Axon: Creative Explorations

The media poem, 'Golden spaces', uses footage of Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin. It samples images of the design drawings done by Marion—the originals are on beige linen in a muted palette with many touches of gold. This poem emphasises Marion over Walter, not something done in 1911 when Walter was given all of the credit and Marion was considered merely an architectural draftsperson. The face is a metaphor here for the veneer of ‘nation’ that Canberra was to be. A utopia, but one that only Walter seemed to believe might actually come to pass. It also references the ‘facialisation’ of Deleuze and Guattari and Meghan Morris’ use of the concept to explain the process of creating cityscapes as picturesque surface.

Deleuze (1986) suggests that all arts position their contents to function like faces and landscapes, for signifiance may remain indeterminate without the coding that faciality provides. The link between faciality and landscape is exemplified by the closeup on a face in film which treats the face like a landscape.

There is a large body of work associating the human body with the city—Vitruvius (1960), Alberti (1988), Palladio (1997), for example. All described cities, using bodily proportions as metaphors and models. Whereas the architecture of buildings and cities was understood by these thinkers in terms of the body, Freud (1927), in Civilization and its discontents, inverts this to use an extended metaphor of the city of Rome to posit explanations for the facility of memory, making the first link between psychoanalysis and the city. Steve Pile’s The Body and the city (1996) presents a case (centered on comparison of the nature of the spatial imaginary in Freud, Lacan and Lefebvre) for psychoanalytic analyses of modern cities. Pile builds from an article by Meaghan Morris (1992) who has observed the ‘facialised’ nature of the modern city (after Deleuze and Guattari) which, she argues, is a series of commodified panoramas; skyscraper observation decks and rotating restaurants. Pile (1996, p.43) also sees the forms taken by modern cities as less about ‘Phallus and abstract power’ than about ‘face/faciality’.

Deleuze and Guattari place a white wall/black hole system at the intersection of signifiance and subjectification:

Signifiance is never without a white wall upon which it inscribes its signs and redundancies. Subjectification is never without a black hole in which it lodges its consciousness, passion, and redundancies … A broad face with white cheeks, a chalk face with eyes cut in for a black hole. Clown head, white clown, moon-white mime, angel of death, Holy Shroud.

The head is part of the body but the face isn’t, because to facialise is to code, and ultimately, they argue, the whole body is facialised, coded through the abstract machines of significance and subjectification. Similarly, landscape [or landscapity] functions as does faciality—to code and recode. The requirement in the early 20th century by the fledgling Australian Government for potential sites for a federal capital needing to be picturesque is a clear illustration of the difference between the head and the face. The head of the body politic of the newly formed, imagined community of Australia, was meeting in Melbourne in the shape of the new Parliament. However the facialising role of landscape was yet to bring its territorialising force to bear on the new nation. This would, in the minds of those who supported the idea of a federal capital, be achieved through construction of just the right design in just the right site.

The substitution of the Vitruvian body by the face is read by Pile as:

… substitution of the brutal body politic of urbanised capital by the cityscape as a collection of postcard scenes (and this is why tall buildings have observation decks and revolving restaurants) – to construct the city as a framed panorama. The Manhattan skyline becomes the acceptable face of capitalism. (1996, p.124).

Canberra is not only represented as a collection of picture postcard scenes, it was planned as that and built as that and embodied humans were to take their place in the scenes like so many faces in a crowd. A utopia, if not a heteropia.

Deleuze and Guattari’s series of dualisms including axiomatic and coded space, smooth and striated space, can be said to map onto Lefebvre’s absolute and abstract space. In Capitalism and schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari (1988, p.168) describe ‘smooth (vectorial, projective, or topological) space and a striated (metric) space’ taken from the work of musician/composer Pierre Boulez. The two spaces always co-exist in differing and continually changing proportions: ‘smooth space is constantly being translated, transversed into a striated space; striated space is constantly being reversed, returned to a smooth space.’ Smooth, absolute space is coded/represented and thereby becomes striated, abstract space. The shopping list of criteria for a place for Canberra was for a smooth, absolute space. It sought an endless vista, owned by no-one yet owned by everyone. It listed a set of features to be found in the idealised landscape paintings of nineteenth century artists: a land of distant mountain ranges embracing fertile, safe valleys. A utopian setting for a bureaucratic imagining.

In his lecture of 1967, ‘Of other spaces’, Foucault (1986) declares space to be the ‘anxiety of our era’. He is concerned with two types of space in particular: utopias and heterotopias. These are related to other sites, ‘but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invent the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect.’ Utopias are ‘sites with no real place’ which present idealised, abstracted forms of ‘real space’. Heterotopias are:

… places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society – which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites…are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. (1986, p.25).

Utopia and heterotopia relate as if in a mirror—the real me in front, the reflected me a utopia which is not really a place, yet a heterotopia in that the reflection is really there and challenges my notion of my real position in front of the mirror. Foucault proposes a studying of heterotopia which he christens, ‘heterotopology’, a ‘simultaneously mythic and real contestation of the space in which we live’. Cemeteries, prisons, retirement homes, museum and libraries are all examples of heterotopia. They may perform as closed off spaces or as openings into other spaces, but they always function to foreclose knowledge of what is really going on. They may give the illusion of order, but the illusion only serves to distract us from the complete disorder that is lived, social space. Foucault’s heterotopia might be seen as particular types of spaces which potentially make abstract space visible, even if momentarily. At the point when the federal capital was written but not built, it clearly functioned as utopia. In common with many utopia, it was to solve the problems of the rivalry between states—the sacrifice of the land for the new capital would, it was thought, solve the question of inter-territorial rivalries. The marketing of the capital was indeed functioning to obscure these and the racist dreams of a white Australia—Canberra was to be the real reflection of an imaginary united Australia.

Voices join with music in this poem as another layer of sound, indicating that bodies enter only into the margins of Canberra at this point in time—there is no real recognition of humans as embodied in the plans and their early realisation. The poem uses the phrase ‘waste of a good sheep station’ which has been a critical refrain speaking to critiques of the very idea of Canberra, a critique employed to this day. Although this is a poem which employs media with potential for interactions, there is no technological interaction, indicating the absence of bodies and the lack of real power afforded ordinary Australians in the planning of Canberra, especially embodied agency.