The climax of strip architecture?

Located at the fringe of Salzburg, Austria, the Erotk Markt appears at first sight to be nothing more than a local iteration of the sort of strip architecture that we’re all familiar with. And it is. But the Austrians, as I learned on my recent travels to Salzburg and Carinthia, have an edge when it come to rendering the banal with an extra level of reflection, expense and stubborn hashing-out-of-the-details that can transmogrify the inane into the exotic erotic. Down there I saw tons of overwrought expressions of consumerist fantasy that I now wish I’d stopped to photograph. I think I was just too taken aback by all the sleek detailing and computer modeled form to start breaking it down into something I could make sense of; I was in a daze, I guess, from having just driven by the local headquarters of Bausparkasse Wustenrot.

But at the Erotik Markt I found something both comprehensible and uncanny, something that for all its convention and economy had a much greater impact on me. What it was, really, that I felt had to be recorded, was the building’s corner detail.

Structure and Symbol

This mega strut, from which the roof is hung via steel rods, is jacked at an angle well above 45º. That’s something provocative in and of itself given the context. Topping it is an element filled with innuendo, wavering between conditions of structural necessity and frivolous suggestiveness: the triangular steel plate connecting flange / useless finial.

Learning the rules of hide and reveal from the pros

Driving the double entendre home without any doubt whatsoever, the window dressers have helpfully put a mannequin in what looks like a not-to-comfortable pose against the strut’s base inside the plate glass-enclosed shop interior. The shag carpet sleeve provides a frictive buffer between her and cold steel structure. Cue pink flourescent tube.

There’s something rather touching about graffiti in the provinces, such as the two sad examples here which I snapped in Bonlanden. As a product of American inner cities, graffiti is probably still sufficiently alien to shock the older inhabitants of a small village. But as a city dweller, able to read the cultural signs, it is reduced to pathetic pre-pubescent posturing. You just want to take that young sprayer under your wing, and fix them up with some propper tuition on the mean streets of downtown Stuttgart.

An orthographic ghetto, one assumes

The appropriation of “Westside” as a motif is so ironic in the context of Bonlanden. At little over 900 meters wide, the village doesn’t exactly offer much territory for the budding warlord to fight over. Judging by the droopy arrows, the unfortunately spelt “Getto Gang” seems to be the work of the same author.

But villages can be pretty sinister places – German ones especially so – which sometimes feel as alien to me as, say, Brooklyn might to a resident of this community. I have to wonder what’s going on behind all those beady-eyed windows with their net curtain veils and shutters. Maybe some multi-generational turf war really is being faught at municipal level between the families of local politicians, and the graffiti is just the tip of the iceberg; its juvenile mode of expression refracted through the lens of hip-hop culture.

“For your own safety, no wading or swimming”.

That’s what the warning sign says. Proof that fiction can kill you. If trans fat doesn’t get to you first. Or your satanic neighbor. In hindsight, I wish I had taken many more pictures during my three week sojourn in the burbs of California. It’s hard to pick out whats significant if you are totally immersed in a seamless landscape of illusion stitched together by things like this.  By “Things like this” I mean higher degree simulations, copies of copies that have no traceable origin in something that is not an image. Only, but welcome, reminders of an alternate reality were a few black hawks and a flock of turkey vulchers that had convened on a housing association’s club house. For me, there is a fundamental difference between something like this and, for example, immigrated Welsh farmers of Bruce Chatwin’s Patagonia making themselves at home by the continued use of the Welsh vernacular, or their neighboring German immigrants doing the same by planting cherry trees.

Oh yeah, and those stairs really don’t lead anywhere …

I shudder to think my existence could end then and there in the foot deep rippling reflection of Hadrian’s petrified mirage of the Spanish Steps …

… uh, I crave a spumante …

Any ideas for alternate inscriptions?

But then there are still charming exceptions to the rule: as when motorists have to give way to older, more venerable trees, utterly unimpressed by such human follies as roads: