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SPACES OF COUNTERCULTURE Most of the debate of architects and urban planners about the future of the city is centred in the question of public space. Not to minimize the importance of this issue, my interest while writing this essay lies in the spaces which escape or question the classical economics dichotomy between public and private. We can find this tension in the private interiors made a public arena in bars or clubs, in which one can display himself and spy the others, or in the temporary appropriation of public spaces by graffiti artists or skaters that set in it their own, unwritten rules. These in between spaces provide a starting point for counterproposals for a different everyday life, not engaging in debates about how it should be, but allowing temporarily, and within their domains, a new society in miniature to take place. I hereby use the term counterculture implying the set of values and behavioural rules that “run counter to those of established society” 1 , trying to provide a thread or a link that brings together the so called youth cultures, or subcultures 2 . In this sense, I employ the term culture in a broader sense than the mere production of outstanding cultural artefacts, but rather as the culture that stems from the everyday life, being expressed not only in the excellence of art and sciences, but in patterns of ordinary behaviour. 3 From my point of view, these spaces of counterculture are creating a new culture by redefining social and cultural boundaries and restrictions, if we wanted to link it to the world of art, we could say that their cultural objects could be considered as spontaneous, unplanned happenings which can only take place inside a very precise time and place.
The aim of counterculture is, thus, not trying to solve the structural problems they are countering, but rather building a temporal environment sufficiently detached from that reality to re-create or re-present the new cultures they envision. It is necessarily evasive and utopian; it stands as a “conformation of powerlessness, a celebration of impotence” 4 . Some scholars have directly linked this ambition of creating islands that escape the constrictions of the ruling system and the loss of quality and privatization of public space in contemporary cities, a public space which does not relate with its new citizens 5 . At the same time,
From the definition of the Merrian-Webster online dictionary, http://www.merriamwebster.com/dictionary/counterculture. 2 The scattering of the different subcultures is pointed by some authors as problematic for ultimately becoming infinite and overly vague” (MACDONALD: 2002, p 152). Furthermore I am concerned with the connotations it may arise: Is subculture something regarded as below culture? Do they exist only as a subpart that make up the big culture? 3 Hebdige starts his book on subculture precisely addressing the term culture, HEBDIGE: 1979, p 6. 4 HEBDIGE: 1988, p 35. 5 Citation needed. Lefebvre, Hebdige. 1
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the term counterculture also suggests a broader scope, which tries to define the aspirations of a specific population as a whole, to crystallize its ‘zeitgeist’. These connotations link it with the idea of the gradual process of mainstreaming of subcultures, which also interested me to a great extent.
My aim with this analysis is to try to give an overview of some important features of these spaces through concrete examples of different times and locations. There is a split in two in the bibliography between a theoretical approach to describe and relate these different cases and a compilation of personal impressions of the actual users which give an insight into the actual experienced spaces. The theoretical framework is built mostly around the notions of the Temporary Autonomous Zone (Hakim Bey) and the wellknown heterotopia (Michel Foucault). Besides the written references and descriptions, I will attempt to actively map these spaces as accurately as possible, nailing them to the absolute space of architectural plans to see their comparative spatial configuration and strategies. The examples will range from the mythical institutions of art production like Warhol’s Factory to the anonymous and imprecise spaces of the raves. Some will explore the relation with the domestic realm and others will investigate the bar and the club, that sometimes appear as exclusive, hidden networks, as in the case of gay bars and public baths. The last of all these examples of what I consider spaces of counterculture would be a one that I have experienced as a user, thus trying to go beyond references and written material and re-creating this last space from the subjectivity of first-hand experience.
BEING OUTSIDE INSIDE, BEING INSIDE OUTSIDE. AMBIGUOUS SPACES. Countercultural structures try to position themselves as independent systems that function separately from society and are thus difficult to define as an outsider. This indefinability is always present in the spaces they generate, which are frequently temporal, mutable or unstable, characteristics that detach them from the secure and well-organized typology of the public building in which the agency of the architect is very clear and embedded in good intentions. These other spaces usually share a sense of lack of authorship, which is sometimes replaced by functional interiors that appear anonymous, or other times shown as a collective design in which different contributions accumulate and overlap without any apparent order, displaying a much more ‘phenomenologic’ 6 approach. However their authorless condition may be ABALOS: 2002. Iñaki ABALOS proposes the ‘phenomenologic house’ as the house lived and understood from experience of phenomena.
