One long, bright August evening in 2006, Michael Rakowitz and I met on the South Side of Chicago to watch the Yankees play the White Sox. It seemed the most fitting way to celebrate Rakowitz's move to Chicago after a life largely spent in New York, since both of us love baseball and he is a lifelong Yankees fan. From our seats high above home plate we had a great view of the whole field. We relished the aesthetics of the game - not just the moments of athletic grace but also the poetry within minutiae: the awkward stances of some batters; the fielders' strategic shifts of position over the course of an inning; the perfect wrist-flick that seals the double play. Those upper-deck seats also gave us a view out to the urban surroundings that butt up against the perfectly manicured world of the stadium. Just past the bleachers and scoreboard we could glimpse the Robert Taylor Homes, a block of high-rise flats that was being demolished as part of a controversial plan to relocate the impoverished residents of Chicago's publichousing projects to mixed-income sites around the city. One of the largest projects built during the mid-century public-housing boom in the US, the Taylor Homes were meant to provide access to pleasant, affordable apartments within a stable community. They now typify both the promise and the collapse of that particular utopian vision.

It may seem odd to begin a text on drawing by juxtaposing baseball and public housing, but all three are crucial to Rakowitz's work. Sports stadiums and housing projects express an impulse toward societal self-improvement on a grand scale, so it makes sense that they would recur within a practice that has often explored the ways that we dream and build and fail. That evening of watching baseball and looking out onto Chicago's urban landscape helped me clarify something about Rakowitz's artistic process as well as his preoccupations: Rakowitz is a storyteller who builds narratives around concrete, well-observed details while retaining a big-picture, high-angle view of how those disparate fragments fit together.

Drawing is one of the most effective and least discussed methods by which Rakowitz develops and shares these stories. Critical attention as well as his own writings and interviews have generally focused on the sculptural and interpersonal aspects of his socially engaged, multi-faceted projects, but drawing has always been an integral part of the mix. Since it is now taking on an ever more central place within his practice, it seems time for a few first thoughts on how drawing functions here and why it matters.¹

WHITE MAN GOT NO DREAMING

The title of this essay comes from Rakowitz's most recent large-scale project, a commission for the 2008 Sydney Biennial called White Man Got No Dreaming(2008). The project's centrepiece - although not exactly its centre - is a large sculpture based on one of the most famous un-built structures of the twentieth century: Vladimir Tatlin's Monument to the Third International (1919-20). Over a series of visits to Sydney, Rakowitz met with housing activists and members of the Aboriginal community in Sydney's Redfern neighbourhood, and learned about the complex mix of hopes and failures that characterise the history of the first urban Aboriginal land-rights site, a housing project in Redfern called 'The Block' that was built during the 1970s and is still in use. Working with members of the Redfern community, he designed a new version of Tatlin's structure, linking these two instances of visionary architecture by making the sculpture out of building materials salvaged from empty structures within The Block. A plan drawing presents the idea quite clearly. On top of a photographic image of an earlier reconstruction of Tatlin's model, Rakowitz collaged bits of his own drawing, using a loose, almost cartoonish style of architectural rendering to sketch out how the salvaged materials would fit together into a new structure, with the rising spiral of Tatlin's original design as a palimpsest.² The sculpture that Rakowitz subsequently made formed the most visible part of White Man Got No Dreaming, but to stop there is to miss the heart of the project. The spiky point of this new monument rises like the tip of the proverbial iceberg above The Block's charged history and current problems, which Rakowitz made visible through a set of drawings that offer brief, poetic narratives evoking populist dreams, racist obstructions and the tenuous possibility of a brighter future for the neglected Block.

These drawings exemplify a mode of drawing that Rakowitz now uses in most of his projects. Each framed drawing includes a series of image-text pairs that float on a long sheet of translucent vellum. The texts grow out of discussions and research, and Rakowitz bases the images on found photographs that he combines and embellishes into new drawings to illustrate concrete, poetic facets of whatever larger story he is exploring in each project: Tatlin's failed attempt to build a flying machine, for instance, factors into one of the Sydney drawings. Rakowitz builds each image through dense marks with an even-handed, realistic style that smoothes out their disparate sources while imparting a sense of documentary truth to his renderings. He describes this as 'constructing scenarios that no one photographed' and notes how graphite flattens and unifies the images, giving them an epigrammatic, poster-like quality.³ Within each drawing, the sequences of image-text pairs leads the viewer lightly from beginning to middle to end of a loose narrative arc with a 'purposeful choreography and cadence. They are like frames in a film to be made.'⁴ When gathered together, the groups of drawings open up a play of reference across the full breadth of each project. Meanings spark outward, connecting one image to the next, one sequence to another, linking drawing to sculpture and back to drawing again.

