Collage and the City

Yesterday evening, as the escalator ascended me towards the exit of Leicester Square tube station, a busker started a strained rendition of Lennon’s Imagine, accompanied by electric guitar. The fame of the song immediately elicited smiles of recognition and half-smirks between strangers. I was struck by the unintentional layering of this song with the experience of being on the escalator: going up, simultaneously watching (and being watched) by those on the middle escalator - also ascending, while on the escalator furthest from me people descended. In my mind’s eye this tableaux vivant became an unofficial music video for the song or saddened death knell for the city dweller: ‘imagine there’s no heaven its easy if you try / no hell below us above us only sky’ these lines emphasizes a classical theological space, but any Italian Renaissance depiction of Ascension and Fall is substituted by the mechanized steps of the underground... Almost with knowing contrariness, as the busker asks us to imagine no hell below us, people sink to the pit, the belly of the city, while those who 'rise' within this pictorial game - are not heaven bound, but bound for the rain and grot and cheap fairground attractions of Leicester square. And because it is my collage, my projection and my assembly of ideas and images to music, there is an explicable lack of awareness of my characters’ (fellow commuters) roll in this drama, and so their faces - oblivious to the mental contexts I place them, become all the more tragic - like lambs to slaughter or children and elderly on a one way train.

Blindness (2008)

I recently saw the film Blindness (2008), directed by Fernando Meirelles based on the novel by Jose Saramago. Set in a modern day city, which could as easily be New York as London. An epidemic of blindness appears across the city. It is assumed by state authorities to be a virus, or something transmissible - those who are discovered to be blind are quarantined in a detention centre. The drama follows a woman, (played by Julianne Moore) who is not blind, who can see, who at one stage maybe the only person who can see, but who initially pretends that she too is blind, so that she can accompany her husband to this detention centre. She keeps the fact she can see a secret for as long as possible, eventually confiding to few she feels she can trust. The soldiers entrusted to regulate supplies, care and order are negligent; factions within the detention centre (a former hospital) become increasingly oppositional. As the centre overfills, we see Moore’s character increasingly trying to compensate for the lack of organisation the soldiers should be providing. Initially her impulse is to solely attend to her husband, but the circle of those she feels obliged to aid continues to increase. A close-up on her face as she surveys people in corridors: wandering, lost, pawing their way through a maze of bodies, vomiting, sleeping, pissing, shitting - captures her realisation and guilt at being unable to deal with this sisyphusian task. In Moore’s character I saw a metaphor for a model of a certain type of artist… who you might describe as being ‘blessed with a burden’, the burden is not providing aid to help those who are blind - such aid is presumptuous, unsolicited and not necessarily needed - it is the burden of making a personally satisfying choice as to how that sight is applied. None can see that you can see, the choices to be made are personal and interior, this lack of external judgement becomes the source of the terror.