Safe Terr@r

[Purse Lip Square Jaw] Anne Galloway is a commentator on things urban. She has recently posted something on anti-architecture, which set off a myriad of associations for me.

The first association is : its not okay to say something like anti-architecture. And that is one of the results of 9/11. Anti-architecture is a sublimate of the attitude that is behind fear of modernism and its steamroller effect on the environment. And there are not too many jumps from that square to the square in which Islamic and Christian fundamentalists hold populations in frightened thrall. In other words, the concept of anti-architecture evokes the T-word...terr@r.

Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art is hosting the "urgent architecture" of Marjeta Potrc. It is based on the bottom-up exigencies of poor people in Caracas, West Palm Beach, and the West Bank. In the New York Times this morning, there was an article about "Saint Death" -- a contrived deity of the Mexican disadvantaged. Among the poor, the criminal, the tough and amoral survivors in the vast barrios, a sentimental streak survives which finds its object in the skeletal madonna figure called Santa Muerte. They pray to her, and she rewards them with opportunities for petty larceny, sordid sexual gratification, low-grade revenge. The concurrance of these two items explodes in my head.

Anti-architecture. Nothing is more anti-architecture than a plane crashing into the World Tr@de Center. It is all the pretences of urban continuity gathered up and ripped from the living moment with a feral finality such as we have never experienced here in America. In the meantime, millions of poor people live in crates and barrels, boxes and culverts. They have no stainless steel walls to attract the concussive fatality of opponents who have only death left to say. Marjeta Potrc is framing the anti@rchitecture of the poor in the white graphic space of a privelege-saturated art gallery. To let the conscience, which is not safe, be carried to the encounter with the image, which is not safe, by the body, which must be given safety.

Safe Terr@r is what results. Anti@rchitecture and safe terr@r. The ampersands in this posting are a symbol and a functional device in response to the terr@r unleashed by the subliminal dreadcasts of the White H@use, the P@triot @ct and its incarnate constituents of grasping cowards who want to react to being attacked by attacking their own neighbors. It is the immune system of the body politic gone hay wire.

Welcome to the era of Safe Terr@r. It has been gestating in the machinery of middle class survival for two centuries, and its umbilical runs from the womb of the NSA supercomputers through the ethernet cable in the back of your own machine.