The primary example is of course the psychic mood described by sociologist Georg Simmel in his 1903 essay, The Metropolis and Mental Life. Faced with the constant nervous stimulation afforded by capitalist, intellectual society, the urban subject becomes overwhelmed by a bored, indifferent disregard, developed both as a result of, and as protective shield against the persistent, inevitable shocks of the industrial mechanized environment. Simmel proves his point through comparison with more pastoral habitats, suggesting “This incapacity to react to new stimulations with the required amount of energy constitutes in fact that blasé attitude which every child of a large city evinces when compared with the products of the more peaceful and more stable milieu.” Described as an “adaptive phenomenon”, the blasé typical to urbanites of the 19^th and 20^th century, was figured due to a final complete exhaustion of the nerves, a fundamentally biological solution to the “content and form of metropolitan life” found by consciously or unconsciously “renouncing the response to them.” (14)

In a similar vein, cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard describes a chronological transition from the Moderns’ anomie[i] through contemporary states of schizophrenia according to shifts in popular media. Following a trajectory of incremental increases in surveillance and the associated, persistent commoditization of daily life, for fragmented consciousnesses saturated by forced extroversion, projected images and the ideology of the hyperreal, “the real itself appears as a large useless body.” Thus,

The schizoid is bereft of every scene, open to everything in spite of himself, living in the greatest confusion. He is himself obscene, the obscene prey of the world’s obscenity. What characterizes him is less the loss of the real, the light years of estrangement from the real, the pathos of distance and radical separation, as is commonly said: but, very much to the contrary, the absolute proximity, the total instantaneity of things, the feeling of no defence, no retreat. It is the end of interiority and intimacy, the overexposure and transparence of the world which traverses him without obstacle. He can no longer produce the limits of his own being, can no longer play nor stage himself, can no longer produce himself as mirror. He is now only a pure screen, a switching centre for all the networks of influence (Baudrillard in Jencks, 156)

Indeed, architect Neil Leach has identified and elaborated a wholly new species to be associated with the current urban sphere. Wallpaper* culture, wherein life itself is reduced to image; where, by understanding and appreciating the world only through its look and feel, total aestheticisation “generates its own womb-like sensory cocoon around the individual, a semi-permeable membrane which offers a state of constant gratification while filtering out all that is undesirable. To aestheticize” Leach continues “is therefore to sink blissfully into an intoxicating stupor, which serves to cushion the individual from the world outside like some alcoholic haze”. (Leach Anaesthetics of Architecture 1999: 44)

Leach uses Wallpaper* to encapsulate contemporary subjectivity through analogy to Narcissus, for who the objects of the world, emptied of all but monetary significance are appreciated only as vessels for fleeting self-identification through purchase. Possessions, places, and even associations are useful only in so far as they mirror the users’ ego idea (an ideal often modeled on the ideal egos presented in magazines, billboards, reality shows, situation comedies, internet, “chat” rooms, etc), offered as attainable lifestyle choices without consequence through the simple consumption of mass produced goods.

In defense of these and similar diagnoses –admitedly as much an effort to cope as to generate a positive, creative response to cosmopolitanism, capable of retaining hard and fast moments amid the sensational dream-world of our current period— I offer the return of Echo.

In agreement with the above analogy, Echo is Narcissus’ lover who disappeared and vanquished on his rebuff. In the present re-interpretation, the state of Narcissus depends on Echo for its existence. In fact, thriving in the shadows of the corporate capitalist hall of mirrors is yet another species, whose sole defense —the perfect reflection of Narcissus—makes them invisible to the eye.

First, it is necessary to expand and revise now-conventional views of Narcissus. As many theorists describe, all is not what it seems in contemporary cities. Despite this, Narcissus is often evaluated only by looks. A deeper, more holistic analysis would recognize that self-love is a gratuitous disguise for self-loathing, that fantasy is often nightmare. This is because, faced with ever more phantasmagoric images of perfection, Narcissus can only fail. These images, for all of the real desire they conjure, are increasingly irreal, unattainable. To this point, our analogy is consistent with its origin.

