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Architecture theory in graphic narrative: The Strange Case of Mister X

2010; Routledge; Volume: 15; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13264826.2010.524164

1755-0475

John Biln,

Architecture, Modernity, and Design

Abstract This essay begins with a review of Mister X, a comic serial taking architectural modernism as its point of departure. The graphic narrative renders a dystopian view of architecture and urbanism, as well as a biting critique of the architect as theorist. Rather than demonstrating that architecture is mute and impotent, however, the Mister X story theorises architecture as unpredictably powerful and effective, albeit malicious. The essay examines four architectural failures suggested by the Mister X text, identifying how these limitations of the formal, material object of architecture are, paradoxically, its very possibilities for social effect. Acknowledgement All illustrations from Dean Motter, Mister X Condemned, Milwaukee Oregon: Dark Horse Books, 2009. All images copyright by Dean Motter and used by premission of the artist. Notes 1. Although most commentators seem rather sanguine about the changing readership of comics, blogger Tyler Sticka laments the complexity of many contemporary comics largely because, on his view, this means their audience base is destined to shrink even further than it has already. Tyler Sticka, “Comics' Lost Audience”, 13 July 2009, http://tylersticka.com/2009/07/comics-lost-audience/ (accessed 25 May 2010). 2. Ralph Mattieu, “Is The Current Comic Book Audience Too Old for Superhero Comics?”, Sequential Tart, http://www.sequentialtart.com/article.php?id=1205 (accessed 25 May 2010). 3. Comic book shop owner Brian Kelly, in Megan Pennefather, “The Amazing Adventures of Metro Detroit's Comic Industry”, 9 July 2009, http://www.metromodemedia.com/features/comicbookartistsdetroit0122.aspx (accessed 25 May 2010). 4. Retailer Dan Merrit further observes that “ninety-five percent of my clientele is over twenty. Kids do read comics, but not as much as they used to”. See Pennefather, “Amazing Adventures of Metro Detroit's Comic Industry”. 5. Mattieu, “Is The Current Comic Book Audience Too Old”. 6. Tyler Sticka notes that “as comics have grown and matured, new and innovative compositions have been invented”, sometimes resulting in pages that are “foreign and mind-numbingly confusing”. Sticka, “Comics' Lost Audience”. 7. Vaneta Rogers suggests that this audience is not only relatively sophisticated, but also likely to grow. She points out that “comic book fans tend to be early samplers of new technology” and that while there may be “only a few hundred thousand loyal readers who buy comics” right now, the intersection of the comic book and the tablet computer may well result in what one of her sources, Stephen Christy of Archaia Comics, calls a “direct market” with “millions of people to distribute to”. Vaneta Rogers, “Could Apple's ‘iSlate’ be a Digital Comics Game-Changer?”, http://www.newsarama.com/comics/100106-apple-islate-digital-comics.html (accessed 25 May 2010). 8. Warren Ellis, “Forward”, Mister X, the Archives, Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Books, 2008, p. 11. 9. Dean Motter (creator), Gilbert Hernandez, Mario Hernandez, and Paul Rivoche (writers and artists). Mister X, Toronto, ON: Vortex Comics, 1, no. 1 (June, 1984). 10. Dean Motter, Mister X Condemned, Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Books, 2009. 11. Bernard Tschumi, Advertisements for Architecture, 1976–1977, www.tschumi.com/projects/19/ (accessed 25 May 2010). 12. These are included in the collection by Bernard Tschumi, The Manhattan Transcripts: Theoretical Projects, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995. 13. Daniel Libeskind, Chamber Works: Architectural Meditations on Themes from Heraclitus, London: Architectural Association Publications, 1983. 14. Photos and a discussion of these can be found in Lebbeus Woods, “Libeskind's Machines”, 24 November 2009, http://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2009/11/24/libeskinds-machines/ (accessed 25 May 2010). 15. During the last quarter of the twentieth century, these two academic journals were arguably the most influential architecture theory periodicals published in English. Based in New York and produced by Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, Oppositions ran from 1976 to 1984, while MIT Press' Assemblage ran from 1986 to 2000. 16. Dean Motter (creator), Gilbert Hernandez, Mario Hernandez, and Jaime Hernandez (writers and artists). Mister X, Toronto, ON: Vortex Comics, 1, no. 3 (December, 1984): 9. 17. Motter et al., Mister X, 1, no. 3, p. 9 (emphasis in original). 18. Perhaps the best sustained discussions of architecture's utopianism remain Manfredo Tafuri's two classics in this area, Architecture and Utopia, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1979, and The Sphere and the Labyrinth, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987. On the continuity of utopianism into recent work, see Manfredo Tafuri, “L'architecture dans le boudoir”, in Sphere and the Labyrinth, pp. 267–290, and Manfredo Tafuri, “The Ashes of Jefferson”, in Sphere and the Labyrinth, pp. 291–303. 19. Motter et al., Mister X, 1, no. 3, p. 2. 