Urban | MUSEUM FATIGUE

Zuccotti Park: Passive Recreation Only

October 10, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

This past weekend, while in New York City I walked through Zuccotti Park, the birthplace of Occupy Wall Street. I couldn’t help but notice the new notice that was clearly much more recently installed than the earlier weathered notice beside it. Rather than the simple, familiar text of “No Skateboarding, Rollerblading, or Bicycling Allowed in the Park”—one that leaves all other activities open to public interpretation—the new text reads with the detailed care of a legal document. The notice clarifies […]

Categories: Space, State of Emergency, Urban • Tags: passive recreation, private space, public space, Saskia Sassen, Zuccotti Park

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“Sing Red to Fight Darkness”: Chinese Urban Development as Apocalypse

July 23, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

“Yes, people are constructed by their material world, but often they are not themselves the agents behind that material world through which they must live” (Miller 2009: 84). “The apocalyptic describes not just the spilling forth of the unseen, but also of the undifferentiated matter of the possible, of what could have been and was not, of what neither came to be nor what went away” (Williams 2011: 6). While in Dalian last month I found myself with a free […]

Categories: China, End of Times, Material Culture, Mythologies, Photo Essays, State of Emergency, Urban • Tags: apocalypse, Chinese Communist Party, corruption, 红色年代, Dalian, Daniel Miller, Evan Calder Williams, 钉子户, homes, Mao Zedong, nail houses, neighborhood, Omega Man, security, slogans, surveillance, tea, urban planning, 口号, 拆, 人情味

Ghosts in the City

January 16, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

This month I am finally whittling away at a few of the books in my pile. Among these is the second volume of The Practice of Everyday Life—Living and Cooking. I have been meaning to read it since visiting de Certeau’s grave back in 2012. And now that I am in the middle of it, I’m embarrassed that I waited so long. I didn’t expect that most of the book consists of two projects by the book’s co-authors, Pierre Mayol and Luce […]

Categories: Consumption, Everyday Things, Mythologies, Photo Essays, Urban • Tags: Ghosts in the City, Michel de Certeau, museums, neighborhood, nostalgia, Pierre Mayol, The Practice of Everyday Life, urban planning

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University Avenue: One Street, A Thousand Dreams

January 15, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

This morning, while doing some preparing for this spring semester’s visual anthropology class, I located an online posting of the locally produced documentary, University Avenue: One Street, A Thousand Dreams. The documentary, which premiered on our local Public Television Station in late 2012, provides a nice historical context for the area in which the Hamline-Midway neighborhood is located. Once again this semester, my students are going to do short video ethnographies of everyday life in the Hamline-Midway. I’m going to have them […]

Categories: Documentary, Urban, Visual Anthropology Class • Tags: documentary, Hamline-Midway Neighborhood, Minnesota, Public Television Station, Saint Paul, TPT, University Avenue, Visual Anthropology Class

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Beijing Sunset

October 30, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

Thanks to high levels of pollution in the air, today Beijing “enjoyed” a sunset that lasted much of the afternoon. Driving home sometime around 4pm, making our way through the clogged streets in the thick pollution, I couldn’t help imagine that I wasn’t in the present but in a not too distant post-apocalyptic future of environmental devastation. Then again, who said apocalypses have to arrive suddenly? Maybe they can creep up slowly like a car in Beijing traffic.

Categories: China, End of Times, Environment, Surveillance, Urban • Tags: automobiles, Beijing, cctv, pollution, smog, sunset

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Sleeping Under a Bridge in Shanghai

October 19, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

Yesterday, while walking along the Suzhou River in Shanghai, I came across an area under a bridge where a bunch of migrant workers were living. They weren’t around–presumably they were working at their day jobs. Walking by, I was struck by the belongings of one person. They were carefully laid out under the bridge as if in a room at home. The bedroll was neatly folded over, and bags and boxes and a cup and a bowl were all meticulously […]

Categories: China, Material Culture, Photo Essays, Urban, Work • Tags: homeless, migrant worker, Shanghai

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Post-Apocalyptic Déjà Vu in Gary, Indiana

July 22, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

During our drive through Gary, Indiana we pulled over in front of the dilapidated and boarded up remains of what had once been a supermarket. Standing in the fractured, concrete-and-weed parking lot, facing the building, with its faded paint and busted-out window frames, the strongest sense of déjà vu hit me. I had been there before. I knew what the inside of the store looked like with its dark rows of rusted, toppled shelves and trash-covered floors. When I was thirsty, hadn’t […]

Categories: End of Times, Games, Memory, Urban, Zombie • Tags: deja vu, Fallout 3, Gary Indiana, post-apocalyptic, post-industrial, rust belt, Super-Duper Mart

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Demolishing Shanghai’s Old City, Spring 2006

December 12, 2010 by Museum Fatigue

Before it can be nostalgically remembered as “Shanghai’s Old City” and before newly constructed “traditional buildings” can be experienced by both foreign and domestic tourists as authentic “Chinese culture”, historical structures must be cleared. This afternoon I came across a set of photos I shot in Shanghai in April 2006, which show just such a clearing. The photos were taken in part of the old Chinese city section of Shanghai in the period between the local residents’ departure and the […]

Categories: End of Times, Photo Essays, State of Emergency, Urban • Tags: China, old chinese city, Photography, Shanghai, 拆

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