Another
behind-time exhibition review, continuing our mini-series on
Modernist art and the city
“The
minute I touched New York,” Berenice Abbott reflected, “I had a
burning desire to photograph this city of incredible contrasts.”
And of course she wasn't the only one. This exhibition showcases
eighteen instances where such a desire has ignited, (as the show puts it) “the symbiotic relationship between
photography and the architectural subject.” Of course there's a
style of painting which goes with a type of landscape. But
photography seems inherently suited to the city. While nature is
sliced and segmented by the shutter, cities come camera-ready. Paintings of
cities can feel like when court sketches get shown on the news, a
strange juxtaposition of archaic form and new context. (George Bellows, featured in the previous instalment, and LS Lowry,
to come, made a virtue of this juxtaposition, just as Bellows painted
cars and horse-drawn carts in the same scene. But
they're the exception rather than the rule.) We tend to pass through
cities rather than stand and look at them, an experience better
caught by the snapshot than by the easel.
If
this exhibition features no less than eighteen photographers, reader
be aware this write-up features what could be described as less than
that. Some that is indifferent will be skipped over, but a fair
amount of good stuff will also be bypassed. It'll be a drift through
the streets not a route map. Where not otherwise stated, quotes are
from the curators. Please keep your tickets with you at all times.
Refunds will not be given.
The
Socialised City
Though
the exhibition uses the term 'architecture' in its title and
throughout, there's actually something of a distinction between
'architecture photography' (as in portraits of buildings) and 'city
photography'. And it's the difference between photographing the trees
and photographing the wood. And the afore-mentioned Berenice Abbott
is very much in the latter camp. Not for nothing is her most famous
image 'Night View New York City' (1932, up top).
Her subject matter is the city, even if she only conveys it through
sections of it at a time. The city is an assemblage, not an
accumulation of disconnected buildings, but an entity in and of
itself.
Like
many images of this era they're perhaps hard for us to frame in
retrospect. The past was perhaps never a more foreign country than
Abbott's New York. We have come to use the city first as an amplifier
term, a synonym for bigger and badder. (There's a reason why Bowie
didn't write 'Suffragette Hamlet'.) Then on top of
this comes the conception of the city as the embodiment of
capitalism. Babylon was a city. So therefore the city is Babylon. Last year, for the first time in history more than half of the world's population came to live in urban areas, a statistic which
is easy to read as another signifier for the triumph of
neoliberalism.
So
at least since Expressionism the City in art has become an apparently
self-contradicting combination of cutting-edge modernity and the
basest savagery, exemplified in the title of the early Brecht play
'In The Jungle of the Cities'
(1924). This sense
is enhanced for us in the the UK, where the financial district is
even dubbed 'the City'. (The recent Occupy protests, taking place not
too far from this exhibition, effectively brought back the 'Stop the
City' terminology of my youth.) But its equally enhanced for New
York, home of the financial district to the world's biggest economy,
often seen as as the epicentre of capitalism. So radical art's
mission becomes to expose the poverty behind those gleaming Broadway
signs, and all the rest of it.
Abbott
arrived in New York only in 1929, the year of the Wall Street Crash –
pretty good timing to be looking for poverty to expose. And at times
she did just that, with works such as 'Encampment of the Unemployed' (1935). She largely worked for
Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration, a rare incubator for
socially progressive art in America. But that's not the heart of her
work. Mostly she saw the city from quite a different perspective.
We
can see this, quite literally, in the (to quote Richard Martin of 'Apollo') “dazzling angles and
sharp contrasts” of 'View Of Exchange Place From Broadway
New York' (1934, above). Sweeping avenues pull at us, so
uncongested to our modern eyes, a web of connections free from the
clutter of the past, in a view which feels inviting and celebratory.
As Abbott's Wikipedia entry states she “intended to empower
people by making them realize that their environment was a
consequence of their collective behavior (and vice versa).”
Baudelaire lamented, in a poem laced with classical symbolism, “the old Paris
is gone (the shape of a city changes faster than the human heart can
tell.)” Whereas Abbott champions this very thing,
exulting in “the city that is never the same but always changing”.
The photos are dated to the very day like journalism, but human
figures can be remote if present at all, as if the changing city
itself is what she seeks to capture. As with
Bellows, some of her images are literally of construction. New
York had first been colonised in the Seventeenth century, and was
both sizeable and strategically important from the Eighteenth. Little of that is here. All is gleamingly new, as if the new city has just
over-written the old, soon to disappear itself under the next wave of
innovation. It's only a couple of decades behind, but a long way
indeed from Bellows' “kettle perpetually on the boil” with “paint
as real as mud”.
