Archives of the street.

In Civilization and its Discontents (1930), Freud attempts to describe how memory forms layers within our minds by invoking an image of "the eternal city," a fictionalized Rome. Inside this fantastic metropolis, structures centuries old co-exist side by side with those of recent origin. In Cento: A Market Street Journal, artist Susan Schwartzenberg offers her own sedimented rendering of an "historical sequence in spatial terms." In this compact book, however, Freud's cluttered golden city is replaced by a noir-ish San Francisco.

Leaving behind the concerns of the studio and the bookstore shelves reserved for "Artists' Books," Cento insists on occupying the pockets and palms of the urban traveler. It demands a rendezvous with the stained rind of the street where asphalt and concrete read like the mottled emulsion of an archival photograph.

Ostensibly, this 5 1/2x7 inch offset book is a pocketbook walking tour of San Francisco's Market Street. But it also manages to weigh in on current debates over so-called "new genre public art." Cento achieves much of what recent, publicly-sited art projects aim to do: it acts as an intercessor between public memory, both actual and fantastic, and the reader/spectator at specific urban sites.

Despite its gritty, pulp novel appearance, Cento dodges the authorial voice-over of the tour-guide, mixing first person narrative, oral history, department store records and literary and philosophical writing with cartography, architectural renderings and photographs from newspapers, "unofficial archives," the public library and snapshots taken by the author and her associates. In a sense, this constellation of different executors performs the place named Market Street for the peripatetic reader.

Schwartzenberg assembled her "patchwork journal" by hitting the pavement with camera and tape recorder and interviewing every oncoming pedestrian "who was in the mood to talk." Realizing these conversations were central to her project, the artist went on to obtain select testimonials from city planners, policemen, architects, historians, homeless people, archivists, archeologists, Muni drivers, office workers and sales clerks. It is this accumulation of utterances that sculpts the book's "counter" geography from standard tour-guide materials. Schwartzenberg is also constantly intervening through her graphic layout, making the familiar uncanny, sliding the immediate over the mnemonic - until Market Street is spread out like entrails for interpretation.

Serving as the book's introduction is the artist's own recollection of Market Street as it was when she arrived in San Francisco in 1973. Then, Schwartzenberg acquired her "first real view of city life: the excitement and feeling of possibilities, the well dressed men and women on their way to and from work, the elderly poor, the newly arrived immigrants, the prostitutes and street hustlers and the not-so-discreet drug dealers." Spread beneath this inscription is a picture of a bullet-shattered window. The bullet's ragged trace recalls the reflexive eye/lens in Dziga Vertov's Man With A Movie Camera (1929), while beyond the hole is a miniature view of Market Street looking west.

The contents page is a blueprint of Downtown San Francisco. The chapter headings are flagged as destinations on this map: the Underground, the Hotel, the Department Store, the Archive, the Office and the Frontier. The first stop is the Arrival. A picture of a woman's decayed boot from 1871, with seams and laces rotted away, points, zombified, to the road ahead.

"Every story is a travel story . . ." Schwartzenberg quotes Michel de Certeau, the philosopher of the "disseminated character" who is the "murmur of societies." Like a sputtering newsreel, Cento then cuts to a ferry boat's wake, a porthole and finally to a Monday morning commuter trying to focus on a day of meetings and business reports while still in the penumbra of a dream or a mystery novel about a city that is itself like a dream. Across the bottom of the page slinks a meditation by Jack Kerouac about San Francisco's bitter-sweet sublimation of sex beneath the ". . . portals of work and culture."

And the book continues in this way. Every designated site is an invitation to dig and the opportunity for another displacement. The Office: a transparent set of texts on waxy paper where an owner of a Temp Agency, a woman waiting for a job, a broker, a banker and a bike messenger commingle like a visualization of the white noise of a beehive. The Department Store: a 100-year-old "Emporium" that is now a museum and before long possibly a Bloomingdales. Cento recalls it as a transplanted, nineteenth-century Parisian arcade, where doctors, hookers, fashion boutiques and food markets evolved into a city within a city. The Hotel: where an unmade bed, a broken bar stool and a crooked cigarette are tissue thin traces displayed for, and revelations of, the prying character of the tourist.

Near the end of the walk is the Archive, a "history factory" where workers boast of 300,000 images of California that will go digital in the next few years, causing the photo archivist to ask what point there is in preserving all these "fadographs," to cite James Joyce. It is an inquiry that inevitably exceeds the narrowly defined world of historic preservation returning us unexpectedly to so-called "new genre public art," which Cento unavoidably critiques.

Cento: A Market Street Journal is one of a number of works presented by the San Francisco Art Commission's Market Street Art in Transit Program. It was offered free to the public and appears within a context of other public art made for San Francisco's public spaces. Yet by shifting what some would term innovative urban sociology into the realm of contemporary art, Schwartzenberg's project enters into a cultural altercation over how to make historical representation democratic and what the role of the public artist is in this transformation. Her book takes on this debate at three levels.

First, it aims to affect rather than affirm the reader's phenomenal experience of Market Street, fully operating only when used at specific sites. Second, Schwartzenberg's approach is reflexive. Her exceptional, though understated, use of montage and typography not only challenges the excesses of computer design, but solicits the eye to remain at a critical distance. This framing calls upon the book's 'user' to question not only the way history is represented along Market Street, or in urban space, but at the level of our social imagination and perhaps even within the pages of Cento itself. Finally, the book's free distribution carries it into the sphere of the political, reminding us, as Lucy Lippard remarked 20 years ago, that the artist's book might one day "be used with an enlightenment hitherto foreign to the 'high' arts. . . One day I'd like to see artists' books ensconced in supermarkets, drugstores and airports and incidentally, to see artists able to profit economically from broad communication rather than lack of it."(1)

Though not found in supermarkets, Cento has broken with the "high" art confines of most artists' books. But it is the book's circumspect privileging of fantasy that raises the crucial question about art and the public sphere. Schwartzenberg's journal invites fantasy - hers as well as others - into this re-reading of Market Street. By doing so she acknowledges its important epistemic function in this or any history. But her work also insists on showing the public sphere to be always politically defined: by class, by the socially and economically marginalized, by what is absent, or perhaps worse, by what is becoming ever more munificently managed - public space as a medium for dissent, for the spontaneous, as a site of the unpredictable.

The public artist, if any role is to be hers in this debate, cannot help but shed the questionable self-identification with this or that "community," along with the marketing of nostalgic bric-a-brac, and aim instead for an intensification of the social contradictions already at work within the public domain.

The final chapter-location in Cento, the Frontier, records the dreams of men and women, gay and straight, where "it's the small events. The snapshots, the phone calls, the brief letters that end up becoming significant. . . A caress, a kiss, the way a hand holds my face, an arm holds my body . . . [are] some comfort along the way." Fittingly this unidentified "San Francisco Resident" gets the penultimate word.(2)

NOTES

1. Lucy Lippard, "The Artist's Book Goes Public" reprinted from Art in America in Lucy Lippard, Get the Message? A Decade of Art for Social Change, (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1984) p. 52.

2. Cento. A Market Street Journal by Susan Schwartzenberg is available for viewing at the San Francisco Public Library, The Art Commission Gallery and the San Francisco Art Commission, 25 Van Ness Ave. #240, San Francisco. The book, pagespreads and artifacts are also installed at the Ansel Adams Center, at the Friends of Photography, until June 16.

GREGORY SHOLETTE is a New York City based artist and founding member of PAD/D and REPOhistory. GREGORY SHOLETTE [C] 1997