/LU/: BLACK SUN @ MOMA

The thing otherwise known as /LU/ (Landscape Urbanism), an empty signifier signifying merely itself, appears at MoMA’s “Groundswell” exhibition in all of its muted glory, as eclipse, as possible-impossible synthesis of Landscape + Architecture + Urbanism, and (more critically) as an acritical something large that looms in the architectural imagination as the (un)natural outcome of ten-plus years of advanced work in academies and studios, work effectively obliterating other options (such as an embrace of the ‘Real’) and presenting the ultimate fait accompli -- for example, contemporary urbanism as a network of madly interconnected, totally (totalized) synthetic (instrumentalized) pseudo-environments.

Arguably, the current vogue for an advanced synthetical /LU/ was imported to the US from Europe and the United Kingdom (by way of the Netherlands and the Architectural Association in London), in the early 1990s, in response to the mostly bathetic (and hopelessly pathetic) state of things landscape-architectural, its arrival signaling a turn into hybrid urban mise en scène (as pursued by MVRDV and West 8 in Holland), a purview more or less obsessed with spent infrastructure and, in inept and horribly trenchant ways, renascent (post-McHarg) ideas (however vague) of urban ecology as information flows and ‘datascapes’. Tied to 1980s urban renewal by the elastic bonds of contiguity (as post-modernism is tied to modernism), and part and parcel of the extreme hubris of that decade (yet somehow post-Paris and post-Mitterrand Grand Projets anyway), Landscape Urbanism was the proverbial phoenix rising from the ashes of the post-industrial city in a decade marked by architectural hubris masquerading as theory -- a post-industrial (and edgy) artifact unto itself which suggested the return of the amalgam (the constellation, or event) after so much discredited non-sense associated with modernist utopian projects and the polyglot affectations of post-modernism (the latter, despite claims otherwise by its detractors, inclusive of the strident, formalist maneuvers of the rare deconstructivist-inspired operations, surgical and strategic, rarely built but influential nonetheless).*

Yet despite this seemingly progressive embrace of a slightly broken set of justifications for collecting the detritus of the shattered modernist city, below the dead and dying operational interventions in cities worldwide lurked an unholy embrace of subtle forms of nonetheless rampant exploitation (claws extended) -- making the so-called ‘progressive’ maneuvers of landscape urbanists oftentimes synonymous with regressive, and/or repressive orders operating increasingly from within the vast dematerialized and de-territorialized ‘venues’ of late-capitalism (and neo-liberalism).

The 1990s version of /LU/ that came over from the Netherlands and the UK owes a great debt to the late-1980s hollow, neo-realist gestures of OMA and Koolhaas, most especially by way of the ridiculous, empty figure of terrain vague (foolishly valorized by figures as eminent as Ignasi de Sola-Morales and Massimo Cacciari), a vast indeterminate (often Deleuzionary) field of criss-crossing forces and systems wherein nominal existentialist maneuvers might take place (nomadologies), situating a late-Situationist anti-ethos (the anti-spectacle) amidst the muck and mire of de-racinated, leftover bits of urban fabric or forsaken terrain in-between the fully instrumentalized urban bric-a-brac that constitutes the contemporary city worldwide. This terrain vague, while often (in fact) a ‘terror vague’, was then perceived as a type of titillating frontier, while after all such fragments of the broken landscape of modernity were always only waiting to be stitched back into the machinic operations of Leviathan (the modern State as colossal economic clockworks).

As all of this is more than self-evident today, it is a marvel to see Landscape Urbanism continue today to embrace the now-obvious pernicious and adventitious machine that is turning everything into something that can be bought and sold (and ultimately controlled and/or voided when necessary). The age-old conundrum of the urban square as place of revolution, insurrection, and (of course) punishment more than attests to the radical potential in such systems that swerve between machine and subject. Bataille’s premonitions regarding such, by way of backward glances into twisted forms of sinister Parisian urbanism, as Benjamin’s Arcades Project, dovetail ironically with the absent critique today of what is lost below arch-determinism, and what is occluded beneath the irresponsible ‘realism’ of contemporary urbanism flying under the sexy sign of morphological innovation.

