MARK DORRIAN o THE LONDON EYE

Zachęta Narodowa Galeria Sztuki i Instytut Historii Sztuki UW

zapraszają na wykład

MARK DORRIAN

THE LONDON EYE

AERIALITY, SPECTACLE, AND ‘THE EXHIBITIONARY COMPLEX’

wtorek 3 czerwca 2008 godz. 18

sala 105 stary BUW Krakowskie Przedmieście 26/28

In 2000 the London Eye, a gargantuan hi-tech Ferris wheel, trumped the government-sponsored Dome during London’s millennium celebrations. Today it looks set to establish itself as the city’s equivalent of that 19th century Parisian belvedere the Eiffel tower. One of the iconic ascensional apparatuses of modernity, the urban ferris wheel emerged within modern society at a very specific moment: one characterised by the linked developments of mass tourism and the urban spectaculars of the turn-of-the-century World’s Fairs.

This paper analyses the contemporary re-emergence of the urban ferris wheel by examining the way the London Eye is staged within the city and the city is staged through it. In many ways the British millennium festivities were conceived in the mould of the ‘imperial exposition’, and the subsequent disarray illustrated the difficulties of doing this in a post-imperial condition and in the absence of the progressivist narratives empire authorises. In part the wheel’s success derived from the way it side-stepped the representational disputes by exhibiting London itself: the image of a city cleansed of labour and social conflict was once again produced, but the late 19^th century urban utopia of incorporation discernible – according to contemporaries – from the top of George Ferris’s wheel at the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition had been exchanged for the touristic vision of the spectacle-city. Until recently operated and largely owned by the ailing national airline, British Airways – who market trips in it as ‘flights’ – the Eye has become the focus for the company’s attempt to reactivate the romance and mythology of flight (champagne flights, in-flight weddings, etc.) in a world of mass air transportation and international terrorism.

Mark Dorrian is Reader in Architecture, MArch Programme Director at the University of Edinburgh, and Co-Director of the art, architecture and urbanism atelier Metis. His books include (with Adrian Hawker) Metis: Urban Cartographies (Black Dog, 2002), (with Gillian Rose) Deterritorialisations: Revisioning Landscapes and Politics (Black Dog, 2003) and (with Jane Rendell, Jonathan Hill and Murray Fraser) Critical Architecture (Routledge, 2007). Recent essays include “Clouds of Architecture”, Radical Philosophy 144 (2007), “The Way the World Sees London” in A. Vidler (ed), Architecture Between Spectacle and Use (Clark Art Institute/Yale, 2008) and "Transcoded Indexicality", forthcoming in LOG 12 (2008). He is currently working on a book on the grotesque and collaborating with CNRS Paris on a project on the cultural history of the aerial view.