cream: contemporary art in culture, Phaidon Press, London, 1998, ISBN: 0714838012
text by Okwui Enwezor, New York, pages 372-376

Peter Spaans' photographs are postcards dispatched from the frayed edges of the modern world. A world of commerce, decaying industrial buildings and machinery.
In these works, the vanquished relics of modern aspiration declare themselves like haunting monuments to man's desire to imagine a future unencumbered by the past. Where history is retained, it appears in the form of erased presences, such as abandoned, empty lots or gentrified ghettos.

These silent works turn the city into catacombs. But while there are recognizable, common elements in Spaans' work, it still cannot be summarized.
Though it has a documentary quality, a casual artlessness belies the tough investigative stance that asks us to look again at the surroundings of the city we thought we knew.

From the thousands of photographs Spaans has taken, it becomes apparent that major cities such as New York, Berlin and his native Amsterdam serve as character studies for his work.
Like a flaneur he trawls abandoned landscapes in these exhausted industrial worlds, treating the built structures like examples of nature. Instead of cornfields, however, we find concrete pavements, the rusting hulks of bridges, fading advertising signs, barricaded storefronts, shiny, phallic skyscrapers that are almost a condensation of power and ruthless aspiration, aerial views of the city, impersonal hotel rooms, paint peeling from the facade of buildings.
Or one may view these photographs as extended essays, in which the artist seeks to define his own personal relationship with a world that defamiliarizes itself with every encounter. In this sense, rather than looking at each photograph as an individual, autonomous work, it is best to see them as one great work in progress. Each single image is part of a discontinuous narrative providing different interpretations of the various aspects of the cities he visits.

Spaans' work is a rumination on the question of individual memory and identity within the complex processes of the modern city's transformation from a place of utopian desire to an alienating and anonymous entity. It raises such questions as: what can possibly be the identity of a city in the global moment of fast disappearing boundaries? Who are cities for? What is the meaning of place in defining a sense of community and identity? With the increasing loss of faith in the utopian ideals of modernity and the virtualization of space through digital dystopia, time and place are becoming not only irrelevant, but increasingly displaced and fragmented.

In this context, Spaans' silent photographs might seem quaint in their obsessive exactitude, which pinpoints the banality of our urban, built environments. But by fixing on those structures that monumentalize modernity and its triumph of reason and industry, Spaans' work stands as a measure of the way in which we encounter the spatial and temporal dynamics that define the global metropolis.

Okwui Enwezor.
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