Friel’s “Abandoned Archives” exhibition depicts interiors of neglected industrial facilities and institutions, including factories, power plants, asylums, hospitals and schools. He himself says of it, “Humanity is inexplicably broken and ruined with the occasional burst of white light.”
My initial reaction was wonderment with the availability of his subject matter. Are there really bustling centers for commercial and social intercourse left bereft of humanity as if a neutron bomb silenced them, leaving them completely intact and left to age?
Plaster and chipped paint have fallen on wooden fold up seats in lecture halls. Stained rugs line crusty corridors of hospitals past, littered with old-fashioned wheelchairs and rusty cabinets. A woman with a freshly dried coif has gotten out of a chair in a beauty parlor, leaving the chair abandoned forever.
These crumbling interiors do not mean humankind is broken and ruined. Actually, they mean that humans go on doing what they have always done: improve technology with which to carry on the same old pursuits: transform energy, make hair beautiful, wheel around sick people, and train students for future endeavors. The inventions of man break and end up ruined. The bursts of white light are improved inventions. Technology continues to evolve and, in turn, aids the evolution of man.
These photographs illustrate something else about technology that can be considered inexplicable: how modern technology is succeeding in making man truly different from his ancestral past. Today's technology helps individuals to place themselves above the collective in importance. Today's technology causes collectives to quickly and efficiently replace the traditions of the past with an ever improving future, to make the past obsolete. Today's technology, such as modern forms of birth control, helps individuals and collectives to liberate themselves completely from the constraints of the past.
If Friel is at all correct regarding what his photographs illustrate, it has to do with the speed of change. Technology has evolved so rapidly that most individuals have no idea how it all works. It’s too abstract. Can anyone explain how even a toaster works, let alone the Hubble telescope? Finally, today's technology causes us to cease even asking such questions. We just know it’s supposed to work, that’s all. Technology is God. The truly inexplicable nail on man’s new, improved coffin, that broken and ruined state he allegedly is in, is the tendency of technology to secularize the entirety of human experience. We no longer believe that there is a power greater than our own.
Beautiful decay is what I see. I have my certificate in Historic Preservation of Architecture and love old buildings. Not everyone is into high tech. I'm not much into high tech and work to keep alive many old traditions such as weaving, pottery, animal husbandry, gardening. I'd rather keep what we have in good working order. Although I agree there is a epidemic of the broken and ruined state you describe, most people I have in my community have kept soul and God alive. Before she transfered to SCPA Esme was raised in the Waldorf School. She did not watch much television at all, and only PBS at that (although she was a movie buff). She had no video games, cell phone or other tech especially when she was very young. She engaged in meaningful communication through tech means such as her blog and skype, email You might want to check out the philosophy. http://www.cincinnatiwaldorfschool.org/waldorf-philosophy/steiner-philosophy.html
ReplyDeleteA favorite past time of mine when I lived in downstate Illinois was to drive down the main streets of the small farming towns and ogle at what an aficionado of the sport called "store front vernacular," the art practiced by the nineteenth and early twentieth century masons that involved fashioning the brick located near the top of the buildings into exquisite and usually unique designs.
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