Wars of Armageddon
What does it mean to live in a city already deemed “unsavable”? In this essay, urban geographer Stephanie Wakefield and Gean Moreno, Director of the Knight Foundation Art + Research Center at ICA Miami, interrogate the speculative imaginaries originating from and about Miami, which typically cast the coastal metropolis as already obsolete. Focusing particularly on art produced in the city against this doom-laden backdrop, they ask: Why is the contemporary art made in Miami that deals directly with climate change often so innocuous?
Located at the southeastern tip of Florida, Miami is a sun-scorched, densely-developed metropolitan area that today is home to a hyper-segregated real estate market driven by foreign capital. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, much of South Florida, where Miami now stands, was covered in slow-moving freshwater and swampy wetlands, which planners and government viewed as an impediment to urban development, profit, and productivity. To urbanize the region, millionaire investors and the State of Florida built large-scale drainage projects to reclaim the “derelict landscape”1 for commercial agriculture and real estate development. Thus was created the ground on which the Miami metropolitan area is largely built. But along with drained wetlands, Miami is equally built on manufactured imaginaries of a subtropical urban paradise. Indeed, it is hard to overemphasize the interconnection between ideas of Miami’s habitability and imaginative speculation. Consider, for example, the city of Opa-locka, where Miami was recast as an Arabian Nights–themed city featuring Disney-style architecture, but long before such a thing was codified. Or we might think of the boosterist images in newspaper ads and tourism brochures of swaying palm trees: a central strategy for attracting real estate investment and development to Miami Beach, which by the early 1920s, as the historian Gregory Bush recounts, was for millions of Americans “associated with speeding cars and motorboats, spectacular stunts, grandiose hotels, mansions, lavish parties, polo matches, bathing casinos, and crowds of sunbathers.”2 The spectacle of a decadent, unscrupulous, over-the-top oceanfront city—which historically existed alongside Jim Crow racial segregation, antisemitism, and extreme economic inequality—remains central to Miami’s neon-lit reputation. Today Miami is known as “a sunny place for shady people,” an image based in the city’s corrupt reality but often equally derived from popular culture such as Scarface, 2 Fast 2 Furious, and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.
But as flooding related to sea-level rise has become more frequent in recent years, speculative imaginaries of Miami have shifted, in certain quarters, toward a focus on the environmental and technical risk of inhabiting the city and an emerging image of it as “climate change ground zero.” Images of waterfront luxury (or spring break riots) now compete with a new set of iconic journalistic and social media images capturing the city’s floods, such as shots of an octopus floating in a parking garage or Miamians driving through submerged intersections on their way to work. Likewise, instead of aerial views of sunbathing vacationers beside the sea, climate change imagery is featured by media outlets like Business Insider, the Guardian, and the New Yorker. Just as commonly, government websites feature drone images of the city’s canals and waterways, suggestively inviting their viewers to reinterpret these aquatic urban surrounds as the source of impending crisis.3
Through the repetition of such images, the city as a hazardscape of multiple, interconnected social, environmental, and technical threats (that can be calculated and managed) has become a common pictoral trope. Not limited to visual narratives, media and city reports reframe Miami’s geology itself as a threat, offering extended explanations of the city’s porous limestone foundation (it’s like Swiss cheese, the water moves right through it, both horizontally and vertically) and the unique sea-rise challenges this porous substrate introduces for planners—in particular the fact that seawalls are inadequate to keep out intruding aquatic surrounds. Atop a red-orange vulnerability map of the city’s coastline, Miami-Dade County’s website implores visitors to discover their neighborhood’s risk, linking them to maps created by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration where they can view their area’s flooding, storm surge, and sea-rise risks.4 Even real estate listings now include flood risk information.