20. In fact, he has at least eleven identities. Speaking to Mister X, former classmate Blitzstein notes: “You've made quite a name for yourself, Anton. Several of them, in fact. My list stops at eleven”. See Dean Motter (creator), Jeffrey Morgan (writer), and Shane Oakley and Ken Holewczynski (artists). Mister X, Toronto, ON: Vortex Comics, 2, no. 1 (April, 1989), no page number, fourth page of standard comic format. 21. The production of comics often involves significant collaboration, and over the years a number of hands have been at work in the Mister X serials. Beyond the principal creator, Dean Motter, these include a range of writers and artists variously involved in scripting, pencilling, colouring, lettering, and so on. Warren Ellis notes, for example, that “Mister X had the great good fortune to snare the Hernandez prodigies—themselves already playing with the possibilities of comics in their now-revered Love and Rockets”. He also mentions that Mister X saw “the start of the magnificent cartoonist Seth's career”. See Ellis, “Forward”, p. 12. The creator of the Mister X comics remains, however, Dean Motter, and all the images discussed in this essay are his work, as published in Motter, Mister X Condemned. 22. The origins of psychetecture are somewhat ambiguous in the series. In the most recent Mister X story, the creation of psychetecture is attributed to Eichmann and another architect called Reinhardt. The Meyers and Reinhardt characters share some, but not all, of the characteristics assigned to Meyers in the early volumes. See Motter, Mister X Condemned, p. 80. 23. Scott Bukatman, “X-Bodies (the Torment of the Mutant Superhero)”, in Rodney Sappington and Tyler Stallings (eds), Uncontrollable Bodies, Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1994, pp. 93–129. 24. Motter et al., Mister X, 2, no. 1, no page number, seventeenth page of standard comic format. 25. This doubling is made explicit in the most recent story where a key character refers to Mister X as her “ex”. Motter, Mister X Condemned, p. 98. 26. Motter et al., Mister X, 1, no. 3, 15. 27. Dean Motter (creator), Deborah Marks (writer), and Gene Gonzales and David Rowe (artists). Mister X, Livonia, MI: Caliber Comics, 3, no. 2 (June, 1996), cover art. 28. Emily Apter briefly discusses this issue, although she is not concerned with the term “artefact” but rather with tracing the different genealogies of the term “fetish” through the word fetisso. See Emily Apter, “Specularity and Reproduction: Marx, Freud, Baudrillard”, Fetish; Princeton Architecture Journal, 4 (1992): 22. 29. From the Latin ob, in the way +jacere, to throw. 30. For a treatment of the objective and the objectal in the context of aesthetic works, see Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, New York: Columbia University Press, 1982, p. 10 and passim. 31. Dean Motter (creator), Deborah Marks (writer), and Gene Gonzales and David Rowe (artists). Mister X, Livonia, MI: Caliber Comics, 3, no. 1 (April, 1996), opening panel, no page number (emphasis added). 32. Consider notions such as Marie-Joseph Peyre's caractère by which a building might create an emotional effect or impression. For a general discussion of this and related Enlightenment concepts, see Hanno-Walter Kruft, A History of Architectural Theory from Vitruvius to the Present, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994, pp. 141–165. 33. Motter et al., Mister X, 3, no. 1, no page number, sixth page of standard comic format. 34. Motter et al., Mister X, 3, no. 2, no page number, fifth and sixth pages of standard comic format. 35. Motter et al, Mister X, 3, no. 2, no page number, eighteenth page of standard comic format. 36. Julia Kristeva, “The Ethics of Linguistics”, in Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, New York: Columbia University Press, 1980, pp. 27–28. 37. In the comic, the city is understood materially as little more than an assemblage of buildings. Those urban effects with which the comic is concerned transpire largely within and through the city's buildings. Whatever else this might mean, it serves to reinforce the notion that the burden of the city's success or failure rests at the feet of the architect. 38. Motter et al., Mister X, 3, no. 1, no page number, first page of standard comic format. 39. Motter et al., Mister X, 3, no. 1, no page number, fourth page of standard comic format. 40. Motter et al., Mister X, 3, no. 2, no page number, fifth page of standard comic format. 41. Dean Motter (creator), Jeffrey Morgan (writer), and Shane Oakley and Ken Holewczynski (artists). Mister X, Toronto, ON: Vortex Comics, 2, no. 8 (November, 1989): 2–3, passim. 42. In this respect, Hays' project fully intersects with Fredric Jameson's programme of interrogating aesthetic works for their potential in narrowing the gap between a late capitalist world that seems to be beyond our conception, on the one hand, and some form of representation that would help us begin to grasp it, on the other. When understood in terms of possibilities for struggle and resistance, the political implications of this project are obvious. See Hays, “Editorial: On Turning Thirty”, Assemblage, 30 (1996): 6–10. 43. See K. Michael Hays, “Reproduction and Negation: The Cognitive Project of the Neue Sachlichkeit”, in K. Michael Hays, Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995. 