VISUAL CULTURE
Rut Blees Luxembourg
Sandy McCreery; 1999; ‘Rut Blees Luxemburg: London: The Modern Project’; in Issues in Architecture, Art and Design; vol. 6, no. 1; pp.80-87; ISSN 0960-8648,
Rut Blees Luxemburg London: A Modern Project
Over the past few years Rut Blees Luxemburg has produced several photographic series set in London. The first of these to be published in book form, A Modern Project (Black Dog;1997), soon attracted interest within architectural circles. Indeed even became part of London’s architecture when MUF placed one of the images, Caliban Towers, under the railway viaduct in Old Street as part of their Shoreditch refurbishment scheme. If it is true that architects learn more from images than text, then A Modern Project appears to have set architectural minds thinking. And to further that process, a selection of these images are reproduced here.
Now in one sense these are not architectural photographs at all. There are no celebrated buildings here, not one that would gain a mention in any of the architectural guides to London. Nor do these images record any of the well-known places of the city centre, they are all taken within faceless, everyday, areas of inner London sprawl. Indeed for those who frequent such areas, part of the pleasure in viewing the photographs seems to lie in identifying just where they have been shot. They are familiar places, yet they are also strange.
This strangeness derives particularly from the technique of photographing all the scenes at night, using slow film requiring very long exposures. Thus all transitory events are removed from the images. There are no people, and no moving cars, although the successive passage of vehicles eventually solidifies their lights into coloured trails. Luxemburg accentuates the atemporality of the images by avoiding items of an ephemeral nature such as billboards. She rejected a photograph from the series because, on close inspection of the final print, it was found to contain an abandoned Coca-Cola can. The resulting images, then, are of a city that exists outside time.
When the normally experienced flow of time is removed from the city, what we are left with are its spaces. It is in this sense perhaps that the images have a markedly architectural quality. To an exaggerated degree, we are forced to confront the forms of the city. And with heightened three-dimensionality, for photographing internally lit buildings at night reveals interior spaces usually hidden behind opaque facades. In conventional architectural photography form is accentuated by using black and white film, whereas Luxemburg uses colour. But hers are not the colours in which we would usually experience the city. The reliance on artificial light to record on daylight film washes her images with lurid, yet cold, oranges and greens. This is a sinister, bad-trip city, and the spiralling, disorientating perspective of Vertiginous Exhilaration might suggest to the paranoid an unhappy landing.
Yet perhaps there is an even more sinister side to Luxemburg’s manipulation of time. It is in time that we expect to exercise our free will, make our future. But Luxemburg’s city appears immutable, resistant to all human action because it denies the possibility of human action. It is then a controlling city. Even she, creator of this urban dystopia, claims to have limited control over it, as anything could happen during the long exposures. Of course, very little that is unexpected does occur. For this is a city of rules, barriers and surveillance. These are the constant themes in A Modern Project. Instructions are marked onto roads, sports grounds, and car parks; whilst security lighting, cameras, and razor-wire, ensure compliance. Only instruments of authority override these restrictions, hence the representation of Bishopsgate police station in Spatial Penetration, whilst pitiful vestiges of intimacy glimmer out of tower blocks.
That the Modern project was an exercise in social engineering and control has become a standard trope of urban critics. It suggests that planners, and to some extent architects, reified their rational ideas into less-than-ideal concrete structures. Life was thus constrained within concepts. The irrational, the playful, had no place. One of the most explicit, and well-known, examples of this critical genre is Jean Luc Godard’s (1965) film Alphaville in which the city is controlled by computer that only understands logic. Godard filmed in the coldly anonymous spaces of contemporary Paris, as Luxemburg has done with London. But unlike Alphaville, A Modern Project is not science fiction. It is here, and it is now. Luxemburg claims that she takes no position on the city, that these are disinterested visual records. That may well be true, but these images have something to say to architects. Presumably they are listening.
(c) Sandy McCreery January 1999