by Rem Koolhaas
BACKSTAGE
After the first-night fiasco, humanity—in the form of superannuated vaudeville—is abandoned, and the Music Hall becomes a movie theater. A movie theater needs only ;a projection booth, an auditorium and a screen; but behind Radio City’s screen still exists another realm, “a perfectly organized entity of 700 souls”: backstage.
Its elaborate facilities include dormitories, a small hospital, rehearsal rooms, a gymnasium, an art department, costume workshops. There is. Radio City Symphony and a permanent troupe of 64 female dancers—the Roxyettes, all between 5’4” and 5’7” - a scriptless chorus line without any action to sustain.
Furthermore, there is a menagerie—horses, cows, goats and other animals. They live in ultramodern stables, artificially lit and ventilated; an animal elevator—dimensioned to carry even elephants—not only deposits them on the stage but also on a special grazing ground on Radio City’s roof.
Finally, there is Roxy’s own apartment fitted in between the roof trusses of his theater. “It is round, all white plaster and the walls describe a parabola to meet in a domed top. The whole thing is really breathless—vague, spaceless, timeless. Makes you feel like an unhatched chicken looking up at the top of his eggshell. To make the whole thing even more fantastic, there are telephone dials in the walls. When you turn a dial, a red light starts to flash on and off—something to do with radio.”34 But most painfully inactive is the colossal theatrical machine, “the most complete mechanical installation in the world, including a revolving stage; three manipulable sections of stage flooring; a power-driven orchestral dais; a tank; an electrically draped curtain; seventy-five rows of fly lines for its scenery, ten of which are electrically operated; a cyclorama 117 feet by 75; six horns for motion pictures and two motion picture projection sheets; a fountain in the middle of the revolving stage which can be used for water effects while the turntable is in motion; a public-address system for amplifying speech and producing thunder and wind effects (played from records with fifty-four ribbon type); semi-invisible microphones on the stage, in the footlights, in the orchestra pit and in the sub-basement and an amplifier and six loudspeakers concealed above the proscenium; a monitor system in connection with the public address system which reproduces words spoken on the stage in the projection booths and the director’s office and even in the foyer and lobbies if desired, and which also carries the directions of the stage manager to the dressing rooms and electrical stations; an elaborate lighting system with six motor-operated light bridges over the stage, each 104 feet long, from which lens units and floods can be used for special lighting; eight portable sixteen-floor lighting towers; four spotting galleries, two on each side of the stage, and a spotting booth in the auditorium ceiling; a cyclorama strip in the floor and a floor battery of self-leveling, disappearing footlights; six projection machines, four effect machines and the usual, or rather more than usual, complication of controls.”35
The waste of this mechanical potential behind the movie screen is unacceptable.
Rockettes and Machines: “Members of the Corps de Ballet wait by elevators’ huge gleaming pistons to be lifted to stage level during performance….”
The frenetic sunsets and daybreaks, and the permanent availability of the Roxyettes and the cosmopolitan livestock, combined with the inactivity of “the most complete mechanical installation in the world,” create multiple pressures for .a new stage show that can exploit in the shortest possible time the maximum capacities of this top-heavy infrastructure.
Under these critical conditions Roxy, general director of production
Leon Leonidoff and the director of the Roxyettes (their name soon streamlined to Rockettes) invent a stunning ritual: a new routine that is, in a sense, a record of the crisis; a systematization of the concept of “lack of inspiration”; variations on the theme of “no content,” founded on a process, a display of inhuman coordination that relies on frenzied synchronization, an exhilarating surrender of individuality to the automatism of a synthetic year-round rite of spring.
The essence of this, performance is a mass high-kick: a simultaneous display of sexual regions, inviting inspection but on a scale that transcends personal provocation.
The Rockettes are a new race, exhibiting their superior charms to the old one.
Essence of the Rockettes’ performance: plotless theatrical energy.
PYRAMID
For the sake of the Music Hall audience, this pure abstraction is occasionally intersected with a recognizable reality. Producer Leonidoff invades traditional stories with his man-made race, rejuvenating tired mythologies.
Especially his Easter show becomes a classic of such cross-fertilization. A pyramid of eggs occupies center stage. Cracks develop, marked by neon scars.
After some struggling the Rockettes emerge intact from the shattered shells in a direct reference to the Resurrection.
The stage magically cleared of debris, the reborn Rockettes assume their traditional formation, lift their legs as high as they will go….
CHORUS
Only the Rockettes’ abstract movement can generate completely plotless theatrical energy commensurate with the theater Roxy has created. It is as if the chorus of a Greek tragedy decided to desert the play it was supposed to support and pursued its own emancipation. The Rockettes, daughters of the multiple sunset, are a democratic chorus line that has finally left its background role and gone to flex its muscles at center stage.
The Rockettes = the chorus line as main protagonist, the lead, a single personage made up of 64 individuals, filling the gigantic stage, dressed in Suprematist costumes: flesh-colored bodystockings marked with a series of black rectangles that shrink toward the waist to end in a small black triangle—living abstract art that denies the human body.
