Decay: To pass gradually from a sound, prosperous, or perfect state, to one of imperfection, adversity, or dissolution. -- Webster's dictionary

It was definitely the dead birds. Entombed in netting that hung from the ceiling of Knob Hill Farms -- a Toronto-based discount food emporium and Costco forerunner -- the symbolism was blunt. Once spotted, the dangling sparrows were impossible to ignore.

Things at eye-level weren't much better. Stray cats wandered the aisles. The scuffs and scrapes on the abattoir-inspired, concrete floor acted as tree rings, denoting years of accumulated erosion. A decrepit freezer was filled with concentrated juice tins, erratically splayed as if raccoons, not humans, had sifted through them. The store was gray, dull and poorly lit.

A disgruntled employee provided a behind-the-scenes tour that doubled as an autopsy. Fire exits chained tight. Leaky roof. A spartan, malodorous lunchroom with a boarded-up shower. A malfunctioning butcher counter meant ice, not refrigeration coils, kept meats from spoiling.

During the 1980s, all ten Knob Hill Farms were profitable. The floors were polished and shiny. The employees smiled. Check-out lineups were long. Frugal customers willingly overlooked the limited brand selection and warehouse ambiance. The 1990s were less kind. Knob Hill Farms founder Steve Stavro stopped putting money into store upkeep and infrastructure, focusing instead on his NHL franchise, the Toronto Maple Leafs. The recession lifted, brands became seemingly omnipotent, and Knob Hill Farms went from pioneer to anomaly. In the summer of 2000, Stavro delivered a terse press-release/eulogy for the 47-year-old chain, and all ten Knob Hill Farms closed by November of that year.

In February of 2001, the Knob Hill Farms located at Landsdowne and Dundas auctioned off its remnants, including meat saws and deli slicers. The site remains undeveloped, the store an empty mausoleum. But the charms and rituals of this particular location have been preserved in Eroded Margin (www.biggeworld.com), a recently published bookwork collaboration between photographer Greg White and graphic designer Patricio Davila. Eroded Margin documents the final few weeks of the once famous chain, a photo essay that juxtaposes a decrepit store with its still proud employees doing their best to maintain appearances.

Given the triumph of consumer culture, with its slick overabundance and aspirational offerings, the crumbling palace of Knob Hill Farms was more than an anomaly -- it was heretical. But after experiencing the thousandth iteration of neon-drenched, big-box retail there was something appealing, even refreshing, about a supermarket gone so obviously askew. Knob Hill Farms had become the underdog, its innovations transformed into alluring idiosyncrasies that, sadly, foretold its inevitable obsolescence.

In cities such as Toronto and San Francisco, the past five years of bull market have bequeathed rapid and intensive construction in long-neglected urban cores. Current notions of progress are now dominated by impatience. Suddenly, sick buildings are no longer being given the opportunity to catch their breath -- let alone wheeze. Instead, the new is recycling the old ever faster, like a film on fast-forward. The luxury of watching a building slowly fade away is exactly that. Paradoxically, the inexplicable beauty of decline is most appreciated in abstentia. Only when the last great old movie house with faded velvet seats and a thick red ripped curtain disappears is the loss mourned. Only when the dodgy saloon with cheap draft is converted into an upscale jazz bar do regulars realize how great things really were.

Decay has spent most of its long but ignored history on the dismal periphery. In the past few years, however, urban decay has experienced a modest reexamination. Decay has become the aesthetic adhesive uniting a disparate group of writers, artists, photographers, musicians and their respective communities. Decline and decadence has provoked an ongoing, interpretative dialogue with the past.

The emerging problem is that decay serves no apparent function in consumer culture. Beyond invoking nostalgia for an idealized past that may or may not have existed, decay's mini-renaissance centres around a number of complicated contradictions. As the opportunities for those that wish only to experience and enjoy decay vanish, the ability to purchase faux decay increases.

Thankfully, it's not to late to stop and consider the commodification of fissures, patina and rust. Decay is becoming an unspoken assumption that requires articulation if some of the limitations of consumer culture are to be addressed. Decay even possesses ideological and philosophical potential, a movement deriving intellectual vigor from its rejection of the thin, plastic, disposable sheen of modern design.

A Brief History of Decay
The phenomenon of decay runs like an abandoned logging road through the wilderness of cultural criticism. But its patchy, pot-marked history is required to understand the putrefying past. This ruined road leads back to Rome, according to Wolfdietrich Rasch, whose essay "Literary Decadence: Artistic Representations of Decay" provides a tidy primer on how attitudes toward disintegration have evolved. According to Rasch, the collapse of the Roman Empire generated one central historical certainty: "Nothing that exists, whether natural growth or human creations such as institutions and states, will last for ever; everything is doomed to oblivion."

