Size Matters: Rodin on the Plains

Did you realize that The Thinker is actually quite tiny? He’s about the size of a garden gnome, but lots less jolly. I recently traveled to see an exhibition of the works of Auguste Rodin at the Hillstrom Museum of Art in St Peter, Minnesota. The Thinker was in attendance, as well as thirty or so other of Rodin’s finest. I was struck immediately by his size. I had been given the impression that he’s a rather larger fellow, and in retrospect I wonder if my mental image had been unduly corrupted by The Thinker’s appropriation by Jesse Ventura’s gubernatorial campaign. It was immediately clear that Le Penseur, as Rodin referred to him, was not sculpted with the WWF in mind.

I’m a little embarrassed to say this, but the size had me a little disappointed, at least at first. And I’m sure that my trip to the exhibition only dramatized the contrast. I drove over an hour through the prairies of southern Minnesota: wide open spaces under a not-quite-endless-sky, hurtling past all that American bigness. Leaving behind the mini malls and office parks of the southern suburbs, the space gives way to orchards and car dealerships, train yards and fields, and, finally, not much of anything. Perhaps the journey altered my expectations – we actually drove under the shadow of an enormous Jolly Green Giant billboard cutout just outside of Le Sueur. So, walking into the museum I was really caught quite off guard.

There are actually several larger versions of The Thinker, made at various times after the appearance of the original plaster cast in 1880.[i] I was quickly made aware that The Thinker’s continued life in the popular vernacular has outgrown his scale. The image is re-invented so frequently that that it was striking to realize that’s its myth originated in such a tiny, singular, and seemingly delicate form.

I was even more surprised to find that I wasn’t looking at the original Thinker at all. Apparently there are complicated rules governing the reproduction of Rodin’s works – if I understand things correctly (which I may not), up to twelve casts can be reproduced from the original, at any point in time. So, even though Rodin died quite a few years ago, casts can still be made up until the magic number. Any reproductions beyond a dozen, however, fail to be authentic. I really think this seems a little odd. Why twelve? And wouldn’t size matter? The original Thinker is apparently 182.5 cm in height, which means that the one I saw in St Peter matched up pretty closely. But its size has nothing to do with its authenticity, which is guaranteed instead by the numerical order of its production – some of the large Thinkers are also authentic, but are closer to 2 meters in height.

Does this leave anyone else confused? The calculus of Rodin reproduction can get pretty complicated pretty quickly, and I’m not sure what it’s all indicative of anyway. At any rate, I wondered at the significance of this little thing I was looking at. Why had I traveled all this way to just to see this tiny reproduction? It wasn’t even original (but it was, perhaps, authentic, if you can keep up with the math). And would it really have been more impressive to see the original anyway? Would I have been able to tell the difference?

In telling a friend of mine that I had been to see The Thinker, he suggested that sculpture-watching was perhaps not all that compelling a sport anyway. I could mark it off my checklist, but what could it offer beyond that? Actually, though, I did find more in the sculpture than I anticipated would be there. The subject of The Thinker is not just a man lost in thought, caught in a quiet moment of distraction. He’s considering very serious matters indeed. The piece was intended to be a small component of a monumental portal to the Musee des Arts Decoratifs in Paris. Rodin titled the work The Gates of Hell - and the thinking subject was originally intended to be Dante himself, considering his great poem (though in its final form The Thinker was not intended to have a specific identity). In the portal, The Thinker’s gaze doesn’t seem to be focused anywhere, except perhaps inwardly. This is indeed striking, because as he averts his eyes, immediately in front of him, a man falls hopelessly into Hell.

The image of The Thinker is often understood to be an immediately recognizable representation intellectual activity, but a close look at the sculpture reveals that this misses the point. The Thinker sits in such a terribly awkward pose – his elbow is on the wrong knee for instance – that its clear that his mental dilemma leaves him physically distraught. Surely, Ventura didn’t wish to project the image of a man thinking about the fires of damnation (but would it have changed your vote if he did?).

The Thinker sits precariously. His brief life is nigh at and end, and he well knows it. With that in mind, the tiny sculpture I saw at the Hillstrom somehow seemed more significant. What was this tiny lump of lead and bronze I was looking at? Was it really a work by the hand of Rodin? No, it wasn’t. And so it seemed all the more unlikely that this tiny figure should yet persist, encased in glass, attracting the curious from across rural southern Minnesota. Its delicateness seemed to signal all the more its unlikelihood. It managed to stave off its own oblivion, for at least a little while, and I was surprised to find that it somehow made me feel a little more cheery, wondering at this Rodin, that was hardly a Rodin at all.

[i] For a great discussion of the various casts see http://www.penseur.org/

Art as Hoax, Hoax as Art: A commentary on Aliza Shvarts and the meaning of art

Living as late in the day as we do, it is readily accepted that definitions of art have burst past the point of recognition. Most can admit that we no longer need an art “object” as a locus for discussion. “Art” may take many forms. Nevertheless, inasmuch as art can be discussed at all, one must ask what the boundaries of “art” are (even if those boundaries may not exist). The recent fiasco surrounding Yale art major Aliza Shvarts’ senior project, which involved the intentional and repeated inducement of miscarriages over a nine month period, raises such questions.


After the story broke on April 17th, it was quickly debunked as a hoax by Yale’s administrating authorities. Lest we turn away too soon, however, Shvarts quickly retorted that it wasn’t really a hoax after all, and that she had just told Yale officials what they had wanted to hear.[1] Although we may tend to believe whatever we find most settling about the whole affair, the actual truth is at least a little bit obscured. And this ambiguity, of course, is precisely the point of the whole exercise.