Thus the post-industrial thing is also the latest, perhaps most ferocious example of creeping economic determinism (culture as mechanism) and the flattening of the last frontier (which is also the first frontier); that is, human subjectivity or human ‘nature’. In the face of a machinic spirit quite literally out of control and running amok (if not on auto-pilot), the world is re-configured every day as perpetual (endlessly re-written) artifact. Surrealism’s diagnosis that early twentieth-century advertising represented the colonization of the subconscious registers, therefore, in the annals of operative criticism (given that the Surrealists countered with an equally absurd version of deranged signs) as the penultimate expression of tragic currents unremittingly at play in urban systems.

As the /LU/ juggernaut reaches apogee, it is also likely that its trajectory through the stratosphere will, in turn, sponsor the ejection of modules (satellites) that appear critical while criticality itself belongs ‘on earth’ and ‘at home’, or ‘at large’, and truly on the margins as nascent (and renascent) forms of formalism, or built critique, returning always just in time (on time and in time) -- that is to say, an irrepressible some-thing else calls, a both necessary and superfluous some-thing else in the double sense that any avant-garde also must undo all pretensions to reconciliation with authorized narratives and undo at once the pseudo-avant-garde postures of academicians and practitioners wont to claim ownership of discourse, for obvious reasons, obviously, and for spurious reasons, spuriously -- both wont to circle the wagons and reclaim autonomy while actually vacating the dire and radical ‘nature’ of that always suspect autonomy anyway (a relic of Modernity’s ill-conceived quest for transcendence at the expense of everything else).

For the same reasons that people should be human beings first, before they are black, female, handicapped, stupid, or what-have-you, Landscape +Architecture should be grounded (rooted) in the earth first, versus floating off in a virtual paradise or wasteland. To this /LU/ will return, because it must, once it has passed through its very own nihilism (its very own eclipse/nothingness), venturing once again into the ontological soup, or the slippery non-place from which it emerges every moment without fail, whether or not it cares to see or hear (or think) what is real and what is true (and what is given) -- whether or not it cares to hear the siren song of earth itself. To abandon the critical coordinates of its own arrival on the stage is to turn those coordinates over to the machinic, programmatic, and virtual mechanisms of the voracious and monstrous steamroller now (and once again) approaching the gates of human subjectivity.

Countering all of that, then, and operative in the allied arts (for example, music, cinema, and the visual arts) but nearly totally absent from architecture, one may hear traces of a song that calls, an earth that calls, a confluence of the real and the given and its excessive provisionality, all of which remains offstage, offlimits and -- essentially -- off the map out of necessity.(1) If MoMA’s curators (Peter Reed et alia) missed or chose to ignore the current ‘twittering in the trees’ (that is, other forms and figures of Landscape + Architecture), they cannot be blamed so much as chastised for practicing that special form of myopia that passes for pulse-taking exhibitions, here and there (and especially in Venice every two years), a purblind approach (based in part by adopting ‘elective’ blinkers) that nearly always misses what is arriving or about to arrive, given that such representations of the state of things are automatically retrospective exercises, exercises clearly aimed at a reasonably obvious audience (the abstract public), and out of step, out of time, and out of sync with that extraordinary process of inversion, implosion, and insurrection that marks the ‘annals’ of architectural and artistic practice. Obviously, MoMA has done (again) what it always does (and does reasonably well), by assembling under the specious sign of ‘contemporary landscape design’ a thematic event orchestrated around an already-spent force.

Better, then, not to mention a single project currently encased in the upper reaches of the Taniguchi re-designed vitrine that MoMA ultimately is and point elsewhere, instead, to things not on MoMA’s radar or things about to spring into view from behind the screen (the curtain), things heedlessly out there or nowhere, an out there and nowhere that presents a more fitting present-tense for landscape-architectural production by going willy-nilly outside the authorized parameters utilized by MoMA and the academies, a lost cause aimed nonetheless at fostering an instrumental identity for a profession truly without bounds.

