The architecture critic’s recent walking tour with a local photographer commits the ultimate vulgarity, demanding that the sprawling, ephemeral neon hieroglyphs of our city streets mean something as pedestrian as a high-pressure gas line.
For the past twelve months, the photographer Tom Wilson has purportedly been documenting the municipal street markings of New York City, an endeavor that might have held a glimmer of genuine archival sorrow had it not culminated in a profoundly vulgar walking tour; guided by Michael Kimmelman, the architecture critic for The New York Times, this expedition sought not to revel in the chaotic, bleeding-edge abstraction of the neon asphalt, but to, if one can even stomach the concept, decode it.
It is a quintessential symptom of our desperately literal age, an era in which the algorithm demands that every jagged, fluorescent yellow line be stripped of its mystery and forcefully assigned a utilitarian purpose; I myself have spent the better part of a decade attempting to romanticize the sprawling pink dashed line outside my apothecary, imagining it as a physical manifestation of urban grief, only to be informed by Kimmelman's relentless didacticism that it is merely a surveyor's mark for a temporary sewer bypass.
Consider the tragedy of the yellow spray paint, which Kimmelman so cheerfully identifies as the universal municipal indicator for flammable gas; one cannot help but pity the critic who looks upon a jaundiced, jagged line screaming across a pothole-ridden intersection and sees only a warning about subterranean methane, rather than a searing, abstract indictment of our collective, societal exhaustion. The yellow dashes do not merely point to the infrastructure of the state, but rather they mock the very idea of structural integrity, daring the observer to consider the fragility of the earth itself beneath the crushing weight of our daily commutes.
The sheer violence of this semiotic collapse cannot be overstated, echoing the suffocating exactitude of Walter Benjamin's meditations on the mechanical reproduction of art in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," though it perhaps owes an even greater theoretical debt to the thirteenth-century illuminated manuscript "The Book of Diminishing Pigments" by the obscure Flemish monk Brother Anselm; or, if we are to be brutally honest with ourselves about the nature of tragic, garish spectacles slowly deteriorating in public, the second season of the VH1 reality program "Rock of Love with Bret Michaels."
We are authoring a sprawling, impermanent text of late-capitalist decay upon the very skin of the metropolis, and these absolute philistines in the press keep treating it like a municipal cheat sheet just to avoid striking a 4,000-volt feeder cable with a backhoe.
Wilson, for his part, has spent the last year cataloging these marks with his camera, a project that ostensibly frames him as a documentarian but in truth reveals him as a willing accomplice in the erasure of municipal mystery; by freezing these fleeting, weather-beaten cries for help into permanent digital artifacts, he strips the neon paint of its essential mortality, ensuring that a chaotic smear of green telecommunications designation is trapped forever in a pristine, soulless gallery context rather than being allowed to wash away beautifully into the East River.
To reduce a sweeping, chaotic burst of cerulean spray paint, a gesture as raw and unapologetic as anything Cy Twombly ever committed to canvas, to a mere indicator of potable water lines is not merely an architectural critique, but a spiritual concession. Tomorrow morning, when the jackhammers inevitably arrive to obliterate a perfectly asymmetric swath of orange steam-pipe poetry on my block, I will not concern myself with the ensuing traffic diversion; I will mourn the loss of a masterpiece that dared to ask nothing of the commuter but a fleeting, uncomfortable moment of aesthetic surrender.