The painting in question is L’Angélus by Jean-François Millet, one of the founders of the École de Barbizon together with Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, Charles-François Daubigny and Théodore Rousseau. Painted in 1857, the canvas now resides in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris and shows two peasants saying their evening Angelus in a field near Barbizon. The man has taken his hat off and holds it in his hands while the woman lowers her head and joins her hands in prayer.
This painting fascinated Salvador Dalí who wrote an analysis of it in the 1930s. The manuscript was mislaid in 1941 in the Arcachon region in France, but was eventually published by Jean-Jacques Pauvert in Paris in 1963. The original title was Le mythe tragique de L’Angélus de Millet (2). In the book, Dalí tries to unravel the painting as it constituted one of his many recurrent images (others include the rhinoceros’ horn or the grasshopper). As an avid reader of Freud, who he met in 1948 in London, Dalí developed his own theory which he called the Paranoid-Critical method in 1929 (3).
The aim of the method was to gain an understanding of things from their underlying purpose. Armed with psychoanalysis, Dalí proposed a self-induced paranoid state as the place where the familiar is violently stirred and becomes "uncanny" (4). Once seized and “pinned down with needles”, the unconscious can then be dissected, analysed and ultimately explained: rationalising the delirium and converting it into a story. Dalí’s entire work is teleological in the sense that it revolves around this self-analysis, with Oedipus emerging as the central character.
L’Angélus by J.F. Millet also inspired a series of oil paintings and drawings by Dalí which illustrate what was postulated in the book. Basically, the book develops a subliminal tale about the painting, finding its form in the classical Oedipus myth. Dalí attributed the immense popularity of the painting to its subconscious or hidden meaning. A meaning that had troubled Dalí since his childhood and only now was he able to decipher its fundamental elements: images relating to eroticism and death, or in oedipal terms, infanticide, parricide and incest.
RK explains in the book how Le Corbusier sees his vision for New York frustrated because he is unable to comprehend the city, and the city in return ignores the French architect. However, Dalí’s visit to the city proved to be different. Dalí interpreted the urban phenomenon of New York congestion -Manhattanism, in the words of RK- from its underlying logic: the paranoid state.
RK remembers Dalí’s words about New York:
Dalí’s paranoid-critical conquest of Manhattan is an economic model, especially when, with a final gesture, he transforms the entire city into a performance solely for his own pleasure."Every evening, the skyscrapers of New York come to life as the giant anthropomorphic figures of Millet’s L’Angélus [...] immobile and ready to perform the sexual act and devour each other [...]. This bloodthirsty desire illuminates them and causes the entire central heating and central poetry to circulate within the huge metal structures".
For one moment, his interpretation leaves all the other functions of the city in suspense. The city exists solely for him.
According to RK, Dalí interprets New York City as an economic model for the spectacular representation of himself. New York becomes the giant materialization of Dalí’s self-representation: the Oedipus myth and its Dalian metaphor (the praying peasants in L’Angélus). The anthropomorphic skyscrapers are now ready for the cannibalistic act which unites death and eroticism: the Dalian story sublimated in urban congestion, capitalist economy and entertainment society, all working in tandem for the aggrandizement of Dalí, the great egocentric.
Among the documentary images in Delirious New York are illustrations by Madelon Vriesendorp (MV). The most widely known is on the front cover and page 160 of the Gustavo Gili edition (7). It is titled Flagrant Delit (Caught in the Act) and depicts two buildings, the Chrysler and the Empire State, lying in a post-coital scene in a New York penthouse. They are discovered, scarcely hidden under a sheet, by the Rockefeller Center which is shining a spotlight on them from the doorway. The torch from the Statue of Liberty on the bedside table lights up the bedroom, while the Manhattan Dutch grid and Central Park on the rug are being swallowed up by the bed. Outside the New York skyscrapers contemplate this spectacular scene with a hypnotic gaze. The discarded Goodyear “rubber”, unmistakably reminiscent of Dalí’s soft pocket watch in The Persistence of Memory (1931) (8), is proof of the act: the forbidden act committed by the two anthropomorphic skyscrapers, just like the forbidden act in the Oedipus myth.
Both RK’s text and MV’s illustrations allude to the Dalinian paranoid-critical method. Manhattanism, New York’s delirium, can only be explained from the irrationality of the urban process, as an essentially paranoid dynamic. Pathologically, New York is on the margin of modernity. Le Corbusier's hygienist or Cartesian approaches fail to gain ground in New York, a city which advances according to the swerves of an economic model under the spotlight of show business. Has any other city on earth been filmed more than this?
Manhattanism is, therefore, the expression of a capitalist system in an extremely heighten state. According to David Harvey (9), the supreme precept of capitalism is a 3% compound growth rate which causes the system to permanently subsist "on a knife-edge" producing crisis after crisis, which become the "irrational rationalisers": the very description of Dalí’s paranoid-critical method.
The paranoid nature of New York’s congestion can, thus, be said to be analogous to the paranoid-critical method, which is represented in Millet’s L’Angélus, more concretely, in the figure of the woman who is poised for the sexual act and cannibalism. For RK, and in a foundational way in his work, this woman symbolises the economic and urban processes that define the city. Such processes are paranoid and have a formal effect on architecture. RK’s buildings offer a murderous sensuality; they offer the posture of the praying peasant woman in L’Angélus.
