I apologize in advance for anyone that is reading this because I think I’m in left field with this one. I had an idea that was circulating in my head for a very long time, but then I lost it as I was writing. I hate that when that happens!!!! Anyway, I felt that there was a relationship between on the Van Gogh section and the Bonaventura Hotel section, so if any of you have any input I would love some!
I would like to acknowledge that Fredric Jameson’s critique on capitalism is quite in interesting, but very dense. I enjoyed reading the section about the deconstruction of expression with Van Gogh’s and Warhol’s art because it helped be come to a clearer understanding about postmodernism in architecture. At first, I didn’t understand why Van Gogh was thrown into Jameson’s theory, but let me try to explain.
For example, Van Gogh’s famous works of “Peasant Shoes” are all master pieces. Van Gogh took a concept from the world, such as peasant shoes, and decided to truly reveal them in his art. Jameson explains how Van Gogh would paint the most brutal and marginalized parts of our world and turn them into somewhat of a positive image, “a Utopia gesture.” This then creates an entirely new outlook on a work of art through a type of Utopian mimicry.
Jameson says, “[the work of art is] part of some new division of labour in the body of capital, some new fragmentation of the emergent sensorium which replicates the specializations and divisions of capitalist life at the same time that it seeks in precisely such fragmentation a desperate Utopian compensation for them” (411).
Jameson proposes the idea that we are in this postmodern hyperspace, meaning that we are in “the presence of something like a mutation in built space itself” (425). The Bonaventura Hotel, located in downtown Los Angeles, is a gigantic hotel covered in reflective windows. It is impossible for this hotel to not catch one’s eye. What I found most interesting about this section was the concept of a miniature city within a city.
Jameson discusses the entrances of the hotel and how it imposes this new category of trying to separate the hotel from the city itself by creating a complete world within the hotel. There is a type of separation when one steps into this hotel. What is interesting though is that the hotel is trying to mimic the city itself with all its fallen city fabric. As well, the concept of elevators and escalators replace personal choice because these devices are moving you. This reminded me of Eco’s piece, when he mentions that people at Disneyland believe that they have choice when walking around the park and standing in line. In reality, you really don’t have choice because of the dynamic paths and narrative paradigms are designed to create specific movements with our bodies. We don’t really have any choice, and in the Bonaventura escalators and elevators replace moment by a transportation machine.
Even if you think you have choice, one is still completely immersed in this hotel, or also known as hyperspace, up to their eyes and their body (427). The hotel is literally consuming everything that consists of their being. The way the entire hotel is constructed is to attempt to restore an older space, which is known as the “return of the repressed.” This causes us confusion because it almost feels as if we are in another world. Thus, once the human body becomes aware of its immediate surrounds one can then locate himself or herself. He or she will then be able to recognize where they are in an external world.
Van Gogh’s painting and the Bonaventura Hotel both have something in common. They are both trying to take this space in our world and try to mutate it in their own way. Both the work of art and architecture transform a form of materiality in our capitalistic world. They attempt to restore the coordinates of an older space that once existed (427).
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