Heavy metal: Shandor Hassan makes profound statements with discarded pieces of steel

Shandor Hassan’s “The Dust: American Matter” installation at Street Road in Cochranville, Pennsylvania, includes this pickup truck and Gulf sign.

Cross the Delaware and the tone shifts. The billboards for candidates are everywhere: flashing from the sides of the highways, on metal stilts on country roads. In residential neighborhoods, lawns advertise the names of the adversaries in competing colors. Everything tells the visitor that Pennsylvania is contested territory. You’re not in New Jersey anymore. You’re in a battleground state.

Ours is not a shooting war, and hopefully it will never be. Yet it is meaningful that the metaphors we use for the election are military: We speak of gaining and holding ground, dealing blows, making an impact. It’s an uncomfortable reminder of Pennsylvania’s history. Eight score years ago, only 2 ½ hours west of Philadelphia, the deadliest battle in the history of the North American continent was fought. When the guns finally went silent after three days of unfathomable horror at Gettysburg, some of the most beautiful farmland in the country was strewn with the bodies of the slain, broken machinery, and spent ordnance.

Roughly halfway between Philadelphia and Gettysburg — in the small town of Cochranville — another expanse of ragged metal awaits. There, in a long shed at the arts facility Street Road, Shandor Hassan has installed “The Dust: American Matter,” a piece that is both breathtaking and alarming. Hassan, a photographer, multimedia artist and carpenter presently working in Brooklyn but with deep ties to New Jersey, has flooded the building with a turbulent sea of scrap. Sheared and torn steel — some of it rusted, some of it gleaming, some crumpled beyond recognition and some of it still hinting at a past life — is balled up, heaped up, amassed and carefully positioned to catch and disperse the targeted illumination. In the near-darkness of the shed, the metal seems to shimmer. You, a visitor, are on a walkway in this treacherous dreamland, stepping through something just short of a nightmare, under an artificial night sky, guided by the lit-up steel and marks on the far wall in the shapes of galaxies. A film projected in the rear of the space reveals that most American of sights: the gas station on the highway.

Outside the shed, the hallucination continues. Hassan has parked a beat-up, rusted truck a few paces from the door of the installation. After dark, it is bathed in the orange glow of a retrieved Gulf sign, propped up on a mound of earth. To a motorist on the highway nearby, it may look like the Pennsylvania soil has risen up to swallow a service station, leaving only its electric beacon to remind us what it once was.

It all murmurs of loss: loss of peace and tranquility, loss of harmony, loss of that which was archetypically American, loss of the bucolic to the demands of heavy industry and, ultimately, loss of that industry, too, as the Pennsylvania steel mills have gone into eclipse. It also speaks to Hassan’s personal story as a creator — one bound up in real estate, adaptive reuse of factories, and the economics of redeveloping Northern New Jersey. Twenty years ago, Hassan was forced to close the door on his studio at the Arts Center at 111 First Street, the sprawling complex that, before its demolition, gave Jersey City much of its reputation as a creative place. Two decades later, and for reasons that are eerily similar, fate is about to sweep up “The Dust.” Street Road has been sold. It is likely that a searing installation that has relevance to America, and the Pennsylvanian experience in particular, will no longer have a home in Pennsylvania.

A detail from Shandor Hassan’s “The Dust: American Matter” installation.

By occupants and visitors alike, 111 First Street was often called The Mothership. Hassan was one of its most recognizable captains. He was vocal about the value of the arts community that had gathered in the old Lorillard Tobacco factory, and fought to the end for its preservation. During his years at 111 First Street, Hassan engaged closely with the distinctive features of the built environment in Hudson County. He showed his streetscape photographs at the now-gone Jersey City Museum. In a series that investigated the industrial underpinnings of the redeveloping city, he turned his lens on U.S. Route 1/9. His work demonstrated a burning curiosity about how things were put together — and how they break apart.

Hassan also saw 111 as the beginning of America, or at least the American continent. Manhattan was an island off the coast of America; cross the river and there was the Arts Center, only a few blocks from the mouth of the tunnel. From there, the asphalt unspooled in a ribbon into the hinterland, on and on, through interstates and back alleys, until it reached the Pacific Ocean. Both the highway and gasoline were linked to mobility and the national experiment, but they were also signs of runaway consumption that might well be our undoing. Our fixation on the automobile had had a corrosive effect on urban architecture. At the time of the demolition of the Arts Center at 111 First Street, America was engaged in an overseas war motivated in part by an unceasing thirst for petroleum. Hassan has always seen the beauty and the peril of the highway and the culture it has engendered. It is entirely appropriate that he should show his work at a place called Street Road.

