Baudrillard, Debord and Marcuse: Simulation, Spectacle, Subversion
As mentioned previously, Guy Debord’s analysis of mass culture provides an important theoretical framework to understanding connections between culture and late-capitalism and the Woodward’s built landscape as a spectacle and manifestation of class power. It seems clear that the "visuality of consumption" promoted by Woodward’s II has philosophical implications for social relations in the DTES. As Debord states, “The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images” (Debord 12). The redevelopment is a spectacle because of the scale of the project in contrast to the poverty in the neighbourhood and the attention to the aesthetics of late-capitalism. The considerable debate surrounding the project within popular discourses and the so-called "success" of the project with its multi-use concept and rhetoric of inclusion functions to distract from the current reality of poverty, illness, disappearances and violence. Woodward’s is a landscape of spectacle, it is a collection of images that mediates reality in the area. The towers of the development, the "heritage aesthetic" and Abbott & Cordova, all function to mediate social reality through imagery, and perhaps more problematically, construct reality.
For Debord, the Spectacle refers to a structure built by capitalism to replace needs with wants, to replace reality with an appearance of a reality that does not exist and to create an existence that is not based on nature and the relationship of human beings with each other and nature but a relationship built on commodities. The relationship is one of using commodities to create and foster consumption, and production, of desires and wants that need to be fulfilled. The role of images in the Spectacle is one that perpetuates these false desires as well as promoting the dominant method of production. The mediated world of images that we live in, according to Debord, is meant to obscure the true nature of reality and to create the false sense that everything is the way it ought to be. I argue that the built landscape of Woodward's II fits the description laid out by Debord a little too perfectly. Images now define our reality and frame our experiences as well as functioning to reinterpret our past and our histories, especially with regards to the DTES. As images, and the built form, can be controlled by the dominant ideology, their truth and integrity are unstable. This is obviously problematic. I also claim that Abbott & Cordova works to mediate our relationship to the truth of the reality of the DTES and that it re-interprets and re-positions our understanding of the history of the neighbourhood, and by doing so, has become a part of the Spectacle. Does the image work to uncover truth and bring us closer to reality and history, the history of class struggle and marginalisation and displacement of the neighbourhood's traditional residents, or does it work to suggest that the reality of the DTES, and its recent history re-interpreted to support this idea, is fine the way it is? It can be argued that Abbott & Cordova re-interprets the past history of the neighbourhood's class struggle and activism and uses the resulting image to suggest that "things are fine now because we have addressed this issue" all the while working to obscure the current reality of continuing oppression, marginalisation and displacement of the area's poorer residents.
Is it possible for Abbott & Cordova to address the entirety of these issues? Perhaps it is unfair to expect a photograph in this location to address and highlight the truth, especially considering the location the image occupies and the conditions of its commission and production. The DTES contains and represents so many contentious social and political issues. Many people would find the central issue First Nations displacement and land rights, others the missing and murdered women from the area. Still others would focus on poverty, mental illness, drug use and homelessness. Is the subject matter of Abbott & Cordova, such as police brutality in relation to a "middle class riot over marijuana", so banal that it misses an opportunity? The fact that the above issues of poverty and displacement are so encompassing that any work of resistance in the DTES must not avoid these issues implies a heavy responsibility. It could be argued that if they do avoid these issues then they obscure the social reality and truth of the neighbourhood, therefore, functioning as part of the Spectacle.
In Simulacra and Simulation Baudrillard analyses what happens in a world that is ultimately denied all access to the real and in which only simulacra and simulation exist as a way of not only obscuring reality, but as a replacement of reality and as a determinate of reality. For Baudrillard, this is in fact the world in which we now live. He argues that simulations take over our relationship with real life, creating a hyperreality which is a copy that has no original or at least a completely severed relationship to something that if it did exist, certainly exists no more. This hyperreality happens when the difference between reality and representation collapses and we are no longer able to see an image as reflecting anything other than a symbolic trade of signifiers and layered referents that refer only to themselves.
As a built landscape, the Woodward’s redevelopment is inherently ideological and it represents a way in which certain classes of people have signified themselves, particularly the new urban middle class. Woodward's and Abbott & Cordova could be seen as simulation and simulacra. Late-capitalism and the shifting populations of the new global city make claims to urban space through a language of visuality and symbolic referents. In the DTES, this is a language of historic preservation, social inclusion and best-use. Historic buildings "belong" to those with the financial capital to properly explain, analyse, and understand them as part of an aesthetic discourse or rhetorical framework. Woodward’s developers and marketers have symbolically reproduced Woodward’s as a place of “heritage” when in fact it could be seen as the perfect example of simulation. The argument for historic preservation conceals the fact that with gentrification almost nothing is preserved. The original households are replaced, and the meaning of the structure is redefined from a working-class use value as housing and community place to an aestheticised symbolic value and space of consumption. This is the symbolic trade of signifiers and layered referents that refer only to themselves that Baudrillard understood and that has manifested as Woodward's II . The built-form becomes scarcely recognisable from its former appearance yet what is celebrated is the authenticity of the reproduction. The built landscape of Woodward's II, including Abbott & Cordova must be the material manifestation of a "perfectly descriptive machine that offers all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes. Never again will the real have the chance to produce itself" (Baudrillard 2). This is simulation of the fourth order.
