Development and Devastation

The Memory of Walls: National Battlefields, Civic Casualties

The essay Martin Heidegger concluded by musing on the gigantic is the same one—“The Era of the ‘World-Picture’” (1938)—where he famously defined modernity as “the conquest of the world as picture.” In light of this connection, Isabelle Hayeur’s work on images appears not just as witness but as intimately tied to the process of world domination by technocapitalist development that she depicts. The photomanipulations in the series Dépeindre Québec commissioned for the city’s quadricentennial in 2008 thus only seize on the picturesque to lift the veil on the Battlefield (Champ de bataille) behind. In Quebec City, it is that of the Conquest of the New World as a projection of Western powers, now pacified as National Battlefields Park for the world’s panoramic gaze.

Hayeur transplants from the Côte d’Abraham to the battleground of the Plains of Abraham the remains of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul church, the main prop in her own dramatization of Quebec City as a contested terrain between actual vernacular heritage and the image of a World Heritage Site projected all too close by, that by comparison turns adjoining neighborhoods into a blank surface whose only value lies in its potential development. This church’s unauthorized demolition by a developer, halted midway a few years ago due to public outcry but completed since then, for a while left its façade as the only part spared by the tidal wave of real estate speculation battering the unique fortified city’s ramparts, this solid frame for the pretty picture staged with a view to Depicting Quebec City (Dépeindre Québec) in the public eye of tourists, even if it means artificially cutting this canvas out of the surrounding urban fabric. Several works in this series show the gaping, graffiti-painted backside of this church’s façade, only removed from the invisible backstage of urban development and relocated at center-stage, to replace postcard hallmarks of the prettified, petrified showcase put together for the benefit of visitors in the reconstructed old town. This reversal of the values and contents of social space flips back into ironic but all the more dramatic view the normally obscured flipside of tourist-oriented urban development. For the stone walls framing the historic city as lieu de mémoire offered no protection to the deconsecrated temple of a forgotten Ritual (Rituel [Figure 3]), left outside the “sacred” precinct of official heritage value where it might have been converted to the newfangled cult of a fetishized past.

Simply standing nearby, the abandoned church was instead exposed to unholy Mortifications at the hands of ravenous developers; in Champ de bataille (Figure 1), its severed façade is shown standing in the midst of a construction site against a backdrop of the Citadel’s famous fortifications. The reckless destruction these stone walls seem to systemically incite against the ordinary neighborhoods they exclude from the city’s historic core is thus brought to the fore in sharp relief. And yet, momification as a mere promotional prop may be a fate worse than death when the stamp of “authenticity” that restored buildings lend to a historic neighborhood such as the Petit Champlain serves as an alibi for a meretricious trompe-l’œil, painting local history into a tourist trap in the visual shorthand of the “Fresque des Québécois.” Hayeur’s photomanipulation turns around this huge wall-painting on an old building in plain sight of jaded passers-by, to display The Memory of Walls (La mémoire des murs [Figure 2]) torn down somewhere else out of mind, allowing viewers to look beyond the façade of a blandly reconstructed past and squarely into the sorry state of the sites of lost historical community crumbling in its shadow. The idealized, idyllic picture of a pacified past that displaces the real and dooms it to become ugly elsewhere now becomes the frame in which the space between cause and effect is collapsed to reveal this dark side of the enframing process.

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Figure 1.

Isabelle Hayeur, Champ de bataille, a photomanipulation from the series Dépeindre Québec (2008).

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Figure 2.

Isabelle Hayeur, La mémoire des murs, a photomanipulation from the series Dépeindre Québec (2008).

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Figure 3.

Isabelle Hayeur, Rituel, a photomanipulation from the series Dépeindre Québec (2008).