This is not to excuse apathetic ignorance in our moment of cultural capitalism, but to shift some of the responsibility (and some of the associated guilt) – but where? This is not to excuse a worldview determined purely by economics, but to shift focus from the damnation of contemporary culture, towards empathizing with its subjects who, awares, have not chosen it, but must somehow manage to navigate, emerge fulfilled by their days within it, and must imagine, realise, something different. The intent here is not to pity or excuse, but to calm what many theorists have long described as the hysteric senselessness of city life. While we can chastise vain preoccupations with image, it is important too, to recognize this is a milieu born of a dying futurist dream.

True, there may be nothing to blame for mass culture, but mass itself. As Benjamin feared, the great loss associated with media innovation[ii] has resulted in a pandemic of so-called entertainments culled from the humiliating ostracization of others. Ecological disaster, war and other people’s suffering indeed seem to draw as much compassion as what were Saturday Morning Cartoons. Especially in what was The Evening News, they have been reduced into mere profit generating fodder for media extravaganza.

However, I would argue that the persistent elaboration and persecution of Wallpaper* will not heal Narcissus, nor do like criticisms lead to the type of urban reform that will. We need to be wary of rejecting everyone of a certain space as Narcissus. Recognize the dialectic engaging images produced with the intent of creating need, and those images born of creative inspiration and essential self despite the noise of the previous. Turn from critical assessment of the privatization of public space in our cities, to explore those pockets of authenticity and ask how they remain; explore their techniques, work to understand how a very similar strategy of aestheticisation is used to protect certain dispositions, bind communities and retain places for loud children, slow aged, and everyone in between.

Here, to explore the return of Echo – so, not to deny Narcissus (the risks of anaesthetic are quite apt) — but to draw attention to companions, other selves, those whose reflections persist without the mirror.

The Return of Echo: Part II, Who is Echo

[ii] Benjamin, W.  The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935)

From 1870 to 1970, Left: Frontispiece of Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris, 1844 (pp187), Right: Faux magazine cover created for an exhibition about Hulme Crescents, 2004 (pp207)

Once upon a time, the passage of time was rendered as a neatly organized, one-way highway with never any traffic jams. Often told as a series of master biographies, in architectural history this meant that all roads would lead to Modernism, from Gropius-to-Corbusier-to-Johnson. Accordingly, the destiny of all mankind would be achieved through incrementally less-fussy styling; new places unsoiled by tradition, romanticism, messy allegiances to religion, and especially history itself. Along the way, moments in the drive towards ultimate freedom were landmarked by Important New Structures, whose significance was determined and sealed in a photographic instant. Captured from the actual passage of time, the highlights of architecture sought to represent human progress towards an ideal culture of rational efficiency; the new city would never grow out of style, they would never leak, and if construction required bulldozing a bunch of old structures along the way – then so be it.

Of course this is entirely too reductive and the highway to modernity has always also included a bunch of inroads and detours – some prefer to take the train, and others like to stay home. But how refreshing to read of The Secret Lives of Buildings! In this detailed contemporary history of architecture, UK-based designer Edward Hollis explains and debunks what he coins The Perfection Myth of Architecture, simply by acknowledging the full contexts of a building’s design, construction and life thereafter. Architectural history written in this anti-perfect vein is good because, although fragmented, it more vividly illustrates given periods, thereby encompassing broader fields of relevance. So, buildings are considered important for the people who will have to live in and around them, as well as monuments in an individual architect’s portfolio.

As Hollis shows, counter to Modern renderings of a linear trajectory history can also be considered a present accumulation of pasts. In the book, each new building biography is introduced by the author’s poetic reflection on all the stories combined. Each new building – Ayasofya in Istanbul, Sans Souci in Potsdam, The Venetian in Las Vegas – is used to frame a broader, more captivating tale of psychosocial, religio-political, and economic realities. Each chapter, told through traditional story-telling constructs to remind that this history is just one, among many, tells complex stories of appropriation, simulation, and spectacle.

