Hanakam & Schuller: Trickster 9783110480986, 9783110480078

Table of contents :
Contents
Intro
A Discussion
Invasion
Bloom
Tour
Technologies
Interface
Tablet
Cosmic Cathedral
Crystal Cathedral
Crystal Healing
Housing & Healing
Travertin
Sphere of Truth
Aura
Speicher
Profile
Palaces & Courts
Shuttle
Kokomo
Discs
Archetypen
Trickster
Faux Terrain
Road Movie
Palm Springs
Candy House
Fagiano & Facciata
Drop
Tartes
The Arkadikon
Bubble, Wilderness
Site, Play, Energy
Ways, Styles, Spaces
Atrium, Eden
Setting, Aura
Stimuli
Oasis
Stone, Rock, Water
Shimmer, Symbol
Village, Market, Life
Epos, Tahiti, Magic
Folklore, Spectacle
Rest, Strength
Soap, Fake, Content
Illusions, Vanitas
Happy Ending, Healing
Selected Bibliography
The Artists
Photo Credits / Thanks to
Imprint

Citation preview

Hanakam & Schuller

Edition Angewandte Book Series of the University of Applied Arts Vienna Edited by Gerald Bast, Rector

Hanakam & Schuller Trickster Edited by Angela Stief

Intro Angela Stief

6

A Discussion Anselm Franke Uta Grosenick Annette Hünnekens Wolfgang Ullrich Lois Weinberger Stephanie Weber Oliver Zybok Hanakam & Schuller 9

Invasion 29 Bloom 34 Tour 40 Techno­ logies 45 Interface 46 Tablet 47

Housing & Healing 66

Arche­ typen 130

Travertin 72

Trickster 131

Sphere of Truth 80

Faux Terrain  136

Aura 84

Road Movie 138

Speicher 94 Profile 102

Cosmic Cathedral Palaces & Courts 48 110 Crystal Cathedral Shuttle 114 54 Crystal Healing 60

Palm Springs 140 Candy House 143 Fagiano & Facciata 144

Kokomo 118

Drop 151

Discs 126

Tartes 152

The Arkadikon Roswitha Schuller

Bubble, Wilder­ ness 157 Site, Play, Energy 159 Ways, Styles, Spaces 168 Atrium, Eden 169 Setting, Aura 175

Stimuli 182 Oasis 185 Stone, Rock, Water 187 Shimmer, Symbol 189 Village, Market, Life 195 Epos, Tahiti, Magic 200 Folklore, Spectacle 208

Rest, Strength 216 Soap, Fake, Content 219 Illusions, Vanitas 224 Happy Ending, Healing 228

Selected Bibliography 230 The Artists 232 Photo Credits / Thanks to 235 Imprint 236

6

Intro

The greatest social innovation of recent years has taken place in the sphere of social media and the development of new communication technologies. More than ever before the virtual platforms of Facebook, Twitter & Co have contracted the world. Thus on one hand it appears to be decreasing in size as drastically as a shrunken head and, on the other, information is able to travel enormous distances in real time: friendships come into being at a simple mouse click and so-called face-to-face communication over great distances via computer screen has become easy. Humanity has presently been given the chance to come together via communication. Only a few decades ago what are now long established standard networking practices would have been regarded as romantic social utopianism or esoteric dreaming and compared to teleportation and the existence of extraterrestrial life forms. However, it does appear that against the background of these developments the innovatory power of art and its transformations has paled. Nowadays a frequently asked question is: what can we expect from art? This is best answered by means of close-ups of individual oeuvres. In the works of the artists Markus Hanakam and Roswitha Schuller forms of artistic involvement, analysis and argumentation such as self-reflective but also socially critical praxis, knowledge transfer and temporality play a central role. The ephemerality of their work is also reflected in their main medium, film. Here, they proceed from a contemporary sensibility in relation to subjects such as utopias and landscapes of desire, to examining motifs for their historicity by linking scientific studies with artistic esprit.

Angela Stief

As artist researchers they are interested in fulcrums in time, drawing closely-related motifs from the above-mentioned ‘shrinking and growing’ of the world. This entails the unfolding of the spatial dimension of existence along a time axis and embedding such notions as idyllic living spaces—from the past, present and projected future—in a narrative which, in turn, exhibits fractures and tears. Amongst other things, the process produces filmic formats with a modular structure and a participative approach which combine randomness, manipulation and determinism. Since the artists churn up predetermined systems of order and push the guidance systems we use to orient ourselves in daily life to the point of absurdity, the appellation Trickster is apposite. But what role can a book play here, bearing in mind that it is a medium which tends towards becoming antiquated and lags behind the topicality of the new informational mediums with almost no relevance as far as more extensive access is concerned? As a mere medium of representation it would be too ponderous for Hanakam & Schuller. Yet it may be regarded as one of their artefacts, an analogue counterpart to the digital manifestations of their artistic praxis. As an artefact the bound work is beyond the limits of the classic artists’ book because it is not only designed like an art work itself but it is integrated into an already existing body of work too. Hanakam & Schuller’s artistic manifestations/art products normally undergo different mutations and run through various mediums. And this is why it is highly likely that the present book will appear in some future film, its form or material changed or perhaps transformed into an object made of synthetic

material on which one can sit. The work of these two artists always holds a surprise in store. One never know what is going to happen and where, or whether, one is going to encounter an object that one has met before in another context. This, too, is typical for the Tricksters. They juggle with the viewers’/readers’ expectations and powers of recollection, fake realities, leverage systems of order and turn rules on their heads. The unpredictability and suddenness of action confers something magical on the Trickster; his art, analogous to a magician’s trick, is a dialectical game with the reality of appearances and disappearances which defies static fixations and linear modes of narration. The book as an artefact is an artistic balancing act by Hanakam & Schuller between the loss of moorings implicit in the non-places of the virtual world and a aesthetic counterpoint provided by the artists’ fascination with the crystalline, with mirrored worlds and refracted light, with glittering materials such as sequins or the crystal ball from one of their films. The dematerialisation which occurs in the case of the medium of light is opposed by the book as a haptic medium of ‘practical’ use. In this way Hanakam & Schuller are formulating a contemporary diagnosis and subtle critique of the acceleration and boundless spaces of possibility of a reality which is itself in the process of evaporating. The book is an invitation to actually handle it, part of carrying out mundane tasks with their inevitable rhythms and rituals. But this takes on a new meaning as a counterpart to virtuality. The feeling of touching the smooth surfaces of our multifunctional devices and displays and the incredible speed of networking provided by the applications stands in contrast to the raw tactility of the paper and the weight of the cardboard. In this case the book is also a work which, in keeping with Martin Heidegger, is located between Ding and Zeug [objects and things] and transfers the aesthetic experience to the level of touch. The present publication is an open system which does not propose a linear approach in working through it but leaves recipients freedom to spend time—long

or short—to look, to read, to take it in their hands and to leaf through it. It is designed to be self-explanatory but its character can be distinguished from that of other art books. It contains three sections and begins with a discussion with creative and culturally involved artists and intellectuals who discursively consider the themes and motives in Hanakam & Schuller’s work. The second and middle section consists of installation views, production pictures and illustrations of sculptures, photographs but, above all, by film stills, a frame-by-frame parsing of a timebased medium which gives them a permanent place and stills them. Finally, the third and last section contains the essay, Arkadikon, by Roswitha Schuller which subjects what one can see, touch and understand in the works to a cognitive analysis and theoretically substantiates a central subject in the work of Hanakam & Schuller—Arcadias—existentially anchoring them within the framework of a philosophically interpretive system and, importantly, in the practice of cultural studies. The Vienna University of Applied Arts in the persons of Rector Gerald Bast and Anja Seipenbusch-Hufschmied (Section Head: Information, Publications, Events) deserve our gratitude. Without their support the book would never have been made. We would also like to express our warm thanks to the publishers, Verlag De Gruyter and Angela Fössl (project editor), the graphic designer Christof Nardin and his staff and the authors, translators and editors for their efforts and patient work.

9

A Discussion

Idylls, animism and creativity dispositives. A discussion between Anselm Franke, Uta Grosenick, Annette Hünnekens, Wolfgang Ullrich, Lois Weinberger, Stephanie Weber, Oliver Zybok and the artists Hanakam & Schuller constructed from individual interviews and text excerpts. In this text the authors talk of landscapes of longing and immersion in virtual worlds, about what things do to us and so-called creativity dispositives and about the magic of books and the book as an application.

10

A Discussion

traditional domain of sculpting and neither have we ever wanted We open any book and ask to put something on a pedestal. ourselves: how does it seduce us? We want objects to do something This is especially true if it is an art or, if something is already on a book or artists’ book. Do you think that for the reader, the viewer, there pedestal, then it has to be able to do something representatively can be a kind of immersion in the too. Our objects are intended to ‘world’ contained in a book? undergo transformations and so we send them of on a journey through Uta Grosenick If the viewer is drawn into the book different mediums. Frequently this creates an apparatus or characters in the same way as they are into an that can be used. exhibition, when they experience Every day we execute a the illustrations of the works as plastic and get an impression of the whole vocabulary of gestures on, artist’s work, then the seduction has for example, smart phones: minimal sequences of movement such been successful. For all its beauty and presence as an object, a book is as swiping and pushing over a only a means of representation. That touchscreen, gentle typing, a slight is why there can be no immersion in turning of the apparatus or the finger. All of this triggers reactions, the world of a book, only in that of creates networks, makes contacts, the artist. we dock virtually onto varying content and information. Therefore Hanakam & Schuller if we make a book it, too, must We would like to focus on the be a thing with which one can ‘do’ term artefact which is important something. It should be a smart, for our work. We are sculptors open book or an infinite book and but have never worked in the be able to move in various worlds. Hanakam & Schuller

Annette Hünnekens

Books like that also have a history. A book’s functionality can be taken apart so that something occurs similar to the paintings of Mondrian or Malevitch. In the process one would come across the essence of the book as an artefact because, considered analytically, it is an artefact. Just imagine a book that is Mondrianesque! That is a great idea, perhaps the idea. Thinking further along those lines, leads me to think about concrete poetry, about Dada. At the end one would certainly have two or three books, a whole series with no compelling order. Uta Grosenick

The books we make in Distanz Verlag are ‘illustrated’, i.e. books with pictures. Here, not only is the process of inception a completely unique and ever-differing cosmos but the whole appearance too. In the first place, the magic of these books evolves from their appearance, their smell and their haptics. The format the book takes, its size, the material that has been used and how it has been worked are important decisions. This applies equally to the details of how the binding is worked, the choice of paper, typography and layout as well as the relationship between image and writing. Which brings us to the content that the book wants

to convey. When the book’s form and materials adequately transport its contents then they are fulfilling their function. If I was not convinced that books have something magical about them, then I would not conceive, produce and publish them. Hanakam & Schuller

We have always been interested in the idea of sculpture and, while looking for alternatives and contemporary solutions, we finally ended up with video. We always wanted to use the medium in a way that was interactive. Naturally it has an inherent passivity but various components allow one to generate the haptic presence of the objects and actions that are shown. Prefabricated things or artefacts leave behind a particular impression. So what do things do to us? Anselm Franke

There is a notion of passive material, of hylomorphism in an Aristotelian sense. According to this, material is pressed into a form and thus becomes a thing. We can, of course, turn this perspective around and ask the question as to the form objects impress on us.

12

A Discussion

There is a formula I use in the context of ‘things have designs on us’. This reversal represents a dimension that mingles with historical animism discourse and the subjects of borders, border issues and border phobia. In principle that concerns a dualist conception and extends as far as the issue of organic and non-organic, i.e. the status of material. How does the object conceptualise, structure, interpellate and format the subject? One might assert that a large part of the theory production of the second half of the 20th century—if not the first too—had to do with exactly this question. In poststructuralism we have e.g. Michel Foucault with the subject as the effect of the discourse and a poetological reflection on writing implements too. Hanakam & Schuller

Does this inverse argumentation, as expressed in ‘design on us’, correlate in essence with media theory approaches?

Anselm Franke

Yes, because it goes right to the heart of the mediality of the subject. In a second step one quickly becomes aware that for this dimension we have relatively few terminological tools with which to articulate the experience. The dimension of becoming media is as sparsely examined as that of the subject as the medium of an arrangement of objects. At the far end of the scale of this architecture of mediality there is ‘becoming media’ in a pathological, ‘xenophatic’ discourse, as Elisabeth von Samsonow calls it. One example of this phobia of not-being-able-todefend-yourself, of becoming an object of manipulation, is the figure of Dr. Caligari in the silent expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari from 1920. The worst image of being non-civilised in the colonial imaginary is something akin to possession. The prohibition and exclusion often become established in double figures of this nature, as they are described in this film.

Hanakam & Schuller

Interesting because the doublenature of the figure of the Trickster provided the title for our book. On the one hand it can express a kind of magic in a work or artefact, while on the other is it manifest in the artist-work entity in the work process of the artist when they merge with their work. But we also ask ourselves the question as to what is expected of an artist today. As an artist one feels a pressure to offer the viewer, the reader and the museum visitor the opportunity to interact. In one text you talk about a ‘creativity dispositive’ that besets today’s art world. What does that mean for artists? Wolfgang Ullrich

As far as the basic idea in the term is concerned one can say that currently artists have got themselves into the role of muses and, on the other, into the position of victims. One no longer awaits great masterpieces or values their autonomy. Instead, the artist are expected to deliver something that, above all, gives viewers the feeling that they could have made it themselves. They want to experience themselves as creative, strong, vital and potent, that is, they want to feel inspired by the artist. In this context art becomes

a service industry. Evidence of this is found in how they are generally talked of in museums but also in which art forms are popular nowadays. Today’s artists—in contrast to those of one or two generations ago—are most often successful when they do very different things. That suggests that they start again right from the beginning and are infinitely creative and that is alluring for others. It awakens a feeling in the public that art can happen at any moment. Anselm Franke

I do not want to believe, at least as a working hypothesis, that this works. That is because I cannot imagine that visitors are grateful for every form of institutionally framed representation, when one underestimates them or reduces them to consumer choices. Wolfgang Ullrich

Even well into the modern era the artist’s sovereignty remained unchallenged. The alteration of artworks by viewers and their active engagement with them is, on the other hand, something relatively recent. It changed in the 1960s with Joseph Beuys’s assertion that ‘everyone is an artist’. It took a further twenty to thirty years before that idea took hold.

14

A Discussion

Hanakam & Schuller

Traditionally the public expects a kind of life-relevant interpretation or guideline. But contemporary art can only deliver this to a very limited extent. Stephanie Weber

For that reason there is an increased recourse to the artist as a person, to a highly commodified cult of personality. Hito Steyerl published a text on the issue in which she speaks of the ‘terror of total Dasein’ [presence]. Accordingly, artists find themselves in yet another precarious situation. Instead of the work (subject to selection criteria, involves transport costs etc.) they are in demand personally. Wolfgang Ullrich

I find current developments, the realignment from work to person, interesting. The aura previously ascribed to the artwork has now been shifted to the artist. One is supposed to get the feeling of being part of something important from

the atmosphere that artists exude. It is as if one can tap into them. Nowadays artists are also confronted with the demand that they motivate as many people as possible and should be given the impression that they could be involved in creative activity too. Stephanie Weber

I believe there is a feeling or a presumed expectation that museums should offer more entertainment. Recourse to events, performances and dance have become noticeably more present in recent years. This is certainly not something new. In the final analysis, dance in a museum is a curatorial invention, more a gesture in the sense of a shift of context rather than an artistic act in itself. Oliver Zybok

Exhibitions in which visitors are interactively involved or have unusual aesthetic experiences are crowd pullers. Easily digested visual effects can be achieved with surface phenomena; fast-food art enjoyment requiring no intellectual effort.

Anselm Franke

Wolfgang Ullrich

I would not waste my time with that. These days the game with the It has a certain hypnotic power but surface is popular. What would it is so dull… rapidly have come under suspicion of being trivial, kitschy or too mundane in times past is now Hanakam & Schuller particularly attractive. Thus surfaces … so empty of substance… are dealt with very consciously. Anselm Franke

… and marked by a paradox that can only render one speechless. That derives from the aesthetics of being overwhelmed which in turn is based on false desires and unworked-out premises. And then there is an immersion problem, each immersion produces further paradoxes. The Cartesian world view can no longer be driven out of us, however much Dolby sound is used, we will never revert to being fishes in the ocean. Oliver Zybok

But as soon as an exhibition places conceptual and thus intellectual aspirations in the foreground and viewers have to confront and examine them, they can very quickly lose their appetite for being involved with art. As a curator one should—and must—be critical of the superficial enjoyment of art. That does not mean, though, that the fascination for surfaces and easily assimilated effects are necessarily bad in general.

Hanakam & Schuller

Entertaining the public definitely comes close to a ‘treatment’, a sort of pleasant therapy—in a transcendental sense too. Here, one gets the impression that artists’ allegedly esoteric practices approximate to a marketing strategy. Wolfgang Ullrich

Yes, where one encounters energies, vibrations and magnetic fields in contemporary art it does remind one of esoteric notions. These are supposed to trigger and change something. One even expects artists to be able to cleverly enhance their image. Hanakam & Schuller

Artists become gurus… that was especially the case at the turn of last century and may even extend to the whole concept of modernity.

16

A Discussion

Wolfgang Ullrich

The claim of the modernists and the avant-garde such as Mondrian was that art works into everyday life, downwards, from above. The artist is the creative designer who sets the stage and takes responsibility for the whole thing. Stephanie Weber

The problem ties in with what is expected of artists. I just had a discussion with a fellow jury member. She finds it, quote, totally annoying, unquote, when an artist cannot talk about their work. I believe that artists have no obligation to explain their work on top of making it.

Annette Hünnekens

Every human is a researcher in the best sense of the term. And who is the greatest researcher if not the artist? One wants to find something new in an artwork, have a new experience—everything else is just boring. Hanakam & Schuller

For us that includes intentionally overturning ways of seeing and slipping into roles. Personally, we have an affinity to role games and practiced it during our childhood, in the 1980s and 1990s when pen and paper role games were en vogue. Annette Hünnekens

In this context the masquerade in connection with modern literature But they don’t do it in the sense and aesthetics is interesting. It is of, let’s say, a service provider. concerned with aspects of parallel The image of the artist explaining themselves and their work is already and meta-realities. If one becomes involved in role games one also an established tradition too. The runs across the whole issue of artist as the creator of worlds is selfies which are so important for a classic motive and perhaps the present-day self-image. It is the equivalent today of the artist the role game par excellence. This involved in artistic research. is an extraordinary development Hanakam & Schuller

comparable, perhaps, to the invention of the mirror which also gives continuous feedback. This is about self-awareness and the question of who I really am. On the one hand the mirror image serves as (self-)reassurance, while on the other it can still be changed, brought more into alignment with an ideal. What takes place is a permanent exchange between a desired ideal and reality. Hanakam & Schuller

In speaking about creativity dispositives, Wolfgang Ullrich has looked at the subject of selfies in museums. Viewers themselves become active and creative. Like the educated aristocrat travelling through the landscape with a mirror, they are continuously en route with an apparatus. Here we encounter the historical concept of the ‘grand tour’ which we make references to in our artwork by using old gadgets and give space to the basic need to capture the external world—above all natural spaces—in a ‘box’. In daily life that happens with the smartphone. It puts us in the position of being able to frame the world around us, to filter it, to edit and to record it in digital surrogates, moving and still images or sounds. The historical analogies are multiple, we can see them in various proto-photographic apparatus such as the Claude

mirror, for example. This was a tinted glass mirror through which the viewer of nature was immersed in Claude Lorrain’s chromatic world framed by a particular format. Nowadays these stylised images of our surroundings are formed by the liquid crystal displays of our phones and tablets. Anselm Franke

There is a counter image to the alienation of the new communication media disconnect which represents a kind of non-relational, disciplinary armour. It is the notion of recreating the world as a dialogue which is charged with Romantic motifs but lacks the irony of the Romantics. A central—and partly symbolic—role in this new type of connection is played here by the liquid crystal. Annette Hünnekens

It is actually a supplement which can be traced back to Plato. He defined three worlds of form: that of ideas, that of physical reality—the haptic world—and one in between. It is there that the ‘soft’ structure— I’ll call it that—the virtual, is to be found. This includes mirrored reflections, meanings and opinions, beliefs and ‘what we hold to be true’; everything that one might understand as a parallel reality.

18

A Discussion

Hanakam & Schuller

Can the book represent a parallel reality? What can interactive mean in this context? Uta Grosenick

Perhaps the term ‘interactivity’ is too ambitious. Nevertheless, it is up to the reader of an illustrated book what they look at first—the first or last page, or perhaps only a particular chapter that is of special interest. They decide whether they read the text, how long they page through the book or whether they pick it up for a second time. Hanakam & Schuller

Let us think about other forms of action and acting as if. As an artist or author one acts for the reader or viewer. In this way experiences can be communicated. Engaging with so-called Arcadian doing is important for our work. Annette Hünnekens

Arcadian, or in a wider sense, all virtual places enable acting by trial and error. Meanwhile there are

parallel worlds rooted in Arcadia which are articulated in incredibly differentiated ways. Using Arcadian places one can exemplify principles that appear in many concrete situations. That now functions so well that virtual, Arcadian forms such as role games, post-modern aesthetics and much more are moving closer to what we call ‘reality’. Hanakam & Schuller

As a motif Arcadia can be found in the culture industry and in everyday life in shopping malls. The spheres of historical art production and the present are shaking hands. Wolfgang Ullrich

Today the fixation on museums and the division of high and low culture no longer exists. The same effects or designs are also to be found under circumstances other than those of art. So certain lighting effects or stagings in the museum context also remind me spectacular events that took place in court circles of the

seventeenth and eighteen centuries progressive potential in the historical and/or contemporary where light effects, fireworks, forms of the idyll? electrisising machines etc. were used to enchant. Oliver Zybok

I am very careful about making generalisations about historical One also links enchantment with circumstances. From our standpoint a particular image of nature, an in the present it is very easy to atmosphere, a landscape, natural look back and make judgements phenomena and the subjects of about this and that. All too often trees, streams etc. This is a form we forget that experiential values, of staging too, one still found in art the mental attitudes to conditions practice today. Art and nature and basic premises change meet… over time. Notions of idyll that yearn for an all-encompassing, Lois Weinberger carefree and ideal state really The botanical term ‘ruderal’ must be regarded as reactionary. (rudis = wild and uncultivated)— But we are concerned here with I would not want to change the illustrating the ambivalence of world with art—seemed to me at the end of the 1980s as a promising idylls, the antithetical side of life by which everyone finds out what, metaphor in a revived debate around the subject of art and nature. for them, represents an idyllic The more nature is ‘doable’, the less moment. Artists are not necessarily concerned with negating a sense we are part of it. The discourse on of the idyllic here but, rather, the cultural concept brings with it with animating and continuously the question of the relationship of humanity to itself and the rest of the reinventing their own notions of yearning. The opposite conclusion world—stones, chickens, ghosts, gives rise to a number of questions: cars and dragons. But as long as Is a carefree life really desirable or nature allows us to die, it is not is development more likely to take a metaphor. place by solving problems? Does the idyll not really become visible in Hanakam & Schuller ambivalent, emotional situations? Nowadays, ‘classic’ idylls as in At whose expense am I satisfying genre painting and poetry appear my yearnings? to us highly metaphorical and often regressive. Can we identify Hanakam & Schuller

20

A Discussion

is raised as to the enchantment of the commercial-mass-media Does the yearning for nature not stand in opposition to the seductive complex. How the alienation which still—increasingly inescapably— power of the image? accompanies us becomes obscured. We live in between Oliver Zybok hyper-alienation and a permanent I would certainly not reduce demand that we alienate ourselves the seductive power of the idyll from our alienation, so to say. That just to nature alone. Shopping is an absurdity encouraged by centres represent an almost certain idyllic aesthetics e.g. from perfect synthesis of everyday life Apple screens to the boom of and various hetertopias. These romantic, animistic imaginaries are paired with the promise of private wish fulfilment and with the such as The Hobbit and Avatar. I am consistently trying to work through classic conception of idyllic nature the moment when this powerful and urban idylls too. Nowadays, dispositive or its internal dialectic experiencing an idyll is no longer restricted to nature. Locations such topples over. The film Avatar is as the Metrocentre play on people’s interesting in the sense of readymade experience, a primitivist potential for yearning. Visitors are dream à la Rousseau versus an evil attracted by entertainment offers. modernity. If one places that in In the meantime, this principle represents an established curatorial the context of the technologies that were used to produce the practice. film and the insurrection against the mechanisation of the world as Anselm Franke narrated in the film, then this form In Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory of animation aesthetic is itself an there is a chapter about false argument ad absurdum. The story reconciliation. In it, the question builds a monument to its own departure, as it were. Hanakam & Schuller

Hanakam & Schuller

Does every picture we make of nature have the character of a commodity? Are we trying to contrive nature as an image, location of choice and resource using different means?

who is able to experience the long sleep. The ultimate consequence of loving nature means the disappearance of human beings. Hanakam & Schuller

Nevertheless, why is it that Arcadia, in the form of a picture of a landscape, is so ubiquitous? We Lois Weinberger find it in so many surroundings, Since I am not a gardener, I would define my field of activity as that of irrespective of whether they are digital—for example, Farmville, free analysis though it is certainly also a counter project to prevailing the pastoral parallel to Facebook— or physical. Why does it function consumer behaviour. From the so well as a vehicle for so many beginning I have declared my plantings as both areas of possibility longings? and ruptures. They are sites which have arrived at a point where one Annette Hünnekens can speak neither of beginnings It is really a very old concept, another and endings nor from standstill. kind of experience, to be found in Nature has nothing to do with any the construction of paradise in the notions of purity. For me art is Judeo-Christian tradition as well a construction of the mundane, a as in the case of the Greeks with suitable catalyser for life. their gods and goddesses. Notions like this are always concerned with incorporating domains of possibility Hanakam & Schuller We live a particular image of nature, and testing out or playing through actions that are full of yearning a construction which gives us sensual and intellectual satisfaction. or fright. We also look for this pleasure in art. Hanakam & Schuller Lois Weinberger

Of course, loving nature does not necessarily mean encountering culture at the same time. Casual sayings such as ‘at one with nature’ have no real basis, we are one at one with nature when we are dead. And

Illusion, the pretence of a role, the ability to distance yourself from yourself belongs with these imaginary excursions. This creates an irony. Is there a connective

22

A Discussion

linkage or even a logical conclusion between ideal images of nature and irony? Or put another way: are contemporary idylls always represented in an ironic form? Oliver Zybok

Not necessarily. Idylls also continue to function uncurtailed as a reflection of notions of yearning. At some point they deteriorated into kitschy formulas that trumpet myths of a perfect world. In the 18th century the idyll was still regarded as an ideal state, it embodied the dream of paradise lost. The dream of idyllic existence implied a yearning for happiness and perfection. The knowledge of the factual reality of the present, especially in regard to its negative connotations, is almost destined to provoke idyllic dreams of security, of somehow being able to lead a better and more carefree life in the future. At the beginning of the 20th century several avant-garde

movements pointed out that real life was in no way idyllic and that, for the majority, an idyllic life was being hindered by social structures. This is why the idyll, as a universally valid utopia of carefree living, an ideal state—whatever form that might take—has lacked credibility up to the present. No matter what, idylls, whether in art or everyday life, mean something different for each person. Everyone has their own wishes, yearnings and imaginings. However, every idyll reveals itself to be ambiguous and has another side to it. It cannot be manifested unless its opposite has been experienced. Someone who treats all idylls with irony is lying to themselves. Anselm Franke

It is good to examine cultural products such as the film Avatar in detail in order to learn to read these absurd idylls as a kind of farewell… that is helpful apropos the Romantics from two hundred years ago too.

Hanakam & Schuller

Acadia also contains within them the theme of transience. Anselm Franke

Exactly, it is often about leave taking. Hanakam & Schuller

It is a paradox that we, as artists, stage. On the one hand we create beautiful surfaces which correspond to what the public expects while on the other we exhibit the irony of a mechanism.

Uta Grosenick

I like the term ‘place’ for the art book best. This place allows one to be fascinated by the artist’s imaginative power. A change of dimension takes place—from the two dimensions of an illustration to the three dimensions of the book. But I would nevertheless refrain from talking about virtuality in this context. Why so many artists want to make a book in addition to their internet presence is because they create a tangible fact with it. Hanakam & Schuller

Wolfgang Ullrich

As an artist one has to react to role expectations. As soon as one has seen through them, one can deal with them, intentionally destroy them, exaggerate and or treat them ironically.

