Urban Façades
Generally
speaking, façades in our culture have a poor reputation. The wisdom of the
ages has condemned them to the order of the superficial. The value of the
façade is the value of a book cover, which, we are warned, should not guide
our judgment. What's real are the insides-the organs of a body, a building,
a city. Truth is in the heart, secrets are in the blood, raw feelings in the
guts. Like bodily organs, people who live and work inside of buildings-their
interactions and transactions, their internal circulations from room to
room, staircase to staircase-constitute the real matter.
In a way,
9/11 vividly demonstrated this point. To the terrorists, the Twin Towers
were words ("American Capitalism") more than actual architectures. But when
the planes slammed into the towers they did not punch holes into gigantic
cartoon letters, but tore through the guts of a living organism. Not
symbolism but people in restaurants, offices, meetings, elevators, the
observation rooms-the building's organization, so to speak-constituted the
ultimate truth of the terrorist action.
I do not
disagree with ancient wisdom on the matter of the body. Neither am I
suspicious of surfaces; they are as important to us as language or flesh.
Without flesh there is no desire; without language we cannot be humans. The
long-established dialectic between the internal and the external, between
what is denounced as "skin deep" and what is upheld as the core, is not
productive; it's better to appreciate the outside as well as the inside.
Language and the flesh are the house of being.
Façades
Urban Façades is about the living flesh of the city. The walls, the surfaces, the shades and textures of skin that line either side of a thousand streets in a thousand cities. With Roland Fischer's[1] series Facades on Paper, we have an excellent starting point for the collection, not so much because the name of Fisher's series is similar to that of the exhibition but because his series details the most recognizable feature of any living thing we encounter for the first time: the face.
The eight screenprints (7 of Asian towers and 1 American) that make up Façades On Paper are similar in approach and implication to Fischer's Nuns and Monks series (1984-87), which was a distillation of the faces of nuns and monks from 50 monasteries across France. These rustic faces are to the pastoral what the close-ups of corporate towers are to the urban. Because cities in our global era are defined by their corporate community-the size of the community and its worth or GNP-corporations represent the urban face. One immediately recognizes the Bank of China as the face of Honk Kong, and the World Trade Center (as much as did the terrorists) as the face of New York City.
As abstractions, which is what a face is (an abstraction of the whole surface), the close-ups of these financial towers are comparable to the geometric grids in Wayne Gonzales'[2] untitled prints. These architectural abstractions may either be the façades of towers or the grid of the city itself. Or, better yet, the façades for mutating towers of the future produced by nanotechnology[3] . Whatever the case, these abstractions, like Fischer's close-ups, induce the kind a vertigo not from height but extreme nearness.
If there is one mood that defines of our age, a mood furthermore that was intensified by 9/11, it's not Rem Koolhaas's delirium nor even Hitchcockian vertigo, but a total vertigo that's caused by seeing too much all at once. Sarah Morris's[4] color screenprint titled Dulles Capital (2001), is a wonderful example of this absolute dizziness. What we find in Dulles Capital is an infusion of three forms of vertigo: one that is induced by a city street that's hemmed in by canyons of corporate façades; another is produced by seeing the grid of a city from a tremendous height-either a jet plane or the top of a super tower; thirdly, as with Fisher's facial close-ups and Gonzales' abstractions, one that is caused by severe propinquity, and results in an overload from an excessive amount of minute detail.
With Robert Moskowitz's[5] 1995 pastel drawing of the World Trade Center we have a standard Hitchcockian vertigo (induced by extreme height), but also a new vulnerability, an awareness of the fragility of what was once considered to be permanent and sure. To the determined modernists at the early and middle part of the 20th century, towers were designed and desired for their clarity, functionality, and permanence. A function of the cost of urban real estate, to be sure, and no less glorious for that. But to us, towers no longer speak functionality, but vulnerability. A vulnerability, furthermore, that is collapsed with vertigo to produce the kind of stimmung that saturates Robert Moskowitz's drawing.
Stimmung is German for mood and was used to describe the unsettling effects that characterized, first, German Expressionist cinema (1919 to 1931) and later, Hollywood's film noir cycle (1940 to 1959). This stimmung, which expressed the uneasiness that dislocated inhabitants of massive American cities (Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, New York City) felt at the middle of the 20th century, permeates the late-20th and early 21st century work in this collection by Kathryn Lynch[6] -Hudson Street (1999) and Hudson River, Winter (2001), both oil on paper-and also Richard Bosman's[7] -Untitled (1974), acrylic on paper. Indeed, so noirish are Lynch's cityscapes and Bosman's dark-blue waterfront that they recall the titles of several noir masterpieces: Cry of the City, Scarlet Street, and They Live By Night.
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As for Julian Opie's[8] initially playful sculptures titled Tourist 3, the thing that comes to mind is again connected with 9/11. As critics in the New Yorker and New York Times have pointed out, the destroyed Twin Towers had, ironically, the same appeal to tourists as they had to the terrorists-they were symbols of the world's most famous city. This kind of retrospective interpretation is inevitable for the time being. Before 9/11, Opie's sculptures had one meaning, now they have two: the initial and intended remark on urban consumerism is now coupled with an unintended remark on the current, perturbed mood about towers.