With the development of its own race, its own mythology, its own time, its own rituals, the container of Radio City Music Hall has finally generated a worthy content.
Its architecture has provoked, and is now supporting, a new culture which, preserved in its own artificial time, will remain forever fresh.
Rockettes in crisis: their permanent—useless—availability led to routine based on concept of lack of inspiration.
Rockettes’ medical center: fresh awakening of a new race.
“Dormitory for dancers is located backstage. Girls can rest between shows, stay overnight….”
ARK
From the moment of his sunset Revelation, Roxy has become a Noah: the chosen recipient of a quasi-divine “message” who—oblivious to its apparent implausibility—imposes its reality on the world.
Radio City Music Hall is his Ark; it now contains ultrasophisticated accommodation for selected wild animals and the apparatus to dispatch them throughout the structure.
In the Rockettes, it has its own race, luxuriating in its mirror-clad dorm whose regular rows of unglamorous hospital beds suggest a maternity ward, but without babies. Beyond sex, strictly through the effects of architecture, the virgins reproduce themselves.
In Roxy, finally, the Music Hall has its own helmsman, a planner with a vision who has built a self-contained cosmos on the allotment of his block. But unlike Noah, Roxy does not depend on a cataclysmic event in the real world to vindicate his Revelation; in the universe of the human imagination he is right as long as the “fun never sets.”
In the completeness of its facilities and mechanical equipment, in the selection of its human and animal menagerie—in its cosmogony, in other words—each of Manhattan’s 2,028 blocks potentially harbors such an Ark—or Ship of Fools, perhaps—recruiting its own crew with competing claims and promises of redemption through further hedonism.
Existing in such abundance, their cumulative impact is one of optimism; together, these arks ridicule the possibility of apocalypse.
Kremlin on Fifth Avenue
MOSCOW
In
1927 Diego Rivera, famous Mexican muralist, “member of the Communist Party in good standing, delegate of the Mexican Section of the International Red Aid, representative of the Mexican Peasant League, General Secretary of the Anti-Imperialist League, editor of El Libertador,” visits Moscow as a member of a delegation of “workers and peasants” that is invited to help celebrate the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution.
From the reviewing stand on Lenin’s Tomb, he watches “with greedy eyes, notebook in hand, but mostly sketching on the tablets of his tenacious brain” the Red pageantry.
Delighted, the radical artist records the full panoply of totalitarian mise en scene: “Moscow’s toiling millions celebrating their greatest holiday…the surging sea of crimson banners, the swift straining movement of cavalry .., the cubic pattern of trucks loaded with riflemen…the solid squares of marching infantry…the vast, banner-plumed, float-bearing serpentine of the slow, joyous singing masses of men and women of the city marching all day long and far into the night through the great square,” all impressions from “which he hoped one day to build murals for Russian Walls.”
As his biographer writes, It is not merely that [Rivera] apprehended [the Russian Revolution] intellectually—too many radical artists have found to their cost that in art bare intellect may prove a straight-jacket. Rather did it possess him wholly, stir him till thought and feeling were integrated into the unity from which art alone can issue.”36
Rivera’s unfinished mural in RCA Building. Diagonal from lower left to upper right: cosmos seen through telescope. Second diagonal: bacteria seen through microscope. Upper left: “chemical warfare typified by hordes of masked soldiers in the uniforms of Hitlerized Germany.” In metal cocoon: “the degeneration and persistent pleasures of the rich in the midst of the atrocious sufferings of the exploited toilers.” At center—seemingly bewildered by this ideological conflict—“man controls vital energy through the machine.” Upper right: “expressed without demagogy or fantasy…the organized Soviet masses…are marching towards the development of a new social order, trusting in the light of history, in the clear, rational, omnipotent method of dialectical materialism….” Just off center: Lenin and subversive pact between soldier, black farmer and white worker. “The attack on the portrait of Lenin was merely a pretext…. In reality, the whole mural was displeasing to the bourgeoisie….” (Rivera, Portrait of America.)
1927
In this year the collision between the Russian Modernists and the Soviet regime reaches an ominous phase: the Modernists are accused of being elitists whose production is literally use-less: the Soviet government is determined to define once and for all the principles of an art that will energize and inspire the masses.
The potential of Rivera’s narrative style—he is one of the few convincing visual demagogues in the world—is not lost on his hosts. After interviewing Rivera, the head of the Department of Agitation and Propaganda of the Communist International attacks the Russian avant-garde with arguments borrowed from the Mexican. “The gap between the most advanced artistic expression and the elementary tastes of the masses can be bridged only by following a course which will improve the cultural level of the masses and capacitate them for artistic perception of the new ways developed by the dictatorship of the proletariat. Nevertheless, it may be possible to begin at once the rapprochement between the masses and art. The road is simple: Paint! Paint murals in the clubs and public buildings.”37
Rivera adds a personal reproach that undermines the position of his Modernist colleagues still further: “They should have given an art simple and clear and transparent as crystal, hard as steel, cohesive as concrete, the trinity of the great architecture of the new historical stage of the world.”38
The proto–Socialist Realism of Rivera’s work fits exactly the ideological profile that guides the Soviets’ search for the correct art.
