Helen McCroie Falls the Shadow

During the cold war, if a BBC drama team wanted to recreate the concrete jungle of any eastern bloc regime they came to Scotland. Alan Bennett’s play about the spy Guy Burgess’ depressing exiled existence in a drab Moscow flat, was faked using locations in Scotland. Along with the diet of deep fried mars bars and chronic heart disease, Scotland’s housing is one of its most notorious and disastrous claims to fame. How urban spaces are planned, constructed and maintained is a reoccurring source of interest to Helen McCrorie. Specifically she’s sought to reanimate the ghosts of the cities dead, by focusing on the surfaces, facades and spaces of derelict non-sites. In her various video works, the impassive gaze of the camera, still and silent, invites a bit of ‘radical nostalgia’. Looking at the crumbling ruin of what was once probably a shiny new modern interior, its difficult not to experience a sense of the lost hopes and the dented dreams which planners and inhabitants must of felt. In her work there’s a palatable sense of what happens when idealised plans, come face to face with the hard facts of everyday living. In modern urban planning a counter productive spirit of architectural competition has often prevailed. Increasingly an architects main business centered upon analyzing, then prescribing solutions to social problems. The resultant levels of success or notoriety led to the cultivation of an architectural personae, potentially at odds with the needs of social planning. His (lets face it , it was always a he) buildings became the individual models for his grander vision of widespread utopian innovation. Unfortunately the cult of the superstar architect, with architects akin to creative urban troubleshooters, meant that their visions were inevitably going to clash with the rival alternate visions of other architects better tomorrows. The disastrous end results for the ‘mere’ inhabitants was that they often found themselves living within islands of planned housing, disconnected and isolated from the unifying fabric of the broader community. A striking by product of this competitive individual planning was the growth of dead spaces between distinct spaces – a bit of wasteland between estates. These are the spaces that McCrorie’s camera gaze fall upon, the apparently inconsequential spots – a piece of wasteland underneath a motorway. It’s precisely these negative spaces which, for her are best able to communicate the fatal gap between the plan and the reality. Her work seeks to tease out the manner in which the organisation of social space is implicitly or overtly political and ideological. Many commentators have noted the grid structure often imposed on cities is the direct articulation and necessary component of capitalist logic. New buildings can be easily built without substantial inconvenience; tear one down erect another. Likewise as Paul Virillo detailed in his book Speed and Politics, the layout of a city is often directly related to the need to be able to quickly and efficiently exercise military and political power. After the early revolutions in Paris in the ninetieth century, Napoleon III destroyed the old warren like structure of Paris, replacing it with large boulevards, which the army could quickly and easily move along to crush any future uprisings. While McCrorie’s work is far from a crude illustration of such analysis, her reoccurring choices of derelict houses, vandalized public spaces and rubbish filled canals, all point to spaces where the imprint of individual anger or desperation has been powerfully left. Planning is never neutral; somebody is always paying, while somebody is getting rich.   John Beagles