It's important to emphasize that the uneasy moods or stimmungs that are felt and seen in the sculptures, prints, drawings, and paintings are caused by looking backward not forward. Most of the art in the Urban Façades collection is pre-9/11, so what is taking place, then, is a reevaluation (if not distortion) of these pieces and their meanings. Not only are we seeing them through a very specific time lens, but, mystically, we are trying to see in the art-particularly Robert Moskowitz's drawing and also Fischer's screenprint of World Trade Center's façade-secret signs that spell out the fate of the Twin Towers (specifically) and skyscrapers (in general) in a language we can only now understand, after witnessing the most mediated terrorist action in human history.[9]
But not all of the art in this collection is modified by 9/11. Though thoroughly urban, the themes and images in several pieces exist outside of the radius of the major media event and, the lately felt concerns it raises: the end of the of the modernist project, the end of a kind of urban innocence, the new dangers of the future, and so on. These works of art are about the quotidian instead of the exceptional. Towers, even Opie's playful tourist towers, stand at the center of the urban universe. They are the kind of places that advertise the city on postcards and commercials. But most of our experiences in cities do not take place in exceptional spaces. They occur in the kind of spaces depicted by Steven Criqui[10] and Carolyn Swiszcz[11] . These artists spend their time in the armpits of the city, in the forgotten places and neighborhoods-forgotten not because they are rarely experienced or seen, but quite the opposite, because they are always there. We forget about them out of sheer habit.
Steven Criqui, who is famous for photographing Los Angeles sites that, as Eve Wood as written, "have little or no historical relevance," presents in his untitled digital painting (2001) a façade, a car, a street that most people would pass without noticing. Similarly, the vernacular structures in Carolyn Swiszcz's painting Orleans Apartments (2000) are plain, barren, and beautifully blank. Wayne Thiebaud's[12] etching titled Steep Street-Black and Grey (2001) presents a steep street without any anxiety or vertigo. It doesn't mean or say more than what it is: an ordinary steep street.
But the urban ordinary can also be colorful, as in Adam Henry's[13] painting If Pieces Then Divisions (2000), and Donna Dennis's[14] 3-D color lithograph titled Night Roof (1987). In If Pieces Then Divisions, the blues and reds are lively yet there is nothing special about the buildings, most of which look like the homes and warehouses in a late-19th century boom town. In Night Roof, the earthy browns of an apartment building are serenely set beneath the blue night and warm wandering stars. Finally there is Claudia Fitch's[15] Grail (2001). The drawing, which is composed of metallic strips on paper, has a double effect. One, that of the façade of a skyscraper; two, that of a street grate. The second effect, the street grate, offers an excellent exit to the essay because street grates cover holes that lead into the body of a city, its inside: the inner world beyond the film of urban façades[16] .
- Charles Mudede | Book Editor, The Stranger, Seattle, WA
[1] Born in 1958, Roland Fischer is a photographer who lives and works in Munich, Germany.
[2] Born in 1957 in New Orleans, Wayne Gonzales live and works in New York City.
[3] In William Gibson's novel Idoru, after a massive earthquake, buildings in Tokyo begin rebuilding themselves at night by using nanotechnology.
[4] An American born in 1967, Sarah Morris now lives and works in London. She was educated at Brown University, Cambridge University, and the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program.
[5] Born in 1935, Robert Moskowitz is based in New York City.
[6] Born in 1961, Kathryn Lynch lives and works in New York City.
[7] Born in 1944 in Madras Indian, Richard Bosman-an Australian-studied art at the Byam Shaw School of Painting and Drawing in London, and at the New York Studio School. He presently lives and works in New York City.
[8] Born in London in 1958, Julian Opie is based in London.
[9] In his collection "One-Way Street," German critic Walter Benjamin writes: "[W]hen you are taken unawares by an outbreak of fire or the news of a death, there is in the first mute shock a feeling of guilt, the indistinct reproach: did you really not know of this? Did not the dead person's name, the last time you uttered it, sound differently in your mouth? Do you not see in the flames a sign from yesterday evening, in a language you only now understand? And if an object dear to you has been lost, was there not, hours before, an aura of mockery or mourning about it that gave the secret away."
[10] Born in 1964, Steven Criqui lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
[11] Carolyn Swiszcz was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts ("The Whaling City") in 1972. She received her education at Minneapolis College of Art and Design and currently lives and works in St. Paul, MN
[12] Born in 1920, Wayne Thiebaud worked first as a sign painter, cartoonist, and commercial artist before studying art at San José State University and the California School of Arts and Craft. He currently lives and works in the Bay Area.
[13] Born in 1974, and educated at University of New Mexico and Yale, Adam Henry lives and works in New York City
[14] Born in Springfield, Ohio, Donna Dennis lives and works in Manhattan. She received her education at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota and the College Art Studies Abroad in Paris
[15] Born in 1952, Claudia Fitch, lives and works in Seattle, Washington.
[16] In Richard Wright's novella "The Man Who Lived Underground," a black man named Fred Daniels enters the sewer system while fleeing from the police and, for an unknown number of days, lives in the belly of the city in the way that Jonas lived in the belly of a whale.
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