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| The Visibility of the Urban by Knut Ebeling (Extract from the Home:Sweet:City) |
Stefanie Bürkle’s Archaelogy of History Images
Die Stadt, so stabil sie scheint, verändert sich ständig. Und mit ihr wandeln sich die A city, however stabile it appears, is constantly changing. And as it changes, so do the images we have of it. Whether as cosmos, organism, or stage, when we think of the city as a phenomenon our ideas and metaphors tumble into disorder—the images we produce of its irreality are as numerous as individual cities themselves. The Berlin metropolis alone fills libraries. And with every new city emerges its own knowledge, its own theory and philosophy that surrounds it like a suburbia. With few exceptions, urban paths of exploration overlap, cross, and interlace, their location subjecting them to thrusts and stops. The moment in which a city turns into knowledge and becomes an object of exploration is itself a symptom for the ceaseless urban and epistemic transformations brought forth by the city.
Without doubt, the city’s dual function as producer and image of knowledge has contributed to the “irreality of cities,” a condition already deplored in 1963, by Alexander Mitscherlich. Yet this irreality is not only an epistemic and literary phenomenon. It begins as a visual sign, a trace of the visual surface of cities that one must read, decode, and describe just as one would marks or tracks. This description is clearly more than academic disciplines can provide; cities go beyond the boundaries needed by knowledge to evolve. Accordingly, certain theoretical and artistic forms of description have taken up residency at the borders of the academic disciplines but at the center of cities. These forms visualize the urban and transgress knowledge. Today, small groups of theorists cross Baudelaire’s modern, contemplating cities and touching their surfaces. An entire theoretical modern follows the footsteps of Baudelaire reader Walter Benjamin. Modernism poses the question: “to what extent can one be ‘concrete’ in historico-philosophical contexts”?
There are concrete descriptions of cities everywhere. Today, one walks with Karl Schlögel through East European wastelands, with Mike Davis we climb into a helicopter above L.A., with Michel de Certeau we learn to understand the city as a praxis, and with Georges Perec, the most charming urban narrator of his generation, we cut through the city as a user manual, from his bed in Paris to space. The entire strolling modern, from Baudelaire to Davis and from Georg Simmel to Paul Virilio can be put to a halt with a single operation: holding up an image to it. The image of the city that every one of them tries to describe knows more than the written avancen of the flâneur.
The image carries a knowledge of which theoreticians despair, for it undermines every epistemic ramification. The city as visibility and visibility as the city can only be represented and “blickwispert,” or whispered visually, as Benjamin said of the glass-roofed Parisian arcades. Probably for this reason, Benjamin supplemented his text-fixated Arcades Project with a picture atlas (only several pages of which are preserved today—alas). What does an image say about a city that its knowledge and libraries conceal? What kind of visibility lends the urban something that can be shown that is not contained in what it says?
Conventional answers to these questions either turn to theory or art. One used to assume that the ways of knowledge in art and theory were different. Today, there are art-oriented studies, which, to name one example, visually probe the visibility of cities. Just as science profited from art throughout the modern period, art should be able to profit from theory. Stefanie Bürkle is one of those probing artists moving at the edge of knowledge discourse but in the heart of the big city. She employs an “archaeology of images,” one that does not address images of space, as in Bachelard’s Poetik des Raums, but attends to images of city. Bürkle wrests from the city an image and a visibility that confidently undercut anything it can say.
Sagbarkeit souverän unterbietet.
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