ALONG THE POWER LINES
Along the power lines
In 1967, in Artforum magazine, Robert Smithson published “The Monuments of Passaic [1]”, a report on a visit to his hometown of Passaic, New Jersey, a suburb of New York. Equipped with an Instamatic 400, Smithson photographed the relics of the present in this small industrial town: bridges, concrete abutments, pipes, houses built before and after the Second World War, pumping derricks and parking lots. These banal architectural elements, which Smithson calls “ruins in reverse [2]”, betray the entropy affecting this neglected suburban landscape. If, for Smithson, all lesser modernist architecture is already in ruins, this is not the case for Heidi Wood, born in the same year as the publication of “The Monuments of Passaic”. Like Smithson, Heidi Wood is a child of the suburbs, having grown up in Wheelers Hills, a town on the outskirts of Melbourne (Australia): “I often walked the residential streets of this generic suburb, to and from school from the age of 8. It was a few kilometres from home. But also just to wander and dream. I didn't think of it as an ugly landscape [3]”. Far from using ruin as a trigger, her work since the early 2000s [4] has sought “to challenge the way suburbs in France are represented; to promote places that are underrated and undervalued [5]”.
Heidi Wood's vision of suburbia, decidedly less ruinist than Smithson's, found its starting point in 2011 in the town of Chevilly-Larue (Val-de-Marne) with the “Vacances d'hiver” (Winter Vacation) project. Over a period of more than a year, the artist worked with local residents to create a series of artworks that would promote this Parisian suburb with no particular claim to fame as a tourist destination, thus offering it a new destiny. It began with the collection of hundreds of everyday objects belonging to the people of Chevilly-Larue. Toys, keys, sewing boxes, musical instruments, tools, glasses, watches, jewellery, helmets, shoes and gloves were plucked from their domestic reality. The contours of each object were then drawn by the artist in black pen, to give a simplified representation. From these fragments of intimacy, made neutral by Heidi Wood’s minimal black lines, were born six downloadable colouring books [6]. It's tempting to recall the lines of Walter Benjamin, a collector of objects, especially toys: “Children are particularly fond of haunting any site where things are being visibly worked upon. They are irresistibly drawn by the detritus generated by building, gardening, housework, tailoring, or carpentry. In waste products they recognise the face that the world of things turns directly and solely to them. They thus produce their own small world of things within the greater one [7].”
The drawings of the pruning shears, the sewing box, the old iron and the teddy bear were to expand and find a new dimension in a series of posters. This time, in the advertising space throughout Chevilly-Larue, the drawn objects share the poster with other shapes. Against a white background, a colourful geometric form appears beneath the black lines of each object. While each trinket crystallises a singularity, both in its specific function and in the intimate history it has shared with its owner, the green, pink and orange geometries [8] seem to represent a signifying unity - that of architecture. These shapes derive from her walks around the suburb. Heidi Wood surveyed the streets and drew up a precise graphic inventory of residential and industrial buildings. From this visual register, a set of architectural pictograms was produced, later combined with outlines of personal objects. These large-scale portraits of Chevilly-Larue, associating the citizen with the town's architecture through drawing, form a double regime of signs: on the one hand, a graphic mimesis of the individual, and on the other, with the pictogram, a schematic representation of the collective.
The use of the poster as a graphic medium for a synthesised image of the contemporary city resonates with the thinking of Fernand Léger, painter of the pictographic sign, who was also an observer of the modern city and of “the mobile finery of the street [9]” represented by the imbrications of schematic images in the urban environment (signs, billboards, plaques...): “These interminable surfaces of administrative walls and the like are [...] the saddest and most sinister things I know. The poster is a modern support, which painters immediately knew how to use [10].”[11] However, in Heidi Wood's work, the pictogram, the generic image, is not the sole protagonist. It flirts with the drawing of the personal object, full of its emotional charge. The many high-voltage power lines identified by the artist in the urban landscape [12] of Chevilly-Larue appear to characterise her artistic vocabulary: an axis of tension between the generic and the singular.
In the autumn of 2023, this semiotic duality resurfaced in another suburb, Villejuif, south of Paris. Invited for a three-month residency, Heidi Wood set up a workshop in the Elsa Triolet multimedia library, a place with multiple social and cultural roles: library, lecture venue and meeting place for children, teenagers and elderly people alike. What could be more natural in such a place than to use paper as a means of production? The artist procured a range of recycled materials from the municipality, including remaindered books, posters and other stationery. These leftovers, the starting point for the “En chantier” (Under Construction) project, were soon to find a new existence.
For Heidi Wood, however, it was essential to get out of the library and wander around to turn this pile of leftover paper into new forms. During her long walks, the artist discovered a city in transition, full of building sites for major infrastructure and housing projects. Cranes, excavators and other construction equipment dot the landscape. These iron giants become miniatures under the artist's pencil, and are transformed into pictogrammatic forms, cut from recycled vinyl adhesive [13]. The collages and cut-outs on the library's large work table intrigued users, who asked her about the meaning of the shapes. These initial exchanges led to a weekly meeting between the artist and the library’s visitors, during which she offered to draw their portraits. Charles, Cyrine, Daouda, Gamze, Harold, Mohamed, Vanessa, Xuyang, Youcef... Several hundred profiles were created over the three-month residency. The face is reduced to a silhouette, retaining only the distinctive profile of the individual represented [14].