If we take the story as truth (which we certainly don’t need to do), then it still leaves unresolved questions about the status of a “work” of art. I certainly don’t mean to resolve any of these questions here but these questions are still pertinent to a discussion of the status of art, or the reports of its demise.[2]


While the “art” did consist of some physical material – a documentation consisting of blood, Vaseline and film – it seems that the documentation is almost irrelevant. The material display doesn’t really add anything to the central provocative claim. The real power of the exercise is that someone would induce abortion for art’s sake. If I’m correct in seeing the art in this way, then we’re left wondering what art is: can art be simply a claim, a declaration? If Schvarts had simply turned in her declaration of intentionally induced miscarriage, would she still get a passing grade (and what grade is she getting anyway)? Obviously, performance art doesn’t rely on physical material for its status as art, but its hard to see this as performance, either. The behaviors in question were not “performed” in any traditional sense, because they lacked an audience (we might judge the art as a work of film, but it seems, again, that any power the project conveys is not tied to its status as film at all). Can art be reduced to a provocative statement, which is almost (though not entirely) absent an element of craft?


If we take the whole affair as hoax, then perhaps the claim to art is a little stronger. We’re all familiar with the suggestion that art is a lie that tells the truth. But how important is truthfulness to the equation? If it is a hoax, then we have art as lie – but only that.


If its not a hoax, then it is art as the report of strange behavior. And we can here think of various comparable behaviors. Might I claim to my students that being drunk while lecturing is an important aesthetic experience for them? Shall they counter that a state of deep existential depression precluding an ability to turn in a final paper is an appropriate culmination to an introduction to philosophy course? Can one simply do something strange, dangerous, or immoral, and then tell people that it was art. Is that enough? If this is our guideline, there are a lot of behaviors that qualify, but that we would never ordinarily think of as art. And what does odd behavior have in common with, for instance, Gainsborough’s Blue Boy, such that they would both fall under the category “art”? Do we perhaps need a new name? Is it important that we make these distinctions at all?


As a hoax, the events have a stronger claim. And as Schvarts has made clear in her own statements, the art is about (inasmuch as a set of behaviors can be “about” anything) the resultant ambiguity: we don’t know if the blood is the result of normal menstrual cycle, or an aborted fertilized egg, or animal blood she hurriedly gathered together the night before the project was due. Throughout all of this, we’re still left with something troubling: art as ambiguous publicity stunt.


Even if everyone is famous for fifteen minutes, it doesn’t necessarily follow that each of those fifteen minutes is a work of art. Does art happen whenever the public is briefly shocked, confused, or amused (and could we then submit Larry Craig’s behavior in an airport bathroom as art)? Or, perhaps, only when the public is shocked and confused by something which turns out not to have been true? I fear there’s a central confusion here. We know that art can be shocking. Picasso’s Guernica is proof of that. But that doesn’t mean that art resides in the shock. Guernica was also a painting. Absent the painting, what is left that we can identify, and do we need to identify a “work” of art anyway?


I am certainly not in any position to resolve any of these questions, and so, for the time being, I’ll leave it all open for discussion. Bringing up a lot of irresolvable questions – that can be my “art”.


[1] Schvarts’ explanation: http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/24559
[2] Here’s a link to the original story: http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/24513

The Gehry in the Machine

I recently attended a lecture at the Minneapolis Public Library concerning Frank Gehry’s design methodology, and it sparked some questions for me concerning architectural models, paradigms, and the primacy of artistic creation. The lecture detailed the shift in Frank Gehry’s approach to construction, since discovering the architectural potential of some computer software originally designed with aerospace engineering in mind. I’ll oversimplify things here for the sake of brevity and argument, but hopefully some questions will begin to make sense. Gehry’s design process famously relies on transposing from very abstract models. Because the models are so geometrically irregular, the transposition has been extraordinarily complicated. This may have been most particularly the case with the Weisman Museum at the University of Minnesota. As it was suggested at the lecture, the Weisman was in some sense the last of hand drawn buildings. Beginning with the Guggenheim Bilbao, and more explicitly with the Experience Music Project in Seattle, Gehry and his firm realized that they could utilize new software to translate all the abstraction into hard numbers. This made the whole process tremendously more efficient, saving huge amounts of time and money. After the Weisman, the traditional paper and pencil were no longer necessary – the abstract model could be scanned directly into a virtual representation of itself, complete with the necessary numbers. So, the argument in favor of the process might go something like this: the EMP is much more structurally complicated than the Weisman, but was realized more efficiently. Leaving behind the pencil and paper provides two important benefits: a more complicated design and a cheaper price tag.

But, is it fair to ask whether any downside accompanies these benefits? My question concerns the aesthetic differences that accompany the gradual shift toward greater control. The EMP has a very different aesthetic appeal (while at the same time being very clearly a work by Gehry). It looks much more sleek, more refined, more “produced” (and, indeed, it is all of these things). With the Weisman, it is much more evident that there is a gap between the abstract model and its transposition into a built structure (though, this gap might be something desirable). The geometries are more rigid (more straight lines, less, swooping and diving curves, for instance). An analogy was made with the master builders of the Medieval cathedrals. The tradition of the master builder is one of (not quite) complete control – overseeing all facets of the building process, controlling the transition from the drawing room floor to the built walls. Gehry’s new process brings him closer to the tradition of the master builder. With the Weisman, a tremendous amount of work was left to contractors, out of a matter of necessity due to the complexity of the designs. The virtualization of the design process returns control, both to the architect and, just as importantly, to the model itself.