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relative, this shows us the impossibility of describing these places only from the absolute space we are used to as architects. The very roots of their manifestations are soaked in the world of metaphors and images; so called youth culture “deals in the currency of signs and is, thus, always ambiguous”. 7
These ‘psycho-topologies’ could be directly related to the notion of the Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ), because both temporality (or rather mutability) and autonomy are two of the prerequisites they need to develop. The TAZ is supposed to provide an “intensification of everyday life” 8 , showing a parasitic relation to reality, which Bey describes as a Web (“horizontal, open structures of information exchange”) that invades the holes or interstices of the Net (the hierarchic, controlled structures fixed by the system), as “spider-webs interwoven through the […] broken sections of the Net [as a fishing net]”. 9 This simile stresses again the difference between the order of the existing fabrics and the erratic, anarchic nature of the counterproject. There is also a reminiscence of the organic or the spontaneous, that Bey later synthesizes in the motto “Culture is our nature”. 10 The parasitic condition of these new spaces show their indirect dependence of the everyday, to which they are not completely alien but act as a redefinition, a distortion or sometimes a negation of our everyday landscapes. To elude the structures of control, the TAZ must escape from the formality of the built environment, but this does not mean it has to give up a form (and only work as a mental or virtual construct), but rather avoid a formula: “We have no desire to define the TAZ or to elaborate dogmas about how it must be created. Our contention is rather that it has been created, will be created, and is being created.” 11
The utopian qualities of these spaces, according to Bey, don’t have to relegate them to a no-place or a nowhere: “The TAZ is somewhere”. 12 I would like to bring in here Foucault’s ‘heterotopias’ 13 as a tool that allows us to consider and define spaces as something more complex than their physical manifestation, a series of overlapping layers of meanings and relations. Heterotopias are able to replace the utopian noHEBDIGE: 1988, p 35. Hakim BEY, “The Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ)”, from http://www.hermetic.com/bey. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 8 ‘Heterotopias’, as defined by the French philosopher Michel FOUCALT are “real places (…) which are something like countersites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all ther real sites (…) are simultaneously represented, contested and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality.” Michel FOUCALT, “Of other spaces.” 7 8
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where by the every-where or the here and there. In fact, we can perceive a lot of heterotopian attributes in these spaces of counterculture, such as the creation of powerful boundaries (in the shape of dress codes, friend networks, sexual preferences) that create a tension between its inside and outside. The creation of hidden insides within the secrecy of the city fabric links to the idea of a hidden network that operates only for the ones who have access to privileged information. Private parties, as a heterotopian extension of the domestic, have played an active role in the creation of spaces of counterculture during repressive regimes. We can see an interesting example in Almodovar’s movie “Pepi, Luci, Bom”, where during a private party (set in a private exterior space) a game is introduced called “Erecciones generales” (General erections) 14 . In it, both of the social taboos (sex and democracy in still pre-democratic Spain) are enclosed in this selfproclaimed autonomous zone. We can see also how the function of the space is re-designed by its use, again taking benefit of the existing structure. Therefore, the stairs become a platform for the host to announce the contest, the bench a podium for the contestants to stand.
The occupation and subversion of existing spaces is a common practice of spaces of counterculture, that can happen in public spaces (as in graffiti walls) or private (like squatter communities). Even though conditions of illegality or allegality are common, some of them only take advantage of the inequalities and niches of opportunity of the system that haven’t yet been exploited by mainstream culture. Warhol’s silver Factory was a legally rented space in the fourth floor of an industrial building in Midtown, Manhattan, which allowed a cheap price while offering an essential proximity to the city centre. The industrial nature of the building had other spatial implications: having no walls, all references to the domestic scale was banned. On the one hand, the lack of partitions abolished any kind of privacy, thus creating a sense of community (another experiment of the commune) in which all the activities, even the ones comprising strong social taboos (group sex, drug use) were shared. On the other hand, it was a decisive step towards the formation of a new typology for the creative elite: the New York loft. 15 In this sense, the emergence of a certain ‘yuppyism’ could be considered as the beginning of the formation of a “big upper class subculture”. 16 The furniture was scattered along the space without any apparent order or logic, stressing again this quality of the non-designed, which was carefully thought of. The reflective aluminium foil and paint that covered the walls made its limits blurrier in space, but also stated a disturbance in time, especially for Billy Name, the person who produced this silver coating over two years of work: “It took me so
Scene retrievable at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVIQ3KyL5Ic. ABALOS: 2002. 16 MACDONALD: 2002, p. 152. 14 15
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long to do the Factory I just stayed there.” 17 The image of the decorator under serious drug abuse inhabiting one of the toilets (now converted into a dark room), an individual detached of any notion of time, shows us how this spaces have the heterotopian quality of defying not only its spatial limits, but also altering the perception of time. Inside those spaces, time seems to have the same elasticity showed in the early Warhol’s films, where everyday actions seem to stretch endlessly, detached from reality. This nature is mysterious and attracting, but at the same time it is dangerous, creating places that can absorb and annihilate the individual. Places that haunt you.
