One-Way Street

The Architectural Imagination: An Introduction

I've enrolled in my first online course: The Architectural Imagination, offered by the Harvard Graduate School of Design. I completed the first module, The Architectural Imagination: An Introduction. Like any college course, there are lectures, readings, and assignments. The opening lecture establishes the difference between a mere building and a work of architecture. The first instructor, K. Michael Hays, starts with Kant, which is good, then moves on to Gilles Deleuze. I had forgotten how opaque Deleuze could be. The first assignment was to analyze two structures and identify what makes them architectural. I will post my response to the assignment next.

Next up in the course is module two, Reading Architecture: Column and Wall. I'll post my responses to that module in the near future.

Hanne Darboven and the Endless Archive

Cynthia Cruz sees a lot of Walter Benjamin in Hanne Darboven's Kulturegeschichte 1880–1983, currently on exhibit at Dia:Chelsia. The exhibit pamphlet says Darhoven "[weaves] together cultural, social, and historical references with autobiographical documents, it synthesizes personal history with collective memory"--a description that could apply to any number of artworks. Cruz is more insightful, noticing that Darboven creates an "endless archive" which "does not describe the world around her but rather reflects it, remaining inside and refusing to participate in the distancing and violence of objectification that are inherent in description." This was also Benjamin's technique for recreating history: gather objects around a single point of view, then allow historical objects to speak for themselves.

An American Albert Speer Might Look a Lot Like Philip Johnson

Ian Volner laments how American culture has produced only one fascist with any real panache--Philip Johnson.

[I]n our present political moment, Johnson’s fascist flirtation makes an interesting case study. The most striking thing, for those overwhelmed by the sheer mediocrity of the “Alt-Right” and its camp followers, is how mediocre Johnson wasn’t: almost alone among his countrymen, Johnson carried off his noxious politics with style. Indeed, it was all about style.

via affidavit.culturalcounsel.com

Volner is joking, of course, when he favorably compares Johnson to arty European fascists such as Maurice Barrès, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, and Albert Speer. In the 1930's Johnson had a sketchily documented flirtation with Nazism. No one knows his exact involvement with German fascists. Rumors persisted for so long Johnson was obliged in later life to design a synagogue for free. Volner has no new information on that front. He suggests, however, if anybody would want to become  Donald Trump's personal architect, as Speer was for Hitler, or become the American Marinetti, that person would look a lot like Johnson.  

The Art of Wall Along the Mexican Border

Donald Trump is about to order the building of a wall along the US-Mexican border. As people who live in the borderlands already know, walls already exist on the border. They are mere artifacts among many others in the land where two cultures meet in conflict and reconciliation. The photographer Richard Misrach has been photographing the borderlands since 2004. Like a sort of desert flâneur, he's also been gathering artifacts of the contact zone, from discarded backpacks to shotgun shells, and turning them over to the composer Guillermo Galindo, who converted them into instruments. The story of this collaboration is told in Border Cantos, as well as an exhibition at the Crystal Bridges of American Art through April 27, 2017.

The Literature of Traumas to Come: The Novel in the Age of Trump

 

In the days leading up to the election last November, many people vowed if Donald Trump was elected they would emigrate to some genial and inconsequential place, Toronto or a Canada of the imagination, as if all they had to endure were toxic policies until our electoral system somehow rights itself. When I arrived at work on November 8th, the day after the presidential election, my boss greeted me, "Welcome to the first day in Trumpland!" I thought she was being ironic, but she wasn't. Not only had she enthusiastically voted for Trump, but so had several other of my co-workers. I was completely shocked. This is Chicago, I thought. The globalized economy provides our livelihoods. Sure, last summer I heard people I considered friends talk about how Clinton was just as bad as Trump, but once we learned the restless little hands of our future president liked to plunge themselves into women's private parts, I though the equivalency argument was put to rest. No one liked Clinton, but Trump would besmirch the office of the presidency. Agreed?

 

To this day I walk around my workplace and wonder, did that software developer vote for Trump? Is that executive still looking forward to a Trump presidency? Is that customer service person reading Brietbart News while waiting for the next call? Am I the only person who voted for Hillary Clinton? 

