I knew that I was supposed to be looking for a theatre that doubled as a café, but it still did not register with me, as I strode along the pavement, that the unassuming coffee house to my immediate right was the venue for Ivanov. When I finally entered the theatre, I was startled by how small the space of the performance truly was. I had to be careful not to trip over set props, as I cradled my coffee and weaved carefully through the crowd of theatre goers to get to our seats in the “upper row”.
The play began with Ethan Hawke’s Ivanov stretched out in his bed, reading pensively, as a figure approached with a gun (yes, Chekov’s gun). From the very beginning, I came to appreciate the intimacy of the venue, as the subtle movements and expressions of the characters brought a new life to Chekov’s script. I admit that I was a little underwhelmed by some of the early action of the play. I thought the dialogue was sometimes lacking in vigor and authenticity. But, as the scene progressed, the tensions built, the dialogue flowed, and all the humor and pathos of Checkov’s work was brought to visceral realization.
Hawke’s performance, although not perfect, included moments of fierce brilliance and revelatory clarity. The role of his ailing wife, Anna, was cast well, although I would have liked to have seen more of her as Ivanov grew increasingly morose and reckless. Ivanov’s new love interest, Sasha, and her father also were acted very well The actor playing Michael Borkin , however, seemed exaggerated, even amateurish, although many people seemed to like him in the role.
Probably the most interesting pairing in the play, and the one in which Hawke’s performance excelled particularly, was that between Ivanov and the “honest” doctor. The doctor seemed to me to be an embodiment of the “conscience” interposed in and set against the artistic molding of the play. The climax of the play came with the glint of recognition in Ivanov,’s eye, as he embraced the doctor and thanked him. The doctor, whom we have come to despise as a dour moralist, is right in the end. Beneath all the poetry of sorrow and self-pity, beneath every attempt to rationalize and redeem, is the perfectly base, avaricious, cruel, and irredeemable self – pricked and agitated by a thorny conscience, reproached by a voice that whines and squeals, but that does not –that cannot- speak falsely. The pathos of Ivanov’s character would crystalize into a grand edifice of poetic sorrow, only to be undermined by the reflexive, revealing self-examination that is manifested outward as the doctor.
Perhaps, in Ivanov , Chekov anticipated the modern condition, with its intolerable burden of self-knowledge, with its exhaustion of poetry and of Irony, with the incessant, ever-conquering cynicism that has become the cultural air we breathe . The play, which seems to fixate on the charecter of Hamlet, brings to mind Nietsche’s comments on Shakespeare’s tragic Prince of Denmark:
In this sense the Dionysian man has similarities to Hamlet. Both have had a real glimpse into the essence of things. They have understood, and it now disgusts them to act, for their actions can change nothing in the eternal nature of things. They perceive as ridiculous or humiliating the fact that they are expected to set right a world which is out of joint. The knowledge kills action, for action requires a state of being in which we are covered with the veil of illusion. That is what Hamlet has to teach us, not that really venal wisdom about John-a-Dreams, who cannot move himself to act because of too much reflection, too many possibilities, so to speak. It’s not a case of reflection. No! The true knowledge, the glimpse into the cruel truth overcomes every driving motive to act, both in Hamlet as well as in the Dionysian man. Now no consolation has any effect. His longing goes out over a world, even beyond the gods themselves, toward death. Existence is denied, together with its blazing reflection in the gods or an immortal afterlife. In the consciousness of once having glimpsed the truth, man now sees everywhere only the horror or absurdity of being; now he understands the symbolism in the fate of Ophelia; now he recognizes the wisdom of the forest god Silenus. It disgusts him.
Ivanov kills himself not for any poetic reason. Nothing could be so artistically unsatisfying as the truly desperate, ugly, and un-poetic suicide that concludes the play. Yet there is a sort of relief that we must feel as the audience; a sense that what has occurred was inevitable, inscribed in the first moments of the play, as an unnamed gunman approached Ivanov in his bed. In Ivanov we have a Raskolnikov without a Sonya, a Luther who cannot bring himself to believe in the grace of God. His goodness is so small in comparison to his baseness that it can only urge him to self-annihilation, to blot out what cannot be altered. There is an expression of this archetype in our own culture It appears as a plot element in many science fiction stories: a machine (or something of the sort) grows increasingly intelligent, develops an autonomous will, and proceeds to evolve into a monstrosity. The glint of humanity that gradually arises in the machine will move it to the only decision that is possible rationally and ethically: self-destruction. Having seen into itself, having tasted goodness, and knowing, with its vast intelligence, that redemption is impossible, the technological monster must approximate redemption in death Shelley’s Frankenstein is, of course, one of the earliest and most memorable variations of this modern archetype. Falseness, and a certain degree of unconsciousness , is always the pre-condition of life for “the good”, at least in this conception. Could Ivanov have ended differently? That is certainly more than a literary question.
