Photographing sprawl: picturing the contemporary suburb.

In a roundabout way, Bennett's photographs respond to the arguments in Robert Bruegmann's recent study, Sprawl: A Compact History (2005). Bruegmann convincingly points out the crude and fuzzy use of the term in vociferous debates over growth regulation: it presses emotional buttons rather than encouraging clear-headed descriptions of growth to form better policy. His conclusion seems to be that sprawl reflects what consumers want and that given population growth and the level of affluence in the developed world it is an inevitable outcome. Throughout history, all cities have bled at the edges with dispersed, low-density settlements around them. He also points out that Europe, despite its long tradition of restrictive and comprehensive urban planning, has sprawl. Regardless of the overheated rhetoric, critics of sprawl are responding to a real dissatisfaction with the prevailing pattern of American urban development. (11) Bruegmann himself acknowledges the aesthetic aspect of the problem, but counters the issue by calling the concern an imposition of elites. Indeed it may be. Lacking hard numbers, graphs, charts, or data, these photographs are aesthetic documents-testaments, in a sense, of perceptions and viewpoints. They signal dissatisfaction with and even dread over what is commonly if indiscriminately called sprawl. These artists present in-between spaces that are the leftovers, afterthoughts, and garbage of the predominate land-use patterns of the past thirty years; they put on display what lies behind the brash, colorful development we are supposed to see. While Bruegmann is difficult to counter (and it is beyond my competence to do so), these photographs portray the unappealing visual facts that incite critics of sprawl to the excess and empirical sloppiness that he so carefully picks apart.

The artist Tony Smith's widely cited experience of driving down the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike at night factors largely in Michael Fried's and Robert Morris's essays on art in the 1960s and the radical turn posed by Minimalism. Smith describes a quintessentially suburban experience: driving on a limited-access highway. Given the resolutely urban, New York City-centered nature of the art world of the 1960's, it is odd that driving down the Turnpike should be the subject of a tale that is so central to our current understanding of the artistic watershed of that era. Smith recounts the experience in an interview: "It was a dark night and there were no lights or shoulder markers, lines, railings, or anything at all except the dark pavement moving through the landscape of the flats, rimmed by hills in the distance, but punctuated by stacks, towers, fumes, and colored lights." (12) It is not a cruise down the FDR or up the West Side Highway or the BQE; it is Jersey, a suburban state between New York and Philadelphia.

Smith has pastoralized new road construction. He experiences the landscape as purely phenomenal, thereby eliding and suppressing the reasons--the human actions, the political machinations--for the landscape appearing as such. Driving on an interstate with the one-thing-after-another flicker of rest stops, gas stations, signage, and the rise and fall of the road at interchanges and overpasses, seems about as routine an experience as one could possibly have next to eating or waiting in line. Driving in a car, one sits still, focuses with watchful attentiveness on the road, scans signage, tracks the blinking of turn signals and flashing break lights, and glances in the rear-view mirror. Smith's description tracks both the immediate passing of the road in front of him and the distant view of backlit factories and smokestacks. Keeping the car on the road and scanning the landscape divides his attention. He fluctuates between distraction and attention as he engages in activities simultaneously. A driving, car-ensconced viewer is not engaged in considered looking or scrutiny.

The photographs discussed here do not line up with Smith's spectatorial and pastorializing vision because they do not align with predictable views of suburban sprawl as seen through the windshield. Sorg enables an all-at-once take in which disparate structures can be examined singly and simultaneously. Jovanovic's worm's-eye views are impossible without the camera's mediation and Bennett's spaces are passed over on the way elsewhere--an abandoned lot is never a destination. Unlike the roving camera in Nashville or the car-bound Smith, these photographers dwell on aspects of the suburban, built environment that are inaccessible from a car. With a slight shift in viewpoint, Bennett's messy lots would transform into Astroturf green lawns in the pristine, picket-fenced subdivisions that she uses as titles, and Jovanovic's menacing back alleys would metamorphosize into the Technicolor panoply of the miracle mile. These are squarely images about prosperity, but they are not Ronald Reagan's neo-liberal utopia, a "city on a hill."

It is difficult not to consider these photographs as portents of the unfolding financial crisis caused by irresponsible lending fueled by an unexamined faith in the power of homeownership and lax oversight by the federal government. Suburban single-family homes dependent on automobile transportation despite the rising price of oil, environmental impact, and instability of the housing market continue to be the dominant vision of the good life, American Style. While, at first glance, an aspect of the neo-liberal agenda that everyone can agree on (private home ownership encourages pride, grants substantial tax breaks, and builds equity), the recent collapse of the sub-prime loan market and the fall in home prices in a volatile housing market suggest that a society of "ownership," as President George W. Bush calls it, is not a policy panacea. Though brick and mortar, our homes are not necessarily a more solid investment than stocks and bonds. (13)

JAMES GLISSON is a PhD candidate in art history at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

NOTES 1. Urban historians have challenged the old ring model by demonstrating the mixed uses and wide-income variations in pre-WWII suburbs. In other words, the concentric ring model has not been an accurate model of American cities since before 1949. See Richard Harris and Robert Lewis, "The Geography of North American Cities and Suburbs, 1900-1950," Journal of Urban History Vol. 27, no. 3 (March 2001), 262-292. 2. These statistics and characterizations come from Dolores Hayden's Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000 (New York: Vintage, 2003), 171-172. 3. Thomas Sieverts, Cities without Cities: An Interpretation of the Zwischenstadt, Daniel de Lough, trans. (London: Spoon Press, 2003). It is worth noting that Sieverts takes Germany as his focus, a country with a long tradition of centralized urban planning and an extensive public transportation system that would arguably have mitigated low density development or sprawl. 4. Joel Garreau, Edge City: Life on the New Frontier (New York: Doubleday, 1991). 5. These statistics come from a book that deflates any idea that European cities have developed along substantially different lines than American ones over the past century, Robert Bruegmann's Sprawl: A Compact History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 54-55 and 73-75. 6. See John Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting, 1730-1840 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983) and Alan Wallach, "Thomas Cole and the Aristocracy" Arts Magazine Vol. 56, no. 3 (November 1981), 94-106. 7. Williams writes, "[w]hen nature is separated from the activities of men, it even ceases to be nature, in any full and effective sense," Raymond Williams, "Ideas of Nature [1972]" in Culture and Materialism (London: Verso, 2005). 81. 8. Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, "Moments of History in the Work of Dan Graham [1978]," in Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955-1975 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 179-201. 9. Marc Auge, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, John Howe, trans. (London: Verso, 1995). 10. T.J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life (New York: Knopf, 1985), 29. 11. Bruegmann, 132-135. 12. Quoted in Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz, Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 127; originally appeared as Samuel Wagstaff, Jr., "Talking with Tony Smith: 'I view art as something vast.'" Artforum 5, no. 4 (December 1966), 14-19. 13. The author wishes to acknowledge the aid and input of Nancy Lim, Adrienne Posner, and the artists themselves.