And
she was not alone in this perspective. In the recent Royal Academy 'Building the Revolution' exhibition of Modernist architecture of the Russian Revolution, we saw
how “the buildings are virtually porous - bursting with openings,
held together with criss-crossing gangways or connecting skyways. The
show speaks of ‘wide corridors intended to promote social
interaction’. …[they’re often] built around a central cylinder
housing the staircase. Again and again the emphasis is on buildings
which are light, open and airy.”
The
term 'Constructing' in the tile of course implies Constructivism, and
many of Abbott's photos have a collage-like quality akin to
Constructivist photographers such as Rodchenko. See for example the
(to use her earlier phrase) “incredible contrast” between two
building fronts in 'Glass Brick and Brownstone Fronts, East 48th Street' (1938). And even her fixation with the
signage of advertising, in photos such as 'Columbus Circle,
New York' (1936, below) should be seen as less a critique
of consumerism than a celebration of their, to again quote Richard
Martin, “everyday exuberance”. As the curators note, “advertising
[had begun] to present itself as a new form of urban iconography,
supplanting formal civic sculptures”.
Again,
if counter-intuitively, this relates to Soviet modernism. As Owen Hatherley pointed out in 'Militant Modernism': “Constructivist architecture made a fetish of the extraneous, and
adverts, banners or radio masts can be found as features of most of
the original plans.” If much of that bold and creative new
expression was currently being shackled to the selling of goods...
well, that condition was doubtless temporary. The point was that it
was bold, it was innovative,
that we could now shout from the rooftops without even opening our
mouths. And soon that ability would be in the hands of the people.
Of
course the differences are significant too. The Soviet architects'
aim was to rebuild a city, and with it a society, while Abbott's was
to photograph an existing one. But the parallels are striking, and
aren't coincidental. There was then an evolutionist dimension to
radical thought which saw the city as something which inherently
socialises us – almost as a crucible with the power to transform
us. Marx wrote in the Communist Manifesto how urban migration had
“rescued a great part of the population from the idiocy of country
life”. (That infamous and much maligned word 'idiocy' is actually a
poor translation of the German term closer in meaning to
'idiosyncrasy', meaning isolation, provincialism, disconnection from
the wider world.)
In
Kapital he developed the theme: “The transformation of scattered
private property, arising from individual labour, into capitalist
private property is, naturally, a process, incomparably more
protracted, arduous, and difficult, than the transformation of
capitalistic private property, already practically resting on
socialised production, into socialised property.” Upton Sinclair
titled his 1906 expose of life amid the slaughterhouses of Chicago
'The Jungle'. Yet ended it with a socialist
meeting where they boldly cry “the city is ours!”
Modernism
Comes Home
And
if we already know that the city didn't become ours, and have spent
recent decades backtracking somewhat on the notion of the
inevitability of communism, its notable how much those wide avenues
still carry into the succeeding spaces of his show.
The
Case Study House Program occurred in post-war California, where
houses were built and then not only made into open homes for public
viewing but photographed. The houses we are looking at are therefore
essentially adverts for themselves. Jacob Shulman took the “sumptuous
architectural photographs [which] advertised a post-war American
lifestyle”. After the sharp black-and-white of Abbott's work,
things burst into technicolour. Human figures, played of course by
models, are placed more prominently and are mostly to be found
dressed for dinner or clutching consumer durables. It's a classic
case of product as identity.
And
yet so much of Abbott's empowering, enabling city remains. There's
the same inviting sense of open space, with glass and water as
endlessly recurring features. Take 'Case Study House 9'
(1949, above), shot at such an angle the lounge already looking
expansive enough to play football on, then adding the wall-spanning
French windows onto the garden. Its the porous buildings of modernist
architecture meeting the California sunshine, the refusal of a rigid
distinction between inside and outside.
But
there's a crucial difference – what was once to do with the whole
city, with socialising humanity, is now relegated to the domestic.
Its like an optical illusion where space is simultaneously opened up
and abstracted. If you don't see any old-style picket fences in these
photos, that's because you don't see any neighbours to peer over them either.
