react/review: a responsive journal for art & architecture

Full issue

volume 4 | subversion zones

From 2013 to 2023, the unhoused residents of West Oakland’s Wood Street encampment constructed a sprawling informal neighborhood from the city’s vast material and spatial excess. They built and furnished myriad shanties, tiny homes, and shacks from items cast off by Oakland’s middle and upper classes and by the industries surrounding the city’s massive port. It was common to see tarps and banners used as shading materials, fastened to utility poles and chain link fences. Forklift pallets became picket fences demarcating yards. Structures made from plywood and discarded furniture populated the shade beneath freeway.

This paper examines Monkey Hill, a hamadryas baboon enclosure built in the 1920s at the London Zoo. Georges Bataille’s experience staring across at the baboons during a visit in 1927 inspired writings in which the upper parts of the primate body—the mouth, the face, the pineal gland—represented humanity, and the lower parts—the ano-genital or perineal regions—symbolized a base and contemptible animality associated with the baboons. This human-animal binary is reflected in the architecture of Monkey Hill. Its large, waterless moat divided the baboons from the zoo’s human visitors, operating as a management device to maintain distance between humans and other animals. Despite efforts to distance humanity, encounters like Bataille’s reveal the fragility of the human-animal divide. The paper thus explores notions of civilization and animality and how this dichotomy is constructed and maintained.

In this issue, Corey Ratch explores the less permeable divides at Monkey Hill, the London Zoo’s early twentieth-century baboon exhibit. Surrounded by unjumpable ditches, it forcefully articulated human/non-human distinctions. Just as Monkey Hill put human interventions in the natural world on display, so did a mass fish die-off in Lake Merritt. The August 2022 red tide algal bloom siphoned enough oxygen from the water to litter Lake Merritt’s edges with the asphyxiated bodies of fish, crustaceans, and mollusks. In the Anthropocene and the era of human induced climate change, clear anthropological divides are unsustainable.

In 2006 artist Chemi Rosado Siejo completed construction of El Bowl, a public structure with a dual function of a swimming pool and skate ramp in the La Perla neighborhood of San Juan, Puerto Rico. This article draws upon histories of urbanism and site specific art to examine the history of the structure and its site, located outside the colonial walls of the city. Looking to the development and visibility of the neighborhood since the site’s construction, Jekabson argues that El Bowl is a structure that simultaneously disrupts and supports the growing pervasiveness of media tourism in Puerto Rico.

Alida Jekabson’s “Skating the Surrounds: Chemi Rosado-Seijo and El Bowl in La Perla, Puerto Rico” deals with the tension between the local and the global. She engages with Miwon Kwon’s book One Place after Another, which argues that starting in the 1990s, some artists “are attempting to reinvent site specificity as a nomadic practice.” El Bowl demonstrates how a site-specific artwork can become valorized globally, perhaps in part for its very specificity.

I'd like to take up the particular manifestation of tension between local and global exemplified by pilgrimage. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s (SOM) Hajj Terminal in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia (1975-81) and Gottfried Böhm's pilgrimage church Mary of Victory in Wigratzbad, Germany (1972-6) could be seen to engage some of the dynamics that Kwon calls “nomadic.” I will suggest, though, that pilgrimage is a more appropriate lens through which to view such structures, because it engages with the actual uses to which these spaces were put, rather than employing a fraught metaphor.

In a 1960 article entitled “Younger American Painters,” William Rubin accused Rauschenberg’s Combines of rendering the “inherently biographical style of Abstract Expressionism… even more personal, more particular, and sometimes almost embarrassingly private.” Rubin’s choice of the word “embarrassingly” was telling; the problem the Combines presented was that they were not private when good sense said they should be. This spilling over of the private into the embarrassingly deviant public has been read as an insistence on the work of art as both in its environment and in communication with it, as a valorization of the femininity associated with the interior/personal and relatedly, as a refusal of heteronormative subjectivity as dictated in the Cold War era. This article, however, suggest a supplementary reading of Rauschenberg’s Combines through the lens of disability theory. If Rauschenberg’s Combines are debased, and if one’s experience of them is bodily, then their association with the abject body demands inquiry. Made up of disparate parts that insist upon their discrete, adjunctive identities and former lives, the Combines might be best understood as disabled bodies that refuse to comply and in so doing inscribe new ways of being (corporeally) in the world.

