Jackson Pollock’s paintings are really plans for imaginary cities.

The proficient reader, familiar with all that has been written about the loss of the humanist ideals is probably not going to be much impressed with what I found in the mysterious notebook, in one of Beirut’s back streets, perched over a cemetery constructed on the remnants of a Phoenician temple. This is precisely my point, and a way forward: Things have a habit of coming back, especially in cities like Beirut. Moreover, things don’t just simply ‘come back’. When they do come, they bring with them an inexplicable sense of dread, which may be due to the fact that we thought that what has come back had been lost forever, that it is no longer ‘real’ or from our reality, and as such it throws all of this reality into doubt. I’ve heard, for instance, that in some Arab countries, people still erect tents in the backyards of their newly constructed mansions. For some, this is a certain sign of backwardness, but this is far too easy a conclusion. These tents were supposed to have disappeared, and yet here they are where one least expects them, unassuming and filled with dread, precisely because they are fragments of a past that was supposed to have been buried by modernity. In that sense cities like Beirut live in a perpetual fear of what has been gone manifesting itself again, coming to life in the form of a long forgotten relative from some mountain village who has come to pay us a visit in our chic, urban condominium where the neighbours only speak perfect French, or maybe in the form of an old picture of a grandfather in his outmoded outfit, lying in the attic, or a mispronounced word revealing the dialect that we try so hard to get rid of.

I believe that the same dread emanates from the building with the slightly tilted axis of symmetry, which is opened up and fragmented, sure, but which still contains fragments of what used to be, fragments that contain a perpetual threat of them coming to life again, casting a shadow of doubt on the way things are right now. After all, a “monster” is only monstrous insofar as it is formed of the same members that constitute the human body, but in the body of the monster these members are ‘rearranged’, deformed, while all the while carrying traces of what they used to be, of their original purity. This is why all monsters have humanoid features. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be monsters at all, at least not scary monsters.

The notebook’s writer knew all of this, he felt that dread affecting his whole being, at least I assume he did when he wrote:

My body is everywhere: the bomb which destroys my house also damages my body, insofar as the house was already an indication of my body. This is why my body always extends across the tool which it utilizes: it is at the end of the cane on which I lean against the earth; it is at the end of the telescope which shows me the stars; it is on the chair, in the whole house; for it is my adaptation to these tools.

The monstrous, fragmented body becomes part of the morselated, apprehensible house (and, by extension, the city around it), and not simply a metaphor for it. Furthermore, the house becomes a precondition of that body, and not vice versa.

This brings about many different problematics, but I’ll restrain myself to seeing one through, because I believe that it would be a way of deciphering the enigmatic statement about Pollock mentioned above. What would happen when the fragmented body encounters the decay of the things which have become its extension? Buildings decay, cities decompose in front of the un-amazed eyes of their citizens, and even the most monstrous of bodies can become ill. I encountered a great number of such questions in the notebook, especially towards the end:

What would happen if the air-conditioning system at Spinney’s just stopped working? What would happen if the ceiling in ‘Acid’ started leaking water on the dancers inside? What if people in the Abraj cinemas started to feel the cracks in the aisles beneath their feet? What if the letters in all of the new neon signs in Downtown Beirut started to drop out and the streetlights stopped functioning? All of this may happen so suddenly, and still all the buildings will remain joined by passages that are the conduits of nothing. They will become like jello left out in the sun for too long.

All I could do was imagine the end of the world – but, amazingly, the author of the notebook provided me with an answer, or maybe the beginning of one. Actually it looked more like a plan for action than a real theoretical answer: My body is everywhere is no longer a metaphor for the body in fragments, but a real possibility for the body in perpetual motion. The body is everywhere, it walks around the fragments of the city, with each step encountering fragments that remind it of how things were, or how they could have been, feeling at all times the loss of something that it can never determine, seeing the world ending at every moment, and yet it cannot stop. The only option for this body is to map everything with exquisite detail, to map not the beginning of things (like maps and architectural plans usually do) but their inevitable end.

I decided to make a map of Beirut using the crap left behind by dogs as landmarks. This first sounded like a silly idea, even a repulsive one, but the more I thought about it the more it made sense. Beirutis do not have a tradition of raising dogs, yet, one can, of late, encounter dog crap everywhere. In addition, dogs are soiled animals according to Islam, and yet more and more people, many of them Muslims, are seen walking their dogs. Who owns these dogs, where do they live and where do they take them for their walks were my initial questions – questions that I could only answer by placing myself in a different temporality, in a slightly recent past, when dogs were not fashionable. Then, I realized that in order to produce such a map, I have to radically change my point of view, or the position and nature of the looking eye to be more precise. I cannot simply use the Eye-in-infinity-looking-below that is used in regular maps. Finally, the idea of making a map based on my movements following the movements of the people and their dogs struck me like a bomb on the head. This map doesn’t need a looking eye, and still, the question of what it would look like still haunts me.

