. :. ... : : J u l i e    B e c k e r . ..

Julie Becker's Metropolitan Labyrinths

By Jodi Hauptman
(from Fernand Leger. Museum of Modern Art, New York)

"Now let me call back those who introduced me to the city. For although the child, in his solitary games, grows up at closest quarters to the city, he needs and seeks guides to its wider expanses.", With these evocative words, Walter Benjamin welcomes us to his essay "A Berlin Chronicle" and, even more, to his Berlin, the city of his childhood. This poignant text is Benjamin's effort to lose himself in the city-to perform the "art of straying," opening himself up to the speech of "signboards and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars. "' For Benjamin, Berlin is invested with the imagination of childhood. In city portraits like this one he shows that to describe the city as an adult is to mine one's earliest experiences, and that the conjuring of childhood memories can result in an urban map. Benjamin extends his personal reminiscences of Berlin through his investigation of collective memory, explaining that "a childhood speaks to [the flaneur], which is not the past of his own youth, in all its recency, but a childhood lived far earlier, and it matters little whether that childhood be an ancestor's or his own." Jeffrey Mehlman has discussed the significance of places like Berlin's Tiergarten, covered market, cafes, deserted streets, communist youth assembly halls, and public sculpture as locales for Benjamin's experience and containers of his memory: "It is as though a dreamweb, woven out of the delights and misperceptions of childhood, the stuff of what Freud called the 'unconscious,' has come to invest less the subject's body (as in Freud) than the complex topography of a city."" The goal in Benjamin's excavation of Berlin is to reactivate childhood dreams and fantasies in jarring juxtaposition to the present (he calls this a "dialectical interchange"), and thus to effect "a decisive awakening."-, No less taken than Benjamin with the nexus between the city and the mythology of childhood, the contemporary artist Julie Becker shifts the location and topos of her urban investigation. Instead of the liveliness o1 streets, Becker provides the mystery of corridors; instead of the monumentality of public and private structures, she explores the serial repetition of identical rooms; instead of the city or arcade, she presents the hotel. Having transferred the wonder of urban spaces to building interiors, she replaces Benjamin's storefronts with a maze of anonymous rooms, the magic of his winding streets with doors and hallways. Yet Becker's "metropolis" is just as phantasmagoric as Benjamin's Berlin; for both the artist and the writer, it is childhood that offers the key to the city.

     We see all this in Becker's installation Researchers, Residents, a Place to Rest (1993-96), which reconstructs the gallery in which it is set as three connected rooms. Decorated with a generic office desk and lamp, the first room functions as a reception area, "a place usually used for waiting, receiving mail or messages, meeting visitors; an interstitial zone". Passing through a corridor, the viewer enters the second region, which contains two cardboard models holding miniature pieces of furniture, pictures, and other household objects structures, in other words, evoking dollhouses and architectural maquettes, but also, the artist notes, train sets and laboratory mazes. Strategically placed clip-on lights illuminate details of the tiny rooms, and Becker provides traces of "human" activity: the rooms are all in states of disarray, like scenes of a crime. Alongside the models, cardboard refrigerator-boxes lie about the room. Often used by the homeless for shelter, and by children as imaginary castles, these boxes link the installation both to the pathology of city streets and to the urban playground.' The third section suggests both an artist's studio and a mad scientist's workshop. This "brain center," as Becker calls it, is filled with the detritus and debris from the invention and construction of the entire installation, and scattered through it are a worktable, an easy chair, a copy machine, slides and viewers, magazines, an iron, and, for endurance, a coffee-maker'

     Having encountered only traces of human presence thus far, in this last room we also finally meet the work's protagonists--albeit vicariously, in composition-book diaries left for our perusal. Becker's inhabitants are Eloise, the little girl who lives in Manhattan's grand Plaza Hotel in Kay Thompson's Well-known 1950s children's book, and Danny Torrance, the little boy in Stanley Kubrick's 1980s film The Shining (based on the novel by Stephen King), whose clairvoyant abilities intensify when his father moves the family to the shut-down and spirit-filled Overlook Hotel in the Rockies for the winter.- In Thompson's book, Eloise takes her readers on a tour of the Plaza, describing her daily routine and the mischief she makes down corridors and in banquet' halls with doormen and waiters. All of these locations and characters are refigurations of streets, playgrounds, and classmates. Despite childhood nightmares about monsters in closets, Eloise's environment is a blissful one. Unfortunately, Danny's situation is neither happy nor safe. The corridors of the hotel he lives in may be perfect for riding a tricycle, but the Overlook turns out to be less a playground than a haunted house in which a child's father is doomed to repeat, for eternity, a horrific cringe against his family."