Not
for no reason is Shulman's most famous image 'Case Study
House 22' (1960, above), in which the occupant of an
upraised glass box gazes down onto the city lights below. (In many
ways reminiscent of Abbott's 'Night View New York
City'.) And there's not one suggestion in the series of a
house actually located on a street, the place we tend to come across
them. The optical illusion relies on the sleight-of-hand inherent to
commodity production. When you buy a product, whether a house, a blue
suit or an orange sofa, you know it's mass-produced, one of
thousands. But you focus on this one being
yours, this product being – in some magical way
– an expression of you. The image is splendid isolation in a
nutshell.
Yet
its perhaps not entirely honest just to criticise from this perspective,
and then close the book. These images are designed to seduce the eye
and they succeed. You feel if you lived in one of those dream homes
you'd start to live an unencumbered life, gliding across those
apertures, unclogged by clutter. You would probably think
differently, certainly more clearly, once your daily life was so
unconstrained. (Frankly, I'd rather live in one of those pads than
the place I do.) They represent the post-war economic miracle, where
it wasn't just that capitalism seemed to have overcome its
contradictions to give you everything it had always offered. Its even
subsuming what socialism had to offer into the bargain.
And
arguably the images are seductive that the whole exhibition has been
designed in this California-style manner. It's open-plan while
containing a series of 'pods' dedicated to each individual artist,
easy both to pass through and to linger in. And this design, by
Office KGDVs, was often praised by reviewers. As Rowan Moore put it in the Guardian “they make of it a
little city, allowing glimpses as if of other people’s apartments
into galleries on the other side of the show.”
The
Plan Prevails
...whereas
Lucien Herve perhaps exemplifies the other half of where Abbott's
vision went. After the war, Corbusier designed the new Indian city of
Chandigarh, and (in one of many collaborations) personally invited
Herve to document the result. Nehru described the plan as “unfettered
by the traditions of the past, a symbol of the nation's faith in the
future”. Fine words, indeed. Clearly taken early in the morning,
with correspondingly long shadows, the photos evoke a fresh feeling,
the dawning of a new world.
And
yet... Only the most blimpish Brit would seek to decry Indian
independence, or claim it was ever as authoritarian as Soviet Russia.
Yet something is badly missing. Abbot's work was dynamic
in every sense of the word. We make the city as the city remakes us,
in a positive feedback loop. Yet if Shulman has taken the dream and
run off with it, Herve is left with the plans. Frankly it feels as if
Shulman has captured the soul and Herve is busily propping up the
corpse.
If
socialism could then be thought of as the next step in evolution, it
was also seen as interchangeable with planning – thinking out what
worked for people, as against the 'anarchy' of the market. And this
is socialism-as-planning at its most reductive, a built environment
whose hard edges we are expected to rearrange ourselves around - and
the result is a machine clearly not built for living in. You look at
the High Court of Justice (1955, above), and feel like you stand as
much chance of getting justice from it as milk from a concrete cow.
They're mostly reminiscent of Well's film version of 'The
Trial' (1962), an urban environment which exists only to
anonymise us.
Reframing
The Familiar
If
the last three photographers existed in a continuity, the next group
have strongly similar aesthetics. Abbott had been so taken by a
historic New York she spoke as though she felt unable to do anything
but document it, an artist and their muse. Whereas what interested Ed
Ruscha and his contemporaries was “banal and pedestrian
architecture”, which he captured through a “no-style snapshot
aesthetic, showing a single object with nearly all contextual details
eliminated”. Art can show us something new, something hitherto
unimagined. But art can also show us things we've all seen before,
but in a way which makes them appear as new.
And,
much like the city in general, photography is ideally placed to do
this. We use the term 'photographable' as a synonym for memorable.
But photographs, formally speaking, document. Photograph a bare brick
wall and the lens will diligently record every lump and crevice.
The
focus here is thrown on liminal spaces, places you'd normally merely
pass through. Stephen Shore, for example, took roadtrips around
smalltown America in search of “the prosaic and the mundane”, and
made his images into greeting postcards. He'd even stuff these into
the spinner racks of the tourist shops he'd pass. Because after all,
why bother photographing the memorable? Chances are, you'll remember
it anyway.
In
Ruscha's case he shows us things from literally a new angle. Or at
least ups the ante on Abbott's high-window shots. He took a series of
aerial views of parking lots, empty in the early morning, their
partition lines becoming abstract compositions. (And at the margins
the surrounding grid-plan housing which will later disgorge its cars
over these spaces.) See for example '500 W Carling Way'
(1967). Here we're a world away from Abbott, from constructing worlds
to places already constructed – at a scale beyond our everyday
experience. But with their almost eerie sterility, inhabited and yet
not, they're just as far away from Shulman's images of post-war
abundance. They're actually closest to Herve, but centre what to him
seems an almost accidental effect.