Two pages after that in the notebook I saw the statement about Jackson Pollock, neatly framed in a textbook. Right below it, I read what seemed to be an explanation of the statement, that Pollock’s paintings are really city plans:

Jackson Pollock was not really painting, he was moving in and out of the canvas, letting the paint drip or splash in different ways. The lines on the canvas are precisely the lines that his motions created; the lines are a recording of these motions and actions, accompanied at all times with a great feeling of loss, the loss of the original purity of the flat white canvas. At the same time, he couldn’t help but succumb to the sense of dread that emanated from the fact that he was indeed a part of this big heap of decomposing and fragmented lines that lay beneath him. The past and the future became encapsulated in the present moment.

That was the last piece of coherent writing in the notebook. After that, one could find bits and pieces of texts – some of them very poignant – packed in the remaining few pages, things about “looking for a saviour” or an old man  “who is speaking to me. His lips are moving but I can’t hear what he says”. What I believe is that the architect went on to carry out his plan of the eyeless map, although I can’t imagine how, or what the result would look like. I still hope that, maybe one day, I’ll meet him, and maybe I’ll recognize him and we can talk a bit – although, judging from the last phrase he wrote in his notebook, the chances for that are really slim. It was, by the way, the only sentence written in French:

“Soyons désinvoltes. N’ayons l’air de rien.”

Copyright © Tony Chakar, 2003

Reprinted with kind permission of Tony Chakar. Read Parts I and II here and here

These staircases that lie in front of me, are gateways to other worlds. These worlds are not extraordinary worlds, and this is not science fiction. I am standing on top of one of the staircases that link the top of the Mar Mitr hill to the region of Geitawi; the staircase is steep and I can clearly see beneath me the hustle and bustle of that densely populated region. I can see its electric lights, its people coming and going, gesturing, I can hear their shouts mixed with the car-horns – who would have thought that Heaven could lie underneath? All of these sights and sounds contrast sharply with the limbo I’m in now; everything here is quiet, and no car seems to pass on this narrow, ill-lit, unpaved road, and the angels in the cemetery below me fly so low. The people here all seem to have gone to bed, even though it hasn’t even passed 8pm. Not a sound, not even the familiar sound of television sets broadcasting the evening news…

Realizing that I had stood at the exact point which the writer was describing felt very strange, but that was not what preoccupied me at that point. I was thinking about what I had read, and I thought that it made a lot of sense, especially if one compares this to another, more famous city, say Paris. Over there, unity is achieved almost effortlessly, and the walker is not faced with the obscure feeling of crossing unseen boundaries at each turn, around every corner. And, he or she is not continually offered glimpses of other times and places while walking around. After reading that, the idea of Beirut being formed by heavily contrasting fragments – each fragment producing its own meaning – seemed so natural and true. Furthermore, every fragment was living in a time of its own, in a temporality that was entirely different from the one right next to it (which made the reference to “gateways to other worlds” so accurate). If one were to look at these from the outside, these fragments would make the city they belonged to completely unfathomable, even chaotic, and I started to believe, like the architect/writer believed, that the only way of producing sense and meaning, the only way that these fragments could be united, was through direct experience, through the movement of our bodies in and out of every fragment.

Does the above constitute an insight into the enigmatic statement about Jackson Pollock’s paintings?

Jackson Pollock’s paintings are really plans for imaginary cities.

I believe so. But, before we get to that, there is a distance to be walked, so to speak. What struck me most about the above description of the staircases was the sense of dread that I felt emanating from these words (was it the dread of being “sucked in” by the other worlds? The fear of the permanent state of non-control that was implied? I don’t know.) What was also remarkable was the fact that these words, and others in the notebook, absolutely, though unintentionally, destroyed all the foundations of the Vitruvian notions of beauty and order that we are so accustomed to, that are so ‘natural’, almost like a fatality. I remember hearing that the French magazine Paris-Match once voted Beirut ‘the ugliest city on the Mediterranean’, and I could imagine the French reporter walking around and brushing shoulders with the notebook’s author, each seeing the same things, and yet so differently. What I mean is that, while the eyes of the architect in question were opening issues up for scrutiny and questioning, the reporter of Paris-Match was forcing these issues to a closure, or what seemed to be a closure from his perspective.