With a title like “Political Mother”, it was difficult to avoid speculating before the show (What do they mean by “political”?). Whatever expectations I formed before the performance, however, could not have prepared me for the truly unique and stunning display we witnessed. A thin layer of smoke hung over the theatre in beguiling calm , when we entered the darkened room and headed to our seats. The performance began as sweet, tranquil notes from Verdi’s Requiem rose from the misty darkness and the spotlight shone on a lone dancer, clutching at a Samurai sword. The dancer proceeded to reenact, in vivid, and almost disturbing detail, the seppuku ritual to which members of Japan’s warrior class would once resort rather than bear the dishonor of defeat. It was a transfixing moment. But as darkness fell upon the prostrated figure of the Samurai and the music persisted in its sublime, ethereal tones, my eyelids began to feels heavy. I let my eyes close and took the music in with placid contemplation. I was almost drifting off, when an explosion of heavy metal music jolted me to attention. I was not going to get any sleep.
After that initial start, the performance managed to captivate me without resorting to blunt shock value. It is difficult to describe exactly what transpired over the next hour or so, and anyone interested really has see it for himself. Suffice to say it involved a lot of wild twitching and gesticulation on the part of dancers – and just a little bit of folkdance. As I was watching the performance, I could not help but connect it to our recent readings in Nietzsche: the contrasts between light and dark, sweet melody and savage riff , obliteration of the individual and singular defiance seemed, at times, to be drawn directly as illustration for Nietzsche’s discussion of the Apollonian and Dionysian. There was a schizophrenic aspect to the whole performance, with two tendencies – entities, to speak more clearly of what they were- seizing the will and engaging in perpetual, internecine conflict. There was also something of the Pagan festival , and it felt, at times, as though one had stumbled unto some ancient and terrible cult that has, in some impossible manner, always been an attendant of human affairs..
One striking motif was a terrible figure, obscured by darkness, who stood atop the platform and seemed to direct with strange, superhuman powers the wild scenes of despair and submission below. He seemed to transfix the audience, as well, casting a terrible spell over the whole theatre. Who this figure was – a dictator, a devil, a sadistic God-never is answered in the performance. But, perhaps influenced by the title, I inevitably connected it to the “political”. Politics has its rational discourses, but it also a darker aspect. There is always something primal in the way that people relate to their leaders and the law. Beneath the veneer of smiling faces, polished rhetoric, and noble ideals is the exercise of a power that originates in the more wild and remote regions of man’s psyche. After all, we inaugurated the political struggle on earth, not as autonomous rational beings, but as animals of the irrational group , barely removed from our primate infancy and still clutching desperately for the ground of conscious being. To offer a glimpse into this frightening dimension of the political is not to make a criticism of any one political system or style of governance, but to lay bare the essential forces underlying our political relations, their bizarre shapes and latent malignancy.
An interesting formulation of this came in the funniest moment of the performance: “Where there is pressure there is….folkdance,” a projection revealed. If there was a schizophrenic quality to the entire performance, then this instance intensified it by presenting a specimen of the schizophrenic’s “disorganized” thought. But schizophrenics were the prophets of old, and the message that appeared in bright relief, absurd and humorous as it was, seemed to have a touch of prophetic inspiration in it. Just as systems of power have a “shadow” existence that directs them in essential, but obscure ways, so those movements that arise in genuine opposition to authority must have their own secret and inscrutable motivations. The notion of “folkdance” conquering overlord who stood invincibly atop his platform seems ridiculous to us ,and perhaps that says something about our political moment. The “Occupy Wall street” movement has produced it own marketable brand of rhetoric, and has succeeded in finding some sympathy among the begrudged ranks of the struggling and unemployed. But, despite its smug sense of historical significance, it lacks any true substance, any essential power, whether spiritual or animal. Strip away the organizers and their banners and what remains is the most superficial vein of resentment, out whose impoverished soil no real action can germinate. There is no confrontation in what the Occupy protestors do, regardless of how shrilly they may shout at office fronts and television cameras , because all genuine political confrontation must occur first in the pre-rational depths of the soul before it can spill into the streets and call itself a movement.