You are not only familiar with the area of publishing but also that of the dramaturge. Are there similarities between the two and is there a scenography for the book ‘space’? Uta Grosenick

Lois Weinberger

Furthermore I think that the subsurface values can be recognised in the paradox. In my case, I like being concerned with nature yet not a garden artist. Hanakam & Schuller

Let’s return to the subject of the book and its possibilities. Is there a virtual aspect to the book medium? And can it become a space, a place for playing?

I have never looked at it from that point of view, but yes, a book— and an artist monograph most definitely—is also a stage on which something can be played. Every art book follows a concept that has similarities to a scenography. Publications such as Art at the Turn of the Millennium, Women Artists or Art Now which I published for Taschen Verlag have been called ‘curated books’. Before I began to

24

A Discussion

devote myself exclusively to bookmaking, I was active as a curator in a number of museums and for that reason I find the comparison very apt. But it is much easier to gain access to the reproduction of an artwork than it is to transport one and integrate it into an exhibition context. Stephanie Weber

I notice that there is a current marked tendency towards installation views in, for example, Contemporary Art Daily. Here, the concern is less the work itself and more the presence of a representative room that is characterised by the standard contemporary, corporate aesthetics—white walls, high ceilings, concrete floors—as the paraphernalia of power. Hanakam & Schuller

What does that mean for art and artists? Are they then ‘room prettifiers’? Art would not even be decoration then, just topping…

Stephanie Weber

What does it mean for all of us? To me it means to keep on asking how to grant our work the utmost attention and love and how to distinguish it from our desire for representation in and of itself. Hanakam & Schuller

There are these typical contemporary-looking rooms e.g. the Apple Stores, that look like a gallery. Annette Hünnekens

The strategy of the temple as a salesroom is really ancient and can even be found in the New Testament. In this sense the commingling or art and commerce which exclusive fashion labels have been leveraging for years is logically consistent. Hanakam & Schuller

Inversely, has the museum where, for example, reliance is placed on effects such a lighting, illusions and large-scale installations become a consumer and theme space?

Annette Hünnekens

No. Though perhaps it looks like that. Two very different industries make use of the same means and special effects although art also accesses the mass media. How that is made use of—roughly speaking, some seduce and others reflect— is, however very different and the messages are totally different too. Anselm Franke

That reminds me of the idea of a framed dialogism where the visitor is given the choice between a green and a red button, i.e. it is extremely scripted. The Animism project tried to show that there is another dimension, a much more anarchistic conception of mediality. This concerns the way we address something, the ‘design on us’, the interpellation and the ‘being called’.

of the artwork was to a certain degree transferred to the viewer. If however, an institutional look is created as a consequence then, broadly speaking, the inherent (and largely theoretical) idealism of the work disappears. Wolfgang Ullrich

Some camouflage their art as ‘modern’ by suggesting that it concerns important issues, philosophical questions and political matters. But really it is only designed to comply with the rules of the white cube. That is then perfect, thoroughly prepackaged art that one can sell like salami, in slices. Modern idealism has then completely disappeared and art has become pragmatic, sober. Hanakam & Schuller

Hanakam & Schuller

Sometimes, however, as in the case of minimalist surfaces, the look replaces the basic idea. Then we are dealing with a kind of kitsch… Stephanie Weber

It’s worse than kitsch, I’m afraid, because the artist has had their authorship withdrawn. One claim made by minimalism was the abolition of handwriting and aspirations of genius. Because the perceptual context was crucial for these works, the autonomy

Does the form of the spectacle in the seventeenth and 18th century not correspond to courtly art while that of today’s capitalist system takes the form of a commodity? Wolfgang Ullrich

This correspondence is not new and is already present in classic modernity. However, the commodified nature of art nowadays is to be seen much more clearly in its modular and

26

A Discussion

pre-packaged form in the works of artists such a Olafur Eliasson, Anselm Reyle and Damien Hirst. One can just as well buy eight coloured strips from Liam Gillick as five or fifteen. The concept of a completed, autonomous work in which nothing can be changed is eroding. Artists are making modulelike proposals and custom-made pieces for their customers instead. These can then be arranged by them according to their own preferences and possibilities. And that means that the great traditional difference between art and other commercial things (which could always be apportioned) is lost. Hanakam & Schuller

The module is not only an economic template, modularity is a playground for utopian structures linked, in particular, with historical architectural formations and various historical stages of socially utopian development planning.

Seriality has at least two sides to it—the economic with its logic of production and utilisation and also the playfully visionary, the construction set, so to say. We often think serially in our work. Perhaps our whole archive of objects, our affinity to the artefact, is the result. Annette Hünnekens

I get the impression that everything dissolves in a series. Only the series guarantees understanding. It accords a before, an after and an in-between and it is only from the progression that one can understand something. It is typical of our present that one finds oneself in a state of ‘becoming’ and to reflect on that. Of course, that has effects on static genres, especially sculpture, which have to resist and contend with immersive forms of art. Stephanie Weber

Immersive forms of art, in a present-day sense, have existed at the latest since the 1960s; immersive video and computer games at

the latest since the 1980s. The technical possibilities have changed dramatically. Some artworks are not immersive per se but become so through the use of technology and up-scaling. In addition, in Hanakam & Schuller’s work I see a meta-level with representatives of rooms and systems. In the application, Palaces & Courts, they employ an ekphrastic form, the description of images in writing. The concern here is with text as form but also the relationship of image to text and the rules of aesthetics. Hanakam & Schuller

Our work, Palaces & Courts is a translation of the historical exhibition catalogue of the World Exhibition Panama Pacific Exhibition that took place in San Francisco in 1915 into an other medium. We took existing textual passages and re-ordered them according to formal criteria such as exhibition spaces, artefacts and details and then programmed them as a web application. In order to leave choices end points are missing in our work—we decided in favour of loops. Uta Grosenick

I find apps like this exciting and dream about making an appbook or book-app one day. That would allow us to suspend the inevitable linearity of a book

and to look and think in many directions. Since a book is a vector so there is always a question at its inception: what order should it follow? Chronological, phenotypic, according to genre, purely visual, or, or, or? An app functions a little like a sphere where the user chooses the criteria and navigates according to those decisions. Annette Hünnekens

These opportunities and the complicity of author and reader and really age-old. Above all one runs across them in literature. What is new and exciting is that readers are now becoming oriented in these play spaces and can choose their own place in them.

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A Discussion

Anselm Franke lives and works in Berlin. Critic, curator, author. Head of the Visual Arts and Film in the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. He was responsible there for the exhibition projects and publications such as Animismus (2012) and Whole Earth Catalog (2013). Co-curator of Manifesta 7 (2008) and curator of the Taipei Biennale 2012. Uta Grosenick lives and works in Berlin, she worked as exhibition organiser in Hamburg’s Deichtorhallen and the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn and was curator at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg. She has published Art at the Turn of the Millennium (1999), Women Artists (2001), ART NOW (2002), ART NOW Vol 2 (2005), China Art Book (2007) and numerous other publications on the subject of contemporary art. 2010 she co-founded DISTANZ Verlag. Annette Hünnekens lives and works in GarmischPartenkirchen. She is a media scholar, curator, artist. Co-curator of the worldwide first collection of interactive media art at the Centre for Art and Media, Karlsruhe (Der bewegte Betrachter, 1997). Internationally active as educator, exhibition maker. Publications include Expanded Museum. Kulturelle Erinnerung und virtuelle Realitäten (2002). Wolfgang Ullrich lives and works in Leipzig and Munich. As an art historian and cultural scholar he is working on the criticism and history of the concept of art and on consumersociological issues. Publications include Mit dem Rücken zur Kunst. Die neuen Statussymbole der Macht (2000), Tiefer hängen. Über den Umgang mit der Kunst (2003) and most recently Siegerkunst. Neuer Adel, teure Lust (2016) and Der kreative Mensch. Streit um eine Idee (2016).

Stephanie Weber lives and works in Munich. She is contemporary art curator at Lenbachhaus, Munich before which she was curator in the area of media art and performance at MoMA in New York (exhibitions of Isa Genzken’s and Mark Boulos’ work a.o.). Justus Bier Prize for curators 2015 for the retrospective of the Argentinian/ French conceptual artist Lea Lublin at Lenbachhaus with its associated publication. Lois Weinberger lives and works in Gars am Kamp (Lower Austria) and Vienna. Since the 1990s he has played a significant role in discourses related to art-nature, on the concept of the ruderal as well as numerous public space projects all over Europe. International exhibitions include documenta X in Kassel (1997), Biennale di Venezia (Austrian Pavillion 2009). Oliver Zybok lives and works in Berlin. Art historian, curator. Since 2004 he has been guest editor for subject-specific issues of the Kunstforum International magazine including Zur Aktualität des Idyllischen I & II (2006). Internationally active as educator and exhibition maker. Since 2015 he has been director of the Overbeck-Gesellschaft, Lübeck, since 2016 head curator of the St. Petri-Kirche in Lübeck and member of the board of trustees of the Tichy Ocean Foundation, Prague. Markus Hanakam & Roswitha Schuller, see page 232.

29

Invasion

2010

HD-Video, Stereo, Colour, 6.01 Min.

30

The equipment of the film is freely remodeled after woodcarvings from the 1849 compendium The History and Practice of the Art of Photography: Or the Production of Pictures through the Agency of Light. The scenery shows a variety of different movements and functions of the apparatus, which— akin to science fiction—depicts an essential part of the story and becomes an autonomous character among others.

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32

33

34

Bloom

2011

Production Shot

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Bloom

2011

HD-Video, Stereo, Colour, 6.22 Min.

36

The search for the modern gaze—prior to the development of the photo camera—is reconstructed here with the help of sometimes absurd apparatuses and objects, including land-art-like installations. The scene alternately shows workspaces, utensils and landscape pictures and conjures up an atmosphere of the picturesque.

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Tour

2012

HD-Video, Stereo, Colour, 6.20 Min.

41

The historic Grand Tour, as a survey of the picturesque, represents the beginning of an endeavor to capture landscape impressions in a tangible manner. Thus simple optical devices such as the camera obscura and colour filters like the Claude glass are utilised. Tour is a pre-modern road movie in which the equipment that is carried along, analogous to our present-day reality, decisively determines the experience of the travelers.

42

43

44

Tour

2012

Production Shot

45

Technologies

2012

4 Tabletops, Drawings, 80×120cm each, Objects

46

Interface

2013

Tabletop, Drawing 150×1000cm, Mixed Media on Paper, Objects

47

Tablet No. 2

2015

Drawing, Mixed Media on Plotter Paper behind Diasec®, approx. 89×132cm

48

Cosmic Cathedral

2016

Digital Film / HD-Video, Stereo, Colour, 137 Sequences, Randomized in Permanent Loop

49

Transformation is a key aspect of alchemy; like the artist, the alchemist turns physical material into a higher, immaterial good. Cosmic Cathedral is the staging of various absurd ‘operations’ to text passages from the French author Fulcanelli, the last alchemist of the 20th century.

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52

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Crystal Cathedral

2012

Video PAL 16:9, Stereo, Colour, 18.10 Min.

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‘Yes, all problems are really illusions. In reality, every problem is only a decision waiting to be made. And you are in control. You alone have the freedom, the authority, and the power to make that one decision that will solve your biggest problem!’—If It’s Going to Be, It’s up to Me: The Eight Proven Principles of Possibility Thinking. Robert H. Schuller, 1997 Crystal Cathedral deals with mechanisms and linguistic conventions of American megachurches, such as the eponymous Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California, not far from Disneyland. It was formerly the headquarters of the evangelical congregation founded by Robert H. Schuller, the originator of Possibility Thinking.

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57

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Crystal Cathedral

2012

Installation View Former Burgkapelle at MMKK Museum of Modern Art Carinthia, Klagenfurt

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60

Crystal Healing

2014

Digital Film / HD-Video, Stereo, Colour, 7.47 Min.

61

The former Sinop Post Office, an office and residential building in late Ottoman style, is imaginarily cleaned up by the practice of Crystal Healing. The structure had previously been used for hosting a commission of scientists from the Turkish Atomic Energy Authority in the course of the planning of the Sinop nuclear power plant. Professional cleaning workers from Sinop adopt the space in performing several absurd cleaning and healing rituals through the use of various artefacts.

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63

64

65

66

Housing & Healing

2014

Digital Film / HD-Video, Stereo, Colour, 7.43 Min.

67

Against the backdrop of lovely, untamed nature, as it is manufactured for tourists in the gardens of the parks and resorts of Sri Lanka (Ceylon), temporary habitats are created—imaginary living spaces measured not by human needs but rather by those of the artefact. The sphere of habitation is juxtaposed with the process of healing—in its archaic form of exorcism, as is still sometimes practiced on the island.

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69

70

71

72

Travertin

2015

Double Channel, Digital Film /  HD-Video, Stereo, Colour, 12.04 Min.

73

With its conventional documentary film style, the two-channel serial film Travertin initially seems to be a coherent and site-specific narration. However, the presented characters, shown in various interior scenes in the Czech city of Pilsen, in apartments designed by the Austrian architect Adolf Loos, recount autobiographies that are completely foreign to them, stories that gradually transform themselves into a science fiction scenery.

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76

77

78

79

80

Sphere of Truth

2013

Domemaster, HD-Video Animation, Stereo, Colour, 16 Min.

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‘Artist brain is our creative, holistic brain. It thinks in patterns and shadings. It sees a fall forest and thinks: Wow! Leaf bouquet! Pretty! Gold-gilt-shimmery-earthskin-king’s-carpet!’ (Voiceover Sphere of Truth, excerpt)

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Sphere of Truth

2013

Video Documentation iSphere Cinema Projection

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84

Aura A Frankenthal Chinoiserie Potpourri Group

2014

Acrylic Ink on Kodak Endura, approx. 112×90cm

85

Aura A Capodimonte Group of the Lover Spurned (‘L’innammorato Respinto’)

2014

Acrylic Ink on Kodak Endura, approx. 89×115cm

86

Aura A Pair of Doccia Figures of Harlequin and Columbine

2016

Acrylic Ink on Kodak Endura, approx. 145×130cm

87

Aura Two Meissen Groups of Lovers

2016

Acrylic Ink on Kodak Endura, approx. 102×175cm

88

Aura A Meissen Group of ‘America’

2016

Acrylic Ink on Kodak Endura, approx. 150×150cm

89

Aura Meissen Allegorien der vier Erdteile, Erdteil Afrika (Group of ‘Africa’) and Erdteil Asien (Group of ‘Asia’)

2015

Acrylic Ink on Kodak Endura, approx. 50×62cm each

90

Aura A Meissen porcelain-mounted gilt-bronze Inkstand

2014

Acrylic Ink on Kodak Endura, approx. 96×120cm

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Aura

2014

Installation View at Sotheby’s Vienna, Palais Wilczek

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Aura At Sotheby’s

2014

HD-Video, Stereo, Colour, 12.27 Min.

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94

Speicher (Memory) No.4

2012

Digital Image, Kodak Endura, 70×100cm

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96

Speicher (Memory) No.3

2012

Digital Image, Kodak Endura, 70×100cm

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98

Speicher (Memory) No.1

2012

Digital Image, Kodak Endura, 70×100cm

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100

Speicher (Memory) No.5

2012

Digital Image, Kodak Endura, 70×100cm

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102

Profile

2016

Series of 50 Unique Digital Images, Kodak Endura, 40×50cm

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104

105

106

107

108

109

110

Palaces & Courts

2009–10

Interactive Flash-Application

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Palaces & Courts is an interactive, web-based guidance system that links monochrome image areas with text passages and functions like text-based role play. The start-up screen offers four choices, starting points from which the user continues to follow series of links, so that through the image-text combination—thanks to a random generator—a personal story is created. The text passages are taken from a catalogue for the world’s fair of 1915, the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco.

112

Palaces & Courts

2009–10

Installation View MAK Museum for Applied Arts / Contemporary Art Vienna

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Shuttle

2009

HD-Video, Stereo, Colour, 8.00 Min.

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‘One of the finest equestrians at the Exposition is Cortez. As we look upon the rider we are convinced that he is every inch a conqueror. He is represented absolutely motionless—his feet in the stirrups— and yet you feel that. What accents itself in the mind of the layman who makes even a cursory study of the sculptors and their works. The sculptor’s work calls for steadfastness of purpose through long years of study, acute observation, fine intellectual ability and above all a decided universalism. Otherwise the world soon passes him by.’ (Voiceover Shuttle, excerpt)

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117

118

Kokomo

2009–12

Series of 20 Digital Images, Kodak Endura, 70×70cm each

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120

121

122

Kokomo

2012

Installation View

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Kokomo L

2012

Installation View Series of 3 Digital Images, Kodak Endura, 150×150cm each

124

Kokomo White L

2015

Installation View

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Kokomo White L

2009–15

Series of 4 Digital Images, Kodak Endura, 110×110cm each

126

Discs

2015

Digital Film, HD-Video, Stereo, Colour, 5.55 Min.

127

Discs

2015

2 Discs, Sequin Work on Styrofoam, Silver-Pink-Blue and Silver-Multicolour-Green, Ø 35×4cm

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129

130

Archetypen: Sphäre, Zuckerhut & Monolith (Archetypes: Sphere, Sugar Loaf, Monolith)

2014

3 Geometric Bodies (Cone approx. 30cm height, Sphere approx. Ø 30cm, Cube approx. 49×31×7cm)

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Trickster

2014

Digital Film / HD-Video, Stereo, Colour, 13.15 Min.

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134

135

136

Faux Terrain

2013

Installation View Barcelona Project Space, Freiburg

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138

Road Movie

2008–09

Video PAL 16:9, Stereo, Colour, 18.29 Min.

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140

Palm Springs

2008

Video PAL 16:9, 9.25 Min.

141

142

143

Candy House

2009

Sugar Bowl / Object, Plastics, approx.  14,5×10,5×7cm

144

Fagiano & Facciata

2013

Double Channel, HD-Video, Stereo, B/W and Colour, 15 Min.

145

Fagiano & Facciata makes a flimsy connection between the monumental, fascist architecture of the Roman district of E.U.R. (Esposizione Universale di Roma) and the iconography of the pheasant. In a play on the semantics of surface and conventions of image interpretation, the stylised artistic research in some circumstances reveals itself as décor.

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147

148

Fagiano & Facciata

2013

Installation View

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150

151

Drop

2015-16

Resin, Lacquer, Ø 89×25cm

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Tartes La Tarte Biedermeier

2012

Ottoman, MDF, Inlay, approx 47×87×50cm

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Tartes La Tarte Esterhazy

2011

Ottoman, MDF, Inlay, approx 47×87×50cm

154

Tartes

2011–12

Series of 12 Ottomans, MDF, Inlay Genuine Leather, Various Dimensions

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156

Tartes

2012

Installation View

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Bubble, Wilderness Site, Play, Energy Ways, Styles, Spaces Atrium, Eden Setting, Aura Stimuli Oasis Stone, Rock, Water Shimmer, Symbol Village, Market, Life Epos, Tahiti, Magic Folklore, Spectacle Rest, Strength Soap, Fake, Content Illusions, Vanitas Happy Ending, Healing

157 159 168 169 175 182 185 187 189 195 200 208 216 219 224 228

The Arkadikon Roswitha Schuller Bubble, Wilderness

ET IN ARCADIA EGO I, too, was in Arcadia. When looking at Carl Wilhelm Kolbe’s engraving, our gaze falls upon the almost naked couple placed on an equally expansive, albeit strictly geometrical, pseudo-classical sarcophagus on which this statement is engraved, hardly distracted by the lushes grasses and leaves of this stylised micro-jungle around them. Kolbe’s print Arcadia is certainly not the most significant, nor is it the most typical or most spectacular version of a motif that at the same time has always been a program. To that extent, it is perhaps indeed the exemplary type of Arcadia, a space that in the history of various art forms was described by way of its décor, but is actually of interest as a space of action. And even the aspect of action itself is a precarious one, for in the place of leisure Arcadia it takes the form of non-action, allowing growth, becoming, and passing. If in a progressive sense the European Enlightenment is ‘man’s emergence from his self-imposed nonage’ (Immanuel Kant, What is Enlightenment?, 1784), its regressive side is that of the European idyll, and Arcadia represents a special case of this, not a step outwards, but perhaps a sidestep to a parallel life possibility. This sidestep, the sideward

Auch ich war in Arkadien (I Too Was in Arcadia) Carl Wilhelm Kolbe, Etching, before 1801

1—The French socialist Paul Lafargue movement, can be retreat to the interior, the wrote The Right to Laziness in 1884, private, the domestic, or the Biedermeier. with the subtitle Rejection of the Or a self-staging directed outward, the beautiful ‘Right to Work’ of 1848. life as a bubble, with a transparent protective shield that is not very permeable. Arcadia is an image of nature that in its history par excellence mediates the culture of its time, in particular the intellectual landscapes of European antiquity and the Renaissance. In this sense, it is not a spa-like landscape for relaxation, but an art landscape, an intellectual surplus value that first truly opens to the educated beholder or user. Cultural history is a history of action. In his book The Mind of Egypt: History and Meaning in the Time of the Pharaohs, Egyptologist Jan Assmann uses the concept of history res gestae to study how acts were planned, perceived, and remembered. The fixed contours of this res gestae, as created through language, includes other traces of historiography, found pieces, artifacts, and art objects, which in their formats represent still other narratives. Such traces, and their surrogates today, are the subject of this essay. The sign system, the icon of Arcadia is complex, for is initially pure form, pure motif, the profoundly human image of nature that is a further form of culture. In its leisure, indeed laziness, Arcadia takes on a political dimension. For example, the right to laziness, as described by Paul Lafargue in his pamphlet of the same name,1

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Site, Play, Energy

is an affront against our capitalist logic of labour, market, and value. And thus the non-intervention of the Arcadians in nature around them, which often appears rather neat and well tended, is actually a scandalous riot. This is Arcadia’s ecological aspect. The notion that nature could be simple and benevolent, without domestication, without exploitation, is the foundation of an ecologism as we have come to know it in various historical forms: that of the romantics, the social utopia of garden cities and community gardens, the ecology movement of the postwar generations of the 20th century, the hippies, or today’s eco-punks like Vivienne Westwood. And thus the cycle of ancient mythological images is completed through a golden age and being one with nature in the new promises of sustainability, maintaining the last remaining paradises, science fiction about new paradises created using technology, and finally the ‘feel good’ factor that we sense as consumers of various images of nature in our leisure environments, in an artificial happy ending.

Take me down to the paradise city Where the grass is green and the girls are pretty Oh won’t you please take me home Guns N’ Roses, Paradise City (1986)

Arcadia as a place must be conceived from the urban as a starting point. The landscape image emerges from the Arcadian activity of the city dweller, not from the actual characteristics of an actually existing landscape. As Walter Benjamin describes the city for the flaneur—it opens to him as a landscape, it surrounds him like a living room—Arcadia should be seen analogously as a space of possibility, whose quality of experience generates its form, not as a physical, but as an imaginary topography. Many Arcadias exist at the same time, real ones like the former Greek prefecture, currently an administrative district Αρκαδία (Arcadia), or the American city of Arcadia, California. Arcadia as a cruise ship, as a hotel complex: there are virtual Arcadias, Arcadian communities, Arcadia as a computer game level, and the poetic Arcadia, which has been stylistically formative for the reception of this landscape, this landscape motif since European antiquity. All Arcadias share their visuality; they are a form of expression of the picturesque, a visual representation of space and time. Arcadia is the expanding image, or in other words, an image that itself becomes an experience, a moving image in the Deleuzian sense. Besides this simultaneity, or as it were, as a consequence of it, Arcadia is what it isn’t: it seems to exist, it is a place of longing, a parallel world. The contradictory quality of this location, that still exists today on the map of today’s Greece, but whose qualities do not adhere to

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this physical location, constitute its specific attraction, beginning with classical poetry, which imagines it as a site of escape beyond everyday lifeworlds. Vergil’s descriptions of the country life already no longer accurately depicted the reality of his day. In fact, agriculture of the period was already quite developed, so that large estates, so-called latifundia with more than 500 hectares in surface area, were operated as mono­ cultures by slave labour. No room here for leisurely shepherds. In ancient society, the discrepancy between unproductivity and leisure was already a fact. The landscape does not just consist of beautiful nature; it is also land that can be used for agricultural purposes. This develops into another aspect of the topos: Arcadia is a site for negotiating the conflict between naturalness and culture, where it seemingly dissolves, at least temporarily. Arcadia is a place where nothing must be done, a third nature, an artificial nature, a place for freedom and play. In his Manifesto for a Third Landscape, contemporary landscape architect and theoretician Gilles Clément calls for unproductiveness as a key function of landscape and natural space. [Third landscape in relationship to society] Make unproductiveness policy. [Third landscape in relationship to culture] Reverse the Western view of the landscape. Gilles Clement, Manifesto of the Third Landscape (2010)

The Western view that Clément here addresses reveals the bipolarity of landscape in its representation as idyll and in its functional usability. The landscape can be beautiful; it can be designed, staged, but only if it is treated manually or intellectually. In this way, nature, or the landscape, ultimately becomes a sign for value systems. Thus, what is needed is a semiotic opening of various landscape motifs (the landscape vocabulary) of which the Arcadian is but one particular incarnation. For the semiotics of a landscape correspond by no means with its actual geography.2 This essay seeks to explore the question of the effects that Arcadia has in its historical use, where Arcadia is concretely mentioned as a term or subject, and in its contemporary use in the culture and leisure industry where it continues to operate as an archetype, albeit not necessarily recognised or named as such. Using its semiotics, it will be shown that Arcadia is an image of stylised 2—I am here borrowing from George nature that, transferred to a narrative form, can Ritzer’s notes on the semiotics of Main be compared to the motif of a happy ending. Street and their use as a symbol by the American supermarket chain Walmart. Furthermore, in its use in the culture industry, Arcadia undergoes a transformation from motif ‘And in the case of Walmart, the Main Street USA image is a semiotic to method, in that the moods and impressions achievement, not embodied in a that it communicates to the beholder are geographic main street.’ See George to have an effect on him or her as consumer. Ritzer and Michael Ryan’s 2005 essay Prototypes of emotional and experiential Transformation in Consumer Settings: Landscapes and Beyond. consumption have been described in detail in

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the literature on the sociology of consumption. Certain motifs are part of a collective memory and serve as such beyond short-term periods and fashions. As the Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz comments: Romantic feelings and bonds are produced and sustained by the invisible presence of a variety of leisure commodities. At the turn of the 20th century, the commodities offered by the nascent consumer market channeled and transformed the definitions of romance and love: leisure goods (as movies or restaurants) now provided symbolic outlets to channel and ritualise romantic feelings. Diffuse longing for “fun”, the desire to experiment with new forms of sexual freedom and the search of emotional intimacy were systematically invoked by the nascent leisure industry, to the point where it became difficult to disentangle the emotion of “feeling romantic” from its consumer experience. Eva Illouz, Emotions, Imagination and Consumption: A New Research Agenda (2009), 387.

