Public (E-Journal, York University)

Fisher, Caitlin

PUBLIC 34
D: \ personal
I hear stories about my mother who was walking along the street one day and saw that a ship
was leaving the next week and knew she should be on it. So she was. It's the 60s, eifter all.
She's a papermaker, a lingUist, a painter, a flamenco dancer and a very smart girl, alone on a
boat and on her way to Europe. I remember going somewhere and waving at that ship---is that
my mother gOing? Tap tap tap. Morse code on my grandmother's shoulder: Take. Me. Home.
Myfriends and I try very, very hard to let our mothers know how much we love them-
our mothers are small, eifter all, and eaSily hurt. We have mothers who cry, sleep all day, weave
curtains from beads we later choke on. We have the kind if mothers who do not know
Heimlich but who will shake us upSide down to get beads or pennies out and when they laugh
they spin us around and around until we're almost sick. Our mothers know about ginseng
and Carnaby street. We have mothers who make their own poisonous pigments and who keep
vats ifmulch on the patio. Mothers we need to tuck in at night eifter parties. Mothers we tell
to please get more milk. Mothers we ask "who is sleeping in my bed?"
360 0 is a short interactive piece about four generations of women built using
the Korsakow system, a computer program developed by Florian Thalhofer in
2000 for the creation of database narrative film. Short clips are entered into the
movie database and multiply tagged by the filmmaker with folksonomic terms. A
sample viewing of 360' has been captured and is available on the DVD for linear
viewing. The interactive version is also bundled on the DVD and can be accessed
via computer.
www.korsakow.com
47


