Urban Legends: The South Bronx in Representation and Ruin

• Main Author: L'Official, Pete Thomas
• Other Authors: Roberts, Jennifer L.
• Language: en_US
• Published: Harvard University 2014
• Subjects: American studies; Art history; American literature; built environment; municipal art; representation; ruin; trompe l'oeil; urban crisis
• Online Access: http://dissertations.umi.com/gsas.harvard.inactive:11825; http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:13065024

"Urban Legends: The South Bronx in Representation and Ruin" examines the construction of the South Bronx in the American imagination during the 1970s and 1980s--a time when the South Bronx was synonymous with the failures of urbanism. The project attempts a multidisciplinary excavation of the cultural manifestations of urban ruin as articulated through the histories, literatures, and visual arts produced within and inspired by the ruins of the Bronx. The dissertation contends that Bronx ruins offered a site for visual artists, writers, and photographers to create new ways of understanding the production and perception of urban environments, while shaping the forms and styles that these creations took. The project theorizes the emergence and legacy of these forms alongside what it terms "municipal art": public works of city governmental bodies which, themselves, responded to ruin, and that might also be read as art. The dissertation's first part places the building cuts of the artist Gordon Matta-Clark in dialogue with the trompe l'oeil window decals of New York's "Occupied Look" program. It argues, on one hand, that Matta-Clark's artworks employ the tactics and effects of trompe l'oeil, and, on the other, that the seemingly failed "Occupied Look" project presents, upon close examination, vastly more interesting questions about temporality, duration, stasis within the built environment. The dissertation's second part views 1980s New York City Department of Finance tax assessment photographs within and against documentary and conceptual art contexts to reveal aesthetic debts owed by photographers and artists to "administrative" or systematic modes. The dissertation argues that these tax photos, despite their empirical intention, are inevitably productive of narrative, and demand an empathetic model of viewership that gestures at historic ruin-gazing while puncturing mythological understandings of urban ruin. The dissertation's third part examines how the popular fiction of Tom Wolfe and Don DeLillo imagined the Bronx built environment. The dissertation argues that the infrastructures that animate these portions of their fiction--abhorred in one and celebrated in the other--bind the South Bronx to city, making it less an alienated nowhere than one that is intimately tied to the world around it.