Quasi-icons / Art in urban transition zones
Judith Laister

Project INTO ALL NETWORKS, 10 murals in public space, city of Graz, 2013

Transcapes
Deserted petrol stations, vacant shops, empty lots, dumped cars, waste land: urban transition zones in a state of “no more” and “not yet” can be found in every city the world over, all similar in typology. Their indefinite stage of development is indicated by rank vegetation, crumbling façades, piles of rubble, and rubbish. Nature takes over technical infrastructure, clear-cut functions are obscured by apparent uselessness, nonhuman actors dominate human forms of appropriation. Often, these transition zones are situated in commercially low-rated districts with a poor image – in places where investments are no longer or not yet worthwhile, where owners and urban developers see no urgent need for action, look away or simply bide their time.
Borrowing Arjun Appadurai’s concept of “scapes” as the main figure for describing our globally networked space-time continuum, we may refer to such transition zones as urban transcapes: as urban landscapes that, while being locally positioned, equally elude such localisation, refusing to be unambiguously identified, and remaining both socially and economically undefined. If the city in the traditional European sense is a narrative space, informed by history and stories, culturally clearly coded and socially determined, urban transition zones are characterised by disintegration and functional refusal. Within the urban sign system, dominated as it is by sights, advertising icons, architectural landmarks, and other functioning inscriptions of space, transcapes remain open to interpretation. They neither promote the urban image, that has to be planned, designed and commodified as an ideological instrument of control, nor do they superficially serve a particular purpose, for example society, commerce or simply the human being. In urban transition zones, the “work of purification” – that is for Bruno Latour formative in the development of modern societies and thus modern cities – stands still. The neat division of urban space into clear-cut functional zones gives way to the formation of “hybrid networks” in which nonhuman beings become actors and the boundaries between urban infrastructure/nature, architecture/humans, object/subject are renegotiated.

“Cracks in the urban fabric” and “blanks”, that are not well defined by architecture or advertising and thus open up open creative space, is the term which the artist Bernhard Wolf gives to those urban transition zones which he sets out to find in Graz and other cities. His latest series of works, “In alle Netze” (Into all networks), proves to be the consistent continuation and resumption of interventions in urban space between Moscow and Graz, Frohnleiten and Maribor since the early 1990s. While these partly poetic, associative and partly tongue-in-cheek, but always ambiguous text/image comments on the sign systems of public space are also found at central meeting-places (e.g. by the opera house, in pedestrian zones, in market-squares), even in these places Bernhard Wolf makes use of ephemeral sites such as hoardings or infrastructure already adapted by others for advertising purposes, for example site fences, lampposts, electricity boxes or phone boxes. Many of these old posters were pasted anonymously or as communicative space practice without any solicitation or official legitimation in the art sphere. His activities, among others with the FOND artist group, thus consisted above all in temporarily reactivating vacant buildings which – like the “Postgarage” in Graz – are still popular venues today; an abandoned car wreck, wallpapered and covered with posters, served as a contribution to the FOND exhibition “Schleuse” and was thus exposed to the watchful eye of urban surveillance, soon to be removed; and finally, Bernhard Wolf himself has since recently been working in a once vacant shop in Griesplatz in Graz, a district which, while close to the centre, if rather lacking in prestige, has already been targeted for future urban development. “Urban pioneers” is the name given in the gentrification discourse to those social actors who temporarily make use of urban transition spaces as squatters or temporary tenants, injecting social and symbolic capital into low-image areas with their creative space practices.

Icon/s
Be it urban transition spaces or city centres of culture and commerce: when Bernhard Wolf inserts his iconic signs and text messages into public space, he does so with simple means of low-key design. Most of the subjects are black on white ground and dimensioned in accordance with the international standard sizes of sheets of paper and hoardings. Other recurrent principles which make reference to the manipulative technologies of the marketing industry are seriality, the combination of a powerful image and a terse slogan, and their conspicuous application on vertical surfaces in urban areas. Like their commercial rivals in the fight for public attention, Bernhard Wolf’s utterances only become complete when combined with people’s internal image worlds. Every social actor is visually and linguistically habituated, can read certain codes based on his socialisation, while others are undecipherable. To begin with, one must, at a very fundamental level, have German reading skills in order to decipher textual signs. In Bernhard Wolf’s latest piece, “In alle Netze” (Into all networks), these are, for example, the terms “time”, “spiritual extravagance”, “dream”, “bread, sausage, parsley”, “right, left” or “power plant”. In the “Mythos 2000” series, which was applied to a hoarding outside Graz opera house during the 1995 steirischer herbst festival, it was words from the semantic universe of “Austrian mythology”, for example “Heinz Conrads, Dalai Lama”, “Cordoba 1978” or “The German in me”. Anonymous posters from the 1990s, for instance, sported the words “charlatan”, “Olympic Gold” or “attack”.

