Walter Benjamin's New York
 
C. LOUIS PHILLIPE
OR THE INTERIOR

By John Gordon



Notes continued
Narration
Against the armature of glass and iron, upholstery offers resistance with its textiles. ([I3,1], p. 218)

Author's Note
"For the first time since the Romans, a new artificial building material appears: iron" ("Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century: Exposé <of 1939>," p. 16).
Iron construction, born in the nineteenth century, allows for most every apartment block in twentieth century New York. This technological advancement lets skyscrapers soar and curtain walls dissolve into glass expanses. Yet Benjamin notes that "iron is avoided in home construction but used in arcades, exhibition halls, train stations—buildings that serve transitory purposes" ("Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century: Exposé <of 1939>," p. 16). Such cold and industrial materials compliment the activities of commerce and technology. But in the home, these materials must be hidden. Within the New York apartment building, made possible by these technological advancements, their application is negated by the use of inviting fabrics: curtains ensconce the windows; couches and pillows create softness. New York is a world created by industrial materials, yet many inhabitants choose to ignore the glass and iron in favor of silk and wool.

Narration
Why does the glance into an unknown window always find a family at a meal, or else a solitary man, seated at a table under a hanging lamp, occupied with some obscure niggling thing? ([I3,3], p. 218,)

Author's Note

The flâneur walks the streets, taking in the world around him. His gaze also falls upon domestic scenes, framed in apartment windows. The flâneur sees the city both inside and out. Wandering the streets at night, he witnesses un-selfconscious activities that reflect a genuine domesticity. Just as streets become domestic spaces through the presence of housewares displayed on paving stones, the view through windows link the street with the home by creating a living tableau visible to the passer-by ([M3,1], p. 421, and [M3,4], p. 422).

The witnessed images are archetypes. First is the nuclear family sharing a meal. Second is the solitary man lost in work. These common images transcend time and location; they could be in any city in any year. The universality of domestic life brings together the past and present, allowing the glance into an unknown window to take place in nineteenth century Paris and twentieth century New York with the same results.

Narration
To live in these interiors was to have woven a dense fabric about oneself, to have secluded oneself within a spider’s web, in whose toils world events hang loosely suspended like so many insect bodies sucked dry. From this cavern, one does not like to stir. (Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 216, I2,6)
Author's Note
At this point, the film’s tone changes. This second section attempts to invoke the phantasmagoric. Phantasmagorias were magic lantern shows that incorporated projected images blending together. For Benjamin, this term takes on the notion of a dream, with a bombardment of disassociated images flowing over the viewer. He likens this experience to the array of images that constantly assail the urbanite on a daily basis, especially in the advertisement-laden arcades. The phantasmagoria links states of dreaming and awakening, as the images lull the viewer into stasis, yet the juxtapositions illuminate the intricacies of how the modern world functions. The steady, pulsing music, laced with the sounds of exhalations, and the constantly shifting images, drifting in and out of focus, aim to create a similar surreal or magical atmosphere.

Within the comfort of our interior surroundings lies a nihilistic thread. The worlds we create are just that: created. The inhabitant of the interior, be it the collector or not, ensconces himself in a world of dreams which serves to placate and protect. We fortify our interiors with the objects that comfort us, make us feel safe, please us. "In the end, things are merely mannequins, and even the great moments of world history are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances of complicity with nothingness, with the petty and the banal" ([I2,6], p. 216). The inhabitants of these interiors have yet to awaken. They surround themselves with objects that play into their dream-state. Yet, as comforting as this state may appear, it is still a dream. It is easy to slip into this state. It is comfortable to exist in this illusory world. Unlike Proust, who awakened into remembrance as an individual, the collective tends to maintain its stasis, locked in the currents of forgetfulness ([K2a,3], p. 393). But, as Benjamin notes, "the imminent awakening is poised, like the wooden horse of the Greeks, in the Troy of dreams" ([K2,4], p. 392).

