Unmapping the City – Perspectives of Flatness (Critical Photography) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1841503169 ISBN 13: 9781841503165

Publisher: Intellect, 2010

Synopsis

Unmapping the City, the first title in the new Intellect series Critical Photography, features photographs shot between 2004 and 2008 in different cities around the world. The images are linked by their shared attempts to define a two-dimensional approach to a three-dimensional built reality, and to address spatial representation, ritual, and urbanity through art. In representing the cityscape through a flat texture of lines and bold colors, the reader is drawn into a conversation about the interplay between reality and its representation. This volume significantly challenges and expands the critical discourse on photography and text and will be of interest to artists, curators, photographers, architects, and critical theorists.

About this title

About the Author

Alfredo Cramerotti is a writer, curator and editor working across TV, radio, publishing, writing and exhibition making. He co-curated Manifesta 8, the European Biennial of Contemporary Art, 2010, the Maldives Pavilion and the Wales Pavilion at the 55th Venice Art Biennial, 2013, and the 4th Trienala Ladina in South Tyrol in 2013. He directs MOSTYN, Wales’ leading contemporary art institution, and the itinerant projects AGM Culture and Chamber of Public Secrets (CPS). He is Research Scholar at the European Centre for Photography Research, University of Wales, Newport, and Editor of the Critical Photography series by Intellect Books. His own publications include the book Aesthetic Journalism: How to Inform without Informing (2009) and Unmapping the City: Perspectives of Flatness (2010).

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Unmapping the City

Perspectives of Flatness

By Alfredo Cramerotti

Intellect Ltd

Copyright © 2010 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-84150-316-5

Contents

Foreword 1, 
Unmapping the City: Perspective of Flatness Jonathan Willett, 
A Middleword Inês Moreira, 
Bibliography, 

CHAPTER 1

Unmapping the City

Perspectives of Flatness

_Jonathan Willett

There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective "knowing"

– Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (1887)

We erect our structure in the imagination before we erect in reality

– Karl Marx, Das Kapital (1867)

The Art of Critical Practice

A critical photography series will inevitably draw upon a wide spectrum of critical traditions in theorizing the complex relations between image, text and social practice. The assemblage of photograph and critical analysis is designed to produce a dialogue between knowing and seeing, a differential space where two systems of representation work not to determine each other but to expand a common horizon of possibility for photographic practice. The philosophical antecedents of the critical perspective can be found in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1781), where mental structures are said to precede our experience of the world, as a basis for knowing how we come to know about things. De Certeau argues that in The Critique of Judgement (1790) Kant identifies an 'art of thinking ... a practical knowledge' (1988: 72) in the 'relation between the art of operating (Kunst) and science (Wissenschaft), or between a technique (Technik) and theory (Theorie)' (ibid.: 72). The 'Kantian channel' (Foucault in Raunig: 2008) in European Modernism has given rise to numerous critical philosophies, which themselves go beyond Kant's model for investigating the subjective limits of knowledge. Operating within the 'Kantian channel' Gerald Raunig re-evaluates Foucault's lecture What is Critique? (1971) to suggest an art and technique of the critical project as an effective poetics of social action, a productive mode of aesthetics emerging in spaces of 're-composition and invention' (Raunig: 2008); a place occupied by the resistant image in the art of the critical photograph.

This emphasis on the transformative power of thought resonates with Karl Marx's (1818–83) famous dictum 'The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it' (Marx: 1845), a material praxis that offers an understanding of the individual's subjectivity as the product of a collective social and historical situation. In Capital Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy (1867) Marx adapts Hegel's dialectical method to his philosophy of historical materialism, which argues that consciousness is determined by the socio-economic realities of work in the newly industrialized cities of modernity. Marx introduced philosophy to the political struggles of everyday life, and in the process provided the basis for the critical tradition in the social sciences. The critical theory that we associate with the establishment of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research in 1923 has its origins in revisionist Marxist thought, and in particular the sociology of Max Weber (1864–1920) and Georg Simmel (1858–1918). Simmel's essay The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903) develops an early critical perspective on the urban experience of modernity by analyzing how the individual forms a sensory relation to the city, and in turn is reconstituted as the fragmented, alienated subject of modern life. Simmel's writings influenced the urban sociology of the Chicago School, in particular the work of Robert E. Park (1864–1944) who saw the city as a kind of laboratory for mapping the social ecologies of the urban environment. Contemporaneous with the Second Chicago School were the urban photographs of Harry Callahan (1912–99) who taught at the Institute of Design, Chicago from 1946–61. Callahan's images are the equivalent of Simmel's alienated perspective, their geometric repetition emphasizing the 'formal composition of the image [...] even to the point of distortion and beyond' (Rexer 2009: 103); the critical photograph reflecting the topographies of the modern city.