44. An interesting exchange between Michael Hays and Sylvia Lavin lays out the basic issues quite clearly. See Sylvia Lavin, “Essay: The Uses and Abuses of Theory”, Progressive Architecture, 71, no. 8 (August 1990): 113–114, 179; and K. Michael Hays, “Rebuttal: Theory as Mediating Practice”, Progressive Architecture, 71, 11 (November, 1990): 98–100, 158. 45. Motter et al., Mister X, 2, no. 1, no page number, eighth page of standard comic format. 46. This is a commonplace most succinctly worded in Le Corbusier's famous slogan “Architecture or revolution”, but evident in the writing of architects as diverse as Giuseppe Terrani, Nikolai Ladovsky, Frank Lloyd Wright, Richard Neutra, Eliel Saarinen, as well as a host of others in the 1930s and 1940s. For an overview, see Harry Francis Mallgrave, Modern Architectural Theory: A Historical Survey, 1673–1968, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, and Kruft, History of Architectural Theory. 47. For example, see the writings of architects such as Germain Boffrand, Marie-Joseph Peyre, Etienne-Louis Boulee, Claude-Nicholas Ledoux, Francesco Milizia, and Sir Roger Pratt. The central figure in this discussion is perhaps Nicolas le Camus de Mézières. This writing is discussed in detail in Kruft, History of Architectural Theory, pp. 141–165, 233. 48. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, New York: W.W. Norton, 2004. 49. For example, in his general statement for the “Object of Architecture” session at The Second Kennon Memorial Symposium: Architecture and Individualism at Rice University (April 1997), Fares el-Dahdah notes that contemporary writing in architecture has tended to neglect the object in architecture, effectively treating it “to a point of erasure”. 50. Hays, “Editorial”, pp. 6–10. 51. Michel De Certeau, The Writing of History, New York: Columbia University Press, 1988, p. 82. On page 37, de Certeau writes of history that the “fragile and necessary boundary between a past object and a current praxis begins to waver, as soon as the fictive postulate of a given that is to be understood is replaced by the study of an operation always affected by determinisms, always having to be taken up, always depending on the place where it occurs in a society, and specified, however, by a problem, methods, and a function which are its own” (emphasis in original). 52. In this failure of intentions, as Neil Leach points out, Jürgen Habermas includes even “‘participatory architecture’, in which designers work ‘in dialogue with the clients’”. For Habermas, even these projects tend to fail because practical regulatory constraints and entrenched media ultimately serve non-client interests to the point that such projects result in “dysfunctional consequences on the lives of those concerned”. Clearly, this is despite the best intentions of many of the actors involved in the process. See Jürgen Habermas, “Modern and Postmodern Architecture”, in Neil Leach (ed.), Rethinking Architecture, London: Routledge, 1997, p. 235. 53. For a development of this point in the context of an early design project by the architect Samuel Mockbee, see John Biln, “Given Domain: Mockbee–Coker–Howorth, Breaking the Cycle of Poverty”, Assemblage, 16 (1992): 73–91. 54. Some of the ideas in this essay, not least the notions of “hesitation” and “failure”, draw on a 1990 essay by Jacques Derrida, Memoires d'aveugle. I make no claims about the faithfulness of the present writing to Derrida's text, but certain of his formulations and structures have been central to its development. Jacques Derrida, Memoires d'aveugle, published in English as Memoirs of the Blind, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. 55. Manfredo Tafuri is surely the critic of architecture who has made this argument most insistently. His pessimism is not shared by all cultural critics, however. Even as he admires Tafuri's dark rigour, Fredric Jameson holds out hope for some kind of “Gramscian architecture” that might allow for emancipatory social change. See Fredric Jameson's essay on Tafuri, “Architecture and the Critique of Ideology”, in The Ideologies of Theory, Volume 2, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988, pp. 35–60. 56. Perhaps the most important of these has been Emmanuel Levinas. For an accessible introduction to his work, see Adrian Perperzak, Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi (eds), Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. 57. See, for example, Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, Boston: Beacon Press, 1994. This is essentially the argument of the entire book. At the outset, Bachelard claims that “the poetic image is a sudden salience on the surface of the psyche” (p. xv) and that “the house image would appear to have become the topography of our intimate being” (p. xxxvii). 58. For a sense of the breadth of this critique, see Diane Ghirardo, Out of Site: A Social Criticism of Architecture, Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1991. 59. This point is made extremely well in Hays, Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject. 60. See Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken Books, 1969, pp. 245–253. 61. On this point, see Tafuri, “L'architecture dans le boudoir”. 62. Motter et al., Mister X, 3, no. 1, opening panel, no page number. 63. See Bachelard, Poetics of Space, p. 11. 64. Marcel Proust, Marcel Proust on Art and Literature, 1896–1919, New York: Carroll and Graf, 1997, pp. 99–100.