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.