay soon will be biotech facilities. I think of an old boxcar I saw out there, on which someone graffitied the word “dream.” This apparition gives weight to the photographer Susan Schwartzenberg’s assessment of the loss of ruins and vacant lots, what she calls “dreamspaces,” or the urban unconscious excised. I remember well the furious punk concerts in the vacant lot facing the 1984 Democratic Convention at Moscone Center, a lot that had been created by tearing down working-class residential hotels. That lot is now the shiny Yerba Buena Gardens, which always makes me feel as if I’m in an airport. Where Survival Research Labs once gleefully destroyed the machinery of Modernism, Costco sells in bulk to its members and can only be entered through the parking garage. This, too, is part of a suburbanization of the city that characterizes not only class and cleanliness (thought as well as deed), but an erased, homogenized sense of place and a shift from production to consumption. If the beer vats were the face of the local, these big boxes are the face of the global–or rather, its facelessness.
The ruins are disappearing, not only literally in the cities, but conceptually, in the aesthetics of our time. Disappearing with them is a romantic sensibility that may have looked like desperation in the nineteen seventies, but looks swooningly luxurious now. The task of the young today is radically different: to face the future, to come to terms with or subvert this brave new world of the generic. It shows not only in the subjects of their art, but in its very texture. Decay itself has been stopped and replaced by growth. As my era was defined by its relationship to the past, this one is defined by its relationship to the future. New technologies signal the beginning of a new sense of time and place, and this alone marks those coming of age now as faced with profoundly different questions than those of us who thought we were living at the end of the world, a quarter of a century ago. To be sure, the nineteen seventies have been aggressively, but selectively revived in the past few years: We got the glitter rock and disco, the polyester and platforms, all part of an official nineteen seventies. You have to look harder at underground music and grungier kids fighting globalization and sweatshops–the industrial jobs that went over the horizon in the remaking of American city life–to find any reference to that other nineteen seventies, the one that asked, as the Avengers put it, not what you can do for your country, but what your country’s been doing to you.
American ruins are something comparatively new, at least in the cities. Although the ruins of the rural South and the Dust Bowl had been documented by Walker Evans and the WPA photographers in the nineteen thirties, the American city for the most part has been the site of a Modernism that is utopian, industrial, and urban. Until the late nineteen seventies, they mostly signified a Marxist fantasy that avant-garde and proletarian aesthetics would unite in some unimaginable redemption. Of course, there was no redemption, only decay, and this decay, more than all the books of postmodern theory, was postmodernism itself, the other face of suburbia, with its white flight, vanishing industrial workers, and endless consumption. Ruins spoke of nonintervention, of places that were neither maintained in their original uses nor redeveloped. They remain a kind of free space, liminal, between roles: an ideal site from which art may emerge. For a brief moment, in one intermediate era, the city’s ruins constituted a dark playground for those of us who felt ourselves to be something like ruins–out of place, not of use, belonging nowhere, open to definition, engaging in noneconomic, nonproductive activity, imaginative, and erotic.
In clinging to the ruins as icon and actual space, the artists and writers of my generation were clinging to what was left of Modernism’s sense of a heroic mission. For the late nineteen seventies and early eighties were heroic, perhaps foolishly and vainly so, but we possessed a belief that art could change the world, that its subjects were justice, truth, and history. Since then, the culture we created has died so quietly that nobody has bothered to write an obituary for it, though we may consider every Starbucks in America–and Beijing, and Glasgow (where the coffeehouse has replaced the Romantic poet Robert Burns’s bookstore)–its tombstone. We are now at the beginning of an era whose constructions are far scarier than ruins. “Eat your heart out on a plastic tray,” sang the Sex Pistols. Now, we know where to buy the tray, and what the heart tastes like.