Descriptions throughout also belie a much less formal emphasis in contemporary thinking on architecture. For example, the following description of the Notre Dame de Paris in 1870 is written with an elaborate attention to form,

Notre Dame lowered over the Paris of the Commune as it had done for many centuries. The west front of the Cathedral was a tottering city of building piled upon building, a vertical labyrinth infested with all the creatures of the medieval imagination. Each of the three doors of the west front was thronged with angels – choirs and choirs of them – and saints, martyrs, and personifications of the virtues and the seven deadly sins. Above the doors sat Saint Anne and her daughter Our Lady herself, with Christ presiding over the Last Judgment in the center. Above these portals were arrayed all the kings of Israel, and above the Gallery of the Kings stood the Queen of Heaven flanked by two guardian angels. Behind her, like a halo, there was a rose window. Higher still, above the rose window, another gallery ran across the west front: a delicate forest of colonnettes and pointed arches, the eyrie of brooding gargoyles, misshapen, ugly and hauntingly sad. Above this stone menagerie rose two towers, pierced by tall lancet windows so that the bells that hung within them could sound out over all of Paris: as if in response to the music, tendrils, leaves and strange beasts seemed to sprout from the architecture. On top of everything else, a spire dissolved into Parisian skies as gray as stone and lead (191-192).

Perhaps this formal emphasis in the description of Notre Dame stems from its medieval origin. Built in a more historically distant period according to more romantic visions of the world, contemporary writers struggle to understand historic places as would then-contemporary peoples.

In contrast, perhaps because he takes for granted the readers’ familiarity with Modernism, Hollis’ descriptions of Manchester’s Hulme Cresents in 1970, crystallize around social contexts, recent reflections and an intimate appreciation for style (we may all be more attuned to understanding “God Save the Queen” from the vantage of The Sex Pistols, than we are to really know what it meant to go to Church on Sunday in the Dark Ages).

There were four crescents, each a half a mile long, set amid a vast open park. Each crescent was seven stories tall, with hundreds of flats, all of them designed to the latest ergonomic space standards and all of them accessed by open decks that overlooked acres of greenery. … And that’s when the Crescents started to eat themselves. It began at a party in 1989. It was just an after-party at first, a few folk getting together in a kitchen after the clubs had closed to dance off the last of their drugs; but before long, things got out of hand. Everyone had brought their mates, and soon the kitchen was so crowded that no one could breathe, let alone dance. Bruce can just about remember what happened: “I recall Jamie taking a jackhammer to the wall of his flat to start a club? … But that resulted in him getting all his studio gear nicked?” They had knocked a hole through the wall to the flat next door, you see. And when more people showed up, they did it again. And when still more people showed up, they did it a third time. By the time Jamie had put his jackhammer away, they had knocked through several walls and floors, so that the former kitchen was now an infernal cavern rammed with sweaty bodies and thumping bass (212 and 226).

The jump between these chapters is jarring. Beginning a relatively comprehensive chronology with a delightful story about the Parthenon, at midway Hollis jumps 100 years — from Notre Dame to the Hulme Crescents. Abruptly shifting from formal gothic descriptions to narrative dialogues and social incidences, Hollis shatters any notions of linear history and invites broader thinking about space.  It also illustrates an important imperfection in the history of design itself. In ways, the Parthenon and Notre Dame are as contemporary as the Crescents. The first two are still standing, while the Crescents no longer. From a cohesive object, however symbolically dynamic, to a fragmented accumulation of disparate views, Hollis balances hard and soft detailing according to historic content.

We might explore these inherent flaws in architectural history. For example, Secret Lives begins with the Parthenon, described as “what architecture was, is, and should be” (15). The last chapter explores The Western Wall in Jerusalem. Wouldn’t it make more sense to draw lines from Medieval Peasant homes[i] to Hulme, or from Notre Dame to some contemporary temple? The problem is that the everyday lives of civilians were rarely recorded because they weren’t considered worth remembering (and the peasants themselves were apparently too busy toiling). As for the last — contemporary historians gratefully avoid choosing any one contemporary temple to represent human culture on such a scale. Indeed, what should it be? A museum? A shopping mall? A religious building? A bank tower? Vegas?  “To each their own”, as they say. The gap also surrounds the void imposed in most design histories, by world war.