The difficulties in describing this motif transfer are clear. If a motif can be described in art historical terms in its iconographic, formal, and symbolic expression, the grasping of a motif in terms of a theory of consumerism is confronted with ‘diffuse needs’ and ‘feelings’. In the following analysis of the Arcadian motif, the often very general terms of emotion are to be concretised as part of a specific spatial experience. The opening of the Arcadian narrative in its spatial dimension, the creation of a (temporary, parallel) space, develops, to put it briefly, in the following way: 1) A space for leisure 2) A space for free time 3) A space for consumption. The quality of leisure for all described historical situations needs to be questioned, not just regarding the development of the motif with the push of industrialisation in the 19th century, and grasped in terms of its accessibility, that is, its exclusivity and its target group. Like everything in Ecotopia, my room is full of contradictions. Ernst Callenbach, Ecotopia (1975)

The approach to nature can be read as a mirror image of the contemporary culture of the time. Nature becomes a large reservoir of suppressed primal fears and a compensation for a life style thought lost as the consequence of the achievements of development. In the same way, the question of nature and/or the landscape is a question of space, expansion and the elimination of borders, that can be altered and needs to be mastered and redefined by each generation anew. This is compounded by ecological and economic problems. They are the subject of convictions on resource use, processes of using organic material and the impacts of ecological changes on the life world

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and the global climate. Environmental historian Rolf Peter Sieferle studies the cultural history of nature from the perspective of its energy systems (Rückblick auf die Natur, 1997) and sees modern society as an era of transformation at the end of the development from a hunter and gather society to an agrarian society that in turn created a duality between folk culture and high culture. This term contains both the shifts within physical space in which the formal traditions of earlier decades dissolve both in the conception of the city as well as in the conception of the countryside and are replaced by provisional solutions. Early societies, pre-agrarian and agrarian, had to accept a cycle of natural energies (for example, solar energy) that they could not control. In the design of their landscapes, these societies placed their emphasis on long-term possible use. But the energy used was also subject to a transformation. With 19th century industrialisation, the affected countries began to turn to fossil energy in a massive way. Currently, we are experiencing a growing scarcity of fossil fuels and at the same time an excess of existing information that needs to be communicated, that is, transported. Sieferle described the landscape image that developed from the era of transformation as a total landscape (Die totale Landschaft [2004], 6), that in its form ‘could be understood on first glance as a lack of style’, but actually corresponds to a replacement of old, binding patterns with new, individual-transient patterns, a kind of intermediate landscape, ‘whose only permanent quality is the permanence of transformation’. There no longer is a practical necessity to create permanent landscapes as natural space or cultural space in the industrial age and the age of information. Wishes or fears triggered in people in face of an elementary conflict with their surroundings were processed and sublimated as narrations in various literary and artistic genres. The formation of complex social structures and the development of cultural techniques that developed in parallel determine the felt and real loss of nature. In the process, both a lack of individual link to nature is mourned as well as the repression of nature within the common life world. The loss of nature essentially shaped Judeo-Christian iconography in the narrative of the lost Garden of Paradise. In addition, there are secular narratives like the dream of a golden age that Ovid describes in his Metamorphoses or Thomas More’s classical Utopia. Arcadia here takes on a special role, since it is an ideal image that is neither religiously nor socially-politically motivated; it is an ideal made accessible for consumption that is also aware of its own transience. Whenever urban life fails as the example of an ideal social form, in that it tips functioning political, social, and aesthetic structures towards the manneristic and lets them decay, or winds up under pressure due to need, desolate working conditions or warfare, its inhabitants develop fantasies of flight. Until the late 19th century, developing and living out these fantasies of flight were effectively reserved for the propertied classes, the aristocracy and bourgeoisie. Then came the onset of the democratisation of education and public space. In the process a broad mass was given access to formations of these fantasies. The shift from an exclusive cultural good to current mass cultural formations of the subject of Arcadia makes it necessary to describe it

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situatively. Arcadia can be understood as a medium or even as a method, for it was constituted as a topos of literature and the fine arts using certain motifs, but contains a palpable, almost fleeting quality that defines it. This quality is the formation of a mood, a setting, an atmosphere, a feeling. The difficulty of getting a grasp of such conditions, to name them means that the adjective Arcadian is mentioned in various contexts, often in footnotes; the aim, method or strategy of this Arcadian remains diffuse. How does this medium Arcadia develop? Literary Arcadia The initial form of the engagement with the landscape Arcadia is a poetic-artistic one. The poet, later the writer or the fine artist develops a literary or painterly image of nature that serves the pleasure or amusement of an exclusive readership. Arcadia is the model of a counterworld that is intended solely the purpose of leisure and thus can be interpreted as autonomous. The narrative image of a landscape is a product of the intellectual processing of nature. It generates regimes like the Renaissance concept of various natures (first, second, third nature, where terza natura, third nature, artful nature, takes a place of privilege) or even world images (beautiful nature, good nature, benevolent nature). As a stimulus for natural moods, literary arcadia assigns landscape a function, where the human being is the point of reference. Cultural studies explore landscape in this sense as a cultural practice (what does landscape do), not the existence of landscape (what is landscape) and not the metaphors that have taken shape around landscape (what landscape means). W. J. T. Mitchell poses the question of the power relations that generate landscape and sees these in a semiotic interpretation of landscape that is the expression of a certain psychology and also ideology (Landscape and Power, 2002). He calls for traditional forms of reading to be abandoned and to understand landscape instead as medium that not just symbolises power relations but itself is an instrument of cultural power. Just like a currency that can repeatedly be adjusted, the landscape stands for a value. Mitchell calls the value of a landscape its ‘social hieroglyph’. Its conventions seem natural, just as nature becomes convention. Mitchell’s formulation of conventions is an essential component of the quality of landscape, which despite its cultural formation is assembled using components of nature; this does not mean that these components need to be natural. The elements of landscape are placed into position by people, be it by taking a special perspective to observe nature as landscape. The components, or details, of the landscape are conventional just as nature is used as a convention when we speak of naturalness or a state of nature. The term convention also refers to the interpretive authority of a society over nature; it expresses a concept of power. There are various forms in which landscape appears as an instrument of power. Clear models are imperialism and colonialism, that appropriate landscape spatially ideologically and aesthetically.

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The Utopian Dimension In the politics of landscape, the (virtually) ideal image of nature is here as a model for real society. The idealised environment is a parameter for the utopian world plan of the author. But Arcadia is not entirely interpretable as a utopian space, perhaps it is only suited, as Ernst Bloch puts it, to be a ‘soft’ form of utopia (Arkadien und Utopien, 1976). The utopian design of a landscape is directed both in its literary and its planning form at a general public and is not exclusive, as its predecessors were. The exclusive space of association that was offered by Arcadia for the protagonists of the Italian villegiatura, a complex city-landflight movement 3 in Renaissance Tuscany and the Veneto, transformed into new concepts of the 18th and 19th century, as exemplified by the garden city movement of Ebenezer Howard, who used the vocabulary of urban architectural forms in a new arrangement of rural space.

3—The architectural movement villegiatura had its origins in early Renaissance Tuscany and experienced its pinnacle in the Veneto villa, exemplified by the residences designed by Andrea Palladio in the mid-16th century. Villegiatura was also an expression of a complete re-structuring of economic conditions, as Venice was in decline as a trading power and the affluent classes were forced to adjust their orientation; it is a world view that offers a countermodel to the old city and marks a new claim to power. The villa is accordingly not a result of urban flight, but it is oriented towards the city, it emblematises the progress in the countryside in the service of the city. For the territorial lords, in contrast, what can be described as Arcadian dream, distance from the city, flight fantasies, and a supposed return to a more primeval, because not overly civilised life, is rather a practical necessity, since the new capitalist order and its focus on agricultural production force them to spend more of their lives in the countryside.

The Arcadian Template The originally literary core of Arcadia is replaced in the 20th century by new narrative mechanisms that can be generated by photography and film or the digital media. An expanded dimension of the staging of Arcadia is already present in garden landscaping, since at issue here is material space. In contrast to historical examples of garden landscaping, for whose legibility knowledge of a literary Arcadia or literary history is a general requirement, modern stagings of Arcadia are based on other patterns of experience. They are part of a mass culture; the essentially idealistic image of the landscape is embedded in a consumerist, market-oriented system. The need for counterworlds is clearly assigned a purpose, imaginative moments should steer the beholder, or more precisely the consumer, in his or her leisure or consumer behavior. The long nourished claim to autonomy in light of the aesthetic beholding of nature tips, for it fulfills a purpose in the consumerist system. The motif of transience, an integrative component of the Arcadian motif and a stubborn antagonism to a religious reading of idyllic depiction of nature, presents itself in relationship to the mechanism of the market in a strange ambivalence. There is just one moon and one golden sun And a smile means friendship to everyone Though the mountains divide And the oceans are wide It’s a small world after all Sherman Brothers, It’s A Small World (1963)

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The Consumerist Landscape Arcadia What forms of expression does this structure Arcadia—or the Arcadian— take on today and in what contemporary fields does it present itself? A look back: the image of Arcadia is assembled of various individual motifs, that all reflect a direct or iconological significance. This treasure trove of motifs is at first not visual, but literary. Arcadia is a topos of ancient poetry that increasingly changed into a type of various visual and spatial experiences. The phenomenon of Arcadia is a synesthetic experience, an ensemble of various genres and media, the ideal synthesis of text, image, and space. Arcadia is located in an imaginary past, a schematic Mediterranean space decorated with pseudo-classical or Italianate elements. As a space, it is in a certain sense autonomous, a site of contemplation and the opportunity for unconditional leisure, and yet all these spatial qualities should be questioned in attempting to historically survey the Arcadian template. This stage of an imaginary past offers a great deal without committing to the (moral) regulative of utopia: Arcadia thus has a certain utopian potential, but its longing and nostalgic impetus lacks the total space-timelessness of classical Utopia. It is only this spatial distantiation ‘that liberates the utopian space’ and thus generates the possibility of ‘transforming individual and social relationship freely from all traditions from the ground up and to recast them only committed to reason’ (Richard Saage, Politische Utopien der Neuzeit [1991], 73). But a restructuring of relations is not an Arcadian program, at issue here is breaking out of reality. This act of flight does not lead to the desire to transform one’s own life reality over the long term. Arcadia instead is a temporary time out, and takes place not only in virtual, but also in physical space, it materialises. Its vocabulary of forms refers to historical and/or virtual space, virtual in the sense that at issue are spaces of literature or other ideational constructs, and yet it is never a non-place (οὐτοπία, Greek ou-topos). But Arcadia can manifest itself within a non-place in Augé’s sense, just as a heterotopian space can manifest itself in the sense of a utopia realised in fragments. Is there an ideal Arcadian setting, or did the ideal Arcadian setting ever exist in its historical implementations? A functioning Arcadia outside the literary or artistic sphere, but where they continue to have an influence on scenic implementations, an Arcadia right next door? An Arcadia next door that lies parallel to all historicity is always unattainable, but also always present. The compound of the essential elements, contemplation, which allows for the possibility of leisure, and vanitas, which underscores the instantaneousness of the beautiful moment or the beautiful time span, would point towards a functioning Arcadia. Leisure is, for historical moments as for today, at least possible: free from economic pressure, it can be created for partial social groups. Whether it is also free of representative constraints like the moral code, as described by Thorstein Veblen in his Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), needs to be questioned. As a counter model to modern, highly structured leisure, leisure that requires nothing at all is for Habermas even a perspective for the future of non-work-time (Soziologische Notizen zum Verhältnis von Arbeit und Freizeit, 1958).

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The expression or the experience of vanitas, in contrast, is manifest at first in the use of vanitas motifs, but more difficult to grasp as an emotional state. In the concluding chapter, I will refer to this by way of new formats of transience. In the contemporary environment, the use of the classical Arcadian motif, that is, the motif combination to emblematise an idealised nature, is not identical with the expression of an authentic feeling of Arcadia built on this combination. The discrepancy between the formal motif and the idealised notion that such a motif can trigger leads to the stereotyping of the Arcadian. These visual simulacra, as can be found in sites of the leisure industry, are referred to in the following as Arcadian templates. The Arcadian template includes the use of artificial brooks, water elements, springs, fountains, and other decorativ e water elements, trees and artificial trees, flower arrangements and artificial turf, acoustic stimuli reproduced on speakers that simulate the outer world (nature), artificial rock groups, Italianate decor like column fragments, but also the ornamental use of historical systematics of location like the Italian piazza, arcades, petting zoos, fruit juice oases, and much more. Conversely, a scene that is not typically Arcadian in terms of its composition, the assembly of individual style-forming motifs, can be saturated with the Arcadian ideal; in the following this will be described as the Arcadian trace. The emphasis here is placed on the contemplative effect, being sunk in nature, being immersed or feeling secure in nature. Here, there is a broad spectrum between natural experience in various levels of intensity, all the way to the natural product: the consumption of organic foods, contact with nature in national parks, forest preserves, and the like, but also vacation on the farm, gardens, and everything that can find interest and pleasure in the conception of second nature. A mixed form of Arcadian templates and traces is possible and forms variously extensive intersections. Fundamentally, templates as well as traces are used according to their marketability. Herein lies the significant difference to historical conceptions of the Arcadian that were not designed along a strategy of profit making. The use of the Arcadian as a space for or product of a free economy makes access to it virtually more egalitarian; not exclusively available only to certain groups of the population. And yet a new limitation crystallises here in terms of access to the Arcadian: the target group to which the one or the other contemporary representation of Arcadia is directed. Of course, the criterion of social position will have an influence on this target group formation, since different groups have different budgets for product and leisure time consumption. But these groupings are flexible and more permeable than the historical models. There is a parallelism of highquality product forms. Experience as a product is just as included as sties of experience that possess a higher degree of exclusively, and simple product forms that target a higher distribution. Perhaps it does still exist, the idyll of elites as manifested in contemporary architecture and industrial design, in select concepts of tourism and living (gated communities) and the idyll of the masses, which can accurately be described with the term Disneyesque. This does not

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result necessarily in a problematisation of these mechanisms of making value with the Arcadian. It is the specific aspect of the Arcadian, that is, its distance from political discourse or to religious compulsion that makes it an optimal product of the leisure industry. For it communicates— not immediately perceptible to the consumer—the atmosphere of something old and European, but nevertheless is a much more general life model than would be considered objectionable in a globalised market economy for non-European regions as strange or objectionable in terms of content (the sexual connotation that has developed and once again degenerated, should be left out here). It is a comfortable site of longing that requires no political reorientation or religious approach. This returns us to the origin of Arcadia in the literary field: the development of the Arcadian idea that was always linked to a narrative element and never was a pure landscape of its own accord. Narration, in the historical context, the poem, and the text that today can be replaced by other narrative media like television or film—is what creates the atmospheric density of the motif. This atmosphere is shaped by the absence of pain, a sense of being embedded in nature, and a reduction of complexity. The latter presents itself as the simple life, a life that is not burdened by work or the need to erect and maintain structures, a living for the day. In narrative as in film, this atmospheric moment can be described as a happy end. The culmination of these two concepts, beautiful (good) nature and the happy ending, to a happy end nature will conclude these considerations and the function of the Arcadian again from the perspective of its narrative qualities. For, as German advertising researcher Guido Zurstiege points out, ‘Making geography,’… the expansion of the horizon of possibility, the production of space for the purposes of its consumption takes place with the help of technologies of symbolic manipulation in our zones of consumption and entertainment today. Guido Zurstiege, Über den Funktionswandel von Räumlichkeit im Zeitalter des Konsumismus (2008), 199.

‘Making geography’, creating worlds, the construction of spaces of longing: these processes are directed by certain spaces and objects that are represented as part of a collective memory of the knowledge of their original narration, be it in literary or in artistic means. Undoubtedly, these narrations often use an image of nature as a stand in for an image of society. Images of landscape and nature are supports for moods and allow positive feelings to emerge. Voltaire lets his antihero Candide, returned from his trip in search of the ‘best of all possible worlds’, end his journey simply with the words, ‘Well said’, Candide responded, ‘All we have to do is let our garden grow.’

Ways, Styles, Spaces

Arcadian Motifs Today For discovering and sketching Arcadian motifs in the contemporary world, a method has to be found, like textual analysis in the literary field or visual analysis in an art historical context, that is able to grasp the ensemble as well as its details. If an entire spatial arrangement is addressed, with the help of sociological spatial models a concept of the Arcadian can be depicted today. But the placement of individual spatial elements, be they human beings, goods, or ideas, can be also be captured in terms of a sociology of space. Martina Löw describes this attempt at structuration as spacing; the worlds of imagination, the perception of these elements or processes of memory, that they trigger, synthesise this spatial structure, they become a spatial ensemble (Raumsoziologie [2001]). Löw’s spatial configuration makes it possible to find a descriptive form to capture Arcadian motifs, or the Arcadian motif. The process of spacing is conceivable as an expanded form of visual description that includes the motif, the ensemble, and the interaction of beholders or consumers. Various actions, beholding, strolling, consuming, enjoying, and much more, trigger processes of placing, or vice-versa, are triggered by them. Arrangements in space are always relational, space is not constituted solely by materialisations in and of space or conceptual linkages of space (memories, symbolic markings), but ‘space emerges from placement in relationship to other placements’ (Raumsoziologie, 225). For the analysis of contemporary Arcadian space, this entails the dissolution of the traditional genre of the image, historical spatial strategies and landscape concepts and the reconfiguration of individual elements, figures, narrative strategies, and memories. Using these rearranged individual components, we can assemble a contemporary locus amoenus, an idea of contemplation that fits the age and a modern staging of Arcadia. A readjustment of the motif applies also to the nonmaterial motif building blocks, that are expressed as atmosphere or mood, for the functions of leisure, momentariness, or the elegiac appear differently, they aren’t applied in the same way as in the traditional concept of Arcadia. The notion of the momentary is given a very new and different meaning in the context of a capitalist system of value creation or in the realm that can be called the culture industry. But the idea of the painterly or the picturesque, which also corresponds to the Arcadian, as a section of landscape, changes with the devices used to assist vision, that allow this section to be viewed and recognised. The optical devices for viewing nature have also continued to develop, just as artistic possibilities of expression and the successive implementation of new media changes the framing of the sections of the image, allowing them to emerge or be reproduced in a certain way. Cinema and television not only have a decisive effect on new idylls, for this genre changes not just its mediators, but a new spatial embedding of these idylls. The transition of Arcadia to the present not only happens in a temporal sense, but even more in a geographical sense: new stages for the Arcadian emerge especially in the opening of consumer zones like the suburban mall and the amusement parks that surfaced at the same

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time; both are prototypes of American leisure culture. While European ideational worlds were also imported as part of these models of leisure culture, at the same time a typology emerges that by using copy and paste repeats and imitates historical European and international elements by way of its own modern and anonymising structure. This process of translation is shown in the landscape, that in America is strikingly marked by forward movement, that is, as a backdrop of an acceleration, as represented in road movies, and less as a showplace for images before which the beholder rests. Landscape seems to be less a cultural product and more a setting for a lifestyle. As Baudrillard writes in his text America (1987): ‘The freeways, the Safeways, the skylines, speed, and deserts—these are America, not the galleries, churches, and culture.’ Indeed, the highway and the desert are virtually formative for an idea of the American landscape of the 20th century until today. For these leisure sites can only be reached by car, be they ‘natural’ national parks or artificial amusement parks, and with Las Vegas emblematises the modern oasis in the desert is achieved (as Las Vegas also serves as carte blanche for landscape designs of all kinds and all reference systems). As part of the Americanisation of landscape, landscape serves as a consumer item corresponding to Sieferle’s total landscape, the total accessibility of a globalised landscape image. This total landscape is the natural pendant to Augé’s non-places, a place that can summoned and recalled over and over and found in all Western or Westernised countries. And Arcadia is just next door. As a horizon for longing, it is not the promise of a better future, but the expansion of a (beautiful) moment; a moment of pleasure. This moves Arcadia in the immediate proximity of reality, constitutes ‘Arcadia’s charm, its palpable proximity; this creates the tempting impression of the repeatable and reproducible’ (Klaus Luttringer, Weit, weit… Arkadien [2000], 69) as Dan Graham so fittingly captures in his Corporate Arcadias (1987).

Atrium, Eden

Corporate Arcadias At the end of the 1980s, Dan Graham and Robin Hurst published an article in the American art journal Artforum on the design of urban and suburban green spaces that they called ‘corporate arcadias’, using the term for the first time. The authors use this new term to combine the aspect of landscape (and subsequently nature and naturalness) with aspects of urban life (wage labour and leisure, public life and privacy). They use the motif Arcadia to reveal the contemporary aspects of dialectics of nature and culture. The term corporate is used in the sense of corporate identity whereby Graham and Hurst include both the identity of a specific company as well as the identity of a city as such. The city is a field of tension between the natural and culturally created; corporate Arcadias in Graham’s and Hurst’s sense are the

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incorporation of this field of tension and the expression of a typical narrative like that of the utopian, the Edenic, and indeed the Arcadian. It is only the abandonment of rural life in favor of increasing urbanisation that allows people an aesthetic view of nature. The distance from the country as a habitat enabled the aesthetic view of nature within the habitat of the city. The opposition of city and country thus constitutes aesthetic natural experience and hence our very notion of landscape. Not just a change in location or lifestyle would lead to a new understanding of nature; a key factor of nature must have changed in relation to life reality: the perception of nature as threatening. The historical perspective, climaxing in the age of European, but above all English and German Romanticism, looks upon wild nature and the aestheticisation of its horrors. Beside this historical development of the view of nature, there is a second aspect that comes to bear that shapes the image of nature: its idealisation. People’s ideals and notions shape and form the aesthetic image of landscape decisively. The idealisation of landscape is linked to the transposition of certain narrations to a landscape. This conglomerate corresponds to an Arcadian type of landscape that Graham and Hurst used as the starting point for their markings of nature in urban space. The link of the landscape to image or text is used to distill the term of the painterly landscape that essentially shapes the English landscape garden (keyword: picturesque), but also found use in antiquity. The idealisation of nature is also the view of privileged social groups from the urban bourgeoisie and aristocracy. They are the ones who travel across the country or have their country homes decorated and enjoy aesthetic sensations while travelling and residing. There are also certain landscape qualities that can be considered ideal-typical, especially those that the painters of the period take up, consider Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin, and after which high society went in search on their travels to Italy.4 But landscape is also generated in urban space, if in some cases only in a model way. Graham and Hurst describe the model of the primitive hut of Abbé Laugier, a French Jesuit and architectural theorist and historian of the 18th century as an example for the dialectic of the urban that could be traced back to the time of the early Enlightenment. Increasing industrialisation during the 19th century created new zones in and around the urban space, suburbs and working class neighborhoods and city gardens. Both can be seen as symptoms of the social transformation to an industrial culture. The new gardens in the words of Geza Hajos are ‘pleasure sites for the urban population that were pushed by industrialisation away from direct natural experiences’ (Illusion und Landschaft: Gärten und Parks im Wettstreit zwischen Natur und Kunst [2003], 39). This trend finds 4—Travels through Italy came into expression in the type of the urban garden, fashion in the 17th century, when which is more a replacement landscape than an the first Italian travelogues were aesthetic elevation of a real existing landscape. published, the most famous German The first city parks in Europe were created in example being Goethe’s reports of his travels to Italy from 1786 to 1788. mid-19th century Paris at the initiative of Baron

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5—Georges-Eugène Baron Haussmann.5 The new boulevards brought Haussmann (1809–1891) was a prefect not only light and air to the ever more densely populated urban areas, this new transparency in and urban planner in Paris. His planning shaped the city of Paris from urban space also served to control the masses. the mid-19th century to today. The boulevards enabled quick communication between municipal authorities and guaranteed unlimited access to the city. Landscape becomes a medium for ideas of a social utopia, the expression of a new social order. The English garden city movement sought new solutions for problems similar to those in Paris. The high concentration of the population in the rapidly growing suburbs made them sources of civil unrest. The new idea was to house families of the working class in their own home, if possible in rural surroundings, and in this way to stabilise this part of the population. At the same time, borrowing from the artificial distortion of nature, as representatives they saw themselves in the tradition of the landscape garden. A similar reform movement took shape around the turn of the century in Germany, both English and the German currents were pioneers of the Arts and Crafts movement in England and Jugendstil in the German-speaking world. During the 19th century, the first arcades emerged, new interior spaces in the urban exterior. These new landscapes for the first time served a purpose that was clearly economically articulated, the presentation and sale of goods. This introduced a new social type, the modern consumer. The consumer uses nature as a comfortable environment for acquiring commodities. In this way, the aspect of landscape shifts from the earlier form of appropriating an ideal landscape as an aesthetic experience and sensation to the appropriation of a product staged with the help of nature. The new arcades promise what up until then did not seem possible: the fulfillment of the longings that humanity projects onto nature by the actual appropriation of a commodity. Graham and Hurst paraphrase the striking passage in Benjamin’s Arcades Project, in which he writes about the residues of a dream world that the arcades and winter gardens represent: ‘Residues of a dream world [in which] the collective consciousness sinks into ever deeper sleep… The city is now a landscape, now a room’ (Corporate Arcadias, 68). With the acquisition of the commodity, the customer is in possession of a piece of this dream world, part of this phantasmagoria of the 19th century, as Benjamin would put it. These new landscapes are landscapes of flight. During the 19th century, no longer is the recognition of aesthetic qualities of nature a reason to approach nature, but instead nature balances out lack through replacement, a compensation for modern life reality.

In their crystal palaces, these often included a conservatory, in which plants were displayed in a protected environment that enabled them to survive throughout the year. Remaining after

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the expositions ended, this winter garden became a place in which to take temporary refuge from everyday life, a ‘natural’ place effecting a symbolic escape from existing urban society. Dan Graham & Robin Hurst, Corporate Arcadias (1987), 69

Graham and Hurst place the glass architectures from the 19th century to the turn of the century in a direct relationship to subsequent developments or urban greenery as it emerged in various domestic spaces. At the start of the 20th century, a new kind of office building emerged in the U.S. based on the architectures of well-known arcades and exhibition spaces. They are office buildings with covered atrium and large-surface glass facades that continue the idea of urban greenery, now found in the protection of a building and yet still visible for the public. Graham and Hurst see Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin Building (built from 1904–1906 in Buffalo) as an example for this new construction type. After the Second World War, a transformation took place that decisively changed the American cityscape. By way of the rapid growth of the automobile industry and the motorisation linked to this growth, the middle class became more mobile and more autonomous. It was now possible for companies to act in a more decentralised and dispersed fashion. The workplace and sites of recreation moved with the middle class. Two new architectures of leisure undergo rapid growth: the drive-in cinema and the shopping mall. These new regional shopping malls emerged using motifs similar to the European models from the 19th century. An increasing decline in urban surroundings noted first of all in areas of ecology and security forced retailers to find a solution that would guarantee customers a comfortable and secure shopping atmosphere. Mall maker 6 Victor Gruen, urban planner and architect of the postwar period, described the new planning concept in retrospect in his manifesto Das Überleben der Städte ([1973], 10), that ‘goes far beyond the creation of mere sales machine, that it could serve the need for urban points of crystallisation and thus provide the residents of the suburbs with significant possibilities for urban experience’. This concept later became the valid standard around the world. Gruen sees the creation of artificial worlds of shopping as a real ecological chance for maintaining the environment. In key phrases like ‘back to nature’ or ‘back to the country’, he recognises the downside of a movement of flight that would mean ‘that the last remains of nature and landscape would be wiped out’. Gruen understands the role of retail as one that always made ‘significant contributions to environmental planning’ (Das Überleben der Städte, 29). Retailers as mediators between industry and the individual needs of customers have to create an atmosphere that presents goods in an attractive way (given that a surplus of commodities exists). If retail can no longer operate in the public environment because it has become 6—Jeffrey M. Hardwick used this term antagonistic, it needs to create an alternative as the title of his publication on Gruen: environment with the help of architects and Mall Maker: Victor Gruen, Architect of an American Dream (2004). urban planners. Even before the big boost

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of motorisation in the postwar years, there were regional shopping centres in the U.S. planned as centres for new residential areas. These early prototypes were already multifunctional and occupied by small regional retail; large department store chains had not yet moved into the mall, but were still located in the city centre, so-called ‘miracle’ or ‘magnificent miles’. The idea was instead to create a village-like atmosphere, which perhaps also explains why the complexes sought to aspire to a ‘European, specifically Mediterranean character’, importing primarily Italian stylistic devices, various construction elements, ornaments and sculptures. The desired village structure was massively expanded as of the 1950s, according to Gruen allowing a new, important form of architecture in the sales zones dominated by the car around major American cities, planned and built by a single owner. The extension of the consumption and leisure industry over everlarger surface areas becomes clear using the example of the adventure world Disneyland. The original Disneyland opened in 1955 and became the base of a corporate ideology. Disneyland Park, planned by Walt Disney in 1953 and later realised in Anaheim, California, is in a certain sense the materialisation of Disney’s film work. His claim was always to design the park as realistically as possible, his reality become fantasy model based on the idea that the ideal landscape must include both fantastic and realistic elements. Disneyland Park is the imaginary flight of its inventor from the supposedly degenerate urbanity of the early 20th century to a nostalgic world with fictional elements. This realistic implementation of the filmic work was formulated by Disney in a series of designer principles that were intended to transfer the filmic and cinematographic techniques to concrete architecture. The visitors should experience the entry into Disneyland like the immersion in a film. Walt Disney explained this moment in 1953 in his written instructions: ‘like Alice stepping through the Looking Glass, to step through the portals of Disneyland will be entering another world’ (Chuihua Judy Chung, Disney Space [2001], 27). But in the 1950s, Disneyland not only shows things fantastic, it also could not resist the American myth of progress: one of the major attractions at the time was called Carousel of Progress. This carousel is a moving theater in which the ideas of better living and technological progress in the realm of consumption were presented. Individual scenes (like a middle-class kitchen) were enacted by robots in human form that sang along with the audience: ‘It’s a great big beautiful tomorrow, shining at the end of every day. Man has a dream and the dream can come true’ (Corporate Arcadias, 70). Urban space also continued to change: in the 1960s, high rises begin to dominate the American urban landscape. Their large-surface glass facades are on the one hand an opening towards the outer world, the landscape, an effect that is underscored by the mirroring of the sky on their surface. On the other hand, passersby are given views inside. He is to be the observer of the lively activity, and above all monitor that in fact work is taking place. This new layer of surveillance by outsiders does not apply to the higher employees, who themselves sit on the upper and top floors and are thus not visible to the public, but for the lower floors:

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And while the lobbies of these towers open to the public, they are not public space; they are designed as passages for those ascending to the higher floors. Dan Graham & Robin Hurst, Corporate Arcadias (1987), 70

At the end of the 1960s, with the continuation of the Vietnam War, a collapse of urban areas in the North East and Midwest of the country took place. Many companies left the cities and moved their offices or working spaces to the suburbs, where they were now closer to their employees. But it was not just the departure of the companies that changed the image of the city. The companies that remained no longer created modernist high-rises of glass and steel, but the new buildings were now similar to medieval castles. Closed fortresses that instead of offering views inside were now designed to offer protection from their surroundings. The longing for zones of protection in the cities grew enormously. This resulted in a new concentration of pedestrian traffic to inner courtyards, where services and retail is now found. The atrium becomes once again an integrative part of urban architecture: it opens the cities anew, but also offers a protected space. A striking example of this is the Ford Foundation Building, built by the architects Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo in 1968. This new atrium corresponds in its idea to a closed plaza (piazza) that in turn recalls the medieval city. The plaza is linked a nostalgic dream that despite its display of openness resists modernism and its sterile plans. At the time, the late 1960s, urban planners saw great potential in the protected pedestrian zones of atria like this one for visitors, in this way new comforts and leisure offerings were created in the city centre, providing profitable business space for retailers. The atria thus took on many functions of the classical park, but were at the same time always monitored, under surveillance, never left to their occupants alone: Graham and Hurst call them ‘corporatised public spaces’. The increasing difference between a heavy outer shell and an idyllic interior is well represented by Atlanta’s Peachtree Center Plaza Hotel, planned and built by John Portman. The atrium of the hotel is located inside a cylindrical, glass tower. This building places a new inner space in the city, that seems like a tropical resort, but from the outside appears quite massive and inaccessible. In this atrium, Portman takes the conventional urban greenery to a new level, creating a dream-landscape that works atmospherically on the visitors and gives the impression of walking onto a film set. This corresponds until now to the corporate worlds like Disneyland, but not urban islands of leisure. Portman’s Hotels have developed a pattern of combining the dream world of the amusement park with the recreational arcadia of the picturesque park of the city. Landscaping techniques are brought indoors to create the dreamlike mood of a film set. Corporate Arcadias, Dan Graham & Robin Hurst (1987), 70

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Graham and Hurst refer explicitly to the means of landscape architecture that were now used in urban space for designing certain atmospheres and moods. Comparing this kind of landscape architecture with a film set seems like a virtually compelling conclusion. In their essay, Graham and Hurst quote Portman himself, who in this context emphasised the light mood of the building using plants: the shadows that result from hanging plants on the ground remind the visitor of untouched forest ground. Many of these atria developed into a parallel form of the suburban mall. In the late 1970s and 1980s, the middle classes began coming back to the cities from the suburbs; the atria in the cities consequently adopted the suburban model. Now there are buildings that are simultaneously office or residential, public park space and mall, as shown by the regional, multifunctional centre. The new atria bring the worlds of experience from the suburbs directly to the cities, suggesting at the same time a sense of security in unprotected urban space and making it possible for residents to flee the city: ‘These atriums suggest a suburban arcadia in the midst of the city (no need to commute), an urban fantasy of the picturesque brought into city central’ (Corporate Arcadias, 71). The connotation of the garden as an idealised landscape and the return to a pre-urban state (Eden) contradicts the real situation of the natural surroundings, which are shaped by increasing decay. At the same time with the reawakening of a longing for paradise planners also take up the idea of technological progress as human progress that is also expressed by this architecture of experience. Graham and Hurst see here a possible link to the social-utopian concepts from the 19th century, like those of Charles Fourier or Robert Owen whose communes left the urban space for the country.