In another RK publication, Content (10), our attention is drawn to the subheadings: Perverted Architecture, Homicidal Engineering, Sweatshop Demographics, Slum Sociology, Big Brother Skyscrapers, Al Qaeda Fetish, Martha Stewart Urbanism and Paranoid Technology. They constitute a set of notes on what is both pathological and spectacular; of paranoid states and cannibalistic sensuality. This is where RK’s architecture germinates and grows, under the auspices of a woman resembling a praying mantis i.e. Millet’s peasant. RK’s buildings are erected with difficulty, with a suffering more insect than human, reflected almost always in the leaning posture.
Content provides numerous examples, like the illustrations of the OMA buildings that have come to life as anthropomorphic villains poised for sexual and criminal acts by Simon Brown and Jon Link at &&&. It also contains an article by Fenna Haakma Wagenaar (FHW) titled Astorology. Protect us from what we want (11) which gives an account of OMA’s paranoid activity. FHW exposes the many conflicts between OMA (Rotterdam) and Herzog & de Meuron (Basel) in terms of ideology and methodology. She describes OMA's activity as a febrile, verging-on-delirious production which Rem Koolhaas occasionally tries to rationalise. Though never excessively, as there is no room for complacency at OMA, just like the knife-edge instability of our capitalist system.
Enric Llorach, Barcelona 2012.
NOTES.-
(1)_Crane.tv, Shohei Shigematsu, OMA member. In New York, format: video, Metalocus Architectural Journal, On-line version, 21.12.2012.
(2)_Salvador Dalí, Le mythe tragique de L’Angélus de Millet, Société Nouvelle des Éditions Jean-Jacques Pauvert, Paris, 1963. Spanish version: El mito trágico de “El Ángelus” de Millet, Tusquets Editores, Barcelona, 2004. 1st edition in Marginales collection: March 1978. 1st edition in Esenciales collection: January 2004.
(3)_In the prologue to the French edition in 1963, Dalí wrote: "I, personally, firmly believe that this book is proof that the human brain, and in this case Salvador Dalí's brain, is capable of functioning as a cybernetic, viscous and extremely artistic machine thanks to the paranoid-critical activity (paranoid: soft; critical: hard)” idem Tusquets edition, pg. 20.
(4)_In the essay The uncanny (1919), Freud describes the uncanny as: “…every affect of an emotional impulse, whatever its nature, is converted into fear by being repressed, thus, from among the fears there must be one group in which it can be recognised that this is something repressed which returns. This type of anxiety would then constitute the uncanny, and it would then be irrelevant if this anxious nature was innate or if it was brought out by another affective tone. Secondly, if this is really the essence of the uncanny, then we understand that the current language passes insensibly from the Heimlich to its opposite, the Unheimlich; the latter, for which the uncanny is not actually anything new, but something that was always familiar to the psyche and was estranged only by being repressed. And this link with repression now enlightens us to Schelling's definition of the uncanny as something that should have been hidden has come out into the open" (Italics from original text). Sigmund Freud, Das Unheimliche, Imago 5 (5-6), 297-324, 1919. First publication in Spanish in 1943, Ed. Americana, Buenos Aires. The Uncanny is also included in the prologue to E.T.A. Hoffmann, El hombre de arena (The Sandman), José J. de Olañeta, Palma de Mallorca, 2008, pg. 28. The Sandman is one of a collection of short stories by E.T.A. Hoffmann titled Nachtstücke (Night Pieces) and published in 1917.
(5)_Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York, 1978. Spanish version: Delirio de Nueva York. Un manifiesto retroactivo para Manhattan, Gustavo Gili, Barcelona, 2004.
(6)_Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York. Ibidem (3), pp. 263-264.
(7)_Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York. Ibidem (3), p. 160.
(8)_The soft melting pocket watch in Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory (1931) also plays the role of a foundational image in OMA-Rem Koolhaas architecture. On this occasion, the resemblance is found in the soft slabs that abound in RK’s work, which Dalí would have referred to as “edible architecture”.
(9)_Such structural features of the capitalist system are described in the following pages of David Harvey’s book, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism, 2010. Spanish version: El enigma del capital y las crisis del capitalismo, Ediciones Akal, Madrid, 2012, pages 64-65. Harvey explains how financialization periods like the present always precede a change of hegemony. The US National Intelligence Council published at the beginning of the Obama era that the world's economic centre will have moved to Asia by the year 2025, due to the relentless flow of capital from West to East. RK has already directed his attention to this part of the planet, as well as managing to conquer Manhattan, the city that inspired his architectural dream and which had eluded Le Corbusier.
(10)_AMOMA/Rem Koolhaas/&&&/Simon Brown/ Jon Link, Content. Perverted Architecture. Homicidal Engineering. Sweatshop Demographics. Slum Sociology. Big Brother Skyscrapers. Al Qaeda Fetish. Martha Stewart Urbanism. Paranoid Technology, Taschen, Köln, 2004.
(11)_Fenna Haakma Wagenaar, Astorology. Protect us from what we want, Ibidem, pg. 204-207.
