A few thoughts about life and public art in Arlington Virginia’s Crystal City.
Recently, I visited Washington D.C. My girlfriend was attending an HIV research conference nearby, and I tagged along to see the sights. We visited the National Mall and many of the Smithsonian museums, but what wound up capturing my imagination the most was the Crystal City, in Virginia where her conference was taking place.
Situated across the Potomac River from Washington, this neighborhood of Arlington is a narrow strip of residential and office buildings constructed in the 1960s and 1970s. Many of the back offices of government and related industries are located within its boundaries, and the community sports a significant daytime population of commuters. In particular, a number of defense contractors have set up shop in here due to its close proximity to the Pentagon.
One notable feature of the Crystal City is its network of underground passageways. These tunnels connect the buildings together and provide all manner of shopping and services to people without requiring them to go to the surface for light and air. Groceries, hair salons, dentists, snack bars, and clothing shops all line the labyrinth in a mall-like fashion. While searching for a sandwich shop, I had the thought that living in the Crystal City would be good practice for existence on a hostile alien world. The weather above is so famously hot and humid that a permanent life in catacombs seems completely reasonable, even in the community’s terrestrial manifestation.
The city, while still strangely vibrant, has perhaps seen better days. Much of the architecture is of the brutal curtain wall variety, and these facades have become stained over time with mold and grime. Below, the lighting in the tunnels is reminiscent of 1980s mega malls where mirrors and bulbs have been arranged in attempt to create an illusion of space. Along the walls of several connecting passageways I found a series of posters for a revitalization campaign called “What sparks you?” These posters show photographs of people involved in all manner of bicycle races, many of which seemed to take place in parking garages. The whole scene radiates the sense of old newness that many overly planned urban areas seem to acquire with time. Programs emerge in an attempt to breath new life, but they only serve to remind everyone of the aging infrastructure and the long departed moment when it all seemed like a good idea. It is impossible to avoid the fact that an underground city was built during the height of the Cold War just over the river from the nation’s capitol.
One of the more interesting (and telling) revitalization projects that I discovered during my visit was a program called Crystal Art, sponsored by the Sheraton Hotel. This project’s goal is to envision the exterior building walls of the Crystal City as an art gallery.
While few people traverse the streets above ground, a large amount of car traffic moves through the city everyday, and this public art initiative displays abstract artworks for viewing primarily by motorists. The project can be seen as an interesting inversion of the way that Edward Hopper positioned the viewer in his paintings. In many of his works, Hopper imagines the landscape from the low point of view of a person in a moving automobile. He freezes the moments that a traveler might notice at speed but preserves their mystery through a continuing reticence from within the scene itself, as if to question the very possibility of intimacy in a fast moving automotive age. In Hopper, houses, people sitting on the stoop, gas stations, and forests become enigmatic, part of a long string of objects blurred by the high velocity of the implied viewer.
The works of Crystal Art double back on this idea by transforming the painting itself into the passing glimpse as seen from an automobile. In essence, the Crystal City driver assumes an exterior perspective that looks into a temporary interior space where the paintings hang. The effect is the opposite of visiting the National Gallery and looking at something like Andrew Wyeth’s Wind from the Sea, where we are able to study the tiny brush strokes that make up the lace on the curtains. Instead, we see the paintings in the same way that we see the landscape in Hopper, as a flash of something that we can’t quite pin down.
The paintings themselves are interesting in this regard. For one, they are not actual paintings but rather images of paintings printed on Alumalite, which is a sturdy aluminum composite panel with a corrugated polypropylene core. Imagine the cardboard used in boxes but made of metal. For the works to endure in the harsh environment above ground they have to be constructed of a material that can tolerate temperature extremes, pollution, and UV radiation. Alumalite, then, serves a similar purpose as the underground passageways in that the material acts as a protective barrier against the effects of an inhospitable environment. Having visited the Udvar-Hazy Center the day before, I was reminded of the bespoke tiles on the Space Shuttle Discovery and their ability to withstand the extremes of atmospheric reentry.
The specific paintings that I saw were colorful abstracts by artist Susan Finsen. I was on foot when I encountered her work so I was able to get a closer but atypical look at the panels. Finsen’s paintings consist of bright rings of color and child-like, but sophisticated shapes arranged on top of bold fields of color. Her joy with the paint is palpable, and I enjoyed the works quite a bit. I was able to locate a small brass plaque that contained her artist statement. Finsen writes that she draws inspiration “from everyday things and childhood memories,” and that her process involves rotating the canvas and building layers as she works to find excitement and interest. I also learned that the works as presented were actually details of larger canvases that Finsen considers “paintings within paintings.”
All of this information only served to strengthen the connection to Hopper in my mind. It seems clear to me that Finsen is reckoning with a kind of intimacy that is reflected through a number of protective layers. First, the paintings are abstract and so are pushing experience into an essential realm. These are childhood memories and everyday things acted out on a Platonic stage more through the act of painting than by any attempt at faithful representation of experience. Then there is the fact that the paintings as presented are but details of larger works, so there is a separation there, as well. Finally, the images are printed on metal, so there is another loss of detail in that the texture of the paint is flattened to a photographic smoothness, hardened in the process against environmental factors. Placed into the context of the roads and the work’s primary point of view, we get something similar to Hopper, a brand of concealed intimacy only glimpsed and hard to digest or understand due to modern circumstance.
I have no idea if any of this was intended by the artist or purveyors of the project, but it all seems kind of brilliant to me. Take a place where people live in a sealed environment, much of which is underground. Put a series of images of abstract paintings about the everyday up on the walls of the buildings where nobody walks by and you get kind of a perfect statement about the place in all of its fastness. In this reading, Finsen’s paintings become a protective shield for the buildings against whatever catastrophe was imagined at the community’s inception. The bold colors and the fact of their placement draw you in, but they also keep you out because you don’t have time to delve too deeply into their mechanisms. Looking at them, however briefly, thrusts you (again) right in between that old, tired, and terrifying mark and a void.