At one point, for instance, the author wonders why the axis of symmetry in buildings, when it existed, was always a vertical axis (later on, I found out that he already knew, and that his question was only rhetorical). He then went on to talk about the visual ambivalence created by what was probably an involuntary horizontal axis of symmetry in some of Mies van der Rohe’s constructions. After that, he started a series that began with “what if?” One of them, for instance, was to ask what would happen if the axis of symmetry was tilted 20 degrees to the left or to the right. It was theoretically conceivable, of course, but would it still remain an axis of symmetry? And, more importantly, what would the resulting building be, what would it resemble? The question of resemblance is of central importance to this issue. The axis of symmetry had to be vertical because – at least in the humanist architectural tradition inherited from the Renaissance – architecture was analogous to the human body, to the perfect human body that was shaking of centuries of being put to shame by the system of thought prevailing in the Middle Ages. The theoretical writings of the Old Masters of the Renaissance, from Alberti to Palladio and Leonardo da Vinci, confirmed this analogy between body and architecture, and turned the human body into an authoritative foundation for architecture.  However, it seems that, since then, there has been a gradual loss of that body from architecture, until it became clear, in the modern architecture of our modern times, that the premises of architecture are to be found in a high degree of technology and specialization. So, why is our mysterious author preoccupied with the human body to such an extent?

If we think again about tilting the axis of symmetry a few degrees to the right or left, what kind of conclusions can we draw? The easiest and least interesting one would be a building that seems to be partly embedded in the earth on which it is built. But, that would be in sharp contradiction with the fact that the axis of symmetry’s main function is to give balance to the building. In that sense, the two parts created by the axis have to be not only identical, but of equal value. Clearly, the two parts of a partly-buried building are not, and cannot be, equal. That would leave us with the only logical conclusion possible for tilting the axis of symmetry: to remain balanced, the building itself has to be ‘dismembered’, opened up, and each mass, each detail, would find its balancing equivalent a little farther up or down. That is not a simple thing, and it introduces new problematics that architecture has to deal with – especially if the axes are, as it usually happens, multiplied in one building (a building with, say, two axes of symmetry, one in the plan and one in the façade).

The body as authoritative metaphor loses its centrality

it cannot fix or stabilize. Rather, its limits, interior or exterior, seem infinitely ambiguous and extensive; its forms, literal or metaphorical, are no longer confined to the recognizably human but embrace all biological existence from the embryonic to the monstrous; its power lies no longer in the model of unity, but in the intimation of the fragmentary, the morselated, the broken.

This body is not simply an inversion of the classical ideal body, not only the act of turning that body (and all the concepts that are based upon it) on its head, like at medieval carnivals, for instance. It carries with it an irrevocable loss – the loss not only of that holistic body, but also of what used to hold it together, and the world that had been built around it.

To be continued…

Copyright © Tony Chakar, 2003

Reprinted with kind permission of Tony Chakar. Read Part I here.

Jackson Pollock’s paintings are really plans for imaginary cities.

I know that this statement hardly makes any sense, and, to be honest, I was as much surprised by it when I first read it as any reader would be. Still, I have to admit that it carries an eerie truth that one cannot shake off very easily – especially since the conditions of how I came across that statement may have reinforced the emotional charge encapsulated in it.

I was, in fact, taking a long, slow evening walk in the back streets of my neighbourhood, an activity which I used to practice regularly when I was younger. Now, I do it less often, since somehow, as life goes by, a regular activity becomes a burden. My walk took me from the Sioufi garden, up the hill to the region behind the Saint-Cœurs school, then from there to the Lazarus school, which I circled to get to Sassine Square, passing over the old Greek Orthodox cemetery of Mar Mitr. I once read somewhere that the cemetery and the church next to it were built on the site of the remains of an old Phoenician temple, and, almost dizzied by the strong scent of the cypress trees planted there, looking everywhere except ahead of me, I stumbled on an old black suitcase lying on the side of the road. In normal circumstances, I would have left the suitcase there and walked away, but I saw what looked like a small notebook sticking out of the case, and my curiosity led me to pick it up.

