by Rem Koolhaas
So it can be that Rivera’s Red Square sketches—now in the possession of Mrs. Rockefeller—can surface in the pages of Cosmopolitan and even appear on the cover of Fortune, itself a Capitalist-realist pamphlet devoted to the glorification of management.
FATA MORGANA
The story of the RCA mural is that of two parties who start digging a tunnel from both ends, having arranged to connect in the middle, only to find that when they reach the intended spot there is no one on the other side. For Rivera, the virgin surface of the Manhattan lobby becomes a displaced Russian wall on which he will finally project the Red Army fresco. At the service of the Rockefellers, he will fix for eternity a Communist Fata Morgana in Manhattan—if not a “Kremlin on the banks of the Hudson,” at least a Red Square on Fifth Avenue.
The fortuitous meeting of a layer of Communist paint and a Manhattan elevator bank represents a political version of the Murray’s Roman Gardens strategy: the appropriation by individuals or groups of ideologically unclaimed territories inside Manhattan’s architecture through special forms of decoration.
Just as before this strategy could produce flashbacks to nonexistent pasts, it can now generate political flash-forwards, the establishment of desirable futures: Rockefeller Center, headquarters of the Union of American Socialist Soviets.
At the same time, consciously or not, Rivera is acting exactly within Nelson Rockefeller’s concept of “New Frontiers”: “the development of civilization is no longer lateral but inward and upward” For Rivera, the ideological settler, the RCA lobby becomes an interior, metropolitan Wild West; in the best tradition of the frontier, he is staking a claim.
DIAGONALS
The fresco is organized by two diagonals, elongated ellipses that for Rivera create “dynamic symmetry.”
On the left of this cross is an itemized quilt of capitalist abuse: policemen victimizing workers in a bread line; images of war, “the result of technical power unaccompanied by ethical development”; a nightclub scene, in which a group of latter-day Marie Antoinettes—representatives of the bourgeoisie—play cards in the armored isolation of a metallic cocoon.
On the right, at last, the walls of the Kremlin.
The silhouette of Lenin’s Tomb.
Lenin in Manhattan.
The “slow, joyous, singing masses of men and women marching all day long and far into the night.”
Underneath Red Square, materialized through the lenses of television,
“a group of young women in the enjoyment of health-giving sports.” Then another cocoon, in which (in Rivera’s synopsis) “the Leader unites in a gesture of permanent peace the hands of the Soldier, the Negro farmer and the white worker, while in the background the mass of workers with their fists held high affirms the will to sustain this fact.”
In the foreground, “a pair of young lovers and a mother nursing her newborn child see in the realization of the Leader’s vision the sole possibility of living, growing and reproducing in love and peace.”
Groups of students and workers are arranged on each side of the main panel, made up of “international types” who will “realize in the future the synthetic human compound divested of racial hates, jealousies and antagonisms….” The first ellipse is a view through a microscope, the cosmos of “infinitesimal living organisms.” A tactless close-up of the germs responsible for venereal disease forms an ominous, if colorful, cloud over the heads of the card-playing women.
The second ellipse brings the vision of man to the most distant celestial bodies.
At the intersection of the ellipses, “the cosmic energy received by two antennae is conducted to the machinery controlled by the worker, where it is transformed into productive energy.”44 But this energy is rerouted from the formal center of the composition to an off-center point that is the fresco’s real center of gravity: the multiple handshake, engineered by the Leader.
Looked at strictly in terms of square footage, by far the largest part of the image is occupied by a colossal machine that is to perform the miracle for which the entire mural is an incantation: the amalgamation of Communist ethos with American know-how.
Its enormous size is a measure of Rivera’s subconscious pessimism as to whether the synthesis USSR/USA can ever be sparked into life.
Left side of Rivera’s mural. Below right: the crisis-ridden masses, barely controlled by mounted police, threaten the rich in their protective cocoon. Above: “progress” of the armaments industry. Around the corner: benevolent deity spins electricity.
ANXIETY
From the beginning, Rivera’s juxtaposition of the two ideologies causes anxiety in his patrons, but they ignore its implications until, weeks before the May 1 opening, Rivera paints out the large cap that has so far obscured the Leader’s face, and reveals a portrait of the bald-headed Lenin, staring the viewer straight in the face.
“Rivera paints scenes of Communist Activity, and John D. Jr. Foots Bill,” screams a World-Telegram headline.
Nelson Rockefeller, willing to put up with Red Square, writes Rivera a note: “While I was in the #1 building yesterday viewing the progress of your thrilling mural, I noticed that in the most recent portion of the painting you had included a portrait of Lenin.
“This piece is beautifully painted, but it seems to me that his portrait appearing in this mural might very easily offend a great many people…. As much as I dislike to do so I am afraid we must ask you to substitute the face of some man where Lenin’s head now appears.”45
Rivera responds by offering to replace the card-playing women under their venereal cloud with a group of American heroes—such as Lincoln, Nat Turner, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Wendell Phillips—that might restore the balance.