Yet,
while it might be tempting to try and make Ruscha into a social
critic depicting urban alienation, that feels like shoehorning. His
aesthetic isn't built around an argument he's advancing, but serves
to frame a question – can we find such places sublime, like our
forefathers did oceans and mountains? It's Duchamp's problematising
questioning of art thrown over the urban environment. I found myself
half-seriously comparing them to the Nazca desert lines. In both cases, we know they're there. In neither
case does that particularly help us in reading them.
Photo
Chris Jackson/Getty Images
Bernd
and Hilla Becher worked on “the architecture of industrialisation”,
which they described as “anonymous sculptures”. In perhaps the
epitome of photography as cataloguing they'd capture objects flat-on,
in isolation, displaying the accumulated results in juxtapositional
grids. (In the example above, water towers.) And, like Abbott's
buildings, you need to see the images assembled like this before you
get the picture. It's like the way biologists catalogue insects.
When seen together, there's a huge variety of construction styles
you'd never otherwise notice. But they're perhaps more like the way
folk culture items can be displayed – fastidiously removed from
their surrounding culture and function.
Sean O’Hagan writes in the Guardian, of their “documentation of the
fast-disappearing industrial architecture of the Rhine-Ruhr
region of their native Germany” (my emphasis), as if they’re
folklorologists of industrialism, framing a once-living culture in
their fixed dispassionate lens. Those pipes, ducts and water-towers
were once part of some functioning system, now they’re wrenched
away to be pinned to some foreign index system like butterflies in a
book. There does seem something almost stereotypically German about
the deadpan quality of their work; as with a Brecht and Weill
sprechtsang vocal, the more dispassionate the surface the more
numinous the content becomes. Its almost like the Zone in Tarkovsky’s
‘Stalker’, there comes to be something
compelling about the detritus, you come to feel there's some meaning
which is currently eluding you.
O’Hagan has also remarked on “the underlying sense of loss and
melancholy that emanates from these photographs”, and perhaps they
rest upon an irresolvable ambiguity. Do they signify an aesthetic to
this industrial world of valves and gears, something which we never
saw until it was too late? Or do they rely on the decay for their
effect? Could we only stop and contemplate them when they stopped
being of use to us? Like a twist on the old Bauhaus doctrine, form
could only emerge once function was over.
The
Future That Never Came
While
with the rest of the exhibition, a strength is the way it so
frequently takes us out of Europe and North America. Guy Tillim's
images, for example, are of post-colonial Africa. 'Grande
Hotel, Beira, Mozambique' (2008, above) opened in 1954 and closed a mere eight years later. It was another
twelve before Mozambique gained independence. It looks so dilapidated
you at first assume it must be a ruin, then notice the washing hung
by squatters along those bold curves. “How strange,” comments
Tillim, “that modernism, which eschewed monument and past for
nature and future, should carry memory so well.” The images have a
Ballardian quality – even down to the empty swimming pools. Built
within the living memory of many, its still as strange to us as a
Mayan ruin.
Evocative
as they are, one weakness of these images is that they tend to see
squatting merely as a symptom of dilapidation. Whereas squatters themselves
tend to see the process as a means towards gaining a roof over their
heads. It’s the very failure of the planners’ intent which gave
these squatters a home; however squalid conditions might be, had it
remained the intended luxury hotel they would probably be sleeping in
the streets. Wikipedia comments “there are
only two common rules... Respect one another. And, the Grande Hotel
is open to anybody who wants shelter.” (It also suggests
that things were at their strangest while the hotel was still open,
filled with staff poised to open doors to never-arriving guests, a
cross between 'The Shining, 'Waiting For Godot'
and a cargo cult to Western luxury lifestyles which were never going
to straddle the globe.)
However
Iwan Baan's pictures of the Tower of David in Caracas take a
different tack. This 45-storey squat, originally intended as a
'flagship project' for a bank headquarters, has perhaps become
iconic, with an episode of Homeland set there. Baan, however, managed to
gain access to the inside of the Tower and tells more of the
squatters' stories. As Victoria Sadler of the Huffington Post puts it, his images
challenge our preconceptions of squatting as living in squalid
conditions”.
Writing in the Guardian he commented “At first the tower was just
a construction site: no elevators, running water or electricity.
But... nowadays its more like a village – a self-contained
community in the sky. It has its own economy...the ingenuity is
incredible. These people have absolutely nothing, but they find ways
to get by.”