The social historians and philosophers of the Frankfurt School re-interpreted Marxist thought in modes of critical theory capable of apprehending the mediatization of life in metropolitan cities; with emphasis on the power of the image as ideological surface and cultural interface in the visual economy of capital. Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) in particular, saw a cultural convergence between politics and aesthetics, and sought to illuminate the dialectal character of images. Benjamin turned the production of critical histories into something of an art form, his 'open source' Marxism an attempt to grasp the cultural complexity of everyday life, where the fragmentary experience is like a crystal of our wider historical condition. In the art of critique, Benjamin induces a heightened awareness of the relations between technical processes of modernization, the lived experience of those processes and their cultural representation in modernist aesthetics. In One Way Street (1928) Modernism is pressed into action,

its constellations of images, aphorisms and juxtapositions are intended to be a form of thinking in pictures (Bilddenken) from which understanding emerges without having to be expounded (Macey 2000: 38)

It was no coincidence that Benjamin and his contemporaries perceived photography, and later film, as sites of cultural contestation, where the social function of images was open to historical modes of critique. Painters, poets, photographers and filmmakers alike were not simply representing the city, they were creating it in modern life. In all its dynamism and complexity urban experience could be sampled, filtered and synthesized through the intelligent surface of the image; 'thinking in pictures' becomes constructive criticism in the work of art, reverberating like visual feedback in the 'Kantian channel' of European Modernism.

In a photographic study developed over four years, Unmapping the City traverses the history of modernist aesthetics, connecting retrospective forms of abstraction to new perspectives in contemporary urban photography, a process shaped by the 'implicit recognition of a historical transition from the representational priority of "surface" to that of "interface"' (Burgin 1996: 157). In practice, Unmapping the City develops a flatness that shifts between modernist surface and the interface of post-modernity, as the contemporary city is conveyed (transported) through multiple layers of sensation. The photographic effect is to deconstruct the three-dimensional built environment in 'perspectives of flatness', which in turn re-construct a sensibility toward the concrete, rationalized spaces of urban cartography. The conscious representations of a particular place in all its architectural and geographical features are subsumed into a more suggestible surface of abstraction, as the photograph becomes a cultural index of the unknowable City. In the process, it re-instates a relationship between individual perception and the vast complexities of urban life.

The unknowable City exposes the established order of space as a cartographic fantasy of the rational mind ('everything in its right place'), is encountered in the 'actual' city that we think we know as a matter of routine, while editing out the peripheral details that elude the frame of our everyday lives. In critical practice our vantage point is closer to that of the private detective of noir fiction, who casts an inquisitive gaze over a shadow city of sinister encounters, ambivalent places and shifting perspectives, where the ambiguous narrative of the 'detective story functioned as a tool giving shape to this increasingly abstract and seemingly amorphous urban terrain' (McQuire 2008: 48). In a world of appearances things are called into question and interrogated through the lens of uncertainty, which in the critical photograph of Unmapping the City, becomes a visual technique for manifesting the structure of an urban unconscious.