The revolutions of the 1960s – to give an example that is vivid, if highly colored and distorted, in the American memory – were accompanied by titanic shift in the pre-rational psychological and social landscape of a generation. The figure of the hippie cannot seem anything but a strange caricature to us now, but what seems most like caricature today -engaging in folkdance, for example- was actually the essential part of the movement , not its intellectual or moral content, which was largely derivative. This is not the element of a political movement that can pursue its objective in a rational, purposeful, and effective manner, but it is the life-blood, the animating principle, without which the rational faculty cannot operate in any meaningful and vigorous way as a political agent. Political Mother was political. It was also interesting, and that is a great accomplishment in of itself.
Object 1: Untitled (1988,) Malika Cosme
As I strolled through the galleries of EL Museo del Barrio, I found many of the art objects compelling – but not in a way that I could capture in words. Their colors, rhythms, and symbols possessed an abundant and moving character. They spoke of a living culture and history that I could behold and appreciate, but not one capture and define – I who was looking in from the outside, a suburban New Yorker, little familiar Caribbean history and life . It was an untitled photograph by Malika Cosme that first elicited deeper reflection, whose wordless compulsion gave rise to words. Cosme was raised in a small, rural village on the Island of Puerto Rico. As a young girl, she taught herself photography, later emigrating to New York City and beginning a career as an experimental photographer. This work in particular was a chromogenic photograph from a series called “Dreams”. I felt that there was something significant to be understood, not only about Caribbean culture, but also about the human condition , in the “dream” that Cosme presents . Taken in Puerto Rico, in a place of her childhood, its double-exposure technique presents the dark, indistinct outline of some country woods contrasted with the bright white figure of a dog. The dog’s face is turned away, with features obscure, but its coat glows hauntingly in the pale moonlight. For Cosme, this photograph must have said something about the Puerto Rico of her childhood. For me its faint, resonant shapes spoke of no particular location, but of a condition of memory that we all share as human beings. The countryside is a remembered landscape, viewed through the prism of Cosme’s decades in New York City and a new language, culture, and pace of life. It is, in this, very much the like the countrysides that we all must carry somewhere in the dim and cavernous vaults of our memory. In the landscape there is the unmistakable quality of the dream, of the transient and insubstantial. In the featureless dog, there is a sense of moving away, of perpetual, unremitted loss. But in the radiance of the coat, in the persistence of the wood as contrast, there remains something indelibly moving. We see, in the simple outlines of the photograph, the way in which memories fade, yet persist, the paradox of memory that eludes all attempts to recapture the past, yet constantly animates the present. The work is a remarkable example of the personal in art becoming universal.
Object 2: Crop Time (Version 2, 1955), Albert Huie
Albert Huie, born to a poor family during Jamaica’s colonial period and raised in the town of Falmouth, Trelawny, was considered the “father of Jamaican painting”. Much his work celebrated the land and the people of Jamaica. Crop Time, which spoke clearly to me from across the room, presents a sharp contrast between artistic subject and artistic vision.
The subject of the painting is industrial degradation of the landscape and agriculture. Faceless laborers toil in the mud, stooped over, enervated, dejected . The bare fields are overshadowed by a complex of industrial buildings. A smokestack rises toward the cloudless sky, spewing dark clouds into the atmosphere . One sees a native people broken and bowed by industrial imposition, a landscape ravaged, a culture suffocated and nearly extinguished.
Yet, this is only the subject of the painting, and not its animating principle. The coloring of the work transforms and creates the possibility of redemption. The delicate greens of the landscape, the old spirit of land and people, radiate outward from the tree-lined mountaintops, infusing the bleak scene with a new visual life, permeating and transfiguring even the industrial smoke that mars the horizon. Pinks and blues brighten the tattered garments of the field workers, bringing out the subtle power of their gestures. The sky becomes a sensuous mixture of earthy green, ethereal blue, faint, tantalizing pink. The whole image is alive in light, deep, natural colors that do not obscure the the brutal subject matter of the panting, but reanimate it in the substance of a new vision. The scene is transformed, not by some starry-eyed hope or insubstantial vision of the past, but by the living culture preserved and nourished in the hearts of Jamaicans. Through the spiritual vision of this culture, any physical degradation can be redeemed. There is still dignity in work, beauty in nature. There is still unity, joy, and tradition, even as the weight of industrial servitude crushes the physical body – in the coloring of one’s vision, in the archetypal motions of the harvest.
