Changing Representations of Nature and the City

The 1960s-1970s and their Legacies

Gabriel N. Gee, Alison Vogelaar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781134968404
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

The turn of the 1960s-70s, characterized by the rapid acceleration of globalization, prompted a radical transformation in the perception of urban and natural environments. The urban revolution and related prospect of the total urbanisation of the planet, in concert with rapid population growth and resource exploitation, instigated a surge in environmental awareness and activism. One implication of this moment is a growing recognition of the integration and interconnection of natural and urban entities. The present collection is an interdisciplinary inquiry into the changing modes of representation of nature in the city beginning from the turn of the 1960s/70s. Bringing together a number of different disciplinary approaches, including architectural studies and aesthetics, heritage studies and economics, environmental science and communication, the collection reflects upon the changing perception of socio-natures in the context of increasing urban expansion and global interconnectedness as they are/were manifest in specific representations. Using cases studies from around the globe, the collection offers a historical and theoretical understanding of a paradigmatic shift whose material and symbolic legacies are still accompanying us in the early 21st century.

Part I

Forgotten Spaces

1 Beyond Narcissus

The Sea and the Metamorphosis of Port Cities in the Late 20th Century

Gabriel N. Gee

In late July 2005, a Ghost Ship designed by the American artist Chris Burden made its way from Fair Isle, Scotland, to Newcastle-upon-Tyne, North-East England, unmanned, self-navigating via GPS.¹ In the mouth of the river Tyne, it sailed solitarily under the city’s Millenium bridge, in what was once the busiest harbor for coal distribution in England. Ghost Ship brought to the fore the radical transformations of global maritime cultures and spaces that took place in the second half of the 20th century. With the introduction and subsequent adoption of the shipping container in the 1960s, the perception of maritime spaces evolved dramatically as container terminals replaced former docking areas, as automatization displaced harbor working communities and merchant navigation disappeared into a network of invisible motorways of the sea. Additionally, the 1960s witnessed a seminal shift in passenger transportation, with air travel overtaking maritime routes.² Jointly, these developments in the movement of goods and people induced a transformation of port cities’ imaginaries. This chapter looks at a series of artistic practices which have engaged with this profound metamorphosis taking place at the turn of the 1960s–1970s, in order to approach and unpack our changing perceptions of maritime spaces. The aesthetic representation of the relation between port cities and the sea has a long history. In the modern age and in the Western art historical tradition, the emergence of a new pictorial genre in the 17th century, the marine or seascape, embodied a novel perception and recognition of nature.³ The marine also significantly developed alongside the rise of the Dutch Golden age and its global commercial empire; hence it also articulated a world view with far reaching political consequences. While maritime painting is no longer a potent artistic genre, new forms of the marine have emerged in the late 20th century, which provide unique perspectives into the changing configurations of maritime socio-natures. To guide us into this reflection, I will revolve in particular around Allan Sekula and Noël Burch’s documentary film The Forgotten Space (2010), which explores the impact of the container on global maritime economic and cultural spaces.

Additionally, I refer to the mythological figure of Narcissus, to explore the evolution of port cities’ imaginaries. Narcissus, as the poet versed, fell in love with his own reflection mirrored in the liquid surface. Throughout history, Western port cities have emulated this mythological abandon in a reflective gaze. They and their adventurers were fascinated by the world beyond the seas; however, to what extent was their encounter with these worlds mediated by a projection of their own cultural expectations, fantasies and internal political ambitions? And to what extent did the caesura between sea and port in the 1960s invert this relation, as the sea was momentarily forgotten, while the world beyond channeled by emigration and cultural exchanges suddenly emerged at the heart of the port city? Port cities and coastal regions around the globe have been attracting increasing populations, and at a time of challenging global environmental issues, a multifaceted understanding of port cities’ cultural relations to the sea and the worlds beyond appears crucial to assert a critical renegotiation of their territorial inscription in their natural sites and cultural histories. I will evoke first the figure of Narcissus, and its metaphorical value for an understanding of maritime imaginaries; secondly, I will consider the sea as a ghostly presence in the age of the container, before exploring two possible articulations of a beyond Narcissus: on the one hand a Western path described as an ‘inverting’ of civilization, and on the other a Southern hemisphere alternative in the form of the Taiwanese Lily.

1 Foreword: Narcissus and Port Cities

An analogy between the figure of Narcissus and the European port city serves as a starting point for this reflection. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Narcissus falls in love with his own reflection in a pool, and only the words of the nymph echo his ultimately deadly fascination with his mirrored image.⁴ This pool can be seen as the sea, a surface of projection not only for the sailing ships of the adventurous travelers, but also for the desires fomented by the European port cities as they launched themselves into the conquest of spices and foreign lands. The arrival of Spanish and Portuguese vessels in the New World and the Indian Ocean constituted a decisive step in the ‘great opening up’ of the world taking place at the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries.⁵ The principles of an ‘économie-monde’ described by Fernand Braudel and originating in the Mediterranean Sea were expanding to new shores, thereby bringing about novel forms of global interconnectedness.⁶ However, despite a leap into unknown spaces, the European gaze was also fueled by internal visions that limited the reach of any encounter with the Other. Sanjay Subrahmanyam evokes for instance the fanatic messianic vision of the King of Portugal Don Manuel, and the subsequent ever present quest for the Kingdom of Prester John that accompanied Vasco de Gama’s first encounters on the Indian continent.⁷ In understanding the modes of representation of past and present Western societies, pictorial production offers a privileged entry into the narcissist character of these great discoveries.