Shades of Suburbia: Looking Beneath the Surface of the American Dream

A fate similar to that of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul church awaited the old colonial house, conveniently gutted by arson, whose charred ruins frame a suburban travelogue of stereotyped simulacra of traditional dwellings on valuable real estate carved from rich farmland in the video Losing Ground (2009; Figure 4). It was filmed in Brossard’s new Quartier Dix30 on the South Shore off Montreal Island, infamous as the biggest “lifestyle center” in Canada. The cosmetic, commodified aesthetization of life in such suburban occupation of the land comes out here as both amnesia and anesthesia. Its ghostly plastic veil hangs on the kind of monster houses often immortalized by Hayeur as machines à ne pas habiter (pace Le Corbusier), since this development model’s only use for the land is as a featureless area for compartmentalized and standardized activities. Speculation on their limitless expansion feeds the real estate frenzy that consumes any trace of local particularity in its path, where agriculture as well as culture, both heritage and nature are constantly losing ground.

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Figure 4.

Isabelle Hayeur, still from the video Losing Ground (2009).

Once all local color has been washed out in the development of the land to picture perfection, residents may not truly dwell on it, but can still lose their footing on conquered soil where all resistance of the real has seemingly been liquidated. From the distance of a taller building, Hayeur’s zooming camera takes us down closer and closer to the heated pools where, oblivious to winter weather, commuters relax in blissful amniotic regression after a stressful day. But just as we feel like we are about to join them, a fade switches the viewpoint below the steamy surface lit in candy colors to show us the murky depths of toxic slime whitewashed by their lifestyle choices. They thus appear to be soaking in the ecological devastation wrought by the North American way of life on both the land and its waterways, evident in these underwater shots of the Lake of Two Mountains where the Ottawa River flows into the Saint Lawrence. The bucolic dream of country living at a comfortable distance from the city with even more of the benefits of all modern conveniences is bought at the price of the actual country. By visually collapsing that artificial distance into two sides of the same coin of suburban development, Hayeur follows this costly pipe dream down the drain of best-laid plans, into the cesspool of industrial waste where it inevitably issues.

Isabelle Hayeur has since pursued this path downstream in the series Underworlds (2008-present; see Roy, 2011 [Figures 5, 7]), wading into degraded waterways of North America with a watertight camera, to then juxtapose, in the single image of deceptively realistic photomontages, the pretty sights of shoreline settlements and tamed nature above the surface and the polluted or sterile environment just below. The sensual siren call of dissolution in ambient fluids is barely countered for the viewer by revulsion at the toxic soup she/he is vicariously immersed into, generating an ambiguous subliminal response that viscerally compromises one’s position as a detached critical observer. This is even true of the video Castaway (2012; see Roy, 2013), in which the entire picture is one of decay, as Hayeur ventures both above and below the waterline amid the rusting hulks of a boat cemetery on Staten Island’s Arthur Kill, across the river from New Jersey’s Chemical Coast. These vessels used to service its polluting industries before joining consumer society’s endless procession of junk, safely out of sight and of the light of mind in this developing bath of chemicals that are here made to reveal, in the very process of its emergence, the complete picture of industrial development, as though analog photography could provide metaphors for the systemic obsolescence of all technologies, as will be argued later.

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Figure 5.

Isabelle Hayeur, Death in Absentia, a photomanipulation from the series Underworlds (2008-present).

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Figure 6.

Isabelle Hayeur, Le Congo reconnaissant, a photomanipulation from the series Formes de monuments (2009).

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Figure 7.

Isabelle Hayeur shooting the series Underworlds (2008-present).

Castaway’s nightmare vision is but the shadow side of the American Dream, whose ironic contrasts appear nearby in Hindsight (2009), a video that traces its arc among the eerily still, empty buildings of Governors Island, within sight of New York City. The presence of the military on this island goes back to Dutch colonial times. It culminated in their settlement in Brick Village, a residential project like so many a Levittown mass-produced along the lines of military housing after World War II to fulfil the promise of liberty and happiness through private property, for which America fought. This model suburb is now a desert island; its shuttered houses call to mind those of so many American citizens whose dreams of access to property have been exploited and shattered by irresponsible financial speculators. In the video, the houses are haunted by the faint recorded voice of a present-day soldier for whom enlisting seemed like a last chance to escape the planned obsolescence of all but the wealthiest social classes of the United States, by enlisting to fight for what still passes for the promised land of opportunity. This vision of a home of the brave, whose manifest destiny to secure a continent and then make the world safe for free enterprise was meant to ultimately benefit all, ends up dissolving like any mirage, under the peeling paint of echoing walls, along with the statue of Liberty as reflected in blind windows. Founding myth and grim reality are conflated in the space of a deserted island.