When I stepped off the subway unto a busy Manhattan street, searching for some telltale patch of green at the distant end of the block, I had no idea of what to expect on my visit to the Highline. I had always loved the sprawling oasis of Central Park and what it represented – the idea of taking refuge in nature when the city grew too loud and tumultuous, of escaping from the hectic pace of life into an “alien” world of trees, grasses, and flowers – but I had never visited the Highline and didn’t anticipate how little the park would betray its surroundings. Amid burnished storefronts and old street signs, one could easily miss the glass elevator that shuttles visitors to and from its second story overpass and the adjacent staircase. There was no pulsating electric sign, no magisterial grove of trees, no heralding crowd of tourists, rushing by one another to catch a glimpse of another New York landmark. As we entered the park on a cold, bright November afternoon, only a few people were strolling along the walkway, a converted freight rail track that that runs from Gansevoort Street in the Meatpacking District to West 34th Street on Manhattan’s Westside. The scene that opened before us was the same one we had encountered moments earlier, walking casually in the streets, and yet that brief flight of stairs seemed to somehow transport. The structure itself was a model of simplicity: a metal path, understated shrubbery, benches, a sparse, but striking array of art objects, brief plateaus, unexpected views, and a sense of reorientation of the familiar embodied in the very logic of the construction:
I had expected something more – intricate landscaping, bright fauna, crowds of visitors, perhaps some food and live music. There was none of that in the Highline. But there was something that in New York City can be as rare and invaluable as any masterpiece of art and architecture – a genuine sense of calm and perspective. It was an impenetrable calm that enclosed the thin stretch of track, unperturbed by the ceaseless, blearing traffic below and the imperious arch of the skyline above. The sounds were still there. The hectic pace of the city still rumbled below, visible with a slight glance over the railing. The shadows of skyscrapers were still bent fiercely over the horizon. And yet, twenty feet above the chaos, one could not help but feel, as much as De Certeau felt gazing down from the 110th floor of the WTC, that the agitation [of the city] is momentarily arrested by vision” Perhaps De Certeau captured this arrested vision of the City better than any other in his essay:
“The gigantic mass is immobilized…It is transformed into a texturology in which extremes coincide..paroxysmal places in monumental relief…one lifted out of the city’s grasp…one’s body no longer clasped by the streets that turn and return according to an anonymous law…its elevation transfigures him into a voyeur…It puts him at a distance…It transforms the bewiching world by which one was possessed into a text…It allows one to read it, to be a solar Eye…a God…this lust to be a viewpoint and nothing more.”
“Walking in the City” can mean stumbling into an endless procession of sights, sounds, and tastes, wandering the bright, buzzing labyrinth of momentary distraction and eternal enchantment that the streets of Manhattan offer. In the Highline, however, to walk is to walk, to be with people is to really be with them, to see is to see. Like all great works of arts, it is useless. It serves no immediate utilitarian or sensual need, and so serves a most important need for people of New York City: the need for tranquility, for understatement, for intimacy, and for a kind of bare, but essential beauty. The beauty of the Highline is always a minimalist beauty. The views are not grandiose or contrived. The design is not imposed upon the surrounding neighborhoods. Vegetation is designed to reflect the wild, resilient growth that persisted after the railway was discontinued.
There is, in this simplicity, a rich spectrum of possibilities for the the flaneur, the “voyeur…lusting to be a viewpoint and nothing more.” One can look ahead and allow oneself to be carried by the logic of the path, submitting to its gentle bends and strange offerings. Odd statues speckle the landscape, offering pleasure in their curiousness and unabashed superfluity. Zebra stripe buildings peek through the brown, windswept foliage, as if mocking some imagined safari, a fantasy of urban visitors. Benches invite visitors to rest, and talk, and absorb the scenery more completely:
Or, one can look to the side, and see the alleyways, decrepit and graffitied. And notice the the river peering through, feel it whispering the city’s secrets in the light autumn breeze. The people who live there speak in the elaborate paintings that decorate the walls of old, decaying edifices:
Or one can look down at the yellow taxi cabs and the bleak, gray sidewalks, with residents scurrying to destinations nameless and obscene, eyes downcast, shoulders braced against the crowd – and perhaps see oneself in the whirl of silver hubcaps and winter coats.