Today it is common to find the inevitable decomposition of the most powerful empire poetic, even glamourous. But even during the Renaissance, artists found beauty only in Rome's pinnacle -- its decadent latter years were ignored or pitied. It was not until the 18th, and especially the 19th century that decline became artistically appealing and -- more importantly -- no longer the exclusive purview of the Roman Empire.

Poet Charles Baudelaire successfully legitimized decadence as a topic, forever erasing its connotations as a pejorative term for second-rate literature. His 1857 collection of poems Flowers of Evil catalogues the various permutations of decay. In his poem "The Ragpicker's Wine" Baudelaire describes the City of Lights as, "The jumbled vomit of enourmous Paris." In "A Carrion" a dead mule inspires Baudelaire to inform his mistress that eventually, "[a] worm shall kiss your proud estate." Finally, in "Joyful Death" he writes:

O worms! Dark neighbours without eyes or ears,
Behold a free and joyful corpse appear;
Calm revelers, the offspring of decay

The result, according to Rasch, was that decay and downfall now had the same validity as "rude, aspiring life and are just as worthy as classical subjects of a place in poetry and literature." Not that acceptance of decay was immediate, nor welcomed. Baudelaire's affirmative representations of decay provoked hostility. To acknowledge decline is to reflect and contemplate one's inevitable mortality, transience and fragility. Baudelaire's carefully constructed odes to dissolution irritated or were rejected outright.

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"The ideas that ruins awaken in me are grand." -- Denis Diderot

Until the Renaissance, debris was used in subsequent building or reburied if considered too sacred to recycle. Today ancient architecture is preserved, acting as a historical anchor and contributing much-needed texture to cities. Ruins connote loss while at the same time offering a connection to what once was but is no more. Ruins signify the impact of history on the living.

It was during the Renaissance that collapsed remains become understood as something separate from mere dilapidation. As Claire Lyons notes in the art and archeology book Irresistible Decay, "Constituted by memory and distance, ruins are proxies for a past that is continually reinvented by the present." Without ruins, we risk losing a gradually disintegrating past, like a glacier melting into a thousand lakes.

Irresistible Decay and Baudelaire present decay as a decadent luxury to be embraced, but only describe reactions and responses to decay. It was the Japanese who first embraced decay -- in the 15th century -- a few hundred years before the West, in the form of wabi-sabi. Wabi-sabi emerged from tea ceremony traditions -- what began as aesthetic guidelines morphed slowly into philosophy. Under wabi-sabi, decay became a comprehensive aesthetic system and veritable state of mind.

Wabi-sabi is a kind of zen state that must be reached slowly over time, best translated as "the beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete." Metaphysically, wabi-sabi suggests that "Things are either devolving toward, or evolving from, nothingness." What does this mean? According Wabi-Sabi author Leonard Koren, "wabi-sabi needs to maintain its mysterious and elusive -- hard to define -- qualities because ineffability is part of its specialness."

Despite this obscurantism, a careful study of wabi-sabi reveals that it is organic (not geometric), corrosion and contamination make its expression richer (rather than purity), and it romanticizes nature (instead of trying to control it). Wabi-sabi also accommodates degradation and attrition (rather than requiring constant maintenance) and it is comfortable with ambiguity (rather than requiring a how-to explication). Wabi-sabi is, in essence, a philosophy that contradicts the current notions of modernity. As Koren puts it, "Things wabi-sabi have no need for the reassurance of status or the validation of market culture." North Americans learn to replace their possessions to maintain their status, while wabi-sabi acolytes retain and proudly display decay in all its guises.

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"Decay is inherent in all conditioned things. Strive diligently!" -- Maha Parinibbana Sutta

Contemporary Decay
Despite the grand philosophical trappings of wabi-sabi and the romance of ruins, decay is often more enjoyable in theory than in practice. Many artists and young city dwellers endure the viscera of decay -- rot, thrift store odour, sun-bleached curls of paint on wind-weathered wood -- out of economic necessity. Those in the midst of decay are more concerned with the pragmatic necessity of imposing order upon their disheveled surroundings.

Still, there is beauty to decay, but finding it requires effort. Ottawa zinester Jeff Otaku describes an extended sojourn in Montreal in issue #6 of Ghost Pine (see excerpt this issue) as a negotiation between the glorious past (Expo 67) and grim present ("the crumbling Stade Olympique.") For Otaku the future isn't that bright: "Avenue De L'Eglise fared little better than it's eponym though it remained the main artery of Verdun, a neighbourhood with a rich history which decayed appropriately.... An old man posted his open letter on telephone poles, lamenting days gone by when it was blue collar and both French and English took pride in the neighbourhood."