But does the greater control of the construction process lead to an aesthetically preferable result? To put it bluntly, is it worth it? It would be too much to characterize it as a Faustian bargain, but nevertheless, one might ask whether the greater increase of efficiency leaves something to be desired. One of the more celebrated and appealing characteristics of Medieval cathedrals is their indeterminacies – those architectural moments which fall outside of the master builder’s plan – stonemason’s signatures, unique gargoyles, and other irregularities. What do we look for in a complete building – a direct translation form a model, or perhaps an indirect one.

How closely should a work of architecture resemble its paradigm? To the extent that a work becomes a more repeatable duplicate of its model, then we might look at the building itself as a “duplicate’, a copy. In just this sense I’ve used the word transpose to refer to the process of proceeding from the model to the building. But a transposition, of course, means that two things shift places. Is there not normally a shift in primacy from the model to the building, once construction is complete? If for Gehry, the primary work is the model, then by all means it makes sense to try to duplicate that model as precisely as possible. But then what can we say about the building? Is it secondary to the model (and we might here be reminded of the trend of museums paying millions for architects’ collections of renderings, models, and other artifacts once thought to be mere secondary ephemera).

In other forms of art, we ridicule anything judged to be over-produced. Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, and Ashley Simpson are just a few of the obvious musical examples. Lucas basically ruined his Star Wars franchise with an overreliance on CGI, i.e. Jar-Jar Binks. Likewise, we might scoff at Thomas Kincade’s art empire or even a fast food meal for not just being generally bad, but for being produced too closely to a formula. I admit that I’m being at least a little unfair here – any of Gehry’s works are of far greater aesthetic significance than a McDonald’s burger, and I don’t mean to put the two on the same level. Frankly, Seattle’s EMP really is pretty cool, even if something was lost in the transposition. But we might still ask about the virtue of live performance, even in architecture.

Strip Mall of the Ancients

In July 2006, I attended the SOBO Summerfest in Boulder, Colorado. This was a pretty forgettable affair – some uninteresting jam bands and some merchants giving away sports bottles and power bars-- but certainly nothing to write home about. What caught my attention, though, were the staging grounds themselves. The revelers gathered in a strip mall parking lot, backing up against a row of shops: used sporting goods, knickknacks, a diner, classroom space for knitters, mountaineering equipment repair, and the now empty Social Security Administration office. It is a commonplace that America is losing public space – town squares are abandoned in favor of strip malls on the edge of town. The first strip mall is thought to have appeared in Kansas City early in the last century, and we’ve continually moved further out along the road ever since. This de-centering has left an indelible mark on virtually all American cities; even Boulder, which in many ways is a beacon for the success of central town planning. So placing the Summerfest in a parking lot was an obvious choice, logistically. SOBO refers to South Boulder, not really a neighborhood proper, but simply that part of Boulder south of the rest of town (duh). The out-sized strip mall here (actually several interlocking strips) is the hub of activity in South Boulder, and I’m writing in a coffee shop in the strip mall right now. The structure does actually have a name, the Table Mesa Shopping Center (not the Table Mesa Strip Mall, a more accurate, but rather less grandiose title), though no one actually refers to it as such. I’ve heard it referred to as ‘the shops’, ‘the hood’, ‘the café’, ‘the strip mall’, and only very occasionally as SOBO (always said with a snicker of derision). These monikers reveal a certain familiarity – a speaker would only ever refer to ‘the shops’ if the listener was certain to know what was being referred to, otherwise it would be hopelessly vague. Furthermore, it is precisely this familiarity that goes against the expectation of pessimistic critics, historians, and preservationists.

Conventional wisdom has long said that as a community moves away from its center, its cohesive identity will evaporate. However, the millennial predictions of the city’s disappearance have not come to pass – or, rather, the outcome is just a little more complicated than predicted. For instance, sitting here as I am, looking through the coffee shop window, I see many familiar faces: Pyramid-Head Guy[1] just walked past, the women from the cooking school next door are taking their break, the banjo hippie has made an appearance, and I’m always hopeful that Camo-Man[2] will show up again after a long absence. So, that sense of community once engendered by the town square has not really been lost, it has just moved to the outskirts of town. Despite the rather dismal state of this strip mall, I find that I’ve become quite attached to it. It is my cultural and communal center, even in spite of its shortcomings. Things are not the same as they were before, however, in that pre-strip mall state of urban bliss. Indeed, in important ways our relationship to the city has changed, though this change is complicated. But there are several threads here, so let me slow down and try to pry them apart.

The centerpiece of ancient Greek architecture was the agora – this was, in fact, hardly a piece of architecture at all, it was a plaza. It was largely an empty space, but one in which the most important social events occurred. Surrounding the agora, however, was the stoa. The stoa should seem to us strikingly familiar; it did not differ substantially from a strip mall. It consisted of a long, low roof, supported by columns, backing against a wall. Most were one story, though several were two-leveled (like much of the Table Mesa strip mall). In terms of its actual structure, the strip mall differs from the stoa most substantially in that the wall which originally backed the Greek stoa now has shops behind it (the stoa held vendors selling wares, but not shops, proper). So it is not without a certain amount of irony that the strip mall, perhaps most denigrated of modern structures, should be essentially the same as a Greek structure, whose culture is still often heralded as the architectural high-water mark. The historian R.E. Wycherly called the stoa a work of peculiar genius, but I think that is really overstating the case. Quite the contrary, the stoa seems to me to be an obvious development: a wall and a roof. Clearly, similar structures have appeared in many cultures at many times, and are probably close to automatic.

