Coastal Traveler - Summer 2008 - (Page 44)

Library is a true Fortress of Solitude: a Wunderkammer, and ingenious example of narrative art, wax museum, cave of robots. And it suggests that there is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition. Constructing a full-scale model of the Oval Office (using the same materials, the same colors, but with everything obviously more polished, shinier, protected against deterioration) means that for historical information to be absorbed, it has to assume the aspect of a reincarnation. To speak of things that one wants to connote as real, these things must seem real. The “completely real” becomes identified with the “completely fake.” Absolute unreality is offered as real presence. The aim of the reconstructed Oval Office is to supply a “sign” that will then be forgotten as such: The sign aims to be the thing, to abolish the distinction of the reference, the mechanism of replacement. Not the image of the thing, but its plaster cast. Its double, in other words. Is this the taste of America? Certainly it is not the taste of Frank Lloyd Wright, of the Seagram building, the skyscrapers of Mies van der Rohe. Nor is it the taste of the New York School or of Jackson Pollock. It isn’t even that of the photorealists, who produce a reality so real that it proclaims its artificiality from the rooftops. We must understand, however, from what depth of popular sensibility and craftsmanship today’s photorealists draw their inspiration and why they feel called upon to force this tendency to the point of exacerbation. There is, then, an America of furious hyperreality, which is not that of Pop art, of Mickey Mouse, or of Hollywood movies. There is another, more secret America (or rather, just as public, but snubbed by the European visitor and also by the American intellectual); and it creates somehow a network of references and influences that finally spread also to the products of high culture and the entertainment industry. It has to be discovered. And so we set out on a journey, holding on to the Ariadne-thread, an open-sesame that will allow us to identify the object of this pilgrimage no matter what form it may assume. We can identify it through two typical slogans that pervade American advertising. The first, widely used by Coca-Cola but also frequent as a hyperbolic formula in everyday speech, is “the real thing”; the second, found in print and heard on TV, is “more” – in the sense of “extra.” The announcer doesn’t say, for example, “The program will continue” but rather that there is “More to come.” In America you don’t say “Give me another coffee”; you ask for “More coffee”; you don’t say that cigarette A is longer than cigarette B, but that there’s “more” of it, more than you’re used to having, more than you might want, leaving a surplus to throw away – that’s prosperity. This is that reason for this journey into hyperreality, in search of instances where the American imagination demands the real thing and, to attain it, must fabricate the absolute fake; where the boundaries between game and illusion are blurred, the art museum is contaminated by the freak show, and falsehood is enjoyed in a situation of “fullness,” of horror vacui. The first stop is the Museum of the City of New York, which relates the birth and growth of Peter Stuyvesant’s metropolis, from the purchase of Manhattan by the Dutch from the Indians for the famous twenty-four dollars, down to our own time. The museum has been arranged with care, 44 coastaltraveler summer

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Coastal Traveler - Summer 2008 Contents Coastal Connoisseur Coastal Picks Coastal Art Coastal Flyer Coastal Sex Coastal Eco Coastal Surfer Coastal Adventurer Coastal Snaps San Diego La Jolla Laguna Beach Malibu Santa Barbara San Luis Obispo Big Sur Carmel Monterey Santa Cruz San Francisco Sausalito Mill Valley Stinson Beach Bolinas Olema Point Reyes Station Fairfax Inverness Marshall, Tomales Sebastopol Petaluma Sonoma Coast Redwood Coast

Coastal Traveler - Summer 2008

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