I had been meaning to post this image for a while now, and only just now finally did. To me, the work of Bruegel the Younger talks quite a bit about the kind of public space that I find interesting. Setting aside now any sort of strange and misleading nostalgia for a middle ages period when civic space was supposedly better than the forms of public or civic space we have now, I'd mostly like to talk about the emphasis Bruegel the younger places on activity.
Activity, in some places rote, everyday, simple and clearly defined; in others utterly absurd, unintelligible and in some ways hilarious, is the main focus of the above painting. I wont pretend to be an art historian, but I will say that the picture, as a whole constitutes much more than the sum of its parts. The parts in this case are various activities: women laying out fish for market, men on ladders repairing the facade of a building, people in earnest conversation or carrying bread, two men picking up a pile of objects they had dropped. What is interesting here is that the painting is undeniably about civic space, and that no one of these narratives is particularly emphasised, while all are potentially interesting. Everyone here, in some way, is working. Not laboring in the post-Marxist sense of the word, but simply going about their everyday lives. The complete chaos of the painting belies the fact that there is an underlying order, a city is primarily here not for some unquantifiable sense of belonging, but really because there are physical parameters around which cooperative work can happen. From this, the urban condition, the unknowable chaos of activity, and the civic image it constitutes, comes.
There are two parts to the analog that helped with this realization. First is the choice of the motorcycle as the object of the camera's affection, or the centralizing "thing" that was the main provocation of the piece. The motorcycle itself is a familiar object, we see them every day on the street. The intimate knowledge of, and appreciation for, these kinds of machines really is only brought about by many hours of attention paid to the machine and its ontological wants. They're a beautiful composition of symbiotic systems, have a clear function, are efficient in their design for pure performance that is beautiful. It is no small acknowledgement that they are fetishized by owners and enthusiasts. But transporting one from the street or even the repair shop to a carpeted room in a design school broadens that circle of attention: suddenly the intake and exhaust, the heat dissipation fins on the cylinder head and the compact intricacy of the twin carburetors all become objects of scrutiny and fascination, mostly because the majority of the people in that space have never really paid attention to these machines, but the out-of-scale, out-of-place nature of the installation almost forces one to.
The second provocation was the scrambling of its parts, via the camera and another machine, to draw further attention to these discrete parts, and bring the viewer into the world of the problem space and the overlay and reassembly of various images and parts to create an image, and a full fledged spectacle. The spectacle in this case is the second conceit of the piece: in this portion of the public space on the internet there is no narcissistic broadcasting of the minutia of someone's day, but instead actual information that allows for cooperation across the scales of the English speaking world. The object, or the thing here, displaces the banal, narcissistic impulse, and has actually created a community around it.
The question here is how can the out of place object also create a community, or public space? The ships left to waste on what was once the seabed of the Aral Sea after Soviet irrigation projects drained the rivers that fed it are one place where the provocation certainly existed, but there is little in terms of community. The implications behind this uncanny moment are apparent though: the Soviet five year plan and the history of cotton-growing in central Asia are all poetically contained in one image, albeit with a little unpacking.
Perhaps there is something to be said about the collapsing of leisure and work in the same place. Or at least the scale-crossing that happens when something engineered for operation outside of the urban realm makes your normal citizen stop and have a moment where a full understanding of the modern world becomes a little too close for comfort.
Or perhaps the machinations behind the out-of-scale event, or the event that requires much more attention to understand just how in hell it happened. Christopher Lasch wrote in the eighties that psychologists were beginning to worry about children who didn't want to know about the trap door under the clown car that spews forth an impossible twenty clowns from a VW Bug. They were content with simply the spectacle. I don't know if my "trap door" should be absolutely explicit and didactic, but at least provocative enough to make one at least curious about the thing, the context and the seemingly impossible narrative of how and why this thing got where it is.
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