Cities

In Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino takes us on a fantastic journey through a series of short and unconnected narratives — “Cities and memory”, “Cities and desire”, “Cities and signs”, … But as we move through the book, we are slowly alerted to the traveller’s secret: Marco Polo’s wonderful and diverse places, deliciously described to Kublai Khan, are in fact the same city drawn from many and varied perspectives  …  “Cities and the dead,” “Cities and the sky,” “Continuous cities,” “Hidden cities,” … these are Calvino’s fragments, pieces of a complex conundrum that never quite fit together but produce fissures and voids, and continually flee from the limits of absolute or singular meanings.

In Alex Monteith’s vigilant extraction of everything save the nouns from Calvino’s text, leaving only the naming, she has isolated the conflicting energy that sits under the surface of the original text. As each noun is salvaged by Monteith, and reinserted into a replica of the original pressing, she slowly purifies and cleanses the work of its messy contingency.  We are able to focus on the accumulation of names and details that have become the mark of Calvino’s work. But while appearing to simplify the work through this condensing, compressing process, Monteith actually deepens the fragmentary nature of the original text: she makes it denser and more complicated.  Imagine fanning the pages of Calvino’s text and each time the eye, as its wont, tries to settle on a word, it is forced to move on, so that our compulsion to make sense out of every written word (that terrible obligation that makes us read again and again the writing that passes in front of us) is undermined by the rhythmic fanning of the pages. Monteith’s careful excising of all action and description underlines the inevitable disagreement that arises between our desire for movement, with its enchanting, distracting potential (as in the seamless flow of narrative), and our desire for fixing meaning.

Halfway through Calvino’s text, Khan tries to turn Polo’s game around by relating to him his own “idea” of a model city.  But Polo’s cities, as Calvino stresses, “were always different from those visited by the Emperor.”  My model city, “from which I deduce all the others”, he answered, “is a city made only of exceptions, exclusions, incongruities, contradictions.”  Not only can there be no ideals or utopias, for there is no navigating in the space between imagination and reality, no city can be fixed in the eye of the ruler. In Calvino’s disjunction, juxtaposition, heterogeneity, in his proliferation of colliding fragments, there is also a refusal to bow to an arbitrary rule of order (to total systems of thought and style).  Something always escapes, breaks away.

Cities re-enacts a similar slippage.  Monteith converts Calvino’s text into something resembling a series of film stills, slowing the work down so that each morsel can be devoured with more concentration and intensity.  We are able now to notice the detail that is often lost in our love of the “drama” and action of the story.  But despite discovering the joy of detail in the tranquillity of each word, there is still the will to movement that propels all writing.  Gaps and spaces have been hollowed out of the already fragmentary form of Invisible Cities, and we hesitate in the chasm that opens up between each name. Cities is hard to read.  It becomes a mighty struggle to move through the wearying list of nouns.  So with the action removed, and the overarching narrative hidden within the cluster of nouns, Monteith has made it impossible to reconstruct the original story.

The “Invisible”, however, which Monteith removed from Calvino’s title, might also connote the invisible spectres haunting the work: these are the eradicated but not forgotten words with their unsettling presences (our compulsion to read). What might appear as a stupefying move to destroy the openness of Calvino’s work actually opens the work to unbounded potential: since, finally, through the stories that can now be re-imagined in the spaces between the nouns, Monteith has relocated a central thrust of Calvino’s work, the infinite potential of the reader’s imagination.

It is a slow and painstaking task to isolate all the nouns in the text.  Monteith cautiously marks each noun in the book by hand, a process that simultaneously retraces and resituates Calvino. By focusing just on the nouns, her concentration shifts to unexpected ground. Some nouns, when removed from the structure of the sentence, take on new and chimerical forms, they begin to ‘act’ like verbs, re-animating the list from within.  Monteith hesitates over these words that settle happily as nouns in one context but become strangers in another.  But then, just as the work seems to effortlessly flee from Calvino’s fold, we discover another intricacy. As with Marco Polo’s model city, the grammar upon which Monteith’s Cities was first conceived begins to collapse under the weight of its own rules. “Exceptions, exclusions, incongruities and contradictions” returns Cities to the themes inserted by Calvino in the first place: for nouns prove to be slippery and complicated things — proper nouns, common nouns, compound nouns, collective nouns, pronouns. This is the brilliance of Cities: its playfulness becomes a battle against the terror of over-determined rule setting.  Those “cities”, as Marco Polo explains, “are too probable to be real”.

Alex Monteith

Alex Monteith describes herself as a new media artist based in Auckland, New Zealand, who produces large-scale new media works that often involve collaboration with people outside the conventional realms of “art”.

Depending on the demands of the project, Alex Monteith employs a variety of means (sound, performance, photography, installation, film, video, kinetic electrical components, Live Internet or CCTV cam feeds) to produce concentrated moments that have been wrenched from the complex configuration of larger concepts. Concepts are never simple or singular, or composed of beginnings or ends,  so when Alex isolates the smallest possible detail — patterns, movements, flows — of flocking sheep, roving dogs, coursing bikes, spinning wheels, cinematic stock shots — charging them with the meditative potential of incessant repetition, these conceptual components, which are themselves already many, begin to proliferate.  Patterning grows ever more complex. This being the beauty of a concept, it acts as a vector for expansive thought, and for revealing thought.  Alex’s practice is interested as much in national histories and identities, as it is in the politics, limits and freedoms incumbent in lens-based media and consumer-level technologies (CCTV technology, DV-cams and the web).