ART & ARCHITECTURE INTERVIEWS for FIVE BOOKS, ESSAYS, FIELD NOTES

NO. 2 - Zoon Politikon

Welcome to the second Appel Art Journal newsletter, featuring the latest Five Books interviews relating to art and architecture, and other material. Aristotle maintained that we are ‘political animals’, zoon politikon, social creatures that find their fulfilment in the polis, or city-state. In this edition, we take a look at a few of the pros and cons of city living in a time of crisis.

INTERVIEW | In Conversation with Dr Davina Jackson | 20.04.20

Future Cities - Technology in an age of ‘Viral Internationalism’

We are a city-dwelling species. Our urban existence creates both opportunities and challenges, as the recent pandemic has illustrated. One thing seems clear, however. Understanding the way we interact with our built environment is becoming an increasingly data-driven enterprise, as Davina Jackson argues compellingly in her book, Data Cities. Here, the author who coined the phrase ‘Viral Internationalism’ to describe the transfer of architectural ideas across cultures shares the five books that best explain the technology behind the urban planning of the future.

WHAT’S CAUGHT MY EYE & CROSSED MY SCREEN

Paulo Mendes da Rocha - City as Solution

Brazilian architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha's text 'Exercise in Modernity' reinjects an idea of hope in the city as a universal solution to society's inequality, via Reading Design.  

Forensic Architecture - City as Surveillance

Shortlisted for the Turner Prize, Forensic Architecture - an interdisciplinary team that includes architects, filmmakers, lawyers and scientists - is hard to categorize. Their work uses the built environment as a starting point for explorations into human rights violations. The practice’s exhibit at the ICA demonstrated to me how, for all the terror they serve to reveal, data visualizations can be strikingly beautiful. Recently denied entrance to the US, founder Eyal Weizman reflects in this article on the ‘militarization of quarantine’.

Berlinde de Bruyckere - Lockdown Consolations

Belgian artist Berlinde De Bruyckere’s Cripplewood was due to accompany a production of the Maria Vespers in NY postponed due to the pandemic. Seeing this work at the Venice Biennale in 2013 was a haunting experience. De Bruyckere ‘paints’ in three dimensions with materials like wax and wood. Read and listen to her moving and meditative thoughts on a painting for consolation. De Bruyckere is profoundly influenced by traditions of the Flemish Renaissance, drawing from the legacies of the European Old Masters and Christian iconography, as well as mythology and cultural lore. The voice of her text carries the angel figure before us as it metamorphoses into healthcare workers, the archaic angel or the guardian angel we all need. De Bruyckere offers us light where there is darkness, ‘there are angels amongst us’, she says, ‘I see them everywhere now.’ Via Hauser & Wirth.

Eric Fischl - American Hula

Goya’s Colossus - also known as The Panic or The Storm - is the accidental counterpart of American painter Eric Fischl’s latest work produced in lockdown. Fischl describes his process for American Hula, which began as a trademark meditation on the lives of the affluent in American suburbia, and evolved into something that evokes the B-Movie classic, Attack of the 50ft Woman, representative perhaps of the final rampage of sexualized American consumerism, ‘incredibly huge, with incredible desires for love and vengeance’, as the horizon line for late-stage capitalism comes into view. Coincidentally, Maria Lassnig’s Woman Power crossed my screen only days after seeing American Hula. Compare and contrast.

It has been messing with our sense of both space and time, but we will all remember where we were during Corona lockdown 2020. Maybe we will remember what we were reading. And we will almost certainly recall, for years to come, the pictures that conveyed critical information to us at this precarious time: the flattening of the curve… the billiard-balls of contagion.

How data is visualised can help with the task of problem solving. And how data visualisations are coming to the forefront of urban policy is the subject of my latest interview for Five Books on Future Cities, with Australian author, architecture and urban planning specialist Davina Jackson. Davina coined the term ‘Viral Internationalism’ to describe the way architectural concepts gain currency around the world. In the current crisis, it’s a useful way to think about how information flows between and within centers of population.

 We live in what has been dubbed the Anthropocene, although the ‘Metropocene’ might be an equally apt moniker, as we are overwhelmingly a city dwelling species. The world is spiky, and the spikes in innovation and creative solutions are overwhelmingly concentrated in cities, which renowned Brazilian architect Paulo Mendes de Rocha sees as sites for hope.

Cities are as much about flows as they are about buildings and spaces - flows of human traffic, of information and yes – even viruses. How do we contend with all this information? She argues that satellites are what help us keep tabs on the evolution of ‘Digital Earth’, the vast information that is at our fingertips thanks to technology.

For many years my work in financial markets involved numbers – statistics, ratios, multiples. ‘The Numbers Don’t Lie’, we would often hear on the trading floor. And while that may be true, Numbers – like Statistics, Damned Lies and Statistics – can be presented more or less lucidly, with degrees of competence and honesty in the way that they are visualised. The remarkable Forensic Architecture looks at numbers and a lot more besides in evaluating clues provided by our built environment, where tradeoffs between security and surveillance abound.

Tradeoffs notwithstanding, I’m certainly grateful to live in a functional municipality, where technology reliably brings the work of architects and artists I admire into my day.

I hope they provide you with inspiration too. Thank you for taking the time to read this second edition.

Stay healthy, stay courageous,

Romas Tauras