Contemporary art produced in Miami tends to reproduce and reinforce these media and governmental imaginaries. Drawing on such assessments, much climate change–themed art produced there envisions the city’s twenty-first century endgame: people playing guitars or drinking coffee while floating in tanks of water; lawn placards indicating homes’ future sea-rise risk; a sand-carved traffic jam installed along Ocean Drive. Echoing media and planning narratives while helping produce Miami’s problematization as climate change ground zero, these and many other climate change–themed artistic productions envision the city and its residents overwhelmed by nature’s powerful forces.
Leonardo Erich's "Order of Importance," installed at Art Basel Miami Beach 2019. Photograph by Geoff Livingston, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Imagining the end of cities has long captivated artists and writers, for whom envisioning the obliteration of skyscrapers and urban landmarks—as in the supercut feature of New York’s cinematic destruction stitched together by film collective Anti-Banality Union5—has offered a means of imagining the overturning of oppressive social relations that only apocalypse seems able to achieve. In contrast, however, the new anthropocenic reimagining of Miami is largely pedagogical and governmental, intended to raise awareness and call policymakers and planners to action. Visual and discursive narratives repeat and reinforce one another, attempting to raise awareness of the city as a climate change frontline and raise support for governmental and policy actions—actions that fit within the boundaries of prevailing social and economic systems, rather than questioning or envisioning transforming them—as an urgent, existential necessity. The moral “rightness” that these visual and discursive narratives enact cloaks their overinvestment in symbolic representation and seemingly forgives the redundancy of their messaging—and, more crucially, it forgives the overlap of this messaging with that of the most conservative forces at play in this urban scenario. But perhaps most strangely of all, what is missed by these artistic imaginaries, just like the media and governmental narratives they mirror, is the far more complex and disjointed reality of actually living in Miami today. This is an experience that cannot be captured solely in the seemingly objective frame of climate risk maps, nor in the tame didactic tone of the art that seeks to appeal to politicians. Instead, any diagramming of this experience has to in some way register, if not be thoroughly twisted by, the far less coherent contradictions that have come to shape the city in the last few years, particular during and since the COVID-19 pandemic.
Indeed, the city is, on one set of frequencies, preparing for apocalypse, with everything properly tuned to the coming climate mayhem; on a different set of frequencies, it is readying itself to be the “Most Glamorous City in America.” It’s as if Miami is rehearsing, in some deranged, time-twisted loop, the glam of its early days, updating for a time of remote investing, tech bros, and celebrity champagne. The headless dashing through this loop has only been jolted to red-line levels during and by the COVID-19 epidemic. It’s as if the city can squeeze from the virus the nutrients it needs to have another go at being, at swelling into, the natural setting of chromed-vinyled Lamborghinis and dozens-long lines outside the Gucci store, soldiering on through sun or drizzle, whenever a new accessory drops. In January 2021, in a story reposted by many local real estate and media outlets, a real estate-adjacent company ranked the city as the “ritziest, glitziest, and trendiest” city in America:
Sunny Miami dominates our ranking of the Most Glamorous Cities with more cocktail bars, lounges, and nightclubs per 100,000 residents than anywhere else in the U.S. But it’s in the beauty, fashion, and shopping category that Miami really shines. Miami took the top spot in a whopping four shopping-related metrics: luxury fashion, jewelry, watch, and perfume shops. There’s no better place in American to party hard and spend on bling than The Magic City.6