It is likely one of the oldest architectural designs; there may be genius in the first moment of architectural awareness, but that it should take the form of a stoa is no big surprise. Visiting the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, I was struck that artisans selling their wares outside the monument at Wounded Knee had aligned their handmade awnings in perfect strip formation, parallel to the highway. The stoa/strip mall may be the architectural vernacular supreme. So what’s the difference? The difference is that relationship between the stoa and the agora that existed for the Greeks. This does not properly exist any more. The agora was shared public space – Socrates engaged in dialogues here. Now we have parking lots (though I think philosophy still proceeds here[3]). Is this a bad development? Not necessarily. As heir-apparent to the Greek civilizations, widespread appearance of the strip malls is nicely nostalgic but the transformation of the agora into a parking lot is peculiarly American. The strip mall, in dispensing with the agora, becomes an architecture peculiarly suited to the road. It is an architecture of movement. Think of the word itself: strip implies an elongated strand, itself already directional. It also implies the removal of something, in this case a center. The strip, once denuded of its agora, is reduced to only direction, an arrow pointed onward. Movement; travel, but without a destination. So, the SOBO Summerfest had to make use of a parking lot. But the parking lot is only a momentary agora. Most of the time it’s a temporary resting place for cars. And this is telling, too. Not-quite-dead space, a repository for our stuff before we are back on the road again.

Parking lots, and not just those in front of strip malls, are the frequent centers of public events now: concerts, farmer’s markets, pottery shows, dog shows, roller hockey. And this is very clever, in a certain way. Public space has broadened its use. But really, it’s just a response to a lack. We need public space, and we’ll invent it if its not readily provided. The parking lot provides this opportunity, but in a somewhat sadder way. The parking lot is public, but it's also tenuous – sadder, wiser. We might buy our organic vegetables here in the morning, but we also come here to fight and smoke cigarettes at night. This after-the–flood attitude has been amply shown in movies from Heavy Metal Parking Lot to Say Anything, where the kids without dates hang out aimlessly behind the gas station. The strip mall as such, though, is well overdue for a more serious study. A glossy photographic coffee-table volume just depicting strip malls would be welcome, indeed. So, even if goaded by a lack of options, we still come to the strip mall for various revelations – I, myself, once performed with a band at a strip mall (as Jonathan Richman put it, “Couldn’t stay inside talkin’, had to get outside rockin’”). We come here to celebrate, but we know we soon will have to move on (to another strip mall?). So, it is with that sense of existential whimsy, but wistfulness that I walk past these shops. The strip mall is in constant change – here the book store has closed down, and the homebrewer’s supply has relocated. But now we have an Indian grocery and a dollar store – so I can cheaply buy out-of-date Chocolate Lucky Charms. It's human nature to grow attached to certain features of our environment, but at the strip mall our attachments are continually unsettled. With the Greek stoa/agora, this must have been much less the case. On the strip all bets are off. I am always hoping that Camo- Man will reappear – clad only in camouflage trousers, constantly playing hacky sack, blasting Tom Waits from his camouflage truck. For a season he literally lived here, and could be seen every time I passed, bringing a weird constancy to the strip. But, of course, he eventually moved on, presumably to another strip mall, kicking hacky sacks off another roof.

This article originally ran in AmericanNerdMag.com on July 3, 2006.

[1] Pyramid-Head guy is a bookish, genial young man who appears to be wearing a medium sized pyramid on his head, under a blue windbreaker. In addition, he is always wearing sunglasses over duct tape – the duct tape is directly applied to his nose. My wife once observed him looking up transdimensional harmonics in the dictionary at the library.
[2] Camo-Man, obviously, wears camo pants and, not obviously, nothing else. I once saw him leap from the strip mall roof, terrifying soccer moms strolling past with their soy chais. He may summer in the mountains. More on Camo-Man later
[3] Transdimensional harmonics anyone?

Cracking Eggs in the Self-Aware Diner: Prolegomena to an Aesthetic

This essay is reprinted from AmericanNerdMag.com. It originally ran July 18, 2005.













This morning I had breakfast at Dot's Diner, just about the tastiest place a person can go for morning fixins in Boulder, Colorado. When I'm there, I order a vegan breakfast burrito. This burrito configuration doesn't appear as such on the menu; it's my own twist on their existing breakfast burrito. I've now ordered it so many times that the staff knows immediately what I'll be getting when I walk through the door. I've become a regular, and that's a comfortable position to be in. To be completely honest, I harbor a secret desire that Dot's will name the burrito after me; that some day my name will appear on their green laminated menus. And what an honor that would be! I'd have entered into the mysterious pantheon of diner namesakes, those faceless geniuses who have begotten many an omelet and sandwich across this fair nation.

There's no place I would rather eat than a diner, and Dot's is among the best. At Dot's, as with any diner worth its salt, the heaviness of a coffee mug in one's hand while leaning into a vinyl booth is uniquely satisfying. After all, the beauty of a diner isn't the food, anyway (or at least not entirely), it's the ambience; or, more accurately, the context. The diner is the quintessence of American eatery. No other variety of establishment quite matches it for the rawness of Americana found therein. But this much is obvious. Everyone involved knows that they are embedded in a time-worn tradition. And this, in itself, is a bit of a predicament. Because people who run diners know that they are serving up hot plates of American quintessence, they market their diners as such. That is to say, diners are, more often than not, explicitly marketed as diners, just in case you're apt to miss the point.