There is a reason, of course, for my long and boring digression – the small black notebook is precisely where I found the statement about Jackson Pollock’s paintings. The notebook was practically filled from cover to cover with writings, notes and drawings made by someone who was definitely an architect, judging by the nature of the texts and drawings, which all revolved around the city – Beirut, to be exact – or, more accurately, around the physical experiences of the writer in that city. I started flipping through the pages with anticipation and a sense of insecurity, because I thought that its owner would be waiting for me around the next corner to reclaim his property. I couldn’t make a lot of sense of what was written, since it was dark and all I had for light was a dim, yellowish street lamp that hardly illuminated anything at all. However, I could tell from the state of the texts and images that the writer had been in a state of urgency, especially towards the end. When I got home and finally examined the notebook closely, my original feeling was confirmed: The texts and drawings of the first few pages are deliberate and ordered – almost rehearsed – but then, further towards the end, this sense of deliberation subsides, and we are left with an almost haphazard collection of unrelated thoughts and drawings. Also, and in addition to the fact that the author was obviously in a hurry towards the end, the last few pages were extremely dense, as if no corner on the paper, no matter how small, had been intended to be left white. In fact, what started out as writing was ultimately transformed into unfathomable graffiti, which was made even more unintelligible by the fact that the drawings were entwined into what was written, to the point that both had become indistinguishable.

That said, after careful examination, it became very clear that there was no unity in the notebook. Of course, notebooks are not meant to have unified contents, but that’s not what I mean: it seemed as if the notebook was made of fragments, and, despite the coherence of these fragments, their condition made it very difficult for this coherence to come through. An idea would start on page 6, for instance, and then would be continued on page 19, while the pages 6 to 19 were permeated with other ideas that would start there and end a few pages later. Each of these fragments, I thought, produced its own meaning, while the general meaning of the whole thing would only unfold itself in relation not to the writer (as in, say, a diary), but to the city he was living in, experiencing with all his force. The notebook was a metaphor for Beirut.

I write “was” because there was something extremely ominous about the form of the notebook, a feeling that was later supported by the content of the ‘work’. It seemed as if the architect, the author, knew that his life would end, or let’s say would be radically changed, when the last white spot on the last page was filled with his ideas. That would probably explain why the last few pages were filled up almost to the point of explosion – or, if I wanted to use the metaphor of an old city within its walls, I would say that the inhabitants of such a city were certain that only void and death lay beyond their city walls, so their buildings became denser the farther one went from the centre to the periphery of the city. Didn’t sailors in ancient times believe that their ships would fall off the horizon if they ventured into the open sea? The architect had been an urban sailor from these ancient times.

My suspicions were, as I mentioned above, confirmed by some of the scattered ideas that I read in the notebook. Beirut was his whole universe, and there was no indication whatsoever of anything that might have existed beyond it. Here is, for instance, one of those fragments I spoke of (I made the effort to re-arrange it, so that it regains its unity, and becomes easier to read):

These staircases that lie in front of me, are gateways to other worlds. These worlds are not extraordinary worlds, and this is not science fiction. I am standing on top of one of the staircases that link the top of the Mar Mitr hill to the region of Geitawi; the staircase is steep and I can clearly see beneath me the hustle and bustle of that densely populated region. I can see its electric lights, its people coming and going, gesturing, I can hear their shouts mixed with the car-horns – who would have thought that Heaven could lie underneath? All of these sights and sounds contrast sharply with the limbo I’m in now; everything here is quiet, and no car seems to pass on this narrow, ill-lit, unpaved road, and the angels in the cemetery below me fly so low. The people here all seem to have gone to bed, even though it hasn’t even passed 8pm. Not a sound, not even the familiar sound of television sets broadcasting the evening news…

Realizing that I had stood at the exact point which the writer was describing felt very strange, but that was not what preoccupied me at that point. I was thinking about what I had read, and I thought that it made a lot of sense, especially if one compares this to another, more famous city, say Paris. Over there, unity is achieved almost effortlessly, and the walker is not faced with the obscure feeling of crossing unseen boundaries at each turn, around every corner. And, he or she is not continually offered glimpses of other times and places while walking around. After reading that, the idea of Beirut being formed by heavily contrasting fragments – each fragment producing its own meaning – seemed so natural and true. Furthermore, every fragment was living in a time of its own, in a temporality that was entirely different from the one right next to it (which made the reference to “gateways to other worlds” so accurate). If one were to look at these from the outside, these fragments would make the city they belonged to completely unfathomable, even chaotic, and I started to believe, like the architect/writer believed, that the only way of producing sense and meaning, the only way that these fragments could be united, was through direct experience, through the movement of our bodies in and out of every fragment.

To be continued…

Copyright © Tony Chakar, 2003

Reprinted with kind permission of Tony Chakar. Tony Chakar is an architect based in Beirut, and will be speaking at the Liverpool Biennial on June 2nd 2010.