Setting, Aura

At the start of the 21st century, the developments described have become a worldwide standard in urban areas. More recent corporate Arcadias, however, are no longer necessarily bound to a landscape ideal; the use of linguistic means also feeds the fantasies of the observer or the consumer. Language as a link between an ideal landscape and its real incarnation is essentially an Arcadian moment. The mediation of texts (narratives) supports the visual impression given to the visitor. Already in Disney’s conception, the narrow linkage of cartoon films to Disneyland’s architecture is clear: the architecture emulates narrative sequences. This approach can also be found in Portman’s creations, even if not referring to a concrete model, but in capturing a setting in itself. The setting is initially focused on the presentation of products. These products are coded in and through the spheres of the department store with various categories of experience: their functional use, their material value, their use, for example when it comes to food, drink, or tobacco. But symbolic categorisations fall into this coding as well. Then

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the product represents a lifestyle, a life feeling, affluence or belonging to particular social groups. Consumer goods serve as a bridge between traditional ideals and hopes to a material form of their expression, as Grant McCracken describes the consumer good’s form of meaning. The consumer good is used to maintain and repeatedly renew ideals, while at the same time increasing the appetite of the consumer that never arrives at full satisfaction. McCracken refers to this significant function of the consumer good in Culture and Consumption (1990) as ‘displaced meaning’, a displacement by which a topos in intellectual history or a cultural meaning is displaced to the sphere of consumption. Cultural significance is also offered by the shopping trip for basic food and supplies, but in narrative shopping surroundings is increasingly replaced by shopping for the sake of the experience. Shopping becomes a symbolic act, through which not only the commodity itself, but also its auratic admixture is acquired. The mall serves then as an at least temporary offer of identification that is faced with the difficulty of enabling identification against the backdrop of a limitless freedom of commodities and choices. Thus the customer finds him or herself confronted with a surplus of commodities that communicate a sense of variety and luxury. At the same time, it is in the interest of the individual mall retailers to lead the shopper in a directed way through the world of commodities, to keep him from reacting with confusion. It is hence necessary to create idealised commodity settings, based on narrative elements that structure the shopping experience, with a simultaneous reduction of complexity. This means that these settings need to be quickly grasped by the potential customer. A reduction of complexity is also a key function of displaced meaning, that uses the factor of the commodity as a solution strategy for the discrepancy between real and ideal social life, in that the commodity forms a kind of simulacrum for an ideal state, variably definable depending on the case. The displaced meaning strategy however not only serves as a protective umbrella for ideal images, for which McCracken calls the Golden Age exemplary, a ‘location for displaced meaning’. It transfers these ideal images to ‘practicable realities’ (Culture and Consumption, 106) that are not limited to the Western sphere of consumption. The Golden Age as a ‘location for displaced meaning’ implies trust in a perfect past, a ‘cultural classicism’ that can be found not only in Western society, but also in traditions of the Orient. Consumer goods are bridge builders not only as of their actual acquisition, but for the potential user as well. Goods serve as bridges when they are not yet owned but merely coveted. Well before purchase an object can serve to connect the would-be owner with displaced meaning. The individual anticipates the possession of the good and, with this good, the possession of certain ideal circumstances that exist only in a distant location. Grant McCracken, Culture and Consumption (1990), 110

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7—Project on the City 2 was part of McCracken’s note on the ‘distant a research project under the direction location’ also expresses a distance between of Rem Koolhaas, see Rem Koolhaas, space and time that refers to the utopian et al., The Harvard Design School content of the displaced meaning strategy. The Guide to Shopping (2001). Arcadian potential that is both reflected in the emotional state of the (potential) consumer—McCracken emphasises the act of contemplation—as in the idealised life plan that is created by way of commodity presentation parallel to the actual life reality of the consumer. The consumer good is a stand-in for a lifestyle, for the emotional constitution of ‘would-be owners’. The time span before the purchase is decisive, for it is during this phase that the purchaser thinks through the lifestyle linked to the commodity in question. McCracken also distinguishes between goods that are ‘futureoriented’, when a future lifestyle can be recognised in the product itself that can become reality with the help of the product, or ‘past-oriented’, when the consumer object represents a past beautiful or better time. Here, a compatibility with the Arcadian topos can be recognised that exists as a moment oscillating between the irrevocable past of a golden age and a lasting presence that lies parallel to reality. Inherent here are not just the nostalgic components, but also future life models, including the realisation that they are temporally limited. The bridge function of the consumer good, as McCracken describes it, allows the individual and the group to gain or regain access, albeit limited, to intellectual historical meanings. Through the consumer good, a link to (moral, social, political) ideas opens that denies or excludes actual life surroundings, physical life reality. It allows the appropriation of ideal values by way of a material process of appropriation. The design of spaces in which goods are presented as commodities follows their ideational appropriation. The presentation demands attention, not just the sale itself. The consumption of commodities expands to the consumption of the space itself in which the goods are stylised, and so these atmospheres and landscapes, their sites, paths, escalators, atria, and displays move into focus. There is a mutual interaction between consumption and space that has essentially changed since the second half the 20th century. Sites of trade, market places, and retail, until now divided into iconographically occupied professional groups, have changed to sites of experience that follow the same norms and structures in various locations. At the same time, traditionally narratively occupied anthropological sites have become sites of experience that follow these norms.

Mall = City City = Mall Rem Koolhaas, Project on the City 2 (2001), 135

Rem Koolhaas comments in his research project Project on the City 2 7 on the total consumer landscape by saying that ‘Everything is shopping’

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or ‘The mall is the city’ and ‘The city is the mall’. The result is an understanding of all cultural sites, whether they originally belonged to trade, communication, or the cultic, as zones of consumerism. A decisive aspect here is the separation of leisure from free-time and pleasure; it is this worth asking whether the historical site of leisure, which was definitively a site of exclusivity, can also be interpreted as a space of consumption or whether leisure can be distinguished from the current concept of consumption. The action of shopping and the mall as a scene for activity can be set in correlation to one another: shopping is the relationship of a consumer on the one hand to a commodity, on the other hand to a promise that has an ideational character and is transported via the medium of the commodity. By ‘wanting to have’ and through the appropriation of a consumer good, the relationship to ideational goods is opened, the space of consumption then reflects the utopian potential of the market or, more aptly, a formation of the Foucauldian heterotopia. In addition, this design of spaces of consumption already relies on utopian, mythical, and generally narrative symbols that are used as settings and templates in various thematic architectures. Each of these aspects can be derived historically: the thematically designed space, whether an interior or a landscape, the narrative expression of architecture, utopian islands, or heterotopias within planning or urban planning conceptions. Their inter-articulation within the consumer space lends these aspects another dimension: the free-market orientation of all individual parts of the structure and thus their calculability. Motifs of fantasies of flight, landscapes of longing and atmosphere, transform into triggers that evoke certain associations among consumers and make them economically usable, culminating in a purchasing decision. Shopping, a term that can be used to include all shopping activities or possible shopping activities that go beyond the purpose of basic provision, but rather serve the purpose of world appropriation (the appropriation of material, ideational, and imaginary worlds), can still take place in exclusive locations, but at least in principle is accessible to all consumers. Pleasure in the pure viewing of commodities instead of their acquisition is even an integral component of shopping and is reflected in concepts like window-shopping. Due to the various world offers that are presented by consumer architecture, shopping can be divided into several different categories of experience. This categorisation leads from the macrocosm of sociological spatial categories like non-places or counter-spaces to a microcosm of consumer sociological spatial typologies. The space of consumption has to bring together thematic and motivic concepts to form an attraction that becomes an experience for the consumer, ‘shoppertainment’: a neologism that borrows from the common terms infotainment or edutainment. Shoppertainment makes possible the link of physical experience and imaginative world experience: creating this link is the goal of conceptualising retail environments, as described in an essay by Robert V. Kozinets and his colleagues (Themed Flagship Brand Stores in the New Millenium, 2008). In creating retail spaces, planning is oriented around an axis that seems to mark the conflict

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between nature and culture. The link between narratives about nature with narratives of traditional market surroundings seems essential for the spatial atmosphere. The typologisation of retail options stretches in the diagram (see below) horizontally between the poles natural and cultural, and vertically between ethereal (ideational, not material, etc.) and physical (the world of things, the palpable). Ethereal Mindscape Cyberscape Nature Landscape Marketscape

Culture

Physical Robert V. Kozinets’ Typologisation of Service Themes

Linked to this, individual scapes stand for certain implementations in the realm of retail. Types of retail themes Associations Nature, Earth, animals, physical Landscape body, simulation of an outdoor environment Marketscape Associations and images of different cultures, manmade places, and buildings (Las Vegas: The Venetian, Paris Las Vegas, etc.) Draws on abstract ideas and concepts, Mindscape introspection and fantasy, often spirtual or ritualistic in their inclination. Examples include spas and health treatments. Cyberscape Associations relating to a virtual community, in the retail realm for example the platform eBay, the virtual marketplace Scapes according to Robert V. Kozinets et al. (Themed Flagship Brand Stores, 19)

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These scapes can also form combinations when they are embedded as an ensemble of several figures in a larger mall context (the authors speak explicitly of ‘brandscapes’, implementations of a single brand as shop, store, or world.) An additional attempt at typologisation is the concept of mythotypes according to Robert Olson, also presented in Kozinets’ essay. Mythotypes form a kind of icon of expressive forms of narratives or narrative structures. Olson describes the mythotype as ‘a symbol that (1) is locally significant for a certain audience and (2) expresses a universal emotional state of combination of states’. Pleasant or sublime emotional conditions are the effect that contact triggers among the consumers with individual mythotypes, for example, ‘awe, wonder, purpose, joy, and participation’ (quoted in Kozinets et al., Themed Flagship Brand Stores, 20). This linkage between icon and emotion makes it possible to symbolically charge the sales space, the retail area (store) as well as the entire retail surroundings (mall). Furthermore, Olson names ten characteristics that describe successful mythotypes. These characteristics correspond to the following narrative qualities: ‘a narrative that provides a lack Openendedness of closure, thereby inviting further consumer development and interpretation’ Verisimilitude ‘a narrative with a sense of natruralness and trueness’ ‘a narrative involving technological Virtuality sopshistication and the potential for electronic mediation’ Negentropy ‘a narrative that has the ability to order and direct consciousness’ ‘a narrative that demonstrates the Circularity return to a starting point’ ‘a narrative that omits some detail, Ellipticality thereby providing mystery’ archetypically ‘a narrative containing Dramatis Personae charcters that manifest universal emotions and states’ ‘a narrative providing the feeling that Inclusion the consumer is included in it and its values’ ‘a pervasive or widely distributed Omnipresence narrative’ Production values ‘a narrative containing grand style, bombast, or spectacle’ The concept of mythotypes according to Robert Olson, cited in Kozinets et al., Themed Flagship Brand Stores, 20.

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The short-circuiting of the conception of scapes and the concept of mythotypes makes clear that the fissure between nature and culture, as it reflects over and over the social power structure, the accessibility or the exclusivity of both positions, also finds its expression in apparently democratised space of consumption. Olson’s assemblage of the qualities that mythotypes need to provide overlaps with the traditional, representative functions of landscape or nature: their verisimilitude, their authenticity, their unfalsified nature, but also the communication of notions of value, landscape as a mirror of culture as well as the open, as a possibility of our own exploration and experience, the secretive, archetypical narratives, the lost paradise, the Golden Age. Here, the scape concept refers to the correlation between landscape and economy, landscape and marketscape, whereby the concept of the marketscape is also loaded with meaning as the concept of landscape itself. Marketscape refers both to the abstract economic space, the market economy, as well as to the consumer landscape that is built as a materialisation of advertising messages and lifestyles. The two conceptual poles, physical and ethereal, form a bracket. They stand for the material implementation of certain images that function within the marketscape and their ideational charge. One of these images is that of Arcadia, as it has formed as a compositional category in many spaces of consumption, or rather the spatial ensemble of Arcadia, in which the human being, the consumer is included in the sense of Löw’s theory of spacing. Several of the Arcadian motifs were already linked in the prior chapter to corporate Arcadias, especially the plazas, which represent a development from the suburban mall, but also an antipode to the standard mall concept. The subtext of Graham and Hurst’s corporate Arcadias is certainly the approach to American society with the factors of insecurity that its modern lifestyle brings with it. The recoding of consumer spaces into spaces of leisure time makes clear the longing of the urban and suburban population for islands or idylls in the centres of their lives. This wish goes beyond the historical bourgeois need for such a flight in their own home, the ‘outside’ needs to offer this refuge and at the same time provide a protected zone of experience. Around the late 19th century, public parks and green zones became a stage for the excursion to the green countryside, just as the garden colony movement was undergoing its first boom. Beautiful nature is nature that allows for control and patterns of categorisation. Botanic gardens and zoos also offer an idealisation of nature, but present it in an artificial way. The sublime in nature is ignored; it does not fit the comfortable rendering of alienated nature available to experience as leisure activity. Linked to the display of nature is the display of foreign cultures, expressed in a standardised way using their semiotics. This collection of components of various cultural landscapes is treated in the modern mall by the food courts in particular. Malls offer entire ‘gourmet’ areas arranged by country: these ensembles are additionally supported by green oases in various ethnic styles—a contemporary fantasy of colonisation without the difficulties of actually taking hold of a foreign

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land. A pioneer model of the modern mall is the 8—The advertising slogan of CentrO is ‘the new centre of Oberhausen’. In fact MetroCentre near Newcastle, England, which Oberhausen no longer has a clearly advertises with the slogan ‘safest shopping definable city centre. CentrO is includin Britain’. Central European shopping malls ed on public signage, and the traffic like the CentrO in Oberhausen, North Rhineplanning of the highway leading into Westphalia, Germany take their orientation the city increases its status as centre. from the British model. Like the British version, 9—Bluewater was planned in 1999 the CentrO, which calls itself the new centre as a suburban mall in the British town of Oberhausen8 offers alongside the standard of Greenhithe, the fourth largest shopping mall in Great Britain (2016). retailing a gourmet mile in the architecture of It is thus one of the largest such American west, a Japanese garden, and in the complexes in all of Europe. glass-roofed courtyard a garden architecture in the style of an orangery as a place for customers to take a break. In so doing, the interior of CentrO points clearly to stylistic models as can be found in English garden culture.

Stimuli

Landscape Images and the Picturesque Already with the emergence of the English landscape garden, the Arcadian was strongly associated with this garden type, also because the landscape architects of this period took their models from the sprit of the age with narratives of antiquity and the Renaissance and thus created neo-classicist ensembles. It is not surprising that the English concept is still to be found in the design of green surfaces of various kinds and in various contexts, from the private garden, the public park, or the semi-public space of consumer landscapes. Be it as a conscious association with the intellectual history or an unconscious placement of familiar and stimulating markers. These landscape images are highly artificial, but over the centuries well learned, and the natural ensembles that they represent generate immediately targeted natural moods. For the necessary linkage of experience and pleasure that shopping makes possible, the design of consumer space with decoration is necessary, and, as the relevant literature of planners and architects shows, this decoration is Arcadian: ‘They now use a lot of skylights, artificial ponds, plans, ornamental flowers and trees. The aim is to create an outdoors feeling or space like that of a fantasy.’ (This is the description of Yasuhiko Taguchi and Tao Im in their 1996 design guide Shop Design Series— American Shopping Centers 2, 6.) The linkage of the outer world (landscape) and the narrative interior (mindscape) with the help of natural components found pleasurable seems to be an ideal foundation for the postmodern mall, as planned today. The British mall Bluewater9 refers in a marketing statement explicitly to the mutual implication of the landscape image or a natural atmosphere and the sales complex and its architecture, and is thus able to translate the impression of the environment, of the exterior, thematically to the interior world and thus the offerings in terms of commodity and leisure.

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Bluewater’s striking architecture and innovative retail design sets it apart from other shopping destinations. Situated in a stunning location among towering 50 metre high cliffs, Bluewater is surrounded by a tranquil landscape of lakes, parkland and trees. www.bluewater.co.uk (2011)

10—With the panopticum, a space that could be overlooked and watched over from the centre, Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), legal scholar, philosopher, and social reformer, developed a model for the prison that for Foucault became the prototypical architectural form of the society of discipline. For him, the panopticum is a striking symbol for structures of surveillance and dominance in civil society.

When Arcadian motifs appear in the mall—or rather their templatelike reproductions—they have in this location not just the function as advertising or marketing, but also form under certain conditions a functional component of building and security technology. In reference to the circle of themes security and surveillance, that will briefly be mentioned here, without being discussed in any greater detail, every form of decoration serves as distraction from the actual scaffolding of the mall or leisure complex, designed to regulate visitor currents, monitor visitor frequencies and aims toward the total control of physical movements and potential consumer behavior. It is perhaps cynical that standard mall architecture, which is so decorated with semiotics of freedom, is ultimately an expression of a disciplinary society in the Foucauldian sense (Discipline and Punish, 1977) and in its architectural typology, which makes it much like Bentham’s panopticum.10 The stream of customers can be directed without resistance through the escalator system to the various levels, on which the shops, arranged like cells, try to force people to abide for certain amounts of time. In the mall, two historically spatial ideas find themselves overlapping: a cause for flight and a place of flight at the same time. As the expression of a capitalist disciplinary society, the mall emerges as a commercial zone. As a flight from this society, it presents itself as a space of relaxation and experience which, following Olson’s characterisation, is charged with mythotypes. The deliberate confusion, the deception, exists on the small level as well; not only is the overall structure of the complex altered motivically for the customers, individual functional parts, for example loudspeakers, can be veiled with the help of artificial natural objects. AudioRockTM are plastic rocks containing loudspeakers, which can be adjusted to match various landscape motifs: the selection ranging from the models Palm Beach to Santa Fe or Newport. The characteristics of the individual coastlines are reflected in the design of the AudioRockTM in question. Many consumer oases are compositions consisting of ReplascapeTM elements. This American company supplies plant modules for various landscape applications that are assembled on site according to a building block system. ReplascapeTM advertises for its products with the slogan: ‘We’re sure Victor Gruen would approve!’ Here, the manufacturer makes clear that this production spectrum is exclusively directed at the planners (in the tradition of Gruen), not the customers of the mall, who are not supposed to recognise the deception. A variant

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11—Paradeisos (Greek παράδεισος of in part organic, in part synthetic natural zoo, park; Latin, paradisus; Hebrew, construction set is available: Mall SkillsTM offers pardes) is derived from the Avestan a connector system that includes natural tree term pairi-daêza, literally ‘bounded trunks combined with plastic branches, leaves, area’. The Greeks used the term and the like. As already mentioned, the nature paradeisos as a foreign borrowing, moods that are to be achieved by using organic, and used it to refer to an oriental park surrounded by a wall. Over the course partially organic, or synthetic greenery feed of history, the term was no longer on traditional landscape images that beside used for profane gardens, but only for the Arcadian live from the oasis, as a fragment ‘divine gardens’ that had a religious of the paradisiacal. The reference to mall reference. This is also the current spaces as oases results in the contradictory topos of the garden of paradise, in its situation that the oasis in the frame of reference religious reading a synonym for the Garden of Eden. of the oriental or paradise garden11 always refers to a closed space, and yet the inclusion of nature in consumer architecture seeks to be a stimulans for spaces of longing, that is, open spaces. In this light, the concept of Arcadian spaces and their continued use in the type of the landscape garden can be seen as an antagonism to the closed paradise garden, whose limits also have significance in a metaphorical sense (for example, as an allegory of a space of domination). In this way, the oasis in consumer architecture is much more clearly part of the Arcadian than the traditional concept of the Garden of Paradise. The paradisiacal in its profanisation is part of an ensemble of spaces of longing, within which the image of beautiful nature is propagated. In most cases, mixed forms of historicising garden elements are necessary, for all these elements are able to transform the architectural structure of the mall, that is often built over several stories, to a single landscape vision. The mall The Galleria, which opened in 1985 in South Bay, Los Angeles, could be considered prototypical for such a structure; as the archetype of the closed multi-level shopping centre, it combines elements of the winter garden with arcades, oriental seeming springs and luscious greenery. The familiar megamall structures often offer such oasis-like ensembles, for example Europe’s largest shopping centre, England’s MetroCentre Gateshead or the Mall of America in Minneapolis, with which Camp Snoopy includes its very own amusement park within the shopping centre itself—the oasis is also embedded here. Another system of references is established by South Africa’s largest mall, Gateway Theatre of Shopping in Umlhlanga, Durban (opened in 2001), already triggered by its very name. The term ‘gateway’, portal or threshold, recalls Walter Benjamin’s concept of ‘threshold magic’ from his Arcades Project, while the term theatre almost refers in a virtually subliminal way to the staging provided by this theatre for the purposes of consumption. The entrance area of the mall is just as ambivalent as its name: in the entrance, the visitor is received by a strikingly classical Arabian garden arrangement, with the main axis along a water basin and plantings along the sides. The dramatic element that this entrance culminates in is a fountain fed by neo-classical amphorae. The communication of concrete natural moods can also be achieved by the coupling of wording and scenography, as for example in

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Central Milton Keynes (Milton Keynes, UK, opened in 1979), a shopping mall in England whose circular atrium is called Midsummer Place and almost in a poetic way refers to a differentiated mood of nature and lighting. The mall also corresponds to the model of the traditional spa, intersecting with the concept of the English landscape garden. The open-air mall The Summit (in Birmingham, Alabama, opened in 1997) offers the look of a traditional European resort with boxwood hedges and flowers in a village-like structure. The stores here are not organised over several floors, but along an artificial urban pedestrian zone.

Oasis

Food Courts Developers insert a great deal of story, that is, narrative structure, quite in the sense of Olson’s concept of mythotypes, in the realm of the socalled ‘food courts’, the gourmet miles that we find not only in the large malls of the Anglo-American world, but also in Europe and Germany, where the food and beverages are directly linked to an experience. A simple conclusion here would be that an oriental-seeming layout of the food court corresponds to pseudo-oriental food offerings. Usually, a certain palette of quick and casual dining is offered that is international: at all food courts, there is an offering of pizza, North American foods (often represented by the well-known chains), Chinese food (also often organised in chains, but also present as individual restaurants), a broader Asian offering with sushi and the like, as well as ice cream and drink sellers. Like the food offerings, the atmosphere found at food courts is quite varied on the surface. And yet, we find once again the familiar typologies of winter gardens, oases, and jungle landscapes: like the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas, which operates a Rainforest Café featuring jungle sounds, animated fake animals, and the constant trickling of water, which is described as: Part adventure, part restaurant and wholly entertaining for the whole family, the Rainforest Café recreates a tropical rainforest with waterfalls, lush vegetation, and indigenous creatures. You enter through a 10,000-gallon double archway aquarium. Inside the family-style restaurant, the food continues the rainforest theme with the Primal Steak, Rumble in the Jungle Turkey Wrap, and other exotic fare. www.mgmgrand.com, 2011

The food court is intended to suggest to the customer: everything is available in excess; the contradiction between experience and comfort is here obliterated, for both take place at the same time. The focus on specific thematic areas of a mall on the food court reveals many Arcadian

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templates. Nature: often as a luscious background of vegetation, springs emblematising and underscoring the offerings of drinks and food, a location that provides rest, for it is intended as an antipode to the experience of shopping: a space of relaxation, even if the reality in the system of gastronomic operations can never meet that demand, a location providing shade (or more subtle lighting) and finally the benevolent nature that is once again signaled by an excess of food. Equally popular are castle-like environments that emerge from more of a fairy-tale atmosphere than actual historical ensembles, which like the oasis suggest security and abundance of provisions, while and at the same time emphasising the theme of being safely surrounded. The Grand Dining Hall at Park Meadows shopping centre in Littleton, Colorado, a suburb of Denver (opened in 1996), creates this atmosphere both through its name and a 20-metre faux fireplace of stone located at the centre of its food court. Conceived by planner Anthony Belluschi as a kind of luxurious mountain lodge, the centre thus interacts with typologies of the region and the proximity to the Rocky Mountains, in so doing imitating ‘the warmth and richness of a mountain lodge hotel’, as planner Peter Coleman describes in his reader Shopping Environments: Evolution, Planning and Design (2006, 106). The thematic framework of the winter garden, implemented in an exemplary way at Berlin’s KaDeWe or Britain’s Bluewater takes recourse to a traditional interior felt to be warm, which promises security and exoticism at the same time. At the food court it is easier to generate an appropriate overall impression than in the mall itself, for here almost exclusively restaurants are located that often aggressively use different idyll themes unlike the (corporate) retail shops that within the mall have to represent their own corporate identity. This impression is also defined by the placement of the food court, which often represents a piazza arrangement within the mall structure. They are organised in a circular form and have a clear centre where the seating for the consumers are found, around them a ring with the goods on offer that provides for good circulation and seduces the consumers to do the rounds. While the British Metro Centre features a Mediterranean Village, with small, white-chalked market stands within the superstructure, Germany’s CentrO offers the Coca-Cola-Oase (Coca Cola Oasis) as an equivalent. Striking in both cases is the concrete assignation of particular landscape form for the idyll, with borrowings from the Italian Renaissance, which in turn exhibited a strong impulse to represent the idyll in the context of art history. Those kinds of recourses can today be observed in various sites, renaissance landscapes and architectures can be found in computer game worlds and the scenery used on teleshopping channels. This results in nostalgic niches that lead for the moment from abstract, economic difficulties and concrete everyday problems and allow them to partake of the provided lushness to suggest access to a luxury that would never be achievable under circumstances. The food court creates temporary inclusion in a ‘well-todo’ community, representing the ideal bridge to a world of surplus and allowing the real world to disappear temporarily due to its power of seduction.

