Bug: Archive

Rem Koolhaas, the nervous cultural observer and architect, gave a public talk. Because at that moment he would have preferred to be thinking rather than talking, he spoke very quietly, off to the side and away from the microphone. He spoke in English to a German audience. He wasn’t able to conceal the fact that he didn’t want to impart anything new at that moment. Perhaps tomorrow. It was ridiculous to set the date for public events like this six months in advance. How was he to know whether he would want to say anything at that particular moment? So it was that the conditions for communicative contact between the 1,000 people collected in the great hall of Munich University and himself, the attentive observer, were far from ideal.

What he said (for him nothing new) was the following: Maxim Gorky went to Coney Island and looked at the attractions: the Ferris wheels, carnival booths, the “wonders,” gambling halls, the spiral slides, the “places of nonsense and forgetting,” and the peepholes for moving images. He considered the mass of visitors, and the “principle of entertainment,” to be a “betrayal of the real needs of the people.” Here you lose time and win nothing, he said.

The fantastic facilities of Coney Island did not lead only to the skyscrapers of New York, so Rem Koolhaas continued, but also to the cinema (i.e. “new, real conditions”), while the critique of Maxim Gorky produced nothing real whatsoever; criticism, as Marx predicted, had only accompanied the realities.

For this assertion, said Koolhaas (continuing to develop his thoughts), he did not need the key phrase: the masses are always right. That was a phrase that Gorky would have agreed with, but also the one which paralyzes serious discussion. What mattered much more was the observation that the masses “magnetize attractions” in two different ways and thereby initiate or destroy creative innovations. On the one hand there is a kind of mass demand that has no effect in and of itself (but which can be used by third parties to exploit it). At the same time there is a second type of demand that is both spontaneous and long-lasting. Parasitic businesses can benefit from this desire, but they cannot change the general direction of it. This kind of mass initiative is in search of “blind happiness.”

At this point there was a question from the audience (the speaker was hard to understand and spoke quietly, which meant that he was also easy to interrupt) as to what “blind happiness” meant. It constituted the antithesis of “blind unhappiness” Koolhaas answered. “Blind unhappiness” ends without memory (like soldiers at war storming forward, who want nothing more than to escape the misery of being ordered about, run blindly and ceaselessly, but after being rescued can remember absolutely nothing about it). According to Rem Koolhaas neither the slot machines of Coney Island nor the subsequent “flowering of cinema” could have generated a sufficiently strong promise that they would deliver “blind happiness.” Moments of surprise, sudden insights into another world, and memories conjured up by film did, however, offer an INDICATION of “blind happiness” and word of this got around. The indication that there could be such moments at all is sufficient to justify the founding of a new medium.

Media, however, are best judged using architectural criteria because these feelings are always on the lookout for rooms, caves, or houses in which they can park themselves. It is not the spectators’ judgement of taste that is the issue, but rather their habituation. If they feel at home, i.e., if public spaces are created, it is irrelevant whether art or kitsch holds sway.

At this point, because they didn’t want to remain inactive, the listeners rewarded themselves for their effort at listening, which had been achieved in difficult conditions, with enthusiastic applause. The leap to the idea that cinema is in itself an architectural art form appealed to the audience. For them it was not necessary to add that some of the most imaginative buildings of the century were in fact cinemas. It was not these buildings of marble, wood, and stone, but rather the films themselves as buildings which were the artistic event offering hope that cinema would, according to Koolhaas, not only satisfy the needs of 1902 but also (despite the demise of the cinemas themselves) of the 21st century. The listeners were able to visualize innovative future places of entertainment that “somehow” had something to do with the moving image (and thus also with moving sound).

pritch

Apr 30, 20129 notes

#alexander kluge #film

everyone is a babe

im intimidated

Apr 30, 20126 notes

crankiness as political project

Apr 29, 201213 notes

stop sexualizing me

last warning

Apr 29, 20124 notes

writing articles about being depressed and submitting them to mute magazine