Two weeks later, the lobby is sealed off. Rivera is asked to come down from the scaffolding, given a check for his full fee and asked to leave the scene with his assistants. Outside, another vision awaits Rivera: “The streets surrounding the Center were patrolled by mounted policemen and the upper air was filled with the roar of airplanes flying round the skyscraper menaced by the portrait of Lenin….
The proletariat reacted rapidly. Half an hour after we had evacuated the fort, a demonstration composed of the most belligerent section of the city’s workers arrived before the scene of battle. At once the mounted police made a show of their heroic and incomparable prowess, charging upon the demonstrators and injuring the back of a seven-year-old girl with a brutal blow of a club.
“Thus was won the glorious victory of Capitalism against the portrait of Lenin in the Battle of Rockefeller Center….”46
It was the only Rivera mural ever to come alive.
Six months later the fresco is forever destroyed.
The Kremlin becomes elevator bank again.
2 Postscripts
ECSTASY
Atop the RCA Building is the Rainbow Room.
Reality of the RCA slab. “Americans are the materialists of the Abstract….”
“Viewing New York through the 24 large windows of the Rainbow Room, or watching a floor show in the Rainbow Room’s sparkling splendor, visitors taste the ultimate in 20th century entertainment.47
The planners of the Center want to call the space the “Stratosphere,” but John D. Rockefeller vetoes the name, because it is not correct. The best orchestras play in the room; “Jack Holland and June Hart dance…maybe fly is a better word.”48 The diners are arranged in curved terraces around a remnant of the Globe symbolism: a circular dance floor that slowly revolves.
The window recesses are clad with mirrors so that the view of the Metropolis is equal parts real and mirror-image Manhattan.
The room is the culmination of a perfect creation.
Only the lingering imperfection of the human race itself casts a shadow in this arena of ecstasy; the architecture is superior to its occupants. But even that may be corrected. “Now let
’s streamline Men and Women,”49 suggests Count Alexis de Sakhnoffsky, designer, “tilting back his chair at the luncheon table in the Rainbow Room.” The count has designed cars, watches and clothes. Now he unveils his plan for the remodeling of the human race.
“Improvement is in the air, let us apply it to ourselves. The scientists would tell us what the body lacks for things it is called on to do today. They would point out what it has that it no longer needs. The artists would then design the perfect human being for the life of today and tomorrow. The toes would be eliminated. They were given to us to climb trees, and we do not climb trees anymore. This would permit interchangeable shoes, beautifully streamlined. The ears would be turned around, slotted and streamlined to the head. Hair would be used only for accent and decoration. The nose would be streamlined. Certain changes would be made in the contours of both men and women to make them more graceful.
“What poets and philosophers have called the eternal fitness of things is the objective of streamlining.”
In a culture that creates congestion on all possible levels, streamlining equals progress.
Manhattan needs not decongestion but smooth congestion.
New human race unveiled, elevation and plan. “Count Sakhnoffsky’s idea of future men and women. Ears and noses Sakhnoffsky-streamlined… Hair would be used for decoration only….”
ILL
Hood has never been ill, but in 1933, when the first installment of Rockefeller Center is complete, his health collapses. Friends think that the frantic work on Rockefeller Center has exhausted him, but in fact he suffers from rheumatoid arthritis.
“His energy never left him” in the hospital; “even when he was sick to death he was tingling to go back to his office and do the buildings he felt he had in him.”50
But in the Great Depression there is no work, not even for Hood. Rockefeller Center, first fragment of the final Manhattan, is, for the foreseeable future, also the last.
Hood, seemingly recovered, returns to the office. The RCA Building now completely dominates the view from his window in the Radiator Building. An old friend visits, reminding him that he left the provincial office to become the greatest architect in New York.”
The greatest architect in New York?" Hood repeats, focusing on the RCA slab, fiery in a sunset. By God, I am.”
He dies in 1934.
Corbett, fellow theoretician of Manhattan, co-promoter and designer of the Culture of Congestion, writes: His friends all knew him as ‘Ray’ Hood, dynamic, brilliant yet affable ‘Ray.’
“I have never known a man in any walk of life with a more vivid imagination or more vital energy, and all without a trace of ‘pose.'51
Madelon Vriesendorp, Freud Unlimited.
Europeans: Biuer! Dalí and Le Corbusier Conquer New York
For New York is the Futurist city, the Baden Baden of that dying stench called Europe, the ironic gargantuan offspring of the senility, the debilitating spirituality and black breath of the European succubus.
—Benjamin de Casseres, Mirrors of New York
BIUER! Al BRING OU SURREALISM.
AULREDI MENI PIPOUL IN NIU YORK JOVE BIN INFECTID BAI ZI LAIFQUIVING AND MARVELOS SORS OF SURREALISM.
—Salvador Dalí
Manhattan, great unfilleted sole spread out on a rock…
—Le Corbusier
CONQUEST
In the mid-thirties both Salvador Dalí and Le Corbusier—they hate each other—visit New York for the first time.
Both conquer it, Dalí conceptually through interpretative appropriation (“New York: why, why did you create my statue long ago, long before I was born?"),1 Le (“its skyscrapers are too small”)2 Corbusier by proposing literally to destroy it.