For the age of the great European discoveries was paralleled by the advent of a new system of representation in Western culture, based on the use of perspective in the construction of a picture plane operating as a window open onto the world. Interestingly, Leon Battista Alberti, the major theoretician of this new pictorial space, specifically referred to the figure of Narcissus in his treaty on painting, Della Pittura (1436).⁸ Alberti sees in the mythological figure the inventor of painting, ‘the flower of all the arts,’ and concludes by asking: “what is painting but the act of embracing by the means of art the surface of the pool?” As commentators have underlined, Alberti’s reference to Narcissus is allegorical; it aims to highlight the demiurgic power of painting.⁹ The allegory itself also incarnates the manner in which the aesthetic system which emerged during the Renaissance accompanied the shaping of a modern Western cosmological conception in the age of discoveries. Through the use of linear perspective, the three-dimensional world finds itself projected onto a two-dimensional surface in a highly illusionistic manner, suggesting a truthful and objective representation. However, as Erwin Panofsky famously underlined, the system of perspective remains a constructive device, symbolic of the society which invented it, and its specific intellectual conception of the world.¹⁰ Similarly, the set of relations that the European adventurers formed with the ‘new world(s)’ was informed by ambiguous purposes. The journal reporting the travels of Joris Van Speilbergen around the world, significantly entitled The East and West Indian Mirror (1619), aimed to present to the reader “as in a mirror some strange things that the art of navigation has brought to light,” and to enlighten him in “foreign countries, peoples, nations and trade, just as if he had visited the same in person.”¹¹ Voyages, such as those of Captain Cook in the 18th century, hosted a personnel devoted to documentation, of space, flora and fauna, including artists.¹² Yet as Geoff Quilley pointed out, while such members of the crew professed noble ambitions, their participation was also motivated by career opportunity and financial gain, just as the travel’s aforementioned ethos of furthering knowledge was rooted in aggressive commercial competition.¹³ Behind the noble claim to represent the world as it appeared to the bold adventurers, lurked a narcissist projection that tended to mediate the perception of foreigners and foreigness.

A pictorial genre emerged to bear witness to the expansion of European maritime networks: the marine. Margarita Russell, in her study of Hendrick Cornelisz Vroom, the so-called father of Dutch marine art, aptly retraced the direct filiation between the growing interest in naturalistic representations of the sea, evident in religious paintings of the 15th and 16th centuries, and the appearance of an independent maritime pictorial genre in the Low Countries.¹⁴ Within the broader pictorial genre of landscape, which itself is closely associated to the Dutch Golden Age, the seascape rapidly came to represent a Mirror of Empire.¹⁵ As the Dutch, soon followed by the British, sent their ships across the seas to take part into the lucrative Asian and American trades, the marine could articulate the quintessential relation that the two nascent maritime nations were establishing with the world at large. Marco Vegetti, rereading Carl Schmitt’s Land and Sea (1942), points to the new world vision that underlaid the Western technological and industrial development, in which inland and ports have become a series of mere coastal connective interfaces within a deterritorialized network.¹⁶ Christina Payne, in discussing subsequent 19th-century British depictions of the sea, could zoom into John Brett’s Britannia’s Realm (1880), to identify the painting’s representation of a serene sea gently punctuated by a few sails on the horizon, as a quintessential symbol of the British empire.¹⁷ Within this new spatial order, the port city despite its far reaching tentacles, secretes its understanding of the world from within. In Skyline. La ville Narcisse, Hubert Damish evokes the possibility of a modern urban Narcissus, and explores the modalities of this urban inward turn.¹⁸ Our narcissist port city is not turned towards the sky, however, but towards the sea, and its mirroring trope should correspondingly be called ‘sealine.’ Within a history of globalization, the mirroring sealine became associated with the generic imposition of Western formats.¹⁹ However, to revert to the Ovidian tale, as Alina-Daniela Marinescu reminds us, Narcissus ultimately realizes the illusion of his infatuation, that it is himself with whom he has fallen in love. The poet grants him the crucial capacity to become aware of himself, the precondition through which to become conscious of the world.²⁰ Similarly, the narcissus port city saw its spell broken at the turn of the 1960s.

2 Spectral Navigation and Invisible Harbors

In the opening shot of The Forgotten Space, Allan Sekula and Noël Burch’s 2010 documentary film, the camera floats in the mouth of the Meuse, the much remodeled river by Rotterdam Harbor; cranes are visible in the distance, then two power plants towers, smoking, the sound of ships and seagulls. The narrator’s voice enters: we are mid-stream, in “a muddy estuary near a port,” a “forgotten space, out of sight, out of mind.” This spectral maritime space is located in an in-between, with the hinterland upstream, “a greedy continent,” restlessly demanding goods to be fed, and mirroring cities downstream, “other ports, great harbour cities,” all connected through the oceans and a hidden economy, “one thousand invisible ships, one and a half million seafarers, binding the world through trade.”²¹ Considered in relation to the photographic oeuvre of Allan Sekula, The Forgotten Space condensed the Los Angeles photographer’s reflection on maritime spaces identified as the locus of drastic and unequal globalization forces.²² The sea has become invisible, a mere gliding surface on which ships move according to preordained routes between similar functional port-container terminals. Yet, there is a labor involved on board those ships, and awaiting their cargo: the sequence dedicated to Sekula’s home town focuses mainly on the Hispanic community servicing the trucks that carry the containers inland to the consumers. Sekula in that respect rejects the assumption that with t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Global Cities, Global Nature
• Part I Forgotten Spaces
• Part II Artificial Spaces
• Part III Interstitial Spaces
• List of Contributors
• Index