And just what do we make of such an establishment? Such a place is no longer a mere diner, but a Self-Aware Diner, which, to be sure, is a yolk of a different color. The Self-Aware Diner has discovered itself. It announces its own identity from tack-on mansard rooftops. We might think of the Self-Aware Diner as having reached maturity, no longer tolerating the indiscretions of the searching youth. But, as any diner devotee will tell you, the Self-Aware Diner isn't where we really want to be, is it? Diner self-awareness is a cause for concern. We, the coffee drinkers and omelet eaters, want to eat at a real diner, whatever that means, and a diner that loudly displays its dimerism seems, well, phony, doesn't it? Bill Griffith, author of Zippy the Pinhead, refers to the phenomenon as the meta-diner: a diner that's about being a diner. Doesn't this seem like a problem? What happened to the diner that was about breakfast? And, isn't this essentially what Plato was so worried about in writing The Republic? Plato didn't want meta-experiences, he wanted to get right to the heart of reality, or at least as close as possible. And what could be more real than a burger and fries (or more phony than a burger and fries that attempts to capture the national zeitgeist)?

The worst offenders among the self-aware bunch make themselves pretty obvious. If you've ever been to the Rock & Roll Runza in Lincoln Nebraska (and I think we can assume that we've all been there, right?), you'll know the symptoms. Upon entering the restaurant, one experiences a time-warp. But instead of being back in the 1950s as they actually were we emerge in sickeningly nostalgic bizarro 1950s, where the employees look like the cast of Grease, you can eat in the replica of a '57 Chevy, and if you're lucky, Elvis himself (or a pimply-faced sixteen year old in Elvis-guise) will croon for you. Notice, also, that it's the "Rock & Roll" Runza, not the "Rock" Runza. This is a place to go for the safe, fun-loving, good times of Bill Haley and the Comets, not the threatening near-Satanic posturing of AC/DC (for the facsimile of danger, one heads on down to the Hard Rock Café, a slightly different breed of Self-Aware Diner). Sure, the themed menu items are fun, but, to any one in search of a real diner, such a place is unsettling. Everything is phony, a mock-up – and, of course, this is precisely the appeal. For a discerning public, who wants an eatery both safe and fun, staged dinerism is precisely what's called for. If you're looking for a controlled and predictable, yet innocently fun dining experience, you'll want to be in the Self-Aware Diner. Properly speaking the Rock & Roll Runza isn't really a diner at all, but a fast-food joint masquerading as a diner. But, of course, what they ultimately offer to customers isn't authentic diner fare, but a nostalgic redressing of post WWII-innocence and optimism.

The real thing, on the other hand, is an unknown; there's just too many X-factors, and, for a lot of people, the threat of finding oneself in a dive (and not faux-dive, mind you) is too great to be risked. And, easy as it is to find a Denny's, Perkins or IHOP (Self-Aware Diners, all), why flirt with danger?

Diner self-awareness is not a fleeting phenomenon. The Self-Aware are here to stay, and they're sinking into public consciousness. The problem is what to do with these places? Vincent and Mia dance in a Self-Aware Diner in Pulp Fiction, and enjoy the parody (though, notice that the film opens and closes in a "real" diner – or at least a less-self-aware one, anyway). Ghost World's Enid expresses disgust with a Self-Aware Diner, but ultimately enjoys the kitchiness, which gives her a chance to make fun of the dupes that the diner suckers in. The patrons are dupes because they are un-aware of, or at least accepting of, the diner's self-awareness, and Enid feels superior because she's clued in. She knows that the whole thing is a sham. But, ultimately, this turns back upon itself – after all, she's a patron, too. Later in the film when Seymour watches Blueshammer, the Self-Aware Blues Band (though unaware, presumably, of how bad they are) he feels awkward – he's looking for real blues, and isn't satisfied just with being clued-in. So, how should we react? Can we make fun of Self-Aware Diners while still enjoying them? Or is it better to retreat in disgust?

Let's pause for a minute to consider self-awareness as such. The philosopher Harry Frankfurt suggested that second-order awareness was the identifying characteristic of personhood. That is to say, if you can think about yourself in abstract, you're a human. Thus, a human, as opposed to what Frankfurt called a "wanton" would not only think about eating at a diner, but would think "I'm a person who likes to eat at diners." But, failing, that you're dealing with a different kind of animal (well, okay, you're dealing with an animal). But, how should we translate this into the world of dinerdom? The Self-Aware Diner not only thinks about burgers and fries, but thinks about how such foods are emblematic of its status-as-diner. This is second-order awareness. And does this mean that Self-Aware Diners are, in fact, human? More and more, I'm reluctant to respond with a no… But, self-awareness doesn't really stop at the second level, anyway.

Both humans and diners are also capable of third-order awareness. One could guess that the Pulp Fiction diner has not only second level awareness, but third level awareness, too. It not only knows that it is a diner, but knows that it knows that it is a diner. Put another way, the Pulp Fiction diner knows that it's a diner, and also knows that you, the patron, knows it's a diner, and, further, knows that you know it's a diner that knows it's a diner – and, thus, that its appeal is its pretense toward irony. The deceived patron slurps his soda thinking, "hey, here is a diner that is really trying hard to be a diner – hilarious! I love it!". While the diner itself knows that that is why the patrons are here – and that that is precisely the point. So, the patron's ironic stance fails as long as the diner is more aware than the patron. This may be Enid's mistake in Ghost World, too. She accepts the irony of being at the diner, but it still managed to draw her in, and the experience, while initially amusing, is ultimately unsatisfying. But, of course, now that you're in the know, you can trump the third-order awareness diner with some third-order awareness of your own. It's not exactly a vicious circle, but a vicious, upwardly moving double helix.

