I haven’t said much about theme parks recently, even though that’s where all the pain is taking place. It seems time for a Pain Bulletin. A really long one, sorry.
(Well actually I should briefly mention some pain not to do with study. A few days ago I had the left half of my thyroid removed, because it was something out of Lovecraft. Be blessed you know nothing of its dark and terrible nature, it is consigned to the flames of hell etc. They cut across my throat to get it out so I am sitting here looking like a Halloween mask. The days of vocals on stage are done, but that was always part of the plan.)
I am determined to make an major artwork based on research. It tells a story in virtual architecture – and architecture in itself is complex battleground. This story extends over centuries, it includes white supremacy, colonialism, surrealism, religion, the psych, notions of progress, pornography, midgets and freaks, kings and presidents… it is like swallowing a grand piano to play it.
I first understood an Orphic view of the fairground – that it is a combination and opposition of light and dark, yin and yang, Jekyll and Hyde. To attempt a purely ‘light’ version as did Disney, is an act of denial. He banned roller coasters and grog from his land – and they slid back into the vacuum the moment his personal power waned. It is better to employ the dark as a painter does, accentuating the light.
The makers of the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition learned this the hard way when the ‘dark’ settled around the perimeter of their bright white city – in the Midway Plaisance. They lost control of the booze and sex shows and – learning that it’s better to piss out of the tent – they incorporated it inside as THE MIDWAY. A world fair now has two hemispheres – the WHITE CITY and the MIDWAY.
On reaching this Orphic view I read architect Rem Koolhaas’s Delirious New York. At one point he introduces a mock battle between Salvador Dali and Le Corbusier for NYC and the 1939 fair – the baked bean versus the cube – the same fight designed into every World Fairground. In this he explains Dali’s paranoid critical method. Once I understood this process I realised it is necessary to my own work.
Currently I am finding infinite resonance and connection between every aspect of my source material. All evidence is interpreted as support for my idée fixe. For example it is possible to see the fairground as the two sides of the human brain, bridged by a corpus callosum – that bridge is right there in the 1939 map. The relationships become tenuous when looked at critically – but that’s for later, when the design has to collapse into an actual production.
Colonialism and other isms.
A great deal has been written about the racism and colonialism expressed in world fairs. (For example here’s a very useful source regarding fairground Orientalism.) Other people have covered this far better than I can, plus there’s debate that I’m not equipped to settle. For example the common claim that the centre of each fair was the White Anglo-Saxon exhibit, with increasingly ‘inferior races’ spread out towards the edges – one critic has pointed out that just looking at the maps you can see that Austrians must have been held inferior to Hottentots if that were the case and there are more complex economic reasons for the layout than simplistic racial theories.
I’ve been worried about portraying the reality of a 20th century fairground – midgets, belly dancers, American Indians etc. that are going to ‘trigger’ somebody somewhere who can’t see the difference between what was and what should be. Bluntly – my Midway cannot and will not have a Little Miracle or Coon Town even though these were real. They were supposed to present a scale of civilization – which I also need to present, but without the hurtful pseudoscience or the notion of superiority.
Instead I will hold that some mental formations are more primal / fundamental, and portray these as architecture. Rather than arraying people and cultures along my map, I can set the ‘civilized’ Jekyll against the ‘primal’ Hyde, with the constant refrain of their interdependence. For Freud, there was the contest between id and superego, for Jung there were the archetypes, then there are the spiritualists and surrealists and many other symbols I can use without hurting anyone. My exposition will be an interior landscape that informs the exterior civilization.
Sort of. It’s not exactly clear how this will work. On one side the WHITE CITY, tall, hard edged, streamline style, progressive. On the other side of the bridge, the MIDWAY, soft and fleshy, primal and filled with ancient emotions. But who will be in this landscape? What goals? What challenges? There’s a long way to go.