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The MetroCentre combines two decided qualities of heterotopias: first of all, a combination of several placements in one location, as can otherwise only be achieved by the cinema, and then the arrangement of heterochronia, temporal periods that are not only shown not only in the arrangement of various historical epochs, but also in that the visitors break with their usual temporal feeling, step out of their ordinary daily lives, are given the suggestion that their private longings and desires can be fulfilled. Oliver Zybok, ‘Zur Aktualität des Idyllischen’, Kunstforum International (2006), 68

Stone, Rock, Water

i feel emotional landscapes they puzzle me Björk, ‘Joga’ (1997)

Natural Attractions The adjacency of sites and temporal images is not exhausted in the arrangement of Arcadian-idyllic or paradisiacal idyllic scenery, even if they show a nostalgic yesteryear that never really existed in such a form. An idealised first nature also fits into this repertoire, in the form of artificial mountains, waterfalls, and the like. The image of the mountain in consumer architecture was surely also shaped by Walt Disney’s conception for Disneyland Anaheim, where nature and a specific pioneering spirit of the American West was always part of the conceptual orientation. This new kind of thematic architecture, while using scenographic elements from Las Vegas or large amusement parks like Coney Island, also rejected such referential landscapes and was able to achieve a status similar to natural attractions and national parks, despite the obvious artificiality of all its elements. Contemporary reporters also listed Disneyland among the highlights of the West, almost exclusively alongside natural attractions. Because so many guests came from the West and stopped in Anaheim during vacations in which they also visited other regional attractions, it seemed natural to identify the theme park with the region. One Kansas reporter conceded that Disneyland could be rather artificial, but lumped it nevertheless with ‘Grand Canyon, Pike’s Peak, Old Faithful and the rest’ as one of ‘America’s great wonders.’ The Anaheim Bulletin similarly linked the wonders of Disneyland to the natural attractions

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of Yosemite and the Grand Canyon, as well as to unnatural Las Vegas, in depicting a tourist’s West. John M. Findlay, Magic Lands: Western Cityscapes and American Culture After 1940 (1993), 89

The complex owes this impression and this look to several images: the Mississippi landscape with the steamboat (Frontierland), the adventure course with its artificial mountains and canyons (Adventureland), and above all the iconic mountain of Disneyland, the Matterhorn. Disney’s Matterhorn is the most condensed form of everything that can be associated with the subject ‘mountain’: the danger, the sublime (daunting cliffs and waterfalls), but also winter attractions, tourism (made clear with a light dusting of snow and its being accessible by lift). And even more, the mountain stylises Disney’s signature style as known from their animated films, and so the sublime colossus narrows to a flat mountaintop, that like a jelly bag hat slightly tips to the one side: the Matterhorn becomes a dwarf’s hat. The play with dimensions is typical for Disneyland; all backgrounds are miniaturised so that adult visitors see the next attraction coming up. Perspectives are controlled as in film editing and the defined gaze of the cinema, the visitor experiences a cinema-like sequence. In the case of the Matterhorn, the so-called ‘imagineers’ took account of the relationship to the actual mountain to the extent that Disney’s Matterhorn was reproduced in terms of its height in dimensions of exactly 1:100. Natural attractions in consumer landscapes do more than just provide atmosphere. They frequently offer the actual physical experience of this transfer of nature in that they can be actively used by consumers. In the megastructure of North America’s largest mall, West Edmonton Mall12 in Alberta, Canada, there is a large indoor pool (Water Park) with tropical plant arrangements inserted into the leisure area. The Gateway Theatre of Shopping features a pool with artificial wave simulation for surfing and a naturalistic reproduction of an indoor rock-climbing wall. The experience of wild nature is made possible by integrating (moving) water, but also artificial mountain structures, as Disney had already shown. Or the artificial scenery becomes the key image, the corporate image for the entire business area, as for example at the flagship store of the outdoor clothing store REI in Seattle (REI Store, opened in 1999), where a centrally positioned, dramatically illuminated mountain serves as an indoor rock-climbing wall framed by a steel architecture that like a glass case protects and 12—West Edmonton Mall in Alberta, presents the object. The iconographisation Canada opened in 1981. West of the mountain or the mountain landscape also Edmonton Mall (or WEM) was from 1981 to 2004 the largest shopping mall serves to locate the consumer architecture in its anthropological location, by visualising its in the world in terms of retail space (today will 500,000 square metres still historicity and the approach to regional nature. the largest in terms of overall surface The complex Flat Iron Crossing (Broomfield, area) and includes a bungee jump, Colorado, opened in 2000) already refers the world’s largest artificial wave in its name alone to a crossing, an intersection pool, and the world’s largest internal artificial river. where business life and pleasure settle, as

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was historically the case at such junctures in the middle of nowhere in inhospitable natural surroundings. The mall architecture includes a mountainscape at the foot of the actual mountain landscape of the Rocky Mountains. At Flat Iron Crossing, a direct relationship to the regional landscape was established, the mall presents itself as a refuge in the landscape like a mountain lodge, and the interior consists of a stylised living room with a fireplace with heavy couches. The simple hut is here already planned as a comfort zone and thus removed from the actual purpose. The outer area is designed in such a way as if it were a lodge directly at the foot of Rocky Mountains; an oversized artificial waterfall that is surrounded by an additional artificial rocky backdrop further supports the impression of a combination of wildness and security

Shimmer, Symbol

Historicity and the Museé Imaginaire The creation of new spectacles and immediate experiences of nature in the consumer landscape runs contrary to the need to evoke familiar, comfortable memories. The nostalgic glow that architectures of experience like Disneyland and its variations spread in retail environments serves the collective memory of locus amoenus, a comfortable place that can be understood as emblematic for the reconciliation of nature and culture. In addition, the impetus of nostalgia is not only the remembrance of an external environment, but also an inner experience, a kind of inner retrospective or interiority. In this case, the consumer does not view what he has himself experienced, but what is experienced via a second or third nature in models of experience. The phenomenon of Arcadia becomes part of a collective memory; it is expressed in various cultures of memory. Starting with an arrangement of symbols (symbols of nature, vanitas symbols, symbols of relationships) it develops into a spatial ensemble of motifs. In the current context, the approach to symbols is initially interesting: the summonabilty, memorability, and interpretability of symbols is enabled on the one hand by communication and interaction with a community and by media (books, pictures, architectures) on the other hand. Both form the social framework, or cadres sociaux, as the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs calls them. These enable, as it were, access to their own, individual memory, which for Halbwachs then become mémoire collective, part of a collective phenomenon. For the phenomenon of Arcadia, the question of a culture of memory can be depicted more specifically using the help of Aby Warburg’s concept of ‘social memory’, which he develops from his theory of a collective visual memory, linking research in art history to this field. By comparing images, Warburg studies the appropriation of ancient conventions of representation by artists of later eras as the return of artistic forms and interpreted them not as conscious appropriation of ancient forms by the contemporary artist in question, but instead acknowledges

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the power of cultural symbols to trigger memory. It is not the significance of the symbol in antiquity that is here summoned, but a memory of it, and this is charged with a respective contemporary meanings. Concretely speaking, this appropriation takes place via so-called ‘pathos formulas’. The artist takes recourse to the symbols of ancient models to represent emotions, for in these symbols an affectual content all its own inheres. Symbolism here can be the representation of object composition, physiognomy, or attitudes and gestures. Pathos formulas serve in Warburg’s linguistic cosmos as ‘cultural engrams’, as ‘dynamograms’, as storage of ‘mnemic energy’ 13 that can be released under changed historical circumstances or in distant locations. The symbol is a cultural energy store. The ability to remember symbols shapes Warburg’s concept of culture and thus creates a moral structure, since in his view social memory is also linked to the concept of orientation. This could be continued in terms like civilisation, compositional ability, self-control, and, abstractly speaking, dominability. Some of these pathos formulas can be transferred to the subject of Arcadia, for this is also a bearer of affect. The specific feelings and longings communicated here have to be recharged over and over, since every epoch creates its own, typical modernisations, and thus changes the collective memory. A memory of an approach to second nature that was not experienced directly in such a way, just as a memory of wilderness or beautiful nature: they are points of departure for a musée imaginaire, a virtual spatial constellation that brings together images from the collective memory in one place. The French writer and art journalist André Malraux developed the term musée imaginaire in the early 1950s in the face of art’s reproducibility. It thus forms an antipode to Benjamin’s ‘Artwork’ essay, for it does not foreground the loss of the auratic, but an autonomisation, a liberation of the artwork from its material and representative context: the reproduced artwork is now even more so a pure work of art. This liberation is made possible by the reproduction of an artwork in the medium of photography: the use of reproductive technology makes it possible to grasp a previously unknown spectrum of artworks from various epochs and cultural circles. Reproducibility forms its very own field of aesthetic production. And in this media field of production, a second, imaginary world of art emerges, the imaginary museum that Malraux considered as general and not 13—Aby Warburg worked in the 1920s under the aspect of individual experience or on his Mnemosyne, an atlas of images individual prior knowledge. no longer extant today that was named The imaginary museum is an ideal pool for the Greek goddess of memory and of art that takes from all, has no purpose and is the art or remembering. The resulting divorced of profane references, and thus, for publication bore the title Mnemosyne: Bilderreihe zur Untersuchung der itself, ideal. This virtualisation is accompanied Funktion vorgeprägter antiker by a loss of the original materiality. But it also Ausdruckswerte bei der Darstellung creates new qualities. The media scholar bewegten Lebens in der Kunst der Annette Hünnekens describes them in her europäischen Renaissance and book Expanded Museum: Kulturelle Erinnerung explores the issue of how typologies und virtuelle Realitäten (2002) as the strongest of European antiquity continue to live on in European cultural history. meaning that an artistic style can take have.

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Virtualisation and loss of their original physicality lead to a significance, not a new one, but a more recognisable one. Beyond this, they lead to the fictionalisation of the object. What is required is ‘reproduction ability to fictionalise the original’ (Expanded Museum, 127). Fictionalising here can be understood in such a way that reproduction enables a new, also stylistic contextualisation of the object, as effected by the application of the medium of photography (by detail shots, dissolving of fragments from their visual context, by montage techniques, by way of close up). For Malraux, dematerialisation, which in Benjamin leads to the loss of the auratic, generates stylistic commonalities of a new kind, new quality attributions and functional contexts. Dematerialisation entails at the same time removal from the original dimensions and thus once again the amplification of the significance and the narrativity of the object. Malraux sees his musée imaginaire as an intellectualised topos, an imaginary museum space, outfitted with masterpieces of all epochs and ethnicities like a collective pool of memory, from which the past can be brought to the present. As an apparatus of memory, Malraux’ musée imaginaire is not so far from Benjamin’s phantasmagoria, although Benjamin limits it to a particular epoch, the 19th century. All the same, both patterns when applied to the field of consumer architecture can lead to similar possible uses. The imaginary museum of reproductions, or the model of the virtual museum, introduces a transformation in culture. The intent is now no longer to create something from the past once again with the help of a new means, as in concepts of classicism or historicism, but to use the reproductive pool and to achieve something for the future with its help. Both the space of the imaginary museum and its functions and applications are for Malraux anchored in the sphere of art, high culture. While masterpieces are transferred from their material and representative context to a purely art context, the knowledge of their significance as art works remains intact among the visitors of the musée imaginaire. If we develop Malraux’s idea further, by not only taking up the historical formal vocabulary from the fine and applied arts, but also the thematic worlds that they conjure? The American geographer Jon Gross finds a consumerist musée imaginaire in the ‘magic of the mall’, a broad field of now clichéd signs and symbols of real or fictive sites from various ages that serve to: create an imaginary setting that elicits from us an appropriate social disposition or action. With the collapse of time-space produced by global electronic media and tourism, the stock of place imagery in the consumer’s musée imaginaire, has expanded dramatically, and we are able to read with facility a vast array of clichéd signs of real and fictitious elsewheres. John Goss, ‘Magic of the Mall: An Analysis of Form, Function, and Meaning in the Contemporary Retail Built Environment’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 83 (1993), 20

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Local metaphors of this or that fictitious elsewhere serve to constitute the mall as a location, as a destination, that, as took place in the case of Disneyland Anaheim, is included among the tourist sites of a country. Thus, shopping centres are transformed from regional centres to provide goods and experience to trans-regional tourism destinations ‘complete with tour guides and souvenirs, and some include hotels so that vacationers and conferees need not leave the premises during their stay’ (Magic of the Mall, 18). If it at first seems contradictory that a mall would sell its own souvenirs—what are they supposed to remind their purchasers of?—and yet it is typical that it shapes a memory, for in the end it is a conglomerate of many memories. Megamalls like the Mall of America14 engage in a profitable business with these souvenirs (www.mallofamericagifts.com), which, like the non-places themselves, have become a kind of non-good, can be found all over the world and ultimately are exchangeable, regardless of whether as souvenirs from historical places and sites or other locations like malls and amusement parks: tote bags, T-shirts, teddy bears, cups and the like, that feature a symbol of the location applied with print or sewed into the object. The objects remain the same, only their linguistic location changes: the same concept is pursued by food chains like Hard Rock Café or Starbucks, that beside their food offerings also sell souvenirs of their specific and yet normed locations. At the same time, more and more places of transit are becoming malls and, according to Goss, the mall becomes a dominant architectural form of contemporary public life, in that it also extends, overlaps, and stretches to other public sites, as well as to train stations, airports, office complexes, and the like. Like the tourist, who becomes aware of him or herself and his or her identity when abroad in a strange place (the destination), the consumer oscillates in his or her shopping surroundings between the assertion of his or her identity on the one hand and its denial on the other hand. The surroundings suggest that they can free themselves from the profane act of shopping and promise a different kind of fulfillment of desire, the experience of a genuine location and thus an offer of identity. This effect of suggestion on the space is the emergence of what Goss calls a pseudoplace. The mall is a system of significance, as already described above using McCracken’s term ‘displaced meaning’. This system symbolises the cultural good of consumerism by referring to different times and places and translates their positive associations and readings to displays. It is a trope of seduction, of stimulation and physical manipulation. The design that controls and shapes the consumers draws on the collective memory of spatial ensemble, like the Arcadian. A locus amoenus that exists in the imaginary emotion of the consumer, in his or her nostalgic sensations, but not in their experienced memory, is to find spatial equivalent in the consumer landscape. Historicising spatial design creates a context, sociocultural attributes that feed longing and manifest itself in the form of a landscape. Subjects are found nostalgic that 14—Mall of America© (MOA™), either recall (individual) childhood memories founded in Bloomington, Minnesota, or place a setting in a larger historical context, in 1992, is considered the most-visited shopping centre in the world today. that is, designed in a historicising fashion.

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Triggering moments for nostalgic sensations have already been discussed in the sections on landscape images, the picturesque, food courts, and natural attractions. Here, allow us to explore the link between architecture and nostalgia via the creation of urban or representative architecture. Immediate links to the Arcadian can be found in Italianate or neo-classical motifs in general. The impetus of the planners to include historically representative subjects in the mall results in a treasure trove of motifs that is often found in consumer architecture. Motifs like the perron, the gallery, the colonnade, and the piazza, as described above for food courts. An additional step that leads over the bridge of English landscape gardens, itself an ensemble of historical links, is the motif of the winter garden. Such are the motifs that recall a classical approach to the formal language. In the urban field, the dominant motif is Main Street, which combines the typology of a European pedestrian zone or promenade with an American street in a small town. A key point for the planning of such main streets is the use of the traffic surface for seasonal events, for parades and marches of all kinds. A well-known example of this is Main Street USA in Disneyland, Anaheim, where each day a parade takes place in a framework adjusted to match the season. The Main Street motif was surely lastingly shaped by Disney and is used in a Disney-like way at malls such as The Grove15 in Los Angeles, an open-air mall that represents a pseudo historical European city centre and is linked to a Farmers Market, a stylised weekly market. The Grove, that is located on a formerly agricultural field, but today is located directly next to large shopping malls like the prestigious Beverley Centre, includes a striking implementation of Disneyland’s design concept: the recreation of beautiful past, in fragmentary and eclectic, distorted in its dimensions, so that it resembles a gaze through the child’s eye, making the adult gaze in a sense into a child’s gaze. This child-like perspective in turn generates an experience that is added to the experience of shopping. Another form of staging is chosen by the Thames Walk located at the shopping centre Bluewater, which imitates a trip along the River Thames. Here, landscape images are metaphorically translated and find their translation in iconographies of regional historical references. Thames Walk is just such a translation of the River Thames as an interior. No real water is used as an attraction, instead a path is marked linguistically and by elements of decoration, stylised sails, and white-blue striped textiles that are hung from the ceiling 15—The shopping and entertainment and supported by blue floor markings. The complex The Grove at Farmers Market Rose Gallery and The Guildhall Mall operate was opened in 2002 and is located in the same way. Bluewater also establishes a on the grounds of a former arboretum, reference to the subject of the winter garden the final remains of the large or crystal palace with the food complex The 19th century farm that once belonged Wintergarden. The representational structure to A. F. Gilmore. of the Italian villa also resurfaces in the 16—Princes Square was opened in megastructure mall, for example at Glasgow’s 1986 and includes a historical city block Princes Square16 explicitly in the motif of from 1841. The complex also features La Scala Staircase, a freestanding stairwell that a replica of Foucault’s Pendulum.

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17—Union Station opened as a train moves stylistically speaking between classical station in 1907, after remodeling in residential architecture and an imaginary fairy 1981 to 1988 it opened in its current tale castle, as familiar from Disney’s animated hybrid form as infrastructure (a films. The positioning of the stairway and working train station) and shopping the resulting spatial symmetry can be clearly and entertainment centre: see derived from the type of the Veneto villa. Coleman (2006). Brandstores also use the nimbus 18—The American film Logan’s Run, of historical stately architecture to give an dir. Michael Anderson, presents an ideational charge to their products, for example image of a futuristic society that in apparently harmonic, democratic, the computer brand Apple, which stages in and sexually liberated conditions their London flagship store (Regents Street, lives under a glass dome surrounded opened 2004) a gallery-like setting and thus by benevolent, artificial nature, raises the object character of the Apple product seemingly idyllic surroundings. But range to the sphere of high culture. Another the idyll falls apart when we discover point of intersection in light of a historical that the maintenance of peace, affluence, and free sexuality is only architecture of representation opens where possible via the execution of all those historical and historicising spaces are used: over 30 years of age. Protagonist typical here are retail environments in train Logan 5 (played by Michael York, stations, for example Washington’s Union each individual is cloned after their Station.17 The train station, a columned hall ‘termination’, thus the numbering with arcades and neoclassical motifs like the after the first name) breaks out of the architrave that bears a sculpture of figures, is a hermetically sealed idyll. He then sets out on a dangerous journey and shopping centre and transit zone in one; an reaches the ruins of the former capital ambivalent non-place and also a place charged Washington, now overgrown with with significance, merely due to its location and wilderness, where he meets the old function in the political centre of Washington. hermit played by Peter Ustinov. For the planners of the mall, the appropriation of already existing, historical architecture entails a dual possibility of representation. The mall, which usually develops its power of representation on the inside, while on the outside remains an anonymous large structure with sufficient surrounding parking, is here linked with the historical building, for example, the old train station, which in turn is linked by the (historical) key function of the façade. But less centrally properties, that do not lie on the major traffic intersections of major cities, are also used as malls or leisure areas. These ‘neighborhood stations’ use existing spatial stagings like generous halls or stairways and expand them by including cinemas and retail. Dallas’ Mockingbird Station is strikingly like a film set (opened in 1997), which with its broad, promenade-like stairwell entry that leads to a cinema entrance, recalls the apparent Arcadian, but ultimately dystopian urban landscape vision from the science fiction film Logan’s Run.18

Village, Market, Life

A. At the centre of all planning and architecture is the human being. B. The first goal of planning and architecture must thus be the fulfillment of human needs and human hope. C. The achievements of science and technology should be used to achieve the targeted goal, a higher fulfillment of human life. D. Science and technology should not become an end in themselves. They should neither oppress nor tyrannise humanity. The Charter of Vienna Victor Gruen, Das Überleben der Städte (1973), 341

Community: New Village Structures, The Survival of the Cites The necessity of the structure mall emerged in the postwar period due to the development of the American city, which extended more and more to the periphery, allowing the suburbs to grow. Here, two fundamental needs collided with one another: the need for new locations that formed a meeting point for young urban communities, and the need for providing goods locally and beyond that a need for a calculated luxury, now available to a wider group of people. Viktor Gruen used this point of departure to develop a fully new type of suburban mall, offering a new centre alongside the historical downtowns of the cities and providing a surface for presenting the surplus of commodities that was now being produced. By creating thematic architecture within the mall, especially one that simulates nature indoors, Gruen saw the opportunity to protect the exterior, and thus ‘real’ nature, from uncontrolled access, or even as the target of a movement of urban flight. Gruen’s Charter of Vienna from 1972/73 was an attempt to rework and renew The Charta of Athens from 1941 (once again published in 1957 with a foreword by Le Corbusier and edited by Jean Giraudoux) was a manifesto for modern, democratic, and sustainable urban planning, in a way that was fitting for the times, especially in light of ecological conditions and environmental protection. Gruen’s four-point program was clearly shaped by the atmosphere of the Cold War and the insecurity that technological developments can entail for the human being and for nature if developers do not deal with them responsibly. The result could be a panicky urban flight, the uncontrollable exploitation of natural resources, and thus ecological collapse. Point IV of Gruen’s considerations refers to the essence of urbanity, which for him consists ‘of the human striving for personal liberty’. Liberty is the possibility of making individual decisions; the foundation of this is ‘the existence of a variety of choices’ (Das Überleben der Städte, 1973, 344). Urban life can be equated with human freedom; it fulfills all human needs. The attraction of a city consists in its selection of possibilities, its unlimited offerings, its abundance. The more complex the structure of a society, the stronger the necessity to protect it from egocentric, destructive acts of individuals. Fundamental human needs include protection against the forces of

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nature, wild animals, illnesses, and the provision of food, a home, and healthcare. Only then come the longing for individual forms of expression, pleasure, handing down life to the next generation, sexual satisfaction, longevity. The needs and desires for a happy life stretch from the simple satisfaction of basic needs to the most complicated power symbols and structural elements. In addition to managing the problems of a peaceful coexistence between the human being and nature, in a complex modern society there is the need to manage the peaceful coexistence of human beings with the very tools they create. For Gruen, the first basic requirement for maintaining urbanity in the sense of enduring communication and community in city surroundings is compactness. This foundation of compactness, which Gruen at first intends in a global sense, is also symptomatic for the development of the mall at the end of the 20th century. While the shopping malls and leisure centres increase in their surface area, at the same time they seek to achieve the absolute fusion of space, of realities and simultaneity. Increasingly, the type of the mall that emerged in the 1950s changed in the 1970s and 1980s to become leisure complexes in which shopping seemed exclusively for the sake of the experience and became divorced completely from fulfilling needs. The term ‘shopping’ was virtually used as synonymous with leisure time. This was necessarily accompanied by the emergence of hybrids between the amusement park and shopping mall. The use of thematic elements takes up a great deal of mall architecture, and in the realm of services it becomes necessary to generate experiences as well, because experiences with emotional qualities guarantee durability in the customers’ memory. They lead to customer loyalty, the goal shared by all malls. Consumer architecture, according to Aldo Leganaro’s sociological travel guide, becomes a narrative machine. It possesses a narrative order to create many voices and multiple stories. Things are different in their representation towards the outside, that is, directed at potential customers: In the depiction of non-places, there is little mention of narratives, but only of experiences, a term that in a virtually inflationary way is linked to all kinds of services, from a druggist (which offers a ‘health experience’) or the variety of a restaurant that praises its ‘experience gastronomy’. Aldo Legnaro, Stätten der späten Moderne: Reiseführer durch Bahnhöfe, shopping malls, Disneyland Paris (2005), 30

Conversely there is the hypothesis that Gruen’s early mall structure could also be understood in combination with a narrative element, as in the Mediterranean flair of a piazza. Here, the question of the authentic is already posed. Is the early mall an authentic simulation of urban life in harmonic union with nature or does it possess its very own authenticity as simulation? While for Gruen the new village quality is a structuring

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element, that is, the combination of (regional) offering of commodities, (regional) service provision and communication in one location, this village quality or small town feel is today one element for thematic consumer architecture among others, as American sociologist George Ritzer systematically analyses using his case study of Easton Town Center (Transformation in Consumer Settings: Landscapes and Beyond, 2005). Introducing his study, Ritzer states that in the 1980s and 1990s so-called ‘cathedrals of consumption’ emerged, ‘spectacular themed, shopping and entertainment environments that drew crowds and consumers en masse’ (Transformation in Consumer Settings, 292). The economic compulsion to create ever newer and more elaborate worlds of consumption, results in a concentration or combination of such cathedrals that Ritzer calls ‘landscapes of consumption’. According to this categorisation, the suburban mall, the thematically designed restaurant, the cruise ship and similar were cathedrals of consumption, while in contrast the Las Vegas Strip as a collection of several cathedrals could represent an image of a landscape of consumption. Ritzer’s study object is the megamall Easton Town Center in Columbus, Ohio, which he, following the typology of the scape concept, calls ‘streetscape’ or ‘retroscape’ but also ‘leisure-time centre’ and ‘urban village’. A retroscape can be used to describe all retail environments designed with a nostalgic theme and provide a coherent space-time image, to describe them using the aspect of narrative structure. Coherence, as already described for other situations, is necessary to generate individual significance and to enable consumers to develop a personal meaning for a mass-produced brand item. In the case of Easton, this atmospheric charge takes place by way of the simulation of a location. Easton is a themed mall whose theme is the mall itself in its historical dimension as a suburban mall of the American 1950s. The spectacle is the unspectacular, the lifeworld of an American small town. With this simulation of a location still known to many, the designers create a hyperreality with the mall, ‘a reality unavailable to everyday experience is created by designing an environment that appears more real than reality itself’ (Transformation in Consumer Settings, 296). Even more than that, Easton is the spatialisation of the collective American memory. The thematic framework of retail surroundings and commodity presentation is not beautiful nature, not an existing landscape, not a dream world. It is the social, the community. In so doing, the concept of the social becomes a commodity, a consumerisation of the social takes place. Shopping is not to be the focus of attention, but the social structure, that has formed since time immemorial at marketplaces of all kinds. Everyday life in all its facets is to be experienced here: Easton recalls a time when shopping was an act of providing for the family, a unity of consumption and everyday life. This unity presumes that the retailers and service providers in this location orient themselves towards the needs of the community on site and develop a specific supply to meet a specific demand. Easton is a complex of retail zones, residential areas, office space, and hotels with a surface area of over 365 hectares, combining an indoor-shopping realm,

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Easton Station, with an outdoors complex. Easton Station generates its nostalgic flair by referring to the subject of the train station, just as in the open-air complex, where on an area of six blocks the experience of shopping in a small town is simualted. The shops that are located here all come from a potent American pool of brands, including large chains such as Virgin Records, Nordstrom, and The Cheesecake Factory, a restaurant chain that also works with the thematic frame of nostalgia, pseudo-traditional food, and stylised cakes. This conglomerate leads to the phenomenon that the mall becomes a destination, a tourist attraction that makes it worth the trip from other parts of the country. Shoppers from all over Ohio, the Midwest, and beyond are now moving Easton higher up on their list of travel destinations. One Indianapolis resident and visitor to Easton said, “Easton just reminds me of the way shopping used to be—more about seeing people and less about buying things.” Another group of five women who were former roommates at Ohio State University take an annual shopping trip somewhere. Even though they now live all over the country they chose Easton as this year’s destination. George Ritzer, Michael Ryan et al., Transformation in Consumer Settings: Landscapes and Beyond (2005), 297

The subject of interior and exterior is a key aspect for understanding the Easton cosmos: usually, cathedrals of consumption, as Ritzer describes them, reproduce the experience of the outside in a virtually hermetically sealed interior. Here, the thematic architecture triggers associations among the customers of nature as a physical element, landscape images and natural moods. At the same time, urban themes are also simulated that refer to a beautiful past, like stylised cast iron park benches, telephone booths, façades, railings and balustrades. Strategies like this have already been described elsewhere in more detail. And yet the power of these spaces and space collages to simulate is limited, for the customer always awaits something new or spectacular, and by no means the repetition of the already familiar. One possible response to this would be removing the backdrops from the enclosed malls and creating open pedestrian zones, as shown by The Grove and other artificial outdoor shopping centres. Easton succeeds in negating the contradiction between interior and exterior and dissolves the structure of the megamall into what looks like a small town structure, not only as a transformation from interior to exterior, but at the same time from present to past. The design team of the complex claims have created a genius loci, albeit a secular one, in formulating the following description: ‘Cobblestone brick streets, stylised lighting and telephone booths combine with many other carefully planned architectural elements to create a “sense of place”—the feeling that this is a distinct, memorable environment’ (Transformation in Consumer Settings, 298).