English

360°

Fones, Robert

Skunk Motel
ROBERT FONES
The words "Skunk Motel" appeared on the fayade of the building one morning.
Some spray-can wielding kids hit the derelict structure in the middle of the night
leaving behind their individual tags, "Skunk" and "Motel 6," scrawled across doors,
boarded up windows and brick, fusing everything into one Cubist blitz of surfaces
and letterforms and combining the two throw ups, as this kind of graffiti is called,
into a suitable name for the shabby edifice. It was this lettering that caught my eye
and made me think about the building in a new way, speculating about what kind
of life it had had, the changes it had gone through and what the name Skunk Motel
meant as signage for this new imaginary enterprise.
Not that the building is an outstanding piece of architecture. Like most houses
in the area, like most houses everywhere, it is a simple brick box with a smattering
of architectural details that give it stylistic identity. The building's abandoned state
and run-down condition must have made it irresistible to the graffiti artists as a
suitable blank canvas; there was no one to hear the hiss of the spray cans and no
one to stop them. What they painted-from the wildly different styles I suspect
there were two of them working side by side-created ironic signage while simul-
taneously giving voice to issues of homelessness, soaring housing prices, and the
runaway gentrification of Toronto's artsy west end. Like Rachel Whiteread's
famous cast concrete house in London, England, this iconoclastic yet artistic inter-
vention made public what many had thought privately, creating a site for com-
mentary, protest, and reflection.
I would never have paid much attention to Skunk Motel, which was literally
a dump, if it hadn't been for the graffiti lettering. Skunk Motel, like many of the
middle-class houses in the area, consists of two conjoined buildings, each a mirror
88 PUBLIC 33 ERRATA
image of the other. My house and its Siamese twin adhere to a similar plan and
have not changed much since they were built. Skunk Motel on the other hand is a
battle-scarred survivor, the victim of multiple tenants, indifferent landlords and
now a neglectful owner probably waiting for a demolition permit. The eastern
porch still has its original wooden columns although the pine floor has several
holes where legs have gone through rotten boards inadvertently creating suitable
homes for the motel's namesake animal. It has lost its second-storey bay window.
The western porch is concrete and the original wooden columns have been
replaced with wrought iron. The slate shingles, which would have been the standard
roofing material when all the houses in this area were built, are now only visible
on the sides of the third floor dormer. Doors and windows, house numbers and
mailboxes have probably been replaced numerous times.
I have lived in my house for twenty-five years and in the west end for a little
longer so I know the area well. I walk my dog around the block on which Skunk
Motel is located and have become familiar with many of the architectural details
of the houses, particularly the variety of stained glass windows. There are designs
depicting tulips, hanging swag, fleur-de-lis or organic abstractions bordering on
Art Nouveau, all of them with a vertical axis of symmetry. At night, the pale grey,
green and yellow stained glass seems to hold back aquariums of light with interi-
or details obscured by the texture of the glass. I have also paused on numerous
occasions out of necessity while my dog marked yet another tree or fencepost, and
briefly studied the eclectic mix of architectural styles that give the neighbourhood
its unique character. This character is a mix of Neoclassical, Tudor and Arts and
Crafts. There are white Doric columns and little temple-like side entrances, half-
PUBLIC 33 ERRATA 89
timbered gables peeking out from behind spruce trees, and the ubiquitous bay
window on the second story with upper sashes often divided-as is the case with
the remaining bay window of Skunk Motel-into three or four six-sided vertical
panes. All these architectural features that originated in Europe and England have
migrated across the Atlantic and ended up here in the designs of early twentieth
century houses. Skunk Motel was based on an architectural model that had crys-
tallized in a single architect's imagination, a fusion of elements from the history of
architecture.
Aside from the architectural influences that have determined its structure,
Skunk Motel has a history that is linked to the site on which it was built. This
undulating topography is unique in the flat, rectilinear plan of the city. Thousands
of years ago, this area was on the bottom of a glacial lake, with waves washing up
on the shore of a beach cliff now several miles from the current shoreline. A creek
drained this gently sloping plain once the water subsided, and left behind the hills
and valleys that characterize this part of the city. My house, for example, is built
on a slight hill that is a remnant of the former bank of this old stream, called
Garrison Creek because it once emptied into the lake beside the old British
Garrison.
Before Skunk Motel was built then, this area was still farmland with tobacco
and other crops grown by tenant farmers. The Denison family, with old British
military connections, owned most of the land, which had been acquired as hun-
dred-acre park lots running north from a surveyed baseline called Lot Street. John
Taylor Denison, one of three sons, managed his portion of the estate from Heydon
Villa, which once stood, as can be seen in old photographs, on the north bank of
an east/west branch of Garrison Creek, a stone's throw from Skunk Motel. With
its Doric columns and surrounding veranda, Heydon Villa was likely the model for
the scaled-down versions of its grandeur that were built around it once the farm-
land was subdivided for development. Heydon Villa survives in the name of an
90 PUBLIC 33 ERRATA
aging Tudor-style apartment complex built on the site of the old homestead and
in the name of the street that meanders past it following the course of the former
stream.
I saw an archaeological slice of the original topography of the area when the
Ukrainian Church, directly across the street from Skunk Motel was demolished a
few years ago to make way for a tovvnhouse development. When they excavated
for the foundations, they exposed a strata of earth on a part of the site that had
clearly never been built on. Beneath the upper layer of sod and dark humus the
ochre-coloured virgin soil sloped down toward the old channel of Garrison
Creek. From this small cross-section I got a brief glimpse of the wooded valley
that had once existed.
Skunk Motel is one of hundreds of houses all built around the turn of the cen-
tury on what was at that time, the suburban edge of the city. Garrison Creek had
by that date already been buried within a four foot six inch diameter brick-lined
sewer that can still be heard gurgling beneath the cast iron utility covers in my
street. Skunk Motel was built on what would have been the eastern bank of one
of its tributaries. The dip in the land and in College Street is still visible today. In
keeping with the Arts and Crafts aesthetic of the time and the economics of pre-
automobile transport, construction materials for these houses were drawn from
the region: brick from the red earth of Terra Cotta, limestone for foundations
from the Niagara Escarpment, and pine and spruce from Northern Ontario. The
farmland consumed by these new housing tracts had long ago claimed any locally
available lumber. Skunk Motel was probably sold to two different families who
began their lives on either side of the common dividing wall that separated their
mirror-image houses.
Even as the valley of Garrison Creek was filled in, probably with earth exca-
vated prior to building local house foundations, it continued to influence the
development of the west end. These filled areas were unstable and less desirable as
building lots so they were built on last, with the result that the neighbourhood
forms a kind of accidental genealogy of building types from the early 1900s up to
the 1950s. Several large apartment buildings, with the common architectural mix
of Tudor, Arts and Crafts and Neo-Classical styles, were constructed in some of
these low-lying areas. The cracked walls and out of whack windows on a rambling
two-storey yellow brick building just up the street from my house bears witness
to the unstable ground on which part of it was built. The earlier northern section
has doorways flanked by Doric columns, each pair supporting a semi-circular tym-
panum. The southern section, built a few years later, has Arts and Crafts style flat
porch roofs supported by brackets below and diagonal chains above. This building,
now almost vacant, is awaiting City Hall approval for demolition.
I went by Skunk Motel almost every day as I took the streetcar to the university
where I was teaching and every night on my usual circuit with my dog. So I had
ample opportunity to study the lettering and think about what it meant as signage
PUBLIC 33 ERRATA 91
and how it gave expression to the imaginary life of the building. I could imagine
the many different families each of whom had decorated the rooms with different
colours, different wallpapers, and unique groupings of furniture and had lived
within the building with their own mental image of its space. I could imagine the
American artist, Gordon Matta-Clark, whose work I had included in one of my
university courses, cutting huge circular holes into the walls of Skunk Motel,
exposing all this layered history-interior rooms, wallpaper patterns, and severed
floor joists-to the light of day and the views of passersby.
The meager architectural details of Skunk Motel, even its missing details,