The photographer adopts the method of the psychoanalyst to retrieve a critical image of the city, as the photograph restores to perception the information that remains absent, like a blind spot in the individual's urban conscious. A superficial patina of uniformity is rendered through the strategic use of the close up and a filtering down of colour tones, a homogenous surface resistant to signification, not dissimilar to the alien indifference of the unwieldy city. The dynamic relation between the unknowable City, photographer and photograph, resembles the topology of the imaginary, symbolic and real in Lacanian psychoanalysis,

The real is not simply synonymous with external reality, and nor is it simply the antonym of 'imaginary'. It exists outside or beyond the symbolic, is menacingly homogenous, and is not composed of distinct and differential signifiers (Macey 2000: 324)

The undifferentiated surfaces in Unmapping the City, recall the 'difficult' or resistant aesthetics of the modern artwork, they require some visual analysis on the part of the viewer who like the urban detective carries out a critical investigation into what might have been missed, scratching at the surface in order to make sense, to become susceptible to the affects of the critical image. Philosophers, historians, social scientists and psychoanalysts who develop techniques of critical practice share a desire to question the limits of understanding with a view to creating new conditions of possibility. These critically minded individuals tend to situate themselves in connective practices that pertain to their own field and those of other disciplines, their versatility stemming from the indeterminate nature of the differential position, as a place for making differences. Critical spaces of 're-composition and invention' (Raunig: 2008) are not the formalized, rational discourses of the individual's specific discipline, they are the un-thought, emergent practices of critique that occupy a privileged position as creative practices without specific rationales, and which are entirely of a 'manouvrier knowledge' (de Certeau 1988: 68).

'Manouvrier knowledge' translates as the intelligent labour of the workman or artisan, a sense derived from the subtle meanings of manoeuvre, which encompass the act of dexterity and skill, the strategic movement either military or political, the tactic, and the co-ordinated approach. Unmapping the City traverses the urban terrain in a series of creative manoeuvres that are shaped by the contingency of the photographic event. The photographer's 'manouvrier knowledge' translates into the 'perspective of flatness' that cuts across and moves between structures of reality and imagination in the city, connecting modernist aesthetics to urban perspectives to photographic event, in the currency of contemporary visual practice. The following chapters explain this versatile photograph not in terms of representations, but rather show how it works as a type of 'manouvrier knowledge' for Unmapping the City.

The Urban Perspective of Modernity

The genre of urban photography has played a significant role in the 'materialization of an urban system of perspective' (McQuire 2008: 37), commencing with Charles Marville's photographic survey of the destruction of Ancient Paris and its subsequent re-construction in the regulated spaces of the modern city. Marville's photographs are part of the historical 'territory of images' (Sekula in McQuire 2008: 45) that overlay the rationalized spaces of modernity with a virtual architecture of signs. Unmapping the City builds a critical interface between the territory of images and the contemporary city, a place for making perspectives in the architecture of the imagination, which originates in the Modernism of nineteenth century Paris, its most notable exponents the poet Charles Baudelaire (1821–67) and the Impressionist painter Edouard Manet (1832–83). In Loss of a Halo Baudelaire reveals a new sensibility toward the mundane experience of the everyday, at the moment in history when high art descends into the commercial life of the city's streets,

the point at which the world of art and the ordinary world converge ... is not only a spiritual point but a physical one, a point in the landscape of the modern city. It is the point where the history of modernization and the history of Modernism fuse into one. (Berman 1983: 156–157)

If today we take the spiritual to approximate the psychological, Unmapping the City resonates with Saul Bellow's architecture of the imagination in the The Bellarosa Connection (1989); 'You can never dismantle all these modern mental structures. There are so many of them that they face you like an interminable vast city'. Emerging from the social and historical complexities of the urban environment are a thousand cities of the imagination, as the shadow architectures of perception. These other places are the yet to be experienced vicinities of the city, the interstitial places that materialize in the gaps between 'perspective seeing' and 'perspective knowing', layers of imagination that exist within the same place. Here the viewer is invited to extend their photographic imagination into the material substance of the urban fabric, to interface with the 'interminable vast city' in a form of urban poetics. In the 'perspective of flatness' the infra-structure of the modern city merges with the info-structure of urban photography; a retrospective insight into the discourse of Modernism, and a prospective lens through which to encounter the aesthetics of the contemporary city.