Or one can cast his gaze upward at the arresting grandeur of a skyline that speaks for itself:
One moment my eyes descend into a desolate urban canyon, the next they are drawn upward by the gleaming visage of steel and glass. At once the symbolic relief of a defiant street culture, the hard, steel lines of cororate office building, the sumptuous sllouhette of some temple of culture are all present in my shifting field of vision:
One can understand Quine when he says New York is the “Nowhere he built around himself”. But one also gets the sense of being everywhere, of being connected to everything. One is small, marginal to the city, but also inseparable from its diverse life. One is surrounded by Scruton’s ugliness, but also by beauty – and the boundary between the two is often not clearly demarcated.
The Highline seems to reflect the most ambitious, even starry-eyed vision of what a city, what New York City can be: beauty and degeneration in redemptive coexistence, various neighborhoods, cultures, and styles appreciated as distinct, living entities, but united in the narrative of walking, a celebration of the public that offers private joys, an anonymity that is also an implicit form of intimacy. What we experience at the Highline, more than the ‘Return to Nature’, is a return to the city, its organic patterning and peopling. As Decerteau observed, “Beneath the discourses that ideologize the city, the ruses and combinations of power that have no readable identity proliferate , without points where one can take hold of them, without rational transparency, they are impossible to administer”. At the Highline, we are able to experience the city as a complex totality, which for people who live there, is very much related to the totality of the self. At the Highline distance is no boundary to intimacy, as one is set apart from the city, while remaining very much a part its enveloping life.
Although I would like to claim that our next destination was selected after careful thought and deliberation, I have to admit that the Empire State Building chose us more than we chose it. Towering over the skyline, it immediately attracted our gaze and offered us so clear a contrast to the scope, design, and spirit of our present surroundings that all other options seemed to dissolve. “Empire State seemed to float, like an enchanted fairy tower, over New York”, Rem Koolhaas observed in his “Delirious New York”. “A structure so lofty, so serene, so marvelously simple, so luminously beautiful, had never before been imagined.”
The neuropsychologist Julian Jaynes hypothesized that early language users, without well established relationships between the various regions of the brain needed for speech and comprehension, hallucinated the voices of the Gods and built monuments in the center of their cities to localize them. Drawn by the allure of the Empire State Building , traversing block after block in its shadow, it is not difficult to see the traces of such a primal relationship to structures. In a landscape of competing glitter and attraction, the Empire State Building attempts, like the Godheads of old, to seize the attention of its viewers, to inspire compelling interest and even awe in a city where interest is endlessly divided and awe is regarded as the most unforgivable sentimentality. As Koolhaas observed, “The ESB is the last manifestation of Manhattanism as pure and thoughtless process, the climax of the subconcious Manhattan”. Beyond conversations about aesthetics and cultural context, there is man’s fascination with the tremendous – his universal respect for natural power, elegant functionality, and sheer height – and it is this fascination that is animated in the ESB.
While Highline attempts to fuse with a surrounding vision of the city, the ESB seeks to overshadow – it does not strive to elevate, but to surpass. The ESB stands as self-absorbed monument to its own vision, an aesthetic end-in-existence, a thoughtless charge against the vault of heaven. One cannot help but connect the building to Stillman’s Tower of Babble – “a form of automatic architect, a sensuous surrender by its collective makers – from the accountant to the plumber – to the proccess of building”, as Koolhaas puts it. There is something undeniably arrogant and extra-human in the building. But there is also something necessarily superficial:
Pure product of proccess, the empire State can have no content. The building is sheer envelope…The skin is all or almost all. Empire State will gleam in all its pristine beauty, for our children’s children to wonder at.”
The lobby of the ESB is a museum of the myth of its own exterior. Reliefs of the buildings are carved into the walls. The famous image of King Kong scaling the side of the building is parodically recreated with an ape doll in one of the display cases.
The interior has its own beauty, but it is a different grade of beauty. The lobby, with its harsh, bright-dark textures does not welcome. It does not invite exploration. It seems to be cognizant of the fact that the utopian premise of the exterior is only a premise, that the interior of business offices and restaurants cannot justify the collective gesture of Babel-making any more than internal motivation can justify the poetry of sorrow in Ivanov. There is a sort of embarrassment in design.
The contrast between the Highline and the ESB is not only a constrast between two visions o f New York City, but between two visions of man and his project of civilization.
