I’VE NEVER HAD quite this difficult a time before, trying to think of something to say at the front of a book. I’ve had a box of prints of Greg Girard’s photographs here for entirely too long now, and every time I open it, and start looking through them, it’s as though my head falls off.
I’ve never seen anything like them. I have, though, imagined things not unlike what they depict, though never at anything like this resolution. In my novel Neuromancer, when the protagonists visit a decrepit surviving fragment of lower Manhattan, hemmed in by my sketchy description of Bigger, Globally Corporate Things, I had something like these photographs in mind.
But really, every time I open the box and look at them, they shut me up. Lump in throat.
Liminal. Images at the threshold. Of the threshold. The dividing line. Something slicing across accretions of cultural memory like Buñuel’s razor.
Documents of the Gone World, captured, one thinks, the Tuesday before it went entirely. Something so aching. The record of something which we know, instinctively, shouldn’t happen. They really shouldn’t do this, but…
Erasure. And look what they’ve erased. Wiped clean. Catch this last (and in my case, first) glimpse. Adios. “One little whoops and a push.” Gone, then.
And beyond the shattered matchstick fields of progress arise these shoals of cheap-ass concrete thunderheads, these arc-lit mesas apparently designed to emulate downmarket Japanese consumer electronics.
At the time of this writing, I freely confess, I know little more about Shanghai than these images. They came upon me, as it were, in the night, unexpectedly.
I know, and knew instantly, that I will never forget them.
I had long treasured Ian Lambot and Greg Girard’s City of Darkness, but in its case I had already seen other, and as it happened quite splendid, photographs of Hak Nam, and knew that that place, that near-infinitely interstitial universe or black hole, was indeed Gone.
Phantom Shanghai is the actual vanishing, the hideous twenty-first-century urban hat-trick itself. I think of the line of dawn rushing through desert, causing stones to explode. It is almost more than I can bear to contemplate, though the images themselves are so gorgeous, so extraordinary, that of course I look and look.
These images truly are, in that particular coinage of J. G. Ballard’s, terminal documents. One might compare them to Robert Polidori’s images of Pripyat and Chernobyl, except that what Girard reveals is so much more possibly the fate of so many places, hence so much more terrible.
I go back to the box, look again, and again am struck silent.
“Pictures or it didn’t happen,” they say on the Internet.
One of Greg Girard’s pictures is worth some ridiculously high number of my words. If you want to have an unforgettable experience, find this book and see why I was rendered basically speechless.
“Terminal City” was some rail magnate’s early suggestion for naming Vancouver. It’s a very lazy title for this introduction. I wish I’d thought of something better.
Introduction: “The Body”
THERE WAS A HEYDAY of virtual reality conferences during the late Eighties and early Nineties, and thus I found myself in Barcelona, San Francisco, Tokyo, or Linz, blinking through jet-lag at various manifestations of new technology, art, and attempts at interfacing the two. Very little of this stuff managed to work its way into long-term memory, most of it evaporating from the buffer almost immediately. Highly memorable, though, were the destructo-displays of Survival Research Laboratories, the machine-assisted street theater of Barcelona’s La Fura dels Baus, and the performances of Stelarc.
When eventually I was able to meet Stelarc himself, in Melbourne, I found that he radiated a most remarkable calm and amiability, as though the extraordinary adventures he’d put “the body” through had somehow freed him of the ordinary levels of anxiety most of us experience.
As he sat in a Melbourne restaurant, recalling the sensation of having discovered that a robotic “sculpture,” inserted down his throat and mechanically unfurled, was stubbornly refusing to refurl for removal, and that surgical intervention might shortly be the only option, he struck me as one of the calmest people I’d ever met. He resembled a younger J. G. Ballard, it seemed to me, another utterly conventional-looking man whose deeply unconventional ideas have taken him to singular destinations. Ballard’s destinations, however, have been fictional, and Stelarc’s are often physical, and sometimes seem to include the possibility of terminality (as with the elegant little sculpture converting “the body” to gallery space).
I had first encountered this art in the pages of the American magazine ReSearch: photographs of an event in which unbarbed steel hooks were inserted through various parts of “the body.” Counterbalanced with rocks, on ropes, these then levitated the prone body, which remained suspended for some period of time above the heads of onlookers. This immediately put Stelarc on my map. Who was this person, and what was he up to? Whatever it was, I sensed that it had little to do with rest of the magazine’s contents (someone who’d opted to bifurcate his penis, extremes of recreational corsetry, etc.).
Later, at the Art Futura festival in Barcelona, I saw video footage of more robotically oriented Stelarc performances. I imagine now that I was watching Stelarc in performance with his robotic third arm, but what I recall experiencing was a vision of some absolute chimera, at the heart of a labyrinth of breathtaking complexity. I sensed that the important thing wasn’t the entity Stelarc evoked, but the labyrinth that the creature’s manifestation suggested.
Extraordinary images, not least because they seemed the literal physical realization of Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2.
Stelarc’s art has never seemed “futuristic” to me. If I felt it were, I doubt I’d have responded to it. Rather, I experience it in a context that includes circuses, freak shows, medical museums, the passions of solitary inventors. I associate it with Leonardo da Vinci’s ornithopter, eccentric nineteenth-century velocipedes, and Victorian schemes for electroplating the dead. Though not retrograde in any way: timeless, as though each performance constitutes a moment equivalent to those collected in Humphrey Jennings’s Pandaemonium: The Coming of the Machine in the Industrial Revolution: moments of the purest technologically induced cognitive disjunction.
I am delighted at the publication of this volume, and look forward to a day when the world’s museums house effectively immortal suburbs of that great work, “the body.”
Stelarc walks the Posthumanist talk.
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