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June 1, 2002
Walt Brasch
Crumpling the Constitution
May 31, 2002
Rev. Sandra Olewine
Land Grabs and Occupation:
Silent Destruction of Palestine
James Dunlop
Russian
Colonel:
"Insane But Fit for Duty"
Chomsky / Bennett
Debating "Terrorism"
May 30, 2002
Steve Perry
Jim Carrey:
"Love Me!"
Tom Turnipseed
Sex Among the Sacred
George Monbiot
Corporate
Phantoms
Web of Deciet over GM Foods
Robert Jensen
Are You a Journalist
or a Patriot?
Gary Leupp
Georgia
and the War on Terror
May 29, 2002
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Age of Inequality
Philip Farruggio
The
Cleaning Lady
Bill Christison
Disastrous US Foreign Policy:
Part 2, Globalization
May 28, 2002
Michael Leon
Lincoln
Brigades Memorial
Scott Lucas
Christopher Hitchens:
No Longer an Authentic
Voice of Dissent
Nelson P. Valdes
Castro,
Bioterrorism and
the State Department
Harvey Wasserman
What Does the White House Know
About Atomic Terror?
Norman Madarasz
France,
Brazil, the Politics
of the World Cup
May 27, 2002
Dave Marsh
Why I Voted for Nader:
Ticketmaster's Stranglehold
on Music and Politics
Robert Fisk
The Coming
Firestorm:
Bush's Crazed Remarks
May 26, 2002
Alexander Cockburn
Diary of a Northwest Trip:
Why Reds Live Longer
May 25, 2002
Chris Floyd
General
Principles:
Unmasking Colin Powell
Gavin Keeney
All Politics is Local? The Unbearable
Lightness of NGO's
Jeffrey St. Clair
A Hero
of Our Time:
Stephen Jay Gould
May 24, 2002
Edward Hammond
Documents Prove Pentagon Violated
Bioweapons Act
Mark Weisbrot
Bush
Administration Scandals:
Beginning of the End?
Feingold / Corzine
Halt Executions Nationwide
Bill Christison
Former
CIA Analyst:
Big Changes Needed in
US Intelligence Agencies
May 23, 2002
Dean Baker
Attack of the Clowns:
The Real Bush is Back
Susan Abulhawa
Israel
and South Africa:
Apartheid's Accidental Prophecy
Uri Avnery
Sharon the Great Reformer?
Behzad Yaghmaian
Travails
of a Middle Eastern Migrant: Accosted at the Border
May 22, 2002
Brian J. Foley
Dick Cheney's Obscenity
Gavin Keeney
Bete Noire
Enron & the Great Game
Fran Shor
Follow the Money
Bush, bin Laden & Carlyle
May 21, 2002
George Monbiot
Riddle
of the Spores:
The FBI and Anthrax
Yulie Khromchenko
Displaced Reality:
Impressions from Jenin
Bernard Weiner
Kenny
Boy to Bush:
"Welcome to the Club"
Ron Jacobs
Confusing the Face
of the Enemy
Gary Leupp
"War
on Terrorism" in Yemen
May 20, 2002
Rep. Ron Paul
Say No to Military Draft
Dave Marsh
Music Monopolies
Jordy Cummings
Israel, Jews and the Left
Francis Boyle
In Defense
of a Divestment
Campaign Against Israel
Christian Salmon
The Bulldozer War
Edward Said
Crisis for
American Jews
May 19, 2002
Philip Farruggio
Where's Twain's Protector Government
Now?
Norman Madarasz
Canada,
NAFTA and Kyoto
May 18, 2002
M.G. Piety
Economic Fiction:
From Here to Annuity?
Michael Colby
Bush Fiddled
While
New York Burned
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Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
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June 1, 2002
Bush and Mies
van der Rohe:
Architecture and Ideology
by Gavin Keeney
In the absence of serious journalism -- here,
there, everywhere -- the recent flow of gilded imagery from Russia,
ever since Air Force One set down at Sheremetyevo airport in
Moscow on Thursday, May 23, has been nothing less than spectacular.