Some of the metal in “The Dust” has clearly been torn from the chassis of old cars. On the floor of the exhibit, it lies bent and mangled, folded back on itself, creased and ribbed, and stained black with soot. Then there are the objects that still retain a memory of their prior function: springs, hooks, grills, crushed canisters, long flat wrenches with grease-choked sockets. But most of the scraps under the lights are too small and too distressed to allude to any specific machinery. They have been pounded into their abject shapes on the merciless anvil of time. They still mean business — you wouldn’t want to step on their serrated edges — but they have exhausted their utility.

In the gloom of the Street Road shed, circles of illumination fall on the steel sea. Under the spotlight, steel shows its unique personality: its endurance, its tensile strength, its ability to retain color, shape and heft even after it is crushed. Pieces in the heap are as wrinkled as the skin on an old piece of fruit. Metal ripples and swells and achieves the quality of water, or folds in on itself like a paper envelope. Nests of jagged needles rest on the floor of the room. Slats of metal point emphatically upward, toward the ceiling and beyond.

The mutability of all of this broken material — its stubbornness, and its resistance even in the face of its metamorphosis — reminds us of something important. Steel is scary. The bones of contemporary society are composed of this intimidating substance, and we made our uneasy peace with that long ago. But seeing the steel in “The Dust,” shredded and mangled but still dangerous and maybe even a bit malevolent, underscores the effort and energy required to manufacture it. No matter how much we buff the metal, it still retains a whiff of the blast furnace, of heat and sweat, mining and manual labor, rollers, transport trucks, cargo ships, and the objects we make from the steel. Cars can crash, knives can cut, plowshares can be beaten back into swords. Even exhausted and torn to shreds, steel doesn’t rest. It lays there on the battlefield, marking its territory, warning us not to stray from the footpath.

Lukens Steel Company, the oldest mill in the country, is no more than a 15-minute drive from Street Road. Coatesville, the town that contains the works, looks every bit the part of the steel manufacturing community: rough-hewn, foursquare, unpretentious, automobile-friendly. So deeply embedded in the identity of Pennsylvania is metalworking that one of its professional football teams is named after steel.

New Jersey, too, has a long history of manufacturing and labor. Many of those old brick buildings in our river towns have been converted into condominiums, but the imprint of industry remains. Hassan kept his studio at 111 First Street at the tail end of an era in Hudson County — the last moment when Jersey City neighborhoods were composed of warehouses. Even then, many of those historic buildings were searching for a contemporary purpose. The artists community gave the old Lorillard factory, and with it the entire city, a new kind of life. Then its owner decided to chase the artists away and destroy it. He wanted to erect a luxury residential tower instead. That was the plan. But for two decades, nothing has been on that block but a pile of bricks.

A detail from Shandor Hassan’s “The Dust: American Matter” installation.

The rubble-strewn lot at 111 First Street in Jersey City and the scrap-choked floor of the shed at Street Road are both battlefields. As any visitor to Gettysburg knows, battlefields have their own peculiar and mystical gravity. If we can tolerate the curious stillness, we can examine the aftermath, and catch the vibrations of a fight that we may not have witnessed, but that we can still feel. In the low light of the shed, “The Dust” could be a vale where armies had clashed: the sawed-off slabs of steel could have been the fuselages of downed planes; the odd cylinders could be the muzzles of guns dropped by frightened combatants; the black sky and distant stars, impassive in the face of human folly, a silent condemnation from above.

But not every battle is settled with guns and bullets. Some authorities enlist the law, or the courts, or the police, or the coercive hand of big business to achieve their aims. Some dissidents use words, and art, to stand up for the integrity and aesthetics of their communities. Shandor Hassan, an artist once driven from a place of creation, shows us a pile-up of steel — a microcosm of charismatic devastation — and invites us to speculate about the forces that have set Americans fighting. It is a timely piece, and one rooted in the histories of the places where the artist has lived and worked. It hits like the breath of the smelting oven. Once inside, it is awesome to behold. It is well worth a trip from New Jersey to see it before it, like the traces of far too many historic struggles, are wiped from the land for good.

“The Dust: American Matter” can be seen at Street Road in Cochranville, Pennsylvania. Visit streetroad.org.