We
first see a flat-on image of geometric windows, which frame signs of
individual habitation (above). The next wall is a grid of rectangular
images inside the building, as if we're peering close-up through some
of those windows. Like some impromptu, haphazard, sledgehammer
version of the Constructivist aesthetic holes in walls become
passageways or serve as shop kiosks. But my favourite image is
perhaps the most ubiquitous one (below). A weightlifter works out on
an open roof, the cityscape stretching away behind him. Yet two
figures stand either side of him, as casually as if they were in a
basement gym. Baan comments “there's no handrail so you feel like
you're floating above the city.” Like many of the images in the 'Pioneers of the Downtown Scene' show of urban New York art, its
almost a superhero image – the combination of peril (the precarity
of being so close to so huge a drop suggesting a symbol of the
precarity of squatter life) with the human figure so dominant over
the environment, standing over skyscrapers.
The
Landscape of Neo-liberalism (A New Architectureless Kind of
Architecture)
But
what about the world since Modernist architecture. We don't, after
all, just live in ruins. We may want to ask - who can explain our own
world to us? Reviewing an earlier exhibition devoted to the Bechers, O’Hagan commented “this is a requiem for a lost world and shows that, through the
passing of time, even that which was once considered purely
functional and even ugly, can attain beauty.” Will we ever feel
that way about what's around us now?
Two
Bas Princen images perhaps capture the landscape of neoliberalism the
best. 'Mokattam Ridge (Garbage Recycling City), Cairo'
(2009, above) is a vast picture, taken so the city seems to recede
into infinity. Yet at the same time it feels stifling, garbage
encrusting the rooftops - sometimes piled high, sometimes just
scattered debris, yet combined with roof furniture, satellite dishes
and other signs of life being lived. Abbott's city looked
ever-evolving, constantly over-writing itself. This looks like
creation and destruction existing in some strange symbiosis. Its as
conflicted as any of Dali or Miro's Spanish Civil War paintings, a city trying to
breath while simultaneously stuffing its own throat with garbage.
Many of the buildings look half-finished, tarps spread over roofs,
columns holding up nothing. One way of reading the image would be as
a Tower of Babel where humanity ruined itself without God having to
get involved, each storey of the buildings representing an era in
history - culminating only in detritus.
'Cooling
Point, Dubai' (2009, above) features a black cube like a
Borg spaceship combined with the '2001' monolith,
in complete contrast to the pale sandy earth around it. Surely this
was plonked down, never raised up. In a Muslim country, its almost a
parody of the Kaaba in Mecca. Those blue-overalled figures presumably work in
it, but seem entirely disconnected. Is there even a doorway among all
that blackness? It exposes the contradiction at the heart of
neoliberalism. We're constantly told this is not merely the way
things happen to be done now, still less something decided upon, but
that things have to be this way. Society as it's
run right now is a true reflection of our essential nature, a point
to which the rest of history had merely led us up to. And yet we see
in its architecture not even a twisted reflection but a kind of
imposing absence, simultaneously alien and blank-faced, a pristine
sheen with nothing behind it. Whether intended by Princen or not, its
one of the most Marxist images of the alienation of labour I've seen
lately.
It
became almost a commonplace to say that occupied Iraq and Afghanistan
became the epicentre of the modern world, an almost collage-like
clash of values where all the old certainties had been swept away
(perhaps symbolised by the looting of the museums) and free market
values were imposed at gunpoint. In an almost complete reversal of
Abbott, they’re of environments which cannot possibly join up, like
a jumbled collage made up by the real world waiting for some
photographer to happen by.
Simon
Norfolk's 'Bullet-scarred Outdoor Cinema at the Palace of
Culture in the Karte Char District of Kabul' (2001/02) and
'Unfinished Speculative Property Development Near Kabul
Airport' (2010/11, both above) essentially belong together.
The first is in some ways a harsher image than a bullet-ridden human
body would be, suggesting not just people but our very sense of
society (an outdoor cinema as a place where people gather together)
has been destroyed. As, on gaining power, the Taliban attacked and
closed cinemas there's no real indication which side committed this.
(Though bullets might suggest a fully-fledged battle, and hence
invasion.)