Hollis writes,

The cities of western Europe have turned into a realization of the architect’s dream: the buildings of their past have become static exhibits in a monumental museum. Elsewhere, however, ancient buildings are still stolen, appropriated, copied, translated, simulated, restored, and prophesied. They still change as they have always done, and they do so because they still excite passions beyond the merely aesthetic. … Outside the confines of the West, historic buildings are not imprisoned in the timeless rapture of the architect’s dream but overflow its fixed frame and impose themselves on the present. History has not come to an end (282).

An interesting irony: Notre Dame, while perhaps a symbol of unchanging permanence, repeatedly undergoes major renovation. Meanwhile, the change it so violently sought to enforce destroys Hulme, an expression of futurist progress. The future of the future, “resembles nothing so much as its past” (228).

A re-telling, rather than a complete departure from architectural history, Hollis begins with (and often returns to) the highest moments in Classical architecture. Allusions to Thomas Cole’s 1840 painting The Architect’s Dream are used to anchor all 13 chapters. A 2009 publication from New York’s Metropolitan Books, Secret Lives… makes excellent reading across the humanities: social science, literature architecture and design, history and theory. Body design by Meryl Sussman Levavi is both clean and classic. Jacket design by Rebecca Seltzer ensures this book is also a great addition to display shelves.

References

Hollis, E. (2009), The Secret Lives of Buildings, New York: Metropolitan Books.

* As published in the Journal of Writing in Creative Practice

Real is the perfect word.  Expanding postmodern penchants for the correlational and simultaneous through happenings, events and performances, British sculptor Antony Gormley’s current work effectively brackets everyday life in the city. Yet Event Horizon frames much more than surface spectacle. A literal embodiment of the now in the city; an expression of emerging cosmopolitan subjectivities, while also a solid foil to predominating corporate aesthetics of the disposable, the installation is both simply, and hyper-real.

Comprised of 31 figures cast throughout and beyond New York City’s Madison Square Park (from 34^th Street to 14^th, from Broadway to Park Avenue), the artist’s U.S. premier balances tropes altogether universal and individual. Material and form harkening both prehistoric and postindustrial moments, these heavy and raw, rusted metal figures appear as much as though fossils of some long past industrial age, as vessels for the coming of some future Nietzschean übermensch. A poetic inversion of commonsense binaries, Event Horizon underscores the strength in nakedness and the vulnerability of iron; ignites the now by collapsing past and future.

Event Horizon stands as a literal embodiment of the cosmopolitan gestalt determined by satellite imaging and commuter relationships. Seen together, the figures are icons for a global subjectivity which through new media creeps ever closer to God’s view, telepathy. As Heidegger’s telephone explained the expansion of modern sensibilities, for many city dwellers today the imagined sense of being in more than one place at a time is no longer so much Surrealist abstraction as everyday experience. Thrown through Ethernet and radio signal, we’re becoming habituated to transnational conversations; increasingly more apt to be engaged in cross town, over immediate (let alone cross cultural) interactions.

A reversal of the plinth/work relationship of art history, Event Horizon offers a dynamic presentation of the city to itself. Indeed, Gormley intends to inspire moments of flânerie. Having caught a glimpse of an eerie individual silhouette on the skyline, the gaze is drawn to always slightly more distant and numerous others, incrementally tossing awareness to further vistas, towards real appreciation for the maddening simultaneity of city life.

Initially produced in London, the installation reconfigures the city as game — a treasure hunt – particularly poignant here, where places are often known first as images. Fine art photographs and cinema as well as a growing accumulation of Kodak albums and Flikr pages: the Flat Iron, Empire State, and Metropolitan Life Insurance buildings manifest a culture of multiplying and kaleidoscopic presences. Threaded throughout some of the world’s most iconic architecture, obviously real in their own right, we tend to know this horizon in the same way that we know profound experiences – ”just like a movie”. Effectively bridging the spaces between coherent visions of the city, Event Horizon punctures the sky with the shadows of a very real, tangible and consistent presence. Eclectic aesthetic, modern utopia and contemporary corporate monolith are quilted together by these temporary monuments, an awesome reminder that the urban landscape and our position within it exists in many dimensions.

