FLASH MEMORY

Hallucinatory Homage

clip from Quantum Trilogy. Bradford Kessler and Chip Roundtree, 2010.

(Bradford and Chip‘ kindly asked me to write something for their recent show in Beijing, The Origin of Life)

Could there really be a village where houses stand right beside each other covering the fields and reaching further than the view from our hills, with men standing shoulder to shoulder between these houses day and night? Rather than imagining such a city, it’s easier for us to believe that Peking and its emperor are one, something like a cloud, peacefully moving along under the sun as the ages pass.
- Franz Kafka, “The Great Wall of China”

“Time spent there is time lost here.” Someone who spent time in China with me said that recently. We were Americans in the United States, drinking Tsingdao, eating General Tso’s chicken. It occurred to me she was right, in part. But this was partly why we went abroad in the first place. Not to spend time, but to have time, a good time. To find some time out of time. A chance to not only see the world from new perspectives, but to see the future speeding up, as the past slides away in slow waves, all under the haze of modern progress. What’s all that if not an attempt not to spend time at all, but to lose the timezone we knew, and at the risk or benefit of forgetting where we came from, to get lost in a completely different zone.
Start at the Forbidden City, that paradox of a city, royal palace open to the public, monument to a history — a history attacked as dangerous, by a monomaniacal chairman who stood on the gate just outside. There time gets lost in the edges, the grooves of Beijing, carved out 700 years ago and called hutong, a place where everything seems slow, except for the destruction of that slowness.

Time get lost too in the Central Business District, the new center of the city, off-center, where anonymous holes in the ground make us gasp for air with devastating gulfs. The blind buildings use their full height to proclaim the strength of Collective Man, says Auden — but here it is in a language we cannot understand. One building in particular, the CCTV headquarters, still stalks me at night, a 12 hour airplane ride away. A loop in steel and glass, terribly opaque, always unfinished, a primitive character, a gate into nothing, a closed circuit television screen commanding your gaze. The view is parallax, and it simply throws away everything you thought you knew. Its emptiness is like the whale’s whiteness. Wrapping around that nothing, it ties up our attentions, and like a snake it doesn’t let go. “It is a machine for complexity,” somebody said. (Someone else: “That building will be there for a thousand years.”) And so it must also be a machine for illusions and hallucinations.

If a time machine defies the linear progression of time — if it is able to bend time backwards and forwards, thus undoing the way that time as we know it behaves — it is not a machine for time. It is a machine that destroys the very notion of time.

Between ancient mazes and steel haze, bicycles and all the dry-wall in the world, the ox yoke and smokestack, everything a thousand times over, time splits like an atom, a family, a noodle. We live there in a strange recombination: the farther we tumble into the hazy future, blown forward by the storm of progress, the faster the past crumples into oblivion. As we stare back, and we can’t help it, it’s hard not to be nostalgic — as hard as it is to be nostalgic. Good thing beer is cheap: how else would we tell the past to get lost, and to get lost in it at the very same time.

Images flash into mind without order, with great speed, rushing forward and falling back, giving us vertigo. Like the way in movies that the camera slides forward towards its subject — the perplexed narrator, mouth agape, eyes glassy — while zooming back, throwing everything in the background farther away in a flash. Images of fireworks rising before descending into a hail of fire; image of a nude descending a staircase. That isn’t a descent, it is a disaster. In a timezone that is not American, we Americans are always living in the future. Without a present, we are not fixed. We can only be transfixed. Hypnotized, seers, we stare stupified as the past capitulates to a furious future, and the future, as new as it looks, horribly, boringly, mimics a past we have already seen (development, excess, destruction). As we get lost in the loop, tossed between the past and future, between moments of absurd comfort and extreme estrangement, we realize that we love being lost.

That’s Beijing.

***

If traveling in space is traveling in time, any travel, I thought, is like a halucination from which we never quite return: nothing is certain, everything is up for debate, the most ordinary things (time, for instance) are no longer taken for granted, and the strangest things are. A sea of people on bicycles, many men in the very same colored jumpsuits, bicycles carrying many men, carrying everything, a panoply of drinking friends disappearing into oblivion, the paranoia of a webpage not found, news reports that no one really believes even if everyone reads them eventually. When I and hundreds of foreigners were ferried to a patch of desert in Inner Mongolia, being developed into a luxurious city of architectural wonder, I could hear the vain roar of Shelly’s King Ozymandias. And I could see, like a mirage over the snowy dunes, the fuzzy image of Xanadu, that stately pleasure dome decreed by Kubla Khan not a hundred miles away (it’s now called Shangdu, or Kaiping, or nothing).

