THE CITY IS AN IMAGE AMONG IMAGES

The City is an Image Among Images

Julie Mehretu, Kevin Lynch, and a new urban project

Two summers ago, I visited the Whitney Museum in New York City. I decided to start at the top and work my way down. But upon reaching the eighth floor, I entered an exhibit beyond traditional spatial coordinates. The canvases swallowed the room, fusing the Whitney’s pale floors and white walls into their facades. I found myself pacing through the exhibit like a rat in a maze: right, left, closer, further back, to the right again, and to the left once more.

Julie Mehretu’s mid-career survey, on view from March through August of 2020, encompassed more than two decades and 30 paintings. Mehretu, known for her dynamic use of space, architecture, and abstraction, was born in Addis Ababa but fled to the U.S. in 1977 after the Ethiopian Revolution. Political violence and migration all figure heavily in her work, but it is the city that grounds her pieces. Take Mogamma (A Painting in Four Parts). Seen from far away, the paintings appear as abstract movements, the brushstrokes gestural and blurred, like whispers of birds taking flight. They’re mostly black and white, cut through by colorful geometric shapes that suggest some sort of order to the chaos. But when one gets closer, the dynamic shifts. Behind these smudges and lines, the viewer finds a sketch of buildings fit for an architectural blueprint—a strikingly mathematical basis for a painting so wistful. Drawing closer, the buildings’ designs come into focus: windows with iron balconies, glamorous entryways, and stained glass. These windows, doors, and walls overlap so that just as the viewer locates one spatial plane, they find themselves dissolved into another.

The buildings Mehretu references can be found in Addis Ababa’s Meskel Square, New York’s Zuccotti Park, or Cairo’s Tahrir Square, all sites of political demonstrations. The diagrams of these buildings were composited and then projected by the artist using computer programs. She traced over these projections and then painted strokes, blobs, lines, and shapes— illusions of paths or landmarks—on her map of this fictional megacity. The product manages to reject representation from five feet away but embrace it at a closer range.

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Mehretu is interested in the image of the city: the city as an aesthetic locale as much as a political one, a compilation of images—abstract and representational—as much as a destination. A decade before Mehretu was born, urban planner Kevin Lynch explored the conceptual basis for this kind of thinking in his hallmark book The Image of the City (1960).

For Lynch, “the urban landscape, among its many roles, is also something to be seen, to be remembered, and to delight in.” In essence, Lynch is interested in the aesthetic form of the city. By studying Boston, Jersey City, and Los Angeles through interviews with locals and excursions, he foregrounds “mental mapping” as a crucial aspect of urban conception; that is, people experience their cities based on specific images that orient their thinking of the space. Lynch identifies five features that urbanites recall in their mental maps of each city—paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks—as “building blocks” for city designers. “We have the opportunity of forming our new city world into an imageable landscape,” Lynch writes, “visible, coherent, and clear.”

Lynch championed the city at a time when white people were leaving in droves, and cities were suffering financially as a result. In the minds of mid-century urban planners, a ‘better’ city would bring these white flight-ers back into the fold, with their money, resources, and political power. While he proposed a new framework, that general objective seems to have informed Lynch’s work. Because of this, Lynch’s book does not sit well with the 21st-century reader. The class and race politics of the city are suggested but never stated. Lynch’s biases aren’t excusable, nor would his book’s argument alone provide a truly equitable vision of the urban.

Yet many top-down urban redevelopments have been attempted since Lynch’s time, and many have failed. The mall/massive highway combination has left cities like Providence with deserted downtowns, parking lots, and missed opportunities. Urban renewal has pushed out downtown dwellers to make room for empty offices and expensive high-rises. And the more recent “creative class” model pioneered by urban theorist Richard Florida, which argued for development that catered to “high bohemians”—that is, tech workers, creatives, and “gay men and lesbians”—has left us with gentrification in every mid-size city. Lynch’s idea, for its many faults, offers a new way of conceptualizing space. Might Lynch’s imagefirst model more effectively democratize urban space?

