“Speed Limits” and “Solitary Crowding”

The acclaimed Italian Futurist Marinetti held, in 1916, that “speed renders agile,” that it accelerates the blood circulation of cars, trains and planes everywhere. In two recent exhibitions: “Speed Limits” at the Canadian Centre for Architecture and Momoko Allard’s “Solitary Crowding” at Concordia’s Faculty of Fine Arts Gallery, we were offered a truly adult and binary dosage of Ephedrine, but without any adverse side effects. The shows were potent stimulants to think, if not exactly racing thoughts, then at least accelerated ones.

In graphic detail, “Speed Limits” surveyed the role speed plays in the violence and dynamism of contemporary life across its full array: art, architecture and urbanism, design graphics and economics. The motto for the exhibition, lifted from the founding manifesto of Italian Futurism, was apt: “The world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed.”

The exhibition explored several principal axes of the culture of speed. Installed in linear fashion in adjoining halls, each of the five interwoven themes was given its own gallery. Beginning with issues of pace, circulation and transit, then on to construction and the built environment, efficiency, measurement and representation of rapid motion, and, not least, the mind/body relationship, “Speed Limits” examined in a spirit of trenchant critique both the antipodes and dovetailing continuities between the snail and the hare. A vast plethora of objects, publications, photographs, advertising posters, architectural drawings, publications and some highly diverting video games shed welcome light on the complex issue of speed, in terms both technological and human, and as both progress and detriment.

Some highlights of the exhibition included large-scale video projections with slowness and speed in counterpoint, where an elliptical space with adjacent plasma screens showed continuous loops of ultra-fast video games with cars whizzing across the core of inner cities. Entering the first gallery meant crossing the threshold to the snail’s gait projected on the ceiling and the accelerated cityscape projected on the floor below. The room also highlighted to great effect a group of Italian Futurist ephemera, including a reproduction of F T Marinetti’s “The Futurist Manifesto,” published in Le Figaro on February 20, 1909. Images of fluid traffic interflow were juxtaposed with the traffic jams we all know as a trope of city life. The fast-paced construction of the Empire State Building is mischievously paired with Andy Warhol’s seemingly interminable film Empire. Both office and domestic kitchen were analyzed in terms of their transformation by speed. Drawings by Le Corbusier outlining kitchen dimensions were succeeded by a collection of clocks and calendars testifying to the accelerating tempo of our existence. Together with a glut of accelerometers, altimeters, odometers and speedometers, the ingenuity involved in measurement was seen as radiant.

The exhibition also explored the ecstasies and injuries associated with speed. A pharmaceutical cornucopia on display—everything from caffeine, cocaine and amphetamines to the active ingredients in energy drinks—was telling. A final gallery juxtaposing the photographic studies of motion conducted by Edward Muybridge in 1887 with a large-scale projection of Usain Bolt’s record-breaking performance at the 2008 Olympic Games was fitting punctuation for an exhibition that sought to cover all the angles of speed and its attendant excesses.

The exhibition was designed by Los Angeles-based Michael Maltzan Architecture, and the graphics were executed by New York-based Project Projects, marrying ease of access with ergonomic viewing possibilities and pedagogically enhanced thematic continuities. The show was accompanied by a book edited by curator Jeffrey T Schnapp and co-published by the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Wolfsonian-Florida International University and Skira Editore, Milan. This 320-page publication is integral to the exhibition’s thesis. When French thinker Paul Virilio argued that everything in this sunlit world of ours is dedicated to speed, the CCA proved him right.

Concurrent with the opening of the CCA show was Momoko Allard’s “Solitary Crowding,” held at Concordia’s FOFA gallery. With these recent photographs taken in Tokyo commuter trains at night, Allard confirmed the argument of Virilio and other commentators who held that, in Tokyo, an obsession with velocity is felt everywhere. Tokyo is Speed City. As early as the 1920s, that obsession was beginning to be felt, and the fact that it was the principal sire of the Japanese futurist movement provides a nice segue with the CCA show. Japanese poet and futurist Hirato Renkichi argued that the city is a motor. It is no surprise, therefore, that it has now revved up to race level RPMs that exceed any comforting margin of safety.

In my text accompanying the FOFA exhibition, I argued that Momoko Allard’s photographs are studies in pure and implied accelerando. Gradually increasing in tempo, they speak eloquently of human subjectivity at the crossroads of speed, nomadism and non-place. Allard is an adept amateur ethnographer whose images taken on the Tokyo trains provides us with a perspective on speed that complements the CCA exhibition.

Allard, who is of Japanese and Canadian heritage (she still has family in Tokyo) and profoundly nomadic by nature and inclination, explores the surreal, illuminated world of the trains at midnight when exhausted workers board and travel to their minute apartments within or on the periphery of Tokyo after extended and probably gruelling work hours. Allard’s working itinerary was at the midnight hour on the Chuo (“central”) line, or between Shinjuku Station in central-most Tokyo and Kichijoji, a 15- to 20-minute ride west.

These images were all about the speed the CCA show studied, only Tokyo-style. Speed here is not necessarily movement; the two are not synonymous, although interrelated. The accelerated pace of life in Tokyo has become a matter of global legend. The long hours of those office workers, and the sheer repetition of their treadmill days, are brilliantly captured in images that highlight the interiorization and anomie of their subjects. Allard seizes on their “absences” as a potent trope of big city life. The acceleration of the trains and the fact that Allard photographs through glass (both camera lens and the train’s windows function as a readymade filter or mediating device) result in deliberately blurred images and abstract light-ignited incidents that redeem them from a purely documentary function while rendering them at times definitively abstract.

Reflected and refracted but never homogenized in the ambit of her lens, the images seem as mutable and transient as memory itself. Faces and bodies fade, recede into, emerge from and merge with the backdrop like ghost riders on some high-speed mnemonic wavelength. The images were taken when she literally turned away from her subjects and caught their unknowing reflections in the window.

Virilio convincingly argued that the windshield of the car is the only appropriate screen for experiencing the world at its hectic new rate of acceleration. This statement became a truism for both the CCA and FOFA exhibitions. Allard’s subjects, like the viewer-as-surrogate for the drivers in the breakneck-speed video games seen at the CCA, are as much “voyeur-voyagers” as Virilio’s own reckless drivers, now dedicated to a kind of pure circulation that seems to militate against or at least impede the possibility of creative introspection or critical reflection. But if Virilio (in Speed and Politics, his still-seminal study of speed) boldly heralded this new science—whose sole object of study is the so-called “dromocratic” revolution with speed as the defining trope for contemporary life—the two Montreal exhibitions discussed here restated his case more eloquently still: accelerated temporality as exponential progress, and regress, and the advent of the new tense of supermodernity. Together, the exhibitions provided both critical reflection and speed-assisted introspection on our own pilgrimage through time. ❚

“Speed Limits” was exhibited at the Canadian Centre for Architecture from May 20 to October 12, 2009. “Solitary Crowding” was exhibited at FOFA gallery at Concordia University from July 13 to August 7, 2009.

James D Campbell is a writer and curator in Montreal who contributes regularly to Border Crossings.