 

Actually, over 80% of voters in my town voted for her and she carried Illinois easily, so no, I'm not alone. Yet I have a new mindset, one similar to that Aleksandar Hemon first experienced while wandering the streets of Sarajevo in his youth. War had broken out in neighboring Croatia, but it seemed impossible for it to reach Sarajevo. Nevertheless, Hemon couldn't help spotting good places for a sniper to go to work. Hemon now recognizes those imaginings as the first stirrings of a "war mind" preparing itself for the trauma to come. 

 

The pre-war mind was still busy convincing itself that war is, must be, avoidable, because it simply didn't make sense — who would want war? I took my involuntary thoughts to be symptoms of a minor mental breakdown, and exerted myself to dismiss them [. . .] 

 

People asked me if I had known the war was coming — I did, I'd say, I just didn't know I did, because my mind refused to accept the possibility that the only life and reality I had known could be so easily annihilated. I perceived and received information but could not process it and convert it into knowledge, because the mind could not accept the unimaginable, because I had no access to an alternative ontology.

For the Age of Trump Hemon wants a "split-mind literature" in which the deer hunters come looking for you. Remember when you first saw a plane slam into the World Trade Center? There should be a literature of that kind of trauma, the story of staring at 757's flying overhead and feeling uneasy. Trauma renders everything uncanny, but Hemon points out "the upside is that living with and in a mind where nothing appears normal or stable is the best antidote to normalization." When you're comfortable in your house, snug against your neighbors, imagination functions to smooth over the sharp edges that keep popping up. In this context conventional literature, as an art of the imagination, stamps the quotidian real as fixed, inevitable, as the normality we all crave. Trauma, however, interrupts the smooth flow of language and thwarts easy reconciliation with immediate circumstances. In the years to come literature should teach us to be alert to how our worst fears are, in fact, coming to pass. Then we can see a moment from the past as a harbinger of a future we have troubling imagining, such as a call from Hemon's mother from Sarajevo during the siege of 1992. "They're already shooting less than yesterday," she assured him.

The Landscapes of John Berger

Late in his career John Berger retreated in the foggy mists of the French countryside, reappearing every so often with a novel or an essay. But in the 1970s Berger was perhaps the most famous art critic in the world. He brought Walter Benjamin into popular culture at a time when few people outside the Frankfort School tradition paid much attention to the German critic and philosopher. Ways of Seeing, Berger's most famous work, was an update of Benjamin's Artwork Essay. In the book and the accompanying television series Berger showed how advertising appropriated the aura of great works of art to sell products. Like Benjamin, Berger applied Marxist concepts to art criticism. Oil painting, Berger once wrote, "did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects. Everything became exchangeable because everything became a commodity."

Landscape painting was a particular area of interest for Berger. He didn't hate it all, but he was deeply skeptical of a lot of it.  The painting below by Thomas Gainsborough, Mr and Mrs Andrews (circa 1748), in Berger's eyes, was an image of socio-economic power.

Completed shortly after Mr. Andrews' marriage to the daughter of a neighboring gentry--a marriage that enhanced his estate--the image captures the unchanging power of property relations in pre-industrial England. "They are not a couple in Nature as Rousseau imagined nature," Berger comments. "They are landowners and their proprietary attitude to what surrounds them is visible in their stance and their expressions." There's even a blank space in Mrs. Andrews' lap for an as-yet unborn heir (or so the speculation goes) to help perpetuate control over the land.

Jonathan Jones compares the Gainsborough landscape to a contemporary image, speculating how Berger might have interpreted an image of a polar bear standing on an iceberg in 2014.

Jones recognizes something of Mr. Andrews' proprietary gaze in the polar bear, but unlike the 1748 image of permanent ownership over an unchanging landscape, the polar bear's world is literally falling apart. His realm gets smaller every day. What had once been eternal has become an object of historical change. Jones writes, "Berger taught us to see the landowner’s whip behind every painted haystack, and his critical attitude to images of landscape is the more telling today when human action is destroying nature even as we lovingly photograph and film it." 

There's one more point of comparison between the images. Still early in his career when he painted the Andrews landscape, Gainsborough was still developing naturalistic effect into his oil paintings. Note, for example, the tumultuous weather in the background. Photographs are conventionally held to be the most naturalistic of all image forms, yet this polar bear is shot with a wide-angle lens to dramatize the polar bear's environment in a non-naturalistic way. The power of the bear is diminished by the warp of the very limited horizon in the background.