     "This installation," Becker writes, "creates mazelike situations and multiple ways for the viewer to enter and exit, through which he or she can access and assimilate information, create connections, pick up cues, and construct or find narrative events." Although built for adult viewers, Researchers, Residents, a Place to Rest is infused with the fantasy life of children. Critics have called the installation a "tormented fun house" and "a Magic Theatre"; by focusing on Becker's allusions to and visualizations of the hotel, however, the viewer might also see the work as an imploded city, a metropolitan labyrinth moved inside.' For the hotel, as a number of authors have argued, is a key element of twentieth-century urban topography, even a metaphor for the contemporary city. James Clifford, for example, has described the history of Paris in the 1920s and '30s as "travel encounters," a series of "New World detours through the Old," of "departures, arrivals, transits," in which the hotel is the primary locale for metropolitan circulation. Like train stations, airport terminals, and hospitals, the hotel is a liminal space where "you pass through, where the encounters are fleeting, arbitrary.""" The novelist Joseph Conrad, Clifford points out, described his age (the early twentieth century) as one "in which we are encamped like bewildered travelers in a garish, unrestful hotel. Perhaps it was this quality of bewilderment that made the hotel so ripe for the Surrealist imagination. Not only were Parisian hotels "homes away from home to the Surrealists," they were also "launching points for strange and wonderful urban voyages, Nadja, Paysan de Paris-places of collection, juxtaposition, passionate encounter. Brassat's photograph Le Marechal Ney (Marshal Ney, 1932) offers a striking visualization of the Surrealist conception of the hotel: the illuminated letters H-O-T-E-L float in the fog like a lure. The glowing letters, and the dematerialization of the building's structure, suggest the placelessness of the hotel: even when you are there, you are nowhere, or on your way somewhere else. As opposed to the honor and permanence of the monumental statue, the hotel's glowing light pictures the danger and seduction of transience, the mystery of continual deferment.

     The hotel's transient quality, and its association with exotic places and glamorous travel, were captured by Joseph Cornell, who, while lacking travel experience himself, fell in love with the evocative names of faraway institutions found in his collection of Baedeker guides: "Hotel de l'Etoile," "Hotel du Nord," "Hotel du Cygne," "Grand Hotel de l'Observatoire." These places represented for him the world travel and physical flight of the ballerinas of whom he was an avid fan. Thus the distinctly melancholic series of hotel box-constructions, with their decrepit walls, cracked windows, constellations, yellowing hotel ads, and empty perches, evoke Cornell's inability ever to possess the dancers whose spirits infuse these places and the impossibility of his reaching these wondrous locales.

     In addition to providing a stop on the Surrealist passage through the city, the hotel has frequently appeared in films, most often as a "carnivalized space" that offers its guests the opportunity to break out of the limitations of their everyday lives.- The epitome of this genre, Edmund Goulding's Grand Hotel (1932), with Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford, brings together disparate professions and social classes, and liberates guests to choose new identities, disrupt hierarchies, and play new parts. One character in the film alludes to the circulating momentum on which all activities at the hotel are based: "The Grand Hotel. People come. People go. And nothing ever happens." He is only half right, for things do happen, things that would be impossible under normal conditions, and they are precisely what make the hotel such a fantasy-filled environment. '

     By the 1960s, the carnival of the Grand Hotel, with the optimism and freedom it implied, had become its opposite. The hotels in Jean Luc Godard's film Alphaville (1965), with their tranquilizers, seductresses, and surveillance, are microcosms of state repression. And it is by way of Alphaville--the other Paris, the one lost in darkness-that we travel from Berlin's Grand Hotel to Los Angeles, Becker's home and reference point, and also the site of an establishment appropriated by Fredric Jameson to explore postmodernity and the city's related shift from center to sprawl. Postmodernism, Jameson argues, implies "a mutation in built space ... we do not yet possess the perceptual equipment to match this new hyperspace.... The new architecture, therefore... stands as something like an imperative to grow new organs, to expand our sensorium and our body to some new, as yet unimaginable, perhaps ultimately impossible, dimensions." As his paradigm for this hyperspatial architecture dependent on the "lexicon and syntax" of postmodernism, Jameson fixes on John Portman's Bonaventure Hotel, a structure based on pure implosion".

