Page - 132 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

132 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.