In White Man Got No Dreaming, the drawings also link the material and immaterial parts of the project. The stories told within them derive in large part from the conversations Rakowitz had with people in Redfern. He listened to them. He learned about their symbols and heroes. He extended that information with historical research and filtered it through his own ongoing aesthetic and ethical preoccupations in order to tell stories of busted hopes and persistent optimism that unfold through unlikely, evocative connections. (Who knew, for example, that Tatlin worked for a while as a circus boxer? Who would have imagined that this fact could be linked in a meaningful and poignant way to Aboriginal housing activism in Sydney?) The drawings speak outward, carrying stories of The Block out to the biennial audience and beyond, but also inward, back to Redfern. Rakowitz showed the sculpture for the first time at the Redfern Community Centre, accompanied by photocopies of the drawings (the originals were being framed for presentation at the biennial). Community members who had previously been suspicious of the artist's intentions responded well to seeing their own stories made visible: people began to take them off the walls, and Rakowitz pinned up extra photocopies so that people could take their favourites home.

PARASITE

Rakowitz hasn't always used drawings in such a narrative mode, but it has been crucial to his practice from the beginning. In 1998, he began his first major body of work: the ongoing paraSITE series of portable shelters, each of which he designs with a homeless person. Though each paraSITE is distinct, with nuances of form and function customised to suit individual desires, the shelters share a number of attributes: they function both as temporary housing and mobile public sculpture; they are made of cheap materials (usually plastic rubbish bags and tape); they fold into small, easy-to-carry packages; and each includes an ingenious appendage - a wide tube that attaches to a building's exhaust vent and channels hot air down to inflate and heat the plastic walls of the shelter. Drawing is here again key to the design process, exemplified by a pair of working sketches showing the evolution of a design for a shelter requested by a homeless man named Artie for himself and his girlfriend Myra. Such informal drawings are lively things made as part of the collaborative design process in order to work out ideas, communicate them and guide the making of the shelters.

Although the early paraSITE drawings sometimes circulate now - Rakowitz shows the Artie/Myra sketches in lectures and on his website, for instance - they were not originally intended for anyone other than the artist and his collaborators. However, a series of early concept sketches for the project were meant to have both private and rhetorical functions. Rakowitz sketched images of as-yet-unbuilt shelters on vellum and collaged them onto photographs to show the paraSITES comfortably occupying anonymous urban settings. One depicts a warehouse with a trio of parasitic guests clustered along its roof, each replete with the building's surplus warmth. Others show individual shelters discreetly tucked away behind buildings or parked cars. Some of the most compelling are those in which the shelters emphatically claim their own space, such as one in which a paraSITE nestles against a man who seems entirely unconcerned by its presence. Twisting the visual conventions of architectural proposals, this collage suggests that the paraSITE concept will function: it shows the shelter flourishing within its habitat as an accepted, or at least tolerated, form of respite for someone in rough circumstances. But it also gently rubs against the hard fact that homelessness is largely unseen yet endemic. Rakowitz acknowledges that the paraSITES do little for that larger problem. He thinks of the project as a productive failure in its social impact: it can help a few individuals and perhaps, as he says, shift some dinner-table conversations, but can do little to address the societal problems that make paraSITE necessary in the first place.⁵

DULL ROAR

Drawing crystallised as a mode of storytelling within Rakowitz's practice in 2005, with Dull Roar. This work memorialises the death of a modern architectural ideal: public housing in which good design was meant to foster affordable, democratic living. It centres on the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex in St Louis, Missouri. Designed by the architect Minoru Yamasaki - who would later go on to design the World Trade Center in New York - the complex opened in the 1950s, fell fairly quickly into a spiral of social decline, and was demolished in 1972. Rakowitz built a plywood viewing platform surrounding a large inflatable version of the Pruitt-Igoe complex, inviting viewers to consider the multivalent legacies of this event from the many angles from which they could watch the sculpture fill with air and slowly collapse, again and again. The adjacent Real Estate Drawingsadd other layers to the story. In each drawing, an image of the implosion sits below a portrait of one of the expensive new single-family homes that were built in a St Louis suburb on landfill that included debris from the Pruitt-Igoe site. (Discovering and giving visual life to such improbably symbolic histories has become a classic Rakowitz move.) These delicate pencil drawings build strength through repetition, a pattern that reinforces the ambivalent rhythm of the inflating and deflating sculpture: building-unbuilding-rebuilding.

