The
City Is A Sewer
catalogue
essay (edited) for Callum Morton, part of the FACE UP exhibition
of contemporary Australian Art, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin,
2003
complete
unedited version reprinted in catalogue for Callum Morton's
"More Talk About Buildings & Mood", MCA Publications, Sydney,
2004
Playing on a television somewhere in the world is a documentary
on architecture. There's probably a British voice-narration.
It's probably funded by European cable companies. The Americans
will buy it cheap. This British guy will undoubtedly be
anthropological about architecture. He'll use some standard
line about how Man lived in caves, covering its walls with
his own excrement. A wry tone in his voice will marvel at
how far we have progressed.
But
we still live in caves. We've just renamed them homes. Some
even pay architects to design their homes for them. If living
in caves is making walls out of your excreta, then getting
an architect to design your home is having your bum wiped
for you.
Living
with human waste is a basic modus of the domus. Behind every
living abode is a place where that waste has to be organised:
the toilet. For most, this involves a disappearing act.
It's pure magic: you'll never have to clean up your own
excreta, but you can still live with it. Your walls aren't
made of the stuff any more, but they are signs of the invisibility
of it. The most stringent council regulations are those
connected to waste disposal. Your house extends its colon
into the bowels of the earth and to sewerage farms far away
from your domain.
Just
as your discharge is jettisoned laterally away from you
in the private sphere, your collective excrescence is linearly
projected about you in the public sphere. Public architecture
- the glowing orb of Man's sophisticated endeavour - throws
itself up around you at every move in the city. Like the
smell at the sewerage farm, it clouds the air. In the city
centre, it blocks the sun, casts ominous shadows, and impedes
all traverse. These buildings are the visibility of that
which your home hides.
Such
gilded gargantuans of verticality have long been associated
with the phallic. Even our repressed British voice-over
narrator will make such a quip. Men, women and children
all marvel and mock the phallic these days, as if there
is profound insight in a lazy Freudian association of an
erect cock with something that stands erect. (Besides which,
if buildings were actively phallic, they would be sticking
out horizontally.) In the collective mind of the architectural
guild, maybe architects' cocks are 30 stories big. The reality
is more likely to be millimetres.
Big
buildings are neither phallic nor penile - residues of a
failed attempt to ascribe symbolic weight to their form.
Read as morphological signage, they are best viewed as human
excrement that has been piled up. High. This gravity defying
feat is a testament not to Man's ingenuity, inventiveness
or inspiration, but to the excessive amount of bowel movement
he can induce. The public landscape is the sewerage farm
you've heard so much about but never visited. The spread
of tall buildings are not monuments to architects but extruded
columnar charts indicating the growth of the city: the more
people, the more shit, the taller the buildings. The excreta
that once covered the cave walls is now ritualised into
an effluvia that binds the heavens to earth in the monumental
skyline of the stinking city.
Artists
can be rightly accused of playing with their own stools
and sludge. Grand narratives might link Prometheus to the
sculptor and his clay, but the child who marvels at his
own waste is closer a model for idle artistic endeavour.
As architects make greater claims for their artistic discourse,
and artists morph installation practice into virtual architecture,
a splatter-ball battle ensues, each hurling the other's
discharge back at the other. Space becomes inverted, as
architects design galleries that look like magnified objet
d'art from the outside, while artists toil away inside setting
up art that resembles demolition zones, constructions sites
and renovation schemes. Far from being a phenomenon of postmodern
fusion and integration, this battle for the city within
and without the museum is mostly a neurotic territorial
collision. It's a spectator sport worthy of any televisual
enterprise - but flicking the channel might be the best
option.
Callum
Morton's work plays on a different channel. Joining the
regurgitative impulse of the artist, the time-consuming
syndrome of the artisan, and the heroic expulsion of the
architect, Callum places small but potent turds downwind
in the museum. They accrue the stench of the city's prize-winning
architectural edifices, intensifying their odour through
essencing their form in his maximalized miniatures and transmogrified
turrets. Feeling the air currents cartographically formed
by the city's wind tunnels, Callum's schematics, models
and installations strategically pinpoint the intersections
where architectural voiding has left its mark - and where
the city reveals itself as sewer.