made me aware of its basic architectural form, a form that is duplicated, with
slight variations, throughout the neighbourhood. Just as one half of Skunk Motel
is a mirror image of the other, the building itself is mirrored in most of the hous-
es in the west end. I began to realize that Skunk Motel was more than its physical
structure, that what was visible on the street was just a false front, like the fa<;:ade
of a funhouse. Within the space that spread like a Leviathan behind the fa<;:ade
lurked the experiences and memories of everyone who had lived in Skunk Motel
or its cloned neighbourhood equivalents. With their impromptu signage, the graf-
fiti artists had shone a spotlight through time, illuminating a history that had gone
unnoticed because it was impossible for one person to see and too ephemeral to
document.
Skunk Motel was the name of this midway ride through time. The graphic
style of each word evoked its own historic associations and influences from
Popular Culture. The letters of the word Skunk, difficult to discern at first, are all
based on the same geometric pattern of four rectilinear forms with rounded cor-
ners assembled in a grid, with the upper left and lower right portions enlarged.
The blue lines that distinguish the "K" from the "u" are so subtle that most people
I showed my photographs to couldn't see the difference. With most graffiti, legi-
bility is secondary to speed of execution and formal inventiveness. Because the let-
tering appeared on the building just before Christmas, I saw each letter as a snow-
covered continent veined by blue rivers flowing to an arctic sea. Whether the graf-
fiti artist was aware of it or not, his modular Skunk letters are reminiscent of the
computer punch card letters of the 1960s in which letterforms had to conform to
the thick and thin rectangular slots that could be read by computers.
Looking so closely at the letters making up Skunk made me curious about the
animal itself. I did some cursory research and discovered that skunks are native to
North and South America but not to Europe. The word "skunk" was derived from
the aboriginal Abenaki word variously spelled se80unkw or se8unki. Skunk had its
origin in Massachusetts where, one presumes, the early colonists, never having
seen an animal like a skunk before, asked the native people what it was called and,
putting together the best English approximation of what they heard, came up with
the word skunk. Skunk is consequently a fusion of the alphabet of the Old World
with the phonetics of the New World.
92 PUBLIC 33 ERRATA
The other half of Skunk Motel is of recent origin, being a fusion of the words
"motor" and "hotel." Like the architectural details of the building, both words have
European origins with New World applications. The word "Motel" as it appears on
the ground floor brick fac;:ade is a white primeval word splashing around in its own
generative soup. In keeping with the unsavory character of a place named after a
very stinky animal, the coloured dots around the word suggest a polluted envi-
ronment. The two detached drips at each end of the word and the third about to
separate from the T suggest that the word itself is struggling, perhaps even sweat-
ing or crying, to get out of this situation. And yet, ironically, two white stars
sparkle nearby as if evoking the sanitized image of the real Motel Six franchise
after which Skunk Motel is named, or the night sky above dead-tired motorists,
searching for a lit up Vacancy sign.
I looked at the word Motel many times before I saw the eye in the lowercase
"e." It is looking towards the door where the number six is painted within a white
drip. Graphic devices like x's and eyes are common in the interior spaces of graffiti
letters. The "e" made me think of the famous E inscribed above the entrance of the
temple at Delphi and interpreted by Plutarch in 200 B. C. as meaning "know thyself."
The conscious "e" in Motel seems to be eyeing the locked door, as if waiting for
Skunk Motel to open, one big tear shed in its plea for accommodation.
lorge Zontal of the artist's group General Idea, once lived down the street
from Skunk Motel in a semi-detached house much like my own. He lived there for
a few years during the 1980s. I have a photograph of him covered with grass clip-
pings lying in a hammock in the backyard. It might have been his birthday. Then
he moved to NewYork and returned years later to stay with us for a month or two
in the apartment on our third floor before the penthouse he was going to move
into was ready. When I picked him up at the airport I noticed that his pants were
sliding down off his hips. He was that much thinner. As I wheeled his luggage to
the car in the parking garage a grey solid-bodied camera case slid off the dolly and
fell to the ground. He assured me the camera inside would be fine.
After he moved to the penthouse I visited him there frequently, usually with
some food I'd made myself-saffron risotto was his favourite. His eyesight was
failing so I began to read to him and to look at gouache drawings he had made in
New York. He wanted me to describe each one so he would know what I was
looking at. He would laugh fiendishly as I tried to describe the curious amalgama-
tions of assholes and heads, penises and torsos, some with ambiguous bits of
anatomy bristling with stubble ala Philip Guston. Even as he declined physically,
lorge retained his provocative and outrageous side. It was in this apartment that
he completed his last works of art, drawings of giant cockroaches that he claimed
were crawling all over his room. Of course, there was no such infestation-the
moving black spots were the holes in his degenerating retinas. lorge left me his
Hasselblad camera, the camera that had been inside the grey case at the airport
and the same one he had used many years prior to photograph the Dalai Lama
PUBLIC 33 ERRATA 93
before the latter fled his native Tibet. I used it to photograph the lettering on the
front of Skunk Motel.
Whenever I've used his camera I've always felt that he was there with me
going through the checklist of steps, making sure I didn't forget anything. Jorge
had decorated the black leather case of his light meter that came with the camera
with green and white dots and irregularly shaped pieces of pink tape outlined with
blue. So whenever I took a light reading he was always there checking the reading
with me. I used his camera to photograph two variety stores at the intersection at
the end of my street, one with Doric columns and the other with Ionic. Except for
the different orders of their
columns they are mirror images
of each other. I always admired
the way the columns are con-
structed of curved bricks like the
ones I once saw at Ostia Antica
outside Rome. Jorge and I shared
a passion for things Italian.
I never knew what other
businesses had operated in the
buildings before I moved into the
neighbourhood until one day
when a letter that had been
slipped through my mailbox got
caught in a crack between the
threshold and the oak flooring. As
I pulled it out I noticed another
letter deeper inside that I could-
n't get out. I pulled some lath and
plaster off the ceiling in the base-
ment and got into the space from
below. I found about fourteen
letters in all, the oldest going
back to 1931, each letter
addressed to the various occu-
pants of the house who had lived
in it before we did. One of the letters contained a card encouraging people to
come and visit a new millinery shop that had just opened. The address was the
store with Ionic columns at the end of my street.
Skunk Motel has been sitting empty for a couple of years. Notices were post-
ed at one point informing neighbours of impending alterations to the building to
convert it into a restaurant. We've watched the wave of gentrification move west
along College Street as grocery stores closed and reopened as restaurants, the old
94 PUBLIC 33 ERRATA
Polish War Veterans Hall was turned into a Jazz Club, and a Starbucks opened in a
former Bank of Commerce building. Further south, The Cee Dee Candy Factory,
which used to make the multi-coloured, cylindrical "Rocket" candy I remembered
collecting on Halloween during my childhood, was reinvented as the Candy
Factory Lofts. The sprawling Robert Bury Hardwoods on Sudbury Avenue with
huge letters spelling out the company name along the north side of the ramshackle
building was replaced with generic pseudo-Victorian townhouses, built, as far as I
could tell, with no lumber at all. The houses seemed to be made out of brick,
metal studs and rigid pink insulation. They are so plain it's hard to say what archi-
tectural style they are supposed to be.
One morning the graffiti let-
;F::~i:;~;~U:~~ih~: ;::~~ ~
graffiti crews from City Hall with a
muddy pink mix of leftover paint.
Without its signage the building
lost its identity. The mailbox that
had been dangling in the K of
SKUNK was also gone. I searched
around the side and back of the
building with my dog to see if I
could find it but it had vanished. I
suppose I wanted some souvenir of
Skunk Motel, something that would
confirm that it had once existed,
that letters had actually been deliv-
ered to a real address. My dog
looked at me quizzically wondering
when we were going to continue on
our usual route.
Skunk Motel had given a focus
to ideas that had been drifting
through my mind for many years,
ideas about the slow, almost unde-
tectable rate of change. I realize now that those changes were all stored in my
memory and in the memory of everyone who had ever lived in the area.
Individually, none of us had the whole picture. All the photographs we had taken
would never be assembled into one album to reconstruct the slowly changing real-
ity we had lived through. It took an imaginary motel to bring us together and to
suggest that we were all occupants of one place over a long span of time.
PUBLIC 33 ERRATA 95


