Notes from the Underground

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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.

All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.

Sunday, February 17, 2008

 
In Against Venice, Regis Debray decries the city of Venice as a hyperreal sanctuary for the artificial and picturesque, where the tourist can bathe in the festive unreality of the city's "ongoing fancy dress ball." Venice only plays the city and we play at discovering it, through a repertoire of poses, temptations and daydreams. I was reminded of this when I came across this article:

"Venice is a corpse. It died in 1797 with the last, preposterous old Doge eased out by the French. Napoleon then insulted the Venetians by calling the Piazza San Marco Europe’s finest drawing-room... As Henry James observed, "Of all the cities in the world it is the easiest to visit without going there." That does not seem to stop them. Preserving the fiction has become destructive of the very spirit that made Venice a miracle.

It was Ruskin who indexed Venice for almost all subsequent visitors. Applying a nihilistic and absurd rejection of wealth-producing modernity to the Pearl of the Adriatic, Ruskin fiercely opposed the creation of the vaporetto service to the Lido. When he was in Venice to finish Portrait of a Lady in 1881, James was also cross about democratic water transit systems, raging about the "accursed whistling of the dirty steam engine of the omnibus."

James also found poverty useful for his art and conducive to his pleasure, a disagreeable example of the retardataire snobbismo that has frozen Venice in the past. In 1872 James was complaining that the Lido was being "improved" and the deserted beaches and dunes were turned into a mere "site of delights" for visitors less worthy than The Master. These improvements, of course, eventually comprised the splendid Hotel Des Bains and the Hotel Excelsior.

Ruskin and James wanted Venice kept in a state of picturesque poverty. James resented modern plumbing because it would deny him the sight of washerwomen struggling with huge ewers and pitchers. He resisted the industrialisation of glass-making because it would reduce the number of bead-stringers whose back-breaking labour he enjoyed contemplating. Never mind that vaporetti and factories might help Venetians prosper — filthy old conditions were better for art. "The misery of Venice," James said, "is part of the spectacle ...it was part of the pleasure." To James, Venetian beggar girls were at their very best when starved and wearing thin, exhausted, limp clothing: "it would certainly make an immense difference if they were better fed."

The slightly potty futurist F.T. Marinetti thought Venice a "jewelled hip bath for cosmopolitan courtesans ...a great sewer of traditionalism." On the evening of 8 July 1910 Marinetti ambushed travellers arriving home from the Lido, shouting "We want electric lamps brutally to cut and strip away ...your mysterious, sickening, alluring shadows! Your Grand Canal, widened and dredged, must become a great commercial port. Trains and trams, launched on wide roads built over canals that have finally been filled-in will bring you mountains of goods and a shrewd, wealthy, busy crown of industrialists and businessmen... Le Corbusier had an unrealised design for a new hospital at San Giobbe. The Biennale brought some decent architecture: Josef Hoffmann in 1934, Gerrit Rietveld in 1954 and Alvar Aalto in 1956, lately Zaha Hadid et al., but it is a passing show."


I'm less than impressed with the implied elevation of Marinetti and his fascist dogma above Ruskin and his naive brand of medievalist socialism (reading Marinett's advocacy of brutal electric light simply makes me think of Tanizaki and his anti-modern polemic, In Praise of Shadows), but there is nonetheless a valid argument to be had here, which I've written about before on my other weblog. Modern Venice is trapped like a fly in amber, forever preserved more or less as it was at the fall of the Republic, when its history ended. In its present form it is less of a subject in its own right than an object for the gaze of others. The Lido is indeed the only part of Venice to include modern architecture, such as rather drab fascist era casinos and cinemas. Its main street also features an art deco hotel, albeit not the one Von Aschenbach stayed at, its exterior covered in beautifully painted stucco sculptures of the muses. Beneath the bustle of tourism, Venice is inert, etiolated and lifeless, a ruin caught in an endlessly deferred process of decay; and this is, course, precisely the source of its captivation. By contrast, London is unremittingly modern, its structure a pullulating mass of destruction and construction; to my mind it is also unremittingly ugly, noisy and dirty, a place that has come into being without any consideration for aesthetics or quality of life. By contrast, the lack of cars in Venice makes it quiet and serene. Were a firestorm to destroy all of the new buildings constructed in London since the second world war, I find it difficult to believe that I would miss a single one of them.

In terms of aesthetics, there is really no choice for me between Venice and modern cities. But in terms of politics, I'm less certain. It's true that most economic activity in Venice has either adapted itself to tourism or migrated to Mestre. It's true that the city is becoming increasingly depopulated. Nonetheless, there's something in the idealised role of craftmanship that Ruskin saw in Venice that reminds me contemporary plans for another medieval italian city, Orvieto:

"Slow City" advocates argue that small cities should preserve their traditional structures by observing strict rules: cars should be banned from city centers; people should eat only local products and use sustainable energy. In these cities, there's not much point in looking for a supermarket chain or McDonald's. "Our goal is to create liveable cities," says Cimicchi, a cheerful 51-year-old with a white moustache and laugh lines around his eyes. "We are working, if you will, on the concept of the utopian city, in the same way as the writer Italo Calvino and the architect Renzo Piano have done."

To a certain extent, a "slow city" tries to preserve the civic structures from medieval or Renaissance times, while at the same time incorporating the most recent scientific findings of ecology and sustainability. Even modern technology is allowed if it helps to meet the city's goals. For example, Cimicchi is hoping to install electronically controlled access gates in Orvieto, which would grant entrance exclusively to city residents. Pisa already has a similar system: If the camera catches you letting the parking meter run out -- whether it's for a single minute or an entire day -- you can expect to receive a parking ticket.

There's still work to be done in Orvieto. Even with its medieval charm, the hillside town still has a good way to go before reaching Cimicchi's ideal of a utopian city. Retailers' fears of decreased profits have led to continued opposition to a total ban on automobiles in the city center. And Coca-Cola is still served in street cafés, on request."


As some of this hints at, I suspect that much of the ideas behind the Slow City movement are somewhat impractical and no more likely to come to pass than anything envisaged by Ruskin or Morris. In practice, I'm less than convinced whether I would want or be able to live in a city like this (and without moving to Shropshire or Norfolk, I couldn't anyway). But it's still an idea I find myself drawn to.

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posted by Richard 4:03 pm