Picturing Infrastructure: or the infrastructure of Picturing
Art and art historians are irretrievably sunk into global infrastructures. Artists, photographers, engineers, surveyors, cartographers – both professional and amateur – have pictured the ‘infrastructural imaginary’ (Parks, 2015) on all continents. So, where infrastructure studies has emphasised invisibility, insofar as infrastructure apparently works unnoticed, until it breaks down (Bowker and Star, 1999), we can point to: pictures of/from ships or balloons; pictures shipped or flown; pictures lost in transit; pictures made of materials mined and transported (and pictures of mining); pictures of (and received at) ports; pictures at market; and pictures amassed around and through imperial and colonial projects. Such a vast transhistorical and global corpus may indeed suggest art history is uniquely placed to study infrastructure. Yet the provocation of this panel is twofold. A material/ist history of art, and perhaps even individual works of art, asserts the visuality of infrastructure against its apparent invisibility. Meanwhile, assembling pictures of infrastructure emphasises the underrecognized yet pervasive embeddedness of art and infrastructure.
This panel invited papers that think with images of physical infrastructure like bridges, ports, wires, cables, and roads, and invites considerations of other forms of picturing infrastructure such as shipping routes, logistics, art markets, global trade, and data storage, as well as studies of how infrastructure has shaped the field of art historical inquiry itself.
How do pictures move from here to there? How do the materials of pictures move from there to here? And how do we?
Session Convenors:
Zoë De Luca , McGill University, Montreal, Canada
Emily Doucet, McGill University, Montreal, Canada
Speakers:
Mark Crinson, Birkbeck (University of London)
Out of the Clouds: Infra- and extra-structure at London (Heathrow) Airport
Infrastructure may be the ‘central trope of modern urban thought’ (Chattopadhyay, 2012) but it is also a mutable construct, as demonstrated by its visual culture. London (Heathrow) airport was first developed to provide infrastructure (runways, hangars) while human-centred structures were marginal and temporary. Early publicity made the first visible by glossing it as glamourous – whether through the logistical sublime, slick uniforms and machines, or world-girdling imagery – while the second was classed as eccentric, as extra-structure. The architect Frederick Gibberd was appointed in 1948 to design elevations for plans already generated by engineers: the talk was of ‘interim terminal buildings’ and ‘passenger handling buildings’. Taking over the significant design decisions in the airport’s central diamond space, Gibberd’s designs picture infra- and extra-structure not as opposed (contra Easterling, 2014) but interwoven: raised roads attached to buildings, the glamour of the ‘waving base’ in roof gardens, stadia-like restaurants, and terminals as baggage and people-processing flows. Before completion the new terminal became the main location – future-fitted in Ealing Studios – for Out of the Clouds (1955), a Basil Dearden-directed film ostensibly about the new cosmopolitan romance of the airport, underpinned by a cadre of war-seasoned professionals. The film is interpreted here as a training manual in how to learn the airport, how to negotiate infrastructure either/both because you don’t really know it is there or/and because you understand it as demonstratively sensitive to human craft and experience. The prize? Connectivity.
Kimia Shahi, University of Southern California
Images, Information, and the Infrastructure of EPA’s Project Documerica
Inaugurated in 1972 by the newly founded Environmental Protection Agency, Project Documerica was an ambitious initiative to photographically document the state of the environment in the greater U.S. Although the project lasted only a few years, it yielded more than 20,000 photographs by over seventy photographers. Aligned with EPA’s regulatory priorities, Documerica was also an effort to picture the environment as capaciously as possible, and photographers were instructed to follow the ecological maxim: “everything is connected to everything else.” The result is a sprawling portrait of 1970s America as well as a complex record of environmental thought in formation. It encompasses subjects as diverse as smog and water pollution, infrastructure, mining, recreation, and scenes of community work and protest across suburbs, farming towns, Native reservations, and city neighborhoods.
Uniting this range of photographic subject-matter was not only a broad notion of environment. Documerica was also one of the first—if not the first—computerized image databases. Conceived alongside the project in 1972, the Documerica Image System (or DIS) indexed photographs according to terms like location, maker, date, and subject-matter, which corresponded to numbered microfiche cards. It was hoped that researchers seeking images relevant to the environment could visit EPA and use the system to view and order prints. In this paper, I examine Documerica through its data infrastructure. I ask: What did it mean for environmental photography to take on the terms of information and computerization in the early 1970s? How did the translation of photographs into search terms function as a form of remediation that shaped Documerica’s scope and intended audience? Finally, how can a focus on Documerica as information system offer new ways of thinking about the visual politics of its environmental image, as well as historicize the technological infrastructures that make up the media environments of today?