On the near horizon we find Peter Eisenman’s Cultural Center for Santiago de Compostela, Galicia (under construction but not on display at MoMA) about to rear its lovely, ‘proverbial’ three heads amidst so much rubbish elsewhere, rising in the public’s eye as mirage (as will the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, in Berlin, lurch at least momentarily, in May 2005, into the middle of the collective radar). Tracking in reverse earlier forms of building-as-site -- such as Raimund Abraham’s 1970s neo-rationalist work (consistent with both Eisenman’s and John Hejduk’s 1970s neo-rationalist excavations), one cannot help be struck by the peculiar presence of two towers at Santiago designed by the late John Hejduk but built by Peter Eisenman. If the language games of the faux neo-modernist /LU/ projects at MoMA are to be properly contextualized, or recognized as what they are, they are also to be constellated against and/or in (re)view of the savage marks of the ontological experiments conducted on the ashes and bones of architectures past, acts of contrition (perhaps) by architects working ‘inside’ the tomb of architecture (as archaeologists), digging to pull it (the discipline as discourse) up by its own bootstraps and find (as it was quite lost then as now) the origin of the mauling and making of sites. One wants to ask Eisenman, then: “Peter, Santiago, c’est votre vous, mais oui?”

Land Art notwithstanding, /LU/ owes its highly-suspect notoriety to all that has been obliterated by the machine it services, and the anti-humanism at its dark heart (its elective post-humanism) is the darkest portion of its spectacularly (un)natural acts of abject instrumentalization of everything in its path. To punch holes then in this strategic veneer (a black shroud thrown over an otherwise dangerously indeterminate terrain, or earth itself) is to also save Landscape + Architecture from its current self, and to liberate what always lies within it -- its obviously dangerous (and therefore repressed) sublime potential.

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GK (03/21/05)

This essay - http://www.geocities.com/ateliermp/black_sun.rtf

ENDNOTES

1 - Paul Virilio and Francois Burkhardt, “Abbiamo Bisogno del Sottosuolo” (“We Need the Below-Ground”), Domus 879 (March 2005), pp. 108-112 - Regarding Hans Hollein’s unbuilt Guggenheim Museum, Salzburg (competition c.1989) - “PV: To my mind, the great success of contemporary art, aside from video installations which interest me a lot, is land art. And what is land art? It is art in the ground. It is the architecturing of a place. It is working with the architecture of the ground. It is about reintroducing art into the earth […] Today, through land art and its modernity, this return to a carving of land by sculptors, by architects or by landscape designers is in my view one of the most successful things in the history of art and the one with the biggest future.” (p. 112)
The Catalogue - Peter Reed (ed.), Groundswell (New York: MoMA, 2005) - Paper, 176 pages, ISBN 0-870-70379-X
*The Anti-Catalogue - Richard Weller (ed.), Room 4.1.3: Innovations in Landscape Architecture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004) - Cloth, 288 pages, ISBN 0-812-23784-6 - A survey of landscape-architectural work truly ‘off the map’ …
The Symposium - http://www.archleague.org/lectures.php?article=groundswell
Eisenman Juggernaut - http://www.geocities.com/ateliermp/eisenman.html

EISENMAN (NOW & THEN) - Peter Noever (ed.), Peter Eisenman: Barefoot on White-Hot Walls (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2005) - Paper, 302 pages, ISBN 3-775-71561-4 - Catalogue for the exhibition @ MAK, Vienna (December 12, 2004 through May 22, 2005) / Peter Eisenman, Codex (New York: Monacelli Press, 2005) - Paper, 256 pages, ISBN 1-580-93138-3 / Mark Rakatansky (ed.), Eisenman Inside Out: Selected Writings, 1963-1988 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004) - Cloth, 264 pages, ISBN 0-300-09008-0 / Andrew Benjamin, Cynthia Davidson, Blurred Zones: Investigations of the Interstitial, Eisenman Architects 1988-1998 (New York: Monacelli Press, 2003) - Cloth, 334 pages, ISBN 1-580-93049-2 / Peter Eisenman, Diagram Diaries (New York: Universe, 1999) - Paper, 240 pages, ISBN 0-789-30264-0 / Codex (due in April 2005) will include essays by Peter Eisenman, plus 300 illustrations, including the code-driven work behind, beneath, and buried within the majestic and magisterial Cultural Center for Santiago de Compostela …

EISENMAN / BERLIN & BEYOND - The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is scheduled to open in May 2005 … A photo-documentary publication will follow (in June), from Lars Müller (with photographs by Hélène Binet and an as-yet-unspecified second photographer), on the implicit nature of the site, the process of construction, and the over-arching epic phenomenon of the project per se, inclusive of the Spring 2005 ‘opening’ Itself … / Regarding PE’s “Garden of Lost Footsteps”, at Castelvecchio, Verona (June 27, 2004 through March 28, 2005), an ‘hommage’ to Carlo Scarpa, see the catalogue for the installation, The Garden of Lost Footsteps (Marsilio, 2004) … For ‘this + that’, and other PE effects, in a nutshell, see Constructs, Yale SOA (Spring 2005), “Faculty News”, p. 25