The aesthetics of modernity are inseparable from the transformation of the urban landscape in mid-nineteenth century Europe, expressed in and through the construction, expansion and habitation of cities. The Modernism of the metropolis is closely connected to the history of urban reconstruction as Harvey explains in The Condition of Postmodernity,

Modernism, after 1848, was very much an urban phenomenon ... in a restless but intricate relationship with the experience of explosive urban growth (several cities surging above the million mark by the end of the century), strong rural to urban migration, industrialization, mechanization, massive re-orderings of built environments, and politically based urban movements, of which the revolutionary uprisings in Paris in 1848 and 1871 were a clear but ominous symbol (Harvey 1989: 25)

In Paris between 1852 and 1870 Baron Haussmann commenced a programme of public works for Napoleon III that resulted in a 'massive re-ordering' of the built environment, which sets an historical precedent for the systematic practice of urban planning, in which 'geometry and arithmetic take on the power of the scalpel' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 212). Public space was increasingly organized around the commercial practice of real estate development, as Haussmann implemented his programme of public works in the construction of new apartment blocks and department stores on the boulevards of central Paris. The architectural facades of the city assumed a more uniform character, as the result of an economic imperative to build faster and higher than ever before. The cultural force of Modernism begins to take shape in the social survey of the straight line, reflected in the grid pattern of streets and the formal divisions and subdivisions of space into blocks, quarters and districts, a guiding principle of urban design for most major international cities in the modern period.

The modernization of Paris involved a different type of thinking about how to organize social life in the metropolis. The modern city was conceived as an urban design, 'a picture of how the environment ought to be made, a description of a form or a process which is a prototype to follow' (Lynch in Grahame Shane 2005: 31). The modern perspective was first an attitude toward the ideal cityscape, realized in the cartography of the mind and built by architects, planners and engineers in the growing infrastructure of urban life. The preoccupation with 'the model way of life', found a place in the popular discourse of the model citizen, model employee, fashion model, role model, as various expressions of an individual psychology, which had the tendency to take things out of context and separate them from the social complexity of the everyday situation. The Impressionist paintings of Gustav Caillebotte (1848–94) had the appearance of an 'architect's impression' of Paris's new boulevards, their flatness of colour and photo-realism depicted a city abstracted from the particularities everyday life. The virtual feeling conveyed in Caillebotte's street scenes was part of a wider historical shift toward a society of appearances, mediated in the surface experience of the city's burgeoning commodity culture. The new perspectives of the modern metropolis were designed to meet the business requirements of the bourgeoisie for a model boulevard, capable of increasing the flow of consumers, commodities and capital in the economic life of the city.

In a city governed by economic cycles of production and consumption the pace of urban life began to accelerate, as the demands of technological progress, economic transformation and political upheaval, countered the individual's ability to grasp the complex state of affairs that was perceived to be modern. The artistic search for a modern perspective was driven by the need to provide an image that could somehow reconcile the fragmented nature of urban experience,

The aesthetic as a synthesizer of values, relations and forces [...] a point of reflection, identification and orientation for the subject in relation to its community and to the world (McMahon 2002: 4)

There is no single perspective of modernity as the sheer scale, speed and complexity of modernization and its social effects are, in a sense, incomprehensible for the individual. Hence the decisive role of cultural productions in making perspectives of modern experience, based on the tendency of the image to capture an imaginary 'complete picture' of the social complexities of everyday life. Cultural perceptions of 'the everyday' were framed in and through the act of looking at things; the enchantment of the commodity, the allure of the department store window, the spectacles of the city, all combined to make the social and historical perspective of the modern individual a primarily aesthetic experience. The city is mediated in 'perspectives of flatness' and at the same time negotiated in images as 'sites of struggle [...] where powers converge but are also produced' (Tagg 1988: 148). A cultural technique of vision found expression in the voyeuristic character of the flâneur, whose obsession with the act of looking invests a surplus of meaning in the imaginary surfaces of the city.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Intellect
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1841503169
• ISBN 13: 9781841503165
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 128
• Editor: Alfredo Cramerotti