Temple to New Idols
Any good religion needs a temple, and the ICA plays the role to perfection. Filled with the iconography of contemporary art, the building offers a number of spaces for devotees of the urban experience, flaneurs, to worship. The ICA media lab drops down from beneath the building’s overhanging outcrop to offer a set of screens, headphones, a view of the harbor, and (for those in the top seats) a view of the other people in the media lab to anyone wishing to experience a streamlined form of the natural voyeurism found in the city environment (of course there is also a theater that looks out on the harbor). Instead of religious texts, one room contains a set of twenty photogravures entitled, The Russian Ending, annotating disasters as if they were “storyboards for a film.” This again calls to mind the insight of Weinberger’s film essay: “all modern art is urban art.” Enshrined at the edge of the Seaport District, the ICA is a place of cold mysteries and unforgiving realities whose adherents drive the tectonic movements of the urban palimpsest. Beyond issues of social inequality and gentrification, an excess of modern forms defines this process of waterfront “renewal,” and as one can see with Dormeuse, on the surface these can often appear inhospitable to humans despite their impressive beauty. Indeed, the kinds of apartments here do not seem marketed at the residents of nearby South Boston. The quests to make a city livable and a city beautiful are not mutually exclusive, but perhaps in the Seaport District, the latter has left the scales unbalanced.
Works Cited
Weinberger, Eliot. "Camera People." Transition No.55 (1992): 24-54. JSTOR Web. 27 Sep. 2015.