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| DREAM CITY |
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“In that unbounded moment, I saw millions of delightful and horrible acts; none amazed me so much as the fact that all occupied the same point, without superposition and without transparency. What my eyes saw was
simultaneous; what I shall write is successive, because language is successive. Something of it, though, I will capture.”
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Jorge Luis Borges, "The Aleph"
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“I am convinced that the future is lost somewhere in the dumps of the non-historical past; it is in yesterday’s newspapers, in the
jejune advertisements of science-fiction movies, in the false mirror of our rejected dreams. Time turns metaphors into
things, and stacks them up in cold rooms, or places them in the celestial playground of the suburbs.
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Has Passaic replaced Rome as The Eternal City? If certain cities of the world were placed end to end in a straight line according to size, starting with Rome, where would Passaic be in that impossible progression? Each city would be a three-dimensional mirror that would reflect the next city into existence. The limits of eternity seem to contain such nefarious ideas.”
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Robert Smithson, “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey”
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| A few years ago I was in a bookstore thumbing through a book of Peter Schjeldahl’s reviews, and I came across something on Smithson. Schjeldahl raised the question of whether or not Smithson was really just full of it, or something to that effect, and I found it refreshing that someone else had the same doubts. I’m not sure what the above quote means, but I think that’s part of the point, and whether he was full of it or not, Smithson captured the mysterious and metaphysical in his writings. This uncertainty, this wonder of
not knowing, in fact its impossibility, is the same sensation evoked by dreams, or memories (and sometimes through a secondary romanticization, particularly Proust). It can come through reading poetry, or novels, or through the study of history. For me, it is often the reason why I paint. |
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| Smithson’s romanticism is a nostalgia tinged with despair, a dystopian frustration focused on impossibility and entropy. Borges, however, offers us the possibility of the impossible, a utopia (in the more literal meaning of
no place) that is “delightful and horrible”. |
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| I propose a mixture of these two thought experiments: what if Smithson’s “impossible progression” of cities could be experienced through the simultaneous Aleph of Borges? What if all cities throughout history, real or imagined, merely hoped for or mistakenly remembered, existed in one place at one time, from the boldest stentorian hopes of utopia to the most saccharin longings of kitsch? This would be an impossible city both delightful and horrible, a dream city (for some dreams are nightmares). |
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| Dream City represents that vast expanse of all that is outside the crushing force of the present moment, antithesis of the mundane, forever relegated to a lost past or an unrealized future, but all in the mind, individual or cultural. It is a graveyard, a museum, an ideology, a memory (sweet or painful), a wish, a fear, a hope… |
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