Empty Pools: Failed Space/Space to Fail
A small feature that may appear incidental is the architectural space of the empty swimming pool transformed into gladiatorial arena/pit in the Max Headroom “Rakers” episode. Built space is a constant presence throughout this project and we work through its shadows, alleys, beneath highways, in front of fancy boutiques, and in fading neighborhoods. The pool is an unlikely but consistently circulating site within which we can think the failures of urban luxury and the overlay of meanings and intent provided by global youth skateboarding practice, such that “the pool” becomes ironic and iconic in a global imaginary—a space of play and stage for mimetic mediated representations of LA skate history by Japanese pop stars.
Los Angeles skateboarders in the 70s began to exploit a new terrain in earnest—a vacated space out of which to extract new pleasures—the drained suburban swimming pool. The environmental risks constantly inherent in Southern California—wildfires and drought—meant that pools and the houses they augmented with liquid reservoirs of luxury were exposed to austerity and abandonment. Human territorializing of the landscape fails spectacularly with these events and again when real estate markets crash or tracts are divested from because of racial coding, government attrition, and/also expansion of the city’s transport capillaries with airports and freeways.
How pathetic property appears when such forces are arrayed against it! Suddenly though, such evacuated/evicted suburban dreams leave new possibilities exposed, possibilities skaters then activated into pleasure zones. The effect of seizing empty space for pleasure is a radical reconfiguration of vacuity precipitated by environmental or market effect. “Thus while the primary rationale of the villa habitat is that of speculation on plots and property, pool skateboarding was an insertion within suburban residential space—specifically the relatively accessible outdoor space of the pool—and so attacked its property logic, appropriating spaces for use rather than investing for exchange” (Borden 2001, 46). A challenge is unintentionally posited to unimaginative capitalism, though we must be cautious in sharing Borden’s exuberance: we have learned the lesson well—where new intensities are invigorated, capitalism’s schizophrenic attentions are quick to follow. Judith Halberstam tracks the queer allure in failed space through the photographs of the Spanish artists Carbelo/Carceller. In positioning the photographs of empty pools amid a larger investigation of queer failure, a reading of emptiness emerges as a profound site for contemplating loss, history, and desire:
Los Angeles skateboarders in the 70s began to exploit a new terrain in earnest—a vacated space out of which to extract new pleasures—the drained suburban swimming pool. The environmental risks constantly inherent in Southern California—wildfires and drought—meant that pools and the houses they augmented with liquid reservoirs of luxury were exposed to austerity and abandonment. Human territorializing of the landscape fails spectacularly with these events and again when real estate markets crash or tracts are divested from because of racial coding, government attrition, and/also expansion of the city’s transport capillaries with airports and freeways.
How pathetic property appears when such forces are arrayed against it! Suddenly though, such evacuated/evicted suburban dreams leave new possibilities exposed, possibilities skaters then activated into pleasure zones. The effect of seizing empty space for pleasure is a radical reconfiguration of vacuity precipitated by environmental or market effect. “Thus while the primary rationale of the villa habitat is that of speculation on plots and property, pool skateboarding was an insertion within suburban residential space—specifically the relatively accessible outdoor space of the pool—and so attacked its property logic, appropriating spaces for use rather than investing for exchange” (Borden 2001, 46). A challenge is unintentionally posited to unimaginative capitalism, though we must be cautious in sharing Borden’s exuberance: we have learned the lesson well—where new intensities are invigorated, capitalism’s schizophrenic attentions are quick to follow. Judith Halberstam tracks the queer allure in failed space through the photographs of the Spanish artists Carbelo/Carceller. In positioning the photographs of empty pools amid a larger investigation of queer failure, a reading of emptiness emerges as a profound site for contemplating loss, history, and desire:
The images of vacant swimming pools in these works signify the gulf between fantasy and reality, the subjects and the spaces onto which they project their dreams and desires. The empty pools, full of longing and melancholy, ask the viewer to meditate on the form and function of the swimming pool; from there we are drawn to contemplate the meaning and promise of desire. These swimming pools, empty and lifeless, function as the city street does for Benjamin: they work in an allegorical mode and speak of abundance and its costs; they tell of cycles of wealth and the ebb and flow of capital; the pool also functions as a fetish, a saturated symbol of luxury; and like the shop windows in the Parisian arcades described by Benjamin, the water in a swimming pool reflects the body and transforms space into a glittering dream of relaxation, leisure, recreation, and buoyancy. At the same time the empty pools stand like ruins, abandoned and littered with leaves and other signs of disuse, and in this ruined state they represent a perversion of desire, the decay of the commodity, the queerness of the disassociation of use from value. When the pool no longer signifies as a marker of wealth and success it becomes available to queer signification as a symbolic site of failure, loss, rupture, disorder, incipient chaos, and the desire animated by these states nonetheless.
(Halberstam 2011, 111)
The built form is constant presence in this entire project and Halberstam’s analysis coincides with a turning back of the capitalist fold Borden introduces, exposing “the queerness of the dissociation of use from value” and the perversion of the future in decay and desire animated by “incipient chaos.” For skaters, intense individual and social energies circulated around and within appropriated pools and the shifting intensities were a “socio-spatial co-production where architecture and activity were concrete enactions of each other” (Borden 2001, 53). Halberstam’s queer zones of failure are in sympathetic contact with the space appropriated by skaters.