Barely a month in Moscow, Rivera is asked to do a portrait of Stalin. He also signs a contract with Fine Arts Commissar Lunacharsky to do a fresco in the Red Army Club “and to prepare serious work for the new library V. I. Lenin, at present under construction in Moscow.”
But through the professional jealousy of local artists, the Red Army project—the projection of Rivera’s mental notes onto Russian walls—is aborted; Rivera leaves the USSR abruptly, taking with him only his notebooks and, inevitably, the sketches “on the tablets of his tenacious brain.”
NEW YORK
Back in Mexico, Rivera decorates walls in the National Palace with, among other images, the Billionaires’ Banquet: Rockefeller, Morgan and Henry Ford dining on ticker tape.
To feed his output, Rivera has to consume fresh iconographies continuously. Like a demented oil well, the America of the thirties gushes myth, from the assembly line to the bread line—both equally useful to Rivera.
In 1931 the Museum of Modern Art—the Rockefellers’ connection to the latest developments in the avant-garde—offers Rivera a retrospective. Five weeks before the opening, on November 13, 1931, Rivera arrives in Manhattan to produce a series of seven mobile frescoes—portable as a precaution “in a land where buildings do not stand long.”39
As in Moscow, he immediately starts to harvest iconography. Three of the new frescoes interpret New York: Pneumatic Drilling, Electric Welding and Frozen Assets. “The third depicted New York on three levels, at the base a guarded bank vault with immobilized wealth, in the middle a municipal lodging with immobilized men lying on the floor like corpses in a morgue and, above, the immobilized skyscrapers of New York like monuments on a tomb of business.”40 (The two “tombs” chosen to occupy the foreground are Raymond Hood’s Daily News and McGraw-Hill buildings.) The explicit politics of Frozen Assets create controversy; the show breaks all MoMA records.
Sponsored by the Ford dynasty, Rivera spends 1932 largely in the mechanical entrails of Detroit, where he is asked to decorate the Ford-financed Institute for Fine Arts.
More fascinated than critical, his mural is a sensual apotheosis of the assembly line, a glorification of the industrial mystique, the sacred conveyor belt that delivers, at its end, a liberated mankind.
Diego Rivera, Frozen Assets: A Cross-Section Through the City, “mobile” fresco, 1931. For its exhibition, the Museum of Modern Art invited Rivera “to paint seven frescos…in the style of his Mexican work with the possibility that two might be on United States subjects.” They were painted with such speed and so late that they could not be included in the catalogue. The critical, subversive nature of his “United States subjects” was discovered when it was too late.
CROSSROADS
Like the Soviets, the Rockefellers are planning to incorporate appropriate works of art in their colossal complex to substantiate its cultural claims. Through the attraction of a peculiar economic-artistic gravity the Red Square notebooks-48 watercolors and innumerable penciled notes—end up in the possession of Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Other Rockefellers too buy Rivera’s work.
Later in 1932, Nelson Rockefeller invites Rivera to decorate the main lobby of the RCA Building.
With Matisse and Picasso, Rivera is invited to submit sketches on the theme “man at the crossroads looking with hope and high vision to the choosing of a new and better future.”41
The architects are anxious about art invading their domain; on Hood’s insistence, the murals are to be in three colors: white, black and gray. Matisse is not interested in the subject, Picasso refuses to see the Rockefeller delegation and Rivera is insulted that, although world-famous, he is still expected to submit for a competition. He refuses, but insists at the same time on using color, warning Hood that otherwise “we would accentuate the funereal feeling which is fatally aroused in the public by the juxtaposition of black and white…. In the lower parts of a building one always has the feeling of a crypt…. Suppose some ill-disposed persons should chance upon a nickname such as ‘Undertakers’ Palace.' ”42Sorry you can’t
accept,” Hood wires hastily; but Nelson Rockefeller negotiates a settlement, and a more specific subject is formulated.
“The philosophical or spiritual quality should dominate the mural. We want the paintings to make people pause and think and to turn their minds inward and upward…[to] stimulate a not only material but above all spiritual awakening….
“Our theme is NEW FRONTIERS!
“Man cannot pass up his pressing and vital problems by‘ moving on’
He has to solve them on his own lot. The development of civilization is no longer lateral; it is inward and upward. It is the cultivation of man’s soul and mind, a fuller comprehension of the meaning and mystery of life. For the development of the paintings in this hallway, these frontiers are—
“1. Man’s New Relation to Matter. That is man’s new possibilities from his new understanding of material things; and
“2. Man’s New Relation to Man. That is man’s new and more complete understanding of the real meaning of the Sermon on the Mount.”43
CONFUSION
1932 is a time of iconographic convergence between the USSR and the USA. The style of Communism and the style of Capitalism—two parallel lines that might be expected to meet in infinity, if ever—suddenly intersect.
This approximation of visual vocabularies is misread by many as actual ideological confluence: “Communism is the Twentieth-Century Americanism” is the slogan of the American Communists.