Similarly, in its 2022 “World’s Greatest Places” issue, TIME declared Miami “so hot right now” and “the U.S.’s capital of cool.”7 The Financial Times declared Miami “the most important city in America.”8 Amid a COVID-19-fueled exodus of wealthy individuals and companies from colder, more crowded cities like New York to work remotely from second or new homes in the suburbs and rural areas, Miami was ranked the #1 destination for Americans relocating during the pandemic.9 Housing prices have skyrocketed since the pandemic. Fueled by a social media campaign orchestrated by Miami’s mayor, Francis X. Suarez—who self-proclaimed himself the “tech bro mayor” before the raucous cheers and applause of his boosters—a growing number of tech companies have announced their relocation from Silicon Valley to Miami. Suarez’s self-described “How can I help?” movement to make Miami the tech and crypto capital of the country revolves around social media, financial incentives, and a cryptocurrency branding campaign (the City of Miami created its own cryptocurrency—MiamiCoin, the first “CityCoin” powered by the Stacks protocol—and has proposed using it to pay municipal employees), alongside the allure of no state income tax and remote work calls set against real swaying palm trees—not fake Zoom background versions.10 This frenzy to tech colonize the city has created skyrocketing home prices, with tech investors like Keith Rabois (a vocal promoter of the tech relocation who believes sea-level rise is “fake news”11) paying $29 million for a 15,000-square-foot Miami Beach waterfront mansion, outfitted with a massive 5,600-gallon saltwater aquarium, the maintenance of which requires a scuba diver.12 PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel purchased two neighboring waterfront mansions for $18 million.13 Investment and financial management companies such as Blackstone, SoftBank, CI Financial, and Thomas Bravo, as well as the crypto company Blockchain.com, also moved their headquarters to Miami while Novo opened offices there. To service the newly arrived elites, New York restaurateurs are opening Miami locations and waitlists at private schools and country clubs are growing rapidly. According to RealtyHop, in 2022 Miami became the most expensive housing market in America.14
Living in Miami—inhabiting its radically complex and uncertain social-ecological contexts shaping and being shaped by what appear to be seismic shifts in the nature and scope of habitability in this “city on the edge”—one cannot help wonder, with something like astonishment: Why is the contemporary art made in Miami that deals directly with climate change often so innocuous? It’s not because anything is inherently wrong with it or the artists who produce it. Instead, we argue, it’s because it addresses a generalized concern, in terms that are probably the same everywhere, at the expense of taking the pulse of the contradictions that really govern the city. What Miami contemporary artists often miss or misconstrue is that their pedagogical approach is hardly ever more than a reiteration of what, arguably, journalism says more efficiently and science more profoundly. It slides right off the electrical crosscurrents of everyday life that pierce through bodies, often jolting the vitals before bothering to awaken thinking, a place where something else demands to be registered. The blatant contradictions, for one, and the wildly variegated affective textures that they generate, for another. Uffffff, the massive hurricane just missed us; Supreme is dropping a new hoodie today. These contradictions live as an open secret and everyone moves as if blind to—or perhaps rather enthralled by—them, basking in all the warm light they cast. The Prada store, two blocks from the overpass that was stormed during the George Floyd rebellion, is not an embodiment of these contradictions but rather their amazing yield, an exciting amenity. Just like Pharrell’s new restaurant. The flooding of international banks on Brickell Avenue during even minor storms is just how it is. The water can sit, but capital has to flow.
Miami climate-change art often misses the mark precisely because it presupposes that subjectivity itself, under the city’s current conditions, is an integrated and salvageable structure. It nowhere signals that it is, instead, the very tablet on which the forces of capital engraved themselves in the human apparatus and that they do so by, paradoxically, disintegrating it, smashing it to shards. It may also be where the unfathomable statistics and apocalyptic scenarios of imminent climate mayhem—the scientist’s objective finds, things that are always placed in a supposed projected future space that, curious and curiouser, is always identical to the one locals move in—appear not as mere information but as searing agents, scorching the intricate details off the very machinery of subjectivity. Who—or how—is one when already dead or displaced in an imagination that plots to one’s everyday and intimate points of reference? It’s my house that is going to flood, not a house. It’s my block that gets photoshopped into the images that accompany the PowerPoint presentations. We are the abstraction. We are the dead bodies one thinks one can avoid becoming with the proper mitigation strategies.
