MEDITATIONS ON
THE POSSIBILITY OF ROMANCE IN THE RADIANT CITY Film programme
curated by Michael Connor
The story begins with Houston, Texas.
Houston thinks big. This is the city that in 1965 opened an indoor
40,000-seat stadium, the Astrodome, with an air conditioning system
that moves 2.5 million cubic feet of air per minute, and a lighting
system that uses more power than a city of 9,000 people. This is
a city with twice as many lane miles of freeway as Los Angeles,
and the home of Enron, whose wheeling and dealing led to the collapse
of the entire California electricity market in May of 2000.
In 2001 and 2002, while living in Austin, Texas, I made a series
of visits to Houston, and developed a weird affection for the place
in all its megalomania. Fittingly, it was during one of these visits
that I came across Lewis Mumford's The
Pentagon of Power (1974) in 1/4 Price Books, a used bookshop
in the Montrose neighborhood. This influential book argued, among
other things, that humankind¹s urban culture is a contemporary
manifestation of the ancient cult of sun worship. For evidence,
Mumford provides a series of photographs of 60s contemporary technology
and pharaonic modernist architecture that evoke connections with
ancient pyramids and temples. The argument was compelling, but Mumford¹s
take on modern cities was decidedly fatalistic. He believed that
hypercapitalist urban centres would inevitably devolve from metropolis
to megalopolis to Necropolis; later in his life, he took up the
cause of the idyllic, centrally-planned 'Garden City', the kind
of place where everyone can own a house and walk to work. Spare
me the boredom.
It was around the same time that I happened to unearth a copy of
Scott Thomas' Architecture of the Petroleum
Age (c.1975). Like Mumford, Thomas sensed a religiosity
in the secular buildings of 1970s capitalism - though in his case,
he traced its origins to a spiritual reverence for oil. Thomas expresses
an optimism about this spiritualism, an optimism that seems to stem
from an belief that the Petroleum Age was in its last days. Throughout
the film, Thomas' point of view shifts between contemporary architecture
critic and an archaeologist looking back at the city as a record
of a failed civilization. Although Thomas thought the end of petro-capitalism
was near, he looked to its end with hope and eager anticipation.
The urge to eulogize the petroleum age also characterizes Gerard
Holthuis' live narration of Hong Kong (HKG) tapes
(1998-2002), in which he laments the 1998 closure of the Kai Tak
airport in Hong Kong. For years, the Kai Tak airport¹s flight
paths had forced pilots to make daredevil hairpin turns not far
from the city¹s tallest buildings. Long-lens shots of planes
flying through the metropolis in slow motion become part of the
fabric of Holthuis' engaging personal narrative, as he weaves a
romance of internal combustion and international travel, while the
geopolitical consequences of flight and the September 11 subtext
are left blithely to one side.
Saki Satom's video work occupies a similar space
between celebration and critique. M Station Run
(1997-8), which shows zombielike businesspeople running en masse
between trains on a subway, could be seen as an illustration of
Mumford's necropolis thesis. And yet this is re-framed by two further
works, interventions into featureless (yet
emblematic/metonymic) spaces of the fast-paced Tokyo economy. In
From B to H, Satom's conceptually precise action
transforms an office lift into a private ballet studio. In Giving,
the artist gives out single flowers to strangers on a crowded subway
platform, unthinking, repetitive. Yet when the tape is played in
reverse, a moment of synchronized generosity is revealed: stranger
after stranger approaches the artist, handing her a flower.
Even while rebutting Mumford's fatalism, each of these works betrays
a sense that they share his perception that technological society
is riddled with tension and fear. The quest for sincerity and optimism,
in itself, may tell us more about tension and fear than we could
learn by making a more direct inquiry into the subjects. By making
the attempt to dispatch cynicism, the artists do highlight the existence
of cynicism; yet the attempt itself is anything but cynical. Perhaps,
through all the darkness of the contemporary moment, there is reason
to be cautiously optimistic.
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independent
dist 
georgian
quarter 
city
central 
docklands
artists