While the house-portrait drawings hold their own as a set of images and provide a crucial counterpoint to the sculpture, another set of drawings related to Dull Roar marks a critical shift in Rakowitz's practice. These drawings - which present a series of narratives about other modern deaths that connect back to Pruitt-Igoe and extend an outward-reaching play of meanings that eventually encompass the 2001 collapse of the World Trade Center - are his first experiments with the storyboard format that has become one of his signature means of storytelling. Though drawn on heavy paper rather than vellum, Rakowitz's storyboards offer the same format - sequences of image over text - that he has used since in a series of projects.⁶

This mode of storytelling developed in part as a compensatory strategy. In 2002, Rakowitz became a lecturer at the Maryland Institute College of the Arts (our baseball outing was occasioned by his subsequent move to Chicago's Northwestern University in 2006). He first began working with images of Pruitt-Igoe's implosion in that context, as a professor giving an illustrated PowerPoint lecture. And Rakowitz gives great talks: the lecture format allows him to adopt a conversational tone as he spins stories around images, reworking them through sequence and repetition, energised by the audience's response. This storytelling verve also infuses other kinds of projects in which he is physically present as host and guide. Rakowitz uses such spoken stories to engage participants in projects such as Enemy Kitchen (2006-ongoing), in which he teaches small groups of people his Iraqi-Jewish mother's recipes, and also afterwards, to frame such events for those who weren't there to experience things firsthand.

Rakowitz made Dull Roarin 2005, for his first show in a commercial gallery, and he developed the storyboard format in part as a stand-in for the kind of hosting and teaching enabled by other situations.⁷ The drawings offer a generous, poetic way to share imagery and information with the viewer, a means to open up his conceptually rigorous projects to a wide range of audiences. This has been a crucial development for Rakowitz, whose socially engaged work continues to oscillate between formal gallery spaces and public, participatory sites. Like any good teacher, though, he never connects all the dots. And as with the collages and sketches from paraSITE and other early projects, the storyboards also play another crucial role: they offer alternative ways of envisioning the world.

One final drawing related to Dull Roar takes us back to the confluence of baseball, visionary architecture and drawing with which I began this essay. This drawing is one of two in which Rakowitz used a variety of photographic sources to create composite images from the Pruitt-Igoe story, without any textual explanation. This one features Busch Stadium, home of the St Louis Cardinals baseball team. The famous Gateway Arch, Eero Saarinen's mid-century monument to the pioneer spirit, is visible behind the stadium. High in the stands, at about the same level Rakowitz and I sat to watch that Chicago game, a group of spectators watch Pruitt-Igoe implode; Rakowitz has transplanted the housing complex onto the space where the field should be. All the fans are shown raptly watching the collapse except for one man, who looks out of the frame to make eye contact with the viewer. It is an awkward, open drawing. Without any knowledge of the rest of the Dull Roar project, one might unpack this image as a surreal juxtaposition of Americana. It combines resonant images - a baseball stadium, buildings that announce 'public housing' and a modern monument to national yearning for upward and outward extension - in order to unravel the apple-pie optimism of mid-century American dreaming. If seen with the rest of Dull Roar, things get more specific. The collapsing Pruitt-Igoe repeats an image familiar from the Real Estate Drawings and from the rising/falling of the inflatable sculpture. For viewers who have inside information, additional layers of meaning come from knowing that part of Pruitt-Igoe was demolished on 22 April 1972, at exactly the same time that the Cincinnati Reds were trouncing the Cardinals during a game at Busch Stadium, not too far away from the housing project. Rakowitz's drawing pulls out the spectacular nature of both experiences, as does the title of the project: 'dull roar' refers to the sound of Pruitt-Igoe's demolition and the cheer reportedly made by the watching crowd, but it is just as easy to imagine such a sound emerging from a mass of baseball fans. And beyond that, it helps to know that the figure catching our eye is the architect Yamasaki himself. Rakowitz imagines him turning away from the failure of his own designs and involving, even implicating us as participants in its demise. And, perhaps, as dreamers of new dreams that are informed by the lessons of past failures but not cowed by history. We dream, we build, we fail. We dream again.

- Stephanie Smith