Essay about Painting and the City by Pierre Ouellet... a Lifeworld Image e-publication

Anne-Laure Djaballah

When a City Dreams...

A Project Lifeworld E-Publication - 2019

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Anne-Laure Djaballah - When a City Dreams... ISBN Published in 2013 by LIfeworld E-Publications 72 Ellsworth Avenue Toronto - Ontario - M6G 2K3 e-mail:

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A Project Lifeworld E-Publication - 2019 Project Management and Design : Pierre Ouellet

Anne-Laure Djaballah MontrĂŠal Studio 2012

Introduction I was skimming the art section of the Globe and Mail one Saturday morning in the fall of 2011 when I came across an article/review by R.M Vaughn about an exhibition at the Muse Gallery in Toronto. What struck me first were the two works of art on prominent display, at the center of the article, because without reading a line of text I immediately knew they were somehow from and about Montréal. This struck me because my own research at the time into “the Image of the City in early modern Canadian Poetry” was broadening in order to examine other representations of the early modern city in other media, most notably, painting and music.

As I read the obligatory review, with its measure of self-indulgence (did I really need a prominent reference to Fraggle Rock to frame the critical discussion?), its half-hearted attempt at aesthetic analysis (drawn primarily from the artist’s own statement) and the obligatory endorsement which suggested that Anne-Laure’s works were “fresh real estate” for the discerning collector (no wonder art critics are so despised by the constituents they serve), I decided nevertheless to take in the show as soon as I could.

Early the next week, I spent some time at Muse Gallery and felt immediately connected to the works, in terms of their energy and what I would later come to think of as a sense of memory prior to meaning: the mostly uncategorized déjà-vu of fleeting images and impressions that constitutes my greater sense of Montréal.

Muse owners, Lisa and Jay, were kind enough to give me an email for Anne-Laure and I tried, over the next several months, to set up a meeting with the artist.

This took several months and when we finally sat together in a small coffee shop in the shadow of the Jacques Cartier bridge near her studio, I was initially unable to overcome her natural reluctance to appear on film and share her story. It took the better part of another year, and a show at the Ossington Gallery in Toronto, before Anne-Laure agreed to share her thoughts and her work with the world in the film When a City Dreams.

To this day, I am still blown away by the work, (as I hope you will also be) and by the limitless potential of the artist’s inner vision and creative intuition, her uncanny sense of being in the genius loci of the imaginary order of collective life.

Pierre Ouellet - 2016

Painting & the Image of the Modern City by Pierre Ouellet The definition of what constitutes an image lies at the very center of any discourse regarding the nature and function of representation as a social practice. The term image, in the broadest sense, refers at once to all forms of representation, to the mimetic production of likenesses, to mental or physical impressions as well as to figures of speech which somehow reflect the infinite variety of iconic, symbolic and indexical human relationships to collective life and the lifeworld.

No doubt, as well, the concept of the image, understood in the Deuleuzian sense of the term, carries within it not only its troubled past but the unrest of its uncertain future in terms of the often opposing interests and concerns of both verbal and pictorial representation.

While the Greeks debated the very legitimacy of representation, Plato advocating the banishment of images while Aristotle argued in favor of mimesis as a corrective of nature itself and the necessary movement towards Ideal forms, reluctant modernist such as Benjamin and Bazin not only bore witness to the emergence of contemporary image culture but offered early theoretical insights into the new forms of subjectivity and social organization that these techne of modernity, the machineries of image production which haunt Deleuze and Virillio, inexorably brought forth. While the “automatic production of likeness” is perhaps best exemplified by the photographic image, there follows a radical transformation in the mimetic imagination of western culture which now promotes “image theory and practice” as the transection of disciplinary boundaries, from philosophy to psychology, from aesthetics to semiotics, auguring the reinvention of a politics of representation whose primary orientation is the reclaiming, beyond the artifice of simulation, of an enduring lived engagement with the expressive order of collective life. It is with this in mind that we can, in turn, consider the concept of the image, as it is articulated to urban existence, that is to say, the image of the city, from several successive vantage points in a movement from sociology through urbanism which comes to rest, if only for an instant, in visual discourse and the painting of modern urban existence.