Also on the premise that the texts can be read as denotations, the connotation will be different depending on the reader’s cultural and social positioning, contingent on what lies stored in their mental reservoirs. Some terms are more deeply rooted in culture and society (e.g. “Cordoba 1978”, Amanda Klachl or Heinz Conrads), and others, while evoking different individual associations, do not necessarily refer to specific contents of collective memory – such as “bread, sausage, parsley”, “time” or “power plant”. This intrinsic ambiguity of words contrasts with an even more universal polysemy of iconic signs. Not everyone sees images in the same way. Once again, to speak in Hans Belting’s (2005) terms of image anthropology, it is the “internal images” which complete the “external images […] in the act of sensory perception” and thus put the human being at the centre of a process of aesthetic production and reception as a “locus of images”. Every person decodes images in keeping with his habitus, following different associative impulses informed by culture and society. Someone with a knowledge of art history, for example, will discover in Bernhard Wolf’s iconic repertoire similarities to works of op-art, pop art, art informel or conceptual art. Someone familiar with the icons from the world of Austrian consumption and media or the icons of virtual worlds will associate common properties with them. While traditional advertising reacts specifically to this relativity of image perception by emphasising the positive characteristics of a consumer item at different levels of iconic and verbal signs, Bernhard Wolf’s inscriptions in urban space seek neither to fetishise nor manipulate. Instead, they aim to “strew barbs” so as to break with viewing habits: “Nothing is sold, nothing is announced, they cannot be consumed en passant.” (Bernhard Wolf) For example, when he paints large dark, concentrically shimmering circles on a white ground on the exposed brick wall of a vacant lot in the “In alle Netze” series, adding the caption “TIME”, Bernhard Wolf stages an icon with a verbal comment which clearly refuses to fulfil the function of iconic manipulation: a quasi-icon that neither plays with the yearnings of potential consumers, nor issues clear commands (Believe! Buy! Consume!) or relies on cult and general validity, but rather perplexes as a result of its ambiguity and engages in hybrid cross-links in different directions.

Quasi-icons
According to Bruno Latour, the concept of the quasi-object describes neither object nor subject, but rather their “intimate fusion in which the traces of the two components are effaced” (Latour 1997: 73). Quasi-objects are actors endowed with the potential to act that associate with other human and nonhuman beings to form hybrid networks. They are not statically rooted in a sphere of society but rather circulate between different symbolic orders, ever seeking new connections and contacts. These translations into other spheres give rise to “drifts”, as they are known, along with the inherent shifts of meaning. Seen through the Latourian spectacles of the quasi-object, Bernhard Wolf’s artistic interventions in urban transition zones can also be seen and understood better. It is not pure, complete-static “white cubes” in which his images are to be viewed. Instead, they occupy impure, dynamic-open sites in urban space, where plaster crumbles (vacant lots), nature and time are the main actors (condemned houses), and where one would not necessarily expect to find art (hoardings). At the same time, it seems as if it is not an ingenious artist subject who is speaking to us, through the coherent semantic entity of his artistic object, but rather the things themselves, tangled up in multidimensional connections. The condemned house with its flaky layers of paint is just as much an agent of artistic expression as the “natural” surroundings of the ghetto palms, the traffic infrastructure of busy roads or the architectural neighbourhood of official sights. Precisely because of the emancipated position of material and atmospheric spatial qualities, the location of viewing plays an integral role in the course of the reception process. Not only the view of the subject, but also the subject’s view of its urban setting is part of the space of interaction which opens up. “TIME” with its shimmering concentric circles looks the wrong way up a one-way street, past waste land and a vacant grocer’s shop, onto the urban development zone of Griesplatz. There, the installation “Bread, sausage, parsley” above an unused shop window looks straight onto the studio room opposite, temporarily occupied by Bernhard Wolf. Time will tell for how long, because consciously making use of transcapes implies acknowledging and encouraging the ephemeral as a fundamental conceptual principle.

Judith Laister, cultural anthropologist and art historian, researches and teaches at Karl-Franzens University Graz

Literature
Appadurai, Arjun (1996): Modernity at Large. Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis.Belting, Hans: Bildanthropologie. Entwürfe für eine Bildwissenschaft. Munich 2001.Latour, Bruno (1997 [1991]): Nous n’avons jamais été modernes:
essai d’anthropologie symétrique. Paris.