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All the same, Easton is not an anthropological place, even if it is emulates a small town in construction details in a mall structure, which itself is not entirely dissolved. It is not a place to live, but a place to consume. The simulated village or small town retail here has not grown out of the needs of an actually existing community, but a range of the same consumer brands. It is surprising that apartments and hotel complexes emerge alongside the retail architecture in Easton. This non-place in fact increasingly becomes a town by building up a residential structure. Easton simulates the small town, the village not only on the level of construction, but above all the simulation of the social, the community. Here, many activities of a community that shape the image of a typical American small town of the 1950s are actually lived out. In the summer, there are outdoor concerts, buskers and street artists, and a farmer’s market. During the Christmas season, parades take place and the town community Christmas tree (the community of mall visitors and temporary residents) is officially erected, and there is also an opportunity to go skating and members of the community walk through the streets caroling. Another part of Easton’s PR strategy is the generation and display of community ethos. Easton’s management maintains a scholarship program for high school and college students and various other charitable projects that their customers can contribute to. Part of this budget comes from intakes from parking meters and parking tickets (Change for Charity Parking19 ). The centre management argues that this is an innovative concept to promote public welfare. The innovative concept of helping the local community via parking meters and parking tickets, truly reflects the vision of Easton Town Center… Even when a customer is dropping a quarter into a meter, that customer becomes part of the experience and makes a difference in the community. Transformation in Consumer Settings, 300

All of these activities are part of a thematic program, just like the jungle café or pseudo-Italianate piazzas at other shopping centres. The smalltown quality and the ethic dimension are the something extra, the always more authentic, the even greater the spectacle and a possibility for the retail operators to increase their profits. How can a (non) place like Easton become a travel destination and even a (temporary) home? Ritzer argues that it is the very emptiness of meaning in these not-places that makes them attractive to people. As a result of their more or less obvious emptiness, non-places can take on a greater significance for the individual, by charging them with individual meaning. This logic corresponds to the concept of suspended leisure time, as Habermas describes it, where the worker in his leisure time symbolically continues to work and entangles 19—www.eastoncommunity foundation.org, 2016 himself in do-it-yourself activities that can also

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Epos, Tahiti, Magic

be derived from an industrially made construction system. The mall is just such a construction box, a preexisting consumer architecture that the consumer decorates with his wishes, thus making it into a valuable and memorable location. For in the end, the consumer is in this place in search of happiness or the good life. The mall as a condensation of the world, but also as a conglomeration of various narratives, combines images of paradise along with the Arcadian and the sublime natural landscape alongside historicising and social structures. The mall is an offering of identity in terms of a postmodern site of longing and a signifier of global urban planning. Often, without value or hierarchy, things comfortable and adventurous are used, their extension, new interpretation, and its authenticity are decisive factors here. But in this way, thematic architectures emerge that strictly develop a narrative concept, not least in order to place them in a rich tradition and communicate a sense of status to its customers. The leisure industry in its epic, expressive form includes both virtual and physical landscapes.

Off the Florida Keys, there’s place called Kokomo That’s where you want to go to get away from it all Bodies in the sand, tropical drink melting in your hand We’ll be falling in love to the rhythm of a steel drum band Down in Kokomo The Beach Boys, Kokomo (1989)

Just like the concepts of the idyllic, the nostalgic, or the Arcadian, the epic is used as an advertising message to direct the gaze of the visitor, beholder, or player in the desired direction and thus to satisfy consumer and economic needs. The term ‘epic’ is today undergoing a shift from the sphere of literature or literary studies to various forms of the culture industry. Epic is an expression of and description of virtual worlds of experience, both in film, in the world of game playing (above all in the genre of role playing) but also in leisure complexes like amusement parks or large-scale hotel projects. Here, landscape and architecture can be described as epic. The epic is initially immediately linked to the literary genre of the epic. While the genre term refers to formal elements of a text. The epic is always also linked to thematic qualities: the extensiveness of a text, fidelity to details, and the inclusion of a large time frame. The epic can, in contrast to a dramatic text, expand and contract its temporal track, flash backs and views into the future are possible. Its temporality is surely the essential element in describing the epic: it has an immediate impact on spatial definitions (how much space is included, for how long a period of time). Worlds of experience, both virtual and physical, use the play with temporal structures for their places, that is, surrogates of countries,

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architectures, or stylistic elements. This kind of world creation that lies at the basis of planning and marketing an object can be compared with the concept of diegesis, as used by the theorist of narration Gerard Genette (Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, 1972) to refer to the world creation of an author. The diegesis is the spatio-temporal universe of a narrative consisting of the frame, stage, and logic of the plot. In The Narrative, Genette refers to the fundamental duality in the temporal structure of a narrative sequence, distinguishing between ‘narrative time’ and the ‘time of narration’. Distortions in the temporal structure are only possible in this way, so that a period of several years can be narrated in just several sentences. This temporal stretching and expansion forms the foundation of a concept of the epic. Only in this way can the apparently never-ending expanses and lengths of the described world be generated. While the temporal structure of a written text is grasped through reading, in new epic worlds the players or visitors experience the narrated (or represented) time. The table below links key characteristics of the epic to the virtual gaming experience (concretely speaking to digitally supported role playing games) and the architecture of experience (for example, the amusement park, the hotel complex). In comparing the literary epic with the epic in digitally supported role-play, parallels on several levels are revealed:





Development in the literary genre

World creation Author(s) (Diegesis) Narrated time/ Narrative time

Time distortions by way of compressing or extending individual sequences. development in the literary genre.

Reading Experienced time

Development in digitally supported role play Author(s) But also further development by individual players (editing) Temporal distortions but also simulation of real time,* Development in digitally supported role play Play at the console, on the computer, in the network

*Depending on the manufacturer, minimum play times can be stipulated.

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In addition, we could compare the architecture of experience, which already shows greater divergence from the experience of reading. Development in the literary genre Author(s) World Creation (Diegesis)

Development in the architecture of experience

Narrated time/ Time distortion by Narrative time compacting and stretching individual sequences.

Parallelism of narrative sequences *

Temporal Reading experience

Temporally limited stay on site / in surrounding areas

Architects, planners

*Here, the term narrative as a literary text or text-image combination needs to be replaced with elements like construction style, landscape form, or theme. Beside the inner temporal structure of a work, a game, or architecture and the experience of the reader, the player, or the visitor (the consumers), another moment is important for grasping the epic: its fictionality. Genette calls the problem between diegesis, pure narration, and mimesis the attempt to imitate real distance. Of course, mimetic elements are required to make a narrative lively, as rich in detail and close to reality as possible. On the other hand, these elements can only effect an ‘illusion of mimesis’. The epic has an impact not only in mimetic expression, but also in the realm of the metaphorical. The epic is not from the beginning an expression of interiority. This means that the world depicted is not necessarily linked to the interior life of the hero. Homer, who marked the beginning of European epic, had a worldview that does not know interiority in the genuine sense. The ancient hero, for example in the Odyssey, is not outfitted with an individual emotional life. He experiences feelings as a force of destiny that affects him from outside. This force of destiny also determines the course of the further narrative. The image of an expansive landscape is here not yet a metaphor for freedom or being unfettered. The notion of interiority emerges only gradually in a slow transformation of European cultural history via the Christian tradition to the beginning of the early modern period. It was only at this point in time that the individual was perceived as an individual being within which a world of the individual’s own invention can emerge, a kind of inner space. With Petrarch’s The Ascent of Mount Ventoux (1336) the stylisation of the outer

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20—Exemplary here are works by world becomes a metaphor for individual inner space, interiority. In so doing, an aesthetic landscape painters like Lorrain, Poussin, Friedrich. transformation takes place: descriptions or 21—This refers to digital virtual representations of areas are directed linked spaces like PC-generated worlds and to certain feelings and emotions. The stylistic networks (the Internet in the form used 20 that canon of landscapes of sensation today), in contrast to the general term emerges over the course of the following ‘virtuality’, which is not tied to any one centuries is also mobilised in the modern spatial medium. arrangements of the leisure industry. Virtual spaces21 are also often linked to metaphors that are intended to make their spatial formation palpable, as reflected in concepts like information highway, cyberspace, and the global village. This metaphorisation makes it possible for users to locate themselves in virtual spaces. It represents a kind of geography of such spaces, although it cannot be described with standard spatial references (a coordinate system). It represents distances and expanses that are actually dissolved in virtual space. Clearly users feel the need to take land, to conquer or discover a new space for themselves. The term cyberspace, which combines the Greek term for the art of steering, cybernetics, with the Latin term spatium, unlimited extension, underscores this desire for the discovery of new space. The referential system of nautical travel expresses users’ need for navigation and taking land and culminates in the term ‘sea of information’.

The strong spatial reference is also striking in the use of metaphors from the nautical realm: one of the most powerful being the ‘sea of information.’ Markus Schroer, Räume, Orte, Grenzen: Auf dem Weg zu einer Soziologie des Raums (2005), 254

The sea of information as a mere concept seems to refer to the epic understanding of virtual space and to have helped to shape the special contents of this sea of information—online and role playing games— as an epic space of narrative. The game Arvale is advertised using the following qualities: ‘Epic role play with over 20 hours of game time, where around 280 maps can be researched on seven continents and 200 kinds of monsters can be defeated’ (Arvale—Journey of Illusion 4.0). Game sellers who describe their products as epic use the term as an advertising concept. Epic is also a widespread term among players. It is usually used to describe the adventure or role-playing genre. The success of the games can be attributed to the fact that they offer a space to makes things possible that real life cannot offer. But despite the technological possibilities offered by the new media, many of these narrative spaces follow traditional narrations. The game worlds are often a true-to-detail implementation of already existing literature or films, the landscapes are often stereotypical, ideal images of nature. Basically, there are two game types, player versus player (pvp), a well-known example of this

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22—Half-Life is an on-line shooter is Half-Life,22 and player versus environment game that was released by Sierra in (pve), that represents an version of classical 1998. Since 2004 the follow-up version 23 role-playing where the hero pen and paper  Half-Life 2 has been available. In undertakes a task in a ‘environment’. 1999, Counterstrike, a very popular Although there is great importance modification of Half-Life, was released. placed in role-playing on the design of the 23—The current common form of worlds in question and the detail of all elements, pen and paper role-playing emerged Half-Life also offers very precise landscapes in the US where Gary Gygax and (maps). In this online shooter game, it is Dave Arneson 1971 created the possible after the standard game time (running, rules for Dungeons & Dragons in 1971. Dungeons & Dragons has been shooting) to place self-invented landscapes available in a computer version since as an editor online that astonishingly (and the 1990s and can be played online contrary to the game plot) reveal very idyllic as well. characteristics. In addition to the 3D generated landscapes through which the player moves, the 24—The company Club Méditerranée was founded in 1950 by Belgian Gérard game also includes maps that show the entire Blitz. The originally non-profit company game world. These maps clearly emblematise was transformed into a stock company the epic components of the game, its (virtual) in 1963, from which Blitz withdrew. spatial extension and thus also the game duration that depends on the size of the world to be explored. One of the most famous worlds is surely Forgotten Realms, a campaign world in Dungeons and Dragons, which not only can be played online, but also offline on the personal computer. In linguistic terms, role-playing games borrow from traditional (neo-classical) materials: the console game Lost Odyssey already alludes to its epic potential in the title. Modern park complexes or amusement parks use terms like epic or odyssey not to the same extent used by virtual worlds to describe their topographies. And yet, certain stylistic means can be found in the virtual and in the real maps. This is of course due to the fact that contemporary amusement parks are shaped by perception patterns from film and the new media, if they are not even in competition with them. The links between amusement parks and narrative elements are already legible in garden art from earlier decades, as prototypically represented in images of English landscape gardening. If we leap over later developments in the art of landscaping, the same motifs can be found in leisure complexes and malls of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Certain narrations are implemented in a fixed series architecturally and in terms of landscaping. These contemporary narrations form not only motif ensembles (templates, patterns), but also represent a corporate identity. In the case of the Disney theme parks, these design stencils are linked to key components of the corporate identity. Think here of Disney’s model of reality as fantasy. Here, Disney decisively shaped the planning of modern worlds of experience that increasingly penetrate urban life, like shopping malls or the various corporate worlds. In the 1950s, the French tourism company Club Méditerranée24 developed the concept of a holiday club that promises visitors an entire world of vacation within a single resort complex. The first Club Med resort was founded on Majorca, followed by Club Med Moorea on Tahiti in 1955. The South Pacific motif is in several ways similar to the Arcadian motif, it lies parallel

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to the everyday world, it is located far away and yet is reachable and can be created in the present. In this way: Over the course of scientific and touristic journeys of discovery during the past four centuries, the islands of Gaugin and Diderot supposedly untouched by decadent Western civilisation are stylised as places of eternal happiness. Arcadia now lies in the South Pacific, Rousseau lives on Tahiti. Norbert Reichel, Der erzählte Raum: Zur Verflechtung von sozialem und poetischem Raum in erzählender Literatur (1987), 101

The location of the first clubs on islands in the Mediterranean and in the Pacific is surely no coincidence. The motif of water (or the sea) also includes the motif of—at least temporary—escape. Utopian realms are usually described as islands where upon arrival the traveler leaves behind the expanses of the sea and at the same time leaves behind his or her past. But the sea motif also contains, as already alluded to, the possibility of discovery and exploration. The visitor of the Club Med in the South Pacific, which in the 1950s was only reachable by boat, an active form of travel, an adventure, that led him to a place that seems untouched and natural, although designed according to an ideal image. The notion of the dream of the South Pacific finds its equivalent in the notion of the desert realm; both can be described as themes of escape. The longing for the desert also reveals that the landscape in the actual sense is only a model for the needs of the visitor or the beholder. Two characteristics of the desert landscape can be distinguished from one another: first the presupposition of the general desert character of the world, not as the result of a catastrophe, but the absence of a location that was actually already lost. Here, the desert reflects the traditional theme of the lost paradise that can be rediscovered in the form of oases. Second, the mastering of the desert by way of knowledge of their caravan routes and oases, whereby the oasis in this notion epitomises the victory of culture over nature, 25—The topology of The World has as a temporary resolution of the nature-culture been under construction since 2001. The first phase of construction was conflict. In this way, the distinction between completed in January 2008, the landfill desert and oasis is rendered invalid, for the of the islands and completion of the dream of the oasis can only be reflected in channels. This was followed by the the context of the desert. We can also add that design of the individual islands, zoned the idea of the blank canvas (carte blanche) on for various usages (private property, which a new world can emerge characterises clubs, shopping). But the impact of the global financial crisis from 2007 the charm of the desert landscape: typical here seems to have put a brake on the is Las Vegas, which is protected on all sides project; in 2011 the first consequences from the desert and blossoms on the inside. of the stand still became evident In the example of the artificially created with the sanding of smaller channels. island world and hotel complex The World off The completion of the island group, the coast of Dubai, a large construction project originally planned for 2020, is now unsure. begun in 2005,25 all these characteristics

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appear in the marketing campaign. The Internet appearance of the World greets the visitors on the first page with the words: The World is today’s great development epic. An engineering odyssey to create an island paradise of sea, sand and sky, a destination has arrived that allows investors to chart their own course and make the world their own.

26—The World consists not only of several private islands, but 43 national representations, that are planned and implemented by various so-called developers regardless of their nationality. 27—Utopia is a residential cruise ship, a project that was announced in 2009 on the website www.utopiaresidences. com. The ship, which is being built by the Samsung subsidiary Samsung Heavy Industries, is currently expected to reach completion in 2016.

www.theworld.ae, 2012

This story of creation is supported by seven principles that are listed on the menu of the website alongside information on construction progress and investment possibilities. The World is an attempt to implement in a comprehensive way traditional European intellectual history in the Arabian world as an artificial leisure paradise. The builders are largely Westerners who create their countries on the fictional world map as hotel islands, thus representing only a certain part of the real world within The World.26 Added to the exclusiveness of the clients, there is the use of stereotypes in the representation of select countries in designing individual hotel elements; The World thus responds to the standard scheme of vacation resorts with the limitation of their clientele and luxury shopping. The seven principles (The World Principles), which reveal similarities to the seven days of creation, can be read as models of traditional narratives. The World Principles

Associations

I* BESPOKE

‘custom made’ ‘the world can revolve around you.’ An allusion to the blank canvas (which is also mentioned in the subtext), a longing for paradise and its fulfillment

II* GRAND

The clients adapt to the size of the project itself. The project’s aim is universalist. Here, the notion of grand is not transcendental, but a synonym for a positive counterworld in the real world. Borrowings from the concept of English landscape garden from the 18th century.

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III* RARE ‘rare, and thus precious, valuable.’ The exclusivity and uniqueness of the location are emphasised in the third principle just like the access of resources that are scarce (the subject of the oasis). Pureness and naturalness resonate in this concept. IV* VISCERAL

‘An inner feeling.’ Emphasis on interiority, an idyllic outer world as sign for interiority.

V* INTELLIGENT

Designing nature according to one’s own will, represented here as an achievement of intelligence. Also a reference to a more intelligent approach to nature. A realised utopia.

VI* MAGICAL

As a contrast to point IV, this refers to a magical sense of nature, like interiority; can be compared to the concept of romantic nature.

VII* LEGACY

A longing for paradise, between arcadia and social utopia. (in the subtext, the terms humanity and community, progress, and monument stand out).

*The seven principles are numbered with Roman numerals on the website www.theworld.ae and also written in all caps. Unlike The World, the project Utopia Residencies,27 a luxury cruise liner for both temporary passengers and with permanent residences for sale, does not offer a fixed ensemble of principles, but its website names particular situations and experiences. Stations of ‘utopian living’ are represented available for purchase. Utopian Living Lasting Memories Utopia. Bringing the World home A World of Discovery Unforgettable Experiences A Day in Utopia www.utopiaresidences.com, 2016

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The fragments of utopian living correspond to the usual canon of metaphors of an economically secured beautiful and lovely life: the term utopian is in this case rather addressed to all those who remain excluded from utopian living than to the clientele for whom this exclusive form of leisure consumption is accessible. The motif of world appropriation is even more clearly recognisable in the various aspects: for example in ‘Bringing the world home’, or ‘A World of Discovery’. Since this ‘exploring’ does not take place at the initiative of the clients themselves, but rather is presented as an attraction or an atmosphere, its sensation is rather a passive act or, to introduce an Arcadian quality, an act of contemplation. The mixing of community experience and a life-giving environment (in the sense of surroundings, not nature) is communicated by potential consumers of utopian living as a weblink in the realm ‘philanthropy’. There, we can read ‘A better World for everyone’. On Utopia, charity is a theme, one attraction among all the others that is planned as part of the programming for the passengers. This inclusion of charity in the atmospheric program of Utopia Residencies recalls the thematic preparation of the social (the commoditisation of the social) in the context of the shopping mall, although in the context of potential clients signals the form of community that the investors are addressing with their advertising.

Folklore, Spectacle

Arcadian Design Worlds of experience, as represented by malls or large hotels and resorts, offer their specific experience of lone, individual consumers. In fact, however, these worlds of experience take place in society, often in an anonymous mass. Here, the personal or personalised address within an overall structure trimmed for the masses is the achievement of the provider, if the inclusion of the community, the feeling for community, is not part of the thematic concept itself, as in the case of Easton. All the same, the mass entails first of all a loss of exclusivity. In regard to the Arcadian motif, this also means the loss of intimacy and possibilities of retreat. The framing conditions have an effect on the available of leisure, if this is at all desired in the respective setting, here of spaces of consumption. For Thorstein Veblen’s concept of conspicuous idleness, the implementation of the Arcadian in such large-spatial idylls is quite coherent, for here the idleness of the individual is visible to a group, and its actual purpose is thus fulfilled. Veblen’s approach contradicts the notion of idleness as something other than free time, a leisure that is not linked to the machinery of production and its dictate for a period of time. Benjamin, for example, describes leisure in his Arcades Project as a sensation of the individual that precedes the constraints of strategies of individualisation that is, solitude.

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Among the conditions of idleness, particular importance attaches to solitude. It is solitude, in fact, that first emancipates— virtually—individual experience from every event, however trivial or impoverished: it offers to the individual experience, on the high road of empathy, any passerby whatsoever as its substrate. Empathy is possible only to the solitary; solitude, therefore, is a precondition of authentic idleness. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 805

‘Contemporary living’ offers possibilities of penetrating Arcadian zones without them being preset by themed architecture, but where the designconscious consumer creates the setting on his or her own. The following examples from contemporary industrial design and the wording with which they are described and advertised come from Robert Klanten’s compendium Arcadia: Cross-Country Style, Architecture and Design (2009), where Arcadian strategies of interior design are presented under the leitmotif ‘out of the wood-work and into the wild’. What lifestyle is this Arcadian design supposed to communicate to the owner? Klanten understands how to represent the link to naturalness and the attempt to thus recreate rest and harmony. Today, the desire to escape the urban bustle inspires the longing to retreat to natural serenity. The book ARCADIA is an inspiring reference that shows how the arcadic idea of life in harmony with nature can be reflected in contemporary living. Robert Klanten, Arcadia: Cross-Country Style, Architecture and Design (2009)

Other key words that run through the volume form an entire conglomerate of the intellectual history of nature, for example, alpine, backcountry, traditional & progressive, inspired by nature and folkloristic. Here, the frame of reference stretches from the sublimity of the mountains to the architecture of a Swiss chalet. All the same, Klanten captures the Arcadian idea in a perhaps unintended, yet even more precise way, when he establishes the link of an idealisation of second nature (learned from nature, inspired by nature, a treatment of nature) to a certain comfort and convenience: ‘Arcadia will introduce you to examples of remote architecture and interiors inspired by nature, merging tradition with Modernism, innovation and independent comfort’ (Arcadia. CrossCountry Style, Architecture and Design, 6). If ‘inspired by nature’ perhaps does not yet accurately explain the concept of second nature, especially because it remains unclear what concept of nature or naturalness this inspiration should be drawn from, the formulation ‘independent comfort’ is clearer. Independent of labour and capital yields, with simultaneous conve­ nience and comfort, this can sum up the idea of the contemplative today. Klanten’s ‘look book’ which can be classified within the category ‘design and living’, makes clear above all else the diffuse sense of the

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28—Martín Sabattini & Manu Rapoport, Arcadian today, a term that covers many www.designopatagonia.com.ar, 2016 concepts that is supposed to combine many different things: luxury, exclusivity, ecological 29—www.michaelclydejohnson.com, 2016 awareness, and a fitting mix of styles (nature, alpine, folklore). The Arcadian spectrum of contemporary design elites stretches from accessories to furniture to interior design and architecture, and thus reflects the Arcadian activity of past eras. For example, the Argentine designer duo Designo Patagonia28 draws a concrete reference to Arcadia when it stages a pampa landscape in its Matero Stool. The chair, actually no more than a stool with a seat covered with sheep wool, becomes in a metaphoric sense of design becomes itself a sheep, or at least something sheeplike. But not just the chair, but the arrangement of several chairs in the Argentinean landscape result in the Arcadian structure, at least as stylised in the product photograph: the blue sky, on which picturesque cloud formations are shown, and on the field an ensemble of ‘sheep’. The intention of the piece of furniture and its exemplary photographic staging is to transfer the feeling of landscape that is here communicated with the acquisition of the product to the residential space. Designo Patagonia refers itself to another aspect that corresponds to the experience of a second nature, that is, the tradition of Argentine field workers to drink mate tea during their breaks as refreshment. This subliminally introduces the motif of refreshment, the spring, as theme. With another strategy, the American designer Michael Clyde Johnson29 allows a landscape structure to emerge that analytically approaches the term picturesque. His ‘room for forced perspective’, is located in the Catskills Forest Preserve in New York, as a localised installation and a design object. The funnel-shaped construction using the very affordable material particleboard directs the gaze of the beholder, who here is explicitly somebody on a hike or a walk, to a certain section of the forest. But using the funnel, a certain image is generated and the gaze is given an orientation, similar to a landscape garden. At first glance, this image appears to be one among many landscape images and seems to reveal nothing special. Decisive for Johnson’s installation, however, is the making visible of the apparatus itself that directs the gaze. Johnson’s design strategy appears as the pure form of a strategy of designers and architects in approaching nature, making nature visible. Located in the country, and thus as a contrast to the urban home or apartment, spaces are to be created that present to the beholder landscape images that are as beautiful as possible. This phenomenon began already with ancient country homes, as Pliny describes:

It is a great pleasure to look down on the countryside from the mountain, for the view seems to be a painted scene of unusual beauty rather than a real landscape, and the harmony to be found in this variety refreshes the eye wherever it turns. The Letters of the Younger Pliny, To Domitius Apollinaris, Book 5, Letter 6

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It has folding doors or windows as large as the doors all around, so that at the front and sides it seems to look out on to three seas, and at the back has a view through the inner hall, the courtyard with the two colonnades, and the entrance-hall to the woods and mountains in the distance… Views which can be seen separately from its many windows or blended into one. The Letters of the Younger Pliny, To Gallus, Book 2, Letter 17

The techniques of the contemporary construction industry make it possible to create these landscape views, until now statically framed, as an actual tipping effect. One example of this is Chicken Point Cabin, a weekend house designed by Olsen Kundig Architects30 in northern Idaho. The vacation home is a small house on a lake in the form of a modernist box of concrete, steel, glass, and wood, whose glass windows, which basically make up the entire façade of the house in the direction of the lake, can be turned on a wheel system. This allows both views of the landscape: on the one hand through the windows the size of the building, and on the other hand a direct view. The large-surface or panorama-like use of glass surfaces can often be found in holiday homes, as in Holiday House on the Rigi, designed by Andreas Furmimann & Gabrielle Hächler31 in Scheidegg, Switzerland, where the form of the vacation home in the Swiss Alps enters into dialectic 30—www.olsonkundigarchitects.com, 2016 with glazed surfaces. They recall the format of a cinema screen, and make the mountain 31—www.afgh.ch, 2016 panorama into a narrative experience, like the 32—www.ruch-arch.ch, 2016 projection of a film. In Single Family House in 33—Neutra plans natural elements Sent, another Swiss example by architect Hans close to the architecture, i.e., 32 the window glazing take up a Jörg Ruch, directly adjacent or as an integral complete wall of the building and thus forms a component, ‘nature near’, that glass veil between the outside and inside rather then is the optically fuse with the than an actual separation. In so doing, Ruch surrounding nature, ‘nature far’. In so transforms what in standard architecture would doing, he achieves an effect similar to the one already achieved by the be a view outward into a visual expansion of Ha-Has in the landscape garden. An the space towards the outside. actual physical separation or barrier This play between inside and outside to the landscape (streets, moats) is and the accompanying use of large surface optically distorted by the use of higher windows was already established in the surfaces, creating the impression of a continuous landscape that stretches program of architectural modernism primarily to the horizon. For more on this, see by proponents of the international style in the Sylvia Lavin, Form Follows Libido: United States. Here, the basic conception is Architecture and Richard Neutra in bringing natural space to architecture so that a Psychoanalytic Culture (2007). architecture is saturated with nature. Think here 34—Also known as the Kaufmanns’ of Richard Neutra’s postulate of ‘nature near, Residence, located in Pittsburgh, 33 that works primarily with hovering nature far,’  Pennsylvania, Wright’s concept water and pool surfaces that expand optically consisted in the actual fusion towards the horizon, or Frank Lloyd Wright’s of outside and inside, the attempt Fallingwater.34 The desire not just to reconcile to form an organic architecture.