THE TOPOLOGICAL SUPPLEMENT - “So in what, exactly, does the difference between Lacan and deconstruction reside? Let me elaborate this crucial point apropos [of] the Derridean couple, ‘supplement/centre’. In a way reminiscent of the Foucauldian endless variations on the complex of heterogeneity of power relations (they run upwards, downwards, laterally), Derrida also likes to indulge heavily in exuberant variations on the paradoxical character of the supplement (the excessive element which is neither inside nor outside; it sticks out of the series it belongs to and simultaneously completes it, etc.). Lacan, on the contrary -- by means of a gesture which, of course, for Derrida would undoubtably signal reinscription into traditional philosophical discourse -- directly offers a concept of this element, namely the concept of the Master-Signifier, S1, in relation to S2, the ‘ordinary’ chain of knowledge. This concept is not a simple unambiguous concept, but the concept of the structural [topological] ambiguity itself. That is to say, Lacan reunites in one and the same concept what Derrida keeps apart [splits]. In Lacan, S1 stands for the supplement -- the trait which sticks out, but is as such, in its very excess, unavoidable; and, simultaneously, for the totalizing Master-Signifier. Therein, in this ‘speculative identity’ of the supplement and the Centre, resides the implicit ‘Hegelian’ move of Lacan: the Centre which Derrida endeavours to ‘deconstruct’ is ultimately the very supplement which threatens to disrupt its totalizing power, or, to put it in Kierkegaardese, supplement to the Centre itself ‘in its becoming’. In this precise sense, supplement is the condition of possibility and the condition of impossibility of the Centre.” Slavoj Zizek, “The Eclipse of Meaning” (1994), Interrogating the Real (London: Verso, 2005), pp. 209-210

/LU/, NO THANKS - What ‘sticks out’ of urban systems (architectural and landscape-architectural) is the Real Itself (as it always already supplements constructed systems). In the case of the city, this Something Else (often a telluric something else) is always suppressed for structural reasons. It appears spectral as it pulls further and further away (further from Truth). This ‘Real’ is not simply ‘nature’ (whatever that is); it is also the irreal or spectral thing-in-itself (a post-Kantian thing-in-itself), insofar as the topological knot that all cities ultimately represent represents figuration and representation, as such. The ‘as such’ (or ‘the given’) is as much the space of the topological knot as anything inscribed within it. Thus all attempts to inscribe difference (while done so, typically, horizontally and/or rhyzomatically) fail due to the missing principle embedded in all topological thought; that is, that topological thought contains the traumatic kernel (as Zizek would say) of the Real plus its other (the Big Other or otherwise) -- a field, then, of repressions that sponsor the appearance of the phantasmatic (haunted) ‘nature’ contained within urban systems. To excavate the Real is to also ‘free’ it from all such repressions (and reifications as markets, economic flows, datascapes and what-have-you today in the de-natured, new-ish Master-Signifier, Landscape Urbanism). Thus, architecture-as-site remains the principle problem (and the principle ‘radical’ form) of all formalist insurrections. Thus, too, the ontological returns, until the object of architecture is no longer the object per se but instead topological thought itself. (06/12/05)

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SUPPLEMENTAL DOCUMENTS

Being Jean-Luc Marion - http://www.geocities.com/ateliermp/marion1.html
Prolegomena - http://www.geocities.com/ateliermp/prolegomena.html
The Affective Sublime - http://www.geocities.com/ateliermp/affective_sublime.html
Linguistic Dust - http://www.geocities.com/ateliermp/linguistic_dust.html
Netherlandish Urbanism - http://www.geocities.com/ateliermp/sinking.html
Crosshairs - http://www.geocities.com/ateliermp/crosshairs.html
Manfredo Tafuri is Dead - http://www.geocities.com/ateliermp/manfredo_tafuri.html
Immodernity Itself - http://www.geocities.com/ateliermp/immodernity_itself.rtf

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“A garden’s silence is made of sounds. Press your ear to a tree and listen.” Valentina (Signorini Ghirardini), Monica Vitti, in Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte (1960)