Jesus Sanchez's Second Dérive
March 20, 2018, by Jesús
“75% Off All Non-Media Items.” This message was one of the first things I saw when I began my second derive. Printed on an 8 ½” x 11” piece of paper and taped to the door of a thrift store on Chambers Street, the sign drew me toward it with a perplexed and bemused expression on my face. I thought it was peculiar and funny, not only because of its relevance to this project but also because of how simply, declaratively and cleanly the store had managed to separate the media from the non-media items. Another makeshift sign next to that one read: “Media/ Mix and Match Records, CDs, DVDs. DVD Box Sets, and Books 10 for $1.” There it was: media explained and distilled by Housing Works Thrift Shop. Media reduced to the most obvious tangibles: CDs, which you could buy two of and a book for only a dollar.
The last thing I want to convey is smug condescension aimed a thrift store’s blowout sale but it did help shape the rest of my second derive. Initially I was worried that I wouldn’t have any new concepts to explore (blame a post-midterm exhaustion) but the store’s advertisement steered me to a new set of questions: What constitutes media? What is its purpose? Why does the culture have a generally narrow sense of media? What is the importance of the physicality of media?
Marshall McLuhan’s phrase, “The medium is the message,” is one that has stuck with me since my freshman year of college and it once again came back to me after seeing the thrift store’s ad. The phrase itself argues that any media’s presentation—film, paper, acrylic, wood, and so on—provides a message in and of itself. Rereading McLuhan’s argument in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, he contends that the medium’s messages “are the psychic and social consequences” it conjures (1). Essentially, a light bulb’s message is communicated through illumination, creating the possibility for a social space at night. A chair from the Housing Work Thrift Store communicates: sit or use me at the dining room and so on. McLuhan’s argument is one I considered while I roamed around Ground Zero. What were the space, memorials, buildings and sculptures communicating through the materials they were built with?
Near the end of Greenwich Street, the derive app tasked me with finding something that seemed “out of place” and already in my sightline I saw Jeff Koon’s balloon flower sculpture and in the background loomed the Oculus. I had seen this sculpture before but every time I saw it, I always thought it had seemed brazenly lost. While I personally do not like Koons and his incessant kitsch and crass commercialization, it is oddly pleasant to see this jewel like bulbous sculpture set randomly in the middle of a park (Silverstein Family Park is a pathetic excuse for a park in my opinion). But the sculpture seems out of place because it is surrounded by corporate buildings, a mall, a post office, and a 9/11 memorial. That’s postmodernism, I suppose. It juts out amidst a swarm of grey suits on their way to work. But I suppose this is where a Koons belongs—in the epicenter of a lot of money and questionable taste.
The Koons and Oculus, though, jut out for more than just aesthetic reasons. The occupy space in a zone that seems almost pious. This is the area where the twin towers collapsed. The area where thousands died. Now, sixteen years later, in the same area sits a kitschy balloon sculpture and a Westfield mall. To me, it seems a little sacrilegious. Yes, of course the space cannot go un-utilized forever and if New York had not rebuilt it would have been seen as a city incapable of powering forward. This reminds me of Judith Butler’s sentiment in her essay “Violence, Mourning, Politics” in which she laments the fact that grief is often seen as something to be avoided or rushed through and ultimately a weakness instead as a tool for forming community and human connections.
But I come back to the placement of the Oculus. It’s a beautiful and futuristic feat of architecture that looks like it was lifted from one of the Alien sci-fi movies and plunked in lower Manhattan. The Oculus and Koons’s sculpture next to a somber 9/11 memorial remind me of Shannon Mattern’s “Conclusion: Coding Urban Pasts and Futures” that all throughout our cities is evidence of “entangled temporalities and materialities” (154). The incredibly modern and sleek Oculus mall, entertainment space, and subway entrance embodies a “fetishistic, use of technological tools to tidy up an awkward mix of presents and pasts, a messy mélange of urban environmental, cultural, and media histories” (154). Across from it, right next to the One World Trade, is a large constructions site with machinery and porta potties galore.
While walking across the West Side Highway, the derive app told me to find a “watering hole” and enjoy a drink. It was cold out and Brookfield Place seemed to fit the description so I did not complain. I ordered a hot chocolate inside at Olive’s. When the cashier asked for my name she exclaimed that her best friend’s name was Jesus. The woman smiled and revealed to me that through her friend Jesus she was reunited with her father and siblings. She didn’t give me all the details but she was sure it was through some act of God. A miracle through Jesus. Even as agnostic as I am, I could appreciate this moment. It’s always flattering when people see me as approachable enough to share in something special or to communicate beyond the quotidian. Like last time, the derive steered me back to myself—to some retrospective moment illuminating how small the world is.
Often, when I walk through the city alone my mind plays David Bowie’s “Five Years,” the words etched into my memory: “I heard telephones, opera house, favorite melodies. I saw boys, toys, electric irons and TVs. My brain hurt like a warehouse. It had no room to spare…I never thought I’d need so many people.”
Works Cited: Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: the Powers of Mourning and Violence. Verso, 2006.
Mattern, Shannon Christine. “Conclusion: Coding Urban Pasts and Futures.” In Code + Clay…Data + Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media, 147–156. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man. The MIT Press, 2013.