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architecture with the exterior and with nature itself, but also to unify the two, is also attested to by statements like those that can be found in Klanten’s volume, where one reads of Arcadia Cross Country Style, or deep in the woods or the mountain calls (Arcadia. Cross-Country Style, Architecture and Design). The divergence from an ideal image of Arcadia is clearly seen in the attempt to capture Arcadia in architecture, spatial strategies, and furniture objects. A truly contemplative life with nature would have to take place in nature itself. With the exception of the grave as a motif of vanitas, no other architecture element is present in this topos. This problematic is not a new one, but stretches across the historical solutions mentioned above. Since a life in unprotected nature would be unthinkable for any clientele, it could only ever been an imaginary escape. But the wall paintings, the wallpapers, park complexes, and villas should not be seen as the attempt to define architecture or design elements themselves as Arcadian, as in the examples of Klanten’s compendium. If in the historical solutions a stage is prepared for the Arcadian (objects allow for an Arcadian atmosphere to emerge) Klanten labels the object itself with the tribute ‘Arcadian’ (the object from an Arcadian atmosphere). A dominant quality of this Arcadian style is its exclusivity based on a specific target group. It is an exclusivity of information, access to education and knowledge, that enables the contextualisation of this new Arcadian, and above all the exclusivity of the milieu, who has access to enough space to design as they will or the possibility of owning a second home in country surroundings. Exclusivity here replaces the term used up until now for historical topoi (for example the villa): structures of domination. The construction of platforms like The World or Utopia is nothing other than the premise among the like-minded to share an experience. The idyll that is experienced within a small community of the like-minded as something exclusive offers not just the possibility of retreating to interiority, but also the outward demonstration of political or economic power. Exclusivity is itself part of the classical villa’s formal language and its declination in the various settings need not necessarily correspond to actual exclusivity. Exclusivity is often pretended as a backdrop, and created with low quality construction materials, as in the prefab villa or plastic marble in the private garden as offered at DIY shops and teleshopping. Where the air of form and superficial elegance are pretended is based on an industrially manufactured mold. The proportions aren’t right and individual elements of construction and decoration might appear artificial: and yet they provide access to the individual fulfillment of longings. This generalisation and widespread classical formal language in objects for home and garden or as an architectural element can be subjected to an ironic take, a play with forms that originally represented symbols of power. The ironic take on classicism is an essential stylistic device of architectural postmodernism. Hans Hollein’s Österreichisches

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35—The Österreichische Verkehrsbüro Verkehrsbüro35 is an important example im Opernringhof in Vienna was the of this, where the treatment and ironic use of classical forms are used to create a postmodern main headquarters of Österreichisches Verkehrsbüro GmbH, designed by spatial ensemble. The customer walks into an Hans Hollein in 1976–1978, completed interior that recalls the atmosphere of a winter during the years 1978–1979. According garden—almost like the historical glass palaces to Archiv Hans Hollein the travel agency was destroyed in 1987. of the 19th century—and is framed by a glassvaulted ceiling supported by stone columns. The open interior is divided motivically into various zones that recall the setting of a landscape garden or recall the eclectically adopted form of a landscape of leisure and experience. Upon closer inspection of the used materials and material combinations, Hollein shows that he questions this mechanism of unreflected appropriation. He contrasts concrete with marble and transfers organic elements to the material of metal. The floor plan of the space consists of several fragments of circles. In this way, he provides the customer with winding path that can generate the sense of strolling. This system of guidance leads the customers to the various desks. One of the curved sections of the space houses an ensemble of palm trees and a column ruin. The stability of the materials used for this installation stands in diametrical contradiction to their symbolic value, and thus expresses the fragility, the vagueness of the motifs. From the ancient reference of a column fragment of stone emerges a column core with a polished, stainless steel surface. The palm trees, also made of metal, are slightly abstracted in comparison to their natural models. Elsewhere, there is a pavilion (or a pagoda, the abstract form allows for both associations) that serves as a waiting area and supports a golden-shimmering roof. Over one of customer counters, in the horizontal a bar is inserted, above which a drape is placed, that frames it like a trompe-l’œilpainting and arrests it in metal. A play in perspective is also possible and the gaze from the counter on the interior space is framed by a cloth motif. Over an addition customer counter, two stuffed birds of prey are hung as if in free flight. A stairwell banister is replaced by a boat railing, including a lifesaver. Hollein’s interior includes several motifs of travel, but above all motifs of longing and the idyllic. Hollein is impressively able to generate a virtually elegiac atmosphere, defined by the generation of vanitas motifs, the ruinous, also the petrification of the drape or the birds. In so doing, the entire ensemble can be interpreted as a classicalArcadian one. The hybrid function of postmodern architecture is its key quality. It works with systems of reference, the semiotics of classicism, using symbols and in so doing creates meaning; meaning that itself is a stylistic device. Symbolic architecture today allows meanings to emerge that are essentially a hybrid of functional, ornamental, and formal events, as the architect and architectural theorist Charles Jencks has formulated (Towards a Symbolic Architecture, 1985). For Jencks, Hollein’s implementation is the virtually ideal solution for combining moments of memory with identifiable motifs and thus to create a semantic relationship, a comprehensive symbolic structure.

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If we think the ideal solution further, the meaning of individual elements is decisive that jointly play a narration for the beholder, the customer, in that each plays its own specific role. The overall ensemble can be read ironically, even if individual elements are laden with conventional ideas. For it is surely the mutual interaction of systems of coding that postmodernists reflect in their architecture: the system of classicism, that transports an ideational system of values via its formalisms, just as the system of themed architecture that uses the theme to communicate material goods. Historical symbolism is an independent system that is reflected in stylistic epochs (gothic, renaissance, etc.), where contemporary architecture outfitted with symbols use these historical structures as systems of reference, and not necessarily developing an independent one of its own. A few stuck-on astragals do not the Pantheon make. Charles Jencks, Towards a Symbolic Architecture (1985), 11

Contemporary designers work partially, while historical architecture is already elaborated, prepared, and can be classified in an intellectual history. The ‘symbolic intention’ (Jencks) of the architect or designer need not be explicitly up for discussion, for when meanings or narratives are not clearly formulated (and independently interpreted) they run the danger of becoming kitsch. Then they are but mere applications of a model onto anonymous architecture, as Venturi describes in his Las Vegas case study for the type of the decorated shack. They tend toward kitsch symbols, ‘the ephemera tacked onto the building at the last moment’ (Towards a Symbolic Architecture, 11). As a theorist, Jencks pleads for an intelligent iconographic program in place of such quick solutions. As an architect, he develops a formal language that can serve as an iconographic program. His building and garden designs combine the plan of modernism with elements of art deco and classicism with the aim of creating an actually symbolic architecture, where the symbolism in relationship to its landscape and cosmic surroundings, and in which the architectural space possesses a relationship to human proportions, an anthropomorphism, as familiar from Renaissance architecture. For example, in 1975 he created the Garagia Rotunda, a conglomerate of two referential systems: 1) the prefab garage, constructed using prefabricated elements in their simplest and most functional form, mixed with 2) the Italian rotunda, a massive round structure, that is linked not just in terms of conception, but also in expression closely to the round structures of Palladio, a highly symbolic architectural genre that also expressed power. The positioning of historicising elements takes place (ironically) freely according to a stringent conception, ‘classical parts are used freely’ (Towards a Symbolic Architecture, 47). Like the Head of Medusa, that marks the entranceway, but which is entirely built in an American

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suburban style. An equally free, if not radical approach to eclecticism is shown by Charles Moore in his design of Piazza d’Italia36 in New Orleans, an atrium situation in urban space surrounded by a high-rise and office and retail spaces in the centre of the city’s Italian neighborhood. Moore’s choice of style shows the pluralism of the location; he succeeds in linking the themes of the home country (immigration), consumer society, and the relationship to contemporary architecture. His motifs are layers of columns placed behind one another in various column orders and materials, an oversized pergola, the design of the flooring, the outlines of Italy in relief, and in addition the Arch of Triumph, with Roman lettering. The many different construction materials, the motifs, broken several times over, but also the use of water and green lend the square’s architecture something spectacular. At the same time, they define a location and demonstrate contemporaneity, usually expressed in the use of current construction technologies (concrete, polished chrome steel, neon). Jencks’ Thematic House is varied in its styles as a problematisation of the theme itself, directing an architectural site.37 In redesigning a home built in the 1840s in the late Georgian style38 there are not only thematic rooms that are ordered to match the seasons, various ethnic styles and the changing positions of the sun, but also the Time Garden. It has its own specific plot, entirely in the tradition of the English landscape garden. This too is directed according to the change in the seasons with continental/geographical attributions and thus transports certain wish images of vegetation: South: Summer Egypt West: Autumn America East: Spring China North: Winter Europe Jencks’ Time Garden is the attempt to synthesise seasons and landscapes or images of landscapes that operate in an associative way and trigger certain notions of longing for the landscape. Ideas of nature and 36—Charles Moore (with Allen Eskew and Malcom Heard, Jr. from Perez landscape images have been analysed in & Associates and Ron Filson): Piazza the previous chapters in their linkage to d’Italia, New Orleans, Louisiana. visual motifs, motifs that can be considered Planned and realised in the years triggers for atmospheres. The image of nature 1976–1979. here projects a landscape of longing. Just 37—The Thematic House, planned as the motif of Arcadia can be historically and built by Charles Jencks and Terry classified in the concept of three natures, Farrell, London, 1979–84. the question of functions and areas of use 38—An English variation of continental of these natures is posed, first, second, and classicism or neo-classicism, from third nature, in the contemporary context just the mid-18th to mid-19th century. The as in the expansion towards a fourth nature, term refers to the name George, held as garden and landscape researcher Brigitte by four British monarchs one after another. Franzen suggests for a concept of nature in

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hyperspace (Die vierte Natur, 2000), a would-be second nature beyond its reflection in the thematic worlds of the leisure industry, third nature as art-nature, as a place of leisure beyond its economic value. Just as for historical situations, the distance of people from certain natural spheres, as represented as nature or landscaped nature, is revealing for their reception.

Rest, Strength

Even in rural areas, where the population has a proximity to agriculture and the cultural landscape thus created, the sensation of being directly surrounded by something like nature is disappearing. Nature is even becoming a special experience for that part of the population that has a close relationship to nature on the basis of their work. Experiencing nature is coupled to products of the leisure industry and its accessibility to tourism. In the cultural section of the German weekly Die Zeit, we read on this: How do people experience nature in a purely practical sense, other than with a watering can and a plant guide on the balcony? Until the 1960s, most had a direct relationship to agriculture, at least through their relatives. But with the marginalisation of agriculture, even for the majority of countryside residents nature has largely become a synonym for relaxation. For 80 to 90 percent of all Germans, enjoying a beautiful landscape is right at the top of their travel motivations, regardless of whether they want to lie on the beach on a Maldives island or bike through Weserbergland—and their demands are increasing. Just off with a rucksack? That was once upon a time. Christiane Grefe, ‘Wie man in Deutschland Natur erlebt’, Die Zeit (October 16, 2003)

Regardless of which beautiful nature is declared a destination, each type of landscape has to meet a series of needs for the visitor and/or beholder, demands for beauty, the paradisiacal, the comfortable (and thus the Arcadian). The criteria that long applied for the exotic landscape, guaranteeing a plannable escapism and serving as a landscape of longing, can be transferred equally to the nearby cultural landscape. The glorification of second nature is revealed in the contemporary framework of vacation on the farm as an example of profitable tourism or the organic movement that has been gaining in economic strength since the 1980s as an example for the implementation 39—‘Urlaub am Bauernhof in of second nature as a lifestyle. Using the Österreich’ is a registered service example of the online marketing by Urlaub trademark and associated with Verein Österreich Werbung. am Bauernhof in Österreich39 (Vacation on

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the Farm in Austria) motifs can be derived that are primarily based on benevolent nature and the contemplative experience of this nature: There’s everything here for all those who want to go all the way to the top: crystal clear mountain water, clean air, rest and strength, and an amazing quiet, only broken by the cow bells that start the day. And then there is the smell of wood, the remoteness and expansiveness of mountains and forests. The alpine chalets, mountain farms, mountain inns, and romantically lone mountain cabins and ski lodges, usually located at high altitudes, are rustically idyllic, appropriately equipped, and always have an honest simplicity. Whether with the family, friends, or as a couple, at altitudes from 900 to 2,200 meters you can discover a new world between heaven and earth, whirlpool and outhouses. You have to fire up the oven yourself, and you can wash up at the spring trough. You go to bed in candlelight, the night full of stars, the meadows aglow in all colours or are snow covered and untouched. You can go hiking, ski, or just look into the sunshine, while the smell of your supper of tasty mountain cheese and tasty bread tickles your nose. www.urlaubambauernhof.at, 2012

The very first sentence sketches the program of the farm vacation: ‘There’s everything here’, the apparent retreat to a farm does not exclude the complete fulfillment of all the client’s needs, quite on the contrary. At the same time, the formulation ‘for all those who want to go all the way to the top’, provides an indication of how this form of vacation is a part of contemporary production relations: the guest is one who wants to go ‘all the way to the top’ and has to realise this aspiration in both his profession and his leisure time. The ambiguity of the statement is key here, for the linguistic humor advances the emotional reference of the possible customer who is alluded to as ‘potent’, quite in the sense of a designer of second nature.40 This is followed by a description of the atmosphere of locations that are stylised by addressing all sensory impressions, from the ‘crystal clear water’ and ‘clean air’, the ‘amazing quiet’, the special ‘rural smells’, and ‘rest and power’, but also ‘romantic solitude’. From this derives the description as ‘rustic’ and ‘idyllic’ together with ‘honest simplicity’, a ‘simplicity’ that includes

40—During the mid-16th century, the term terza natura, or third nature, formed in Italy, accompanied by the classification of first and second nature. The idea of this form of representation of a step model towards the definition of nature (or definition of landscape) emerged in light of the interest in garden art, that the humanist Jacopo Bonfadio was the first to call terza natura. The original first nature is the material for the second, revised nature, which is already a landscape, where nature is used as a good. Cicero already used the term second nature in his work about the nature of the gods De natura deorum: ‘All dominion, too, of the resources of the earth belongs to man. We enjoy the mountains and the plains, the rivers and the lakes are ours, we sow the crops and the trees, we give fertility to the land by conveying water to it, we confine the streams, we straighten or divert their course—in short, by means of our hands we endeavour to create in nature a kind of second nature.’

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both an exotic seeming outhouse and the luxury of a whirlpool. In the conclusion, advertisement entices the potential customer from his or her passivity and challenges him to be active in idyllic surroundings: ‘you have to fire up the oven yourself’, then also promising that everything is available to him or her. Such a farm, as described as a vacation offering by the advertising, corresponds neither to a landscape that is being made usable, a domesticated, second nature, nor to an original, anthropological place: here the adjective ‘rustic’ expresses an already aestheticised primevalness. The farms are a projection surface for the rural that has to possess all the qualities that the average visitor considers comfortable, and contrast with the place being fled from. A primevalness that includes an incalculable risk of wildness and the unpredictable is not desirable for the experience of nature from the point of view of a consumer. Vacationers want relaxation. But not alone in the wild, encountering a wolf unexpectedly or getting cut off from the rest of the world by a storm. Visiting a farm nearby or walking to a forest close by, both are places of memory, places of childhood or fictional places (from novels, fairy tales) that are to be maintained in as familiar a condition as possible. Despite the need of the beholder for the genuine, the attempt to return to the state of nature before its use as a cultivated landscape by way of the re-naturalisation is not desired by consumers or met with skepticism. The forming and shaping of nature contrary to this is expressed in the concept third nature, an artificial nature as manifested in historic garden designs. The contemporary spread of third nature takes place in a pop culture variation in the landscape backgrounds of shopping malls, DIY stores, online garden shops, and themed architecture. But the art form of landscape architecture is also alluded to, for example, in the ‘garden jewelers’ of the service provider Terza Natura, whose web presence reads as follows: We… dedicated a large part of our life to music and related arts. This background has given us a great sensitivity in approaching aesthetics, space, and time. We have always been fascinated by nature in all of its colourful nuances. For us, it represents a grand adventure. In the context of garden design, the interiorised images of numerous experiences of nature take on a form. www.terzanatura.com, 2012

The creation of the reference to the term of third nature, coined during the age of Italian humanism, their own work as garden service providers (‘We offer customised care contracts’) corresponds rather to the essence of an Arcadian template than to a contemporary form of garden art, as can be seen in projects like Time Garden by Charles Jencks or Little Sparta41 by the Scottish garden artist Ian Hamilton Finlay.

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Fourth Nature—Digitalised Nature The possibility of becoming a modifier and designer of nature is provided to users by applications of digitalised nature or natural depictions in virtual space. The use of the new media to represent nature began in the early 20th century, when the media of photography and film surpassed all prior image-creating media in terms of the precision of their depictions and thus achieved an enormous suggestive power for a wide audience. For Brigitte Franzen, too, this achievement in terms of depiction takes on a symbolic dimension: As apparatuses of observation (like the telescope or the Claude glass) they themselves (the new media) and the images created with their help are able to clarify the beholder’s standpoint on nature on a mechanical-technical and on a symbolic level. Brigitte Franzen, Die vierte Natur (2000), 18

In the question of society’s distancing itself from nature by the use of the new media, Franzen refers to historical situations where nature had already been perceived as aesthetic scenery for a much longer period.

Soap, Fake, Content

41—Beside extensive projects in public space (documenta 8, 1987, Kassel, and Skulpturprojekte, 1987, Münster) on the thematic areas of classicism, the elegiac and the Arcadian, developing their contemporary aesthetic effect and critical potential, Finlay, who died in 2006, had been working since the mid-1960s on the garden concept of Little Sparta in his private garden at Stonypath, located in Pentland Hills, southwest of Edinburgh. In almost every area of Little Sparta, Finlay realised installations with stone inscriptions in various sizes, with sculpture or various architectural elements. These elegiac inscriptions, like Finlay’s print works, were completed using a neo-classicist style. In the exterior, the weighting of the content by the choice of a classical typography was additionally underscored by the (artificial) patina of the objects that are often simply placed in the meadow. In so doing, Finlay deconstructs the typical axes of vision of the English landscape garden and labels them using a sign system for the beholder, who can thus consciously perceive in their constructedness. See Jessie Sheeler, Little Sparta (2003).

Space Crisis, or Arcadia as a Platform of Communication Wherever the clarification of space has to take place via a communicating medium, the existing (physical) space seems insufficient to satisfy all spatial needs. It is the situation of a spatial crisis, caused by a felt narrowing of space that awakens the desire for expansion in humanity. This takes place on highways, through a longing to travel, in cyberspace. Sites of transit and transition are to be designed in as pleasantly or attractively as possible to invite the beholder or user. In his Non-Places, Marc Augé refers to the explication of space that takes place, for example, in the following way:

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Pardoxically, it is at the city limits, in the cold, gloomy space of big housing schemes, industrial zones and supermarkets, that the signs are placed inviting us to visit the ancient monuments; and alongside the motorways that we see more and more references to the local curiosities we ought to stop and examine, instead of just rushing past, as if alluding to former times and places were today just a manner of talking about present space. Marc Augé, Non-Places, trans. John Howe (1995), 59.

The transit behavior that Augé describes for the highway might well serve equally as a choreography (the movement or passing of certain places) or a staging (choreography has a starting point and a certain or open conclusion) and thus forms an analogy to fake landscapes like that of Disneyland. To that extent, the trip to the countryside and an evening before the television can satisfy the same need, not just for space, but rather, much more concretely, for a more simply structured, yet also symbolic and above all comfortable sense of space or a spatial atmosphere. This is the impetus behind the idyllic. And even if the goals of these real and imaginary trips are apparently contrary to the idyllic, when they lead to an amusement park or a crime show, they still have the function of creating a quasi-idyll for the consumer, to which the consumer can withdraw with a pleasant feel. The hidden idyll can not only be found in the transmissions of the new media. Much more traditional images of the idyll and Arcadia are so numerous that in the following I will only briefly sketch two formats as representative for the many 42—Reality Soaps are a sub-genre possibilities, the reality soap and the social 42 with a clear of Reality TV, where the attempt is media game. A reality soap supposedly or actually made to depict aspect of the idyll is the show Ich bin ein real life for television. The reality or 43 commonly Star—Holt mich hier raus!, docu soap operates like a standard known in the German-speaking world as Das soap opera as a daily broadcast series Dschungelcamp (Jungle Camp), produced and of shows and is based on a screenplay, thus the term scripted reality. broadcasted by RTL Group. The show can be classified as a soap opera because beside the 43—I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of play and show elements the everyday lives of all Here! is a reality television franchise produced by ITV in the UK, a format participating actors and their social interaction with one another are shown and broadcast daily that is sold internationally and produced by other channels. The in the series. The principle behind this show is German version was broadcast by RTL the gather points by way of tests that have given in 2016 for the 10th season. the show the nickname ‘gross television’, for The show is produced on a former example eating live animals or inedible parts of farm in New South Wales, Australia. animals or getting covered in slime, insects and The leaseholder of the site is the sewage, that can be exchanged for food for the British production company Granada Television, which redesigned the group. Viewers choose individual candidates formerly open terrain elaborately, from this group, consisting of prominent figures outfitting it with camera and sound from the realms of film, music and television, technology. During shooting, the for these tests. In a second phase, the viewers complex is guarded by security staff in military garb. vote on which candidates should remain in

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the camp. The last remaining participant is then named King or Queen of the Jungle. The scenery pretends to be a jungle-like landscape, in the centre of which there is a so-called camp, a step-like natural soil ground with cots, a fire pit, and a bathing pool. This realm to sleep, cook, and live is, invisible to the TV viewer, actually covered to protect it from rain. The film set corresponds not so much to the wilderness of first nature, but rather to an ‘Australian park that RTL fenced in a corner of and furnished like a jungle camp’, as Eleonore Büning sarcastically remarked in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (‘RTL-Dschungelcamp. Jeder Mensch hat seinen Preis’, Jan. 28, 2011). The micro society of camp participants placed in a natural backdrop fascinates the audience in several ways. First of all, the viewers shudder over the simple relationships in the natural surroundings, the staged struggle for survival, the unpredictability and being exposed to the jungle climate and the like: this level characterises the aesthetic of the wilderness and in some elements a horror before the sublimity of nature. But this is followed by a brief adjustment phase of two to three days, the show is broadcast daily for two weeks, the reconciliation with the surrounding nature that now becomes a protection, a companion, and ultimately benevolent, place of contemplation for actors and viewers alike. As a third level, external nature presents itself as an allegory of human nature sui generis, as symbol of interiority. ‘They don’t want to eat animals and instead devour one another’ (‘RTL-Dschungelcamp. Jeder Mensch hat seinen Preis’). Aspects of living together in a closed group in close quarters become palpable for the television audience. Staging, screenplay, and editing of film material do nothing to prevent this. Erotic constellations emerge that recall the Arcadian antics of the 18th century, as well as interpersonal conflicts, that are here carried out in place of the audience. The sensations communicated through the medium oscillate widely between the poles of struggle and survival, as well as security, community, and sexuality. What throughout history has been communicated using depictions of nature in terms of emotion, is still communicated in reality TV as a profitable spectacle. There is also a need for idyllic content in virtual reality, in the social networks of the World Wide Web. The Facebook app FarmVille, which was brought to the market in June 2009 by American software manufacturer Zynga, became within a brief 44—FarmVille was developed by the time the most frequented app of the social software company Zynga in 2009 and network with over 82 million active users and quickly became the most-used game around 24 million likes.44 In 2010, 20 percent app within the Facebook network. of all Facebook users were playing FarmVille, The use data from May 2010 show the climax of the app’s use, with 82.4 one percent of the entire world population. million active users, and 23.9 million FarmVille works as real time simulation of Facebook members that ‘liked’ stylised rural life, the player/farmer cares for FarmVille. Since 2010/11, the number his plants, animals and trees. The game goal of active players began to decline, is first of all to increase play money through primarily because of leaving for other continuous farming and harvesting, to invest offerings. Zynga still operates many once again in the previous three categories browser games, currently FarmVille 2.

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45—www.bogost.com/ and in property, functional and decorative blog/cow_clicker_1.shtml, 2016 architecture, improving the farm with all sorts of decorative objects. The game goal of the second level is however to gain as many friends from the social network as possible for the game, by way of invitations, gift exchanges, and neighborly help. This allows the game makers to obtain the private information of millions of players who have agreed by way of using the app to the use of their data and, on a third level of play, to exchange real money for play money, for play money can be purchased on this level by credit card. While only a small portion of the overall players actually takes advantage of this offer, but with the overall volume of players this results in a profitable business for the game’s operators. FarmVille presents itself as a prototypical template of the Arcadian motif, as friendly, idyllic surroundings, within which the user harvests what nature offers. The first game levels are shaped by the cycle of sowing, harvest, and gradual growth, the player is alone with himself and the landscape. In the additional course of the game, the player can acquire typical accessories of the idyllic sphere: a pond, small hills, a cottage, and a greenhouse, all the way to a crystal palace, the botanical garden. The more time is spent on the game, the quicker the players experience the representative rise of their stretch of land, which now can also include a manor with a mansion or villa. Higher yields result from the interaction with friends from the social network, who also activate the game, making the conversion to machine production (all conventional agricultural devices can be acquired in the game and simplify or shorten harvest activities) and using real money, with which products and services can be acquired within the game world. Inviting friends seems to be harmless and unconstrained communication in the virtual world. But in fact it is a reference to the capitalist structure that stands behind the app and behind the social media in general. For the initially free games do not remain free. Virtual goods, equipment, or decoration objects can be acquired for real money or in exchange for the source of friends. These games, just like the platforms on which they can be called up, can be considered in the broadest sense of the term a service, an offer for a limited time that always possess a virtual and a real monetary value. Game success can be achieved not only via the investment of the personal time of a player and the play money generated in that fashion, but also by way of the acquisition of game goals by investing real money. They are an expression of the economisation of time, like the physical presence of customers in leisure and consumerist architectures. The ambivalence of games like FarmVille lies in the gain of free time by losing oneself in the game, that promises a virtual time of leisure, but at the same time economises this leisure time in the Habermasian sense. The American video game designer and game researcher Ian Bogost provides as a counterpoint to this situation his own programmed application Cow Clicker 45 to demonstrate the paradox of leisure and constraint. Cow Clicker, like FarmVille, binds the players to the program via a virtual course of the day, but in an extreme slowing of game activity,

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46—A description of such a that cannot be optimised by committed and community is provided by Johann time-intense user engagement. The only goal Wolfgang von Goethe in his of the game structure of Cow Clicker is the Italienische Reise: During his stay regular clicking of a cow over a six-hour period. in Rome, Goethe himself became a This leads to the cow’s increasing in value, shepherd in the city’s Academia degli but to nothing else, for this increase in value Arcadi, a linguistic society that dealt with ancient literature. Its members is not transferred to the game world in which took the viewpoint that Arcadia is the object is embedded. Perhaps this clicking actually amongst us, a synonym, devoid of meaning (‘I am clicking a cow’), the really available to experience, not a purposeless game, represents the actual regain dream world. ‘There, they discussed of free time. their convictions, principles, and Not only in the social media do intentions: they read poems in which countless other examples of idyllically designed one pondered the meaning of high antiquity, seeking to call the honored play worlds exist like Treasure Isle, FishVille, Tuscan school back to life. Then one ForestVille, The Pioneer Trail by Zynga, Island called out in delight, “This is our Paradise by PalevoGames or Gardens of Time Arcadia!” This led to the name of by Playdom), but also in the realm of classical the society and idyllic aspect of its computer games (like the SIMS by Electronic establishment.’ The literary travelogue describes the writer’s stay in Italy Arts) or online role-playing games, where designing environments and landscape images between September 1786 and May 1788. The text was written later in as natural a fashion as possible has already between 1813 and 1817. become a goal of the game all its own, or in that component items of the Arcadian treasure trove of motifs are used as in architecture. Alongside the components of the Arcadian used to design virtual game worlds, an Arcadian trace can be recognised in which the digital alter ego of the players, the avatar, takes on a role comparable to that of the shepherd in a historical staging of Arcadia and thus can make statements on the true world in the protected realm of the game world. Classical Arcadia, as a kind of intermediate world, offered the possibility to express oneself in the role of the shepherd in allegories about the real life world, as for example took place in Arcadian societies46 by way of cultivating literature and poetry; this is a decisive aspect of Arcadia’s socio-utopian potential. For Annette Hünnekens (Expanded Museum) these topoi are the new Arcadia. She sees the creation of platforms of communication as a contemporary function of the Arcadian. It is only the distance to the life world that allows a discourse about this life world, in the forms of representation of utopia, a space of longing. Hünnekens develops Arcadia’s form of thinking as a virtual community and communication platform in connection with her considerations on the atmospheric staging of a virtual museum, inspired by Malraux’s theory of the imaginary museum. Her comparison consists in the proposition of Arcadia as a system of reference of new virtual communities where avatars—virtual doppelganger—exchange ideas in certain platform offerings of cyberspace (for example Second Life) about things from their real lifeworld in a utopian form of representation, the space of longing. Hünnekens describes a ‘dual referentiality’ in these offerings: first in the construction of a paradise-like landscape—the summoning of certain landscape patterns generates certain moods— and in addition in the creation of a literary context, the pastoral.