Photography Develops as Brussels Sprouts

Not that America has a monopoly on the projection of venture capital to capture and develop land. The walls of Brussels have long been crumbling under speculative pressures in the vicinity of the institutions of the new Europe. In the photo series Formes de monuments (“Monument Forms”) that Isabelle Hayeur was commissioned to create by VOX Contemporary Image Centre in Montreal for L’espace photographique Contretype in Brussels in the spring of 2009, she holds up these old walls as a mirror to development’s true nature. It shows through the cracks in the walls of abandoned houses, pockmarked by deliberate neglect as symptoms of the urban cancer known as “brusselization.” For ever since Brussels became the main seat of the European Community in the 1960s, it has fallen prey to the cynical speculation of real estate developers and their friends in public office on the decay of entire neighborhoods to a point where, beyond repair, they become breeding grounds for “the leprosy of houses” that is dry rot, caused by the merulius fungus. This devious scorched earth policy, making sure existing buildings are eventually condemned to demolition, paves the way for rootless glass and steel skyscrapers to sprout up like mushrooms in the chaotic wake of massive tears in the historic urban fabric.

As visual shorthand for this cancerous transmogrification of organic growth into sterile development, stretches of the outside wall covering of derelict houses are rendered as metallic in Hayeur’s photomanipulations. This happens to make them reminiscent of copper plates, altered by the elements as the surface of a daguerreotype used to be by chemical fumes, in order to store a picture’s imprint and then reveal it on development. The early photographic process of daguerreotypes was the first one to be commercialized, in lock step with the triumph of the bourgeoisie and of its ideology of Progress in the revolutions of 1830 in France and Belgium. Similarly, in Hayeur’s visual treatment of what happens to old houses as modern Brussels sprouts, chemical agents seem to alter a light-sensitive surface to reveal a latent image captured in it, that happens to represent the symbolic agents of Belgium’s capitalist development, namely, the entrepreneur-princes commemorated on so many monuments in Brussels. It is specifically for this role that Hayeur brings the monarchs’ portraits to light on these plates, out of the dust of an endless construction site.

From the Congo Free State to Europe’s Egyptian Fate

Remembered as the “Builder King” for the many urban projects he commissioned in Brussels and elsewhere, King Leopold II personally financed the construction of the Arcades du Cinquantenaire, celebrating the kingdom’s jubilee, from which are taken the effigies of its dynasty, marking its progress through history, that appear in Hayeur’s series. A true heir of his grandfather Louis-Philippe, “Bourgeois King” of the French (as he was dubbed by his critics) from 1830 to 1848, the second King of the Belgians used for this the profits of the Congo Free State, the private colony he had invested in, beyond the purview of the political institutions it was his role to safeguard as constitutional monarch. Enslaved to savage colonial exploitation with the civilized Western alibi of freeing it from the Arab slave trade, a Grateful Congo (Le Congo reconnaissant [Figure 6] as portrayed in the plaque under the Arcades from which these royal cameos are drawn) thus got to pay for an extravagant monument to its own economic exploitation at an outrageous human cost, even for the times. (As though in a casual blueprint for later genocides—down to our own day in all former Belgian colonies, estimates of the death toll run in the millions, with mutilation and torture on a massive scale, culminating in an international scandal fuelled by the writings of Joseph Conrad and Mark Twain among others, that led to the transfer of the Congo Free State to the Belgian government as a bona fide colony shortly before the king’s death in 1909.) But like the ouroboros serpent of hermetic lore, the head of development has always fed off its tail end in a vicious circle: the world-system thrives at its imperial center on the very chaos it creates at its colonial periphery.