Skunk Motel

O'Donnell, Darren

Beachballs 4 1+ All
DARREN 0 'DONNELL
Beacbballs 4 1+ All was a simple intervention that
tried its best to pretend not to be an intervention.
Through the charitable status of Toronto-based
performance company Mammalian Diving Reflex
(MDR), 400 inflatable pool toys were donated
from Liz and Rennie's No Frills to Alexandra
Park pool for its Wacky Fun Day. Then, again
using the resources of MDR, a call was made for
participants to come down to the pool early in the
morning to donate air and lungpower. About 20
people showed up, providing 400 toys for about 100
kids.
The intention was to induce an encounter between two
sets of people who have very little contact. The first was the artsy culture types
who check out MDR's work: friends, colleagues, and acquaintances, mostly white
and, while not rolling in dough, certainly in relatively confident possession of
social and cultural capital. The group included artists, curators, editors, produc-
ers, programmers, funders, academics, and one guy training to be a United
Church minister. The other population was the kids who frequent the pool; they
usually come from the lower half of Wards 19 and 20 (Kensington Market, the
Alexandra Park Housing Co-op, and surrounding area) and comprise a variety of
ethnicities with lower than average household incomes. Getting these two groups
together for a moment was motivated by a desire to create a small alliance
between the two populations, to offer the adults an opportunity to act in the inter-
est of the kids, and to have the kids be beneficiaries of fairly random, spontaneous
generosity. The intervention was not so much about reversing an already existing
power dynamic-though it did do that-but rather, introducing a relatively new
and different dynamic, if only for the duration of the day.
Another of Beacbballs 4 1+ All's concerns was to demonstrate abundance-
thus the decision to offer the toys en masse to the kids and not hand them out in an
orderly way. With 400 toys available, all kids in attendance could take home as
many as they wanted. For most of us, moments of abundant resources and time
are rare; we are used to "lack" as both a coercive idea and oppressive reality. Thus
the objective was to introduce the sensation of abundance to prove that it's possi-
ble, it exists, it's just a matter of shuffling a few things around, but distribution-
as always-is an issue.
If not for this abundant excess, Beacbballs 4 1+All would have looked a lot like
charity. It was in its excessiveness that the event began to bear the weight of
metaphor, artistic intention, and intervention-but an intervention where the
artist is barely noticed, and instead of being a creator is a conduit for already exist-
ing energies and resources, redirecting them and tweaking them slightly in a quiet
way. This strategy leaves plenty of room to experience the event with or without
137
criticality. It doesn't matter if the point isn't understood by participant, onlooker,
or audience-the roles here being completely muddled-since the experience is
being lived.
In his September 2005 visit to York University, Michael Hardt talked of uni-
fying the opposing poles of charity and desire. Charity remains liberal do-goodery
if it doesn't acknowledge and, in fact, encourage selfishness. It's not enough that
charity might be the right thing to do, but it's the thing you do because you know
it will render Jour life better. As long as the recipient is seen to be the only one on
the receiving end, we sustain charity as an act of discrimination and tend to rein-
force or sustain inequalities. Effective charity is work for others undertaken to
make your own life more tolerable. In the case of Beachballs 4 1+ All, the benefit
accruing to all the adults was the opportunity to hang around and have some fun.
Another result of the event was that adults and children who did not know
each other played together, breaking one of the most sacred rules of childhood:
don't talk to strangers. The prohibition against talking-let alone playing-with
strangers is irrational; children are more likely to be molested or abused in the
safety of their own home than by any playful adult on the street. There is a strong
perception of the public sphere as a place of danger and atomization rather than
safety and communication, and the lack of spontaneous play between strangers in
public is one of the clearest indicators that public space is a sphere of intense,
mostly internalized, surveillance. It feels odd to try to advance the idea that chil-
dren benefit from playing with strange adults, not because the idea is particularly
outlandish, but because it isn't outlandish at all. The whole thing looks to be a case
of notions of security and safety once again cloaking social control. In any case,
pools are great places to cavort. The sheer physical challenges offered by a tank of
water level the playing field. No matter how powerful the individual, when you're
only wearing a swimsuit and are up to your neck in water it's hard to control out-
comes-you've got to go with the flow. While most spontaneous play is anarchic,
playing in water introduces an element that ensures equality: almost everybody
becomes a kid again and all parties have the potential to benefit from experienc-
ing the affects of this equality. Play holds abundant possibilities for public inter-
vention, and generating atypical playmates also holds the potential for examining
typical and problematic power dynamics.
Nicholas Bourriaud, in his 1999 book Relational Aesthetics, states that today's
artistic avant-garde has given up the quixotic desire for Widespread social revolu-
tion and instead tries to simply inhabit the world in a better way. But what's miss-
ing from this strategy, and what makes Bourriaud and a lot of the current inter-
ventionist work vulnerable to criticism, is that without an analysis of power there
can be no addressing of imbalances. Thus, there is a tendency for relational work
to become glorified socializing. Rather than a relational aesthetic, which is too
loose and accepting, what might be more effective is an aesthetic of civic engagement.
This would involve an artistic use of the institutions of civil society, of community
13 8
centres, schools, seniors centres, sports clubs, and the media. Civic engagement
as an aesthetic uses the consensual participation of these institutions and individ-
uals as material to create work that, seen from most angles, appears to be mostly
not art, nor even intervention, for that matter, but that takes modest glances at
simple power dynamics and, for a moment, attempts to provide the sensation of
other possibilities.
PHOTOS: Darren O'Donnell