What Miami climate change art—and not only Miami’s—overlooks, in other words, is that climate change designs the very obsolescence of Holocene art. For the millennia that saw a stabilized earth system, meaning arose out of cultural patterns. What are we to do with a constant overhauling of those patterns and the wild proliferation of contingencies? We are the resistant matter, endeavoring to continue to produce meaning as the deluge intensifies, that climate change is designing anew. To think things are otherwise—that “we got this”—is what allows resilience ideology to silt and block our capacities to imagine ourselves as the malleable material that external forces are quickly mutating, and, as a consequence, to miss the chance to imagine what our bodies can actually do in the face of unimagined and unprecedented contingencies, how they can draw a new set of resources from them. We will be made something we are currently not, there is no doubt about that. It is a matter, then, of how we wish to angle ourselves in relation to the metamorphosis.
A grid of metallic cars adorns the facade of a Museum Garage in Miami Design District. Photograph by Werner Bayer, CC0 1.0
To hold oneself together in the tug between the Most Glamorous City in America and the accounting of the Unified Sea Level Rise Projection for Southeast Florida hardly seems like the best move, if it’s even possible. Instead, to really get the city inside oneself, to properly jack into its energy sockets, is to become whatever kind of subject is represented by the glitchy stock characters in the video game world of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City—kind-of-humans stuck in partial configurations, their features a little blocky and smudged, their bodies often twisting where actual bodies have no capacity to articulate. What kind of subject is inside that body, walking through sunny-day nuisance floods—“Oh look, a fish in the middle of the street”—while perusing on their phone the architectural animations of the new Renzo Piano tower that is about to go up, now that 70 percent of its units have sold, including one to crypto trading platform Tagomi co-founder Marc Bhargava, priced at $6.2 million? The tower is sited next to the former Champlain Towers South condo building, which tragically collapsed in the middle of the night—due, initial analysis suggests, to a combination of structural wear and flaws, subsidence, and repeated saltwater flooding.15 That the International Noise Conference, hosted every February in Little Haiti, is always a resounding success signals only that glitch “subjects” know how to soundtrack their atrophied feelings.
What cosmology can already dead glitch subjects bend to? Apocalypse’s dark moods prove too brittle to contain and store the wild energies that reigning contradictions unfix. A different disposition—if not, the very unraveling of disposition in the absence of mooring coordinates—may be required. What musician George Clinton calls “Wars of Armageddon” is a possible description,16 provided it is an endless, internal, high-speed, godless war, in which one fights for all sides simultaneously and indiscriminately. But what technics emerge from these Wars of Armageddon and become available to the glitch subject? This is the question that Miami climate-change art too often elides and where a political inflection may be possible. How does one delaminate from conservative mainstream discourse, even if supposedly enacting it through the “radical” message of climate change and the demands for alterations to our behavior? One begins with tools, and not those of the master. One thinks of the tools that are becoming newly available. It is the tools themselves, blooming from or in the collapse, if we can put it this way, which are calling out from the very place where one stands. What is presenting itself as a kind of consubstantial prosthetic with which to pry open escape hatches? The glitch subject picks up her own tapir bone and tosses it into the sky. It falls back down and spears the sand. It sits upright not before a mysterious monolith but a condo luxury tower. A song slowly fades in. Funkadelic:
When do we want freedom?
Now!
What do we want?
Freedom!
It’s trying to tell us something, this nasty ditty, and maybe it’s not even something about freedom, before it returns to being as twisted as we are. It reminds us that the tools we need and that we will make may be full of glitches and trouble, jonesing for discord:
More power to the people
More power to the people
More pussy to the power
More pussy to the people
More power to the pussy
More pussy to the power
Pussy to the people
Power to the pussy!
More peter to the eater
More power to the pussy
More pussy to the power
Right on, right on!
More power to the pussy
More pussy to the power
More power to the peter
More peter to the pussy
Right on!
This may just be how the instruction manual for these new tools reads—or how its words simply shoot right into our cortex. Hard to know just yet what operations it is that such instruments effectuate. But this, surely, is a more real, a more honest place to be, down in the mud as it were—the places people actually inhabit—than at the lectern pedaling well-worn formulations. No better way to smother a fire than with all the sanctioned right moves.