Still, the conditions of the ravaged overseas periphery may be brought uncomfortably close to home by the same power effects of cannibalistic concentration, as inscribed in the capital’s urban fabric, where proximity to new centers of unchecked growth condemns older existing neighborhoods to gangrenous decay. This is the never-ending story these walls tell us when Hayeur makes them literally reflect, with timeless iconic flatness, the processes that built and ultimately doomed them. Like ancient Egyptian reliefs scarred by time’s indignities, they show immortalized monarchs in hieratic profile, with the cryptic comment of graffiti, as the glyphs left by nomadic urban tribes in the ravaged capital of the European Union (whose flag, by ironic coincidence, multiplies 12-fold the lone golden star on a blue field on the flag of the Congo Free State).

Is this a reminder that the gleaming monuments of global capitalism are doomed by the instant obsolescence they are built on to be overtaken by it, just as the pyramids and temples of an ancient civilization premised on eternal stability eventually were by the dust of time’s relentless desert dunes? The suspicion that what is most up-to-date is bound up by its impermanence with the mummified past it purports to dismiss seems confirmed by allusions to the technology that makes Hayeur’s images possible. For if the State sponsors of capitalism in the age of imperialism appear like watermarks on a tattered old banknote, it is after all within a pattern of diamond-shaped tiles that is subtly reminiscent of the pixels on a digital screen as the current medium of image-making. This conflation of the very physical beginnings and of the overwhelmingly virtual endpoint of both photographic development and economic development reveals not only the temporal continuity within both of these processes, but also their essential unity, inasmuch as, according to Heidegger (1950), “the fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture” (p. 87), “which makes of man a subjectum in the midst of beings” (p. 85).

This modern viewpoint reins under its panoptic gaze the perspectival extent of the real as a virtual object of exploration, control, and exploitation, enfolding and unfolding the world as standing reserve in the process of its apprehension by Western metaphysics. This became apparent under the visual regime of Renaissance perspective with the Great Discoveries that mapped the world for European colonization, but could only be exposed as nihilism with the full advent of modern technology’s instrumental stance toward all that is brought to restless presence under its cold glare, as so much material for further investigation, systematic consolidation, and methodical development. Photography may be held to encapsulate this process, in that it captures any given material in order to develop its latent image as a token representation of this limitless potential of the world as enframed and harnessed by technology.

One might think that digital photorealism could only add a rather cynical finishing touch to the technological process of replacement of nature by wholly manipulable simulacra. Yet its poetic use can also open up a critical distance from photographic realism, to reveal how the latter is part and parcel of the objectifying alienation from reality it both enacts and counteracts. For instance, photographic development could serve as a metaphor for the kind of urban development with which it arose, documenting it in its very process as well as in the pictures it captures. Seen in this light, photography could itself be seen as a more fitting monument to industrial modernity than the public statuary erected to celebrate its official agents in the Victorian era of “improvement” as the hallmark of Western civilization, that is, in a deceptively innocent time when human agency was still assumed to matter in the process.

Fleeting Monuments to Perpetual Motion

But it would be a monument premised on the ephemeral; one that makes space ever more penetrable and its contents interchangeable, subject to manipulation, yet calling for protection. To be sure, as a capture, the picture is by the same token a memory trace. Its modern development nonetheless goes hand in hand with that of the city that tramples all traces of the past in a careless palimpsest, as virtuality in action swallowing up the real, in much the same way that pictures bury their referents and blot each other out in layer upon layer of mechanical reproduction.

