Painting and urban planning are as incompatible as fire and water / translating Lu Xinghua again / PART ONE
[I have written about Lu Xinghua 陆兴华 in the past. I have translated earlier essays, including one in praise of Osama bin Laden and in meditation on the suicide of Deleuze and the Falling Man. I have made attempts on chapters from a recent book called The Anthropocene and Platform Cities 人类世与平台城市, which I found originally quite promising but cooled on. This essay from earlier in the year seems to be his attempt to marry an interest in art and design to a wider examination of urban philosophy—chéngshì zhéxué 城市哲学.] [But forgive me if this is overly schematic. Forgive me. Forgive me, Professor Lu, since I know you consider each sentence carefully and must not appreciate me tossing them here and there.]
Painting and urban planning are as incompatible as fire and water
绘画与城规水火不容
Lu Xinghua
I.
Edward Hopper's personal attitude to New York was this: he treated New York as a ham and his paintings were slices carved from it for us to see, so that we could see the city as he did. Hopper viewed the city with pessimism, suspicion, and reservations. On the tall buildings in New York, he said, I just never cared for the vertical. So, he always treated the architecture in his paintings with indifference. In his paintings, the city and its buildings are vernacular architectural styles, and they always play a negative role. New York was only an additional ingredient to add to the paintings.
But in his paintings he also proposed another New York. It was a New York that emerged from his work. In his hands, the city and its architecture were just the stage on which he set his own New York. And the real New York he painted was a ghost town.
The other New York that he created was one that invited the viewer to imagine entering it. It was mysterious, certainly. He did not paint the real New York in front of his eyes. He invites us to enter another New York, which exists in his paintings.
By contrast, architects and urban planners begin their work of design from an abstract space. They enter this zero dimensional abstract space and then with their geometric tools construct and enrich it, revise it, turning it into a space to perform our daily lives. These real estate spaces require our bodies to enter them, to fill them, to turn them into actual living urban spaces, just as our friendships activate WeChat.
The artist, though, from the beginning does not want this abstract space regulated by planning. The artist wants to open their painting into another city, to open up another type of urban space, and to invite the viewer to enter. The painter from one city is offering the possibility of entering another. The painter helps us escape the city of reality.
II.
The philosopher Henri Lefebvre says that the abstract space that can be designed by the architect and bought and exchanged as a commodity was developed by modernist painters. He has no doubt that cubist "painting" as represented by Picasso and Braque paved the way for the architectural space of the Bauhaus. “Just about the same time as Picasso, other great artists such as Klee and Kandinsky were inventing not merely a new way of painting but also a new 'spatiality'. It is possible that they went even further than Picasso in this direction—especially Klee. The object (painted on the canvas) was now apprehended in a perceptible—and hence readable and visible—relationship to what surrounded it, to the whole space of the picture. In Klee's work, as in Picasso's, space is detached from the 'subject', from the affective and the expressive; instead, it presents itself as meaningful.” “It fell to the painters, then, to reveal the social and political transformation of space. As for the architecture of the period, it turned out to be in the service of the state, and hence a conformist and reformist force on a world scale” (The Production of Space, p. 304 [translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith, whose version it appears Lu Xinghua is also referring to]).
He says that it was the cubist painters that opened up the space of architecture and urban design. Cubism and abstractionism were the source of Bauhaus. But the Bauhaus took this space of modernist painting and served the rationality of the state, to build factories and subdivisions [the word used here is xiǎoqū 小区, which might be interpreted as “subdivision” but also “housing complex,” “residential district,” or even “gated community”; there is a further discussion of the topic in an earlier entry on the work of Xu Qianjin], to plan the city, to establish the subdivision concentration camps.
This paper will attempt to revise this famous position of Lefebvre.
III.
So, because the starting point of each is completely different, the space offered by painting is a complete deviation from—as incompatible as fire and water with—the space designed in urban planning. New paintings and extant urban spaces are mutually destructive.
Painting is external to the city's planned spaces; the former is incompatible with the latter. So, the destruction and forced renewal of the workspaces of contemporary painters is an inevitable occurrence. They each have a deep-rooted hatred of each other. Painting is incompatible with the process of urbanization. Painting does not take place within the present urban space or within the extant urban space, nor can the event of painting fundamentally take place. The artist must leave the extant city, get beyond the city, and find as a subject the urban space that has not yet arrived. Painting in the city opens a window to the place beyond the city.
Industrialization leads to urbanization; urbanization makes out of all people material for machines; AliCloud and Meituan turn even our footsteps through the city and our purchasing history into commodities. Urbanization has no history because it pulverizes our historical narratives. But painting is also ahistorical. The frame does not allow narrative or history. So, painting is non-urban and ahistorical. In the city, why do we look at paintings? In fact, we must look at paintings. To look at paintings is to open a window in the walls of the city. Painting is a chance to burst forth from the extant city. Painting is a chance to escape the concentration camp housing developments. They are a prison break.
The purpose of looking at paintings is: to enter our own cities, regardless of the process of urbanization taking place around us. A painting we admire is like an entrance to the city we hope to come.
In Alex Katz's paintings, the most important element is the urban manual space [shǒugōng kōngjiān 手工空间 is rendered this way based on the approaching reference to Deleuze, who talks about l’espace manuel, or in Daniel W. Smith's translation, "the manual space"] that he creates. Through the manual creation of the urban space, he crafts a painting. In the history of painting itself, summarized by Deleuze, the creation of this manual space is the objective of the artist's struggle. [But if my interpretation of Lu Xinghua interpreting Deleuze is misleading, I recommend going back to the "The Diagram" in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, translated by Daniel W. Smith. This text will come back again.] This is not to say that painting is done to serve the urban space.
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