Among humans, self-reflexivity is prized. The more aware we can be the better. But with diners, quite the opposite is true. The mythical "authentic" self-unaware diner, lurking somewhere deep in the heart of a rural no-man's land, is the holy grail of dinerdom. It'srecognizable by a few hallmarks: lifeless food, ancient décor, palpable weariness. Of course, what's most important is that the seed-cap wearing patrons have no pretense that they're doing something emblematic of the American zeitgeist (and no awareness that lunch can exist at varying levels of meta-meaning, anyway). They're just getting a bite to eat. Which makes you, the discoverer of the authentic diner, an interloper. You'll have discovered a hidden tribe in a dark continent. The diner's practices will be ultimately inscrutable, untranslatable. And to the diner's true patrons, it won't be worth asking questions about. But actually, as I've already mentioned, the authentic ur-diner is a mythical creature, and like all mythical creatures, it's a useful fiction. This is not to say that seedy rural diners don't exist – they do, but their status as authentic is merely a useful counterpoint to the Self-Aware Diner's existence as phony. Will immersing ourselves in increasingly primordial diners really solve lingering self-reflexivity questions? It's really hard to say. A friend of mine went on a quest to find the diviest diner in his vicinity, but, two diners in, he gave up. He couldn't handle their strangeness, and so went back to eating at Self-Aware Diners.

I recently visited the Happy Chef restaurant in Mankato, MN. I was attracted by the statuary. In front of the Happy Chef, greeting travelers on highway 169 is the Happy Chef, a two-story statue of a beaming chef, triumphantly holding a spoon aloft. At its base, one can push a button to hear Happy Chef's delightful jokes. Happy Chef statues used to be commonplace, though now the Mankato location is the only one still standing. (Though apparently, some derelict chefs still exist in unwitting locations). Diner statuary is a funny thing. The Happy Chef announces to all passers-by, "Hey look at me, I represent dinerdom." Thus, the Happy Chef is definitely self-aware. But, because, there's only one Happy Chef statue left, it can make a claim to a certain authenticity. The statue is a genuine relic from a Self-Aware Diner; its authentically inauthentic. And this exposes a crucial point. Self-Aware diners are still real places, at the same time that they're phony. Sure, they're mock-ups pretending to be something that they're not, but real people still eat there.

I'm a regular at Dot's Diner, which is, itself, certainly not unaware of its status-as-diner. Nevertheless, the occurrence of regularity itself speaks to its reality. The regular is the time-worn, and so, one could conclude that diner self-awareness is itself becomingquintessentially American. Thus, the Self-Aware Diners get what they were after, though in a clearly unintended way. To those diner purists looking for reality in imagined unawareness, I recommend a change in strategy. In retreating from the phony, we are apt to miss something that is itself real, and that is unreality. I'm not necessarily saying we should embrace it, either, but it is something to be aware of.

Urban Monuments, Irreducible Identities

In 2004, a proposal was approved by Berlin’s city council to memorialize the Berlin Wall, absent from Berlin’s landscape for fifteen years. Unlike other, more familiar approaches to memorialization, by which past events and figures are merely portrayed, the new Berlin Wall memorial at the Checkpoint Charlie museum attempts to recreate the experience of life in the shadow of the wall itself. This has been accomplished by the actual rebuilding of a section of the wall. I would like to suggest that such an attempt at remembrance is radical, but that it fails to escape the double-headed irony of all attempts at memorialization through monumentality. Put simply, the building of monuments is an attempt to solidify cultural identity. Identity, however, is an entity never solid, and so always escapes from any monumental framing. Identity is not the only aspect of culture that resists memorialization in stone. A culture’s monuments, themselves, also shift physically, aesthetically, and symbolically through the progression of time.

Writing a century ago, Alois Riegl proposed a varied set of perspectives by which we might understand monuments.[i] Riegl anticipated that the twentieth century would be marked by a desire that the monuments of history display their age-value. Age value is that particular value attached to a monument in virtue of its visible ruination. Crumbling structures, Riegl proposed, appealed to the observer because they served to be a reminder of impermanence. Cracks and fissures, faded patinas, and scattered detritus all were to make one powerfully aware of the endless crush of days. An important further distinction detailed by Riegl is that between intentional and unintentional monuments. Most relics displaying age-value are unintentional monuments. They were built not to be landmarks of remembrance, but for purposes now forgotten. They were not constructed as memorials, but, rather, became memorials as they aged and their appearance gradually shifted from mundane to sublime.[ii]