beachballs 4 1 + All

Liinamaa, Saara

Of Treasures and Trash: BookCrossing, Mark Dion's Tate Thames Dig and the (lost) objects of urban intervention

Contributors
MICHAEL AWAD'S current practice of experimental urban photography relies on camera equipment that he
has built and software that he has developed. He first exhibited this work as part of Substitute Cit)' at
Toronto's Power Plant Gallery in 2001. In 2002, Awad was selected to represent Canada as co-curator
and exhibitor at the Venice Architectural Biennale. In 2004, the Canadian Consulate of Chicago commis-
sioned Awad to participate in the Five Cities exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Centre. Awad's first solo
exhibition, The Entire Ci9' Projea opened at the Art Gallery of Ontario in the fall of 2005. For the past ten
years, Awad has taught photography, \~deo production, computer science, robotics, and architectural
design in the Faculty ofArchitecture of the University ofToronto.
NICHOLAS BALAISIS is a doctoral candidate in Communication and Culture atYork University. His research
interests generally pivot around the broad category of non-fiction film, from Italian neorealism and early
cinema verite to his present focus on self-inscription and reflexi\~ty in contemporary documentary. He has
recently completed his first short documentary film.
ADRIAN BLACKWELL is a Toronto-based artist, an urban and architectural deSigner, a teacher, and an
acti~st. This year he is teaching at the University of Michigan's College of Architecture and Urban
Planning, where he is pursuing urban research on the underdevelopment of Detroit. In 2004 he produced
three urban interventions in southern Ontario: car collective for the exhibition Parking:Art in Parking Lots in
Kingston; light net at Kitchener City Hall for this year's Contemporary Art Forum Peace of Mind; and
blind for Constructive Folly at the Doris McCarthy Gallery in Scarborough. With Kika Thorne, he partic-
ipated in the C-side collective's creative examination of the neighborhood surrounding Firgrove
Community Centre in Toronto's northwest.
ROSEMARY DONEGAN is an Associate Professor and Assistant Dean in the Liberal Studies Department at
the Ontario College of Art & Design. She is also an independent curator and writer whose work is
focussed on the complex layering of urban and industrial history and its associated relationship to both
cultural and industrial work, represented and reflected in all its varied ~sual and architectural forms.
VERA FRENKEL is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in Toronto. Her current touring project
on the inner life of a dysfunctional cultural organization, The Institute™: OrWhat We Dofor Love (www.the-
national-institute.org) has received the 2004 Untitled Art Award. A 3-disk DVD compendium of her
\~deotapes,media works, and writings is scheduled for release this spring.
ADAM KRAWESKY has been photographing people in Toronto's streets on a daily basis for the past three
years. He uses his website, inconduit.com, as a point of transmission for the beauty he sees in the face of
every person rendered anonymous by the city. His work is represented by Patrick Mikhail Gallery in
Ottawa (patrickmikhailgallery. com).
SAARA LIINAMAA is pursuing her doctorate in Social and Political Thought atYork University. Her writing
and research combine modern and contemporary art, culture, and the city-in particular, the dynaruics
of art, loss, and play ,,~thin the physical and imaginative spaces of the city. She is currently a researcher
for the Visible City Project + Archive (York University), and she has contributed to and co-edited one
pre\~ous urban-themed issue of Public, Localities (29).
AN TE LIU is the Director of the Master ofArchitecture Program at the Faculty ofArchitecture, Landscape
and Design at the UniverSity ofToronto. His gallery-based creative practice explores issues of function,
occupation, and cultural coding in the domestic and urban realms. Liu's works have been exhibited in solo
and group exhibitions in Canada, the US, Europe, and Asia. Current exhibitions include Re:Building the
World at the Art Gallery of Alberta and Therifare Beautiful at the Ursula Blickle Foundation in Germany.
Liu is represented by the Henry Urbach Architecture Gallery in NewYork.
JANINE MARCHESSAULT is a Canada Research Chair in Art, Digital Media and Globalization in the Faculty
of Fine Arts at York University. She is the Director of the Visible City Project + Archive (www. \~si­
blecity.ca), which is examining creative industries and artists' cultures across several cities. Her most
recent publication, Marshall McLuhan: Cosmic Media (Sage, 2005), explores McLuhan's theories of media in
the context of new digital cultures and globalization.
140
DARREN O'DONNELL is a writer, director, social acupuncturist, designer, and artIstIc director of
Mammalian Diving Reflex. His shows include A Suicide-Site Guide to the Ci9', Diplomatic lmmunities,
pppeeeaaaccceee, [boxhead}, White Mice, Over, Who ShotJacques Lacan?, Radio Rooster Says That's Bad and Mercy!
He has organized The Toronto Strategy Meetings, a durational project focusing on self-responsibility as a social
act, The Talking Creature, a continuing experiment in public discourse, and the upcoming Haircuts by
Children, an event offering free haircuts to the public by children aged 8-12 years.
The PEDESTRIAN MOB is a loose collective ofindi\~dualswho seek to engage the urban em~onmentas the
locus of numerous social ills and inspirations. To contact the mob or get information on new and upcom-
ing projects, check out pedestrianmob.net
KARYN SANDLOS is currently completing a Ph.D. in the Faculty of Education atYork University. Her WTit-
ing and research combine interests in media art, psychoanalysis, and pedagogy. Sandlos is the co-editor,
,,~thMike Hoolboom, of Landscape With Shipwreck: First Person Cinema and the Films '!fPhilip H'!ffman (2001),
and curator-in-residence for the Visible City Project + Archive. She has been a member of numerous
boards and curatorial collectives in the media arts sector, including the Images Festival, Pleasuredome,
and REHAB: Parkdale's Film and Video Showcase. She is Acting Director of the Writing and Learning
Centre at the Ontario College ofArt & Design.
CATHERINE SICOT is an art educator and curator committed to developing connections between artistic
practices and communities. She has worked as an Art Educator at the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville
de Paris and co-founded L'Art en Face, a Parisian non-profit organization. Since mO\~g to Canada in
2000, she has been working at Oakville Galleries, where she is currently the Education Manager. In the
mean time, she has become involved in the Toronto community as a board member of 4Unity
Productions, a youth media association located in Parkdale, and of Mercer Union, where she has been on
the programming committee for the past two years. She holds a D.E.A d'Histoire de I'Art (Masters of
Art History) from l'Universite Pantheon-Sorbonne, Paris I. Torontroll was her first major curatorial
project.
KAJA SILVERMAN is Class of 1940 Professor of Rhetoric and Film at the University of California at
Berkeley, and the author of seven books, including Male Subjectil'ity at the Margins (1992), The Threshold '!f
the Visible World (1996), and World Spectators (2000). She is in the process of completing a new book, Flesh
'!fMy Flesh, which is a response to our current historical moment. The book is devoted to forms of rela-
tionality that are the exact antithesis of those presently on display in the United States.
LORNA SIMPSON is an artist, from New York, working in photography, \~deo, and film. Recent interna-
tional publications about her work include Lama Simpson (Phaidon Contemporary Artist Series, London,
UK); Loma Simpson: Interior/Exterior, Full/Emp9' (Wexner Center for Contemporary Art, Ohio
University); and Campastela/Lama Simpson (Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea, Santiago de
Compostela, Spain. A travelling survey exhibition of her work is being organized by the American
Federation of the Arts, NewYork, for 2006-07.
DAVID TOMAS is an artist and writer. His latest books, A Blinding Flash '!fLight: Photography Between Disciplines
and Media (Editions Dazibao: Montreal) and Beyond the Image Machine: A History '!f Visual Technologies
(Continuum, London), were published in 2004. Tomas is an Associate Professor in the Ecole des arts
\~suels et mediatiques at the Universite du Quebec it Montreal.
GEORGE YllDICE is a Professor ofAmerican Studies and of Spanish and Portuguese at NewYork University.
He is Director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. He also directs the Privatization
of Culture Project for Research on Cultural Policy and the Inter-American Cultural Studies Network,
whose purpose is to engage scholars, intellectuals, acti\~sts, and artists in North-South dialogue on the
role of cultural work in furthering citizen participation in aesthetic, political, social, and economic mat-
ters. For the past seven years he has been conducting research on systems of support for art and culture
in the US, in several Latin American countries, and in international institutions. He has written ,,~dely on
literature, art, and culture in the U.S. and in Latin America, and is author of numerous books in Spanish
and English, including The Expediency '!f Culture (Duke UP, 2003), Culture and Value: Essays an Latin American
Literature, Culture, and Theories '!f the Americas (a reader for Blackwell, forthcoming).


