Michael Mann’s 1995 thriller Heat culminates in a night-time shoot-out between Vincent Hanna, a jaded cop played by Al Pacino, and Robert de Niro’s Neil McCauley, a ruthless criminal. The scene is memorable not for the outcome, which is predictable and in a sense irrelevant, but for the setting, a no man’s land between runways at LAX, a vast expanse of turf punctuated only by a couple of concrete bunkers. By the time Hanna kills McCauley it is clear that the moral divide between them has all but collapsed. They both have dysfunctional private lives, they both live by skewed professional codes; in fact, they occasionally seem to swap roles, the cop showing a blithe disregard for the law and the criminal dressing and expressing himself with the stiffness of a civil servant. That is what the airport setting is designed to convey: a world without moral north or south, without a clear social or ideological topography, without the cover of functioning communities.
Air travel
has long carried a potent allegorical charge. Airports and planes, pilots
and flight attendants, are the stuff of modern legend. But their valency has
changed. Not so long ago air travel conjured images of glamour, speed and
power: American presidents stepping out of Air Force One, Elizabeth Taylor
and crew playing millionaires in The V.I.P.s, the sleek lines of Concorde.
Terms like ‘jet set’ and ‘jet age’ resonated with confidence. From Eero
Saarinen’s TWA terminal at JFK to the criss-crossing walkways of Roissy-Charles
de Gaulle, airport architecture carried the stamp of technological
utopianism. Air travel was a shining emblem of progress.
Today utopian thinking seems anachronistic. Few still see technological
innovation as an unalloyed good and the ideological underpinnings of the
notion of progress are more and more apparent. Meanwhile, air travel has
lost much of its lustre. In the long shadow of September 11, United Airlines
has filed for bankruptcy and others may follow suit. Deregulation has
brought cheaper flights but also delays and cancellations, overcrowded skies
and environmental damage. The press regularly reports on near-misses, air
rage and deep-vein thrombosis. Air travel is a lightning rod for a set of
anxieties around global corporatism and technological change: in other
words, for the defining anxieties of our time. That is what makes the runway
a compelling location for the final scene of Heat; it acts as an echo
chamber in which pre-existing fears reverberate in the mechanical violence
of the two protagonists.
Air travel is now as closely associated with the failures of modernity as with its successes and that, presumably, is why the plane and airport have become such common motifs in contemporary art. A considerable number of artists have addressed the subject and it seems their work falls into three categories. Some, like Panamarenko, deflate the ideology of progress, with its sly conflation of technological change and social betterment, by imagining the plane as a plaything, often a broken one. Others, like Martha Rosler, see air travel and its infrastructure as illustrating the homogenising effects of global corporatism. Their works convey an overwhelming order and sameness, giving the once-utopian spaces of air travel a dystopian undertow. Most recently, a third perspective has emerged in which the plane and airport become the sites of an ersatz mysticism.
Panamarenko’s flightless machines invert the terms of post-war technological utopianism. They swap engineering for craft, method for improvisation, efficiency for exuberant failure. The artist, whose pseudonym derives from the now-defunct Pan American Airline Company, puts mechanical invention at the service of gratuitous play, while recalling, in the grandeur of his designs, the heroic ambitions that air travel once epitomised. In Alighiero e Boetti’s biro drawings of impossibly busy skies, air travel is viewed with a similar combination of child-like wonder and indifference to the logistics of flight.
For artists like Panamarenko and Boetti, the appeal of the air industry lay in its connection with lofty post-war visions of modernity, which they disrupted by divorcing technological prowess from utility and realigning it with play. But as the ideology of progress has become more threadbare, images of air travel have tended to hinge less on technological utopianism and more on large technocratic systems. The focus has to some extent shifted from the plane to the airport, which is regularly presented as the perfect expression of global corporatism.
For architects like Richard Rogers, the Italian piazza has come to represent an ideal of organic sociability. The airport, as pictured by Rosler or the Swiss duo Peter Fischli and David Weiss, is the antithesis of the piazza. It largely abstracts itself from local history and geography, its guiding principles are not social contact but flux and consumption – it serves as a generic, vacuum-packed environment for the itinerant credit-card holder. In Rosler’s photos, the lounges are windowless, the corridors are crushingly long and the lighting is lurid; in these quasi-hallucinatory spaces, the passenger is a rare and disjunctive presence. For their part, Fischli + Weiss tend to shoot planes at their gates, often surrounded by boarding ramps and fuel trucks. The tenor of their photos is more deadpan than Rosler’s. They tease the sheer sameness out of the planes and gates without tipping it over into the drama of airless uniformity. There is a reticence about their photos that suggests a detached, vaguely bemused gaze, one that is not in tension with the world of air travel but somehow matches its blandness. And yet there is no doubting that they chose the subject for a reason. Look at their titles: Zürich (Lufthansa), Rio (Air France Jumbo), Sydney (Quantas), and so on. They have photographed planes and terminals all over the world, but who would know it from the pictures?