AVOIDING THE ‘TERRIBLY CONVENTIONAL’ 18 . THE NECESSITY OF BEING KINKY. The defiance of social rules and conventions, actively disobeyed through a more or less deviant behaviour, is another commonplace for all these spaces. Their users become, thus, self conscious nonconformists that establish their own set of rules, actively defining their space. Everyday life is seen from here as a homogenizing and limiting force that puts the individual’s personal freedom at stake. This romantic image of the rebel entered mass culture gradually throughout the fifties and sixties, also being more and more linked to leisure. Eventually the images of ‘youth as trouble’ and ‘youth as fun’ 19 overlapped, as a kind of mainstreamed version of the legacy of the Beat Generation. From the city of London in the sixties, one of the hot spots of this emerging movements, a humble young writer wannabe who had just left the Francoist Spanish reality behind described this new landscape as a “slippery territory – and therefore, amusing – where the weird is imposed as a way of self-knowledge for the pleasure of amateurs and obsession of collectors. It was the time when a new necessity spread, the necessity of being kinky.” 20
This awkwardness is present in most of these spaces as an assumed or agreed condition to which the users are not meant to react if they don’t want to be considered outsiders. Andy Warhol’s immutability to anything that happened inside its Factory would be the perfect example to illustrate this toleration. The use of the bizarre when defining spaces of counterculture constitutes also a tool to evade from reality, like the
Billy NAME from STEIN: 1986, p 205. Term quoted from Billy NAME in STEIN, 1986, p 205. 19 HEBDIGE: 1988, p30. 20 MOIX: 1998, p 324. Translated from Spanish by the author. 17 18
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depictions in Almodóvar’s film, which find a way to allow the penetration of life by the Marvellous. 21 Dislocation becomes here a keyword, as a tool that allows the overlapping of different layers on the space, exploring new combinations between space and use. In this sense, the notion of ‘appropriated space’ 22 becomes more relevant than ever, as it labels spaces that are claimed, occupied and diverted to be engaged in a different use. This term can be applied to different and more subtle strategies than the illegal occupations carried out by squatters. We can have a look at the question of homosexual relations, and how they quietly invade and subvert the existing urban structures to build their hidden niches (dark alleys, parks, zones of cruising). However, if we look at the formal spaces designed to house homosexual relations (for example public baths), they also show an idea of dislocation. Their anonymous, hygienic interiors which act as closed bunkers, denying any visual relation with the exterior, make it virtually impossible for them to be located. Behaviours that are supposed to be private are suddenly made public, starting by nudity. The cubicles where the sexual intercourse takes place would constitute the only realm of privacy left, relegated to bare functionality. This untraceability makes Aaron Betsky conclude that perhaps the most illustrative of these queer spaces is the car, as mobile private realms that defy any law. 23 I would argue that the space of the Internet, the interior of chat rooms, blogs and profiles, would be definitely embody the ultimate contemporary counterculture space; a Net which has no limits.
The estrangement of the individual inside these spaces is always shared by the community that rests within their boundaries, which provides a certain bond between their users. A good example of this shared estrangement could take place in the landscape of open-air raves: crowded free parties that take place in the outskirts of cities all around the globe. These events are organized in a grassroots basis, following structures of soft power networks, which have also in the last years taken advantage of the internet to crystallize. The setting is frequently a plot of land in an industrial or rururban area, a setting which is also devoid of any identity. Thus, the individuals inhabit these no-places, where every point of reference (the people, the DJ trailers, the temporary sheds) is not fixed. This is a dynamic environment in which the space vanishes in favour of the repetitive loud music. The use of drugs creates a general altered state of awareness which enhances this detachment from reality and the sense of a shared experience. There is a tension between the individual and the group: while the detachment from the surroundings make the individual users introverted dancers to the all-encompassing music, there is a general sense of being a
Hakim BEY, “The Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ)”, from http://www.hermetic.com/bey, linking the TAZ concept with the Surrealist ideas. 22 LEFEBVRE: 1974. 23 BETSKY: 1997. 21
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small piece of a bigger system, the metaphor of the rave as a collective ‘desiring machine’ 24 . The thin line between pleasure-seeking and nihilism is present also in these spaces, which produce fascination because of the danger they enclose. The sublime aspects of the rave settings, their harsh and dusty landscapes, bring about an epic dimension to them. We could see the exodus from the city and the inhabitation of these toxic in between spaces as a vague anarcho-primitivist act of liberation. Parallel to the relation of TAZs with the existing structure, spaces of counterculture reject but at the same time are dependent on the city.