Sasha Shestakova, Ruhr-Universität Bochum
Infrastructural Intelligibility and the Soviet Art
The USSR provides an exciting example of infrastructure’s role in the visual culture and state construction. In the USSR, infrastructural projects were at the centre of the public imagination, reproduced on paintings, porcelain and even postal stamps. However, as the Soviet officials understood, the infrastructural power lay not only in transforming the land but also in altering the “souls” of the people who constructed them. Simultaneously the infrastructures of production and distribution of Soviet art were also entangled with the infrastructural power of the Soviet state. I will focus on how the depiction of infrastructure in Soviet art in the 1960s can shift our understanding of maintenance practices. In the 1960s, one of the key artistic styles was the “Severe Style”. Art critic Kamensky coined this term to refer to the “younger section” members of the Moscow Union of Artists. They claimed that the Stalinist painting was “decorating” reality and described their aims as returning to the “true” reality of working people. The key themes of “Severe Style” included the depiction of the maintenance workers, scientists, and construction workers. In my presentation, I will argue that while revealing the relationality of the Soviet infrastructural projects, the “Severe Style paintings” have also maintained the colonial mindset of transformation of land, which informed the Soviet conquest of the land. I will thus show how these images produced “infrastructural intelligibility”, to use Lisa Parks’ term, of the Soviet colonial state.
Steyn Bergs, Utrecht University
Nelson Makengo’s Nuit Debout and Toujours Debout: Infrastructure Between Promise and Improvisation
Nelson Makengo’s video works Nuit Debout (2019) and Toujours Debout (2021) document electricity outages in the DRC’s capital city of Kinshasa. More specifically, the works examine how these regular outages are negotiated and dealt with by the inhabitants of certain Kinshasa neighbourhoods, where infrastructural breakdown and fallout constitute the norm rather than the exception.
As such, Makengo’s work challenges and qualifies assertions, found in many scholarly accounts on the topic, that infrastructure is a particularly elusive ‘object’ due to its purported tendency to remain below the threshold of conscious perception. Infrastructures, when operational, are routinely claimed to recede into the unexamined and unthought background of the quotidian. Their ordinary workings are not actively processed, registered, and considered by the people who make use of them, it is argued, until a disruption occurs.
However, as Nikhil Anand, Hannah Appel, and Akhil Gupta have pointed out, “the very idea of ‘disruption’ operates with the assumption that quietly working infrastructures are ‘normal’.” Nuit Debout and Toujours Debout provide this assumption—evidently biased toward Western contexts—with a welcome corrective. I want to argue, through a close reading of both video pieces alongside relevant theoretical accounts, that Makengo’s work does so particularly by picturing the everyday habits, practices, and struggles of a population suspended between what has been called “the promise of infrastructure,” on the one hand, and the reality of those informal and improvisational processes that render “people as infrastructure,” to quote Abdou Maliq Simone, on the other.
Richard J. Williams, University of Edinburgh
Picturing São Paulo’s Big Worm
Built in 1969-71, São Paulo’s Minhocão (‘Big Worm’) is a four lane, 3.5km-long elevated expressway that cuts east-west across the central city. It is highly unusual as infrastructure in being so visible – not only in its material presence in the city, but in the quantity and range of its picturing. Throughout its history it has been an obsessive object for architects and urbanists, artists, filmmakers, journalists, urban activists, and politicians of all stripes, and the range of the pictorial representations they have made of it is remarkable. Often dystopian, frequently fantastic, and sometimes surprisingly bucolic, the Minhocão’s picturing represents innumerable urban fantasies. It permits such a range of images largely because its condition has long been highly ambiguous. Operating as a highway during weekdays, it is closed to traffic at night and at weekends, whereupon it becomes a leisure space, the nearest thing the city has to a beach.
This paper explores the Minhocão’s strange condition though images and their politics: the official images produced by its designers to begin with, and then the dystopian images produced by filmmakers (including its appearance in Hector Babenco’s Kiss of the Spider Woman, 1986). The paper then concentrates on the collages produced by the architect-politician Jaime Lerner in 2016, which reimagine Minhocão as a hedonistic fantasy. The politics of these images, and their relation to the actually existing structure are key concerns. The paper concludes with reflections on what the pictures of the Minhocão tell us more generally about the politics of infrastructure.
Meagen Smith, Lambeth Palace Library, National Church Institutions
Tracing Chancels – conservation work reveals previously invisible religious infrastructure
Chancel plans in the National Church Institutions’ (NCI) archive collections is an assemblage of pictures well representing engineers and surveyors artistic infrastructure designs. In church architecture, the chancel is the space around the altar including the choir and the sanctuary or presbytery and may terminate in an apse. Previously subject to all the agents of deterioration during active use, the NCI’s Chancel Plans are now being conserved and catalogued in parallel with the Church Commissioner’s Chancel repair liability and budget allocation strategy. Conservation is rendering visible the formerly invisible “unfit for production” archive items. More widely, this collection depicts visible and invisible key aspects of places of worship and locations of religious art. Not only do the Chancel plans describe and document visible and invisible church infrastructure such as structures obscured by decorative elements, they also show the potentially undocumented workings of infrastructure creators through their plan annotations which are carefully and ethically preserved during the conservation process. The conservation process itself balances the visible and invisible of the plans infrastructure themselves using stabilising techniques that are partially visible for plans on tracing paper while some repairs on handmade paper are less visible due to specific repair techniques. Therefore, the Chancel plans represents multiple layers of visibility and invisibility from a materialist perspective of the infrastructure they represent.