Reimag(in)ing the Urban

Abstract

“Reimag(in)ing the Urban” compares the way in which contemporary German artist Thomas Struth’s four photographic series construct relationships between the urban environment and its inhabitants to contemporary Dutch architect, Rem Koolhaas’s employment of various forms of photography to map, image, and analyze the late twentieth‐century city. The article proposes that Struth’s photographic series produce a complex matrix of urban sociocultural production that simultaneously emanates from urban space and envelops it, offering a variegated understanding of the operations that develop between individuals and the urban environment. Koolhaas’s collection of images in the book, Mutations (2000), presents a challenge to such more traditional forms of visualizing the city, which Koolhaas believes have become obsolete, replaced by new urban determinants such as speeds, flows, and GIS systems that require comparable forms of imaging. Comparing Struth’s and Koolhaas’s approaches to conceiving the contemporary city raises important issues about the ways of imaging the city and, with that, concomitant concerns of visuality, representation, history, and subjectivity.

Keywords:

• Photography
• Subjectivity
• Architecture
• Koolhaas, Rem (b. 1944)
• Struth, Thomas (b. 1954)

Notes

1 For a longer discussion of this aspect of Struth’s work, see Norman Bryson, “Not Cold, Not Too Warm: The Oblique Photography of Thomas Struth,” in John M. Armleder, In Broad Daylight: Jeff Koons, Jean‐Luc Mylayne, Thomas Struth, Sue Williams, Parkett 50/51 (Zurich: Parkett‐Verlag, 1997), 157–66.

2 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Portraits/Genre: Thomas Struth,” in Thomas Struth: Portraits (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 1997), 161.

3 For a discussion of the relation between the concept of archive and Struth’s four series, see Nana Last, “Thomas Struth: From Image to Archive to Matrix,” Praxis 7 “Untitled Number Seven” (2005): 78–87.

4 See Last, “Thomas Struth,” for more on this topic.

5 Norman Bryson, “Thomas Struth’s Nescient Portraiture,” in Thomas Struth: Portraits, 132–33.

6 Bryson, “Thomas Struth’s Nescient Portraiture.”

7 Hinted at in the accumulation of cities in Struth’s first three series, the landscape series serves another important function, it brings to the fore an additional frequently utilized attribute (along with class and ethnicity) of identity and difference belying much of traditional archive production— nationality.

8 Rather than construct separate categories, the resultant composite urban matrix, although composed of seemingly separate archives, does not as much frame distinct categories as deconstruct them, thereby indicating the impossibility of keeping the categorical distinctions produced within and between the archives, impenetrable to one another. As a result, viewing Struth’s archives as productive of an overarching matrix confronts the various dualities and dichotomous categories seen to define the subject matter of the individual collections. Struth’s collection of archives becomes a matrix through its ability to dissociate and multiply the various aspects and elements of knowledge.

9 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Thomas Struth’s Archive,” in Thomas Struth Photographs: The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, March 25–April 29, 1990, exh. cat. (Chicago, The Renaissance Society, 1990), 9. Struth sees a quality “engender[ed] by the mere fact that photographs of high‐rise buildings in Tokyo appear simultaneously with eighteenth‐century Roman architecture…”

10 Buchloh, “Thomas Struth’s Archive,” 9.

11 Rem Koolhaas, Stefano Boeri, Sanford Dwinter, Nadia Tazi, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Mutations: Rem Koolhaas, Harvard Project on the City, Stefano Boeri, Multiplicity, Sanford Kwinter, Nadia Tazi, Hans Ulrich Obrist (Barcelona: ACTAR, 2000).

12 Mutations is described as a manual for the design of cities. While Struth creates his photographs of the city and Koolhaas includes photographs by others in his books, each remains fundamentally engaged in acts of visually representing the city, producing contrasting depictions of the contemporary urban situation.

13 Koolhaas, Mutations, 19.

14 Koolhaas, Mutations, 19.

15 In some ways, the situation Koolhaas postulates is similar to that raised by conceptual artists in the 1960s, who wanted to challenge the limits and privileging of the visual in the “visual” arts. One of the ways this challenge manifested itself was in the replacing of traditional visual features with written language. For one strain of conceptualism (such as that developed by Joseph Kosuth), the replacement of “visual” art by “written” language was seen to move into the nonvisual and nonmaterial realm. Another group of conceptual artists, who also invoked related aesthetic strategies of incorporating language, understood the replacement of traditional visual imagery by language to be less a trespassing beyond the limits of the visual, than an expansion of the visual to acknowledge language and writing. This second approach is exemplified by the conceptual artist Mel Bochner’s painting from 1972, Language is not Transparent, which both acknowledged the visual to include language and proclaimed the continued potential for painting itself.

16 Antoine Picon, “Architecture, Science, Technology and the Virtual Realm” in Antoine Picon and Alessandra Ponte, eds., Architecture and the Sciences: Exchanging Metaphors (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2003), 307.

17 Sarah Williams Goldhagen, “Extra Large” in New Republic 235, no. 5 (31 July 2006): 21–26.

18 Goldhagen, “Extra Large,” 26.

19 One might also ask: What possibilities or failures of visualization do the images suggest?

20 The opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics in August 2008 offer an excellent example of the mass ornament.

21 Sigfried Kracauer, “The Mass Ornament,” trans. Barbara Correll and Jack Zipes, in New German Critique 5 (Spring 1975): 67. “Das Ornament der Masse” was first published in Frankfurter Zeitung in 1927.

22 Kracauer, “The Mass Ornament,” 69.

23 Kracauer, “The Mass Ornament,” 67. Kracauer similarly posits an association between these spatial aerial images and what he calls rationality, which can in some ways be likened to Koolhaas’s invoking of empirical computation as the nonvisible means by which we understand the contemporary city.

24 It is interesting to note that geometrical, seemingly ordered, rationalized formations are notably absent from Struth’s work. Neither his posed portrait groupings nor the crowds depicted in the museum series enter that territory. Even the streetscapes, shown at an angle, deemphasize geometrical order that evokes more complex and ambiguous acts of perception.

25 Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for New York (New York: Monacelli Press, 1994), 217.

26 Kracauer, “The Mass Ornament,” 69.

27 Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), 8.

28 Goldhagen, “Extra Large,” 24.