July 17, 2007
global cities: seeing there
The Global Cities show at the Tate Modern endeavors to take the measure (especially the measure of change) of ten cities: Cairo, Istanbul, Johannesburg, London, LA, Mexico City, Mumbai, Sao Paulo, Shanghai, and Tokyo, by way of understanding something (but what?) about the ongoing process of urbanization, especially insofar as it might describe the general motion of humanity toward the future.
Much of the exhibit presents itself most immediately as "information" rather than traditional "art" (though there are some thrills often considered to fall into the latter category, some unfamiliar Andreas Gursky photos not the least of 'em). The data is organized by five categories taken to be critically instructive about the situations: size, speed, form, density, diversity. Some of these are revelatory, as in the 3D contour maps of urban density. Dude, Cairo is serious.
But for the most part the show isn't about these things. It's about graphicalization of data as a problem — data that in their implications and scope threaten to overwhelm understanding — and about rhetorics of graphicalization. In thus reveals exactly the horizon of "information art," generally sacrificing the sublimity of what's been called elsewhere "the data sublime" on the pyre of comprehensibility. Perhaps this is a virtue, the opposite number to Fredric Jameson's postmodern art: the art which finally fails to articulate the complex space of late capitalism. At the same time, a museum isn't a library, and shouldn't be. Nor should it be a mortuary with a conceptual veneer and an awesome foyer, which is what the Tate is, for the most part.
The question, then, of capturing both the information and the experience of late modernity, of global cap and life in the ultropolis — of the existential conjuncture of collective and monadic — remains open, even as the Tate show closes it rather mildly. This goes again to gesture at the greatness of Gursky (to whom we shall not link as his affect is lost on these little screens), and the fundamental divide between him and Jeff Wall, who has of late supplanted him as the international photo-hero. Wall is brilliantly self-reflexive, a visual theorist of the social structure of visuality. But finally he speaks to the individual looking at (or for) the singular. Gursky's best efforts are exactly toward capturing the conjuncture, the both/and, the singular eye peering after the always-escaping affect of the world system.
Posted by jane at July 17, 2007 03:15 AM | TrackBack