With a century’s retrospection, we can see that Riegl’s prediction was wildly off the mark. Our current age does not favor age-value, but, rather, what Riegl called historical-value. Historical value is that value placed upon an object or structure because it serves to be a reminder for a particular moment in time. Those who search for historical value lament the passage of time, and seek to cease it, even if momentarily, through preservation. Riegl recognized the nineteenth century to be an age of historical value, in which there was a tremendous increase in both preservation of structures and erection of memorials. Walter Benjamin would later write, “there is hardly a square in Europe whose secret structure was not profaned and impaired over the course of the 19th century by the introduction of a monument.”[iii] Benjamin and Riegl both recognized that this movement toward preservation or monumentalization, which occurred during the nineteenth century, was a reaction against modernity. If modernity is, as Baudelaire suggested, “the fleeting, the transient, the contingent,”[iv] then the preservation of a locus of historical value, it was hoped, could provide longed-for stability.
What Riegl recognized as characteristic of the nineteenth century has come to be characteristic of the twentieth century also, and the desire for all things historically- valuable show no signs of abating any time soon. It is, in fact, the entire span of modernity that is marked by the desire to preserve and to commemorate. We should not think, however, that there has been no change in attitudes toward the past in the years since the nineteenth century. As the reconstruction of the Berlin Wall demonstrates vividly, we often no longer desire to commemorate history, as through the construction of monuments, or even to preserve it, as through the rehabilitation of derelict architecture. Instead, we are now witnessing the desire to re-construct what has already been destroyed. Our age endeavors to make the disappeared apparent again.

This shift is notable, for while there is still a desire to recognize historical-value, there is increasingly a desire to remove the historically valuable from the progression of history itself. Projects such as the Berlin Wall reconstruction indicate a desire to witness and experience the historical event itself, perpetually. We seek in our monuments not to revisit the memory of a past event, but to relive the event itself, in as much of its richness as may be recreated. The Berlin Wall project is not alone in this regard. After the incidents of September 11, 2001, in which New York’s World Trade Center towers were incinerated[v], there was a significant call for the rebuilding of the towers to the exact specifications of their toppled predecessors. This suggests a desire to deny that the attacks happened at all, to instead re-make the world as it was previously. This is idealization of the past is remarkable in that it seeks to regenerate a state which existed so very recently.

I call the memorialization-through-reconstruction of the Berlin Wall radical, though not simply because it stands opposed to the march of time, or fights against the passing of fleeting moments. All historic preservation attempts this. Historical preservation proceeds on the premise that an audience is provided with a kind of snapshot, an instant of frozen time. This preserved parcel becomes a segment in a constructed narrative. The narrative is visited by its audience, who in so doing re-visits the past moments of which that narrative is constructed. Taking a step back from the present moment one may observe the historical thread, which provides life with narrative continuity. The importance of seeing this historical thread as narrated is to see that it is a created entity. We do not experience the flow of history as narrative in the moments that it passes us by; a narrative is projected, in this case backwards.

Nietzsche warned in his The Use and Abuse of History against the momumentalizing of history.[vi] The creation of monuments, particularly monuments of the past, is necessarily a selective process. Individual moments are raised to significance, while others are forgotten and quickly pass away. One danger, then, is that the past is not entirely knowable. Giving all the events of the past equal due is an impossibility. This much, however, is an obvious ill accompanying any work in history. The more significant danger of the monumental approach to history is that it works to reduce the events of the past. It is not simply that some events are left out, but that even those included undergo a reduction, a simplification. The creation of a historical narrative, in its way of making sense out of a myriad of events, often works to facilitate such a reduction.

We should not think, however, that all narratives of history are to be condemned. Nietzsche advocated a critical approach to history. Such an approach contains within it something of the monumental, and, also, something of it’s opposite, the antiquarian approach to history. The antiquarian casts his net widely, preserving everything he comes across. Indeed, Europe has witnessed a tremendous boom in rate of memorializing, such that one wonders what could be left out. Whereas monumental history creates identity through the selection of an historical narrative, the antiquarian worries about all possible narratives, and strives to maintain them all. The critical historian is aware of both attitudes toward history. From the monumental, we can see the benefit in idealization. Around such idealization, identity can be constructed. The danger is that idealized identity can become hegemonic, such that a particular narrative becomes dominant over all others. From the antiquarian comes the importance of minority narratives, and the acceptance of a pluralistic attitude toward history.

All intentional momumentalizing works by attempting to solidify (and, in fact, to create) identity. This is true whether the group in question is a nation, or a small community of voices within a larger society. It is in this solidification of identity that the first irony of monumentalization resides. Intentional monuments, for which I have characterized our age as having a particular fondness, are erected in opposition to time itself. In preserving individual moments or events, monuments seek to shore against history and its destructive force. The end of this defense against time is to safeguard identity, to give a culture or nation’s identity a solid surface upon which to cling. By shielding that solid surface, which may be the actual solidity of an architectural creation, it is hoped that the identity which has coalesced around such a built entity will likewise be solid and lasting.

Identity, however, is, by its nature, not a solid entity. Cultural identity, like the city itself, is always an entity in flux. Identity is in continual process of becoming manifest, which it does in and around the environments people pass through. However, this process is never closed. The architectural repositories constructed for identities can never ultimately contain them. Always shifting, narratives find placement only to be displaced again. So, the heritage crusades which have become ever more popular in the last few decades, may actually be active in arresting the lived identities which they wish to maintain.
Monumentalization is always a political act. It seeks to make the concerns of one group, or set of groups, prominent, in competition with completing claims. As this is the case, there can often be a need for monuments, inasmuch as they aid the work of memory. To have a place within the collective memory of a city is valuable, particularly for those disenfranchised groups that seek to safeguard against the hegemony of the majority. However, as Nietzsche warned, monumentality often reduces identity to a façade, an appearance which can only reflect the surface of a group’s lived experience. The past of any culture’s identity is, ultimately, irreducible to an anachronistic museum-piece. The irony of preservation is that while groups seek and, indeed, need, to define themselves in order to become politically potent, such definition is necessarily limiting, compromising the messy vitality from which all idenities spring.