Contributors

Liu, An Te

Chinatown in the Ether
AN TE UU
The following essay reflects upon various realities and conditions that produce the
contemporary Chinatown in North America. The idea of "ether," both in my title
and as a more general idea, speaks to a set of conditions that is both palpable and
non-substantive; ether is a way of thinking about emptiness or "nothing" in more
instrumental terms-as a space we inhabit and move within, and one in which it
is possible to establish a sense of place, purpose, and character despite the amor-
phous and expansive aspects of this space. In many ways, it is within this space-
the ether-that the contemporary Chinatown is finding its current habitat, telling
a story not only about the evolution (or devolution) of the so-called traditional
Chinatown, but also about changing settlement patterns and their effect on how
we (not as Asians or even immigrants, but all of us) might come to understand, in
alternative terms, an idea of the local.
Before launching into the ether, let me summarize some of my research on
what is perhaps the Asian-North American metropolis par excellence, Vancouver.
Richmond, British Columbia, is just adjacent to Vancouver and to the south. Its
population is over 40% ethnic Chinese. In previous research, I became interested
in how Richmond was forming a decidedly non-urban or extra-urban counterpart
to the traditional Chinatown of downtown Vancouver and contributing in partic-
ularly interesting ways (both architecturally and socially) to the increasingly com-
mon phenomenon of the suburban satellite Chinatown, or "China-burb." The most
interesting aspects of the Chinese malls in Richmond arose when pre-existing
commercial building types-the big box retail outlet, the large scale regional
mall, and the strip mall-were being transformed in ways that began to describe
a divergent commercial vernacular that was not only more Asian, but also more
urban. These Chinese malls formed a counterpart to the characteristics of more
typical North American malls, which possess a clearer organizational logic and
stricter regulation of zones of operation, are more spatially and programmatically
predictable, and are therefore coming to represent much of what the city is not.
We can witness the emergence of what might be termed the Asian Maxi-mall,
whose critical traits can be roughly described in three ways: as typological h)'bridi-
t)', as a return to the bazaar, and as programmatic instability.
Typological hybridity configures many of the Asian malls as curiously expand-
ed versions of the strip mall. The usual shops face the parking lots, but now with
vast interiors featuring multilevel, maze-like shopping arcades. It is easy to get
completely lost in these spaces. The interiors are roughly based on the regional
mall type; however, they have become more dense, intense, and unpredictable.
The plan of the Empire Centre in Richmond represents another kind of hybrid
strip mall with buildings and parking organized around an inter-block "street." We
can observe an urban commercial edge on both street fronts, and a village of sin-
gle and multiple storey buildings serviced by surface and rooftop parking.
President Plaza in Richmond is perhaps the most curious and complex hybrid
building, a kind of Cadillac of architectural crossbreeding. It begins as the Radisson
business hotel. The Radisson feeds into a high-rise office building and a six-storey-
high atrium space with an adjacent multi-level parking structure, which finally ter-
minates the building. The Plaza's interiors describe a spatial and experiential rich-
ness, with complex sequences of spaces large and small, formal and intimate.
President Plaza cannot decide if it is one building or at least five or six, if it is beau-
tiful or ugly. An architectural mixed bag, it is somewhat like a city dropped into
the suburb.
Moving from buildings to their occupants, the character of the bazaar links
the interior life of the Asian mall back to the life of the city. Cities are character-
ized by variety, density, and mutability. Their spaces facilitate genuine social activ-
ity. If the environments of transaction in the North American suburb have failed in
offering this interaction, the Asian maxi-mall seems to revive it. In the bazaar, the
persuasion of the merchant is also revived. They hawk their wares in a space of
exchange that is aggressive, messy, and vital, revealing aspects both of consump-
tion and production. Goods spill out of shops and share the space of the lanes,
blurring the boundary between the two. Merchants set up informal and tempo-
rary stalls, making all available spaces into spaces of transaction. Zones and activ-
ities merge and are overlaid as implied boundaries shift. InYaohan Centre one can
find temporary vendors in the foreground and, a little further along, the checkout
stalls of a supermarket. Beyond the checkout stalls, two independent stores have
been inserted within the space of the supermarket itself. Stalls within malls, little
stores inside bigger stores-here space is divided and subdivided in an articulation
of space through commerce.
In the bazaar, issues of zoning are dealt with in an ad hoc manner. One shop
owner may subdivide an already tight lot into two smaller units: one in front with
half its products out in the hall, and the other wrapping behind. This ad hoc allo-
cation of space creates a kind of programmatic instability. Programmatic instability
is aided and abetted by two factors: strata-lot ownership and laissezlaire zoning.
Strata-lot designation allows for outright purchase of a retail space within the
mall, creating a village of independent storeowners who are free to operate, lease,
or sublease their spaces. Because the lots are privately oVl'ned and operated, a wide
variety of unique goods and services present themselves in an equally unusual
range of spatial configurations. Laissez-faire zoning pushes the practice of mixed-use
(and mixed sensibilities) space to an extreme, offering diversity and even surprise.
President Plaza, as indicated on the mall directory, is host to a hotel, an array of
restaurants, a mall and supermarket, a spa and aesthetic services, offices, and the list
goes on. Rising further through the complex, we arrive at a skylit courtyard where
professional services such as a chiropractor, a dentist's office, and an educational
foundation are interspersed with antique stores and cell phone and import-export
companies. Following the light at the top level of the building, one finally arrives at
the last tenant. This is, amazingly, the Buddha's Light International Association, com-
plete vvith a temple and a monastery where monks actually study and reside.
86
The phrase "best function and sensation" seems logical enough, but in
Richmond, the process of translation has offered new possibilities for density and
diversity, even as the process restates obvious goals of good buildings and social
spaces. In many ways, the malls of Richmond revive the rituals of human transac-
tion in increasingly urbanized environments, which contest the homogeneity and
conformity of the suburbs. The malls somehow do allow for the best function and
sensation, for only in a place like the Asian mall, or maybe in a good city, can you
get a bowl of noodles, ride an elevator with a monk on the way to getting
your teeth cleaned, and then do karaoke until four in the morning.
There is, then, a very rich world existing in these malls, one
that is not well known to many westerners (Canadians), but that
is thoroughly assimilated into daily experience, and even taken
for granted by Asians. While Richmond is a relatively estab-
lished Asian enclave, we also know that Asians and Asian malls
are popping up in less likely, more unfamiliar and emergent
terrains. Let me turn to the phenomenon of the monster home
in this regard. This saga revolves around questions of where cer-
tain groups of immigrants choose to live, the homes they buy and
build, and how ideas and ideals of a new domesticity in a foreign yet
familiar land are struggling to find some kind of expression (and often
encountering opposition) in architectural terms. This is a story concerning the
influx (mainly from pre-reunification Hong Kong) of so-called entrepreneurial
class Asian immigrants who preferred to locate themselves in the most tradition-
ally non-ethnic Vancouver neighbourhoods, such as Kerrisdale and Shaunnessey.
This settlement is especially ironic, since there had actually been a covenant for-
bidding Chinese people and Jews from settling in these areas. Earlier in the cen-
tury, it had also been common for residents to keep servants, referred to as "the
Chinaman" in early house plans.
What was and perhaps is still most striking about this episode centres on the
issue of visibility. The new Asian arrivals, not so much the people but their habi-
tats, began marking the physical fabric of a sensitive area. Huge homes maximized
land use and were characterized by double height columns, big windows affording
a view of the chandelier hanging in the vestibule, gates and paved front lawns,
large expanses of stucco or, alternatively, conspicuous stone veneers. It seemed
that the harder these houses tried to emulate the building traditions surrounding
them, the stranger and even more visible the results were. Moving forward into
the past, it was as if the homes were holding up a slightly distorted mirror to their
neighbours, with their funny turrets, gazebos, and other attempts at an anglo-his-
toricist style. The homes mark a curious shift from the post-colonial to the cross-
or poly-colonial. Indeed, despite various efforts at compliance, these homes
would invariably violate some form of etiquette in the process of translation. This
situation raises questions for all of us, which might be posed as such: How do we
choose to locate ourselves? In what style do we build? How might a transplanted
ethnicity manifest itself in the physical fabric of a locale?
Can we read the dramatic transformation of the Vancouver city centre, pre-
cipitated by the development of countless high-rise condominium towers over the
last decade, in terms of such cultural translations? Many of these buildings had
been developed and sold within the context of an international property market.
Often, units were pre-sold sight-unseen to overseas purchasers seeking to estab-
lish assets and a residential base in Canada. As with the monster homes, the tow-
ers commonly became the domain (or a kind of international space station) for
what is popularly termed "the astronaut": the sky-bound, trans-Pacific Asian
nomad with multiple passports, residences, and dispersed family. This new itiner-
ant population, together with a teeming number of Asian tourists and visiting
Asian language students, has transformed areas like the Robson North district,
giving it a distinctly trans-Pacific character and producing a delirious sensation of
being both here and somewhere else at the same time.
How do all of these accounts force us to think about the complex intersec-
tions between the local and the global, the here, there, and anywhere? How do we
arrive at a sense of place and make meaningful connections between where we are
from and where we might find ourselves? After living for the last ten years in Los
Angeles, Paris, and Vancouver, I am back in Toronto living downtown in
Chinatown. I knew that Chinatown was changing, receiving new immigrants from
South-East Asia and many other places, and that many of these new Asian immi-
grants toToronto were locating themselves not in Chinatown, but in Scarborough,
Mississauga, Richmond Hill, and Markham. One day, in search of some good
Shanghainese dumplings, a friend from Hong Kong recalled that there might be a
DingTai Fung, a famous chain of Shanghainese restaurants, located somewhere in
Toronto. She called up the Chinese 411 service and found the address, which
turned out to be in Markham, in something called First Markham Place. Ding Tai
Fung is a fairly exclusive chain, "vith only a handful of locations in Taipei, Hong
Kong, Shanghai, Tokyo, Los Angeles ... and now Markham. Here I began to dis-
cover the suburban Chinese malls of the very outer reaches ofToronto.
A map from the 1996 census shows the settlement patterns of the most
recent immigrants to Toronto. The patterns indicate that there is no discernible
concentration in the city core, where the old Chinatown is located. If there is a
pattern, it is a push upward and outward, especially to the north. This is where
Richmond Hill and Markham are located. Markham is about 20 miles from
Toronto's downtown core. Formed in 1971 with a population of 36,000, by 2001
the population had reached 267,000, over 30% of which are of ethnic Chinese ori-
gin. Its population is expected to grow by another 70% over the next 30 years.
Markham represents one of the outer (but certainly not last) frontiers of subur-
ban expansion in the greater Toronto area, Vlrith new, single-family housing and
retail! commercial developments further encroaching on what was recently
88
considered the countryside, beyond the fringes of Toronto. Here we find a wide-
open landscape of giant thoroughfares lined with large big-box stores, strip malls,
plazas, and office complexes. It is difficult to see where and how people live, as
most of the residential enclaves are set back from the streets and face inward.
Most of the Chinese malls in the Greater Toronto Area are not as complex or
typologically inventive as the Richmond malls, but they do operate, at the level of
their interiors, like small cities. Almost all of the stores are independent, offering
a very diverse range of goods and services, and flexible opening and closing times.
The malls are commercial manifestations of a community taking shape in a new
land, among other cultures. They offer a locus for social interaction and cater to
the daily needs of an ethnic group at a neighborhood scale, while also providing
specialty goods for a population at a regional scale. The malls may be obscure, even
undetectable within a seemingly barren landscape, but inside they begin to form
a distinct locality of vibrant satellite enclaves seemingly in the middle of nowhere.
The malls are places where a culture can express itself, flourish, and take hold.
This may seem unlikely in what may be described as a "non-place," to use Marc
Auge's term, but as Auge maintains, "... the same things apply to the non-place as
to the place. It never exists in pure form; places reconstitute themselves in it; rela-
tions are restored and resumed in it ...." I
The evolution of Chinatown in Toronto and elsewhere is about a steady
migration, or wandering-out from the city in many directions, of people finding
sites between and among other sites and other cultures. There are over 30 Chinese
malls and centres north of Toronto alone, all taking various forms and scales.
There are now more Chinese people living outside of China than there are
Canadians living in Canada. Fixed and bounded, the old Chinatowns may contin-
ue to survive, but they no longer represent the most complete story about Asian
immigration, settlement, and commerce. What we witness is something that has a
weaker sense of representation, that is harder to identify and locate. The malls rep-
resent a mutation, multiplication, and dispersal of Chinatown-they are mobile,
adaptable, and sometimes invisible. They have no natural habitat, but they can land
and begin to participate in forming meaningful locations and a contingent sense of
place that is equally a result of an intrinsic foreign quality. Amidst the ether, these
places are simultaneously foreign and domestic, familiar and strange, non-urban
and kind-of-urban, somewhere, nowhere, and anywhere.
NOTES
1 Marc Auge, Non-Places: lntroduction to an AnthropoloBY of Supermoderni9', trall'. John Howe (London:
Verso, 1995),78.


