Melbourne Up Close 2001 Catalogue essay Flâneurs Rachel Fensham 2001 The classic text on the nineteenth century flâneur by Baudelaire has ‘the painter of modern life’ strolling the streets of Paris, aimlessly drawn by the movement of the crowd, immersed in the details of shop windows, passers by and alleyways, gathering impressions. This upper-class man of leisure has access to the experiences of the masses without being one of them. He stores up the dynamics of the city for his private paintings or his poetry.  "For the passionate observer, it’s an immense pleasure to take up residence in multiplicity, in whatever is seething, moving, evanescent and infinite…The amateur of life enters into the crowd as into an immense reservoir of electricity." Baudelaire.  This figure of modernity inaugurated the art of the city, where observation was no longer directed at the beauty of trees and skies but at the density of buildings and people. Thus, a landscape of nature was replaced with a vision of culture. Since this time, the discourse of the city as emblematic of culture and society has exploded into the representations of architecture, social planning, film, visual art, journalism, photography.  The full-stop is used at the end of a sentence, a period. The full stop in an ellipsis is three spaced full stops, where words are omitted. Michel de Certeau extends the notion of ‘walking in the city’ beyond that of the flâneur. He relates the act of walking in the urban system to the speech act within language. If a language is defined by vocabulary, grammar and rhetoric so is the city. The city is constituted by systems, orders and functions but like the utterance, walking is the active making of a statement. Thus the city ceases to be a fixed concept, like a text or map, and the person walking in the city produces a ‘pedestrian rhetoric’ and a ‘forest of gestures’. The experience of the city, both familiar and strange, is thus made by ordinary practitioners who live every-day life at street level where the threshold of visibility begins.  I like looking at other people, what they are doing, what they are talking about. But if you stop at ground level and look up, you are amazed at what you don’t usually see above the roof of shops.  An obsessed photographer, described by Walter Benjamin as a ‘scientific flâneur’, was determined to document every corner of Paris before its disappearance under the assault of modern improvements. But while the flâneur went in search of private, unexpected moments, the walker with a camera sought knowledge. Photography used for objective documentation became an instrument of power and ownership. It located the gaze of the flâneur by selecting, structuring and shaping the image towards realism. The evidence today is both social and democratic, the city can be seen through many different eyes. The democracy of the photograph records the images that ordinary people have gazed upon. The f-stop is a hole in the centre of the camera lens that measures aperture size. The opening or closing of the f-stop, or iris-diaphragm, makes the image darker or brighter. The modern city reproduced a grid-like order with its foundations in the concept of progress. The human subject read its image like a map. The city of Melbourne is dominated by horizontals, its horizons are flat, the sky is heavy overhead. There is an apparent unity to its concrete boxes, carefully designed public buildings and partitioned recreation areas. Travelers find their bearings by the big and little names of its streets. The grid formation determines many journeys but other pathways are constructed in lanes and arcades, by the railway lines, along the river and in its parks and squares.

 

The tram-stop is a stop, or period, in the grammar of city life. Waiting at the tram-stop is a demarcated place in the grid of Melbourne’s planning system. They are curious and dangerous places to wait, placed as they are in the middle of the street, beside the tracks. From this vantage point one looks diagonally across the coordinates, at street corners or around buildings. You see the city askance. The most monumental panoptic perspective on the city was from the top of the World Trade Centre in New York. Looking down, the verticality of the contemporary city totalised Western urban development. De Certeau recalled the figure of Icarus who dared to fly too close to the sun, whose elevation ‘transfigures him into a voyeur’. Melbourne also has its towers, its places which escape claustrophobia, from which to be exhilarated by the dazzling vista or giddied by the swirl of insects below. The voyeur holds suspended this view from on high. Looking down is a vanishing point.  The camera lens plays a different role, it is an active eye, an agent with the desire to stop a moment, to collide perspectives, to see a fragment, to catch a reflection. We now know that that place, the top of the World Trade Centre, no longer exists. This view of the city has crumbled and we have even seen the fall of figures that might be Icarus plunging into the oceans of streets below. We have also seen the dust cloud that remains of the building and its contents, the sharp debris and the fire slowly burning underground. The apparent triumph of the modern city has been punctured.  There is an aperture in Melbourne outside the State Library, for hours people find themselves staring into a hole that seems to extend under the tar, under the ground upon which the crowd is standing. From the hole, a Phoenix is arising, new apartment blocks for the upwardly mobile. The postmodern city is identified with shiny layers and the illusions of spectacle. For the human subject, the postmodern city produces vertigo. The flâneur must feel at ease with radical instability, since the city is always in transition, between being and becoming. The speed of a city exists in the contingency and particularity of its many appearances. The city comes into ‘play’ precisely at those points where a constraint is met by local resistances and the site is opened up for further negotiation.  The tram stop suspends the movement of the city in anticipation of being carried through it. This temporary pause has been colonised by advertisers, those marketeers who would have people look at a man’s crotch or into the cleavage of a bubbly bra. In a contemporary city, time-space compression requires that the marketplace signify in every available pause. Resistance to these dashed spaces occurs when the gaze is otherwise averted, in conversation, in drunken-ness, in distraction or the indolence of habit. The photo is a temporary distraction, the country appears in the city, a child stares at you. The flâneur in Melbourne is no longer the bourgeois white gentleman. There are other figures including young women, middle class shoppers, office workers and tourists whose experience changes the city. There is a multiplicity of differences in gender, class, culture and race. They live beside one another, in moving they belong to the flow and transition. Modern urban life is desirable, it attracts the energy of diversity. Optimistically, Iris Marion Young argues that cities enable strangers to be together. They encounter each other, from within their differences, the intimacy of strangers – no-one view contains them all… looking in from outside, belonging.  There is the rush of moving with the crowd, being swept up in its velocity, crossing the intersections whether you will it or not. The momentum of pressing forward merges with the wave of bodies coming towards you on the other side.  The flâneur of today is all of these and perhaps increasingly young. The city attracts young people, full of energy – the kids of today are part of it and not of it.  Mood change. At night, the crowd eddies outside theatres and cinemas, rivulets form in front of restaurants and bars, the city becomes a slow river. After midnight, the fast food stores beckon and night clubs swallow patrons through hidden doors. This is the time of singles or young people. Private pleasures… The operations of the city constitute the sociality of the human subject, but its deconstruction is activated through alternative patterns and interactions. All movements of people are processes of spatial interpretation and all are different. Reading sites, and reading differences, the photographer provides an intricate view of city life. We see a place of ‘taboos’ and regulations but the stop to busy-ness of the ambulant camera also identifies the likely ‘powers’ and ‘secrets’.  In the very dark are the city-dwellers, the homeless or itinerant communities who settle on doorsteps, outside churches, in underpasses. The eye strains to see the dimmest light requires an open f-stop. Melbourne Up Close is a point in time and space where the stopped eye of the camera meets a logic that keeps moving. The site of the photo is there for further negotiation, at the tram stop and in the art-gallery. This method of interpretation engages the historical specificity of spatial practices as well as the particularity of the here, the around and the far. Rather than reducing their power in the construction of the city, the project of the twenty-first century flâneur makes space for the agency of the spectator. These journeys of the living, constituted by the closeness of walking and looking, open up new ways of experiencing the private and the public, the individual and the community, in the open story of urban culture.

Rachel Fensham is a performance theorist and critic, Senior Lecturer in the School of Literary Visual and Performance Studies, Monash University.

Individual & Society + Distance & Proximity + Difference & Compatibility + Innovation & Tradition  + Cooperation & Conflict + McCormick & Lewens essay + Public Forum