As in “Vacances d'hiver”, here the artist combines two signifying regimes: silhouettes of faces meet architectural pictograms in an unusual collage. The grafting of these two semiotic categories creates a real tension here, and revives memories of that international visual language created in 1920 by Austrian sociologist Otto Neurath and German graphic designer Gerd Arntz (15): the Isotype (International System Of Typographic Picture Education). Neurath's motto ˗ “Words divide, Pictures unite” ˗ was the watchword for the creation of this new language, which was intended to be simple, universal and non-verbal. Neurath's initial intention was to use the language for children's education, but it later became popular in the field of data visualisation. Arntz created a visual lexicon of over 4,000 pictograms, with simple, uncluttered lines, giving shape to the universalist aspirations of the “Vienna Method”, which allows numerical data reflecting the socio-economic changes of the time to be transcribed visually for exhibitions or publications.
Arntz's graphic tool was coupled with a political aim: the social emancipation of the masses. His commitment was reiterated in the mid-1920s with the production of two series of pictogrammatic woodcuts, entitled Mitropa and Twelve Houses of Our Time, dealing with class struggle, the organisation of work and mass exodus to the suburbs. Nearly one hundred years later, Heidi Wood revives Arntz's ideological ambition, crystallised in the pictogram. The montage combining these signs of faces overlooking the architectural pictograms of Villejuif seems to synthesise the German graphic designer’s thinking: the silhouettes belong to those for whom Arndt’s pictograms were intended, with the aim of making their lives easier.
Twelve years separate the Chevilly-Larue and Villejuif projects. In the meantime, Heidi Wood has been a suburbanist on many other occasions, determined to promote what lies beyond the ring road. German artist Franz Ackermann's Mental Maps from the 1990s come to mind; multi-polar, chaotic images of urban representations, produced in response to the sensations of his travels. Heidi Wood's explorations of these peri-urban areas are of a completely different nature, generating not psycho-geographical testimonies but rather the construction of an ennobled image of the suburbs, in dialogue with the people who live there. Visitors could experience this at the Limay art centre, Les Réservoirs, in 2012. The “Banlieues” (Suburbias) project involved a fictional twinning of this small industrial town in the Yvelines, classified as a “disadvantaged urban area”, with Wheelers Hills, where Heidi Wood grew up. Designed along the lines of a town's tourist office, the exhibition promoted two different images of suburbia through a series of murals, paintings and photographs, the starting point of which was architectural pictograms resulting from the observation of both places.
Pictograms were also on display at Le 116 art centre in Montreuil in 2015 as part of the Production Site exhibition, and on the walls of the Aretha Franklin secondary school in Drancy in 2020 as part of the Alentour project. In the latter, students from this school in Seine-Saint-Denis created a fictitious application for UNESCO World Heritage listing for an ideal city superbly named Alentour. The result of this collective research into an urban dream was a set of twelve polyptychs installed throughout the college, along with eight heraldic shields representing the identity of the “Alentourians”. Architectural pictograms as well as trams, trucks and catenaries line the school's corridors, as if in this place of passage, the motif of displacement and the iconic abbreviation of transport were the order of the day; as if the ideal city were one that we could both return to and flee.
The sign of transport, of movement, not unlike Léger's painting, is very present in the work of English artist Julian Opie. Highways, trains and cars are schematised in the extreme, leading to an immediate reading of the image; pictograms for viewers in a hurry, like the Drancy pupils running through the school’s corridors. As is the case with Opie, and given the proximity of the two imaginary worlds, it's not surprising to see road signs appearing in Heidi Wood's work over the last ten years.
The two series Tissu urbain (2015) and Étapes urbaines (2017) [16] are made up of large aluminium road signs, painted in a crash repair garage. But what do they signal to passers-by at the exhibition venues? Whereas, along highways, these signs extol the architectural or natural beauties of the land, Heidi Wood's celebrate neglected places and deindustrialised areas that nobody looks at anymore, like the port of Le Havre or abandoned steelworks in Lorraine ˗ a Lost Civilisation, as per the title of her latest series of signs presented in Villejuif during the Nuit Blanche in June 2023. This time, the panels were presented on the ground, on the footpath, like recumbent figures that have lost all signifying power. At their centre, stylised one-eyed faces, made of fragments of geometric shapes, seem to signal that there's nothing left to see.
If Heidi Wood's work seems to move, in one direction or another, along a line that runs from the generic to the singular, it crystallises other polarities, to which the series of paintings Décor d'une vie ordinaire (2013), Région parisienne (2013), Gros plan (2015) and Détramé (2016) resolutely bear witness. The acrylics in question take the form of grids that, in some cases, take up the entire pictorial field, with the various squares offering a non-systematically regulated play of colours. These geometric abstractions originate from a fragment of facade or, more generally, of architecture or urban structure. However, it is impossible to identify their referents, given the similarity of these forms: abstract portions of the standardised architectural ensembles that Heidi Wood has observed in the suburbs. Two modernisms for one painting.
