A few weeks ago I went to have my car fixed and I hung around this old garage while it was being fixed. It’s in that kind of punchy village, poorer village. Everything is crumbling and slums and the garage is full or dirt and oil. And you like that stuff, you know, rusty stuff, that kind of atmosphere. You know how one always feels connected with deteriorating things.
Phillip Guston, Conversation with Morton Feldman
Perhaps we feel an affinity with deteriorating things because we are deteriorating things. Life winds down and past a certain point you cannot deny that truth. But it’s ok; that’s life, as the saying goes. Rust is natural and nothing has a claim on eternal existence.
Or perhaps Guston is simply expressing an eccentric aesthetic position. In any case, I know what he means and feel the same way. I like oily garages and grimy factories and broken machines and the patterns of eroding surfaces. I grew up amidst enormous smelters and giant smokestacks and old cars and junk abandoned to the bush. People who grow up in big cities romanticise the bush as pristine wilderness, but if it is anywhere near a town or city it it is full of the shit people think that they have a human right to discard anywhere they please. The romantics would no doubt see these artifacts of human industry as ugly violations of the integrity of the forest, but the pretty and picturesque are easy and boring. Human beings build things that break: junk is our record of having been.
Where would archaeologists be without the refuse of peoples? And if our junk is a trace of our having been, why should we not look at decaying materiality as beautiful? Comedies are fun, but tragedies are art.
One does not need to walk in the bush to discover decaying structures. Cities are also full of corroding objects and the random interactions of nature and culture. The back streets and alleyways of any city are like the bush: hidden spaces where people dump their old appliances and furniture because they think that no one is looking.
Like other cities, Windsor is Janus-faced: an outward-facing cross-hatch of arterial roads and residential streets and an inward-facing, hidden world of alleys running behind backyards and store fronts. In a less regulated country than Canada the alleys might be a second world of informal-economy workshops and kiosks like one finds in the Medinas of Marrakesh and Fez.
My neighborhood is something like the punchy village where Guston waited while his car was fixed. It is certainly no Fez or Marrakesh but mostly students houses, a little grimy and unkempt. Riverwest- as our neighborhood association re-christened the area a few years ago– has its problems, but also its charms. Most families have left the few blocks near the university where we live and their houses are now filled with mostly international students. There are no kids playing road hockey but there are Indian students playing driveway cricket and setting off fireworks for Diwali. What the neighborhood now lacks in well-manicured middle-class order it makes up for with a genuine urban energy. The main street is lively with pedestrian traffic, we have the best Chinese and Indian restaurants, the river is only a block away, and behind almost every street there is an alley open to the solitary walker.
I feel that it is a duty of those who live in a neighborhood for any length of time to fully immerse themselves in the spaces that might be hidden from the casual passer-by. The long-time resident should know the shortcuts, the hidden gems, the trouble-spots, and alleyways.
I began my mental mapping of the alleys during Covid. Lockdown after lockdown, frustrated, enraged at the ultimate pointlessness of being confined to home, and with nowhere else to go, I would take long walks. I am a creature of habit but also appreciate variations on a theme. The streets got old quickly, but I learned to distinguish driveways from the entrance to alleyways. Languishing under Covid-induced boredom, even the most banal discovery seemed exciting. I felt like a spelunker might feel discovering the new entrance of a cave, but also a little twinge of anxiety as I entered, wondering whether there was an exit or if I would have to turn around. I have passed the age where anyone would suspect me of lurking, waiting to break into a garage, so I was free to explore the backspaces where no one else– I have never encountered another person– treads (not because they don’t dare, there is no danger, they just don’t think of walking up the alleys).
And so I would walk, but not for exercise, but to look. I think of walking as an essay on looking. Most people see the obvious: a lot of garbage, over-grown patches, boring graffiti tags and cartoonish portraits. The challenge is to look again, and then one finds the sort of accidental art and sculpture that I think that Guston was referring to when he felt drawn to the grit and grease of the small town garage.
To look at the familiar in an unfamilar way is to frame the visual field in a deliberate way. From a distance, paint peeling off a wall is just paint peeling off a wall, but impose a novel visual frame and it becomes abstract painting as interesting as any you will find in a gallery.
A rusty autopart separated through some violence from the car is just a piece of metal trash, but look at the material form and it becomes an accidental sculpture.
Given how so much contemporary art is derivative of Duchamps’ ready-mades, save the thirty bucks major public museums will charge you and go for a walk. Look differently at the things and surfaces that you encounter. Our back spaces are free open air museums of the random deterioration of things which produces material forms far more visually compelling than Duchamps’ coat racks and urinals. Decay sculpts and paints: unintentional transformation is still creative, i.e., productive of that which would not be were it not for that process.
Ours is a visual culture, people say, but it is a visual culture once removed from material reality. The screen is the frame through which most people see the world. The smart phone manufacturer and the content creators pre-determine and limit the experience of the virtual world. These photographs are my way of seeing the alleys, others would frame things differently. On-line, one scrolls and swipes and imagines that one is active when in reality that which one experiences has been determined by the engineer and the uploader.
To walk the alleys is to explore, and to look, concentrate, narrow or broaden one’s focus is a completely free act (in both senses of the term). That which is there to be seen is given, but what one sees when one looks is an act of concentration and imagination, a collaboration, even, between the natural and social forces that structure the physical environment and one’s conscious, active attention.