Digitally relocated by Isabelle Hayeur in the city’s bowels, as suggested by the pipes, cables, and junk food remains sticking out around it, the Monument to the City-Builders (Monument aux bâtisseurs de ville) by Charles Van der Stappen (1843-1910), a Belgian pioneer of modern sculpture who also took an active interest in photography as an art form, now makes these workers look like heroic abortions stuck in a ravaged womb, as though swindled by a production process fusing creation and destruction, construction and entropy, activity and passivity. Far from the static official representation of Pharaoh-like “builder kings,” their forced labor, captured in stone amid freshly broken ground, conjures up at once the birthing of a brave new world and a work of mourning for Progress as its lost meaning, made obsolete along with them by its own realization as pointless performance. Are we witnessing “a world in gestation or in ruins?” as Bernard Charbonneau (1910-1996), an early French theorist of political ecology, once asked about “exponential development” as both system and chaos; for “like the buildings, everything here is unfinished, under construction, or too new” (Charbonneau, 1969, p. 105).

Not included in L’Envers du décor, Hayeur’s rendition of the Monument to the Quarrymen (Monument aux hommes des carrières 2 [Figure 8]) merges these workers with the loads they carry, as just so much material straining under the pressure of impersonal forces, chained by metal tendrils to their Sisyphean task. Strangely timeless—like change as the only thing that does not change—their labors seem to engulf them in a jungle-like, metamorphic swirl of tellurian forces churning the architectonic crust of a field of ruins in incessant upheaval. Charbonneau’s words apply equally well to Hayeur’s relocation on a construction site of this specimen of Belgian social statuary from a small Brussels park.

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Figure 8.

Isabelle Hayeur, Monument aux hommes des carrières 2, from the series Formes de monuments (2009).

The urban agglomeration in accelerated development does not have any time to strike roots in the soil or to found stone walls on it. It sweeps away everything in a tabula rasa, and then erects the vertical upon the horizontal. And no sooner is it finished than it needs to destroy anew to build some new model. Its creation is but a perpetual chaos where, without cease, draft follows upon draft, a construction site, a battlefield swarming with masses and machinery. But this frontline is only a no man’s land. (Charbonneau, 1969, p. 104)

The Worker’s Fatherland as No Man’s Land

To add literal weight to this military analogy, it is on the Western Front that Ernst Jünger (1895-1998), a German writer whose seminal reflections on technology in Der Arbeiter. Herrschaft und Gestalt (1932) influenced Martin Heidegger, first glimpsed the Gestalt or global pattern becoming pervasive even on home fronts with the Great War as the violent hatching of what had been gestating all along under the benign guise of Victorian Progress. What he called the “total mobilization” of the world by Technique was relentlessly turning it all into a perpetually transient and forever unfinished “workshop landscape” (Werkstättenlandschaft), where the particular and the individual are overwritten by the type (Gestalt) of the Worker as the impersonal agent of this process. In Hayeur’s muscle-bound figures fused with matter under stress, we may likewise discern both the emerging Worker and the workers he subsumes and submerges—unknown soldiers in this total war, the permanent revolution without rhyme or reason that is development in peacetime as well, beyond the rival ideologies and identities in whose name they have been periodically mobilized against each other. Ernst Jünger was himself already keenly aware of how smooth the transition is from a middle-class utilitarian mindset geared to security and profit to the nihilistic industrial efficiency of total warfare. A decorated officer in both World Wars, Jünger witnessed aerial battles from his home on December 5, 1944, just as he was commenting in Kirchhorster Blätter (one of the celebrated wartime diaries later collected under the title Strahlungen) on the mechanically secure bourgeois sex life of Leopold II’s British cousin Edward VII, whose orthopedic chair custom-made for comfortable intercourse he recalled being shown in a Paris brothel. This sight of modern warfare prompted him to add:

Possibly, nay certainly, in a magical or even a causal fashion, a spectacle like this one has something to do with the fact that there were such monarchs as this Edward and Leopold of Belgium or in another respect Wilhelm II, and not in their place the last blades of Occidental chivalry. (Jünger, 1995, p. 336)

