Secret Shrine

If you go to Paterson, you may now happen upon a secret shrine to William Carlos Williams' poem. Although, it might not be there anymore. Composed of trash the Education Department leaves in the abandoned Hinchliffe Stadium (e.g. busted file cabinets, waterlogged textbooks, wobbly bookcarts), the shrine is itself subject to the vagaries of what constitutes trash and what art . . . and what, for that matter, desirable furniture. After the first day, the "library" aspect of the shrine--a small bench facing a bookshelf under a tree sprouting from the concrete and stocked with English textbooks and xeroxes of Paterson in baggies--was disrupted when someone must have realized that the bookshelf was indeed still a good book shelf, and took it away (even though it may have been there for years.) It must have been a critic, because they also let their dog "have their way" in the shrine as well. The orange design is a shadow of the jacquard--the punch card that interfaced the vast worlds of labor, nature, and machine in the old silk mills.

Anywhere is Everywhere

The Flux Factory project in Paterson, which I participated in for the last month and a half, finally settled on a plan for a monument to Paterson, the city. What you see here is the plan of a walking-path, created by imposing the design of a spiral on the city (nods to Smithson’s Spiral Jetty), and then tracing the streets that the spiral intersects. During the meetings leading up to this particular solution, I would get tired and headachy because it seemed like the initially proposed paths were so inclusive and conceptually vague that I felt it would be better just to go to the gas station, buy a map of Paterson, hand it to the mayor and announce “here is your monument!” This path is still overwhelming, especially because of the territorial nature of neighborhoods in Paterson . . . people don’t usually cross into areas they “don’t belong” . . . not to mention its sheer length. Regardless of whether the path has the powers to somehow wear away these invisible borders, I think it can at the very least be a good template for an urban mapping project a la Yellow Arrow or Google Maps, with anybody able to input data for points along the path. Also, to create a more palpable, virtual sense of a monument that strains even the most dogged psychogeographer’s good will, there will be a mini-version that can be placed on the floor of the museum or other space in Paterson. In much the same way that medieval labyrinths provided a place for pilgrimage when actual trips to the holy land were difficult to realize, this unicursal floor maze will provide a way to think about the territory and the map in dynamic relation.
Click here for Patersonian Don Kommit’s poem commemorating the project.

No Socially Shared Metaphysic

Flux Factory has just released its schedule of free tours, parties, meetings, and readings to take place during its happening in Paterson this June. Among other things, I will be hosting Paterson reading group, with meetings and tours throughout June (download the schedule for dates and info.)
The purpose of Flux Factory is to use this month--in cooperation with inhabitants of Paterson--to conceive of a monument for the city. In conceptualizing some kind of urban monument, my two blogs collide. On "The Woonasquatucket Primitive," I already expressed my cynicism at the unchecked proliferation of monuments of all stripe in the Providence riverwalk area, in deference to the more modest interventions of an anonymous artist I recently discovered to be a homeless man. Will this Paterson monument be a "real" monument? Such a thing could provide some sort of sense of public meaning, even though, as Richard Serra pointed out in reference to his anti-monuments "there is no socially shared metaphysic." The last time I was in Paterson, we discovered a depressingly perfunctory tombstone behind chainlink fence commemorating the underground railroad: at the very least, something like this should be given the dignity that is misdirected onto the Lou Costello statue. But a monument is surely a luxury, and perhaps would even be construed as a sign of corruption or frivolity in a city like Paterson, which would be better off investing in the future than the past. It has been suggested that Flux buy a cheap house for urban youth programs. Or, in the end, given that they call themselves "flux," the happening itself could be a kind of dematerialized monument, based on the heightened interactions of people who would not normally have met. The impulse to memorialize in Paterson will undoubtedly meet with a score of paradoxes and ironies. In fact, this preference for future growth over historical past is perhaps based on a false distinction. As Robert Smithson pointed out, New Jersey is precisely the place where the future fails, and its landscape memorializes the ruin of impossible utopian projects.