The second is in some ways a successor image to
'Cooling Plant, Dubai' in it's image of a building
plonked arbitrarily in a flat landscape. It suggests less a world in
flux than trapped in some between state. In the half-light, the
off-white building looks almost like some kind of mirage. But the
blurred, slow-focus figures look ghostly, like the residue of some
time when children still played in public space. 'Part Wedding
Cake, Inspired By Bollywood But Reverential to Greek Classicism, It
Represents a New Architectureless Kind of Architecture'
(2010/11) has a title which essentially performs my job of
translating these images into descriptions. The world depicted is a
mixture of fairy tale opulence and actual debasement.
If,
ever-implicit in Abbott's New York shots, lay the idea we were
looking at the world's powerhouse of that era, of course today this
has shifted to China. (Or shifted back there, depending on how far
back you choose to take your history.) Rather than there be something
at odds between the free market and authoritarian political systems,
China is ascendent by combining both. So its not altogether
unsurprising if some of the most memorable images come from Nadav
Kander's images of the Three Gorges Dam project, which displaced over
a million people.
In
'Chongquin XI, Chongquing Munipality' (2007,
above), fishermen stand before and below a gargantuan bridge. The
bridge recedes into misty distance, like something from classical
Chinese Painting. The division isn't between the natural and the
artificial, but between the grand and the human scale - a scale so
disproportionate its almost like an image from 'The
Borrowers'. 'Bathers, Yibin, Sichuan'
(2007, below) recalls George Bellows' '42
Kids', as covered in the previous instalment. Yet even Bellows allows the image to retain some sense of
exuberance, the children pallid but playing, leaping into the water.
The bathers here are bunched onto a stump of rock before a grey and
uninviting river, the factory chimney above their heads suggesting
its only going to get greyer.
Corinna Lotz of 'A World to Win' writes: “There are shades of
Whistler’s Battersea Bridge and Casper David Friedrich’s yearning
views into the distance. Superhuman constructions tower over tiny
human beings who try to carry on with their lives. The eerie beauty
of Kander’s images is in stark contrast to the horror of
eco-degradation.” And indeed the industrial sublime of Turner is here.
A
catch-all definition of the sublime might be that which is too vast
to truly take in, and yet we cannot stop looking. Yet the Romantic
sublime came from a religious era, where the vastness of nature
became a metaphor for the unboundedness of God. These city pictures
(and not just Kander's) reverse this. Man-made environments appear as
so otherly to us, so beyond our sense of scale yet alone our
influence, that we're rendered stupefied. We feel apart from what we
made.
In
the new corporate world, buildings don't just contain but are
themselves billboards for brands. Here in Brighton American Express
sponsored the new football stadium, which means whenever anybody
mentions “the Amex” as a landmark their brand has been inserted
into everyday conversation. Similarly, Owen Hatherley has called the
London skyline “both logo and icon.” Also writing in the Guardian, Ian Martin lamented:
"Just
look at London’s privatised skyline. It would be hilarious if it
wasn’t so cartoonishly tragic... The utter capitulation of
London’s planning system in the face of serious money is detectable
right there in that infantile, random collection of improbable sex
toys poking gormlessly into the privatised air... I loathe its
banality... I loathe its monstrous, bullying scale. It’s Gulliver
big. End-of-level-boss big. Its stupid anything-goes-now size mocks
us.”
But
even the monstrous regiment of the London skyline doesn't convey the
true banality of the evil we live among. Its grandiloquent,
Brobdignigian nature is virtually misdirection. On the train home
from the exhibition, I couldn’t help but compare the landscape of
South London to the show. And while there may never have been a time
when Croydon has thrilled the senses, nevertheless the distinction is
striking. They are grand in scale, in fact grander than ever before.
But they are grand only in scale, they are as
anonymous as they are imposing. Buildings once evoked the same
response in us as of mountains and lakes. Now those glass-and-steel
sheens are like characterless faces, like an Ozymandian sculpture to
the excess banality of evil. We feel only the sublimation of the
sublime, never the transcendence. To put it bluntly, the big stuff
nowadays only makes us feel small.
The
conception of the city as ever-changing, as always over-writing
itself, repeats as farce. These buildings are simultaneously so grand
and so bland they can all too easily be replaced, but only by another
variation on the same non-theme. They're so chillingly ubiquitous
your eye can barely fix on their shriekingly bland facades before
falling off again. And how can you start to consider an alternative
where you can't even notice what's there to begin with? Our landscape
now affects us like Valium. The Romantic painter Caspar Friedrich once commented the artist needs to
feel the connection to his subject or, “his pictures will
be like those folding screens behind which one expects to find only
the sick or the dead”. Which is about as accurate a description of
the landscape of neoliberalism as we’re likely to get.
Coming soon! More of this sort of thing...
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