From the opening shots of Bush reviewing the "imperial"
honor guard, upon arrival, to the glamorous staged scenes at
the Grand Kremlin Palace (St. Andrew Hall), to the imperial city
of St. Petersburg (with Bush-Putin visits to the Mariinsky Theater
and Hermitage Museum), Bush and Putin have spared no opportunity
to illustrate what the press failed to analyze: Neo-Imperial
Russia and Neo-Imperial America are now best friends, and, ipso
facto demento, will join cloven hooves to stamp out upstart and
established miscreants (naysayers) worldwide, but primarily in
Central Asia.
The lavish imagery documents the generic
addage "A picture is worth a thousand words", but it
also underscores the more subtle notion of cultural ambience,
the aura surrounding an event or object. Ambience is the barely
legible complex that supports an image -- in Walter Benjamin's
well-known interpretation of this epi-phenomenon, aura is also
the imagined effect of the object looking (gazing) back at the
subject through space and time. As critic Paul Werner has recently
written regarding the work of painter Ellsworth Kelly (now on
display at the Drawing Center in New York City), Kelly's apparent
abstract paintings are in fact a form of Realism. The planar
color surfaces act as a metonym for an implied "fugitive"
structure -- "a patch of green" connotes a patch of
grass, "a patch of blue" connotes a very real patch
of blue, the sky, but more importantly quite often the sky at
a particular moment. (Or as Paul Werner writes: "This is
no less an affirmation than Andre Breton's when he wrote that
the color of Courbet's skies is the color of the blue sky of
Paris the day the Vendome Column fell.") Given this indelible
(anamorphic) stain haunting all imagery and perception, what
is to be made of George W. Bush's sky-blue tie, worn during his
tour of the Hermitage?
Presidential ties have been the source
of a great deal of speculative ekphrasis since perhaps Kennedy.
(Don't forget that Clinton supposedly used his tie to send secret
messages to Monica Lewinsky.) Ekphrasis is the relatively old
practice of describing the exact moment a painting or work of
sculpture embodies. Sigmund Freud wrote (anonymously) a rather
fabulous account of the meaning of Bernini's Moses based on this
traditional form of art interpretation. The idea of ambience
is a related method of getting down to business -- the subliminal
message of the power tie (or the piano-key tie!) is of the same
order of things. In architectural criticism, one can tell more
about a building or landscape by analyzing the environmental
elements it engages or disengages rather than by judging the
mere facade or structural form. This surplus is a means of getting
a purchase on the significance of the entire apparatus that supports
and underwrites architecture. Included in this apparatus is the
political-economic machinery. The recent twin re-representations
of the work of arch-modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe,
in New York at MoMA and the Whitney, in 2000, accidentally revealed
the power of ambient factors in architecture in ways that are
admittedly somewhat obscure but also subliminally at play in
the very act of artistic and curatorial representation.
Architecture
& Ideology
The Mies legend -- that he was the exemplar
of ideology-free, open space planning (i.e., free-flowing space
and majestic clear span) -- is/was both an elective fiction perpetrated
by the self-anointed keepers of architectural modernism and a
means of obscuring promiscuous political trace elements buried
in Mies' work. This political aura was brilliantly reconstituted
in photographs by Thomas Ruff, at MoMA's "Mies in Berlin",
through artistically doctored photographs of key buildings intended
to restore the missing links, or the supplemental ambient forces
that produce/support a work of architecture. These included ideological
as well as architectural presumptions. At the Whitney ("Mies
in America"), the recovery of aura was more overtly realized
by Inigo Manglano-Ovalle's design of the installation, especially
the culminating gesture -- a room with an eerily spot-lit model
of Mies' New National Gallery (Berlin) amid darkness, and a video
loop documenting a day in the life of Mies' last monumental effort
to produce "an architecture of almost nothing". Manglano-Ovalle's
timelapse cinematography not merely restored the environmental
and existential conditions of the vast empty box set on a gargantuan
podium but enhanced these effects and proved conclusively that
Mies' game of architectural reductionism came with a very high
price attached -- i.e., extreme alienation. The New National
Gallery was presented as a monument to the supposed autonomy
of art and architecture, standing aloof within its Berlin mise
en scene, a park, with visitors flitting ghostlike through its
empty, pure space.
This picture of alienation reclaims for
Mies the sublime system of reduction at play in his buildings
without erasing the principle adjuncts to his theatrical sense
of form and space -- the sky, the horizon, the play of light
and shadow, and the ever-present symbolic tissue of object-subject
relations. The hyper-optical nature of Mies' buildings (he always
drew his projects in one-point perspective) underscores the architectonic
premise of Mies and Miesian architecture. Signed Tout a vous,
"here" is the condition of Modernity Itself.