Narration
Yes, this epoch was wholly adapted to the dream, was furnished in dreams….The photomontage that fixes such images for us corresponds to the most private perceptual tendency of these generations. Only gradually have these images among which they lived detached themselves and settled on signs, labels, posters, as the figures of advertising. ([I1,6], p. 213, )

Author's Note
We live in a world mediated through advertising. The images we see on billboards and in magazines blend with our own conceptions of reality until the very objects we surround ourselves with take on the guise of commercialism. Here, the real and the ideal blend together visually. The hallway is both hallway and an advertisement for a hallway, the chair is both a real chair and a phantom.

The home becomes the "place of pilgrimage to the commodity fetish" as the distinctions between advertisement and reality blur ("Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century: Exposé <of 1939>," p. 17). And the home transforms into a placard announcing the attributes of the inhabitant. The domestic interior becomes both cocoon and commercial.

Narration
The private individual needs the domestic interior to sustain him in his illusions. ("Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century: <Exposé of 1935>," p. 8)

Author's Note
This nocturnal image, "Room in New York," by Edward Hopper depicts a young couple at home. The gentleman is engrossed in reading the daily paper while the woman idly taps the piano keys. They are together in the same room, perhaps even married, yet they are strikingly alone. Their home typifies a bourgeois apartment, with an upright piano, framed landscapes, and tastefully cheerful colours. But how much is this only an appearance of perfection? Does the blissfully domestic interior belie an unhappy union or is this the nature of the modern household—unified by design only?

The interior of the collector is created out of illusion: the assemblage of artworks transforms the domestic space into distant fantasy or a projection of self-identity. The interior serves to mediate reality. It serves to placate the dreamer until a time of awakening. It creates a world built from our own desires, a haven from the impersonal modern city, an asylum of illusion.

Multi-Media Essay Notes
To help bridge the space between art and scholarship each author has put together a series of notes to his and her film.

These include the voiced-over words of Benjamin
(Narration) with appropriate citation, other text where appropriate, and a discussion of the author's intent (Author's Note).

Louis Phillipe Notes


Author's Note
Jazz, the music of twentieth century New York, sets the tone for this section. This musical genre emerged from, and represents, the city’s diverse cultural history and inter-war exuberance. Yet, as the century has passed, the sub-culture origins and avant-garde associations of 1920s jazz have been partially domesticated into an urbane aural backdrop for cocktail parties and quiet evenings at home. Just as a collector reinterprets histories and cultures on his or her shelves, time has reinterpreted jazz for a new audience.

Narration
"To dwell" as a transitive verb—as in the notion of "indwelt spaces"; herewith an indication of the frenetic topicality concealed in habitual behavior. It has to do with fashioning a shell for ourselves. ([I4,5], p. 221)

Author's Note
Opening with a view of a New York apartment building, this section brings the viewer inside from the city streets. In stages, the viewer approaches the building, enters, and nears the door of one of the apartments—habitual actions for the average New Yorker. The front door dissolves into a nautilus shell, representing the metaphoric shell of the interior. Like a human dwelling, the nautilus shell is composed of a series of chambers that open on to each other, creating rooms for inhabitation and safety. But as unchanging as many interior spaces tend to be, the irregular actions of the inhabitant constantly recreate how the space is utilized.
Narration
The interior is the asylum where art takes refuge. The collector proves to be the true resident of the interior. He makes his concern the idealization of objects…. The collector delights in evoking a world that is not just distant and long ago but also better—a world in which, to be sure, human beings are no better provided with what they need than the real world, but in which things are freed from the drudgery of being useful. ("Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century: Exposé of 1939" p. 19)
Author's Note
Just as the interior forms a shell around the inhabitant, the collector creates a whole world within that shell. Through collecting, grouping, displaying, and cataloguing objects, the collector presents a facet of the world in miniature. This created world reflects the desires of the collector—a nostalgia, a private dream, for stability in a fluctuating world. This collected world, while fabricated with concrete items, is a fantasy: the collector is free to evoke a specific moment in the past or to create an ersatz reality, where every objects satisfies a lust or helps formulate the collector’s vision of self.

Under the collector’s aegis, art is protected from the wear of time and exposure, yet is divorced from original context. Within a collection, a plate ceases to serve food. A chair ceases to support a sitter. These objects take on new roles as meditative objects, conveying concepts of craftsmanship, quality, and culture. The question arises, though, whether an object ceases or begins to exist once ensconced within a collector’s cabinet?