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This dual referentiality is the mark of ancient pastoral and shepherd poetry that sought in the narrators by way of a form of less complex and simplified interaction to provide participation and distance at the same time. Here, the main function insisted in not being a promise of fulfillment of ideal lifeworlds, but using the distance to the lifeworld to allow a discourse. Annette Hünnekens, Expanded Museum: Kulturelle Erinnerung und virtuelle Realitäten (2002), 135

Illusions, Vanitas

The offerings of Arcadia, be it a platform, a place of retreat, a free space, have as an aesthetic concept a market value; they are an expression of a cultural hegemony. Marxist philosopher Wolfgang Fritz Haug spans a bridge from the glamour of art to the illusion of artistic capital in his Critique of Commodity Aesthetics (1971). In this representation the determining aim in the enterprise— profit—is hidden beneath the glamour of art. Capital, with art at its disposal, not only shows off as a connoisseur and admirer of Fine Art but also, in its esoteric interests, adopts the lofty illusion that it is the highest creations of the human spirit, and not profit, which is its determining aim. Thus everything good, noble, beautiful and great seems to speak for capital. Art is used to dazzle, as a tool to create the illusion that the domination of capital is legitimate and just as valid as the domination of the good, the true, and the beautiful, and so forth. In this way works of art can become a means, among others, of stupefying the public. They are deployed as one of the many techniques of creating an illusory solution to the contradiction between capitalist private interest and the vital concerns of society as a whole. Since this contradiction is as fundamental as it is allembracing, it does not stop with capitalism’s use of individual works of art. The function of illusory solution to this basic social contradiction, by expropriating “high culture” or whatever is “sacred,” is to create a style: it permeates all the architecture of capital wherever it occupies a place in the public eye and emerges in the form of a building. The seat of finance capital appears as a Greek temple, the brewery as a knight’s castle and the publishing house of the tabloid press as a Christian cathedral—places of worship for a pulp empire. Wolfgang Haug, Critique of Commodity Aesthetics: Appearance, Sexuality and Advertising in Capitalist Society, trans. Robert Bock (1971), 130

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If a landscape serves the purpose of pleasure, as ‘used to dazzle, as a tool to create the illusion that the domination of capital is legitimate’, as on a stage on which one or several stories are played out, on which the appropriation of material goods is accompanied by the appropriation of immaterial goods, does the experience of nature achieved in this way itself lead to a happy end to this story? The translation of the narrative moment of a happy ending to an act of consumption appears plausible under specific conditions that allow the understanding of consumer space to be understood as something primeval or alienated in its Arcadian state. This is the view of Arcadia as scenographic element, as a stage space, the understanding of consumer space as an apparatus,47 like the cinema as such, and the meaning of the fixed ending, or transience or perishability, both as an artistic motif and in economic practice. Contrary to tragic death, the happy ending makes your breathe the air of paradise and suggests at the same time that life will continue, thus catering to the camera’s demand for limitless reality. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (1960), 268.

Siegfried Kracauer equates the paradisiacal and transience in relationship to the happy ending, an untragic ending. The implied hope that the history could or can go on amplifies the effect of the happy end. It shows the end of pleasure that the viewer has while watching the film, and thus creates an inducement to consume more such film experiences. What Kracauer describes with the camera’s demand for unlimited reality is also the reality of the consumer. He is aware of the simulation. This is why it is part of his reality, and this is why he takes advantage of simulation, this is why it entices him. The successful act of consumption is similar to the happy ending, and in this case happiness is revealed not by the appropriation of a commodity but the appropriation of the entire commodity setting, the experience of a consumer landscape, the specific impressions of its surroundings and its aura. Perhaps the Arcadian motif is the most practicable stage form because it is the most universal, classifiable as part of European intellectual history, but not on the surface motivated by religion or other ideologies, a template that can be used in a limitless way. Constitutive for classical arcadia is the motif of vanitas, transience, which we encounter much more in the consumerist sphere as a trace of Arcadia than as a template. An iconographic representation of vanitas, in images and backgrounds of the ruinous, can be a part of a staging, but in the setting of a consumer landscape need not be an initial moment for consumption. Transience, however, is part of the act of consumption. When a pleasure is satisfied, the decay of the 47—The term apparatus is used consumer good and the ebbing of a fulfilled to refer to the creation, simulation, and norming of social space. longing already set in. This effect is known in

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marketing theory as perishability, a key term from the realm of service marketing that is used to describe a capacity that cannot be stored for future purchase. This concept of perishability can be applied to all positions that do not effect the material commodity itself and are time based, like campaigns, decoration, seasonal occasions, offers, and in the broadest sense experiences and moments. As already described for the application in marketing, it is economically sensible and desirable to recognise the perishability of certain services or goods as their key quality. This is true of experience or the beautiful moment. Those who live through this moment do not want it to pass, but can only recognise it as such if it is temporally limited, that is transient, a contrast to the everyday. The creation of ever-new events and moments while simultaneously referring to their limited duration is a necessity for the operator of consumerist or leisure complexes. It represents, as it were, its own quality, the resonance of a sweet melancholy, when a need is essentially awakened over and over again as soon as it is—apparently—satisfied. Sigmund Freud already described the psychological impact of scarcity in a brief essay about the problem of transience (On Transience, 1915) not as a loss of value, but ‘on the contrary, an increase! Transience value is scarcity value in time. Limitation in the possibility of an enjoyment raises the value of the enjoyment.’ What is described in the service trade as perishability in marketing theory, the attraction of a commodity (or service) is linked to its perishability (or, in antagonism, its presence) can also be applied to the sale of commodities in general. Perishability is revealed in fashions, in limitation, in exclusiveness. And it leads to a lasting competition. One example for this effect is the product of this industry itself, in an application like FarmVille, for example, that uses the digital image or a pleasant, beautiful nature (as its own purpose) as a starting point and soon takes a turn to the hidden game goals of profit maximisation, quantifiability, and competition. In this simulated course, the motif of second nature increasingly blurs, more and more associations and contexts like architectural styles, epochal characteristics, themes are introduced into the fundamental motif to create new experiences and pleasures, as if synchronous to real consumer landscapes. But ‘looking for pleasure, doesn’t that mean finding boredom?’ Balzac writes in his novel The Girl with the Golden Eyes. In classical Arcadia, elegiac feelings are desired and part of the general mood. Transience is the other side of joie de vivre, youth, it is becoming conscious of the beautiful and good that surrounds one, expressed in the image of benevolent nature. Transience means a certain quality of experiencing time, the extension of time as passive leisure or the condensation of time in experiencing pleasures. Boredom, conscious passiveness, is surely an Arcadian quality, abiding, non-spectacle. A more drastic moment of the vanitas motif is its allegorical function of representing a process of decay and/or a dying. Et in arcadia ego, I, death, am also in Arcadia.

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The interpretation of vanitas as the implied end of a spectacle that is not followed by a next is not contained in the repertoire of marketing. Another aspect of vanitas that cannot be explained, by the fact that the perishability, the transience of a consumer good is part of its ideal value, that does not make the act of consumption a motif of vanitas: all perishability or transience not grasped by marketing. This can be found in the ruins of the decays of consumer landscapes that are left behind wherever the pleasure has run out. Daniel Herman formulates this as a part of a Koolhaas’ Project on the City as an obituary to the American mall and has retail experts announce their death (or rather their execution). Kill the mall. So goes the mantra of retail mavens. They smell a revolution in their field: they smell the blood of the mall. And they thirst for it. Daniel Herman, Mall (2001), 262

Retail concepts age and with them the spaces that were developed according to these concepts. But the constantly changing decoration does not replace new technological possibilities of simulating the outer world and landscape. The eternal cycle of fresh and fashionable commodities cannot develop its full impact if lighting, material, and media are not all up to date. Or, fashions in architecture and façade design change; it would probably be more expensive to remodel and redesign suburban malls with that in mind than to move them to a more favorable location and to plan them anew. If there is nothing old in the way, the planner is even freer in his new designs, the experts plead thus for ‘extinction’, 48 as if the architecture were a hopeless patient. Dead malls are a warning example of capitalism that uses a great deal of surface and leaves it behind, unusable when it is no longer needed. Large empty malls in the U.S. are piles of concrete surrounded by vast concrete landscapes that originally served as infrastructure (parking and delivery areas). And the malls move on, first of all to digital media, but also are retuning to the cities, where there are many central mall structures, not just in the U.S. A recent example is Essen’s Limbecker Platz,49 not far from the megamall CentrO in Oberhausen, whose name already reveals the program. The mall has become a final place in the urban space. This is why it bears the name of 48—‘The experts want extinction. the place it has buried beneath it. City centres Let them die, they say. It’s too late’, are becoming mallified (‘Shopping is returning Mall, 265. to city centres that are, in turn, becoming 49—Limbecker Platz in Essen was mallified’ (Mall, 270)—not just due to mega finally completely opened in 2009 mall structure, but also due to the eternally (parts of the mall were already in identical choreography of the large (luxury) operation) and with 70,000 square retail chains that can afford to pay the rents in meters of retail surface area is one of attractive central urban space, in contrast to the largest urban malls in Germany: www.limbecker-platz.de, 2016. their competition in regional retail.

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In this text, Arcadia was described as lying next door, as a horizon of longing. Arcadia is also the projection of a warning, the admission of perishability. It is the promise of a better future—that would suggest a religious motivation—but also an extension of a (beautiful) moment, the happiness of abiding. In this moment, the motif of Arcadia, as well as the market structure from which it operates, creates a reduction of complexity, as is manufactured by the narrative means of the happy ending in a similar way.

Happy Ending, Healing

The term ‘happy ending’ can be linked in several dimensions with the term of the idyll. On the one hand, because it serves the same motifs as the happy ending that also characterise the idyll. Conversely, an idyll can be understood as a happy ending become space. Examples of this use of the motif can be found certain film genres, like the German and Austrian Heimat film, the animated film, the science fiction film, the fantasy film; in all these genres the viewer encounters the stylistic means of nature as an allegory for a certain mood. Nature here is especially used as a point of conclusion: this is expressed in several motifs, as in the renewed blossoming of a landscape or the first rays of sun after a period of darkness. In these natural motifs, nature is idyll, in the sense of a moment of longing or pleasure, and stands as it were for symbolic form of life or regeneration, or healing, but not only that. Everything is fine, but also: everything will turn out fine. In the setting of the cinema, the played out film is the narrative form that generates an experience (the cinema itself). The happy ending is thus to be understood as an aesthetic experience that works through the narrative form in which (freed of all external influences and darkened) in the space of the cinema itself, for the duration of the stay in this space, not for the duration of the film. This strategy of fulfilling desire, a zone of experience cut off from the outside world, is also pursued by consumer landscapes, amusement parks, parks, cruise ships, and artificial islands: a monopolisation of a feeling of happiness. Within defined areas and freed of disturbing everyday sensations or impressions, a place is created

50—I borrow the term ‘hanging out’ (abgammeln) from a text by Tilman Baumgärtel published in 2006 on the subject of idylls in German art magazine Kunstforum. Baumgärtel here documented his attempt to lead a lifestyle within the simulation game The Sims that does not correspond to the stipulated goals of the game, extending the free time in the game, and the spend phases of boredom, inactivity, and idleness. Baumgärtel described the starting point as follows: ‘As in a virtual doll house, one can establish a small, private, pastoral private life here. The goal of the game is to have the game figures lead a suburban existence that is as “normal” as possible.’ The jobs undertaken by the Sims lead to the acquisition of capital that is used by the players to design their homes in as tasteful a way as possible. Screenshots of the various homes were published by the players to compare with others online. The goal of the game oscillates with the terms of the American dream, where those who work hard are awarded, and seemingly everyone starts from the same starting point. The realisation of this dream in virtual reality tends however to tip into its opposite and the show the oppressive image of a narrow-minded society, according to Baumgärtel: ‘If the Sims are an idyll, they are an idyll with a dark underbelly: those who refuse certain notions of labour, consumption, sexuality, or personal development, are punished by a lack of success in the game.’ See Tim Baumgärtel, ‘Gammeln kann man woanders: Die Vorstadt-Idylle der Sims und ihre Kehrseite’, Kunstforum International 180 (2006).

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that can invite us to participate in leisure, that offers time to allow the beholder to be close to his or her sites of longing. The close relationship to the experience of the cinema becomes even clearer when the visitors are led through these locations, as if through film scenes, as if following a dramaturgy. Following motifs that they know from film and television, because these motifs correspond to narratives that already worked in the narrative media of film and television. Now, the possibility consists in using this simulation to solve everyday conflicts, to create a discourse, as Hünnekens suggests, or perhaps simply to ‘hang out’. 50 Here, we can conclude that these locations are differently programmed, and that they leave their users, consumers in an ambivalence that Goethe already had his Faust express, he who was aware of the fateful pact that he had agreed to but still succumbed to beauty of the situation, longingly formulates in an irreal, subjunctive mood: ‘Then, to the moment I might say: Abide, you are so fair!’

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Goss, Jon ‘Magic of the Mall: An Analysis of Form, Function, and Meaning in the Contemporary Retail Built Environment’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol 83 (1993) No.1, 18–47. Graham, Dan, Hurst, Robin ‘Corporate Arcadias’, Artforum, No22, December 1987, 68–74. Gruen, Victor Das Überleben der Städte. Wege aus der Umweltkrise: Zentren als urbane Brennpunkte, Wien: Molden, 1973. Habermas, Jürgen ‘Soziologische Notizen zum Verhältnis von Arbeit und Freizeit’, Konkrete Vernunft. Festschrift für E. Rothacker, Bonn 1958, 219–231. Hajòs, Gèza ‘Illusion und Landschaft. Gärten und Parks im Wettstreit zwischen Natur und Kunst’, Vorlesungen und Vorträge Heft 16, ed. Ludwig Boltzmann Institut für Europarecht, Wien, 2003. Haug, Wolfgang Critique of Commodity Aesthetics: Appearance, Sexuality and Advertising in Capitalist Society, trans. Robert Bock, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Herman, Daniel ‘Mall’, The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping, edited by Koolhaas, Rem, et.al., Köln: Taschen, 2001, 461–476. Hünnekens, Annette Expanded Museum. Kulturelle Erinnerung und virtuelle Realitäten, Bielefeld: transcript, 2002. Illouz, Eva ‘Emotions, Imagination and Consumption: A New Research Agenda’, Journal of Consumer Culture 9.3 (2009), 377–413. Jencks, Charles Towards a Symbolic Architecture, New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1985. Klanten, Robert, ed. Arcadia. Cross-Country Syle, Architecture and Design, Berlin: Gestalten, 2009.

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Schroer, Markus Räume, Orte, Grenzen. Auf dem Weg zu einer Soziologie des Raums, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2005.

Kracauer, Siegfried Theory of Film: Redemption of Physical Reality, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960. Legnaro, Aldo Stätten der späten Moderne. Reiseführer durch Bahnhöfe, shopping malls, Disneyland Paris, Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2005. Löw, Martina Raumsoziologie, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2001. Luttringer, Klaus Weit, weit… Arkadien. Über die Sehnsucht nach dem anderen Leben, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2000. McCracken, Grant Culture and Consumption. New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Mitchell, W.J.T. ed. Landscape and Power, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002. Reichel, Norbert Der erzählte Raum. Zur Verflechtung von sozialem und poetischem Raum in erzählender Literatur, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1987. Ritzer George, Ryan, Michael, et.al. ‘Transformation in consumer settings. Landscapes and beyond’, Inside Consumption. Conusmer motives, goals and desires, edited by S. Ratneshwar, David Glen Mick, London/ New York: Routledge, 2005, 292–308.

Sieferle, Rolf Peter Rückblick auf die Natur, München: Luchterhand, 1997. Sieferle, Rolf Peter ‘Die totale Landschaft’, Topos. European Landscape Magazine, 2004, No. 47, 6–13. Taguchi, Yasuhiko, Im, Tao, ed. Shop Design Series—American Shopping Centers 2, Tokyo: Shōten kenchiku-sha, 1996. Veblen, Thorstein The Theory of the Leisure Class, New York: MacMillan, 1899. Zurstiege, Guido ‘Über den Funktionswandel von Räumlichkeit im Zeitalter des Konsumismus’, Räume des Konsums. Über den Funktionswandel von Räumlichkeit im Zeitalter des Konsumismus, edited by Kai-Uwe Hellmann, Guido Zurstiege, Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2008, 197–200. Zybok, Oliver ‘Zur Aktualität des Idyllischen’, Kunstforum International Bd. 179 (2006), 39–79.

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The Artists

2009

Markus Hanakam *1979 Essen / Germany

2008 SHOWROOM, das weisse haus, Vienna

Roswitha Schuller *1984 Friesach / Austria Collaboration since 2004.

2006 2006

Selected Solo Shows

Selected Group Shows & Festivals

2016 Kostka Gallery, MeetFactory, Prague 2016 Eight Treasures, Neuer Kunstverein Wien 2016 Cosmic Cathedral, Krinzinger Gallery, Vienna

2016 Lichtwürfe, Volkskundemuseum Graz / Universalmuseum Joanneum, Graz 2016 Nonstreaming Artifacts, easy!upstream, Munich 2016 OFF IS Artspace, Vienna 2016 Rencontres Internationales, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin Rencontres Internationales, Gaite 2016 Lyrique, Paris

2015 Phantom and Travertin (with Janek Rous), Austrian Cultural Forum, Prague 2015 Zirkel & Drop, Clemens Gunzer Gallery, Zurich 2015 Housing & Healing, Fabrika, Moscow Aura, Artist Quarterly Sotheby’s, 2014 Vienna 2013 Fagiano & Facciata, Galerie 5020, Salzburg 2013 Enchantment, The Lust Gallery, Vienna Faux Terrain, Barcelona, 2013 Freiburg 2012 ZUCKER, Viertelneun, Vienna Obrist Gallery, Essen 2012 2012 Museum of Modern Art Carinthia MMKK, Kunstraum Burgkapelle, Klagenfurt 2011

Poetry of Architecture, The Lust Gallery Vienna

2010

Palaces & Courts, MAK Museum for Applied Arts / Contemporary Art

Road Movie (Screening), Kunsthalle Wien Ursula Blickle Lounge

Wir sind perfekte Liebhaber, Patrick Ebensperger Gallery Graz All Night Long, Christine König Gallery Vienna

2015 Recommended By, easy!upstream, Munich 2015 Paris International Digital Week, Identité rêvé(l)ée, Gallery mi*, Paris 2015 TEXT:BILD/BILD:TEXT, Fotogalerie Wien 2015 Destination Wien Extended, Kunsthalle Wien | DI8G | wellwellwell, Vienna 2015 SHARE Too much history, more Future, DEPO, Pilsen 2015 AiR 2013–14, Krinzinger Projekte, Vienna 2015 TRANSform V, Kunstverein Kärnten, Klagenfurt 2014 2014 2014 2014

Atelier, PACT Zollverein Essen PARA, Medienwerkstatt Wien Nordico Museum of the City of Linz 5th International Sinop Biennial, Sinop, Turkey

2013 2013 2013

Eating in Art, Kunsthalle Krems Forum Frohner, Krems The Colours of the Landscape, Hilger BROTKunsthalle, Vienna Rencontres Internationales, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin

233

2013 Sculpture by the Sea, Aarhus 2013 videodumbo, Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology, New York City 2013 15th WRO International Media Art Biennale, WRO Center, Wroclaw 2013 Plinque, Gallery 22,48m2, Paris 2013 Elastic Video, Kunstraum Niederoesterreich, Vienna 2012 Rencontres Internationales, Palais de Tokyo, Paris 2012 Videoquotation, Krasnoyarsk International Media Art Festival, Krasnoyarsk AiR Ungarn 2011–2012, Krinzinger 2012 Projekte, Vienna In der Kubatur des Kabinetts, Fluc, 2012 Vienna Paraflows .7 ‘Reverse Engineering’ 2012 Festival for Digital Art and Cultures, Vienna After Solaris, Kunstvilla Hospizgalerie, 2012 Bregenz Japan Media Arts Festival—Video 2012 Works Art Division, d-labo and National Art Center, Tokyo 4th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary 2011 Art Pro&Contra Symposium of Media 2011 Culture, ArtPlay Design Centre, Moscow Konschthaus, Luxembourg 2011 Space Odyssey, Gallery MAERZ, 2011 Linz ISEA 17th International Symposium 2011 for Electronic Arts, Istanbul Photophobia 3, Baltic Biennale 2011 of Photography, Kaliningrad DIAGONALE. Festival of Austrian 2011 Film Elastic Video,Tokyo Wonder Site, 2011 Hongo,Tokyo 23rd Festival Les Instants Vidéo, 2010 Marseille back from, Kunstverein Freiburg 2010 Atelier Oktober, PACT Zollverein 2010 Essen The conditional Form of the Real, 2010 Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow 2010 Le pire n’est jamais certain. (Bibliothèque des Projets), Centre Pompidou Metz

2010 PETIT PLINQUE, Transforming Freedom, Museumsquartier Wien 2010 The Old Man and the Sea, NÖ Dokumentationszentrum für moderne Kunst 2010 Atelier Februar, PACT Zollverein Essen 2009 2009 2009 2009 2009

Plinque Projéction Paris Filmriss Festival Salzburg Plinque Meringue, Vienna SPOTLIGHT. Neuzugänge seit 2006, Museum der Moderne Salzburg Final Projects Group XXVII, MAK Center for Art and Architecture Los Angeles

2008 2008

Video Edition Austria, Release 02, Medienwerkstatt Wien Plinque, Vienna

DUOS, Patrick Ebensperger Gallery 2007 Graz Unité, Kunstpavillon Innsbruck 2007 Klasse Erwin Wurm (Burn, Baby, Burn), 2007 Kunstverein Ettlingen / Wilhelmshöhe ZUSATZSTOFFE, dieveranda 2007 MAK NITE©, MAK Museum for Applied 2006 Arts / Contemporary Art Mozart The Enlightenment: 2006 An Experiment in Vienna, Albertina Vienna 2005 2005

Ideenräume Bétonsalon, Vienna Letzte Versuche, Hohenlohe und Kalb Gallery Vienna

Public Collections Art and Design Collection of the University of Applied Arts Vienna Ursula Blickle Video Archiv Museum der Moderne, Salzburg Artothek of the Federal State of Austria MUSA Artothek of the City of Vienna MMKK Museum of Modern Art Carinthia MUMOK Museum of Modern Art Vienna, Ludwig Foundation

234

Grants & Scholarships 2016

Visionaries-in-Residence, MeetFactory, Prague

2015 LOOP Barcelona Discovery Award shortlist 2015 CCA Studio Program, CCA Andratx, Mallorca 2015 Artist in Residence European Capital of Culture, Pilsen 2014 Studio Grant Federal State Austria, Tokyo 2012 Travel Grant Federal State NRW, Rome 2012 PACT Zollverein Artist in Residence Program, Essen 2012 Jury Selection Japan Media Arts Festival 2012 Austrian State Grant for Fine Arts 2011

Krinzinger Gallery Artist in Residence Program, Petömihályfa, Hungary

2010

Prix Ars Rothkrebschen

2009

Studio Grant Province of Carinthia, Cité International des Arts Paris

2008

MAK Schindler Artists and Architects in Residence Program, Los Angeles

2007 2007

Recognition Award of the Province of Tyrol Otto Prutscher Award

www.hanakam-schuller.com

Markus Hanakam & Roswitha Schuller are represented by Galerie Krinzinger Seilerstätte 16 1010 Vienna www.galerie-krinzinger.at Galerie Clemens Gunzer Hottingerstrasse 44 8032 Zurich www.clemensgunzer.com

235

Photo Credits

Thanks to

Markus Hanakam & Roswitha Schuller (unless otherwise noted), Maximillian Hochstätter (p. 192–196), The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (p. 158)

Christoph Amann, Wakimoto Atsushi, Gerald Bast, Margaretha Bauer, Katharina Burkhardt, Anne Sophie Christensen, Brian Currid, Lucas Cuturi, Raimund Deininger, Douglas Deitemyer, Julius Deutschbauer, Ewa Esterhazy, Scott Evans, Fred Feu, Angela Fössl, Anselm Franke, Lona Gaikis, Lukas Gehrmann, Simone Graf, Alexandra Grausam, Elodie Grethen, Uta Grosenick, Clemens Gunzer, Veronika Haberler, Nathalie Hénon, Gertrude Henzl, Stefan Hilterhaus, Roman Horak, Leon Hösl, Annette Hünnekens, Karina Karaeva, Valentin Kenndler, Sakiko Kito, Stephanie Koch, Isa Köhler, Ursula Krinzinger, Andreas Kristof, Elsy Lahner, Gerda Lampalzer, Felix Leutner, Jim Libby, Carolin Lotz, Gerald Matt, Peter Melicharek, Karin Mihatsch, Simon Mraz, Christof Nardin, Torsten Obrist, Roman Pfeffer, Stefanie Pluta, Karin Raith, Mara Reissberger, Jean-François Rettig, Else Rieger, Joyce Rohrmoser, Kurt Schlögl, Alexander Schukoff, Michael Schultes, Anja Seipenbusch, Claudia Marion Stemberger, Tim Sharp, Maximillian Spiegel, Angela Stief, Kathy Tanner, Margarita Thurn, Ferdinand Ullrich, Wolfgang Ullrich, Katarzyna Uszynska, Stephanie Weber, Lois Weinberger, Jörg Oliver Weinöhl, Jürgen Weishäupl, Patrick Werkner, Christine Wetzlinger-Grundnig, Yvonne Whyte, Manfred Widmann, Manfred Wiplinger, Marlies Wirth, Erwin Wurm, Oliver Zybok

© 2016 for the texts by the authors and De Gruyter © 2016 for the reproduced works by Markus Hanakam & Roswitha Schuller © 2016 for the reproduction of Artist Carl Wilhelm Kolbe, German, 1759–1835 Title Auch ich war in Arkadien (I Too Was in Arcadia) Date before 1801 Medium Etching Dimensions 15 1/8 × 19 7/8 in. (38.4×50.5cm) Credit Line: The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Museum purchase funded by the Marjorie G. and Evan C. Horning Print Fund, Benjamin and Renée Danziger in honor of Barry Walker, and by Nina and Michael Zilkha

236

Book Series of the University of Applied Arts Vienna Edited by Gerald Bast, Rector Editor Angela Stief, Vienna, Austria Concept Markus Hanakam & Roswitha Schuller Authors Angela Stief, Markus Hanakam, Roswitha Schuller, Anselm Franke, Uta Grosenick, Annette Hünnekens, Wolfgang Ullrich, Stephanie Weber, Lois Weinberger, Oliver Zybok Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the German National Library. The German National Library lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, re-use of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in other ways, and storage in databases. For any kind of use, permission of the copyright owner must be obtained. © 2016 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Supported by

Translation Tim Sharp (Intro, A Discussion p. 6–28, Back Cover), Douglas Deitemyer (Synopses, p. 29–156), Brian Currid (The Arkadikon, p. 157–229) Copyediting Else Rieger Proof Reading Scott Evans (The Arkadikon, p.157–229) Coverimage Markus Hanakam & Roswitha Schuller From the Series Profile Graphic Design Bueronardin Printing Holzhausen Druck GmbH, Wolkersdorf, Austria Printed on acid-free paper produced from chlorine-free pulp. TCF ∞ Printed in Austria ISSN 1866-248X ISBN 978-3-11-048007-8 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-048098-6 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-048032-0 www.degruyter.com