Peter LOfficial

I spent a couple of weeks plowing through [Urban Legends: The South Bronx in Representation and Ruin]. The concept was interesting—how the South Bronx in the 1970s and '80s became this overarching symbol for urban devastation and ruin, and how that was interpreted/misinterpreted by artists and in popular culture. It hit a lot of notes for me personally: urban studies and the Bronx in particular (I live in the North Bronx, an area that never fell into disrepair), high/low art, inclusivity—but fell short in a few ways. Most notably, although the book discusses how the reality of life in the S. Bronx of the time was othered or omitted from the examples L'Official featured, from really problematic pop culture like Fort Apache, the Bronx or Bonfire of the Vanities to more open-ended art world treatments like Gordon Matta-Clark's deconstructions taken from demolished Bronx buildings or the half-ironic gallery Fashion Moda, which had a storefront in the S. Bronx for a while, he gives hardly any space to actual S. Bronx voices, other than novelist Abraham Rodriguez.

I get that he feels hip-hop and graffiti and all their associated offshoots, have already gotten a lot of exposure as the voices of the Bronx, and I realize that that story wasn't the book he set out to write. But it still feels slightly inconclusive framed that way—I get a strong sense of a series of individual articles strung together. The book is also on the academic side, a bit too rooted in cultural studies artspeak formalism to be a joy—I felt like I was back in art school in 1985—and it was a slow read for me. What I did really enjoy was the overlay of 2020 tech, plugging the addresses L'Official offered as typical rubble-strewn lots of the time and seeing how they've been rebuilt now—a lot of polite, well-kept townhouses and typically anonymous low-slung brick retail stores that look pretty much the way they did then, but cleaned up. And it did give me some things to think about, not just in regards to the Bronx but the narrative of urban spaces and New York in particular, and my own (very white, very young, very hungry for sensation) experience of NYC downtown in those same years. I'm glad I was there and lived through that, but it's good to consider centered in the wider world—which I most decidedly did not do, then.… (mais)