As Benjamin notes, the collector "can bestow on them only connoisseur value, rather than use value" ("Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century: Exposé <of 1939>," p. 19). Through this idea, the collector becomes antithetical to Marx, who states: "I can, in practice, relate myself humanly to an object only if the object relates itself humanly to man" (Karl Marx, Der historische Materialismus, quoted in [H3a, 3], p. 300, ). Through the act of accumulation, the collector transforms objects from tools to decorations.

Narration
As far as the collector is concerned, his collection is never complete; for let him discover just a single piece missing, and everything he’s collected remains a patchwork. ([H4a,1], p. 221, )

Author's Note
This unquenchable thirst for a complete collection fuels the New York art market. At the turn of the millenium, Chelsea galleries spend immense sums transforming abandoned warehouses into sleek temples to contemporary art. Fueled by the concentration of money and want in New York, the world’s three largest auction houses inaugurate flagship sales floors, vie for customers, and weekly make headlines. Every collector’s whim can be entertained, and purchased, as exemplified by this image of an auction. The collector’s money finances the art world, which, in turn, supplies even more objects for acquisition. The collector is caught in the cycle of his own collecting and of the art world in general.
"The physiological side of collecting is important. In the analysis of this behavior, it should not be overlooked that, with the nest-building of birds, collecting acquires a clear biological function" (Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 210, H4,1). Collecting is less of a pathology than it is an inherently animal act.


Narration
"Notice.—Monsieur Wiertz offers to paint a picture free of charge for any lovers of paintings who, possessing an original Rubens or Raphael, would like to place his work as a pendant beside the work of either of these masters." (A. J. Wierts, Oeuvres littéraires, [Paris, 1870], quoted in [I2,5], p. 216)

Author's Note

Benjamin’s notes are a patchwork of disparate phrases. Some sections constitute musings, investigations, and research. Other sections quote sources. Echoing the organization of the convolutes, this section stands apart from the previous quotes on collecting, punctuating the flow of the narrative. It is both a digression and an insight.
Monsieur Wiertz acknowledges the value of the collector and the collected object: if his painting rests in the collection of one who also owns a Rubens or a Raphael, then his painting would, through association, be just as desirable. The actual objects in a collection thus become subservient to the collection’s status as a whole.

Narration
"Small pictures alone are in demand because large ones can no longer be hung. Soon it will be a formidable problem to house one’s library….One can no longer find space for provisions of any sort. Hence, one buys things that are not calculated to wear well," Honoré de Balzac quoted in Ernst Robert Curtius, Balzac [Bonn, 1923], quoted in [I6,5], p. 224-225)
Author's Note
In twentieth century New York, space is a luxury. These two images elucidate Balzac’s insight by showing interiors filled with objects of all sorts. The first image focuses upon the private library, so filled with volumes that future acquisitions would threaten the room’s order. The second image shows that order broken down. Various items encrust every surface, transforming the apartment into a cave of possessions (Vasari, cited by Benjamin, [H4,2], p. 210). In order to continue accumulating objects, the urbanite must continually relinquish objects.
Similarly, as Balzac notes, one decorates this ever-shrinking environment with objects not intended to wear well. As one cannot purchase a new object without making space by throwing an old object out, all one’s possessions should be disposable. This mind set has helped institutionalize such companies as Ikea, which fabricate inexpensive and transient house wears that populate many New York apartments.

Narration
"More and more, you hear every place of habitation called a ‘studio,’ as if people were more and more becoming artists or students." Henri Pollès, "L’Art du commerce," Vendredi, quoted in [I6a,3], p. 225)

Author's Note

New Yorkers pay a premium for their domestic life. Surveying the real estate section of the newspaper reveals a city constantly moving in, moving out, leasing, buying, refurbishing, and searching. The glamour of a bohemian lifestyle leads to the gentrification of areas like Soho and Chelsea, areas now prohibitively expensive to the people that created their romantic allure. The modest dwellings of students and artists become the posh repositories for the upwardly mobile. With every square foot of space a potential real estate sale, New Yorkers live in spaces smaller than their desires.

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