Blandness and reticence: these are the keynotes of a broad tendency in contemporary art. Fischli + Weiss, who are among the tendency’s central exponents, present homogenising globalisation and media saturation as simple givens. Their works are without clear effect and without rhetoric; they verge on a kind of expressive autism. And for artists who fuse the ordinary and the alienating, the non-places of air travel are clearly congenial.
That applies not just to Fischli + Weiss but to a host of other artists who have an interest in blandness. Andreas Gursky has shot the runway at Schiphol through windows so high that the flatness outside is almost comically anti-climactic. Dan Holdsworth has photographed the outer fringes of an airstrip in French Guiana (on the edge of the Ariane launch site), an almost featureless area bathed in bright light. These photos recall JG Ballard’s celebration of ‘the global culture of the departure lounge’, which he sees as a defence against nostalgic parochialism. Gursky and Holdsworth may not share Ballard’s enthusiasm, but like him they draw attention to ‘the transience, alienation and discontinuities, and [the airport’s] unashamed response to the pressures of speed, disposability and the instant impulse.’
Few artists quite manage the post-expressive (dis)engagement of Fischli + Weiss, but whether they lean towards Rosler’s progressive-humanist revulsion or Ballard’s anti-romantic embrace, the terms of description remain the same. The airport is above all a place of uncompromising sameness. But in another, related body of work, the airport takes on a strange numinous dimension. The blandness shades into stillness which shades into other-worldliness.
In Mark Wallinger’s video, Threshold to the Kingdom, passengers emerge in slow motion from the arrivals gate at London City Airport, materialising like apparitions from the far side of the automatic doors to the accompaniment of Allegri’s Miserere. The soaring harmonies of the music and gliding, weightless movements of the passengers give the footage the pregnant quality of an ever-suggested and ever-deferred epiphany. In Miko No Inori, Mariko Mori plays a space-age mystic – at once fortune teller, Shinto priestess and sexual healer – as she rolls a glass ball suggestively in her hands against the backdrop of the new, $15billion Kansai airport, which is reflected in the ball. David Spero has taken photos from aeroplane windows and others of airport interiors, broadly symmetrical shots in which light often radiates from an invisible core. In Grazia Toderi’s video Terra, a plane slowly, almost imperceptibly gains and loses altitude against an iridescent sky.
These pieces have certain features in common. They take the speed out of air travel, favouring a slow pace and states of suspension. They are often light-filled and many of them are organised around symmetries that hint at hidden patterns. In mood they tend towards a vague euphoria – ‘vague’ because it is not rooted in any practice or belief system but seems to emanate from the very sameness that Rosler, for one, found oppressive. The best of these pieces are neither ironic reflections on the godlessness of contemporary society nor hymns to globalisation or advanced technology; they are deeply ambiguous pieces in which the apparatus of air travel is monumentalised in all its exemplary blandness and the euphoria it inspires is always on the brink of emptiness and collapse.
In the hands of artists, the plane and airport have long served as allegorical images of the present as it turns towards the future. First they signalled a critique of the ethos of progress. Then they highlighted the blandness that is the outward face of global corporatism, the blandness occasionally mutating into a pseudo-transcendent order. What now? The events of September 11 may change the terms of engagement, lifting air travel out of the epochal time of allegory and annexing it to the politics of terror and counter-terror. More to the point, perhaps, those TV images may prove too horrific – too horrifically gripping – for artists to operate in their slipstream. Damien Hirst said of the attack on the World Trade Center that ‘it was devised visually’, that it was ‘kind of like an artwork in its own right’. If so, it was the kind of work that few artists will want to measure themselves against.
There is a joker in the pack, however: an artist who fits in none of the boxes. In his book Concorde, Wolfgang Tillmans creates a sustained first-person narrative in which he follows the plane’s progress through south London skies as a tracker might follow a wild animal. The sightings are at times surprising, even alarming, but as they multiply the surprise and alarm are overlaid with an unlikely sense of intimacy, a sense that is fostered by repetition but also by the book’s small format. Tillmans’ engagement with Concorde is like Romanticism’s engagement with nature: obsessive, awe-struck and powered by a taste for freedom. In an odd, left-handed way, the book re-infuses air travel with long-lost glamour. But the project remains a quixotic one – a personal, non-allegorical, neo-Romantic ode in blank verse.
Marcus Verhagen is a freelance writer and curator