We can begin by accepting the practice of painting the city as a particular type of utterance, a production or text, which has relevance and value, sui generis, for a sociological inquiry into urban cultural practices. To this end, we turn, first, to a work by Raymond Ledrut entitled Les images de la ville published in 1973 in the wake of the structuralist and semiotic project which over-whelmed the social sciences and accounted for much of the critical analytic work of the period. Ledrut’s study sought to cast the “urban experience” as “meaning” or signification expressed in everyday life, in the manner of de Certeau by first separating the subject and the object of analysis or inquiry. Ledrut wrote: There are no more meanings in the urban object than there are in the urban subject. Meanings/significations do not exist in the city per se, divorced from human practices in a time and a world. Neither are they simple projections. Meanings exist neither in heads nor in things, they exist in experience: in this case, the urban experience.

This grounding in lived experience required, however, information and social facts, a collapsing of subject and object, a surrendering of one to the other as data, which the author discovered in ordinary utterances or speech acts about the city through which an “image” of the city began to appear and take shape.

Solicited/summoned one way or another, humans speak of the city. They speak in a variety of ways, as they speak of all else, however the initial question that arises is whether they also speak of it in a particular manner, more or less specifically. Is there a language or speech (talk) of the city which tells us something particular?

Here we should immediately dissociate the notion of ‘image’ that Ledrut theorizes from the commonplace notion of imagery and imagism in art and poetry, a concept which refers, at once, to a certain quiddity of expression, and a literary movement in the early part of this century and ground the term, rather, in Ledrut’s own definition: The term “image” refers to a structure of the discourse which is about an object and a relatively well defined group of phenomena. The “image” of the city is not the gestalt of states of consciousness; it is a “distinctive speech.”

He reminds us that, furthermore, the search for the ‘image’ is the attempt to discern, in a discourse on an object, however the discourse has arisen, all that is unique or particular to this object. As such, the ‘Image’ can take many forms. Ledrut proposes: ... It is portrait, figure, model, according to the level of abstraction, of schematization, that one takes into account.... The image of the city is similar to a myth or a literary work. The Image is not the simple expression of a simple signifier, direct, pure, one might say, it is a sign which itself is composed of signifiers and signifieds.

Furthermore, this notion of “Image,” now capitalized to represent its meta-discursive mode, is not indebted to the conceptual category of the city as such, rather: it is the “apparition of the city” which is connoted within the discourse itself with a sense of the image of the city as “figure: evocation and manifestation.” All the elements that are conjugated by the Image and constitute it have an imaging quality, in so far as they are the means of an incarnation rather than a designation. The “image” of the city is an “epiphany,

Ledrut theoretical model of the ‘Image of the city” allows us to consider the possibility that painting “of and about urban existence and place,” might be productive and valuable as a means of socio-cultural investigation and cultural analysis. These painterly texts, although unique on one level, should also be read as meaningful reflections which offer unique insights into the complex imaginary of the expressive order of the city.

These representations differ from the ethnographies collected by the sociologist and his researchers in several salient aspects, two of which should be briefly discussed. While Ledrut adheres to the classic Saussurian distinction between “langue” and “parole,” it might serve us better to think of painting as a more highly determined form of speech and representation, a “metaparole,” perhaps, constituted of evolved and complex associative relations. This consideration extends the interpretative field of any analytic framework in relation to the scope of simple sociological or literary studies and confers upon it another dimensionality through which an interdisciplinary approach can begin to take shape. One should also take into account the particular nature of the relationship between the painter, her work and her audience, an engagement which is significantly different from that of the generic speaker engaged either in simple dialogue or in the process of responding to survey questions, a difference which we might conceive in terms of the social embededness and contextual awareness of the visual act in terms of its relation to language itself. We might even think of this self-othering consciousness as constitutive of a particular comparative ethics of aesthetic representation, a move which would allow us to read at once the text, the artist and the city as ‘image’ and as ‘experience’ in direct relation to each other, invoking, as little as possible, the distortions of solipsistic mediation which privileges subject and interpretation over action and praxis.

