“It’s clear that the type of a metropolis or of a metropolis is not going to exhibit some gigantic, stratified order. It will likely be an advanced sample, steady and entire, but intricate and cellular. It have to be plastic to the perceptual habits of hundreds of residents, open- ended to modifications of perform and that means, receptive to the formation of recent imagery. It should invite its viewers to discover the world.”
—Kevin Lynch, The Picture of the Metropolis
“Breton und Le Corbusier umfassen – das hieße den Geist des gegenwärtigen Frankreich wie einen Bogen spannen, aus dem die Erkenntnis den Augenblick mitten ins Herz trifft.”
—Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk
In opposition to the objectivist spirit of architectural functionalism and social positivism that under- wrote the nice post-war experiments in city improvement and renewal, Kevin Lynch’s now-classic research from 1960, from which this exhibition takes its title, sought to know town as a psychic phenomena. The important thing characteristic of town was what he recognized as its ”imageability”, a corollary of the attribute visible markers (resembling landmarks, paths, districts) that lend perceptual cognition a sure coherency and readability in orienting itself; a measure of how efficiently the composition of components might be discerned and retained by consciousness, and thus reintegrated into the cognitive maps we assemble of our lived setting. In distinction, a metropolis with some paucity of those markers resulted in “low imag- eability”, in impact vitiating the topic’s capability to situate themselves in relation to their setting, such that the affective sense of recent alienation emerges, no less than partly, from a literal failure of spatial orientation.
As one thing like a mediary of wise expertise and conceptual understanding, neither purely subjective nor clearly goal in type, Lynch’s picture of town serves as the place to begin for the exhibition. But what is efficacious for our functions is much less his conclu- sions than the suggestive potential his method yields as soon as reoriented past the boundaries of city concept. The late literary critic Fredric Jameson famously appropriated the notion of cognitive mapping as a speculative instrument for plotting the ”situational illustration on the a part of the person topic to that vaster and correctly unrepresentable totality … of society’s constructions as a complete”. Analogously, as soon as refracted by the query of artwork and the aesthetic, the picture of town discloses its proximity to the visible imaginary of modernity as such.
For Walter Benjamin, the picture of town was undoubtedly a dialectical picture, however a dialectics with out decision, a logic of estrangement. In contrast to the notions of conquest and management that implicitly shore up the best kind in Lynch’s schema, Benjamin’s imaginative and prescient of Paris – as ”the capital of the nineteenth century” – was spatially unnavigable and temporally out of joint. Ever the enemy of “the ideology of progress”, Benjamin noticed that to attain a political venture for a future discontinuous with the current demanded the redemption of a forgotten previous, an “awakening of a not-yet-conscious data of what has been.” Surrealism had indicated the shape underneath which the dream-work of capitalism may yield the emancipatory modernity latent inside it; its content material, the (unfinished) Arcades Venture [Passagen-Werk], a refraction of town on the juncture between the Paris of Balzac and the Paris of Hauss- mann, by the determine of the Baudelairean flâneur, whose aimless wander finds its formal counterpart within the cumulative textual fragments of the convolutes, if not the discontinuities of historicity itself.
In his 1978 work Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto For Manhattan, Rem Koolhaas mapped a brand new form of metropolis, conceived underneath the signal of a brand new century and on the precipice of a brand new spirit of capitalism. For Koolhaas, the founding gesture of recent Manhattan will be discovered within the summary Cartesian plan that, in 1811, carved up the island topology into 2,028 blocks; “The Grid”, Koolhaas causes, “makes the historical past of archi- tecture and all earlier classes of urbanism irrelevant.” This was a sensible exigency that, on this telling, doubles as an Oulipean constraint; during which the modernist hyperlink between Surrea- lism and Le Corbusier is likely to be reconceived “retroactively” in New York’s basis.
The skyscraper internalises the logic of the grid, mapping the non-coincidence of utility and design onto the very division of inside and outdoors—an architectural break from Europe, Koolhaas claims bombastically, that “resolve(s) perpetually the battle between type and performance”. Thus town’s programmatic utilitarianism turns into the unintended precept for an architectural vanguardism, a “mosaic of episodes” that “contest one another”, imper- vious to assimilation by any unifying perspective—an allegory, maybe, for a selected second within the self-image of American democracy itself, and undoubtedly a world away from the monolithic imaginative and prescient of boulevards, parks and facades that had disclosed an older second of political modernity. But when Koolhaas first revealed his manifesto, New York was close to chapter and structure was marooned between pastiche and commercialism; in hindsight, the west appeared on the point of a brand new period of financialised capital that might revise the very idea of town because the shared, collective website of the social.
At the moment, the exhibition brings collectively artists whose works reevaluate this new conjuncture, amidst market prosperity and civic austerity, consumption, squander and mounting crises. If the current marks a sure distance from the “delirium”, provocation and formal rupture of earlier epochs, capital itself proved to be singular in producing avant-garde have an effect on, whether or not by the Verfremdungseffekt of market paroxysms or the violent severing of type from its content material, the spatial from the temporal, simply as digitality rends data from its bodily physique. Thus John Miller’s works, on town and its crowds, disclose the labour in “leisure” and the artifice of our mediated self-image, the misleading veil of the normative itself. If Peter Cain’s vehicle work communicate to a barely earlier second within the artifice of American iconography, as workouts in exact formal discount they render unmistakable the hallucinatory fetish of visible commerce. The works of Alan Michael, against this, stage a verisimilitude of appropriation, using a meticulous photorealism to discover questions of illustration and the tensions between labour and virtuosity. In the meantime, the spectrality of the worth type is palpable within the work Kayode Ojo, who assembles totems of prosperous cathexis into simulacral tableaux, haunted paeans to an other- worldly opulence. Lastly, Gili Tal’s works meditate throughout diversified motifs of town, from the quotidian to the essential, exploring the lack of public area to non-public seize amongst the ideologies of the cosmopolis. Fractured and irresolute, town persists in our shared aesthetic imaginary nonetheless, a fraught and essential website of contestation for our fallen current, and the novel modernity but to be unearthed.
—Joe McCarney
at josey, Cologne
till Might 29, 2025
