Off-Road: The GPS Guide to Cultural Tourism in New Haven’s Yale Hospital, Oak Street Connector and Historic Orchard Street Synagogue Area (2009)
Nancy Austin
Artist Statement:
How can the expanding field of cultural tourism be used by contemporary artists to initiate historically grounded conversations about, for example, religious tolerance in America? My project is a prototype for artist-driven content circulated via new cultural tourism sites. My first video is about documentation and facts. “Historic Synagogues of New Haven: The First Century, 1856-1956” is a looping video showing every known exterior, street-level view of New Haven’s historic synagogues. To date, I have only found about 50 surviving (mostly photographic) views recording the existence of these twenty synagogues representing a century of Jewish religious architecture in New Haven. How can it be that not only the synagogues themselves are gone, but also the visual record of their history is lost as well? My second video is a prototype for a different kind of cultural tourism experience. It contextualizes the Orchard St Shul as the lone-surviving synagogue of the still-controversial urban renewal efforts of the 1950s and 1960s and the semi-aborted Oak St. Highway Connector. This was a massive demolition project that demolished three other synagogues right away, dispersed the strong Jewish presence that supported the shops and other synagogues in the area, and transformed the surrounding neighborhood fabric forever. This devastation can be documented literally, and also more conceptually. In my video tour, I am both using and subverting a popular GPS drawing application for personal GPS travel diaries. Thus, if my first video is about the politics of archival photo documentation as the foundation for historical memory, then my second video should be seen as a cautionary tale about detached storytelling. For this exhibition installation, at a suitable distance from my altar of video screens, I have created a surrogate experience for the viewer to hop on an exercise bike and become, for the moment, a cultural tourist generating GPS data – shadows of facts as though we are all back in Plato’s cave. This is the dialectic and dialogue, and there is no quick answer to the question: “what do you know when you know a fact?”
How can the expanding field of cultural tourism be used by contemporary artists to initiate historically grounded conversations about, for example, religious tolerance in America? My project is a prototype for artist-driven content circulated via new cultural tourism sites. My first video is about documentation and facts. “Historic Synagogues of New Haven: The First Century, 1856-1956” is a looping video showing every known exterior, street-level view of New Haven’s historic synagogues. To date, I have only found about 50 surviving (mostly photographic) views recording the existence of these twenty synagogues representing a century of Jewish religious architecture in New Haven. How can it be that not only the synagogues themselves are gone, but also the visual record of their history is lost as well? My second video is a prototype for a different kind of cultural tourism experience. It contextualizes the Orchard St Shul as the lone-surviving synagogue of the still-controversial urban renewal efforts of the 1950s and 1960s and the semi-aborted Oak St. Highway Connector. This was a massive demolition project that demolished three other synagogues right away, dispersed the strong Jewish presence that supported the shops and other synagogues in the area, and transformed the surrounding neighborhood fabric forever. This devastation can be documented literally, and also more conceptually. In my video tour, I am both using and subverting a popular GPS drawing application for personal GPS travel diaries. Thus, if my first video is about the politics of archival photo documentation as the foundation for historical memory, then my second video should be seen as a cautionary tale about detached storytelling. For this exhibition installation, at a suitable distance from my altar of video screens, I have created a surrogate experience for the viewer to hop on an exercise bike and become, for the moment, a cultural tourist generating GPS data – shadows of facts as though we are all back in Plato’s cave. This is the dialectic and dialogue, and there is no quick answer to the question: “what do you know when you know a fact?”
Bio:
Nancy Austin is an interdisciplinary design historian and artist who has taught at Yale, RISD, and WPI. She is an expert on the sites and circulation of culture in the modern period, and the history of the museum from the Renaissance to Museum 3.0. Her studio, Austin Alchemy – writing, research, design, partners on art-driven projects that bridge historical scholarship, an expanded notion of cultural tourism as an opportunity for public discourse, site-specific installations, and the critical exploration of new locative media.
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