Ledrut’s conception of the “Image” of the city was intended, in part at least, as a critical response to another conception of the city as “Image” articulated, around the same time, by Kevin Lynch, an American urban planner who focused on the cognitive and psychological dimension of what he termed the “imageability” of cities, understood as the visual quality of the American city, a “vast construction in space,” from which individuals derived “mental images.”

It was Lynch’s contention that the designed urban environment exhibited a particular visual quality, which he termed “legibility” and that this “apparent clarity... of the cityscape” was responsible, in part at least, for the degree and type of affective relationship that the city might elicit from its citizens. This pleasure of apprehension of the lived urban environment, was therefore concomitant, for the author, with “the ease with which its (the city’s) parts can be recognized and ... organized into a coherent pattern.” The individual’s cognitive organization of external space was based on the fundamental understanding that the city existed both as “a thing in itself,” a designed “object of overwhelming size, time and complexity” in the process of constant change through building, as well as the product of sensory perception. This cognitive organization was also grounded in a particular version of time and space as a palimpsest of subjective and objective impressions.

At every instant, there is more than the eye can see, more than the ear can hear, a setting or a view waiting to be explored. Nothing is experienced by itself, but always in relation to its surroundings, the sequence of events leading up to it, the memory of past experience...Every citizen has had some long association with some part of the city, and his image is soaked in memories and meanings. (Emphasis my own.)

Commenting on the basic phenomenology of way-finding, grounded in “the environmental image, the generalized mental picture of the external physical world that is held by the individual,” Lynch argues that much of the anxiety, disorientation and alienation produced by the modern city comes from poor structural organization which he sees as a hindrance to collective life as well as “individual growth.”

The city is seen, thus, as possessing the potential for “strong expressive meaning” which, as “a vivid and integrated setting... plays a social role as well. It can furnish the raw material for the symbols and collective memories of group communication.” Acknowledging the seminal role of landscape in the choice of the location and the future development of modern cities, the author speculates that “a good environmental image gives its possessor an important sense of emotional security,” furthermore, the “distinctive and legible environment ... also heightens the potential depth and intensity of human experience.” This argument is significant because it underscores the ambivalence which, at once, exists as a critique of the “visual chaos of modern city” and the avowed rational possibility of constructing an urban environment which will maximize human comfort in relation to the material order of collective urban existence. In commenting on the “value of mystification,” Lynch acknowledges that the element of surprise, of mystification, can also be present in the individual’s apprehension of the city, but only under the conditions that one can escape this temporary disorientation when necessary and that some form of cognitive order about this environment can be developed and sustained over time and that it exist only in a “small region in a visible whole.” This understanding of the dynamic phenome-nological nature of constructed environments lead the author to propose that the relationship between the observer and user of the city is a creative engagement through which an ever-changing image of the city exists as “an open-ended order, capable of continuous further development.”

Environmental images are the result of a two-way process between the observer and his environment.

The environment suggests distinctions and relations and the observer—with great adaptability and in the light of his own purposes— selects, organizes, and endows with meaning what he sees.

It follows that the “image of a given reality may vary significantly between different observers.” However, these individual differences are not the primary concern of the author, whose interest lies in the planning of the urban environment, so that what is sought rather, are “public images, the common mental pictures carried by large numbers of a city’s inhabitants” reflections of a “common culture and a basic physiological nature.”

The environmental image can be analyzed, according to Lynch, in terms of three fundamental components: identity, structure and meaning, which the author reminds us, always appear together. Identity, the product of the process of identification, is concerned with the distinction between a given object and all others, its specificity and uniqueness. At the level of structure, one is aware of the spatial relationship of objects to each other and to the observer. Finally, meaning exists either as a practical or emotional relationship and is the abstraction which is developed over time by the subject in relation to either objects and spatial configurations. The author suggests that it is desirable to separate meaning from form because of the highly subjective nature of individual significations and perceptions as opposed to the relatively stable, i.e. communicable nature of material forms. As well, the urban image must have several qualities, such as sufficiency, clarity and redundancy, but the essential characteristic of the urban image resides in its polysemic potential in relation to the changing exigencies of the communicative action. Lynch writes:

The image should preferably be open-ended, adaptable to change, allowing the individual to continue to investigate and organize reality: there should be blank spaces where he can extend the drawing for himself.