Chinatown in the Ether

Yúdice, George

The Heuristics of Contemporary Urban Art Interventions

Balaisis, Nicholas

Driving Affect:
The Car and Kiarostami's Ten
NICHOLAS BALAISIS
We peform our movements in a space which is not "empty" or
unrelated to them, but which on the contrQlj, bears a highly
determinate relation to them: movement and backg1"Ound are,
in fact, only artificially sepamted stages ifa unique totality.
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami's recent film Ten (2002) is notable for its
exclusive use of a car as the central site of drama. The film, which features ten
emotion-laden exchanges, is shot entirely from two digital cameras placed near
the dashboard within the protagonist's car. Pivoting for the most part around the
female protagonist and her kin, the conversations in the film are all mediated by
the car. The characters' interactions are inflected (and often interrupted) by banal
events such as heavy traffic, communication with other motorists and pedestrians,
parking, as well as the constant preoccupation of driving itself. The car, however,
is not merely the film's backdrop (it is not simply another road movie) but, as
Kiarostami argues, is the structuring agent of the film itself, the catalyst of the
affectively charged encounters. My concern is to explore the ways in which the
body is held and shaped (in its various affective registers) by its physical context.
By using the car as the central site of the film, Kiarostami draws attention to the
material, and more importantly, immaterial affects of filmmaking: the ephemeral
and perhaps under-examined forces that constitute a scene. In this way, he mod-
els a mode of atmospheric sensitivity in filmmaking. This peculiar emphasis of
Kiarostami's is perhaps best understood in light of the corporeal phenomenology
of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and his notion of the chiasm-the enfolded relationship
between bodies and space. For Kiarostami, like Merleau-Ponty, the body is not
something that acts independently in space in a way distinct from it, but rather,
the body inhabits and is thus deeply intertwined with the space in which it is held.
Merleau-Ponty and thefilm act
My reason for invoking Merleau-Ponty in a discussion of film is rooted in a desire
to examine, in greater depth, the consequences of the film act. This question has
received the most significant attention from documentary film critics concerned
with the direct and often intrusive intervention that the documentary enacts.
Much of the writing on this topic, however, has focused primarily on the exclu-
sive effects of the filmmaker and the camera. Michael Renov and Thomas Waugh,
for example, have argued that in many cases, the filmmaker's presence (or the
effects of their presence) is explicitly inscribed, and hence observed, in many
seemingly neutral, observational documentaries. Renov, for instance, observes a
point in the film An American Family (1973) where a "conspiratorial glance is
exchanged with the camera'" by one of the film's subjects, while Waugh infers the
effects of the camera from the "flamboyant" performances of the subjects in Fred
Wiseman's observational films. 2 Kiarostami, instead, draws our attention to the
effects of the general atmosphere or site of the filmmaking act itself, effects which
for him are as significant as the presence of the filmmaker or camera. Merleau-
Ponty's phenomenology is a helpful frame for considering Kiarostami's film
methodology since his philosophy emphasizes the body's primal relationship to the
world and the contingent totality of experience. In the chiasm, we are presented a
7 1
model of embodied subjectivity where the body is constituted through an enfold-
ed proximity to the world; it is a body that stretches out toward objects in the
world and is simultaneously inflected and shaped by those very same objects.
Chiasm is a concept of subjectivity so immediately and intimately bound to the
vicissitudes of the world that "one cannot indeed say of [the] body that it is not
elsewhere, but one also cannot say that it is here or now in the sense that objects are."3
In short, the body is described as a complex field of forces that cannot be simply
reduced to psychological interiority. Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology can thus
serve to cleave a space in which to speak about Kiarostami's film more effective-
ly, given his unusual emphasis on the dynamic role played by the car in Ten.
The eifJectil'e particularities if the car
A brief survey of Kiarostami's body of work reveals the car not simply as a recur-
rent backdrop, but indeed as the "heart of the Kiarostamian cosmology.'" His most
celebrated film, A Taste ifCherry (1997), famously takes place almost entirely with-
in the protagonist's Range Rover. In the film, the car not only serves as the site of
the film's central diegetic action (the protagonist's awkward attempts to solicit
various strangers to bury him after his anticipated suicide), but also structures the
very rhythm of the film. The car slowly meanders through the streets and hills of
Tehran while the camera records the unfolding duration, tracing the geography of
the city often in the real time marked by the car. In Ten, unlike A Taste ifCherry,
there are no external shots of the car; the ten vignettes that constitute the film are
all shot from within the female protagonist's vehicle: a "container" for the charac-
ters and their drama. S Ten has both a technical and narrative simplicity that give it
the sense of an observational documentary, as if the cameras simply happened to
capture an unscripted day in the life of a contemporary Iranian woman. This tone
is reinforced by the fact that the film has no plot in the conventional sense and is
instead composed of short, elliptical conversations that index the daily struggles
of women's lives in Iran. For example, three of the vignettes feature arguments
between the protagonist and her frustrated son regarding her recent divorce from
the boy's father, while other scenes play out the difficulties of marriage and par-
enting in conversations between the protagonist and her sister.
Much like the Italian neorealists, and Cesare Zavattini6 in particular,
Kiarostami betrays an anxiety concerning the performance of his characters.
While he employs both actors and non-actors in Ten, he is careful that they do not
perform roles in the conventional sense, but that they "act as themselves." Like the
neorealists, who are no doubt his artistic kin, Kiarostami's principal filmic con-
cern is for loose, natural expression in his performers, free from the artificiality
of acting. Kiarostami describes the structure of his films as unscripted and improv-
isational, designed to allow space for the performers to act and react without the
over-determination of fixed lines or character motivations. In this way, the emphasis
7 2
on character performance overrides Kiarostami's concern with plot or rnise-en-scene;
as he puts it, "I can't bear narrative cinema. I leave the theatre."? Ten is thus quite
literally a vehicle for the characters' real everyday fears, needs and frustrations, a
fact that retains a trace of Kiarostami's original intention for the film: to portray a
female psychoanalyst compelled to treat clients in her car. In other words, Ten
seems to enact a kind of talking cure. In the tradition of neorealism, the film aims
to unearth real emotion from non-actors, emotion drawn directly from the char-
acters' life struggles, and not simulated or "acted" for the camera. However, it is
clearly Kiarostami's use of the car that marks his distinct fashioning of the neore-
alist aesthetic. It is the car that functions as the emotional mechanism par excellence,
the device that frees the film most decisively from the artifice of acting.
As Kiarostami argues in the accompanying film treatise 10 on Ten (2004) (also,
not coincidentally, filmed entirely within a car), the car is the perfect location for
a film since it generates the right atmosphere for natural dialogue, emotion, and
behavior. The fact that it is a small and relatively confined space has a relaxing and
reassuring effect on the actors, creating "the right mood for dialogue." This is
aided by the fact that there is no crew or director in the car with the actors; how-
ever, their absence alone does not seem to account for the productive effects of
the space. In describing his own experience of being in a car, Kiarostami notes the
ease with which it allows him to communicate his inner thoughts: "I imagine my
voice getting lost among the noise of other cars... these iron cells give me a sense
