On my first visit to Bath as an adult I was struck by a piece of information given to me by a taxi driver. “Looks old doesn’t it”, he gestured at the Georgian terraces, with their luminous ancient stone. I agreed, it did. “Well that soapy stuff has to be replaced every few years – each brick – the acid rain you see.”
We think that cities, with their stone monuments and sedimented layers of historical grime, their vast mysterious processes, are permanent and enduring. That part of their point is to project beyond mortality. But cities are time-bound, forever treading on their own disappearance. We’re familiar with postcards of Rome, “The Eternal City”, showing the bright tarmac of the four-lane highway snaking insouciantly metres from the ruined coliseum. Reminiscent of what Claude Levi-Strauss found in the cities of South America; extremes of decay and renewal; temporal distortion; the ancient slum abutting the futuristic skyscraper. As Siegfried Kracauer wrote of Berlin in the 1920s “If some street blocks seem to created for eternity, then the present-day Kurfürstendamm is the embodiment of empty, flowing time in which nothing is allowed to last”.
Trisha Brown "Roof Piece", 1973 Gelatin silver print, Courtesy Broadway 1602 New York © Babette Mangolte
The latest exhibition at the Barbican Pioneers of the Downtown Scene seeks to enact a temporal leap: to hold a disappeared New York up against a possible future London. From the late-60s to the mid-70s, the work of Laurie Anderson, Trisha Brown and Gordon Matta-Clark sought to use performance amongst other media, to engage the city from their quarters of SoHo in lower Manhattan, rive themselves into its changing nature, while at the same time having it symbolise “the hard-shelled cultural reality we meant to push against”. Pioneers employs a mixture of frontier and community language, selling itself to us as a portrait of brave bohemians pitted against the height of the city’s post-war economic decline, working in the large windowed loft spaces vacated by industry, which took with it the middle classes and public services leaving a metropole that was in Anderson’s words “dark, dangerous and broke”. But ultimately it raises some larger questions. Of how cities remodel, and what place art might have in processes of change.
“This is the time, and this is the record of the time. This is the time, and this is the record of the time”. Laurie Anderson’s robotic susurrations on the first track of her 1982 debut album Big Science, make dramatic play of the gap between the event and the document of the event. The ever-vanishing moment is all through Anderson’s frenetic, graphomanic documentation of the city. Her casual photo of a wall of a town house, covered with the palimpsest of traces of the disappeared buildings that once abutted it, the sun-tan of a pitch roof, an older line of chimneys drawn across the top, capture the problem of the city’s disappearance, the quiet abstraction of its fitted-togetherness and falling-apartness. Her Institutional Dream series from 1974, in which she slept rough in public spaces and recorded her dreams is here documented in photographs. Cramped under arches, her small missives from the dream side are ephemeral, ordinary and mundane, the promise of public space is broken very quietly.