The emphasis on the physical environment as an independent variable whose physical qualities are the attributes of identity and structure leads the author to develop his notion of imageability which he understands as “the quality in a physical object which gives it a high probability of evoking a strong image in any given observer.”

To support this definition which seems somewhat trite and obvious, Lynch refers to other concepts such as legibility and a “heightened” conception of visibility as well as Stern’s notion of the apparency, understood as one of the two basic functions of the work of art. Thus for Lynch A highly imageable (apparent, legible, or visible) city... would seem well formed, distinct, remarkable; it would invite eye and the ear to greater attention and participation... Such a city would be one that could be apprehended over time as a pattern of high continuity with many distinctive parts clearly interconnected.

Summing up the intent of his project, Lynch concludes Our purpose is simply to consider the need for identity and structure in our perceptual world, and to illustrate the particular relevance of this quality to the particular case of the complex, shifting urban environment.

Lynch’s analysis of the imageability of city forms focuses, on the material elements which are instrumental in the creation of the “City Image” and can be read as the theoretical antithesis of Ledrut’s conceptual model, regardless of which came first.

One might even say that one approach evokes the other under some impulse towards conceptual symmetry in an ongoing dialectic movement. For our purposes, therefore, we can look to paintings and other visual texts about the city both from Lynch’s cognitive perspective, equating, as he does, recognition with various types of affective relationships and with Ledrut’s insistence that the signifying center of all urban experience resides primarily in common speech forms of residents and by extension, in their signifying representational practices.

Nest

Let us now turn to some of the Anne-Laure Djaballah’s paintings and consider how these might illustrate and represent some of our previous ideas and reflections regarding the Image of the city as it might exist in her work. Ledrut begins by insisting on the chronotopic specificity of the image, that is to say, its unique relation to a “ time and a world.” At their most elementary levels of approximation, paintings from the early NEST series (2013) offer a universal and thus generic version of the urban experience in which the forms and motions at play evoke modern urban space(s) without the commitment to locale and the strictures or representative obligations of formal identification.

Unless clearly identified, as in the name of the work, space overcomes place in the early paintings. A semiotic of immersive engagement, much like Barthes photographic “lure,” draws the viewer into the works while simultaneously pulling her back into memory as light, motion, stasis, presence and absence, engagement and estrangement of line, or shape, or surface and texture.

One might further propose that, following Ledrut, each individual piece or work constitutes the visual equivalent of a speech act or utterance which taken together in a gallery exhibition or other collected forms such as the film “When a City Dreams” present a particular form of discourse, itself uniquely grounded in the phenomenology of lived common experience, And that, further, the discursive practice in question is evocative of a specific and particular city, in this case, the city of Montreal. This image of Montreal, in the works of Anne-Laure, is thus a “distinctive speech.” “a sign which itself is composed of signifiers and signifieds.”

Nest 18

Individual early works (2005-2009) are frequently given whimsical descriptive names, like “Tumble “of “Ready for School” and the painter herself restates the disjuncture between naming and the object itself, a position which betrays her unwillingness to fully surrender to figuration and adopt the rules and conventions of realism as a representational practice.

Ready for school

Tumble

Riverside 1150 Sherbrooke

In later works, the paintings are identified by name of location, such as “Riverside” or “1150 Sherbrooke.” Here, each name becomes a specific types of sign, primarily indexical in nature, which refers to that which is beyond the painted surface rather than on it; the space of meta-discourse emerges between the painting, the physical space referred to in the title (1150 Sherbrooke) and the indexical reference opened up in terms of the city itself (Montréal). The full play of revelation and concealment is possible in this strategy which mirrors the painter’s technical process itself, in which the movement between “painted over areas” or surfaces “left in their earlier raw stages” serves an essential expository function as it reflects the material process of urban transformation itself, a constant transformation through destruction and rebuilding. And in the movement between the painting, its name and its referent, between all three types of signs within the signifying system, we come to realize Ledrut’s insight and its meaning for an ethical and critical understanding of the image of collective space in everyday life, whereby each individual city exists as specific discourse, unique onto itself as it is expressed by its inhabitants; In this way, while the painter accumulates and manages, over time, a toolbox of techniques, ideas and attitudes towards her work as subject and subject as work, she contributes, in a non-verbal manner, itself suggestive of speech, to the Image of the city of Montréal.