Cole Graham’s article “Inefficient, Unsustainable, and Fragmentary: The Rauschenberg Combines as Disabled Bodies” prompts us to consider disability as one of the precarious, suspended, and contradictive subversion zones that this volume explores. Framed through the lens of a cultural-critical disability model he calls sitpoint theory, Graham demonstrates how Robert Rauschenberg's Combines disrupt spatial, bodily, and sociocultural hegemonies, thus challenging existing ableist power structures and introducing the potential for new ways of living that do not center around conventional notions of ability. What if we were to apply Graham’s sitpoint theory to other modalities of disability or neurodivergence?

During the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), Mexican-Hungarian photographer Kati Horna (1912–2000) produced visual materials for the anarcho-syndicalist union, the CNT-FAI (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo-Federación Anarquista Ibérica/National Labor Confederation-Iberian Anarchist Federation). From 1937 to 1938, she created photographs, photomontages, and collages that contain anarchist intonations. However, Horna’s own humanitarian-feminist voice can still be heard and recognized beyond the immediate goals of the organization. She was able to achieve this by combining Constructivist and Surrealist formal elements with a theory espoused by Lajos Kassák (1887–1967), the founder of Hungarian Activism, to create a heterogeneous artistic practice which extended beyond the traditional borders of a singular avant-garde movement. Horna inherited the belief from Kassák that artistic autonomy and politically engaged art can coexist, without allowing one to engulf the other. Her hybrid avant-garde presented a solution to the dominant interwar debate on how to create art that transformed life praxis (and by extension, politics) without sacrificing artistic autonomy. Horna’s participation in this discourse, profession as a photojournalist, and presence on the front lines during the Spanish Civil War challenged spaces traditionally reserved for men. Her creative voice uniquely resonates in these spaces due to her constant compassion towards her subjects and her creation of a hybrid avant-garde.

In this issue, Lizi Anderson-Cleary looks at the work of Mexican-Hungarian photographer Kati Horna, one of the few foreign female photographers of the Spanish Civil War. Horna’s humanitarian-feminist intentions informed her creative vision, one that did not seamlessly align with the male-dominated version of anarcho- syndicalist aims. Such image production amid the turmoil of the Spanish Civil War challenged both prevailing ideas about women’s place in society as well as some images produced by allies of the Spanish Republic. Anderson-Cleary’s analysis shows how depictions on the Spanish left and their corollaries in the avant-garde movements sometimes repurposed the trope of the female body as a signifier of biological reproduction toward radical ends. Thinking about images of milicianas and other women active in the war, in which they are so often depicted alone or with men, I wondered how we might adjust our historical imagining to see women not just on the frontlines and the city streets at all but also together.

As cities globally aim for healthier environments and confront biodiversity threats, integrating nature into urban settings becomes crucial for various ecosystem services and ecological functions. Urban green spaces, with features like trees, water elements, and green roofs, play a vital role in supporting biodiversity and human health. However, designing such spaces involves navigating tradeoffs, such as balancing recreational needs with wildlife habitat preservation. To address this challenge, the San Francisco Estuary Institute (SFEI) developed Ecology for Health, a science-based urban design guide. This guide, accessible on SFEI's Making Nature's City Toolkit website, merges biodiversity research with the health benefits of green spaces, aiming to enhance urban community well-being.The guide offers strategies across three scales: urban planning, site design, and detailed design and management. It synthesizes three decades of global research on urban greening, human health, and biodiversity, with a focus on supporting native wildlife. Highlighted strategies from the guide include enhancing greenspace connectivity, optimizing park and waterfront designs, and balancing planning and site design considerations. These insights, coupled with feedback received during an outreach event with practitioners following publication of the guide, offer valuable direction for planners and designers aiming to create biodiverse urban environments that promote both human health and wildlife conservation.

A review of Kris Lemsalu's sculpture 'Chará,' exhibited in Vienna's Graben from August to November 2023. This public sculpture, made of steel and pigmented synthetic resin, explores the themes of feminine pleasure and joy. It was commissioned by KÖR to enhance Vienna's public spaces and serves as an art installation that engages the public in a dialogue of mythological and contemporary feminist narratives. The review highlights the sculpture's material attributes, its connection to ancient myths like vagina dentata and Baubo, and its societal impact.