The photograph is stock photo from the site Alamy.com. I haven't been able to verify the photographer, but I think it's Peter Barritt, who specializes in, among other things, photographs of great oil paintings. As Berger and Benjamin would have reminded us, the polar bear stock photo and the Gainsborough together are just images among others, but if we look at them properly, as Berger and Benjamin teach us, we can understand what they mean.

Reading Cities as a Flâneuse

You were drawn to many cities but Paris is very much central. Given the overlap between existing places and the literature set there, do you think the city can be “read”?

Just walking through a city is like reading – we’re receiving and processing an onslaught of information, we’re writing our own stories as we make our way through the city. This might mean paying attention to the way we experience space, the way we perceive it to be organised; or it might mean remaining alert to the traces of history, or just discerning the little differences between shopfronts, the feel of the way the neighbourhoods change as you walk across town, the rubbish on the ground, or the men cleaning the metro floor tiles with toothbrushes like they do in Tokyo…

via www.irishtimes.com

Lauren Elkin's Flâneuse: Women Who Walk the Cities will be published in the U.S. in February, 2017. I'm anxious to read it. She doesn't mention Walter Benjamin in this interview, but she must be influenced by him.

The Destiny-Filled Glare of Napoléon

One of the lasting impressions left by Abel Gance’s film Napoléon (1927), now showing in a new, digitally remastered print at the BFI and the Lumière, is that it consists solely of close-ups and crowd scenes. This impression is too simple, but it doesn’t go away when you correct it with the modest, more diffuse truth. There are shots that do not linger on iconic faces, on an agitated Danton, a hazy Joséphine de Beauharnais, an unnamed dying solider, or the ever-present destiny-filled glare of Napoléon himself. There are houses and fields and mountains and oceans that are not packed with scrambling people, that do not represent a battle or a riot or a march or a pile-up of milling bodies at the National Convention. But why do we scarcely remember these exceptions?

The answer has something to do with Gance’s view of history, which hovers between forceful individual action and sheer seething mess, and even more to do with his sense of the cinema. These two elements are precisely what a movie, or Gance’s movie at least, can show to perfection. There is no place, it seems, between loneliness and engulfment among the masses.

via www.lrb.co.uk

This is Michael Wood's excellent appraisal of Abel Gance's Napoléon (1927), a high-water mark of the silent cinema. I particularly like the line "There is no place, it seems, between loneliness and engulfment among the masses." Reminds me of somebody . . .

Marketing at the Limits of Language

It’s a strange kind of language, all modifiers bleached lifeless by cliché, employing the most grandiose terms (‘discover,’ ‘transformational,’ ‘revolution’) to describe what tends to be a new way of doing paperwork, spinning precariously on the edge of meaninglessness, but it’s still language. But what about the firm calling itself (for unknown and possibly unpleasant reasons) Kwanko, announcing simply that “data is the new performance?” Or Lapa, which claims without any other information to be “transforming the way people search and protect all the things they can’t live without?” Or CrowdT, a “crowdfunding platform using apparel to raise funds?” This isn’t meaning, in any of its usual senses, something that exists to be understood, but the zombie signifier, words building and feeding on each other to form a system terrifyingly self-sustaining and utterly opaque.

via www.theatlantic.com

Sam Kriss sees the vanishing point of both language and the human subject at Web Summit, Europe's largest tech conference. From what he sees, soon we will cease being people; we'll be little more than end users.

A Data Visualization of One's Own

The 2016 election cast Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec's Dear Data: A Friendship in 52 Weeks of Data  in an entirely new light. Dear Data came out in September as polling data started to harden around Hillary Clinton's chances for the presidency. It was reassuring to see der Horror-Clown, as German newspapers referred to the Republican candidate, didn't seem to have much of a chance at the presidency. Even the Trump campaign expected to lose. Among the casualties of the stunning result was our faith in big data in general and its predictive efficacy in particular. By contrast, Dear Data testifies to the storytelling power of data when it is personal and concrete. Lupi and Posavec used very small data sets--the stuff of daily experience--and ingenious data visualization to create what they call a "personal documentary." Unlike, say, your Fitbit, their data visualizations are beautiful. They're drawn by hand on postcards, which they mailed to each other weekly. 