In a rare moment of political awareness, Lynch argues that a city designed with aesthetic intention could make “exploration of new sectors both easier and more inviting.” He then notes that “[i]f strategic links in communication (such as museums or libraries or meeting places) are clearly set forth, then those who might otherwise neglect them may be tempted to enter.” Of course, neglecting to enter public space usually has less to do with apathy and more with exclusivity. But the idea he espouses still holds merit. In Lynch’s time, the ‘nice side’ of Beacon Hill, Boston, was full of distinct nodes and landmarks that allowed the citizen to “inform it with his own meanings and connections.” The other side of Beacon Hill, however, had little of this imagistic quality.

Urban renewal— which bulldozes distinct, derelict buildings to make way for indistinct, pristine ones—could be read through Lynch’s terms as a destruction of meaning for the urban subject. A different sort of renewal would instead provide more opportunities for “meanings and connections.” And, in an urban plan more nuanced than Lynch’s proposal, this sort of meaning-making would lead to a more democratic and equitable city through aesthetic means. It would blur the lines between city and art, as Mehretu’s work does. It would acknowledge the urban as what it is: a collage of images.

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Henri Bergson, an early 20th-century philosopher, made the brave claim that the brain is only “an image among other images.” “Here I am in the presence of images, in the vaguest sense of the word,” he wrote, “images perceived when my senses are opened to them, unperceived when they are closed.” In his insistence on the image as the basis of experience and perception, Lynch finds an ally in Bergson.

Bergson had faded into philosophical obscurity by the time Lynch came around, but in the latter half of the ’60s Gilles Deleuze returned to the philosopher to continue Bergson’s project of “a metaphysical image of thought corresponding to new lines, openings, traces, leaps, dynamisms, discovered by a molecular biology of the brain: new linkings and rethinkings in thought.”

Openings, traces, leaps, and dynamisms provide the rhythm for Mehretu’s complicated projects too. Just as the viewer links an edge to a window or a door to a facade, a tower interrupts the image constructed, or a red strike leads the eyes elsewhere. The blend of the abstract and representational creates an “intermingling” in Mehretu’s words. To borrow Deleuze’s terms, Mehretu “makes thought think” by severing the viewer from all of their presuppositions.

This severance, however, isn’t enough for some critics. Writing recently in The New York Review of Books, Jed Perl took aim at Mehretu as another example of the trend whereby artists alternate between abstract and representational modes with little rhyme or reason. He argues that while the post-postmodern era likes to reject labels, artists could benefit from having to answer the question, “Where do you stand?” He argues Mehretu’s abstract markings clash with the representational blueprints onto which they’re inscribed because “for marks to be meaningful they must be tied to some vision of an alternate reality, a new reality.” Instead, he writes, her paintings take the form of “a visual shouting match.”

Perl, though, critiques from a position of extreme stasis, for the emergent realities within Mehretu’s paintings appear with movement. “You have this multitude of experiences in a short amount of time,” Mehretu says of her pieces. “You have to travel through it, and something in it becomes a memory in your experience.” In the exhibit, I oscillated between viewing positions before the prodigious works. The after-image of a close-up view persisted as I backed away, and when I returned to inspect a detail, the canvas’ totality lingered in my mind. A new image emerged from my memory of images.

This kind of viewing is as essential to abstract art, as it is to the city. Mehretu provides an artistic model for zooming out of the city while “atomizing,” in her words, the individual landmarks of memory that form a city’s experienced consciousness. Lynch provides a framework for actually carrying this project out in city planning. Large-scale conceptualizations have not served urban dwellers in the past. But what Lynch is proposing is not so much a transformation of urban experience but experience transformed into the urban. This would be a process, much like Mehretu’s paintings require a processing from the viewer, like Bergson’s idea of perception requires a processing from the subject, like the urbanite processes the nodes, edges, paths, districts and landmarks that form their mental image of the city. This process itself could be enough to, as Lynch says, “sharpen the [city’s] image,” even if the physical result proves unsatisfactory. The development of the image is the important part, for it is through painting marks onto blankness, as he writes, that “the amateur painter begins to see the world around him.”

CECILIA BARRON B'24 can be found around a node or edge of Providence, depending on the day.