The Spaces In-between Driveways

By Matthew Stadler

“Mothers, businessmen, bus drivers. All sorts of people dream at night in the spaces between driveways.” —Danielle Dutton, S P R A W L

I want to know the dreams that transpire in the spaces between driveways, and I want them to matter. suddenly is an attempt to find language that can articulate these dreams inside a political process, such as urban planning or literature.

Since we — those who organize and enact suddenly — don’t know how to speak about our subject, we generally begin by inviting people into an open, social space, such as a gathering or a website. Our first time around, we made a series of gatherings in Portland, OR, in October 2008. The series was catalyzed by the work of Thomas Sieverts, a German urban planner whose 1995 book, Zwischenstadt, seemed to provide a good starting place.

“Zwischenstadt” means, literally, “in-between cities.” Sieverts coined this neologism to describe what most of us think of as “sprawl,” though notably he did not reserve the term for the old peripheries (as we do when we equate sprawl with suburbs). Instead, he describes the whole urban fabric — from what we once called the center to the remotest reaches of the built environment — as zwischenstadt. All of where we live now is radically “in-between” (in-between driveways). In Sieverts’s terms, the landscape in which we live sits in-between city and country, freely and unpredictably intermixing elements of both; it is in-between man-made and “natural,” with each force shaping the other; it is at once crowded and empty, swift and unbearably slow, changing and changeless; and, it stands in-between the local and the global because the pressures of both local particularity and global markets give it form. Sieverts asks us to engage these landscapes by inhabiting the fine grain of this radical intermixing while we put aside all our antiquated struggles about the fortunes or misfortune of the old urban “center” (or its ideological twin, the unspoiled countryside). “To comprehend and unfold [such a] landscape’s formal composition,” Sieverts writes, “new sources and perspectives will have to be found.”

Sieverts suggests turning to the “research process” of artists and designers to find the essential openness that policy-making desperately needs. “These different approaches have in common a positive concern with uncertainty, which expresses itself through the active reconfiguration of uncertainty as a space of hope. Uncertainty is understood as a challenge, as an adventure in urban evolution, as a space that cannot be made secure but can be shaped by the imaginative projections and led toward a certain inclination. Such a space cannot be functionally determined; it is an open space of possibilities.”

In Portland, first, and later in Los Angeles, San Francisco and last summer in Seattle and Burien, suddenly sought that open space in community gatherings and art events that could inform city planning and policy making. We led tours of Burien based on maps made by seniors and kids. We inhabited a disused gallery space in Pioneer Square where Eli Hansen’s blown-glass still produced alcohol from local flora. We met with both city councils.

These explorations and the food and drink and conversations shaped language that can articulate dreams inside of politics. Sieverts, again: “When we come from the world of decoded information (the cultural landscape) into nameless and insignificant wild places, [here, Sieverts means the spaces in between driveways] boredom sets in at first. We cannot read what comes to us. Thus boredom becomes irritation. Only after a while does productive perception set itself going, and then the world around us starts to fill up. Empty spaces are necessary to train people in the capacities of cultural beings: decode, integrate, interpret, associate, project, remember.” suddenly seeks out empty spaces and then inhabits them for long enough to catalyze boredom, irritation, and, ultimately, productive perception.

For Love of Kinship

By Stephanie Snyder

“I’m very careful not to have ideas, because they’re inaccurate,” — Agnes Martin

Because friendship with a beloved, like understanding art, is nearly impossible, let’s attune our shared para-aesthetic, sensuality — intellectual, unstable and synaesthetic — and fill it with laughter, suddenly. Let’s discover the topos anathema, spiteful and brash, the one that we do not yet know how to embrace, appreciate or interact within. This space we’ll resolve to love like the oily scum on the side of the freeway. Michael Damm showed us the exquisite evening sunset undulating across soot, oil and water as the earth rotated the Oakland freeway. Suddenly, investigating with an eye toward vulnerability, and testing (our own) prejudices, we’ll awaken to history and the design patterns and desires that might shape our city, countryside and that gorgeous frontier—the suburb. From the outset of this collaboration, my desire was to move farther away from the edges between works of art, and instead, bring works of art, artists, events, conversations and moments into a kind of collapse, with as many agents as possible. Evening after evening, year after year. Suddenly’s reiterative dreams are a set of operations for those who believe in drowning in the same river twice.

Typically, we remove ourselves from what we find unappealing. What is your normative anesthetic? We seek to interfere with this. And what is the difference between this and that?—Once, one, perhaps, a combatant will want to fuck you. That’s a statement. That’s worth voting for. Whether or not suddenly artist Mike Merrill should vasectomy himself, Mike asks his shareholders to vote on that, to know that’s worth voting for.

Hormonal effluence, gnats and abstraction are forms for understanding the in-between space of the “where we live now.”

We’ve dined under dripping tarps, artist Nico Wright stringing sagging billboards above our heads. Speeding along trailing honey and Gary Wiseman’s drawings. We stopped at the sea to dwell on the glassy shores of Zoe Crosher’s photographs. And, home. That was holy. Now what, now what becomes a moment before an interval. Love. Velocity. Rear view mirrors become portals where Hadley+Maxwell converse through time and space, from the other side of the world, creating suddenly together—Jen Graves lounging in front of Hadley+Maxwell’s mirrored time machine for hours, telepathically connected to the world.

Love for a resistance to beauty, love for Oscar Tuazon and Eli Hansen’s far far away that scares and attracts; their risk bears no persona.

At times, the purpose of the project has felt pornographic; nothing isn’t censored, but the Komos has its own mind. Messy nature; that is, suddenly. Elias Hansen dousing us with homemade hooch after Michael Hebb, Hanes Wingate and Michael McManus live on an island in the I-5 freeway. Portland, Seattle. What is the boundary? Many a Komos has emerged from the sympotic way findings of our feasts—many of us traveling to events without knowing why, really, we are there. Molly Dilworth reads poetry to no one at two o’clock in the morning in Thompson Square Park. She is painting rooftops for Google Satellite to relay back to her—oh heavens, find her work! Boris Sieverts and Matthew Stadler fly above Burien via Internet recounting experiences of place and interest. Did they find Mostlandia there? Spiritual home of Katy Asher and Rudy Speerschneider?

When Matthew began to talk about Thomas Sievert’s work, and he and I set out on the thinking path that resulted in suddenly, (Alive in the Zwischenstadt! was our first title), an unsteady but resolute we arose, in spirit and practice. Our shared work wore a scuffed edge between us, the kind of symbolic edge space described by Lisa Robertson when she articulates the auditory edge of human habitation. Our interests rubbed and snagged, and the resultant evolving expansions and contractions of patience, communication, morality and desire, I believe, became the model for the manner in which the project unfolded and will continue.

And to be clear, this is your narrative, too.