In contrast to history’s larger-than-life, supremely personal bronze sculptures throughout the park, the Event Horizon figures are gigantic only in the imagination. Cast from the artist’s body they nevertheless suggest, I am You. And when this conveys an ominous presence, these interpretations are informed by surveillance economies and renewed appreciation for the real fragility of human life in the elements. Gormley’s oeuvre ultimately recalls the individual as the reflection of its community, society the sum of individuals, through human bodies — their aura regained, spiraling outward and shrouded as well as sometimes preserved or buried. Perhaps this expresses an increasingly popular longing to experience real space with the same speed of the instant, networked version, a stream of simultaneous connections. Here with you whether across the globe, or in the next room, Gormley seeks to describe “a human space within space at large”.

Event Horizon is then also a foil to the slick transparency enforced throughout corporate designs for the city. Velveteen sienna moulds, Event Horizon stands apart from gadgets and gismos, optimal when invisible so as not to distract from commercial content. Indeed, lived reality is the real object of Event Horizon, even if most engaged through snap shots. For global cosmopolitan travelers drawn to the city by its image, in order to reproduce it through image-making, the project is then the moment of capture, multiplied. Reflecting projections of the nomad – more real for being all the more adrift in a world of image and artifice – Event Horizon amplifies peripheral visions of overwhelming freedom. Capturing tensions between desires for ubiquity despite visceral entrenchment, what may be most enduring in the experience of this Event Horizon is the uncanny real-ness of these scattered, hidden-in-plain-view figures.

An economy of material expressing the sometimes graceful, sometimes awkward dance between people, each other, and their stuff, Wexler’s work demonstrates a scientific objectivity, and a rationalism that any self-professed Modern would admire. But the artist’s dexterity with means is also sensitive to realms lacking in the modern worldview: our susceptibility, our frailty; our essential dependence on artifice. So, Burnt Chair / Charcoal Drawing collapses the object-subject to conjure issues related to preservation and representation. The quintessential human condition, especially in the 21c: isn’t there some way we can have our cake, and eat it too?  Isn’t there someway I can exceed human limitations, while somehow becoming more human? Included in exhibition were working drawings used to formulate some of the constructions on display, showing that Wexler’s process is as pared as his attack. Organized according to rigid, self-imposed constraints such as one chair per day, or, one chair in eight hours, the results fluid and imaginative.

Also on view were a series of experimental architectures, clean cut paper models set in vitrines at the back of the gallery. These Studies for Small Buildings and Landscapes provided what the gallery describes as “intricate constructions that relate to invention and perception.” Intricately detailed indeed, as these ideas may be translated into narrative, although non-linear, processes of invention. This series also encapsulates the most direct and concise expression of the artist’s thinking on space. Delicately executed, with diamond-sharp precision and force of vision these are equally at home in a laboratory. Curious, then, that Wexler documents these tiny paper worlds using quick, “bad” snap shot images blown out into large scale photographs, entiteld On the Art of Building in 10 Books.

Imaged above is Wexler’s Floating Self-Portrait, balancing only inches from the ground through a counter-collection of bricks the weight of the artist’s body. Illustrating how elation may not be a matter of degree, this work provides some indicaiton of the gentle lightness of the artist’s voice. Most comfortable working in the space between what he calls transcendence and physicality, Wexler commented “I like the unknown. My work is all about the dual relationships between techniques of construction and interactions with form – and these at their most elemental: earth, air, fire, and water…”

The exhibition takes its name from Wexler’s most recent public project Overlook, pursued jointly with his partner Ellen Wexler. Commissioned by the MTA Arts for Transit for the Long Island Rail Road, the project opens this fall in the new Atlantic Terminal at Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues. A pixelated rendition of a popular rocky overlook, Overlook aims to encourage travellers to indulge in scenes of day-to-day transport, again perhaps a proposal for slight shifts in how we interpret, and ultimately perform and generate, our relationships with everyday stuff and any more properly ritualized experiences.