We owe Jacques Rancière some memorable lines on these two modernisms: “What they [Greenberg and his followers] proclaim the end of is much more broadly historical modernism, the idea of a new art in sync with all the vibrations of universal life: an art capable both of embracing the accelerated rhythms of industry, society and urban life, and of giving its infinite resonance to the most everyday minutes of ordinary life. Ironically, posterity gave this desire to put a stop to it the very name of what it set out to destroy. It was named modernism [17]”.
In her paintings, Heidi Wood brings together these two opposing versions of modernism: suburban collective housing projects, the very image of avant-garde utopia, take the form of mute geometry. The products of a functionalist ideology are transformed into an abstraction preoccupied with its own essence and the affirmation of its irreducible difference from the objects of the world. From Mondrian and Sarah Morris to Vasarely and Peter Halley, to name but a few, abstract painting's affinity with architectural and urban structures has been widely exploited by artists. Heidi Wood's architectural paintings are distinctive in that they are painted on upholstery fabrics. Floral-patterned textiles host fragments of dormitory towns, as if the domestic and the urban were flirting within the composition, and even more so, the ornamental and the functional, which, often considered enemies by art history, are reconciled here.
In June 2024, with Archipel de portraits (Archipelago of Portraits), Heidi Wood offers a new existence to the “En chantier” project, begun in autumn 2023 in Villejuif. For the Nuit Blanche event, the grafts, combining the silhouettes of residents and architectural pictograms of the town, change scale and take on a sculptural dimension within the public space. Heidi Wood's double portrait of Villejuif, which is both the fruit of work with local residents and rooted in urban reality, seems to be the offspring of modernist utopias. A little over a hundred years after Oskar Schlemmer created the Bauhaus logo in 1921, depicting the profile of a face whose features resemble a rationalist building, Heidi Wood returns to the same hybridisation. While Schlemmer's logo seeks to represent an ideal, homogenised and standardised world, and the New Man who is its master, Heidi Wood convincingly shows that it is the singularity of each of its inhabitants that makes a city rich and complex.
Marjolaine Lévy
April 2024
NOTES
1 Robert Smithson, “The Monuments of Passaic”, Artforum, VII, n°4, décembre 1967.
2 Jack Flam (ed.), Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey”, Berkeley/Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1996, p. 72.
3 Interview with the artist, March 2024.
4 From 2004 to 2010, Heidi Wood did several residencies in cities (Los Angeles, Santa Fe, Budapest, etc.) that became the subject of her work.
5 Interview with the artist, March 2024.
6 https://www.heidiwood.net/en/project-categories/drawings/#
7 Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, (trans. Edmund Jephcott; edited and introduction by Peter Demetz), New York: Schocken Books, 1978, p.69
8 The world of the residents is expressed in shades of green, the world of the firefighters at the Villejuif fire station in shades of orange, and that of L’Oréal, the project’s corporate partner, in colours inspired by the brand’s winter lipstick range.
9 Gustave Kahn, L’Esthétique de la rue, Paris, Fasquelle, 1901, p. 292.
10 Fernand Léger, “Les réalisations picturales actuelles” (1914), in Fonctions de la peinture, Paris, Denöel, p. 57.
11 It is interesting to note that in 2013, Heidi Wood produced the exhibition “Décor d’une vie ordinaire” (Setting for an Ordinary Life) at the Musée National Fernand Léger (Biot), a tribute to the suburbs and their architecture constructed in two parts: Grand ensemble (The Projects) at the Musée Fernand Léger and Pavillon (House) at the Musée d’histoire et de céramique biotoises. In these two parts, the artist emphasised the opposition between standardised architecture and domestic intimacy.
12 Heidi Wood produced a series of “tourist souvenirs”, including plates on which photographs of high-voltage power lines in Chevilly-Larue are reproduced.
13 Since 2012, using ordinary black masking tape, Heidi Wood has produced a series entitled Industrial Collages of pictograms of cranes, electrical pylons and other infrastructure in suburban areas.
14 For example, Peter Coffin’s Untitled (Sculpture Silhouettes) (2007-2009) is a series of two-dimensional black silhouettes of three-dimensional historical works (from Michelangelo to Sol LeWitt, including Rodin, Picasso, Boccioni, Tatline, Smithson and a statue from Easter Island) placed in public spaces.
15 On the work of Gerd Arntz, see Marie Neurath and Robin Kinross,
Le transformateur, trans. D. Subotocki, Éditions B42, Paris, 2013.
16 It is interesting to note that the series was produced by Renault.
17 Jacques Rancière, Aisthesis. Scènes du régime esthétique de l’art, ch. “L’éclat cruel de ce qui est”, Paris, Galilée, 2011, p. 307.