Indeed, an argument for skater’s “queerness” might be usefully be made, however, I want to abstain from claiming this theoretical and experiential claim uncritically as an easy veneer of contrapuntal coolness or radical legitimization. The masculine, homosocial and aggressively heteronormative spaces opened up in the perforated, fragile, overdetermined fantastic and speculative landscapes of Southern California, Arizona, Nevada, and elsewhere are not such that they can be subsumed smoothly into the sign of queered failure. However, they do share a political orientation pointing to collapse and the openings made possible in the ruptures to totalizing systems of value and meaning. In particular, Japanese skater and photographer Hirano Taro has made a complimentary body of images focusing on empty, abandoned, decaying pools as part of a series entitled poignantly, Foreclosure. The large scale color photographs were first exhibited in Venice Beach, California in November of 2008, just as the financial turmoil swept fully through the American economy, reaching the ground level of small scale real estate. A rising tide of defaulted mortgages would lead to an epidemic of foreclosures on the same kind of properties evacuated by conventional logics of ownership and made vulnerable to insurgency by the post-apocalyptic youth swarming at the end of the golden era of endless expansion. An entirely new natural and social ecosystem flourished before Hirano’s lens, summarized in part by Toby Burger’s terse list-poem on the back of the Foreclosure catalog: “trespassing, wheel marks, green water, mosquitos (sic), vacant property, lurkers, 15 minute rule, drop in, fence, brown grass, real estate.”
The empty pool is a reservoir of potential brought into being through failures of capitalistic and the everyday abilities of the inhabitants to maintain the domestic desires for a luxurious imaginary actualized in limpid pools in the midst of deserts. Once the desertification of the real and abstractly monetized landscape took hold, new folds in the tale of these constructed sites became apparent. The skaterboarders’ actions of carrying the surfer’s ocean to the abandoned, arid site carelessly inscribes the failure of prior systems of meaning in the temporary trajectories of carves through the deep end into the chipping tile and finally, so briefly, into the airspace above. The failure of the skater is immanent and the future of the pools is uncertain, vast enough to hold many overlaid meanings and claims. As the included photo shows, the duration of the capitalist event inscribed on the landscape is itself so fraught and exposed to the “crisis” of decay enacted by erosion, weather, and “misuse.” The failed spaces of Hirano’s Southern California and Carbelo/Carceller present open futures where temporary autonomy of body and lines of flight play.
Other forces are also playing here: those of mediation through the camera and imaginary investments that will reproduce themselves on the coast of Japan and a photo shoot involving a pop star and foreign skateboarders.
Indeed, an argument for skater’s “queerness” might be usefully be made, however, I want to abstain from claiming this theoretical and experiential claim uncritically as an easy veneer of contrapuntal coolness or radical legitimization. The masculine, homosocial and aggressively heteronormative spaces opened up in the perforated, fragile, overdetermined fantastic and speculative landscapes of Southern California, Arizona, Nevada, and elsewhere are not such that they can be subsumed smoothly into the sign of queered failure. However, they do share a political orientation pointing to collapse and the openings made possible in the ruptures to totalizing systems of value and meaning. In particular, Japanese skater and photographer Hirano Taro has made a complimentary body of images focusing on empty, abandoned, decaying pools as part of a series entitled poignantly, Foreclosure. The large scale color photographs were first exhibited in Venice Beach, California in November of 2008, just as the financial turmoil swept fully through the American economy, reaching the ground level of small scale real estate. A rising tide of defaulted mortgages would lead to an epidemic of foreclosures on the same kind of properties evacuated by conventional logics of ownership and made vulnerable to insurgency by the post-apocalyptic youth swarming at the end of the golden era of endless expansion. An entirely new natural and social ecosystem flourished before Hirano’s lens, summarized in part by Toby Burger’s terse list-poem on the back of the Foreclosure catalog: “trespassing, wheel marks, green water, mosquitos (sic), vacant property, lurkers, 15 minute rule, drop in, fence, brown grass, real estate.”
The empty pool is a reservoir of potential brought into being through failures of capitalistic and the everyday abilities of the inhabitants to maintain the domestic desires for a luxurious imaginary actualized in limpid pools in the midst of deserts. Once the desertification of the real and abstractly monetized landscape took hold, new folds in the tale of these constructed sites became apparent. The skaterboarders’ actions of carrying the surfer’s ocean to the abandoned, arid site carelessly inscribes the failure of prior systems of meaning in the temporary trajectories of carves through the deep end into the chipping tile and finally, so briefly, into the airspace above. The failure of the skater is immanent and the future of the pools is uncertain, vast enough to hold many overlaid meanings and claims. As the included photo shows, the duration of the capitalist event inscribed on the landscape is itself so fraught and exposed to the “crisis” of decay enacted by erosion, weather, and “misuse.” The failed spaces of Hirano’s Southern California and Carbelo/Carceller present open futures where temporary autonomy of body and lines of flight play.
Other forces are also playing here: those of mediation through the camera and imaginary investments that will reproduce themselves on the coast of Japan and a photo shoot involving a pop star and foreign skateboarders.
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