of security and this facilitates my inner dialogue." This intimacy is reproduced in
the deSign of the car itself; as Kiarostami again remarks:
A person sitting next to someone else [in a car] might not even pay attention to the
other's presence. Each of them narrates his or her own inner world. So the choice of set-
ting is appropriate for addressing the psychological issues of the characters in the film.
The car's seats draw the driver and passenger close to each other physically
but simultaneously, by virtue of the front-facing orientation, allow them a certain
visual autonomy. Sitting in a car allows a person to drift in and out of conversa-
tion, to connect and engage with the person beside them, or to simply fix their
attention out beyond the car's window. Indeed, the characters in Ten only rarely
turn to face the person beside them. It is as if their proximity to the outside gives
them the space to more easily reveal themselves, freed of the direct gaze of their
fellow passenger.
The other important structural feature of the car, then, is the fact that it binds
two heterogeneous spaces-the private interior of the car and the public space of
the city ofTehran beyond the window. The city's presence is distinctly marked in
the film as it constantly interrupts the conversations inside the car, often injecting
itself as punctuation in the dialogue. Kiarostami notes that this intervening pres-
ence of the city adds to the charged emotional spontaneity achieved in the film.
73
Who has not, he asks, been affected, or drawn into an argument, by the noise of
traffic and the actions of other motorists? "It's a space that can create emotional
or nervous tension because of proximity or because of the discomfort caused by
bad traffic." It is thus the combined work of the internal space of the car (its
rhythm and privacy) and the public exterior space, represented by passing visual
stimuli and random encounters, which make the car an ideal site for natural dia-
logue as well as private confession.
As a space of private confession, the car also highlights the gender critique
central to the film. The fact that it is in the car that the women are able to com-
municate freely and honestly speaks to an absence of such spaces in Iran, or at least
the limited political space afforded to women. This problem is most overtly illus-
trated by the opening scene of the film, where the protagonist explains to her son
the reason for her false testimony against her former husband, in which she
accused him of being a drug-addict. In dramatic manner, she defends her accusa-
tion as the only way for her to have secured a divorce in present-day Iran, since
the "the laws of this country give no rights to women." As a site of security, there-
fore, the car is symptomatic as much as it is literal; the restricted autonomy of the
space reveals the estrangement felt by the female characters beyond the car's
boundaries. In the car, at least, the women can safely voice their repressed frus-
trations, accumulated as a consequence of Iranian patriarchy. To again recuperate
Kiarostami's original psychoanalytic intention, the car serves as a confessional
space (akin to Freud's analytic couch) whose temporary distance from the domi-
nant male economy permits a more spontaneous emotional purge.
Kiarostami and the chiasm
In the film Ten, it is the car's literal dynamic-the affects that it supposedly engen-
ders-that remains the film's most provocative aspect. The relationship between
the car, the city, and the actors in the film best expresses Merleau-Ponty's notion
of the chiastic bond, and in particular, the determinate role of seemingly
ephemeral or atmospheric phenomena. In Merleau-Ponty's description of music,
for example, he most eloquently describes how a phenomenon that is not visible
in space produces a tangible affect in the way that it ''besieges, undermines and dis-
places that space.'" Music not only affects the listener's body, but also reconstitutes
the very space in which the music is heard. The listeners in a concert hall, "unaware
that the floor is trembling beneath their feet, are like a ship's crew buffeted about
on the surface of a tempestuous sea'" (my emphasis). Merleau-Ponty here assigns
a particular affect to music that not only destabilizes the perceived boundary
between listener and sound (as if we could simply extricate or detach ourselves
from the music we are listening to), but also does so surreptitiously; music seizes
the listener from ''beneath their feet," beyond their conscious recognition of the
fact. In this way, Merleau-Ponty suggests the ambiguity immanent to sense experience,
74
the fact that a given phenomenon like music holds us in a way that is both deter-
minate (it has a clear affect on the listener) but also ambiguous (we cannot be sure
how or in what precise manner we are being affected). The listeners who are
moved by the music, who tap their feet or gently sway their heads, do not neces-
sarily know that they are being moved; there is an uncertainty in the distinction
between what the individuals are doing and what is being done to them. It is not
the music that strictly determines the listeners' movements, nor is it the listeners
who consciously decide to move in sync with the music, but rather, it is an inde-
cipherable union of the two, an erifolded bond as Merleau-Ponty would say, where
the two are "united at the very instant in which they clash."'o
This example reveals the ambiguous dynamic at the heart of Ten. While
Kiarostami's commentary on the film implies a determinate bond between the
actors and the car, the car does not simply direct the characters' emotions, as if it
were a transparent mechanism with clear cause and effect. The relationship
between the car and Kiarostami's characters, instead, is much more chiastic. The
film shows how the body is shaped and limited by its context, but in a way that is
mutually constituted. In Ten, the body and the car are bound together like "two
halves of an orange."" The car is not simply a neutral stage upon which the char-
acters interact, but in a certain way, it is as if the car (and its attendant connection
to the city) communicates through the characters. We witness the way that the car
both subtly and explicitly inflects the characters in the film, allowing them tem-
porary reprieve from a difficult scene via its windows, for example, or further
complicating a heated exchange through its proximity to heavy gridlock.
In this way, Ten can be read as a comment on the affects of modern urban life
as expressed in the car, perhaps the object most symptomatic of the contemporary
metropolis. The uniquely interstitial space that the car inhabits (the way that it
straddles both public and private space) makes it a particularly sensitive site for
absorbing and expressing the dynamic between the subject and the city. In a sense,
the car in Ten is a privileged site that stages the affective forces (both negative and
positive) of the city. It reveals the city not merely as empty ground for human
action, but, as Merleau-Ponty suggests, as a site enfolded in our every movement,
"as flesh offered to flesh."'2
NOTES
1 Renov, Michael. The Subject ofDocumentaJ)'. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 173.
2 Waugh, Thomas. "Acting to Play Oneself: Notes on Performance in Documentary." Making Visible the
lnl'isible: an anthology of original essays onfilm octing, ed. Carole Zucker. (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow
Press, 1990),72.
3 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alfonso Lingus (Evanston:
Northwestern UP, 1968), 147.
4 Caputo, Rolando. "Five to Ten: Five Reflections on Kiarostami's 10." Senses of Cinema, (29), 2003 Nov-
Dec. (no pagination).
5 Ibid.
6 Zavattini, Cesare. "A Thesis on Neo-Realism." Springtime in ltaij':A Reader On Neo-Reolism, ed. and trans.
David Overbey (London: Talisman Books, 1978).
7 Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Evidence ofFilm, trans. Christine Irizzary andVerenaAndermatt Conley (Brussells:
Yves Gevaert, 2001), 88.
8 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Phenomenolo8J of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge,
2002), 262.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
11 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the lnvisible, 133.
12 Merleau-Ponty, 131.
Films Referenced
A Taste of Cherry. Dir. Abbas Kiarostarni. 1997. DVD. Criterion, 1998.
Ten. Dir. Abbas Kiarostami. 2002. DVD. Zeitgeist, 2004.
10 on Ten. Dir. Abbas Kiarostami. 2004. DVD. Zeitgeist, 2004.


Not a member yet