The original Woodward's "W" sign displayed in a vitrine in the courtyard and the installation of Abbott & Cordova are evidence of “aestheticised symbolic value”, simulacra, and can be understood as monuments or artefacts. These monuments are used to appropriate space, to re-interpret reality, and to construct truth through an aestheticisation of activism and neighbourhood "grittiness" only to remake this into a landscape of conspicuous consumption with no connection to its true past. This is what Baudrillard means when he says, “It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real” (Baudrillard 2). Abbott & Cordova itself can also be argued to be a simulacrum. The referents employed in the narrative of the image have a very tenuous relationship with the truth of the moment depicted. Again, the photographic image (representation) is preceding and altering (constructing) the reality of the situation. The method of production of the image is also very far removed down the symbolic chain from the original event. Every detail was recreated on a "set" meant to represent a space that presently exists.
Socialist-realism and political and revolutionary narrative are thought of as the primary ways that art should realise its role in the struggle against oppression and in the subversion of capitalist economic and social structures. Marcuse does not agree with Marx's assertion that art must speak for the "ascending class", the proletariat, and claims that the true subversive potential of art lies in its capacity for estrangement, to dissociate people and reveal reality and how things could be different through form. Radical form and the realm of aesthetics is the location where true subversive potential in art resides.
Marcuse states that "Art's separation from the process of material production has enabled it to demystify the reality produced in this process" (Marcuse 22). He continues by saying that "to ascribe the nonconformist, autonomous qualities of art to aesthetic form is to place them outside...the realm of praxis and production" ( Marcuse 22). Marcuse says that art "can be called revolutionary if, by virtue of aesthetic transformation, it represents, in the exemplary fate of individuals, the prevailing unfreedom...thus breaking through the mystified (and petrified) social reality, and opening the horizon of change (liberation)" (Marcuse xi). It seems as though Abbott & Cordova has been unsuccessful in realising these tenets. Because of the physical space that the photograph occupies within the built landscape of the Woodward's development, it is unable to function autonomously, objectively or subversively outside of the dominant economic and political ideology. By indexing a documentary position, by positioning itself as almost a socialist-realist representation of (historical) truth through hyper-real photography, the image works to mediate the present reality of the DTES. Abbott & Cordova is unable to stand separately outside of the "process of material production" due to the privileged conditions of its very own production as a simulation of an actual event recreated at great cost at another location. The fact that it was commissioned by the architects of Woodward's II also raises questions regarding the autonomy of the work. The referents contained within the image, and evoked outside by looking at the image, are repurposed to refer abstractly to notions of social justice and gives a patronising, see above regarding "heritage", nod to the history of activism located at the old Woodward's site.
Marcuse argues that art without explicitly "social" themes, in fact especially such art, can produce a shift in consciousness or, "a negation of the realistic-conformist mind". Marcuse argues that this is more likely to occur in non-social realist works, works whose subject matter is separated from social realities. This is because those realities have become sublimated in the work, and contact with the work brings about a corresponding de-sublimation in the viewer. By meeting these criteria, by avoiding the obviously political position, and by not being overly didactic, art can resist being co-opted, absorbed or becoming banal.
It would appear that Abbott & Cordova fails to meet any of the criteria outlined by Marcuse. Does Abbott & Cordova sublimate social reality, does it estrange or dissociate the viewer causing a shift in consciousness regarding the local powers of domination and oppression? It could be argued that the enormous size of the work, and some of the formal arrangements; such as the massive empty space in the centre of the image as well as the placement of the action and the actors in the margins, could be dissociative, or jarring. I hesitate to agree with this reading because it does not go far enough. Also, Abbott & Cordova still claims the position of presenting documentary, realistic, photographic "truth" through the detail oriented historical accuracy of the recreated set. Regarding aesthetic form, if Douglas is already re-creating, or fabricating, a "historical reality", why not push it further and completely construct a fictitious space/place/time that addresses multiple DTES issues by playing with the realities of place and time. He has already used multiple images to create an image that is physically questionable and aestheticised so why not create the synthesis of content and form that Marcuse calls for while addressing and "not avoiding" the multiple critical issues at play in the DTES today.
When critically analysing Abbott & Cordova using the theoretical frameworks outlined by Debord, Baudrillard and Marcuse, it is difficult to find the image as anything but problematic. The space that the work sits in makes it extremely difficult to consider it outside of this context of location. The Woodward's site has long been a focal point of the contentious issues surrounding the DTES and the changes the neighbourhood is undergoing and the placement of Abbott & Cordova within this contentious space makes the reading of the work contingent on its very location and the signifying role it plays is tied in with this fact as well. Is Abbott & Cordova a subversive work of art challenging the dominant ideologies of neo-liberalism, late-capitalism and urban gentrification or has it been co-opted, or worse created, to promote these ideologies of the dominant class to create and generate the values and realities they desire through the mediation of visual images?