A SPACE THAT CONDENSES LIVED MOMENTS. THE ‘MYTHOLOGY OF US’ 25 . “And our bar is closed, it has been closed for a long time/ When it happened we did not care, nor we do now/ but years have passed/ and now it is a Starbucks/ and we feel so angry it looks like nostalgia/ So we took action/ and now we come together to see if we can grosso modo/ remember how everything was./ The motto is this: we have to rescue from vanishing/ something like a 3D idea of that room/ with every detail, scale one to one/ with everything the way it was, I swear I already got a headache/ of remembering so much./ We have made workgroups/ one per room/ I have the toilets.” ASTRUD, “Acordarnos”, from the disc “Tú no existes”, Sinnamon Records/Austrohúngaro 2007. Traduction from Spanish by the author.
There was a general sense of excitement when amongst my friends when I mentioned I intended to write something about the Indie bar as a closing example for my essay. My conversations with them soon became flooded with references, memories, stories that straight away evoked the place, like the steps for a certain choreography that described the space in the air. All these partial chronicles provided all of a sudden a history of collective intimacies and details, shared by some regular clients that made use of that space during the specific summer of 2005 in the city of Barcelona, the majority of them we have never seen since, we wouldn’t even recognize their faces of most of them as we pass them by in the street. It led me to the conclusion that, more than in any other kind of spaces, these ones act as condensers of actions and routines, articulating a system that can be described almost entirely devoid of any reference to its physical materiality, but as the materialization of flows, relations and exchanges, of unexpected meetings, dance steps and flirting glances.
The Indie bar was located in the lower part of the Raval in Barcelona’s city centre, an area that still stood relatively untouched by the strong wave of gentrification that was conquering other parts of the 24 25
REYNOLDS: 1999, p 5. Term quoted from Chuck PALANIUK, “Haunted”.
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neighbourhood. This was apparent in the fauna that populated its streets, a reminder of the former condition of Barrio Chino (Barcelona’s archetypical neighbourhood of prostitution and crime). One was suddenly surrounded by Pakistani street-vendors selling beer cans, groups of chatty prostitutes, lonely dealers waiting in the street. The hybrid condition between the marginal situation and the proximity to the touristic area (and
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the invasion of the archetypical tourist, the guiri) made possible the development of a network of bars that were still relatively cheap and populated by crowds of urban bobos (bohemian bourgeois). In this atmosphere, the Indie bar appeared in 2005 as a new project led by a visionary DJ for a space that had been used formerly as a modest game saloon and local pub. Its main feature was that it was the only one open space after 3 AM at a reasonable price in the area, which was possible due of course to its illegal status.
The interior space had a high ceiling which allowed a mezzanine opposite to the entrance. The central double height space right after the doors, implemented with a bar, had the function of a dance floor, while the mezzanine space, whose height was so low that customers had to lower their heads, was used more as a chatting room or vantage point. There were no chairs, but only a couple of table footballs seldom used that operated as tables and seats. Under the mezzanine, the DJ set was located, communicated with the dance floor through a large opening, and the cabin extended to a VIP room behind it with two couches. The space was full of reminiscences to former uses or owners, and it was populated by various objects (a real-size statue of an iguana near the DJ set, lamps that evoked medieval torches, a homemade baroque balustrade in the mezzanine) which enhanced the feeling of a surreal environment, like a tacky bar temporarily squatted by young bobos. The intended style of music was an import of London sounds, underground indie, pop and electro, but the atmosphere and audience were more linked to a kitsch eclecticism, encompassed inside the general framework of the Removida, the rediscovery of the Movida, the golden Spanish eighties. This of course affected the musical selection, which normally grew more unexpected as the night progressed, including in the mix local electro-pop and tontipop (silly pop) and key concessions to the Spanish Bizarro (oldies and rarities). The majority of the public was inscribed in an image of colourful camp and style clash in which the far-fetched was actively encouraged. Many different contributions joined in the hectic melting pot, ranging from the boho-chic to an incipient emo fashion, with regular night owls and neighbourhood icons like Natacha, the exuberant and often topless transsexual that became the star of the Indie until she was banned the entrance after falling from the bar in one of her enthusiastic dance routines.