The United Nations’ World Heritage Site designation attempts to embrace this irony. On the one hand, sites are honored with designation due to their cultural or aesthetic uniqueness. In this way, World Heritage seeks to give voice to threatened groups and structures, which may be largely forgotten in their own countries. On the other hand, the preservation of individual sites is part of a larger program of cataloguing and categorization, through which a new global identity is constructed.

We should not think, however, that this dynamism resides solely in a community’s inhabitants. The city, itself, resists reduction to anachronism. Once again, the intentional monuments described by Riegl are attempts to defend against the ravages of time. As a second irony, however, monuments are themselves not immune to the peculiarities of time. Unintentional monuments exist in direct contradiction to memorialization. Checkered streetscapes retaining the memory of several historical footprints are monuments not to the solidity of cultural identity, but to its fragility. But, intentional monuments, also, have unpredictable lived histories once they have been erected. Monuments, even when cast in stone, are not truly immobile. They are altered, moved, hidden, vandalized, forgotten, and are frequently rallied around by new causes, new groups, and new identities.

Riegl predicted that we will seek out age-value because it “triggers in the beholder a sense of the life cycle, of the emergence of the particular from the general and its gradual but inevitable dissolution back into the general.”[vii] It is this effort to distinguish the particular event, the particular identity from an undifferentiated generality that intentional monumentality attempts. However, our lived experience occurs in the chaotic generality of a fragile world. Once an identity is drawn out, removed from its context, the identity is no longer the same, and no longer participates in the lived experiences which generate the on-going process of identity formation.

This attempt at particularization is never ultimately successful, as Riegl saw in privileging unintentional architectural remainders. Benjamin saw this too, as is apparent in his reference to the “secret structure” of spaces. Our urban spaces are not reducible; they cannot be contained by a monument. For Benjamin, the secret structure, or aura, or a place may be witnessed, but is ultimately ungraspable. The particularity of a place exists enmeshed within the generality of its context. Once that particularity is mediated, as memorialization attempts to do, the meaning of the site changes. It is, in fact, no longer the same site.

The Berlin Wall reconstruction is radical because it seeks not historic preservation of a defunct historical remnant, but seeks the actual recreation of that remnant. The lived experience, then, can stay alive. Similar recreations are becoming popular. The appeal is that such attempts are imagined to bring one closer to reality than was possible with the soon-to-be-antiquated reduction of a site to a memorial. A memorial describing Berlin during the division would only narrate to visitors the now absent experience. The reconstruction, however, attempts to make that experience alive again, physically and concretely manifest, albeit in a contained state. Narration would no longer be needed.
The irony, however, is still intact. The experience can never truly live again, and the installation of the experience into a museum succeeds only in creating a frame, which the Berliner identity has long since vacated. It is itself significant that the wall, which became an unintentional monument to fear and isolationism, should be intentionally reformed as a monument to democracy. Once again, this shows that monuments are themselves transitory.

I have suggested that the erection of monuments is an act of resistance against modernity, an attempt to make the world more stable. It should also be seen as a peculiarly modern endeavor. It is an effort to organize the world, to categorize experiences, and thus make sense out of them. This act of making the world smaller displays a modern mindset. Thus, when Riegl anticipated a century of age-value, he was anticipating the maturity of modernity, and the emergence of the postmodern.

Age-value recognizes the faded, incomplete, and crumbling as potent. Decaying monuments are inevitably monuments to frailty and unpredictability, precisely what those who wish to solidify identity don’t want to expose. However, if we can recognize identity as something continually in flux, dying and re-emerging, then we can see it more accurately embodied by the unintentional than the intentional. Slavoj Zizek has noted that insistence is the opposite of reality.[viii] Rather than accepting transitory reality, intentional monuments insist that a permanent reality can be made manifest. It is this insistence which mediates a monument, and moves it away from real lived experience to a space of isolation.
Memorializing mourns the perceived inauthenticity of the current age, and hopes that the recollection of the past will help redefine identity in a carefully selected way. Once memorials become enmeshed in the ever-changing urban fabric, however, they do become part of the authenticity that is the current age. The double irony consists in the attempt to grasp the authentic, to ensure its permanence. Such an attempt ultimately misses the mark, exacerbating the slippery ambiguity of authentic identity.


Works Cited
Baudelaire, Charles. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays New York and London: Da Capo Press, 1986, p.130.
Benjamin, Walter. “Moscow Diary,” October 35 (Winter 1985): 65.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Use and Abuse of History trans. Adrian Collins, New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1957.
Riegl, Alois. “The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Its Origin,” Oppositions 25 (Fall 1982): 21-51.
Zizek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real! Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates New York and London: Verso, 2002.


[i] Riegl, Alois. “The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Its Origin,” Oppositions 25 (Fall 1982): 21-51.
[ii] An exception is Shelley’s Ozymandius, whose intentional monument lies a derelict ruin.
[iii] Benjamin, Walter. “Moscow Diary,” October 35 (Winter 1985): 65.
[iv] Baudelaire, Charles. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays New York and London: Da Capo Press, 1986, p.130.
[v] It is significant in itself that the debate of how best to memorialize the towers was taken up by the press so immediately after their collapse.
[vi] Nietszche, Friedrich. The Use and Abuse of History trans. Adrian Collins, New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1957.
[vii] Riegl, p.24.
[viii] Zizek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real! Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates New York and London: Verso, 2002.

This essay was originally prepared for a lecture at the Rocky Mountain European Scholars Consortium Annual Meeting in Provo, Utah, 2004.