The first week Lupi and Posavec recorded how many times they checked the time. In "A Week of Clocks" Lupi, an Italian living in New York City, and the American-born Prosavec, who lives in London, tallied up how many times they looked at clocks. Lupi devised a symbolic system to capture why she checked the time. Prosevec drew radials to illustrate where she checked the time. Nothing earth-shattering was revealed in the exercise--really, what profound truths lurk in checking the time?--and the drawings are rather crude compared to what the authors will produce over the next 51 weeks. But their first subject hints at their larger project: to create a story of a self through data slices take over time. A narrative, after all, is change over time.

Like any good story, character is revealed Lupi's and Prosavec's data. With her tiny, precise symbols and keen attention to detail Lupi excels at examining intimate spaces. She inventories the closets in her Brooklyn apartment and compares the ratio of clothes she actually wears (a small share) to the clothes her boyfriend actually wears (every article in his closet). Early one morning, before any of her co-workers arrive for work, Lupi records the objects in every cubicle on her floor. Her co-workers must have been startled at the precision and stealth with which their workspaces were examined. We don't know for sure, but we find that Lupi sits only a few cubicles away from her boyfriend. How does that effect their relationship? Lupi doesn't say, letting the data speak for itself. 

Lupi is the more introspective of the authors, yet Posavec is the more personally revealing. For Lupi everything is data and she plunges right into it. Posavec approaches her data more warily, commenting more readily on her data gathering and visualizations. She is frank about her struggles to expand her design vocabulary while matching Lupi's craftsmanship. Posavec loves Brixton and cultivates a wide circle of friends throughout London. Her sociability leads to occasional gaps in data collection--the authors refer to them as "data voids"--such as when she's been out drinking with friends. It turns out Posavec likes to swear, greeting "A Week of Swearing" with "F*ck Yeah!!" She relishes the chance to count birds and small mammals (but no rats) in "A week of Urban Wildlife." One of the most effective data visualizations appears late in the book and not as part of a weekly assignment. Posavec bluntly charts the course of an argument and reconciliation with her husband over the apparent loss of her cellphone, which she uses to track her data for Dear Data.

This is one of several instances in which Lupi and Posavec confront uncomfortable truths about themselves. During the "Week of Compliments" Lupi discovers the asymmetry between the compliments she receives and the ones she gives out. Lupi's boyfriend worries, not for the first time, for her sanity after she spends six hours obsessively drawing every door she's touched that week, tagged with characteristically whimsical attributes such as "So heavy!" "Boyfriend opened it for me," and "I locked it!" After Posavec finds the length of her to do list remains the same over a week, she consoles herself by admitting she  "may as well stop worrying about getting everything done, because the list will never, ever, die." Posavec has to confess to (and draw) a data void that lasts an entire week when she forgets to track data for that week's assignment. Neither Lupi nor Posavec feels especially good about themselves at the end of "A Week of Envy."

Writing as someone who has been creating a lot of data visualizations lately--working, alas, in JavaScript and HTML rather than colored pencils and markers--I can appreciate how honest Lupi and Posavec are about their data. My experience has been corporate managers dislike, and won't believe, metrics that tell them what they don't want to hear. Also, big data is often quite narrow, nothing like the range of experience the authors track. At the same time, I'm awed by their inventiveness in rendering their lives in data. Over the year we see them grow as data visualizers and artists. Lupi's meticulous, symbolic style evolves to the point at which she seems more interested in her visualizations as an abstract work of art. At one point she looks to Kandinsky and Malevich for inspiration. More representational in her style, Posavec tinkers with her spirals to capture the way data moves, how it changes over time and through space. Her to-do list diagram is a good example. For another example see her map of walking through a crowd trying to smile at strangers--and growing grumpier with the effort.

"To draw is to remember," Lupi and Posavec remind us when their 52 weeks are up. They ask us to join in their project of tracking and visualizing our data. We create data all the time, now more than ever. If you have the Google Maps app on your cellphone Google is mapping your movements on a daily basis. It knows you took the train to work, drove to the grocery store or pool hall, and rode your bike to the park. Lupi and Posavec show us how to reclaim ownership of our own data--through drawings, of course--to make our data work for us rather than some corporation trying to sell us something. "It's not that hard" to they assure us. Perhaps not, but to draw it as beautifully and imaginatively as they do certainly is.