Monsterpieces: Anti-Towers

Part II

Streit: The demythologizing or de-aurizing of powerful cultural sites is probably even more obvious in the photos of New York’s Freedom Tower and the Statue of Liberty.

LeClair: The tree in the first photograph partly obstructs the Tower while the stone column in the second does not cover any of the Statue, but does take up an inordinate proportion of a photograph of Lady Liberty. It and the Freedom Tower, like the Parthenon in the previous photographs, are radically decentered and backgrounded. The photographs have in common a dark, textured, concrete mass dominating the frame and the highly designed but somewhat vague landmarks associated here with blue sky and blue water. From this perspective and in this light, Liberty is half dark like the column. The V-design of the Freedom Tower reverses the form of the Eiffel Tower and implies that with technological ingenuity mass can be supported by a point.

Streit: Next to the powerful hulks on the left of the photos, the famous landmarks appear rather fragile.

LeClair: Yes, they carry significant abstract meanings and are pointed toward heaven. But the concrete tree and stones are insistent—and powerful in these frames--aspects of earth. Unlike the buildings, they have no beginning or end in the photographs. Their extent is unknown. They are simply there, possibly everywhere. They might be called the “anti-sublime.”

Streit: Or the “foundational,” as in the Eiffel Tower photograph.

LeClair: Ah, thank you, yes. If the Parthenon in the last photo was part of living nature, the New York landmarks are part of a more fundamental or basic realm represented by the hulks. The tree is apparently living, but is similar to the never-living stones. Both are elements of and represent what Frost called the “design of darkness.” If the first photo of the Parthenon, along with the photo of the Eiffel Tower, may ask the viewer to remember the history of its construction, these two photographs seem to inflict on the viewer a much longer, deeper and perhaps more powerful history—the concrete world before abstracting humans, perhaps the world after humans. Knowing what happened to the Twin Towers, the viewer may see the two photographs as memento mori. In entropic time, if not sooner, the brightness of the scenes will turn to darkness, perhaps the ultimate abstraction, both full and empty of meaning.

Streit: Now I hear that other Thomas—Pynchon. If the two heaven-pointing structures were constructed, like the Eiffel Tower, out of predictable human pride, the New York photographs seem to express uncommon human humility, the recognition of power beyond human intervention. The oil may be pumped and the steel mined to construct towers but the stony earth remains.

LeClair: Maybe there’s some hope for humans in the second photograph of London towers. I find it interesting that these extremely substantial buildings have been assigned different names, those abstract identifiers. The first is the former London Bridge Tower, now called the Shard, an edifice that dominates the city skyline. The second is currently called the Elizabeth Tower and houses Big Ben. The sculpture in the foreground of Big Ben is part of a larger sculpture by Rodin entitled “The Burghers of Calais” that memorializes an event of communal self-sacrifice in the 14^th century. The sculpture is in Victoria Tower Gardens.

Streit: I think I see where you’re going with humanizing obstruction in the second.

LeClair: Given the preceding abstractions and interpretations, viewers and readers of our conversation should be able to generate plausible and possibly satisfying speculations about the purposes of these two obstructions, their contrasts between what rises high from earth and the lowly earth itself, between powerful human constructions and, in this case, powerless humans. But I fear we may repeat ourselves. I’d rather give you a quiz. What is the next one?

Streit: I suppose there’s an app that can identify it, but I have no idea. It can’t be the Parthenon of Nashville.

LeClair: What’s called “The Parthenon of the North” in Edinburgh. With this much more heavily obstructed photograph, I suppose I’m moving from “realistic seeing” to “barely seeing.” I believe obstructions in photographs can bring out qualities of famous structures. Here the obstruction suggests that the viewer has to go to the site to see and appreciate it. I’m not deconstructing the site. I may be deconstructing the photographer or photography. Ultimately, to really see the concrete you have to be there and move to find an opening, avoid the obstruction.

Streit: I read that you titled your Ph.D. dissertation “Final Words.” Any summary abstractions about concrete photos?

LeClair: It was about death and literature, and was supposed to be a joke. The title, not the dissertation. I hope to keep taking photographs, so no final words here. But I like to think that my modest device has in small ways “brought the Towers low,” deconstructed some of their cultural power, undermined the pride of tower-building, humanized grandiose symbols, even “naturalized” them, reminding viewers of the earth from which the towers have risen. The final words of Gravity’s Rainbow are “Now everyone.” Just before them is this quatrain from which I quoted at the beginning:

There is a Hand to turn the time,

Though thy Glass today be run,

Till the Light that hath brought the Towers low

Find the last poor Pret’rite one.