Springtime
& the New Gilded Age
In the news media, today, one has to
similarly read the images (as one has to read between the lines
of any article or op-editorial, in say The New York Times) to
find the presence of the symbolic -- the complex of authorized
things, ideas, operations that condition our day-to-day consciousness.
In the case of the images of Bush and Putin, gamboling about
St. Petersburg (after having dispensed with the "historic"
Nuclear Arms Reduction Treaty in Moscow), one needs to remember
that St. Petersburg is Putin's "hometown" and only
recently George W. Bush serenaded Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince
Abdullah in Crawford, Texas (Bush's imaginary hometown), driving
him around the 1600-acre ranch and pointing out the Texas blue
bonnets. Ah! the blue tie. Does the blue tie connect back to
springtime Texas and sunny appeasement? Does that tie signal
the optimism of George Bush in the new Russia-America entente?
In the spirit of free association, please connect the dots: Blue
tie, blue blood, blue skies, blue bonnets. Blue is also the natural
complement to gold (which is why both blue and gold were part
of the cosmic symbolism of Russian symbolist poets).
If so, or even if not, what does all
that gold leaf signify? Is it not a means of conveying the grand
intentions of this alliance? Does it not hearken back to Imperial
Russia and suggest that Russia, today, understands the importance
of window dressing? The honor guard at the airport reception
certainly confounded our usual picture of poorly equipped Russian
soldiers slugging it out with Chechen rebels in the North Caucasus
(a land crisscrossed by pipelines from Caspian Sea oil and natural
gas fields).
Anyway, speaking of the architecture
of politics, the broken steppes of Central Asia beckon. Major
media's colorful coverage of the Bush-Putin summit resembled
nothing less than a National Geographic spread on the perquisites
of privilege, wealth and power. While Bush and his ilk are fast
securing the domestic and international ramparts of the New Gilded
Age, off-stage, or just beyond the ornate picture frame, there
are seething hell-holes eating at the edges. In the analysis
of architectural and political form, essentially the art of eye-wash,
what is omitted is as important as what is admitted. Reading
images is one thing, reading the future is another. Unfortunately,
for everyone, the devastated and clotted landscape of Central
Asia is the historic repressed aura haunting Imperial and Neo-Imperial
Russia.
Gavin Keeney
is a landscape architect/critic in New York, New York. He attended
both Mies exhibitions in New York last year and spent several
weeks convalescing. He is the author of On
the Nature of Things, a book documenting the travails
of contemporary American landscape architecture in the 1990s.
He can be reached at:
ateliermp@netscape.net
Links to his reviews of these two blockbuster
exhibitions are listed below.
Outtakes
"Mies
and Mies Not"--Mies in Berlin
"Levitating
Architecture"-- Mies in America
Regarding the "historic" Moscow
Treaty, signed with pomp and splendour at the Kremlin, see The
Independent (05/25/02)--"Moscow was willing to destroy
the warheads not deployed, knowing that because of its economic
weakness its ability to deliver warheads is going down. America
was not. Instead it will 'deep freeze' warheads. In 10 years
it will still have 10,000 nuclear warheads that it could use."
For bona-fide National Geographic photographs
of the wrecked landscapes of the post-Soviet Caspian Sea basin,
by Iranian-born photographer Reza Deghati, cliquez
ici.
Geo-Linguistic
Footnote
If the landlocked Caspian Sea can be
redefined as "a lake", all oil and natural gas reserves
would belong equally to all countries bordering the waterbody,
including Russia and Iran. The one bone of contention between
Bush and Putin during the Moscow portion of the summit was Russia's
helping Iran to build a nuclear power plant in Bushehr, Iran.
Iran, fingered as part of the Axis of Evil, and Russia, new best
friend of the U.S., would both like to see the Caspian Lake cleared
of "arbitrary" claims by rival regional powers. Since
the oil and gas is unevenly distributed throughout the sea- or
lake-bed, Russia's and Iran's share of the action is considerably
less than Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, and,
surprise, Chechnya. A Stalin-era complex known as the "Oily
Rocks" -- a 48-mile-long network of depleted wells, booms,
platforms, storage tanks, and gangways -- is currently rusting
into the sea between Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan.
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