(It's worth noting the economic exodus that occurred in Montreal during the 70s and 80s which made such decay possible. Often, the emergence and erasure of decay is inextricably linked to the financial fortunes of a city.)

As an urban tourist, Otaku is well suited to detail this decline. His writing effuses the low key charm of a punk rock flaneur, as he describes the dark days leading up to the new millennium, in a city that flinches in anticipation of destruction, not renewal.

It isn't coincidence that the first portal into contemporary decay comes by way of a zine. The wabi-sabi philosophy believes that greatness exists in the inconspicuous and overlooked details, and nothing could be more fundamental to the zine enterprise. Zines imbue people, places and objects that appear to lack mainstream appeal with cultural capital. As Koren notes, "Wabi-sabi is about the minor and the hidden, the tentative and the ephemeral: things so subtle and evanescent they are invisible to vulgar eyes." The overlooked is the spiritual fiber that links Poodle (a zine celebrating five-pin bowling) with Wi'ndbaegs (a zine photo-album that documents old plastic bags caught in tree branches). Decay and independent culture are old friends, a realm where necessity and nostalgia intersect.

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While Otaku lives entirely in the rotting -- but oh so immediate -- present, Ontario comic artist Seth (who lacks a last name) searches to find a similar urgency in the withered past, as chronicled in the 1996 picture novella It's A Good Life, If You Don't Weaken. After wandering through the deserted streets of Toronto at night, the illustrated version of Seth comments to his friend Chet, "There's something in the decay of old things that provokes an evocative sadness for the vanished past."

Seth savours this visual corruption, preferring a dilapidated old farmhouse to a pristine deco hotel lobby, since only the latter "convince(s) you of the reality or the beauty of yesterday." He isn't content to simply pine away for an imagined past, however. In the next panel Seth yanks the reader out of his reverie by noting, "I'd hate to think that my belief in the superiority of the past was really just a misplaced, over-rationalized aesthetic choice."

In the next panel Seth backpedals. "No, forget I said that. Things are obviously getting worse every year." What the solipsistic Seth omits is a confession that his affinity for old forms and reactionary attitudes toward the present are generally associated with grumpy old conservatives, not moody young hipsters. The only way Seth is able to critique the continual, ceaseless progress of the modern world is by projecting his hopes and dreams onto a tidy, controllable, simplified version of the recent past.

Meanwhile, Toronto artist Dan Kennedy has built a career upon avoiding such tidy narratives of nostalgia. Like Seth, Kennedy has an incredible fondness for shiny pop iconography and referents of the early to mid- 20th century, but he expresses this fondness through decayed colour, texture and typography. His 2000 painting Trick (#10) is a typical example of nostalgia nuzzling ambiguity. Dark, bleeding, rust browns dominate his palette, as Kennedy mixes pencil sketches of a braying donkey a la Disney with carnival signage to create a dense collage. In the centre of the painting is a bearded, smiling, grizzled prospector, his eyes hidden, framed in an oval.

Struggling to emerge from the layers of smudged paint is what Kennedy calls "the commercial unconscious." His characters are immediately recognizable as pre-60s era Disney creations, and his signage evokes the clean lines of the 1950s. Most people viewing his work prove their incubation in consumer culture by their ability to immediate identify his sensibility. It reinforces a kind of legislated nostalgia enforced through television, movies, magazines and advertising of the era.

Kennedy refuses to create a unified whole, in the process proving how difficult it is to integrate the past and the present. Clearly, the past lies as much in the realm of imagination as it does memory. In seeking an artistic niche to inhabit, both Seth and Dan Kennedy refract their philosophies through a rear-view mirror, gazing at an unrecoverable past. Seth simply rejects the present, while Kennedy refuses to impose an order upon the shards and images that compose his delirious consumer nightmares.

Other artists challenge the lifestyle orgy through dirty realism -- a narrative of reduced expectations. Brothers Clint and Scott Griffin engage decay not as a topic, but as basic substrate and canvas, approaching the aesthetic of decay in similar ways through divergent mediums. For Scott, rusted sheet metal with uneven surfaces is where he welds and etches tiny, struggling objects onto bleak, minimal landscapes. Clint rescues discarded photos from dumpsters for his collages. He often erases and removes portions of these photos, creating through subtraction. The use of such unstable canvases -- untreated metal, old wood -- means these works will change and mutate over time, reflecting the ideals of wabi-sabi.

Decay art asserts itself most vigourously by denouncing the new. As the ability to digitally reproduce art and imagery continues to improve, some artists have decided to favour mediums that limit their ability to represent reality. Short films shot on grainy Kodachrome Super 8 instead of DV, lo-fi albums recorded on four-track recorders instead of G4s.

Part Two