But rereading Coleridge’s poem again, and you remember that his account of opulence and grandeur may be just a vision in a dream, a hallucination brought on by the poet’s opium addiction. The image of the Khan’s summer palace – which would later be removed to Beijing – has all the authority of a grandiose Chinese historical text, translated into English, and read backwards during an acid trip. The sensation is one of zooming in on a television screen hooked up to our camera: frames giving way to frames and frames and frames. Perhaps this is why the poet writes, “Weave a circle round him thrice, /And close your eyes in holy dread.” Keep your eyes open instead, gazing through the loops, and you too might have visions, the kind of delectable illusions of grandeur that give way to, for instance, pleasure domes in the desert.
(Aside from the Forbidden City, and its successor the CCTV building, the entire capital city itself is built on a similarly hallucinatory series of loops: ring roads so bedeviling that no matter how many times we count to six, one is always missing.)

***

At the start of what we call modernity, another generation began to recognize that order was no longer an illusion that could be sustained. Life was just a tale told by an idiot. So great was their estrangement from the once familiar, the artists among them left behind their homes to take refuge in other, mainly European, timezones. Gertude Stein called them and all the other young people of the time the Lost Generation. They didn’t just stand apart from their own time; they got lost from it, and they recognized its own terrible loss. Having lost the time and space they once knew, the modernist artists dispensed with narrative or perspective or objectivity. From this loss, they found they could compress perspectives and times, and shore up their enchanted sphere against the rest of the world using whatever detritus the world had happened to leave in its wake. They relished the absurdity of progress, described by linear “time,” and so embraced the logic of the economic system that had prodded them into their ruthless detachment, the logic of creative destruction. One illogical but logical culmination of this modern version of progress was the manufacture of things that promised a better life, and those things that promised the near-total annihilation of life altogether.

Among the many logical but illogical responses to that was, for instance, Jean Tinguely’s fantastical machine installation, Homage to New York, which was erected in the garden at the Museum of Modern Art in New York one evening in 1960. Like some of his other works, the machine — built out of scraps found in a dump in Newark — was, like a Rube Goldberg machine designed by Sartre, excessively complex given its simple, fatal aim: it was built to be both self-constructing and self-destructing at the same time. This wasn’t just a clever metaphor for the existentialist crisis of the modern age. It was a kind of primitive time machine. As a curator wrote in the press release
Jean Tinguely’s experiments are works of art in which time, movement and gesture are demonstrated–not merely evoked. Being very much part of his time Tinguely uses machines to show movement, but he is fully aware that machines are no more permanent than life itself. Their time rubs out, they destroy themselves.
Naturally, the experiment did not go as planned; things that were meant to happen did not on time. Tinguely had envisioned something apocalyptic, with well choreographed pyrotechnics, a haze of gunpowder, intolerable noise. Instead, a weather balloon inflated and popped. A blue paintbrush missed the paper for which it was intended, the paper rolling uncontrollably out of the machine. Smoke wafted out and a player piano rattled something useless off. As a recording of his voice played, patiently explaining the piece, while a shrill voice corrected him, a fire began in the piano. Fearing another fire like the one that damaged the museum two years prior, officials summoned waiting firemen to extinguish the blaze. Before the machine sputtered out into a burnt husk, onlookers shouted “let it burn.”
(One of the architects of that CCTV building in the Central Business District called it a kind of “Trojan horse.” When it burned, people shouted the same thing as they did at MoMA.)

The accidental genius of Tinguely’s machine was not just its self-destruction as an illustration of temporariness. It was what it said about our unstable relationship with time. An ever strange relationship at a time when the past fades and the future rushes up, and the two collide faster than ever. When the best laid plans by the greatest minds of our generation — the stimulus packages and the campaign promises, the invasions and the Five Year Plans — spiral out, to be replaced of course by yet more plans. Plans, plans, plans. More connected than ever, with all the apps we need to plan better, we are more than ever, at a loss for planning very much at all. If we need to reschedule at the last minute, we can send an email.
An eon before the iPhone, the press called Tinguely’s contraption, smirkingly, “the gadget to end all gadgets.”

(Sometimes at the electronics market, between the iPhone knockoff and bewildered shoppers, I have looked for an Homage to Beijing.)