Their reactions—diametrically opposite—are episodes (fueled by equal parts jealousy and admiration) in the long history of European attempts to “reclaim” Manhattan.
METHOD
“I believe that the moment is at hand when by a paranoid and active advance of the mind, it will be possible to systematize confusion and thus help to discredit completely the world of reality”:3 in the late twenties Salvador Dalí injects his Paranoid-Critical Method into the bloodstream of Surrealism.
“It was in 1929 that Salvador Dalí turned his attention to the internal mechanism of paranoid phenomena, envisaging the possibility of an experimental method based on the power that dominates the systematic associations peculiar to paranoia; subsequently this method was to become the frenzied critical synthesis that bears the name of‘ paranoid critical activity:"
The motto of the Paranoid-Critical Method (PCM) is “The Conquest of the Irrational.”
Instead of the passive and deliberately uncritical surrender to the subconscious of the early Surrealist automatisms in writing, painting, sculpture, Dalí proposes a second-phase Surrealism: the conscious exploitation of the unconscious through the PCM.
The PCM is defined by Dalí mostly in tantalizing formulas: “the spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on the critical and systematic objectifications of delirious associations and interpretations….”4
It is easiest to explain the PCM by describing its exact opposite.
In the sixties two American behaviorists—Ayllon and Azrin—invent a “reinforcement therapy” which they call Token Economy. Through the generous distribution of colored plastic tokens, inmates of a particular insane asylum are encouraged to behave like normal people whenever possible.
The two experimenters “posted a list of desired behaviors on the wall and then gave bonus points (tokens) to those patients who made their beds, swept their rooms, worked in the kitchen, etc. These tokens were redeemable for canteen items or for amenities such as a color TV, staying up later at night or a private room. These incentives proved very effective in motivating the patients to look after themselves and take care of the ward.”5
The hope that underlies such therapy is that, sooner or later, such systematic simulation of normality will turn into real normality, that the sick mind will insinuate itself successfully into some form of sanity like a hermit crab into an empty shell.
Reinforcement-therapy patients at hospital party: “sustained and potent challenge to Freud.” A plastic token for each convention remembered smile, lipstick, small talk, etc. Such “incentives proved very effective in motivating the patients to look after themselves….” (Note large number of Polaroid cameras in foreground, ready to “record” this triumph of simulated normality.)
TOURISM
Dalí’s PCM is a form of reinforcement therapy, but in the opposite direction. Instead of the diseased performing the rituals of health, Dalí proposes a tourism of sanity into the realm of paranoia.
When Dalí invents the PCM, paranoia is fashionable in Paris. Through medical research, its definition has been amplified beyond simple persecution mania, which is only one fragment of a much larger tapestry of delusion.6 In fact, paranoia is a delirium of interpretation. Each fact, event, force, observation is caught in one system of speculation and “understood” by the afflicted individual in such a way that it absolutely confirms and reinforces his thesis—that is, the initial delusion that is his point of departure. The paranoiac always hits the nail on the head, no matter where the hammer blows fall.
Just as in a magnetic field metal molecules align themselves to exert a collective, cumulative pull, so, through unstoppable, systematic and in themselves strictly rational associations, the paranoiac turns the whole world into a magnetic field of facts, all pointing in the same direction: the one he is going in.
The essence of paranoia is this intense—if distorted—relationship with the real world: The reality of the external world is used for illustration and proof… to serve the reality of our mind….”7
Paranoia is a shock of recognition that never ends.
Diagram of the inner workings of the P
aranoid-Critical Method: limp, unprovable conjectures generated through the deliberate simulation of paranoiac thought processes, supported (made critical) by the “crutches” of Cartesian rationality.
SOUVENIRS
As the name suggests, Dalí’s Paranoid-Critical Method is a sequence of two consecutive but discrete operations:
1. the synthetic reproduction of the paranoiac’s way of seeing the world in a new light—with its rich harvest of unsuspected correspondences, analogies and patterns; and
2. the compression of these gaseous speculations to a critical point where they achieve the density of fact: the critical part of the method consists of the fabrication of objectifying “souvenirs” of the paranoid tourism, of concrete evidence that brings the “discoveries” of those excursions back to the rest of mankind, ideally in forms as obvious and undeniable as snapshots.
As a didactic model of such a critical operation—in this case, to prove the paranoiac (i.e., essentially unprovable) thesis of Mary’s Ascension—Dalí describes one of his dreams.
“Now that I am awake I still find this dream as masterly as when I slept. This is my method: take five bags of green peas, collect all of them in a single large bag and then drop them from an altitude of 50 feet; now project an image of the Holy Virgin on the falling peas; each pea, separated from the next one only by space, just like the particles of an atom, will reflect a small part of the total image; now one projects the image upside down and takes a photograph.
“Due to the acceleration, conform to the laws of gravity, the upside-down fall of the peas will produce the effect of the Ascension. To refine the effect even more one can coat each pea with a reflective film, which will give it the quality of a screen….”8