The sense of community grew after that summer, creating a regular clientele that only interacted during the nights at the Indie. Those were unplanned and irregular relations that usually developed in weekly phases. Strangers joined every weekend, but the size and density of the space provided a great field for spontaneous conversation to happen, a characteristic that I haven’t seen in many more bars or clubs. After the bar closed by the end of the summer by the police after endless prosecution, this human networks,
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again similar to the structures of soft power, continued to operate, arranging into collaborations and associations that continued to redefine Barcelona’s nightlife, in a series of events (La Rara, Noche de fiesta and eventually the opening of a new bar, the B-side) and artistic manifestations that grew from the germ of the Indie. More informally, this network of relations still gets in touch from time to time, especially at the closing of the bars of the area of the Raval, engaging in the practice of the after-casa (after-house); one of them lends their available apartment to continue partying there, thus avoiding the expensive and often deceiving after-hours. The spaces of counterculture are thus invading again the domestic. This prolongation of the Indie summer in time and place(s) seems to challenge the physical notion of space to show a more complex set of relations that can outlive the actual existence of the place.
The role of these spaces is however questioned. Some voices claim that countercultures have become another mere part of the system, which they no longer subvert but support. According to them, we need a “more coherent and effective Left politics.” 26 These statements show, in my opinion, a denial of the role of everyday life in the practice of politics, which is supposed to pursue greater goals. Bey talks about ‘applied hedonistics’ 27 when defending a resistance built by “heros who carried on their struggle […] but still knew how to party” 28 . This is only possible with the assumption that we need to achieve those necessary structural changes through our everyday life, and stop searching just for the Truth with a capital T but also for ‘the truth of pleasure’ 29 to be able to incorporate it in our own culture. In a messy world of inequalities, approximations and hybridizations, purist approaches are not a help but a constraint; the distinction between content and surface is not only irrelevant but inoperative.
The process of commodification that all of these spaces face can only be avoided through their temporal and mutable condition. All these expressions of resistance should not be judged as accomplished goals, but as explorations of new behavioural rules and relations between individuals. They are interesting as spontaneous cultural manifestations of their time that can entertain us, touch us, and help us understand the world we live in through the illusions we create out of it. Their subsistence can only be fuelled by a powerful body of fables and legends that these spaces are able to generate; a process of mystification. They can implement our new cultures through their myths, ‘the mythology of Us’. 30
HEATH and POTTER: 2004 Hakim BEY, “The Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ)”, from http://www.hermetic.com/bey. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 30 Term quoted from Chuck PALANIUK, “Haunted”. 26 27
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BIBLIOGRAPHY/ FILMOGRAPHY Dick HEBDIGE, “Subculture: the meaning of style”, 1979 (retrieved partly from Google Books). Dick HEBDIGE, “Hiding in the light: On images and things”, Routledge LONDON 1988. Ken GELDER (Ed), “The subculture reader”, Routledge LONDON 2005 (Retrieved from Google Books). Nancy MACDONALD, “The graffitti subculture”, Palmgrave Macmillan NEW YORK 2002. Hakim BEY, “The Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ)”, from http://www.hermetic.com/bey. Henri LEFEBVRE, “The production of space”, 1974. C GRAFE, D MULDER, J SCHOTANUS, Reader urban territories and interior spaces, TU Delft, 2003. Joseph HEATH and Andrew POTTER, “The rebel sell: How the counterculture became consumer culture”, 2004. Jean STEIN, “Edie” (Ed: George PLIMPTON), 1986 (Retrieved partly from Google Books). Inaki ABALOS, “Warhol at the factory: from the Freud-marxist communes to the New York loft”, from “La buena vida”, Gustavo Gili, 2002. David BOURDON, “Warhol/ David Bourdon”, Henry Abrams NEW YORK 1989. Aaron BETSKY, “Queer space: Architecture and same-sex desire”, William Morron & Co. 1997. Simon REYNOLDS, “Generation Ectasy: Into the world of Techno and Rave culture”, Routdelge 1999. (Retrieved from Google Books). Terenci MOIX, “Extraño en el paraíso”, Planeta BARCELONA 1998. Luis Antonio DE VILLENA, “Madrid ha muerto: Esplendores, ruido y caos de una ciudad feliz de los ochenta”, Planeta BARCELONA 1999.
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Pedro ALMODÓVAR, “Pepi, Luci, Bom” (“Pepi, Luci, Bom, y otras chicas del montón”), 1978. Pedro ALMODOVAR, “Laberynth of passions”, 1982.
Thanks to Nacho, for becoming the best historian of the Indie summer for me.