American sociologist Kevin Lynch’s ideas about the image of the city focuses on his central concept of imageability which might be best understood as the particular characteristics and spatial attributes of urban space, both found and constructed, which render it familiar, productive and even pleasurable to its inhabitants, natural features such as mountains and shorelines (both distinctive in the case on Montréal) and the architectural palimpsest in which the new often emerges from the old in an often surprising congruence of history laid over an age-old grid ascending from shoreline to mountain through class, race, time and language.

If we are to accept Lynch’s notion of “legibility,” that is to say, the “apparent clarity of the cityscape” which imbues the experiences of the citizens with the security of recognition and the assurance of order in their daily apprehension of the unknowable phenomenology of urban space, like travelling though a new neighborhood or experiencing an unexpected social event or phenomenon, like a parade or a political demonstration, we must recognize the significant, and at times, over-determining effect of the city as it articulates the rituals of everyday life – a favourite bookstore, café or restaurant, a preferred route to work and to play – where the constant reordering of human experience touches all city dwellers in countless and unimaginable ways.

The dynamic nature of constructed environments creates not only,“ an open-ended order capable of continuous development,“ it also, in Lynch’s words, “selects, organizes and endows with meaning” as part of a reciprocal relation between observer and environment.

Here again, individual and collective choice orients to the lived environment in a play of selective affinities which constitute, after all, the image of the city at its most engaging and productive moment.

Returning to Anne-Laure’s paintings, one might, first, sense a sympathetic resonance between her subject matter, the city, and the painting itself, which is first manifested is the sense of familiarity one experiences when first seeing the work(s), followed by an orientation to recognition triggered by a call to memory summoned by the features of the image itself: line, shape, colour, light, texture and so forth. In this, it would appear that the painter, instinctively not to say subconsciously, adopts Lynch’s conditions for the imageability of urban space and channels them in her work, creating, on an entirely affective level this time, the three way semiotic exchange with the viewer previously mentioned in regards to Lynch’s notions of identity, meaning and structure.

Anne-Laure describes a fleeting moment in her embodied relation to the city as follows: Sometimes if I’m walking home or just walking somewhere I feel kind of blown away by how beautiful something is, the richness around me and (I feel) a little bit of despair because I think there is no way that I can paint that and so it always feels as though I can never quite get it. (Interview for film.)

And it is in this interstitial opening, a space of being with beings, that we come to appreciate the open-ended nature of the painter’s relation to the city, ever present, yet ever changing; a transformative dance of decay and rebirth, the rewriting of the soul through the experience that is, always and forever, the image of the city in everyday life.

Sources Quoted Deleuze, G., 1991, Cinema I: The Movement-Image? transl. by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Haberjam; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press de Certeau, M., 1984, The Practice of Everyday Life, transl. by Steven Rendall; Berkeley: The University of California Press Bazin, A., 1967, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” in What is Cinema? ed. and transl. by Hugh Gray; Berkeley: University of California Press Ledrut, R., 1973, les images de la ville; Paris: éditions anthropos Lefèbvre, H., 1996, Writings on the City; Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Lefèbvre, H., 1991, The Production of Space, transl. by Donald Nicholson-Smith; Oxford: Blackwell Publishers ltd.

Lefèbvre, H., 1991, The Critique of Everyday Life, transl. by John Moore; New York, Verso Lynch, K., 1997, The Image of the City; Cambridge, Massachusetts: the MIT Press Plato, 1987, The Republic, transl. by D. Lee; New York: Penguin Books Plato, 1995, Phadreus, transl by A. Nehamas and P. Woodruff; Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company Inc. Virillio, P., 1989, War and Cinema: the Logistics of Perception; New York: Verso