Isabelle Hayeur’s photomanipulations manage to magically embody the hidden patterns of causality tying seemingly disparate or even opposite phenomena, as only they can give the full measure of such dark spectacles, freezing them in a vivid virtual state of spatial suspension between the security of modern comfort and man-made cosmic tragedy, frantic activity and timeless stasis, hyperrealistic detail and stark iconic monumentality. The titanic struggles of the modern age into which European States have drawn the world thus find an echo in Brussels’ stuffy monuments to veterans for whom serving king and country was still the “supreme law,” as graven in stone in Isabelle Hayeur’s Salus patriae, another segment of Formes de monuments left out at her former gallery Pierre-François Ouellette. But the law of the market no longer knows any boundaries in the new Europe now unified under its sway, as it buries all limits beneath the blindly reflective surface (also sampled in this piece) of the high-rises it keeps erecting on peacetime wreckage, as self-explanatory monuments to exponential growth.

For this seems to be the only constant in a frenetically sterile world, at once stillborn and undead, that mindlessly generates the instant ruins Hayeur’s photo series Formes de monuments reveals to be haunted by ghostly images of development’s earlier princely champions and worker armies, mobilized, coopted, or absorbed willy-nilly in the capitalist construction of a world-economy (Immanuel Wallerstein) as the conquest of a world-picture (Martin Heidegger). Formes de monuments also suggests a parallel between the development of photography and the development of the world both as economy and as picture. More than a comment on the proverbially dysfunctional development of Brussels, this series portrays the sprawling Belgian metropolis as a fitting capital for Europe as the original epicenter of the groundswell of technocapitalist development that has now engulfed the globe. She throws its unknown soldier into the trenches dug by these related processes, whereby construction and destruction, total war and a deceptive peace, real estate and battlefields are joined like the two sides of the same coin, struck in the effigy of both the sponsors and the bit players of a show that must go on at all costs, with the entire Earth as expendable backdrop. Isabelle Hayeur may just be giving us a backstage pass to the dark spectacle of modernity’s visual conquest of space when she drives the manipulation of images to the point where this war machine is dismantled under our very eyes, its inner workings no longer hidden in plain sight.

Probing the Gigantic’s Invisible Shadow

The global pattern of this world-system strides across vast gulfs of geographic, social, conceptual, and emotional distance, like a giant who cannot be grasped as a single entity within the visual field of a mere human witnessing his footfall at ground level, while it bypasses nature and culture to rebuild a world on its own hubristic scale. Its true scope thus escapes the notice of consumers who take what it delivers for granted, since today “the gigantic prevails in a guise that seems bent on making it disappear,” as in the “annihilation of great distances” mentioned by Heidegger in 1938 (Heidegger, 1950, p. 87). Isabelle Hayeur manages to bring the gigantic into view as such by collapsing the distances it normally maintains between its seemingly incommensurable twin aspects as benign development and dark devastation, within a single pseudodocumentary picture whose telltale artificiality also makes the literal manipulation of the world visible as art.

Martin Heidegger did not overlook the greatness peculiar to the technological age, as embodied in the grandeur of industrial sites, transportation infrastructures, and urban vistas. He held that sheer quantity can turn into a quality all its own. For “the gigantic of planning and calculation” is so overwhelming that it thereby becomes the Incalculable, and as such, the “invisible shadow” (Heidegger, 1950, p. 88), eluding representation, that is cast around all beings by the withdrawal of Being into forgetfulness in a world mobilized as resource, where Being shines on out of view—by its very absence. This is the dim twilight spectacle Hayeur attunes us to, suffused by the sense of a hidden, enigmatic presence: not only the faint echo of the untold suffering of millions or the troubling familiarity of casually desolate man-made environments, but something unfathomable, a sublime, all-encompassing Openness, made palpable by the excess it allows to unfold in an endless procession of expendable material, saturating the visual field. The still, nonjudgmental light of this Clearing, suggesting the grace of a primordial space beyond the reach of the total mobilization of the world as object, lends Hayeur’s images a haunting beauty that does more to counter its darkening than any subjective moral mobilization they might induce.