Post-Linz
Posted on August 7th, 2006 in musings
I recently returned from Linz, Austria where I taught a workshop with the Transart Institute, a new low-residency MFA program. The experience was unique for many reasons, but perhaps most notably, in one respect, was how little I actually saw or understood of the city. The actual work I was contracted to do was very intensive, leaving only a few hours here and there for exploring the host city—hours mostly spent unwinding with food and drink with my fellow instructors. For whatever reason, I was pretty unprepared to play the part of “tourist” in Linz, much less my normal role as the artist whose work is ostensibly and self-consciously about Place. As an unplanned reversal of my past engagements with rich, “thick” places (places where I spent much more time, though, too), this trip to a foreign city was marked by a soft barrier that muffled my experience of it.
Ultimately, for me, Linz became a relatively mute city. Its language was vague, or perhaps I couldn’t decipher its language and its unique rhythms, the subtle patterns and differences that render a city legible for the explorer. Block after block of italianate buildings might have been in fact neo-classical or verging on baroque (revival?), but their age seemed indeterminate, their style slightly parodied. The old (altes) quarter was familiar and predictable, like the set piece from the movie about Old Europe. It’s not so much that Linz was mute—more likely, its articulations fell on ears stuffed with cotton, becoming murmurs and weak whispers. The miscommunication was actually refreshing.
Walking through the streets of Linz during the few hours I stole away from teaching, I felt the ability to write the city for myself upon this background of murmurs. That is, I navigated the paths of the city along the pathways of thought, of ideas and stories. Many of my walks through Linz were taken with my fellow instructors or students; our conversations followed trajectories that meshed with our movements through the space of the city. Footsteps became verbs; gestures adverbs; buildings, walls, and cobblestones were nouns; shop window displays, signs, architectural details were adjectives. Spatial stories a la De Certeau. My memory of Linz (if I can speak of it so soon) is more dependent on these relationships with the people I met there than the physical space of the city, which was almost just consequential—important as context but not as subject. I’ve always focused on the raw space of the city in my thinking about how memory and architecture and meaning come together. People, of course, were always with me to some degree to enrich and establish meaning in the cities I’ve lived or visited. How could I have overlooked their significance for so long?
