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siting futurity
Bones: The Eternal City of the Industrial Age (2016), Camilo José
Vergara “mutes the romanticization of ruination” and “prompt[s]
the reader to investigate the built environment and question the
processes that produce the observed context” by including im-
ages such as “startling Crime Stoppers billboards that feature a
photograph of a murder victim and the charge, ‘You know who
killed me’” and “a ‘kind of fantasy architecture’ made possible by
new building materials that allow architects and builders (and
others) to transform the simple profiles of small churches, De-
troit’s unique Coney Island hot dog restaurants, and strip clubs
into new “ornamental forms,” with bold columns, waving roofs,
and dramatic curves” (Schalliol 2018, 106).
In addition to the potential consciousness-raising that ruin
images can do “[b]y evoking the very fears they mean to pacify”
and thereby “mak[ing] visible our continuing fall into widening
inequality and decline” (Apel 2015, 157), they also draw attention
to the affective workings of our increasing visual culture, some-
thing renée hoogland explores in her post-Deleuzian considera-
tion of local documentary photographer Julia Reyes Taubman’s
Detroit: 138 Square Miles. hoogland insists that we attend not to
some ethereal concept of affect but rather to what works of art
do to us — how and why they affect us in the ways they do. If one
considers the soggy furniture in Khan’s Come Hell or High Water
or the even more bedraggled teddy bears nailed to the outside of
houses in the Heidelberg Project, an “outdoor art environment”
that reclaimed a street on Detroit’s East Side, one gets a sense of
the transformative power that art can have and the importance
of its materiality.6 As we have seen in this study, the historical
locational specificity of this materiality is a mode that cultural
practitioners in Vienna find open to them, and as we see in the
next section, this is precisely the lesson Vienna presented Wes
Anderson a chance to learn.
6 For more on the project, see its informative website at https://www.heidel-
berg.org.
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book Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna"
Siting Futurity
The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna
- Title
- Siting Futurity
- Subtitle
- The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna
- Author
- Susan Ingram
- Publisher
- punctumbooks
- Location
- New York
- Date
- 2021
- Language
- English
- License
- CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
- ISBN
- 978-1-953035-48-6
- Size
- 12.6 x 20.2 cm
- Pages
- 224
- Keywords
- activism, Austria, contemporary art, contemporary theater, protest culture, radicalism, social protest, Vienna
- Category
- Geographie, Land und Leute
Table of contents
- Preface 11
- Introduction 19
- 1. (Re)Forming Vienna’s Culture of Resistance: The Proletenpassions @ #Arena 39
- 2. Converting Kebab and Currency into Community on Planet #Ottakring 57
- 3. Lazarus’s Necropolitical Afterlife at Vienna’s #Volkstheater 81
- 4. Hardly Homemad(e): #Schlingensief’s Container 101
- 5. From Grand Hotels to Tiny Treasures: Wes Anderson and the Ruin Porn Worlds of Yesterday 119
- 6. Capitalism, Schizophrenia, and #Vanlife: The Alpine Edukation of Hans Weingarter 143
- 7. #Hallstatt: Welcome to Jurassic World 161
- Bibliography 189
- Filmography 215