     "A total space, a complete world, a kind of miniature city," the Bonaventure has a reflective glass skin that turns the building's exterior into a giant reflecting mirror. This external shell not only "repels the city outside" but makes it impossible to see the building's structure at all-passersby are left only with distorted images of the hotel's surroundings.' The lack of grand entrances constitutes a further rejection not only of the local neighborhood but of the entire surrounding metropolis. The interior, with its greenhouse roof, artificial lake, climbing elevators, and dramatic central atrium decorated with hanging streamers, prevents a clear understanding of spatial relationships; voids seem crowded, and losing one's way is common. In this interior city, "people movers" (elevators and escalators) replace streets, so that - i the urban wanderings of Benjamin's flaneur are "underscored, symbolized, reified and replaced by a transportation machine which becomes the allegorical signifier of that older promenade we are no longer allowed to conduct on our own." The Bonaventure, like the postmodern condition, Jameson argues, "has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself." Inside the hotel and outside in the unmappable city of Los Angeles, body and structure are equally decentered, space is confused and confusing, perception unclear. In Researchers, Residents, a Place to Rest, Becker intensifies the implosion and decentering suggested in Jameson's view of the Bonaventure and in postmodernism more generally. Location and direction continually unwind in her installation, but Becker's implosion is less the violent pull of inward collapse--like a building exploding in on itself--than a centrifugal force propelling exterior to interior, expansive to miniature. The installation choreographs a move from the hotel's life-size walls, rooms, and corridors to the smaller structures of refrigerator boxes and, finally, to the still smaller miniature models.' Like dollhouses, these tiny buildings represent what Susan Stewart calls "the tension between two modes of interiority ... center within center, within within within," and Becker further directs attention to the interior by her disregard for their exterior decoration.

     Despite the pull of this inward-pointing force, we never reach an absolute center, and as we move through the installation we continue our boundless and labyrinthine wandering. Installed within an unfamiliar, unkempt, and unnavigable area, Becker's models deceive us into thinking we can find location and direction, a smaller mirror to the space we currently inhabit. Yet these rooms, with their shifts of scale, indecipherable architecture, unnatural lighting, and surreal sense of crimes and tragedies, offer no solace or home for the lost and wandering nomad. Becker's models do not provide the "perfectly complete and hermetic world" of the dollhouse,"' but instead present the kind of interiority found when two facing mirrors enact an infinity of reflections-like the repetition of identical doors, hallways, and public spaces that so terrifies Danny Torrance in The Shining's Overlook Hotel. Given Danny's gift of telepathy (the "shining" of the film's title), this terrifying placelessness seems also to exist within his own mind, which opens out uncontrollably to access faraway realms of time and space. In Researchers, Residents, a Place to Rest, the nowhere of the hotel joins the unending, ungridded, and octopuslike metropolitan (postmodern) sprawl.

     The junk piled up in the work area both denies location and extends the sense of fragmentation found in this installation and induced in our bodies within it. For a child, though, such disorder, the perfect terrain for hide-and-seek, is part of the fun. "I am all over the hotel," Eloise exclaims, "Half the time I am lost." From the description of her days at the Plaza, it is clear that the other half of the time Eloise spends wreaking havoc: from writing her name in red crayon across a lobby mirror (the image on the cover of my own childhood copy of the book), to running a stick across the doors in a hallway to disturb staff and guests, to harassing switchboard operators. In insinuating Eloise and Danny into her installation, Becker invites us to envision the hotel as a playground. She also turns to another children's activity that enlivens the detritus of the city: the collection. Children salvage castoffs and transform them into their own magical talismans. These trinkets, the critic Roger Callois writes, "are not beautiful but brilliant....". Bodies of this sort possess a magnetism which sensibly enhances a somewhat mysterious character of their nature: here is a metal which folds, which crumples.... They spirit him away to the world of adventure.... They appear as booty lifted from a universe compared to which the real is weak and pale. Benjamin turned this game of collecting into a form of theoretical praxis, and described the child's-and his-particular interest in places where things are "being visibly worked upon. They are irresistibly drawn by the detritus generated by building, gardening, housework, tailoring, or carpentry.... In using these things they do not so much imitate the works of adults as bring together, in the artifact produced in play, materials of widely differing kinds in a new, intuitive relationship.

     Children thus produce their own small world of things within the greater one. Becker's installation offers a re-creation of just such a junk-filled construction site. In a short essay on Becker's Researchers, Residents, a Place to Rest, Chris Kraus asks, "Where do Danny's and Eloise's inner lives converge?"- My answer is, within a hotel. And with its series of repeating and repetitive rooms and mazelike corridors, this hotel is also a city--which brings us, once again, back to Leger. In comparison to Becker's maelstrom of gathered objects and shards of mirror, Leger's ruptured spaces, his fragments of shapes and colors, seem orderly, controlled, and marching-band rhythmic. The city/hotel to which Becker refers is thus no longer Leger's thoroughly modern and mechanized metropolis, nor Nadja's marvelous Paris, that "forest of symbols"; it is the hyperspatial sublime of Los Angeles and of the Bonaventure Hotel, bewildering, fractured, fragmented, reflective, repetitious, endlessly expansive. The fragments and castoffs found in Becker's installation are not simply playthings for children--they are the building blocks of this continually discontinuous and disassembling city.